in a way this is a shame, Qt is so vastly superior to MS's WPF technology (think - all the power of XAML and all the ease of use of winforms, and MS could have had this if their stupid divisions weren't fighting each other) could have kick-started a proper GUI environment. You know they're still slugging it out with win32/winforms.WPF/and now the WinRT XAML (not to mention failures such as silverlight).
Having Qt could have let them save face and release a decent GUI system. Such a shame for MS they didn't think things through when they sent Elop over there.
the difference now is that everybody's used Microsoft's software for a couple of decades, and have decided that they really would rather use something else when given the option.
MS didn't make a fortune in the console industry, the amount they paid to make the xbox successful has roughly only just been paid back. Any other company (ie without a big sugar daddy parent company) would have been bankrupt long ago. That's how 'successful' xbox has really been.
don't bother doing anything hard kids, take a 'media studies' degree, 'cos you'll end up sweeping streets anyway. In fact, forget the degree - go straight to an industry apply to be an apprentice or intern and then work your way through its hierarchy by diligence, and/or brown-nosing.
Then, in 20 years time, you can turn around to anyone who asks "what became of America, why is it such a useless 3rd world country now when it was so great back in the 50s", you can give them the answer before telling them to get off your lawn.
I love quick fixes. The problem with Microsoft is the the company. We are asking why an army of clever; highly qualified and paid individuals could release so many failures...obvious failures before release
you assume there is an army of clever people there. Reading blogs like minisfmt it appears these people either left for startups or Google et al, or are sitting around doing nothing but keeping their head down while their stock options rise.
then just put the pricing information on the form, anywhere you like, maybe on the back or in the margin.
If the company wants to transcribe that into a computer system and discard the pricing info, that's their choice. And if they want to sell on your number to other marketing companies, that's their lookout, not yours (best to include a disclaimer saying they cannot do this, then its a potential lawsuit too!)
as TFA says, after implementing this the number of cold calls dropped from 30 per month to 13.
The regulator says you have to be transparent about the cost, so personally, I'd always make sure I read out a pre-written information sheet that informed the caller that he was being charged, and why, and what my policies about charging were, and how they didn't impact on the rights of the caller, and... well you get the idea:)
If you have a hugely successful product set, and sell billions and billions, and the entire world depends on you and your stuff then you'd be crazy to rock the boat and try anything new. You'd keep on doing the same thing and the money would keep rolling in forever.
Until a crappy new device, called a PC turned up with a crappy OS on it, that no-one took seriously for business use, maybe just a niche toy for home users. Well, we all saw how the behemoths of DEC and IBM turned out. The trouble is, your comment would not have been any different 25 years ago.
so yes Microsoft, keep on doing what you always did, nothing will change, you're not fucking it up. I mean, what could go wrong?
Re:What's good for others apparently is no good fo
on
Break Microsoft Up
·
· Score: 1
its no acceptable for Microsoft because everything MS has done is in reaction to someone else doing it first, successfully.
MS wasn't in search... until Google became successful. Virtualisation... not until VMWare showed us how. Mobile - canned at MS, until Apple popped up. Cloud - well, first Amazon, *then* Microsoft.
I could go on, Microsoft is like an attention-deficit bully who simply wants to muscle in and take whatever it is you have.
This is the reason no-one cares too much about the MS offerings, people only go for them because it has the MS branding and they'd buy a polished turd (hmm, sharepoint) if it had the MD branding on it.
So the point of breaking MS up is to allow the little divisions the opportunity to do something good and new and innovative instead of simply trying to make products that are solely there to make you buy another Windows licence.
Mr Ballmer's planned departure comes shortly after activist investing fund ValueAct Capital Management took a small stake in the company, and started agitating for a change in strategy and a clear succession plan.
Despite the recent criticism, the timing of his decision to go surprised analysts.
"Yes, this was a surprise, especially considering how close it is to the recently announced strategic overhaul towards devices and services," said Sid Parakh, an analyst at McAdams Wright Ragen.
except.... it was Bob Muglia who enabled all that goodness.
Who was then sacked by Ballmer - so it shows how well Bob did turning Server and tools div around so much.
I agree that there is a lot of good stuff in what Microsoft offers an enterprise, and I see lots and lots of companies buying into more and more of MS stuff - like sharepoint (god help us all), and recently ASP.NET MVC development tools (all the jobs round here are for that damn thing), and even more recently to TFS (sigh).
They don't do really good technology, but they do make it easy to adopt that tech and that makes a huge difference. When something of Microsoft's gets 'good enough' then it gets taken up massively. (eg compare ASP.NET MVC with old style ASP.NET. Compare TFS2012 with the old versions. They're all quite different, quite a lot better, though that still doesn't mean they're best in class).
Bob Muglia - he turned the server and tools division from a cost centre that 'sold' stuff you had to give away in order to sell more copies of Windows, into the 3rd most profitable division.
That he got sacked by Ballmer shows just how successful he was.
Same with Sinofsky too. Either would have made better CEOs, maybe they'll come back.. but I doubt it. Microsoft is a services company now, they need a IBM-type guy now. Of course, if we're lucky, they'll get someone just like Fiorina:-)
well, we all say he was useless but... under his leadership Microsoft turned its revenues round dramatically. If you consider MS to be a boring corporate instead of a tech company, we'd probably have thought him a really good CEO.
Sure the stock price went nowhere, but thats because a tech company needs to be at the forefront of technology to be seen to making future growth possible. It hasn't helped that he's managed to sell crap like sharepoint and other business tools to practically everyone and their dog.
So maybe its just a communications issue and he should have said MS was a services company ages ago, but I think that would have gone down like a lead balloon with the nerdistia.
Anyway, the next leader cannot be all the great guys that he sacked... Sinofsky? nope. Muglia.. nope.
That leaves board members like Kevin Turner who was suggested as a truly terrible leader - more interested in the number of beans than anything technological. The kind of guy who would dump xbox for (rightly) being a money pit.
So what's the chances he's going to get the job... I think quite high, he'll be the best thing for the IT industry as he completes the process of turning MS into IBM.
much as I'd like to be a supermod (mouhahahahahahhahaaaa)(ahem) I don't think such things are useful, and are just part of the slippery slope towards having full-time mods with their own opinions and baises (there are many documented instances where 'reasonable' posts conflict with some moderation).
What might be better is to allow all posts to go further intot he negative, so all the GNAA posts will end up at (probably) -2 instead of just being hidden at -1.
stackoverflow requires 5 people to vote to close a question, so the concept works, however I've seen my own post about the Java JRE being part of the recent security problems downvoted heavily (the thread had a lot of apologists saying Java is totally secure, its only the plugin that's at fault, so don't panic, keep using Java) so I worry that the system would get abused by fanbois. So maybe we need a more complex system that allows you to vote something up, or down, or to vote that a previous vote was wrong. Even on/. you get a few +5 posts that turn out to be factually incorrect, because they've been modded up by people who would like it to be true. Having your mod voted wrong would allow the system to reduce the weight of your future votes.
anyway, slashdot's seems to work as is, just wish they'd put a richer edit box for comments, like stackoverflows.
well, it depends which laptop you compare it to, my old work Dell was heavier than a desktop PC!
The BBC's Click programme did a piece on it when it first came out and they ripped into it for being heavy, showing it being used in a gym for weight training. They also showed the very unresponsive keyboard in use... which told me all I needed to know about it.
but it does happen. In the UK some police have taken to wearing very obvious cameras, partly to protect the policeman and partly to add evidence where necessary - can cut down on expensive trials and paperwork if you can play back the footage to the suspect once he's been caught. It also acts as a deterrent, apparently, though I figure a policeman in the area does that, they don't need a camera if they're there.
These have been used openly since 2006 in some areas.
sure, Microsoft deserves all they get and I am happy to laugh my tits off at their lack of success with Windows Phone now they're trying to shove themselves into a market they don't have a monopoly in.
But.. I do not want to replace them and their crap practices with a different company that acts in the same stupid, locked-in, sod-the-user, anti-competitive, and just generally evil ways. Google needs to be called out for this by us all before they turn into Microsoft 2.0
as he said - "the suits wanted to buy", and the suits generally have the budget, which looks true when he also says they engaged with redhat salesmen who didn't have a flexible licencing for bulk purchases.
Ultimately its a story of redhat business models being less than perfect, but it still confuses me why someone would make the distinction between RHEL and CentOS in any way other than price, which is what he was suggesting - that IT staff somehow value the free version over the paid version for no more than idealogical reasons. If he had said "the suits wanted to buy Windows, the IT staff wanted Linux" then I'd be all with that, but not between RHEL and rebranded RHEL.
not just favouritism towards open source. If you, as a company, made your money doing nothing except support... your support will be damn good.
Microsoft, Oracle etc, might (do) have some great 3rd line support engineers... but you have to get past the army of call centre drones and basically beg for help.
So it shouldn't be just because you like the idea. RH, Canonical will just be significantly better.
Slashdot Mirror
in a way this is a shame, Qt is so vastly superior to MS's WPF technology (think - all the power of XAML and all the ease of use of winforms, and MS could have had this if their stupid divisions weren't fighting each other) could have kick-started a proper GUI environment. You know they're still slugging it out with win32/winforms.WPF/and now the WinRT XAML (not to mention failures such as silverlight).
Having Qt could have let them save face and release a decent GUI system. Such a shame for MS they didn't think things through when they sent Elop over there.
the difference now is that everybody's used Microsoft's software for a couple of decades, and have decided that they really would rather use something else when given the option.
MS didn't make a fortune in the console industry, the amount they paid to make the xbox successful has roughly only just been paid back. Any other company (ie without a big sugar daddy parent company) would have been bankrupt long ago. That's how 'successful' xbox has really been.
in some markets, yes.
Symbian still sells way more than Windows phone, both in smart and feature phone versions.
I'm sure it can't last forever, but who could have said that'd outlast the company.
http://bgr.com/2012/07/19/nokia-q2-2012-earnings-analysis/
Of course, this is a vastly reduced sales figure compared to what it was before Elop opened his mouth.
don't bother doing anything hard kids, take a 'media studies' degree, 'cos you'll end up sweeping streets anyway. In fact, forget the degree - go straight to an industry apply to be an apprentice or intern and then work your way through its hierarchy by diligence, and/or brown-nosing.
Then, in 20 years time, you can turn around to anyone who asks "what became of America, why is it such a useless 3rd world country now when it was so great back in the 50s", you can give them the answer before telling them to get off your lawn.
I love quick fixes. The problem with Microsoft is the the company. We are asking why an army of clever; highly qualified and paid individuals could release so many failures...obvious failures before release
you assume there is an army of clever people there. Reading blogs like minisfmt it appears these people either left for startups or Google et al, or are sitting around doing nothing but keeping their head down while their stock options rise.
.... who also seems to have a humour bypass.
Stock price doesn't mean diddley squat....
And this visionary thing is overrated...
sigh, another Microsoft apologist posting to slashdot ... :-)
then just put the pricing information on the form, anywhere you like, maybe on the back or in the margin.
If the company wants to transcribe that into a computer system and discard the pricing info, that's their choice. And if they want to sell on your number to other marketing companies, that's their lookout, not yours (best to include a disclaimer saying they cannot do this, then its a potential lawsuit too!)
as TFA says, after implementing this the number of cold calls dropped from 30 per month to 13.
The regulator says you have to be transparent about the cost, so personally, I'd always make sure I read out a pre-written information sheet that informed the caller that he was being charged, and why, and what my policies about charging were, and how they didn't impact on the rights of the caller, and... well you get the idea :)
IIRC Lenovo are selling machine pre-downgraded to Windows 7. Lenovo are also the only PC manufacturer who saw an increase in sales recently.
I don't think the 2 are non-coincidental.
because they've seen it before.
If you have a hugely successful product set, and sell billions and billions, and the entire world depends on you and your stuff then you'd be crazy to rock the boat and try anything new. You'd keep on doing the same thing and the money would keep rolling in forever.
Until a crappy new device, called a PC turned up with a crappy OS on it, that no-one took seriously for business use, maybe just a niche toy for home users. Well, we all saw how the behemoths of DEC and IBM turned out. The trouble is, your comment would not have been any different 25 years ago.
so yes Microsoft, keep on doing what you always did, nothing will change, you're not fucking it up. I mean, what could go wrong?
its no acceptable for Microsoft because everything MS has done is in reaction to someone else doing it first, successfully.
MS wasn't in search ... until Google became successful.
Virtualisation... not until VMWare showed us how.
Mobile - canned at MS, until Apple popped up.
Cloud - well, first Amazon, *then* Microsoft.
I could go on, Microsoft is like an attention-deficit bully who simply wants to muscle in and take whatever it is you have.
This is the reason no-one cares too much about the MS offerings, people only go for them because it has the MS branding and they'd buy a polished turd (hmm, sharepoint) if it had the MD branding on it.
So the point of breaking MS up is to allow the little divisions the opportunity to do something good and new and innovative instead of simply trying to make products that are solely there to make you buy another Windows licence.
the BBC suggests so
Mr Ballmer's planned departure comes shortly after activist investing fund ValueAct Capital Management took a small stake in the company, and started agitating for a change in strategy and a clear succession plan.
Despite the recent criticism, the timing of his decision to go surprised analysts.
"Yes, this was a surprise, especially considering how close it is to the recently announced strategic overhaul towards devices and services," said Sid Parakh, an analyst at McAdams Wright Ragen.
except.... it was Bob Muglia who enabled all that goodness.
Who was then sacked by Ballmer - so it shows how well Bob did turning Server and tools div around so much.
I agree that there is a lot of good stuff in what Microsoft offers an enterprise, and I see lots and lots of companies buying into more and more of MS stuff - like sharepoint (god help us all), and recently ASP.NET MVC development tools (all the jobs round here are for that damn thing), and even more recently to TFS (sigh).
They don't do really good technology, but they do make it easy to adopt that tech and that makes a huge difference. When something of Microsoft's gets 'good enough' then it gets taken up massively. (eg compare ASP.NET MVC with old style ASP.NET. Compare TFS2012 with the old versions. They're all quite different, quite a lot better, though that still doesn't mean they're best in class).
Bob Muglia - he turned the server and tools division from a cost centre that 'sold' stuff you had to give away in order to sell more copies of Windows, into the 3rd most profitable division.
That he got sacked by Ballmer shows just how successful he was.
Same with Sinofsky too. Either would have made better CEOs, maybe they'll come back.. but I doubt it. Microsoft is a services company now, they need a IBM-type guy now. Of course, if we're lucky, they'll get someone just like Fiorina :-)
well, we all say he was useless but... under his leadership Microsoft turned its revenues round dramatically. If you consider MS to be a boring corporate instead of a tech company, we'd probably have thought him a really good CEO.
Sure the stock price went nowhere, but thats because a tech company needs to be at the forefront of technology to be seen to making future growth possible. It hasn't helped that he's managed to sell crap like sharepoint and other business tools to practically everyone and their dog.
So maybe its just a communications issue and he should have said MS was a services company ages ago, but I think that would have gone down like a lead balloon with the nerdistia.
Anyway, the next leader cannot be all the great guys that he sacked... Sinofsky? nope. Muglia.. nope.
That leaves board members like Kevin Turner who was suggested as a truly terrible leader - more interested in the number of beans than anything technological. The kind of guy who would dump xbox for (rightly) being a money pit.
So what's the chances he's going to get the job... I think quite high, he'll be the best thing for the IT industry as he completes the process of turning MS into IBM.
much as I'd like to be a supermod (mouhahahahahahhahaaaa)(ahem) I don't think such things are useful, and are just part of the slippery slope towards having full-time mods with their own opinions and baises (there are many documented instances where 'reasonable' posts conflict with some moderation).
What might be better is to allow all posts to go further intot he negative, so all the GNAA posts will end up at (probably) -2 instead of just being hidden at -1.
stackoverflow requires 5 people to vote to close a question, so the concept works, however I've seen my own post about the Java JRE being part of the recent security problems downvoted heavily (the thread had a lot of apologists saying Java is totally secure, its only the plugin that's at fault, so don't panic, keep using Java) so I worry that the system would get abused by fanbois. So maybe we need a more complex system that allows you to vote something up, or down, or to vote that a previous vote was wrong. Even on /. you get a few +5 posts that turn out to be factually incorrect, because they've been modded up by people who would like it to be true. Having your mod voted wrong would allow the system to reduce the weight of your future votes.
anyway, slashdot's seems to work as is, just wish they'd put a richer edit box for comments, like stackoverflows.
lol, and all the dancers in the commercials hold it with both hands. Now we know why.
well, it depends which laptop you compare it to, my old work Dell was heavier than a desktop PC!
The BBC's Click programme did a piece on it when it first came out and they ripped into it for being heavy, showing it being used in a gym for weight training. They also showed the very unresponsive keyboard in use... which told me all I needed to know about it.
I suspect the keyboard was not included originally to stop people thinking "that's a laptop, but twice as expensive and heavier".
not forgetting that Windows RT doesn't come with Outlook, so you can write a word document but cannot send it to anyone. Genius work Microsoft.
but it does happen. In the UK some police have taken to wearing very obvious cameras, partly to protect the policeman and partly to add evidence where necessary - can cut down on expensive trials and paperwork if you can play back the footage to the suspect once he's been caught. It also acts as a deterrent, apparently, though I figure a policeman in the area does that, they don't need a camera if they're there.
These have been used openly since 2006 in some areas.
sure, Microsoft deserves all they get and I am happy to laugh my tits off at their lack of success with Windows Phone now they're trying to shove themselves into a market they don't have a monopoly in.
But.. I do not want to replace them and their crap practices with a different company that acts in the same stupid, locked-in, sod-the-user, anti-competitive, and just generally evil ways. Google needs to be called out for this by us all before they turn into Microsoft 2.0
as he said - "the suits wanted to buy", and the suits generally have the budget, which looks true when he also says they engaged with redhat salesmen who didn't have a flexible licencing for bulk purchases.
Ultimately its a story of redhat business models being less than perfect, but it still confuses me why someone would make the distinction between RHEL and CentOS in any way other than price, which is what he was suggesting - that IT staff somehow value the free version over the paid version for no more than idealogical reasons. If he had said "the suits wanted to buy Windows, the IT staff wanted Linux" then I'd be all with that, but not between RHEL and rebranded RHEL.
not just favouritism towards open source. If you, as a company, made your money doing nothing except support... your support will be damn good.
Microsoft, Oracle etc, might (do) have some great 3rd line support engineers... but you have to get past the army of call centre drones and basically beg for help.
So it shouldn't be just because you like the idea. RH, Canonical will just be significantly better.