Heh. (H/T, rep3)
If Microsoft Made Cars
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Tag Archives: Microsoft
Microsoft’s Surface Pro: Floor Wax or Desert Topping?
Mary Jo Foley asks the question over at ZDNet. (H/T, Wombat-socho).
I suspect the correct answer is, “It’s a desert topping that tastes like floor wax.”
But that is the level of success achieved by most products that are “solutions” in search of real-world problems.
Windows RT DOA
That’s the opinion of The Register. (H/T, Wombat-socho) Their article describes the OS as underperforming, overly closed, and running on a device (The Surface RT) that competes with Microsoft’s OEM customers. It criticizes Microsoft’s poor advertising campaign.
Everything the article mentions is a valid criticism, and, taken together, they’re more than enough to sink the product, but the article misses the principal reason for the failure. There was no real niche for The Surface RT as an ubertablet, and Microsoft, unlike Apple with the iPad, has not been able to create one. Other than a few techies, no one I know who wants a lightweight portable device wants a “tablet.” They all want iPads.
Zune. Vista. The Surface RT. Windows 8. When will they fire Steve Ballmer?
A Penalty for Clippy-ing?
I’m reminded of The Ransom of Red Chief.
How is the Federal Bureaucracy Like Windows?
Smitty takes a look at that question when he considers how the government grew to reach critical morass.
Which operating system has more systems deployed: Microsoft’s Win*, or the various Unix flavors (with Apple’s line standing far closer to Unix)? Linux, in particular, is wrecking all non-desktop comers (supercomputers, routers, servers) because Linus Torvalds is ruthlessly anti-bloat. The U.S. Code is far more like Windows, with its tendency to add more layers of noise atop the existing crap, without insufficient trimming of legacy crap.
Ruthless focus on first principals is the difference between Apple under Steve Jobs and Microsoft under Steve Balmer. It’s the difference between George Patton and William Westmoreland. It’s the difference between spectacular success and meh.
And, yes, all the computers in my business and my household run either some form of Mac OS or Linux, and all my families mobile devices run iOS.
Surface Appearance
I wasn’t going to bother with commenting on the Microsoft Surface, the tablet they unveiled yesterday, but …
UPDATE—The Daily Caller has a gallery of other Microsoft fiascos.
