Tag: bbweblog

A couple of years back Ballmer said in an interview about Microsoft’s Mobile strategy “I like our strategy, I like it a lot”. Trouble is, whether or not Ballmer likes it or not, whatever that strategy was at the time, it doesn’t seem to have led anywhere that involves significant market share. Apple have whipped their butts with the iPhone, the Palm Pre although slow on the uptake right now is light years ahead of anything that Windows Mobile 6.0 can offer, and Google Android handsets are also being eaten up like hotcakes, and the major manufacturers don’t even have their Android phones on the shelves yet.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Windows Mobile is a pile of junk. It’s worthless. It pains me to say that because I used Windows CE PDA’s for years and absolutely loved them, and I so wanted Windows Mobile to be a evolutionary step forward for Windows CE, but it wasn’t – Microsoft broke it. Windows Mobile is unreliable, unstable, for most of the time on my HTC Wing, it’s practically unusble. Would I buy another Windows Mobile device? No, absolutely not. Complete waste of money. My next purchase will either be an Android based phone or an iPhone.

I read this post, ‘Not too stupid for polyglotism’, and was curious to read that some developers think they have/need to stick to one programming language to get their job done. Depending on what you’re working on, especially if you have a very narrow role in your development team or are focusing in a specific area, this may be true. In most cases though, you need to use the right too for the job. Just because you can program with Java doesn’t mean you should always program with Java. The reality is in most large scale systems development, you’re already using many different languages and you’re not even thinking about it. SQL to access the database, Java backend, HTML, CSS and JavaScript on the front end, XML for exchanging data with other systems – the list can be pretty long if you think about it.

While an interesting read, I would be cautious of working with developers if they think they cannot handle more than one programming language, because the reality is we have to use more than one language on most systems, to solve different types of problems – there is no ‘one size fits all’ programming language. Sure, there are general purpose languages, Java included, but there’s still a long list of tasks you would not use Java for – you should pick the tool that’s most appropriate for the job.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard is bringing integrated Microsoft Exchange support to Mail, iCal and Address Book, which other than the performance improvements, is likely to be the most significant new feature coming in the new OS X release coming any day now.

Office for Mac has had Entourage, a Mac specific, somewhat scaled down version of Outlook, which is included in Office for Mac for sometime now, but given that it’s not a full version of Outlook, it’s a half hearted approach from Microsoft to bring full integration with Exchange to the Mac. But you can appreciate Microsoft’s reasoning – they want you to be accessing Exchange from Windows based PCs not Macs, so why would they provide anything better?

Full Exchange integration across the native Mac OS X apps Mail, iCal and Address Book is somewhat of a game changer though. You no longer need to buy Office for Mac just to get Entourage. With Snow Leopard you will have native support built in to Mac OS X. If lack of interoperability between Macs and Exchange, which in most enterprise environments is the dominant email/calendar system, was previously a reason not to use Macs in the workplace, that argument is soon to disappear.

Microsoft have had their day. They’ve been cruising on autopilot with no one at the controls for the past few years. XP was a step up from 95/98/ME for home users, but only a small incremental step up from NT. They’ve been enjoying the fruits of Bill’s original ‘deal made in heaven’ which propelled Microsoft into the stratosphere, and resulted in Windows being pre-installed on the majority of all new PCs sold worldwide.

The tide has started to turn though, and while the Microsoft machine has been stuck on autopilot with Bill out of the driving seat and Ballmer jumping around doing his monkey impersonations, the rest of the world has been catching up… fast.

Apple have kept to their beliefs and continued to develop hardware and software combinations that work together in tandem to do just that… work. And work very well. Without driver issues, installation issues, hardware stability issues, blue screens of death, viruses, trojan horses, you name it. iPods are everywhere. iPhones are everywhere. College students are gravitating towards Macs as ‘standard issue’. Media professionals have always believed in Macs. Microsoft must be filling it’s pants, because right now they are very much in danger of being made irrelevant.

This article on investor news site Seeking Alpha absolutely slams Microsoft for resting on their laurels and basically doing nothing while Apple and Google are moving in to their space and owning it. I’d like to fast forward another 10 years or so in to the future to see what Microsoft is up to 10 years from now, because I’m starting to wonder if they are on their way out… is Microsoft set to become the GM of the software industry?