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Celebrate Your Next Birthday At the Microsoft Store
theodp writes "Chuck E. Cheese, meet Bill H. Gates. A leaked PowerPoint posted at Gizmodo provides a glimpse of what Microsoft's retail shops may look like, noting that you'll even be able to pay to celebrate your birthday there. Some of the stores that were profiled for ideas were Nike, Nokia, Sony, Apple, and AT&T. Microsoft's take on the Genius Bar is the Answers Bar (aka Guru Bar, Windows Bar)."
Funny, how you clearly pointed out that, as nearly all of the time with such errors, it's a driver problem. And even more fitting, that it's one from ATi. Known for their notoriously bad drivers in all of the game development scene, including Carmack.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Dear God in heaven, have these guys *ever* had an original thought?
Yes.
I mean an original though that was good, of course.
Oh. Er, not in some while. The office application suite was a pretty nifty idea, for example. Um... hrm... Active directory? I think that was original, and it was damned nice. There's been some other stuff, I'm sure, especially if you allow for somewhat trivial things, like Bing's video preview.*
*Which may not've been original; I dunno. But stuff like it, if it wasn't.
A successful antitrust suit is a pretty good indication that people are not using a company's product though choice.
A successful antitrust suit is a pretty good indication that people are not using a company's product though choice.
No. It's a pretty good indication that the government thinks a company is getting too big for its britches.
At least *read* the article you link to. A settlement is not the definition of a successful suit.
People file class-actions to make companies own up to their mistakes. Governments file antitrust to protect competitive commerce.
Here's a quote cited in the very Wiki article you linked: "Consumers did not ask for these antitrust actions - rival business firms did."
The DOJ suit was about the browser wars. It wasn't about OS/2 or OS9 or Office. It was about letting grannies install Netscape v4.79, and the upshot was all us web coders had to test pissy rendering quirks for an extra couple of years and keep using table layouts. The same was true for IE5 for OSX, thank god they let that die.
From Windows 95 through 2000, which we can now remember fondly, I installed web browsers literally hundreds of times on dozens of machines. From Mosaic to Netscape Gold to Opera, not once did Windows make that process at all inconvenient for me. It took a while, but the browser teams finally realized that browsers weren't something users should have to purchase, and that offering a better feature set was the best way to be competitive.
The real winner here is modern day open source, which removes the potential for corporations to outright buy competing products. My only genuine, non-bandwagon complaint about Microsoft is that it's products are so minimalist out of the box. There's always something missing. This is partly an effect of the antitrust concerns, and succeeds in creating an aftermarket for every product they have. I'm fine with using Microsoft products, I'm just sick of tinkering with them. Spending time looking for more choices and new features is damn annoying!
Now and ultimately, Microsoft will lag behind the curve with its application and OS development, because of its lumbering size, disparate teams, and categorical imperative to protect it's intellectual property; while always succeeding as an enterprise solution thanks to its immense level of tech support and training. Having the government make it lean-and-mean won't actually improve its products or our experiences/respect, and once the government thinks Google's britches are getting tight (and a wee bit evil), I expect we'll see the same things all over again.