Has Microsoft ever, in its entire history, made a better product than the competition, sold it for a better price, and made a profit doing so? I'm not trolling; I'm genuinely curious to know if this has ever happened.
How old are you, 12?
Try Excel vs. Lotus 123
Try Exchange vs. Notes
Try Explorer 4 vs Navigator, when Netscape refused to get their CSS act together.
Right now, WMF blows MPEG4 to hell. Smaller files, better quality.
You should read more and write less. I think you ARE trolling.
We all got that letter, but it doesnt mean Jack. Rational is a public company, and they have to accept bids from EVERYONE, no matter what sweet deal the CEO made with IBM.
Microsoft can afford to spend whatever they need to move the shareholders to their side. IBM is going to lose this one.
I know there were some very pissed off people at Microsoft that Rational accepted a bid from IBM without even talking to Microsoft. I actually hope Microsoft wins if there is going to be a bidding war.
I HATE Visio for UML, and anything that encourages more UML usage in VS.NET is a good thing. Besides that, the horrific pricing for the Rational Suite should come down.
You might checkout the Microsoft message boards on this, because it almost NEVER works. Now, with Rational being from IBM, I suppose it will give Microsoft the nessesary incentive to FIX Visio, but using it right now for UML is a crapshoot at best. You can get away with diagramimg, but using it for code generation or database roundtripping works no where near as well as the Rational XDE for.NET.
Oh, I suppose you would rather be stuck doing your UML in crappy VISIO?
Shut up!
Since you are using Rose in CLASSES, you havent been doing UML long enough to know what is shitty and what isnt. Frankly, for a CLASSROOM, you are LUCKY to be using Rose, considering what it costs.
The traffic here is the worst I have ever seen. In San Diego, there are so many highways, you can pick one of five different ways to get anywhere. You have 4 SEPARATE freeways leading right into downtown.
In Seattle, you dont have a lot of choices. If you want to get from Magnolia to Redmond (my commute, you have to go across(5mph crawl) or around (15mph longer crawl) the fucking lake.
Not to mention that everyone up here drives like my dead grandma drinking a latte in one hand with the other on their cell phone.
The monorail isnt going to help, because it doesnt go where it needs to go, which is across the LAKE! Who the hell goes to or from Ballard to West Seattle for WORK? NOBODY.
Total waste, and when they get around to considering something to relieve that joke on 520, where it takes A HOUR to get from Microsoft to the west side (13 miles), they will naturally run out of money.
They could build another bridge across the lake for what this boondogle is going to cost, so that a bunch of hippies can get from Greenlake to the beach before their coffee cools off.
Too bad so few here understand your very well made point. I dont agree that there is no answer to the basic question that you posed.
The answer is simply a return to the basic rules of life. Eventually, the people of planet are going to reach a point where they will no longer tolerate or support unproductive people. Just like in nature, the weak and stupid will become the food or fertilizer for the stronger and the smarter. There is no other answer, there never was, just temporary insanity on the part of all those believers in Religion or Society to solve their problems and their hunger.
What will first happen is the ending of social programs, with laws forcing people to support the members of their families themselves, or risk punishment. This will precipitate a massive drop in births in the industrialized world, along with a drop in the tax base used to support the undeveloped world, which will largely die out, just like animals whose water hole has dried up.
OSS doesnt have the patience, resources or the coordinated manpower to replace Exchange, and would rather opt for short-term glory fixing easier stuff.
People dont work in Collaborative Groups. At least not very well, anyway. This is why Groupware features in Exchange were downplayed when the product was being developed.
A typical sell against Lotus Notes went as follows:
Client: -"Do you have field level replication?"
MS: -"No, but would you like to recieve attachments reliably in your email, wouldnt you?
Client: -"Sure, but what about this groupware thing? Lotus tells me it will change the world."
MS: -"When is the last time you sat down at the same time with 10-20 people to write a memo?"
MS: -"A report?"
MS: -"An MRD?"
Client: -"Never."
MS: -"Would you really want to trust a company responsible for marketing Ami-Pro?"
The only thing difficult about making an Exchange replacement is the technical (and legal) difficulty of deciphering MS' proprietary protocols.
This is the exact nonsense I'm talking about. Write your own fucking protocals!! Do it, if its so damned easy. It aint.
You and your bretheren think its better to just take(by government force)MS's intellectual property, so you sit back and whine, rather than put your heads down and code a replacement.
Fact is, 99% of you wouldnt know where to begin, which is why Exchange is in no danger. Most of it, is actually easy, but then try integrating it, genius.
If Microsoft and Chevron with their 100,000 member server clients not rebooting nightly, surely any company can install and configure Exchange correctly. Bottom line, 80% of MCSE's dont know squat.
Seriously though, check out OWA(Outlook Web Access) to see the emplementation, if you havent already.
Again, it is the server handling all these messages, that is going to take years to design, code and test, no matter what kind of interface you want to put in front of it. Frankly, were Microsoft to get stupid and provide OWA clients for other platforms, the game would be over.
No chance of that happening, though.
A big problem in building an Exchange Server replacement, is that you end up with the same inherent security challenges that Exchange has. RPC's alone are enough to gag a maggot. Now try sticking all that on a web server, with the Calendaring, Authentication, and other processes, give it 4 9's of uptime, and when you(and your 100-person coding team) are done, I'll be dammed if you dont try to make some money from it. It will NEVER happen. Use Exchange.
Not a troll, just the truth. First, there isnt and never has been a functional replacement for the Exchange/Outlook combination. Wanna know why?
Because its DAMMED HARD to build. If it were a no/brainer, you would have a dozen choices by now. The fact is that all these OSS wannabe coders bitching about Exchange are in no position technically or financially to replace it, no matter how much bitching about it they do.
I was in the Exchange group, back in 98, and I can tell you that as bad as Exchange is, it is still better than anything else approaching its functionality, and all these people know it. Dont like Exchange? Go fuck with simple SMTP, and shutup. Hell, I remember when Lotus Notes installs had to cross their fingers every time they sent an attachment. Groupware? Kiss my ass. People dont work that way.
The reason that Exchange/Outlook are #1, is because they do the most things that people want done, more OFTEN and naturally than its competition. Is it perfect? Hell no, but it is BETTER than everything else out there.
Microsoft wont say it, but Exchange's reputation is more the fault of brain-dead MCSE's than anything else. It is Microsoft's fault that they made the product approachable to any idiot that could get their hands on the software, but the fact remains that Exchange is the best Messeging/Calendar product on the market, and if anyone things its easy to beat, SHUT UP and BUILD IT!!!
You treat us as if we aren't anything more than a pair of breasts and a pussy and that we're on this planet only to provide you with masturabatory material
Look sweetheart, although most slashdotters still hoping for their first lay, and are too afraid to admit it; the things you mentioned are the primary reason men speak to women in the first place. Nor is it wrong to say so.
The fact is, its BIOLOGY.
Take those things away, and see how many men are going to be willing to risk 50+% of their incomes to be marry your ass.
All men willing to marry women without breasts or pussies; speak now, or forever hold your 'piece'(cause that's ALL you'll be doing.)
If Exchange is good enough for a Corporation as large as Chevron, its good enough for me. I maintain that most people just dont know how to configure and manage Exchange correctly, which can lead to all kinds of hell.
SQL may not be as good as Oracle, but for 80% of the world, its good enough, and WAY cheaper. Tahoe will be even better. TSQL is again "good enough". Microsoft wins most of these arguments, because "good enough" costs about half as much as "great".
I'm no Microsoft cheerleader, but the.NET Framework is pretty awesome. No objective person could say otherwise.
First, Microsoft already has enough share in the Enterprise space with Exchange and SQL to insure enough revenue to for the foreseable future.Dont forget that for Database-driven web sites; SQL already is the marketshare leader.
Second, the.NET CLR has a great deal of momentum already, and will certainly pickup marketshare from J2EE, because with the IDE, its just too damn easy. Say what you want about IIS, but as far as IDE's and languages go, Microsoft is as good as anyone.
Third, with MS picking up Apache support for.NET, Microsoft picks up even more share. MS wont have any problems selling Visual Studio, they never do.
If Linux is going to pick up Desktop share, its going to have to become as easy to install and configure as XP, and that aint gonna happen anytime soon. When my mother can install Mandrake like she installed XP, then I might agree with you.
However Genius, there are reasons why we do it. In addition to personal satisfaction for coming up with a particularly clever solution to a problem, I LIKE TO GET PAID.
No profits = eventually NO PAY. There may be those of you willing to slave over a hot CPU for months on end just to feel better about yourself, but I am happy to be called a CodeWHORE. I do it for the bucks as much as anything else.
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How old are you, 12?
Try Excel vs. Lotus 123
Try Exchange vs. Notes
Try Explorer 4 vs Navigator, when Netscape refused to get their CSS act together.
Right now, WMF blows MPEG4 to hell. Smaller files, better quality.
You should read more and write less. I think you ARE trolling.
If you think that convertable assets (into cash) is better than CASH itself, then you are smoking something.
Converting assets entails costs, either capitol gains taxes, fees, etc.
Cash is King. Get a grip.
If this rumor turns out to be true, Microsoft can and will cut the bigger check with ease.
Microsoft can afford to spend whatever they need to move the shareholders to their side. IBM is going to lose this one.
I HATE Visio for UML, and anything that encourages more UML usage in VS.NET is a good thing. Besides that, the horrific pricing for the Rational Suite should come down.
I want Rose free in my MSDN subcription!
You might checkout the Microsoft message boards on this, because it almost NEVER works. Now, with Rational being from IBM, I suppose it will give Microsoft the nessesary incentive to FIX Visio, but using it right now for UML is a crapshoot at best. You can get away with diagramimg, but using it for code generation or database roundtripping works no where near as well as the Rational XDE for .NET.
Actually, I posted the story days ago, but it was rejected. I can only guess it was because I asked what the impact would be on Microsoft.
Shut up!
Since you are using Rose in CLASSES, you havent been doing UML long enough to know what is shitty and what isnt. Frankly, for a CLASSROOM, you are LUCKY to be using Rose, considering what it costs.
The traffic here is the worst I have ever seen. In San Diego, there are so many highways, you can pick one of five different ways to get anywhere. You have 4 SEPARATE freeways leading right into downtown.
In Seattle, you dont have a lot of choices. If you want to get from Magnolia to Redmond (my commute, you have to go across(5mph crawl) or around (15mph longer crawl) the fucking lake.
Not to mention that everyone up here drives like my dead grandma drinking a latte in one hand with the other on their cell phone.
The monorail isnt going to help, because it doesnt go where it needs to go, which is across the LAKE! Who the hell goes to or from Ballard to West Seattle for WORK? NOBODY.
Total waste, and when they get around to considering something to relieve that joke on 520, where it takes A HOUR to get from Microsoft to the west side (13 miles), they will naturally run out of money.
They could build another bridge across the lake for what this boondogle is going to cost, so that a bunch of hippies can get from Greenlake to the beach before their coffee cools off.
The answer is simply a return to the basic rules of life. Eventually, the people of planet are going to reach a point where they will no longer tolerate or support unproductive people. Just like in nature, the weak and stupid will become the food or fertilizer for the stronger and the smarter. There is no other answer, there never was, just temporary insanity on the part of all those believers in Religion or Society to solve their problems and their hunger.
What will first happen is the ending of social programs, with laws forcing people to support the members of their families themselves, or risk punishment. This will precipitate a massive drop in births in the industrialized world, along with a drop in the tax base used to support the undeveloped world, which will largely die out, just like animals whose water hole has dried up.
This is not an 'IF' scenario, it will happen.
OSS doesnt have the patience, resources or the coordinated manpower to replace Exchange, and would rather opt for short-term glory fixing easier stuff.
Nice analogies.
People dont work in Collaborative Groups. At least not very well, anyway. This is why Groupware features in Exchange were downplayed when the product was being developed.
A typical sell against Lotus Notes went as follows:
Client: -"Do you have field level replication?"
MS: -"No, but would you like to recieve attachments reliably in your email, wouldnt you?
Client: -"Sure, but what about this groupware thing? Lotus tells me it will change the world."
MS: -"When is the last time you sat down at the same time with 10-20 people to write a memo?"
MS: -"A report?"
MS: -"An MRD?"
Client: -"Never."
MS: -"Would you really want to trust a company responsible for marketing Ami-Pro?"
Client: -"Tell me more about Exchange."
This is the exact nonsense I'm talking about. Write your own fucking protocals!! Do it, if its so damned easy. It aint.
You and your bretheren think its better to just take(by government force)MS's intellectual property, so you sit back and whine, rather than put your heads down and code a replacement.
Fact is, 99% of you wouldnt know where to begin, which is why Exchange is in no danger. Most of it, is actually easy, but then try integrating it, genius.
If Microsoft and Chevron with their 100,000 member server clients not rebooting nightly, surely any company can install and configure Exchange correctly. Bottom line, 80% of MCSE's dont know squat.
Again, it is the server handling all these messages, that is going to take years to design, code and test, no matter what kind of interface you want to put in front of it. Frankly, were Microsoft to get stupid and provide OWA clients for other platforms, the game would be over.
No chance of that happening, though.
A big problem in building an Exchange Server replacement, is that you end up with the same inherent security challenges that Exchange has. RPC's alone are enough to gag a maggot. Now try sticking all that on a web server, with the Calendaring, Authentication, and other processes, give it 4 9's of uptime, and when you(and your 100-person coding team) are done, I'll be dammed if you dont try to make some money from it. It will NEVER happen. Use Exchange.
I was going to say just what you said(only meaner)but I thought for sure people would think I was just trolling.
Very easy to design a replacement, but impossible (for OSS) to agree on how to code it. It will never happen. NEVER.
Not a troll, just the truth. First, there isnt and never has been a functional replacement for the Exchange/Outlook combination. Wanna know why?
Because its DAMMED HARD to build. If it were a no/brainer, you would have a dozen choices by now. The fact is that all these OSS wannabe coders bitching about Exchange are in no position technically or financially to replace it, no matter how much bitching about it they do.
I was in the Exchange group, back in 98, and I can tell you that as bad as Exchange is, it is still better than anything else approaching its functionality, and all these people know it. Dont like Exchange? Go fuck with simple SMTP, and shutup. Hell, I remember when Lotus Notes installs had to cross their fingers every time they sent an attachment. Groupware? Kiss my ass. People dont work that way.
The reason that Exchange/Outlook are #1, is because they do the most things that people want done, more OFTEN and naturally than its competition. Is it perfect? Hell no, but it is BETTER than everything else out there.
Microsoft wont say it, but Exchange's reputation is more the fault of brain-dead MCSE's than anything else. It is Microsoft's fault that they made the product approachable to any idiot that could get their hands on the software, but the fact remains that Exchange is the best Messeging/Calendar product on the market, and if anyone things its easy to beat, SHUT UP and BUILD IT!!!
You should have stopped right there. Save your PrimeTime predictions for things you know about.
Look sweetheart, although most slashdotters still hoping for their first lay, and are too afraid to admit it; the things you mentioned are the primary reason men speak to women in the first place. Nor is it wrong to say so.
The fact is, its BIOLOGY.
Take those things away, and see how many men are going to be willing to risk 50+% of their incomes to be marry your ass.
All men willing to marry women without breasts or pussies; speak now, or forever hold your 'piece'(cause that's ALL you'll be doing.)
Excuse me, and I'm not trolling, but MICROSOFT DID THAT ALREADY!!!!
Yeah, I know it was Windows only, but the fact remains, that Microsoft's 1.2 JVM kicked Sun's ass, and all they got for it was a lawsuit.
I think anyone who does a better JVM than Sun can look forward to the same treatment.
SQL may not be as good as Oracle, but for 80% of the world, its good enough, and WAY cheaper. Tahoe will be even better. TSQL is again "good enough". Microsoft wins most of these arguments, because "good enough" costs about half as much as "great".
I'm no Microsoft cheerleader, but the .NET Framework is pretty awesome. No objective person could say otherwise.
thanks for the update.
Any problems with it are usually are the result of some stupid paper MCSE setting it up in the first place.
Configured correctly along with AD, and maintained properly, Exchange2000 pretty much rocks.
Second, the .NET CLR has a great deal of momentum already, and will certainly pickup marketshare from J2EE, because with the IDE, its just too damn easy. Say what you want about IIS, but as far as IDE's and languages go, Microsoft is as good as anyone.
Third, with MS picking up Apache support for .NET, Microsoft picks up even more share. MS wont have any problems selling Visual Studio, they never do.
If Linux is going to pick up Desktop share, its going to have to become as easy to install and configure as XP, and that aint gonna happen anytime soon. When my mother can install Mandrake like she installed XP, then I might agree with you.
However Genius, there are reasons why we do it. In addition to personal satisfaction for coming up with a particularly clever solution to a problem, I LIKE TO GET PAID.
No profits = eventually NO PAY. There may be those of you willing to slave over a hot CPU for months on end just to feel better about yourself, but I am happy to be called a CodeWHORE. I do it for the bucks as much as anything else.