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Say What? Wading Through the Nonsense In Microsoft's Re-Org Memo
curtwoodward writes "Steve Ballmer's attempt to reorganize Microsoft into a more focused company will define his legacy as CEO. So you'd think the wordsmiths in Redmond would take a little time ensuring their message was crystal-clear, right? Not exactly. Ballmer's big, gung-ho memo to Microsofties, posted on the company's website, is chock full of nonsense and corporate executive doublespeak — or, as Ballmer might say, `high-value experiences' that will `involve repartitioning the work' and `drive partners across our integrated strategy and its execution.' Huh?" Honest language in corporate communications is a rare quality. I suspect there's a special language-butchering training course that most C-level executives enthusiastically complete.
http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html Easy, no need to hire copywriters anymore.
ralphbarbagallo.com
This shit is just like the bullshit out of that : http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/live
Ballmer will make you want to take back those nasty things you said about Bill Gates in the late '90s.
Yes, the prerequisite is a minimum of two years as an editor for slashdot.
Have you ever watched an interview with Ballmer and after thought to yourself "Did he actually answer any questions?" /Ballmer smiles.
Ballmer: "We pass the TCP/IP stack into a business flow analysis helping our customers make better decisions!"
Interviewer: "Wow, you guys are busy. Way over my head."
Ballmer: "Just look for it this fall on stores. You'll be pleased we fixed the UDP experience problems with VB."
Where is the actual story?
D'OH!
For both Microsoft and C-level execs.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Ostap Bender lives!
If you can actually parse the bull, it does have some actual meaning underneath it, and what it says isn't necessarily a good thing.
"We will pull together disparate engineering efforts today into a coherent set of our high-value activities. This will enable us to deliver the most capability—and be most efficient in development and operations—with the greatest coherence to all our key customers.”
This says that smart people won't be able to work on small, high functioning teams like they need to. Instead, itsounds like they're going to break up teams and pool their people. This will have the effect of making everyone equally mediocre, which is not what they need.
“Some of these changes will involve putting things together and others will involve repartitioning the work, but in all instances we will be more coherent for our users and developers.”
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." What value does he deliver if everything is the same? This squashes out room for innovation.
This memo is not only gobbledygook, it's hiding some really bad practices.
John
Executives and managers like to use double-speak in order to obfusticate messages. A good example is a company being more global-oriented. That mean "no local" and ultimately your job will be outsourced.
How wonderfully appropriate.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I deal with that doublespeak so much that ready Curt's summary made me spray coffee. Damn that hurt, but I will be smiling the rest of the day.
I have gotten more than a few dirty looks for playing buzzword bingo.
Every person who lived in soviet block remembers similiar slogans. It was everywhere: in communist factories, on the streets, everywhere. For me current form of corporate capitalism is very similiar to old communist system. These are two sides of the same coin: centralization. Corporate central planning masquerading itself as "free market" (which it isn't) with almost the same side effects, parasites (party comrades in old system, corporate CEOs in new system) and inefficiencies. This will fall sooner or later in the same way old soviet system has fallen.
Microsoft can't seem to do anything right on the consumer front, and while pushing customers into the cloud may get them a nice reliable monthly subscription from a lot of shops, it's also a dangerous gambit, as it increases the odds that shops will abandon the Windows desktop OS or eventually move their services to another provider.
It's a very dangerous time for Microsoft right now. They'll still be selling a whole fark ton of software/services, but if they don't grow at the rate that Wall Street expects them too, their stock will start taking a beating and then the spiral starts.
I was in times square yesterday, the news ticker said "Steve Ballmer re-asserts direction of Microsoft". I am beginning to believe you're right.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
Scott McNealy was well known for this.... at Sun, "put all our wood behind 1 arrow" was one of his favorite phrases.
Microsoft's market cap is 299B; Oracle's is 144B, so at least they aren't destined to be purchased by Oracle yet...
Shaka. When the walls fell.
I agree with you and with Curt Woodward's final summation, "It makes sense, if you can stay awake." There is some meaning behind the catch phrases. I also agree with you that it about putting the overall company goals above the idiosyncratic.
I disagree that this is necessarily bad or means removing small high functioning teams. The ability for a developer to create an application that functions is different environments, such as desk top, cloud and tablet is significant. What is means for Microsoft is understanding requirements, a high level vision, and how to generate a standard across team. This is the kind of thing a large company can do. They can make their own de facto standard and stick to it. Sometime that means their engineers can't do things the most natural way for a specific environment, but being intuitive for the internal engineer is not the most important element of the product. How it suits the customers, such as an external engineer and end users is what matters.
Sure their needs to be tailoring by the external engineer so that the application would suite a give format. But this is a lot different than having to retool the whole thing because each technology from the same company is fundamentally different.
You used that spelling in the correct context[1]. Is you one of them there fancy-ass book-larned college boys?
[1] i.e. not as in trademarks and patents.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We will be replacing all of the employees with small shell scripts. The ones we can't, we will be outsourcing your
jobs to Elbonia, until there are no employees remaining that are not upper management.
Then we will declare bankruptcy, pocket all the profits until we re-emerge as a shell company sellining
rights to our name.
Oh and XboxOne.
Lawks a mercy!
While he's not exactly the last person I'd want to be within arms length of the big red button, he's certainly not in the top half of the list.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hurr Durr Herp Derp
some executives were getting noticed too much, so I decided to fire a couple and shake up the rest so that there is no-one to challenge my position as CEO.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Holy Crap! It's wholly crap. My eyes glazed over from the first paragraph. It was literally painful to do anything other than skim the first sentence of a paragraph.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Ballmer's big, gung-ho memo to Microsofties, posted on the company's website, is chock full of nonsense and corporate executive doublespeak — or, as Ballmer might say, `high-value experiences' that will `involve repartitioning the work' and `drive partners across our integrated strategy and its execution.' Huh?"
Relax. I'm sure Ballmer didn't write anything. Rather it's the work of market-droids trying to justify their MBAs with buzz words - anything to keep the chairs on the floor and not in the air. I will comment on one quote, however:
“We will pull together disparate engineering efforts today into a coherent set of our high-value activities..."
So when will this start? :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Yay, certain companies should definitely use that generator - the first thing Ive got was "maximize sexy interfaces". Sounds much better than the usual human-generated "penis enlargement" phrase i am getting in spam...
I'm not sure Balmer realizes he is no longer in B-school. He seems to like to surround himself with like-minded B-school buddies, and runs Microsoft like it's the fraternity Mu Sigma Alpha. This kind of bizarro, "in"-group lingo doesn't actually fly when you're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company in what appears to be a consolidation/contraction phase and a profit-taking decline. This buddy mentality is the last thing "MS House" needs.
Plainspoken English matters in business when there is a crisis at hand. This kind of platitude laden memo belongs in a company that is not hungry and is cruising along with a high-quality, high-growth business strategy. Then you can talk biz-orgs theory all you like, however you may please.
My 2 cents. That penny is depreciated to the inflation standard of the year 2500, I would guess, but I find this kind of gamesmanship worrying.
I want MS to adapt and succeed. It has every reason to. It doesn't seem to be doing so. It seems to be resting on its laurels, and has been for a decade.
What I gathered from the memo is two-fold:
1, Drive as much business as they can to the subscription model
2. All products will be tightly integrated and dependent on proprietary interactions
The first gives them the constant revenue stream. The second one destroys modular computing in that if you upgrade one area running Microsoft software, you are almost forced to upgrade all areas. That cost (we used to call it the forklift upgrade in mainframe days) will drive more businesses towards the subscription model.
Once they have a critical mass on the subscription model, they can then dictate technology to customers. Obviously, they plan on doing this from top to bottom (mobile, consoles, hardware, software, cloud). There will once again be open standards and Microsoft standards.
It's all about driving the market rather than being market-driven.
http://geek-news.mtv.com//wp-content/uploads/geek/2012/11/picard-facepalm2.jpg
-- Fuck Beta
"We have powered devices for many years through Windows PCs and Xbox."
What the heck is that actually supposed to mean?
#DeleteChrome
What people fail to realize is that these memos are poetry; they're meant to be poetry and are to be poetry and nothing factual at all.
Their meaning is designed to be interpreted by the mood of how the reader feels about their position in the company. This is a taught
skill. Anyone expecting to gleam facts is seriously barking up the wrong tree.
I though everybody knew this?
Reminds me of the old Dilbert Mission Statement generator. Loads of fun.
Table-ized A.I.
Well what is he gonna say? "Hi, I want Wall street to kiss my behind and love me like they do Apple so I'm gonna burn the company to the ground by being MORE expensive, MORE cellphone like (since iPhone is kicking our behinds) and with more walled gardens and even higher apps! What could possibly go wrong, it works for Apple right?"
I wonder if in 5 years we'll take of "The Ballmer Effect" where a CEO has such a disconnect from reality that he'll torch the company trying to make it something it isn't. if Ballmer reads this let me make this perfectly clear, okay? Hey Steve...if I wanted a tablet I'D BUY A FRICKING TABLET so stop trying to jam a tablet UI onto my PC, okay buddy? And we sure as hell ain't paying apple money for Windows Steve, that plan is as retarded as Walmart raising prices 5000% and thinking that means they can compete with Macy's, its a different demographic dude and you can't slap a coat of paint on a Pinto and sell it for Porsche money, its just not gonna work, its a giant bloated failwhale on the beach of life.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Here's something similar that you can tweak:
http://cmorse.org/missiongen/
Table-ized A.I.
Whilst there's more chance of me growing a third cock than there is of Steve "Chairmaster" Ballmer reading that, I can only say that I wish I had mod points to give. That was spot on.
it's on a thread.. that's why he is again getting rid of everyone who could replace him. that's what the reorg is about, they haven't been performing that badly as teams they are now it's just their objectives which have been set to total fuckdisaster.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Perhaps "entering, then later leaving" -- as in: "We have powered devices for many years [starting with in the days of the Altair and the TRS-80] through Windows PCs and Xbox [which are now equally obsolete]" ...?
(Oops). ... Did untold damage. Operating overheads went through the roof, and it is now virtually impossible to do small well focused work (at least in many divisions). CSIRO has seen it' 80th birthday, but unless things change I won't be holding my breath for a centenary.
So, if we want a roadmap for Microsoft....
From my own observation of MS there are no "small high functioning teams" there for very long. Any truly effective small team gets snapped up by an ambitious manager higher up the corporate pecking order, it gets re-directed (generally on a task unrelated to whatever their previous focus was), and then the team is either bloated by unnecessary personnel being added or it fragments.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
it's like he was required to write such a memo by someone else(the board? *bulletpoint on memo: "address the troops") and he filled it like schoolwork, like it had to be x words long.
because the actual content is just that they're doing a re-org. an actual one liner would have been less of a joke among employees..
holistic my ass..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
MS is trying to follow in the mistakes made by Sony. I wouldn't buy Sony DVD players for many years. Why not? Because they wouldn't play VCD or DivX. And why wouldn't they? Because the division of Sony that produces films made sure that wouldn't happen, as VCD and DivX were often used for piracy. Thus the hardware was crippled as a result of the overarching strategy of the company as a whole. They compromised in one area with the theory that somehow the other part of the company would profit more (which is of course incorrect in this case).
The more a diverse company attempts to function as a single entity, the less flexibility the divisions have to compete on a level playing field with companies that aren't so encumbered. It's clear that Sony is finally waking up a little, as they have been quick to point out how the new PS3 allows offline gaming and resaleability of used titles. It's very, very rare for Sony to come across as an advocate for consumers' rights, so that was quite a big change for them.
So in other words, I think this philosophy is going to hurt MS in the long run.
Better known as 318230.
Sounds like they are planning to create more hardware of their own and focus on supporting that hardware.
So are they planning to sell the Xbox One as a combo PC/Console?
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
The memo was written by multiple writers. The only stuff in there that might be Steve's are things like: "Kurt is a truly amazing leader and a special person". A few sentences later, we go from believably human to "driving core OS innovation".
The best part of the whole memo is actually this:
Culturally, our core values don't change, but how we express them and act day to day must evolve so we work together to win.
Before:
PowerShell lead: Windows team could you please respond?
Windows shell lead: Sorry we cannot accept code from outside our department
PowerShell lead: Screw you guys we'll release it separately, see you on MSDN
After:
PowerShell lead: Windows team could you please respond?
Windows build wrangler: The Windows lead told me to tell you to fuck off
PowerShell lead: Ok at least we're synergying better together after that reorg
Dear business community:
Please pay no attention to the news that we are sending pretty much everything you type directly to the NSA in exchange for buckets of cash and favors. Especially you, China! Losing our entire strategy for southeast Asia would probably hurt the stock price. Hah! If those idiots knew!
Also, for those of you who like Windows 8 except for the forced UI change, you're shit out of luck. It's a thing I've said is good, therefore it is good, and the millions of customers desperately fleeing the platform have no effect on how I view that decision. Because I'm a really smart business guy. Look, I'm in a suit and tie!
All the best,
Steve Ballmer
Do you really have to use the disgusting slur perpetuating hateful stereotypes against persons with intellectual disability?
Did untold damage. Operating overheads went through the roof, and it is now virtually impossible to do small well focused work (at least in many divisions). CSIRO has seen it' 80th birthday, but unless things change I won't be holding my breath for a centenary.
It's nice to know that some country other than the US is screwing up one of its premier research institutions. On second thought, no it's not.
... in three big dimensions: strategy, capability, collaboration, agility, common goals, divisional strategies.
Did Steve also head up the Spanish Inquisition?
(the extended course in language butchery)
Fire the managers. 90% of them are overhead with no added value for the organization.They cost a lot of money and quite often are clueless about whatever division they are managing. They lack communication skills towards the working men, and therefore are unaware of the real problems of the organization. Also, their drive to "manage" typically means that problems aren't solved, but managed, which are two completely orthogonal things. I now for the first time in my life work in a company where management appears to work (kind of), basically because there are so few managers, and the managers are skilled and know the (technical!) ins and outs of the product we make.
The messages were re-organized so that yours is not the first anymore. Sorry.
Thanks but as a grunt in the trenches this REALLY pisses me off, they have this beta program, we all happily do their damned job for them and tell them what's wrong and what do they do? throw ALL THE INFO they gained in the fucking trash because ballmer has a stiffie for the iPhone yet doesn't have a damned clue about what makes an iPhone an iPhone! News Flash, Jobs spent more than 3 decades slowly but surely building up Apple to be a high end boutique brand, refused to cut prices even in the 90s when they were on the ropes, because for his entire strategy to work it NEEDED to be expensive!
A perfect analogy would be slapping a new coat of paint on a Pinto and expecting to get Porsche money for it, because MSFT slaughtered the competition precisely because they were NOT expensive, they were the Walmart to Apple's Macy's and there is NO WAY IN HELL they are gonna suddenly flip that and get people to pay more than for an Apple to buy WinPhones and Wintabs, its NEVER gonna happen, it will NEVER work, the MSFT stores are ghost towns, all the little shops like mine have "Yes we have Win 7!" signs in the window, he is burning the damned company to the ground trying to force a strategy that has less of a chance of succeeding than Heaven's Gate II has a chance of being made!
Those of us on the ground could have told them that and saved the company billions, but as long as Steve "I'm duh big cheese, herpa de derp!" Ballmer is in the seat the company is gonna keep tanking. Its business 101, give the people products they want to buy or they'll go somewhere else. sinofsky knew that, he wanted Win 8 to be Win 7.1 and got fired for it, now there is nobody to rein in the sweaty one and he is gonna trash their remaining businesses by ignoring the numbers and shoving a "We're a more expensive Apple clone!" strategy on the company. If the people want an apple they'll BUY an Apple, they sure as hell ain't gonna pay Apple money for a Windows device, its doomed to fail.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I wish I had mod points. :(
I really don't want Chairmaster reading that rant: the last thing I want to see is Ballmer to get a clue and do something that would help that company. It's way too much fun watching him run it into the ground.
There is a thought that MS is re-orging itself to be a copy of Apple's structure. But from the reporter's opinion it won't work because it requires a feared and obsessive dictator at the top which Ballmer isn't and it is unlikely that Apple will continue with it's current structure.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
If I were working for Microsoft, I'd look for a new job.
Whatever you parse it as, it doesn't sound good.
If I were depending on Microsoft in any way, I'd start look at alternatives as well.
Also, sell my stock...
I didn't know "Steve Ballmer" was THAT disgusting a slur.
Microsoft is buying time. They need to downsize by at least 25,000 employees. And to prevent the key employees from jumping away now, they are eliminating that urge by dangling carrots.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Perhaps its just a metaphor for both having one and acting the part as well. Now a third then becomes quite difficult to imagine.
Another long-winded motherhood statement full of corporate buzzwords.
But I don't think that's fair at all. The reason Microsoft can't be Apple is that they have earned a reputation for not sweating the details. Windows Explorer still hangs periodically, even in Windows 8, when you're looking at a big directory tree or accessing a network share. Too many updates require a system restart. The user interface for the control panels isn't consistent. Navigating the legalese to figure out licensing if your company is too small to just throw money at the problem is a nightmare. Navigating the documentation as a home user to figure out which version of Windows you want is a nightmare. As recently as last year I had Windows Update break with an obscure error message and I had to spend hours entering a DWORD into search engines before I gave up, wiped the entire machine, and started over. When a program does hang, there is no "stop immediately option" unless you bring up a command shell and use Taskkill, you are always forced to wait even when you know from the first second that you just want to exit the program completely.
Apple has the love of millions because they sweat the details as much as they can. They still screw up - see the Apple Maps fiasco - but they try very hard to make everything clean and consistent. Microsoft has an install-base of millions because they sweat the details just enough not to lose the customers, and don't seem to care if what remains will annoy the customer as long as they keep getting their money. That attitude works fine for keeping Microsoft where it is, but it won't help them take marketshare in phone or tablets from Apple, and it won't help them get nearly the fanatical loyalty that Apple has.
I hate Apple. I hate Microsoft. But I think it's easy to see why Apple's fans are fanatics and Microsoft fanatics are comparatively rare.
While I'm complaining - for Windows 8 they took out DVD playback for no good reason, unless you get the top version plus a Media pack. Apple would not have done that. With Windows 8 they came up with the confusing and useless name Windows RT so that consumers would have a hard time understanding the difference between Windows 8 regular and Windows RT. How could they not see that better naming conventions were required?
Even look at application stores. Valve has been doing one on Windows with Steam for many years now, and it's a well-done product. Microsoft's Store for Windows 8 is fine - but they could have been doing that first, even before the Apple app store, and they failed.
Even Steve Ballmer's memo is 300 words of information in 2700 words of text. That's half the company problem right there, fluff and complexity in so much of their official documents for no obvious reason except maybe to annoy customers.
Wow, that's a lot of extrapolation from so little data. And quite erroneous. I'm also just shy of 50, have a daughter and am considered deadly in the art of the lowest form of wit.
Whoa, hang on... Ballmer has a strategy? I thought he was just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what stuck - then spraying gold paint on the shit and marketing it as bullion.
I believe Angeret is counting the fact that Ballmer, himself, is also a dick - as well as having one as an appendage.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
... because Ballmer has a stiffie for the iPhone yet doesn't have a damned clue about what makes an iPhone an iPhone! News Flash, Jobs spent more than 3 decades slowly but surely building up Apple to be a high end boutique brand, refused to cut prices even in the 90s when they were on the ropes, because for his entire strategy to work it NEEDED to be expensive!
A perfect analogy would be slapping a new coat of paint on a Pinto and expecting to get Porsche money for it, because MSFT slaughtered the competition precisely because they were NOT expensive, they were the Walmart to Apple's Macy's and there is NO WAY IN HELL they are gonna suddenly flip that and get people to pay more than for an Apple to buy WinPhones and Wintabs, its NEVER gonna happen, it will NEVER work, the MSFT stores are ghost towns, all the little shops like mine have "Yes we have Win 7!" signs in the window, he is burning the damned company to the ground trying to force a strategy that has less of a chance of succeeding than Heaven's Gate II has a chance of being made!
...
And Apple execs too can destroy a company trying to make it the "next Apple".
Former Apple retail chief Ron Johnson, confident in his extreme brilliance that had made Apple incredibly profitable (of course, why share credit with Steve Jobs or anyone else?), extended the benefits of his genius to J.C. Penney's, attempting to run it like an Apple store: dumping value priced merchandise for boutique items; no discounts, not ever; simply throwing away unread a huge consumer study just completed declaring that "just like at Apple, customers don’t always know what they want”.
Chief’s Silicon Valley Stardom Quickly Clashed at J.C. Penney.
Former Apple retail chief presides over JC Penney's lowest sales in 20 Years.
Apple exec fired after 17 months.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Yes, but how will we opportunity the challenges created when the synergies created by fully incentivized participants don’t leverage the learnings?
Some days it's just not worth chewing through the restraints.
Well, I don't really like to explain as it would be seen to be so obvious that the explainee would commit suicide from realising their stupidity, but... okay.
The impossibility of the average human male having 2 dicks is meant to equate with the probability of a given thing happening (or not, it depends) or of something being true (or false, it depends), therefore mentioning the chance of growing a third cock would imply that not only is the thing I'm comparing against - for instance that chairchucking engineer (considered to be the worst CEO ever) seeing something written for him to read on /. - impossible, but something like heat death of the entire universe within the following 3 seconds and/or my being declared the new president of the United States of America is more likely to happen.
Or I could really have two cocks. Oh, did I mention something about sarcasm before?
I'm sorry friend but I gotta throw a flag, 15 yard penalty for ignorance on the field. You get the occasional explorer hang NOT because "MSFT didn't sweat the details" but because you are talking about literally tens of thousands of hardware combinations that it HAS to work on, and considering my win 7 systems have been running happily in the field since Sept 09? I'd say they did a DAMN good job at that. With win 8 Ballmer made them bolt metro, or as i call it "Tweeting Twits for Shits" and between that and all the phone home DRM garbage it makes it buggy. Just one more reason to avoid Win 8 like a kick in the balls IMHO.
I mean just look at what my GF is using while i put together a new system for her, a late gen P4 with HT, 2GB of RAM, and an HD2400XT OEM card by Dell and you know what? Runs Win 7 like a charm, no crashes, no hangs, in fact when i got over there for supper tonight she told me "It won't let me get my pics off my camera" and when i had her show me what it was doing I had to tell her "Honeybunch its pulling the pics off and dropping it in your picture folder the second you plug it in, you don't have to "do" anything, it just works" because she couldn't believe that it could just magically do all the work that fast without her having to jump through hoops. But I'd say the UI for Win 7 is VERY consistent, its the UI for win 8 that is a damned mess and again that is because of Tweeting twits For Shits, or TTFS for short. Instead of doing the SMART move and making a UI for mobile and one for desktop they tried to make a jack of all trades and not only is it the master of none it drools and kinda smells bad.
As for your Windows Update or WU error? No offense dude but "Your doin it wrong" if you use WU for updates. Don't ask me why but about a year after the release of Win 7, which would put it right around the time you had your problem, some numbnuts at MSFT decided to put pretty much every damned hotfix ever created into the "optional" section of WU without telling people those are just that OPTIONAL and should NOT be used unless you have the SPECIFIC problem it addresses. A MUCH better way to update Windows, and this covers XP- Win 8, both desktop and server if you desire, is to use the free WSUS Offline which will apply ONLY the updates that apply, no optional crap, hell it'll even update WMP, IE, DotNET and DirectX if you want it to. I've used it on more systems than I can count at the shop and I have NEVER had it bork a system or screw something up, not ever. But you can't blame the OS for this, the OS is fine, the flaming idiot that started offering hotfixes to those that don't need them is the damned problem.
And I'm sorry but you may THINK that is why Apple is popular but as a retailer I can tell you its not, its popular precisely because they are elitist . Its the same thing that causes Air Jordans to sell for crazy prices or Prada shoes, is those Prada or Air Jordans made THAT much nicer? Nope but as Porsche found out when they tried to have a 911 priced to compete with the Camaro and nearly killed the company the fact that only a subset of people can afford it? Makes it worth having to "Keep up with the Joneses". I mean can you think of ANY other OS that could have actually had a $1000 app called "I am rich" and have it sell any copies? Being in a college town i'm surrounded by the Apple faithful and while they can't tell you jack shit about the hardware they CAN tell you to the penny how much it costs, quite proud of it in fact. This is why Apple abandoning products at such a fast clip isn't bitched about hardly, because having an old Apple just isn't considered hip, its like buying a used Ferrari.
Finally you can't really compare an embedded product with a general purpose OS and that is what you are doing when you compare MSFT and Apple, The entire currently supported Apple catalog of hardware can be counted on 2 hands with fingers left over and frankly friend you really don't have to "sweat the details" when you only su
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Nonsense.
1. Windows Explorer hangs because it's single-threaded, not because of hardware problems. It has one process trying to move files, copy files, read the directory list, etc... and that same process trying to update the graphical user interface. It should split them into two linked processes, one to do the actual disk reading and writing, and the other to display everything for the user. That way when the disk process has a problem, the GUI continues to work flawlessly for the data it already has, and just shows an hourglass icon or some other helpful information for the contents it does not have. Instead, the whole damn window hangs. That's just laziness, they could have fixed it years ago.
2. Likewise, having a program hang before you force it to close it is not a hardware problem, it's a software problem. If the whole computer hangs it could be because there is a heat or power supply problem, and there is nothing Microsoft can be expected to do about it. But if one program hangs and Windows won't let you close it immediately using Task Manager when you CAN close it immediately from a command prompt or PowerShell, then they just don't want the "close it immediately" option in the Task Manager. The only possible reason for that is to make annoyed people froth at the mouth and switch to Linux - which is what I did.
3. If it's copying the photos off of her camera without notifying her somehow, that's poor user interface design. She shouldn't need an experienced IT person to explain it to her.
4. Using Windows Update for Windows Updates is what Microsoft recommends, it is the default option. If I need to use some other website to get Windows Update then clearly Microsoft is doing it wrong. And the great majority of updates on Windows Update are security fixes. If you want to run with a botnet zombie box, that's your privilege. Me, I prefer not to be open to every script kiddie that downloads last year's publicly documented hacks.
5. High price alone won't make your company rich or your product sexy. You could add a $700 price jump to every Windows laptop and it would only hurt sales because the product itself just isn't that exciting. Cadillac tried to do that with the XLR, which was a Corvette plus angular lines and a $30,000 price jump. It was one of the biggest car sales disasters of the 2000-2010 period. You need high price and a good product, and that's what Apple has. Now, I don't own anything by Apple and I'll never buy anything by Apple because I hate Apple as much as I hate Microsoft. But Apple clearly has smarter people in charge of marketing and product design.
6. And you didn't address my other complaints. The different versions of products, the inconsistent marketing, the bad naming conventions, the unmemorable advertisements, and the legalese around licensing types and configuration and so forth.
1.- You DO know there is a checkbox, right? Tools>Folder Options> View> Open Each Folder In a Separate Process. as for why its not checked by default there are certain chips (most notably some Intel Celerons) that will have degraded performance if its checked, why MSFT didn't just put a check at install damned if i know but you check that box and that problem goes bye bye. hell I've had a burn, a copy, and a move across networks going at the same time, no problems whatsoever in either XP X64 or Win 7, although IIRC XP would sometimes choke but since I haven't had XP since i got rid of my P4s it may have just been shitty netburst acting up.
2.- and are you REALLY gonna blame Windows because some third party program hangs, really? Because i have seen badly coded programs hang in every OS from DOS to OSX, there really isn't much an OS can do because what might appear to you to be a hang may just be a program that takes awhile to process. Again its easy enough to change the delay before Windows calls a program hung but I have found some programs simply look hung and aren't, some XML based programs can take awhile to load no matter how fast the system is so its understandable why MSFT wouldn't be too aggressive when it comes to calling a program hung. that said I've not seen a program hang in Win 7 that Windows didn't point out and offer to kill or restart which again when you are talking about a third party program is really all one can do.
3.- No its called "her BF worked for a couple of years at a helpdesk and knows what to set to minimize support calls" but I didn't know my baby would be trying to get her pics off while having a dozen things on screen at the same time so she simply missed the dialog box informing her that it was copying them to her pictures folder. Once i took a couple of pics and showed her that it DOES pop up a box and inform her where they are going, but if she simply would have clicked on the folder labeled "pictures" in any explorer window? she'd have instantly seen 'em. So if you want to blame somebody blame me, my girl is used to a slow as Xmas XP box, not a fast win 7 system.
4.- WU works fine IF you actually know what the would OPTIONAL means, but for some damned reason way too many folks don't seem to grasp that concept and end up checking all the OPTIONAL updates which again are designed to fix specific issues with specific hardware. Now I will agree that the numbnuts that lists everything by KB article needs to be fired, one shouldn't have to go click on a link and pop up a webpage just to see what "KB534497" or whatever does, but if you just stick to WU and leave the optional alone? Works just fine.
5.- and high price WILL make you popular if and ONLY if you build up the brand to be "elite" and snobbish, and lets face it Jobs was a fricking MASTER when it came to creating an air of elitism around his products. of course it took 30 years and a LOT of rough patches, but even when the company was on the ropes he refused to allow the cloners to stay or cut the prices because he KNEW that building Apple as an elite brand was the key to its success. The reason MSFT can't do it is precisely what I said, you can't slap a paintjob on a Pinto and sell it for Porsche money. Does that make the Pinto a bad car? Nope in fact you could make it the nicest Pinto on the planet and it won't matter because it all comes down to public perception and MSFT spent the same 30 years killing the competition by being the cheapest game in town, supporting the cloners over IBM, practically giving away XP and creating Win 7 Starter to keep Linux off the low end, for 30 years the entire strategy has been all about volume, you can't just switch to an elitist strategy this late in the game.
6.- And what about 'em? Windows has had Home and Pro since the days of Win9X and WinNT and nobody has a problem with it, in fact the majority of my SMBs use Home over Pro because they simply aren't using the enterprise features of Pro so see no reason for the extra expense. Even I hav
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm enjoying the debate, thank you.
/f /im firefox.exe" (or "taskkill /f /im eclipse.exe", or whatever for the appropriate program) to exit immediately. It would be nice if the GUI let me do that, because I don't care if it takes 10 seconds or 2 minutes for the program to react, it's too long. More than once PowerPoint, Eclipse, pgAdmin3, and Word have hung for more than ten minutes before I killed them manually. This is also on more than one physical machine, so it's not a specific problem to one particular workstation or laptop. Granted, I do run more programs concurrently than the average Windows user.
1. No, I didn't know about the checkbox. I'll take that option for a spin. I was having that problem with Windows Explorer hanging on XP, Vista, 7, 2003 Server, and 2008 Server. So maybe there's just some oddness with our network - but again, there should be a separation between the flow of control drawing the GUI and the flow of control reading and writing data, so that no matter how bizarre or unreliable your network is, the entirety of the file manager doesn't hang because one folder out of 1000 is slow to read.
2. I am impatient. I consider it a virtue in a software developer - if waiting for a program to react to me makes me angry, then I am more likely to work extra hard to ensure that programs I write won't make their users wait either. If one of my programs hangs - sometimes Firefox, Eclipse, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, pgAdmin3 (a GUI tool for manipulating PostgreSQL databases), I've had them all hang - I Alt-Tab to a command prompt and do "taskkill
3. Fair point, if she's got a lot going on she might miss the notification.
4. The update process failures I've had were with the security updates, not the optional ones. I don't want the Bing Desktop, I don't install it. But as you say their information display for the updates is terrible - instead of trying to use plain English, it's KB4949339.
5. Part of the reason Microsoft can't switch to an elitist strategy is that they just don't have the consistency in user interface and user experience that Apple does. I realize Microsoft came to success by being cheap, but they should have realized ten years earlier that all of the crapware HP, Gateway, and Dell were bundling with each machine was nearly ruining the user experience. Now they have the "Microsoft Signature PC" experience, which I would recommend to anyone that wants a least-possibly-sucky Microsoft PC experience without having to do the work for themselves. When they released Vista, they should have insisted the PC vendors give even the minimum machines more computing power so nobody was stuck with a dog slow piece of junk. They had the power, just call HP and say "If you sell any Vista machines with less than 2 GB of memory, we are revoking your ability to activate Windows licenses."
Related to this, the Search and Help features in Windows 7 are incredibly well done. I'll give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and guess that weaker hardware in 2001 or 2006 prevented them from making Search as good in Windows XP or Windows Vista. But there was no magic technology that made Help better in 2009, just more attention to making Help files that don't suck. Microsoft could have done that in 2001 for Windows XP, but they did not. I don't know any experienced Windows user that ever uses the Help button in Windows, because we all learned to use Windows back when Help was totally useless.
6. At work we have laptops that we purchase from Lenovo or Dell with Windows 7 and Office Professional installed. They're fine. But the only recovery data we receive with the laptop is a partition on the hard drive. When we have a laptop hard drive failure, we typically replace the hard drive with any available 2.5 inch SATA drive with enough space - and I can't figure out how to legally re-use our lawfully purchased Windows 7 and Office Professional lice