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$600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

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Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#301

Post by gmueckl »

krn wrote: post #290
bena wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a lot of ways they aren't/weren't. Office does a lot of things their own way and without a lot of the cross-compatibility that's a feature of most Microsoft products. That's why you'll find you'll be able to do something in Office, but other Microsoft programs won't. Or vice versa. Like Notepad and Internet Explorer are pretty much just containers for certain Windows controls. Controls Office don't use. They roll…

> Office does a lot of things their own way and without a lot of the cross-compatibility that's a feature of most Microsoft products. That's probably because unlike most Microsoft products, Office is cross-platform and has to support multiple operating systems, including MacOS, iOS, and Android.

Isn't Office for Mac a completely diverged fork from an old Windows version of Office? I remember some blog posts from the understaffed Mac Office team stating that much several years ago. I don't know if they rebased it in the meantime. The posts read as if the big Office team was focused entirely on Windows and everything else was done by understaffed teams struggling to keep up.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#302

Post by johncolanduoni »

candiodari wrote: post #277
ChrisSD wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I meant disabling "suggestions" stops them coming back again in the future. Although Windows has had update "bugs" whereby this setting is ignored. This is solved by delaying feature updates until at least a week or so after release.

Maybe I'm the only one here, but it seem absurd to me to count on Google, an advertising company, not advertise on Chromebooks. Not yet ... perhaps. Perhaps. Not ? No way.

Since Chromebooks are very internet-forward, they get plenty of advertising opportunities without installing banner ads or something similar into the OS. Are you expecting them to start advertising on the Android home screen too?

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#303

Post by mattkevan »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #300
mattkevan wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you could ‘squirt’ songs from one Zune to another. The Zune was a litany of poor decisions, but that word choice must have been the worst.

From the company that brought you “wince.”

And MicroSoft

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#304

Post by reaperducer »

danso wrote: post #293
nailer wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think changed those people's minds? My feeling is that in the years post Jobs' death negative stories about his personality have been increasingly common. For the record: I believe Jobs definitely deserves the credit, I'm just observing the mud that has been slung his way.

Stories about his negative side are likely more common because people feel more free to talk about them, now that Jobs, being dead, can no longer respond or retaliate against people with grievances, such as the daughter he disavowed [0]. I perhaps unfairly read negative connotations in your use of "revisionist", but I see nothing wrong with adding Jobs' uglier side to the historical record. It doesn't change what he…

I think you and I see eye-to-eye on Woz. I feel like there's been another uptick in idol worship when it comes to him in the last few years.

As for Jobs, I was thinking more of his technical abilities. The Woz-worshippers putting him on a pedestal seem to feel it simultaneously necessary to denigrate Mr. Jobs' technical side.

Jobs knew a hell of a lot about computers. More than I, or anyone I've met, ever will. It's clear reading old interviews with him that he knew his stuff, all the way down to the circuit level. But these days the conventional wisdom is that Woz built everything and Jobs was the equivalent of P.T. Barnum.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Did he personally know how to program 68000 assembler? Maybe some, or maybe not. But did he know how the chip worked? Absolutely. And more importantly, he picked the right kind of smart people and let them (largely) do their thing. And he did something that rarely happens these days — he gave them personal credit for their technical achievements.

When I read his biography a few years ago, it reduced my respect for him. But these days, reading archives of first-hand documents and interviews, I have more respect for him than before.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#305

Post by Hydraulix989 »

gruez wrote: post #34
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought RT was just an ARM port, not a rewrite?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Runtime

Close, but not quite. The first sentence on the linked article says:

"'WinRT' redirects here. It is not to be confused with Windows RT."

So "Windows RT" is an ARM port of the Windows 8 OS, while "Windows Runtime" aka "WinRT" is an API for "modern" Windows applications.

To be clear, I was responding to OP's literal "Windows RT" mention in my parent post.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#306

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

supernovae wrote: post #279
reaperducer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is entirely due to backwards compatibility. That's the current conventional wisdom. But it's more like an excuse. Windows got bloated because Microsoft relied(s) on cheap masses of mediocre programmers, backed by equally mediocre managers. A pattern that Windows application developers copied. Yes, Microsoft has some really talented people. I knew a good number of them from the Bing and Xbox group when I…

This isn't true at all. The ENTIRE industry had to re-invent itself MANY times - and MANY companies failed and have long since shutdown. Microsoft on the other hand has survived - and not only maintained backwards compatibility but embraced new technologies - and is doing so at a breakneck pace today. Microsoft research is a top notch research company. Microsoft is also a large, if not the largest, contributor to Lin…

> Microsoft is also a large, if not the largest, contributor to Linux & Open source.

I always hear things like this. What exactly are they contributing though?

> Windows has maintained a level of compatibility second to none to support all that legacy

As far as I can tell, if you want to run a legacy Windows app, you're more likely to be successful running it in Wine on Linux.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#307

Post by Buge »

reaperducer wrote: post #261
thaumasiotes wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What londons_explore said. Windows OS didn't succeed, but the comments about the iPhone seem to have been basically accurate...?

the comments about the iPhone seem to have been basically accurate If by "basically accurate," you mean "not accurate at all." It's a long way from 2% to 45%. Not many companies get to underestimate their competition's potential marketshare by a factor of 22 and survive.

Apple has 15%, not 45%. So it's 5-8x, not 22x. And the original quote appears to be about all phones, not just smartphones, so the factor would in fact be even lower.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#308

Post by mark_l_watson »

skymt wrote: post #89
sarcasmic wrote: post #24

Any Chromebook more than $400 right now is just there to absorb even more disposable income from the market, because they ship with nicer finishes and faster processors, but they are anemic on memory and storage, making them subpar for intense multitasking, or getting certain types of work done. The situations in which they excel can be reliably hit by Chromebooks around a $400 price point, and even cheaper Chromeboo…

> I suspect one reason for $600 devices, other than Google itself trying to reposition Chromebooks as more upmarket, is because $600 Windows laptops are still are a mess of preloaded bullshit put there by the vendor. Microsoft has tried various ways to fix this but it only tends to protect high-end models. In the current version of Windows 10 there's a feature called "fresh start" that makes it trivial to reset to a…

You can also buy a windows 10 laptop from the microsoft store and not getting any crap ware installed on it.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#309

Post by bena »

gmueckl wrote: post #301
krn wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Office does a lot of things their own way and without a lot of the cross-compatibility that's a feature of most Microsoft products. That's probably because unlike most Microsoft products, Office is cross-platform and has to support multiple operating systems, including MacOS, iOS, and Android.

Isn't Office for Mac a completely diverged fork from an old Windows version of Office? I remember some blog posts from the understaffed Mac Office team stating that much several years ago. I don't know if they rebased it in the meantime. The posts read as if the big Office team was focused entirely on Windows and everything else was done by understaffed teams struggling to keep up.

Funny story, Excel was on the Mac before Windows.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#310

Post by scarface74 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #251
sarcasmic wrote: post #24

Any Chromebook more than $400 right now is just there to absorb even more disposable income from the market, because they ship with nicer finishes and faster processors, but they are anemic on memory and storage, making them subpar for intense multitasking, or getting certain types of work done. The situations in which they excel can be reliably hit by Chromebooks around a $400 price point, and even cheaper Chromeboo…

To my way of thinking, this is exactly the blind spot: ... they are anemic on memory and storage, making them subpar for intense multitasking, or getting certain types of work done. Look at the iPad Pro, 2GB of memory, not a "laptop" class CPU. etc. It is eating into Microsoft's market for the same reason. The "big" part of the laptop wedge is people who aren't gamers, or intense multitaskers, or intense local storag…

The iPad Pro has 4GB of RAM but the point remains.
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