Apple has announced A-TV, which will be what the Microsoft Media Center tried to be.
And Microsoft continues to innovate, with its breakthrough coffee-table PC...
But Microsoft has finally shipped a million Zunes! Almost 1% of the ipods sold!
And just as Microsoft has released an OS centered on DRM, everybody else is getting over DRM.
That's Innovation!
John
All I can say is that they have a weird idea of what constitutes "real world for most of the world's population.
A customer can grab a phone off the shelf, place it on the tabletop where it will recognize the device and pop up the handset's specifications and information to the screen. For a side-by-side comparison with another phone, the customer can put down a second handset next to the first phone.
"It's drop-dead simple and people really like it, because it mimics what they do in the real world," said Pete Thompson, general manager of Microsoft's surface computing business.
Microsoft said at launch it will deploy a virtual concierge for Harrah's Entertainment Inc.'s casinos in Las Vegas and place the surface computers in the lobbies of Starwood Hotel & Resorts Worldwide Inc.'s Sheraton hotels.
only losing 99% of the market is a good thing then in their "real world"
much more than MS twisting the screws another notch on their captive herd of cash cows.
There will always be ""Jack Shepherds" to faithfully recycle the Microsoft PR and sales pitches though.
Yeah, but you or I would be happy to sell a million of *anything*, you know? :-)
I'm surprised they sold a million... it didn't seem to offer anything innovative, and the DRMed "share songs with your friends... who can play them three times and then they die!" ad campaign sure didn't help.
I've had several MP3 players over time, the most recent one being an Archos XS202 that no one has heard of. In the near future I'm thinking of ditching it and using a Nokia N800 with SD cards instead (the XS202 is "only" 20GB and SD cards and quickly getting there...).
Never crashed a drive on those. Wrecked three in a Contura but that didn't have a reset button. Didn't need it because it ran straight DOS. But this old Contura did at least 1/2 million flight miles so it had a right to become tired.
Also, if someone in my field (med electronics) would design some device that failed upon a power failure or hard reset that guy would be read the riot act. It's pretty easy to avoid that situation on a HD if the designers are smart enough.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com
Are you quite sure about that?
Exactly. A learning curve needs to be accepted unless, as you wrote, it's advertised as "instantly easy". We may say what we want about Apple but when I helped an elderly lady with what she said would be a PC and it turned out to be an Apple I was amazed at how easy this was. Almost like hopping into a rental car and driving off. They sure know that GUI stuff. I had it running again in under five minutes, plenty of time left for a cup of tea.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com
Quote: "The company is selling the Surface for between $5,000 and $10,000 each, but aims to bring prices down to consumer levels in three to five years and introduce various shapes and forms." ROFL!
I guess in American that's called "behind the eight ball". No matter what we say about Vista here my impression when at clients is that the reception of that OS appears to be luke-warm at best right now. In fact, I have seen some go to great lengths to get a new machine delivered with XP. (Jack: That was not upon my recommendation)
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com
That's its main attribute.
It sure Don't Run Much.
M$ never took any responsibility for anything.
You'll never forget the first Vista mistake (buying it).
-- Keith
We run all our VME development crates and our production test stands under DOS. We can direct-access the VME bus, the PCI bus, serial ports, and other hardware without drivers and a gigabyte OS getting in the way.
John
Like Xboxes? Where they lose about $150 for each one sold?
When has Microsoft ever innovated anything?
John
You mean someone who goes by "MassiveDong" or "FatBytestard" wouldn't appreciate "small is beautiful"? ...but you do have a point. There isn't anything beautiful about his head.
-- Keith
Thanks, I'll have to look into this some time. :-)
Thanks, Rich
We recently bought a dozen HP raid-ed "servers" as the standard company PC, and a dozen OEM copies of XP. They work great, and we should be OK for 5 years or so, so we can probably skip Vista completely.
All the old Dell crap is going to Goodwill across the street.
John
Boy! you are down the line and with that metality, that is where you'll stay.
-- "I\'m never wrong, once i thought i was, but was mistaken" Real Programmers Do things like this. http://webpages.charter.net/jamie_5
Well, I angered the VME community by using the bus to do SPI and, gasp, switching it to 3.3V. So my punishment is that I have to use a USB pod and thus Windows. But at least the client got us a XP box.
I guess we could bit-bang it through a parallel port except that there are none anymore on new PCs :-(
To be fair here, it sure is nice to use the pretty graphics tools in Windows. Like 3D rendering.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com
In the same way I completely skipped Win 95/98. Went from DOS (plus a miniscule exposure to Win 3.2 or whatever it was called) to NT. But not before most of the bugs were out of it.
I wish there were small backup RAID assemblies that you can just hang on the LAN where the whole thing would show up as one shared drive. Most I saw were USB, very few had a LAN port but those only had one drive in it without the possibility to connect several as RAID.
Very good. Hopefully they come to good use with people less fortunate. We can only give money and our own time because by the time I retire a PC the rest of the world (certainly Jack...) consider them hopelessly obsolete.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com
Why don't they just chuck that line then?
MS-Works is pretty good, at least the older versions. I started with 1.0 and that was a marvelous program already. Paid $100 for it in the late
80's. Did all my biz books and much more. The best: In contrast to Word and most anything else I used from them Works never crashed on me.-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com
Joerg wrote:
You seem to be saying that *re-inventing the wheel* is innovation.
Then you should look at his pathetic comments about the Memorial Day Celebration photos I posted on the news:alt.binaries.schematics.electronic newsgroup.
-- Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to prove it. Member of DAV #85. Michael A. Terrell Central Florida
Nope. But I am a firm believer in this capitalistic mantra: If you fail to market your innovation properly you might as well have never invented it.
Sure, there was Visicalc, Lotus and so on. Where are they now? Innovation means many things and most are not at all related to the nerd stuff that we deal with. Such as: Creating a good user interface, advertise your product, make it versatile, make it reliable, make it compatible, have it accept other program's inputs, bring it to market at an affordable price, make sure it's available in regular stores and not just academic or industry circles, and so on.
WRT MS-Works Microsoft sure performed all of the above. WRT to some other stuff like Outlook Express, ahem, they did not IMHO. Which is why I do not use that one.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.