2:17pm 05/03/2006
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Posted on 05/03/2006 11:31:31 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- For the past year or so, this is what I've been telling people in private. Now that there appears to be some sputtering by both the stock and by those who defend Microsoft I think it might be high time to explain my position.
Last: 23.33-0.68-2.83%
2:17pm 05/03/2006
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) is not about to stop making gobs of money. It's just that there is virtually nothing interesting or exciting happening (with the lone exception of the X-Box360) with anything the company is doing.
: Apple Computer, Inc.
Last: 70.72-0.90-1.26%
2:17pm 05/03/2006
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) . And now Apple is piling on with new TV commercials ridiculing all the viruses and security issues you buy when you buy a Windows-based PC. Microsoft advertising ironically highlights dinosaurs.
6. Pad-based computing. According to Gates just a few years back this was to become the dominant form of computing by now. What happened?
I told MSN's product manager in 1993 that it was stupid idea that would be eclipsed by the Internet and the WWW.
He was no fool, and it was pretty clear that he "got it," even as he advanced the party line (that was his job, after all). But Bill didn't.
Now MS is trying to suck new members into MSN by tying it to the otherwise excellent MS Money. Problem is, most users don't want anything to do with MSN -certainly they don't want private financial data stored on it - so they're rejecting MS Money as well (read the cnet or epinions reviews).
What a disastrous farrago MSN has been. MS apparently can't take a lesson from observing the demise of AOL.
I'll file this right alongside his prediction that the internet will crash from overload in 1998.
Microsoft just put a new program on my desktop yesterday. They said they had an update to their anti-spyware beta and I said fine. It turns out it is now named "Defender" and shows a fort icon. It also wants you to join something called "MS SpyNet" (I declined) to help it ferret out spyware quicker. The only problem so far is that it detects as spyware one of my specialty programs and I had to tell it to ignore it.
Another disaster for Microsoft was purchasing WebTV for $400 million, although I'm sure the inventor of the product isn't complaining.
> 2. Office 2007. There is nothing in this new suite ...
Does it even support the just-adopted ISO/IED 26300
XML Open Document Format?
Sure, it will support the closed MS XML format, but
the market is starting to realize the hazards of MS
formats, particularly over many years ... and MS
would love to maneuver everyone into a position where
if they don't have an on-going paid-up subscription-
based licence, a day will arrive when they can't even
open their own documents.
Windows Defender is the second beta release of the program that in the first beta release was called Microsoft Antispyware (which was actually bought from a company called GIANT). So in that sense, it is an upgrade. It's still a beta - I have a recurring issue with a phantom definitions update download on one of my computers that seems to be fairly common - but at least on my systems it works completely silently and in the background. Never had it pick up anything real or false although I don't have many unique applications on my computers.
Although there are several things in .NET that rub me wrong (although a lot has been fixed in 2.0), I see it exactly that way. It's like a nice little environment wrapped in the kludge of Windows.
> ... if every open-source and non-MS commercial office
> product can already read MS formats, ...
Legend has it that Open Office can open some old MS .doc
files that current MS Word can't. But it's risky to
assume that the history of reverse-engineering MS
file formats will be the future of r.e. of MS files.
MS didn't put a binary header in their XML format to
make it easy for the other office suites to read it.
And if they'll sue people over the FAT fs ...
> ... and they're more efficient than the XML, ...
For most of what people create, .txt or .RTF suffices.
I want a document standard for full pre-press page
composition, and at this point in history, only XML
makes sense as the underlying markup language.
My DTP app today can create .xml, but it can't
interchange with it; heck, it can't even round-
trip it. Same is true for PDF, which otherwise
might have become a round-trip DTP standard.
If performance (or file size) is an issue, a binary
variant of ODF is sure to arrive, along with compilers
and uncompilers (for when you need to read the tags,
or to load in an app that doesn't support the .bxml).
> ... who needs open-source just for the sake of
> open-source?
I never said that. But open-source assures archival
interchange (worst case - you write your own reader),
and eliminates the expense (and any legal risk) of
reverse-engineering proprietary.
While Dvorak has become something of a joke for his offbeat and often-wrong predictions, he does raise a few good points here.
I thought I was the only one.
MS Money 2002 is the same way.
I used my older version to run amortization tables, etc.
Money2002 requires me to go online, sign in to do simple tasks such as that.
I never use it.
Back to Money 97.
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