You forgot one very important reason why they might say they're pro-consumer. Companies that are pro consumer make money. Companies that aren't pro consumer don't make money..at least not for long. Making your customers happy is good business. A company can try to maximize profit AND be pro consumer. Take off the tinfoil hat dude.
I read and re-read your short post and tried to restrain my desire to reply but couldn't. My argument, which many may disagree with, is that saying "Microsoft has been fighting open standards/interfaces for 2-3 decades" is fallacious. Remember, it was Microsoft that did more to open up the PC to developers than any other company. Before Microsoft popularized DOS (not, I didn't say "invent" in an attempt to limit the "Microsoft didn't invent DOS rants from the crazies), computing was a mish-mash of competing "standards" that made it close to impossible for developers to build hardware and software that worked on systems from multiple providers. DOS and then Windows created a huge comparatively open environment on top of which thousands of companies could build. In that sense, Microsoft was perhaps the biggest promoter of open standards ever.
Now, 20+ years after DOS, openness means something entirely different. I won't even attempt to define it because...well, everyone has a different definition. But to suggest that Microsoft has been fighting open standards/interfaces for all these years is silly.
It's funny how the "media" likes to play up departures from Microsoft of mid-level people like this guy. I seriously doubt that there is much hand wringing over this and Ballmer certainly wasn't throwing chairs. I doubt he even knows about this guy leaving. The rumor about Ballmer throwing a chair when Mark Lucovsky left is, at best, unsubstantiated but at least in the case of Lucovsky you can imagine Ballmer giving a sh$t. Lucovsky was a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and, while never actually shipping any real software, probably had a lot to offer. Ward was working on patterns and practices for god sakes!
This is just another example of the media (and/. posters) trying to dumb down "news" to the point that the ignorant masses can get it. I think we deserve more credit. So, Google's going to add a link to Star Office from the Google tool bar and that's going to bring down Microsoft? So, "Web 2.0" is going to take over the world, leading us to nirvana where all applications are Web-based and we're freed from the shackles of PC's?
I don't buy it. The situation is more complex than that. The web is changing the way software is designed and that's good thing. Thing will not be the same. But it's not an either/or world. There is such a thing as nuance.
My take.
The most interesting scenarios are not entirely Web-based. I think the world is not going to go entirely one way (Web-based) or the other (all PC/device-based). The most interesting scenarios take advantage of the easy deployment and easy updating of Web-based applications and the power of PC-based applications. Note: didn't say Windows but Windows will be a major player for many many years to come IMHO.
There are lots of reasons for this. First, let's talk applications. While web email systems like Hotmail of Gmail are nice, they're clunky compared to a full email client like Outlook. I have played around with some of the Web (Ajax) based "productivity" applications (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_usin g_Ajax/) for links to some examples and they're nice but nothing compared to Office or a good PC-based personal information manager. Try them for yourself to see.
Then there's hardware. PC and mobile device hard ware is getting incredibly cheap. I just bought a duel core 3.3 mhz systemn with 2 gigs of ram and 1 tb of disck space for less than $3,000. There are literally billions of PC's out in the world and will be billions of smart phones out there within a few years. Just this week MIT talked about the $100 PC coming. Why would we want to use all of that processing power for nothing more than driving dumb-terminals with browsers? It just doesn't make sense. Software developers should build applications that use that processing power to do cool things that you can't with purely Web-based applications.
Then there's privacy and security. You can whine all you want about problems with security of Windows or PC's in general but I would guess that most people are still more comfortable having their personal information on their own PC rather than up in the cloud. Do you really want your Quicken files sitting on a server somewhere? I'm sure people will get more comfortable with this over time but I don't think these concerns will ever go away entirely.
Then there's connectivity. Sure, someday connectivity may be 100% pervasive but I don't see that happening any time soon. I live in a very "wired" city and there are still many many places where I can't get WiFi access or even decent wireless phone service. Do I really want to rely completely on Web-based applications for my computing? Not this decade.
The good news is that good software developers will find ways to give users the best of both worlds. Although it will take time to come to fruition, I think amazing applications will come along that have locally running code, combined with code running on servers that deliver experiences we can barely imagine. I saw a demo at Microsoft's PDC last month of an application developed for 3M. The application ran in a browser (IE now but relatively trivial to make it work in other modern browsers) that used Windows Vista's new presentation technology running on the PC and connected out to Web services to deliver an absoltely amazing experience. Because the application used local resources the graphics were incredible - 3D zooming, great navigation, rich graphics etc. But the application also connected up to Web-based resources using Web services to bring data into the application. The application runs
Love 'em or hate 'em but Microsoft has better backward compatibility that almost any software company...sometimes to their detriment. They get beat up all the time on/. and elsewhere for not making great leaps forward because of their concerns with backward compatibility. It's not like their complete idiots. If they wanted to they could throw Office and Windows legacy code out and start fresh. But if they did it would piss their customers off.
Show me your proof that MSFT intentionally adds incompatibilities to new versions of Excel etc.
Re:What?! No more Flash-based Microsoft Ads?
on
Flash, Meet Sparkle
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· Score: 1
Why would that make you laugh? Microsoft uses lots of technlogy from other companies. They use Siebel for their CRM system. They use SAP for their HR/Finance system. Adobe/Macromedia is one of the biggest ISV's for Windows. Why wouldn't they use Flash? Grow up.
You immediately equated Sparkle (what a dumb name) to Flash eye candy which suggests you didn't read anything about this stuff. True, in the wrong hands Sparkle (or, Expression Interactive Designer as I would call it) has the potential to improve our lives like the Blink and Scroll tags so popular in the early years of HTML. But in the right hands it has the potential to help developers WITH designers help to create much better applications. Lets face it, most developers have the design sense of a rock. They should rightly focus on programming logic/code. Most designers have the programming skills of a rock. Expression/Sparkle makes it possible for each person to focus on what they do best. Think of it as "code behind" where the presentation layer is mostly separate from the plumbing code.
I'm not a Flash developer but from what I know from friends, it's extremely difficult to write real applications in Flash. That must be why the Flash specialty developers charge so much? Love 'em or hate 'em, Microsoft is usually pretty good at making things easier and I would expect Expression/Sparkle to do the same thing for rich 2D adn 3D applications.
Humbly...
No, not really. Do you complain when you are offered multiple models of mobile phones from Motorola? They're all pretty similar, just a few more featuers for the higher priced products. What about cars? You can buy 3 or 4 models of the BMW 5 series. You can buy several models of Mac's (see my previous post). This is a basic business concept called "segmentation." You segment your customers based on what products you think they ned at particular price points. If done right you serve your customer better and, if you're a good business manager, you get more $$ in the process.
Bear with me on this one before you flame me. Although one might argue that I'm comparing Apples and Oranges (no pun intended), I don't see a big difference between MSFT offerings multiple flavors of Windows Vista and Apple offering multiple flavors of Mac.
If you look at Apple's Web site (http://www.apple.com/hardware/), you see that they're currently offering four major "flavors" of Macs: iMac G5, Mac mini, Power Mac G5 and the eMac. One can, of course, purchase many flavors of each of these Mac families. Although the OS remains the same across the families, Apple is doing classic market segmentation. They're offering products at various price points with various features to try to reach the broadest range of customers and (not coincidentally) get the most money out of their customers.
This isn't business rocket-science. You can see the same principles being applied in any business. Take "Swiffer," that annoyingly named product from Proctor and Gamble. Go to the Swiffer home page and you'll see seven different flavors of Swiffer including the NEW! Swiffer Carpetflick. Swiffer is undoubtedly doing this to make as much money as possible by segmenting the market.
One more example closer to home. Redhat is currently offering four versions of their Linux distro: Redhat Enterprise Linux AS, Redhat Enterprise Linux ES, Redhat Enterprise Linux WS, and Redhat Desktop.
My point is that Microsoft's decision (which I haven't seen confirmed by them...) to offer multiple flavors of Vista is probably just good business and, hopefully, giving their customers products that are best suited for them.
By the way, I forgot to mention that Lucovosky's big innovation while at Microsoft was the Web services initiative called "Hailstorm." Hailstorm, for those of you who don't remember, was a set of XML-based services that were designed to give developers the ability to build in presence, notifications, calendaring etc. into web-based and pc applications. Neat idea well before its time and badly timed becuase they announced it when everyone was at their most paraoid about MSFT.
Lucovosky is a smart guy but is also a prima donna quite capable of embellishment. Let's just say there are undoubtedly two sides to this story. I read the story linked to from the original post and note that Ballmer said that Lucovosky exaggerated the meeting. Based on my interactions with Lucovosky I would tend to believe Ballmer.
That said, I have no doubt that Ballmer was passionaet and noisy. Anyone with an Internet connection knows that (Developers! Developer! Developers!).
I think many of the people commenting on this are completely missing the boat. Microsoft will probably add some end-user facing features to Windows that take advantage of WinFS to enable better search on individual PC's but the big opportunity is for developers (either at MSFT or elsewhere) to build applications that take advantage of the API's. WinFS (and Windows Vista for that matter)is a developer release with a few nice features for end users. It's about MSFT making Windows attractive for application developers again.
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You forgot one very important reason why they might say they're pro-consumer. Companies that are pro consumer make money. Companies that aren't pro consumer don't make money..at least not for long. Making your customers happy is good business. A company can try to maximize profit AND be pro consumer. Take off the tinfoil hat dude.
You did not play with an XBOX 360 in WalMart. The demo machines are not in stores yet.
I read and re-read your short post and tried to restrain my desire to reply but couldn't. My argument, which many may disagree with, is that saying "Microsoft has been fighting open standards/interfaces for 2-3 decades" is fallacious. Remember, it was Microsoft that did more to open up the PC to developers than any other company. Before Microsoft popularized DOS (not, I didn't say "invent" in an attempt to limit the "Microsoft didn't invent DOS rants from the crazies), computing was a mish-mash of competing "standards" that made it close to impossible for developers to build hardware and software that worked on systems from multiple providers. DOS and then Windows created a huge comparatively open environment on top of which thousands of companies could build. In that sense, Microsoft was perhaps the biggest promoter of open standards ever. Now, 20+ years after DOS, openness means something entirely different. I won't even attempt to define it because...well, everyone has a different definition. But to suggest that Microsoft has been fighting open standards/interfaces for all these years is silly.
It's funny how the "media" likes to play up departures from Microsoft of mid-level people like this guy. I seriously doubt that there is much hand wringing over this and Ballmer certainly wasn't throwing chairs. I doubt he even knows about this guy leaving. The rumor about Ballmer throwing a chair when Mark Lucovsky left is, at best, unsubstantiated but at least in the case of Lucovsky you can imagine Ballmer giving a sh$t. Lucovsky was a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and, while never actually shipping any real software, probably had a lot to offer. Ward was working on patterns and practices for god sakes!
I don't buy it. The situation is more complex than that. The web is changing the way software is designed and that's good thing. Thing will not be the same. But it's not an either/or world. There is such a thing as nuance.
My take.
The most interesting scenarios are not entirely Web-based. I think the world is not going to go entirely one way (Web-based) or the other (all PC/device-based). The most interesting scenarios take advantage of the easy deployment and easy updating of Web-based applications and the power of PC-based applications. Note: didn't say Windows but Windows will be a major player for many many years to come IMHO.
There are lots of reasons for this. First, let's talk applications. While web email systems like Hotmail of Gmail are nice, they're clunky compared to a full email client like Outlook. I have played around with some of the Web (Ajax) based "productivity" applications (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_usin g_Ajax/) for links to some examples and they're nice but nothing compared to Office or a good PC-based personal information manager. Try them for yourself to see.
Then there's hardware. PC and mobile device hard ware is getting incredibly cheap. I just bought a duel core 3.3 mhz systemn with 2 gigs of ram and 1 tb of disck space for less than $3,000. There are literally billions of PC's out in the world and will be billions of smart phones out there within a few years. Just this week MIT talked about the $100 PC coming. Why would we want to use all of that processing power for nothing more than driving dumb-terminals with browsers? It just doesn't make sense. Software developers should build applications that use that processing power to do cool things that you can't with purely Web-based applications.
Then there's privacy and security. You can whine all you want about problems with security of Windows or PC's in general but I would guess that most people are still more comfortable having their personal information on their own PC rather than up in the cloud. Do you really want your Quicken files sitting on a server somewhere? I'm sure people will get more comfortable with this over time but I don't think these concerns will ever go away entirely.
Then there's connectivity. Sure, someday connectivity may be 100% pervasive but I don't see that happening any time soon. I live in a very "wired" city and there are still many many places where I can't get WiFi access or even decent wireless phone service. Do I really want to rely completely on Web-based applications for my computing? Not this decade.
The good news is that good software developers will find ways to give users the best of both worlds. Although it will take time to come to fruition, I think amazing applications will come along that have locally running code, combined with code running on servers that deliver experiences we can barely imagine. I saw a demo at Microsoft's PDC last month of an application developed for 3M. The application ran in a browser (IE now but relatively trivial to make it work in other modern browsers) that used Windows Vista's new presentation technology running on the PC and connected out to Web services to deliver an absoltely amazing experience. Because the application used local resources the graphics were incredible - 3D zooming, great navigation, rich graphics etc. But the application also connected up to Web-based resources using Web services to bring data into the application. The application runs
Love 'em or hate 'em but Microsoft has better backward compatibility that almost any software company...sometimes to their detriment. They get beat up all the time on /. and elsewhere for not making great leaps forward because of their concerns with backward compatibility. It's not like their complete idiots. If they wanted to they could throw Office and Windows legacy code out and start fresh. But if they did it would piss their customers off.
Show me your proof that MSFT intentionally adds incompatibilities to new versions of Excel etc.
Why would that make you laugh? Microsoft uses lots of technlogy from other companies. They use Siebel for their CRM system. They use SAP for their HR/Finance system. Adobe/Macromedia is one of the biggest ISV's for Windows. Why wouldn't they use Flash? Grow up.
You immediately equated Sparkle (what a dumb name) to Flash eye candy which suggests you didn't read anything about this stuff. True, in the wrong hands Sparkle (or, Expression Interactive Designer as I would call it) has the potential to improve our lives like the Blink and Scroll tags so popular in the early years of HTML. But in the right hands it has the potential to help developers WITH designers help to create much better applications. Lets face it, most developers have the design sense of a rock. They should rightly focus on programming logic/code. Most designers have the programming skills of a rock. Expression/Sparkle makes it possible for each person to focus on what they do best. Think of it as "code behind" where the presentation layer is mostly separate from the plumbing code. I'm not a Flash developer but from what I know from friends, it's extremely difficult to write real applications in Flash. That must be why the Flash specialty developers charge so much? Love 'em or hate 'em, Microsoft is usually pretty good at making things easier and I would expect Expression/Sparkle to do the same thing for rich 2D adn 3D applications. Humbly...
No, not really. Do you complain when you are offered multiple models of mobile phones from Motorola? They're all pretty similar, just a few more featuers for the higher priced products. What about cars? You can buy 3 or 4 models of the BMW 5 series. You can buy several models of Mac's (see my previous post). This is a basic business concept called "segmentation." You segment your customers based on what products you think they ned at particular price points. If done right you serve your customer better and, if you're a good business manager, you get more $$ in the process.
Bear with me on this one before you flame me. Although one might argue that I'm comparing Apples and Oranges (no pun intended), I don't see a big difference between MSFT offerings multiple flavors of Windows Vista and Apple offering multiple flavors of Mac. If you look at Apple's Web site (http://www.apple.com/hardware/), you see that they're currently offering four major "flavors" of Macs: iMac G5, Mac mini, Power Mac G5 and the eMac. One can, of course, purchase many flavors of each of these Mac families. Although the OS remains the same across the families, Apple is doing classic market segmentation. They're offering products at various price points with various features to try to reach the broadest range of customers and (not coincidentally) get the most money out of their customers. This isn't business rocket-science. You can see the same principles being applied in any business. Take "Swiffer," that annoyingly named product from Proctor and Gamble. Go to the Swiffer home page and you'll see seven different flavors of Swiffer including the NEW! Swiffer Carpetflick. Swiffer is undoubtedly doing this to make as much money as possible by segmenting the market. One more example closer to home. Redhat is currently offering four versions of their Linux distro: Redhat Enterprise Linux AS, Redhat Enterprise Linux ES, Redhat Enterprise Linux WS, and Redhat Desktop. My point is that Microsoft's decision (which I haven't seen confirmed by them...) to offer multiple flavors of Vista is probably just good business and, hopefully, giving their customers products that are best suited for them.
By the way, I forgot to mention that Lucovosky's big innovation while at Microsoft was the Web services initiative called "Hailstorm." Hailstorm, for those of you who don't remember, was a set of XML-based services that were designed to give developers the ability to build in presence, notifications, calendaring etc. into web-based and pc applications. Neat idea well before its time and badly timed becuase they announced it when everyone was at their most paraoid about MSFT.
Lucovosky is a smart guy but is also a prima donna quite capable of embellishment. Let's just say there are undoubtedly two sides to this story. I read the story linked to from the original post and note that Ballmer said that Lucovosky exaggerated the meeting. Based on my interactions with Lucovosky I would tend to believe Ballmer. That said, I have no doubt that Ballmer was passionaet and noisy. Anyone with an Internet connection knows that (Developers! Developer! Developers!).
I think many of the people commenting on this are completely missing the boat. Microsoft will probably add some end-user facing features to Windows that take advantage of WinFS to enable better search on individual PC's but the big opportunity is for developers (either at MSFT or elsewhere) to build applications that take advantage of the API's. WinFS (and Windows Vista for that matter)is a developer release with a few nice features for end users. It's about MSFT making Windows attractive for application developers again.
But that doesn't mean the numbers they're reporting aren't amazing! Really!