Another telling sign: in the late 90s when trying to raise money for a startup you had to have an answer to the M question. These days you need an answer to the G question. No-one asks the M any more, it's just not relevant.
Microsoft is Dead
231–240 of 454 posts
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#232Almost exactly ten years after John Walker (founder of Autodesk) wrote "Microsoft at Apogee" - http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/msapogee.html . I have to admit I was surprised that no-one mentioned this essay.
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#233Surprisingly eye opening to me, who is still trying to educate WinIdiots and WinMorons, by handing out free LiveCDs like http://pclinuxos.com in Costco, and WalMart.
CompUSA and BestBuy seem to be dead, ala Microsoft. They have a few devoted WinIdiots and WinMorons, but, most folks just shop on the Internet, now, for high tech. goodies, running upto 50X faster in GNU/Linux, on an old PC, so it all looks as great as Mac, at reduced investment, that recycles systems for another 10 years!
Anybody who knows a school kid, or, a geek, has heard of Linux, and probably even has at least one computer that runs it! Exception is School Boards in 10 remaining states who still support convicted felon Microsoft, desktop Windows, and the "trusted partner" protection racket, while Linux is faster, safer, runs on old equipment, and is FREE!
310 of the distros are at http://livecdlist.com
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#234You article sums up what I think as well. Microsoft no longer has an technical relevance, and many other companies have taken the lead in innovation. I blogged about this in December in an article I called "The Microsoft Bubble in 2006":
http://www.osxautomation.com/2006/12/10/the-microsoft-bubble-in-2006/
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#235Deep thoughts. Thanks for them.
Exeeding my goal since 1997, converting one computer and/or person each week to Open Source, usually GNU/Linux, but, have done some BSD (yes, there are some 25 of them!), I am fighting the lock-in monopolism of BOTH Apple/Macintosh and the multiple convicted felon Microsoft.
Major reasons people switch, from my experience: 1. Simplicity of use - GNU/Linux and BSD are immune to the "114,000 Microsoft Virus Definitions" and provide thousands of included applications: games, suites, browsers.
2. Users are tired of having to become a computer technician and spend 2 hours or more each week trying to clean or prevent Microsoft virus, trojan, malware infestations.
3. Disgruntled that Microsoft treats paying customers like criminals, but, now aware that convicted felons act that way, thus, WGA, and in Vista, corporate Microsoft spyware with a "shutdown feature"! Why would anyone accept this?
4. Realization that Microsoft and Mac will sell included free stuff, without proper conscience, and worry about the 'details' such as royalties, customer support, or customer satisfaction, "later"!
5. Awareness that 15 day TRIAL WARE is NOT a selling point for new Dell, HP, Compaq, Gateway computers... it is a dis-incentive, thus the great migration to FOSS, where all the FREE software is self protecting, at no extra penalty to the customer.
Yeah, http://distrowatch.com has it, and http://livecdlist.com has it Live!
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#236Microsoft recently came to my graduate school to recruit for user experience design and user experience research positions. 10 folks out of my program (about 25% of us) scored and interview.
Every single one of us had no intention of working for Microsoft and joked about it intensely. Microsoft had be relegated to the realm of other boring places to do our type of work but that you interview at for practice (and, you know, just in case that job at google doesn't pan out).
In my interview, the topic of digg.com came up and neither interviewer had heard of them. I said they were like a type of slahsdot, or maybe magnolia. Never heard of those either I quipped "oh, maybe you're not involve much in the web / web development world".
"Actually, I'm one of the project managers for Internet Explorer."
The interview went downhill, from Microsoft, from that point forward. My heart wasn't even in it "just in case" anymore.
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#237Being nearly 50years old, what frightens me about MS is that they think they can sell an OS which they can remotely turn off without out a court warrant and then its up to you if your business hasn't gone bankrupt to sue them . This just shows complete and utter contempt for their customers.Which will do for them in the long run.My next box will be linux. Maybe the apple setup etc looks attractive to the younger gene…
I recently acquired a Mac Book Pro. There was precisely one Windows program I wanted to run on it (SuperMemo) under Parallels, which received good reviews. Rather than wait to purchase a copy of Windows from the local CompUSA, I used an OEM copy of Windows from a defenestrated a DELL box (I replaced Windows with Debian). After installing XP as a guest OS under Parallels, I activated XP online by purchasing a product…
That is how convicted felons think, everyone else is a felon, or is going to be one!
But, yep, you now deserve this for having anything to do with multiple convicted felon and pirate Microsoft.
Nobody of integrity openly deals with convicted felons, for the taint will corrupt our customer trust. We all switched a decade ago. Where were you?
Well, never too late!
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#238I'm a little bit surprised that pg posted this article at all. It's probably a bad choice of words, as "dead" can mean lots of things other than what I think pg means: it's not as intimidating to startups as it use to be. It will not be the source of technical innovation that attracts the best minds in the world, as it once was.
In any case, a couple days ago, I was on the john, reading Hackers and Painters, and there's a chapter on "What you can't say" dealing with controversial thoughts. Apparently, this is one of them. pg's advice in the end of the article was not to say anything at all, so you don't have to deal with bickering with others, and go about your merry way.
But then again, I don't see pg here in the trenches. In fact, most of us have wasted our time (some more than others) posting 200+ posts here, instead of working on our startups.
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#239dunno which place you pulled the Mac/Linux observation from but I can assure you that finally Microshaft are actually getting it right, and company IT departments are finally realising that TCO and facilities is tipped in MS's favour. I would thus say that your observation comes from clique formation, and perhaps doesn't reflect the overall industry. I freelance IT for organisations which go all the way from accounta…
You have been infected with the disease of Microsoft, rose colored glasses, greed in the marketplace, tunnel vision...
Wake up and shake off the shackles of corporate greed! Gnu/Linux processes upto 50X faster, runs on any platform, DEC Alpha to Sparc. Why else is Microsoft using 'Nix in front of all servers, on all Redmond networks, for all routers (Aruba leased routers are on all MS nets), and etc.?
Learn the new revenue streams, or go bankrupt with them.
Re: Microsoft is Dead
#240As a developer of MS web solutions that people are happy with, and can be developed quite quickly, many of these points fail to resonate with me. Users pretty much don't care what the file extension of the page is serving up their content, they just want it to work. I can develop develop rich UI pages with the MS AJAX controls very easily and users are happy.
As a developer, working in the open source, 5 billion different products in various stages of non-existant support and working in a single consistent framework with fabulous support, it isn't a difficult decision which way to go... Unless you are one of those "software tools should be free" kind of people who doesn't mind not getting paid either.