What the hell is going on in Redmond? Seriously… Somebody Fill Me In. - Windows Central Forums
Digital Dave is losing his cool with Microsoft… again.
He really needs to pay attention to what is going on. The bell is tolling for Microsoft, folks. You can smell the shift in the air. Change in the wind.
Leo Laporte and his gang of TWiTs have become heroes of mine. It’s great to keep up with the pulse of their opinions on a weekly basis.
Ever since the new iPhone ads came out, Leo has projected on his podcasts that the editing of the ads was misleading - the interface is not that smooth, there will be wait time inbetween applications, etc.
I wonder if Leo has watched the keynote from WWDC? At WWDC, the iPhone was demo’d for some applications and the interface/app switching was indeed very fluid and smooth. The only rough edges occurred when moving around in Safari. There was a “checkerboard” filler on the screen while Safari rendered the page as requested. Everything else was fluid.
Therefore, I find myself in disagreement on Leo’s point. It may be somewhat slower, but seeing the demo in person sold me.
Apple’s New iPhone | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source
The tear-inducing Onion strikes again.
Is Apple missing out on a desktop for tinkerers?
A few weeks ago I was chatting it up with Whitey over what could be a missed opportunity for Apple. You see, Whitey is one of those power desktop prosumers when it comes to computers. He’s like me… he’s never been particularly interested in purchasing a branded computer. We’ve always built our computers and compared them as though they are penises:
“d00d I just got an Nvidia 666 with 666 mb of RAM.”
“No shit?”
“Seriously. The GPU is supposed to be awesome. But I need to add more system RAM and my motherboard is 10 minutes old, so I can’t use it.”
“That sucks. Well, I got an ABIT Samurai.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah, seriously. The fan on the CPU is made of metal blades, so if your power supply cables get too close to it, something bad might happen.”
You get the idea. We like to tinker. We like to tinker a lot.
So now here I am talking to Whitey and he’s expressing something I felt about a year ago. Microsoft is in a rut. Vista sucks hard, the requirements to run a decent kick of Vista are just too insane and overall, it sounds like he’s just ready to bail from that sinking ship.
“Great,” thought I. “I’ve had this fantastic Macbook Pro for the past year that work bought for me and let me tell you, it’s the single best thing that has ever happened to me!”
“Yeah, but Macs are just too expensive.”
That’s not so anymore and I corrected him on that. The cost for cost comparison, when you boil it down to software and hardware, does not balance the way it used to. These days, the Macs come out right about even - or even cheaper.
But there’s a catch.
You see, we tinkerers are used to piecing our computers together as we can afford them. Think of it as a perpetual loan. We don’t go for the package deal. We like to tinker and since our measly IT jobs in the southeast U.S. pay about as much as the beggar at Toys R Us gets in a month, we have to stretch our budgets to squeeze those heavy hitting parts into the case. We’re not equipped to take a chunk of change and plop it down all at once.
The iMac, while quite cheap, caters to the users who want power and a decent home machine - but aren’t interested in opening it up. It’s an even better value when you factor in the costs of a 20″ or 24″ monitor that is included and a very robust operating system. But… you can’t open her up like you want. You have to… gasp… use the damn thing… and not spend your time futzing with it.
So along comes the Mac Pro. This caters to the people who like to add and remove parts, but the price of entry is a bit steep for this class of user. Not to mention, midrange gamers do not necessarily need a server-based chipset.
So is there something missing here? Is Apple missing out on a midrange prosumer product for those tinkerers who long to get rid of Windows but cannot afford to sink that much cash at once?
Why not take the guts of an iMac and turn it into a desktop?
I had a conversation with a senior Apple engineer last week at WWDC expressing these very sentiments. He listened intently, then brought up the point that Apple is trying to sell the “full experience” of software and hardware as a Zen-like harmony kind of thing. Apple sells based on the experience and not having to worry about parts going bad or software that is incompatible. They want to be the BMW of computing; they want to cater to those people who will flash a credit card and sink that much cash at once.
“But again,” I retorted to him, “It’s an opportunity. There is only one person I know in my circle of friends that has loaded Windows Vista and kept it. Everyone else has reformatted and gone back to XP or Ubuntu.” (side note: I sure would like to know how many of those 20 million something licenses of Vista that were sold this year are actually in use). At the time that I made this statement, I was thinking of that one person… who happens to be our Microsoft Technical Account Manager. Of course, he’s not going to get rid of Vista… even if he hates it.
(note: since that conversation, I discovered one more person that kept Vista on his new HP laptop, but he doesn’t speak highly of it.)
Anyway, back to my point. Vista is not doing well. Sure the sales numbers look nice on paper to the investors, but the real world truth is that people are uninstalling the crap. Why does Microsoft care about that anyway? They already made the money on the sale, who cares if the users actually use the software? Well, if no one is using the software, how are you going to justify all those certifications you need to sell? What about the after-market boot camps that support that business? What if the IT people just aren’t interested in supporting it any longer?
They’re going to be looking to Apple for a viable alternative. Park a Windows person in front of OS X long enough and eventually they’re sold. Thus, the opportunity.
Most of those IT people are exactly like Whitey.
So is there a missing Apple?
Margaret Heffernan: Why Does Microsoft Hate Its Customers? - Business on The Huffington Post
While this is a really small example of how Microsoft has been ganking up its software, the basic premise applies to a much larger scope. I echo this sentiment for Exchange, Office 2007 and Mac Office 2004 (soon to be 2008).
I can only hope people continue to wake up to how badly Microsoft’s software is sucking.
Don’t wait for Vista SP1, pleads Microsoft | APC Magazine
OMG, the picture in this article is absolutely, positively one of the funniest things ever. I’ve been giggling like a little schoolgirl ever since.
Something has dawned on me tonight that I wish had dawned on me before.
I have a nightmarish situation developing that I will have to face soon.
On my Macbook Pro, I have a fairly gigantic iPhoto library consisting of many, many pictures… most of them are duplicated on my home PC, but not all.
My home PC is in the same state - some pictures there, but not on the Macbook. They’re cataloged on Picasa and sorted in a specific folder structure on the disk.
Pending nightmare: merging the two systems together into one iPhoto library when I replace the PC with a Mac.
I can only hope iPhoto’s duplicate detection is good stuff.
Microsoft sues Immersion for contract breach - News at GameSpot
Is it just me, or is Microsoft starting to just play dirty pool? More and more, they seem to be acting out of desperation. I find it interesting that they would sue over pennies in their pocket - but it appears to be over IP and licensing much more than anything else. The assertiveness is interesting… and quite alarming.
I suppose I have to set up this video.
We had been waiting a little over 3 hours to get to this point… this… oh glorious point at which we climb the holy escalator to the third floor of Moscone Center West for a chance at getting into the main keynote presentation without falling victim to the overflow room. In the final stages of the line, we had been broken up into two feeds to tackle both escalators. I was on a feed that was moving at a nice clip. As I turned on the camera to record the video, I noticed that the other line was not moving.
If you listen closely, you can hear someone mention that the escalator for the other line stopped working. Watch and you’ll see one geek decide to jump the line. He succeeds mostly because the security folks didn’t see him do it - but he starts a bit of a commotion as the other geeks decide to follow along.
A brief uproar sparked and left at least one geek quite upset. This is what happens when you worship The Man Who Giveth Us Apple.
Please note that the Asia Albums site URL has changed. If you’re getting RSS from there, please check your links.
You can get to the new album here.
