3 ms·

c'mon, man. you know microsoft can't do that. they're MICROSOFT. even if this were the best technical choice to make, they would never do it. the negative p

c'mon, man. you know microsoft can't do that. they're MICROSOFT. even if this were the best technical choice to make, they would never do it. the negative publicity would kill them. the problem they are solving is that windows, as it currently exists, is dragging around 20 years of cruft. the weight of all that cruft is slowly strangling microsoft to death. they can do it now, or they can do it later, but sooner or later, windows will have to be scrapped and replaced with something else altogether. look what a great move it was for apple. painful in the short-term, big win in the long-term.

cypress-hill 18y ago
c'mon, man. you know microsoft can't do that. they're MICROSOFT. even if this were the best technical choice to make, they would never do it. the negative publicity would kill them. i agree, eating that much crow would be impossible for them...but the reality is they are dining on crow now anyway. MSFT is drifting in the 25-27 range. this stock has gone from just a sideways bet to a decliner. they don't have time. in five years if they don't put a "grand slam" product on the market, the stock is going to 15. i hate apple but i will grant steve jobs this - he found a product to completely dominate his revenues in five years with the iphone.
Hexstream 18y ago
"even if this were the best technical choice to make, they would never do it. the negative publicity would kill them." Never underestimate what a crazy marketing department with a budget of hundreds of millions can do.
Tamerlin 18y ago
There's been an internal war of sorts within MS for years about this. They have had a long history of patching their own libraries and their own SO to fix bugs in software like SimCity... yes, they put special-case custom code in their own software to fix bugs in other companies' software. It was all in the interest of backward compatibility. It was also short-sighted; that's not a sustainable way to go forward, because every one of those custom patches increases the maintenance overhead of your code, and it's not already stellar quality code, you're going to be in trouble... and MS was the epitome of the sweatshop, so there's no way that they had much if any good code floating around there. Lately however, the other side has been gaining ground, leading to things like dotNET. They've willingly sacrificed backward compatibility in so far limited ways, which is a start in the right direction, IMO. Since this project is in MS Research, it has a shot, but I suspect that if it were part of the standard development process at MS, it would take 90+ years, based on the story of the guy that wrote the start menu for Vista... I think you're right; no matter what they do with the brand, I agree about windows. I don't think that they have as much time as they'd like, especially if Apple decides to get aggressive and teams up with Dell or PowerNotebooks or Boxx and starts expanding its OS marketing to take on Vista directly...

cypress-hill 18y ago

c'mon, man. you know microsoft can't do that. they're MICROSOFT. even if this were the best technical choice to make, they would never do it. the negative publicity would kill them. i agree, eating that much crow would be impossible for them...but the reality is they are dining on crow now anyway. MSFT is drifting in the 25-27 range. this stock has gone from just a sideways bet to a decliner. they don't have time. in five years if they don't put a "grand slam" product on the market, the stock is going to 15. i hate apple but i will grant steve jobs this - he found a product to completely dominate his revenues in five years with the iphone.

Hexstream 18y ago

"even if this were the best technical choice to make, they would never do it. the negative publicity would kill them." Never underestimate what a crazy marketing department with a budget of hundreds of millions can do.

Tamerlin 18y ago

There's been an internal war of sorts within MS for years about this. They have had a long history of patching their own libraries and their own SO to fix bugs in software like SimCity... yes, they put special-case custom code in their own software to fix bugs in other companies' software. It was all in the interest of backward compatibility. It was also short-sighted; that's not a sustainable way to go forward, because every one of those custom patches increases the maintenance overhead of your code, and it's not already stellar quality code, you're going to be in trouble... and MS was the epitome of the sweatshop, so there's no way that they had much if any good code floating around there. Lately however, the other side has been gaining ground, leading to things like dotNET. They've willingly sacrificed backward compatibility in so far limited ways, which is a start in the right direction, IMO. Since this project is in MS Research, it has a shot, but I suspect that if it were part of the standard development process at MS, it would take 90+ years, based on the story of the guy that wrote the start menu for Vista... I think you're right; no matter what they do with the brand, I agree about windows. I don't think that they have as much time as they'd like, especially if Apple decides to get aggressive and teams up with Dell or PowerNotebooks or Boxx and starts expanding its OS marketing to take on Vista directly...