Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft 'under attack' On All Fronts
khujifig writes "The Beeb are carrying a story looking at the challenges facing Microsoft in the next few years.
This includes a brief description of the M.Home (sans Clippy) which the Beeb describes as "a far cry from real life", and a discussion of the next few years competition for Microsoft. They go on to highlight Linux, OpenOffice.org, the GIMP and Firefox (which Gates himself has used: "I played around with it a bit, but it's just another browser, and IE [Microsoft's Internet Explorer] is better,"), and look Apple in relation to Longhorn. Not as bad a read as I was expecting. Their summary: Microsoft is under 'attack' on all fronts, and either needs to innovate or die. "Why use Microsoft if you have a broadband connection and combine Firefox with powerful web services like Google's Gmail?."" It should be said, tho', that articles like this have been written about MSFT for a long time - and there's still billions in their war-chest.
Which Microsoft product "The Gimp" is supposed to attack? Paintbrush?
I thought The Gimp was Adobe Photoshop concurrent, and AFAIK, Adobe has not yet been bought by MS.
Microsoft is under 'attack' on all fronts, and either needs to inovate or die.
Microsoft is about likely to go under as IBM, they may take a hit now and again, they they always come out fighting.. Look atthe X-Box, they had no real console based experenice before, yet they managed to give Sony a good fight, even debuting a year after Sony... I expect that the new version of IE will have everything that FF has, and more...it's just how MS does things...
I have always looked at MS as a big mean dog...you really don't want to mess with them, and you really really don't want to back them in a corner..
Please don't talk this as pro-MS, it's more of a pro-reality statement
Because of corporate image. Microsoft realizes that Firefox is at least a worthy competitor to IE, but it would look absolutely terrible for the company if their very famous captain came out and said 'Well, what do ya know...our competitor's product IS better.'
there is more to the world than just the web and e-mail
Not to the vast majority of computer users. Most people I know think that the Web and the Internet are the same thing.
The computer using experience for most is: email, web surfing (this includes shopping on eBay) and gaming.
Digital photography is starting to push into that list more and more, but let's face it, Picassa is a great app and the price is right!
(oh, and i have no real problem with slashdot rendering in Firefox)
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Last year I have had an index corruption on a sizeable (32 mil entries at 2kb) table on our live MSSQL server, and we couldn't find out a way to do anything with that index file, since all attempts to do this just returned error messages.
Indexes are recreatable, and we could easily have time for dropping all indexes, deleting any references to such indexes and recreating them - but the glitch wouldn't allow to do this.
The MS knowledge base for that error message contained a single sentence that basically said - 'Known issue since 2003, no workaround available'.
The phone support suggested us to reinstall the computer/SQL server, and populate the data from backups.
We had other issues with other, fairly niche commercial software - and it is clear that the vendor support is useless, and it is not an argument.
The real support will be provided either by in-house people or third-party support companies. Or by the vendor charging extra in an attempt to compete with these third parties.
This support is as available for open source programs as for closed-source programs. It is a separate service.