commandersprocket

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    • Microsoft: Pity the Big, Bad Wolf [view article]
      The biggest threat MSFT faces isn't Apple, Apple is and will remain a niche vendor. MSFT biggest threat is OSS. IBM knows this, that's why they spent half a billion plus on getting Eclipse up and running. But while open source has good programmers their usability/HCI and QA people are MIA. The big danger to MSFT is that a handfull of large companies recognize how much they spend to enhance MSFT and decide to invest the money to do the QA and usability Feb 29 02:26 PM
    • Microsoft: Pity the Big, Bad Wolf [view article]
      Mr. Barta, FYI I'm not a MSFT supporter, I have a clear view of the history of the company, their early anti-competitive practices against IBM's OS2 and DRDOS (each of which were better OS's IMHO). Their success has had more to do with shrewed business dealings than technical excellence (much of which was Bill Gates dealings, he may not be the technical genius many believe, but he has absolutely been enormously shrewd businessman).

      You are absolutely correct Mr. Barta, not all versions of Vista are 64 bit. But hardware isn't quite ready for the changeover (there are currently no 8GB + laptops, and only a few motherboard chipsets that support 8 or 16GB on desktop machines). Vista is a fraction of what it should have been, most of it appears to be copied from OS X, but I still think it positions MSFT very well for the next couple years (I think their next OS will be late, a copy of a bunch of OS X ideas, and lacking the features they're currently planning on, and still will "win" the OS wars). Still MSFT has realized much better text to speech and voice recognition in Vista than just about anyone else (that, reasonably good 508 compliance, combined with the availability of their OS and software in every language under the sun, will continue to propel them forward as the standard).

      I do have Mac running OS X, it totally rocks (imagine... a company where management actually cares about usability), but there is a PERCEIVED costliness (and certainly limited options) to the mac hardware that many users aren't able or willing to get over. (OS X also supports 64 bit, and emulators and VM's for Windows exist, but few users in the general computer using public have a good understanding of this).

      I have found times when command line on other (not OS X) desktop *nix's (BSD, Solaris, and Linuxes) unavoidable and absolutely necessary. If Apple were to license their OS to Dell/HP/Gateway etc. I thing that things could become very ugly for Microsoft very fast, but as long as Apple views itself primarily as a hardware company I don't think that's going to happen. So, until we have a cloud OS with windows emulation (which I'm sure there are plenty of smart people working on now) I don't think there is any credible threats to MSFTs "mothership"... And I think they are in a position to purchase most credible competitors (or hire away their best engineers, like they did with Anders Hejlsberg from Borland).

      MSFT biggest danger comes from their management team, they appear to stifle innovation, MSFT research come up with great ideas seemingly every day, but the lab innovations don't seem to make it into products very often.

      MSFT can do things less well than their "competition"... because they have the inertia of standardization behind them. While they continue to fail on realizing the efforts of their talented engineering staff, they also overwhelm all their competition with their massive marketing spending (open any computing magazine and you're likely to find many full page MSFT ads).

      Smarts don't drive the (corporate) IT industry, standards do. MSFT has become the de facto standard and they will remain so. If Ray Ozzie can get products and ideas from research to product they might even deserve to be the standard.       Feb 28 04:07 PM
    • Microsoft: Pity the Big, Bad Wolf [view article]
      Vista is an important release. It's MSFT first usable 64 bit operating system XP 64 was unusable. In the next year or two, I think we'll see one of the alternate RAM types (NRAM,MRAM, etc) take off and we'll see laptops and desktops with 16 or 32 GB or RAM (by 2010), Vista will be MSFT OS still, and everyone will be using the 64 bit version. MSFT has more than their OS business, their XBOX franchise hasn't won this round of consoles, but their next try is their third (at MS, third times the charm). Their silverlight software is interesting but it'll take another 2 years and 2 versions to take off. Bill stepping out of the spotlight is dangerous for them. If you look at tech jobs (to see where the market is heading) most of the jobs seem to be web jobs (the desktop is dead). MSFT has a working media OS with Vista, they're doing semi-innovative work with surface (surface could easily drive silverlight/expression and the desktop/rich client interface).
      Mr. Barta, the ludites are still running windows applications and need a MS OS, they still default to word and excel, and they don't want to learn to use a command prompt. The emperor may not be wearing clothes, the problems you allude to are real, but for the end user switching is like changing from a car with a steering wheel to one steered with joysticks, and people just don't like things they perceive to be weird.       Feb 28 12:10 PM
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