Ballmer Sends Wakeup Call to Staff

Puneet writes "An MSNBC article outlines details of how the world's biggest software company seems to be facing a technology gap. Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft, sent a memo across the company basically saying that with no immediate breakthroughs in technology coming, and with the Linux computer operating system and a batch of other open-source programs biting at its heels, Microsoft will have to do a better job of persuading customers it has something they need. . Microsoft must "improve business consistency" so that customers are not hit with unexpected - and unwanted - changes. Also covered by Forbes but in lesser detail."

Comments

Re:Huzzah!

[Chief Crazy Chicken]

Linux and all of its branches like BSD

Timeline of GNU/Linux and Unix

Note particularly:
1980: Bell Labs finally shows interest in BSD Unix
-and-
1991: 05Oct: linux 0.02, first mention of directory-name 'linux' on netnews

Maybe ballmer should read more

[Anonymous Coward]

When you compare POSIX native thread in the next release of Linux and this article by Chris Brumme about AppDomains it's obvious the issues with distributed transaction on windows platform has serious problems. In Brumme's article, he discusses why creating new threads is heavy weight and diificult to scale. Read his other articles, they are very informative. Distributed transactions don't necessarily require threading, but without a robust threading implementation, solving the problem is that much harder. Not only that, doing complex distributed transactions requires a robust Object Persistence manager, which isn't available from microsoft. There are third party tools for .NET that do Object Persistence management, but it's not nearly as mature as several Open source apps.

There are several important differences between how .NET handles dynamic runtime loading of classes and how java does it. .NET requires a separate AppDomain, which means it has a higher overhead. Using a separate AppDomain is only needed if you need to unload/reload an assembly at runtime. Although java classloaders are difficult to grasp for many programmers, it provides a better way of handling dynamic loading. I won't bother going into the details of how dynamic loading works. Tomcat has plenty of examples of how it is done for each webapp.

When did .NET fail?

[OrangeGoo]

Sorry, I haven't seen a failure of .NET. I'm just curious where you're looking. I work for the US Army Corps of Engineers, and we use the heck out of .NET and everyone loves it. There is some Java development here, too, but most of our new stuff is in C# (which is, of course, essentially a Microsoft-ized Java).

I haven't heard any complaints from people who use .NET on a regular basis. Personally, I think it's great.

Re:.NET failed?

[kahei]

Yeah, I know. I am STILL regularly explaining to people what the hell .NET is. Microsoft could have said:

'.NET is a runtime environment and set of libraries for programs written in a bytecode called IL. There are some developer tools that compile languages like C# to IL, and there are some high-level services like ASP.NET implemented in .NET'

What they said was, I believe:

'.NET is all about XML. .NET *is* XML'

This is part of what they got for putting Steve Ballmer in charge.

So as a PR thing, yeah, totally mishandled. But for providing solutions, it's very good -- I'd use it over Java whenever possible, and so would several ex-Java people I know.

Re:What else are they supposed to do?

[alexandre]

A linux for school distro was just relaesed here in
Québec:

http://www.edulinux.org/spip/

it's based on mandrake 9.1 and add some better local french support and many useful tools needed in university or college ... everyone should try and make that in their own state/province :-)

Re:What else are they supposed to do?

[ThogScully]

When Linux can come up with a browser that works as well on every site I use

I can't believe you think IE is a better browsing experience than Mozilla. If you do, it's likely that you just haven't used Mozilla. Mozilla's features and standards compatibility are so much more advanced than IE that you've debunked your own post in this one statement alone.

comes up with 100% Office clone (and I do mean 100%)

Trying not to sound like a conspiracy theorist here, but you're already too reliant on MS to notice anything else. This isn't a possible goal. There's no way that reverse engineering the Microsoft proprietary formats can be as quick and accurate as Microsoft designing them. By using MSOffice, you are supporting the very formats which have already locked you into Microsoft for as long as Microsoft remains proprietary (read forever).

Realistically, if MSOffice could open OpenOffice files, I would really have no need to use it again. I don't notice the features it lacks and like many of the features it has over MSOffice and I assume I'm not alone in that. My only qualm is that I have to save files in MSOffice formats and confirm that they look right in MSOffice before sending them to someone using it.
-N