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Microsoft's Not So Happy Family
D.A. Zollinger writes "Reports from Redmond are that Microsoft Employees are not happy with the double delay of Windows and Office being pushed back into 2007. EETimes is reporting that some Microsoft employees are calling for the termination of several top managers Including Brian Valentine, Jim Allchin, and Steve Ballmer for the delay debacle. The report references a blog by Who da'Punk, an anonymous Microsoft employee who asks, where's the accountability for failure? So far the blog entry has generated over 350 comments from Microsoft insiders and outsiders."
That he says that sales will come from people buying PC's with the OS pre-installed, not people buying the vista OS in a box off the shelf. Even MS employees know they can't sell their crap, they have to force it down peoples throats or it won't sell.
If a Microsoft 'desktop' had just ONE of the rough unfinished edges that can be found everywhere within 'Linux Desktops' there would be a holy war of screaming against it.
I'm not flaming 'Unix desktop' projects per-se. I make daily use of this NetBSD machine running FVWM2 that I am typing this on, and find it a perfectly adequate system for my kind of use.
I'm not going to pretend, however, that any free software desktop is ready for 'the masses' the way Microsofts product is (kinda, anyway). There's no army of testers and usability engineers involved in the free projects. They aren't aimed at joe six-pack, who is an information-appliance user.
That's just how it is. Let's stop pretending otherwise.
The entire computer industry has been stifled for years. We need competition, and we need it badly.
Yeah. Because Microsoft has no real competition at all in desktop operating systems.
My blog
You have confused cause and effect. People at Microsoft are unhappy because the non free software way is failing. There is no way it can be otherwise. The anger and backstabbing you see is typical of any failing company. Tiny mistakes, which make no difference in the long run, become sources of contention. Productivity will fall off geometrically now, but even a perfect effort would not save them from the overwhelming superiority of free software.
It has been said hundreds of times and I'll say it again, the non free way of making software is obsolete. The GNU debugger has more than 87 authors. Not even Microsoft can afford to lavish that kind of effort on a single program regardless of it's importance. The "unimportant" programs are the ones that give free software systems a polished finish Microsoft can't touch. Their best five years of effort to graft together terabytes of purchased code are producing the equivalent of one modest productivity package and a window manager on top of a decidedly second rate GUI and a disaster of an OS. The free software approach, in the mean time, has produced many better equivalents on top of a unified system that fits onto a single, live running and self installing CD, which is offered by hundreds of different groups.
They can't catch up. Missing Christmas sales will hurt them. It won't hurt them near as much as the embarrassment and loss of face. The game is over. Only hardware DRM can save them and that is unlikely without IBM and other cooperation. 2007 will be the year free software takes majority market share and the Microsoft monopoly will be history.
Good riddance.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Considering you can't even spell "sentence", I do believe it is just you who can't process the period in ".Net". I have never had a problem. Then again, I probably have a much higher IQ than you, as do most others.
I don't think they wanted to rewrite the operating system in
Georg