Tag: microsoft

Office 2007 is a Nightmare

Hey, category managers in charge of IT spend. Want to make yourself a friend of the business for life? I’ve got a secret for you: don’t rubberstamp your CIO’s decision to upgrade to Vista or Office 2007. In fact, tack on a big “reject” to the request or the requisition. And don’t do it to save money. Do it to save your hide.

the comments seem to house a fair amount of microsoft astroturfers

Content Endgame

Why would I want different reader apps for different publications. He’s talking about New York Times’ Reader. I’ve tried the reader, and I remember seeing prototypes back when I worked at Microsoft. This was an app designed to show off Windows Presentation Foundation, er, .NET 3.0. Some things that that technology does that the Web doesn’t do are much better text control, better typography, and better resizing of the app on different resolution screens. But, it doesn’t matter. Google Reader is eating the lunch of this approach. Why? Cause we’ll put up with a little less readability in order to share items with other people, in order to see the information on multiple computers and platforms, and the ability to mash up the content with content from other services ala BlogLines, NewsGator, or Google Reader or other RSS aggregators.why indeed. this strikes me as a very dumb move on the nyt’s part

Cloud Operations

Her belief is that there’s going to be a tipping point in Web 2.0 where the operational environment will be a key differentiator. I mentioned the idea that Web 2.0 has been summed up as “Fail Fast, Scale Fast,” and she completely agreed. When it hit its growth inflection point, MySpace was adding 1m users every 4 days — not at all an easy feat. As these massive apps become the norm, unless you can play in a game where services can be highly stable, geodistributed, etc., you won’t be in the game. And that’s where she came to the idea that being a developer “on someone’s platform” may ultimately mean running your app in their data center. Why did Fedex win in package delivery? They locked up the best locations with access to airports, warehousing, etc. so they had the best network. A similar thing will happen with packet delivery.

where ms gloats about their datacenters