"...Microsoft will make wireless e-mail ubiquitous" and Bill Gates' cellphone will beat the iPod

I mean, it's all press release doublespeak of course. What else do you expect?

heh. this may be more accurate than you realize.

I wanted to buy the same phone but they were discontinued. I ended getting an iRiver flash player for OGG playback and another Samsung phone with all the camera phone stuff. I love uploading all the phone pics to flickr. Now I just want them to get the camera and the mp3/ogg player back into my phone at the same time.

Explain please?

Bill's a moron because he doesn't realize that the BlackBerry Enterprise Server is the STRENGTH of RIM's business model, they're entrenched in the culture of a ton of institutions already, and security is hot shit today. RIM locks in their customers, and nobody's offered a strong enough alternative to their feature set to make anybody switch.

You make it really painfully stupidly easy to develop applications for Windows with .NET and lock-in a bunch of IT consulting firms and company internal development teams to your framework.

Then when somebody suggests switching to Red Hat for something or something else, the CTO goes "but we've standardized our homebrew apps with .NET" and the proposal is shot down, because all of a sudden instead of being Almost Free, Linux is the most expensive OS you can use, because it doesn't play well with others.

That's the conspiracy .NET Vision. Switch people to MSFT's proprietary dev environment so they get used to writing apps that only work on one platform and make it so easy that the cost of porting becomes objectionable to the CTO.

The reality is Mono has made this kind of a moot point, .NET is still time-and-money-consuming to port legacy application TO, and dropping backwards compatibility is always dumb.

A lot of people liked .NET when it came out and it was something to play around with and it made everything seem so easy. Now everybody I talk to kind of hates it. Steve Ballmer's insane and Bill needs to just pay attention to AIDS in Africa. MSFT still has a long, long way to fall, though.

It's all here, mostly except he's just explaining why .NET/WinFX is bad for everybody, not so much talking about lock-in to the framework and lock-out for alternative OS's.

Anyway I think putting 20 GB of songs on a cell phone is a stupid idea and I don't want to use the same interface to make phone calls that I use to flip through tunes. Maybe they should include a STYLUS.

Time to market is also often way more crucial than operating costs anyway, in order to gain market share. If development is simpler, time to market is faster.

Mono is a noble, yet doomed project. I don't see large companies placing their faith in it as a solution without backing from the likes of a big player like IBM (which isn't impossible in future, given their interest in non-Microsoft servers).

The problem I think it solves is needing to carry two devices and being a big fat-pocketed twat!

I just have to laugh at the idea that anybody wants their music coming through their HEADPHONES to be suddenly interrupted by ringing. Wow. How incredibly up-your-own-ass do you have to be to think the average consumer wants this?

For what it's worth I largely agree with you about the dedicated devices thing, but where I think it falls over is in the moving about thing. I don't want to have to carry lots about with me. Things have changed since the 1970s where I couldn't carry a record player and a telephone about with me; now I can, because it's practical; the more practical the better.

I totally want this Tom! Music is pleasant and being rung is SUPEREXCITING and obviously you want it to interrupt yr music. Why wouldn't someone want this?

Especially when you place a lot of inference into what I mean. Thanks.

Do you need to be Bill Gates to care whether or not people put words into your mouth or not? Or is there another reason why you suggested that?

That said, I don't fully understand the comment. Which designers are you referring to?

My comment was based on me suggesting combining the phone/MP3 player thing rather than company guys.

The ringing phone whilst listening to music thing wasn't a big deal with my phone/mp3 thingy. It would beep to let you know there was an incoming call and pause your track automatically if/when you switched over to it. This much better than say fumbling with your iPod and switching over when you feel your phone vibrating in your pocket. Also, interface design allows you to turn the beep thing OFF so you won't be disturbed while listening to your jams.

demanding? well, whatever, it might happen. this shit always gets cheaper/more possible, right? but it would be good to just plug my headphones into my phone i think.

no word on whether it'll have an electric toothbrush attachment or not

from the Wired summary:

Friday, 21 July 2006
Microsoft "iPod Killer" May Debut In October

Topic: Media Players
According to BetaNews, Microsoft’s long-rumored “iPod killer” could be unveiled in late August, with the device hitting the streets in October. Though details about this project — dubbed “Argo” — have been murky and the devices have been code-named, it appears to break down like this: “Zune” is thought to be the iPod-like player that would include wireless connectivity; a second player, code-named “Pyxis, is billed as a Nano competitor with video support; and "Alexandria" is the code for the music service that would accompany these devices a la iTunes for the iPod and would operate similar to MTV’s URGE. If the timetables are correct, it would mean the heat is on Apple to respond. It’s speculated that Apple may unveil “a refresh to the iPod nano lineup including multiple colors and larger capacities” at its World Developer Conference, which takes place three weeks before the possible unveiling of Project Argo. But Apple’s main iPod line isn’t expected to be updated until next year.

Dead in the water, then.

i can't help imagining a little crappy hammer with a microsoft logo on it, smashing up a couple of iPods before breaking for no reason whatsoever.

Bad for them

Engineers brought Bill Gates an ereader prototype in 1998 – but he dismissed it because it didn’t look like Windows.

Mr Gates also claimed the device was “unimportant”, because he thought the touchscreen device would never be able to compete with keyboards.

The news, featured in a report for Vanity Fair on Microsoft’s alleged “downfall”, means Microsoft missed out on being part of a market that is today worth £243million in the UK, and billions globally. Digital sales are growing rapidly, and now account for 8 per cent of the world market.

Mr Gates said the engineers should abandon the project and work on something else instead, while Microsoft engineers also dismissed the possibility of a ‘micro-messaging’ system such as Twitter

And perhaps more important...

Analyzing one of American corporate history’s greatest mysteries—the lost decade of Microsoft—two-time George Polk Award winner (and V.F.’s newest contributing editor) Kurt Eichenwald traces the “astonishingly foolish management decisions” at the company that “could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success.” Relying on dozens of interviews and internal corporate records—including e-mails between executives at the company’s highest ranks—Eichenwald offers an unprecedented view of life inside Microsoft during the reign of its current chief executive, Steve Ballmer, in the August issue. Today, a single Apple product—the iPhone—generates more revenue than all of Microsoft’s wares combined.

Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

When Eichenwald asks Brian Cody, a former Microsoft engineer, whether a review of him was ever based on the quality of his work, Cody says, “It was always much less about how I could become a better engineer and much more about my need to improve my visibility among other managers.” Ed McCahill, who worked at Microsoft as a marketing manager for 16 years, says, “You look at the Windows Phone and you can’t help but wonder, How did Microsoft squander the lead they had with the Windows CE devices? They had a great lead, they were years ahead. And they completely blew it. And they completely blew it because of the bureaucracy.”

Best pull quote from the story: "Paul Allen on First Meeting Steve Ballmer: He Looked Like a Stalinist Police Officer"

Pretty sure that launching an ereader in 1998 would have been a terrible idea.

I don't see anybody carrying an iPod who doesn't also have a bag over their shoulder. I also don't hear anybody complaining about "having to carry two devices." I do hear people saying they never use the camera built in to their phone because it's stupid. Consumers like dedicated hardware. Combining shit usually creates more problems and irritations than it solves. With the Blackberry, for example, people I know with them usually use them for email ONLY, and take phone calls with a cell phone.

I just have to laugh at the idea that anybody wants their music coming through their HEADPHONES to be suddenly interrupted by ringing. Wow. How incredibly up-your-own-ass do you have to be to think the average consumer wants this?

― TOMBOT, Thursday, May 12, 2005 4:12 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.osusilverbullet.com/uploads/3/4/3/3/343323/3874843.jpg?428

That's not fair; he makes some good points. My smartphone was a terrible music playing device. It didn't have enough memory and it was a pain transferring and managing music on it. I did do a lot of internet on it, but I hated the eyeball busting experience so much that when the phone got stolen I replaced it with an old flip phone. Iphones are cool for loading up a few dumb games on them and letting your kid play. Sometimes I get ios game envy, like I want to play Glitch Tank and Goat Up and some other things, but it makes me want to have a dedicated touch game device, not an ipad (which I would never use for anything besides games) or an iphone. Really it just makes me want ports of those games.

And I know lots of people who carry around their iphones and ipods together. Who do you know who carry iphones in their ass pockets? People with cracked screens, maybe. I've seen a lot of cracked screens in my time.

My brother-in-law uses the camera in his iphone sometimes, but he uses his digital cameras way more. My smartphohe's touch screen camera was really stupid. Virtual buttons are stressful, even after lots of practice. The stress just becomes quieter. It's still there.

Why did I type this. The ringing/headphone listening thing is annoying, it's true.

is the full vanity fair story online?

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/12/22/over-a-quarter-of-photos-now-taken-with-smartphones-according-t/

yeah it is jord

link?

wait I guess it isn't, I just read the shortened version and thought that was the whole thing

I don't care that a lot of people take pictures with smartphones. Lots of smartphone pictures look good, too. I only meant that tombot had some good points.

The other thing I hated about taking pictures on my smartphone was that it took too long for the camera application to load up. On my old sony flip phone the camera loaded up very quickly, and the button to start it up was easily accessible, as was the button for picture taking. There was also much less of a delay between clicking the button and when the picture was taken. It wasn't perfect, but I liked that phone a fair amount. I took way more pictures with it than I did with my smartphone. I was a cell phone picture fiend back then.

Definitely play music on separate device, I don't like the phone ringing in my phones when I'm playing music

If my battery lasted longer I *might* be more tempted to do everything in same device

stop fighting against the future

I carry both a work phone and personal phone around with me on weekdays, and carrying an extra MP3 player on top of that just became annoying.

I'm quite happy for the phone to ring in my ear. Better that miss a call because I've got headphones on.

The battery thing is annoying but I'm assuming it'll only get better with time. Have an extra charger at work anyway so it's only an issue if I'm out for ages on a weekend.

have been using the iphone 4s camera a lot more as it means i can ditch my DSLR and concentrate on film

can't really use iphone for music anyway never worked out how to get music onto it from more than one computer

Yeah I've been using an Android which is pretty much just drag-and-drop from anywhere.

can't really use iphone for music anyway never worked out how to get music onto it from more than one computer

― coal, Friday, 6 July 2012 04:48 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The unfortunate answer is to give more money to apple for iCloud.

i think it depends on how much you care about your music/photos/emailing/calling

i like listening to music but i am happy with having 32Gb of it on a microSD
i like taking photos but most photos i take are OMG LOL STUPID CAPTIONS
i like emails but it's never for business or nothing
i don't get many phone calls.

i think the last generation of phones (i have Samsung GSII) have just become good enough at all of the above to satisfy my needs. like, it'd be GREAT if i can also have every single song i ever owned. AMAZING if i can take perfectly focussed macro photography. but i just don't need any of that enough to justify shelling out extra cash and carrying around an extra ipod or a proper camera + the additional risk of losing them. so i dunno.

i don't think i've played a decent game on the phone yet (drawsomething doesn't count).. recommendations? still have a PS3 at home. still have a laptop at home (and work) for proper internets.

i did really enjoy having the Canon G10 before it got stolen though. but i just can't bring myself to get another and another coat that has a large enough pocket.

"score classic goals"

is my game rec for you

The unfortunate answer is to give more money to apple for iCloud.

― American Fear of Pranksterism (Ed), Friday, 6 July 2012 11:20

i thought about this but then luckily found an mp3 player in my pocket so decided to use that, also it clips onto my belt!

I carry and iPhone and an iPad. I wish I could combine them into a device that changed size to suit my needs at the moment.