webGL or equivalent, I guess it's gotta be webD3D
Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
21–30 of 381 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#22Say to Ballmer?
I'd tell him to move aside. Ballmer's a sales' guy. He is clearly a good sales' guy. But he's the wrong person to be determining strategy at Microsoft.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Ballmer had gone to Sun, as the sales' guy. Is there an xkcd for that?
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#23Suggestion to Microsoft - Do less, but better. My faith in their products has slowly grown over the last 10 years, however they still suffer from trying to have too many fingers in too many pies. And in my opinion their products suffer for it. Maybe they should put more focus into fewer products?
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would you consider a maximum acceptable boot time?
As low as possible, and ideally virtually instantaneous. From a cold boot, I'd put a cap of 10-15 seconds tops.
Why would anyone reboot a system, instead of putting it to sleep¹? (Except when restart is required by an upgrade.)
[1] Powered-off-and-ram-image-stored-to-disk type of sleep.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#25Personally, I think Microsoft needs to make the strategic "pivot" to selling experiences - not necessarily operating systems. They've done a great job of this with Xbox and Windows 7. I was incredibly sad when the Courier got cancelled. This was a big head pound moment for me. At it's core, MS sells software, but increasingly, it seems apparent that consumers are going to spend their dollars on hardware/software comb…
Care to explain how come Chrome OS is dead?
Because netbooks are not the future of ultraportable computing; tablets are, and Chrome OS is primarily part of a mouse and keyboard driven paradigm. Also it is making increasingly little sense for Google to support two divergent operating systems.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#26An understanding that if you're asking us for ideas like this, that if you don't already know what's wrong despite everything that's been written and everything your developers could tell you, you're in deep trouble?
More constructively, I'd like to see Microsoft taking more risks and leading more. Kinnect and XBox Live are good examples of Microsoft being first in or coming up with the best thing out there. You could make a case for elements of Bing too.
So be more ambitious. Too many MS entries into markets now seem me too relying on the MS brand to prop up an otherwise ordinary product (Zune?). You need to either be better on day one or moving with such momentum that you're confident that you will be very quickly. How are you going to move with that momentum? I'd suggest less management and less marketing. Yep some of projects which don't have the current level of guidance are going to bomb out heading in totally the wrong direction, but the ones that succeed will be better than what you're producing now and get there a lot faster.
Your historic approach of watching markets develop and muscling into them using Windows and Office as leverage won't work any more. Windows isn't an effective lever in the new markets and the competitors (Apple and Google) don't shift as easily as they used to. You need to be in earlier and better.
Your developer tools are pretty good but your licensing is a quick route to insanity. I've honestly recommended Oracle in the past because for a proposal I had to put together very quickly, working out the licensing cost for a complex SQL Server implementation was simply too time consuming.
Mobile - you seem to have become obsessed with the iPhone where frankly you're ill equipped to fight. Aim at corporate, go for RIM. You're strong in corporate and if you can't do a better integration with a corporate infrastructure (which is likely based around Exchange) then you shouldn't be playing at all. Once you've got that sorted, then look at the consumer market building on that.
But also good luck. Though I don't think you'll ever be what you were historically, I honestly believe MS could be a company turning out great products and the more competition in the market the better.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#27Don't let dynamic languages in the CLR die!!! (IronPython, IronRuby)
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Care to explain how come Chrome OS is dead?
Because netbooks are not the future of ultraportable computing; tablets are, and Chrome OS is primarily part of a mouse and keyboard driven paradigm. Also it is making increasingly little sense for Google to support two divergent operating systems.
That's just ridiculous. Is this theonion.com ?
Step outside the bubble for a second. Most people don't have tablets, and don't want tablets.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#29Interesting if real. Ok lets go for benefit of the doubt, starting with the highest priority items: Mobile technology - The Windows phone 7 will not succeed. Sure you will sell a few phones but for the marketing and sheer executive brainspend on this you will not get a profitable return within 5 years. I had a good debate on Quora about what sucess looks like for Microsoft and I don't think this is realistically achi…
This post has so much FUD it makes my brain hurt.
Really? I really try to avoid FUD, this was my honest views, anything specific you thought was FUD?
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#30Personally, I think Microsoft needs to make the strategic "pivot" to selling experiences - not necessarily operating systems. They've done a great job of this with Xbox and Windows 7. I was incredibly sad when the Courier got cancelled. This was a big head pound moment for me. At it's core, MS sells software, but increasingly, it seems apparent that consumers are going to spend their dollars on hardware/software comb…
Care to explain how come Chrome OS is dead?
I'm sure it's not "dead", but it doesn't have any "e-buzz" right now. It was designed to be a tabletOS - how come all the upcoming tablets are all going to be based on Android? Are Android and ChromeOS going to interact with each other? It seems silly to have two free products that compete with each other doing very similar things - especially when both of them are supposed to offer the same thing experience-wise.
Android has all the buzz, Android has the market share, Android has all the apps - if I were a tablet maker, would you put Android (a proven platform right now) or ChromeOS on your new tablet? ChromeOS will need some serious help from Google if it's going to be viable (i.e a Google specific device that shows it off). This is a prognostication on my part (a big one), but if Google relies on it's manufacturing partners (without strong direction), ChromeOS will fail.