Microsoft's Failings - Who Should Carry the Can?

Obviously one of the big stories while I was away was the delay in shipping Vista, missing the crucial consumer holiday shopping season. While this may be a bigger financial blow to the hardware manufacturers than Microsoft itself, it is another damning indictment over the way the company is run. When Vista is finally released it will be almost 6 years after Windows XP. Yesterday it was announced that now Office 2007 will fail to begin shipping this year, slipping also into 2007.

Granted, this software stuff is pretty damned hard. But let's face it, if a company with MS' resources drops both functionality and slips on dates time and time again, something is wrong. This got me thinking about who should really be taking the blame (I notice a bit of deck-chair shuffling yesterday).

I have a certain amount of respect for Bill Gates as a businessman. He has been uniquely shrewd in building the company over the years with tactics of doing the same thing only better. He smashed Lotus with GUI-based Excel and Word (I was an early customer for hundreds of these on the Mac and can testify how much better it was than the competition). He smashed IBM with Windows vs OS/2 as well of course with his clever licensing of the original MS-DOS/PC-DOS. We can go on and on. His track record has been pretty damned good - obviously not the Steve Jobs showman, and not really a visionary, but certainly the ultimate business geek. His (and MS's) legal knowledge have also allowed them to nail the competition for good on numerous occasions even if it's led to pay-offs to achieve this. You also have to hand it to Bill for his great philanthropy (though with his truly enormous wealth, is there anything else one could really do?).

But, when I look at Steve Ballmer, the performance of the company under his direction (he took charge in January 2000) has been pretty poor. The share price is around the same as when he became CEO and way below it's peak. During his tenure, Microsoft has paid something like $10billion in payments to companies it "might" have harmed, and has also fallen foul of both US and European consumer bodies resulting in large fines. Employee morale has been pretty poor for a number of years (stock options ain't what they used to be). I have not seen him speak, and only hear second-hand of his pronouncements. And, perhaps it's hard under the shadow of Bill (all the difficult decisions and none of the kudos for any success). But, whenever I see something he's involved in - bashing an employee for leaving for Google for instance, it all seems that this is a man who is out of his depth and rather lacking in any redeeming qualities.

Is anyone reading here a supporter of Ballmer? Am I missing some great qualities and failing to recognise his achievement(s)? Why have MS shareholders not been more vocal about his role in MS' failings? If you don't blame Bill, who else is there who's going to accept responsibility?

In-flight Entertainment as it should be

I wrote back in August about a disappointing experience with Virgin Atlantic's in-flight entertainment system. I had always held Virgin in high esteem and these problems (and others I had witnessed on a flight to Tokyo) made me feel they were making mistakes. Or were they just ahead of their time and pushing the technology a bit far?

Well, I got my answer on our flights with Emirates to our holiday destination (there's your second and last clue). The system on both flights (a 777-300 and a 777-200) was absolutely top class. While some features were not available until after takeoff as usual, the system worked flawlessly. You could view live cameras to the front and underneath the aircraft - great for take-off and landings. But best of all was the entertainment itself. Something like 100-150 films (a mix of new and classics) were available on a personalised Video-on-demand basis. I can't stress how important this is - to be able to pause the film when you need to. Furthermore, the audio component was even richer with hundreds of channels (mixes) and hundreds of albums available, whether you wanted 50 tracks from David Bowie or Madonna's latest album in full. I have to confess to not using my iPod for the whole flight.

And in case you were wondering, this was all in Economy (with pretty decent legroom also). Perhaps the only gripe is the display quality on the screen (the same signals displayed vastly clearer on overhead cabin LCDs). I'm afraid Virgin has lost the crown in this regards.

The flight back however demonstrated that there is still hope for others. While both planes were newish 777-300's they used an older system similar to the last Virgin version (pre Video-on-demand). One channel was unwatchable (the only film I wanted to see) for some technical reason, and music choice was considerably less. So until the better system is installed throughout, I would hold back from recommending Emirates unreservedly. But that aside, this airline has really come from nowhere to offer perhaps the best service in the World (especially in Economy) - usually at decent prices, a flexible timetable (13 flights a day to Dubai from 5 UK airports!) and with excellent onward connection options and timings through the superbly efficient Dubai airport. Sir Richard, take note!

Back in action!

You might have been wondering (I won't use the word "caring") if I'd dropped off the blogosphere.

In fact, I've have been away for a couple of weeks on holiday on another cycling adventure. It was a fascinating and wonderful experience and I will post a few more entries about that over the course of the next week or so as I catch up (and process the photos from my new camera).

Clearly, while I was away the world of technology moves on. From a remote internet cafe I had seen about the delay to the Sony PlayStation 3 (worst-kept rumour), which has obvious repercussions in the game console market but may also affect the Bluray/HD-DVD war. I also saw on the plane back about the Vista delay which seems to be the biggest news at least for financial analysts. Perhaps the real curve ball though is the French decision on DRM. I hope to cover some of these in more detail over the coming days. Is there anything else of significance that I missed?

I'd hoped to post an entry en-route, but time and facilities made it a little difficult.

Finally, to encourage a little interactivity here, can anyone make a guess where I've been (I'll need more than just country)? Contest open only to those who didn't know of course, and "prize" will be limited to me giving a detailed personal answer to the winner on anything related to my destination/trip (wow!). Your first clue is "coconuts". The next clue will appear in my next post.

Nice to be back though!

Oh dear (2)

Jupiter Research's Michael Gartenberg writes posts that are short and insightful. (Perhaps I should take a leaf out of his book?)

I enjoyed this one yesterday, commenting on his experiences using Vista (I assume the new CTF release) under the headline "Where has all my stuff gone?"

(See, that was a short post, perhaps I can learn something from him!)

Oh dear (1)

Posting will be very light for the next couple of weeks.

By the time it picks up, we'll know all about Microsoft's Origami project. But based on the news from Intel's Developers Conference, there are some pretty big clues.

I don't think it looks anything special. And in UI tests with XP (which doesn't really support a scalable UI) it looked pretty bad I understand - everything too small to really use properly. That might improve with Vista, but that's another day. Battery life of 3 hours + will not cut it for uses people might imagine it for.

It does seem a classic problem of having a device designed essentially by committee (Intel + MS + insert PC manufacturer here).

But Apple could be easily poised to nail this market. It will now be easy for it to use the same Intel chips in a tablet Mac which could fit very well into it's offerings. Also, it has the Inkwell technology in Mac OS X already (from Newton). Whichever way the Origami product turns out, I think Apple will do it better very quickly. Whether that's innovation, copying (or just MS releasing something before it's ready) is for the world to judge.

GDrive?

My friend Tim alerted me (in comments on an earlier blog entry) about Google's rumoured introduction of unlimited remote storage, possibly called GDrive (story in Ars Technica among others). As an aside, it might seem some of these Google "announcements" have been accidental which will not please Wall Street.

While PC users may relate to the GDrive analogy quite well, I assume for Mac users it will have a lot in common with the .Mac iDisk feature (a disk mounted using WebDav protocols). I love the concept of iDisk though I underuse it, partly because I find it a bit slow at times (upstream issues with adsl broadband primarily to blame).

It's an obvious new area for Google - many Gmail users have been using Gmail for a similar purpose (mailing attachments to themselves).

While GDrive will presumably be free to users, one can't help feeling that this is further pushing the limits of what people will feel comfortable about. Sure, I store files on iDisk for sharing and other things. But I don't store really sensitive stuff there. And, I'd feel even less inclined to do that if I knew Apple's bots were searching through the files finding out things about me. Of course, that hasn't stopped lots of people (including me) using Gmail.

Answers on a postcard (or comment) please about what might constitute a future service I've called "Gspot" which would surely put a bit of fun back in the Google brand.

Mac mini competition

I came across this review of the primary competitor (rip-off) to the Mac mini over at Anandtech. As usual, it's a well-researched, well-written piece. But the timing was a bit unfortunate as it was published close to the announcement of the Intel Mac mini which is already shipping.

I say unfortunate, but in fact what is interesting is that the OLD Mac mini in fact comes out way ahead over the AOpen mini tested (although just about all PC's do too). And the old Mac mini was considerably less expensive than the AOpen (and so is the new one too).

It seems strange that it has taken so long to get something out similar to this (though did it really have to be so similar?). I did cover something similar with an Evesham model in a posting in December. Apple has now raised the bar substantially already. It also strikes me that the designers of the AOpen haven't got it right yet - the particular unit on test failed within a couple of days due to a fan problem (and indeed is noisier than the Mac).

Whatever the gripes of the mac faithful about the new mini, it just goes to show that Apple is way ahead in the design/packaging stakes at least for this sort of form factor.

And just some comment on the criticisms of the mini (primarily around the use of Intel integrated graphics and the increase in cost):

The original machine used a very tired old chip a mid-range G4 - at best equivalent to a low-end Celeron, but used a separate (but pretty low-grade) GPU to dress it up. Mutton dressed as lamb perhaps. The new one uses state-of-the-art Intel chips as well as adding lots of other new benefits. Sure, perhaps the integrated graphics is a bit disappointing, but for it's intended purpose (general computing, media, tv etc) it seems actually quite a good choice. It certainly seems to have cracked the problem of HD H.264 playback on reviews I've seen. If anyone's buying one, though I'd say make sure you get AT LEAST 1GB, and perhaps even go for the full complement of 2GB. And with a Core Duo too, you'll have a machine that will be useful for many years.