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10 Biggest Microsoft Surprises of 2005
IZ Reloaded writes "The Microsoft Watch has a top 10 list of the biggest Microsoft surprises of the year. Among the surprises are Internet Explorer rising from the dead, Microsoft gets RSS and Microsoft Office team blogging. From Microsoft Watch: MS 'gets' RSS: While some folks were less than overjoyed that Microsoft was tinkering with the "little orange RSS box," Microsoft ended up looking like a company with a clue when it came to outlining its company-wide RSS strategy in 2005. RSS support will be built into not just Internet Explorer 7.0, but also Outlook 12 and Windows Vista itself. Almost all Microsoft blogs and sites have RSS feeds these days. RSS is gospel in Redmond these days."
Is it just me or do other people not get RSS?
It seems to me to be very limited, only useful to be able to quickly read headlines from peoples blogs.
Sorry to piss on your blogfire, but most people have better things to do that keep up to date with blogging.
I realise its Web 2.0 and all that, but is RSS really important enough to put into the OS?!
Who here honestly believed that MS would really put some effort in cleaning up the crap that is IE? Oh sure, they might make some fixes to the next version but what do you expect? The people at MS are not insane or stupid, they do not produce shoddy code on purpose. It is just the MS always adds so many features to its product that on release it turns out there are a whole lot of open holes because of all the features. The best way to make IE more secure is to rip out activex. Not going to happen.
You can in theory do the best more secure development in the world and if you then have some idiot decide that it would be really cool if unknown code could have free access to the system (html/javascript email) none of it matters. It would be like trying to design a safe and have markelting insist on a nice clear glass panel in the outside wall so people can see how save their money is.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Hard to tell from the hyper "This is all _so_ cool" attitude of the writer, but
every indicator I've seen in the past year says that more and more Americans
(not sure about the Europeans) have wised up to the MS process of whipping up
some alpha-level code, throwing it on the market all the while marketing said
code as the greatest thing since sex. The experience of the consumer after she
gets her pretty new Dell does not match the picture presented by Microsoft and
Dell as to what the experience will be.
I talk with a lot of folks from grandmas to IT people and the one constant across
the board is that people are sick of Microsoft's junk because of unreliability
problems, whether due to security or stability or scalibility, etc, etc. ad
infinitum, ad nauseaum.
The only reason Microsoft has managed to get away with pushing their junk on the
market is because most of these folks were coming into the PC realm for the
first time and didn't know any better. Well, they sure as hell know better now:
They've been burned repeatedly by lousy MS junk since the middle of the
1980's and they are actively looking for alternatives.
Look for Apple and F/OSS to have a banner year.
Cheers.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
The Windows Genuine Advantage validation plug-in was the biggest surprice for me. In the download page they even have step-by-step instructions with photos on how to install it on Firefox.
How on earth can Microsoft's 2nd greatest surprise of the year be addition of RSS support in IE? Blogmonsters living in their blogospherecaves don't seem to have any clue about the real popularity of RSS. Hint: it's close to zero in any scale.
Why didn't the writer tell us about the results of MS Research http://research.microsoft.com/? Or the growth of Raymond Chen's fan club http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/? Or that the notorious nitpick Jacob Nielsen gave a bit of positive feedback to Microsoft and the upcoming Office http://www.useit.com/alertbox/wysiwyg.html?
let's say you have a company with 500 computers
...
:) and don't forget that backuping one server is a lot easier than backuping 500 clients (yeah, sure everybody uses network disks but hey, there are days when the network switches break down and the silly users think that it's safe to leave the company's financial information on their sloppy ide disks.... and they tend to forget it there).
they all need some sort of office software to handle text documents and spreadsheets
would you pay 50 times the price of an office suite for an web based office that will handle all the 500 computers or would you like to buy 500 office licences instead ?
at some point it all comes down to some cost. the current microsoft licencing techniques are very very tricky and unless you get what's behind it, you are literally ripped off.
and now updating one machine with a new office server suite is quite an easy job but updating 500 machines ? have you ever administrated a 500 machine windows mess ? no ? try it out, i promise it won't be boring
ps. not depending on the office suite producers platform is also quite a big boost, if you can run thin clients instead of 500 windows boxes, you will save a lot of windows licence money and a lot of hardware money. also the electricity bill will be much thinner with thin clients.
ps. ps. microsoft wont ever make their office run in "any browser", maybe they will add more ways to run it in IE (at least some office components already work in there), but that's as good as it gets.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
3. WinFS bits go out early: For some strange reason,
Strange reason? Mac OS X with Spotlight shipped!
I think the comment referred to IE's once-shrinking userbase.
I've seen the IE userbase start to grow over the last few months, apparently at the expense of Gecko-based browsers. Of course, my corporation-centric public site isn't representative of all sites world-wide, but it is a single data point. Surprisingly, Safari growth is happening too... likely due to the rapid collapse of IE on Mac.
MS 'gets' RSS: While some folks were less than overjoyed that Microsoft was tinkering with the "little orange RSS box," Microsoft ended up looking like a company with a clue when it came to outlining its company-wide RSS strategy in 2005. RSS support will be built into not just Internet Explorer 7.0, but also Outlook 12 and Windows Vista itself. Almost all Microsoft blogs and sites have RSS feeds these days. RSS is gospel in Redmond these days."
Microsoft is adding RSS features years after they have become standard in other browsers and email clients. Microsoft is blogging years after others started. MS adds RSS feeds to its websites years after others. And this means MS gets RSS?
MS was slow to RSS just like they were slow to understand that the Internet was important. But they will probably dominate RSS just like the Internet.
I can see the MS bulletin now: Critical. A buffer overflow exists in the MSRSS parser that will allow the execution of arbitary code with the current user's priviledges [will be admin by default]. If the user has chosen to use our pointless "My Favorites' (sic) headlines on your logon screen" then code could be executed as system [analagous to root], as we really don't have any clue when it comes to sensibly implementing security.
Back to this moderation: if you have mod points and you don't get a joke 100%, or even understand a comment completely, please don't moderate it. Concentrate on modding up.