> --
> FORTRAN, "the infantile disorder", by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly
> inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is
> too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
> -- Edsger W. Dijkstra, SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 17, Number 5
Let's see...20 years old... that must have been about 1977? Funny, I
see a lot of people still using it today. Of course they've fixed it
up to make it more modern. Sort of like putting lipstick on a pig,
I'd say. Or other expressions I won't repeat. I myself wrote quite a
lot of code in Fortran, but can't stand it now. Do wish C had native
support for complex data type, though, as well as a better handling of
float and double types.
About the actual article about Ballmer crying.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/20/technology/ballmer_0707.fortune/index.htm
It's actually quite interesting, an analysis of where Microsoft is
and where they are going. Seems they are doing very well in terms of
increasing their income and profit, but it hasn't translated into
gains in stock price. All that money gives them a lot of power to do
damage, witness the Yahoo deal. I was also interested to see that
Microsoft search is now rated (by someone) to be equal or nearly equal
in quality to Google, but that hasn't translated into market share,
either. Back in the days of the Netscape-IE wars people said,
Microsoft will get it right on the third try. Maybe that has happened
here, too, although they seem to have taken so long getting there that
they lost the market.
The impression that Microsoft is stumbling is pretty widespread, in
spite of what the trolls here would like you to believe. From the
Fortune article:
<Quote>
Last year's rollout of the latest version of Windows, called Vista,
was a public relations and consumer marketing disaster. The rest of
the software industry, meanwhile, is either supporting its products
with advertising, like Google, or starting to rent them as online
services. Microsoft has yet to gain traction in either business.
And then there's Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500). From the iPod to the iMac
to the iPhone, its products have cornered the market on cool. Apple's
small share of the PC market in the U.S. is growing fast - it was 7.4%
in the first quarter of 2008, up from 5.1% a year earlier, according
to International Data Corp. (IDC). Perhaps even more alarming, its
ubiquitous "Get a Mac" TV ads have painted the personal computer
loaded with Windows software - the central achievement of Gates' 33
years at Microsoft - as a loser.
</Quote>
More on the Apple ads:
<Quote>
While the Google battle is about growth, the feud with Apple is mostly
about honor. It pains Ballmer and his troops react viscerally when
they watch those Apple ads - and when they see how much they've harmed
Microsoft's reputation. The consulting firm CoreBrand calculates
Microsoft has declined from 11th among global brands in 2004 to 59th
today, and reports that the two-year-old "Get a Mac" campaign has
almost certainly played a role.
</Quote>
Makes it sound like Apple is the only thing that has hurt Microsoft's
reputation. Got to give them credit, though, for years and years they
had people convinced that worms and viruses just came with the
computer. So if Apple has done a little reeducation on this matter,
good for them. I haven't seen the Apple ads, since I don't watch tv.
They sound fun, though.
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