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40 Comments
- suppazone, on 10/12/2007, -3/+21memberID: henry1984_65
Pass: 20020721520 - partyonaisle7, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13(in case you haven't heard of bugmenot)
http://www.bugmenot.com/view/www.nytimes.com
Tell the world! - clickmyface, on 10/12/2007, -3/+15and p.s
The proclaimed "mac-fanboys" are not iPod users. We are the people who spent a decade battling Windows as our jobs. We tend to know a thing or two, and give a ***** about the industry.
I myself want Vista to work well, be secure, and be INTERESTING. You're a dick if you think Microsoft hasn't eared an enormous anti-crowd. - rompom7, on 10/12/2007, -10/+20Am I the only one that thinks digg is way to much pro-apple and very anti-microsoft?
All I see around here is a bunch of kids praising Apple for the iPod. (btw, I hope Apple loses it's case to Apple Records.. They had an agreement.. Buying music on iTunes and PHYSICALLY putting it on your iPod breaches their agreement)
The fact of the matter is, you can't live without Office & Windows. Sure you can personally, infact I run Debian on my home PC. But at work, school, etc, you don't see Linux or MacOS.. you see Windows.. you see MS Office.. And as good as OpenOffice (sorta) is, it won't be the mainstream office software for quite a while yet.
I'm not a MS fanboy.. But i'd like a level playing field..
Watch how many negs I get for this. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -7/+16Microsoft's Worst Enemy: Microsoft.....Wow....so deep man.
- ThinkBox, on 10/12/2007, -7/+16Back in 1998, the federal government declared that its landmark antitrust suit against the Microsoft Corporation was not merely a matter of law enforcement, but a defense of innovation. The concern was that the company was wielding its market power and its strategy of bundling more and more features into its dominant Windows desktop operating system to thwart competition and stifle innovation.
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Windows 95 had 15 million lines of code. That grew to 18 million lines by the time Windows 98 launched, above. Windows XP, released in 2001, has 35 million lines of code.
Eight years later, long after Microsoft lost and then settled the antitrust case, it turns out that Windows is indeed stifling innovation %u2014 at Microsoft.
The company's marathon effort to come up with the a new version of its desktop operating system, called Windows Vista, has repeatedly stalled. Last week, in the latest setback, Microsoft conceded that Vista would not be ready for consumers until January, missing the holiday sales season, to the chagrin of personal computer makers and electronics retailers %u2014 and those computer users eager to move up from Windows XP, a five-year-old product.
In those five years, Apple Computer has turned out four new versions of its Macintosh operating system, beating Microsoft to market with features that will be in Vista, like desktop search, advanced 3-D graphics and "widgets," an array of small, single-purpose programs like news tickers, traffic reports and weather maps.
So what's wrong with Microsoft? There is, after all, no shortage of smart software engineers working at the corporate campus in Redmond, Wash. The problem, it seems, is largely that Microsoft's past success and its bundling strategy have become a weakness.
Windows runs on 330 million personal computers worldwide. Three hundred PC manufacturers around the world install Windows on their machines; thousands of devices like printers, scanners and music players plug into Windows computers; and tens of thousands of third-party software applications run on Windows. And a crucial reason Microsoft holds more than 90 percent of the PC operating system market is that the company strains to make sure software and hardware that ran on previous versions of Windows will also work on the new one %u2014 compatibility, in computing terms.
As a result, each new version of Windows carries the baggage of its past. As Windows has grown, the technical challenge has become increasingly daunting. Several thousand engineers have labored to build and test Windows Vista, a sprawling, complex software construction project with 50 million lines of code, or more than 40 percent larger than Windows XP.
"Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base, the size of its ecosystem and its insistence on compatibility with the legacy hardware and software, that it just slows everything down," observed David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. "That's why a company like Apple has such an easier time of innovation."
Microsoft certainly understands the problem, the need to change and the potential long-term threat to its business from rivals like Apple, the free Linux operating system, and from companies like Google that distribute software as a service over the Internet.
In an internal memo last October, Ray Ozzie, chief technical officer, who joined Microsoft last year, wrote, "Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."
Last Monday afternoon, James Allchin, the longtime engineering executive who leads the Vista team, held a meeting with 75 Windows managers and senior engineers to discuss the status of Vista. On Tuesday morning, Mr. Allchin met with a handful of his lieutenants and told them of the decision to push back the consumer introduction, a move that was announced publicly later that day, after the close of the stock market.
Brad Goldberg, a general manager of Windows program management, who attended the Tuesday morning meeting, said he was not surprised, because he had been involved in the decision. "But it's a different place than Microsoft a few years ago would have wound up," he said.
Like other Microsoft executives, Mr. Goldberg bristles at the notion that little innovative work has come out of the Windows group since XP. In the last five years, he said, Microsoft has released two versions of the Windows Tablet PC software intended for pen-based notebook computers, and four versions of Windows Media Center. To combat viruses plaguing Windows, much of the engineering team focused for 18 months on fixing security flaws for a downloadable "service pack" in 2004.
"The perception that nothing new has come out of the Windows group since XP is just so far from the truth," Mr. Goldberg said.
But last Thursday, Microsoft reorganized the management of its Windows division. Steven Sinofsky, 40, a senior vice president, was placed in charge of product planning and engineering for Windows and Windows Live, a new Web service that lets consumers manage their e-mail accounts, instant messaging, blogs, photos and podcasts in one site.
Fred Prouser/Reuters
James Allchin said the Vista delay was the "right thing" to do.
Mr. Sinofsky, a former technical assistant to Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, was one of the early people in the company to recognize the importance of the Internet in the 1990's. He comes to the Windows job from heading Microsoft's big Office division, where he was known for bringing out new versions of the Office suite %u2014 Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other offerings %u2014 on schedule every two or three years.
The move is seen as an effort to bring greater discipline to the Windows group. "But this doesn't seem to do anything to address the core Windows problem; Windows is too big and too complex," said Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Vista delay, Microsoft executives said, was only a matter of a few more weeks to improve quality further, not attributable to any single flaw and done to make sure all its industry partners were ready when the product was introduced. Vista will be ready for large corporate customers in November, while the consumer rollout is being pushed back to January 2007.
Mr. Allchin conceded in an interview that the decision was "a bit painful," but he insisted it was the "right thing." Mr. Allchin, 54, will continue to work on Vista until it ships and then retire, as he said he would last year.
Microsoft will not say so, but antitrust considerations may have played a role in the decision that Mr. Allchin called the right thing to do. As part of its antitrust settlement, Microsoft vowed to treat PC makers even-handedly, after evidence in the trial that Microsoft had rewarded some PC makers with better pricing or more marketing help in exchange for giving Microsoft products an edge over competing software.
In the last few weeks, Microsoft met with major PC makers and retailers to discuss Vista. Hewlett-Packard, the second-largest PC maker after Dell, is a leader in the consumer market. Yet unlike Dell, Hewlett-Packard sells extensively through retailers, whose orders must be taken and shelves stocked. That takes time.
Hewlett-Packard, according to a person close to the company who asked not to be identified because he was told the information confidentially, informed Microsoft that unless Vista was locked down and ready by August, Hewlett-Packard would be at a disadvantage in the year-end sales season.
Vista was also held up because the project was restarted in the summer of 2004. By then, it became clear to Mr. Allchin and others inside Microsoft that the way they were trying to build the new version of Windows, then called Longhorn, would not work. Two years' worth of work was scrapped, and some planned features were dropped, like an intelligent data storage system called WinFS.
The new work, Microsoft decided, would take a new approach. Vista was built more in small modules that then fit together like Lego blocks, making development and testing easier to manage.
"They did the right thing in deciding that the Longhorn code was a tangled, hopeless mess, and starting over," said Mr. Cusumano of M.I.T. "But Vista is still an enormous, complex structure."
Skeptics like Mr. Cusumano say that fixing the Windows problem will take a more radical approach, a willingness to walk away from its legacy. One instructive example, they say, is what happened at Apple.
Remember that Steven P. Jobs came back to Apple because the company's effort to develop an ambitious new operating system, codenamed Copland, had failed. Mr. Jobs convinced Apple to buy his company Next Inc. for $400 million in December 1996 for its operating system.
It took Mr. Jobs and his team years to retool and tailor the Next operating system into what became Macintosh OS X. When it arrived in 2001, the new system essentially walked away from Apple's previous operating system, OS 9. Software applications written for OS 9 would run on an OS X machine, but only by firing up the old operating system separately.
The approach was somewhat ungainly, but it allowed Apple to move to a new technology, a more stable, elegantly designed operating system. The one sacrifice was that OS X would not be compatible with old Macintosh programs, a step Microsoft has always refused to take with Windows.
"Microsoft feels it can't get away with breaking compatibility," said Mendel Rosenblum, a Stanford University computer scientist. "All of their applications must continue to run, and from an architectural point of view that's a very painful thing."
It is also costly in terms of time, money and manpower. Where Microsoft has thousands of engineers on its Windows team, Apple has a lean development group of roughly 350 programmers and fewer than 100 software testers, according to two Apple employees who spoke on the condition that they not be identified.
And Apple had the advantage of building on software from university laboratories, an experimental version of the Unix operating system developed at Carnegie Mellon University and a free variant of Unix from the University of California, Berkeley. That helps explain why a small team at Apple has been able to build an operating system rich in features with nearly as many lines of code as Microsoft's Windows.
And Apple, which makes operating systems that run only on its own computers, does not have to work with the massive business ecosystem of Microsoft, with its hundreds of PC makers and thousands of third-party software companies.
That ballast is also Microsoft's great strength, and a reason industry partners and computer users stick with Windows, even if its size and strategy slow innovation. Unless Microsoft can pick up the pace, "consumers may simply end up with a more and more inferior operating system over time, which is sad," said Mr. Yoffie of the Harvard Business School. - deepsub, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Here's a pointer to a Firefox extension that automates Bugmenot.
http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/02/07/bugmenot/ - automagnus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5You don't actually have to pay for anything to sign-up. Only looking at NYtimes archives costs money. Articles from the past 14 days(i think it's 14) are free.
- inkswamp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4And the nomination for The Biggest No ***** Sherlock Award for 2006 goes to Ray Ozzie. Ray, care to say a few words to the folks about your nomination?
"Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."
Wasn't this the big fight between Unix and Windows? Unix has a modular approach where little apps do one thing and do it well while working together, whereas Windows uses a monolithic approach where it all gets stirred together into a big stew of intermixed code? Seems the Unix model wins out (again.) - Simon80, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I think that even though MS and Apple both have their problems, Microsoft's situation is a bit different, in that they managed to corner the market and largely eliminate choice, like how you describe, while also irritating people with a product that doesn't work stably, even now (they've made some strides but I'd say that Windows XP is still unacceptable). Not to say I disagree with you, the Apple sycophants that frequent digg are quite irritating, but lets not complain about the anti-Microsoft sentiment, the real problem is the non-newsworthy hype about Apple that makes it to the front page at times.
- johndi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/26/business/soft.php
- mushroom, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5@ rompom7 no your not the only one this site is base on Apple/Linux fagboy site why do you think there is no Microsoft Category but there's a Apple/Linux category why is that Kevin?
- antdude, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Use http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/technology/27soft.html?ex=1301115600&en=d0c82ccf5d5122fb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss ... Forget BugMeNot. :)
- clickmyface, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5If you desire a level playing field you should play at the level yourself.
"while Apple Computer was allowed %u201Cgoods and services . . . used to reproduce, run, play or otherwise deliver such content%u201D." - Times Online, UK
And what do you mean by "physically"??? And how does the iPod/iTunes not fall under these terms? I dont the details, and neither do you. Nor do I really care. Apple is doing something more interesting and innovative than the people who happen to own The Beatles.
And what relevance do you mean to bring by saying Windows is at school and in the office? Because Microsoft has 90% marketshare people should just shut up about it? You call that a level playing field? - miker71, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"Windows runs on 330 million personal computers worldwide."
If this is correct (I suspect it's not cos I'm sure I read at El Reg in about 2002 that there were about 600 million Windows PCs) then Apple could have an 8% share with the cited 30 million OS X install base.
[/damned lies and statistics] - iriemanhq, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3re: "level[ing] the playing field..."
The difference between Digg and other sites is that the readers- you and I- are the ones who post, read, and rate all the articles/content on this site. (Unlike another un-named popular tech-oriented site) there are no pesky editors, marketers, conspirators, or ad agencies tipping the scale regarding content or bias. Therefore, it is fair to say that Apple folks are way more "vocal" than Windows or *Nix users far beyond their market share. Hence, a perceived bias. How to level the playing field? (IMO): The 95% of the market need to find and post more good things to say about Microsoft, then this same market needs to rate/digg these stories, then they make it to the front page, then there will be less to b**** about.
As for mushroom's comment "...why do you think there is no Microsoft Category but there's a Apple/Linux category why is that..." Not speaking for Kevin, but at 95% of the market, Windows pretty much is its own category. Wouldn't you think?
Digg is democracy in its truest form. Don't hate- participate. (ewww- did *I* just say that?!) - superalamar, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4MS simply needs to hire ppl they trust to design and release a cutting edge desktop OS. MS tends to FEAR innovation.
- superalamar, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4to get upset with digg is to get upset with the public at large....
- deusx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2FYI: That wasn't a comment - that was the text of the article
- ZachPruckowski, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Ok, but of those 200 million computers, like 75% are going to replace another Windows computer
- anagami, on 07/02/2008, -0/+1"Microsoft has the opportunity to innovate, they could really help computing take shape..."
No, they don't have such opportunity. When something doesn't work (ie: Windows' spaghetti code) in the tech world it should be thrown away. - xedeon, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Microsoft worst enemy: Steve Ballmer and his alter ego Baldmer
- levee, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3I disagree. As most of the computing action these days moves toward the Web, I think the OS is starting to become largely irrelevant.
There are a huge number of quality web-based services out there. As for OpenOffice, I've played a little, but prefer something like Writely where my work is available from any computer.
But for someone who only needs a browser and basic office apps, Linux should be a viable alternative. I've had my wife using Knoppix for the last week or two and she doesn't see much difference. Yes, I see it as one in the eye for Microsoft - the pricing of Office is unfair to most home users, yet it's ubuquity depends on countless home users pirating the software. I just think most of those users who've used a hacked copy of Windows or Office should consider their options. - efree58, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I don't like how this article blames bundling as part of the problem with windows. Look at OSX, lots of really good apps included. Microsoft has their fair share as well but I think appled does a better job and still they can get out more updates. But their updates really arent as big as microsofts. The last big update to mac was os9 to os 10. Microsofts was 2000 to XP which really wasn't that big, just a new look and more built in multimedia support. Vista will expand windows on all fronts. It will become as feature rich as OSX and then some. I still like OSX more but I still don't want to leave my windows completely because I still want to do a few things that I have grown acustiomed to from years of windows use. If Apple was the dominant OS I think that thier would be alot of OSX haters and windows stuff would be on the front page alot more.
- Phoenyx, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Actually, my perception is that Ubuntu is the OS that Diggers love. I've seen plenty of negative responses about both Microsoft and Apple.
Also, I didn't find the article to be particularly anti-Microsoft. It is just delving into the reasons why Microsoft continues to delay Vista, and why it is easier for Apple to release new versions of OS X.
Windows is Slow [delayed], but Why?
1. They lost their anti-trust suit
2. There are trade-offs with every design decision. For example, Microsoft makes backwards-compatibility a priority with Windows, and that adds a lot of complexity, testing, etc. Microsoft wants Windows to support many different hardware configurations, and that add a lot of complexity, testing, etc.
I think that Microsoft does compete with itself. I have Windows XP on my machine at home and I'm perfectly content with it. I don't personally have any reason to upgrade to Vista. Microsoft has to continually Improve on their products over their previous products, or people won't upgrade.
(I work as a web developer professionally and I have no need whatsoever to use Windows) - cazabam, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1So, Windows' compatibility issues are killing it? Blimey, it's a wonder NetBSD ever get anything release, what with them having to maintain compatibility with ... what was it? ... 30 different platforms?
I can't help but think that it's not the amount of work in maintining backware compatibility that is the problem, it's the fact that Windows is 98% cruft. - paulmdx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1According to ArsTechnica, Microsoft expects OEMs will ship 200 million PCs with Vista pre-installed in the first two years of its release. I seem to remember El Reg reporting more optimism than this (in a more recent article I can't find)..
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060207-6126.html - hammerattack, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2This is one reason I laugh at all the sheeple who go ***** over a Wal*Mart, a Microsoft, or a Google. They see size as a threat, but usually size is only a threat to itself. When companies get too big, they lose agility, and in a free market capitalist economy the prize goes not to the biggest or strongest, but the most agile.
- Woknblues, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1i have to join the site to view? reported as bad link.
- 7of7, on 10/12/2007, -6/+6Microsoft's worst enemy is that fact that people will believe any lie that shows up in the "blogosphere." I guess it's the same people that succumb to every marketing campeign that Apple comes up with, weak minded people.
- alucinor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I imagine the Windows code is a huge ball of spaghetti. A brute-force approach of heavy black-box testing is probably the only way they can get the codebase stable.
It seems the business world and tech worlds don't mesh too well together: business demands shiny, complex features to sell the product, but tech demands architectural stability and steady, thoughtful development. It seems Microsoft's paying the price for the 90s attitude of wild code-slinging focused solely on the next cycle.
Not a smart long-term business move. Piles and piles of cash can't buy MS a cleaner code-base because adding more engineers to the projects just make the projects even more complex and difficult to manage. - Photog, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I like the NY Times as much as the next man, but not enough to buy a subscription. You wanna do us a solid and post the article... Clin-ton?
- h2d2, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Ever heard the term, "sticking it to the man". Well, in geek world, Microsoft is the man... and using Apple, iPods, iTunes, Linux, OpenOffice is all just that... sticking it to Microsoft.
It's just that there is no standard on digg. It's filled with 14-year-old wanna-be techies who are simply following what's cool and hip... iPods and Apple stores.
Although personally I think the hatred for MS here is way too much. Simply ridiculous. - wilsonics, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Microsoft Needs to forget windows backward compatibility or at least drop 9x...start with a clean code base. Sure, NT was great, and still is...but it's time is over. Now they need to sit at the table, after vista ships, and wipe the slate clean and say....ok we really need to start over fresh.
Dropping ancient hardware compatibility would be a great idea for one....maybe supporting a new boot technology called EFI, and drop this BIOS junk that is really holding the PC platform back.
Microsoft has the opportunity to innovate, they could really help computing take shape...instead they only want to line their pockets with gold, and worry about supporting older technologies. Move forward.
Seems to me, if someone wants to run an older program, use an older version of windows....seems logical to me.
Wake up MS, you need a new OS that ISN'T backward compatible....start over. Sure, some people will be a little pissed at first, but then, they will praise you for cleaning house. - rompom7, on 10/12/2007, -5/+4"I myself want Vista to work well, be secure, and be INTERESTING. You're a dick if you think Microsoft hasn't eared an enormous anti-crowd."
They have earned it. But the problem lies in the fact that the anti-crowd don't see that Microsoft have turned a new leaf... I went to a MS Roadshow and they have some pretty exciting stuff coming up, but none of it makes the digg frontpage. This is stuff that will affect the office workplace and schools as well as the IT industry... What does Apple do to get the front page? Release a new iPod or content delivery system. Thats not tech related news. It's pop-tech.. it's just the tech pop culture.
I do like competition, I like the fact Apple and MS rival each other.. It gives them motivation to always bring the best to the table.
I do give a ***** about the industry. I really do. But discriminating against MS won't get it anywhere. - miaow, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3back in the 90s we thought you had to have windows for a computer to work and Gates had our naive trust. Now that we know what Microsoft are all about and also now that linux OS and open source alternatives are getting to realistic standards, I can see Microsoft becoming nothing but a large software company for non-techies. Still rich and big, but no longer a necessary part of a computer sale.
I expect linux OS use to go the same way as firefox. FF still has a small % overall, but a huge % amongst the computer literate (as well as opera, and other microsoft alternative programs). Here is an example of that http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
The worst case scenario for microsoft is if the non-techies move over to ubuntu/kubuntu or Google OS or whatever as well. That way his company will probably become a garage company again. Google OS is probably his greatest fear, since the non-techies go with recognised brandname.
Apple isn't the alternative IMHO. They use the same lock-in tactics as Microsoft and are too expensive
Microsoft's obvious bad tactics have left many people with a bad image of their company. Their first goal in any project is self-preservation of monopoly. - NotParker, on 10/12/2007, -6/+5Ny Times = Layoffs dwindling profits and circulation
Microsoft = More revenue than Unix (a first) and 12 billion a year in profits
The NY Times should investigate why they are a disaster ... and why Jayson Blair may have been their most honest employee ever. - Agent0100, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Informative and relatively objective. This is the kind of digging I like to see.
Thank you!
I realize a lot of people want to hate MS or Apple or *nix, but many (perhaps most) simply do it because that's the fan group to which they've subscribed.
I grew up in the town that gave birth to the Apple and watched it grow from the wedge to the box to the short-lived page-length box and then to the glowing ovoid screen. I was surrounded by every new Apple product growing up and learned to use personal computers through Apple.
I find it amazing how many people say the Macintosh is so much easier to use than a PC when I found it absolutely unnoticeable to switch after essentially having the Apple logo permanently burned into my retinas.
What I also find fascinating is how many Windows users out there hate Mac because it's so focused on style and image instead of computing performance. Neither assertion is particularly useful or accurate. Macintosh has made brand image a huge part of its success but certainly not at the expense of product quality. They wouldn't be around if the products were just shiny boxes. PC manufacturers have often opted to make compatibility the primary design factor, with the exception of a few who have taken the more "stylish" approach like Sony and Alienware to name a couple. Making the generalization that Mac is easier to use is like saying milk is the best. For whom and what purpose?
Of course there will always be fanatics. It's just nice to see thorough and insightful commentary once in a while. - clintonintern, on 10/12/2007, -8/+4Perhaps it would have been better to quote Bob Dylan: The Times, They Are A Changing?
- yongfook, on 10/12/2007, -9/+3suppazone > not sure whose account that is, but you've basically allowed anyone to go in there and change the password etc. Might not be such a good idea if it's a proper subscription account.
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