The hot post today that has the blogosphere churning is this essay by Paul Graham entitled “Microsoft is Dead.”
I like the way the author of this post has just suddenly realized that Microsoft’s business model is in trouble. I had an epiphany much like this while I was in the very den of the mothership itself. While standing on the third floor of building 25 in Microsoft’s Redmond campus… fighting with their products to get some test data put through on our… unusual deployment of their products… came the word that Apple went Intel. That’s when I had the epiphany: Microsoft is toast. Thus begins their slow, painful demise as people wake up to the innovations happening elsewhere. Microsoft’s lack of supporting standards and their blind eye toward security… combined with failing in just about every endeavour except Windows and Office… was finally starting to do them in.
So, I have this question that struck me tonight and I’m hoping my army of readers (cough) can help me out with a resolution to it.
I’m faced with a nagging question – its relevance is no concern of yours. 🙂 But the important question is: do copyright and/or trademark issues prevent realism in stories and movies?
We all know that it’s a rare, rare thing to find realism in fiction when it comes to computers. Is there a known copyright or trademark fact that prevents this realism?
There’s an enlightening and interesting article up on InformationWeek discussing the Leopard server product. It’s basically a guy who headed out to the sites covering public information on Leopard server and summarized it. It’s still a good read. My favorite piece? Clustering for email and iCal servers!
One thing the author did mention is that while it’s compelling for SMB, Leopard server isn’t shaping up to be an enterprise-bound powerhouse. I would agree in that respect, but I diverge away from this when he declares that Apple just clearly isn’t aiming for this market.
There’s all this hullaballoo about Twitter and the twittering and yadda yadda. It’s another company that has taken an amazingly simple idea that apparently quenches an odd thirst to be social.
Why do you think I call it odd? More on that later.
I do not find myself attracted to using Twitter. Occasionally I’ll find myself posting something in the little note areas of any messaging program I use to accomplish the same functionality and… hey, what do you know, my friends can see that message. I know, I know. Twitter makes it easy to change that message from my cell phone or a kiosk or… whatever… but… who cares? If you want to know what I’m doing, call me up… email me… or find some way to contact me using the pigeon RFC, whatever – and hook up with me for some lunch. I’ll tell you what I’m up to. Come by my office, knock on my door.
I am likely the most indecisive user I know. I’ve mounted a collection of hundreds (maybe thousands) of bookmarks in Firefox on Linux, Windows and Mac. I’ve amassed almost a hundred feeds that I prefer to be checked daily.
I’ve grown tired of Firefox and Google Reader, so I’ve spent some time today syncing my bookmarks and importing feeds into Safari. I really like Safari – it’s minimalist, integrates well into OS X, and blazing fast. It has issues with some sites that prefer IE browsers, but hey, that’s the breaks. Firefox has that problem too.
My motivational transportation has sprung a leak and suffered a flat. I’m at work, but could give a damn if I get anything done. The weather is too nice outside. I’ve not been able to shake the sleepy haze this morning and I have a tinge of a headache. It’s one of those headaches that you get when your assbone digs into the fluff of your chair so much that it starts to harm your circulation and you feel minor little spasms in the back of your head. Top that off with being quite hungry and knowing that you have several meetings to attend in the afternoon, it makes for a flat tire.
Now this is just sad.
Not content with getting its ass whipped repeatedly by search and online services, Microsoft now plans to pay enterprise customers for convincing its users to use Live search and services.
Yet another item that is just too sad to be real.
I’ll say this about Microsoft Live search and support searching. The algorithms you guys have crafted absolutely sucks. Live search almost never finds the pages I am looking for, plus it will not search USENet, which is one of the largest goldmines of information from user experiences ever made. As for searching its own knowledge base, searching support.microsoft.com has become useless. I rarely, if ever, find what I’m looking for when searching with Microsoft’s own utility (which seems to be based on the same useless algorithms as Live search) and often resort to Google to find items on Microsoft’s knowledge base.
It seems like one of the cool things to do is to have multiple sites – multiple blogs, multiple photo albums (flickr, picasaweb, etc.)… just all things to all people. Why can’t there be one site that functions as the one site for a person and their identity? What is the requirement to need to set yourself up on multiple sites?
Is it because of the passing fads of social networks? At one time, everyone flocked to MySpace. Now it’s Virb and/or Twitter. Twitter will be a dead fad by the end of the year maybe – what will be the next fad?
I updated my Meditations on Vista page because, frankly, I can’t take it anymore. I lasted all of what… two weeks? One of those weeks I wasn’t even home. Vista is crap, folks. I’ll just wrap it up for you here and now.
Nothing to see here, move along.
