Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ballmer Sends Wakeup Call to Staff

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the good-morning-good-morning dept.

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."

3 of 829 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Huzzah! by Chief+Crazy+Chicken · · Score: 5, Informative
    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
  2. Maybe ballmer should read more by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

  3. When did .NET fail? by OrangeGoo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.