__/ [ Mark Kent ] on Saturday 29 July 2006 09:16 \__
> begin oe_protect.scr
> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>> 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."
>
> The problem will be easier to avoid in future, I suspect.
You're sarcastic, right? Unless they deliver yet another
revision of Windows XP (Vista is Service Pack 3), this
considerable gaps going to recur, repeatedly. The
frustration will also drive some good developers away. The
code needs to be rewritten; 60% of it, to be quantitative.
There is a reason why Longhorn was scraped in September
2005, only to have Windows XP (Server 2003) extended for 6
months before feature freeze (it was never feature
'complete').
>>| 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.
>
> MS has made it a point of promising vapourware for years, /chiefly/ to
> kill competition. This time, the competition was free software; the
> techniques don't work on free software, because there's already a tight
> relationship between users and developers, in many cases, they're the
> same people. Why wait for Microsoft to offer something on a buggy,
> unreliable, insecure, expensive, locked-down OS, when you can have it
> /not/ on a free, secure, reliable, open OS?
I wonder if there is an aspect of legality to vapourware
tactics. IBM used these tactics before; and they got away
with it. I suppose a company's reputation is being damaged
by void promises (Microsoft has almost hit the bottom of
surveyed brands in March), but what about the needs of the
cutomer -- that which is so frequently defended from
commercial 'sharks'?
Best wishes,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | How I learned to stop worrying and love GNU/Linux
http://Schestowitz.com | GNU is Not UNIX | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
roy pts/8 Sat Jul 29 09:24 still logged in
http://iuron.com - proposing a non-profit search engine
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