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Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com)
For a little Thursday amusement, take a peek at John C. Dvorak's latest column at pcmag.com. He has an—ummm—interesting view of Linux and open source software, but he thinks it is time for Microsoft to adopt it: "The fact is Microsoft is zigging when it should be zagging. It needs to open a new division that has nothing to do with the rest of the company, so Open Source code can't come into contact with its commercial code. Here it can evolve an Open Source and Linux policy with products for sale and support services. The company needs to get back to an even footing with Google in the phone and, soon, the pad business. It may not catch up with Apple insofar as innovation is concerned, but it can't afford to languish and constantly be humiliated by seemingly pointless and dead-end rollouts."
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What I'd like to know is when the apocalypse happened ... Posted Jan 28, 2011 0:34 UTC (Fri) by kmself (subscriber, #11565) [Link]
... and John C. Dvorak became someone I could agree with on significant issues.
His points regarding Microsoft are pretty spot-on, but I can't be bothered to care. My interactions with that company were fatally soured ages and ages ago.
Looking back through his recent archives, though, I see a string of winners. Phone-company banking (bad), online tracking (bad).
I'll even hit up his personal blog from time to time.
Phone payments Posted Jan 28, 2011 3:11 UTC (Fri) by lakeland (subscriber, #1157) [Link]
FWIW I disagree about phone banking... or more precisely, I very much doubt NFC in a phone has any reason to be tied to your phone company bill rather than your bank directly.
Apple, Nokia and Google are all dipping their toes in the water of NFC at this point but only for their smart phones, and those phones all have data plans so can communicate with anything you like.
Corrin
Except that that's how it works Posted Jan 28, 2011 22:09 UTC (Fri) by kmself (subscriber, #11565) [Link]
Particularly in the developing where banking infrastructure is far more limited, mobile customers may not have a bank account at all.
Even in the US and elsewhere, the plan has been to tie billing and collections to comms service, not banking.
Except that that's how it works Posted Jan 28, 2011 22:59 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
giving people access to your bank account is extremely scary for a lot of people.
but doing things that will run up your phone bill is not (even if the phone bill is paid by your bank without you looking at it)
there are also lots of barriers (regulatory and process) around what's needed to get access to a bank account (and scarily lower barriers to moving money once you have that access) compared to a phone bill.
also, due to a long history of long distance billing disputes, 900 numbers, etc, there is a fairly good process in place for disputing phone bills, especially compared to disputing things with your bank.
Bank account access also sucks Posted Feb 1, 2011 1:06 UTC (Tue) by kmself (subscriber, #11565) [Link]
Frankly, I don't find either option particularly appealing.
And I don't see switching the collection authority from banks to telco (or vice versa) as having much impact.
The idea of having a remotely accessible hole in my wallet which is directly tied to my primary ability to attempt to remedy the problem (contact/communicate with merchants, bank(s), bill collectors, government regulators, and/or lawyers) really doesn't sound like a wise bet to me.
I'll feel somewhat better when a reliable, trustworthy mechanism for authorizing single payments to a designated payee are possible.
Oh, and there are plenty of reasons merchants and lenders would love to remove physical payment frictions:
Bank account access also sucks Posted Feb 3, 2011 3:10 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
There is no question that the idea that cash spenders drop less money was true. The question is whether it's still true. One of the largest grinds on the economy right now is that people are spending less and saving more. Saving rate 5 years ago was something like -7% (yes negative), last I saw it was up to 5%. That's a 12% shift is spending rates averaged over the entire US population.
To put that in perspective(very very roughly, this math is not very accurate as there are dozens of factors I'm not putting in and the stats are only ballpark) if average household income is ~$35k a year and spending is down ~12% from 5 years ago and there are ~100 million households that's a drop in spending of around ~420 billion on average.
Most of that drop in spending occurred due to people taking less credit so it's conceivable that today cash spenders account for more spending (by percentage method like the factor you quote) than purchasers on credit. This recession has changed a lot of variables the banking and credit industry has relied on for more than two decades. It's also a significant factor in the continuing recession. In the long term it's also something that's likely to make the US much more stable as -7% saving rates were not sustainable. You simply can't have the population on average borrowing more than they take in and financing it against their homes for very long before the entire economy dies a horrible slide into permanent recession.
Except that that's how it works Posted Jan 28, 2011 23:25 UTC (Fri) by lakeland (subscriber, #1157) [Link]
Interesting - that would work for me but I would have expected most people to install an app written by visa or similar.
You assume too much... Posted Jan 29, 2011 13:53 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] WTF? How can they install an app written by visa or similar when they have no bank account and no phone capable of running apps? If you are interested in the topic then please read this. This particular revolution comes from "the other side": while US is talking about NFC and apps Kenya is nearing half point...
You assume too much... Posted Jan 30, 2011 22:53 UTC (Sun) by lakeland (subscriber, #1157) [Link]
That was a long blog post, so please let me know if I missed your point.
1) Not all RFID phones can run apps
We're talking smartphones here so they must have a phone capable of running apps. Maybe Nokia will try to bring RFID back to the low-end phones next year, but that's a different discussion (and unlikely IMHO)
2) Not everyone has a bank account
True, but most people do, and for those that don't I'm sure there will be alternatives. For instance the Korean T-Money can be topped up with cash at most convenience stores and I imagine they will be writing an app if they haven't already.
Will there be an open standard for transferring money so that a single reader can handle both? I don't know, but I hope so.
It's scare how hard to think "outside of the box" for some people... Posted Jan 31, 2011 0:28 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] 1) Not all RFID phones can run apps. Why are you talking about RFID or smartphones? Do you really believe people in Kenia use phones with RFID or smartphones to do mobile banking? Nope: they are using $30 Noikias and SMS. There are 5 billion mobile phones on the planet. Most of them support SMS. Only about 10% of them are smartphones capable of running apps. Very small subset of these support the RFID. Do the math. 2) Not everyone has a bank account Well, here it's somewhat trickier. There are 5 billion people who have a mobile phone, but only 2.1 billion have a bank account. That means "most people" is just plain wrong. But, more importantly, people who have bank account usually have a means to transfer money (via bank, you know). Mobile banking is of special interest for people who can not have traditional banking account (not old enough, too poor, no job and/or work permit, etc). For instance the Korean T-Money can be topped up with cash at most convenience stores and I imagine they will be writing an app if they haven't already. Well, sure, it's probably convenient, but app is 10% of the whole story at most.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 0:45 UTC (Fri) by cas (subscriber, #52554) [Link] Dvorak says:They think that suddenly, because of some error in distribution or usage, Word, for example, could become Open Source. Microsoft is scared to death this will happen. actually, no. microsoft isn't that stupid. That isn't why MS is scared of open source. what microsoft is terrified of is that Open Source means the inevitable death of their business model of selling commodity operating systems and applications. support and service and customisation can compete with free. commodity sales can't. even worse, without that near monopoly over the operating system, they will lose their power to control how people use their computers, what software they run on them, and what media (video, audio, etc) they play on them. so FOSS breaks their ability to take a cut on those things too. FOSS doesn't make them irrelevant, but it does weaken (and will eventually destroy) their dominance. which is why they try to undermine real open standards like ODF with bogus "open standards" like OOXML - customer lock-in via proprietary data formats is the only stick they have left to beat off competition. and that's doomed to failure in the long term anyway...they can't keep on sabotaging competitors' reverse-engineering efforts by making their new versions of the formats incompatible with the old because customers are getting really pissed off with that kind of crap, AND are starting to see that open formats like ODF mean that it is possible to upgrade without suffering huge disruption from format incompatibility.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 1:48 UTC (Fri) by jiu (subscriber, #57673) [Link]
I see MS as still a big threat to users' freedom, they keep the same tactics of pushing proprietary, closed and uninteroperable protocols wherever people allow them to do so, especially in the enterprise with sharepoint. So whatever helps sink them makes me happy :-)
The OS/Office market Posted Jan 28, 2011 4:47 UTC (Fri) by kmself (subscriber, #11565) [Link]
I'd say you're closer to the truth (or at least what I think the truth is) of what Microsoft's been scared of, historically. That message is consistent from the first Letter to Hobbyists through the various Halloween Documents.
More recently, it's become evident that Open Source / Free Software isn't going away, and tactics switched to FUD (the SCO lawsuit largely being an exercise in sowing doubt, and the Intellectual Ventures stuff probably going along those lines).
It's becoming pretty evident that Microsft hasn't won and isn't going to win on either the server or embedded space. It still owns what's left of the desktop market (and that's still a very large market), but there are pressures growing and old alliances (Wintel) are no more. Attempts to build or dominate other markets (transaction processing, Web search, authentication, gaming) haven't gone well for the most part, gaming being the primary exception.
The company is still founded on the twin pillars of OS and Office sales. Both are rapidly being comoditized and pushed mobile, cloud-connected devices. Future direction, regardless of what it is for the company, will have to undermine the twin pillars. It's a classic Clay Christensen Innovator's Dilemma, and the problem with the situation is that you're stuck in a pretty inevitable trap.
Personalities don't help, and Microsoft still has Balmer at the helm, though his hold looks a bit shaky. I strongly suspect that Balmer's been a large factor in many of the less beneficent practices of the company in the past (go through the DR-DOS court records for a host of choice quotes, not just Steve's). Attempts at fresh blood (Ozzie) have failed. Much of the old guard has moved on.
I don't know if you could say it's license fear, monopoly control fear, a Christensen trap, inertia, personality, or just plain aging-tech-giant ossification that's Microsoft's primary problem, but the cocktail as a whole doesn't work well for the company.
I'm not writing their obit yet, but I've noticed that very little of the news and publicly-perceived initiative in tech comes from Redmond, and that this has been the case for some years now.
Nobody fears the old tyrant like they used to.
The OS/Office market Posted Feb 3, 2011 3:34 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link] Attempts to build or dominate other markets (transaction processing, Web search, authentication, gaming) haven't gone well for the most part, gaming being the primary exception.I would disagree with that assessment very very strongly. Microsoft might have succeeded in number of consoles deployed but it's been a financial disaster of unrivaled proportions. Total expenditures on Xbox have exceed $5Billion, their first profitable quarter was last quarter and they made about 100million dollars. If they could make the same profit every quarter until they were profitable it would take them 12.5 years to break even. The problem is there is another console cycle coming in the next 1-2 years which will start the losses up again and it will be another 5 years from release before they have a profitable quarter again. From a financial perspective the Xbox play has been a financial disaster that would have bankrupted and destroyed almost any other company. The only reason it hasn't is because they make 10 billion a year on Windows and Office. As you said, Microsoft only makes money on two ventures, Windows and office. With it being about an even split IIRC. If either product begins to collapse you are looking at the possible failure of the entire company without massive changes to how they operate. The biggest problem for Microsoft is that they are engaged in several dozen different enterprises and only 2 make money. It's astounding the amount of money they pour into projects and products they don't make a penny on and most of them lose gobs of money. What's intrigued me the most about the company is how little shareholder opposition there is to how the company is run. They pour billions into losing ventures every year and almost no one complains and demands the management be replaced. Most of it is possible because of the financial trickery they engage in by burying their losing ventures in the revenue from Windows and Office but still, it's fairly common knowledge. I personally believe Microsoft is in decline right now, another few years and that will become apparent to the stock market and there are likely to be changes. The big question though is whether Libreoffice will totally gut the Office revenue before wall street demands fixes at which point there will be little that can be done to save the company other than fragmenting it into separate ventures that are forced to be profitable. Unlike you I see their obituary written in their financial filings, it's simply a matter of time at this point.
The OS/Office market Posted Feb 7, 2011 1:54 UTC (Mon) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link]
> The problem is there is another console cycle coming in the next 1-2 years which will start the losses up again and it will be another 5 years from release before they have a profitable quarter again
Why would that necessarily be the case? The losses were a result of Microsoft forcing its way into a crowded market; now that Microsoft is an established console maker, its continuing development costs should be on par with other companies in the field.
> The big question though is whether Libreoffice will totally gut the Office revenue
Unlikely. Compatibility is too important, and Office is actually a very good product these days.
The real danger comes from iOS and Android, which are textbook disruptive technologies that will eventually work their way up the market and begin to consume laptop and desktop sales.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 5:21 UTC (Fri) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
Everything you said is correct, but regarding this bit:
> Dvorak says:
>> They think that suddenly, because of some error in distribution or usage, Word, for example, could become Open Source. Microsoft is scared to death this will happen.
> actually, no. microsoft isn't that stupid. That isn't why MS is scared of open source.
Having spoken to people that work in large corporations, I am starting to believe that this *is* part of the reason why open source scares them. One major corporation even went to the length of creating a separate subsidiary company, which exists just for the purpose of everyone that works on open source code for the company's products.
In other words, all open source code is created in the subsidiary company, so that if there are implications from that open source work, it would only affect that small and limited company, and not the original one. The fears are apparently (1) they release GPL code, which grants a patent license (with the subsidiary, their patents remain unlicensed in the original one), and (2) that the 'viral' aspect of the GPL or other licenses will 'force' them to open source other code of theirs (and with the subsidiary, only it's code would be affected, which is all open source anyhow).
These reasons are a little absurd (hence my scare quotes), but sadly they do seem to be believed, in some parts of the corporate world.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 6:07 UTC (Fri) by bvdm (guest, #42755) [Link]
It's not absurd. Companies are not afraid of the FSF coming after them. They are afraid of their competitors doing so. Look at what is happening in the mobile space with everyone suing everyone else over patents. This is how corporate lawyers "add their value".
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 8:01 UTC (Fri) by madcoder (subscriber, #30027) [Link] which is why they try to undermine real open standards like ODF with bogus "open standards" like OOXML - customer lock-in via proprietary data formats is the only stick they have left to beat off competition. and that's doomed to failure in the long term anyway...they can't keep on sabotaging competitors' reverse-engineering efforts by making their new versions of the formats incompatible with the old because customers are getting really pissed off with that kind of crap, AND are starting to see that open formats like ODF mean that it is possible to upgrade without suffering huge disruption from format incompatibility. Please no, it's not a proprietary lock-in they do, it's just that they have the sole Office suite that works well enough. No matter what you say, OOo isn't at the ankle of MS Office in way too many useful aspects to be any useful. And yes, I do prefer to work with MSO and its painful Word renumbering bugs rather than OOo whose numbering never failed me, but that is non-interoperable with MSO that is the de facto industry standard. Hate it love it I don't care, it's a fact that if you can't interoperate with MSO you're out. The "open standards" is a battle that the floss people have invented from thin air to port the debate to some kind of moral ground, but it's just wrong. The debate is technical: MSO was there "first" (okay they hijacked the place, but oh well), so if you want to replace them, you have first to understand their format, and do something better (which is exactly what they did to get there in the first place). And please, don't get me wrong, I do define myself as a Floss guy (being and DD and so forth), but clearly on the Office suite, the arguments I read from "my" community are just completely off with respect to the reality.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 10:40 UTC (Fri) by emj (guest, #14307) [Link]
Well it is near impossible to be 90% MS office compatible, so you have conditions that will never be met. OOo is compatible enough for me and everyone I work with, so it's obviously there is a market.
But yeah would it ever be a problem I guess I would have to boot Windows..
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 18:24 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
> The "open standards" is a battle that the floss people have invented from thin air to port the debate to some kind of moral ground, but it's just wrong.
Troll?
Open standards battles have nothing specific to Microsoft Office. They even pre-date computing, so the concept did obviously not come from "floss people". Open standards are simply about avoiding vendor lock-in and increasing competition. Yes you can call that "some kind of moral ground" if that makes you feel better.
The only new thing that computing added to the issue is complexity, which is very extremely useful to confuse consumers. Like you. Thanks to complexity you can for instance pretend that OOXML is a standard, or pretend that software X is compatible with software Y, when it is only 90% compatible (whereas a socket and a plug are rarely "90%" compatible...)
Shit under any other name... Posted Jan 28, 2011 18:52 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] And yes, I do prefer to work with MSO and its painful Word renumbering bugs rather than OOo whose numbering never failed me, but that is non-interoperable with MSO that is the de facto industry standard. Yup. "Looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck", yes, it's proprietary lock-in. Distilled, pure, textbook case of it, actually. Heck, it's listed in the Wikipedia article among other examples! The debate is technical: MSO was there "first" (okay they hijacked the place, but oh well), so if you want to replace them, you have first to understand their format, and do something better (which is exactly what they did to get there in the first place). Sorry, but you are wrong. Second part is a requirement, first part is not. MSO is good existing proof: Microsoft pushed WordPerfect aside when it "invented" GUI (borrowed it from Xerox like Apple) and moved battle to the new battleground. It never achieved adequate compatibility - but it was not important. The "open standards" is a battle that the floss people have invented from thin air to port the debate to some kind of moral ground, but it's just wrong. No, it's not wrong at all. As long as "compatibility with MSO" is a requirement there will be one and one only contender: MSO itself. This is classic and pretty strong vendor lock-in we are talking about. It's too easy to change the format constantly and too hard to play catch-up. "Open standards" were invented to sidestep this problem. The only way to fight vendor lock-in is to use out-of-market mechanisms: the only entity which may effectively fight the monopoly is government - and it can not do it if there are no standards to enforce. It works here... to a degree. Time will tell if it's enough or not, but it was absolutely right thing to do given the circumstances. P.S. There are another approach to kill the vendor lock-in: some kind of disruptive technology. You create something incompatible in adjacent market, then thing grows and eventually replaces old way of doing things. Vendor lock-in does not help there because it does not exist in a new market. This is what happens with smartphones and tablets. But will they ever able to dethrone PC and MSO? Who knows... time will tell.
Shit under any other name... Posted Jan 28, 2011 19:02 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
don't forget that MSO compatibility isn't even achieved by MSO.
each version of MSO uses a different format, and there has never been a case yet where the new version can convert the old format with 100% accruacy.
Well, sure... Posted Jan 28, 2011 21:27 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] I still remember the case where the same version was incompatible with itself: we had bunch of 144dpi matrix printers (used for drafts where you need one page or two) and one 300dpi laser printer (used for final version). It was shock for a lot of people when they found out that the same Word document has significantly different number of pages when printed on these two systems! But it's matter of perception: when people hit incompatibility between different versions of MS Office they accept it as fact of life, when incompatibility is found between OpenOffice and MS Office - it's presented as show-stopper.
Well, sure... Posted Jan 29, 2011 3:28 UTC (Sat) by jjs (guest, #10315) [Link]
MSO has always formated based on the printer - so the MSO document you send to your customer may not print the same as on your system. Print and send PDFs only.
Also MSO versions, as indicated, aren't compatible with each other.
Bottom line - any criticism about the "incompatibility" or "training requirements" to change from MSO to OOo apply equally to upgrading MSO. Of course, upgrades are "a cost of doing business" while the same costs to convert are "a new requirement" - a way to ensure you don't change bacause of some nice terminology, not reality.
Well, sure... Posted Jan 30, 2011 7:29 UTC (Sun) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]
It wasn't just that it formats for the printer. Theoretically, if I set my page size the same, it should print the same everywhere right?
Wrong: The GDI refuses to do sub-pixel positioning, so the DPI matters more often than it should.
For a long time, I used to set my printer to "Apple LaserWriter" and print to file, just to get a nice, fairly portable PostScript I knew I could print anywhere. (This was before PDF became ubiquitous.) I could even Ghostscript it out to my 9 pin Citizen (which clocked in at 216 DPI with the crappy 6-pass overstrike driver I wrote).
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 31, 2011 0:06 UTC (Mon) by JEDIDIAH (guest, #14504) [Link]
> Please no, it's not a proprietary lock-in they do,
> it's just that they have the sole Office suite that > works well enough.
This is just Lemming nonsense.
Microsoft Office has never been anything special besides the fact that it is the most compatable with Microsoft formats. This isn't just about "Free Software" but about any other competitor in the market including those proprietary options that predate Microsoft's perceived monopoly.
This herd mentality when it comes to applications and proprietary vendor standards is the most annoying thing about Windows. It's the monopoly vendor so it's supposed to "run everything" but you can't actually run whatever happens to suit your fancy.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Feb 1, 2011 17:43 UTC (Tue) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link] MS being first doesn't make them open standard. And they will loose that one.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 12:35 UTC (Fri) by exadon (guest, #5324) [Link]
Face it, on the desktop Microsoft wins because of technical superiority. Big way. Here they have nothing to fear from Open Source, except that it's cheaper. And even that doesn't create them nightmares, because they know many people are willing to pay for better quality.
Handsets are different, here they have a worthy opponent: Android. And that's what they are scared of.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 13:31 UTC (Fri) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]
If they have nothing to fear then explain the various statements about open source and linux over the years (cancer, hobbyists, infringing patents etc.)
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 14:29 UTC (Fri) by exadon (guest, #5324) [Link]
They create Linux-related FUD mostly when it comes to server functionality, never about the desktop. Because on the server we shine.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 23:03 UTC (Fri) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]
Calling open source a cancer or communist or anti-capitalist is attacking a philosophy, not a product.
Ballmer's notorious statements Posted Jan 28, 2011 16:52 UTC (Fri) by jthill (guest, #56558) [Link] As with standing an egg on end, that's easy once you see it. If you define the American way as the marketing model, constructing money pumps that get people paid for mcguffins, everything he says regarding Linux makes perfect sense. Look around, there's good reason to define it that way. People whose professions' research focus is not on how to make money have reasons just as good to disagree.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 14:13 UTC (Fri) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]
Superior? If by superior you mean the most market share.
It wasn't technical superiority that got Microsoft the most market share.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 14:37 UTC (Fri) by exadon (guest, #5324) [Link]
They are superior on the desktop. Look at the number of crashes. Modern Windows never crashes. Try this with Gnome or KDE. Similar for other bugs: Ask a MS user about bugs in MS Software. Very few. Then ease of use. Integration. They are better in every respect. Why? Maybe because they can put pressure on their developers to care about bugs. Maybe you need a central dictator for a UI-related project to succeed. I don't know.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 16:39 UTC (Fri) by quintesse (subscriber, #14569) [Link]
First of all, number of crashes has nothing to do with technical superiority, but with quality, they obviously spend more time and money getting rid of that kind of bugs. But there's more than enough outside of Microsoft and Windwos that is technically superior (Internet Explorer for example? Superior? It lags behind almost anything in the market today!).
Secondly, it might be true that Windows hardly crashes anymore but I don't know which Linux distro/version you are running but I haven't seen my KDE crash in years.
Applications you mean? Well yes, but that happens to me all of the time on Windows as well. Only a couple of days ago Word crashed trying to load a document. (And after the restarting Word it loaded the document fine, so there wasn't anything wrong with it, Word just decided it had enough I guess)
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 18:25 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
>Internet Explorer for example? Superior? It lags behind almost anything in the market today!
Internet Explorer 9 is actually one of the most compliant browsers right now. And it's fast, beating even Chrome in rendering speed sometimes.
>Secondly, it might be true that Windows hardly crashes anymore but I don't know which Linux distro/version you are running but I haven't seen my KDE crash in years.
Happens regularly here :(
Microsoft stack right now is quite stable, and is becoming more and more integrated. It's scary what you can do with Outlook, Sharepoint and Exchange.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 18:42 UTC (Fri) by quintesse (subscriber, #14569) [Link]
Tell me when we get to the end of the comercial block will you? ;)
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Feb 3, 2011 5:49 UTC (Thu) by rilder (subscriber, #59804) [Link]
>Internet Explorer 9 is actually one of the most compliant browsers right >now. And it's fast, beating even Chrome in rendering speed sometimes.
No. It is not one of the 'most' compliant, but yes, it has improved from 20/100 to 95/100. 100/100 has been attained by most browsers for a long time since the current ACID tests are now old. Newer ones are yet to come. Rendering speed is not the only metric. Rendering *may* be faster because of tighter bounding between OS and its browser. But comparing something like javascript/DOM speeds (which is what matters) of IE to Chrome is a sick joke.
>Happens regularly here :(
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Feb 3, 2011 23:58 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
First, IE8 passes the ACID2 with the perfect score.
Second, only Opera achieves 100/100 on ACID3. FireFox 4 is at 97/100 with IE9 at 96/100.
Third, IE9 is actually faster at JS interpreting than FireFox 3.6 and is tied with Chrome 8: http://www.devcomments.com/video/Internet-Explorer-9-VS-G... (yeah, there are reports of cheating by over-optimizing IE for this benchmark, but IE9 is still _fast_)
So yes, dismissing IE9 out of hand is a sick joke.
>What distro are you using ? You should use a better distro and wipe that :( of your face. :) Also KDE 4.x has not been the same as KDE 3.x of yester years, so you can try different DE (there are tons of others) or not use DE at all.
I'm not using KDE. However, Amarok crashes quite often on me. IntelliJ IDEA manages to crash Compiz from time to time. netbook-launcher-efi spams .xsession-errors with gigabytes of warnings.
etc.
Yes, I've filed bugs for these issues. I don't expect them to be fixed, though and they don't annoy me too much to be bothered to fix them myself.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 23:07 UTC (Fri) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]
Sorry, but the anecdotal "My OS never crashes" is about as relevant as "My OS never gets viruses"
Now I'll assert that KDE 4.2 or whatever is shipping in RHEL v6 never crashes. I'll even assert that KDE 4.5 never crashes, and that Windows 7 on my laptop routinely crashes.
See how meaningless these statements are?
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 29, 2011 0:10 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
> Sorry, but the anecdotal "My OS never crashes" is about as relevant as "My OS never gets viruses"
How about: "the OS of everyone I know and his dog"?
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 29, 2011 20:58 UTC (Sat) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
My OS has been crashing with annoying frequency lately ... now is that Windows, VirtualBox, or Gentoo ... ?
But I seem to have tracked down the cause - I upgraded the PC to 8Gb ram a few days back, and the power cable to the disk drives trailed over the ram. Rerouting the wiring round the back of the cpu fan seems to have fixed the problem ...
Cheers,
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 31, 2011 14:15 UTC (Mon) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]
> First of all, number of crashes has nothing to do with technical superiority
Well, "doesn't crash" was what people used for a very long time to sell the idea of Linux desktops.
A good example of where Linux desktop is lagging behind windows, 3d drivers:
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/01/firefox-4-beta-9-a-huge...
The ratio of developers/users is simply too out of portion in Linux desktop graphics side. On server side most users are developers so features come faster and bugs get stamped faster, and thus server-side Linux keeps ahead of Windows server, while the desktop remains catch-up.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 29, 2011 15:08 UTC (Sat) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]
By the metrics you've posted, MacOS is far superior to Windows. Marketing, vendor relationships, etc, have placed Windows in the hands of the most users. Apples to Apples (no pun intended) MacOS smokes Windows but occupies a smaller market share.
Again, technical superiority has nothing to do with Windows market share.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 16:49 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
> Face it, on the desktop Microsoft wins because of technical superiority. Big way.
Not a chance. Macs win the technical superiority race hands down. No getting nagged to buy antivirus programs, better desktop experience, suspend works quickly and reliably (yes i've used win 7), etc. Is this even arguable in the big picture?
And I'm a linux fanboy.
Like others have said, Win is most popular. But that's not because of technical superiority.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 23:02 UTC (Fri) by Otus (guest, #67685) [Link]
I don't think any of those have to do with Macs' supposed "technical superiority".
The number of viruses is mostly low because there are less of them, actual security is worse than Windows - at least that's what the guys at the browser hack competition say. Desktop experience mostly comes down to good design, not the technical aspects. Suspend works well because they control the hardware.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 29, 2011 16:55 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Those sound more like excuses... If it's impossible to offer a good user experience without controlling the hardware then Microsoft needs to release its own hardware. If viruses aren't a problem on Win 7 then why are there billion dollar industries dedicated to this, complete with nag hooks built right into the os? And of course good UX and design is a part of the technical product. What did you think it was, icon colors that get glued on last?
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 29, 2011 17:46 UTC (Sat) by jthill (guest, #56558) [Link] then why are there billion dollar industries dedicated to thisI think, because it's a big part of Microsoft's business model - make sure everybody who furthers their interests gets paid. Bad publicity is still publicity; if the bad news about you drowns out all news about your competition, and particularly if it's news that most people won't understand except to say "but I'm safe if I just buy this widget", it's good for you.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 30, 2011 15:35 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] Face it, on the desktop Microsoft wins because of technical superiority. Big way. Here they have nothing to fear from Open Source, except that it's cheaper. This is patently false. Windows has to be restarted at least once a week, else it gets all knotted up and eventually crashes. You can't install anything without rebooting. There is no reasonable package handling. A reboot takes a long time. MS Office has a few features that LibreOffice doesn't have, but 99% of its users won't even notice. Page numbering problems? What page numbers, if all you do is write 1 or 2 page memos? Problems with formatting, if nobody uses syles, they just "fix up" fonts and sizes and positioning by hand? There are specific use cases for MS Excel that calc doesn't handle, but only a tiny minority of users even know that the relevant features even exist, let alone use them. Microsoft stuff is prevalent mostly by sheer inertia. They were the first to work reasonably enough on hardware that wasn't outrageously expensive. Now the hardware landscape is changing, the new "mobile" world will just leave them behind.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 30, 2011 17:22 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
That's not always true. There are a lot of organizations out there with enormous programs on their systems that are utterly dependent on Excel for the simple reason that the 'programs' are vast and terrifically complex spreadsheets. This is not only for financial stuff but a surprising amount of e.g. civil engineering as well. (And probably other fields I have no experience of.)
With regard to Word, you're probably right. But certainly not with regard to Excel.
Function points Posted Feb 2, 2011 22:51 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Probably part of the blame on those insane loads of unreadable, high-maintenance Excel code can be found in function points and similar code metrics: supposedly they say that Excel metrics are much more efficient than other languages. For example on QSM median data: Excel takes 46 lines to do what assembler takes 203 lines (and C takes 107). Access is even better! Thus many authors recommend "higher-level" languages whenever possible. Never mind performance, extensibility, maintainability or pure sanity.The function points metric is fundamentally flawed: what matters is really the number and quality of libraries you have at your disposition. Excel is not "higher level" than C, but it comes with a truckload of prepackaged code. And so do most languages nowadays. The truth of the matter is that Excel code sucks big time no matter how many "lines" it takes to write anything in, but it's handy to play a few tricks. If people are writing engineering code with it, I somehow admire them.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 31, 2011 14:06 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>This is patently false. Windows has to be restarted at least once a week, else it gets all knotted up and eventually crashes. You can't install anything without rebooting.
You clearly haven't used any version of Windows released this century. I regularly run Windows for months without rebooting. Pretty much the only time I have to reboot is when there's a critical security vulnerability in the kernel, affecting some component of relevance to me. That happens a few times a year (about as often as I have to reboot Debian for the same reason).
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 31, 2011 19:00 UTC (Mon) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link]
"Face it, on the desktop Microsoft wins because of technical superiority. Big way."
Disagree. On the rare occasions when I happen to run a Windows box for some reason I find myself amazed at how awkward and limited the interface has become in comparison to Linux. Example: cut and paste in Excel. On Windows, this is just not like cut and paste in, say, a word process. On Linux with Openoffice it works just as you would expect, not so on Windows. Bizarre.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Feb 3, 2011 5:38 UTC (Thu) by rilder (subscriber, #59804) [Link]
"
"
Do you think KDE/Gnome is developed in the wild ? There are many companies involved in its development. "Integration:" You better be joking (the only other alternative is you are out of your mind and you don't know what Integration means). "Maybe because they can put pressure on their developers to care about bugs": No cares about bugs in linux desktop ?
You are the user who considers KDE/Gnome to be the only linux desktop out there and quoting it as crashing (which it doesn't often). Perhaps, you are one of those who has never used one and whining about it everywhere. I have been using linux desktop for a long time and I have to crash it manually (with signals) for it to crash. Perhaps you are using a crappy distro.
Speaking of technical superiority, compare a Windows 7 desktop with a linux desktop. The former can't even do basic stuff such as full fledged auto-tiling of windows (and they called the OS Windows ;)), lacks even the basic window based scripting capabilities allowing user to customize. I am not going to comment any further.
"
If you are one of those who consider Linux as a server only, using Redhat 1.x still and barfing everywhere about it, then you better not use linux, enjoy your long earned Windows fandom.
There are tons of developers involved in enrichment of linux desktop even though commercial gains may be low, mindless comments like these add little to the appreciation of their work.
Instead of perpetual whining, you could have reported bugs, submitted patches, improved documentation, but who cares when whining on forums like lwn is far easier.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 15:32 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Those people who know and love WordPerfect have LONG known that upgrading doesn't mean losing functionailty.
I can take a document created with the LATEST version of WP, and open it in a DOS version, modify it, save it, and then take it back to the latest version without losing anything!
When did people stop developing for DOS?
Cheers,
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 2:31 UTC (Fri) by zander76 (guest, #6889) [Link]
When I see articles like this it makes me laugh. MS is not scared of open source. MS isn't scared of anything. They walked into the console market and just pored money into it until they were successful. They created direct x and were successful and they will pore money into phones until they are successful.
Don't get me wrong I love open source and sharing knowledge. I have always pushed for open source code at any office I have worked in. Microsoft makes tools that makes it easier and easier to get locked into ms. Everything from the compilers, direct x, and even word just makes it easy to get locked in.
They are going to integrate phones, computers and home media ( xbox ) into a single network and people are going to love it. Commercial companies love Microsoft because its easy to sell windows based products.
I have been using Linux for 15 or so years now and I can honestly say that windows 7 is easier to use. It's easy to just purchase windows, download visual studio and buy office and know that everything is just going to work ( sorta anyway ).
Linux is great and it gives me tons of options. I can pick from millions of distributions, then try to find packages for that specific distribution and pick between 20+ messenger programs ( why is there so many stupid messenger programs ) but I can't find a game. I can use OO but man that is slow and painful not to mention the fact that everybody else uses office.
For a long time I was a die hard Linux supporter. I ran it on my desktop. I dealt with all the incompatibility issues. I ran wine to support windows apps. I tried it all. Now that I am older and I need to work in business I run windows 7 on my desktop and Linux on my servers. I don't have time to deal with the crap associated with running Linux on my desktop.
I am glad to see distributions working together to address the packaging issues and that will be a big step in making it easier to sell Linux applications. If people actually started buying Linux applications and games then companies would be a lot more inclined to support it. I continue to push Linux support for games but I am met with a lot of resistance.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 6:18 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> When I see articles like this it makes me laugh.
Yes. Dvorak is a tool. I can't think of anything he said that impressed me or did cause mild nausea. I don't know why anybody still pays attention to him.
> MS is not scared of open source. MS isn't scared of anything.
Well Microsoft, being a major corporation, has lots of people doing lots of things and probably some of them are scared, but I doubt most of them care.
> They walked into the console market and just pored money into it until they were successful. They created direct x and were successful and they will pore money into phones until they are successful.
Yeah. There is only so far you can go with that approach, but it works for now.
> Linux is great and it gives me tons of options. I can pick from millions of distributions, then try to find packages for that specific distribution and pick between 20+ messenger programs ( why is there so many stupid messenger programs ) but I can't find a game. I can use OO but man that is slow and painful not to mention the fact that everybody else uses office.
That's a problem. Choice is good if some of your choices actually work and are usable. If you have a hundred different things to choose from and all of them are broken in some horrible way then all that means is that you have a hundred ways of suffering.
>I am glad to see distributions working together to address the packaging issues and that will be a big step in making it easier to sell Linux applications. If people actually started buying Linux applications and games then companies would be a lot more inclined to support it. I continue to push Linux support for games but I am met with a lot of resistance.
Most large game publishers are like Microsoft and philosophically oppose the very idea of open source. Especially when it comes to open sourcing any thing they create or could potentially make money from... not so much to the open source stuff they can use themselves, of course.
On top of that Linux has suffered from the 'hundreds of broken choices'.
Microsoft succeeded with DirectX not because it was better then OpenGL (back when it was still relevant for gaming on Windows). They succeeded because they provided a single implementation that ran the same regardless of what hardware you used. If the hardware supported DirectX FOO then you could run all games that supported DirectX FOO. With OpenGL each video card manufacturer supplied their own OpenGL implementation and each of them was different in some way.
So.. game makers could try to target OpenGL and have to deal with 3 or 4 different OpenGL stacks and their each little broken problems and different features. Or they could just target DirectX and not have to give a shit and let Microsoft deal with the details with support with the hardware manufacturers themselves.
Now take a look at that and think about how Linux and graphics fit into the picture....
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 7:22 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
In terms of DirectX now, it really is just because it's better. We're having some trouble getting simple things to accelerate as well on OpenGL as we do on DirectX (particularly regarding instanced rendering), and GLSL is a complete pain in the ass compared to HLSL when it comes to building complete effects pipelines (hence why nobody actually writes GLSL for games, they just use Cg, which is very similar to HLSL and abstracts away all the dumb in GLSL). Plus GLSL's design adds other performance problems that are difficult to work around. And then don't forget that GL doesn't include a math library, texture loading routines, or even simple text loading routines for shaders (must less an effects/pass layer like HLSL), so doing even a simple "OpenGL 101" app takes way more code to get running than a DirectX app.
And the GL API is just horrendously designed. Hidden global variables controlling a "state machine" that has nothing to do with how modern hardware works. Highly mutable objects represented by integers. They couldn't even have been bothered to use opaque pointers. That's a source of bugs and confusion and overhead. The object mapping between the integers and internal data structures just adds overhead, too, and the only thing you get in return is the ability to "allocate" multiple objects in one go, although that actually just reserves ids and doesn't allocate anything at all (all the allocation still happens one at a time as you individually bind the objects).
A lot of the old complaints about Direct3D are also pretty funny if you look at them now. The infamous OpenGL vs DirectX article from Carmack, for instance, mostly centers around how DirectX required the programmer to use vertex buffers while OpenGL allowed immediate mode rendering. Of course, immediate mode rendering is so incredibly slow as to be unusable now, and both OpenGL ES and even full desktop OpenGL Core Profile lack immediate mode rendering and require the use of vertex buffers.
OpenGL needs a redesigned API and a redesigned shader language, badly. And it needs it one clean break, not little nickel-and-dime updates over the next few years.
It's irritating that simple fix-the-horrifically-stupid-interface changes to GLSL get tied to the hardware-dependent feature updates, such that you have to have DX10 capable hardware just to get interface blocks which are a very poor facsimile of the superior API offered by the DX9 versions of HLSL.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 9:39 UTC (Fri) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> In terms of DirectX now, it really is just because it's better. We're having some trouble getting simple things to accelerate as well on OpenGL as we do on DirectX [...]
A couple of thoughts there. I have heard (though am not expert enough to judge myself) that while DirectX is better for games, OpenGL is better for more professional sort of things. And secondly, isn't there now a working Direct3D state tracker for Gallium3D? Which would make Direct3D available as an alternative graphics API for the FLOSS desktop in the medium term future, as all of the Gallium3D-based drivers start to mature.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 31, 2011 19:20 UTC (Mon) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link]
"OpenGL needs a redesigned API and a redesigned shader language, badly."
I haven't written any shaders yet so I can't speak to your GLSL comments, but much else you wrote is just plain wrong. The 3.1 core API is perfectly fine and efficient. Getting better with each revision. I don't know what issue you have with instanced rendering but it clearly works very well on PSGL. Like I say, haven't written any shaders yet myself but I will soon.
As for John Carmack's comments, he was completely correct. It is significantly clumsier to write vertex array based code, never mind vertex buffer objects. Yet it is faster, but immediate mode is also amazingly fast. I have written a mesh rendering test in five different ways ranging from immediate mode to MultiElements. (No buffer objects yet, but soon.) Immediate mode holds its own, its very fast. I will quantify that later.
I do not disagree that vertex buffer objects are the way to go for production code, but they are just a pain for trying out new ideas. Significantly more code and more fragile. Adding new layers of abstraction tends to do that. Kronos has done exactly the right thing with immediate mode by moving it to an optional profile. That way developers can use it when convenient and save the premature optimization for later.
By the way, John followed up later with the equally famous "now DirectX sucks less but it still sucks". OpenGL rules the entire 3D graphics world except for Windows and XBox games. Read the writing on the wall.
It seems like your comments are written from the perspective of someone who last used OpenGL 1.5.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 15:14 UTC (Fri) by zander76 (guest, #6889) [Link]
> On top of that Linux has suffered from the 'hundreds of broken choices'.
Someone needs to address the scoring problem with linux choices, well I guess this issues is related to everything on the internet but there needs to be a better way to score what is the best choice.
To me the applications score should be related to the date. If you try ordering by rating you get lots of apps from 10 years ago ( exaggeration ). They need to set some kind of diminishing return on scoring based on the date.
Rating - User rating assigned from either the user selecting a value or download as an example.
Date - The date the rating was made
Current Date - The current date when you are looking for something.
Max Rating Length = 5 weeks.
// Calculate that person score contribution today.
After 5 weeks the rating will hit 0 no matter what. New choices will float to the top. Something like that would help I would guess.
Ben
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 15:58 UTC (Fri) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]
popularity contest adds some data.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 10:29 UTC (Fri) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]
> I have been using Linux for 15 or so years now and I can honestly say that windows 7 is easier to use.
Funny, for me the reason I value Linux on my desktop is that it I find it much easier to use (despite, whether I run bleeding edge software or not I quite often run into bugs of various sorts).
When it comes to things that I find friendlier in my (Gnome) desktop: consider for instance installing a printer or a scanner. Or maybe network connection management, from chanigng an address to sharing a network connection or connecting to VPN. The Windows control panel look just resembles a space shuttle control panel when it comes to intuitivity.
Let alone the software installation, which is a complete nightmare on Windows.
> I can use OO but man that is slow and painful not to mention the fact that everybody else uses office.
How does Office constrain you to the Windows platform? It runs on Linux flawlessly.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 16:44 UTC (Fri) by roblucid (subscriber, #48964) [Link]
All the hardware I've tried, I just had to install it and boot, or plug it in and with Win 7 it goes find drivers and updates them, at times too "helpfully" when one has reason to use an older version; or they want to install some software they recommend.
The windows networking configuration is annoying and frustrating, their aversion to using the technical terms or allowing you to simply configure it, leads to having to "game" things to figure out what tasks they think you're trying to do.
The thing is, the Win quality driver program, and work they've put in on Vista & 7, does show; it's not like it used to be in Win 98 & NT days with regular BSoD's.
A nice feature of Win 7 here, is the quiet graphics card operation, thanks to the power management. Even though it's not bad under Linux, it's perceptible enough the difference to be annoying at times.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 23:10 UTC (Fri) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]
Wonderful.
Now try using a device created 5 years ago with Windows 7. Good luck with that if the vendor is no longer updating the drivers.
Once again, compatability is very much in the eye of the beholder. My G15 logitech keyboard might not be fully compatible with linux, but my 'designed-for-xp' capture card is alot easier to manage.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 29, 2011 5:06 UTC (Sat) by JoeF (guest, #4486) [Link] but my 'designed-for-xp' capture card is alot easier to manage.Unfortunately, my 'designed-for-nt' capture card is not managed on Linux either, anymore. So, there are limits to the "it runs old hardware" stuff.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 29, 2011 21:03 UTC (Sat) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
But you have the option ...
Find the driver from an older version of linux that works. Find out when/why it was removed from the kernel. Get some help and get it put back.
The only question from your point of view is whether the effort is worth it, or is it simpler/cheaper to buy a new one.
On Windows, your *only* choice is to buy a new one.
Cheers,
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 30, 2011 7:37 UTC (Sun) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]
I guess that's Microsoft's version of the "stable API nonsense"? When anything outlives the economic incentive to update the driver, force everyone to buy new widgets!
Drivers & Incentives Posted Jan 30, 2011 17:10 UTC (Sun) by jjs (guest, #10315) [Link]
But there never is an economic incentive to update the driver. Drivers are a cost, not a profit. No one buys a driver. They by the widget, the driver is needed to make it work.
With Linux you have the advantage of not depending on an economic incentive to update - you can depend on personal interest (I want the driver for X upgraded because I have X - and there normally is someone with the skills and the X that will do it).
Drivers & Incentives Posted Jan 30, 2011 18:16 UTC (Sun) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]
Are you kidding? I could agree that the effect is limited, but it can't be zero. If it were zero, we would never see any driver updates. The level of support a product receives affects the reputation of that product and the producer, and therefore influences buying decisions.
Granted, the effect is much larger for higher-profile brands than it is for no-name suppliers. For example, NVidia's latest Windows drivers support cards from 3-4 years ago (maybe longer), and they're continually updating them. Why even bother with a driver architecture and GPU architecture continuity that enables this broad span of coverage unless that's going to give you some advantage in the marketplace?
Drivers & Incentives Posted Jan 31, 2011 2:23 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
driver updates happen in the windows world for one of two reasons.
1. the driver is supporting a family of devices and a new item was released, so there is a new version of the driver to support the new item, and it happens to also cover some older items.
2. there is a bug in the driver that customers are screaming about, so they need to have a fix to stop the screaming.
Drivers & Incentives Posted Jan 31, 2011 2:33 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]
My statement is that #2 (and the potential impact on reputation and therefore sales) provides an economic incentive. Otherwise, vendors would uniformly just ignore the unhappy customers.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 29, 2011 19:32 UTC (Sat) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]
The special features of the G15 does not work out-of-the-box, but there is a driver for it:
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Logitech_G15
I very rarely come across hardware lacking proper linux support. When I do, I tend to get it working through submitting and following up bug reports.
On the desktop side, I pick kde over win7 or osx any day. Gnome is about as boring as the two proprietary alternatives. I use linux desktops at work and at home every day, the only problem I see is lock-in mechanisms from MS. Sharepoint is just a badly designed web-interface to access your documents. The nice trick of forcing the user to access it by IE is just tragic. To have it support only MS Office documents is equally tragic. Combine that with the absolutely horrible MAPI protocol, and the table is set. I do hope anti-trust legislators wake up at some point. It is already 2011, I am sick and tired of it.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 31, 2011 0:12 UTC (Mon) by JEDIDIAH (guest, #14504) [Link]
> All the hardware I've tried, I just had to
> install it and boot, or plug it in and with > Win 7 it goes find drivers and updates them
...really?
I did that with a Mac Mini and it did no such thing. This includes basic stuff like built in Nvidia GPU that Ubuntu would give you the option of downloading the proprietary driver for. Win 7 also failed to do this with my printer. It couldn't even manage to suggest a "near match" like Ubuntu does.
Windows 7 is still no Debian despite of all the hype and all the noise and the usual "but we got it right this time, really we did" propaganda.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 14:05 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
You're mistaken if you think consoles is the first time Microsoft tried to solve a problem by pouring money on it. For XBox 360 it worked, but the Zune is all but abandoned, their walled garden MSN is dead, HPC Windows is a joke.
Microsoft isn't scared of Open Source, they're a user of and contributor to Free Software -- they just don't want that cold fact to influence customers, who might choose a Free Software alternative over one of their big ticket products like Windows.
Microsoft is scared of stagnation. The replacement for the visionary leader of a big corporation is never another visionary leader - no room for one to grow inside, and no way to bring one in from outside and get him accepted. So it became a generic middle-aged corporation as Bill gradually retired. Employees become subjects of fiefdoms within the company, nobody can speak up when the company is doing something stupid, because self-critique is confused with treachery. A company whose employees were once glad to _buy_ its own products is now one where your iPhone must be kept out of sight of the boss while a free Zune sits in a desk drawer.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 31, 2011 21:57 UTC (Mon) by moofar (guest, #70283) [Link]
"A company whose employees were once glad to _buy_ its own products is now one where your iPhone must be kept out of sight of the boss while a free Zune sits in a desk drawer."
I know for a fact that this is the complete opposite of the truth.
I've wasted the last 20 minutes reading comments of people who all write as if they are authoritative on MS, and lots of stuff sounds plausible or semi-insightful, yet are all mostly in disagreement, with glaring inaccuracies abound. This seems to be pretty standard of random commentary on MS. It ends up just being a waste of time.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Feb 1, 2011 0:43 UTC (Tue) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link]
"For XBox 360 it worked"
Did it? I doubt MS will ever get its $8 billion back and this hardware generation is getting long in the tooth. The next generation, besides having two entrenched Japanese competitors with no intention of yielding ground, will have the added complication of a significant competition from more capable hardware than a console will ever have, running on Apple and Linux. The Windows game monopoly already hit its high point a while back and is now in decline. MS failed to transform it into a lucrative DirectX console monopoly as hoped. MS doesn't know any other way to make money than by monopolistic coercion. I see the game market as just a continuing use of cash for MS in the long run.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 12:55 UTC (Fri) by dag- (subscriber, #30207) [Link]
> I'm sure there have been a lot of meetings about this with a lot of shouting and bogus excuses for yet another failure.
Shouting ? Is that an euphemism for chair-throwing ?
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 13:57 UTC (Fri) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]
There is no lock-in with phones. The applications are cheap, the data is held elsewhere and easily transferable. Microsoft has to create a compelling product that grabs attention in the first week, otherwise they lose.
Especially since applications written for their previous mobile OS don't work on the new one. They are starting from scratch in a saturated market. They got attention due to their name, and some channel access.
As for them taking over the market by their standard procedure of continuous investment and releases, they already have tried. This is the latest iteration.
Derek
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 31, 2011 1:53 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Yes, there it is.
Applications may be cheap, but people will not willing to pay for them _again_ when they change phones. So, iPhone people will just buy a new iPhone, while Android people will keep buying Android.
I would call this lock-in.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 31, 2011 2:28 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
one significant difference between the iphone and android is that with android you can change phone vendors.
Also, since Android is open, if there is enough demand, someone will make an emulator that will allow you to run Android apps on other devices (except on iPhone, but only because Apple forbids interpreters or emulators)
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Feb 1, 2011 19:55 UTC (Tue) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
> Also, since Android is open, if there is enough demand, someone will make
> an emulator that will allow you to run Android apps on other devices > (except on iPhone, but only because Apple forbids interpreters or > emulators)
An emulator is possible in theory, but I doubt it will actually happen any time soon. There's just too much infrastructure on Android that isn't there on, say, Symbian or WinMO. I mean the most obvious thing is Dalvik, but there's a whole process lifecycle framework, native code framework, the Intent system, all that... You'd be better off just writing a web app if you really don't have the money to put your application on multiple platforms.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Feb 1, 2011 23:35 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I wasn't thinking in terms of android on symbian, but instead android on other linux
as far as linux on windows, if cygwin can work, android on cygwin can probably be made to work as well.
I see it as a given that linux will trounce the competition in this space, it may or may not be in the form of android, but it doesn't need to be.
Microsoft Phone 7 Is Dead in the Water (pcmag.com) Posted Jan 28, 2011 15:15 UTC (Fri) by rriggs (subscriber, #11598) [Link]
Microsoft will "evolve an Open Source and Linux policy with products for sale and support services" when pigs fly.
Just my humble prediction.
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