[LINK] Microsoft: Vista follow-up likely in 2009

Craig Sanders cas at taz.net.au
Sun Feb 11 09:44:13 AEDT 2007


On Sat, Feb 10, 2007 at 10:01:34AM -0800, Glen Turner wrote:
> Howard Lowndes wrote:
> > It seems that the Evil Empire have plans to torture us further.
> > 
> > http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20070209/tc_infoworld/85937
> 
> > I like this bit, translate as "Why release all the features in one hit
> > with only one revenue stream when you can achieve multiple revenue
> > streams if you spread the feature releases out":
> > ""We put Longhorn on the back burner for awhile," Fathi said. "Then when
> > we came back to it, we realized that there were incremental things that
> > we wanted to do, and significant improvements that we wanted to make in
> > Vista that we couldn't deliver in one release.""
> 
> He's drunk the Kool Aid. Vista was a failed development project.
> 
> Its technical capabilities caught up with Linux, its graphical
> interface caught up with MacOS.  What makes Vista a failure is
> the sheer cost of the development project, which did nothing but
> keep up with the competition. Compare the size of the Vista and
> MacOS teams and compare the results, now convince me that Microsoft
> is the software company, not Apple. Microsoft have failed at
> one of its core competencies.

their core competency has NEVER been software development. they've
always been good at:

1. buying software, crippling it, and marketing it very effectively.

2. watching what everyone else does, writing or buying a half-arsed
clone, using their monopoly to take over the market when they release
it, and eventually evolve it into something halfway decent by the third
upgrade....by which time, everyone else is doing other stuff and it's
time to repeat the process.

i.e. they play catch-up and rely on their market dominance to survive
and triumph.


it's what they do.  it's what they've always done.







MS also has problems with Vista because they can't decide who their
customer is: is it the buyer/end-user of their operating system, or is
it the RIAA and MPAA?  

AFAICT, they've decided on the latter but with an (as usual) enormous
marketing push to convince people that it's the former.



craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>

Currently listening to: Prana - Voyager III (Voodoo rmx)

"God cannot send to eternal pain a man who has done something toward
 improving the condition of his fellow-man. If he can, I had rather
 go to hell than to heaven and keep company with such a god."
                  [Robert G. Ingersoll]



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