Re: They already have
Meanwhile Blackberry has abandoned BB10 in favour of Android. Chen just keeps sawing more holes in the leaking boat to let the water out...
45 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
I still don't get the point of this at all. If I want to answer my phone, text my friends, read my email, listen to music, watch a video, etc, I can do it on the phone that I already have! If I have this huge Casio-esque lump on my wrist, I still have to stop whatever I am doing to use it. Why don't I just pull out and use the phone I already own?
Nokia told Microsoft, "Win8 phone sales suck and are never getting better. We're going to quit making them."
Ballmer panics and buys Nokia's phone making division.
The deal is sealed, then Ballmer is fired when the board sees what he has done.
MS is already setting itself up as a patent troll shell company with all of those protection racket style agreements with Android phone makers. "Nice phone. Shame if anybody was to sue you over patent infringements..."
Once it splits off software/patents into its only money making division, the hardware division will go the way of RIM and Motorola.
And the signal is: "Oh shit, I'm dead!"
Microsoft has never figured out that the user experience is the key. Even if other people think that "ease of use" = "toy", I will use a toy if it lets me get things done.
The sad thing about Windows 8 was that, within ten minutes of installing the beta, I could tell it was horrible. Everybody except shills in the press said that it was horrible and kept saying it for a year before it was released, and yet MS (ie Ballmer) kept telling the world "you just don't get it".
A CEO with half a brain should have been listening, but it took ages (in computer time) for MS to respond, grudgingly, with Win 8.1. Meanwhile everybody who just didn't get it either stayed with WinXP or Win7, or switched to something else. And the Surface fiasco reiterated that MS had no clue how to appeal to end users.
Blackberry/RIM has pretty much admitted it will give up on hardware/OS and become BBM for other, more successful wireless devices, after dumping CEOs that really didn't get it. In a longer time frame, Microsoft will end up as Office apps for Android/iOS.
Win8 is not suitable for anything but touchscreens. Within hours of the beta release, early adopters spotted that fatal limitation, because they installed it on laptops and desktops without touchscreens.
In typical corporate-think style, Ballmer et al. began shouting down any negative comments as disloyal, biased, or naive, and those people all stopped complaining and went back to Windows7.
Now that the "respectable" press like The Economist has taken up the issue, MS has progressed from sneering to whining.
So all this time playing catch up with Apple's app store, they learned absolutely nothing? They didn't read any of the complaints about Apple being slow and arbitrary and say, "Hey, we can be better than that!"???
The Win8 launch was kind of sad and cringe worthy, watching the execs struggle to make their laptops do anything useful, needing repeated attempts while pretending the trackpad was just like a touch screen. Even Ballmer couldn't work up the energy to do a monkey dance. I was hoping he'd go Gangnam Style. The CNET commentary ended with "well, that was an anticlimax."
So in three year's time we'll see if there's anything except Angry Birds in the Win App Store.
Pumped storage hydro-electricity has an efficiency of about 70%. You run electric pumps (off peak) using your excess baseline power and pump water into an elevated reservoir. During peak time the water runs back down through the same pumps which become generators through the magic of, well, through no magic at all.
There are two of these in Scotland. The Soviets built one in Lithuania back in the olden days.
Now, if you put in some windmills to run a separate set of pumps, you could have renewable energy rather than baseline energy doing the filling. The reservoir becomes your energy storage "battery" and voila! -renewable energy is practical and efficient and you've only had to dam and flood all the glens in the highlands to keep the lights on in London. Who could possibly object to that?
MUTS? MUST? TUMS? SMUT?
None of those really work.
Metro is a supermarket chain in Canada. I doubt they sued, though.
I was so looking forward to being labelled a Metrosexual when I fell in love with Win8's 4-bit colour squares and touch screen interface on my 27" monitor. But then my arms got tired. Damn you Saint Jobs, you were right again!
It's a standard political/economic pressure tactic to remind Canada who is boss. The evidence is not there but many Americans believe that pirated movies all come from Canada. They also still believe that the terrorists responsible for the Sept 11, 2001 attacks crossed the border between Vermont and Ontario, as mentioned on West Wing (Google Map that one!), rather than commuting between Florida and Saudi Arabia for months. A major power failure in 2003 started in Ohio, but was initially blamed on an Ontario power plant. And so it goes.
Sadly, the present regime in Canada is very open to this influence. They are implementing copyright laws influenced by RIAA and MPAA lobby groups. They are giving personal information to the TSA and banning Canadians from domestic flights based on US "no fly" lists, as if they have to seek permission from American authorities before Canadian citizens fly from Toronto to Vancouver.
Note the changes recently introduced to the national anthem:
"Oh-bah-ama
Whatever you say goes
Please, when you sit
Watch out for Harper's nose."
I installed the trial version.
I marvelled at the pastel Post It notes on the screen and the lack of the (misnamed) START button.
The only thing worse than pastel Post It notes on the screen is a bunch of "live" Post It notes on the screen and the fans running to cool down the CPU even when I'm doing nothing.
I used the new improved 12 step process to shut down and then I wiped the partition.
Before anything John Dvorak says, especially about Apple, has any relevance, Hedy Lamarr's ghost will have risen and sued everybody for using her spread spectrum broadcasting technology, thereby bankrupting the entire cellphone industry. And that will happen after the solar flares have wiped out our satellites and made terrestrial wireless communication impossible.
I'm buying up army surplus hand cranked handsets and lots of wire...
Why would anybody need so much porn?
More importantly, why would anybody pay for porn? I realize that the demand for (relatively) anonymous pornography was the foundation for Polaroid, VCRs, and the commercial internet, but there's no need to pay for anything except an ISP connection.
Smut on the internet is the biggest renewable resource in the world, and unless you're a washed up rock star cum pedophile, it's available free.
Just consume it out of sight of your mom and your boss and the TV camera behind you.
- No, it's resting!
And the fact that all the tests for any signs of life came up negative means...?
-We stunned it just as it was waking up!
These guys are so desperate to find life/water on Mars they will ignore all evidence to the contrary.
Go back to reading Asimov and stop wasting money.
It seems that Microsoft has no idea how to advertise its products, and looks increasingly desperate and out of touch with each ad campaign. Since The Mary Whitehouse Experience has been off the air longer than Seinfeld, but was much funnier in its prime, I think Microsoft should do a combined ad for both Windows 7 and Songsmith, with Ballmer as the embarrassing dad who can't dance.