Comments on: What’s Up At Microsoft!

By: Agile Management

Agile Management — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 02:03:07 +0000

Pregnant Patent Pause Passed

I just got notification that the first of a whole suite of patents that my team filed when I was working at Sprint on the Mobile Portal and Wireless Application Manager platform was approved last week - US Patent 6987987. The listed inventors are me,...

By: Om Malik’s Broadband Blog » Is (Microsoft) Reorg Enough?

Om Malik’s Broadband Blog » Is (Microsoft) Reorg Enough? — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 20:36:56 +0000

[...] Anyway the latest reorganization may not be perfect, but it shows that Microsoft’s big dawg - Bill G - knows that something is not right. Step in the right direction? But as I said earlier, the challenges remain. More @ The Wall Street Journal, subscription required. In Random Access Posted Tuesday, September 20, 2005 at 1:35 PM PT [...]

By: Noel Guinane

Noel Guinane — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 06:46:01 +0000

Apple’s making money. Record profits. The problem with MS products is that they *don’t* work for the masses. They’re buggy crap.

Linux may not do what MS Office/Windows does for a small business (i.e. frustrate the hell out of them), but Apple will. Can’t get a more simple, elegant interface and an underlying operating system that’s rock solid reliable than Tiger. Why anyone continues to use Microsoft products is beyond me since better alternatives exist. Maybe it’s convention - they always have so they always will.

By: Stephane Rodriguez

Stephane Rodriguez — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 06:23:59 +0000

“I Saw the PDC North Face Video, and it blew me away they were able to throw that together in 6 weeks”

Chris, I have seen some of the demo on C9. While DirectX animation provides no built-in debugging support, I could map a video on a 3D moving texture in just half an hour. And that’s without knowing anything about DirectX animation, just wading through the samples and doc.

“And Paul’s point about Sparkle (i had forgotten the name of it) is so true.”

I disagree again. I think there is potential in Sparkle and other designer, no discussion on that. But the whole thing about a new designer is the new file format it creates and how much interoperable it is with existing file formats and existing platforms.
Sorry to disappoint you again, but Director’s ability to run on both Mac and PC without changing anything was a clear mega-winner at that time, kinda the right tool at the right place.
In the IDE business, tools like Delphi are just as good : you can produce native or .NET code by just checking a flag.

Just think about the implications of write once, run on multiple places. And then think again about the fact that, Xaml runs only on Windows XP and above (because it needs so much of the underlying infrastructure, and it ships only on Windows XP and above). Microsoft made a big mistake by creating yet another incompatible run-time WPF/E.

That speaks volume what their real intent is : seed the market, scare the competition, try keep everybody ignorant about the many interoperable file formats available elsewhere (OpenGL is one of them).

Now, evolving a technology is good. I can’t say Microsoft shouldn’t sell Sparkle and other designers.

By: Marina Architect

Marina Architect — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 22:02:05 +0000

The outlook for Microsoft will fracture as Web 2.0 and Open Source eventually render Microsoft an O/S only company with all other applications inferior to Open Source. Microsoft however will continue to make money on inferior products based on the always dumb core audience. I always see fools in Santa Monica on Segways. Microsoft will always own the Segway crowd and the early adopter gadget crowd. The veneer of marketing gets a certain segement of the population no matter what. Microsoft will eventually become a hybrid marketing company in my view. Marketing to mask the veneer of inferior products.

By: lovemehateme

lovemehateme — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 20:21:14 +0000

good for you, but corporations are here to make money ;)

who said that MS makes the best products and who said that they will have stranglehold ? Look at my post..I didn’t LOL

Usually,

1. A good product makes money (good, not the best)
2. A good product might not be free :)
3. A free product will not make a company sustainable (not the product, the company!!)

MS makes products and those products work for the masses.

Super users might be comfortable using Linux (as I am), but Linux doesn’t do what Windows/Office does for a small business/for people who just want to use a simple interface to get things done (like my grandma) and people who don’t give a damn about installing new drivers everytime I have new hardware.

By: Noel Guinane

Noel Guinane — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 18:36:44 +0000

I don’t use any Microsoft products, neither Office nor Windows nor Explorer, and I get by very nicely. That something has made billions doesn’t mean it’s the best or that it will always have a strangehold on the market.

I think with my head and use products that are far better than Microsoft’s. The days when we had no alternative are long gone.

By: lovemehateme

lovemehateme — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 05:11:59 +0000

Google lives on Adsense - tell me their other products - for how long?
Apple lives on iPod - for how long?
The market thrives on shareholder return not on geekdom and opensource-dom.

MS has products and services that make billions more than each of their competitors and each one of you that type here probably use some of MS’s products..

Think with your head, not with your heart - true geek speak ;)

By: Noel Guinane

Noel Guinane — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 21:07:03 +0000

2006 the year of Microsoft? You must be joking.

You’re betting that long overdue beast of theirs, Longhorn, is going to be that good, assuming it shows up. As usual, when it comes to any Microsoft product, I’m not expecting much. At best, Microsoft will copy Apple’s Tiger, and true to form, it will be just that, a copy, or rather a bad copy. Meanwhile, Apple is planning in 2006 to release the next version of their operating system, Leopard, guaranteeing they remain at least two steps ahead of them, not just for 2006, but for the foreseeable future too. Plus, Apple are switching their operating system to Intel chips.

If 2006 is going to belong to anyone, it’s got to be Apple. Microsoft’s dominance is on the decline, not just because of Apple’s innovation and the Linux and open source alternatives, but in my opinion also because of blogging.

Yep, blogging. It is not working so well for Microsoft as you’re suggesting. There are plenty of cracks showing, former employees criticising them, customers complaining. Microsoft are trying to do with blogging what the old Soviet Union tried to do with Perestroika - let in a little freedom. Never works for long. People get a taste for freedom and want more, lots more. Unfortunately, the blogiverse is not something you can control, especially not through front men like Scoble who is not as respected as you’re making out. You can’t buy everyone to mouth your line. Either your products are good quality or they’re not and if they’re not, as Microsoft’s are not, lifting the lid even a little to let people voice their opinions about them is going to blow up in your face.

By: Piers Fawkes

Piers Fawkes — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 21:06:09 +0000

You say Microsoft is not smart and then you write this sentence: “Well, in years that have passed, that theory has been proved right.” You don’t even get your grammar right fella.

By: chris holland

chris holland — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 19:34:49 +0000

Steph, Paul, my “bunnies hopping around” line was ill-inspired, I truly meant to convey i found what i saw actually, very cool. I Saw the PDC North Face Video, and it blew me away they were able to throw that together in 6 weeks, while the developer was originally purely a web applications developer with zero windows development background.

And Paul’s point about Sparkle (i had forgotten the name of it) is so true. From what i’ve read/seen/heard, microsoft has created something that could be compared to Macromedia Director, except that it apparently doesn’t suck, is all object-oriented, and keeps UI development an artistic process. Likely a far cry from hand-coding DirectX in IE.

By: pwb

pwb — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 16:17:07 +0000

I’m hanging on to my January MSFT Puts.

Microsoft is getting destroyed on the server, Java in the enterprise, LAMP elsewhere. Microsoft is getting destroyed in music and video. Excel is the only impressive app in Office. MacOS and Linux are making inroads on desktop. Xbox is interesting but in a competiive space. PocketPC and Media Center are lame attempts to throw Windows at things that require dedication. Before switching to Vista, users will take a close look if it’s all really worth it.

By: Paul W.

Paul W. — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 16:13:12 +0000

Steph — I thought the same thing when I read the “bunnies hopping around” line. But I don’t think that the reason web developers haven’t taken advantage of the DirectX capabilities in IE isn’t because they couldn’t think of anything useful/non-annoying to do with it, it’s because there aren’t any tools to allow you to do it effectively (and because it’s not cross-platform, something I think Microsoft under estimates the importance of). Sparkle will change all that with regard to XAML. The hopping bunnies are a bad example. Check out the North Face demo from the PDC or the Media Mania demo over on channel9 (http://channel9.msdn.com/) to see some examples of what you can really do with XAML/WPF.
Yes, we will see some ill thought up UI designs that have no right to exist, just like there are some website UIs that are downright horrid, but in the end the overall movement will be positive.
The positive thing XAML/Sparkle does is that it lets a designer take care of the UI and a dev take care of the code, and those to sides of the application are able to mesh fluidly. What we currently have is a designer drawing a UI, and a dev trying to code that UI from the drawings, and the result is much less engaging than it could be.

By: Stephane Rodriguez

Stephane Rodriguez — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 06:04:46 +0000

“When Vista rolls out, it’ll be a matter of a couple of a few lines of declarative markup to build a 3-D animated user experience, with things flying around, and bunnies hopping around.”

Funnily enough, you can do just this today with Internet Explorer, if you don’t forget (or simply figure out) that IE4 ships with the DirectX animation vector markup. Scenarios like videos mapped into textures, or flying pigs is just a few lines away.

Nobody uses those, I wonder why…. Could it be that it irritates?

By: Dimitar Vesselinov

Dimitar Vesselinov — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 03:09:21 +0000

Om, you could see the big picture at Accelerating Change 2005.

(link)
(link)

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 00:51:26 +0000

i agree stu. a little humility would be good. but then there is the other aspect of winning - MSAOL. Anyway i think they will be playing defense for sometime, because i think the business is changing around them, and as a company their future depends on their ability to adapt.