Topics on businesses, good and bad.
Poloni Ploni Almoni mentioned this page to me. I’m not an MBA, and I’ve never studied their way of thinking, so it was quite eye-opening, and finally explains a lot about cell phone providers that I’ve never understood before.
I was recently discussing the state of computers with a friend, and it occurred to me that there’s no obvious business case for Apple to make their Safari browser available for Windows. It makes sense for them to have their own browser for the Mac, so that they’re not at the mercy of any other …
Microsoft finally woke up and realized that people aren’t going to pay their usual rate for OEM copies of Windows when the PC itself is under $200, so they’ve decided to allow those computers to run Windows XP — the previous (and in many peoples’ opinion, better) version of Windows — instead of ceding the …
Continue reading ‘“Vista fiasco continues with retreat to XP”’ »
Speaking of Microsoft’s arrogance when it comes to following existing standards, the results of the ISO vote on their unnecessary OOXML have been leaked, and it looks like they won approval… though a number of people in the know are saying that they played fast and loose with the rules to do so. No surprise …
Continue reading ‘Microsoft’s OOXML Now An ISO “Standard”’ »
I received an odd newsletter e-mail this morning. Odd because it looked like a perfectly legitimate newsletter, but it was from an outfit calling itself IDG Connect and claiming that I’m a “valued customer.” I’d never heard of the company before this, so far as I know, so I did some research. It’s hard to …
This has to be an April Fool’s gag — Microsoft would never put anything into the public domain, no matter how minor, and Office (one of its two major cash cows) most especially. But it was fun for the first couple paragraphs.
It seems that Microsoft has realized the foolishness of last year’s unsubstantiated assertion that Linux “violates 235 of [MS’s] patents.” Failing to scare corporations away from Linux, and failing to scare Linux distributors like Red Hat into paying them extortion money, they’ve backed away from that claim and are making friendly overtures to the open-source …
Continue reading ‘“All That Got Stolen Was Microsoft’s Thunder”’ »
Bill Gates’ Microsoft, long hated by the technorati for its aggressive pushing of inferior technologies, its arrogant attitude toward the standards used by the rest of the industry, the secrecy that it cloaks its own proprietary ways of doing things in (so that no one can interoperate with its products), and its paranoid and monopolistic …
Comcast, the ISP-slash-cable company that has been in hot water for the past year for “managing” (i.e. blocking) P2P applications, has thrown down the gauntlet to the FCC. After eight months of denying that they were doing it at all, now they’re basically saying “yeah, we’re doing it, and you can’t stop us. Nyah, nyah!“ …
Continue reading ‘“Comcast: FCC lacks any authority to act on P2P blocking”’ »
Joel Spolsky has hit the nail right on the head, yet again. This time, he’s talking about Internet Explorer 8 and the decision whether or not to automatically follow web standards, and the eternal flame wars that are going to erupt over it. He also points out that this is the same reason that Windows …