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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: Windows 8 is ‘the end of Windows’
Venture Beat ^ | 10/21/2012 | Sean Ludwig

Posted on 10/21/2012 7:52:06 PM PDT by SeekAndFind

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To: Jonty30

I have no idea about the personal issues between Dr. An and his son. All I know is that his son exhibited very poor leadership and was far too interested in the trappings of being CEO (the high, corner office with lots of glass, the nice cars, etc) than actually doing the work. The son was also not a technical guy at all. All sales and marketing.

It’s not terribly different than what we see with Obama. Obama loves the trappings of being POTUS. He doesn’t really like to do the actual work of the job, tho.


41 posted on 10/21/2012 9:11:46 PM PDT by NVDave
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To: SeekAndFind

Cloud computing is great when it works but let the cloud go down or get hacked, then not so much.

Relying on the cloud is epic fail.


42 posted on 10/21/2012 9:13:07 PM PDT by packrat35 (Admit it! We are almost ready to be called a police state!)
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To: NVDave

Jobs was always just a salesman.


43 posted on 10/21/2012 9:17:05 PM PDT by longtermmemmory (VOTE! http://www.senate.gov and http://www.house.gov)
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To: Nervous Tick

“the cloud” is the biggest BS marketing gimick in computing.

the cloud is just bs for “your personal data on out servers”


44 posted on 10/21/2012 9:19:36 PM PDT by longtermmemmory (VOTE! http://www.senate.gov and http://www.house.gov)
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To: SeekAndFind

Why is everyone so anxious to boldly predict the future? I’ll tell you why: we are living in the age of unaccountability.


45 posted on 10/21/2012 9:19:59 PM PDT by Revolting cat! (Bad things are wrong! Ice cream is delicious!)
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To: Jonty30

No you won’t be the only one. I hate the concept.


46 posted on 10/21/2012 9:20:47 PM PDT by packrat35 (Admit it! We are almost ready to be called a police state!)
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To: longtermmemmory

Not quite.

Jobs was an internal cheerleader as well as a goal-setter. Jobs got personally involved in product design from the standpoint of having a vision and insisting that it be carried out.

Sony used to have the same kind of CEO - in the 80’s, when Sony was riding high in consumer electronics, their CEO would invest himself into product parameters much as Jobs did. The “Discman” CD player? Sony’s CEO whittled one out of wood, put his hack mark on it (these stamps that the Japanese use instead of signatures) to prevent the engineers changing it and said to the engineers “This is your required product size. It can be no bigger than this. Find a way.”

Setting hard parameters and requirements like that can sometimes be very important.


47 posted on 10/21/2012 9:22:44 PM PDT by NVDave
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To: martin_fierro
"But dumb terminals are HOT HOT HOT!"

Actually, you're not that far off the mark. "Everything old is new again!"

We started out with batch processing on centralized computers, formerly known as minicomputers or mainframes. Technology got more and more powerful, allowing the switch from tape and card readers to dumb terminals, allowing for "time sharing systems." As technology advanced, new devices designed to handle the communications between the end users and the central computer (front end processors) freed up even more processing power on the central system. Eventually the processors got powerful enough to allow multiple individual systems to run as "virtual machines" on these mainframes, and shortly thereafter the PCs began to hit the market.

The march of technology REALLY exploded in the PC type systems, going from 8 bit (Intel 8086/8088 @ 4.77MHz) to 16 bit (Intel 80286 @ 8MHz) to 32 bit (Intel 80386 @ 16MHz) to 64 bit, multi-core (as many as 8 cores) processors running at speeds faster than 3GHz! This new computing power allowed for the demise of the older centralized computing, putting incredible power directly on the desktop, allowing distributed computing.

Eventually those processors go so powerful that we're now moving back to centralized computing, using virtualization similar to the original methods used on mini-computers and mainframes! And now that's happening with desktop PCs, moving to the graphical equivalent of "dumb terminals" again!

Mark

48 posted on 10/21/2012 9:22:57 PM PDT by MarkL (Do I really look like a guy with a plan?)
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To: SeekAndFind

Idiot. I love my tablet and smart phone as productivity devices...to a point. But 60-70% of what I do on my workstation I can’t do on them, including most Office document creation, which is maddening on either tablet or phone, image/video editing, spreadsheets, etc.


49 posted on 10/21/2012 9:26:25 PM PDT by montag813
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To: MarkL

Predicted in my presence by an old IT hand 20 years ago. The dumb terminals are coming back only this time in Technicolor with Etch-A-Sketch features. The same man mocked so-called object based computing around the same time at a professional conference we both attended, asking what is the difference between it and the old IBM code libraries and never receiving a satisfactory answer.


50 posted on 10/21/2012 9:29:21 PM PDT by Revolting cat! (Bad things are wrong! Ice cream is delicious!)
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To: SeekAndFind

Just bluster...


51 posted on 10/21/2012 9:31:52 PM PDT by Vendome (Don't take life so seriously, you won't live through it anyway)
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To: dayglored
Microsoft was originally a UNIX company (does anyone else remember that far back?).

I wouldn't go THAT far... However, they did one of the original ports of Unix to the Intel platform, as the original Xenix, and while Microsoft really didn't do much with it, they did license it to number of companies, like Altos and Tandy, as well as the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO, back when it was actually a software company), and it was pretty darned successful.

The reason it really never took off was simply due to the fact that there really wasn't powerful enough hardware at that time - though Altos did a lot of really cool things, like implementing real 16bit memory addressing on the 8086 based Altos 586, and designing REAL hardware memory management for the 80286 based Altos 2086, bypassing the stupid way the processor switched between operating modes.

Mark

52 posted on 10/21/2012 9:33:46 PM PDT by MarkL (Do I really look like a guy with a plan?)
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To: dayglored
I think Windows 8 will do GREAT on handhelds. It's got a lot of attractive characteristics for handhelds.

Perhaps. There is only one minor snag: they need to convince people to buy those handhelds. The catch is that if they run on x86 then these beasts are expensive and heavy; and if they run on ARM (Win8 RT) then there is no advantage in running Windows. You would actually be better off buying Apple or Android because their app stores are full of useful stuff, unlike MS stores. MS had nothing to even showcase on Win8 prereleases! MS's own Office is not Metroified yet (probably impossible to do anyway,) which means that you can't run your Outlook on an x86 tablet in Metro mode. But Apple and Android already have mail clients that connect to Exchange and work full screen.

If you are a business person in search of a tablet or a smartphone, why would you pick the first release of a new product from a company that repeatedly failed with tablets? Are you insane? Perhaps you would grab one that is made by a company that already sold millions of units and has great reviews? Remember, in this scenario you are a consumer, not a geek - you don't care for Apple or Google or MS, you just want a product that works for you. MS tablets will be sold in some quantity, of course - MS can sell probably 100K units just into their own sales channels. But who in the end will buy them? I personally have no interest, though I have an Android tablet here.

53 posted on 10/21/2012 9:36:57 PM PDT by Greysard
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To: RegulatorCountry
Boy did you strike out on that technical analysis.
First Wang produced the most widely accepted word processing system. Ran on its own hardware and software. PC and Wordperfect killed it.
Honeywell was one of the original seven dwarfs to IBM. Honeywell, Burroughs, NCR, Univac, CDC, RCA and GE. Funny none are in the mainframe business ant more.
54 posted on 10/21/2012 9:38:57 PM PDT by Kozy (Calling Al Gore)
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To: RegulatorCountry
Boy did you strike out on that technical analysis.
First Wang produced the most widely accepted word processing system. Ran on its own hardware and software. PC and Wordperfect killed it.
Honeywell was one of the original seven dwarfs to IBM. Honeywell, Burroughs, NCR, Univac, CDC, RCA and GE. Funny none are in the mainframe business ant more.
55 posted on 10/21/2012 9:39:05 PM PDT by Kozy (Calling Al Gore)
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To: BereanBrain
Microsoft is "leading from behind". Maybe they should spend less time copying Apple, and playing in Media (MSNBC they just ditched) and more time ENGINEERING.

You bring to mind a scene from "The Big Bang Theory!"

[Usual gang and Priya are gossiping about Sheldon]
Howard Wolowitz: Raj, did you ever tell your sister about the time Sheldon got punched by Bill Gates?
Priya: Oh, God! You're kidding?
Raj Koothrappali: Nope. Gates gave a speech at the university. Sheldon went up to him afterward and said, "Maybe if you weren't so distracted by sick children in Africa, you could've put a little more thought into Windows Vista."
[all laugh]
Leonard Hofstadter: Bam! Right in the nose. Made me proud to own a PC.

Mark

From http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1632232/quotes

56 posted on 10/21/2012 9:43:52 PM PDT by MarkL (Do I really look like a guy with a plan?)
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To: NVDave
This has resulted in the death or near-death of the following companies:

Don't forget SCO (back when they were a software company), Novell, and Sun Microsystems.

Mark

57 posted on 10/21/2012 9:46:39 PM PDT by MarkL (Do I really look like a guy with a plan?)
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To: Kozy

What is it that I wrote, that is in any way negated by what you wrote? You included ancillary products produced by Wang. That is the only difference.

A two sentence reply hardly constitutes a “technical analysis,” by the way. It was exactly as it was intended to be, provided to another FReeper as an explanation of the original reply.


58 posted on 10/21/2012 9:54:37 PM PDT by RegulatorCountry
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To: BereanBrain

no will ever ask a proprietary OS to control stuff is is not certified to control. Wind River and Green Hills do that.


59 posted on 10/21/2012 9:55:48 PM PDT by RitchieAprile
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To: NVDave; scan59

“MSFT is having the same problem so many computing companies that were started by techies have had: They handed the control over to a salesman.”

Amen to that.


60 posted on 10/21/2012 10:07:10 PM PDT by babyfreep
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