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Challenges To Microsoft For 2006
TekkenLaw writes "Directions on Microsoft, a site which claims to be 'the only independent organization in the world devoted exclusively to tracking Microsoft', has published a list of 10 challenges for 2006 for Microsoft as a company. Top strategic issues in all areas of operation from OS to gaming are covered." From the article: "Windows Vista could offer large organizations improvements in software development, security, reliability, systems management, and user interface. However, public demonstrations have been full of cool graphics effects and consumer features that probably turn off more IT staff than they attract, and sales of Windows upgrade rights to corporations have been disappointing. In 2006, Microsoft has to settle on a feature set for Vista that appeals to enterprises, explain clearly what that feature set is, and reveal what PC hardware and other infrastructure corporations require to reap the benefits." Actually presented in a fairly respectful way, it's interesting to see the overall picture we've reported on for the past year condensed down into one page.
Actually presented in a fairly respectful way...
Fairly respectful!!??? This is slashdot, we want meat with the blood still in it.
I meta-moderate because I care.
"However, public demonstrations have been full of cool graphics effects and consumer features that probably turn off more IT staff than they attract"
With the exception of Windows application developers who have been battling with GDI(+) for the last 10 years. The new graphics core of windows has been needed for a long time now.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I would add to the list, cut down on the number of different versions of Vista. If they don't Windows will be more fractured than the number of distributions of *BSD and Linux on x86.
Ok so I exaggerate a little bit. There are hundreds of distributions, but I think there are less than 6 major distributions that have significant desktop share.
Think Deeply.
Gee, wonder why that could be?
Perhaps it's the fact that a small business (like the one I work for) that uses Exchange would have to pay approximately $10,000 in software licensing costs for an "upgrade". Not to mention the new hardware that would be required to run the insanely gluttonous software itself.
Compare that to having a clever sysadmin and an installed base of RedHat Enterprise Linux with sendmail? Even with our yearly subscription costs of ~$600, it would take more than 15 years for the costs to equal out.
Give me the OSS headaches and clever admins any day...
Oh well. If a country's citizens think 'bipartisan' and 'independent' are the same thing, who am I to complain that the concept of independence has slipped a little?
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
Actually, I'm a bit worried that they will wreck what is great about windows: Its the same (for the most part) where ever its installed. It might be hard for the slashdot community to recognize a non-computer expert, but there are a lot of them. Many of them run windows XP in the 2000 look-alike mode - specifically so that they need not learn a new "look and feel". MacOS concentrates on bling only - and this is where it fails - general users don't want zoom up icons, pan out desktops etc. What they want is just a simple environment that looks good and works the way they expect it to - and with M$ changing this it could cause many more people to stick with XP or win2k then they expect. I really wish that they'd fix the security in XP, and improve it rather than concentrate on the bling. -Brett
11) Stop being evil.
It's like when you have a job interview and they ask you to say something "bad" about yourself.
The answers are "You work too hard", "You often take on more work than you should", "You make too many demands on yourself",
My city: Barcelona.
The whole concept of making something visually appealing and powerful seems to be lost on many Linux/Windows techies. That accounts for why IT doesn't understand the visual value of Windows Vista while consumers will love it. But eventually, IT will upgrade. They always do.
As a matter of fact you could keep the article and republish it every time a new Microsoft OS upgrade is released cause' every time an upgrade is released the media predicts the same thing. For following "blah blah blah" reasons, no one going to move from (take your pick, 3.0,3.1,3.11,W95,w98,w2000, wXP) to the latest and greatest. Eventually, everyone does, they just take their time.
It seems that rampant Xenophobia is alive, well and being modded up on Slashdot.
As a business owner located in the EU, I'd be very interested to see evidence of any 'harsh and irrational restraints' that I'm under, as I'm not currently aware of any.
The EU monopoly abuse laws that Microsoft are so dismissive of are pretty much exactly the same as the US, it's just that we might actually be enforcing them.
As for unemployment rates, our 4.7% unemployment rate here in Britain is lower than the 5.5% in the USA. The high rates (which are lower than 10% according to the US Govt.) in France and Germany have far more to do with local left-wing economic policies and the absorption of communist East Germany respectively than EU-wide laws.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
10. Fucking kill Linux.
9. Fucking kill Steve Jobs.
8. Fucking kill Toaster Strudles.
7. Fucking kill open source.
6. Fucking kill South Korea.
5. Fucking kill the EU.
4. Fucking kill Linus Torvalds.
4. Make love to Sun and...
3. Fucking kill Java.
1. Fucking kill Google.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Writing as the guy who evaluates new versions of development tools at work...
No, it's not. It would be pretty good if it worked, but it has some unforgivable bugs.
For a start, there's clearly something wrong with the UI code that make it literally unusable on the majority of our PCs at work. (They have varied specs, and some of them very powerful boxes by any standards, so don't even bother telling me we just need another 512MB of RAM or something. Thanks.) It'll go into a trance for minutes at a time one some machines, hogging almost 100% CPU and GB of memory. We haven't been able to isolate the problem, because other machines run it fine, but it seems to be connected to the background updating of Intellisense (on which many of the useful improvements in VS2005 rely, of course) and the processing power or memory size of the machine in question does not seem to matter. On at least one powerful machine, it was OK to start with but performance has degraded to unusability over time, too.
Even worse, there are also some major bugs in the code generation. It appears, based on tests conducted among our dev teams and some colleagues at other organisations, that they introduced some serious performance regressions between beta 2 and the final release. In a fairly large study, co-ordinated between several dev teams with independent code bases, we've measured a 30-50% drop in the performnce of heavily mathematical code since VS2003, for example, and there definitely wasn't anything close to that problem in beta 2.
How they managed not to notice that, we don't know, but the simple fact is that at present, the parts of VS2005 we're using (mainly VC++ for native code, for performance reasons) are not an improvement on 2003. Several of my colleagues have reverted all the way to VC++ 6 as an IDE, with a workhorse machine building the final code using the 2003 compiler; they never used the earlier .Net versions for day-to-day development because useful features like browse info were removed. The whole team is now backing out of the 2005 upgrade because the UI bugs make it a liability for us and the performance bugs mean our customers -- to whom speed typically matters a lot -- probably won't buy anything we compile with it anyway. Needless to say, since we were the first guys to try it, most of our other dev teams have no immediate plans to attempt an upgrade at this point!
If Microsoft released a service pack that fixed these show-stopping bugs early in 2006, we'd certainly consider upgrading at that stage, because there is a lot to like about VS2005 as well. But the simple fact is that right now, there are some bugs so serious that nothing else matters.
Kudos to the economists who recommended giving away the Express versions for free, though; that's a smart move.
Leaving aside the fact that it's not out yet so we don't know what the ribbons will do in the end product, personally I found them annoying as hell anyway. I've been using MS Office on Windows since version -17 or something, and I know how to get things done. What I want is fixes for the awkward bits that make my life more difficult, or improvements and new features (there's plenty a WP program could do to help a lot of people's everyday work that Word still, bizarrely, can't do). What I absolutely don't want is another UI overhaul, particularly one that's going to mean I have to work out where everything's gone so I can fend off the hoards of enquiries from colleagues who know I like to play with this stuff and will probably find things before they do.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.