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Confidential Microsoft Emails Posted Online
dos4who writes "From the class action 'Comes et al. v. Microsoft' suit, some very enlightening internal Microsoft emails are now made public. Emails to and from Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Jim Allchin, etc all make for some mind blowing reading. One of my favorites is from Jim Allchin to Bill Gates, entitled 'losing our way,' in which Allchin states 'I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.'"
These confirm that Microsoft so-called critics are just telling it like it is. Vista is a second-rate, user-hostile OSX knock-off, .NET is a java knock-off and MS senior execs are lying through their teeth when they talk about innovation.
Classic stuff.
It's interesting for Jim Allchin to state this, because in terms of performance, security and understanding what the most important problems a customer face, I didn't know Microsoft had a "way" they're somehow losing now. To say that Microsoft has always been lazy in these areas is an understatement.
Now this gets me thinking, because we in FLOSS care a lot about security and performance, but not too much about the end users experience and the applications that are important to them. We all know how Apple just Gets It(tm) and we should, too, if we ever want to expand our installed base and market share beyond geeks and tech savvy users.
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
These aren't "illegal leaks" - they're evidence that has been made public - and rightfully so - because justice must not only be done, but seen to be done. Don't expect to be able to keep illegal anti-competitive activities secret because of some non-existent "corporate right to privacy."
It's sort of silly to say that the fact that the guy is PM makes him sort of super authority. It's not as if he has a high-ranking position (VP, PUM). For all we know, he was just hired out of college last week; hell, there are PM interns.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
You think its funny? They think it is fucking HILARIOUS.
By yesterday, Microsoft made more money on Vista than OSX has in its entire lifespan.
Sun's handling of Java gave Microsoft enough time to make .NET a killer platform, especially for Web apps.
Even if the only way that Microsoft is innovative is in how they turn other people's ideas into profit centers, I assure you that they are laughing a lot more than Apple or Sun today.
I think you're misunderstanding the purpose of PDF. It's not just to make text available, but to make documents (including images, and in some cases 3D content) that will look the same on ANY platform. This is absolutely necessary for publishing and other areas where you need a document format that isn't subject to all the inconsistencies of presentation that most word processing formats suffer. To my knowledge, there is no other document format that is intended to work this way. Microsoft was working on a PDF replacement, but I don't know much about it, and I'm sure it'd be bound to Microsoft.
I can agree that the Adobe Reader software sucks. But, there are many, many PDF readers available that work just fine without the Adobe nonsense, but still give you access to one of the nicest document formats available.
I know you're just trolling but I'll play along. It's too cold to do anything outside today. Why not feed the Slashtrolls...
I knew people who were making a decent living doing computer consulting for home users who went out of business because of how many 15 year old neighbours could do most of what they do for free.
That one line has got to be the best advertisement/endorsement for Linux and open source software that I've seen in a long time. If you are truly not trolling, think of how powerful that statement is: "Linux: even your neighbor's 15-year-old kid can maintain it." We should welcome software that is that easy to use and maintain, not lament it's arrival .
Im a big fan of XP, but Vista has left me scratching my head trying to figure out what they were up to, from the emails I gather they don't really know either.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
That "bad file format" you are knocking is the compsiting and rendering format for the Macintosh OS X Quartz user interface.
a cos-x-gui-4.html
See this: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/macos-x-gui/m
This was the natural extrapolation from DPS - display PostScript - used on the NeXT and original SunOS NeWS.
There is a difference between crappy rendering implementation and crappy model.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
including a clarification from Allchin on that 'I'd buy a Mac' quote.
Where I live we don't call that clarification, we call that spin.
AccountKiller
Whether you like Vista now or not, it's a perfectly reasonable thing for him to have said (i.e. I'd buy a Mac), and most likely an exaggeration anyway.
Agreed. Whether exaggeration for effect, or just admitting that Apple has a damned fine user interface that MS would do well to "borrow" from, I don't really think we should take comments like that as the proof of internal decay most have made it out as.
For comparison, how many Linux and FOSS-in-general fans run Windows on their primary desktop machine? I, for one, will admit that I do, because Linux quite simply hurts to use as a desktop on a daily basis. I absolutely love it for anything running behind the scenes (NAS, routers, webservers, mailservers, etc), but when it comes to sitting down and getting real work done at a workstation (or even just wasting time playing a game), Windows has Linux beat hands-down.
And I say that as someone who rolls his own distros. I understand how to make any desired functionality work, but that doesn't mean I want to waste that much effort every time I install a sound or video card, or god forbid try to add any USB device other than keyboard/mouse/mass-storage.
I think a lot of the problem comes down to multimedia. For any machine that doesn't need sound or graphics and only rarely changes hardware, Linux kicks serious ass. For the rest, I hope you have the exact same rev of the exact same hardware and run the same version of the same distro as someone who wrote a HowTo article, or get ready for some pain.
I remember sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for Linux's world domination, but I don't think that that was ever its promise. The whole concept of the "killer application", IMHO, runs contrary to the Linux way of doing things. In fact, the more obviously useful a "Linux" app tends to be to large numbers of people, the more likely you are to see Windows and OS X ports.
Linux let users run whatever machine they could get their hands on and have a stable, supported (as in patched and secure) system that would run current apps while the Mac and Windows worlds had people running to the store to replace perfectly good machines. Schools in under-funded districts and governments in poor countries slowly discover that proprietary software vendors hold them over a barrel while FLOSS just gives and gives. These aren't strategies that get you ahead by the next fiscal quarter, but they get you ahead of where you were four or five years ago.
MSFT and Apple fight for their share of consumers (and MSFT pretty much takes the business world for granted) while the FLOSS world makes sure to keep doing what they're doing and their share of developers, enterprise users, and savvy home users expands slowly but steadily. Linux isn't out to get people to come on board because it's got something you'll be deprived of if you don't, and it isn't out to attack or exploit how the other guys slip up. Hell, Linux isn't marching lock-step towards any single goal - it's fragmented, huge numbers of disparate groups and individuals working towards different ends, which Linus has said is exactly what he likes to see. Linux developers achieve a means to an end, polish up the rough edges when they've got something that's going to be around for a while and the users demand it, and let you get off the roller coaster of everyone else deciding what latest and greatest features you just have to have. You want Linux? Here it is. You want to wait a few years for it to improve some more? It will, and it will still be yours for the asking. [insert stream vs. boulder or similar Taoist metaphor]
Finally modding someone offtopic when they rant about what "Begging the Question" means: priceless.
"We need a simple fast storage system" in this context means "We need to ditch WinFS".
Now that Vista is out, you can see he was talking about much more than that. Had the company quit focusing on trying to become a publishing, music and games monopoly as well as a computing monopoly, Vista would not weigh in at 10GB of trip bits, encrypted binary paths and other in the customer face insult and instability. WinFS was just one of the things that make Vista less than fast, stable, secure or anything else the customer might want. He thought that M$ should spend developer time on making things work for the user, not building better cages.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
When will these guys figure out all email is public?
If you want to scheme, that's what golf courses are for.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Linux is the killer application and it will be even more so in the future. Don't worry MS is scared of Linux and probably even more so today.
1. When you typed this posted at least a few linux boxes where involved in storing, sorting
and displaying your drivel.
2. I bet you probably even do a few google searches per day, there you go again 100,000 linux boxes
faithfully answer your request at lightning speed.
3. Go to work and half the printers there probably have embedded linux.
4. You are probably posting using your wireless router again running linux.
5. Watching your dvr or tivo today, again linux.
6. Go to the movies and watching CG animation again rendered on linux.
7. Request a web page, probably linux dns server answering that request.
8. Check your email, again probably linux or routed through linux boxes somewhere.
9. Wipe your ass, some embedded controller at the paper mill running linux made that happen.
10. Picking your nose... well ok linux probably had nothing to do with that but that is what the
parent had to be doing when authoring that post.
Linux touches your life everyday and does so without
being noticed...now that is the killer app!
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