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I find the Office/Windows 'yin/yang' symbol they're using in that article to be tasteless.

What about it do you find tasteless?

Well, adapting religious symbols for commercial use, generally.

But is all ok for rockers to wear crucifixes and t-shirts that say "Jesus is my home-boy"?

Plese, stop being so precious; there are things that I don't like in the world that affect my religious beliefs, but I don't go all precious about it - I just move on and get on with life.

There's a huge difference between a company using religious symbols to sell a product to people in general, and then somebody making a product using religious symbols in order to sell these products to a specific group.

There are many reasons not to blend religious opinions with economics, as well as politics. They don't fit together well.

precocious?

Well....
Adolf Hitler ripped off an old wiking symbol.
He flipped it round, and came up with a simillar one as we see with this yin/yang symbol as MS is ripping off.

Soo...
It's nothing new, in the perspective of history...

Edit:
Sorry, it seems (after googling around), that it's not only wikings that used it..
It's an old universal symbol, asian and other parts of the world.
In europe it was used as early as the bronze age, and even earlier... Sooo... Well.
Seems that MS is doing nothing new here, taken the historical perspective in hand.

Edited 2007-07-12 18:45

I find the Office/Windows 'yin/yang' symbol they're using in that article to be tasteless.

The yin-yang symbol should represent the good and the evil.
I'm wondering, on the twos, which is the good half.

The dichotomy of good and evil is a western one, you could just as well ask yourself which half is the light? The Bright? The Dark? The Masculine? The Strong? The Feminine?

"""
you could just as well ask yourself which half is the light? The Bright? The Dark? The Masculine? The Strong? The Feminine?
"""

The Bloated? :-)

Not true. The Ancient Persians understood there was an eternal fight between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, iirc.

No surprise MS says this And I am a little glad. Server/heads is easier to maintain in a large environment but I prefer having my own machine, so even if it doesn't use any MS products I don't mind if they are focussed on keeping the one-computer-per-user model viable.

(begin rambling)

Hardly a surprise that Redmond would take this position. They were involved in pushing it from the start, and had a role in moving away from client/server mainframe/head stuff towards everyone getting their own machine.

Today, as machines have a lot of unneeded power (leaving gaming and compositing aside), there is a bit of a move the other direction. A lot of schools and workplaces are rediscovering the idea of central configuration and maintenance of fewer boxes, with remote access to them. Microsoft of course wouldn't like this, as their business model as always has consisted of selling software to be run on individual computers.

If they can come up with a product that does remote heads the Microsoft Way they may soften their stance a bit. By that I mean they would need a Microsoft product to manage everything, and maybe a way to charge usage licenses for each remote head. Maybe they are already working on this or have such a thing, I really don't know. Until then, does anyone see such a large corporation changing a stance so fundamental to the way they work?

(OT time)

The dichotomy of good and evil is a western one

Not true. The Ancient Persians understood there was an eternal fight between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, iirc.

I don't think of Zoroastrianism as an "eastern" religion like Hinduism / Buddhism / Taoism. A lot of researchers think the Jews (and this Christians and Muslims) got some of their ideas about an afterlife, angels and a devil from Zoroastrians during the Babylonian captivity. At any rate, I tend to lump Zoroastrianism in with Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Whether or not one considers those to be "western" religions, they sure have a lot more to do with each other than with stuff like Taoism / Hinduism / Buddhism etc.

I guess what I'm saying is that Zoroastrianism, rather than being an eastern religion with a good / evil dichotomy, is more of a more or less monotheistic* religion that came from a place a little to the east.

* saying "more or less monotheistic" is leaving out discussion of terms like Monism and Henotheism etc

yeah well, we all have different threshold, i find the fact that they continually poison the world with their crap to be more offending.

yes, mod me down, but its the truth.

Microsoft built this industry into what it is today. Remember that.

That's not even true. Microsoft has - as many other companies - merely managed to create a big fortune through mafia-like behaviour. MS has not built the industry into anything. Rather demolished it. Not unlike IBM before 1990.

IBM is no less ruthless than they were 20 years ago, the difference is today, they're using their brains. Who cares about the operating system - the big bucks are made in the middleware. The operating system by itself is useless without middleware - hence IBM's support for Linux and Solaris.

Add services, the name "IBM" and all that goes with it, and they're in a good position - but it doesn't make them any less 'evil'. Mind you, whether Microsoft or IBM is evil, its immaterial to the discourse in progress - its a business, not an individual. Microsoft didn't get or maintain their share solely through 'evilness' - look at the number of companies who "we would move, but we can't get the applications we need" - its the third parties and their anti-UNIX (Linux and Solaris) agenda that damages competition not Microsoft.

I hate to talk about what would be, it doesn't make much sense but, as you started, lets clarify a bit the unstoppable course of history.

MS didn't created most of fundamental things it uses, if were not them, for sure, we would have another company (or better yet, companies) selling similar softwares. No one can say we could be in better or worse situation as history doesn't allow us to come back and try the other options.

As much as we like to point the creators and their inventions and glorify them (including in economical sense sometimes), what is most of times deserved, lets not forget that, if not all, for sure the vast majority of creations are, at large, fruit of collective human minds and would happen soon or later anyway (at least in science and technology).

Microsoft built this industry into what it is today. Remember that.

Before Microsoft, computers were marketed as these wonderful machines that nerdy guys could program to automate processes and solve problems. Customers bought them and hired the whiz-kids that made them run stock markets and send people to the moon.

Microsoft decided to market computers as a new kind of typewriter that could run special applications that come in boxes. A whole industry of vendors and retailers were needed to sell the flashy boxes of software.

Microsoft reinvented the software industry by making software a business. Before it was the realm of elite scientists. Microsoft's vision was a software industry full of executives, managers, finance, sales, marketing, and customer service. You no longer had to be an engineer from MIT to make money in software. You could be a salesman from UCLA.

The role that Bill Gates played in the computer industry is that he was the first businessman to know enough about programming to be able to manage programmers like any other employee. He signaled the end of the programming as a science/art and the beginning of programming as skilled labor. He represents the shift from computer science to information technology.

Microsoft is the reason why computer science has lost its appeal among talented youth around the world. Why the mythical man-month has been hardcoded into the software industry. Why shipping 100 PYs overseas is a simple matter of economics. Why many highly-qualified programmers wedge themselves into middle management roles in hopes of finding happiness.

Microsoft built this industry into what it is today. Good for them.

Microsoft reinvented the software industry by making software a business.

Not really. They weren't the first to go into the computer business. Heck, until Windows, they were just a little fish in a big pond.

Or they just made the home desktop cheap and accessable to non-geeks. Funny, without that first step to put computers into homes, there would be no open source movement.

Oh, and all the complaining about the yin/yang symbol reminded me of that "coexist" bumper sticker...

"Microsoft reinvented the software industry by making software a business. Before it was the realm of elite scientists."
Nah, I were no scientist but I managed well with commodores/amigas and BASIC. A lot of people did, and they were cheap computers with a lot more functionality then their competitors of that time.

Microsoft built this industry into what it is today.

That must be why so many people still hate computers.

To require that hardware vendors max out their specs just to get their devices to run on the software; is not innovation. At least not on the part of the operating system developers them selves.

Don't get me wrong I love faster hardware but that does not equal software innovation. Which really is quite plain to see.

It's not that bad. First, the Taijitu (Yin/Yang symbol) is not strictly a religious symbol. It is more of a philosophical diagram, supposed to represent the basic equilibrium at play in all phenomena. The two principles, Yin and Yang, are complementary and interdependent. Though they are separate, each contains the seed of the other, and they cannot exist without another...I find that the analogy to Microsoft's two-pronged approach to Desktop monopoly is actually quite fitting.

The Taijitu *is* often used as a symbol for Taoism, however I'm pretty sure true Taoists would find the idea of being outraged at the misuse of a symbol quite amusing...

"Just leave your .doc and .xls files on your server and open them from wherever you want. It's feasable with WebDrive, but Microsoft should offer this possibility out of the box. Same for e-mail, you should be able to access your email from anywhere in Outlook more easily, without having to use a slow webmail. Again, it's possible to synchronize your emails, your contacts and agenda, but if most people don't use it, it's because it's not easy to set up. So Microsoft should realize that people are not always at the same computer."

Ermm...all of this is possible "out of the box". You can connect to VPN out of the box, and therefore connect to all of those things. I could be misinterpreting your comment, but I do these things all the time from multiple computers, outside my companies network. You do need a VPN account, but that is normally just a request to your company sysadmin. If it is a home desktop you are using as a server, that is possible as well with Remote Desktop.

"Ermm...all of this is possible "out of the box". You can connect to VPN out of the box, and therefore connect to all of those things."

That's one solution, however with Outlook Web Access in Exchange 2007, this functionality is baked into the web interface. You can access any share you have permissions for and view all of your documents via the browser, or download them locally. It is IMO the killer feature of OWA 2007.

"That's one solution, however with Outlook Web Access in Exchange 2007, this functionality is baked into the web interface. You can access any share you have permissions for and view all of your documents via the browser, or download them locally. It is IMO the killer feature of OWA 2007."

Absolutely. The new OWA is great.

I'd hate to see that charge per license. You really think they're going to do all that and make it free? I'm surprised MS hasn't adopted the cell phone carrier style of licensing and start to charge per minute of logged server time.

Con artists, and highway robbers...the lot of them.

"Same for e-mail, you should be able to access your email from anywhere in Outlook more easily, without having to use a slow webmail."

Outlook Anywhere in Exchange 2007 lets you use an Outlook client from any PC (it does this via RPC). Dead simple to configure, and you get the full desktop experience.

Have you ever heard of DAV or WebDAV protocol ? All MS Office apps are DAV clients. With DAV one can load and save documents on the server as if they are on hard drive. DAV is an open standard, Apache HTTPD and Apache Tomcat speak DAV. IIS too, probably.

You can access your mail "anywhere in Outlook", whatever is that supposed to mean, if you are using either IMAP or MS Exchange protocol. Does your ISP or IT department allow that, it is another question.

And, WebMail does not have to be slow. In fact, if the messages contain binary attachments WebMail is considerably faster.

Much depends of your ISP and/or IT department of your employer. They have to maintain balance between security and ease of use.

"Microsoft will continue to FIX desktop products".

Or rather "attempt to fix".

"Secondly, does "Microsoft reiterates its commitment to the desktop" really mean "Microsoft acknowledges it has lost the server"?"

How did you come to that conclusion, Both Linux and Windows have been growing at the expense of old school UNIX, I think the battle for the server is far from over:

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS5369154346.html
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2007/02/02/february_2007_web_serv...

How did you come to that conclusion, Both Linux and Windows have been growing at the expense of old school UNIX, I think the battle for the server is far from over:

I didn't come to any conclusion. I posed a question (that's what the "?" is for).

Secondly, does "Microsoft reiterates its commitment to the desktop" really mean "Microsoft acknowledges it has lost the server"?

Including the "really" indicates you have already made a conclusion and is now asking for confirmation.

Microsoft has not lost the server because they never owned it. Their server share today is bigger than ever, more than 30%. The rest are different variants of UNIX and Linux.