I like Windows 7. I certainly prefer it to the Mac UI, and I own an iMac and a MBP. SQL Server has lots of great features, and the.Net languages are much nicer than Objective-C, certainly. I use Bing and Google 50/50, probably. But that's not enough.
Microsoft makes a lot of money, but in my view, that is in spite of Ballmer, not because of him. The Courier looked like a great device. Why was that ended? How can Microsoft be so far behind in phones? You are no doubt right, there are others at Microsoft who think like Ballmer. Gates is too busy with his charity to notice or care, I suspect. At least that is a noble cause. Microsoft has been in a bad situation ever since Ballmer became CEO.
It's not "what is holding Microsoft back, it's "who", as the parent suggests. Ballmer is simply a disaster as a CEO. I'm surprised the board hasn't ended his tenure, which they should have done after the (fortunately for Microsoft) attempt to buy Yahoo. (Jerry Yang has to be one of the worst tech CEOs ever for not taking the deal.)
Look at Apple - A succession of mediocre CEOs after Jobs, then Jobs comes back to create great a great company again. It's not the company, really, its the leadership. Ballmer has been coasting on what went before. He's not as bad as people like Jimmy Cayne (Bear Stearns) or Dick Fuld (Lehman), but certainly not of the caliber needed to run a large company like Microsoft.
Apple, Google, IBM, Oracle, etc, aren't perfect, and they need competition. Microsoft has considerable potential, but this will never manifest as long as Ballmer is at the top.
Which is a very subjective assessment, IMHO. Apple made a deal with the book publishers to raise prices of best sellers above Amazon's $10 price. That was detrimental to consumers, certainly. Apple has banned Flash from its devices, which could also be perceived as denying consumer choice. Apple has updated its license terms for developers so that third party tools are not to be used to call their APIs.
Apple does many things to stifle competition, and in my view, more than Microsoft ever did. No question all of the above is worthy of some debate, and judges may get to have that debate in the future. How they decide is anyone's guess. I was party to copyright hearings at one time, and was astounded at the decision the judges reached after the hearings. (Their determination was overturned by Congress...)
I think Apple is playing a very risky legal game, but I guess that's how they think they will fend of the Android devices. I'm skeptical about the strategy. I don't think it will overcome the deficiencies of ObjC and XCode, which is what they really need worry about.
The law is highly subjective. Microsoft didn't have a monopoly until a judge decided they did. The exact same thing can easily happen to Apple. IBM has been the target of anti-trust action, as has Intel. No doubt Google will be getting sued someday. It really doesn't matter what you or I think, it's what the judges think. From what I have seen, that can be anything. If Apple has to face someone like David Boies, they will be in very serious trouble.
Apple has a lot to fear because you never know what will happen in court, if it gets to that. Judge Jackson considered the drive space used by IE DLLs an example of monopolistic behavior, because consumers were deprived of the use of that space, no matter how minuscule it was. He had a number of other reasons that were quite questionable, too. Didn't matter though.
A good prosecutor could have a field day with Apple's marketing tactics in music, books, hardware and software sales. Probably the app store, too. No doubt they are smart enough to settle, but who knows what DoJ might demand. If they decide to go to court, anything can happen.
As a consumer, and owner of several Apple products, I find their behavior to be far monopolistic than Microsoft's ever was. (Want to run Apple software? Buy Apple hardware. Want Apple hardware? It will always be loaded with Apple software. Want to load something on your iP*? Use ITMS, etc...) Do I think Apple really is a monopoly? No. But I never thought Microsoft was a monopoly, either.
Apple fans should hope Apple has better attorneys than Microsoft had when dealing with the DoJ. If Apple doesn't play ball with the DoJ, it will become a hamstrung corporate slushy, just like Microsoft did.
I am currently listening to the Teaching Company lecture series History of Ancient Egypt which is quite interesting. Bob Brier is also a fantastic lecturer.
I'm not so sure your post is that OT. The manner is in which ancient/lost civilizations are studied is very process oriented, and of course the study of the languages requires understanding of abstraction and the context in which they were created. I think software development has a number of similarities. Maybe CS 101 should be the study of an ancient language. Egyptian writing would actually be a great candidate.
I thought about getting an iPod Touch, then I heard the iPad was coming out, so I decided it would be a better device for me. I wont buy one until the next gen comes out, but I am wondering if the iPad will cause Amazon to cut the price of Kindle. If a Kindle was $100, I might be interested, but both the iPad and Kindle are too high priced for me at this time. A reasonably priced iPad that runs Kindle software would be of considerable interest.
Of course I would also like to see a USB port on the iPad - I don't want to be constrained by Apple with regard to files.
The infamous Von Schlieffen plan. Henry Kissinger discusses it in his book "Diplomacy" and a chilling read it is. The idea was that in order for Germany to be secure, France had to be knocked out, so they could focus on Russia.
In reality, it was an extremely destabilizing plan, and obviously led to disaster.
I think it has relevance today, but few seem to talk about it. I suppose people like Herman Kahn thought about it, only in the context of nuclear weapons. Good thing he did.
While China seems to be the boogeyman du jour for America, people should keep in mind that the Euro is competing very successfully against the greenback.
I can say that before Bing appeared, I used Google for 98% of my searches, others for the remaining 2%. I thought I would have a look at Bing and lose interest after a few tries, which is what happened with the other Microsoft engines.
I now use Bing for at least 50% of my searches, and more than that if I am looking for images. The potential problem Google has is that is incredibly easy to use another search engine. It's more difficult to switch an OS. I will be the first to admit that Bing is as good as it is, given the previous attempts Microsoft made.
I have a Series 1 Tivo; bought it about 10 years ago with a lifetime subscription. I late 2004, the cableco offered an HD DVR with HDTV, etc, so I switched to that configuration and stuck the old Tivo on the shelf. In 2008 I subscribed to Netflix, and thought the cableco DVR really wasn't needed anymore since I rarely watch live sports at home, and everything else of interest in HD was available on HD DVD or upscaled DVD.
I looked at the Series 3 HD Tivo, and decided to get one because it was cheap enough to amortize the cost in a few years, could stream Netflix and had some other nice features.
My experience with it was bad, though. The thing had too many software bugs and there are far too many ads embedded in the menus. Tivo has unfortunately jumped the shark. I returned it, got a Roku box for Netflix, and reconnected my old Tivo (good thing I got the lifetime subscription), which makes sense now that the only timeshifting I need to do is for broadcast television, since everything else of interest to me can be streamed.
Sorry to say, but I think Tivo will not be a "going concern" for much longer, given, in my experience, that their product quality has plunged and the need for a DVR is diminishing as more content becomes available via streaming. It's interesting to me that streaming made the old Tivo relevant again.
Maybe someone else has mentioned the idea here, but I think the next huge leap for mobile phones would be language translation ability at some basic level. You let another person speak a foreign language into it, it digitizes the signal, sends it back the a host, then the translated answer comes back to you.
Even at a simple language level, this would be huge. It would also have interesting effects on all spoken languages, since the commonly translated words would eventually migrate into all languages.
The problem was that none of the partners knew anything about software development so they didn't know if the CTO they hired was any good. They went by stupid things like names of the school he was from and names of his previous employers. His previous employers probably did the same. Software development in finance is a giant circle jerk.
Sort of OT, but doesn't the above describe the way people in finance generally get jobs in the first place? It seems the finance industry is more clique than quant, which would explain why so many funds blow up and why mutual fund returns generally suck. It doesn't surprise me at all that fund managers would hire a dolt CTO with a degree from Harvard instead of a great one with a degree from Georgia Tech, for example.
I think what really doomed Borland was the decision Kahn made to develop a C++ compiler for OS/2 instead of Windows NT. I was a huge fan or Borland products back then, but the writing was on the wall, NT would get market share, not OS/2. Kahn let his dislike of Gates skew his business sense, or so it seems.
Another factor to consider: As the EU or various countries within it continue to get fines from Microsoft, they will begin to see them as an alternate source of revenue. In other words, dinging Microsoft for some contrived fine here and there could actually be a "good" thing for Microsoft, as it will bound the EU/individual country actions to some extent, since they won't want to hurt Microsoft too much. In that sense, the fines become a cost of doing business, and a slush fund for the members of the EU. It's a lot like the tobacco settlements in this country. States sought to "penalize" the industry, but the tobacco companies saw the fines as a good way to get the states interested in generating revenue through tobacco sales since they get a bigger piece of the transactions now.
There was no special trait about Bill Gates that led him to the riches he has today, unless hard work (like it or not, the guy has spent a lot of time and effort to get where he is today) and knowing when a good opportunity was passing his way (hello, QDOS!) are somehow special traits.
I understand the impression, but I think you and many, many others miss the point about Gates success - Notice that he grew Microsoft from a tiny company in a cheap office park to a Fortune 100 company with many of the same people. This is really an astounding achievement. Brin, Page, Filo, Yang, Olmydar, and many other founders changed personnel on the way up and gave the CEO job to someone else. That's not a criticism of the practice, they were smart enough to give the job to someone they thought could do it better.
Gates real talent is or was in picking people. This is almost always the case with individuals who do things on a large scale. I would guess the same could be said of Torvalds. Jobs is similar; he recognized talent in Wozniak, but it is virtually impossible to do anything that scales without the enthusiastic participation of others. Since the original topic is about narcissists, you can see how they are destined to blow up at some point because they are very difficult to work with, and even if their brilliance can get them to a certain point of success, they will have created a number of enemies looking to take them down. (See Enron, Bear Stearns, etc.)
It's probably worthwhile to recall that Microsoft did not start out in the OS business. They were more interested in providing compilers. Gates didn't want to get into the OS business, either. But, IBM needed an OS, so Gates and Allen bought one.
Windows makes a fortune for Microsoft today, but lets assume that Linux completely undermined the Windows franchise. Seems to me Microsoft could offer something like.Net VMs as the "OS", selling tools and apps that require it to run. I'm not saying this will happen, but something like it could happen. There's no reason why Microsoft couldn't do just fine in a Linux dominated world. <foil hat>Now we know why they wanted "Lindows"</foil hat>
Think of it this way: My company runs Windows servers on VMware, which is Linux. So what are we running? All of the predictions of Microsoft's demise based on the increasing acceptance of Linux take a very, very narrow view of the possible outcomes.
I disagree with your assessment. No doubt lawyers would argue about the suspension of Habeas Corpus during the Civil war, which might be the basis of your position. But ultimately Congress approved of Lincoln's action. Aside from that, however, Booth decided to attempt, with his co-conspirators, to make a decision about the future of the USA by himself. Hardly patriotic in my view.
As a practical matter, you must recognize that Stalin and Lenin would have been more than happy to see his complete plan succeed. Booth had absolutely no right to act in a way that would deprive the people of the country the ability to make decisions through their elected representatives that would have enormous long term, strategic consequences for not only this nation, but also its friends and allies.
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I like Windows 7. I certainly prefer it to the Mac UI, and I own an iMac and a MBP. SQL Server has lots of great features, and the
Microsoft makes a lot of money, but in my view, that is in spite of Ballmer, not because of him. The Courier looked like a great device. Why was that ended? How can Microsoft be so far behind in phones? You are no doubt right, there are others at Microsoft who think like Ballmer. Gates is too busy with his charity to notice or care, I suspect. At least that is a noble cause. Microsoft has been in a bad situation ever since Ballmer became CEO.
It's not "what is holding Microsoft back, it's "who", as the parent suggests. Ballmer is simply a disaster as a CEO. I'm surprised the board hasn't ended his tenure, which they should have done after the (fortunately for Microsoft) attempt to buy Yahoo. (Jerry Yang has to be one of the worst tech CEOs ever for not taking the deal.)
Look at Apple - A succession of mediocre CEOs after Jobs, then Jobs comes back to create great a great company again. It's not the company, really, its the leadership. Ballmer has been coasting on what went before. He's not as bad as people like Jimmy Cayne (Bear Stearns) or Dick Fuld (Lehman), but certainly not of the caliber needed to run a large company like Microsoft.
Apple, Google, IBM, Oracle, etc, aren't perfect, and they need competition. Microsoft has considerable potential, but this will never manifest as long as Ballmer is at the top.
dominating a market to the detriment of consumers
Which is a very subjective assessment, IMHO. Apple made a deal with the book publishers to raise prices of best sellers above Amazon's $10 price. That was detrimental to consumers, certainly. Apple has banned Flash from its devices, which could also be perceived as denying consumer choice. Apple has updated its license terms for developers so that third party tools are not to be used to call their APIs.
Apple does many things to stifle competition, and in my view, more than Microsoft ever did. No question all of the above is worthy of some debate, and judges may get to have that debate in the future. How they decide is anyone's guess. I was party to copyright hearings at one time, and was astounded at the decision the judges reached after the hearings. (Their determination was overturned by Congress...)
I think Apple is playing a very risky legal game, but I guess that's how they think they will fend of the Android devices. I'm skeptical about the strategy. I don't think it will overcome the deficiencies of ObjC and XCode, which is what they really need worry about.
The law is highly subjective. Microsoft didn't have a monopoly until a judge decided they did. The exact same thing can easily happen to Apple. IBM has been the target of anti-trust action, as has Intel. No doubt Google will be getting sued someday. It really doesn't matter what you or I think, it's what the judges think. From what I have seen, that can be anything. If Apple has to face someone like David Boies, they will be in very serious trouble.
A good prosecutor could have a field day with Apple's marketing tactics in music, books, hardware and software sales. Probably the app store, too. No doubt they are smart enough to settle, but who knows what DoJ might demand. If they decide to go to court, anything can happen.
As a consumer, and owner of several Apple products, I find their behavior to be far monopolistic than Microsoft's ever was. (Want to run Apple software? Buy Apple hardware. Want Apple hardware? It will always be loaded with Apple software. Want to load something on your iP*? Use ITMS, etc...) Do I think Apple really is a monopoly? No. But I never thought Microsoft was a monopoly, either.
Apple fans should hope Apple has better attorneys than Microsoft had when dealing with the DoJ. If Apple doesn't play ball with the DoJ, it will become a hamstrung corporate slushy, just like Microsoft did.
I am currently listening to the Teaching Company lecture series History of Ancient Egypt which is quite interesting. Bob Brier is also a fantastic lecturer.
I'm not so sure your post is that OT. The manner is in which ancient/lost civilizations are studied is very process oriented, and of course the study of the languages requires understanding of abstraction and the context in which they were created. I think software development has a number of similarities. Maybe CS 101 should be the study of an ancient language. Egyptian writing would actually be a great candidate.
Of course I would also like to see a USB port on the iPad - I don't want to be constrained by Apple with regard to files.
undo mod
The infamous Von Schlieffen plan. Henry Kissinger discusses it in his book "Diplomacy" and a chilling read it is. The idea was that in order for Germany to be secure, France had to be knocked out, so they could focus on Russia.
In reality, it was an extremely destabilizing plan, and obviously led to disaster.
I think it has relevance today, but few seem to talk about it. I suppose people like Herman Kahn thought about it, only in the context of nuclear weapons. Good thing he did.
While China seems to be the boogeyman du jour for America, people should keep in mind that the Euro is competing very successfully against the greenback.
Don't be too sure about the Euro
Another link with the famous Milton Friedman comment about the Euro and a currency crisis.
It will be interesting to see what happens to Greece
I now use Bing for at least 50% of my searches, and more than that if I am looking for images. The potential problem Google has is that is incredibly easy to use another search engine. It's more difficult to switch an OS. I will be the first to admit that Bing is as good as it is, given the previous attempts Microsoft made.
I have a Series 1 Tivo; bought it about 10 years ago with a lifetime subscription. I late 2004, the cableco offered an HD DVR with HDTV, etc, so I switched to that configuration and stuck the old Tivo on the shelf. In 2008 I subscribed to Netflix, and thought the cableco DVR really wasn't needed anymore since I rarely watch live sports at home, and everything else of interest in HD was available on HD DVD or upscaled DVD.
I looked at the Series 3 HD Tivo, and decided to get one because it was cheap enough to amortize the cost in a few years, could stream Netflix and had some other nice features.
My experience with it was bad, though. The thing had too many software bugs and there are far too many ads embedded in the menus. Tivo has unfortunately jumped the shark. I returned it, got a Roku box for Netflix, and reconnected my old Tivo (good thing I got the lifetime subscription), which makes sense now that the only timeshifting I need to do is for broadcast television, since everything else of interest to me can be streamed.
Sorry to say, but I think Tivo will not be a "going concern" for much longer, given, in my experience, that their product quality has plunged and the need for a DVR is diminishing as more content becomes available via streaming. It's interesting to me that streaming made the old Tivo relevant again.
Maybe someone else has mentioned the idea here, but I think the next huge leap for mobile phones would be language translation ability at some basic level. You let another person speak a foreign language into it, it digitizes the signal, sends it back the a host, then the translated answer comes back to you.
Even at a simple language level, this would be huge. It would also have interesting effects on all spoken languages, since the commonly translated words would eventually migrate into all languages.
If you are into nukes, don't forget the The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History
Classic cars Auburn, Cord, Duesenburg are here.
astroTurfer[poster] =
(
0=="Slashdot".CompareTo(site) ?
((enjoyProduct) ? ((0=="Microsoft".CompareTo(productCompany) ) ? true : false) : false) : false
)
This is
The problem was that none of the partners knew anything about software development so they didn't know if the CTO they hired was any good. They went by stupid things like names of the school he was from and names of his previous employers. His previous employers probably did the same. Software development in finance is a giant circle jerk.
Sort of OT, but doesn't the above describe the way people in finance generally get jobs in the first place? It seems the finance industry is more clique than quant, which would explain why so many funds blow up and why mutual fund returns generally suck. It doesn't surprise me at all that fund managers would hire a dolt CTO with a degree from Harvard instead of a great one with a degree from Georgia Tech, for example.
OLAP was designed to answer that type of question. MDX is the language used to perform multi-dimensional queries.
I think what really doomed Borland was the decision Kahn made to develop a C++ compiler for OS/2 instead of Windows NT. I was a huge fan or Borland products back then, but the writing was on the wall, NT would get market share, not OS/2. Kahn let his dislike of Gates skew his business sense, or so it seems.
Another factor to consider: As the EU or various countries within it continue to get fines from Microsoft, they will begin to see them as an alternate source of revenue. In other words, dinging Microsoft for some contrived fine here and there could actually be a "good" thing for Microsoft, as it will bound the EU/individual country actions to some extent, since they won't want to hurt Microsoft too much. In that sense, the fines become a cost of doing business, and a slush fund for the members of the EU. It's a lot like the tobacco settlements in this country. States sought to "penalize" the industry, but the tobacco companies saw the fines as a good way to get the states interested in generating revenue through tobacco sales since they get a bigger piece of the transactions now.
There was no special trait about Bill Gates that led him to the riches he has today, unless hard work (like it or not, the guy has spent a lot of time and effort to get where he is today) and knowing when a good opportunity was passing his way (hello, QDOS!) are somehow special traits.
I understand the impression, but I think you and many, many others miss the point about Gates success - Notice that he grew Microsoft from a tiny company in a cheap office park to a Fortune 100 company with many of the same people. This is really an astounding achievement. Brin, Page, Filo, Yang, Olmydar, and many other founders changed personnel on the way up and gave the CEO job to someone else. That's not a criticism of the practice, they were smart enough to give the job to someone they thought could do it better.
Gates real talent is or was in picking people. This is almost always the case with individuals who do things on a large scale. I would guess the same could be said of Torvalds. Jobs is similar; he recognized talent in Wozniak, but it is virtually impossible to do anything that scales without the enthusiastic participation of others. Since the original topic is about narcissists, you can see how they are destined to blow up at some point because they are very difficult to work with, and even if their brilliance can get them to a certain point of success, they will have created a number of enemies looking to take them down. (See Enron, Bear Stearns, etc.)
It's probably worthwhile to recall that Microsoft did not start out in the OS business. They were more interested in providing compilers. Gates didn't want to get into the OS business, either. But, IBM needed an OS, so Gates and Allen bought one.
Windows makes a fortune for Microsoft today, but lets assume that Linux completely undermined the Windows franchise. Seems to me Microsoft could offer something like
Think of it this way: My company runs Windows servers on VMware, which is Linux. So what are we running? All of the predictions of Microsoft's demise based on the increasing acceptance of Linux take a very, very narrow view of the possible outcomes.
I think you could come up with a great list of books about the history of the Roman Empire. Can you post some links?
I disagree with your assessment. No doubt lawyers would argue about the suspension of Habeas Corpus during the Civil war, which might be the basis of your position. But ultimately Congress approved of Lincoln's action. Aside from that, however, Booth decided to attempt, with his co-conspirators, to make a decision about the future of the USA by himself. Hardly patriotic in my view.
As a practical matter, you must recognize that Stalin and Lenin would have been more than happy to see his complete plan succeed. Booth had absolutely no right to act in a way that would deprive the people of the country the ability to make decisions through their elected representatives that would have enormous long term, strategic consequences for not only this nation, but also its friends and allies.
Which Booth are you referring to?