It's possible that IBM did feel that insulted. They were a rather sexist organization at the time, and the fact that Digital Research sent a woman to handle the meeting would not have been well received.
The IBM corporate culture has since improved considerably. When IBM bought Lotus I predicted a disaster because the cultures of the two companies were so different, so I expected a mass exodus of the important people from Lotus. Then IBM did the unthinkable. They changed THEIR culture to be more like Lotus: emphasizing diversity and work/life balance, and getting rid of the expectation that their executives would regularly relocate to different IBM offices. (There was a time when the joke at IBM was that the company's name stood for I've Been Moved. For the record, it officially stands for International Business Machines.)
FrameMaker was great for doing book length products, but it was horribly clunky for doing bread and butter jobs like memos and letters. Word was good for those short things but poor at doing larger scale projects.
Ami Pro was the best competitor to Word for Windows. Lotus bought Samna (the original developer), and instead of doing a 32 bit Windows port of it they changed it into something that tried really hard to be a Word clone. In the process they lost everything what was good about Ami Pro, notably its superior handling of style sheets. (That was REALLY sorely missed a few years later when CSS came along; Ami Pro's style model was similar to CSS and that editor could have easily been turned into a killer app for creating web pages.) Lotus renamed the result Word Pro and it sank like a stone.
WordPerfect for Windows made some fundamental mistakes. They initially tried to make the user interface as much as possible like that of the DOS version of WP, rather than trying to make behave like a Windows program. The two goals were inherently at odds, as it meant doing things like putting Help on a different function key than the one Windows users would expect. It may have helped keep a few of their loyal DOS users in the fold, but it also kept any Windows users who were not already experienced WordPerfect users from adopting it.
The first version of WordPerfect for Windows 95 (not the first Windows version, there had also been a 16 bit version for Windows 3.1) had serious problems with stability that took the companies many months to fix. WordPerfect was also slow to make the product compatible with Windows NT, which would have been irrelevant for a consumer product but was a big issue in some large companies.
The ownership changes that happened during that crucial period also didn't help. WordPerfect was bought by Novell in 1994 and then sold again to Corel in 1996. During the Novell period, that company sued Microsoft on antitrust grounds because they felt (not without justification) that Microsoft had engaged in anticompetitive practices that hurt the market share of WordPerfect and NetWare. Although I believe the case had merit, it was also a distraction at a time when the company desperately needed to release better versions of their flagship products.
Continuously scanning for and trying to connect to new APs does kill battery. It's especially bad if you ever use one of the cable company WiFi services like XFinityWiFi, because you're continually driving past APs that your phone tries to connect to until you drive out of range of them. The only real fix is to turn off the WiFi radio while you're driving, or riding a bus or train that doesn't have WiFi service of its own that you're connected to.
You can fully represent Spanish in ISO/IEC 8859-15. But then you break some documents that are written for ISO-8859-1, the standard English encoding, because eight character values are now associated with a different character. Given that a typical Spanish speaker on the internet lives in a bilingual world - a lot of the online world is English-only - switching to that encoding is not a solution.
By "take full advantage of the interface", I meant that Excel used the particular capabilities of a GUI. There were spreadsheets on the Macintosh before it, but they were just ports of DOS software and didn't do anything that was unique. Excel introduced drag and drop of data, adjustment of row and column sizes by dragging the handles, and the other interface conventions that we now associate with spreadsheets.
To be fair, a lot of that stuff had been pioneered in research projects, like some of the software for the Xerox Alto. But Excel brought it to the public for the first time, and showed the world how a GUI version of a program could be better than just running a text-oriented program in a window. It's probably the most innovative piece of software that Microsoft has ever completed and turned into a popular product. And it shows that at least one good idea has come out of Microsoft.
The big music stores are all gone. Tower Records, kaput. HMV, exited the US market. Borders (a bookstore that had a big presence in music), gone. FYE, a shadow of its former self.
The record departments in the big box stores have also shrunk a lot. Walmart, Target, Best Buy... only a tiny bit of music left. Barnes & Noble (book store with music) has mostly withdrawn from music.
Small record stores and local chains (like Newbury Comics here in Massachusetts and neighboring states) have survived. Some have seen a surge in business with the hipster vinyl revival, which has also increased interest in used records. Urban Outfitters, the quintessential hipster chain, has ridden that revival and substantially increased its music sales, as well as selling record players.
One thing that NBC completely missed is the even more complete demise of video stores, though they were also already struggling in 2007. Streaming video took away most of the market. What market remains for physical video is now Redbox, the shrunken video sections in those big box stores, an occasional local chain that still sells video (Newbury Comics again), and online merchants. A few video rental places are soldiering on in small towns where high speed internet is uncommon, but they're just about extinct in cities.
I don't think commercial shortwave broadcasting has ever been a viable business. The audience is too diffuse and too difficult to measure. Most shortwave broadcasting was done by governments and religious organizations. But now the governments are shutting down operations, leaving just the religious stations.
But those government broadcasts had the potential to be valuable resources in a disaster situation. They can't do that if they're off the air. But it's also true that they are no help if nobody has the receivers... which is a reason to not only keep the government stations on the air, but to have them run interesting programs so people have a reason to buy receivers.
That requires an expensive Windows license to do legally. The Windows license that came with the machine won't suffice; it only covers running Windows on the machine's bare metal, not in a VM. For that you have to buy a FULL RETAIL license, not an OEM (also known as System Builder for a while) copy.
Because Microsoft is trying to use Edge as a tool to get people to upgrade to Windows 10. Their initial hope was that EVERYBODY would upgrade, which would decrease their support burden substantially.
I have upgraded all but one of my Windows 7 systems to Windows 10. The holdout is the Media Center system, because Microsoft has chosen not to make that available for Windows 10. I'm not sure what I'll do with that system after 2020; there is not yet a replacement for Media Center's DVR capabilities that I am happy with.
Edge isn't crappy. (The first release kind of was, but it has received many updates since then.) It just isn't quite as good as Chrome or Firefox. There is no compelling reason to switch to it, so people don't. To get people to switch Microsoft will have to make it BETTER than Chrome and Firefox, which is a challenge because those people have been working on their browsers for many years, and because we're getting to the Good Enough point where further improvements don't matter much.
Internet Explorer is crappy. Anybody who is still running it should switch to something else, unless forced to stay with IE because of requirements of some crappy corporate site. If you're using Windows 10 and you'd prefer to stick with a Microsoft product, switch to Edge; you'll be happy.
It's very different here in Boston. The rental car companies are a short ride from the terminals, and they are all in one building that the airport shuttle bus goes to. The maximum wait time for the bus is under 10 minutes. Once you get there, no counter -- you go out to the lot of cars that have keys waiting in them, you choose one and drive it to the exit gate, and your rental is finalized there. I've never had to wait more than a couple of minutes at the exit gate, though I haven't been there just after a jumbo jet full of passengers arrived at the rental company.
The loyalty programs are free. There is no good reason not to join even if you're only going to rent once. Not even privacy; the rental company gets all your info anyway.
It's true that shortwave broadcasting is mostly gone from the Caribbean. That's unfortunate, because it's a resource that is uniquely suited to the situation that Puerto Rico is in now; it can cover a large area with signal even when no infrastructure exists. That need is one reason that the Australian Broadcasting Company continues to offer shortwave broadcasts for the benefit of Australia's small islands.
Existing shortwave broadcasters could beam additional broadcasts toward Puerto Rico, including the US's own Voice of America (which is now a much smaller operation than in its heyday but still exists). But few people still own shortwave receivers so the broadcasts would not be very useful.
There is a reason that you put AM transmitter towers in low moist areas. The ground is more conductive in those areas and that makes the antennas more effective, meaning more signal coverage. Radio stations in richer parts of the world often have backup studio and transmitter sites, but most stations in Puerto Rico can't afford to do that.
On the other hand, you put FM transmitter towers on high ground to get the actual antenna (which, unlike AM, is not the entire tower) as high as possible. FM reception is largely limited to line of sight; the higher the antenna is, the more places it has line of sight to. The antennas used for FM broadcasting are not dependent of the quality of the ground under them.
The difference has no connection to the modulation method (AM vs FM), but is caused by the different parts of the radio spectrum that the services use.
One of the more notable innovative things that Microsoft did was develop Excel, the first good spreadsheet program for a graphical user interface. It wasn't the first spreadsheet to exist on a GUI, but it was the first to take full advantage of the interface. So I give the OP partial credit for that answer.
The original Napster wasn't selling music. It was offering free downloads. And technically it wasn't even doing that; what it was doing was indexing links to free downloads that you could get from another Napster user in a peer-to-peer file transfer. The courts ruled that it was the moral equivalent of offering downloads themselves, which was probably reasonable.
But it had an unfortunate consequence. Napster was well on its way to becoming a readily available global repository of EVERY piece of recorded music, including demos, bootlegs, and music that had been out of print for many years. People were even ripping old 78s and making them available. Nearly 20 years later, no comparable resource exists. Lots of music is available to buy from Amazon, Apple, etc, to stream from Spotify and other services, or to watch in video form on YouTube, but a lot of it is not. And often music that IS available from those sources isn't available to you because of geographic restrictions.
MP3.com also offered free downloads, and unlike Napster it actually hosted the files. Some of the files on their system were certainly illegal uploads of copyrighted music, though they attempted to remove those. But they also offered a lot of original music that people uploaded to the service. What eventually killed them legally was when they started offering a service that let you stream your own CDs from the service - except that they didn't actually do that, they did a signature detection of your CD, and then when you streamed it they sent you THEIR copy of the same CD.
The court decision against MP3.com was a horrendous mistake. What they were doing was WAY ahead of its time; their service was doing deduplication of data, something that is standard practice in server farms now. (You don't really think that Amazon stores a million copies of those purchased MP3s that you can stream from their servers, do you?) And they were doing DISTRIBUTED deduplication at that. But they couldn't make that argument in court because the term didn't even exist yet. It's true that you could have borrowed somebody else's CD and put it on the service, but the same is true for the uploads of your own music that are currently offered by Amazon and Google. (And if you don't think that those companies are deduplicating those music uploads to save storage space, I have a bridge to sell you...)
Google's key innovation wasn't returning clean results. It was returning BETTER results, results that were more likely to answer the questions that people had. The insight that led to that was analysis of the links to a page, which they called PageRank; the oversimplified version is that the more often your page was referenced by other pages, the more likely it was to be relevant.
As soon as word got out that they were doing that, people started to game the system. So the next improvement was to include a factor for the quality of the pages that link to yours. Links from poor quality pages such as spam farms count for nothing or may even have a negative value, while links from pages with a high relevance score count for a lot.
Google continues to adjust the algorithms to improve results and to counteract the attempts by others to game the system and get excessively good results for their pages. It's a continuing battle between them and the people who attempt search engine optimization. Others have adopted many of the same ranking techniques. When Google came along there was a huge difference in quality between its results and what you got from Yahoo or AltaVista. But that gap has narrowed considerably; Google is still excellent, but competitors like Bing are not far behind.
64 bit applications tend to be a bit larger than their 32 bit counterparts, mostly because pointers and some other data types are larger. (Even if you keep the same data sizes within your application, the size of some data items called for by APIs like time stamps and I/O counters for streams get bigger.) Code size tends to stay about the same; the 64 bit code uses fewer instructions because of having more registers available, but the instructions are on average a bit larger.
How all of this affects execution speed varies. AMD processors are generally faster running 64 bit code. Intel has been more of a mixed bag. One notable case was Intel's first 64-bit capable CPU, the Pentium D; its speed was limited by the CPU's ability to fetch instructions rather than by execution units, so the fact that code size stayed the same or grew by a bit meant that the same was true of execution speed.
At major airports there is no longer a significant delay at the rental car counter. The key is to join the loyalty program of the company (or companies) you use. Then you don't have to go to the counter at all. You go to the lot, pick out a car from the correct group (they're parked by rental class so it's not difficult), and drive it to the exit. Unless you're there at a peak arrival time and the exit gates are backed up, ten minutes tops.
If you leave out ridiculous status symbol devices like diamond-encrusted phones and ultra-secure models made for the high security niche, iPhones are in the top tier of pricing. The upcoming iPhone X raises the bar for flagship phone pricing.
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It's possible that IBM did feel that insulted. They were a rather sexist organization at the time, and the fact that Digital Research sent a woman to handle the meeting would not have been well received.
The IBM corporate culture has since improved considerably. When IBM bought Lotus I predicted a disaster because the cultures of the two companies were so different, so I expected a mass exodus of the important people from Lotus. Then IBM did the unthinkable. They changed THEIR culture to be more like Lotus: emphasizing diversity and work/life balance, and getting rid of the expectation that their executives would regularly relocate to different IBM offices. (There was a time when the joke at IBM was that the company's name stood for I've Been Moved. For the record, it officially stands for International Business Machines.)
FrameMaker was great for doing book length products, but it was horribly clunky for doing bread and butter jobs like memos and letters. Word was good for those short things but poor at doing larger scale projects.
And yet Ami Pro got it right on Windows, within the limits of screen resolution. It's not an impossible problem.
Ami Pro was the best competitor to Word for Windows. Lotus bought Samna (the original developer), and instead of doing a 32 bit Windows port of it they changed it into something that tried really hard to be a Word clone. In the process they lost everything what was good about Ami Pro, notably its superior handling of style sheets. (That was REALLY sorely missed a few years later when CSS came along; Ami Pro's style model was similar to CSS and that editor could have easily been turned into a killer app for creating web pages.) Lotus renamed the result Word Pro and it sank like a stone.
WordPerfect for Windows made some fundamental mistakes. They initially tried to make the user interface as much as possible like that of the DOS version of WP, rather than trying to make behave like a Windows program. The two goals were inherently at odds, as it meant doing things like putting Help on a different function key than the one Windows users would expect. It may have helped keep a few of their loyal DOS users in the fold, but it also kept any Windows users who were not already experienced WordPerfect users from adopting it.
The first version of WordPerfect for Windows 95 (not the first Windows version, there had also been a 16 bit version for Windows 3.1) had serious problems with stability that took the companies many months to fix. WordPerfect was also slow to make the product compatible with Windows NT, which would have been irrelevant for a consumer product but was a big issue in some large companies.
The ownership changes that happened during that crucial period also didn't help. WordPerfect was bought by Novell in 1994 and then sold again to Corel in 1996. During the Novell period, that company sued Microsoft on antitrust grounds because they felt (not without justification) that Microsoft had engaged in anticompetitive practices that hurt the market share of WordPerfect and NetWare. Although I believe the case had merit, it was also a distraction at a time when the company desperately needed to release better versions of their flagship products.
A tech business with enough scale to have a macroeconomic effect? Sure sounds like "news for nerds, stuff that matters" to me.
Continuously scanning for and trying to connect to new APs does kill battery. It's especially bad if you ever use one of the cable company WiFi services like XFinityWiFi, because you're continually driving past APs that your phone tries to connect to until you drive out of range of them. The only real fix is to turn off the WiFi radio while you're driving, or riding a bus or train that doesn't have WiFi service of its own that you're connected to.
You can fully represent Spanish in ISO/IEC 8859-15. But then you break some documents that are written for ISO-8859-1, the standard English encoding, because eight character values are now associated with a different character. Given that a typical Spanish speaker on the internet lives in a bilingual world - a lot of the online world is English-only - switching to that encoding is not a solution.
By "take full advantage of the interface", I meant that Excel used the particular capabilities of a GUI. There were spreadsheets on the Macintosh before it, but they were just ports of DOS software and didn't do anything that was unique. Excel introduced drag and drop of data, adjustment of row and column sizes by dragging the handles, and the other interface conventions that we now associate with spreadsheets.
To be fair, a lot of that stuff had been pioneered in research projects, like some of the software for the Xerox Alto. But Excel brought it to the public for the first time, and showed the world how a GUI version of a program could be better than just running a text-oriented program in a window. It's probably the most innovative piece of software that Microsoft has ever completed and turned into a popular product. And it shows that at least one good idea has come out of Microsoft.
The big music stores are all gone. Tower Records, kaput. HMV, exited the US market. Borders (a bookstore that had a big presence in music), gone. FYE, a shadow of its former self.
The record departments in the big box stores have also shrunk a lot. Walmart, Target, Best Buy... only a tiny bit of music left. Barnes & Noble (book store with music) has mostly withdrawn from music.
Small record stores and local chains (like Newbury Comics here in Massachusetts and neighboring states) have survived. Some have seen a surge in business with the hipster vinyl revival, which has also increased interest in used records. Urban Outfitters, the quintessential hipster chain, has ridden that revival and substantially increased its music sales, as well as selling record players.
One thing that NBC completely missed is the even more complete demise of video stores, though they were also already struggling in 2007. Streaming video took away most of the market. What market remains for physical video is now Redbox, the shrunken video sections in those big box stores, an occasional local chain that still sells video (Newbury Comics again), and online merchants. A few video rental places are soldiering on in small towns where high speed internet is uncommon, but they're just about extinct in cities.
It leaves them at home on their Xbox or PlayStation.
I don't think commercial shortwave broadcasting has ever been a viable business. The audience is too diffuse and too difficult to measure. Most shortwave broadcasting was done by governments and religious organizations. But now the governments are shutting down operations, leaving just the religious stations.
But those government broadcasts had the potential to be valuable resources in a disaster situation. They can't do that if they're off the air. But it's also true that they are no help if nobody has the receivers... which is a reason to not only keep the government stations on the air, but to have them run interesting programs so people have a reason to buy receivers.
"You have zero privacy anyway, get over it." Scott McNealy (then CEO of Sun Microsystems), 1998.
That requires an expensive Windows license to do legally. The Windows license that came with the machine won't suffice; it only covers running Windows on the machine's bare metal, not in a VM. For that you have to buy a FULL RETAIL license, not an OEM (also known as System Builder for a while) copy.
Because Microsoft is trying to use Edge as a tool to get people to upgrade to Windows 10. Their initial hope was that EVERYBODY would upgrade, which would decrease their support burden substantially.
I have upgraded all but one of my Windows 7 systems to Windows 10. The holdout is the Media Center system, because Microsoft has chosen not to make that available for Windows 10. I'm not sure what I'll do with that system after 2020; there is not yet a replacement for Media Center's DVR capabilities that I am happy with.
Edge isn't crappy. (The first release kind of was, but it has received many updates since then.) It just isn't quite as good as Chrome or Firefox. There is no compelling reason to switch to it, so people don't. To get people to switch Microsoft will have to make it BETTER than Chrome and Firefox, which is a challenge because those people have been working on their browsers for many years, and because we're getting to the Good Enough point where further improvements don't matter much.
Internet Explorer is crappy. Anybody who is still running it should switch to something else, unless forced to stay with IE because of requirements of some crappy corporate site. If you're using Windows 10 and you'd prefer to stick with a Microsoft product, switch to Edge; you'll be happy.
That makes me sad. What service do they offer to those areas now?
It's very different here in Boston. The rental car companies are a short ride from the terminals, and they are all in one building that the airport shuttle bus goes to. The maximum wait time for the bus is under 10 minutes. Once you get there, no counter -- you go out to the lot of cars that have keys waiting in them, you choose one and drive it to the exit gate, and your rental is finalized there. I've never had to wait more than a couple of minutes at the exit gate, though I haven't been there just after a jumbo jet full of passengers arrived at the rental company.
The loyalty programs are free. There is no good reason not to join even if you're only going to rent once. Not even privacy; the rental company gets all your info anyway.
It's true that shortwave broadcasting is mostly gone from the Caribbean. That's unfortunate, because it's a resource that is uniquely suited to the situation that Puerto Rico is in now; it can cover a large area with signal even when no infrastructure exists. That need is one reason that the Australian Broadcasting Company continues to offer shortwave broadcasts for the benefit of Australia's small islands.
Existing shortwave broadcasters could beam additional broadcasts toward Puerto Rico, including the US's own Voice of America (which is now a much smaller operation than in its heyday but still exists). But few people still own shortwave receivers so the broadcasts would not be very useful.
There is a reason that you put AM transmitter towers in low moist areas. The ground is more conductive in those areas and that makes the antennas more effective, meaning more signal coverage. Radio stations in richer parts of the world often have backup studio and transmitter sites, but most stations in Puerto Rico can't afford to do that.
On the other hand, you put FM transmitter towers on high ground to get the actual antenna (which, unlike AM, is not the entire tower) as high as possible. FM reception is largely limited to line of sight; the higher the antenna is, the more places it has line of sight to. The antennas used for FM broadcasting are not dependent of the quality of the ground under them.
The difference has no connection to the modulation method (AM vs FM), but is caused by the different parts of the radio spectrum that the services use.
One of the more notable innovative things that Microsoft did was develop Excel, the first good spreadsheet program for a graphical user interface. It wasn't the first spreadsheet to exist on a GUI, but it was the first to take full advantage of the interface. So I give the OP partial credit for that answer.
The original Napster wasn't selling music. It was offering free downloads. And technically it wasn't even doing that; what it was doing was indexing links to free downloads that you could get from another Napster user in a peer-to-peer file transfer. The courts ruled that it was the moral equivalent of offering downloads themselves, which was probably reasonable.
But it had an unfortunate consequence. Napster was well on its way to becoming a readily available global repository of EVERY piece of recorded music, including demos, bootlegs, and music that had been out of print for many years. People were even ripping old 78s and making them available. Nearly 20 years later, no comparable resource exists. Lots of music is available to buy from Amazon, Apple, etc, to stream from Spotify and other services, or to watch in video form on YouTube, but a lot of it is not. And often music that IS available from those sources isn't available to you because of geographic restrictions.
MP3.com also offered free downloads, and unlike Napster it actually hosted the files. Some of the files on their system were certainly illegal uploads of copyrighted music, though they attempted to remove those. But they also offered a lot of original music that people uploaded to the service. What eventually killed them legally was when they started offering a service that let you stream your own CDs from the service - except that they didn't actually do that, they did a signature detection of your CD, and then when you streamed it they sent you THEIR copy of the same CD.
The court decision against MP3.com was a horrendous mistake. What they were doing was WAY ahead of its time; their service was doing deduplication of data, something that is standard practice in server farms now. (You don't really think that Amazon stores a million copies of those purchased MP3s that you can stream from their servers, do you?) And they were doing DISTRIBUTED deduplication at that. But they couldn't make that argument in court because the term didn't even exist yet. It's true that you could have borrowed somebody else's CD and put it on the service, but the same is true for the uploads of your own music that are currently offered by Amazon and Google. (And if you don't think that those companies are deduplicating those music uploads to save storage space, I have a bridge to sell you...)
Google's key innovation wasn't returning clean results. It was returning BETTER results, results that were more likely to answer the questions that people had. The insight that led to that was analysis of the links to a page, which they called PageRank; the oversimplified version is that the more often your page was referenced by other pages, the more likely it was to be relevant.
As soon as word got out that they were doing that, people started to game the system. So the next improvement was to include a factor for the quality of the pages that link to yours. Links from poor quality pages such as spam farms count for nothing or may even have a negative value, while links from pages with a high relevance score count for a lot.
Google continues to adjust the algorithms to improve results and to counteract the attempts by others to game the system and get excessively good results for their pages. It's a continuing battle between them and the people who attempt search engine optimization. Others have adopted many of the same ranking techniques. When Google came along there was a huge difference in quality between its results and what you got from Yahoo or AltaVista. But that gap has narrowed considerably; Google is still excellent, but competitors like Bing are not far behind.
64 bit applications tend to be a bit larger than their 32 bit counterparts, mostly because pointers and some other data types are larger. (Even if you keep the same data sizes within your application, the size of some data items called for by APIs like time stamps and I/O counters for streams get bigger.) Code size tends to stay about the same; the 64 bit code uses fewer instructions because of having more registers available, but the instructions are on average a bit larger.
How all of this affects execution speed varies. AMD processors are generally faster running 64 bit code. Intel has been more of a mixed bag. One notable case was Intel's first 64-bit capable CPU, the Pentium D; its speed was limited by the CPU's ability to fetch instructions rather than by execution units, so the fact that code size stayed the same or grew by a bit meant that the same was true of execution speed.
At major airports there is no longer a significant delay at the rental car counter. The key is to join the loyalty program of the company (or companies) you use. Then you don't have to go to the counter at all. You go to the lot, pick out a car from the correct group (they're parked by rental class so it's not difficult), and drive it to the exit. Unless you're there at a peak arrival time and the exit gates are backed up, ten minutes tops.
If you leave out ridiculous status symbol devices like diamond-encrusted phones and ultra-secure models made for the high security niche, iPhones are in the top tier of pricing. The upcoming iPhone X raises the bar for flagship phone pricing.