Tag: Microsoft

Do People at Microsoft Actually Use The Company’s Software?

ZDNET has a story about Amazon.Com’s use of Linux which the companys says saves it a lot of money. If you read the fine print, though, the main reason it saves them money is because the OS is free in dollar terms — they claim it costs them about as much to administer as Windows or Unix, but the low cost of the OS and the fact it will run on low-end beige boxes produces a large cost saving.

Rather than point that out, however, Microsoft’s Doug Miller steps in it big time, saying that when companies deploy Linux they,

end up being in the operating systems business, managing software updates and security patches while making sure the multitude of software packages don’t conflict with each other. That’s the job of a software vendor like Microsoft.

Has Miller ever actually used any of Microsoft’s products in a real world environment? The nightmare of having to deal with a litany of software and security patches alogn with conflicts between software packages is practically a textbook definition of Windows.

Stupid Microsoft Tricks

ZDNet reports that in “recent versions” of Internet Explorer (I’m assuming they mean IE6 here), if a user types in a domain name which can’t be found, the browser redirects to MSN Search.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Personally, I want to see an error page, not some stupid MSN Search page, especially if the address window now contains an MSN Search URL (it is unclear from the ZDNET article if this is the case.

If I accidentally type Slashdot.CoN and get an error, I just go back there and type an M over an N. Microsoft is not exactly helping me if they redirect me to an MSN Search URL and I have to type the URL all over again.

Think about it — if I mistyped it the first time, what are my odds of failing the second time if I have to type it over from the beginning? This is especially true for very long URLs. I rarely mistype Slashdot.Org, but often mistype SteveJacksonGames.Com.

Dan Gillmor on Windows XP

Personally, I’m going to upgrade to Windows XP as soon as its available because pretty much everything I’ve read indicates its the most stable version of Windows yet (granted that’s not saying much…)

Dan Gillmor, writes that, “The Justice Department and states must quickly seek an injunction blocking the release of Windows XP, at least the version Microsoft is planning to ship.”

If I understand it, the Justice Department won’t be able to ask a federal judge to issue such an injunction until the case goes back to the lower court near the end of August, at which point it is extremely unlikely the court would issue such an injunction due to the harm it would likely cause Microsoft.

I think it’s kind of amusing to watch the same people who were horrified at the injunction that shut down Napster suddenly turn around and beg the government to do pretty much the same thing to Microsoft. Plus, Gillmor doesn’t even bother to be internally consistent with what he objects to with Windows XP. Among other things he doesn’t like about it are,

  • Microsoft removed the Java environment from XP, thereby breaking thousands of Web sites that use Java. XP customers will face endless downloads to replace the functionality they’d come to expect.

    • …

  • Microsoft is bundling all kinds of services into XP in ways that block competition, from photography software to video/audio playback. If customers want to use other vendors’ products they’ll have to jump through Microsoft-designed hoops.

Hmmm…so bundling Java with XP is fine even though it potentially hampers alternatives but bundling video/audio playback software is bad? I’m not seeing the logic there, Dan. I suppose he’s still peeved that Windows includes a calculator and text editor too.

I also didn’t understand this objection,

  • Windows XP contains harsh controls on users to prevent unauthorized copying of the software. If you reinstall the OS after upgrading your hardware in ways that Microsoft considers questionable, you’ll need Microsoft’s permission.

Yeah, Windows XP and several thousand other PC applications. Maybe the Justice Department should have asked for a preliminary injuction against all those Safedisc-protected games I keep running into. Actually Windows XP is better, in that respect, because its authentication method is a lot easier to spoof than is something like Safedisc.

Microsoft Strikes on Java

Microsoft is a lot like a venomous snake. I wouldn’t want to stand to close to it, but I also feel a sort of awe at just how vicious and predatory it can be.

After being forced into a settlement with Sun over the way Microsoft was using and abusing Java, Microsoft recently told Sun to take its ball and go home — Microsoft is pulling Java support out of Windows and Internet Explorer (note this doesn’t mean anything for Javascript which is completely different from Java).

This is a brilliant call. With Internet Explorer being the dominant browser, this will help turn web developers off of Java. As Purdue University professor of computer science Jan Vitek tells ZDNet, “if you want your Web page accessible to the largest number of people, you may want to drop Java.”

And it’s going to be extremely difficult to make a case that Microsoft is trying to kill Java since Sun itself has been whining for years about how Microsoft implemented Java (in fact Sun’s press releases almost sound like they’d prefer that Java not be included in Windows).

Of course, Microsoft also takes the chance to give Java a little kick over security (conveniently forgetting to mention that Java’s problems pale in comparison to ActiveX).

Microsoft has turned brutal competition into such an art, that I suspect someday insurance policies might be updated so that they will no longer cover “an Act of Microsoft.”

Where Do You Want Your Data to Go Today?

Upside.Com reports that one of the problems Microsoft has experienced with its ongoing Internet Messenger outage is that not one, but two sets of backup systems had faulty disk controllers, and a Microsoft spokesman is quoted as saying, “…we have had to go to our third level of backup to restore the service and retrieve customer data, [so] this process has taken longer than we had hoped.”

Gee, I can’t wait for .Net so Microsoft can manage all of my data!

Microsoft Employee Steps In It

I’ve been very critical of Dave Winer’s comments about Smart Tags on Scripting.Com, but off some Microsoft employee goes to help make Winer’s case for him. Winer posted an e-mail from an MS employee defending Smart Tags. I almost stopped reading after the first paragraph,

I come at this from a non-involved end-user, basing my opinion on my experience to date, as just a “reader” , and as such, an end-user, I love smart-tags. I find it is one of the most user friendly, productive tool we have create since “auto-complete”.

Frankly, Microsoft’s implementation of auto-complete sucks. Its the first thing I disable when forced to use Word. My wife absolutely detests Microsoft because of auto-complete because to truly disable it you have to muddle your way through a long set of menu options, and then hope and pray that Word gets the message.

On the other hand, a later paragraph is downright scary assuming this is not some spoofed e-mail,

To suggest that the author knows best how to write effectively to each individual reader is silly, yet that’s what I understand of you position. When you write a piece, when any author writes a piece, he or she is always at a tremendous advantage over the reader. Theoretically at lease, you have at least familiarity if not command of the topic about which you write. The reader most likely does not. That’s why they are reading, to learn something, to be exposed to new ideas that you do not yet have or understand.

That sort of arrogance is just amazing. This is pretty much what Winer’s been arguing all along — that Microsoft wants to alter people’s content, and along comes this person to say “you’re absolutely right, and that’s a good thing! You should thank us for altering your content.”

On the other hand, the MS employee does add something which was interesting,

Many articles, including yours, accuse smart tags as “re-editing” the work?? I don’t get this, they do no such thing, The orginal work remains unchanged, no new links, no removed links. Smart tags do add “Meta-context” , and hopefully over time, our software will get even smarter so that the “Meta-Context” smart tags evolve with me, learning and tracking my “knowledge” quotient, thus getting more and more specific about what they call out and what they don’t, either based upon what it knows about the things I’m interested in, or what it knows about the things I don’t know a lot about.

Isn’t this the sort of thing that Winer’s been urging? That we’ll put these streams of XML data out there and let the end user mix, match, slice and dice information how he or she wants? Isn’t MS just bringing its weight to bear on a variation of what Winer has been championing all along?