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Tales From Behind Microsoft's Firewall
lizzyben writes "CIOinsight.com is hosting an interview with Robert Scoble on life after Microsoft. 'By blogging for the world's largest software company, Scoble changed the way companies communicate with the world and became an industry celebrity in the process.' He talks about MS culture, senior management and the benefits of blogging from inside the belly of the software beast." More from the article: "We used blog-search engines to find anyone who wrote the word 'Microsoft' on their blog. Even if they had no readers and were just ranting, 'I hate Microsoft,' I could see that and link to it, or I could participate in their comments, or send them an e-mail saying, 'What's going on?' And that told those people that someone was listening to their rants, that this is a different world than the one in which no one listens. It was an invaluable focus group that Microsoft didn't have to pay for."
If I was behind a Microsoft firewall, I'd just feel insecure ;)
Is it just me or is it not going to upgrade to Vista in here?
"We used blog-search engines to find anyone who wrote the word 'Microsoft' on their blog. Even if they had no readers and were just ranting, 'I hate Microsoft,' I could see that and link to it"
That's sure to be a short list
What are "CIO" and "Insight" doing in the same word anyway? Are they leveraging an optimized something or another?
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Robert,
You may have responded to some rants on how Microsoft products work (or don't), and that is all fine and dandy, as it was appreciated. However, the problems are *still* there. I still get the little hardware wizard that wants to help me when I plug in a new mouse, or Windows will still notify me that there is either a new network found or that my computer is at a security risk because of virus subscription expiration in the middle of a Powerpoint presentation!
It's stuff like that (and much more) that are driving people to alternatives
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Why didn't he just read Slashdot? Faster, cheaper, and probably holds the core user/developer base that would have the most to say on the subject of Microsoft software. Face it: even the most virulent criticism of MS here would contain enough useful information that if Gates & Co. actually paid attention, they'd find innumerable ideas for improving their wares. And all for free.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Actually, I beg to differ on the characterization that the world's blog is being considered like a big focus group. When a real focus group pans a product idea, the maker doesn't try to rationalize the current design, the maker drops it or improves it and starts over. Blog writers are howling into the wind, and it doesn't matter if they are heard or not: Microsoft will just go on doing what Microsoft wants to do, because they're big enough and the market is big enough that they feel they can ignore the whiners.
[
"...we'd have a one-shot amazing piece of software that would set a new standard for useability and reliability."
But I doubt we'd have any interoperability.
Microsoft have tried to support a *real* O/S, Xenix. I used this on AT class hardware many years ago and this got me hooked on Unix and other derivatives (AT&T SvR4.3, Minix, SCO Xenix, SCO Unix, Novell / SCO Unixware, and obviously Linux). ( See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix for a brief history of Microsoft's involvment in Unix) But, as you note, they seem to be primarily a marketing company, and it's in their best interest to promote the O/S that sells and gives them the greatest return for their investment.
good point, but I wonder if you meant to make it, interoperability with what ?
A mono culture of a cheap reliable and highly useable os would quite possibly do more for the image of computing as we know it than what passes for production grade systems these days.
Interoperability issues, the multitude of different windowing environments and the enormous amount of work duplication in the IT branch would better be concentrated on doing it once and doing it well than everybody just doing their own thing because they can.
Some 14 years ago I did a bunch of contracting on a Canadian built system called QNX, and I'm still amazed at the level of quality (stable, fast, easy to program for) and productivity we achieved.
If I compare that system (which is now marketed almost exclusively to the embedded systems market) to what I can get on my desktop today (and that includes Linux, which I'm writing this on) then we haven't moved at all in the last decade or two.
MP3 Search Engine
"As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue." ~A. Einstein
I have one of the "I hate Microsoft" web sites he linked to. I used to read Scoble's blog and comment on it occasionally before he become famous. As soon as his blog started to get any traction he stopped posting anything intelligent. He became a pure evangelist who claimed Microsoft should listen to the haters, then bashed anything critical of Microsoft. And in the end, not much if anything changed. Microsoft used him to try to improve their image. And having this fake power Scoble became full of himself. He's a tool. Microsoft still ignores critics.
Developers: We can use your help.
...I never quite understood Scoble's impact or why so many people considered his tenure at Microsoft so important. I can't think of a single Microsoft product that has significantly changed as a result of his interceding on some poor user's behalf. It was more like a grand, and public, experiment in listening to the users. Considering they let him leave and especially since they haven't replaced him, it says they've heard enough.
In a perfect world, you're right. Build a good product, and people will come running. Well, let me just begin the list of good software with bad marketing that have failed due to the lack of marketing: ...
OS/2
Word Perfect
Lotus
There are so many different ways of handling system messages.
#1. An icon on the task bar that changes appearance to indicate you have system messages.
#2. A list of messages pops up when you log on.
#3. A list of messages pops up when you come out of a period of inactivity.
Your "check engine" light does not take over the windshield of your car, does it? Why should a less important message on your computer take over the monitor?
wordperfect was not a good product that failed due to bad marketing- it was a good product that failed to keep up with the market, and became a bad product...
Just spell it Micro$oft, M$ Windoze, or /\/\1Cr0$oF7 5\/XXo|Rz.
No rant is complete without a gross deformation of Miyoursoft's name.
>>> "millions of people run it without serious problems or they wouldn't stay with it."
Perhaps these 'millions of people' don't realise they actually have a choice.
I think your observation is flawed. Throwing money at problems almost never efficiently solves them. The fact that MS has been so successful indicates they've made very good use of their money, really. If they were able to spend their "marketing" cash on OS development instead, they'd (in an ideal world) end up with a teriffic OS, but one that most people weren't aware of or convinced to switch to.
Step 1: Buy Apple.
Step 2: Don't change anything at Apple, except to tell them to license their OS to other manufacturers.
Step 3: Plan the transition from XP to OS X.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
It's hardly a surprise to learn that deliberately publicised information is being found and read - that's the whole point, surely? I remember reading a comment from the BBC News web team a while ago saying pretty much the same thing - people were saying it was scary when the Beeb team replied to them. Er...why?
Cheers,
Ian
Failed to keep up with the market do to companies that bought and failed to improve the product to keep up with times, i.e. Novell and Corel. They ran what was the top product at the time in DOS days into the ground instead of keeping up with the likes of MS Word.
More like, they search all the blogs like /. and mod down anyone who critizes Microsoft or calls their products proprietary pieces of shit.
Microsoft did hold back the industry for about three decades, but they finally dropped the DOS based line of operating systems with XP.
We can still complain about their illegal and unethical business practises, and of course specific software glitches. But today, their OSes are as real as any other provider.
Perhaps they don't want to realise they have a choice. They aren't like us, computers aren't "fun" for them, they are just a tool. What OS they use has little meaning to them, but they wouldn't want to have to learn another, even if it were better. Having to choose an OS would only confuse and anger them. Sorry, I love Linux as much as the next rabid slashdotter, but people who care about what OS they use are a tiny minority.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
They have a vast collection of tremendously bright people. I think they've just reached the limits of how massive a monolithic system can be maintained, even given effectively infinite coding muscle. The UNIX model, on the other hand, doesn't run into this issue; the layers provide well-defined interfaces, and apart from that, remain blissfuly ignorant of each other. This design bothers a lot of people, but it does having the overwhelming advantage of scaling much better than the MS approach.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Mods awake? The parent comment is 50% Informative?
NT is a real OS. It's just saddled with a bunch of buggy insecure CRAP in userland, including userland that gets too friendly with parts that should be privileged (I'm looking at you IE) and a poorly-documented afterthought of a commandline toolchain born of a culture that actively disdained anything not graphical. Underneath all the cruft is a damn nice OS.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Microsoft licensed it from AT&T and marketed their derivative (which included some BSD enhancements) as Xenix, a full-blown UNIX for 16-bit x86 computers. For a while, it had the majority of the UNIX market share. Xenix was eventually dropped by Microsoft (and sold to the old SCO) when they started developing OS/2.
At the moment, Microsoft are working on Singularity, an OS using type theory as the basis for security (based on similar ideas to the JNode operating system).
Over the last three decades, Microsoft has developed three 'real' operating systems; Xenix, OS/2, and Singularity. They have developed Windows NT, which is quite a nice OS buried under a pile of userspace crap written for backwards compatibility. The closest thing to a real OS that they have been able to sell is NT, and that's because of all the backwards compatibility junk, rather than the strength of the OS.
The moral of the story? You can build a better mousetrap, and the market will decide it's rubbish because it doesn't come in purple.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Choice is good.
Perception is all that matters to Microsoft. They don't have to fix their product, they just have to fix people's perception of it. If someone rants about their problems on a blog and out of the blue someone from MS makes a conciliatory comment, probably the first damn comment they ever got on their blog, now Windows has gone from "That piece of shit OS written by that greedy callous company" to "that loveable, quirky OS written by that friendly company that cares enough about me to post on my blog!" Problem solved, from Microsoft's point of view, anyway.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Not to mention that an OS like Linux would be a disaster for your average user. That's the problem with the views given at sites like this. They are coming from people who are generally very technically adept whereas your average user is not.
If MS would spend a % of their cash reserves on developing a *real* os instead of the load of junk they ship (no, this is not a troll, this is an observation) we'd have a one-shot amazing piece of software that would set a new standard for useability and reliability.
Excuse me, but in the past few years that I've seen, Windows has evolved significantly.
And guess what? Usability is hard. Designing good interfaces is hard. It's a fine line, between security and usability - anything that's convenient isn't always the best thing because someone could take advantage of that convenience.
And for all of Windows' faults, I've not had either 2000, XP or 2003 crash on me. All you need to do is look up CERT's bulletins to know that the number of security exploits in Windows has been steadily decreasing. Combined with the legacy applications that Windows users insisted on using (and unlike some companies that break the applications, Microsoft at times actually caters to its customers), it takes time to migrate away from a legacy codebase, with so many flaws.
Here's the thing - the usability of Windows makes it usable to anybody. Simplicity is not easy. Grandma Rogers can use Windows, but remember that she - the user - is the weakest security link.
The fact that you make a system so usable will mean that everybody will use it - usability is a double edged sword.
The reason why *nix is so stable is because Grandma Rogers cannot use it - the level of skill needed to use *nix means that you inherently do not have an ignorant user.
At the end of the day, Windows has come a long way.
I try to talk everyone I know into switching to Linux. They always say "What is Linux?" After I explain this, they say "What is an operating system?" And after I explain this, they always say "Don't I already have one of those? Everyone else has Windows. If I switch then you'll be the only one I can go to to get help." Its not that people don't realize they have a choice. It's that they don't care. They have what works for them and don't want to go through the hassles of switching. And honestly, I'm glad. Not that I like Microsoft, but I don't want to go to all my relatives house after they read on a joke website that typing rm -R /* would make thier computer run faster.
Freedom is a state of mind. A mind is a state of being. Stay the fuck out of my mind and my being. - Corporate Avenger
kde and genome are applications running on top of an operating system, they are not part of it.
much as windows has tried to make us believe otherwise there is a fairly rigidly defined boundary between 'user space' and the operating system proper.
with proper design (microkernels) that boundary can be pushed back another step and that will open up a whole new world of possibilities at a fairly small performance penalty, and a system that feels subjectively much faster.
MP3 Search Engine
an anonymous coward that calls on moderators to moderate away a 20+ post discussion, interesting
I wonder how much time mr. AC spent in OS architecture class to get this far in life.
MP3 Search Engine
>>> They always say "What is Linux?" After I explain this, they say "What is an operating system?" And after I explain this, they always say "Don't I already have one of those?
I spent ages trying to switch people too. Now I just show them the 'door' and they are the ones that have to go through it. Linux requires an enthusiastic user if that user is the one who is going to administer it. Its usually easy to set up (Ubuntu) and once its set up it works fine day to day, but like with anything (cars/plumbing/Ikea products) it takes a certain amount of 'competence' to make adjustments. While you have more control over Linux than Windows, with that control comes great responsibility, and some users are just not cut out for that.
Even your mention of microkernels as the end all solution is biased towards what YOU want. There are users who need an OS that has the benefits a microkernel provides, and there are users who need an OS that has the benefits a monolithic kernel provides. One size does not fit all.
IE, I give you a Stern Wag of the Finger! (this works on small child and dogs as well. They all look downcast and sad when I do this).
I drank what? -- Socrates
Wow, there are people here that realize that 80% of the worlds computer users aren't uber geeks and don't have a clue what an OS is, let alone how to switch to a different one? I'm impressed.
Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
Microsoft doesn't own any percentage of Apple. Those shares ( from 1997 ) where
*non-voting
*sold a long time ago
a man, a plan, a canal, panama
where = were
a man, a plan, a canal, panama
so, go solo. If you're any good you should not have a problem to contract.
:)
worked for me
fwiw if I compare the guts of XP with the elegance of unix, plan9 or qnx I still stand by that it plain sucks. API's all over the place, layer upon layer of different ways of doing the same things, every hardware device it's own way of being talked to, security tacked on as an afterthought, applications reaching all the way in to the core os.
Not very pretty to put it mildly.
If you feel like qualitatively defending your flamebait call then go ahead, I'm all ears, explain in less than say 500 words the true beauty and elegance of MS windows, any version will do.
MP3 Search Engine
Generally I agree. The current incarnation of XP and Server 2003 are quite stable.
HOWEVER - there is a fundamental problem with the way XP deals with non-responsive network (SMB) shares. I have wasted too much time waiting for Windows to figure out that the share isn't accessable and have crashed explorer.exe on many occasions due to this problem. In extreme cases explorer.exe doesn't come back and refuses to start, requiring a reboot.
I have read in a few blogs that MS is addressing this issue in Vista. I do not understand why it hasn't been fixed in XP, unless there is some fundamental flaw in the XP kernel.
twitter fails to understand that this is a public forum, and expressing one's opinions will eventually result in one's opinions being questioned in one way or another. Most of the people who "troll" twitter are simply requesting that he qualify his remarks, which more often than not are simply hysterical FUD and misguided attempts at "evangelism", which in his head are somehow good for the free software community.
twitter acuses anyone who does not toe his line of being "M$ PR astroturfers", tries to spread outrageous FUD left and right and then links to things that happened seven years ago to try to prove that Microsoft is out to get him. This kind of behavior should not be rewarded.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Yeah, parents comments is such a troll. Of course everybody in the entire world *knows* of ALL the alternatives and made the same 'educated' decision. It is interesting that everybody weighed up their relative costs they could afford and their respective quality requirements and came out with the same product!
Microsoft has followed "Know your enemy, even if they don't know it yet" fo the last 20 years. Anyone who has ever been on a technology edge knows that. In '95 the OLE evangelists got a hold of me because I was making OpenDoc demos. "Here's a bunch of free stuff, why not come over to the other side?" Not the first time it happened to me either. Or others. Apple had a long history of mentoring budding Microsoft employees - and technologies. Anyone remember "Brand X" from WWDC '95? Quickdraw3D? Pippin? Naw. ATG? Anyone? How about... VBA/Script embedded everywhere? Direct3D? XBox? You know those don't ya.
This conversation never happened.
"Hey, what do you think of this Apple Pippin? They figure put a stripped down Mac in a console; tuned for games and multi-media. Re-use existing development tools. Partner with Bandi for distribution."
"Wow, that gimped. Expensive and underpowered. But in a couple years; we can put a stripped down PC in a console; tuned for games and multi-media. Re-use existing development tools. Use our own distribution network; and buy a flagship Mac/Windows game developer like Bungie."
"The fanboys will love it! By the way, give Apple a bag of cash and tell them to kill CyberDog."
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
If you don't think MS has changed then you simply haven't followed them. Vista as a release, product and beta program is vastly different and superior to any other Microsoft OS. I mean public builds, public scrutiny, nearly a quarter million beta testers and release and release of consistent updates. You can't really beat that and that is lessons learned from listening and observing.
Same goes for the Xbox side of the house. THey listen, they get on blogs and they deliver. Checkout Majornelson.com for some great 360 evangelism and see how he does what he can to pass along everything to MS to deliver.
Your blind if you don't think microsoft has changed.
HAHA! Twitter, you never cease to amaze me.
Twitter, do you really want me to prove you wrong?
Right; here we go: my MySpace. Note where I say I'm 17 and I work for a supermarket. And that the picture is me, in a Waitrose uniform.
Now, surely an "M$ astroturfer" wouldn't be working in a fucking supermarket?
I expect you to retaliate with ad hominem shit, rather than what would be most decent; an admission that I'm NOT paid by Microsoft. I don't know why I should try and prove anything to you, except to make you look like a moron.
By the way, people attacking you for your endless rants about M$ and Windoze doesn't equate with "apologists" "swarming". And I see you posted your charming deconstruction of my posting history, which turned out to be shite in which you deliberately misrepresented things I had said.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Really now. Is the mod in marketing or advertising or something?
[UID-HeinzIntel]
So again, instead of insulting my intelligence perhaps you would like to address my questions: Why do you post the same thing twice when you've already been modded down as troll? Why do you insist that those of us who reply to you are "M$ PR astroturfers"? Is that your security blanket? Do you think posting things like these causes you to be "unfairly targeted"? And that's just the start. If you want to keep claiming people are "trolls" then we can always talk about all these as well. Remember - you started all this.
Instead, why don't you grow up and start contributing to the discussions that take place here. Your infantile "zOMFG M$ IS TEH sUxx0rz LOLOLOLOL!!!" disguised with that "let me tell you how it is" tone of yours is annoying and benefits no one.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
1. Nobody would "troll" you if you didn't spout FUD, lies and baseless accusations constantly.
2. He didn't say that voting machine software shouldn't be GPLed, just that GPLed software is not the only option. And bear in mind that he was contesting your claim that Microsoft would put a trojan in a voting machine, which you still have not substantiated.
3. See 1.
4. Way to selectively quote. If anyone is reading this, please read the full post for context. Twitter was, once again, trying to claim that I and several others are sock puppets and/or paid Microsoft employees, and dedazo posted reasoning as to why this made no sense.
5. He didn't call you that. The mods did, a moderation which dedazo cited ("Why are you posting the same thing [slashdot.org] again? Because you were modded down to -1 as troll?"). You posted a duplicate comment because of it, presumably to get back some karma, which dedazo (and I) called you out on...AGAIN.
6. He asked for an explanation for the behaviour described in 6. You didn't provide it.
7. Abuse? He shot your post full of holes, because what you wrote made no sense at all.
8. "This guy is just unbelievable." That's it. That's the whole post. And you call that abuse?
You're doing the same thing you did when you went through my posting history; misrepresenting things and talking bullshit. Get your damn facts straight.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Normally I consider it poor form to counter-argue by demanding examples, since virtually no one has the time to hunt down supporting documents unless they're professional researchers.
But I'm going to do it anyway, because I can't come up with any feature of Windows 2000 or XP that supports your statement. What evolution are you describing?
Yes, 2000 is more stable than NT and XP is more stable than 2000. (XP's flaws overshadow that stability, in my opinion, but that's beside the point.) But evolution? How is XP not a slightly modified and colorized version of 2000? The colors aren't even an improvement; the layout of the "improved" Start menu is an unreadable mess.
I agree. It is hard, and 99% of software developers clearly don't give a damn.
But we are talking about the company with more resources, and supposedly brighter developers, than any other company in the world. And after all of Microsoft's experience with desktops, shouldn't they have some skill at doing hard things like designing good, usable interfaces? Or are hard things out of Microsoft's reach?
It's certainly not an even balance between the two. Some security mechanisms may require a slightly degraded user interface, but we're talking about all the terrible user interfaces that currently exist in Windows, and I doubt they are the way they are due to security considerations.
The Internet is full. Go away.
I've noticed that you haven't addressed any of the points in the previous post by twitter. What do you have to say in relation to the Barkto incident and dead people signing petitions? Else I would suspect you of distraction trolling.
.. Steve Barkto .. DRDOS.. spammed compuserve .. Hiring a firm to fake letters to Congress .. the Apple Switcher .. trick to game Slashdot's moderation system" wrote twitter
"astroturfing
was Re:Karma phishing
davecb5620@gmail.com
Why didn't he just read Slashdot? Faster, cheaper, and probably holds the core user/developer base that would have the most to say on the subject of Microsoft software. Face it: even the most virulent criticism of MS here would contain enough useful information that if Gates & Co. actually paid attention, they'd find innumerable ideas for improving their wares. And all for free.
Slashdot is useless to them because people here realize that there is no way M$ can fix itself. Their strategy of buying "mature" software, marketing it loudly and destroying all "competition" ran out of steam ten years ago. Before it, the NDA, non free way ran out of steam back in the 80s, as explained here. If M$ did not represent a significant public harm, it would all be comical. Instead, a court proved monopoly that sues public schools has the advocacy of your federal government.
We can be sure they are following their 1998 Halloween document plan to disrupt the free software community by astroturfing Slashdot. Their goals would be to bury useful information in garbage and make reading and posting an consistently unpleasant experience.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I frequently hear that "Microsoft pays attention to the user." There is a lot of evidence, including this article, to support it. Microsoft products are constantly trying to give the users what they want.
The problem is, Microsoft has always tried to appease users instead of trying to help them.
The difference is expertise. Users know what they need to do, but they're mostly not software engineers or UI designers, so they aren't able to say exactly how their needs should be met. Even if they have some idea of what they want, they're very unlikely to be informed of the implications of what they're asking for.
A good UI designer has that expertise. He knows how to meet the user's needs. He doesn't just do whatever the user wants; he examines their complaint, realizes what the real need is, and programs an intelligent, usable solution. Then that solution is rigorously tested to ensure it is actually better than the situation it was aiming to solve.
Microsoft doesn't have this expertise. For all their supposedly brilliant minds, I see no evidence of their recognizing any principles of good software design. Instead, they just appease users by doing exactly what the user tells them to do, regardless of the consequences. Even if the addition makes things worse. They don't help the user; they pander to the user.
The user says, "There are too many items in these menus." Microsoft responds with "personalized menus." They addressed the complaint but they didn't help the situation at all. The real solution would be to better organize the menus. Any programmer can look at the menus of, say, Word, and intuit a better arrangement.
The user says, "There are too many icons in my system tray." Microsoft responds with a button that collapses the tray. This is a band-aid solution, which doesn't address the real problem: too many programs staying resident for no reason. The real solution would have been implementing a software certification program (they already have one for drivers, supposedly) that frowns on or utterly fails software which employs undesirable practices like cluttering up the system tray.
The user says, "There are too many things in the Programs menu." Microsoft responds by telling vendors to install programs under submenus which bear the vendor name. It's a horrendous solution. It's the last way anyone would choose to organize anything. No one organizes their books by publisher. Hardly anyone remembers the publisher of most of their books. And indeed, few people remember the publisher of their software.
The user says, "It takes too long to log in." Microsoft responds by showing the desktop before it is "ready"; you can move the mouse, and you can bring up some menus, but they will be forcibly unposted in a few seconds, and attempts to start applications are no faster than they would be if you waited for all the startup items to finish.
The user says, "Windows isn't intuitive, I should be able to know right away how to do things." Microsoft responds with Bob.
There are dozens more examples. The point is that I see Microsoft listening to users, but it is as if Microsoft has no experience with designing usable software, even after all these years. It could well be a case of management paralysis. I don't know the cause, but the symptoms are pretty consistent.
The Internet is full. Go away.
Well it's the same for me. For 99% of business needs, I run Linux. For playtime, nothing compares to Windows, given tuner compatibility, video driver optimization, and of course games availability.
However for my new home system, while I will have Windows installed out of sheer necessity (1% of my business needs), I will probably not boot it often; I disagree with the Microsoft EULA and I disagree with Activation (they MUST implement a De-activate feature for license transfers. Adobe is the ONLY major software company which implemented activation correctly). I can live without video games. On my current personal system I run Windows 98, for the SOLE reason of TV tuner capability (the card I have in that system will never be supported by Linux. Thanks for the support, ATI).
I find computers fun, but mainly as far as the way a stereo or a television is fun; it allows me to access the media I want to access.
Do I find tinkering with systems fun? Oh sure, but when you come down to it, when I'm at work and have to work on a system, or when a big client calls me at home at 6:30am because it's crunch time and one of their interns clicked the "free game" link on Joe H@xx0r's MySpace page and infected CAD workstations with spyware, making the workstations unusably slow, well, it's work.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
You can't have it both ways. If you put up a blog, on the Internet, for the public to read, and submit your blog to a blog-search site....you expect the public to read it. And Microsoft is part of the public.
So either you say something about Microsoft to the world, and allow anyone (including Microsoft) to reply....or you don't say it to the world.
I've noticed that trying to do so is useless - questioning anything he says is an "insult" and automatically categorizes me as a "troll" and "astroturfer". You haven't noticed this, I take it? Instead I asked him to clarify why he was trying to tie in whatever misdeeds he accuses Microsoft of doing to his own alleged "plight".
What do you have to say in relation to the Barkto incident
I'd say twitter has come up with some new links (the Bartko thing happened in 1994, surely if that's a pattern he can get better proof?), but overall I have no problem with criticizing Microsoft as you seem to be implying. I would have gone mad a long time ago hanging around here. There are lots of things to criticize them about, but "OMFG M$ Windoze crashes every FIVE minutes LOLOLOLOL!!!1" for example is not one of them. If you're going to do it, at least do it intelligently.
FUD, misinformation and hysterical rants are another thing.
Now, what do you think about twitter's "help help I'm being opressed" whining? I noticed you didn't address my points either.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I try to talk everyone I know into switching to Linux. They always say "What is Linux?" After I explain this, they say "What is an operating system?"
/, I dearly hope you're not encouraging them to run as root. Because that defeats one of the main purposes of having Linux.
You didn't say "It's an alternative to Windows that's a lot stabler but can do most of the same things - and it's free, often easier to use, and has more free support available on the web"? You don't need any more explanation than that.
A lot of university networks use Linux or another POSIXy system as a base. If freshman can learn this in a few weeks, the general public can. (And no, I'm not talking about MIT. I'm talking about places like the University of Louisiana.)
As far as rm -rf
Um. If I was a manager (I am), I would have set my e-mail client to filter my employee's e-mails into a different mailbox (I do know who they are, right?). Who uses only one inbox these days?
In a perfect world, you're right. Build a good product, and people will come running. Well, let me just begin the list of good software with bad marketing that have failed due to the lack of marketing:
One out of three doesn't even qualify as "not bad".
As far as rm -rf /, I dearly hope you're not encouraging them to run as root. Because that defeats one of the main purposes of having Linux.
'rm -rf /' will damage just as much of the important data, whether you're running as root or your regular login.
The mind boggles at how someone could describe Xenix and OS/2 as "real OSes", but not NT, given that NT's specifications and capabilities are significantly greater than both of them.
How is XP not a slightly modified and colorized version of 2000?
Who claims it isn't ? XP has under the hood improvements to improve performance - particularly on higher end equipment - but fundamentally it is just a .1 release of the NT 5.x product line.
The colors aren't even an improvement; the layout of the "improved" Start menu is an unreadable mess.
Says you. As far as I'm concerned the "new" Start Menu is a vast improvement in usability over the "classic" Start Menu (the bright colours I can take or leave).
It's certainly not an even balance between the two. Some security mechanisms may require a slightly degraded user interface, but we're talking about all the terrible user interfaces that currently exist in Windows, and I doubt they are the way they are due to security considerations.
I'm not aware of any OSes that don't have significant UI problems, if UI utopia is your yardstick.
This is right up there with such urban legends as "Microsoft products crash all the time".
Really. I've spoken to many hard-core developers. I invariably have asked what they think of Linux and their reply is invariably: "I use what gets the job done. Microsoft works and has the tools. But I don't care what the platform is, I just need to get my coding finished and working stably."
I know I have a choice, and I choose Windows XP. I do so because it runs the applications which I need to do my job, and it *doesn't* crash. I have a school full of Windows machines, and they *don't* crash. And believe you me, if they crashed I'd never hear the end of it as it's my responsibility to keep them crash-free.
Oy.
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
How does IE "get too friendly with parts that should be privileged" ?