Challenges To Microsoft For 2006 224
TekkenLaw writes "Directions on Microsoft, a site which claims to be 'the only independent organization in the world devoted exclusively to tracking Microsoft', has published a list of 10 challenges for 2006 for Microsoft as a company. Top strategic issues in all areas of operation from OS to gaming are covered." From the article: "Windows Vista could offer large organizations improvements in software development, security, reliability, systems management, and user interface. However, public demonstrations have been full of cool graphics effects and consumer features that probably turn off more IT staff than they attract, and sales of Windows upgrade rights to corporations have been disappointing. In 2006, Microsoft has to settle on a feature set for Vista that appeals to enterprises, explain clearly what that feature set is, and reveal what PC hardware and other infrastructure corporations require to reap the benefits." Actually presented in a fairly respectful way, it's interesting to see the overall picture we've reported on for the past year condensed down into one page.
Small to Medium Business (Score:5, Informative)
Gee, wonder why that could be?
Perhaps it's the fact that a small business (like the one I work for) that uses Exchange would have to pay approximately $10,000 in software licensing costs for an "upgrade". Not to mention the new hardware that would be required to run the insanely gluttonous software itself.
Compare that to having a clever sysadmin and an installed base of RedHat Enterprise Linux with sendmail? Even with our yearly subscription costs of ~$600, it would take more than 15 years for the costs to equal out.
Give me the OSS headaches and clever admins any day...
Re:What Vista Needs (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, it's type.
Re:I like the pretty lights (Score:3, Informative)
Ever notice how sometimes a window stops responding while an app is accessing a network share or disk? That's because the primary thread is running both the IO process (which hits a wait state while waiting on the stream) and the Graphics process. There are kludges that have been getting stuck into GDI to make it smoother arround this. It is still a piece of crap, a nicely polished and well used piece of crap, but a piece of crap none the less. I unfortunately haven't had much time to developer in the new graphics system, but if it can do even just a fraction of what I have heard, it will be a huge boon to windows application graphics. Good bye grey boxes!
-Rick
Re:Independent? (Score:3, Informative)
Anyone and everyone who has had even the tiniest bit of exposure to something has bias.
" Dude, if you're devoted exclusively to tracking Microsoft, how likely is is that you're independent?"
Independent != unbiased. Independent == not funded by MS or a competitor.
"why would you devote your time exclusively to tracking Microsoft in the first place?"
Because it's too much for one person to track every company? Because it's an area of interest?
"Oh well. If a country's citizens think 'bipartisan' and 'independent' are the same thing, who am I to complain that the concept of independence has slipped a little?"
Pot, meet kettle. Political independence/bipartisanship is not comparable to journalistic independence. Until you understand what independent means in terms of journalism, please don't bother ranting about how everyone else's view of journalistic independence doesn't meet your flawed idea of what it is.
It's one thing to say that the author in question doesn't have journalistic integrity for reasons A,B, and C. It's another thing to say they are inherently biased because they choose to focus on one subject. The best journalists will focus on a subject and still maintain objectivity, which is totally different from independence.
Re:Top Ten Goals For Microsoft (Score:2, Informative)
Visual Studio 2005 / Office 12 (Score:5, Informative)
Writing as the guy who evaluates new versions of development tools at work...
No, it's not. It would be pretty good if it worked, but it has some unforgivable bugs.
For a start, there's clearly something wrong with the UI code that make it literally unusable on the majority of our PCs at work. (They have varied specs, and some of them very powerful boxes by any standards, so don't even bother telling me we just need another 512MB of RAM or something. Thanks.) It'll go into a trance for minutes at a time one some machines, hogging almost 100% CPU and GB of memory. We haven't been able to isolate the problem, because other machines run it fine, but it seems to be connected to the background updating of Intellisense (on which many of the useful improvements in VS2005 rely, of course) and the processing power or memory size of the machine in question does not seem to matter. On at least one powerful machine, it was OK to start with but performance has degraded to unusability over time, too.
Even worse, there are also some major bugs in the code generation. It appears, based on tests conducted among our dev teams and some colleagues at other organisations, that they introduced some serious performance regressions between beta 2 and the final release. In a fairly large study, co-ordinated between several dev teams with independent code bases, we've measured a 30-50% drop in the performnce of heavily mathematical code since VS2003, for example, and there definitely wasn't anything close to that problem in beta 2.
How they managed not to notice that, we don't know, but the simple fact is that at present, the parts of VS2005 we're using (mainly VC++ for native code, for performance reasons) are not an improvement on 2003. Several of my colleagues have reverted all the way to VC++ 6 as an IDE, with a workhorse machine building the final code using the 2003 compiler; they never used the earlier .Net versions for day-to-day development because useful features like browse info were removed. The whole team is now backing out of the 2005 upgrade because the UI bugs make it a liability for us and the performance bugs mean our customers -- to whom speed typically matters a lot -- probably won't buy anything we compile with it anyway. Needless to say, since we were the first guys to try it, most of our other dev teams have no immediate plans to attempt an upgrade at this point!
If Microsoft released a service pack that fixed these show-stopping bugs early in 2006, we'd certainly consider upgrading at that stage, because there is a lot to like about VS2005 as well. But the simple fact is that right now, there are some bugs so serious that nothing else matters.
Kudos to the economists who recommended giving away the Express versions for free, though; that's a smart move.
Leaving aside the fact that it's not out yet so we don't know what the ribbons will do in the end product, personally I found them annoying as hell anyway. I've been using MS Office on Windows since version -17 or something, and I know how to get things done. What I want is fixes for the awkward bits that make my life more difficult, or improvements and new features (there's plenty a WP program could do to help a lot of people's everyday work that Word still, bizarrely, can't do). What I absolutely don't want is another UI overhaul, particularly one that's going to mean I have to work out where everything's gone so I can fend off the hoards of enquiries from colleagues who know I like to play with this stuff and will probably find things before they do.
Re:Small to Medium Business (Score:2, Informative)