161–170 of 203 posts
I liken this to Gruber's Microsoft strategy as being "Own the pipe". Not in the literal sense of becoming an ISP or backbone, but in the networking sense of being the middleman to all communications a la Cisco. They need to figure out something with the ARM architecture and servers to really advance the next decade.
The more they resist Linux as their base and keep plugging Windows NT everywhere.... the worse things will get for them.
My 2 cents.
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>"Moving from OSX to Windows I have noticed a large lack of ease of use and good UX flows in a lot of third party apps." I would say that is because you were really used to OSX. I was the other way around and really dislike the whole OSX UI experience. I think it is just a bias based on our previous experience. Right now after moving freely between OSX, Ubuntu and Windows at different jobs for the last 5 years, I sti…
Have you tried Powershell ? It is pretty nice. If I didn't have 20 years experience with bash, I think I'd even prefer it to it.
I think the Windows 8 gamble could still pay off. We're starting to see 8" tablets that run full Windows. Give it 12 months and the 8" form factor will be powerful enough to cover a lot of enterprise needs. 8" tablet + docking station is a very compelling way to get work done.
As mundane as it sounds, "enterprise" needs often involve opening a bunch of spreadsheets every day, and those are pretty painful on a 7" or 8" screen.
Steve Fucking Jobs said that (the desktop PC was dead and innovation had virtually ceased). He was exactly right. And who knows where we’d be today if Jobs and Next had not been reunified with Apple the next year. As a Windows user, I suspect I'd be about where I am today, except that I wouldn't have to install ClassicShell to get rid of Metro.
You don't think the success of the Mac over the last 10 years has pushed Windows to become better than it would have been?
However, Microsoft under Ballmer thrashed around trying to copy other things from Apple, things that did not belong on a desktop PC, and made life more annoying for a great many Windows users as a result. Like another poster above suggested, another five years of that approach would have brought Microsoft down to the lowest level Apple ever reached.
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MS currently has an advantage in digitizer features on the Surface. But if a swing like this was going to happen, for the reasons you suggest, it would be happening right now. Furthermore, even if such a swing does begin, you are assuming two things: Firstly that Apple will not respond effectively to MS establishing such a niche. Secondly that Android will also fail to compete for that niche. The problem is that all…
I think Android will always play catch up due to the fragmentation. Great quality apps take a lot refinement and it's near impossible to do when you have > 10 main devices to build/test against. I think MS took the right approach with the Surface/Metro, they really needed to reconsolidate their consumer software/hardware stack to provide a good user experience. "When you care enough about software, you'll make your o…
Sure, but why it has to be a low margin, overcrowded smartphone market? It's better to focus on new category of devices such as thermostats;-). Microsoft's situation is different here because they have no choice - Nokia pretty much the only vendor for WP.
What I find surprising is that, in the process of writing a historical review on Microsoft, anyone would ignore the fact that MS has repeatedly identified areas of profit, moved in, failed spectacularly, iterated aggressively, and ultimately become dominant, at least for a time. e.g. What killed Netscape? Microsoft's surface tablets are signs of big things to come. They're currently too expensive for what they are, b…
> What I find surprising is that, in the process of writing a historical review on Microsoft, anyone would ignore the fact that MS has repeatedly identified areas of profit, moved in, failed spectacularly, iterated aggressively, and ultimately become dominant ... When was the last time they have actually managed to pull this off? Maybe the Xbox? It was never dominant or an area of profit. .NET? Never dominant or a di…
Microsoft has always been a software-first company. Their strategy has always been to create the OS and license it to hardware manufacturers and capture the largest share of the market. Apple began as a hardware company that chose to pursue a strategy of building its own software so it could control the entire stack, bottom to top.
One wanted to cast a wide net with limited quality control, the other wanted to produce products of the highest quality.
But here's the thing- neither is necessarily "wrong" and you can't possibly simultaneously employ both strategies.
As of today, Microsoft has a $297 billion market cap. Enterprise software sales (read the large multibillion-dollar entities that quietly purchase billions of dollars of Microsoft products without blog entries or TechCrunch critiques) aren't going anywhere for a long time. Anybody who works in one can tell you that.
What's more is that Microsoft actually has a large and growing number of evangelists for their mobile products. The claim that Prices come down, chips get faster. Software evolves. cuts both ways and should apply as much to Microsoft as to Apple, especially now that the mobile device market is "mature."
No, no, no, that is exactly what I do _not_ want! I want all my computing devices to work completely offline in all circumstances. I want to install programs to my local computer so Incan be shure that I still can use them if the company goes bankrupt. I want to be able to install old versions of programs in case I don't like a newer version...
In my opinion it is wrong to put applications to the cloud because then I become dependent on the provider of this service. For me the cloud should only be used for one thing: to synchronize data between my computing devices!
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Did you even use Netscape in the 90's? While most of the non tech loved it's bloated and "friendly" interface, the tech crowd I ran in used IE because it was lean, fast and didn't try to be some sort of "suite" that took over your PC. Sure MS leveraged their dominance in the OS world with brutal effectiveness, but Netscape was far from the ideal browser. In fact, Opera was our "Firefox" of the time as it could fit on…
Did you use all the hypothetical 90s browsers that never existed because there was "a monopolist giving away a bundled product for free and reducing the incentive for others to enter that market"? No? Well that's my point. And IE sucked from the very beginning, each and every time Microsoft could get away with it sucking due to lack of competition. Where was the spell checker? Clearly veto'd by the Office team, till…
Also, MS didn't make IE "just good enough" they integrated the browser into the entire OS! Good or bad, they made a huge bet on the web as the future but when the DOJ essentially slapped them down they said "fuck it" and starved the market for half a decade until FF came around and the government/public had moved on from the whole Netscape fiasco enough for them to start giving a shit again. Why would you innovate on a product with the potential that any "feature" you added would put you back in court against the US Government. No thanks.