Jobs predicted Vista woes

Assuaging Wall Street impacts product development.

Hey, category managers in charge of IT spend. Want to make yourself a friend of the business for life? I’ve got a secret for you: don’t rubberstamp your CIO’s decision to upgrade to Vista or Office 2007. In fact, tack on a big “reject” to the request or the requisition. And don’t do it to save money. Do it to save your hide.

Having spent approximately 25 of my last 40 waking hours trying to get Vista and Office 2007 to perform at the level of my previous operating system and desktop environment, I can honestly say that it’s an absolute travesty that Microsoft would have released such a half-baked product, having put billions into its development. In fact, my friends, colleagues and clients will probably attest to my slower than average response rates via email recently (I simply have not had the patience or the time to write emails while the new composer catches up with my typing).

And then, there’s this:

A bug in Windows Vista’s built-in antipiracy technology is telling some users that they need to reactivate the operating system after they install new device drivers or run newly installed software.

Microsoft Corp. quietly issued a patch designed to fix the flaw in its Software Protection Platform (SPP) technology late last month. Criticized by some when it was announced last fall, SPP is an updated and more aggressive version of the Windows Genuine Advantage antipiracy tools that Microsoft included with Windows XP. But because of the bug, SPP may suddenly demand that a copy of Vista be “activated” even though the user and/or the computer maker did so earlier.

Wow.

Here’s what Steve Jobs said about Microsoft in 2004:

Q: What can we learn from Apple’s struggle to innovate during the decade before you returned in 1997?
A: You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a technology company. Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together. Otherwise, you can get great pieces of technology all floating around the universe. But it doesn’t add up to much. That’s what was missing at Apple for a while. There were bits and pieces of interesting things floating around, but not that gravitational pull.

People always ask me why did Apple really fail for those years, and it’s easy to blame it on certain people or personalities. Certainly, there was some of that. But there’s a far more insightful way to think about it. Apple had a monopoly on the graphical user interface for almost 10 years. That’s a long time. And how are monopolies lost? Think about it. Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly.

But after that, the product people aren’t the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It’s the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America or whatever. Because what’s the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself?

So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. John Akers at IBM (IBM ) is the consummate example. Then one day, the monopoly expires for whatever reason. But by then the best product people have left, or they’re no longer listened to. And so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn’t.

Q: Is this common in the industry?
A: Look at Microsoft (MSFT ) — who’s running Microsoft?

Q: Steve Ballmer.
A: Right, the sales guy. Case closed. And that’s what happened at Apple, as well.

Read this again:

But by then the best product people have left, or they’re no longer listened to. And so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn’t.

Case closed indeed.

Update: This is getting ridiculous. In an article questioning Vista’s value, Microsoft General Manger Brad Brooks argues that Windows is a bargain: “If you break down the cost of the software over the life of the PC, it works out to be less than how much you’d spend on milk for your family over that same period of time.”
Hmm, I don’t remember seeing Vista on the food pyramid.

MIT’s Tech Review subliminal message?

Technology Review in recent times has become a full blown Microsoft booster (the lone glaring exception was Erika Jonietz’s unflattering review). In fact, TR was troubled with Erika’s assessment that they have asked someone to counter her article with a glowing review of Vista. Bravo!

So I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that in an article about router security, the graphic art depicts a picture of the devil next to an iMac and a Mac Pro:

The article’s core argument is juxtaposed next to the above image:

According to researchers from Indiana University and the antivirus software company Symantec, anyone with a little skill can search for vulnerable home routers and change critical settings so that real websites are secretly replaced with bogus pages asking for log-in information.

Based on the placement, am I to assume that conclude that (only?) Apple desktops are vulnerable? But we already knew that Macs weren’t invulnerable, didn’t we?

I can be accused of being over-sensitive about this. On the other hand, why include a graphic of something that has nothing to do with the main argument and that is not even mentioned in the article? Seems suspect to me. What’s the deal, Mr. Pontin?

Vista loses an evangelist

What does it say one of Vista’s biggest evangelist bails out?

I stand by my original assertion that the shipping version of this OS is late beta, at best. I realize that other enthusiasts are leaving Windows altogether (and leaping instead to Apple’s OS X), but there’s not yet enough momentum behind my willingness to do that. I’ll leave the installs of Vista 32 and 64 on this PC, but I’ll spend most (if not all) of my time back in tried-and-true Windows XP

I keep repeating myself. Microsoft released Vista early to quiet down Wall Street. Not because the product was ready. Watch out for early fall for Vista to finally start “feeling” better.

Meanwhile, some French analyst reports that Vista’s UI is not so Wow-ish when compared to OS X. But then, we already knew that, didn’t we?

Brier Patch

Last week Microsoft lackey Brier Dudley commented on how Jobs was “getting too big for his breeches“. Macalope countered his arguments effectively. I want to draw attention to Brier’s principal argument, which was that Jobs has become so arrogant that he’s decided to ignore the law:

he’s been flippant about U.S. trademark protection, accounting standards, securities regulators and European antitrust enforcers … After ignoring Cisco’s trademark on the term “iPhone,” Apple called the resulting lawsuit “silly.”

It turns out that even Cisco CEO Chambers thought the lawsuit was silly (his term was “minor skirmish”). Anyway, it looks like the infraction was indeed much ado about nothing – perhaps suggesting that Cisco did not have a very strong case.

Brier claimed that the “new” Microsoft is humble and would never stray into arrogant territory again:

Microsoft emerged intact but humbled, with a different culture, a new chief executive and lawyers watching every move.

So, maybe he can explain this to us:

In November, Microsoft’s Internet-based business software, Office Live, became generally available in the U.S., with such features as customer management tools, e-mail accounts and Web site building and hosting.

Office Live, based in the Los Angeles area, registered the “Office Live” trademark in 2002. It initially filed its lawsuit against Microsoft in December in U.S. District Court in California but agreed to withhold serving the suit to allow the companies to pursue settlement negotiations.

Brier, you told us that they would never do anything like this. What will we tell our children about the new, humbler Microsoft?

Automated English

For whatever reason BusinessWeek hypes Whitesmoke:

An Israeli software company called WhiteSmoke has devised a software tool that uses artificial intelligence to scan written English text and suggest ways to make it stronger, clearer, and more fluent. Far more than just a spelling and grammar checker, like the ones built into Microsoft (MSFT) Word, WhiteSmoke performs a black art known as “text enrichment.”

Sounds great. I know I can use something like that, though I am a little apprehensive given what I found on their website:

Err, I am not a grammar queen (or king), but shouldn’t that be “works with” instead of “works on”?

Wow

Vista failed to get a “wow”, but Apple’s new Airport Extreme is getting a “wow” from Computerworld.

First look: Apple offers 802.11n, and a wireless wow

Wow.

More dueling headlines

From Macsurfer:

D is different from X

Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher, and John Paczkowski (formerly of GMSV) are starting a WSJ offshoot called All Things Digital. I am a fan of Mossberg and GMSV so I am looking forward to their new effort.

Anyway, something in their site caught my eye:

Look closer:

That reminds me of Xerox’s old logo:

Hmm.

Dueling headlines

From Macsurfer:

Content is to Google as OS is to Microsoft

I had a previous entry about how the rampant software priracy helped Microsoft dominate the OS and Office automation markets in the ’90s. It’s interesting that today media firms are accusing Google of taking advantage of “pirated” content. From WSJ [subscription required]:

A group of major media companies has accused Internet giant Google Inc. of benefiting from the sale of pirated movies and providing business support to two Web sites suspected of offering access to illegal film downloads, according to several people familiar with the matter.

So what’re the studios gonna do about it? What can they do about it?

they acknowledge that consumers want the convenience of downloads, and the companies don’t want to miss out on a potential business opportunity or try to block downloads completely