Posts Tagged: microsoft


20
Dec 10

The Balmer Tablet

Smart talk about a Microsoft tablet:

“What’s remarkable—and what should be, for any Microsoft shareholders, a deeply troubling sign—is that Ballmer, apparently, wants to do none of this. For him, the PC model is the only option. It doesn’t matter that it has never worked for this market in the past. It doesn’t matter that the tablet needs a new approach to user interface design, one that is fundamentally different from that of traditional PCs. Ballmer wants the PC business model—a Microsoft operating system on commodity hardware—running PC software, and the unsuitability of that software is seen as an irrelevance.”

Apparently though, they have a new tablet to show at CES this year. Given how well their announced-at-last-year’s-CES tablets did this year, it’ll be awesome … oh wait, they never shipped. Never mind.

Anyone else noticing a pattern with Microsoft announcements?


22
Sep 10

Miscrosoft’s lack of cool

Daring Fireball:

“Microsoft has never been cool, has never had good taste, but their lack of cool and lack of taste are spiraling out of control.”

… in reference to a Staged Funeral for iPhone and BlackBerry.


31
Aug 10

Word v Pages

If you can’t get excited about your word processor, stop reading now. But if you can get excited, Betalogue offers a great side-by-side compairson of Microsoft Word and Apple’s take on the classic word processor, Pages:

“In Word 2008, you have at least three different ways of viewing the same information (the style[s] of the current selection), i.e. a palette, a toolbar control, and a dialog box, and none of them is able to provide any useful information. In addition, each of them provides a difference piece of false information!”

Lots of screen shots. Good write up. Check it out.


22
Oct 09

3D Desktop

Folks have been discussing and trying out 3D desktops for a while, and nothing has ever stuck. BumpTop however, looks rather interesting. As Gruber notes, it’s “the coolest software to ship Windows-only in years.”

What do you think? Is this a nicely polished gimmick, or the future of computing?


9
Jul 09

Best Buy and Open Source

Best Buy is one of those companies that loves Microsoft.  So I was particularly happy when I saw this announcement come across about Best Buy Idea X:

“a website where you can share, vote for, and discuss ideas that will help make Best Buy a better company. The site is built using Ruby on Rails and runs in Amazon’s Compute Cloud.”

Maybe open source and cloud computing isn’t so bad, ‘eh? Beautiful looking site too.