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.
> 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.
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.
While Dvorak has become something of a joke for his offbeat and often-wrong predictions, he does raise a few good points here.