6 posts tagged “microsoft”
It's worse that I even imagined...
Shocking, absolutely shocking..
You should be considering Lotus Symphony - the free Office Suite from IBM.
Love the video, very charming. Obviously filmed in IBM's Lotus offices in Boston - I know several of the people in the video, not least Mary Beth Raven who is the lead designer for the Lotus Notes product. Well worth a look at her blog if you are in any way interested in the software development process - Mary has led a real move toward involving customers and partners in making key design decisions on software they use.
I'm not sure I would go quite that far, but a very interesting article at Red Herring:
One day, we may look back on Sept. 17 as the official beginning of the end for Microsoft's dominance. Two separate events signaled the shift; one was the European Union court's harsh ruling against Microsoft itself, charging that the world's No. 1 software maker had abused its monopoly power to harm competitors. The verdict was expected -- and showed that European bureaucrats had more courage than the U.S. Justice Department.
The other important announcement was IBM's offering of Lotus Symphony, a suite of office applications, for free. This is just the latest bullet to the head of Microsoft's cash cow. ...
It is clear now that Microsoft has become the legacy company of the 21st century, playing the kind of defensive role that IBM played when the upstart from Redmond outwitted the incumbent in Armonk and walked away with the best parts of OS/2.
Oh, and guess who registered http://lotussymphonyblog.com ;-)
From a discussion on Ed's blog, refering to Microsoft's strategy of rip'n'replace:
Of course that's the MS mindset. Their stuff only runs on PC servers anyway. It's not like they've ever found themselves suggesting someone throw away an iSeries or a mainframe after 3 years.
If you only ever built for junk hardware, you're probably going to start thinking all hardware is junk.
How true, how true...
Well, just a day after I commented on Google's use of the $1.65bn YouTube investment in their new Universal Search (they also sunk $3.1bn into Doubleclick earlier this month), Microsoft blow four times as much on an advertising firm noone has ever heard of - aQuantive.
MSNBC say:
Microsoft Corp. said Friday it will purchase online advertising firm aQuantive Inc. for about $6 billion in cash, paying a premium to catch up with major ad deals by its competitors over the last six weeks.
The $66.50-per-share purchase price represents an 85 percent premium to aQuantive’s Thursday closing price of $35.87.
Yes that's right folks, an 85% hike over the share price! Meanwhile, Google news shows all the latest updates on the deal...
Mr. "A-list blogger" Robert Scoble (who of course used to work for Microsoft) comments:
[aQuantive] is a firm that builds ads and marketing for companies. We know there’s a lot more money that’ll come into this market over the next few years. I wonder what else is up Microsoft’s sleeve now? They need to buy some audiences, the best audiences aren’t under Microsoft’s brands anymore. This helps keep Microsoft in the relationship game with advertisers, but not sure it really shows a good strategy yet. It sure would be fun to be a fly in the wall inside Ballmer’s office right now. What do you think?
Indeed, wouldn't that be fun to listen to??
