Is Microsoft People-ready?
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"People-ready business." That's Microsoft's latest slogan from hell, and it probably would have passed quietly into the dustbin of marketing history had it not been for a recent blowup in the blogosphere.
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The beta of Microsoft's new online service reveals some good collaboration features for individuals and small businesses, but there are problems that still need to be ironed out.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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The new public face of Microsoft's enterprise information policies has a long and very accomplished history, plus what appears to be a personal need to make his mark on the world. That may be exactly what Microsoft needs after the last guy.
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The data center fabric will at a minimum bring together network, server, and storage administrators. Are you ready? Can you handle it?
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The development monoculture around the OpenOffice suite has, critics charge, become one of the project's own worst enemies. Now that IBM is taking the field, can that be changed in time to fend off Microsoft Office hegemony?
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Microsoft plans to hold its first-ever conference for Microsoft Office software developers, the company announced this week. The conference, scheduled for February 2005, is part of a growing effort by the
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What Yahoo! can do for Microsoft--and what it can't.
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While huge progress has been made toward &quot;user-centric&quot; identity, I still have problems with &quot;user-centric&quot; anything. The point-of-view is still outside the user. It's still organizational, corporate. If you're &quot;centric&quot; about users, where are you? Right, outside the user. And inside something that's, well, not quite human. Or worse, that's super-human. Not a peer, but a superior. \
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MICROSOFT has unveiled a new range of peripherals that include the company&#39;s first foray into biometric identification on the desktop.
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Microsoft is set to change the way that organisations handle upgrades. The company has teamed up with Dell and Vintela in an attempt to cut the people-hours that are spent on software support.
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At a conference for users of its Project software, Microsoft demonstrated a variety of features that likely will be in the next version of the project management application.
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Microsoft is coming to your living room. Get used to it.
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Taking a page from major enterprise software providers like Oracle and SAP, Microsoft announced this week Business Ready Customer Care, an initiative that includes major enhancements to its maintenance and support program for Microsoft Dynamics, ERP and CRM, applications.
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New versions of Office, Exchange, too. But are businesses ready to buy?
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It seems that Microsoft&#39;s new upgrade to Windows is making some people nervous. That&#39;s not surprising, as home and office computing environments are just not as friendly as they used to be due to viruses and spyware. Even the software we ...
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Microsoft has tuned up its software for service providers, but consumers shouldn't expect much in the near future.Photos: Is IPTV software ready for prime time?IPTV chugs along