The Soul of A New Microsoft 294
BusinessWeek Online is running a front page story today about the new future of Microsoft. By 'looking beyond Windows', the company is utilizing fresh blood to come up with new products like the Zune, the Xbox 360, and various online sites. While the Zune probably isn't getting off to as successful a start as they might have liked, the article argues it's a positive sign that they're at least making the attempt. From the article: "The point is that Microsoft needs to find its un-Vista. Several of them, in fact. The software giant is entering perhaps the greatest upheaval in its 30-year history. New business models are emerging--from low-cost "open-source" software to advertising-supported Web services--that threaten Microsoft's core business like never before. For investors to care about the company, it needs to find new growth markets. Its $44.3 billion in annual sales are puttering along at an 11% growth pace. Its shares, which soared 9,560% throughout the 1990s, sunk 63% in 2000 when the Internet bubble burst, and they have yet to fully recover."
need to find their heart (Score:5, Insightful)
The thesis is Microsoft needs to find their un-Vista? Hardly! Microsoft needs to find their heart. Or grow one.
Their 30-year path is strewn with castoff competitors, and wannabe partners. Microsoft has sown nothing but ill-will for the duration of their tenure. I would welcome the change that shows Microsoft wants to be a good-citizen member of the IT community and market but the evidence isn't there, in fact there isn't even a glimmer of evidence, contrary to the article's these that things like "Zune" and "X-box" are starts in the right direction.
Consider only the most recent step to re-invent, the Novell/Linux debacle. What many considered worth waiting for on good faith to be a positive step took only days to be revealed for what it was, more steps to stamp out any competition. As long as executives with the hubris of a Steve Ballmer control the direction of Microsoft, nothing positive will happen, period.
And, what of the collaboration with Samsung, Creative and others? To what end other than wasted time and money for Microsoft's "partners"? Bah!
An interesting quote from the article (Allard's response to bad words from Apple re: their Zune, and how Microsoft doesn't "get it"):
This only demonstrates how much Microsoft doesn't "get it". Microsoft benchmarks everything it does against perceived outside competition -- it'd be nice to see them invent their own cool stuff. Interestingly (to me), they had a chance to do just that with Zune, and completely blew it by trying to measure themselves against the ipod.
I'm not saying Microsoft doesn't have the right to be a good tough business to make good products and good profits, but Microsoft has mostly been about making products barely clearing the bar while making usurious profits with (what eventually was ruled by DOJ, and the EU) illegal monopolistic leveraging.
I know it's an old saw, but I've been waiting more than 20 years for market forces to take hold and allow technology to evolve in a marketplace that encourages competition, i.e., one that diminishes the Microsoft effect (how many company's do you know of whose business model included a goal or contingency to be bought out by Microsoft?). Microsoft may now reap what they've sown.
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Re:need to find their heart (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft rose to the top by illegal business practices, from per-processor pricing to the illegal leveraging of their monopoly in order to get the marketshare. Read the trial transcripts where Microsoft execs admitted that they had to bundle second rate products with Windows in order to grab the marketshare.
Re:need to find their heart (Score:5, Insightful)
There are so many valid criticisms it's a shame to make them up.
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It's still marketing... it just happens to be a form of marketing that's illegal when you hold a monopoly.
Re:need to find their heart (Score:4, Interesting)
Win95 had pre-emptive multitasking and separate address spaces for each app. Mac OS used co-operative multitasking and shared memory space for all apps and the system until OSX. (I don't even know that System 6 had multitasking at all; iirc it had MultiFinder, which allowed the user to switch between multiple running tasks, but the tasks didn't run simultaneously. System 7 either introduced multitasking (co-operative) or at least vastly improved it over whatever System 6 had).
And the api of Mac OS was horrible; horribly primitive. The api actually relied on publicly accessible system globals. Please!! The api relied on apps to explicitly manipulate fields of system data structures (Window and GrafPort structures, for example). It had ancient concepts like "hi" memory and "low" memory. It had "grow zones" to handle cases where an app used more memory than was allocated to it, which brings up another horrible aspect - the user actually had to explicitly tell the OS how much memory to allocate to each app. This is the system that you're praising! It was good when released in the 80's but by the 1991 and certainly 1995, it was horribly dated. Even Apple knew this, which is why they spent a few years trying to create a modern version of Mac OS in the failed Copland project (not to mention the Pink and Taligent fiascos, which were also failed attempts to create a modern OS). Classic Mac OS was NOT a good OS by any means when Win95 was released.
The Name is "Gary Kildall". (Score:5, Informative)
To summarize a very long story, an employee at Seattle Computer Products (SCP) cloned (i.e., ripped off) CP/M, which Kildall developed. Bill Gates, the young founder of Microsoft, licensed an OS to IBM, but this OS was not yet under the control of Gates. In other words, Gates sold a product that he did not actually have. After inking the deal with IBM, Gates then bought a permanent liftime license to SCP's OS. That OS morphed over a two decades into the infamous line of Windows OSes.
As for Kildall, he understandably became very bitter. Kildall was financially well off, but he never achieved either the fame or the wealth that Gates achieved. If Gates had gotten the billion-dollar wealth but Kildall had gotten the fame (for his work on OSes), then Kildall would probably have accepted the outcome. However, Kildall achieved neither the fame nor the wealth. The bitterness drove Kildall to essentially commit suicide by drinking himself to death. He died in a bar.
I understand Kildall's feelings. Someone had screwed me in the same way that Gates screwed Kildall.
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The way you tell it, it sounds like Kildall screwed himself by measuring his success ("wealth and fame") against that of Gates.
Bad idea. Envy is not only a shitty business model -- as one J Allard is currently discovering to his chagrin -- but it's also a crappy way to live your life.
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Re:The Name is "Gary Kildall". (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Name is "Gary Kildall". (Score:4, Insightful)
no. it's just that this bedtime tale of heroes and villains is easier to live with than the truth.
Re:The Name is "Gary Kildall". (Score:5, Interesting)
For instance to copy a file, CP/M required that a program called PIP (Peripheral Interchange Program I think) be on a floppy disk in your computer. You could then use its arcane syntax:
A> pip
*a:=b:foo.txt
Qdos had a copy command in memory so it didn't have to be ondisk. The syntax was also a little more intuitive:
A> copy foo.txt b:
I might add that if my memory serves the PIP command and CP/M's 6+3 file structure were copied from DEC's RT/11 operating system. Essentially, CP/M was RT/11 for microcomputers except it left out some of RT/11's nicer features, like background processing.
Qdos was a solid incremental improvement then. It added commands like 'copy', replaced the 6+3 file system with an 8+3 file system, and I'm sure there were other improvements I know little about.
The original developer of QDOS worked on and off for Microsoft for over a decade in total. He also founded other companies. It doesn't look like he's mad at Bill most likely because in the aggregate Bill paid him quite a bit of money as an employee, and by taking over one of his later companies. Although not as rich as Bill Gates, I'm sure he's very comfortable.
D
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DRI became technically irrelevant around 1986. They could have saved things, they could have hired better people, done some decent UI design, gotten some apps together, done some decent technology, but they just pissed the opportunity away.
Microsofties might have been arrogant, but at least they were willing to cut
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Funny you should say that. I recall a letter to the editor of BYTE magazine describing an experience with a bug in Microsoft's FORTRAN compiler. After several releases in which the bug remained unfixed, the letter writer finally got a response from Microsoft that they were in fact not going to fix
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Gate
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IBM wanted software written to work with their new PC. A high ranking executive knew Gates' mom (Mary Gates). IBM approached Microsoft and asked for some help. As part of that talk, Microsoft told them that they were using CP/M as their OS and sent IBM to Kildall. Kildall almost screwed Microsoft here. IBM and Microsoft had a deal, which almost failed because of
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Anyone one who kills himself for not being rich or famous enough (especially if
Your comment is a bit unfair to Bill Gates. (Score:3, Insightful)
Lots of people are bitter towards Bill Gates, but the fact is that he was the one that saw the business opportunities and therefore got a chance to shape the future...
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Zune and XBox is still dependant upon the core OS and Office money makers in order to exist.
Zune will never ever be as ubiquitous as the iPod unless it is allowed to run on other operating systems.
Even if you were successful enough to convert 100% of Windows iPod users to the Zune, it still won't be the numbers of the Apple/Windows iPod user base.
DRM is Microsoft's only hope for future revenue outside of the OS and Office products. If they can get digita
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Come on don't be so negative, although their new OS is dubious at best I really like my Microsoft mouse, that makes it no worse than 50/50 for them!
Re:need to find their heart (Score:4, Interesting)
Conveniently choosing to ignore the groundbreaking research on language design and static code analysis done by the Spec# [microsoft.com] team
Conveniently choosing to ignore that the debugger in Visual Studio stands head and shoulders above the competition
Conveniently choosing to ignore how Microsoft has been able to establish itself as a major player in the game console world in surprisingly short time
The list continues, but who am I kidding, could anyone here be bothered...
a radical idea that will never happen (Score:2, Interesting)
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A couple. First, promised Unix integration in a domain. A product that would serve up /etc/passwd accounts to 2000 domains was brought to its knees by promised vaporware and then MS bought them out. Why would I buy a "Unix connector" when 2000 is promising to have it? Killed their revenue stream, was easy to make an offer. Classic vaporware, second-hand story.
Next, not so harsh, MS approa
Percent confusion (Score:2, Informative)
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I took a quick look, and Microsoft is not quite there yet. Their latest 10-K filing [sec.gov] with the SEC shows Microsoft's gross revenue for the fiscal year of 2006 was about $44B (here [sec.gov]). The BEA's records for 2005 [bea.gov] show Montana's GDP to be about $30B and N. Dakota is about $24B for a total of $54B (Utah is about $90B [rocket engines and blenders baby
On a side note: how much
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- ND has a sizeable portion of the worlds wheat
- ND has a sizeable portion of the worlds nuclear weapons
Oddly enough, MS has a development office in ND and employs around 1100 people here. None of them work on wheat or nuke distribution, to my knowledge
The market is crazy.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Stories like this are perennial. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, right. Like the upheaval when they announced a top-to-bottom-all-new-strategy named
(Social interface? Come to think of it, where have I heard something like that out of Microsoft just recently...)
Microsoft is always talking about upheavals, but meanwhile what they actually do is keep cranking out big bloated monolithic versions of Windows with badly-copied slightly-distorted features in other operating systems, and strong-arming PC vendors into preloading them.
The parallels are almost perfect (Score:3, Interesting)
Vista = OS/2
Proving the computer industry is like a Saturday afternoon matinee...if you hang around long enough, things start repeating themselves.
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There's a huge, huge, huge percentage of those people who don't really care what's on the computer. If it was OSX they'd learn to do the three things they do there and go on with their day. Microsoft themselves are irrelevant to most of their customers because most of their users do not dream about computer operating systems. Coincidentally, this is also why the Linux deskto
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Get a clue. You don't have to strong-arm anyone to build for 95% of the domestic PC market.
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Once that is done, it is up to Dell to provide (and they have decided that they will) the customer with sufficent restoration media/partitions to allow (and they do) a complete reinstall of Windows, should the original become unusable in the eyes of the customer.
There has been some talk, for instance, about the Dell notebook Inspiron E1505 shipping with too much software, and bogging the machine down, even with 2GB of RAM, and the Intel Dual c
Instead of luck, they'd need to compete (Score:5, Interesting)
They could get away for a decade worth of half-assed technical side and marketing because of their monopoly. Thing is, whenever they tried to enter another market, it raised the question why. When looking at their attempts, many people drew the conclusion, that they wanted to compete at any price and that's why they threw their sometimes failing products out there. In retrospect I think we can say that they tried to perform their usual strategy, but without the backing of the monopoly they fell flat on their face. Of course, the notable exception is the Xbox 360. It might be luck, or that the Xbox division independent enough from the core MS that it can make itself work.
Microsoft is not reinventing itself, at least not yet. Zune is an utter failure and I can't think of any single successful product apart from Xbox 360, Windows and Office that was a success. The last two wells are drying up.
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Maybe Microsoft's other division needs to make $$ (Score:2)
Now, as a strategy, they're bribing content providers by allocating product revenue to those providers [MS is giving a record company a cut of Zune hardware revenues].
How is that competition? Only a monopoly with large cross-subsidies could afford to do anything like that.
If MS H&E were a private comapny, they'd be six feet under years ago.
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They could get away for a decade worth of half-assed technical side and marketing because of their monopoly.
What alternatives and timeframe are you comparing to such that Microsoft's "technical side" was "half assed" ?
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But Microsoft has preached about the freedom to innovate. So they make huge investments in patent engineers and buying other property rights. They want the freedom to take our innovation.
Re:Instead of luck, they'd need to compete (Score:4, Interesting)
Weren't they the first to have a web browser component usable by other apps?
And they have MCE, which Apple is copying with FrontRow. And now there are rumors that Apple will be copying Tablet PC.
Excel had tabbed worksheets long before the concept was added to browsers.
Excel introduced pivot tables.
Microsoft introduced the "squiggly" line for on-the-fly spell check.
Microsoft introduced the ability to embed one app's object into another app's document and allow the user to edit the object inplace using the object app's tools (I refer to OLE). Windows has had that since 1993 while Linux and Mac still have yet to have anything to rival it.
Microsoft had Terraserver, which Google ripped off with Google Maps.
Microsoft introduced the ability to edit and recompile C code while debugging it.
Microsoft introduced the "floating pallette" of Mac Office.
They have many innovations in Office 2007.
Microsoft has had many innovations (they have the 2nd largest software patent portfolio (second to IBM)). I won't list them all (you're ignorant ass isn't worth the effort). They have a lot more innovations than does the Linux "community" or Apple.
I have an idea for Microsoft... (Score:2)
...And my idea is...
With more close to a billion Windows machines out there, ranging from hand-helds to desktops, to laptops and servers, Microsoft should advertise on the desktops themselves. It should be done this way:
Whenever any of these systems accesses the internet, an update to which advertisers get to the desktop interface is done.
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No thanks. I'm sick of Microsoft assuming they own my bloody computer! It's mine, not theirs! The way IE7 is foisted on us whether we like it or not - that's just plain arrogant. Microsoft doesn't get this either - it's MY BLOODY COMPUTER!
Actually I use a Mac, so I'm only empathising with those who suffer from this, like most of my colleagues at work, who are now trying to clean up after the mess left by IE7's crappy and unwanted install. This is
Re:I have an idea for Microsoft... (Score:4, Insightful)
But it's Microsoft's Operating System. You are just a licensee! And Microsoft could choose to withdraw its license at anytime. Microsoft could argue that it has a right to to the "necessary" with its software. After all you agreed to its licensing terms when you installed it.
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Maybe this is a big part of what is wrong with MS. With no other consumer product would people put up with this. New car sir? Certainly - just sign here to say you agree that GM can install speed restrictor "upgrades" at any tim
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This is another reason that Macs suck much less - Apple don't assume they own your machine.
Because it *is* normal for software.
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Actually I use a Mac, [...]
But you don't complain about the stuff Apple "foists" on you, right ? Because Apple's stuff is cool...
So, I bought a 360.. (Score:2)
This is pretty much just a diversion until I can find a PS3/Wii, but, it's not been as terrible as I had convinced myself to expect.
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"At least they tried." (Score:2)
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Because the writing is on the wall. Their OS cashcow won't live forever and they know it. They need a new source of revenue already up and running at the time that the Windows cow dies. It's that simple.
Tip to Microsoft, Sony and the media industry (Score:4, Insightful)
Factoid (Score:5, Funny)
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What The?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Such as? Lets see, you can burn your purchases to CD. You can have them on multiple computers and iPods. What do you, legally, have the right to do with the songs that you cannot do?
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Re:What The?!? (Score:4, Interesting)
He's saying that yes, you can burn a CD - the capability is there and always has been there, but there never was the legal right that you may burn a CD - and thus Apple's DRM, in some ways at least, allows more abilities than the law protects rights.
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It didn't work when I needed it to work.
So they fixed that particular problem later? They still lost my trust.
Anyway, I don't have to do research before relating my experience with a product.
Hopefully my little brother got the message that DRM only restricts things that should be possible from a technical point of view.
Maybe my warnings sunk in.
I'll be buying something else when I get around to buying an mp3 player, and it sure won't be a zune either.
Open source isn't a business model (Score:4, Insightful)
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Everything related to computers has to be "business" to these people... it has nothing to do with providing good products or changing the world in any sort of good way.
And, and it's a common theme around here, the population is too dumb to know any difference...
You can draw comparisons with another company... (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, in 1997 Apple was on the brink of extermination. It had a stale product line, and abortive OS update (Copland) begun in 1994 which was eventually canned, it's replacement to appear a massive 7 years later as OS X. And you think MS's handling of Vista was bad...
Them boom! Jobs is back, the iMac appears, OS X appears, the iPod appears, switches to Intel, Apple reinvents itself again - successfully. You could argue that Jobs is pretty much the heart and soul of Apple.
Microsoft don't have anyone like that. You could argue that Bill Gates is, but most of the projects he's personally championed have been niche markets. Sure, they've had their successful market areas; Windows Mobile, Xbox, Windows Mediacenter, Auto PCs, but you kind of wish they'd look again at what people want.
Apple get it; get a person iTunes, an iPod and a Mac and they're sorted for most of their entertainment needs. Want it around the house? Get an Airtunes adaptor.
Sony don't get it; PSP speaks to PS3, and um... ATRAC? Minidisc? Er... Memory Stick slots? Their idea of a digital home doesn't incorporate other vendors and isn't feature-complete. On its own, Sony stuff doesn't make you go 'wow'.
Microsoft desperately need to get it and the thing they have going in their favour is - ironically - interoperability. Apple and Sony are stuck in lock-in land - our kit, our standards, our profit. If Microsoft took their head out of the sand for a moment and realised this, bit their lip and went with something a bit more open-minded, then they could really make a difference. However, like Sony and Apple, I think they'll be putting their bottom line/market share first, and what consumers want second. It's nice that we're seeing a change though and that they're having a shot at trying new stuff with the Xbox 360 (definitely a great console, no matter how you cut it) and Zune (average first try), but they need to try a bit harder...
Re:You can draw comparisons with another company.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Them boom! Jobs is back, the iMac appears, OS X appears, the iPod appears, switches to Intel, Apple reinvents itself again - successfully. You could argue that Jobs is pretty much the heart and soul of Apple.
Which goes to show how good Apple's marketing really is. Apple has exactly one undebatably successful product: the iPod. The Mac's marketshare is (still) microscopic and irrelevent, and not even growing significantly (in fact, I think marketshare may have fallen, but I'm not up on recent stats). You could possibly argue iTunes is a success, but again, their marketshare of music in general is nothing.
Jobs' real genius is in -- I hate to say it -- lying. He can twist facts around to convince people of nearly the opposite (this is infamously called the "reality distortion field" by the employees, though to be fair, his salesmanship can also be inspiring as well). He's basically a high-level slick used-car salesman.
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"Success" (Score:2)
iTunes is a success in that it is part of what sells iPods. No iTunes and the iPod would have failed.
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"Success" doesn't mean "stomping out the competition". "Success" means "sell at a profit".
If my kid runs a lemonade stand and makes a profit, is he a "success" COMPARED (key word) to Minutemaid? No, though he's a success by the standards of children. By the same token, if I make $5.35/hour minimum wage (or whatever it is these days), am I success by the normal standards of society, even though I'm "making a profit"? No, I'm not. I'm a low-wage grunt. But by the standards of, say, Mexico, $5.35 is great
Contradict much? (Score:2)
I also question your assertion that Microsoft has interoperability going for it. Interoperability with other Microsoft products, maybe, but people like myself who have to deal with getting and keeping non-Microsoft systems talking to a Microsoft-based world see it differently.
~Philly
Re:You can draw comparisons with another company.. (Score:2)
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Considering Apple had 4 billion in the bank at the time, I don't think it did much at all for Apple except act as a very public vote of confidence. Their pledge to keep putting out Office for Mac was probably worth more to Apple-- of course, Microsoft wasn't doing that to be nice, they were doing that because the antitrust storm was brewing and they needed a viable
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Did this surprise anyone else? (Score:2)
So, Microsoft's new hope uses a Mac... That caught me off guard.
Am I the only one getting mixed messages? (Score:5, Insightful)
So Microsoft's stock flies to Mars in the 90's and then comes back to the moon in 2000 after the .com bubble? Someone wanna tell me why Microsoft should take its eyes off the OS market? Sounds like they're not the uber juggernaut they once were, but they're not exactly going to declare bankruptcy anytime soon.
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Well, you see that the up and down figures have a different size. Almost all the bubble hapened during the 90's, so it is not just a matter of bad interval.
And it is really hard to tell if MS is near bankrupt or not, because they use stock options a lot and their spending is anything but simple to classify.
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I love.. (Score:2)
Microsoft needs to find what it hasn't got (Score:2)
> "The point is that Microsoft needs to find its un-Vista."
Or, said differently, Microsoft needs to find its Apple.
Not gonna happen any time soon. ;-)
How the Zune Compares (Score:3, Interesting)
Finally, something a little more objective [google.com].
As far as Windows goes, if MS wants to make real progress they'd break binary compatibility (san virtualization per "Classic"), get rid of legacy hardware support and depreciate/destroy old APIs. 'Course my theory is that Microsoft isn't interested in progress. That said, I'm bit jealous of Picasa and the Filmstrip view.
Aren't these all (Score:4, Funny)
Zune exposes the true heart of Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
Having DRM I can deal with because I can choose to not purchase music from their store. I can obtain it elsewhere. But the fact they send money to Universal Music just from selling the hardware exposes whose side they are on. Even if I never buy from the RIAA they get their pound of flesh. Buyers are forced to pay the "music thief" tax.
Buy a Zune and send money to the people who will sue you or some old lady next year.
I also find it astounding people fall for their "point" scheme. Buy points now and leave a few dozen on the table each time you buy music. They make interest from all those points and mock you with it. It's anti-consumer like 10 hotdogs in a package versus 8 buns in a pack. It forces you to buy more than you want.
The faux-cool of the "it's got wifi and it's not an iPod" crowd astounds me. They are so eager to be "so cool they can't sell out by owning an iPod" are the very same people causing money to go to the RIAA and buying into the very vender who will enslave their music and hardware later.
Make no mistake. The reason MS sends money to Universal Music is to make it harder for all of the other hardware venders to avoid it. It sets up MS as the only people who will be able to do this. To borrow a bad line, "in the future all MP3 players are Microsoft".
BTW, and who thought of the "squirting music" to a Brown Zune bit? Probably the same one who thought "Welcome to the Social" was as sophisticated as the Dr Scholls "I'm Gelli'n, are you Gelli'n" ads. Ecch.
The only one who deserves a Brown Zune for Christmas is Bill Gates.
It's a problem of large numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
We're funding Microsoft's "ventures" (Score:3, Interesting)
Boycott the Zune and the XBox - get them to do something innovative for once.
More an un-DOS, or perhaps a re-DOS (Score:2)
The Zune? That follows the iPod. The XBox, etc? Follows the PS2, etc. There are some neat things, but none of them are a printing license like the IBM license deal was.
I don't know that another such
Keyboards and mice (Score:2)
The way out is in your hands. (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft is just another company with an obligation to its shareholders to continually increase profits. The tactics it has used to do so have hardly been ethical, but the company is financially successful. What would you do in an authoritative position in Microsoft? Open Office's document format? Issue a press release to all major PC manufacturers that they are freely allowed to install other operating systems? Of course you wouldn't. You would use your authoritative position to make decisions that maximize profits. Just because none of you would ever enter such a position due to your beliefs does not matter.
What did you expect? Stop sitting around hoping that Microsoft will behave ethically and change its ways. It will not. The only way out is for a competitive (powerful, robust, and cost-effective) alternative to exist. Slashdot enjoys an educated readership. If you want to see this company's market share shrink for the benefit of the computing world, make a contribution of time and effort to Microsoft Windows' most cost-effective competitor. Join the Ubuntu Linux community [ubuntu.com].
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I always thought they were into stealing souls.
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Better logo (Score:2)
This article gets it totally wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, totally wrong. Microsoft is always focused on the Windows platform. What the hell do you think the Zune and the XBox 360 exist for? The Zune only runs on Windows and uses Windows audio formats, and the XBox 360 runs Windows and uses DirectX.
This author is arguing that Microsoft is going outside of Windows with these devices, when Microsoft is actually using them to drive even more dependency on Windows and its related technologies. Every single thing Microsoft does can be viewed through the prism of preserving or extending their platform in some way. The Zune is a response to the iPod's Windows-independent digital media, and the XBox was a response to the Playstation's gobbling up of the PC gaming market,
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