__/ [ Sinister Midget ] on Monday 31 July 2006 06:08 \__
> On 2006-07-28, Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> posted
> something concerning:
>> Ballmer to Wall St: we always back a winner
>>
>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>| At about this point, investors must have been hankering for the security
>>| of Office, and client and server operating systems. With Windows Vista
>>| bedevilled by delays, Ballmer promised: "We will never repeat this
>>| experience with Windows again. We will never have a five-year gap
>>| between flagship products."
>>|
>>| Pressed to explain what the company has done to avoid delays, Ballmer
>>| said - chiefly - it had learned the classic lesson of promising too much
>>| in one go. He said he shared this mistake jointly with Bill Gates,
>>| Craig Mundie chief research and strategy officer and Jim Allchin,
>>| co-president for platforms and services. "We tried to incubate too many
>>| new things and integrate them simultaneously rather than let them bake.
>>| There was too much complexity. We worked down that path for a while and
>>| said it wouldn't work. We re-booted where we were.
>> `----
>>
>> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/28/ballmer_multicore_investments/
>>
>> That last line opens the door to many jokes.
>
> 'Promising too much in one go'? /TOO/ much? They took everything out!
> All that's left is a costly hardware requirement. If they promised
> *anything* in the beginning it turns out it was too much!
Actually, they have versioning for files, which is a feature that was most
likely inherited from Server 2003 -- the codebase onto which they descended
around September 2003. This feature, which most 'Joes' will fail to grasp or
make use of, raises privacy concerns and, by default, leaks disk space
temporarily [1]. The feature was probably intended for system
administrators, e.g. settings file need version control. CVS/SVN are
primarily intended for programming where diffs don't occupy much space and
are easily interpretable, mergeable and reversible; it becomes confusing if
you version documents because it is difficult to trace and let alone picture
progress, as IBM's work on analysing evolving Wikis showed last year.
[1] http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33350
> And it approaches 5 years plus some change, not 5. There's still no
> reason to believe they'll make that. There's still nothing to show
> they're able to make in less than 6. Or 7, or 10.
>
> Investors need to make a decision: a) ride the s(t)inking ship to the
> bottom; or, b) bail, take their losses, and try to invest in something
> with a better long-range business plan next time.
I have modified my signature temporarily. I'll keep the first line unchanged
(no rotation) for a week. *smile*
Best wishes,
Roy
--
GNU/Linux is beautiful. < http://youtube.com/watch?v=lawkc3jH3ws >
http://Schestowitz.com | Free as in Free Beer ¦ PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
Cpu(s): 18.0% user, 2.7% system, 0.6% nice, 78.7% idle
http://iuron.com - semantic engine to gather information
|
|
