Geek Practitioners Blog

Yet I can totally see it happening, based on my experiences with people and buildings and companies. Server room is a unique location.

Is Microsoft a dying company?

I’d say “dying” is a strong word for it, but my perception is of size and hubris problems enough to place them near their pinnacle of size and success before having to rethink themselves, and probably shrink, whether in a controlled, planned, voluntary way, or a more chaotic, seemingly unpredictable way.

Malone’s observations are good ones. Microsoft really is, as Ian notes, full of marketing and business smarts. My experience working in Microsoft tech support years ago was that they wanted superior customer service because they were fully aware they weren’t automatically going to stay on top forever, and it was important always to scramble as if you were still the scrappy underdog, not the IBM. Have they forgotten that? Probably not overall, but maybe in parts of the company.

All of which might matter little if they are up against sufficient powerful outside forces, accumulated perceptions, and maturation and demystification of the PC market.

I always point out the problem of creating a magnum opus and then not being able to improve on it enough to be compelling. For instance, Word 97, or even Office 97 more generally. Almost nobody would ever want or need anything more in that type of software. If they ended up on Word 2000 instead, the same applies. Microsoft ends up chasing a tiny share of people who really do need exotic new or improved features, first time or “with a new computer” purchasers, and any upgraders they can force. In that last case, they end up looking like bullies. Blam! There goes some mindshare.

Which is not to say that Office 2003 isn’t nifty, but there’s no compelling reason for most users to upgrade, and it’s a business challenge for Microsoft that they seem to have trouble facing. It’s worsened by the fact that writing an adequate word processor is a relatively easy programming challenge, so there is price pressure to boot.

I think Malone is onto something. I also think it will be a long, slow decline that could be arrested at any time, and will be in no way complete, ever. They’re not going to be the next DEC getting eaten by Compaq getting eaten inexplicably by HP in a fit of corporate rock star CEO insanity.

Article link and some of his own commentary via Ian Hamet, who also keeps us posted on the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie here, here, here, here, and probably elsewhere, but those are the recent ones.

This is just so wrong.

When I got my first IBM compatible PC, a 286, it booted up to a C prompt. That was it.

I had to know or learn what was a file and a directory, how to navigate, and that some files by typing their names and pressing enter would - gasp! - run program. Do things, make the computer be useful. By the same token, I learned that other files contained data or were in support of programs, and I learned that files had extensions, usually three characters after the period, and what those extensions were controlled what the system or a program expected them to contain or do. This became vastly more important with the advent of Windows.

These days, people get computers and fire them up to razzle dazzle graphics, but don’t know and often don’t care to learn the first thing about files and folders (directories), how to find and open things, and so forth.

So it is that I have routinely encountered a rather comical if sad scenario. People who never use and are unfamiliar with the concept of Windows Explorer, as such or accessed via “My Computer,” know that they use Word, and the File, Open dialog is a way to navigate and see files. And it is, to a point, because these days instead of the old Windows common dialog interface, it’s a wrapper to Explorer.

The unwitting user then tries to open a JPEG file the location of which they have been given on a network drive, or an EXE utility they have downloaded and extracted from a software vendor, and they cry out “all I get is gibberish!”

Well, yeah. You opened a picture or a program in Word as if it were a document. File open may be a wrapper to Explorer, but it’s a specialized one that says “open the file I have selected in Word as best you can.” Not “open the file I have selected with the appropriate program or action Windows associates with the extension” as it would be in Explorer proper, or from the run command line.

If this were a rare thing, I’d shrug it off. It almost routine though. I find it unbelievable the way people don’t care to learn to drive their computers that are absolutely integral to their jobs. It’s not rocket science.

But it’s no firewall…

Via Acidman

Break the chain!

I have to agree, down with chain letters.

Sending them and, worse, believing them, always struck me as a very newbie computer user thing to do. The surprise is when non-newbies perpetuate them too.

A couple of prime snippets from the list:

I no longer eat prepackaged foods because the estrogens they contain will turn me gay.

I no longer eat KFC because their chickens are actually horrible mutant freaks with no eyes or feathers.

I just received an entertaining plea for computer help from a friend. The subject? “Bill Gates sucks wet farts out of dead pigeons.” Alrighty then.

Now, this is a great guy, tops at what he does, but sometimes surprising when it comes to computers, given how long he’s been using them. His first paragraph:

I can’t access the internet. My IE (windows?) is corrupt, the DNS doesn’t work. The only reason I can get mail is the nice (and smart) guy at verizon diagnosed my problem and walked me through typing my numerical address into OE.

So far so good, except my answer to the IE part was that he’s crazy not to be using Firefox and to start ASAP, because he is susceptible to malware (adware/spyware), almost definitely has malware, and possibly can blame either that or an attempted removal of that on the problem.

I centered my advice around the possibility of malware corrupting networking on the machine, though there’s also the standard thought of trying a different DNS address or two.

The next three paragraphs:

None of the stores sells browsers because you can download them so easily from the net (you can’t get there from here).

Talked to a guy at circuit city who told me how to do a system restore, got the “I’m sorry Dave” response from windows.

He also gave me a AOL disc and told me how to bypass the AOL crap and try to install netscape from it but it didn’t work or I couldn’t work it.

The browser observation is amusing. That’s when you have a friend download and burn one for you. Or you have someone obtain the IP address of a site where you want to download a browser. All of which is moot, because the chances of it being solved by a different browser are vanishingly remote. That’s like saying “my car can’t back out of the driveway because there’s a concrete barrier between the driveway and the road, so give me another car in my driveway so I can back that out instead.”

Last time I had a similar problem, system restore was a wonderful thing. I think that was a fine approach, assuming there were saved checkpoints and he went back far enough. Chances are something is corrupted in regard to network components, and a restore would set things back. I also suggested safe mode with networking support, or running msconfig and disabling all startup items as a test.

Finally, the OS rant:

I always hated XP, but this takes the cake. Do I have to buy a new computer? If I do, will it have something better than XP in it? As far as I can see, microsoft gets it right every other time. I loved 3.1. I hated 95. I loved 98. I hate hate hate XP. At least on my machine its less stable than 95 dreamed of being.

I love XP. More XP Pro than Home edition, and more on a workstation than a laptop, but I have had fine luck with it. I just hate hate hate product activation. Yet even that hasn’t been as painful or tragic as it could have been. You can use XP into the ground like any other OS. You can fail to have a firewall, keep using IE, surf in bad neighborhoods, fail to check for malware, and so forth, until you think your OS sucks dead pigeons out of Bill Gates or something.

Windows 3.1 better than 95? In sheer usability there was no contest, and I am still supporting an install of original 95 that is absurdly stable dating back to 1996. On a crappy quality computer, no less.

I will grant that I hate the new Start menu and some other details in XP, so the first thing I do is change back to the old style menu and so forth. I hate that everything in XP and 2003 is wizardy and wants to treat you like a novice even if you’ve been doing it forever. Some of the things I’ve seen wizards for are absurd and simply cause tasks to take more time. However, ordinary usage it’s fine, and XP Pro is rock stable in every install I have encountered on a reasonably quality machine.

Is my experience unusual, would you say?

I believe what the situation includes is a computer of questionable quality, probably with Home rather than Pro edition of XP. It includes being loaded with tons of stuff that loads at startup, mostly superfluous, bogging the machine down. It may or may not be checked in a cursory way periodically and cleaned up at all. Surfing is with IE and unconstrained. A firewall doesn’t exist on a DSL connection. There is probably virus scanning taking place. Something like that. Take away quality ingredients, crud it up, minimize servicing, and you are bound to have problems after a while.

Jaws directs us to an oh so true fact of modern life. When we go home for the holidays, we get to fix computer problems for the parents. I certainly have been there and done that, but I don’t mind at all.

This practice kind of goes against the idea that old code never dies, it just gets buggier. And if it does die, does it “goto” software heaven? Or does it gosub?