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Former Microsoft Exec: Microsoft Has "Become the Thing They Despised"
zacharye writes "Microsoft has a long and storied history of leadership in the tech industry, and the company has driven innovation for decades. In recent years, however, Microsoft has fallen behind the times in several key industries; the company's mobile position has deteriorated and left it with a low single-digit market share, and Microsoft won't launch Windows RT, its response to Apple's three-year-old iPad, until later this year. In a recent piece titled 'Microsoft’s Lost Decade,' Vanity Fair contributor Kurt Eichenwald analyzes the company’s 'astonishingly foolish management decisions' and picks apart moves made during the Steve Ballmer era."
Looks like Vanity Fair is going to drip feed us this stuff for a while... does it add anything we didn't already know?
Art is the mathematics of emotion
Didn't Bill Gates once say. "When did we become IBM"?
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Not only is a double post, the full article still isn't available, and this is just a short teaser.
Microsoft has a long and storied history of leadership in the tech industry, and the company has driven innovation for decades
LMFAO
Yes, we've seen this before. No new content yet.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
They still have a commanding market share in many areas - it will be interesting to see if they can pull of the reinvention that Apple did.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Elop did to Nokia in a matter of months what Ballmer took over a decade to do to Microsoft.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Executives, Executives, EXECUTIVES
That's the problem with management with KPIs: they have to report results every 3 months. Cutting some long term projects looks great in the beginning: less overhead and fewer costs, and if you move your researchers to production, you even get a bigger income.
The damage only becomes visible 2-5 years later. And then it's too late.
Too bad the whole world is focussed on those dan
...and double links to the same copy-pasted teaser article in the summery!
Triple-win or double-fail...you decide.
No sig today...
A former exec disgruntled with his previous company? you don't say...
did you forget to take your meds?
That thing was way ahead of its time. But Gates and Balmer killed it. and now Allard is off doing something else...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
The article is way off base. The most fundamental reason for their success is not anything they have done or not done. It is the whole corporate sector conflating "Microsoft compatibility" with "interoperability". Otherwise they have always been the same. Lackluster products and copying/buying innovation done elsewhere has been its mainstay. The low quality of its products was masked by the ever increasing speed and decreasing cost of hardware. Their monopoly masked the incompetence of their managers. All that is happening now is people inside and outside Microsoft, waking up and smelling the coffee.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Microsoft Has "Become the Thing They Despised"
That's funny... for me it's just more despicable now than it was way back when. I guess my despicableness threshold is lower than Eichenwald's and Ballmer's?
Why are we even having this discussion about what Microsoft innovated and which company is the best innovator, because frankly none off them innovate anymore. The easiest and most effective way to become the biggest player is to bully everyone else with patent lawsuits. Microsoft, Apple and Google are all exactly the same when it comes to employing dodgy business tactics.
What have they "innovated"? Microsoft Bob? The only useful thing I've seen that they've innovated on their own is the kinnect. If innovate means copied or stole technology or ideas, then yes they're a great innovator.
They didn't make Kinect and still don't own the rights to the tech. It was created by licenced from PrimeSense.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
and the company has driven innovation for decades
Uh... geez. Where to even start?
The first and last real MS innovation was the Microsoft BASIC interpreter which became ubiquitous in 1980s home computers. Everything else they ever did was shamelessly stolen and/or bought and/or badly copied from others. Even MS-DOS started out as a bought-out CP/M imitation.
They disparaged GUIs and the whole idea of user-friendly computing until the Mac proved them wrong. It took them a decade to come up with a usable competitor (Windows 95). Then it took them years to recognize the importance of the Internet, so they killed the competition by illegally leveraging their monopoly on Windows desktops. With the competition dead, they stalled IE development and set back web innovation by a decade until Firefox broke the market back open.
Now you can see them screw up the same way with mobile devices. It took even Bill Gates until last week to admit that the PC-centric model may be "changing". Thankfully, with Gates gone and that dancing sweatmonkey in charge, they don't seem to be capable of their past level of predation anymore.
MS has always been a follower at best. It has frequently been a predatory abuser of its monopoly. It has usually parasitized on the innovations of others. Embrace, extend, extinguish was always how they operated. It has never been an innovation leader.
Otherwise, why would any company bother with PR or advertising?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
the full article still isn't available, and this is just a short teaser.
Just like Microsoft product announcements.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Except that now it's in danger of no longer being a monopoly.
Hey Microsoft changing the way the menus works IS NOT an upgrade. And can I please have a simple way to not show my emails in groups? Hell to do anything simple anymore you have to search on a forum for the magic voodoo steps to accomplish basic tasks in office anymore.
Lets get this over with... Fuck Off
“In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, Sears had it nailed. It was top-notch, but now it’s just a barren wasteland. And that’s Microsoft. The company just isn’t cool anymore.”
Adds to Libraries of Congress, car analogies, and the other multifarious analogies for quantifiers the layman cannot comprehend. Plus it makes one think of breasts.
I think I'll see this happen to Google
Any particular reason or just a vague sense of "Big = Bad"?
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
The Courier seemed fairly innovative. However, Ballmer killed it before it got out the door and the guy responsible for it took off in search of greener pastures.
Microsoft became the dominant PC OS (groan all you want, you know it's true) so it didn't HAVE to do anything.
They were windows, and most programs were created for windows and windows alone.
All they had to do was keep making more of the same, but that's not going to cut it for much longer.
Things are being ported with greater and greater ease to both the Mac and various Linux Operating Systems.
For years, the main thing holding me back from a Linux OS has been video games and my not wanting to screw with emulators (such as Wine)
However, with things like the Humble Bundle releasing several good quailty games for linux, and services like steam coming to Linux , I honestly think in the next few years I'll probably dump Windows.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Some of you might think my hatred is baseless, but that's really not the case. Had the industry decided to run with any of a number of other technologies, we'd have got to incrementally larger platforms (16 bit, 32 bit, 64 bit,) preemptive multitasking and a flat memory model and much more secure systems a decade faster than we did with Microsoft and Intel. Admittedly, the failure of those systems to dominate was as much the fault of the inept management of the owners of those technologies as it was Microsoft's abuse of the monopoly position afforded them by IBM at the time.
I also don't let my hatred of them blind me to the improvements they've made in the last 10 years, though I wonder how much of that would have happened had Linux not been nipping at their heels. We have no way of knowing if the future would have been any different had one of the workstation players of the day had come out on top instead of Microsoft. They traditionally had a habit of doing just enough and then resting on their laurels and not expecting the industry to continue advancing. History is littered with the bodies of companies and product development teams that did that. The main thing I'll credit Microsoft with is they had the vision to realize that one day nearly everyone would have a PC in their home, at a time when the UNIX guys were laughing at PC and calling them toys.
Now that this vision has been realized, I wonder if a Microsoft under Ballmer has the vision to make the next jump. They're already playing catch-up from a woefully-behind position in the mobile market, but it's not the first time they've come late to a party and done all-right for themselves. I don't think they have the foresight to set their target to whatever lies beyond that point, but I can't predict what that thing will be either. One thing I do know all too well is that history is littered with the bodies of companies that were not quick on their feet or flexible enough to adapt to changing situations fast enough, and that some of those companies (Sun) were quite big. I won't shed a tear if Microsoft becomes one of those also-rans in the next decade or two, but I won't dance on their grave, either. For better or worse they had their time and I think their impact on my profession will end up having been a wash.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That's no excuse. If the judge tells you you can't "innovate" by tying new products to legacy monopoly products then you "innovate" elsewhere.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
A couple of years ago I was quick to promote Linux over Windows due to higher reliability. Now I don't remember when was the last time that my Windows crashed but I've had numerous problems with Linux (On Ubuntu, last two times I allowed the package manager to make a major version update have broken the whole system. I then tried to install Mint, it crashed half a dozen times before I was finally able to get the whole installation through and then enabling two monitors broke X. I've had little interest to go back and find out what's the problem). I used to run Linux and just use Wine and VM when I had to use some windows app, now I run Linux inside a VM on Windows when I need to do programming.
Meanwhile, ever since Windows 7 came out, I've felt that Windows has better usability than the Linux desktops I've tried and massively better usability than the Mac I have to use at work.
I know that I've only given some anecdotes and opinions but while I understand that they aren't statistically significant, I use Linux, Mac and Windows nearly daily (iOS development, web-development and entertainment use) and I'm pretty sure that my recent lack-of-hate towards Windows is indicating that something has changed for the better.
Meanwhile MS is still in charge of the second most popular game console (Wii is the most popular but for somewhat different target audience), have gained some increase in market share on smartphones, are launching tablets and I don't think that the current year of Linux on Desktop is going to threaten MS any more than the previous ones.
So.. yeah. I'm not usually this "pro-MS", I hate Metro as much as the next geek, I have had to develop for WP7 and don't have much nice things to say about it, don't remember when was the last time I had any interest to try out Internet explorer and so on... but I still think that everything after the flop that was Vista, MS has been improving its act.
Anyway, the most interesting part is not the article itself, but the comments of many Microsofties.
If you read the Jargon file or read up on hacker lore from the '80s and '90s, IBM was the big, evil giant hackers despised for its unfair strong-arm tactics and lousy products. Microsoft stole that crown in the early '90s.
My perception of MS is actually improving.
So what I see is a company that is, too slowly, trying to learn from its mistakes.
As Microsoft loses primacy, it loses power. I wonder if it is also losing its capacity to do harm, and if a decade from now the MS-bashing will seem as quaint and misplaced as IBM-bashing does today.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
"Microsoft has a long and storied history of leadership in the tech industry, and the company has driven innovation for decades.
... the company has driven innovation for decades...
They drove it into hiding.
Have gnu, will travel.
If you are going to replace a polished Borg-Gates with a politically correct MS logo, all in line with your wonderful BI crap and attempting to shift the demographics to ad influenced "IT professionals" (removing Billy Borg to appeal to drones, how ironic), at least make a logo that does not look like the crap /. used to have when it first started.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
What alternate universe did this story come from?
> Microsoft has a long and storied history of leadership in the tech industry, and the company has driven innovation for decades
No, Microsoft has a long and storied history of waiting for someone else to invent something, then copying it and out-marketing it.
> the company's mobile position has deteriorated and left it with a low single-digit market share
Wa-wa-what? When did Microsoft have a dominant mobile position? Or even a noticeable market position?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
....is "People Magazine" for well-off literate people.
I tried to read the article but after encountering the phrases "astonishingly foolish management decisions," and "Paul Allen on First Meeting Steve Ballmer: He Looked Like a Stalinist Police Officer" I quit. Sorry but if you want to write about the downfall of a company you can at least do it in style, and not throw these extreme phrases around in the first paragraph.
-- Cheers!
Some time in the 1980s the corporations realized the efficiencies of using office computers. But it was an esoteric and complex device and it required lots of training to use, and the top managers did not fully understand how easy/difficult it would be. I have seen highly intelligent relatives of mine who were totally flummoxed by the PC. So they were desperately looking for ways to reduce training costs and to get some kind of predictability. They wanted interoperability and portable skills for their work force. They picked on Microsoft as the common thing. Once enough corporations picked Microsoft, probably because of strong recommendations by IBM and its association with IBM, Microsoft became the de-facto monopoly. Food will appear magically. Not at random but at predictable intervels in a torrent.
Microsoft managers, like the pigeons in the random reward Skinner's box, started believing it is their action that had resulted in this huge torrent of cash. This torrent cash masked the incompetence of managers, the mediocrity of the products, the lack of innovation, the corrosive work culture, abusive customer relations, etc etc.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Well, I don't remember they being innovators anywhen, and I brought Microsoft software on K7 tapes.
They started their company getting code from the trash of better coders (literaly), putting copyright notices on it and then asking those same coders for money because they were using their (aledgedly MS') code.
Rethinking email
Meh I'll get hate for saying this but fuck it, truth is truth. Ya wanna know what is REALLY sad? All the Win 8 apologists have damned near copypasta'd their apologies word for word from the more militant members of the FOSS community. You get the classics like "You don't need that" (except if we didn't we wouldn't be asking for it ass), "Our way is better" (without any concrete reasons WHY of course), "Flash is proprietary crap, all must embrace HTML V5" (while ignoring the creation tools aren't there and it still is used by millions daily), its a hit parade of excuses.
In the end while I have no doubt some will like Win 8, after all i know a couple of old folks that actually liked WinME, I'd say that the way to spot either a batshit softie or a paid shill is anybody that defends Ballmer. I mean look at his track record folks, he has blown, what? 20 BILLION on bad deals that have gotten MSFT exactly nowhere? Hell what has he done that wasn't at least a partial failure? you can't even count the X360 because he rushed that out with a fatal flaw that cost them 2 billion bucks! When you look at the man's track record, Zune, Kin, killing playsforsure which had actually given them an inroad into the media market, the X360 flaw, Vista, blowing shitloads on companies that he knew fuck all what to do with, if you would have taken a chimp and left it to fling its own poo at the stock page and then bought major amounts of any stock whose listing was heavily covered in monkey shit I have NO doubt you would have made more money for MSFT than the man who has led the company for the last decade!
So lets make this dupe into something worthwhile, how about it? lets here from all the guys inside MSFT, are you as fucking frustrated at this lame "Me too!" half ass Apple ripping off by your employer? Is the culture there so filled with PHBs and bullshit you wanna puke? What about Ballmer? Does his direction in any way inspire you, or are you like the rest of us and just wishing he'd go away?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This opinion will be about as popular as a kick in the teeth here I know, but I don't care either way, sometimes you have to go against the group-think....
-Windows Servers are coming into it's own; WinServer 2012 is getting some rave reviews for the new virtualization stuff especially, and it's not even out yet. SQL Server is going from strength-to-strength, not to mention the bizapps servers (SharePoint, Exchange, Lync) have never sold so many ever more than now.
-Windows in general is finally becoming consumer & tablet friendly, some even say at the expense of the power-users, but it'll ultimately broaden it's appeal to grandmas & Joe Sixpack's alike. Metro, love it or hate it, is what grandma wants; simple, shiny, easy to use. This of course is not what everyone wants but there's always the classic UI too - which leads me to my next point....
-Product integration/commonality across a huge range of hardware; the same code & UI works on XBox, WinPhone, Windows tablet (RT), and Windows normal. Windows phone 8 will level out the platform field even further and expect this to be something that improves continually, meaning even more ROI on code over time.
-Office365 is a great product; small business in particular love it as they don't have to run IT anymore (and shouldn't have to) and they get access to enterprise-scale services like Exchange for a mere pitance every month.
-SkyDrive is also taking off; I never thought I'd see the day when Google released an inferior competing product that had less space than the MS offering.
-Finally, finally MS aren't leaving to OEMs to actually give Apple a run for their money. Apple have great toys they spend a lot of time engineering them to be "just right" and have sold bucket-loads of devices because of it. Yes this might wind up the OEMs but this is the kick up the ass they needed, and the Surface should be it.
-XBox is still selling loads even being years old now. It's also proof MS can enter consumer markets if the product's done right.
Not everything's perfect of course; there are plenty of risks as slashdotters like pointing out; Win8 is still an unknown to some extent, Apple are hammering MS on all fronts right now for the consumer space, but there's plenty of action & big descisions going on that I think might just work. On the cloud side Amazon are hammering MS too, but it's all to play for still.
But these are exciting times; competition is a good & needed thing, and so far at least on the consumer side, Apple is quickly becoming the dominant player in this space - let's hope they don't go unanswered. Microsoft are as far as I see willing to stake big bets on some big changes, and that's why I'm excited to see how this all plays out - I think it might just work, personally. Never before has IT been such a competitive & interesting place to be in.
OK, I've accidently said a positive thing about Microsoft. Forgive me slashdot; you may flame away.
throw new NoSignatureException();
It seems so much of the article can be summed by a very simple business statement.
"Give the customer what they want"
(yes... sometimes the customer themselves doesn't know what they want until you give it to them)
Microsoft's early success was all about giving the customer what they wanted. Windows 95 gave people a GUI with DOS with pretty low requirements. I remember trying to toss on some Linux distros on older hardware... and none performed as well Windows 95. Now yes, Windows 95 made a lot of sacrifices to make it speedy... but it was what the customer wanted. Office scripting/VBS are along the same lines, but it worked.
Microsoft's lost decade I think is kind of unique... in that they forgot about this. They began focusing on things outside of providing for the customer. Some of it actually needed from a technical standpoint (gutting/rewriting legacy stuff). But much of it not.
For Vista, where was the demand for a database file system? They also focused too much on making things work with Windows or giving them a Windows feel. All things customers really don't care about. The initial windows smart phones complete with start menu... seems so silly now.
'the company has driven innovation for decades.'
Which document preparation system had a graphical editor for style sheets before Word? I don't think LyX was around then.
> if you would have taken a chimp and left it to fling its own poo at the stock page and then bought major amounts of any stock whose listing was heavily covered in monkey shit I have NO doubt you would have made more money for MSFT than the man who has led the company for the last decade!
Now, *that's* an internship I would turn down...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
When you look at the man's track record, Zune, Kin, killing playsforsure which had actually given them an inroad into the media market, the X360 flaw, Vista, blowing shitloads on companies that he knew fuck all what to do with, if you would have taken a chimp and left it to fling its own poo at the stock page and then bought major amounts of any stock whose listing was heavily covered in monkey shit I have NO doubt you would have made more money for MSFT than the man who has led the company for the last decade!
I'm not sure if there were any chimps involved but they did ship the Zune in fecal matter brown it had a 'squirting' feature.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
They've reversed there previous policies on linux. They no longer run FUD campaigns against linux. They've taken some of the features from linux and various X window managers and incorperated them into windows. They've started more widespread use of linux themselves in their infrastructure.
http://interserver.net/
I know some people who have installed the preview of Win 8. I'm not saying it's not a MS product, with all the crap that entails, but my understanding is that it's actually faster than Win 7, and Windows 7 isn't bad. If you can get over Metro, and there's really no reason you couldn't, it's a serviceable upgrade.
Mind you, if I was using Linux or MacOS regularly, for whatever reason, it is far from switch-worthy, but since Windows has the lion's share of the desktop app and gaming ecosystem, I'm darn glad it's not a stinker like Vista.
Of course, they still have time to shit it up, so call this a provisional review. :)
Absolutely ridiculous. Just because the legal side of the building is doing their thing doesn't mean that the engineering side isn't doing their thing. Google too, we've seen a lot of innovation from them in the last several years.
Getting rid of Ballmer could be nothing but an improvement to MS.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
You are partially right.
Microsoft became big when they could sell DOS to the clones, especially Compaq. They got in the door because of the price of a clone-PC. The magic was in "IBM compatible".
The next part is that I think most software environments tend to gravitate towards a monopoly. As soon as MS had established their first one, they then used some very aggressive moves to expand, their history in the eighties and nineties is one of lost lawsuits. What they used is that the judicial system is just much slower than the speed of software development, so by the time they would lose the lawsuit, it would be irrelevant because MS would have won whatever they were after.
You are right that in business there are wide superstitions like "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft.". It perpetuates the monopolies.
I'm not sure why so many software fields tend to gravitate towards near monopolies, in some cases duopolies, but I see it everywhere (Windows, iOS/Android, Autocad, Photoshop, 3DMax/Maya, there are many more). There are economic theories about why the largest economic power tends to grow fastest, things like agglomeration effects, but I'm not sure what applies here.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
And RT will be the downfall of Microsoft. All of Microsoft's coder base that grew up on .NET will slowly migrate to other technologies... In business, if you make someone choose, they will almost always choose the competitor.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
How about this - assuming you're a programmer, you're no longer allowed to innovate anything related to software or code or instructions that can be executed by a machine of any sort. Now, go forth and innovate and be a market leader.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
And thatâ(TM)s Microsoft. The company just isnâ(TM)t cool anymore.
The most important change is that the mainstream media's position on MS has shifted. It used to be that Bill Gates was the hero of a generation to all but the geeks, and MS the greatest company on earth to all but the geeks, and Windows had no alternative except for the geeks.
These days, iOS and Android get more headlines on a new release than Windows does. Even new OS X releases get mainstream media coverage. And Bill is gone, he did well to step down at the high point, and Balmer has never been liked by anyone in the media. MS isn't a great company anymore, that is the latest shift, there are now quite a few serious, critical and in-depth articles, and they will keep coming.
MS has lost the PR war. This is going to be its end. Not that it's going to go away, the company is way too huge to simply pack up and leave. But the dominance is over, and their markets are ready to be taken over by other people, because "nobody ever got fired for buying ..." has stopped to be true.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
What about Ballmer? Does his direction in any way inspire you, or are you like the rest of us and just wishing he'd go away?
Speaking as an Apple fan, I hope the great Steven Ballmer continues his spectacular reign as CEO long into the 21st Century. In fact, I hope they have his head preserved, Futurama-style, to lead Microsoft down its present path until they are inevitably DE-LISTED on the stock exchange...
But I fear that the MS stockholders will band together and demand his ouster before that happens (sigh).
The whole "Microsoft got the IBM DOS contract, The End." narrative is a pretty gross over-simplification. Its practically forgotten that Microsoft was much smaller than companies such as Lotus or WordPerfect, and were minuscule compared to say IBM or Apple.
However, when you look at the history, there's one big common pattern which jumps out. Most of these larger companies ran into serious issues producing quality software. Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland, Apple, IBM, and Netscape all shot themselves in the foot with buggy or cancelled products, giving Microsoft an opportunity to take-over their markets. While Microsoft's code wasn't necessarily "good", they did know how to produce it at an industrial scale (at least until the Vista period). It came out at regular intervals and generally ran OK on people's low end computers.
Like a lot of successful people/organizations, it's very difficult for someone to determine much of it is due to luck versus skill. A model that worked because it assumed the competitors would fuck-up starts to fail when Google and Apple can churn out superior products even faster. Everyone goes into 'pigeon mode' (eg. Windows Phone will sell because it says Windows on it), because that's all they know how to do.
The other factor is that almost none of the people who e.g. made Excel into a great product are still there aside from Ballmer. They've been replaced with 'pigeons'.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Friend I have a Win 8 CP machine set up in the shop for everyone from tweeners to little old ladies to play with as they shop, know what I found? That this is a typical reaction only with more frustration than that sweet old lady gets. i don't care if it was the business guys or backhoe operators, insurance saleswomen or Suzy the checkout girl ALL OF THEM couldn't figure out fuck all to do with that damned OS.
More speed isn't gonna help you if all it does is lets you get nowhere fast, and that is Win 8 in a nutshell. its just not intuitive, not discoverable,, has ZERO help in the way of tooltips or tutorials that would help the lost users, its just a fricking mess.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
the company has driven innovation for decades
Examples or GTFO.
The problem is who are they going to replace him with, look at what has being going on at HP for a decade. That is another blown tech story, and fundamentally reflects what happens when your management is out of touch in the tech industry. You might be able to sell shitty cars for decades before anyone wakes up and discovers your product and company is total shit (GM!), but in the tech industry it happens much faster.
Microsoft has become an ethical company?
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
That is not only petty and sad, its really pathetic. i'll have you know that most of us Windows guys actually felt sorry for your when you were stuck with one craptastic CEO after another and even though I've never owned an Apple product I happily tuned it to watch Job's first Stevenote as the returning CEO because I was actually happy for you, happy you got to see the incompetent thrown aside for someone who actually knew the product and what you wanted.
So maybe instead of wishing bad on other people you should ask yourself why, why does the product you like ONLY make you happy if you are running someone down, hmmm? maybe its that little niggling doubt you are only buying fashion, that just won't go away how many times you try to swat it with you iPad?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Don't forget Steve Balmer wanted to buy Yahoo.
Don't worry. You know how Stephen Elop used to be the boss of the Office business? Well the guy who was the boss of the Windows business at that time, Bill Veghte, has also left Microsoft and gone to HP now to help them in the way Elop is helping Nokia. He is COO now. You can expect some exciting news from HP on W8 launch I am sure.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
1. It was a JOKE.
2. I have seen that sentiment expressed before by other posters, and you didn't come down on them.
3. I have seen MANY posts that more or less celebrated Steve Jobs' death. Now how "petty and sad" is THAT? Yet you remained silent.
4. I didn't wish bad on other PEOPLE; just other CORPORATIONS. There's a difference. If you notice, I actually wished that Ballmer would live FOREVER.
5. It was a JOKE.
It's true that you need to download and install them yourself... But they are offered by Microsoft for free in their poweruser tools, are very lightweight and work well. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545027
Well this is why we need a joke tab, because I have seen WAAAAY too many posts being deadly serious saying the same thing, just as i'm sure you saw RMS and his "I'm glad he's gone" bit about Jobs which frankly made me sick. And I'll have you know I did NOT remain silent and if you'll look up RMS story about Jobs on LinuxInsider i was quoted calling him out in the article by K. Noyes saying the very same thing, that whether you were a fan or not the man truly changed the world and deserved better than the sick shit RMS spewed.
And have you even imagined a world where there WAS no Windows? The average PC sells for $400, the people that buy those could NEVER afford a Mac. my customers are backhoe operators and checkout girls, a Mac might as well be $10,000 to them because they will NEVER be able to afford one. Know what my lowest systems go for? $120, and that gets you an offlease P4 with a Gb of RAM, a 17 inch CRT with speakers, keyboard, and optical mouse. And you know what? That is frankly all a lot of folks need, and for those that can't even afford that I refurb older systems and give those away, just so everyone can have a computer which I've seen first hand how much good they can do.
So while I appreciate you were making a joke (though again, hard to tell with all the "all go to hell except cave 76!" types out there) just remember that just because Windows is a "low rent" OS run by a frankly shitty CEO doesn't mean we should wish they would die out, we should wish that someone with a fucking brain will take over the company and take it back to what it USED to be good at, which is building easy to use OSes for the masses at affordable prices.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
is Office. Everything else is a distraction they can afford to lose.
I suppose someone had to say it. The question is, does the board have the balls to throw his ass out finally? Thanks for the beer Steve, here's the door. Parking pass - check, Office key - check, building pass - check. See ya! Maybe they can hire Leo Apotheker, the same guy that ran HP off a cliff.
The next guy has his work cut out for him, clearly. They need to ditch that turd of an OS and really move us to a new microprocessor architecture. Ditch the sucky X386 stuff. Iron is hot right now to do it.
let me put on my not caring hat
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?