Open Kosmaczewski » Microsoft

Farewell, Mr. Gates

Adrian — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 08:16:44 +0000

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Pastrami Sandwich

Adrian — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:52:06 +0000

I find many similarities between an event like WWDC and a similar one I’ve attended at Redmond long ago; both are big (huge!) events, with thousands of (men) engineers from around the world (and very few women), with a keynote by the founder, lots of events every morning and afternoon, and merchandasing stuff all over the way. And of course, in both cases you get food boxes for lunch.

However, there is one basic difference between both events. Apple not only has interesting technologies to show up, even bleeding edge ones, more often than not on the open and public domain (many of which I can not write about, and boy they are going to make a difference!), but even better than that, it has a vision.

And passion. Cocoa developers are among the most passionate I’ve ever met, and you just can’t find that in a Microsoft event. You can feel that in the (conditioned) air of the Moscone center, almost touch it. New projects everywhere. People discussing about their ideas. Lots of collaboration, openness and willingness to go further. Microsoft’s stuff is, well, boring at best; dull and gray. Enterprise IT is no fun, believe me, but there’s no reason to try to look at it in a different way. And faithful to its own way, Apple is precisely doing that, right now; and what’s about to come will reshape the industry forever.

As Steve Jobs announced yesterday, the iPhone is now ready for the enterprise, given that the majority of companies here and there use Exchange as the basic means of communication. Now the iPhone is ready to access all that information, and I while I can’t tell you more, this is the just the first step. iPhones will be an important player in the enterprise landscape in the future months.

On the other hand, well, Microsoft is asleep. The sales of Macs are booming, and more and more shops are shifting to it. The iPhone is sold out, the WWDC is sold out, a new wave of iPhones is about to hit the street, and there’s much, much more in store for the future.

Personally, I think that the center of gravity of the consumer software industry has shifted (pay attention to the tense of the verb I used). There is one and only clear leader, and that’s Apple. Microsoft should concentrate its effors in what it does best (I think), which is enterprise products, and stop delivering crappy operating systems every 5 years. Any advantage they had 10 years ago has just vanished, and that’s mainly Microsoft’s own fault. Ballmer should have resigned long ago. But again, as Joel said, they have enough cash to continue screwing things up for a long time.

In the meantime, I’m finishing my pastrami sandwich, sitting right beside the Mission conference room, waiting for the next session. I’m actually here in San Francisco and I can barely believe it.

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Goodbye, cruel Word, by Steven Poole

Adrian — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 06:10:36 +0000

http://stevenpoole.net/blog/goodbye-cruel-word/

Am I not worried that WriteRoom and Scrivener, delightful though they are, are small products from tiny outfits, not “supported” by the corporate might of a large company such as Microsoft? No, I’m not. Because actually my writing is now more secure. Instead of a bloated proprietary file format like .doc, both programs use accessible formats – .txt, .xml, .rtf3 – that (as far as one can predict these things) will be readable forever. My new book is one big “project” in Scrivener, but under the hood each chapter is a universally accessible .rtf file, which can be opened and used in a multitude of other programs.

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Why not ASP.Net? by Jeff Eaton

Adrian — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 19:35:24 +0000

http://www.lullabot.com/blog/why-not-asp-net

Microsoft has poured huge amounts of energy into building the .NET framework, and it’s fair to say that most Windows software written in the past half a decade or so uses it. Lots of .NET code is being written every day: it is the very opposite of a dead language. It’s got a very robust and feature-rich web framework called ASP.NET, designed to compete with Java as a platform for building web applications. It’s very powerful. As Sasha observes, though, you just don’t hear about new sites being launched on it. Outside of the corporate world, and a handful of select projects like DotNetNuke, it’s a pink unicorn: no one’s ever seen it f’real.

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Hey Mr Policeman – this car is stolen!, by Dave Jewell

Adrian — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 07:02:30 +0000

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/08/28/hey_mr_policeman_wga/

Anyone with half a brain cell understands perfectly well that [Windows Genuine Advantage] is all to Microsoft’s “advantage” – and confers no benefit whatsoever on the customer; just tons of unnecessary hassle. For years, I’ve felt that Microsoft has lost the plot as far as Windows is concerned – now I’m convinced of it

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Claim your Vista

Adrian — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 09:12:25 +0000

By far, one of the greatest PR efforts of Microsoft, ever.

http://www.claimyourvista.com/

We introduce to you Windows Vista, which is the newest operation system of Microsoft. We consider Microsoft Windows Vista is the best operation system from all others ever created. Truly, Vista deserves to become the single operation system on Earth for blessing of all humanity, we believe, you know, that Microsoft deserves to be at the heard of the whole scientific potential of humanity and to lead it along the right way.

Very interesting is the security comparison between Firefox and Internet Explorer:

Internet Explorer: All private information is hidden well in different folders of Windows.
Firefox: The private user’s information can be easily accessible to any application, which entered the system

And finally, this very serious description of the open source and free software movement:

Linuxoids is the big, solid group of unequal people. Their single purpose is destroying of Microsoft. The software, which they are creating, has so low quality, that nobody is ready to purchase it. So they have to send it all over the world for free, justifying that thing by crazy discussions about humanity.

What can I say, I think I will go and “claim my vista” too, buy this “operation system” and leave my “linuxoid” life behind.

Now, the interesting thing is that the website is apparently running Apache on Linux…

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One good reason not to work for Microsoft

Adrian — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 14:09:27 +0000

Not that I want, mind you. But this doesn’t help getting me excited about the idea, either:

In my post-MBA job hunt, Microsoft was not the most obvious fit—I’m not a very technical guy. On my first day at Microsoft it took me 30 minutes just to find the latch to open my laptop (though I did successfully find the “on” button pretty quickly). I think that’s why my MBA at Kellogg has played such a vital part in my career development.

So these are the chaps running good ol’ M$. Now that explains everything.

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Bill and Steve on Stage

Adrian — Thu, 31 May 2007 07:40:50 +0000

This is one not to miss. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates met yesterday in a face-to-face interview, where they talked about each other, about how the software industry took off, and this video is a small part of the whole show.

The video ends with jokes about Gil Amelio – Apple’s ill-fated CEO of the 90s… Don’t miss it!

Update: The complete video footage is here, including a summary of the most funny moments!

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Vista’s Long Goodbye

Adrian — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:44:41 +0000

http://www.theregister.com/2007/05/15/vistas_long_goodbye_continues/

Seven weeks ago, when we first reported Vista was causing many machines to stall indefinitely while deleting, copying and moving files, we were sure the problem was caused by a bug that would be fixed relatively quickly. After all, Vista is Microsoft’s flagship product. It’s also an operating system. And everyone knows deleting, copying and moving files are among the most basic tasks any operating system can set out to do.

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Seen on UserFriendly, today:

Adrian — Fri, 18 May 2007 08:13:31 +0000

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070517

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