alright then... they bought Danger and the Kin - a phone and technology when it was freaking obvious toall that smartphones were new and cool and the future and all that.
then the Windows Phone team killed it because it encroached on their territory (even though they were year or so away from releasing something that worked).
It happens all the time at MS, they don't do innovation, they do "NIH" and political infighting. You could say that a strong leader with his finger on the pulse of the company would see that and fix it, and that Ballmer's not that man.
you never know, the guy responsible for watching the blinking light on the server might have read all the news of the takeover, exclaimed "I'm never working for Microsoft" and walked out. And right now, everyone's looking at the servers, scratching their heads and saying "where's the guy who usually resets this thing?".
See items like this are tax deductible - you buy a computer, the taxman lets you write the costs off over a set number of years and you claim the 'losses' regularly. At the end of it, the computer is technically and officially worthless (it must be or you couldn't have claimed all that tax back;) ) so you can't resell it, and you can't throw it away anymore (nasty toxic waste regulations) but I think you can give it away to someone.
My comment wasn't a general BillG bashing.. he really did say that he gave the go-ahead to the board to takeover Skype. Where's the quote....
"I was a strong proponent at the board level for the deal being done I think it's a great, great deal for Skype... I think its a great deal for Microsoft."
"The idea of video conferencing is going to get so much better than it is today. Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue" said Mr Gates.
"It'll be fascinating to see how the brilliant ideas out of Microsoft research, coming together with Skype, what they can make of that"
so there you go - that's the best bit of business analysis I've ever heard, forget build v buy costs, or synergy acquisition savings, or even purchasing unique innovation. Instead we get some vague umm and ahh noises. Oh, revenue at Skype was effectively "sod all" to use the financial terminology. Certainly it just about broke even after the cost of running the show was taken into account.
the overlap - I read about guys from IBM's consulting arm talking about Microsoft consulting. They said if they and guys from MS ever turned up to the same meeting, they knew one of them had come to the wrong place.
The implication was that IBM only does the biggest customers that Microsoft simply can't handle. It makes sense to me, IBM was repositioned as a serious business consultancy, Microsoft is just a 2-bit technology player (and that technology is 20 years old)
there's 2 things to this that will make you realise why Ballmer hasn't gone despite being so f**** useless.
1. He and his buddy Bill Gates own about 10% of the total shares in MS. (or that might be 10% each, I forget and don't care too much anyway)
2. He has controlled his staff - though Scott Guthrie left of his own accord, Bob Muglia was told to pack his bags, basically for being too good (he took the services and tools division from nothing to be the 3rd biggest revenue stream at MS). So obviously if you do well at MS, you can expect to be sacked by Ballmer, to stop anyone from remaining who could take his job over.
All in all, there would have to be an almighty cock-up to get rid of him. Like, say another vastly overpaid acquisition. There are 8.5b reasons why he should go today, but.. guess what BillG steps in and says the takeover of Skype was all his idea. Thus Stevey gets to live another day, 'cos no-one on the board will complain if Billy says it was his idea.
The good news to the rest of us is, if Ballmer goes get the heave, the only guy who is likely to take over is Kevin Turner - the accountant chap. If he gets in, he will have to cut costs and scrap the money-pit parts of the business, so Bing, online services, mobile and all the myriad other money-losers will be spun off or just scrapped. This can only be a good thing for the rest of the industry!
its a bit difficult not to report on something you don't know what you're not supposed to report on!
I understand the media is told what they're not to say. This is why the superinjunction is so stupid - everyone already knows. The super part is so they cannot even report on the existence of the injunction too.
so, they'll be told Giggsy shagged around, that they can't say that, and they also cannot say that they've been told not to say that.
I understand they gave up when certain spammer organisations told them to - "or else".
The BlueFrog company (BlueSecurity) was DDoSed regularly, and spammers tried to do the same to BlueFrog members.
I think the way it was shut down says more about its effectiveness. You can't run a spam business if you get 1 response for every spam email you send out, you just couldn't filter out the people who really did want herbal creams from those who sent in fakes.
But again, it shows that the way to stop spam is at the financial level - stop them taking that money.
what makes you think Win8 on desktops and laptops won't be powered by ARM chips? It would be stupid to do so (well, sortof), but don't think that stupidity will stop them! Remember the Vista debacle with those not-quite-powerful-enough graphics chips?
Win8 on tablets will give people the opportunity to discover the alternatives - but once they've done that, x86 Win8 will at least still be tainted by the idea of incompatibility.
Anyway, I may have not thought it through enough, but you mentioned one interesting thing - Win8 on smartphones.. I wonder what that will do internally with WinPho7. Certainly the Win8 builds will not be based on that codebase, its a completely different thing, so if Win8 comes out for smartphones, perhaps we'll see Microsoft tearing itself apart all over again.
Oh no, Windows 8 competitiors will be pretty much Windows 7 (and XP of course).
Its the same thing about Win7 and XP all over, only this time much mroe serious. I mean, when people upgraded to Win7 and found their webcam sdrivers broke, they complained then bought a new webcam. Businesses on the other hand figured they woudl continue to work with XP until they *had* to upgrade, maybe even skip Win7 and go straight to Win8 saving themselves a ton of cash. Now if Win8 can't run all those applications said businesses need to run, that's not an upgrade put off til later, that's an upgrade cancelled completely.
In the meantime, you're right - anyone upgrading to Win8 will suddenly consider alternatives as Win8 is pretty much as big a change as iOS to them. They can afford to think about what they'd like to move to - and if WinPhone7 sales are anything to go by, that means massive sales for Apple and Google.
Microsoft *has* to include an emulator, and make it at least as seamless as "XPMode" is in Windows 7, and they will have to do it for at least as long as IE6 remained in the browser usage charts for, if not longer.
Dear Mark, as you don't like too many options, we've decided to help you out by not giving you the option to provide us with lots of UI configurability. Job done:)
the best solutions to all this is for all of us to really get behind Miguel and Xamarin, boost its popularity (well, at least on message boards, blogs, and forums), then Microsoft comes along and gives Miguel $1bn for the company, he f***s off to a desert island to tell dusky maidens about his great.NET is, Microsoft is $1bn closer to getting rid of Ballmer and subsequently being broken up by the accountants, and we all laugh as we stop pretending to use it on Linux and continue writing our apps in C and Python.
See, everyone's a winner.
PS. your 100k would be better spent on other activites - invest in Arduino, or Android hardware projects. Invest in providing software to the kind of people who cannot afford it, who still cannot afford a MonoDroid licence. Don't get too focussed on a bit of software that is targetted at an incredibly niche market. Spread your view to the possibilities that all the other stuff is making available to us.
I've built PCs with SCSI, IDE, EIDE, SATA, eSATA, FC and iSCSI standards. And Thank god for them. See, if we didn't have all these things, you'd be building your next PC using an old ATA-33 connector and cable.
The point of different standards like this is progress. Things get made better because better things come about.
Consumers don't like uniformity anyway, they like the latest and greatest. They don't care about most standards, they care about throwing the old out and buying new stuff.
If I remember rightly, there was a patent agreement from Microsoft saying that they would not sue anyone patent-wise if they received Mono from Novell. The implication was that if you received itr from, RedHat say, then there was no agreement not to sue you.
I don't know if that was transferred to Attachmate but I'm guessing that Xamarin doesn't have that agreement. I doubt Microsoft will do anything as getting more people hooked on.NET makes sense to them, but you never know - if Mono really takes off on iOS and Android and helps sell those phones instead of WP7, they might change their minds.
In theory,.NET is the only language/runtime/framework/library you'll ever need, but in practice......
in practice, you use different tools for different jobs. Line of Business apps are still being written in Java, more "hardcore" apps are still being written in C++, more webserver apps are being written in PHP. I think I like this state of affairs, because I wouldn't want to be tied into a single system forever. Apart from being a bit boring, you hit the reason right - it stagnates and never sees any need to compete.
So Mono isn't helping, its trying to make the 'one system to rule them all' come about and we both agree here that that is a bad thing. If Miguel really wanted to improve the overall marketplace, he'd be writing dev tools that kicked ass for Linux/iOS/etc or creating a library platform for all the other languages out there - imagine the.NET framework that he has for Mono available as a native tool for C, PHP and Python code. That would be helping us out. Making a.NET on Linux really isn't.
I do applaud the work he's done, and I applaud C# as a language (its not so bad at all), but I really think he's lost his way here, become too narrow-focussed on one thing.
I guess people are voting with their feet - by not buying WP7:)
We'll see what happens, I think WP7 will continue to bomb even after the $1bn bung from MS runs out, and then Nokia will at least have the opportunity to ressurect itself with its old ace card, maybe beefing it up for non-phone systems. The danger is that, good though Meego is and could be, Android will steal all its market before it has a chance to shine. That's a problem they'll have to deal with while they attempt to flog WP7 devices.
yes, but then you can intermix QML and traditional Qt forms together which is a seriously good thing as you keep the productivity gains for the 80% of common or boring old functionalty and get to work the last 20% in less-rpoductive but mroe functional QML.
Unlike XAML where you have a choice of all or nothing.
also, I was listening to a radio programme about Chernobyl. The casualty rate there, apart from the crews who were sent in to the burning building, is 6.
I don't know - sure, at first they woudl have,but it doesn't take much for some guys to get excited about some non-microsoft technology (eg iPhones:) ) and think they want to develop for it as well. After a few years the ties to the old parent would start to fray and by now (over a decade later) we probably would have them able to make autonomous decisions.
"Did tech innovation suffer over the last 10 years because Microsoft wasn't broken up? 'Yes,' said Vinton Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist, 'but it's ok because open source has become such a strong force in the software world."
small, but signiifcant difference. At the time I thought it made a lot of sense to keep MS together - consistency in their products and de-facto standards were good, but now I know I was wrong. A broken-up Microsoft could have made much more of their various divisions that didn't lock themselves into their own ecosystem. Think how we could have Visual Studio for Android today.
And they don't have much consistency in their own apps now anyway!
That's when you wish that the guy having fun three years ago had written some damn tests.
But today, the guy who writes the tests (and hopefully keeps them updated) is the same one who agrees with the "my code is its own documentation" principle and doesn't put a single comment in there. He won;t have written the design specification either, or the install guide so you still won't know how the damn things works.
There's no silver bullet for doing things right, TDD isn't any different. Good devs can tell bad code from looking at it, they don't need CCN reports to highlight it, and as someone else said - I can write code that passes all unit test coverage requirements and still doesn't actually work.
You're quite right about the difference between new code and maintenance - sometimes I think the onyl answer to it all is to put the 'rockstar' coders on maintenance duties and let the old sloggers work on the cool new stuff. Too bad things are often the other way round!
you got that right - I think most of these 'best practices' are more fashionable things rather than ways to achieve excellence.
I've been writing software for some time, and I used to write code well before TDD was invented. My codeworked back then, so why would I need TDD now? Sometimes I think maybe its because the tools and development practices are geared towards that - we do a lot of fast-development methods whereas once upon a time we'd take time to do design and validation before getting stuck in. Today it seems getting stuck in is the first and only thing, so I'm not surprised we need TDD to fix that, and that leads me to wonder if the time spent writing tests makes the fast-dev cycles so much slower that you might as well be faster overall doing it the old-fashioned ways!
I know we have started doing some of these things, not because the code is bad and needs fixing,but because someone read about it on the internet and thought that we shoudl do it because everyone else is doing it - ie, entirely due to fashion.
Slashdot Mirror
alright then... they bought Danger and the Kin - a phone and technology when it was freaking obvious toall that smartphones were new and cool and the future and all that.
then the Windows Phone team killed it because it encroached on their territory (even though they were year or so away from releasing something that worked).
It happens all the time at MS, they don't do innovation, they do "NIH" and political infighting. You could say that a strong leader with his finger on the pulse of the company would see that and fix it, and that Ballmer's not that man.
you never know, the guy responsible for watching the blinking light on the server might have read all the news of the takeover, exclaimed "I'm never working for Microsoft" and walked out. And right now, everyone's looking at the servers, scratching their heads and saying "where's the guy who usually resets this thing?".
no, its a rich taxpayer.
See items like this are tax deductible - you buy a computer, the taxman lets you write the costs off over a set number of years and you claim the 'losses' regularly. At the end of it, the computer is technically and officially worthless (it must be or you couldn't have claimed all that tax back ;) ) so you can't resell it, and you can't throw it away anymore (nasty toxic waste regulations) but I think you can give it away to someone.
My comment wasn't a general BillG bashing.. he really did say that he gave the go-ahead to the board to takeover Skype. Where's the quote....
"I was a strong proponent at the board level for the deal being done I think it's a great, great deal for Skype ... I think its a great deal for Microsoft."
"The idea of video conferencing is going to get so much better than it is today. Skype actually does get a fair bit of revenue" said Mr Gates.
"It'll be fascinating to see how the brilliant ideas out of Microsoft research, coming together with Skype, what they can make of that"
so there you go - that's the best bit of business analysis I've ever heard, forget build v buy costs, or synergy acquisition savings, or even purchasing unique innovation. Instead we get some vague umm and ahh noises. Oh, revenue at Skype was effectively "sod all" to use the financial terminology. Certainly it just about broke even after the cost of running the show was taken into account.
Now, if you really want a laugh, try this: a list of Microsoft's best, or actually worst, acquisitions.. such as aQuantive.
the overlap - I read about guys from IBM's consulting arm talking about Microsoft consulting. They said if they and guys from MS ever turned up to the same meeting, they knew one of them had come to the wrong place.
The implication was that IBM only does the biggest customers that Microsoft simply can't handle. It makes sense to me, IBM was repositioned as a serious business consultancy, Microsoft is just a 2-bit technology player (and that technology is 20 years old)
there's 2 things to this that will make you realise why Ballmer hasn't gone despite being so f**** useless.
1. He and his buddy Bill Gates own about 10% of the total shares in MS. (or that might be 10% each, I forget and don't care too much anyway)
2. He has controlled his staff - though Scott Guthrie left of his own accord, Bob Muglia was told to pack his bags, basically for being too good (he took the services and tools division from nothing to be the 3rd biggest revenue stream at MS). So obviously if you do well at MS, you can expect to be sacked by Ballmer, to stop anyone from remaining who could take his job over.
All in all, there would have to be an almighty cock-up to get rid of him. Like, say another vastly overpaid acquisition. There are 8.5b reasons why he should go today, but.. guess what BillG steps in and says the takeover of Skype was all his idea. Thus Stevey gets to live another day, 'cos no-one on the board will complain if Billy says it was his idea.
The good news to the rest of us is, if Ballmer goes get the heave, the only guy who is likely to take over is Kevin Turner - the accountant chap. If he gets in, he will have to cut costs and scrap the money-pit parts of the business, so Bing, online services, mobile and all the myriad other money-losers will be spun off or just scrapped. This can only be a good thing for the rest of the industry!
its a bit difficult not to report on something you don't know what you're not supposed to report on!
I understand the media is told what they're not to say. This is why the superinjunction is so stupid - everyone already knows. The super part is so they cannot even report on the existence of the injunction too.
so, they'll be told Giggsy shagged around, that they can't say that, and they also cannot say that they've been told not to say that.
I understand they gave up when certain spammer organisations told them to - "or else".
The BlueFrog company (BlueSecurity) was DDoSed regularly, and spammers tried to do the same to BlueFrog members.
I think the way it was shut down says more about its effectiveness. You can't run a spam business if you get 1 response for every spam email you send out, you just couldn't filter out the people who really did want herbal creams from those who sent in fakes.
But again, it shows that the way to stop spam is at the financial level - stop them taking that money.
what makes you think Win8 on desktops and laptops won't be powered by ARM chips? It would be stupid to do so (well, sortof), but don't think that stupidity will stop them! Remember the Vista debacle with those not-quite-powerful-enough graphics chips?
Win8 on tablets will give people the opportunity to discover the alternatives - but once they've done that, x86 Win8 will at least still be tainted by the idea of incompatibility.
Anyway, I may have not thought it through enough, but you mentioned one interesting thing - Win8 on smartphones.. I wonder what that will do internally with WinPho7. Certainly the Win8 builds will not be based on that codebase, its a completely different thing, so if Win8 comes out for smartphones, perhaps we'll see Microsoft tearing itself apart all over again.
Oh no, Windows 8 competitiors will be pretty much Windows 7 (and XP of course).
Its the same thing about Win7 and XP all over, only this time much mroe serious. I mean, when people upgraded to Win7 and found their webcam sdrivers broke, they complained then bought a new webcam. Businesses on the other hand figured they woudl continue to work with XP until they *had* to upgrade, maybe even skip Win7 and go straight to Win8 saving themselves a ton of cash. Now if Win8 can't run all those applications said businesses need to run, that's not an upgrade put off til later, that's an upgrade cancelled completely.
In the meantime, you're right - anyone upgrading to Win8 will suddenly consider alternatives as Win8 is pretty much as big a change as iOS to them. They can afford to think about what they'd like to move to - and if WinPhone7 sales are anything to go by, that means massive sales for Apple and Google.
Microsoft *has* to include an emulator, and make it at least as seamless as "XPMode" is in Windows 7, and they will have to do it for at least as long as IE6 remained in the browser usage charts for, if not longer.
Dear Mark, as you don't like too many options, we've decided to help you out by not giving you the option to provide us with lots of UI configurability. Job done :)
the next one will be Pugilistic Puffin. You can install it, if you think you're hard enough to have a go.
the best solutions to all this is for all of us to really get behind Miguel and Xamarin, boost its popularity (well, at least on message boards, blogs, and forums), then Microsoft comes along and gives Miguel $1bn for the company, he f***s off to a desert island to tell dusky maidens about his great .NET is, Microsoft is $1bn closer to getting rid of Ballmer and subsequently being broken up by the accountants, and we all laugh as we stop pretending to use it on Linux and continue writing our apps in C and Python.
See, everyone's a winner.
PS. your 100k would be better spent on other activites - invest in Arduino, or Android hardware projects. Invest in providing software to the kind of people who cannot afford it, who still cannot afford a MonoDroid licence. Don't get too focussed on a bit of software that is targetted at an incredibly niche market. Spread your view to the possibilities that all the other stuff is making available to us.
really? well, consider this:
I've built PCs with SCSI, IDE, EIDE, SATA, eSATA, FC and iSCSI standards. And Thank god for them. See, if we didn't have all these things, you'd be building your next PC using an old ATA-33 connector and cable.
The point of different standards like this is progress. Things get made better because better things come about.
Consumers don't like uniformity anyway, they like the latest and greatest. They don't care about most standards, they care about throwing the old out and buying new stuff.
If I remember rightly, there was a patent agreement from Microsoft saying that they would not sue anyone patent-wise if they received Mono from Novell. The implication was that if you received itr from, RedHat say, then there was no agreement not to sue you.
I don't know if that was transferred to Attachmate but I'm guessing that Xamarin doesn't have that agreement. I doubt Microsoft will do anything as getting more people hooked on .NET makes sense to them, but you never know - if Mono really takes off on iOS and Android and helps sell those phones instead of WP7, they might change their minds.
In theory, .NET is the only language/runtime/framework/library you'll ever need, but in practice......
in practice, you use different tools for different jobs. Line of Business apps are still being written in Java, more "hardcore" apps are still being written in C++, more webserver apps are being written in PHP. I think I like this state of affairs, because I wouldn't want to be tied into a single system forever. Apart from being a bit boring, you hit the reason right - it stagnates and never sees any need to compete.
So Mono isn't helping, its trying to make the 'one system to rule them all' come about and we both agree here that that is a bad thing. If Miguel really wanted to improve the overall marketplace, he'd be writing dev tools that kicked ass for Linux/iOS/etc or creating a library platform for all the other languages out there - imagine the .NET framework that he has for Mono available as a native tool for C, PHP and Python code. That would be helping us out. Making a .NET on Linux really isn't.
I do applaud the work he's done, and I applaud C# as a language (its not so bad at all), but I really think he's lost his way here, become too narrow-focussed on one thing.
I guess people are voting with their feet - by not buying WP7 :)
We'll see what happens, I think WP7 will continue to bomb even after the $1bn bung from MS runs out, and then Nokia will at least have the opportunity to ressurect itself with its old ace card, maybe beefing it up for non-phone systems. The danger is that, good though Meego is and could be, Android will steal all its market before it has a chance to shine. That's a problem they'll have to deal with while they attempt to flog WP7 devices.
yes, but then you can intermix QML and traditional Qt forms together which is a seriously good thing as you keep the productivity gains for the 80% of common or boring old functionalty and get to work the last 20% in less-rpoductive but mroe functional QML.
Unlike XAML where you have a choice of all or nothing.
also, I was listening to a radio programme about Chernobyl. The casualty rate there, apart from the crews who were sent in to the burning building, is 6.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010mckx
I don't know - sure, at first they woudl have,but it doesn't take much for some guys to get excited about some non-microsoft technology (eg iPhones :) ) and think they want to develop for it as well. After a few years the ties to the old parent would start to fray and by now (over a decade later) we probably would have them able to make autonomous decisions.
or, to put that correctly:
"Did tech innovation suffer over the last 10 years because Microsoft wasn't broken up? 'Yes,' said Vinton Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist, 'but it's ok because open source has become such a strong force in the software world."
small, but signiifcant difference. At the time I thought it made a lot of sense to keep MS together - consistency in their products and de-facto standards were good, but now I know I was wrong. A broken-up Microsoft could have made much more of their various divisions that didn't lock themselves into their own ecosystem. Think how we could have Visual Studio for Android today.
And they don't have much consistency in their own apps now anyway!
Some people think comments are just a bit of extra information.
Some people think comments are as important as code.
Guess which group writes the best code... ?
My point is with people who write *no* comments. none. nada. zip. zilch.
That's when you wish that the guy having fun three years ago had written some damn tests.
But today, the guy who writes the tests (and hopefully keeps them updated) is the same one who agrees with the "my code is its own documentation" principle and doesn't put a single comment in there. He won;t have written the design specification either, or the install guide so you still won't know how the damn things works.
There's no silver bullet for doing things right, TDD isn't any different. Good devs can tell bad code from looking at it, they don't need CCN reports to highlight it, and as someone else said - I can write code that passes all unit test coverage requirements and still doesn't actually work.
You're quite right about the difference between new code and maintenance - sometimes I think the onyl answer to it all is to put the 'rockstar' coders on maintenance duties and let the old sloggers work on the cool new stuff. Too bad things are often the other way round!
you got that right - I think most of these 'best practices' are more fashionable things rather than ways to achieve excellence.
I've been writing software for some time, and I used to write code well before TDD was invented. My codeworked back then, so why would I need TDD now? Sometimes I think maybe its because the tools and development practices are geared towards that - we do a lot of fast-development methods whereas once upon a time we'd take time to do design and validation before getting stuck in. Today it seems getting stuck in is the first and only thing, so I'm not surprised we need TDD to fix that, and that leads me to wonder if the time spent writing tests makes the fast-dev cycles so much slower that you might as well be faster overall doing it the old-fashioned ways!
I know we have started doing some of these things, not because the code is bad and needs fixing,but because someone read about it on the internet and thought that we shoudl do it because everyone else is doing it - ie, entirely due to fashion.
Do you really want to be using up 10 fiber pairs when 4 would be sufficient?
I would when 4 is no longer sufficient.
The cost of the cable is minor compared to the cost of laying it, so I can't help thinking 100Gb makes more sense overall.