Category: M$
Microsoft, poor Microsoft, Zune falls flat. Vista unfolds. Let’s see how.
Some things are so odd, weird, strange and yet predictable, you simply can not make them up:
Microsoft launches two products right now. “Vista” and “Zune”.
they migh have trouble working together
In case you don’t trust a site called “appleinsider” to break news about Microsoft products, here it is from the the horses mouth
OJ can stand for the juice of oranges or for a strange man, that had an even stranger run in with the legal system.
Youtube has now attorneys. And apparently they are bored.
top 10 spammers are supposed to create
80% of all spam.
I guess that each dollar a spammer makes costs around 10,000 US$ in damages. It might be good for the world, if these individuals would be prevented to use computers. Maybe a few companies get together and make sure that the top 10 spammers are always being caught?
Two kings got together. No, not those. This times it is Novell and Microsoft. To do Linux.
Without having the time or intention to go into detail of the press release the headlines and sound bites read pretty hilarously. Let’s just pause for a second and look back: Microsoft did try everything they could to stop or surpress Linux. For years. They fucking failed. Language? Yes, it is justitified. Since this is a big deal. Not the announcement of Novell and Microsoft doing whatever they feel like doing. The big deal is that Microsoft was unable to win against Linux. They still dominate the desktop, and probably will for years to come. But they lost billions in server revenue. Not to somebody. They simply could not make the money. Nobody did, since Linux is essentially free. If the last sentense should prompt thoughts like “that’s communism” or “but there is total cost of ownership” in your mind, then let me tell you, since today I can, and it is oh so sweet: You merely parrot Microsoft prograganda of a past aera here. Not even the people that paid millions so that you would think these things claim that anymore. Yes, there is also corporate flip floping. No, Ballmer did not stay the course. He never did say that either.
Today it’s allot of fun to quote Sun Tzu:
According to my assessment, even if you have many more troops than others, how can that help you to victory?
Microsoft likes more people to develop games for their consoles. In their press release it sounds like a Windows XP machine is all you will need to develop games for their consoles.
The range of impact goes from ‘flash in the pan’ to ‘Sony is finished’. It all depends on the details of the implementation and capabilities. Nobody has ever opened game consoles to a wider development community. It might or might not take off. Trying it is a bold and innovative move.
Microsoft is a funny companies these days: Some of their divisions do all the right things, while others are as stupid as the Ottoman empire in 1907.
Trolltech makes a phone now. Trolltech got big with a toolkit for graphical user interfaces called “Qt”. I used it years ago, and it is not bad. Now they make a phone that runs embedded linux, and their user interface on top of it. In other words it is an open source phone.
From the pure aspect of technology these developments had to happen. The very interesting question is, what will come out of it. Content is a very tricky thing to predict. Hollywood survived despite constant failures in this area. As long the movie industry existed they tried to mechanize and control creativity and content creation, so that they can churn out products like a nuts and bolts manufacturer. And it never worked.
One the other side of the argument one could see Microsoft and Trolltech shipping typewriters to a million monkeys.
And, of course reality will fall somewhere in between. And once the revolution happened, it will be so clear why it did. Same in the other outcome.
Games could really use some injection of innovation. Roaming the show floor of what was the last E3 of it’s kind I was pretty surprised how alike most games looked. I don’t play. But I care about the technology and business side of this industry. There are racing games and first person shooters. Lot’s of those.
With production costs high new content development is tricky. That’s why I liked Rockstar’s Table Tennis.
Tetris was written by a russian programer when there was still a country called “Soviet Union”.
The situation with phones is similar. They don’t suck, but I never saw a phone that made just sense. Of course all Apple fan boys hope that Steve Jobs will come down Moses like with a phone on his arm. They hope so, since phones are ok, but definetely not as useful as we want them to be. And as they could be. If open software can fix this is to be seen.
Mircrosoft and Nortel want to do things together
Billion dollar companies flow and merge, yet, the winner is already the tiny little Asterisk. I never used it, but I can imagine how it runs circles around those dinosaurs. If you get your phones hooked up the Microsoft-Nortel way you can easily pay a thousand times more for less features compared to Asterisk. What get’s me excited about Asterisk is, that, since it is open source, you can add your own features if you would care to do so.
Having coded interfaces for Nortel systems I can not wait for them to go out of business. It’s beyond horrible.
Peter Krogh comments
iView Media Pro has a stupid name but works fine otherwise.
I understand that they sold themselves to the people out of Redmond. I just don’t see how the product would benefit from it.
I have the best immigration lawyers you can imagine. I know since I also had the worst years ago. The current people are great, not the cheapest, but they really come through with everything. Today they did send me some forms to sign and send back. As Microsoft Word files. Of course they only open as garbage on my computer. I asked for PDFs and these poor souls can not even create them.
Kind of funny that people rather send around a format that can be edited, does not work in all cases and even can contain malicious software.
And, again, these are probably the best immigration experts you can find.
Not being able to send forms and text in PDF is like saying ‘we have no email’. In 1999.
this sounds like a personal Steve Jobs nightmare before Macworld, but it is rather the harsh reality of tech-CEOs trying to use their own products.
Amazing how these companies get to waste Billions of dollars just by ignoring s simple fact:
Features don’t exist if they are not accessible.
The amount of high tech they cramped into those device is certainly impressive. But those don’t do anybody any good if they can not be used.
Windows is not an interface, it’s a hack. People use it since they have to, not because they like to. The biggest miracle is how a crappy system like this could get so far. Trying to resize it into Origami dimensions is not helping.
But let’s focus on something less complex than a OS interface to show that Origami is a dead concept: Battery life.
So it went black during the presentation. That will happen to allot of people. Imagine that the alpha geek you know shelled out seven hundret dollars for this lump of plastic. Eagerly does want to show it to somebody. The chances are rather high that it will run out of juice just inmidst or before this private demonstration. Let that happen a couple of times and your product evangelist moves on to the next gadget. Something that does not let him down when he needs to show off with it.
Origami’s are a debacle. They might get sold to a couple of vertical integrators. But ‘selling’ to big companies and the government does not really count. Those processess share an eiry ressemblance with inner working of the market-economy of the failed soviet empire.
Intel, Microsoft and Samsung might be able to churn out some industrial products in vast numbers. But together they can not innovate. 800 pounds gorillas can not enact a decent ballet.
Almost as long as Vista is delayed.
I think that the PS3 and Vista will both come out together: Never. They share the sickness of the incumbent king. Too fat and saturated to really move. Sony is dreaming about 100 Million PS3 sold, only because they did so with PS1 & 2. And likewise Microsoft thinks that everybody will have to have Vista. Both are in for a surprise.
The same patterns can be found elsewhere: Google Video is not really amazing. It’s outright lame. Google is the incumbent search engine. Not their core business sucks yet. But new launches like Video or base or personal pages are less than great.