“In a rare moment of collaboration, wireless providers AT&T and T-Mobile have agreed to share networks in the challenging days following Superstorm Sandy, allowing customers to use whichever network gets coverage in their areas.”
see AT&T, T-Mobile share networks to help Sandy victims – CNN.com.
Users often find themselves in the dead zones of their ISP. What if they all shared all the time? It’s technically feasible. Maybe a storm will provoke a realization that together we are stronger and more capable than we are divided and competing. The same is true for software. Non-open standards anywhere in IT is stupid.
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Imagine if M$ were open about everything they did, say for example they chose to do what Linus did with Linux.
Instead of trying to gimp the system and own the entire market pie, they would be top dog in the world and highly respected. No one respects M$
Too bad, they chose closed model and decided to crap in everyone else’s sandbox. Sorta reminds me of RIAA and Napster, I’m sure in hindsight, they would go another route.
Six years from now (four hardware generations) Windows will be dead. Or free. I reckon to say that they will take Suse and come up with their own distribution.
Cringley, wrote up a good piece on Windows 8.
http://www.cringely.com/2012/10/28/steve-ballmers-dilemma/
Some of good comments:
Can you name any Microsoft product that is substantively better today than its 2003-2005 version?
The gospel of “it’ll be better if we move everything around” is patent nonsense.
Windows was created so that Microsoft could deploy their Mac apps on IBM PC and compatibles. No other reason. Microsoft tried to clone the Mac themselves, but eventually gave up an licensed Mac OS technologies from CEO John Scully at Apple in 1989, leading to Windows 3/3.1 in the early 90′s — the first functional Windows.
Is there a future for Microsoft in continuing to be the commercial low-end (non-Unix) server provider? Can Windows Server and that aspect of .NET survive and hold the company together, or will the increasing ease or stability of Linux take it down the way it took Sun?
People are just now discovering that Microsoft is not the “WAY” or at least the only way as Microsoft would like them to believe, much like a faith.
Apple may soon be faced with these facts too if it forgets the customer.
I tend to call it “RIM disease” as people finally see the light of day as Gates feared.
What do you do when you hire somebody who is under 30 and they have never used Windows? How many months of training is that? How much does that cost? Or, what is the opportunity cost of your company only hiring from the maybe 15% of college grads who have used Windows?
I was working at a company with all-Microsoft I-T, and 2 dudes spent all day setting up a giant Dell workstation for a new hire. She arrived the next day, pushed the chair down away from the PC, sat down, took an iPad out of her purse, and got down to work. The company spent more money setting up that Windows PC that she doesn’t use than she spent buying the whole iPad.
Then, she took her iPad to a meeting and dominated everyone else so badly that many of them went right out to Apple Store and bought iPads. That lead directly to this:
- corporate I-T sent a pissy letter to everyone reminding them that iPads are not approved, so stop using them
- the CEO sent a pissy letter to everyone reminding them that the only reason we have our own I-T is so we can flexibly adapt to new technologies that help us in our work — like iPads — and that if we can’t adapt flexibly, then we might as well outsource all of our I-T
- suddenly iPads were approved and supported
… so you are living in a world of denial where your users don’t know what is going on in tech. That world ended about 5 years ago.
I let you read the rest.