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How Microsoft Has Changed Without Bill Gates
mightysquirrel writes "It's been a year since Bill Gates left Microsoft in his official capacity. At the time many speculated his departure would spark a significant shift in Redmond. But how much has really changed during Microsoft's first year without Gates?"
Yeah, yeah, I know, I'll be lynched for saying that Bill "I am Satan" Gates should be on par with RMS, ESR and Linus, but think about this for a second.
Bill founded what is now the largest software company in the world, and wether or not you agree with him, he has made a important contribution to the computing industry: Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user.
Now, be honest. How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1? Do you think that if computers still consisted on thin-client-server models based on huge VAX mainframes, that Joe and Jane Smith would be able to dial-in to AOL and connect to thousands of people around the world? Would the Internet have blossomed into the vast information network it is today without the aid of easy-to-use software from Microsoft? How about Grandma who wants to set up a webcam so she can chat with her grandchildren? She doesn't want to have to sit and hack kernels for hours. She wants Plug-and-Play, baby.
Look, disagree all you like, but thanks to things like Windows, Office, and MSN, modern computing has been made easy and affordable to everyone, thanks to pioneers like Bill Gates.
I found this assessment to be adequate when looking at Microsoft as a marketing company that makes the operating system. But what about Bing and Natal? These have been two very important developments to different worlds following the departure of Gates. I read an article from ITPro UK that I think did a better job describing change (or lack thereof) and there's certainly others with their own 1-year-on take.
Personally, it's the small things that Microsoft has done differently that I see as real change. The recent ECMA standardization and community promise surrounding CLI and C# for one. While not perfect, it's an important step. Supporting more community standards (albeit questionable) in IE8 has also been a tremendous step in my mind. I'm not embracing IE8 yet out of sheer caution but these are certainly progressive moves however small. Has Ballmer toned down his wild intensity now that he heads Microsoft and is the unquestionable leader? I don't think so in the operating system world but maybe in smaller subsections of software development. The pricing and marketing strategies they've used for their OS have been just as questionable and (in the case of the OLPC) as ridiculous as ever.
I hate to say it as I thought it was the end of the world when Ballmer took over Microsoft and that everything was going to grind to a halt around them but things don't look so bad. Honestly, I'm more concerned with other companies buying up everyone and everything around them in their quest to own a full stack of software or dominate one cash cow field--Google included. Two or three years ago, had I rubbed--to have everything in the world that was made by them blink out of existence. Now, I'd probably have better things to spend that wish on. I hate to sound like an apologist because I still despise a lot of their marketing tactics and things they do. But I'm glad they're starting to show some improvement and at least a little bit of innovation. I think things had really stagnated under Gates and though Ballmer looked like the big bad wolf, he's obviously taking more risks now that he's in charge.
My work here is dung.
Rainbows are evil. They crawl up your leg and bite the inside of your ass!
It may have been announced October 2008, but it was available in alpha back in June 2008 and earlier. I used it in July while on vacation.
Set it up on my desktop and laptop. I would take pictures, put the SD card into my laptop and copy them to the shared folder on my laptop and they would automatically copy to my desktop which was 2000 miles away. This way i always had room on my SD card for my digital cameral and there was always a second copy in case my laptop crashed.
and the web TS is very nice. i would RDP into my PC from where ever I was to do whatever i wanted. like set up bit torrent to download stuff that was meant only for me. only problem was that it was very slow, but being an alpha version i didn't complain.
Judging by the pricing of Windows 7 Ultimate, it's business as usual at Microsoft.
Friends help you move... Real friends help you move bodies...
No, I don't think MS has changed, but the world has. The iPhone has changed the smartphone market to where even with the best hardware Windows Mobile just isn't wanted much anymore. The 360 is still falling behind the Wii despite MS's attempts to beat it with the "New Xbox Experience" and with the development of the Natal controller. MS though has finally realized that unless Windows 7 is a hit, Linux/OS X/Now ChromeOS is going to kill them in the OS market. Office has stagnated and has had a popular revolt going on because of the "ribbon" UI that a lot of people hate, and I don't see a new version remedying that in the future. MS as a whole has remained the same, however the world is changing and they don't seem to realize that.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
From the perspective of a GNU/Linux person, there seems to be less innovation, and more chairs. Less innovation in that we've not had much that was new since Gates left. Yes there is Vista and xbox and zune stuff, but what is new about these things? Nothing. I think Balmer throws chairs.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Knowing Microsoft, they see it as the new term for Vaporware, without the negative meaning.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The way Microsoft has distributed the beta of Windows 7 to a restricted audience, he explained, has meant that those included felt "special" while others felt they were missing out.
Ummm...the Windows 7 beta was available to everyone. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
Error reading device 'Signature'. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?
Well, let's see, the OpenXML was definitely in the pipeline before Bill left, and the take no prisoners tactics that he loves is what got it pushed through the standards committee.
Next is ODF translators... which don't work, and in fact delete formulas. Not to mention there Smear Campaign. So we are saying maturity is going back to their ruthless kill-them-subversively methods that got them in trouble in the EU?
Oh, wait, maturity is killing declining products... which Bill did often
Sorry, I don't see a real change listed in at least that section
Microsoft is still Microsoft. and they are still have the address: One Microsoft Way. and Windows 7? don't get me started! it drains my laptops battery faster than vista could, i am seriously doubting it will be any better when final.
I guess a few chairs have been moved around a bit...
Fuggedaboutit! Never in a million years would Gates have had made peace with such a potentially damaging open source group.
They gave the puppies to me...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
with products such as Open XML." That was enough to convince me this article was full of shit. It also reminded me how those asshole haven't changed a bit.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Has anyone else realized that since about the beginning of this decade, Microsoft has slowly begun a transition to competing on quality, rather than simply leveraging their monopoly and sitting on their laurels? Take a look at some improvements in Microsoft products over the past few years:
* Windows XP. There is simply no comparing XP to previous "home" versions of Windows in terms of quality. Yes, I know it's largely Windows 2000 with a new skin, but the important thing here is that they discontinued their crufty, broken, DOS-based line that didn't even have true multitasking and replaced it with something stable and mature (in comparison).
* Visual Studio: As for the IDE itself, I never used versions prior to 2003, but I loved 2003 and have seen it getting nicer and nicer since. As for programming languages, their current implementation of C++ is actually quite close to standards-compliant, on the level of G++. They've got a ways to go with C, but it's less of a priority for them. The biggest change is in their flagship RAD offerings. C# and VB.NET are now mature object-oriented languages in the tradition of Java. No comparison with VB6.
* Internet Explorer: 6 was simply a joke, the laughingstock of the web. No tabs, an extremely buggy rendering engine, not extensible, unpredictable for web developers, and largely at odds with every published standard ever. IE7 was a big step in the right direction, and IE8 has entered the playing field as a serious competitor.
* Search: MSN search was useless abandonware; now they are really trying with Bing.
* User interface: Vista brought in a modern, powerful shell complete with modern, powerful command-line utilities. No comparison to the shell (with bundled terminal emulator) that has been outdated since it was released as part of DOS 1.0. Windows 7 has made several improvements on the GUI side.
Yes they're still behind, but they've covered a huge amount of ground. Yes I'd much prefer coding in Emacs using GNU Screen and XMonad for window management than in Visual Studio on Windows 7. Yes I'd much rather use Firefox, Opera, or Chrome than IE8, when given the choice. Yes, Apple has hands down the best GUI of all. But in, say, 2000, who'd have thought Microsoft would have come so far? I'm excited to see where their products will go and whether someday they will be as good as what comes from Apple, Google, and open-source hackers. I don't know whether they will, but it'll certainly be interesting.
Le français vous intéresse?
flamebait ...sorry, couldn't help it.
It's still there, hence the only valid comment can possibly be "not enough!"
/ flamebait
~men are from earth. women are from earth. deal with it.~
Under Gates, Microsoft grew to the empire that it is today. Gates strategic moves were critical to the success of the company:
1) The DOS deal with IBM.
2) The MS Office deal with Apple, and using that contract to gain GUI engineering knowledge from Apple.
3) Porting MS Office to DOS and using it to sell WIndows (ex: buy Excel and get Windows for free)
4) Outsmarting IBM in the OS/2 deal while continuing development of Windows/Promising Windows 95 vapourware to fend off OS/2 Warp, which was superior.
5) Pricing Windows MS Office ridiculously cheaply, pushing out Word Perfect, Lotus 123, etc that were trying to come up with Windows 95 versions.
6) Windows NT to push out Novell in the enterprise.
7) MS Exchange which is still the back-end collaboration framework of choice
8) The sneaky deal with Sun over licensing Java
9) InternetExplorer + ISS + ASP to gain a foothold on the internet despite starting late
Ballmer hasn't had nearly the same impact. So far MSN hasn't really gone anywhere, the high-end console wars are a draw with the Wii way on top at the low-end, Windows server hasn't unseated Linux, .NET has its niche but isn't unseating Java, Google is still dominating search, and Windows Mobile is losing ground.
This space left intentionally blank.
They seem a bit more focused on actually developing new stuff than on simple evolutionary improvements to their current products, and the changes they make in their current stuff tends to be a bigger leap than before. They seem to have integrated their products together better and are making a more cohesive sales pitch in the face of Apples onslaught... And, to be honest, Win 7 looks like a pretty decent way to blunt Apples explosive growth...
Nobody likes a poor thief.
In an interview Steve Jobs said of msft, that msft is a company with no original ideas. I think it is the same even today, but there is one difference. We had Bill Gate who always looks calm and composed, although in reality he is supposed to be really annoying person, and we have SteveO who runs up and down a stage screaming, and had to have throat surgery after screaming "developers developers developers", he is really on some kind of crack. I think in few years msft will turn into a litigation house, like sco they will go down as a technology company that puts out more law suites than any new technology. msft under gates was a marketing company with a very strong arm & huge muscles. Under steveO it will soon turn into a law firm with huge muscles & small a d***.
They could if they were making a widows vacuum.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I believe the thing to criticize about the 360 would be the still unresolved RROD problem, rather than its inability to appeal to all the people the Wii apparently does... Nintendo's gamble of using inferior processing muscle,but an innovative control scheme couldn't really have been predicted to be so successful beforehand, and many people think of the Wii as a totally separate kind of product from the PS3 or 360.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
"You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious."
Sig this!
I got the general impression that MS got so big and unwieldy that it is difficult to assign direction to Gates or Ballmer. They seem to have spent most of the time since 2000 reacting, not leading. Gates didn't so much leave as he simply faded into insignificance. If he'd stayed, it wouldn't have changed the company which seems to lurch into markets solely because growth in their mature markets has stopped. They aren't leading advances in their mature markets either. They have nothing seemingly to offer to new markets, namely because the old strategy of letting others develop them before marching in and stealing customers won't work in the current environment. The new markets are fast moving, by the time MS decides to jump, the market isn't where they thought it was. If Gates had been on the ball from 2000 onward, he still didn't have the organization that could move quickly, decisively, and accurately with a product that could capture the market.
Apple would be in a similar position had they not the current management which is looking to define new markets or show how a staid market can be rejuvenated with a sharp line of products. The U.S. based auto industry lapsed into similar unconsciousness.
More chairs have been tossed since Gates left.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Like it or not, Windows 7 is just Vista with a new Taskbar, a major video display bugfix, a few new control panel applets (at least one of which (ClearType Tuner) used to be a Windows XP PowerToy), some new fonts and the first upgrade to the Font Control Panel Applet in 15 years, and some other misc bugfixes.
Seriously, you're still using the same Vista you all decided to hate on before; you've just fallen victim to the marketing hype.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Wrong. Bill Gates is still with Microsoft in his official capacity as Chairman of the Board of Directors.
Its been more than a year since he stopped working full-time at Microsoft, which isn't the same thing.
I really hate to join this, but my first computer was a kit. 1976. No display, except for LED's. My first programming class had timeshare on computer across town. I programmed on a teletype with acoustic couplers, and saved my program to paper tape.
From there it was wiring my own serial S100 card from a magazine article. Yes, I used BASIC once it became available. Moved to a TRS80 model I and had a friend take me to task for wasting the money on 16k because I should be able to do everything in 4k. Moved to an Apple II, Sharp MZ80K with Pascal, Kaypro II, and eventually my first "IBM Compatible".
Microsoft was a common thread through most of that. Love 'em or hate 'em, they shaped the time.
As for their competitors, what most forget is that in the heat of battle, what allowed MS to win was usually serious mistakes by their competitors.
Word was inferior to WordPerfect, and possibly WordStar, but both companies shot themselves in the head, and allowed Word to take the lead.
Lotus 123 was THE spreadsheet for business, Lotus screwed themselves and Excel took the lead.
Netscape was the end-all-be-all for browsers, but they decided to shift focus and took on stuff that wasn't their core. Where are they now?
Yes, MS acquires a lot, sometimes by ruthlessly. But, most of the time, their competitors simply screw up and give the advantage to MS.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
...as his ego is no longer blocking the halls.
Look, disagree all you like, but thanks to things like Windows, Office, and MSN, modern computing has been made easy and affordable to everyone, thanks to pioneers like Bill Gates.
Oh please. Look past the marketing.
I know, they say they invented the internet, the desktop, programming, databases. But they didn't. They buy (Hotmail), license (TrueType from Apple), reimplement (Word, Excel,...) extend and hope to extinguish (MS J++ vs Sun Java) but rarely innovate...
Bill Gates was a champion of MS Flight Simulator - a franchise that ran for decades. The last version FSX was complete ass and took 3 goes to get right....which culuminated in the sacking of the entire programming staff at Aces Studios (the guys that wrote the sim).
FS2004 included a kiosk mode so any library or museum could demonstrate a flight simulation of an existing or historic plane. FSX killed that feature and tried to sell a monstrosity of a commerical system called ESP for big dollars to do the same. FSX also added activation and all it's headaches.
Bill Gates was a nasty piece of work but under his leadership there was some good stuff done. Now there's nothing.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
...the only reason you can't see it is the companys size and wealth, it may seem invincible but so did Enron, Merrill Lynch or GM.
Windows Vista was a failure, so was the OOXML ISO certification (which btw. resultet in access to their previous file formats) and Office 2007 was no real success...
Microsoft without Bill Gates is a joke... it is almost like Apple without Steve Jobs.
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At any given moment about 1 in 4 of the software bestsellers in software will be Microsoft products for the Windows market. Office 2007/8 has had an extraordinarily successful run.
OS Platform Statistics For June
XP 67%
Vista 18%
Mac 6%
Linux 4%
W2003 2%
Win 7 2%
W2K 1%
The OS stats are from a pro's development-oriented site that shows a 50% share for Firefox. It is not preposterous to imagine Win 7 overtaking Linux before its official launch in October.
They extended the time you can downgrade to XP by another year! Hurrah!
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Compare and contrast the number of digits in your SlashID with mine. I was actually there. I used all those machines I mention. I used and wrote TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) programs for DOS (much like a DOS device driver). I've written Windows Device Drivers. I can say, and back with decades of emperical experience, that you are 100% incorrect. Crashing was a daily thing, and often happened multiple times a day on my machine and most others. The rest of your post shows that you are equally in need of knowledge and experience when you speak on this subject. Now would be a great time to start learning the truth, rather than teaching the myths.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Office chairs?
Did Microsoft develop your joke as well?
There was also Bob.
I can see why.
Free Martian Whores!
Microsoft did manage to hit upon the idea of standard "IBM Compatible" hardware with their OS, which allowed PC's to become usable and affordable to a lot more people. They didn't do anything other than remember someone they heard had an OS with no plans for it, buy it for peanuts, repackage it and present it as their own. Microsoft don't innovate on tech, they never have; they buy other products and rebrand them, or buy competing products and close them down if their own can't compete. Like Apple, Microsoft had a different view of competition when they were the plucky upstart to when they dominate their fields.
.dll error you just had is being experienced by many people in lots of different countries, and if Microsoft think supporting their language can make them some money they'll even have the error message in their native tongue.
To say that Microsoft don't innovate is harsh though. Before Microsoft, corporate bullying, kickbacks, political lobbying, astroturfing were all in the amateur leagues. Not to mention all the parasite industries which formed to help Microsoft products last through the day without failing (too much) like the anti-malware companies. They did standardize "PC Hell" experience around the world, isn't it comforting to know that the same
The concept of charging people to get brainwashed in the form of certificates was also genius. That of course requires a skilled strategy of convincing insurance companies that certificate holders have real skills and are therefor less of a risk, which in turn comes back to the companies who need every IT staff to be certified.....profit.....in addition to the Windows and Office licenses you're already reaming from them. Somehow I think they didn't invent that scam either.
I doubt Microsoft will be remembered in much of a positive light after karma has caught up with them and they're another bankrupt corporation with a flotilla of other companies who went down with them. When all your positive PR comes from paid shills, will they still be your attack dogs fighting your cause when you can't pay them? At that point the scales tip, and it's all negative PR for Microsoft. They will get credit for some early moves, but it'll be dwarfed by all the negative and harmful stuff they've done.
"the same company that created Bob, Me, Vista, the first X-Box controller, proprietery document formats and the Blue Screen of Death"
For all the people asking "What M$ Innovations?" The above is a nearly complete list.
I would add to it the Red Ring of Death.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Hmm. That's interesting: Many of us know MS as the very closed and proprietary monopolist, who's behavior is counter productive to the development of the entire computer industry (and maybe even to the economy?). Anyway, reading your comment I realize that they probably only got their wide-spread market adoption because their software was mainly deployed on an open (and thus cheap and broadly available) hardware architecture. In other words: The business model of this anti-open software monopolist only worked so well because they were deploying on open hardware! Seems like a trivial point, but it still struck me like an interesting turn. (Obviously, I am only talking about PC's and not about zune, xbox, etc.)
a) Why say it?
b) Maybe it's deserved.
I mean, people slated those apologising for Stalin.
Maybe for a good reasons.
I heard they repainted that bathroom. You know, the scary one.
"Microsoft did manage to hit upon the idea of standard "IBM Compatible" hardware with their OS, which allowed PC's to become usable and affordable to a lot more people"
Microsoft was hired on by IBM to create the OS for the yet to be designed IBM PC. IBM lost control of the platform because of a number of reasons. Columbia Data Products figured out how to cleanroom the BIOS and companies such as Compaq produced much cheaper knockoffs in the far east. IBM gave Microsoft a non-exclusive license for PC-DOS little realizing that the clone market would overtake their own efforts, ultimately leading to its total exit from the IBM PC business.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Microsoft was evil when it only sold Microsoft Basic, which had a quirky implementation and incorrect manual.
Evil is Microsoft's business plan, IMO. Without the evil that was possible because the customers had little technical knowledge, Microsoft would be a far smaller company.
Nothing to see here. 4-5 pages of nothing.
MOD PARENT UP to +10.
Excellent history of Microsoft, in my opinion.
Microsoft paid a reported $75,000 for what became DOS 1.0.
Here's a history that seems accurate: A Short History of MS-DOS. See also Origins of MS-DOS.
See Myths About Microsoft. Quote: "... Microsoft gains some of its market share by shady back-room deals and by threatening and intimidating its own customers."
Microsoft has not lead the industry in much of anything for way more than 10 years and from what I've seen, they only react to what the real innovators are doing. These reactions make news because they often expose more dirty tricks, lies, deceptions, and their well know FUD tactics like how they flooded the ISO committees with Microsoft business partners to win approval of MS OOXML and then those new committee members stopped attending ISO meetings which stalled most progress because of the rules requiring certain percentages of the committees to a vote. But back to McDonalds, which is a fine business and they make consistent product but you don't see McDonald chefs on GMA, The Today Show, or as guests of Rachael Rae. They don't set trends or really do anything worth a moments attention. They are just there. So it goes with Microsoft with or without Bill Gates. Who's foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Froundation seems to be walking an interesting line by requiring donations be tied to Microsoft products which financially benefit most of the entire Board of Directors of the foundation. Someone said that was not legal though I've not looked in to that yet. IMO
LoB
Yes, but you didn't mention that Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME all trashed their file systems. You didn't mention that they all trashed their centralized, buggy resource called the Registry.
Windows operating systems need periodic complete re-installation to remain stable. That includes Windows XP, in my experience.
XMLHttpRequest
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
All you need to know is in the corporate mission statement.
Under Gates, it was:
"A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software."
Under Ballmer, it is:
"To enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential."
Sapienti sat.
"until I hear about a botnet of macs, I'm going to be skeptical that virus software is necessary on a mac" - by je ne sais quoi (987177) on Thursday July 09, @10:17AM (#28636099)
----
Zombie Macs Launch DoS Attack:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/16/2327246
----
"I'm going to be skeptical that virus software is necessary on a mac" - by je ne sais quoi (987177) on Thursday July 09, @10:17AM (#28636099)
I'm actually "skeptical" that it's needed on a PC, especially after one secures a modern Windows NT-based OS (2000/XP/Server 2003 or even VISTA + Windows 7) using the principals outlined here:
----
HOW TO SECURE Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003 & even VISTA, + make it "fun-to-do", via CIS Tool Guidance (& beyond):
http://www.tcmagazine.com/forums/index.php?s=4e828ad4a06cd24b41b938af0bed9a8c&showtopic=2662
----
It works (& yes, it suggests resident antispyware + antivirus programs... but, the guide was geared to help the TOTAL novice understand how to secure a PC, & the extra meaures of keeping a resident antispyware + antivirus around running helps them... but, I have actually done the concept of "running naked" for more than 1/2 a year now & am free of infestations/infections of ANY kind... just by practicing "smarter/safer computing", especially online - & that guide goes HEAVILY into that (many of you all know this stuff, but, maybe NOT all of it))
APK
P.S.=> None of them are "110% absolutely safe", but Windows rigs run on the MOST used hardware platform there is, x86, & have the possession of the largest market share from home users, thru departmental LAN workstations + servers, up to "Mission Critical/Enterprise Class" back office servers... thus, they're GOING TO BE THE MOST TARGETTED by those after monies or information (which is, monies & power in the end)... think about it - IF you were a malware maker/botnet master, wouldn't YOU target the largest target you could, with 1 single codebase? Sure you would... apk
You Bill-worshippers really are eager to revise history, rewritting it so that the sun shines out of Bill's every orifice. How soon we forget the Apple ][ and the TRS-80
Ray Ozzie is your classic MBA type who will have Microsoft Chase every new buzzword until microsoft finally collapses from exhaustion. This is a sleazy but effective strategy for a startup trying to raise money but a disaster for a blue chip like microsoft. My guess is that Microsoft will have a twitter ready for 2011 and will recognize that Vista was crap by 2016. Has anyone told Ozzie baby about push technology yet? He should get right on that. Or Jabber. Jabber will be worth billions by 2002. The new definition for Microsoft of "Killer app" will be which app will Ray Ozzie use to kill microsoft? I suspect he will mostly use powerpoint. Cloud technology is so 2008.
and other things that other countries in Asia (particularly South Korea) use because of msoft. You got to many Korean web sites and they require components that are ms-centric if you want to enjoy the site, conduct business, or just browse. I've talked with a few Koreans who absolutely DETEST msoft and the Korean companies that compel this shit.
I'd like to visit Korea one day, and stay for a while. I'll probably have a thrombosis if i have to use msoft warez to do banking, purchase something or just read the news smoothly to avoid bells and whistles that someone got paid to force down Koreans throats. Yes, the Internet in Korea is blazingly fast, deep, popular, and quite astonishingly useful relative to what is here in the US. But, to have it be difficult for Linux or some Mac users should be reprehensible if it persists.
Hopefully, this isn't really the case and won't BE the case by the time i get around to visiting there. If the ms-crap-shoot crap is still going on full steam ahead, i'll have to shock people by just refusing to use the Internet, or by having a friend be an intermediary. People should not be prevented from being OS-agnostic.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The real question is How Bill Gates has changed without Microsoft.
Bill Gates is Microsoft and Microsoft is Bill Gates http://coretanimtihan.blogspot.com/
Different of course, but ALL technologies Microsoft have used were created by someone else.
Fixed that for you. Even at it's beginnings Microsoft was based upon stealing. Microsoft BASIC was developed at Harvard on computers owned by the U.S. Government. Misappropriation of government computer time for a commercial venture was a crime. Bill's dad the lawyer talked Harvard into letting Bill drop out rather than expelling him. Apparently his connections were also good enough to prevent federal charges from being pressed.
Then there was MS-DOS, which was originally developed by Seattle Computer Products as SCP-DOS. Most of SCP-DOS was written by taking disassemblies of Digital Research's CP/M and running it through Intel's 8080 to 8086 translator. Microsoft bought this stolen code, and used it to undercut the price of CP/M-86. CP/M-86 wasn't an automated translation. Developers were actually paid to write it.
The first two major products for Microsoft were the result of theft. That set the pattern for the rest of their products.
Too bad Amazon does not offer linux distro downloads or openoffice.org downloads...
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The Linux product needs a universal installer if you want to compete with DVD and - in time perhaps - Blu-Ray distribution for Windows and Mac.
The geek may fantasize about "unlimited free broadband" - but it ain't going to happen anytime soon.
XENIX is a fascinating story and it seems that if things had worked out a little differently at Microsoft, we might have been running Unix on the desktop since the early 90s. Then Linux would have had a much easier job of challenging the status quo.
I wonder why that didn't happen? Was NT an attempt to leapfrog *both* DOS and XENIX in a single bound? That seems sensible, but iIn retrospect, other than creating lock-in dominance, did it work? NT's ACLs are nicer than Unix's, and Linux is still struggling to adopt capabilities in a standard way - but how did silly things like 'you can't replace an open file' get through? Was it all the fault of the Win32 compatibility box?
And since MS was starting from a clean slate with NT, and Windows was needing an object model, why the heck didn't they build objects into the OS kernel rather than hacking up such a weird kludge as COM? How did 'objects' get perverted into 'components' and why should we ever need two separate, incompatible, ways of saying roughly the same thing? Why did they use C++ to build NT even though C++ had no decent ABI?
I have all these questions about the history of modern computing that just don't make sense. It is sad that even in 2009, 40-year-old Unix remains 'the best we can do' in open systems. What the heck went wrong, and why?
Please don't tell me 'this current architectural mess is the best we can ever hope for'. That would be just too depressing.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Correction: it was WAIT 6502, x
http://www.eeggs.com/items/12571.html
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Buried on page 4:
"Some believe the biggest trend for Microsoft since Gates left is that not enough has changed"
In other words, there is no point or purpose for this article. Thanks for reading through 4 pages of tripe and ads, suckers
I was arguing that we'd have been better off if Microsoft hadn't dominated it, teaching everyone to expect crappy software.
Interesting, if not particularly insightful. And potentially naive.
It's quite possible that during the exponential phase of the PC revolution, that "race to the bottom" was the dominant economic paradigm, and the winner, whoever it turned out to be, was the corporation to first or most deeply grasp this central economic fact.
To make this discussion concrete, IMO the exponential adoption phase concerns the period of time from the early 386 through to a low-end Athlon running Windows 2000.
Prior to the 386, people bought PCs more on potential than reality. It was a skill you wanted to have to stay in business a year or two down the road, but in fact it probably cost more than it returned in productivity bonuses. In fact, it took a very long time before the PC made an unambiguous impact on productivity figures (mostly due to the economists not knowing how to best update their models).
After you hit 512MB of RAM, 1GHz, a 30GB disk drive, and a couple of 19" monitors it wasn't so much your PC holding you back as your own lack of anything to contribute. The driving urge to replace your crap PC every two years began to fade, and PC Magazine soon resembled Ally McBeal. The internet might have also contributed, but not as much as generally presumed. The two effects overlapped.
The formula for success during this era was to buy cheap and buy often. It's a direct consequence of exponential growth over short time frames (i.e. tax law amortization schedules).
There were three kinds of machines sold during this era: niche machines, elitist machines (Sun, N!XT, some Macs), and Wintel boxes. Of the elitist machines, the N!XT machine was the most orthographically challenged (and presciently ungoogleable). As great as the Amiga is purported to have been, it was never going to be all things to all people. As great as any of the other machines might have been, they were never going to be cheap enough to be all things to all people. The network effect takes over when you succeed at being all things to all people, excluding only the snobs, who don't wish to network with their inferiors in the first place.
Many of Microsoft's worst false steps were all about backward compatibility, which is legendary on the PC, but largely taken for granted. Sure it's easy to find counter examples out of a pool of 20,000 popular applications. If you're the kind of person that thinks one terrific counter example amounts to an argument, I bet every PC you've owned has come from the elitist camp. Those of us with elitist tendencies would have preferred Windows to be *less* compatible with the crap of yesteryore.
I have trouble faulting Microsoft for optimizing themselves to fit the niche which lead to their incredible commercial success, so far as they stayed within unbending legal parameters. (Unbending was not in the MS competitive lexicon at any point during Bill's reign of terror.)
There was one idea along the way that Microsoft regarded as particularly toxic to their vision of future success: the ability to roll-back or replicate a stable system configuration. Horrors! This could lead to resurrecting software whose license had since expired, or otherwise controlling the components in a fleet wide deployment image, with the potential exclusion of Microsoft's flavour of the day technology. Double horrors!
Microsoft has always practised forced bundling so that every person who upgrades their PC automatically gets the new MS crap, so they can then brag about their dominant install base, which gets the hardware vendors on side, etc.
The Windows registry was never about simplifying computer management. It was always about making custom installation images so difficult you needed an enterprise scale IT department to pull it off. This is a scale where the problem can be solved by political means: expensive lunches for pow
I think that microsoft over the last year have been getting better. They're doing fair business and making decent (if not good) products.
I dont know if bill leaving was the reason- and I doubt anyone does.
I'm not sure who I like- Gates or Ballmer. Gates is smarter than ballmer, but very very controlling. Ballmet is stupider, and kind of pigheaded, but he is just a party boy at heart.
Either way I dont think a CEO has enough direct influence in a company to shift the entire mindset. Sure, they can put specific things in place to shape the company, but in the end the city is populated by the citizens, not the mayor.
"We would not have had a usable, cheap and pervasive home desktop OS in the 90s without Microsoft"
There were plenty of OSes that would have provided that.
Home desktop computing was going to happen irrespective of the existence of Microsoft.
At the time MS was releasing their first versions of Windows all the major UNIX players had Motif or OpenView graphical interfaces (X11 predates Windows by several years), Apple had the Mcintosh which predates the firs version of Windows.
And lets not forget OS2, which I personally used, and put WIndows to shame in the technical side of things.
So no, Microsoft was not a necessary ingredient at the time for the desktop revolution to happen. That was a natural development of the industry and Microsoft was the company that perhaps understood better this and rode the wave, but by no means they were the ones that sparkled the innovation.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"Then, 2k. Stability of NT meets usability and compatibility of 98"
A server depending on a GUI in order to be usable.
Thankfully most people didn't believe the hype and kept trusting their money making systems to UNIX or mainframes....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... to the freaks that claim that TCO is cheaper with MS products ...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I dunno. I think Microsoft has become more open-minded with the departure of Gates. Who would've expected any of Microsoft's code to become open source? Definitely not under Gates' rule, that's for sure. And the fact that they have pulled the chains off of outside implementations of C# (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/07/07/0434236/Microsoft-Puts-C-and-the-CLI-Under-Community-Promise?from=rss) is only a sign that the beast is finally getting with the times. It's still a long journey before Microsoft parallels Mozilla and Google, but it's getting there.....
Really. I'm surprised at the bad ratio between size and content really related to the topic in the original article.
Basically, not much has changed. It would be sufficient to say that without mentioning all the new, shiny Microsoft products.
4 pages felt like a waste of time. I wonder if the writer is paid to write things like that, and if so, in a per-thousand-words base.
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
In 1983 I wrote a market research study on the competition between Microsoft DOS and Digital Research CP/M-86. DOS was, well, DOS, but Gary Kildall had just put a real-time kernel into CP/M-86, and it could read and write on the floppy drive, the hard drive, keyboard and screen, and the modem all at the same time without missing a beat. DOS then, and Windows afterwards, couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time for many years. Apparently nobody at MS knew anything about concurrent programming, particularly how to make concurrent file operations safe. Anybody remember untangling cross-linked files with Norton Utilities?
Gates was a hotshot programmer in high school, but apparently never learned any significant amount of Computer Science before he dropped out of Harvard. Kildall was a CS Prof. If IBM had been willing to deal with Kildall, we would have been spared more than 25 years of software incompetence coupled with insensate greed.
CS is misnamed, of course. It isn't science. We don't have big experimental CS labs. Some of it is math, and some of it is how to do engineering design so that your product actually works, in large part by using math that actually works. Like how to use semaphores correctly in concurrent programming, how to use that do atomic database writes, and other things of that kind.
"A knot!" said Alice, ever ready to be useful. "Oh, do let me help to undo it!"
OMG, can you imagine a billion children getting their first taste of computing with Windows XP running on an OLPC XO? Microsoft has apparently paid for 7,000 dual-boot XOs (Linux + Sugar in main flash, XP on an extra flash card) to be used in trials in Uruguay.
http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/uruguay/uruguay_windows_xo_ms_office.html
The only good thing I can say about this is, "Woot!" Microsoft is actually paying to have trials of Linux + Sugar vs. XP plus educational shovelware, on the same hardware, conducted by a multitude of teachers and schoolchildren, none of them on the M$ payroll. Oh, frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!
The best bit is that Uruguay has just started an educational blog, where teachers and students have started posting. Story at http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/uruguay/update_on_xo_laptops.html, more (in Spanish) at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Blog_educativo
"A knot!" said Alice, ever ready to be useful. "Oh, do let me help to undo it!"
Two errors with that claim. First, as others have posted, Bing is a re-branding of MSN Live or whatever it was called. Second, it is a response to Wolfram Alpha which, unlike the marketing initiative from MS, is something new. MS has a pattern of re-naming failed products like Live to hide bad reviews or avoid the downside to brand recognition.
Apply the lessons learned elsewhere. When you see a product or service from MS spewed in a media blitz, especially one touted as being new, look around for the target of MS' copying and if that copy is a re-tread of an earlier, failed product. In this case, the original being copied is Wolfram's Alpha.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.