Charlie D: Microsoft has failed.

Post #367,300 by Another Scott 12/5/12 12:16:47 PM Reply	Charlie D: Microsoft has failed. http://semiaccurate....osoft-has-failed/ Yup. But they'll still be around a while yet. Even Yahoo's still around... (via Brad DeLong) Cheers, Scott.
Post #367,305 by boxley 12/5/12 1:00:09 PM Reply	somewhere in the world dos 3.3 lives! yeah, ibm is still around, sort of have you seen this? https://www.touchdevelop.com/ Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 57 years. meep
Post #367,306 by Another Scott 12/5/12 1:06:38 PM Reply	More words, please.
Post #367,329 by boxley 12/5/12 3:22:34 PM Reply	comparing MS to IBM it will be around in some fashion, then put a link to an interesting tool that "may" be useful in the future. Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 57 years. meep
Post #367,340 by lincoln 12/5/12 4:32:22 PM Reply	yeah, those 440,000 employees, $104 Billion in revenue last year, and a market cap of $213 Billion just "sort of" exist. </sarcasm> "Chicago to my mind was the only place to be. ... I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle, and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and peddlers and the boom and clank of freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn't hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up to the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built--a place for trade, of course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from." -- E.L. Doctorow
Post #367,308 by lincoln 12/5/12 1:14:58 PM Reply	sounds like it was written by a 21 year old who has no knowledge of corporate IT. Try to get major corporations off Outlook - I don't see anything out there as good. Google Docs? Requires 100% Internet connectivity uptime 24/7, and Google can't promise that; neither can the ISPs. When I worked for Hell Computers a road contractor's backhoe broke the main trunk line coming into the campus from the outside world; no phones, no Internet orders, etc. Every hour of no connectivity cost them $5 million in lost revenue, and SWBell took 2 full days to replace and test the cable. Sure, let's put everything in the Cloud ... Xbox 360 is great: all the kids my son knows love it. There are alternatives, but Xbox has the mindset. SQL Server is very good, as good (if not better) as Oracle, MySQL, and others. The integration with Visual Studio is first rate. I can build stand-alone programs or Internet web programs that use SQL Server on the backend with minimal differentiation. MS will remain around long enough until I retire, and then it won't matter to me. "Chicago to my mind was the only place to be. ... I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle, and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and peddlers and the boom and clank of freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn't hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up to the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built--a place for trade, of course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from." -- E.L. Doctorow
Post #367,315 by Another Scott 12/5/12 1:59:44 PM Reply	Charlie's been around a long time. He was writing for The Inquirer around 10 years ago - e.g. http://www.linuxtoda...harlie+Demerjian/ You're looking at the present and the recent past in corporate environments. Charlie is look at the overall computing market and the near-term future. Growth isn't in PCs and Windows seats. It's in mobile and tablets and MS is continuting to get killed there. As people do more and more on their tablets and phones, they won't need MS Office as much, and then the lock-in with Winders and Server and SQL Server and the like won't exist either. MS needs to get their head together if they want to be relevant away from the corporate setting. IOW, there's money to be made in corporate IT still, but it's not a growth area. And for most corporations, if you're not growing, you're dying. Citrix started off as a MS OS/2 licensee and built stuff on top of it. They're still doing that, but their growth market seems to be GoToMyPC and the like - http://www.gotomypc....ess/remote_access - which allows remote access from almost anything with a web browser (it seems). They would likely be dead in the water without things like that. (Just a guess.) FWIW. Cheers, Scott.
Post #367,321 by mmoffitt 12/5/12 2:36:00 PM Reply	You cannot be serious. MS Sql Server is a very good workgroup level database - if you don't want to pay a real DBA to get maximal performance from your DB and you don't have > 1TB or so of data. But it has light years to go before its in Oracle's class. MS Sql Server is as good as MySql? Sure. But then so is your grandma's little case with her recipe cards in it.
Post #367,324 by folkert 12/5/12 3:02:05 PM Reply	MySQL is better than MSSQL.. in most areas. Its got far better storage engines that can be selected per table (MS-SQL do this???), far more external features than MS-SQL. Handles Multi-terabytes of data easily and consistently, has built-in replication features you have to pay for in MS-SQL. Has the ability to use external files as a part of the DB seamlessly. Data partitions work amazingly well. Plus I can backup the whole DB using common tools that make restores just about as easy. Clustering (multiple technologies for it). There are many external add-ons that are free and work amazingly well with MySQL. You have to pay BIG BUCKS for the MS-SQL versions of theses because they are ADD-ONS to MS-SQL. MS-SQL for multi-processors and gaggles of memory ... additional fees. Clustering... ouch. High Availability as a product $$$$. No, MS-SQL is a biatch and it doesn't work well with others. -- greg@gregfolkert.net PGP key 1024D/B524687C 2003-08-05 Fingerprint: E1D3 E3D7 5850 957E FED0 2B3A ED66 6971 B524 687C
Post #367,331 by mmoffitt 12/5/12 3:49:35 PM Reply	Okay, maybe that was a little unfair and ... demonstrating my bias for PostgreSQL. But let's NOT start another battle in the endless MySql vs. PostgreSQL war and just agree that both are better than MS-SQL. Okay? :0)
Post #367,339 by folkert 12/5/12 4:31:08 PM Reply	No Problem there... Postgres is still IMO, a better DB technically and on certain scales is fantastically better. But lacks in many "experimental" or edge case usage. MySQL has more "features" I need/use/want/like. -- greg@gregfolkert.net PGP key 1024D/B524687C 2003-08-05 Fingerprint: E1D3 E3D7 5850 957E FED0 2B3A ED66 6971 B524 687C
Post #367,341 by lincoln 12/5/12 4:52:55 PM Reply	Re: MySQL is better than MSSQL.. Again, I donÂt want to mislead you into thinking MySQL has more features than SQL Server because the truth is it doesnÂt. But the features and capabilities MySQL does possess is usually more than enough to handle systems that need a strong OLTP or analytical database. But also understand that, although both SQL Server and MySQL have complementary features in many areas, there are sections where the depth of what SQL Server offers is better than MySQL. For example, both MySQL and SQL Server have GIS features, but SQL ServerÂs is more robust than MySQLÂs. Ditto when it comes to their job scheduler vs. ours. But conversely, there are cases when MySQL rises above SQL Server in some ways, such as partitioning Â SQL Server does have parallel support for partitioning, but MySQL provides more options for various types of partitioning: MySQL offers range, hash, key, list, and composite partitioning whereas SQL Server only offers range. And continuing with the example of partitioning, I find MySQLÂs partitioning much easier to use as itÂs defined right with the table via DDL during creation time vs. creating partitioning objects in SQL Server (partition schemes and functions) that are then applied to tables. Of course, there are features in SQL Server MySQL has no complement for. Security is one particular area where MySQL trails Microsoft Â unlike SQL Server, MySQL has no concept of roles or external authentication, and its data auditing abilities are quite weak compared to Microsoft. I could list many more features that SQL Server has over MySQL (e.g. better query optimizations and methods, transparent data encryption, etc.), but as I said earlier, MySQL isnÂt about going all out with Microsoft or anyone else in the features arena. From the sidebar: Robin Schumacher is MySQL's Director of Product Management and has over 13 years of database experience in DB2, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server and other database engines. http://dev.mysql.com...t_SQL_Server.html "Chicago to my mind was the only place to be. ... I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle, and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and peddlers and the boom and clank of freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn't hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up to the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built--a place for trade, of course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from." -- E.L. Doctorow
Post #367,351 by folkert 12/5/12 8:40:37 PM Reply	CORE ONLY MySQL vs MS-SQL Complete. That is the catch there. I use it daily for Enterprise usage and class of service. For comparison, our product competes directly in TPS with MS-SQL products. We have 10% the hardware requirements and about 1% the Software cost on the server-side. Yeah... MS-SQL works great on Windows. That brings along the costs of the Windows Licenses and the enhanced Hardware requirements. FYI, former customers that have switched to competitors have to spend $100K per server (up to 5 needed for number of operators) to get the TPS we have using our hosted services. All I can say is that one former customer in particular has drank the MS Kool Aid has spent well of $500K on just the server side hardware to get the performance they got with our stuff. Not to mention they've had to upgrade ALL computers that were running WindowsXP and Windows98. They had VERY few Windows Vista or Windows 7 machines. Oh and new versions of Office were required... plus they had to purchase the MS-SQL licenses and many other pieces parets MS doesn't include. Sorry. That article you posted... I don't think you read it completely. -- greg@gregfolkert.net PGP key 1024D/B524687C 2003-08-05 Fingerprint: E1D3 E3D7 5850 957E FED0 2B3A ED66 6971 B524 687C
Post #367,356 by scoenye 12/5/12 10:13:14 PM Reply	Shirley you mean MariaDB? >:-)
Post #367,371 by folkert 12/6/12 8:15:38 AM Reply	Re: Shirley you mean MariaDB? >:-) Not at the current moment. Though the gauntlet has been thrown by Oracle for us to change it out. -- greg@gregfolkert.net PGP key 1024D/B524687C 2003-08-05 Fingerprint: E1D3 E3D7 5850 957E FED0 2B3A ED66 6971 B524 687C
Post #367,328 by jay 12/5/12 3:17:43 PM Reply	Re: sounds like it was written by a 21 year old Sure, let's put everything in the Cloud ... Companies are already doing that with Windows anyway. Moving the big servers off site helps maintenance and upgrades, and Microsoft's high cost per server and user means anything to minimize the number of boxes is good. The real problem with getting corporations off MS is the huge number of Windows applications that are baked into companies. Just moving these applications between "compatible" versions of windows is a huge issue that supports entire consulting companies. Moving these to non-Windows computers is going to take years/decades.
Post #367,338 by lincoln 12/5/12 4:25:19 PM Reply	Re: sounds like it was written by a 21 year old Moving these to non-Windows computers is going to take years/decades. which is my point that the author is glossing over. Not to mention that no one knows when the cost/benefit analysis will justify it. "Chicago to my mind was the only place to be. ... I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle, and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and peddlers and the boom and clank of freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn't hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up to the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built--a place for trade, of course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from." -- E.L. Doctorow
Post #367,357 by jay 12/5/12 10:20:37 PM Reply	Yes, but Yes, but Microsoft will be nothing but a shadow long before the applications go away. Another company that will live for years doing nothing but supporting a slowly fading user base. They could also end up another entertainment company, based on the XBox franchise. That won't be easy though, as that is a risky and highly competitive market. The XBox only succeeded because MS could afford to subsidize it for so long and they happened to buy the Halo franchise at the right moment.
Post #367,374 by folkert 12/6/12 9:13:53 AM Reply	On Halo... It really was the ONLY really successful game on the Original XBOX... until. Microsoft used Bungee to so called "lead the way" with techniques to EEK out performance. Like the whole rendering illusions they pulled off, giving you incredibly good looking graphics on nv7 video chipset and an 800MHz processor. They used the "detail up close" "less at 10 foot" "blurred at 100ft" kinds of alogs for looking at things... it really made the difference between a fast good looking game with excellent game play and a clunky game. Microsoft also used "pre-optimized" instructions that removed a bulk of cumputations and still gave the "mostly correct" answer. This was only a problem on some games with "long ranges" in them, like snipers or viewable hits from bombs... or various things like TV screens capturing the final moments from a distance. Things that took computations away from the current screen. One game, can't remember its name, sniper shots worked better in fog or partially obstructed, than if you could clearly see them. Meh. They did get lucky. They entered late, competing against some well established players... and cut their own throat cutting into the PC gaming industry and forcing it to go Console. Lets just see how well this apparent Windows 8 "hegemony" plays out. -- greg@gregfolkert.net PGP key 1024D/B524687C 2003-08-05 Fingerprint: E1D3 E3D7 5850 957E FED0 2B3A ED66 6971 B524 687C
Post #367,386 by static 12/6/12 8:43:12 PM Reply	It was also an attack against fragmentation. Game makers and Microsoft both were annoyed at supporting the diversity of PC gaming hardware. The Xbox was Microsoft making a console out of PC hardware, basically. Vastly over-simplifying it, of course. And yes, it ran at a loss for years. And we also know that Valve really does not like the prospect of PC gaming under Windows 8. Microsoft might not, either, TBH but I haven't heard anything in the press that says they have even voiced an opinion. They've always liked the closed-ecosystem that a gaming console provides. Wade. Just Add Story http://justaddstory.wordpress.com/
Post #367,409 by pwhysall 12/7/12 1:20:49 AM Reply	Bloody Valve. Less (ridiculously hyperbolic) talk about Windows 8, Valve, and more work on Half-Life 3, plzkthx.
Post #367,845 by Another Scott 12/13/12 5:37:47 PM Reply	SJVN quotes Goldman Sachs report. http://www.zdnet.com...droid-7000008699/ Windows may still be winning the desktop operating system war, but according to a Goldman Sachs report, Clash of the Titans, that doesn't matter because Microsoft has been badly losing the far more important computing device war to Apple iOS and Google Android. Why? Because, "The compute landscape has undergone a dramatic transformation over the last decade with consumers responsible for the massive market realignment. While PCs were the primary Internet connected device in 2000 (139mn shipped that year), today they represent just 29% of all Internet connected devices (1.2bn devices to ship in 2012), while smartphones and tablets comprise 66% of the total. Further, although Microsoft was the leading OS provider for compute devices in 2000 at 97% share, today the consumer compute market (1.07bn devices) is led by Android at 42% share, followed by Apple at 24%, Microsoft at 20% and other vendors at 14%." Interesting graph, too. There was a huge change in 2005 - after Mac sales took off with the popularity of the iPod - http://www.theregist...ple_stock_record/ (via Alasdair Allan on G+ - https://plus.google....posts/QLyKGKfxoVv ) Cheers, Scott.
Post #367,851 by static 12/13/12 7:41:01 PM Reply	That is often overlooked. Apple did not want to release iTunes for Windows or add any sort of Windows support for their iPod because Steve wanted to use the iPod to drive sales of Macs. This was actually moderately successful. But a few people in Apple realized they could sell many many more iPods if they did do Window support. Someone convinced Steve and the iPod took over the portable music player market, paving the way for the iPhone and then the iPad. However, developing iPhone and iPad apps does require a Mac. I have known people to buy Macs just to develop iOS apps. It appears this is a far easier buyin than having to buy a Mac just to run an iPod. :-) Wade. Just Add Story http://justaddstory.wordpress.com/

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