Posts by Eadon
2686 posts • joined Monday 3rd August 2009 06:33 GMT
Page:
MS copying
". It's good to see that MS have been paying attention!"
Translation - MS copied the competition.
Re: Other operating systems
@stucs201 - it was Microsoft admitting they photocopied apple.
Re: Metro Now
@AC +1 funny :))
Re: Still it can only go downhill from here.
@asdf - it's unfair to criticse Ninendo, I think. MS bought its market share with 11 billion dolars from its cash cows, using one monopoly to buy a market from honest players.
Nintendo has innovated and does not have 11 billion to splash out on R&D except from profits from its games work. It is an honest and valuable organisation. The WII was massively innovative and created a huge new market of casual gamers.
If Nintendo make games for kids, then that's their business model, what's wrong with that? Adults like Nintendo too, as I say, especially casual gamers. Sony and Xbox go after the geeks.
Sony and Nintendo did all the innovation. MS simply copied them, especially Sony. MS are the parasite.
Re: Telling the customer what they really want...
Wasn't it Heny Ford who said "If I'd asked the customer what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."
Correct, which is why focus groups are limited in their use. However, now what the customers are saying is, give me a phone with a bit of openness, some apps, and which has a certain "cool" quality, so to speak.
So MS brought out a phone that is more closed even than Apple's, has no apps worth speaking of, and is definitely, quintessentially *not* cool! Not even uncool in a good way.
Re: Give then to America
@asdf - "Would have worked too had they gotten the phones out a year earlier"
If I may respectfully offer a more exaggerated opinion - MS had to get such phones out in 2009 or by early 2010 at the very latest. That was their last window, so to speak, of opportunity before Apple and Android established themselves.
Re: Not only can't MS sell tablets... @danny 14
@Carlton Browne FO
Android uses the Linux kernel, and Android extensions are being fed back into the Linux kernel itself. Soon Android apps will run within Linux. We have the Ubunutu Linux phone on the horizon, but who knows what other linux phones will appear on the market? It's hard to see MS getting anywhere with existing competition, Blackberry beginning a comeback and new competition bubbling up from Ubuntu and Firefox OS.
Tiles interface done badly = win 8
It's true that Android has tile widgets and has done for a while, but it's mostly icon based, like Apple and Symbian, etc. before it.
Windows however has "Metro" which is a poor UI, as Userbility experts who know more about UX than even Eadon, do attest.
There are three problems with MS. They don't stick to good usability practice or even a consistent ways of doing things (see Windows and MS software passim). They don't stick to standards or openness. And they have no taste.
Compare with Android and iOS that are functional first, and also have a polished, well designed look and feel.
Now look once again at Microsoft's tile/Metro UI - tis the very manure of an LSD-overdosing infant Jabberwocky.
MS UI FAIL!
Re: If you can't own the market..
@stephen channell - good point, and MS do buy markets, they did that with the XBox - cost them 11 billion dollars but they did it. To buy the mobile market, however, will cost them at least ten times that. The money they poured into destroying Nokia to turn it into a Windows Phone factory has created null results.
MS are trying to copy Apple: High end, high profit, prestige devices with an App Store that makes gigabucks. The low end does not interest them, they just assassinated the netbook market due to it having low margins. (Watch Google Chrome take over that space this year - another Eadon prediction! And no I do not like the idea of Google Chrome, but it will be a fun battle to watch).
So MS can't afford to go for low margins in the mobile market. Windows is a cash cow and without mobile, windows will whither on the vine, as it is already doing, on the desktop/laptop and in servers. MS must win in mobile or it will sink like a stone. However if doing so means it loses money year in year out, then it will sink anyway, because it needs to subsidise its wilting Windows and Office cash cows and fast!
MS has massive operating costs, and it cannot afford to play in race-to-the-bottom markets.
Re: neither was its lack of tab devices.
@Tom 35 "Guess no one wanted to pay a grand for a netbook with a touch screen."
Here's another wild guess - they won't want to spend $699 for a netbook with a touch screen either.
Re: Contempt! @JDX and Jobs
@Daniel B - I'm not trashing Microsoft, I'm telling the truth. The truth just *happens* to be disfavourable to MS. Nothing in any of my comments is untrue (give or take the odd nit pick), if you think it is, then please pick me up on it. I'm nice to people who are polite to me, which is seldom :-)
app is a great idea
Your website, with all the junk, is a mobile web browser FAIL!
So I guess I'll put your no-doubt dodgy app on my Android and hope for the best.
P.S. when are you going to port it to Win Pho 8? Their 232 users are desperate for *something* to do with their phone.
Re: Actually...
@JDX - you claim, "The public ... just want something they have heard of, and in the phone/tablet market that isn't something MS is able to achieve."
The public have heard of Windows: Windows Phone. The public have heard of that. The public demands Android and is avoiding Windows. It's not what the public have heard of, it's what they like.
@JDX your attempts at apologising for microsoft are highly amusing! MS has spent billions on marketing and everyone has heard of Windows.
MS is failing to sell because it has a bad product that is badly positioned in the market.
keyboard
It was the blackberry keyboard that made apps difficult to port from other pure-touch-screen mobiles, this was one reason for a lack of apps for blackberry relative to Android.
You would have to pay me to own a Surface!
One wouldn't be seen dead with one of these in a public place for starters. And lugging such a hot-running beast about, to have it run out of battery seems rather pointless for travel, which is my main use case for a tab. So if I had a Surface, it would just end up collecting dust and wasting space.
The Surface is half laptop, half tablet and fails at being either. Surface is like making someting that's half a motorbike, half a car. A 3-wheeler perhaps :-)
To compound this, the UI is unusable and horrifically hideous. Windows 8 - Medusa's fave OS!
Re: Actually...
@Alexander Hanff 1
The public did want tablets - Apple proved that. However, the public didn't want tablets running Windows, which require the use of a stylus.
Remember this point, the public now want computers (mobile and even desktop) that do not run MS operating systems.
Re: Contempt!
It's true that one should not design based on the findings of focus groups. But you do need to take on board criticisms. If you design a product that people do not like, then you are taking a huge risk. That's fine for concept cars and the like, but not if you are trying to take down the market leaders, or keep powerful competitors at bay.
Microsoft are designign software (and now hardware) that no one wants to use. In a world where cheap and free alternatives exist that are, simply, excellent and loved.
Microsoft is self destructing, it is in denial of its own impotence right now. It is a staggering, panting, huffing and puffing unfashionable dinosaur, and the vultures (or precursors of said species) are circling overhead!
Re: Instant reaction
@JDK - you criticise the parent poster about having an empty life, but your are a Microsoft APOLOGIST! How sad and lonely is your life? You lead a life devoid of any point! MS cheerleaders slagging off MS critics for not having a worthwhile life is hysterical!
AD HOM FAIL!
Not only can't MS sell tablets...
MS have created hostility in their partners by making their own tablets, and flogging them in retail outlets.
So MS have few friends left. They have to pay OEMs to be friends now (or give them "loands" of 2 billion dollars, e.g. to Dell to stop them moving to Linux and other competitors).
And now MS is seeing a new threat, Chrome OS laptops etc appearing at the low end of the desktop market. Many people that buy windows buy the cheapest, and now the cheapest is Chrome OS.
So MS can't sell tablets in a hot market but it gets worse. Microsoft can't even sell Windows to a market it owns.
EPIC FAIL!
They should be called WindowsNets not Botnets
If you want to keep your servers free from viruses and relatively safe from similar malware attacks, then move to Linux. It's much easier to harden, and is more secure out of the box. And no crap like Virus scanners are needed (unless scanning for windows viruses to protect other boxes that have Windows on them).
This is common knowledge, yet MS manages to sell servers with Windows on them. It's simply bad practice, even irresponsible, to use the least secure operating system on web-facing machines.
Microsoft invests 2 billion to keep Linux off Dell's systems
Or at least Microsoft hope to prevent Dell going head long towards Linux systems on desktop and servers. It's a loan but, given Microsoft's history, and Balmers modus operandi, this smells like a bribe, or at least some kind of "deal".
Microsoft are fighting their own partners now, with flogging their own kit (Surface etc) in the retail channel, so now it has to bribe them to keep them sweet, or at least not too unsweet.
If MS keeps losing market share, it's not going to be able to afford all of these dirty tactics to do business and then things get really interesting, as a critical collapse would ensue.
Re: Into Africa
OK Wintards, two points - first Gates is a robber baron and got his fortune through back stabbing honest partners and competitors. He did so illegally and the DOJ declared his practices as illegal. So it's not his money, he stole it. And now he tries to buy a nice-guy reputation with charity work. Call me cynical but that is my opinion.
Your opinions are different, but I do not complain about you expressing your opinions.
Second point, there are tax incentives and also profit incentives behind this "charity" - the underlying mission is to get them hooked on Windows early, even if the price is spending money on curing diseases. It's called marketing.
And the gullible windows users suck up the PR like the clueless little kittens they are. Pawns to the Microsoft machine.
You guys are USEFUL IDIOTS. (Useful to Microsoft, but not to others, note).
Re: Windows won't sell in advanced civilisations
@Flatpackhamster Windows users obviously are an unadvanced civilisation with no sense of humour ;-)
Re: Very unfortunate
@RyokuMas - I don't post as AC, that wasn't me.
Into Africa
Ah, so THIS is what Bill Gates charidy "Philanthropy" is all about...
Locking Africa into Windows. Who would have thunk it? Well, they do call it the Heart Of Darkness I suppose.
Can't be too generous in business...
Microsoft dinosaur found
I found a fossil the other day. It was the long-dead and unlamented Microsoft mobile market mojosaurus.
Do I get a google doodle?
Windows won't sell in advanced civilisations
So Balmer needn't bother sending his Windows 8 and Surface salesdroids and marketroids and astroturdroids there then!
Now I think about it, Windows isn't even selling on Earth these days...
Re: The other 0.4%
Some of the other 0.4% might be unbranded androids or Linux
Re: Who would have thought?
@AC - "half-decent desktop OS" - unless you're locked into Windows - Linux Mint is fantastic. Those that have only used Windows do not know how good Linux Mint is :)
The Register should do more articles on Linux, on desktop and on servers (and on mobile come to that). This site does not get open source beyond endless freetard jokes. The whole open source philosophy and how it is taking over the tech world is under reported here. So even "techies" on this site (mostly mouse-clicking windodws "admins") assume the only options are Mac or Windows.
The revolution is amazing but el reg seems somewhat oblivious to it, other than a few weird (sometimes he gets it) Matt Assay articles.
Re: Unsurprising really..
@Chris 171 - the hardware may be nice (?) but the combination of hardware with Win Pho 8 is obviously not nice, especially when compared to the competition.
Blackberry 10 will boost blackberry's figures but what will boost Microsofts figures? All the astroturfers in the kingdom can't create any buzz.
Why are Nokia ditching Symbian again??? (no more symbian models from Nokia apparently) I still don't understand it! It's stable at 0.6% of the market, despite Elop's psychopathically killing Symbian 3 years ago, despite, WHEN that decision was made (set on fire by the retarded burning platform memo), it was still *INCREASING* its market share, which back then was huge!
Elop is either the most incompetent CEO in tech history, making Scully look like a genius, or he has been sent as a trojan to murder Nokia - performing Microsoft's dirty work. The latter is the less naive scenario.
The MAGIC rotting MOBILE CORPSE of Microsoft
The fall of Microsoft sounds less than that of blackberry in the table of figures but it's WORSE!
MS and Blackberry both lost 20% of their subscribers IN A QUARTER!!!! Yes, thats ONE QUARTER!
But the article does not make this following point clear enough.
Blackberry are suffering a lull due to people waiting for the next model, much like lulls between iPhone x and iPhone x+1
Whereas the opposite is true of Win Pho 8 - it has been launched within the quarter so that *should* have boosted subscriber share (as it does for iPhone x+1 during its release quarter - oft with queues around blocks)
So these figures are much worse than the article implies.
Also interesting is that this means that Win Pho 8 is obviously not selling. Why? People that bought WinPho 7 phones have been warning their mates how crap it is - negative word of mouth, despite all the astroturfing by MS and the PR companies hired by MS.
WIN PHONE FAIL!
bad karma
Strikes again!
Shame they can't run their business like their virtual farms. where putting in mindless labour yields results. These games are ruining kids minds.
wonderful video
The geeks that operate these spacecraft perform miracles. The mathematics and engineering involved are staggering!
Hats off to the engineers.
Windows 8 effect - total meh!
Kohoutek effect would be bad for comet ISON but the Windows 8 effect would be a real anticlimax!
Here's hoping for a NON-COMET_FAIL!
Posted in When open-source eats itself, we win
LibreOffice
Open Office development was slow under Sun, who did not include the outside community enough. Oracle were much worse! But in a way, this liberated Open Office in the form of LibreOffice.
Now that LibreOffice is established more people are able to contribute. This is a vital project for openness, possibly as important as Firefox. So it's good to have LibreOffice going strong.
Open Office running in parallel is fine too, as it will keep the LibreOffice guys on their toes, and the two projects can exchange ideas and code, though it's easier to port in the direction of LibreOffice due to the apache licence terms.
Posted in When open-source eats itself, we win
"pretty much identical"
@wowfood - yes but those projects compete and this increases innovation. Innovations are then "borrowed" - so you end up with a faster evolution of the technology.
THAT is why what you think is an Achilles heel is, on the contrary a beneficent strength.
Posted in When open-source eats itself, we win
Re: JBoss vs Tomcat?
@stanimir
"Both are virtually developed by Red Hat. JBoss uses tomcat as webengine: I know both of the them on source level, here is a ref: http://www.jboss.org/jbossweb"
Correct, Tomcat is a JSP engine whereas JBoss does the other J2EE stuff and uses Tomcat for JSP serving.
"Tomcat is also not an application server."
- It's a bit of a semantic question. You can run tomcat as a standalone web server and have it host entire end-to-end applications. OK, they won't be J2EE apps, but they're still apps. Tomcat can host Spring apps, for example.
So Tomcat is an application server, but it lacks features of a full blown J2EE server that has container-managed transactions, security, message queues, beans and other gubbins. But Spring or other frameworks can do that in any case.
Posted in When open-source eats itself, we win
Apache MS scrap
For a decade I've been following the web server battles. Apache was twice as popular as MS and the gap was growing. Then MS started to game the systems, with maneuvers regarding Big Daddy hosters and the like and the gap (at least in terms of netcraft stats closed rapidly. But things returned to normal again (according to the netcraft stats.
Along comes nginx and this seems to be taking share from both players. This is the beauty of diversification. And open source is excellent at diversification.
The decline of IIS suggests that Windows is not trusted these days, relative to previous times, to run on servers connected to the internet in the DMZ - windows is not trusted for serving web pages. This maybe due to poor performance (ASP sites are always sluggish in my experience) or it could be due to the poor security that plagues windows. Having to run - and rely on - anti-virus on servers is a nightmare, and that's what you have to do if you are crazy enough to use Windows as your web server.
Microsoft Surface Pro FAIL
It's here. Microsoft will spend quadrillions to market it on TV and everywhere else. And it will FAIL.
It will FAIL because it has crap hardware, it has been burdened with the god awful Windows 8 operating system, it is way over priced in a market of superior Androids at 1/4 the price and, worst of all, the Surface is a JOKE.
That's all you need to know.
SURFACE FAIL
This is subjective but the UI - the UI is FUGLY FAIL!
But the UI looks like someone who is colour blind has designed it. It's like looking at litter on acid, it makes the eyes pray for death.
The dumbing down of the interface continues. And I thought XP and Vista were bad.
As for the gadget who cares? It's crippled with Windows 8, therefore about as welcome as an STD.
FUGLY FAIL.
Re: And todays Microsoft rep on a comments thread is...
@Chris Long
"Forgot to press the Windows key"?
You should try Linux, it is intuitive. Windows 8 is not intuitive, you need to know, somehow, to click "Windows keys" to get a different UI (WTF???) or scroll a mouse wheel to start an app. or swipe apps to the bottom to close them etc. WTF WTF? Windows 8 UI is a WTF interface.
Linux mint with a Gnome 2 based Mate UI is perfect, you don't need specialist knowledge to use the UI. If you can use XP then Linux Mint is for you, it's actually *easier* to use than any Windows OS to date.
not perfect
@Chris Long - it's not just the commentards around here that are saying that win 8 is a disaster. It's commentards everywhere! Also the market agrees with us, people are not buying Win 8. Maybe we fools have learned a thing or two and do not buy stuff unless it's, you know, good. Even your praise of the OS sounds half hearted. It's not perfect. Indeed!
I switched to Linux and I've never looked back, btw.
Re: "Ambitious" as synonym for "Awful"?
Closing apps is important, one often needs to know which apps are active or not. The dumbing down of the UI is a nightmare.
Re: Windows 8 could be great for 3D design applications.
@stevesx - why would stroking (and smudging) a screen be more useful than moving a mouse cursor on a large screen? Using Blender, the accuracy of a mouse is a must-have.
@Chris Long So you obviously bought one then...
Re: "Ambitious" as synonym for "Awful"?
@Chris Long
There are two different UI's in the same OS. FAIL.
The "start screen" isn't just a start screen, it's a fully fledged UI. You are having to explain how to use it, you need to use a scroll wheel, you tell us.
Are you confident that the average Mum would know that? Is that intuitive? Oh, here's a "start screen" - I will use a mouse wheel to fire up my movie!
USABILITY FAIL!
Re: Lord of the flies
Imagine what dung beetles would get up to on Windows 8...
