Yea I haven't had much bad to say about 7-zip. I also like that it appears to be GPL (at least the SourceForge project says it is.)
RAR isn't open source, although they do *basically* give it away for free. You can use WinRAR indefinitely with nag screens only if you open the full program, and all the "unrar" tools available on other platforms are free. RAR really filled a need for an archiver that was friendly to multiple parts and didn't have some of the legacy limitations of ZIP.
But, I really do prefer GPL software when it comes to things like this. Who wants to be locked out of some old archives because there's no tool to extract it with your current version of OS-Whatever? You'll have to pull out old hardware or emulation to do it. With GPL stuff, chances are high that you'll always find a current version of the tool.
"And I see here you work as a Network Administrator for the state..."
They can pull up your employment title. You can't exactly plead ignorance if your job is to know this stuff. However, it does make it easier for us to bullshit a reason as to why that disks' data is all new.
It's quite possible to lose encryption keys, too. What are they going to do, lock you up for 50 years because you lost a CD?
If it's encrypted, they wouldn't be able to make a believable case for knowing what's there, so there probably wouldn't be any legal action taken against you if you refuse the key. The only argument they could use would be "Well, we can't find anything incriminating anywhere else."
Hell yea. Although ARJ had slightly better compression, it allowed for *gasp* two files in the archive to be named the same!
Now a days it's all RAR for the Usenet and Torrents and such. RAR is really great but it's piss slow compressing anything. It's just so easy to make multipart archives with it.
I won't completely refute your claim that the 360 was in more limited supply, but there's two things about that statement: The first assumes that if Microsoft made a lot more 360's, it would have sold a lot more. That's an assumption. I know I wasn't going to buy one even if I could; especially not after seeing the release titles. The second assumes that PS3's were available everywhere right away, which wasn't true until the last few weeks. I had to wait until March to find one. I called around every few days and nobody ever had one in stock. I was repeatedly told "We just got a bunch in but they're gone."
A funny side note to the people telling me the were out of stock as also the same sales people's reasons not to buy one. One guy told me the console will fail because they didn't box an HDMI cable. Another one told me Sony stopped producing PS3's because Nintendo was selling more consoles. It was insane! When I got mine, I plugged it in, and it's been fun every time I turn it on.
I think that Sony could have made the console cheaper if they charged for online services. They could have knocked $100 off the price if they knew people would have to spend that to play their games over the Internet. The reason I didn't care about the $100 price difference over the X360 was that I won't have to pay monthly to play games online. I don't know why this is never in the equation.
I will buy an Xbox 360 eventually, once I can get a used one on the cheap. It's mostly so I'll be able to play Fusion Frenzy 2 =)
Sony doesn't have low sales. They've sold more consoles then Microsoft did relative to release date. Low compared to the PS2? You betcha. Is that a surprise? No, why should it be? It's more expensive, and it's the last of the "big three" to join the party.
Rumors of the PS3's death are greatly exaggerated.
I didn't actually mean to replace Windows XP with Vista, but Vista setup tossed aside my entire XP install, program files, and everything else when I opted not to do an upgrade.
Overall, even though I've had to find upgrade versions for a lot of software, most things do run allright. If you have AGP, beware, you might have issues. But it works.
It works a lot more slow, though. While most apps and stuff would still run find on a 1Ghz machine on Windows XP, and thus run fine on Vista on a much more powerful machine, games really do run like shit compared to Windows XP. I mean, it's pretty bad when WINE under Linux can run Guild Wars, not a new game, better then Windows Vista.
Because I don't play a lot of games, it's allright, but I'm not a happy Vista user. There's too many little anomalies and things that are "what the shit were they thinking?" issues.
Microsoft and it's x64 support has been pissing me off since Windows XP 64. They make it incompatible enough, and difficult enough, that nobody wants to bother with it. It's as if they simply don't want people to make the most out of their hardware for a reason I can't yet figure out.
None of the apple Flash-based players have removable flash memory. You're stuck with whatever's there.
I like the hard drive players. They hold so much data, aren't loud, don't get very hot, last a long time, have excellent transfer rates, and are cheap in comparison to Flash Memory.
If you can't remove it, I'd rather have a 60 or 80GB hard drive in there unless I was completely concerned with the size of the unit. You can't have everything.
As long as they can make 80GB Flash players without costing $800, I'm all for it. Otherwise, the hard disk based players are fine. The iPod videos with the big storage are still pretty darned small, still last a long time on battery, and hold a shit load of stuff.
Of course, I don't even own an iPod, so what the fuck do I know.
You fail, again, to realize that the very definition of gambling includes a CHANCE to win. Everyone knows the payouts are low on gambling and lottery tickets, but someone WILL win, and you're playing for your fair chance to win.
By calling something "gambling" and simply *never* paying out, you're scamming.
Well then you're a complete moron, because if it were ALWAYS and EVER about TODAY, then the only games produced would be on the fucking Atari 2600. There's a shit load of them out there! Or the SNES!
A product needs to be produced and sold. Sony is doing that. What I don't understand is how you don't understand that you can't magically produce 20 million of ANYTHING - it has to be produced and sold, which IS HAPPENING, and stronger then the 360 did.
That doesn't tell the whole story surely, but more sales might equal more installed base moving forward.
You make zero sense. By your logic, all products are doomed to fail.
I mustn't be as much as a gaming freak as.. apparently everyone else, because I don't really remember Sony hyping the system any more then any other system or company.
I also think it's naive to believe that the PS3 would be able to capture any big market this quickly. Think about it - the original Playstation was like a sleeper hit. It came from nowhere and stormed the market because nothing could touch it's performance or capabilities, and it wasn't too expensive. Sony stepped in and captured the market when the market was beginning to stagnate.
The PS2 built on that success because again, nothing could really compete with it. Microsoft's Xbox is a nice machine but came in a year later, two for Japan. The Playstation 2 had a stronghold, and especially in the Japanese market.
So it's several years later now, and when you're up against a company like Microsoft in a major way (MS put a lot more effort and R&D and marketing on the 360) it just won't happen like that again, not this time. The PS3 is the late-entry.
It's selling well, and it's a good product. It's really not much more expensive then the Xbox 360 and it can do some really cool things. But it's not about single platforms anymore - the last set of systems (GameCube, PS2, Xbox) showed that there's enough room for multiple systems. Games are often released on all systems.
So you can own whatever you want, it doesn't matter. The PS3 won't be a flop; Less then the original Xbox and that was actually a pretty big hit.
It's a joke to think that any of this petty shit will affect the platform's viability in the long term.
Games are quickly moving away from the pre-rendered cut-scene plot advancements in a major way. If they had to supplement bad graphics with big CGI cut scenes it would be a big step backwards.
You shouldn't assume that I don't know what an RPG is, or where they came from. Final Fantasy is no longer one of them. They've become action-adventure, where you advance from one scene to the next, in a very linear fashion. This game is still fun to play, but it's not really roll playing anymore then a Super Mario Brother is roll playing.
You really don't make the series sound very good, in all honesty. It sounds like they just pump out the games with no concern about the quality of the product. There will be a point when the name "Final Fantasy" just won't do it anymore. Let's be realistic here: if nobody cared about great sound, great graphics, and the advancement of the video game genre, then why aren't we still playing text-based RPG's or the Ultima V (My favorite RPG of all time) tile-based graphics games?
An overclocked GameCube game might suffice THIS time, but then what? The name itself might be enough to keep the Japanese fans happy but I don't see it keeping everyone else as happy (Final Fantasy isn't nearly as popular elsewhere.)
Yea well the reason I re-hashed the same "factoid" is because it REALLY is not fast machine. It's $250 and what are we really getting for that money?
But it's not about the price, it's the fact that yes, FF has been about graphics as much as any other big title for years now. I don't think the original games were any worse off on graphics then other games - in fact I remember Final Fantasy for the SNES being really cool in terms of graphics and sound.
I think it could be a mistake to release it for the Wii for that reason.
I didn't claim it was anyone else but myself with that opinion.
You do realize that the Wii is basically an overclocked GameCube?
Final Fantasy has always been about the graphics, as well as progress-quest style gameplay. If you put it on GameCube, I mean Wii, it will only look marginally better then older GameCube titles.
It just won't happen, unless they say "screw the graphics" and go for the easy cash that might blemish the entire franchise.
I don't understand all the doomsday talk of the PS3. The Xbox 360 had extremely mediocre games at first, and not too many to choose from. The PS3 is selling better then the Xbox 360 did at the same time since release.
So I don't get it. They've sold an assload of PS3's and they're still selling an assload of them. Just because one game developer, that only has a couple titles anyways, is going to wait doesn't mean Sony "needs to get in gear."
The PS3 is a captive market and any company that doesn't release titles for it is simply paid off by the other guy, or doesn't have the ability to do it. It's not about the system itself.
I'll agree that there's some shortcomings to the PS3's interface and such, but overall I've been having fun with my PS3 and I don't really like game consoles very much.
So you're trying to tell me that developing an app for the iPhone will be *exactly* like developing for a Macintosh?
heheh. It might be the same basic OS (just like any Linux is "basically" the same) but the iPhone has a different architecture, different memory model, different sets of API's.. In other words, it's not different then a Windows PC versus a MS Smartphone - both use Win32-type calls and you can basically use the same development tools. You can use Visual Studio to develop for all of Microsoft's platforms, including Xbox and Xbox 360, the Windows CE based devices, etc etc.
Sorry, but that's just dumb if you think all Apple products are exactly the same, and then turning around and saying Microsoft's various platforms are completely different. And you even cite the different versions of Windows! haha
We could say Apple has a lot of different platforms:
iPod iPod Video iPod Nano OSX 10.0 OSX 10.1 OSX 10.2 OSX 10.3 OSX 10.4 PPC OSX 10.4 Intel OSX 10.5 PPC OSX 10.5 Intel Apple TV iPhone
It's ridiculous, right? So is your argument. Spread your uneducated FUD somewhere else.
He is ignorant, but you sort of are too if you think that we somehow can only do one thing or the other with corn. The US is practically a wasteland of unused land. More to the point, however, is that there's plenty of food in the world to feed everyone. It's just that not everyone is getting it.
If you're starving, it's not because they're using corn to power a truck.
And why the fuck do we care what Castro says? He's a communist dictator, a criminal, and hopefully he'll be dead soon.
Let me clarify for the Anonymous Coward that brings nothing to the table but a criticism:
*IN THE MARKET OF CELL PHONES, THE PROFIT MARGIN FOR CELL PHONES IS VERY SMALL.*
Apple might make money when they introduce the phone, but when they don't lower the price like every other cell phone does within a few months, they will stop selling. Well, stop selling in any significant quantity.
That's my opinion. Now unless you have something substantial to bring, STFU.
The funny thing is, out of all the people I know, I know one with an iPod. There might be another one in there that I'm not aware of. As successful as it is, and the fact that everyone knows that it is, it's still not owned by even a large percentage of IT type folks. Maybe the big market is teen girls or something. Shit, my mother would have never gotten me a $300 walkman, let alone take it to school.
So I don't know who's buying these things, but I hardly ever see them. It might seem, by reading Slashdot and Digg (aka Apple's marketing site) that everyone has one and we're all drooling at whatever Apple feeds us next. Hey, they iPod is a neat thing, but it's a damned portable music player. It's the new Walkman. I don't need to listen to music everywhere I go.
I think the iPhone will be less of a success then the iPod, and so I don't know if I'll ever see someone with one.
(The iPod did take a long time to catch on though, and it was weird. I remember the commercial with Jeff Goldblum, and then it was just kinda gone. Then BAM OMG IPOD ROKS. Strange how that happens. Lots of luck, is my guess.)
NT did borrow heavily from OS/2, however. NTFS, for example, was a straight port of HPFS. The kernel was practically purchased from Digital when they hired the entire VMS team to build a new kernel.
However, it was a home brew app, so that's one.. two was..?
But seriously, the point wasn't that Microsoft never made their own products but for years they simply buy the competition, and very often the product they purchased stagnates. Take Visio, for example. Coolest program ever, and it hasn't changed in seven years since they bought it in 2000.
One could also argue that Microsoft didn't start putting Office into high gear until serious competition started to really appear - OpenOffice started to get really good, as others. So then they put out Office 2003 - which while isn't a giant leap forward in what you can do with it, it's a lot better from a usability standpoint. Then there's Office '07.. I think they took it a little too far. But, the fact remains that Microsft purchases their competition, and lets it stagnate until they need to compete with someone they can't buy.
Because Microsoft has such a captive market they don't have to worry about silly things like product upgrades that actually mean something besides a version change.
God, I feel like I'm ranting here, and I guess I am. I'm just pissed at Vista; I installed it a couple days ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea I haven't had much bad to say about 7-zip. I also like that it appears to be GPL (at least the SourceForge project says it is.)
RAR isn't open source, although they do *basically* give it away for free. You can use WinRAR indefinitely with nag screens only if you open the full program, and all the "unrar" tools available on other platforms are free. RAR really filled a need for an archiver that was friendly to multiple parts and didn't have some of the legacy limitations of ZIP.
But, I really do prefer GPL software when it comes to things like this. Who wants to be locked out of some old archives because there's no tool to extract it with your current version of OS-Whatever? You'll have to pull out old hardware or emulation to do it. With GPL stuff, chances are high that you'll always find a current version of the tool.
"And I see here you work as a Network Administrator for the state..."
They can pull up your employment title. You can't exactly plead ignorance if your job is to know this stuff. However, it does make it easier for us to bullshit a reason as to why that disks' data is all new.
It's quite possible to lose encryption keys, too. What are they going to do, lock you up for 50 years because you lost a CD?
If it's encrypted, they wouldn't be able to make a believable case for knowing what's there, so there probably wouldn't be any legal action taken against you if you refuse the key. The only argument they could use would be "Well, we can't find anything incriminating anywhere else."
AH HAH! Perfect! Just use Outlook to store all your 100GB of MP3's! =)
Hell yea. Although ARJ had slightly better compression, it allowed for *gasp* two files in the archive to be named the same!
..
Now a days it's all RAR for the Usenet and Torrents and such. RAR is really great but it's piss slow compressing anything. It's just so easy to make multipart archives with it.
I really wish Stuffit would go away
I won't completely refute your claim that the 360 was in more limited supply, but there's two things about that statement: The first assumes that if Microsoft made a lot more 360's, it would have sold a lot more. That's an assumption. I know I wasn't going to buy one even if I could; especially not after seeing the release titles. The second assumes that PS3's were available everywhere right away, which wasn't true until the last few weeks. I had to wait until March to find one. I called around every few days and nobody ever had one in stock. I was repeatedly told "We just got a bunch in but they're gone."
A funny side note to the people telling me the were out of stock as also the same sales people's reasons not to buy one. One guy told me the console will fail because they didn't box an HDMI cable. Another one told me Sony stopped producing PS3's because Nintendo was selling more consoles. It was insane! When I got mine, I plugged it in, and it's been fun every time I turn it on.
I think that Sony could have made the console cheaper if they charged for online services. They could have knocked $100 off the price if they knew people would have to spend that to play their games over the Internet. The reason I didn't care about the $100 price difference over the X360 was that I won't have to pay monthly to play games online. I don't know why this is never in the equation.
I will buy an Xbox 360 eventually, once I can get a used one on the cheap. It's mostly so I'll be able to play Fusion Frenzy 2 =)
Sony doesn't have low sales. They've sold more consoles then Microsoft did relative to release date. Low compared to the PS2? You betcha. Is that a surprise? No, why should it be? It's more expensive, and it's the last of the "big three" to join the party.
Rumors of the PS3's death are greatly exaggerated.
I didn't actually mean to replace Windows XP with Vista, but Vista setup tossed aside my entire XP install, program files, and everything else when I opted not to do an upgrade.
Overall, even though I've had to find upgrade versions for a lot of software, most things do run allright. If you have AGP, beware, you might have issues. But it works.
It works a lot more slow, though. While most apps and stuff would still run find on a 1Ghz machine on Windows XP, and thus run fine on Vista on a much more powerful machine, games really do run like shit compared to Windows XP. I mean, it's pretty bad when WINE under Linux can run Guild Wars, not a new game, better then Windows Vista.
Because I don't play a lot of games, it's allright, but I'm not a happy Vista user. There's too many little anomalies and things that are "what the shit were they thinking?" issues.
Microsoft and it's x64 support has been pissing me off since Windows XP 64. They make it incompatible enough, and difficult enough, that nobody wants to bother with it. It's as if they simply don't want people to make the most out of their hardware for a reason I can't yet figure out.
None of the apple Flash-based players have removable flash memory. You're stuck with whatever's there.
I like the hard drive players. They hold so much data, aren't loud, don't get very hot, last a long time, have excellent transfer rates, and are cheap in comparison to Flash Memory.
If you can't remove it, I'd rather have a 60 or 80GB hard drive in there unless I was completely concerned with the size of the unit. You can't have everything.
As long as they can make 80GB Flash players without costing $800, I'm all for it. Otherwise, the hard disk based players are fine. The iPod videos with the big storage are still pretty darned small, still last a long time on battery, and hold a shit load of stuff.
Of course, I don't even own an iPod, so what the fuck do I know.
You fail, again, to realize that the very definition of gambling includes a CHANCE to win. Everyone knows the payouts are low on gambling and lottery tickets, but someone WILL win, and you're playing for your fair chance to win.
By calling something "gambling" and simply *never* paying out, you're scamming.
The taxes analogy is just stupid.
We see about two of these "TOP TECH FLOPS" editorials and blog posts a month.
.com "bubble" burst several years ago.
WE KNOW. MS BOB sucked. Newton failed. We all are very much aware that the
Yet, these editorials keep drawing traffic time and time again. So, without further ado, visit my website for "THE MILLENNIUM'S 1,500 TOP TECH FLOPS!"
Indeed - at that point it's just a scam. You can't really apply the whole "if you're stupid enough to gamble.." argument there.
Well then you're a complete moron, because if it were ALWAYS and EVER about TODAY, then the only games produced would be on the fucking Atari 2600. There's a shit load of them out there! Or the SNES!
A product needs to be produced and sold. Sony is doing that. What I don't understand is how you don't understand that you can't magically produce 20 million of ANYTHING - it has to be produced and sold, which IS HAPPENING, and stronger then the 360 did.
That doesn't tell the whole story surely, but more sales might equal more installed base moving forward.
You make zero sense. By your logic, all products are doomed to fail.
I mustn't be as much as a gaming freak as .. apparently everyone else, because I don't really remember Sony hyping the system any more then any other system or company.
I also think it's naive to believe that the PS3 would be able to capture any big market this quickly. Think about it - the original Playstation was like a sleeper hit. It came from nowhere and stormed the market because nothing could touch it's performance or capabilities, and it wasn't too expensive. Sony stepped in and captured the market when the market was beginning to stagnate.
The PS2 built on that success because again, nothing could really compete with it. Microsoft's Xbox is a nice machine but came in a year later, two for Japan. The Playstation 2 had a stronghold, and especially in the Japanese market.
So it's several years later now, and when you're up against a company like Microsoft in a major way (MS put a lot more effort and R&D and marketing on the 360) it just won't happen like that again, not this time. The PS3 is the late-entry.
It's selling well, and it's a good product. It's really not much more expensive then the Xbox 360 and it can do some really cool things. But it's not about single platforms anymore - the last set of systems (GameCube, PS2, Xbox) showed that there's enough room for multiple systems. Games are often released on all systems.
So you can own whatever you want, it doesn't matter. The PS3 won't be a flop; Less then the original Xbox and that was actually a pretty big hit.
It's a joke to think that any of this petty shit will affect the platform's viability in the long term.
Games are quickly moving away from the pre-rendered cut-scene plot advancements in a major way. If they had to supplement bad graphics with big CGI cut scenes it would be a big step backwards.
You shouldn't assume that I don't know what an RPG is, or where they came from. Final Fantasy is no longer one of them. They've become action-adventure, where you advance from one scene to the next, in a very linear fashion. This game is still fun to play, but it's not really roll playing anymore then a Super Mario Brother is roll playing.
You really don't make the series sound very good, in all honesty. It sounds like they just pump out the games with no concern about the quality of the product. There will be a point when the name "Final Fantasy" just won't do it anymore. Let's be realistic here: if nobody cared about great sound, great graphics, and the advancement of the video game genre, then why aren't we still playing text-based RPG's or the Ultima V (My favorite RPG of all time) tile-based graphics games?
An overclocked GameCube game might suffice THIS time, but then what? The name itself might be enough to keep the Japanese fans happy but I don't see it keeping everyone else as happy (Final Fantasy isn't nearly as popular elsewhere.)
Yea well the reason I re-hashed the same "factoid" is because it REALLY is not fast machine. It's $250 and what are we really getting for that money?
But it's not about the price, it's the fact that yes, FF has been about graphics as much as any other big title for years now. I don't think the original games were any worse off on graphics then other games - in fact I remember Final Fantasy for the SNES being really cool in terms of graphics and sound.
I think it could be a mistake to release it for the Wii for that reason.
I didn't claim it was anyone else but myself with that opinion.
You do realize that the Wii is basically an overclocked GameCube?
Final Fantasy has always been about the graphics, as well as progress-quest style gameplay. If you put it on GameCube, I mean Wii, it will only look marginally better then older GameCube titles.
It just won't happen, unless they say "screw the graphics" and go for the easy cash that might blemish the entire franchise.
I don't understand all the doomsday talk of the PS3. The Xbox 360 had extremely mediocre games at first, and not too many to choose from. The PS3 is selling better then the Xbox 360 did at the same time since release.
So I don't get it. They've sold an assload of PS3's and they're still selling an assload of them. Just because one game developer, that only has a couple titles anyways, is going to wait doesn't mean Sony "needs to get in gear."
The PS3 is a captive market and any company that doesn't release titles for it is simply paid off by the other guy, or doesn't have the ability to do it. It's not about the system itself.
I'll agree that there's some shortcomings to the PS3's interface and such, but overall I've been having fun with my PS3 and I don't really like game consoles very much.
So you're trying to tell me that developing an app for the iPhone will be *exactly* like developing for a Macintosh?
heheh. It might be the same basic OS (just like any Linux is "basically" the same) but the iPhone has a different architecture, different memory model, different sets of API's.. In other words, it's not different then a Windows PC versus a MS Smartphone - both use Win32-type calls and you can basically use the same development tools. You can use Visual Studio to develop for all of Microsoft's platforms, including Xbox and Xbox 360, the Windows CE based devices, etc etc.
Sorry, but that's just dumb if you think all Apple products are exactly the same, and then turning around and saying Microsoft's various platforms are completely different. And you even cite the different versions of Windows! haha
We could say Apple has a lot of different platforms:
iPod
iPod Video
iPod Nano
OSX 10.0
OSX 10.1
OSX 10.2
OSX 10.3
OSX 10.4 PPC
OSX 10.4 Intel
OSX 10.5 PPC
OSX 10.5 Intel
Apple TV
iPhone
It's ridiculous, right? So is your argument. Spread your uneducated FUD somewhere else.
He is ignorant, but you sort of are too if you think that we somehow can only do one thing or the other with corn. The US is practically a wasteland of unused land. More to the point, however, is that there's plenty of food in the world to feed everyone. It's just that not everyone is getting it.
If you're starving, it's not because they're using corn to power a truck.
And why the fuck do we care what Castro says? He's a communist dictator, a criminal, and hopefully he'll be dead soon.
Let me clarify for the Anonymous Coward that brings nothing to the table but a criticism:
*IN THE MARKET OF CELL PHONES, THE PROFIT MARGIN FOR CELL PHONES IS VERY SMALL.*
Apple might make money when they introduce the phone, but when they don't lower the price like every other cell phone does within a few months, they will stop selling. Well, stop selling in any significant quantity.
That's my opinion. Now unless you have something substantial to bring, STFU.
The funny thing is, out of all the people I know, I know one with an iPod. There might be another one in there that I'm not aware of. As successful as it is, and the fact that everyone knows that it is, it's still not owned by even a large percentage of IT type folks. Maybe the big market is teen girls or something. Shit, my mother would have never gotten me a $300 walkman, let alone take it to school.
So I don't know who's buying these things, but I hardly ever see them. It might seem, by reading Slashdot and Digg (aka Apple's marketing site) that everyone has one and we're all drooling at whatever Apple feeds us next. Hey, they iPod is a neat thing, but it's a damned portable music player. It's the new Walkman. I don't need to listen to music everywhere I go.
I think the iPhone will be less of a success then the iPod, and so I don't know if I'll ever see someone with one.
(The iPod did take a long time to catch on though, and it was weird. I remember the commercial with Jeff Goldblum, and then it was just kinda gone. Then BAM OMG IPOD ROKS. Strange how that happens. Lots of luck, is my guess.)
NT did borrow heavily from OS/2, however. NTFS, for example, was a straight port of HPFS. The kernel was practically purchased from Digital when they hired the entire VMS team to build a new kernel.
However, it was a home brew app, so that's one.. two was..?
But seriously, the point wasn't that Microsoft never made their own products but for years they simply buy the competition, and very often the product they purchased stagnates. Take Visio, for example. Coolest program ever, and it hasn't changed in seven years since they bought it in 2000.
One could also argue that Microsoft didn't start putting Office into high gear until serious competition started to really appear - OpenOffice started to get really good, as others. So then they put out Office 2003 - which while isn't a giant leap forward in what you can do with it, it's a lot better from a usability standpoint. Then there's Office '07.. I think they took it a little too far. But, the fact remains that Microsft purchases their competition, and lets it stagnate until they need to compete with someone they can't buy.
Because Microsoft has such a captive market they don't have to worry about silly things like product upgrades that actually mean something besides a version change.
God, I feel like I'm ranting here, and I guess I am. I'm just pissed at Vista; I installed it a couple days ago.