bwahahahaha, now MS will never gain market share with it.
Yeah right. This is frickin' Microsoft you're talking about. They can cut deals to get Silverlight as the platform for content people want to see. They can push Silverlight installs as part of their OS. (They also can, and have, produced a platform that's way more accessible to developers than Flash, though how much that matters is debatable.)
Microsoft may not gain market share on merit, and they may not gain market share clean, but I wouldn't bet on them losing entirely.
Wait, does that mean a Microsoft product is actually better?
A friend of mine used to work for IBM. They (his department, at least) used Outlook.
If that doesn't say it I'm not sure what does. I've heard some probably justified horror stories about being the person who needs to admin the Exchange server, but from the perspective of a normal user who just wants to read their e-mail, schedule meetings, etc... Outlook is ridiculously better. (Or was. I haven't used the latest major version of Notes.)
From what I read, Reiser took the stand against his lawyers' advice, and it sounded like his own testimony is what put the nails in the coffin. He gave his accounting of events, reasons why his car was found the way it was, etc., and from all accounts it sounded like the jury felt sure he was lying.
TV crime drama is full of episodes where someone lies about what they know about a crime to cover up their extramarital affair or for some other reason than "they're lying because they're guilty", but I can't really blame a jury for deciding that Reiser was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt based on his own testimony plus what evidence there was.
Much better to have an online form that people can fill in when submitting orders, which can then go directly into SAP or whatever. Including the Outlook application in such a solution is, in my opinion, a horrible hack.
Thinking back on the example I gave, I can't really disagree. In part it was a little too simple, and in part... yeah, a lot of brick and mortar companies do do things in a backwards way, and are more likely to seek help automating/improving their backwards way in some small incremental way than in replacing it whole cloth. It's true, too, that for whatever reason people feel comfortable e-mailing an order for a million dollars of machine parts to a customer service representative in a way that they don't feel comfortable filling out a web form. Probably a lot of that is culture and will change, in time.
That being said, I still do think we're going to see a lot of push for integration between the Office suite (or whatever would be taking its place) and the other systems that drive the business, be they big iron mainframes or web applications. Probably half of the data crucial to the smooth running of most business currently exists in a non-formalized way in e-mails, in Word docs, in Excel spreadsheets, etc.
We definitely do, and I'm glad to hear yours. Stuff like this is what keeps me coming back to slashdot. I see a pretty good variety of businesses in my work, but there's a lot more out there I don't see and it's interesting to hear what else is going on out there.
I think most companies at this point are using the web for some things, and not others. Some of this will definitely shift as new technology emerges (for example, ten years ago there was a pretty stark divide between the kinds of UI/user experiences you could provide in a console vs. web app, and now, much less so) and some may not.
As far as something like an Office suite, I think it depends a lot on the requirements of the business and what people are trying to get done.
If having multiple people collaborate on a document is of high importance, Google Docs is already probably a much better solution than MS Office + Sharepoint.
What if some of the documents need to have strict security or auditing requirements due to federal law? Now you're looking at Google Docs hosted locally, maybe, which you can do, but you're probably not leveraging the full promise of the web in doing it. Google Docs is still in the running there but it's not necessarily the best choice depending on what your other requirements are.
A case where I think Microsoft will gain ground, at least in the short term, is something like this:
Suppose you're dealing with a manufacturing company. They have a customer service department that processes orders. About half of these orders come in the form of a standard order form which they are e-mailed, and the other half come in the form of normal text e-mails with the order information scattered throughout in sentences. The orders get entered into something like a SAP setup. This, or something like this, is a pretty common scenario.
It's pretty trivial, now, to write a plug-in for Outlook for the customer service department that will automatically consume the standard order e-mails and use them to populate the SAP order forms, either submitting the automatically or showing them to the user for confirmation depending on how much you trust the people sending you the order forms. That eliminates a lot of human error from the process and reduces workload considerably. This is the kind of thing that a developer who knows what they're doing can realistically bang out in a day or so. Right now you can't really get something like that if you're trying to replace Outlook with GMail. (Of course, even Outlook is sort of a hybrid console/web offering these days, since there's OWA... but I'm pretty much talking about non-web Outlook here.) I wouldn't be surprised if that changes in the future, but I'm guessing we'll see a lot of Office apps of this kind written before it does.
I'd say probably a third to half of the companies are either on 07 or have a plan in place to be in the next few months, with the rest still on 03 and with no plan to move that I'm personally aware of.
The majority of the office workers that I've interacted with have seemed to struggle with the new interface for a bit (usually around a day to a week or so) but then thereafter seem happy with it, usually finding that Office will do things for them that they didn't know it could do.
Definitely, the "power users" who actually knew the more obscure old Office functions that are useful to their job and could fire them all off from the keyboard without ever really needing the mouse are seeing the least, if any, benefit... but my experience is that this isn't most office workers. Overall productivity is probably up with 07, even though it might be in the form of ratios like 5 people with more productivity and 1 person with less.
Let me guess, you have some kind of vested interest in MS Office...
Not so much, no.
I'm a consultant. In any given years I spend time working in the offices of a lot of different businesses. Some of these will be Fortune 500 companies, some will be medium or small. This gives me a pretty good read on where a variety of different businesses are going.
Number of these businesses going to Office 07: several. Number of these businesses even looking at making a transition to something like Google Docs: zero.
The wind just is not blowing that way yet.
In case you haven't noticed, the cool developers aren't working on Windows apps any more. There's a new development platform called the web.
You're kidding yourself if you think everything is going to the web anytime soon if ever.
8-10 years ago, sure, the web was our new messiah and everything needed to run on the web.
Flash forward to the present and people have figured out that, at least as the technologies stand for the foreseeable future, some things make sense to do as web apps, and some things don't.
(Professionally, I write both web and non-web apps, whichever is appropriate for the client's needs.)
Sure, it's easy to laugh at stuff like Google Docs today. But that stuff is the future, and it will be the death of MS Office.
I'm skeptical. If MS Office stands still, then surely something like Google Docs will overtake it for many businesses. I don't see MS as being that stupid about Office, though. They certainly aren't being that stupid about it currently.
That being said, you need to consider that because of laws like HIPAA and SarBox, some kinds of information will never be appropriate for a typical web app.
That's not realistically happening anytime soon. It's just not. Few if any businesses are in a hurry to get away from them.
Further, the combination of Office 2007 and the newest version of the dev tools to go with it (VSTO 3.0) open a lot of new possibilities for what an Office suite can/should do for a business -- and what's more, a lot of these are the kinds of possibilities that play extremely well to the pointy-haired boss crowd. Once that dam breaks expect Office to be more firmly ensconced in many businesses than ever.
Microsoft is still a company with basically two extremely profitable cash cows (OS and Office) which are both under threat.
What, exactly, is a serious threat to Office? OpenOffice? IBM's new Lotus thing? I don't think so. Neither of those will be a serious threat to Office's market share in the next year or more.
Your example isn't real evidence. It is an inference by clever two-faced lawyers. Conviction based on inference is not reasonable, esp for 1st degree murder.
In a vacuum this is true. However, there's much more to the case for the jury to weigh than an inference about a car seat.
The Microsoft way to do this is to have pervasive DRM as part of the OLPC framework. Microsoft will partner with textbook publishers to make free or low-cost but time-locked and otherwise DRM-encumbered electronic versions of their textbooks available on OLPC.
I think this is hard to cut and dry into good and evil or even 'best for children in developing countries' or not. (Disclaimer: I think people will, eventually realize that DRM is not a good idea and abandon it in its present forms.)
Freeload Press does something like this currently with college textbooks: you get the book free, but your version has ads. For a college student, the book is free-as-in-beer but not free-as-in-speech.
I feel like your ideal is that there would be tons of great free-in-all-senses-of-the-word textbooks out there for kids in developing countries to have, and I don't think we're there yet. Probably for a few subjects there's some great free material out there, and for others, not so much.
So:
Is the greater evil to get those kids free-as-in-beer but DRM encumbered books now, even realizing that, yes, books being provided in such a way will reduce the incentives for some who might help create completely-free texts to do so?
Or is it the greater evil to insist on a very high standard of free, and thus be unable to, at least in the short term, provide those kids with high-quality texts that the publisher is willing to give out under a certain license or under certain conditions but not abandon the rights to entirely?
I'm not sure there's an easy answer to that. The 'DRM may be a good idea' side of the argument is the side of the greedy and the evil, but it's also the side of the pragmatic.
Additionally, I've always found the "they can modify it" argument a but specious
Parent:
To you. Millions of kids growing up with computers with BASIC on them would tend to disagree.
Having been a kid who grew up with a computer with BASIC and is a programmer today in no small part because of it, I disagree with you and agree with the grandparent. It's not like you can't do development on a WinXP machine.
Further, how many of the 'BASIC generation' grew up with computers with open source operating systems? Oh, right, zero. That in no way prevented them from tinkering, exploring, learning, and growing.
Let's appreciate Open Source for the goodness that it is without trying to make it into mankind's only possible solution to problems that are already easily solved. At best, that dilutes the conversation. At worst, it costs credibility.
I've worked with various client/servers - and what I can tell is Exchange/Outlook is crap. People do use it not because it's good - it's not - because of power of admins dullnes.
The real answer is a little more depressing than that.
Outlook is crap, but it's also unfortunately the best for now. (For businesses, who need Outlook's scheduling, etc., the complete package of which is still better than the alternatives -- I prefer GMail for my personal e-mail.)
I'll admit I haven't used Lotus 8, but Lotus 7 is most likely the worst piece of software I've ever had the displeasure of using. Certainly it's the worst that anyone actually paid for. A mail app shouldn't crash constantly, and it certainly shouldn't crash and then refuse to restart until the machine is rebooted. The last client of mine that used Lotus lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of productivity to Notes every year without a doubt.
The saying goes that no one gets fired for buying IBM, but Notes may be the exception to that rule. If you hate Outlook/Exchange, I would give something Free a shot over Notes.
According to TFA, this is an option they're offering and doesn't replace selling Office as they currently do.
From that perspective, I don't see this as out of touch with their customers. I'm sure a majority of the people who buy Office won't want this Albany thing, but I'll bet some do and those customers will be served better.
Large corporations I can especially see going for this. You budget for it and forget about it. It's how they tend to roll.
Essentially, these people wrote a paper which says that hackers can analyze Windows Updates and figure out how to attack systems that aren't patched yet thereby. It goes into theory and proofs of that. Thanks, everyone else knew this about Windows Update years ago, probably for about as long as there's been a Windows Update.
It then proposes some solutions which are all, on the whole, worse than the status quo for various reasons. For example, forcing all Windows machines, whether they're turned on or connected to the internet or not, to patch at the very same instant is not realistic.
They should've called this thing: "Windows Update has problems. Magic can fix them."
Oh, I know, and you know, but I was correcting the Parent Poster's position that Windows was working better for some sort of magical reason.
Fair enough.
For what it's worth, I would say the reason is complicated and a combination of a lot of different factors adding up, including the one you mentioned.
The biggest one, IMHO, is that the open source community has high esteem/respect for developers, but other tasks that go into producing a polished product meant to be used by less technical people aren't valued the same way. I think someday the community will come around and place high values on rigorous testing, UI design, user documentation, etc., and that really will be "the year of Linux on the desktop."
What kind of idiot would require only the docx format otherwise?
Possibly an idiot that wanted the students to learn the newest version of the by far dominant set of tools.
I'm a programmer, so no one really cares about my Word/Excel skills. Try to get any number of non-technical office jobs and you'll be surprised how many employers do. You don't have to be completely insane or in Microsoft's pocket (although I'm sure in some cases those are the reasons) to try to provide your graduates with skills that are in demand.
You know, I think the current problem with respect to things like the Patriot Act and its abuses is not that most of the public doesn't vote -- after all, they're choosing to be uninterested/uninvolved in the system -- it's that a disturbing amount of the public does vote and does so based on wanting a magic rock that keeps scary things away at any price.
How do you convince Soccer Mom America that there's more danger that their children will be buggered by an overpowered FBI with few or no checks on their authority than there is that Islamic terrorists will blow up the local Wal-Mart? I don't have a good answer for that.
I've done a lot of work in my field, and if you could talk to co-workers or clients with whom I've worked, you'd find that I am quite good at what I do. I couldn't provide you with "samples" of my work as it would generally be inappropriate to do so. Since none of my work is on an open source project, I suppose you would not hire me even though I have a great reputation with my peers.
IMHO, once you've been in the industry a few years, reputation takes you 100x farther than the best set of code samples.
90%+ of the best jobs never get posted to a job board or see a public posting of any kind. They will never go through the usual HR resume screening process. They may not even see a tech interview. Someone already working on the team or for the company will contact someone they have worked with before and convince them to take the job.
You can fake a resume and you can fake an interview, but you can't fake having worked with someone for a year and impressed them with the quality of your work.
Where on earth did you get this idea? HR departments love simple criteria which they can use to rule in or rule out huge amounts of the massive numbers of applications they get. The name of college or university attended is one of the simplest such criteria.
That's true, but in my experience (for people being interviewed for first jobs out of college, which is most of when your college will matter), even HR departments prefer to look at GPA over name of college. Comparing numbers is even easier than remembering which schools are supposed to be good. Stupid, but, see: HR.
If you can go to a less prestigious school and get a 4.0 GPA vs. go to a top CS school and get a 3.0 after competing with grad students and other really smart people with every class graded on a curve that lowers rather than raises your grade, in terms of getting job interviews, you will be better served by the less prestigious school.
Girls, you're probably also better off at the liberal arts college. Engineering school will see you get your own way often by virtue of your gender, regardless of how brilliant you are or aren't, and while that's fun and possibly novel... you'll be challenged more and learn more in an environment where that's not true.
Slashdot Mirror
bwahahahaha, now MS will never gain market share with it.
Yeah right. This is frickin' Microsoft you're talking about. They can cut deals to get Silverlight as the platform for content people want to see. They can push Silverlight installs as part of their OS. (They also can, and have, produced a platform that's way more accessible to developers than Flash, though how much that matters is debatable.)
Microsoft may not gain market share on merit, and they may not gain market share clean, but I wouldn't bet on them losing entirely.
Wait, does that mean a Microsoft product is actually better?
A friend of mine used to work for IBM. They (his department, at least) used Outlook.
If that doesn't say it I'm not sure what does. I've heard some probably justified horror stories about being the person who needs to admin the Exchange server, but from the perspective of a normal user who just wants to read their e-mail, schedule meetings, etc... Outlook is ridiculously better. (Or was. I haven't used the latest major version of Notes.)
Did his lawyers just suck?
It's more that their client did.
From what I read, Reiser took the stand against his lawyers' advice, and it sounded like his own testimony is what put the nails in the coffin. He gave his accounting of events, reasons why his car was found the way it was, etc., and from all accounts it sounded like the jury felt sure he was lying.
TV crime drama is full of episodes where someone lies about what they know about a crime to cover up their extramarital affair or for some other reason than "they're lying because they're guilty", but I can't really blame a jury for deciding that Reiser was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt based on his own testimony plus what evidence there was.
Much better to have an online form that people can fill in when submitting orders, which can then go directly into SAP or whatever. Including the Outlook application in such a solution is, in my opinion, a horrible hack.
Thinking back on the example I gave, I can't really disagree. In part it was a little too simple, and in part... yeah, a lot of brick and mortar companies do do things in a backwards way, and are more likely to seek help automating/improving their backwards way in some small incremental way than in replacing it whole cloth. It's true, too, that for whatever reason people feel comfortable e-mailing an order for a million dollars of machine parts to a customer service representative in a way that they don't feel comfortable filling out a web form. Probably a lot of that is culture and will change, in time.
That being said, I still do think we're going to see a lot of push for integration between the Office suite (or whatever would be taking its place) and the other systems that drive the business, be they big iron mainframes or web applications. Probably half of the data crucial to the smooth running of most business currently exists in a non-formalized way in e-mails, in Word docs, in Excel spreadsheets, etc.
Well, perhaps we have different perspectives.
We definitely do, and I'm glad to hear yours. Stuff like this is what keeps me coming back to slashdot. I see a pretty good variety of businesses in my work, but there's a lot more out there I don't see and it's interesting to hear what else is going on out there.
I think most companies at this point are using the web for some things, and not others. Some of this will definitely shift as new technology emerges (for example, ten years ago there was a pretty stark divide between the kinds of UI/user experiences you could provide in a console vs. web app, and now, much less so) and some may not.
As far as something like an Office suite, I think it depends a lot on the requirements of the business and what people are trying to get done.
If having multiple people collaborate on a document is of high importance, Google Docs is already probably a much better solution than MS Office + Sharepoint.
What if some of the documents need to have strict security or auditing requirements due to federal law? Now you're looking at Google Docs hosted locally, maybe, which you can do, but you're probably not leveraging the full promise of the web in doing it. Google Docs is still in the running there but it's not necessarily the best choice depending on what your other requirements are.
A case where I think Microsoft will gain ground, at least in the short term, is something like this:
Suppose you're dealing with a manufacturing company. They have a customer service department that processes orders. About half of these orders come in the form of a standard order form which they are e-mailed, and the other half come in the form of normal text e-mails with the order information scattered throughout in sentences. The orders get entered into something like a SAP setup. This, or something like this, is a pretty common scenario.
It's pretty trivial, now, to write a plug-in for Outlook for the customer service department that will automatically consume the standard order e-mails and use them to populate the SAP order forms, either submitting the automatically or showing them to the user for confirmation depending on how much you trust the people sending you the order forms. That eliminates a lot of human error from the process and reduces workload considerably. This is the kind of thing that a developer who knows what they're doing can realistically bang out in a day or so. Right now you can't really get something like that if you're trying to replace Outlook with GMail. (Of course, even Outlook is sort of a hybrid console/web offering these days, since there's OWA... but I'm pretty much talking about non-web Outlook here.) I wouldn't be surprised if that changes in the future, but I'm guessing we'll see a lot of Office apps of this kind written before it does.
I'd say probably a third to half of the companies are either on 07 or have a plan in place to be in the next few months, with the rest still on 03 and with no plan to move that I'm personally aware of.
The majority of the office workers that I've interacted with have seemed to struggle with the new interface for a bit (usually around a day to a week or so) but then thereafter seem happy with it, usually finding that Office will do things for them that they didn't know it could do.
Definitely, the "power users" who actually knew the more obscure old Office functions that are useful to their job and could fire them all off from the keyboard without ever really needing the mouse are seeing the least, if any, benefit... but my experience is that this isn't most office workers. Overall productivity is probably up with 07, even though it might be in the form of ratios like 5 people with more productivity and 1 person with less.
Let me guess, you have some kind of vested interest in MS Office...
Not so much, no.
I'm a consultant. In any given years I spend time working in the offices of a lot of different businesses. Some of these will be Fortune 500 companies, some will be medium or small. This gives me a pretty good read on where a variety of different businesses are going.
Number of these businesses going to Office 07: several. Number of these businesses even looking at making a transition to something like Google Docs: zero.
The wind just is not blowing that way yet.
In case you haven't noticed, the cool developers aren't working on Windows apps any more. There's a new development platform called the web.
You're kidding yourself if you think everything is going to the web anytime soon if ever.
8-10 years ago, sure, the web was our new messiah and everything needed to run on the web.
Flash forward to the present and people have figured out that, at least as the technologies stand for the foreseeable future, some things make sense to do as web apps, and some things don't.
(Professionally, I write both web and non-web apps, whichever is appropriate for the client's needs.)
Sure, it's easy to laugh at stuff like Google Docs today. But that stuff is the future, and it will be the death of MS Office.
I'm skeptical. If MS Office stands still, then surely something like Google Docs will overtake it for many businesses. I don't see MS as being that stupid about Office, though. They certainly aren't being that stupid about it currently.
That being said, you need to consider that because of laws like HIPAA and SarBox, some kinds of information will never be appropriate for a typical web app.
The death of Office application suites.
That's not realistically happening anytime soon. It's just not. Few if any businesses are in a hurry to get away from them.
Further, the combination of Office 2007 and the newest version of the dev tools to go with it (VSTO 3.0) open a lot of new possibilities for what an Office suite can/should do for a business -- and what's more, a lot of these are the kinds of possibilities that play extremely well to the pointy-haired boss crowd. Once that dam breaks expect Office to be more firmly ensconced in many businesses than ever.
Microsoft is still a company with basically two extremely profitable cash cows (OS and Office) which are both under threat.
What, exactly, is a serious threat to Office? OpenOffice? IBM's new Lotus thing? I don't think so. Neither of those will be a serious threat to Office's market share in the next year or more.
Your example isn't real evidence. It is an inference by clever two-faced lawyers. Conviction based on inference is not reasonable, esp for 1st degree murder.
In a vacuum this is true. However, there's much more to the case for the jury to weigh than an inference about a car seat.
The Microsoft way to do this is to have pervasive DRM as part of the OLPC framework. Microsoft will partner with textbook publishers to make free or low-cost but time-locked and otherwise DRM-encumbered electronic versions of their textbooks available on OLPC.
I think this is hard to cut and dry into good and evil or even 'best for children in developing countries' or not. (Disclaimer: I think people will, eventually realize that DRM is not a good idea and abandon it in its present forms.)
Freeload Press does something like this currently with college textbooks: you get the book free, but your version has ads. For a college student, the book is free-as-in-beer but not free-as-in-speech.
I feel like your ideal is that there would be tons of great free-in-all-senses-of-the-word textbooks out there for kids in developing countries to have, and I don't think we're there yet. Probably for a few subjects there's some great free material out there, and for others, not so much.
So:
Is the greater evil to get those kids free-as-in-beer but DRM encumbered books now, even realizing that, yes, books being provided in such a way will reduce the incentives for some who might help create completely-free texts to do so?
Or is it the greater evil to insist on a very high standard of free, and thus be unable to, at least in the short term, provide those kids with high-quality texts that the publisher is willing to give out under a certain license or under certain conditions but not abandon the rights to entirely?
I'm not sure there's an easy answer to that. The 'DRM may be a good idea' side of the argument is the side of the greedy and the evil, but it's also the side of the pragmatic.
For clarity, grandparent:
Additionally, I've always found the "they can modify it" argument a but specious
Parent:
To you. Millions of kids growing up with computers with BASIC on them would tend to disagree.
Having been a kid who grew up with a computer with BASIC and is a programmer today in no small part because of it, I disagree with you and agree with the grandparent. It's not like you can't do development on a WinXP machine.
Further, how many of the 'BASIC generation' grew up with computers with open source operating systems? Oh, right, zero. That in no way prevented them from tinkering, exploring, learning, and growing.
Let's appreciate Open Source for the goodness that it is without trying to make it into mankind's only possible solution to problems that are already easily solved. At best, that dilutes the conversation. At worst, it costs credibility.
I've worked with various client/servers - and what I can tell is Exchange/Outlook is crap. People do use it not because it's good - it's not - because of power of admins dullnes.
The real answer is a little more depressing than that.
Outlook is crap, but it's also unfortunately the best for now. (For businesses, who need Outlook's scheduling, etc., the complete package of which is still better than the alternatives -- I prefer GMail for my personal e-mail.)
I'll admit I haven't used Lotus 8, but Lotus 7 is most likely the worst piece of software I've ever had the displeasure of using. Certainly it's the worst that anyone actually paid for. A mail app shouldn't crash constantly, and it certainly shouldn't crash and then refuse to restart until the machine is rebooted. The last client of mine that used Lotus lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of productivity to Notes every year without a doubt.
The saying goes that no one gets fired for buying IBM, but Notes may be the exception to that rule. If you hate Outlook/Exchange, I would give something Free a shot over Notes.
According to TFA, this is an option they're offering and doesn't replace selling Office as they currently do.
From that perspective, I don't see this as out of touch with their customers. I'm sure a majority of the people who buy Office won't want this Albany thing, but I'll bet some do and those customers will be served better.
Large corporations I can especially see going for this. You budget for it and forget about it. It's how they tend to roll.
Right. Perhaps I summed up that part of the article too briefly.
Regardless, none of their proposed solutions are viable.
Not to be inflammatory, but it really is.
Essentially, these people wrote a paper which says that hackers can analyze Windows Updates and figure out how to attack systems that aren't patched yet thereby. It goes into theory and proofs of that. Thanks, everyone else knew this about Windows Update years ago, probably for about as long as there's been a Windows Update.
It then proposes some solutions which are all, on the whole, worse than the status quo for various reasons. For example, forcing all Windows machines, whether they're turned on or connected to the internet or not, to patch at the very same instant is not realistic.
They should've called this thing: "Windows Update has problems. Magic can fix them."
You're entitled to your opinion, but understand that it reflects your politics and not reality in the business world.
Oh, I know, and you know, but I was correcting the Parent Poster's position that Windows was working better for some sort of magical reason.
Fair enough.
For what it's worth, I would say the reason is complicated and a combination of a lot of different factors adding up, including the one you mentioned.
The biggest one, IMHO, is that the open source community has high esteem/respect for developers, but other tasks that go into producing a polished product meant to be used by less technical people aren't valued the same way. I think someday the community will come around and place high values on rigorous testing, UI design, user documentation, etc., and that really will be "the year of Linux on the desktop."
What kind of idiot would require only the docx format otherwise?
Possibly an idiot that wanted the students to learn the newest version of the by far dominant set of tools.
I'm a programmer, so no one really cares about my Word/Excel skills. Try to get any number of non-technical office jobs and you'll be surprised how many employers do. You don't have to be completely insane or in Microsoft's pocket (although I'm sure in some cases those are the reasons) to try to provide your graduates with skills that are in demand.
You do know that Microsoft's personal deals with nearly every hardware manufacturer out there has a LOT to do with Windows' general "lack of fuss."
Ultimately, (most) end users don't really care, as long as it "works" for them.
not only could they pare the whole thing down to file extension (.wmv, .asf, .mp4 ?) but they could probably fast-track an I$O spec for the technology!
.prn files as an international standard.
I, for one, welcome
You know, I think the current problem with respect to things like the Patriot Act and its abuses is not that most of the public doesn't vote -- after all, they're choosing to be uninterested/uninvolved in the system -- it's that a disturbing amount of the public does vote and does so based on wanting a magic rock that keeps scary things away at any price.
How do you convince Soccer Mom America that there's more danger that their children will be buggered by an overpowered FBI with few or no checks on their authority than there is that Islamic terrorists will blow up the local Wal-Mart? I don't have a good answer for that.
I've done a lot of work in my field, and if you could talk to co-workers or clients with whom I've worked, you'd find that I am quite good at what I do. I couldn't provide you with "samples" of my work as it would generally be inappropriate to do so. Since none of my work is on an open source project, I suppose you would not hire me even though I have a great reputation with my peers.
IMHO, once you've been in the industry a few years, reputation takes you 100x farther than the best set of code samples.
90%+ of the best jobs never get posted to a job board or see a public posting of any kind. They will never go through the usual HR resume screening process. They may not even see a tech interview. Someone already working on the team or for the company will contact someone they have worked with before and convince them to take the job.
You can fake a resume and you can fake an interview, but you can't fake having worked with someone for a year and impressed them with the quality of your work.
Where on earth did you get this idea? HR departments love simple criteria which they can use to rule in or rule out huge amounts of the massive numbers of applications they get. The name of college or university attended is one of the simplest such criteria.
That's true, but in my experience (for people being interviewed for first jobs out of college, which is most of when your college will matter), even HR departments prefer to look at GPA over name of college. Comparing numbers is even easier than remembering which schools are supposed to be good. Stupid, but, see: HR.
If you can go to a less prestigious school and get a 4.0 GPA vs. go to a top CS school and get a 3.0 after competing with grad students and other really smart people with every class graded on a curve that lowers rather than raises your grade, in terms of getting job interviews, you will be better served by the less prestigious school.
Girls, you're probably also better off at the liberal arts college. Engineering school will see you get your own way often by virtue of your gender, regardless of how brilliant you are or aren't, and while that's fun and possibly novel... you'll be challenged more and learn more in an environment where that's not true.
Granted, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.