Microsoft's Vista Challenged to Keep Pace With Rivals
Microsoft's Vista Challenged to Keep Pace With Rivals
by , 12:35 PM EST, November 29th, 2006
Microsoft's developers face a "tricky challenge" in following up after Vista, according to an editorial in the Wall Street Journal [Free Access]. Robert Guth tackled the issue in a piece focusing on the ways in which the Internet has changed since Vista development began at Microsoft more than five years ago.
Mr. Guth noted that during this period of time Apple developed iTunes and the iPod, Google developed a superior search engine followed by Web-based software tools, and the Mozilla foundation developed Firefox.
The article poses some serious questions for Microsoft. Will the PC emerge to play a central role in storing music and watching videos? Will customers migrate to on-line services to store their photos and documents instead of, traditionally, on a local PC? Will users tire of endless software updates on their PCs that are better handled by Web-based software that is automatically updated? Mr. Guth quotes Steve Ballmer extensively in response to these questions.
Finally, a possible source of friction between two senior executives and their future development strategy was presented. The article asked a lot of questions and provided insightful answers regarding what Microsoft's strategy will be for an encore and how they'll shape their OS of the future to meets the demands of users on the new Web.
Observer Comments
Wed Nov 29, 2006 10:05 pm Subject:
Well, me for a start. I won't be buying it, whatever Vista morphs into. But the market for any Microsoft OS in the forseeable future is still at least one order of magnitude above OS X's. What Microsoft does is always interesting.
We may mock, and probably should mock, at what comes out of their development. But we ignore it at our cliche.
And the likelihood of its being good is low: http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1959713,00.html
Ha ha ha ha bump (man laughing his head off)
Thu Nov 30, 2006 8:19 am Subject: When theres no Captain . . .
QuoteLaurieF wrote:
Well, me for a start. I won't be buying it, whatever Vista morphs into. But the market for any Microsoft OS in the forseeable future is still at least one order of magnitude above OS X's. What Microsoft does is always interesting.
We may mock, and probably should mock, at what comes out of their development. But we ignore it at our cliche.
And the likelihood of its being good is low: http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1959713,00.html
Ha ha ha ha bump (man laughing his head off)
According to that article: "Now - 43 people? Isn't that a lot? Yes: three teams (Lettvin's "mobile" team, the "shell" team, and "kernel" team) of eight each, plus 16 managers, plus their manager. But, says Lettvin, the worst thing was that "of those 24 there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked. Somewhere in those other 17 was somebody who did have final say but who that was I have no idea since when I left the team - after a year - there was still no decision about exactly how this feature would work.""
When you don't have a strong lead presence (a la SJ) you have a ship that flounders. . .
oh man. . . what am I typing. . . I need coffee, its too early. . .
lol
What else. I've had some friends beta test Vista and they all said XP will remain the preferred OS and likely dominant until people's older PCs need replacement and they must do so with a machine with Vista preloaded on it.
I just don't understand how such software giant with the resources of Microsoft can continually drop the ball like this. They can't even get an mp3 player right.
Apple will do much better once this new lemon is released. Dare we dream of a double digit market share. With Vista, it's very likely.
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