Nobody likes Mojave.

Tags: Pigs With Lipstick, Microsoft

That's my take on the Yahoo/Microsoft takeover. The original image was stolen from The Fail Blog who claim to have stolen it from Fark.

Yes it will go through. Yes the Yahoos will hate it. Yes the results will not be pretty. It's a huge opportunity for all the other players in their respective spaces to welcome customers and their money with open arms and great products. Google still has the small issue of creating new products that generate income to deal with, but it will be good for them. Apple will keep focusing great products on the customer.

Fake Steve sums it up best.

Tags: Fun, Crazy Ideas, Bone-Headedness, Microsoft, Yahoo, Disasters, Yes They Will, Google, Apple

A report that says iPhone browsing is approaching 0.1% market share has been causing a stir. It doesn't sound like a large amount, but the device has only been out for 5 months and that is a bigger share than a decade of Microsoft-based phones.

The stats for this blog show an even bigger percentage of mobile Safari users, close to that of Linux.

The yellow sliver is iPhone, and the blue sliver below it is iPod. Here are my numbers:

Macintosh	80.12%
Windows	17.97%
Linux	0.96%
iPhone	0.56%
iPod	0.22%
(not set)	0.12%

Here's the Wild Guess. Comparing my stats to those in the article, it is interesting to note that the ratio of Macintosh page views to the sum of iPhone and iPod page views is about the same: 100:1. So I conclude that roughly one in a hundred Mac owners have a mobile browser now. But with unit sales of Apple's mobile devices running something like 50% of Macs, I'd expect the 100:1 ratio to change dramatically over the next year: maybe to as much as 10:1.

Tags: iPhone, Linux, Microsoft, Apple, Browsers, Wild Guesses

I know it's hard to believe, but just before Leopard was released Microsoft launched a customer care initiative. Yes, on their Breaking Entrepreneurial News page, Inc.com had this item:

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has introduced a new customer service initiative that provides Microsoft Dynamics clients and partners worldwide with industry-leading visibility and control over their ERP and CRM solutions. Business Ready Customer Care offers reassuring insight into upcoming product innovations and extended product support.

Microsoft will provide ongoing road-map visibility through comprehensive statements of direction that announce planned product innovations 12 -18 months before the next version release for Microsoft Dynamics AX, CRM, GP, NAV, SL and Retail Management Solution product lines.

Microsoft will also extend its Support Lifecycle policy for the CRM, ERP and Retail Management Solution product lines, allowing Dynamics customers to receive ten years of product support rather than the normal five years offered.

I love this stuff. Industry-leading visibility and control. Reassuring insight. Ongoing road-map visibility. Comprehensive statements of direction. All terrifically Business Ready.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick, Buzzwords, Twaddle

Early in 2006, I predicted privately to friends and family that AAPL shares would close north of 90 at the end of 2006. In December 2006 when it was clear that my Wild Guess was correct, I made another Wild Guess, this time publicly:

I'll make a wild prediction here: AAPL will be at 160 by the end of 2007. Ninety dollars a share seemed impossible less than a year ago, and yet the price today is 91.66, so it's not that crazy an idea. Why so high if only 20% growth? Because by the end of 2007 Apple will no longer be viewed as a niche player. Once their full potential is appreciated, there will be a huge rush to get on board the stock. Not a bad prize to win.

Earlier than I thought, AAPL has crossed 160. Today it closed at 167.91. Here is my currently absurd-sounding guess, made in August 2007:

I'll make another wild prediction, now we have the iPhone to play with: $225 by the end of 2008. Again that sounds like a lot, but I figure on continuing large gross margins and 20% growth, plus an extra 20% "look out here they come" factor. That will make AAPL seven tenths the size of MSFT, assuming MSFT stays static. And how could that assumption possibly be wrong?

It will be interesting to see how I do. Of course Microsoft is playing a huge part in Apple's current success. The market for computers, phones, PDAs, music players, and stores that actually work for their customers is huge, and only Apple is filling the demand.

Tags: Apple, Wild Guesses, Microsoft

Nine months ago, in December 2006, I made a wild prediction:

As I write, Apple is a $78.3B company and Microsoft a $288B company. I reckon that Microsoft has topped out, so Apple has to grow to less than four times its current size (3.6 times) to have a market capitalization greater than Microsoft. At 20% per year growth, that's only seven years. And during that time, they will eat a huge piece of the PC business away from the current players.

I'll make a wild prediction here: AAPL will be at 160 by the end of 2007. Ninety dollars a share seemed impossible less than a year ago, and yet the price today is 91.66, so it's not that crazy an idea. Why so high if only 20% growth? Because by the end of 2007 Apple will no longer be viewed as a niche player. Once their full potential is appreciated, there will be a huge rush to get on board the stock. Not a bad prize to win.

Even though it has fallen recently and stands at 131.8 today, I still believe that 160 is possible by the end of the year. AAPL has gotten to within $11 of that goal already, and it's only a 21% rise. MSFT is at 28.96 today, with a market cap much the same as before, $271B, while AAPL has grown to $114B.

How is Apple doing this? With FUD -- Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. But unlike Microsoft that spreads FUD to its customers, Apple is spreading FUD to its competitors, and doing it in spades. Over at ChangeWave, there is a nice graph that shows the effect:

These are bogus statistics of course, because all statistics are bogus. In this case the population is large, but very specific: early adopters. And that is the whole point. If Apple can rapidly and effectively swing early adopters away from your products, then your strategy is toast and you are faced with a great deal of FUD.

I'll make another wild prediction, now we have the iPhone to play with: $225 by the end of 2008. Again that sounds like a lot, but I figure on continuing large gross margins and 20% growth, plus an extra 20% "look out here they come" factor. That will make AAPL seven tenths the size of MSFT, assuming MSFT stays static. And how could that assumption possibly be wrong?

Tags: Apple, Wild Guesses, Microsoft, FUD

With a competitor like WII, it's no big surprise that Microsoft is talking about changing its game. Those numbers from VGChartz represent cumulative sales, so the gradients are the rate of sale. Urlocker has more background and more links that show this was all predicted years ahead.

In less than two months there will be more Wii consoles than XBox360 consoles. If you go to the site and play with the graph controls you can see that things look dismal for Sony and Microsoft in Japan. Wii is outselling PS3 five to one.

Tags: Video Games, Pigs With Lipstick, Microsoft

From my ignorant position as an outsider, I have three predictions for the super secret features that will be unveiled at WWDC 2007. Unfortunately one of them has just been stolen before I could make it. Sun's Jonathon Schwartz announced today that ZFS will be the default file system in Leopard. This is very good news. ZFS provides enormous advantages in flexibility, manageability and reliability over current file systems.

I better get the other two out before they get leaked as well:

OS-Level support for Windows NT applications
We already know that Apple is shying away from virtualization. But why is that? Because it still requires copies of Windows and all the problems that that entails. Much better is to run the applications directly, like WINE does. The implementation would include sandboxing so that Apple can provide a completely secure environment for running Windows apps. Apple could have been working secretly on this for many years and polishing it to perfection. It would provide the best upgrade path for companies who don't want Vista (almost all of them) and draw many more people from the Windows world.

A New Kernel
Mach has its problems and has needed a lot of work to make it granular enough to provide the performance needed by Mac OS X. So my third prediction is that Mach is out and something else is in. Be has shown us that a correctly-written kernel can provide excellent media, and real-time performance, so why would Apple not be doing this? It won't be Linux. My guess is that it will either be home-grown or something few people have heard of.

I am hoping that I will do better than my MacWorld 2007 predictions -- all wrong.

[Update: All wrong again. But then we've not seen the whole of Leopard, so I still could be right]

Tags: WWDC, Wild Guesses, ZFS, Microsoft, Apple

The Register talks to Bill Buxton (who has built several multitouch systems) about Microsoft's Surface:

In fact, according to Bill Buxton - ironically a Principal Researcher at Microsoft's own research centre - these kinds of multi-touch interfaces have been around for over twenty years. Perhaps the Surface Computing marketing guys at Microsoft should check out Bill's web site. Moreover, perhaps Microsoft and developers like Jeff Han at NYU, who are building these 'old-school' multi-touch interfaces out of cameras and projectors, should consider the fatal flaw in their 'innovations'. This being that all back-projection interfaces are enormous. Think about it - you've essentially got a small cinema in a box behind a screen. Forget mobility and portability. Is it even moveable?

I remember using The Wasp, a portable and very yellow synthesizer in the early 80s. The keyboard was touch-sensitive, not in the sensitive-to-velocity kind of way, but in the touch-a-picture-of-a-key-to-press-it kind of way. As the site says:

Its most distinguishing feature is the keyboard and its awful non-moving touch keys. That's right, the flat plastic keys are only sensitive to your touch and so they are difficult and unreliable to play.

Anything that uses a touch interface has this tactile/audio feedback problem. A touch-input display also has the problem of planarity: the display and the input are co-planar. There are very few interactive systems designed this way -- none that I can think of that are designed for more than infrequent, dedicated use. The bigger the device (and so at least on paper the more impressive the display) the worse the situation becomes. Go smaller and the interface becomes usable because the hands can be positioned independently of the surface. Go too small and the area becomes too small to be useful.

I am wondering if Apple actually designed the iPhone like this: starting by finding the most functional form factor, then getting the feel and weight right, then moving on to the display, functionality, and finally electronics.

Tags: Microsoft, Multitouch, History, iPhone, Interesting Stuff

Microsoft announced their first sand table for grown-ups yesterday. The web site is all Flash, so that's an immediate black mark against it (I first thought it was called "buffering").

There have been several demos of this kind of technology on the web in the past few years. That it has taken six years to get from the technology demos that I have seen to this current technology demo is amazing. The original iPod was done in six months and the iPhone in two and a half years. Six years is two technology generations at least.

The real deal-killer is its fundamental ergonomic problem: you can't get your legs underneath it. The original product idea (see the pencil drawing in Origins on the web site) was just like a sand table -- deeper than a table but not uncomfortably so. But this one is a bath tub with a screen on top, so users either suffer from gorilla arm or dinosaur back. The people who are using it in the PR are grinning relentlessly to cover up the pain from their sore arms and aching backs.

A tabletop is actually a pretty bad environment for sharing and collaboration. It has no defined orientation. This means that you have competition among participants who try to out do each other in defining "up". The winner ends up with a haggle of people on their side and the losers are left to mentally rotate everything they see from their respective geometric wastelands. Even without the orientation problem, each participant also gets a different perspective and the table space becomes a hoarding area close to the dominant people. There is a reason we use whiteboards and computer screens in a vertical orientation: they are naturally placed, allow large audiences to share and view information comfortably, and don't suffer from the same degree of competition.

I suppose that the reason for the bath tub design is that there is a camera underneath (and possibly lighting and projection too) that is used to track the movements and recognize objects. The better approach is to build the light sensors into the screen as Apple has patented. The large depth quite substantially limits the places that the device could be used if it were wall-mounted. It simply has to be built in to a structure or mounted on its side like a huge CRT TV. Another challenge for any stand-alone device like this is getting power and data in and out. There will either have to be built-in power, or somebody gets the side with the wires. Venting the heat means that if the top is cool, someone gets warm air blowing at their legs. At least wireless links will rid it of the problem of networking.

Like the Segway, it's cool technology and well-implemented for some very limited applications. But also like the Segway and despite the maker's ideas, it won't change the way almost anyone does anything.

Tags: Microsoft, Segway, Coffee Tables, Pigs With Lipstick, Multitouch, Gorilla Arms, Dinosaur Back

Information Arbitrage has some perspective and discussion on the Xbox 360 and sales in Japan (and on Microsoft's home entertainment division's performance).


Lack of success is not all that surprising if you look at some of the results of surveys of potential customers in Japan. These originally came from Macromill in January 2007. The graphs below were published on Flickr:

Amazingly the Xbox360 was rejected by 71% and deemed a potential purchase by only 4%. 9.3% new nothing of the Xbox360.The Wii was already ahead of the PS3.

The PS3 doesn't do much better:

And supply is surpassing demand. It's pretty amazing that the PS2 will almost certainly outsell all of them in 2007. My kids still play tons of PS1 games on our PS2 machine. If it broke, we'd get another.

Tags: Microsoft, Video Games

The OS stats for this site show that Vista is not yet as popular as Windows 2000. I find that quite surprising, but that's what it says:

The site looks fine in Explorer 7 (checked here). Maybe the search on Vista defaults in such a way that this site is not found. Or maybe it's impossible to use a camera with Vista and so nobody is.

The browser share tells a different story:

Netscape stalled at version 5. Explorer 7 is being adopted pretty quickly. Everyone uses Firefox. Tiger has taken over completely.

Tags: Microsoft, Statistics, Interesting Stuff

My account log showed an access from http://msdewey.ca/. So I went there to have a look. The site is Flash -- all Flash. Oh dear.

The person I found listening to music (non-white earphones, note) is, I presume, Ms. Dewey. She's bad-mannered, has a short attention span, talks on the phone, looks very bored, threatens me, stares at me a lot, and if I wait long enough does this weird super-villain laugh. It's freaky.

Oh, and it's a search engine. I type in penguins. Wait wait wait while she thinks and then talks (about nothing to do with penguins). And then some results come up:


Over two million hits! And no scroll bars. This is going to be interesting.

The URLs are not clickable. The text that falls off the right is not readable. But the titles in blue are, and sure enough I get a page about penguins. But it is in a new window, and so she is still talking. Scrolling is actually possible: putting the cursor in the fuzzy area at the bottom causes the text to scroll, but it gets stuck at times and there is no way to tell how far I have gone or have to go.

I notice a faint copyright in the bottom right: 2006 Microsoft Corp. Ah, I understand now. It's marketing. Your tax dollars at work.

Tags: Microsoft, Google, Video

HP is exiting the Media Center business and pulling out of the Digital Entertainment Center line. This was a $2000 Windows computer in a different box sold as a media center. They had many problems: heat, noise, size, maintenance, set up. All those things that appliances shouldn't have:

Media Center PCs designed to be used as Media Center PCs were difficult to set up and painful to support, with all the junkware pre-loaded and special settings that had to be checked for little things like avoiding system hibernation and turning off the beeps that sound at very inopportune times.

And HP was the first and biggest investor in media center PCs. Have there ever been any successful Microsoft partners?

Tags: Microsoft, HP, Living Room

Robert Scoble was blogging about Microsoft before he was part of Microsoft. Now he's no longer part of Microsoft, his blog is getting interesting. His recent posts and particularly the comments they foster and his responses are very telling. He gets it. He likes Apple TV. He doesn't believe that Microsoft is in it to win.

#127: this is the problem. Microsoft is actually something like 100 companies lashed together. The Xbox team might be doing something cool while the Internet team is totally sucking wind.

In this context we’re talking about the Internet team.

Oh, and cool?

How about Photosynth? http://scobleizer.com/2006/11/10/demo-of-the-year-photosynth/

That’s cool. But it can’t be turned into a product.

Why? Cause it takes nine hours to stitch together a few hundred photos. Unusable.

So, very cool, but not a business.

Most of what we’re talking about above is about being BOTH cool and a great business ON THE INTERNET.

Microsoft is lacking on both areas.

And the comparison to the Beattles is NOT out of place here. Demonstrates that you take a Microsoft approach here.

Comment by Robert Scoble — March 17, 2007 @ 12:03 pm

Tags: Microsoft, Apple TV, Apple, Blogging, Interesting Stuff

Verity Stob writes about the quality of documentation on the Microsoft Developer Network in an article entitled Unhelpful Microsoft help denies helpless millions help. It's all about one function: LockWindowUpdate and how effectively its real purpose is omitted from the information available from Microsoft:


I have actively avoided writing anything for Windows. The documentation for Mac OS X is really very good and very available, and that is one of the reasons I have gotten into programming again.

Tags: Microsoft, Documentation

The Register, the epitome of acerbic British commenting, looks at Vista in an article titled Vista First Look: Bugs and Confusion. I'm just glad that my employer (a large US corporation) has told us that they won't be rolling out Vista for at least another 18 months.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

It's amazing how badly and in how many ways Microsoft is able to send disastrously damaging messages to its users these days.

Roger Ehrenberg writes for Seeking Alpha, describing in detail the thud of envy that has accompanied Microsoft's recent marketing and product efforts. And then there is whatswrongwithu.com that blames the citizens of most of the developed Asian world for Microsoft's failure to successfully market the XBox360 in that region. Alpha geeks are having a bad time with Vista as well. If you can't impress them, then where are the early adopters going to turn for advice?

Tags: Pigs With Lipstick, Microsoft

Owen Thomas writing for Business 2.0 hits several nails on the head in an article about Dell's business performance these past few years:

Dell needs to figure out a new selling proposition, since its price advantage has disappeared and its customer-service message lacks credibility. That's why Michael Dell's new job is so tough. It's not clear why anyone would buy a Dell today.

The other factor in the equation is that Dell only controls half of their product. Microsoft controls the other half, arguably the most important half. So they can't control most of the product, and the rest is made from commodity parts. It's no wonder that the biggest player is feeling the biggest pain.

Tags: Dell, Pigs With Lipstick, Microsoft

The Joy Of Tech demonstrates the tyranny of choice on their comics page.

Tags: Fun, Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

The creation of Daniel Eran, Roughly Drafted Magazine, is a rapidly-moving account of his analysis of Apple's product strategy. It's an excellent site for understanding what is happening right now and in the future with Mac OS X, iTV, the iPod, the iPhone, Microsoft, Vista, and all the other usually hype-ridden facets of the media/computer/mobile/DRM puzzle.

Tags: Site Focus, Apple, Microsoft

This could be a fine example of a pig and a stick of lipstick. Ars Technica has reported that 100 pink Zunes have been secretly inserted into the distribution system, so that a small number of lucky purchasers will experience that feeling of being lucky and special, to have received a rare thing among the multitudes of ordinary ones.

But of course putting pink lipstick on this pig will not have that effect. Unlike the golden tickets created by Willy Wonka, these special wrappers carry no prize. And whereas prize-giving wrappers on candy do sell more candy (or why else would they still be doing it?) because ordinary people can expand their candy budget easily, the same ploy is not going to work with high-cost MP3 players. Worse, this is going to have the reverse effect, with a hundred people returning their pink players because they got the wrong one. The value of the pink player to them will be less than a regular brown player.

I actually saw a Zune the other day in a store. I had to wait in line for ten minutes to get a chance to play with it! Just kidding. It was being completely ignored. It was at the end of an aisle, clamped in place on a stand so it was impossible to do anything with it except stab at the buttons and see the display. The clamp meant that not only could I not steal it, I also could not rotate it to read the display. Yes, the Zune, or at least this Zune at this moment, was displaying everything landscape fashion on a device mounted portrait fashion and so I had to twist my head around to read the display. Click click, oh another MP3 player. Impossible to hold it or see how it feels because of the clamp. At the stand there were none available to buy. So if I had decided that I wanted to be welcome to the social, I would have had to go looking for the thing.

At Costco the opposite problem existed. There were piles of empty packages for Zunes and iPods, the idea being that you grab a package, take it to the checkout and they give you a real product to take home. So I could buy one easily, but not evaluate it at all, even by risking a crick in my neck. This kind of packaging works for thee iPod because everyone knows what it is and can easily evaluate it elsewhere. Costco is for bargain-hunters who know what they want and are looking for the lowest price. But for the Zune, it's hopeless. While I was there I saw one person looking at the display. He was carefully reading everything printed on the packaging: clearly he did not have enough information to make a purchasing decision and the result was inevitable.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

In order to solve a problem, you have to solve the right problem. Obvious really, but not so easy to do in practice, because the root cause is not always waving a red flag.

There has been some interesting discussion online about the design of the Windows shutdown dialog -- or lack of it -- and that had led to more discussion about why Microsoft can't seem to fix things like this and get other things like the Zune anywhere near right. Much blame has been laid on the processes and systems Microsoft has in place to control the gargantuan thing that is Windows, and this comment came to its defense:

The people who designed the source control system for Windows were *not* idiots. They were trying to solve the following problem:
- thousands of developers,
- promiscuous dependency taking between parts of Windows without much analysis of the consequences
--> with a single codebase, if each developer broke the build once every two years there would never be a Longhorn build (or some such statistic - I forget the actual number)

And there you have it. Microsoft is trying to solve a problem that it should never have had in the first place: thousands of developers (ten thousand actually, costing $2B a year). Why? Promiscuous dependency? Why?

Let's look at what this does in real life. From this Slashdot discussion: Why Vista Took So Long

I'd also like to sketch out how actual coding -- what there is of it -- works on the Windows team.

In small programming projects, there's a central repository of code. Builds are produced, generally daily, from this central repository. Programmers add their changes to this central repository as they go, so the daily build is a pretty good snapshot of the current state of the product.

In Windows, this model breaks down simply because there are far too many developers to access one central repository -- among other problems, the infrastructure just won't support it. So Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. At a different periodicity, changes are integrated down the tree from the root to the nodes. In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes. It should be noted too that the only common ancestor that my team, the shell team, and the kernel team shared was the root.

So in addition to the above problems with decision-making, each team had no idea what the other team was actually doing until it had been done for weeks.

The end result of all this is what finally shipped: the lowest common denominator, the simplest and least controversial option.

Now contrast this to what happens Apple:

I used to work at Apple, in the OS and frameworks groups.

There is a master "train" for a release; projects that don't change are "forwarded" to that train, meaning no source changes are required. When a project needs to be submitted for a change for the new release, a new "view" is created for its specific changes. Every few days, a build is produced, sometimes using previously compiled bits from the old "train", sometimes its a full world build (which can take several days) but otherwise building all the latest submissions.

Then there's a fairly labor intensive "integration" phase where the built bits are all put on a box and booted. If a "quicklook" QA process shows that the build is hoarked, the integrator goes and pesters the submitters of the latest project that was submitted and gets them to fix it. (Some percentage of the time, the new code has exposed a bug elsewhere, regardless, the project that is the proximal cause of the failure is rolled back to the previous revision, it anticipation that all the projects that need to rev be submitted at once.)

The whole thing is set up through symlinks via NFS, so if you want to see the latest version of any piece of code in the system (modulus those projects that are "locked down" for security issues) you can just get your release name, append the build number, and you've got the source code, symbol'd binaries and build log *for any release* at your fingertips.

When a new build comes out, you just do a clean install. It takes about two hours on the internal network, so typically you pull the disk image and slam it to a firewire drive, (usually, you can bum a disk with the image already grabbed from a teammate) and do a full install in 15 minutes. I can't imagine having to spend a day (as some other posted mentioned) setting up a machine...

Most projects have 3 or 4 contributors. In many cases, and entire framework is the responsibility of a single person (and he or she may actually own several small frameworks.) Lots of small projects produce cleaner interfaces that lead to fewer dependencies. (Of course there are dependencies, and circular ones, but these are kept to a minimum.) Projects are encouraged to use public API from other projects, rather than SPI or other project internals. If there's something useful enough for some other project to use, its first made into SPI for internal consumption, with the goal that developers will eventually be able to use it through a public API.

Most groups don't have dedicated QA by the way - the engineers are responsible for their code, and everyone is generally just very smart about what they're doing.

As to this start menu problem: the entire UI team is about 5 individuals, plus Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall - and they're likely to say "Thats fucking stupid, just do this" and boom(tm), the decision has been made the product ships, and life goes on.

It looks to me like Apple has solved Microsoft's problem by simply not having the problem: many fewer developers, many fewer dependencies. And of course Apple has its not-so-secret weapon: Objective C. What this means is that Apple has the capability to scale much further than where they are now without getting crippled by complexity and bloat. And because they are actually in control of their products (rather than by large customers or record companies), they can maintain this situation as they scale.

As I write, Apple is a $78.3B company and Microsoft a $288B company. I reckon that Microsoft has topped out, so Apple has to grow to less than four times its current size (3.6 times) to have a market capitalization greater than Microsoft. At 20% per year growth, that's only seven years. And during that time, they will eat a huge piece of the PC business away from the current players.

I'll make a wild prediction here: AAPL will be at 160 by the end of 2007. Ninety dollars a share seemed impossible less than a year ago, and yet the price today is 91.66, so it's not that crazy an idea. Why so high if only 20% growth? Because by the end of 2007 Apple will no longer be viewed as a niche player. Once their full potential is appreciated, there will be a huge rush to get on board the stock. Not a bad prize to win.

Tags: Microsoft, Apple, Wild Guesses

It's hard to ignore the Zune because there is so much noise about it right now. That's not the happy ka-ching of cash registers though, it's the sound of reviewers ripping it to shreds. Even the enthusiastic ones are realizing what an incredible piece of brand destruction Microsoft has pulled off. Here is a representative article from Playfuls where the reviewer started with a positive attitude and met with an opinion-changing and bewildering parade of stupidities: The Stupid, Idiotic and Annoying Things about the Zune-brick.

And don't buy the "this is our first attempt" excuse: they've had Plays For Sure and their own music store fiascos before this one. What's going on? The product has clearly been rushed to market. The software won't run on Vista (yes really!), the installer marketing looks amateurish, the messages are confusing and dated; the list goes on and on. I see a company out of touch with its users and with itself, flailing around, so unable to get traction that it is basically unable to make meaningful product releases any more. Either those tens of thousands of new hires they have been adding are working on a super-secret new operating system project that will reinvent the company, or they are turning the corner into a slow death spiral, much the same way as SGI did.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

Engadget tries to install the software that comes with the Zune and has some difficulty. It took 20 minutes, several crashes, restarts, and tons of registration, including the need to create a "tag":

While we were figuring out which tag to use, we were suggested some pretty awesome(ly awful) names:
• TwinightRyan (sp)
• UprightRyan
• GrizzlyRyan
• PraisedCloud
• ScapularWorm and
• HangingCheetah
• PricyRacketeer
• GutlessStudent
• WontedSum
• PeeweeDust
Do we LOOK like a scapular worm to you? Don't answer that.

Make sure you read the comments as well.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

Microsoft Codename Max is dead. Whatever it was it is no more. It took me some Googling to find out:

With just a few clicks, you can create lists of your favorite photos, arrange them in the layout of your choice, and express them in beautiful views. Preview your photo lists as you build them until your presentation is perfect. You can even use our super hot 3D Mantle View to really show off your work!

A competitor to Aperture? But they have iView. A slide show application? But there are dozens of these, free, open source, Java, Flash, everything.

Maybe it was hard to find out anything because this product is not a product:

Microsoft® Codename Max is not like any other product. That's because it's not a product—it's your opportunity to try an exciting new user experience from Microsoft. Today Max lets you make lists of your photos and turn them into beautiful slide shows to share with your family and friends. Tomorrow...who knows?

With just a few clicks, you can create lists of your favorite photos, arrange them in the layout of your choice, and express them in beautiful views. Preview your photo lists as you build them until your presentation is perfect. You can even use our super hot 3D Mantle View™ to really show off your work!

Max makes it easy to share your memories with friends and family around the world. You can send any photo list to your friends so they can view the photos in your desired presentation. When you update the list, they get the new photos automatically. You just need a Microsoft Passport® network (or MSN® Hotmail) account.

Max looks and acts differently than programs you've used before. Microsoft's next-generation WinFX technology is built into Max, which allows you to create stunning visualizations of your pictures, and share and update them with your friends and family automatically.

It's proprietary, that's for sure. It does what iPhoto does with photocasting. It's a duplicate of Flickr maybe? Honestly it is hard to see what the value is here when there are so many existing solutions to this "problem". Email still works for me.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick, iView, Aperture

Here is an article written in 1999 forseeing a wave of Linux taking over the desktop, eradicating Windows as it goes:

"Are you a Microsoft investor? Be afraid. Be very afraid. By 2010 Windows will be as dead as CP/M, and every Windows-based software vendor will be either supporting Linux or out of business. The process is in fact 80% complete: The end result is already obvious to bright CEOs, and will shortly be obvious even to bright mainstream press columnists. In this essay, we will skim the available evidence, extrapolate the trend, and examine some of the mechanisms powering those trends."

Three years to go. Are we getting close? Yes and no.

The author has the desktop completely wrong: it's still Windows. The exponential effect has not materialized. But in the embedded and server worlds, we're already there. And there are actually two desktops to consider; the work desktop, and the home desktop. This essay was written pre-Mac OS X and things are rather different now. I'd wager that it's not Linux that will accomplish this change, but Mac OS X is a good contender.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick, Interesting Stuff

Ars Technica reports that Microsoft is shipping an industrial design kit to OEMs (computer hardware makers) to help them make their computers visually appealing:

'The toolkit, which is delivered free of charge, contains a whole host of suggestions about how to build a PC that will fit with the look and style of Windows Vista. From color palettes to suggestions about how the power and reset buttons should appear, the kit basically describes Microsoft's vision of what a "Vista PC" should look like. The look features "accelerated curves" and "purposeful contrast," among other qualities. "We want people to fall in love with their PCs, not to simply use them to be productive and successful," reads the enclosed booklet. "We want PCs to be objects of pure desire."'

In other words, we want you to abandon your effective, hard-earned brand recognition to our effective, hard-earned brand recognition, so your reputation can sink as low as ours.

Tags: Pigs With Lipstick, Microsoft

Yes really. Literally they do. And in very personal ways. See this movie for proof (Flash needed).

Tags: Fun, Microsoft, Movies, Interesting Stuff

It looks like my prediction from January 2006 has come to fruition: Microsoft has announced that it will sell its own music player. Actually I predicted that they would ship one, and that has not happened yet, so I'm not 100% right. And I'm at least partly wrong because I said the reason they would do it would be to bail out their licensees who have failed with subscription-based music. Whatever it is, they are saying that it is incompatible with everything that is currently on the market: new DRM, new everything. So that's not the reason. Maybe I was right for the wrong reason.

From Slashdot comes this gem:

Zune's a name like Tune, (how odd!)
Just lacks an 'i' and lacks a 'Pod'.

With marketing and Xbox gloss
They'll gain a share but take the loss.

With 40 billion stock bought back
Ballmer might just dodge the sack.

But Jobs would say the chance is slim,
and silhouettes will come for him.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

I jumped when I read this article on CNET (cough, cough) entitled Microsoft Shutters Windows Private Folders:

"Following an outcry from corporate customers, Microsoft is removing an add-on feature to Windows that allowed users to create password-protected folders"

This is perfect, I thought.

It's perfect because it perfectly illustrates the problems caused by the widening gulf between Microsoft and its users. Not between Microsoft and its customers, but between Microsoft and its users. I stress that because it is the whole point. Microsoft's customers are big businesses who either make the computers (like Dell), or those that buy the computers (like General Motors). Microsoft's users are the poor folks who have to use the things to get something done.

What happened here is that in order to try to close the widening gulf that exists between themselves and their users, Microsoft added a useful feature that has value to them. But they got beaten up by their customers for whom the same feature has negative value. This shows two things: 1) Microsoft does not understand the people who pay the bills (its customers), and 2) users don't count, even if Microsoft wants them to.

It's beginning to sound a lot like the cell phone market. That's the one that delivers features that users (you and me) want but customers (service providers) don't.

Tags: Microsoft

Just announced today. With a zillion engineers, why do that?

Tags: iView, Microsoft

WinFS, the all-singing, all-dancing object storage system that was supposed to be delivered with Longhorn/Vista and was then removed, to be a separate product, is dead.

Worse than not delivering is that Microsoft is showing generations of software engineers and designers what cannot (or should not) be done. As these people move on, this knowledge spreads to competitors and the successful implementation of the ideas is more likely elsewhere. Part of the Microsoft malaise is that it is stuck in a pattern of Grand Thinking that requires a small number of really big ideas to succeed for the company to succeed.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

Apple has posted three new ads comparing the Mac with Mac OS X with Windows PC: Touché, Work vs. Home, and Out Of The Box.

Tags: Apple, Microsoft, Interesting Stuff