Microsoft Courier: Wow, someone is paying attention in Redmond

I hope this 7 inch tablet has something like a 500dpi display. If we learned anything from Tablet PC, it was that writing at 72 or 96dpi sucks.

I really liked the simple drag-to-right collaboration interface. There are some interesting ideas here. Too bad it's just a concept. The devil for these devices is in the execution details.

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Posted 1 month ago

Windows ex-honcho Jim Allchin on WIndows Vista in 2006: I would buy a Mac.

I am not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems [our] customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn’t translate into great products.

I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft. ... Apple did not lose their way.

--Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft platforms, in 2006 on a private email thread with BillG

JimAll was the top guy on Windows back when I was at Microsoft. I had never heard this quote until now.

I can't help but wonder what was the true failure of Vista. Was it really lack of leadership? Or was it just pure numbers? Windows had at least a thousand engineers with commit access -- possibly more. OS X must have had still several hundred -- several times fewer.

Keep it lean and you can move faster. Be small, and do big things. That's what I learned the hard way in my time at Microsoft.

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Posted 4 months ago

Note to Microsoft: The world isn't flat, but Vista does suck.

I saw this teaser ad and had to laugh out loud. They're spending $300 million on a massive ad campaign to 'protect their brand.'

How about spending that $300 million on sucking less? Or spending it on engineers to rip out awful code bloat. $300 mil! Good lord that's a lot of money.

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Posted 1 year ago