Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 4th Feb 2010 20:48 UTC
Now this is something you don't read every day. Dick Brass, vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004, has written an article for The New York Times' Op-Ed section, detailing the flaws in Microsoft's corporate culture, and how they've severely affected the company in a negative way. Telling, and painful. And, in a way, very sad. Update: Microsoft responds. "For Microsoft, it is not sufficient to simply have a good idea, or a great idea, or even a cool idea. We measure our work by its broad impact."
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RE[3]: The "Accidental Monopolist"
by PlatformAgnostic on Sat 6th Feb 2010 12:56
in reply to "RE[2]: The "Accidental Monopolist""
Member since:2006-01-02
How well do ODF apps interoperate with each other? At the time of the whole formula spat, a couple of folks did a few interoperability tests between gnumeric, ooo, and koffice and found that things were not quite peachy and interoperable over there.
ODF as standardized by the ISO isn't a particularly useful standard for spreadsheets. It was standardized too soon, likely because certain industry players wanted to try using standardization as a means of selling their products through legislation.
RE[4]: The "Accidental Monopolist"
by jabbotts on Sat 6th Feb 2010 14:38
in reply to "RE[3]: The "Accidental Monopolist""
Member since:2007-09-06
On the other hand, doesn't OfficeOpenXML provide an open framework that can't get full Office compatability without also including patented closed format bits inside the wrapper? Was that issue eventually resolved or are we still talking an open wrapper to zip closed blobs inside?
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/25/13 0:45 UTC
"So in summary... Google has pulled the plug on support on a protocol they've helped popularize, after years of promising interoperability, for reasons that are dubious at best, and in a way that leaves people who don't jump to the new Hangouts app unable to talk to their contacts without any feedback that their IMs aren't getting through... And they've done that with no warning to anyone. I imagine there's a bunch of people out there wondering where some of their buddies have gone, or why their messages aren't getting responses, because this isn't documented anywhere." Google really messed this up. Such a dick move.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/13 23:59 UTC
The Tizen Greek Community has some screenshots of a very recent build of Tizen running on a Samsung GT-i8800. It looks wholly unremarkable.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/13 22:33 UTC
Joint statement to The Next Web from Microsoft and Google: "Microsoft and YouTube are working together to update the new YouTube for Windows Phone app to enable compliance with YouTube's API terms of service, including enabling ads, in the coming weeks. Microsoft will replace the existing YouTube app in Windows Phone Store with the previous version during this time." Good to know these children stopped acting like little pricks. Can we have full Google support in Windows 8 now, please?
Linked by Howard Fosdick on 05/24/13 21:41 UTC
Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr, the microblogging and social networking website, for $1.1 billion USD. Tumblr offers little revenue but lots of eyeballs if Yahoo can monetarize them. Now Yahoo is bidding for Hulu, the streaming video service. After years of ineffective responses while Google, Facebook, and others took large chunks of the online advertising market, Yahoo is fighting back. Can Yahoo reignite the momentum it had at the turn of the century? What do you think?
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/13 14:44 UTC
"Sources have described iOS 7 as 'black, white, and flat all over'. This refers to the dropping of heavy textures and the addition of several new black and white user interface elements." I couldn't be happier.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 23:22 UTC
"Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher with IOActive, has discovered a large number of issues in the way various X client libraries handle the responses they receive from servers, and has worked with X.Org's security team to analyze, confirm, and fix these issues."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 22:04 UTC
"Google is facing a new antitrust probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission into whether the company is using its leadership in the online display-advertising market to illegally curb competition, people familiar with the matter said." Sucks to be Google today, apparently.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 22:01 UTC
"In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing 'Talk' platform with a new one called 'Hangouts' that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users." That's why I always say: only suckers trust companies.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 17:52 UTC
"The wave of departures is a sign of internal struggle, but amidst all the bad news, there is a glimmer of hope. According to an anonymous HTC executive cited by WSJ, the crucial HTC One is selling 'pretty good so far'. The executive revealed that HTC sold about five million One units since launch, a performance that is deemed encouraging. However, sales have been limited by the persisting supply issues that still plague the production of the HTC One." Finally some good news for HTC. Five million units amidst supply constraints is very impressive.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/22/13 22:23 UTC
"Sony gave the PS4 50% more raw shader performance, plain and simple (768 SPs @ 800MHz vs. 1152 SPs & 800MHz). Unlike last generation, you don't need to be some sort of Jedi to extract the PS4's potential here. The Xbox One and PS4 architectures are quite similar, Sony just has more hardware under the hood. Weâll have to wait and see how this hardware delta gets exposed in games over time, but the gap is definitely there. The funny thing about game consoles is that itâs usually the lowest common denominator that determines the bulk of the experience across all platforms. On the plus side, the Xbox One should enjoy better power/thermal characteristics compared to the PlayStation 4. Even compared to the Xbox 360 we should see improvement in many use cases thanks to modern power management techniques." AnandTech does its usual in-depth thing.More News »
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Member since:
2006-01-19
However, it doesn't seem strange to me that MS was not about to adopt a file format controlled by its competitors (ODF), and many MS customers wanted the Office format to be an open standard. There is a positive angle here, which is now Office uses a human readable format by default which is well specified and documented. That's goodness.
The reason for Microsoft wanting their file format to be an ISO standard was ODF already being an ISO standard, and Microsoft wanting to balkanize the ISO office format standards.
If Microsoft just wanted to give other programmers access to their file format, why not just publish it? Why corrupting a (easily corruptable) standarization process, if ODF being the only ISO office format did not matter to Microsoft? Microsoft has not been keen on giving anybody information about it's file formats and protocols, why then this attempt to confuse people about office file formats?
Really, look at the easily confusable Names: OpenDocumentFormat (an XML format) is the standard document format of OpenOffice. Along comes Microsoft and names it's new file format "OfficeOpenXML".
Nobody will be able to convince anyone with half a brain, that this was not deliberate.
By the way, that Microsoft does not want interoperability at all was proven by - yes - Microsoft. Their Microsoft Excel ODF export filter writes formulas in a way that is not interoperable with any other spreadsheet application that can read ODF spreadsheets. Why? Because they can. ODF 1.0 does not specify how formulas should be written. And Microsoft already announced, that they would not support the openformula format, but rather stay with their crippled version of ODF 1.0.
And it is completely clear to me why Microsoft does not want interoperability: They want to lock-in their customers a little longer into their MS Office ecosystem. Makes sense, doesn't it?
The company I work for (very small company) has switched from MS Office to OpenOffice, because we still could (no Macros yet). But it was not completely without trouble due to Microsoft's lock-in strategy.