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Microsoft Employees Love Their iPhones
portscan writes "There is an entertaining and telling article in the Wall Street Journal about iPhone use by Microsoft employees. Apparently, despite it being frowned upon by senior management, iPhone use is rampant among the Redmond rank and file. The head of Microsoft's mobile division tried to explain it away as employees wanting 'to better understand the competition,' although few believe this. Nowhere does the article mention attempts by the company to understand why the iPhone is more attractive to much of Microsoft's tech-savvy workforce than the company's own products."
I wonder how many Apple employees use Microsoft Office. Or Microsoft employees search with Google. Why are people so intent on declaring one product the winner that everybody should use? Did it benefit Microsoft to switch Hotmail to MS IIS before IIS was ready to handle a site of that scale? This isn't a failure for Microsoft's phone efforts as much as it is a victory against Microsoft's mono-culture mindset.
If they do, then there's a real issue there.
If not, it's the employees money to do with what they please. Upper management needs to STFU.
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
The Apple culture is about obsession. This goes from creation to use. Despite any flaws the iPhone it has, it feels likes someone actually thought how non-engineers would use it. This is an important factor IMHO, because even with the 'wow' factor, a device will only work if people can find it usable. Too many gadgets, IMHO, are designed by engineers and almost feel like the primary user was an engineer. To many people the "it just works" element is as important as any of the features that the device it may include.
There are other companies who have understood the people factor, but all to often it doesn't feel like it is running through the veins of the companies.
Looking at Microsoft, I feel that they are confused about what it means be user friendly. There are elements of the company who seem to get it, while there are other parts that thinks bells and whistles are what user friendly is about. For me being user friendly is something a little complex, it is that right balance of simplicity and richness of functionality. Hiding features or dumbing down an application is not going to magically solve the problem, if the humans factor is forgotten in the process.
The irony in all this is that Apple spends less on R&D than Microsoft, yet whether it is through focused R&D or some other factor I feel they seem to capture the magic combination better. Maybe there is something to be said of having a company run by a guy who is so obsessive that his passion captivates people, rather than alienating them - yes, I am insinuating that Balmer's passion at developer conferences is more an after thought than something that drives the company in a cohesive way.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I suspect a lot of that development has also been fueled by "get rich quick" dreams, which has obviously only come to reality for a small number of developers. Okay if you're a hobbyist, but not a great return on investment for anyone looking for more than that.
Actually, you're the product they're selling to AT&T. Or didn't you get the memo?
Windows Mobile 7 is going to have to be really good to make up for the crap I dealt with on my last Windows based phone. Sure it looks like they've improved the god awful interface but if it's just as buggy and still under performs like my Orange SPV M3100 did then it won't have a chance imo.
We'll see how well they do but until people start using it on a day-to-day basis and feedback positively I'm not going to take anyone's opinion on it seriously.
I'm still not entirely sold on the interface. It is much slicker and isn't trying to replicate Windows on a phone but why can't they just make something that fits the screen rather than making it almost certain I'll have to scroll left and right to find everything and what is the point of making a heading to a section, like People, so big that it's guaranteed not to fit on the screen ever? Again, it looks nice but I can see that getting annoying over time and it reeks of being a lazy solution to making things look nice on various screen resolutions.
Correction: the iPod Touch runs the same software with the same restrictions
It's one thing for them to provide a store/repository of known-good software. It's another to prevent you from going outside of that store if you choose to.
Apple should have a right to keep their store the way they want, and reject any app the want.
On the other hand, I should have a right to run any program I want on my hardware.
Qxe4
I have no problem with them offering the iTunes App store, and in fact think that the cut they take doesn't seem too high.
But what if I want a native app for Google Voice? What if I want Google Voice to essentially replace my Voicemail and SMS buttons with a Google version that lets me use SMS for free? What if I want to use Opera on my iPhone? They're developing an application, but it will most likely be rejected. What if I want to alter my home screen? (e.g. Winterboard) Apple won't let me run those applications, even though they've been developed.
And what of all the developers who won't bother to even write an application because they're dreading the possibility of being rejected and having all their work being useless?
I like the iPhone and I like the iTunes store. I just think we'd see even more apps and better apps if Apple didn't keep such an iron fist over distribution.
Maybe I don't follow this well enough to know, but I don't think Apple is doing an audit, much less line-by-line. Seems to me they just react after the fact. From what I understand they recently pulled some apps related to wifi for using undocumented APIs. If they pulled it after they fact they didn't audit the source in the first place, not even using some automated tool on the binary.
I don't have an iphone, just an ipod touch. But I don't get the impression they strictly control the app-store. They certainly impose their own restrictions, but I don't feel like it's for my benefit so I only get quality apps.
Completely agree. Nice and easy. Unless you:
* don't have an extra $100/yr to spend on a membership fee
* don't have a Mac
* want to write apps that do a better job than Apple's built-in apps
* want your apps to be able to run tasks in the background
* want your apps to be able to download, save and play back locally-stored media
* want to write apps that contain a plugin system or language interpreter
* want to write free (as in speech) software
But other than that, yeah, a hobby programmer's dream.
I contend that for your average ACPI non-expert (99.999% of the population), it seems to be the other way around. I don't care who's wrong, I just want to my laptop to fucking wake up when I open the lid, like it does in Mac OS X and Windows.
Nowhere does the article mention attempts by the company to understand why the iPhone is more attractive to much of Microsoft's tech-savvy workforce than the company's own products.
Most likely, that's because Microsoft doesn't make a phone.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Yes, because they should have gone with the good US cell carrier. Man, that carrier does a great job. They haven't ever tried to hobble the phones that they offer, haven't tried to impede VoIP use on their data network, and haven't tried to keep users from tethering their laptop to their phones. You know, the US carrier that provides great coverage, fast data speeds, and good service at cheap prices without any restrictions on how you use their service...?
Which carrier is that, again?
I have trouble imagining how that is possible considering that you don't submit your source code to the App Store.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Right. In which case you then go speak to the hardware manufacturers and request they write proper Linux drivers for ACPI, or publish their hardware specs properly so the kernel developers can write the drivers.
Countless people went and done that, and what good did it do?
The real solution to his problem - the one that, you know, actually solves his problem, here and now - is the one that he gave himself: use a laptop with OS that can do it with the hardware that exists today. Not chasing unicorns.
By the same logic, it would be perfectly okay for me to call my kid an idiot for not knowing what year the Battle Of Hastings was, even though he's never done anything about it in his history class!
Well, if every single one of his classmates somehow knew that regardless...
The reason Apple fights jailbreaking is simple: They have realized that their most important asset is their brand, and they will do anything to protect it.
Why does this relate to jailbreaking? Well, remember when all those jailbroken iPhones got rickrolled a few months ago? If you read the media coverage, in most cases the detail got lost that it only concerned jailbroken phones with a badly configured sshd on them. It made Apple look bad because iPhones could be rickrolled. That's the kind of news Apple is fighting, and until you can make certain that those kinds of things do not happen on jailbroken iPhones, Apple will keep fighting it out of fear of bad publicity.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
No, it's like calling your kid an idiot if, when asked to research the year of the Battle of Hastings, he writes a letter to the publisher of his favourite history textbook demanding that they email to all customers an errata footnote on the year that the battle of hastings occurred. When there's another free (as in beer -- Microsoft employees can install Windows on their work machines for free, obviously, and this is where the analogy came from) history textbook sitting right beside that has it listed and indexed already. Because he doesn't like the other history textbook.
It's not Linux's fault, per se, but it is Linux's problem. The difference between "Linux doesn't have good ACPI support" and "ACPI hardware doesn't have good Linux support" is pedantic and ultimately irrelevant to anybody not in a position to fix it themselves.
There's definitely an AT&T bias - many overseas mobile networks are quite happy to remove those restrictions as soon as Apple-AT&T agree to do so. For example, in Australia the iPhone was sold unlocked from day 1 (since the 3G came on the market), and 3 out of 4 major networks that carry it allow tethering with no extra charge. The one hold-out charges a nominal fee to enable it. Similar things apply in the UK & Europe, but the primary source of restrictions is still driven by Apple's home market (something I would hope would change with increasing international popularity).
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Without the source code, copyright infringement is probably the most difficult to detect, but they may be specifically talking about copyrighted music or some other audiovisual media clip used in an app without authorization of the author/composer/producer, not copyrighted code. on the other hand, use of non-permitted protocols and APIs could be pretty easily tested for with binaries only (any API calls will need linker/loader info in the executable, and you can run the app in a sandbox to see what it tries to do). As for buffer overflows, while it won't be as efficient as with source, they do have a number of avenues:
a) running through a decompiler before running through a code checker,
b) automated testing apps for testing any/all input widgets
c) see if any input APIs for telecommunications such as bluetooth/IP have load/link references, trace how those are used (ie. what ports are listened to), and then hammer them with automated testing.
A lot of the above could be automated. Sure, it won't be close to foolproof or anywhere as effective as a proper code review but it's better than what NewEgg or any other PC software distributor does for you. If somebody put out a really crappy piece of software full of holes, it will flag it (and probably also let Apple know to scrutinize apps from that developer more closely).
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire