Earlier quoted context omitted.
My next YC idea: A plugin for Vista that makes it work.
You know, that might be just on the right side of crazy. Could one build some kind of layer on top of Vista that would make it tolerable to users?
Disable UAC.
Microsoft Signs Letter Of Intent To Acquire Xobni
51–60 of 63 posts
Re: Microsoft Signs Letter Of Intent To Acquire Xobni
#52I wanted to go work for them someday. :`(
But maybe it'll be like how the TellMe deal went. They're still more or less independent.
Re: Microsoft Signs Letter Of Intent To Acquire Xobni
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Come on, building a working OS is a gigantic effort. Last time I checked Xobni was regex-ing phone numbers and names from e-mail texts, plus some fancy GUI of the kind that you said in one essay that you hate (messing around with obscure Windows APIs). Following your reasoning, the Xobni guys could have more easily built a full OS, which, with all respect, I seriously doubt.
Following your reasoning You're not; you're supplying new reasoning for me. My point was that big companies can screw up even apparently straightforward projects, so screwing up novel ones would be even more likely.
Well, you implied one was more difficult than the other. Then the other one has to be easier, otherwise it doesn't make much sense.
Re: Microsoft Signs Letter Of Intent To Acquire Xobni
#54I'm not sure how this makes any sense for Microsoft. If they assigned a few engineers to work on this, they could replicate the functionality within few months, especially since they know the internals of Outlook.
I assume your estimates of how hard it is and how fast the Outlook team can develop are completely ex-recto. Here's some data. Outlook's last two major releases were in '03 and '06. In those 3 years they added the following visible features: - todo bar - better calendar UI - RSS aggregator - search [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Outlook ] Xobni might be as useful and interesting as all those combined…
My estimates weren't ex-recto as you said. I took a brief look at Xobni, and thought that even I could have done it in a few months. Then a few engineers from MS could do it even more easily.
Re: Microsoft Signs Letter Of Intent To Acquire Xobni
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know, that might be just on the right side of crazy. Could one build some kind of layer on top of Vista that would make it tolerable to users?
Depends on why users think it's intolerable, I suppose. The most common complaints I hear about Vista, even from casual users, are about performance, and I'm not sure what you could do about that.
It would not surprise me if there's a whole bunch of useless services running; disabling them might help.
Re: Microsoft Signs Letter Of Intent To Acquire Xobni
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume your estimates of how hard it is and how fast the Outlook team can develop are completely ex-recto. Here's some data. Outlook's last two major releases were in '03 and '06. In those 3 years they added the following visible features: - todo bar - better calendar UI - RSS aggregator - search [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Outlook ] Xobni might be as useful and interesting as all those combined…
My estimates weren't ex-recto as you said. I took a brief look at Xobni, and thought that even I could have done it in a few months. Then a few engineers from MS could do it even more easily.
You underestimate corporate overhead.
Re: Microsoft Signs Letter Of Intent To Acquire Xobni
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? Building an OS that works is a solved problem, and they don't seem to be able to do that. The reason big companies buy startups is because they can't do what they "could" do.
In the same time a feature idea for news.yc & reddit: the number of votes on a comment should become visible only after someone voted already, similarly to online polls. This would prevent people from mindlessly agreeing with popular opinion, and in the same time it would encourage more people to vote, out of curiosity to see the result.
One issue there is that I know I personally decline to mod people if they already have a large positive or negative balance on a single post. (There are some posts which I think should sit at 0 rather than -30, or even -5, for example.) If I have to mod someone to see what others mods were then I will be much more likely to unintentionally karma-bomb someone when I really just want to see what other hackers here thought about their post.
Re: Microsoft Signs Letter Of Intent To Acquire Xobni
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can have taste without being able to program well, but you can't program well without good taste. The original point was that MS had smart people so a lack of smarts couldn't be the problem. The salient points are 1) smarts don't guarantee programming skill, and 2) smarts don't guarantee taste.
> You can have taste without being able to program well, but you can't program well without good taste. Fair enough. In that sense, then, I wouldn't say that programmers at Microsoft lack taste by definition. There are things at Microsoft that have demonstrated solid taste: the original NT kernel comes to mind, as do early iterations of Word and Excel (starting back when they were primarily developed for Mac). LINQ.…
"I'm not convinced that it's that everyone at Microsoft is individually defective as much as that their methods of collaboration, like those of most large corporations, usually yield results less effective than good individuals or small teams could have produced with sufficient autonomy."
Which brings this thread from the religious fervour of "what it means to be smart" right back to the subject at hand: Why MSFT would pay M$20+ for Xobni rather than write a kock-off in-house.
Re: Microsoft Signs Letter Of Intent To Acquire Xobni
#59This is fantastic for Xobni. Congrats.
Hopefully Xobni is able to secure contractual assurances that they'll be able to maintain a level of sovereignty to continue to work on their amazing vision. Microsoft, from experience, is a patchwork of fiefdoms, some the domain of engineering teams, and some product marketing. A team at Microsoft can easily get lost in the shuffle or killed randomly, without a strong exec as high up in the org as possible to make things work.
Cautionary tale: Lookout, that fantastic Outlook plugin that got bought and then promptly taken offline / never heard from again. I believe they were folded into Live Desktop Search. (Will leave it to an exercise to the reader as to whether that was a good move.)
Re: Microsoft Signs Letter Of Intent To Acquire Xobni
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? Building an OS that works is a solved problem, and they don't seem to be able to do that. The reason big companies buy startups is because they can't do what they "could" do.
Isn't the real cause of their problems maintaining backwards compatibility? As I understand it, Apple doesn't do this, making it easier for them to create a good OS.
it's not that apple "doesn't do this." it's that apple had a recent "ground zero event," a term i just made up, which means they had a perfect opportunity to ditch all their old APIs and start anew when they switched operating systems, from macos "classic" to macosx. that was in 2001, which is pretty darned recent. most new mac apps are written to the cocoa api, which didn't even exist before macosx.
however, microsoft is slated to do the exact same thing with the next version of windows, which will supposedly break binary compatibility with old windows apps. if ms has the guts to follow through on this, it will be a Very Good Thing.