Perfect. Brilliant. Yes we have known it but you encapsulated it so well. At Atlassian we focus our attention on the still impressive accomplishments of Google and companies such those you fund and work with. The New World wants things lighter weight, cheaper, but with no trade off on usefulness. And without a salesman or any annoying popups or other crap. Thx Jeffrey www.radiowalker.com
Microsoft is Dead
301–310 of 454 posts
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#302u didn't explain why u count MS out of the web 2.0 world. may be because as u confessed u never use MS products and are so unaware of what they are up to.
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#303In a very strong way I think you are away out to lunch. The only people afraid of Microsoft is the Microsoft Haters out there who for some obscure reason, can't think much about anything except bashing MSoft
If any of you knew anything about the software business, you would know that almost all the drive for making your product a great product is so M$oft will buy you out. Again for some silly reason a lot of the haters believe that all companies other than M$Soft are fair, reasonable and above board and that sure ain't true. Name me one company that M$oft took over than didn't make the owner a millionaire.
Lets get real and realize that consumer's opinion is not worth zippo to all these companies.
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#304Old news! Death to Microsoft! The more interesting question is do they really not realize they suck? When you have Google as the #1 search engine being used within Microsoft and iPods as the #1 music players being used by Microsoft employees, I find it very hard to believe they don't know they suck. http://www.techweb.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189500876&cid=RSSfeed_TechWeb http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/comme…
In your two examples MS acknowledges the comparison (1) they entered search late, with the wrong strategy. they admit it. (2) Zune also entered late. but was an effort to get established in those markets. Both examples do not comprehensively define MS, or future of core MS strategies, or of the future of MS including search and player strategies
Out of morbid curiosity, what would you say comprehensively defines MS, or future MS strategies? They seem to constantly try to branch out into established markets by throwing tons of money at every area they can think of without actually doing innovative work in any area. It seems they are generally left in the dust trying to catch up to established markets because they lack the innovation to develop and market anything new and interesting on their own.
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#305Microsoft will still be THE MAN on the desktop and enterprise for a long time (I just switched to Mac however. Parallels rocks). And .Net is what will keep them ticking. (Office too, but that's a different post. Have you seen what MindManager has done with Word?) If anyone wants to put the last nail in their coffin, build a better .Net. And do it with Lisp. .Net shows what we have needed for a long time. A consistent…
I'm not sure you realize the can of worms you would be opening up by feeing up the syntax chain. I agree freeing up syntax is a very viable method for imporving codeing, but it is also very easily leads twards confusion in the minds of code maintainers. The idea is old and has been implemented a number of times, but also it has never taken off because of the major problem with what does "for (x) in Y {;;some more cod…
The appropriate use of namespaces and developer discretion would be needed to ensure you don't F up your other code. If you want a switch that checks if one string is contained in another, you don't modify the switch syntax. You make a switchContain.
And you know what "for (x) in Y {;;some more code here}" means the same way you know what "x= someFunc(a,b,c)" means. You look it up. Of course it is best if the developer uses good names and comments so you can make a good guess by looking at it.
Yea it's hard, and yea it's dangerous. All powerful things are. I don't like being told I can't have something because you think I am too stupid to use it safely. Some people won't be able to use it, and everyone at one point will be too inexperienced to use it correctly. But thats why you layer the more common languages on top. And if you are running an enterprise shop where you can't guarantee the quality of the maintenance developers, don't let your developers use it. etc...
Because it's too powerful is not a very convincing argument for me.
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#306Great essay but the death was previously called
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#307Remind me which Web-based apps make money again?
The very first one did.
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#308I have always enjoyed reading Paul's articles/blogs. I was enjoying reading this till I got to the line "All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s." Having used gmail since March 28, 05, gcal since it came out, and other web software as appropriate for a while, I'm a big believer in software-as-a-service because I hate the idea of having desktop software o…
If you want user customizable keyboard shortcuts on the Mac, use QuicKeys...
I run Office 2007 in Parallel's virtual machine software, since I have necessary add-ins, and reboot the machine to Windows when needed for a project.
Since the release of Tiger, I have been performing many conversions from Windows to Mac. There are also large corporations like Mastercard, which are mainstream Mac.
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#309I believe that paulgraham meant that Microsoft is a DEAD-END.
My opinion as to what killed them: suicide by REGISTRY. While any operating system needs a file system, the usual critical lack is a DATABASE system. But instead of a (relatively) simple, open relational database, MS chose some key of hierarchical network database they called the Registry. This made Windows suitably arcane, but rediculously hard to manage and maintain. Coupled with the security holes, and the advent of a capable unix-like OS, makes Windows obsolete, if still operable.
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#310Old news! I've been using Linux since 1993, been involved in startups since 1999, and about the last time that I paid any attention to Microsoft was when they launched .NET (around 2003). In fact, the .NET implementation (a belated catch-up in many ways to Java) was about the only semi-innovative development effort I have seen come out of MS in the last 10 years. Even so, it was little more than a tarted-up virtual m…
Sorry to be really anal and pedantic, but you can have more than 1 language in a .Net DLL (assembly). You compile the code for each language to a .Net module, then bind these together with a manifest into a .Net assembly. I told you it was anal.