It's because end users aren't Microsoft's customers when it comes to Windows.
The customers are OEMs -- the companies like Dell, HP, and all the others that build the PCs the end users buy. For the most part, they're they ones who actually buy operating systems, not end users -- those folks just take whatever came with the PC.
Microsoft has exclusivity deals that are tied to the price of their Windows license with every major PC OEM that punishes them severely if they flirt with providing alternate OS choices on their hardware. This means that when Joe User goes to the store to look for a computer, what does he see? Nothing but Windows (and maybe a Mac or two).
As long as these deals are in place, there's no incentive for Microsoft to improve Windows substantially. Why should they? There's no competition, and no vector for competition to be introduced. The only way for an OEM to introduce competitive products to its customers would be to accept having the cost of its Windows licenses go waaaaay up -- making its bread-and-butter products more expensive than the competitions'. Nobody's gonna do that just to make a political statement.
Until you crack that cozy relationship between MS and the OEMs it doesn't matter how much the end-users squeal. They aren't Microsoft's customers, so don't expect them to listen.
What's the deal with the PDF-format anyway? The document is 17 pages of Powerpoint-like slides. I'm sure some nice, simple HTML could have displayed that much more quickly.
Boy, that's for sure. And you're not the only one who thinks so; see Jeff Jarvis' and Doc Searls' rants on the subject, which prompted a response from ChangeThis' founder, Seth Godin:
I hear you. But I think the comparison is not apt. The right comparison is to compare our PDFs to books.
Books are not searchable. They cost money to reproduce. You can't print multiple copies and Google searches them even less well than they search PDFs.
You don't hear anyone whining about books...
Anyway, we use PDFs because they're a lot more booklike. They read better. They stick together when you forward them. They print better.
Maybe he should have just gone all the way and printed them as books, then?
I love this in America... whatever you do don't reward the Great Performers, that's unfair because it makes me feel bad.
Get over yourself, life will never be fair.
It's not about whether life is "fair" or not. Showering vast riches on a small group of employees is just bad management, no matter how good their performance is.
The reason is because you end up creating cliques within the company -- haves and have-nots. The have-nots resent the haves, so they spend their time plotting how to undermine them rather than working with them cooperatively. The haves suddenly find themselves less motivated to care what anyone thinks (ask any Microsoftie about the "FYIFV" buttons that early employees wore when their options suddenly made them millionaires), so they work when they feel like it, on what they feel like.
The result is that nothing gets done. Great!
There's no reason why top performers shouldn't get compensated appropriately. But dropping million dollar bombs onto your project teams isn't the way to do it.
Re:Talk about backwards compatibility
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
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· Score: 1
That's the kind of backwards compatibility Microsoft, Sony, etc. can only dream of.;)
Excuse me, but: huh?
I'm no Microsoft booster but Windows has remarkable backwards compatibility with MS-DOS (for anything except games, which tended to venture into Here There Be Dragons territory on things like memory management).
Here's an experiment you can try for yourself. Go download VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet program (the copyright holders have made it available for free download) onto your shiny Windows XP machine. Then double click the circa-1981 executable.
Voila! It runs!
That's twenty-four years of backwards compatibility, which in the PC era is pretty astounding.
In fact, if Microsoft can be blamed for anything it's having too much backwards compatibility, which has made Windows the crufty monstrosity it is today. But let's be fair in what we ding them for.
The "Netscape Browser Preview" had the most God-awful UI I've seen in a desktop app in a long, long time. It was like they went out of their way to avoid learning the big lesson from the success of Firefox (which was keep it simple, stupid), preferring instead to chrome it up six ways to Sunday.
They even pushed the menu bar over to the right side of the screen -- in complete defiance of the way every other app does it. Who goes to look for "File", "Edit", etc. over there? Nobody. So there's years of muscle memory that you have to un-learn to be productive with the thing.
Their ActiveX "solution" sounds similar. Why go to all the trouble of keeping blacklists, etc. when there is a much simpler and easier for users to understand solution at hand -- just leave ActiveX out of the default install altogether, and offer it as a plugin. Users who need ActiveX for vertical apps are also likely to have sysadmins handy to keep their network secure, so installing a plugin is no big deal. Everybody else, why do they need ActiveX? The only ActiveX control I've seen in mainstream use in years is FilePlanet's download manager, and they offer standard downloads for the ActiveX-challenged, too, so you could ditch ActiveX without too much pain there as well.
Somebody put a silver bullet in the zombie corpse of Netscape already before it embarrasses its legacy any further...
This is a horrible trend and I don't see it being reversed unless consumers vote with their wallets.
How do you "vote with your wallet" when their is no competition to vote for? If you simply buy nothing, they will not hear your "vote", since most other people never buy their product either, so your "vote" will be lost in the noise.
How long until we start hearing the "massive piracy... soft console market... etc" justifications from EA and Take 2, I wonder?
The ads appearing on the Exeem.com Web site and within eXeem(TM) application are delivered by our web advertising partner, Cydoor. Information about users of eXeem(TM) and Exeem.com, such as the number of times they have viewed an ad (but not user name, address, or other personal information), is used to serve ads to users.
Don't think that just because Exeem doesn't tell you at install time that it includes Cydoor, that it doesn't.
The Mook is what critics call the crude, loud, obnoxious, in-your-face character that can be found almost any hour of day or night somewhere on MTV. He's a teen frozen in permanent adolescence. There's MTV's Tom Green of the "Tom Green Show"
And the daredevils on "Jackass" who indulge in dignity-defying feats like poo diving. The Mook is also found in the frat boys on MTV's ubiquitous "Spring Break" specials. And, the Mook has migrated to MTV's sister network, Comedy Central, where he's the cartoon cutouts of "South Park," or the lads on the "Man Show."
Mozilla evolved from an existing commercial project, Netscape.
The Mozilla people promptly threw away all the old Netscape code and started fresh, and worked on the project for several years on a corporate payroll (AOL/Time Warner's). So the example is better than you think.
Yes, firefox was originally called phoenix, then firebird, then firefox, that doesn't change the validity of the statement.
It does if it indicates that the poster doesn't understand where Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox came from. When you add in the time spent developing Mozilla to the time spent from Phoenix 0.1 to Firefox 1.0, Chandler's development cycle starts to look positively snappy.
While paying developers to work on an EXISTING open source project does work, paying developers to CREATE an open source does not. What happens? Millions of dollars in... money and feature creep at an unimaginable scale.
Now, of course, we all can see what Mozilla.org hath wrought. But it took a loooooong time to get there, and a lot of missteps. So Chandler in this respect is not terribly different from Mozilla.
Firefox 0.1 was 10x more usable than Chandler 0.5.
That's because when Firefox 0.1 was released (as Phoenix 0.1) on Sep. 23, 2002, there had already been nearly five years of work plowed into the Mozilla codebase.
OSAF organized in 2002 or so, so if you want to see where Mozilla was at an equivalent point in its lifecycle, go dig up a copy of Mozilla Milestone 18 or so (bring your crash helmet, you'll need it).
With "talent" like this, it has to be good
on
Disney Plans Tron Remake
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· Score: 2, Informative
I saw the names of the two writers credited with getting the screenplay gig, and figured I would look them up in IMDB to see what else they have written. That ought to be a pretty good predictor of what to expect, right?
Well, here's the results:
Brian Klugman is an actor with mostly TV credits. He has exactly one screenplay credit: "Warrior", a perfectly awful-sounding historical war movie which isn't even due to be released until next year.
Lee Sternthal has no credits at all -- writing, acting, nothing. Oh wait, except for "Warrior", which he co-wrote with Klugman. So that's a big total of one.
So Disney is hiring two writers with practically no experience to work on a property that has been dead for 20+ years. My guess is that you should not expect the finished product to rival the LoTR trilogy:-)
Yet another great decision from G4. Of course we probably shouldn't be surprised since their original business plan could be summarized as "TV for people who don't watch TV".
I agree, Lookout makes Outlook practically tolerable. In fact, Microsoft thought so much of the Lookout team that they bought the company and turned what used to be a for-pay product into a free download.
Additionally, many of the Lookout team are supposed to have worked on the new MSN Toolbar for Outlook, which is supposedly quite good (though I have not had a chance to try it myself yet).
Slashdot Mirror
Two words:
lens flares!
If Sun is doing a database, somebody better tell Tim Bray:
So, is McNealy just being coy, or is Bray terminally out of the loop?
It's because end users aren't Microsoft's customers when it comes to Windows.
The customers are OEMs -- the companies like Dell, HP, and all the others that build the PCs the end users buy. For the most part, they're they ones who actually buy operating systems, not end users -- those folks just take whatever came with the PC.
Microsoft has exclusivity deals that are tied to the price of their Windows license with every major PC OEM that punishes them severely if they flirt with providing alternate OS choices on their hardware. This means that when Joe User goes to the store to look for a computer, what does he see? Nothing but Windows (and maybe a Mac or two).
As long as these deals are in place, there's no incentive for Microsoft to improve Windows substantially. Why should they? There's no competition, and no vector for competition to be introduced. The only way for an OEM to introduce competitive products to its customers would be to accept having the cost of its Windows licenses go waaaaay up -- making its bread-and-butter products more expensive than the competitions'. Nobody's gonna do that just to make a political statement.
Until you crack that cozy relationship between MS and the OEMs it doesn't matter how much the end-users squeal. They aren't Microsoft's customers, so don't expect them to listen.
Boy, that's for sure. And you're not the only one who thinks so; see Jeff Jarvis' and Doc Searls' rants on the subject, which prompted a response from ChangeThis' founder, Seth Godin:
Maybe he should have just gone all the way and printed them as books, then?
Well, blow me down. You learn something new every day. Thanks for that.
I think even if they didn't actually print up buttons, the larger argument stands, though.
It's not about whether life is "fair" or not. Showering vast riches on a small group of employees is just bad management, no matter how good their performance is.
The reason is because you end up creating cliques within the company -- haves and have-nots. The have-nots resent the haves, so they spend their time plotting how to undermine them rather than working with them cooperatively. The haves suddenly find themselves less motivated to care what anyone thinks (ask any Microsoftie about the "FYIFV" buttons that early employees wore when their options suddenly made them millionaires), so they work when they feel like it, on what they feel like.
The result is that nothing gets done. Great!
There's no reason why top performers shouldn't get compensated appropriately. But dropping million dollar bombs onto your project teams isn't the way to do it.
Excuse me, but: huh?
I'm no Microsoft booster but Windows has remarkable backwards compatibility with MS-DOS (for anything except games, which tended to venture into Here There Be Dragons territory on things like memory management).
Here's an experiment you can try for yourself. Go download VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet program (the copyright holders have made it available for free download) onto your shiny Windows XP machine. Then double click the circa-1981 executable.
Voila! It runs!
That's twenty-four years of backwards compatibility, which in the PC era is pretty astounding.
In fact, if Microsoft can be blamed for anything it's having too much backwards compatibility, which has made Windows the crufty monstrosity it is today. But let's be fair in what we ding them for.
Based on the interface I saw in the preview version, it might be better if they concentrated on not sucking first.
The "Netscape Browser Preview" had the most God-awful UI I've seen in a desktop app in a long, long time. It was like they went out of their way to avoid learning the big lesson from the success of Firefox (which was keep it simple, stupid), preferring instead to chrome it up six ways to Sunday.
They even pushed the menu bar over to the right side of the screen -- in complete defiance of the way every other app does it. Who goes to look for "File", "Edit", etc. over there? Nobody. So there's years of muscle memory that you have to un-learn to be productive with the thing.
Their ActiveX "solution" sounds similar. Why go to all the trouble of keeping blacklists, etc. when there is a much simpler and easier for users to understand solution at hand -- just leave ActiveX out of the default install altogether, and offer it as a plugin. Users who need ActiveX for vertical apps are also likely to have sysadmins handy to keep their network secure, so installing a plugin is no big deal. Everybody else, why do they need ActiveX? The only ActiveX control I've seen in mainstream use in years is FilePlanet's download manager, and they offer standard downloads for the ActiveX-challenged, too, so you could ditch ActiveX without too much pain there as well.
Somebody put a silver bullet in the zombie corpse of Netscape already before it embarrasses its legacy any further...
Because we all know that "built from the ground up by Microsoft" equals "quality"! :-)
Do you mind if I steal this line? 'cos it's brilliant :-)
Jumping to that conclusion a little quickly, aren't you? I say let's wait a thousand years or so and find out :-)
From the office of: Jesus Christ
Date: 10.31.2008
To: Allah
From: Big J
Re: Will Mohammed kill Islam++?
As possibly the only offense against creativity more dire than naming a bad character "General Grievous" is naming one "Elan Sleazebaggano".
Electric Boogaloo?
He actually named a bad guy "General Grevious"???
What a breathtaking lack of creativity. I look forward to seeing his counterpart on the other side, Major Niceguy.
Dammit. Why San Francisco? All the suicide bombers are in IRAQ!
Think, people! Think!
How do you "vote with your wallet" when their is no competition to vote for? If you simply buy nothing, they will not hear your "vote", since most other people never buy their product either, so your "vote" will be lost in the noise.
How long until we start hearing the "massive piracy... soft console market... etc" justifications from EA and Take 2, I wonder?
Oh yes it did:
Don't think that just because Exeem doesn't tell you at install time that it includes Cydoor, that it doesn't.
Someone needs to tell O'Reilly that "mook" is already a word. And, um, a derogatory one at that.
Another example of modern usage:
The Mozilla people promptly threw away all the old Netscape code and started fresh, and worked on the project for several years on a corporate payroll (AOL/Time Warner's). So the example is better than you think.
It does if it indicates that the poster doesn't understand where Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox came from. When you add in the time spent developing Mozilla to the time spent from Phoenix 0.1 to Firefox 1.0, Chandler's development cycle starts to look positively snappy.
That's funny, what you wrote sounds pretty much like what everybody was saying about Mozilla circa 2000 or so.
Now, of course, we all can see what Mozilla.org hath wrought. But it took a loooooong time to get there, and a lot of missteps. So Chandler in this respect is not terribly different from Mozilla.
That's because when Firefox 0.1 was released (as Phoenix 0.1) on Sep. 23, 2002, there had already been nearly five years of work plowed into the Mozilla codebase.
OSAF organized in 2002 or so, so if you want to see where Mozilla was at an equivalent point in its lifecycle, go dig up a copy of Mozilla Milestone 18 or so (bring your crash helmet, you'll need it).
I saw the names of the two writers credited with getting the screenplay gig, and figured I would look them up in IMDB to see what else they have written. That ought to be a pretty good predictor of what to expect, right?
Well, here's the results:
So Disney is hiring two writers with practically no experience to work on a property that has been dead for 20+ years. My guess is that you should not expect the finished product to rival the LoTR trilogy :-)
Yet another great decision from G4. Of course we probably shouldn't be surprised since their original business plan could be summarized as "TV for people who don't watch TV".
Doorknobs.
Someone did:
Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards
I agree, Lookout makes Outlook practically tolerable. In fact, Microsoft thought so much of the Lookout team that they bought the company and turned what used to be a for-pay product into a free download.
Additionally, many of the Lookout team are supposed to have worked on the new MSN Toolbar for Outlook, which is supposedly quite good (though I have not had a chance to try it myself yet).