He's not a n00b, he's a highly trained and experienced marketing person, selling the same old 'viral memes' that they think is a good way to get "mindshare" for a dud product.
They do give themselves away by banging on about the developer experience, when its a product aimed at consumers who don't give a fig about development. you could program the things using goats blood sacrifices for all consumers care, and someone trying to explain how good the product is should really be describing how intuitive it is to use, how its a new design of interface to help you organise your stuff. (too bad it appears to be so Facebook centric)
and definitely do not talk about silverlight! (besides, most phone devs want C/C++ development, not to rewrite everything they do for other platforms in.NET). If MS really was interested in "developers, developers, developers" they'd realise that devs want a common platform upon which to code so we can reuse code and don't have to write the same damn thing several times. And definitely not in Silverlight - you were right to ignore it at the PDC, go open standard HTML5 (or even Qt, go on MS, do a Qt port to WP7 like the projects for Android and iPhone). Ignore the vocal minority who demanded to keep their Silverlight skills, let that platform stagnate and slowly die.
If its so great, how come they sold sweet f*** all of the things?
sure, the adverts were pitiful, but the reviews were generally positive. As such, I'd expect a lot more to be sold than the reported 2 million over 3 months. (eg Apple sells 40 million in the same time, Android sells 30+ million).
So, the only answer I can think of is either they'er not as good as some people make out, or people really don't want Microsoft products (ie they only buy Windows and Office because they have to).
Combine that with the great devices Nokia makes and you have... a Windows 7 phone that still no-one wants. Nobody bough Nokias because of the hardware, it was a combination of HW and SW that did what people wanted. Sure, they fell way back int he smartphone stakes, but the old voice+sms phones were very popular and the software was comparitively very good for the time.
I think that people bought a Nokia because their previous phone was a Nokia and it ran almost the same SW, and all the menus and options were the same. Now, they have to really make a choice, and as a result, they have no loyalty - and that means more sales for Google and Apple.
There's one more nail in the coffin - if someone is going to buy a Windows 7 phone (to be different from their peers perhaps:) ), then why would they buy a Nokia one when there are phones from LG and HTC that are just as good.
me, a fanboy? no, I'm a Microsoft developer, have been for donkeys' years. However, I like to consider myself wise and sensible enough to look beyond the petty politics and tribalism of the members of the IT industry and see a slightly wider picture.
I don't have a console at all, and Sony are in my bad books after that rootkit stuff, but their little mp3 players are the dog's danglies, and their new internet-connected TVs are very good indeed.
I do take issue with Microsoft using their cash generative business to subsidise other areas, especially as they cannot compete effectively without doing that. I disagree with Microsoft's position of having to have a finger in *every* pie. I also have issue with Ballmer still being in his position, especially after he kicked Bob Muglia out (someone said that server&tools division was a money-maker, well it is now after Muglia built it up from the cost-centre it used to be. Guess that's why Ballmer did him in).
So, anyway, Microsoft invested $10bn into XBox development, and is now making a relatively small profit. They have never made a return on their investment. Any other company would have gone bust by now.
True, if only Nokia had thousands of people working on useful stuff instead of (obviously) drowing in bureaucracy, Qt would be a world-beater.
however, as its open-source, you'll find the Lighthouse project has already got Qt working on Android, and an Qt-iPhone project is making good inroads too.
you're quite right - unfortunately Nokia appears to think that the single ecosystem should be.NET. If only consumers thought so too they'd be onto a winning strategy:)
how many times do people have to be told that NAT is not a firewall.
OK, in most people's minds "NAT" means "that box that provides a secure local network safe from the outside", when the reality is really "NAT is a packet router that usually comes bundled with a firewall that provides a secure local network safe from the outside". Think of the 'DMZ' or port forwarding options on in their NAT router to clarify.
You can have the safe local network without NAT. If the IPv6 routers come with a firewall, configured in the "NAT" mode, then there will not be the disaster you predict. Even if they screw that up and put no firewall at all on your box, you still run firewalls on the computers on your network - even Windows complains vociferously if you turn the bundled one off.
fair enough - but they should either pay RedHat for the product they reuse, or submit their DB modules etc as open source so they can be added to the upstream repository.
Then everyone can run Oracle on RH (like they do anyway) and Oracle can just drop their own distro and reuse Redhats, directing customers to RH which I'm sure would be cheaper for Oracle and more profitable for RH.
Just give up on the "back to basics" idea in coding. It's not going to happen. More and more "engineers" are graduating the university with almost no actual programming experience, not even knowing a programming language. Many more or graduating without understanding how to code without depending on garbage collection. Tons are utterly oblivious to basics like data algorithms and prefer to just randomly pick and choose the first template they find which will do what they need.
I know, and it hurts just to think of it... and to do the code reviews for our Indian "team of highly trained developers", the same goes for most of the contractors we hired a while back.:(
Phone devs are likely to be even worse - as phones only have solid state storage, we'll start to see apps that consider i/o to be irrelevant from a performance PoV.
true - nothing is perfect, but its the first generation of streaming games to your TV/phone/whatever. I know that if they can stream movies to you, then you can stream games with acceptable quality (especially on a phone screen, which is what we're talking about here)
snap. me too - I like VS (but the newer versions aren't as good as VS6 was)
anyway, the problem with phone OS v traditional OS is stuff like battery life and application bloat. My W7 desktop is as fast as my old Win200 box, yet there's 10 years of hardware improvements in there. I don't see too much improvement in the software that I would say is such a huge difference to warrant all the extra hardware. This applies to phones as the hardware they have (and can support) is roughly the same as the hardware my old desktop had 10 years ago. I doubt we'll be able to get away with the assumption that HW will continue to improve liek my desktop HW did in the past - as a result, we do have to get back to 'basics' in coding and app design.
no, but your steam games collection is already running on the OnLive service, so you could still play them on your phone.
and the new ARM A15 designs are supposed to scale upwards to provide the kind of power you want (assuming you have it plugged into the mains, not off battery).
Still, maybe we just have to rediscover how to write software that is lean,tight and fast. Not bloated, slow and bogged down with all kinds of 'framework'.
I guess what you need is a private cloud running on your desktop at home. Then you'll be responsible for your own data loss:)
Can it run Crysis - actually, it probably can if OnLive has it. why run the graphics on your phone chip when you can run it on a super-computer and transfer the resulting video to you. (apparently it really does work)
Interesting post - I agree with most of what you said except the windows part.
This is why a lot of people were so excited about Maemo, if you look at the N900 and N95, they were billed as computers that also did phone stuff. As they were full-blown Linux under a pretty phone-GUI, you had all the benefits of the existing ecosystem of,w ell, everything you could hope for. And you got to get away from the Windows monopoly (which is really a good thing, all in all)
Android is focussed on being a phone OS, and competing by adding feature after feature. The time's not quite right for a phone that is your desktop too, but there are good first steps taking place now - eg this Atrix - and if they prove slightly successful, you can bet that OSes like Android will add these capabilities in the future - to stay competitive.
Google is also working on its Chromium OS. No-one quite knows if they'll keep that going, or if they'll fold parts into Android to give it the desktoppyness a docked phone needs. Either way, I doubt it'll be fragmented - it'll just be Android v5 that has much more features than before, that's no different for existing version problems that every OS has (eg you can say Microsoft has the same problems - do you code for W7 only, or do you maintain backwards compatibility with Vista, or XP)
you're not thinking this through correctly - $400 for netbook that doesn't run Windows and all you can think about is how much it costs you. No-one spares a thought for the poor manufacturers who now get to charge you more and not pay the windows tax. After all the years of wafer-thin margins, they finally get products that sell and can give them a decent profitable return, and you just sit there complaining.:)
In other words, expect these things to be pushed far more than cheapo Windows laptops. The manufacturers want, really want, to sell you these things.
its not quite like that - if your customer was thinking of leaving, you'd ask them why and try to resolve the problem they had. If their problem was that they wanted to use open standards, then you'd probably start by telling them how much better your formats were, and if that didn't work, change your software to use the desired ones or tell them they could leave.
This is more like sending "Bonecrusher" and "Knuckles" round to tell them it wouldn't be in their best interests to change the status quo.
Still, I can't blame them for trying this, that's what they do. I can still criticise them for being that way though.
to be fair - the sale and lease trick is a tax dodge. The money you pay in rent can be deducted from profits, so you pay less tax. The money you get from the sale is a one-off addition to the balance sheet and is usually spent.. on bonuses or share buybacks or similar.
Still, the cost-cutting and treating employees as interchangeable work-drones is destroying much of the economy.
its still better than the in-the-address-bar approach, as that wasn't long enough to show the full url. At least with the "status-tooltip" they can fiddle with borders, highlights, shadows and suchlike until they get something that looks smart.
have they moved to Android then? 'cos you cannot mean Microsoft - the company famous for infighting between teams. The Kin was shut down because it was in competition with Windows Phone team, and really - if you want a good laugh, read this blog piece about putting the shutdown menu into Vista.
Now, when you consider that one of the options available to Nokia in taking Windows Phone 7 was that their teams get to work on the WP7 code and customise or improve it you begin to understand just what a total, epic, unmitigated, colossal fail WP7 is soon to be (not that its been a roaring success so far!)
I think its partly due to the 'programmers' not being able to do a good job int he current tech they use, so they blame it and then start looking for the next one - which is also why a lot of people insist that a complete rewrite is the only way to go... every time.
The flaw lies not in the "legacy" code, or the "outdated" technology but in the people involved.
While I don't give a fig for those guys, new entrants to the IT workforce are picking up the meme that "you can only do good work in the latest tech" or by getting the framework/library/language/whatever to be easier and easier instead of learning the principles and being able to do things right.
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He's not a n00b, he's a highly trained and experienced marketing person, selling the same old 'viral memes' that they think is a good way to get "mindshare" for a dud product.
They do give themselves away by banging on about the developer experience, when its a product aimed at consumers who don't give a fig about development. you could program the things using goats blood sacrifices for all consumers care, and someone trying to explain how good the product is should really be describing how intuitive it is to use, how its a new design of interface to help you organise your stuff. (too bad it appears to be so Facebook centric)
and definitely do not talk about silverlight! (besides, most phone devs want C/C++ development, not to rewrite everything they do for other platforms in .NET). If MS really was interested in "developers, developers, developers" they'd realise that devs want a common platform upon which to code so we can reuse code and don't have to write the same damn thing several times. And definitely not in Silverlight - you were right to ignore it at the PDC, go open standard HTML5 (or even Qt, go on MS, do a Qt port to WP7 like the projects for Android and iPhone). Ignore the vocal minority who demanded to keep their Silverlight skills, let that platform stagnate and slowly die.
If its so great, how come they sold sweet f*** all of the things?
sure, the adverts were pitiful, but the reviews were generally positive. As such, I'd expect a lot more to be sold than the reported 2 million over 3 months. (eg Apple sells 40 million in the same time, Android sells 30+ million).
So, the only answer I can think of is either they'er not as good as some people make out, or people really don't want Microsoft products (ie they only buy Windows and Office because they have to).
Combine that with the great devices Nokia makes and you have ... a Windows 7 phone that still no-one wants. Nobody bough Nokias because of the hardware, it was a combination of HW and SW that did what people wanted. Sure, they fell way back int he smartphone stakes, but the old voice+sms phones were very popular and the software was comparitively very good for the time.
I think that people bought a Nokia because their previous phone was a Nokia and it ran almost the same SW, and all the menus and options were the same. Now, they have to really make a choice, and as a result, they have no loyalty - and that means more sales for Google and Apple.
There's one more nail in the coffin - if someone is going to buy a Windows 7 phone (to be different from their peers perhaps :) ), then why would they buy a Nokia one when there are phones from LG and HTC that are just as good.
me, a fanboy? no, I'm a Microsoft developer, have been for donkeys' years. However, I like to consider myself wise and sensible enough to look beyond the petty politics and tribalism of the members of the IT industry and see a slightly wider picture.
I don't have a console at all, and Sony are in my bad books after that rootkit stuff, but their little mp3 players are the dog's danglies, and their new internet-connected TVs are very good indeed.
I do take issue with Microsoft using their cash generative business to subsidise other areas, especially as they cannot compete effectively without doing that. I disagree with Microsoft's position of having to have a finger in *every* pie. I also have issue with Ballmer still being in his position, especially after he kicked Bob Muglia out (someone said that server&tools division was a money-maker, well it is now after Muglia built it up from the cost-centre it used to be. Guess that's why Ballmer did him in).
So, anyway, Microsoft invested $10bn into XBox development, and is now making a relatively small profit. They have never made a return on their investment. Any other company would have gone bust by now.
and to think everyone who apologises for Microsoft's bungling on XBox will always say "but they're making a profit now"
Well, they were, now get your shareholders ready for another $10bn down the pan! Good job they can rely on the old monopoly to fund the new toy.
True, if only Nokia had thousands of people working on useful stuff instead of (obviously) drowing in bureaucracy, Qt would be a world-beater.
however, as its open-source, you'll find the Lighthouse project has already got Qt working on Android, and an Qt-iPhone project is making good inroads too.
you're quite right - unfortunately Nokia appears to think that the single ecosystem should be .NET. If only consumers thought so too they'd be onto a winning strategy :)
If this is a ARM story, why is the logo set to AMDs? they haven't bought them out yet have they?
how many times do people have to be told that NAT is not a firewall.
OK, in most people's minds "NAT" means "that box that provides a secure local network safe from the outside", when the reality is really "NAT is a packet router that usually comes bundled with a firewall that provides a secure local network safe from the outside". Think of the 'DMZ' or port forwarding options on in their NAT router to clarify.
You can have the safe local network without NAT. If the IPv6 routers come with a firewall, configured in the "NAT" mode, then there will not be the disaster you predict. Even if they screw that up and put no firewall at all on your box, you still run firewalls on the computers on your network - even Windows complains vociferously if you turn the bundled one off.
you assume that the consumer has a IPv4 address to tunnel over - this assumption may not hold true shortly in the future.
fair enough - but they should either pay RedHat for the product they reuse, or submit their DB modules etc as open source so they can be added to the upstream repository.
Then everyone can run Oracle on RH (like they do anyway) and Oracle can just drop their own distro and reuse Redhats, directing customers to RH which I'm sure would be cheaper for Oracle and more profitable for RH.
Just give up on the "back to basics" idea in coding. It's not going to happen. More and more "engineers" are graduating the university with almost no actual programming experience, not even knowing a programming language. Many more or graduating without understanding how to code without depending on garbage collection. Tons are utterly oblivious to basics like data algorithms and prefer to just randomly pick and choose the first template they find which will do what they need.
I know, and it hurts just to think of it... and to do the code reviews for our Indian "team of highly trained developers", the same goes for most of the contractors we hired a while back.:(
Phone devs are likely to be even worse - as phones only have solid state storage, we'll start to see apps that consider i/o to be irrelevant from a performance PoV.
true - nothing is perfect, but its the first generation of streaming games to your TV/phone/whatever. I know that if they can stream movies to you, then you can stream games with acceptable quality (especially on a phone screen, which is what we're talking about here)
snap. me too - I like VS (but the newer versions aren't as good as VS6 was)
anyway, the problem with phone OS v traditional OS is stuff like battery life and application bloat. My W7 desktop is as fast as my old Win200 box, yet there's 10 years of hardware improvements in there. I don't see too much improvement in the software that I would say is such a huge difference to warrant all the extra hardware. This applies to phones as the hardware they have (and can support) is roughly the same as the hardware my old desktop had 10 years ago. I doubt we'll be able to get away with the assumption that HW will continue to improve liek my desktop HW did in the past - as a result, we do have to get back to 'basics' in coding and app design.
no, but your steam games collection is already running on the OnLive service, so you could still play them on your phone.
and the new ARM A15 designs are supposed to scale upwards to provide the kind of power you want (assuming you have it plugged into the mains, not off battery).
Still, maybe we just have to rediscover how to write software that is lean,tight and fast. Not bloated, slow and bogged down with all kinds of 'framework'.
I guess what you need is a private cloud running on your desktop at home. Then you'll be responsible for your own data loss :)
Can it run Crysis - actually, it probably can if OnLive has it. why run the graphics on your phone chip when you can run it on a super-computer and transfer the resulting video to you. (apparently it really does work)
Interesting post - I agree with most of what you said except the windows part.
This is why a lot of people were so excited about Maemo, if you look at the N900 and N95, they were billed as computers that also did phone stuff. As they were full-blown Linux under a pretty phone-GUI, you had all the benefits of the existing ecosystem of,w ell, everything you could hope for. And you got to get away from the Windows monopoly (which is really a good thing, all in all)
Android is focussed on being a phone OS, and competing by adding feature after feature. The time's not quite right for a phone that is your desktop too, but there are good first steps taking place now - eg this Atrix - and if they prove slightly successful, you can bet that OSes like Android will add these capabilities in the future - to stay competitive.
Google is also working on its Chromium OS. No-one quite knows if they'll keep that going, or if they'll fold parts into Android to give it the desktoppyness a docked phone needs. Either way, I doubt it'll be fragmented - it'll just be Android v5 that has much more features than before, that's no different for existing version problems that every OS has (eg you can say Microsoft has the same problems - do you code for W7 only, or do you maintain backwards compatibility with Vista, or XP)
Come back next year and we'll see.
you're not thinking this through correctly - $400 for netbook that doesn't run Windows and all you can think about is how much it costs you. No-one spares a thought for the poor manufacturers who now get to charge you more and not pay the windows tax. After all the years of wafer-thin margins, they finally get products that sell and can give them a decent profitable return, and you just sit there complaining. :)
In other words, expect these things to be pushed far more than cheapo Windows laptops. The manufacturers want, really want, to sell you these things.
its not quite like that - if your customer was thinking of leaving, you'd ask them why and try to resolve the problem they had. If their problem was that they wanted to use open standards, then you'd probably start by telling them how much better your formats were, and if that didn't work, change your software to use the desired ones or tell them they could leave.
This is more like sending "Bonecrusher" and "Knuckles" round to tell them it wouldn't be in their best interests to change the status quo.
Still, I can't blame them for trying this, that's what they do. I can still criticise them for being that way though.
for you and me maybe, but for the likes of Doris, Sharon and Kylie in the administration call centre its a completely different story.
Ever wonder why companies are still running XP? This is the reason - training all thouse thousands of staff is a big deal.
After all, if training was something that no-one did, the training companies would all be out of business by now, wouldn't they.
to be fair - the sale and lease trick is a tax dodge. The money you pay in rent can be deducted from profits, so you pay less tax. The money you get from the sale is a one-off addition to the balance sheet and is usually spent.. on bonuses or share buybacks or similar.
Still, the cost-cutting and treating employees as interchangeable work-drones is destroying much of the economy.
its still better than the in-the-address-bar approach, as that wasn't long enough to show the full url. At least with the "status-tooltip" they can fiddle with borders, highlights, shadows and suchlike until they get something that looks smart.
have they moved to Android then? 'cos you cannot mean Microsoft - the company famous for infighting between teams. The Kin was shut down because it was in competition with Windows Phone team, and really - if you want a good laugh, read this blog piece about putting the shutdown menu into Vista.
Now, when you consider that one of the options available to Nokia in taking Windows Phone 7 was that their teams get to work on the WP7 code and customise or improve it you begin to understand just what a total, epic, unmitigated, colossal fail WP7 is soon to be (not that its been a roaring success so far!)
ooh! I see a business opportunity that'll require you to splash out $$$$ for a new version of exactly the same thing.
ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching.
sure, you'll be pissed, but you know, someone's got to stimulate the economy and the rest of us have been playing this legacy upgrade dance for years.
you meam all those aggregator sites will stop listing on Google and will fill Bing with all their crapola instead?
that's pretty much the best result I coudl have expected (as I don't bother using Bing in the first place).
absolutely.
I think its partly due to the 'programmers' not being able to do a good job int he current tech they use, so they blame it and then start looking for the next one - which is also why a lot of people insist that a complete rewrite is the only way to go. .. every time.
The flaw lies not in the "legacy" code, or the "outdated" technology but in the people involved.
While I don't give a fig for those guys, new entrants to the IT workforce are picking up the meme that "you can only do good work in the latest tech" or by getting the framework/library/language/whatever to be easier and easier instead of learning the principles and being able to do things right.