This Old Blog

You're looking at the cover of a short story written by Cory Doctorow in 2007. That's a good six years ago. Note the title of the story. I've known about "Scroogled" since 2009 when I first stumbled across it. So it's not like Microsoft or anyone associated with them came up with the term. Lately, Microsoft has been selling merchandise , titled appropriately enough, Scroogled. You can get tees and ball caps and coffee mugs and other paraphernalia with Scroogled emblazoned across each item in the Google logo colors. And everybody has been making fun of the Microsoft efforts, including, interestingly enough, Cory Doctorow via BoingBoing . But as Cory writes in his latest article on the subject: It's a clever parody and Microsoft's point is actually a good one, but Microsoft doesn't have much moral high-ground here. The company's long history of dirty tricks against free and open source software, its role in patent trolling, and its eager ...

I wanted to wait a while and let the dust settle before wading in with my own not-so-unique comments regarding Microsoft's Surface tablets/slates/whatever-you-want-to-label-them. Current commentary is deeply divided over the obvious business perspective about how Microsoft had to do this because the OEMs had failed vs the perspective of labeling what Microsoft did as " one of the largest and most unethical industrial espionage campaigns of the last few decades ." I'm not here to take one side or the other, but to point out examples from Microsoft's long history why I believe these new machines are doomed to failure. I have long experience of Microsoft products stretching back to MS-DOS and further back to the original Altair Basic for CP/M and the Microsoft Z-80 Softcard for the Apple II, forward through a whole series of mice, keyboards, and X-Box gaming consoles as well as their ill-fate Zune player. But I also remember, from the software side, Blackcomb and...

To hear it from the Open Sourcers, Nokia's abandonment of Meego for Windows Phone 7 (hear-after referred to as WP7) was tantamount to the same level of betrayal that the Open Sourcers felt over the Microsoft/Novell patent cross-licensing agreement of late 2006 . The only problem with that assessment is that Meego, and Meego's predecessor Maemo, were an absolute failure in its role as portable device OS for Nokia. Those cries of anguish you hear over Meemo's fate are the cries of sore losers. My first-hand experience with Maemo was with the Nokia 770. It was a bitter disappointment. I spent nearly $400 in 2006 for a device who's operating system wasn't fit for general public use. My general assessment hasn't changed since then, and if anything, it has only grown worse with time. My negative experience with Nokia was so bad that I've not purchased any Nokia phone since, and swore I'd never buy one again. Meego, like Maemo before it, wasn't going t...

It was only a matter of time before I finally figured out how to connect my T-Mobile MyTouch 4G to my Dell D630 running Windows XP SP3, and began to follow the path of Android development enlightenment. What follows are my notes and general observations about getting my handset connected to my computer. Step a : Forget about finding anything useful by googling for it on the web. Everything you need to know about connecting an Android handset can be found through Google's Android developer's pages, starting with downloading the SDK . The page presents various SDK download packages for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. We're talking about Windows development, so we'll concentrate on the two packages you can download for Windows. Step b : Install the SDK. At this point in time there are two packages, android-sdk_r09-windows.zip and installer_r09-windows.exe , which is recommended by Google. I'm an 'old timer' when it comes to installing the SDK, so I always ...

When I read about the crazy antics involved in getting applications into the App Store, or how the end-user license was literally re-written for iOS 4 to keep Adobe CS5 off the platform, or lately, how Apple is removing any mention of Consumer Reports "can't recommend" recommendation of the iPhone 4, because of the fundamental flaw in the iPhone 4's antenna... I have to wonder how much longer we'll have to put up with the little Jobs monster. Whatever respect and admiration I had for Steve Jobs and Apple is now completely gone, burned away by his vengeful antics against the system that forced him out of Apple in the later 1980's. Hailed as the savior of Apple when he returned to, and took over Apple again in 1998, Jobs was going to return Apple back to greatness and give us all cool new digital toys to play with. This was back when the anti-Microsoft sentiment ( the trial started on May 18, 1998 ) was peaking. Jobs wasn't just seen as the savior of Appl...

Found this while slumming on Yahoo (you don't think there's just a tiny bit of Yahoo schadenfreude going on here, do you???). If Bing's first month represented Microsoft's (MSFT) best shot at stealing search market share from Google (GOOG) -- complete with Bing ads everywhere -- it's a huge disappointment. Microsoft's U.S. search market share was 8.4% in June, up from 8.0% in May, according to comScore. It would have been a disaster if Bing didn't grow at all with all that advertising and free promotion via news coverage, so at least it's up a little. (And represents Microsoft's best month since 8.5% share in January.) But gaining 40 basis points -- especially as Google's 65.0% share stayed steady -- is not an impressive victory. It'll still be a few months before we know if Bing is going to be a long-term success for Microsoft. But based on this lackluster first month's showing -- and recent survey results suggesting 98% of searchers wo...

Everybody's been so busy savaging Vista that it's taken all attention away from another Microsoft problem child, the Zune. Not to worry. There's still plenty of sharp commentary around the net from all quarters about Yet Another Microsoft Flop (YAMP). Leading off the comments is this one from Motely Fool ( Leaving So Zune? ): The Zune will never be an iPod killer. Truth be told, it will never even get close enough to be an iPod tickler. Then there's this snarky article from Digital Daily about how the Zune Team is trying to gather more content for the Zune ( Zune Ready for Closeup; Zune Market Share-Not So Much ): Well, it’s also the team that does the impossible–defying all rumors of extinction and plugging away on a platform no one uses. Maybe while the Zune team is making the rounds, they’ll find out who represents U2. Which leads us to the important question of marketshare. Some report it at about 4% worldwide (3.8%). Microsoft got there by supposedly stealing mar...

I'm a proud user of Wii, and have been since January 2007. I own a mere six Wii games, each costing $50 each; The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess, Super Paper Mario, Super Mario Galaxy, Elebits, Mariokart Wii, and Super Smash Brothers Brawl. This is a far cry from my PC games, which include all four Quake releases, Doom 3, Battlefield 1942, Battlefield 2, and numerous releases of Command and Conquer. So you get some idea of my eclectic tastes. But my gaming is equally split between dedicated consoles and the PC. My use of consoles stretches back to my single years in the late 1970s with the Atari 2600 and the TI 99/4A. My use of modern consoles begain with the original Nintendo Entertainment System I purchased from Fryes while visiting Intel in California on a business trip in 1988. I was married at that point and both girls were still little babies. I kept that going for many years, primarily for the girls, picking up a Sega Genesis system (to play Sonic and Dot) before purchasi...

This past Thanksgiving has been ... unique. I've spent a lot less time doing what I planned because of its uniqueness. Regardless, I managed to tinker a bit with some of the latest offerings. NetBeans 6 RC2 RC2 was released right before Thanksgiving. I've got it installed on Windows XP 2 (algol) and Ubuntu 7.10 (europa, shown below). On algol, with its 2GHz Core Duo processor, RC2 runs smooth as silk. It should considering the processing horsepower. On europa, with its single-core 2GHz Athlon XP, it runs a little rougher, especially at startup. To make the NetBeaners feel a little better, Eclipse 3.3.1.1 has the same problem on europa (see below). It takes about 20 seconds after the main window has appeared for responsiveness to be useful. And this only occurs the first time you start it up. Of course, for many people such as myself, you start it and leave it running for long periods lasting days at a time. Regardless of the initial startup lethargy, RC2 shows considerable poli...

Here I am, a long, long way away in time from 1975 and the IMSAI 8080 . All I ever aspired to do was write some interesting software on what I thought at the time was the absolute epitome of cybernetic technology. And truth be told, gaze in lust on those fabulous front-mounted panel switches and watch those awesome blinkin' red LEDs. I thought I had arrived and that it could get no better than that. It was a very simple and wonderfully naive time. No Bill Gates and Micro-Soft . No Novell . No Linux (but Unix was out there). Funny, but I never did log into WOPR . Oh well.

I originally wrote this in January 1999 on my old Geocities website . I had a section called Opinions and the article below, written about the DoJ vs Microsoft trial, was the last entry I wrote before time and circumstances got in the way. As I re-read this I've come to realize that nothing has really changed. The PC Week article I quoted has since vanished. This link points to another source of Dr. Fisher's quote. An interesting article from PC Week danced around the real issue of the DOJ vs Microsoft trial. The following is taken from that article. The government's star economic witness in the Microsoft Corp. antitrust trial lashed out at the company Thursday, denouncing conduct he said was reminiscent of a "pungent" turn of phrase first coined by French songwriter Jacques Brel. "They want to color the world the color of goose shit," Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Franklin Fisher said. "If Microsoft forced upon the world a sing...

As I noted in my last post Microsoft has given permission so that PC vendors can allow buyers (both corporate and retail) to substitute Windows XP for Windows Vista when making a new computer purchase. That fact alone should send every anti-trust watchdog into a rabies-like foam-flecked-about-the-mouth attack-mode straight for Microsoft's jugular. Why doesn't it? This total lack of real competition in the OS market forces the consumer to chose Microsoft's earlier offering rather than going to another vendor. Imagine for a moment if there were only one computer manufacturer, and you were forced to buy last year's notebook or desktop system because this year's model was completely unsuited. That actually happened with the IBM PS/2, and the market voted by purchasing Compaq and HP and others at the time. Today we have a wealth of manufacturers with varying models, and even the processor market has real measurable competition between Intel and AMD. Yet we have only one ...

You'd think that getting Vista squared away would be job one to hear Microsoft talk. Instead you hear the steady drumbeat of stories about just how sorry Vista is and continues to be. Here's a brief sample of today's tasty selections. Vista Ultimate buyers fume over missing Extras - So you spent all that money ($400) and all that extra cash on hardware to run it, and you're upset that those 'Extras' haven't appeared? Is that's what's bothering you, Bunky? Yeah, well, welcome to the wonderful world of Microsoft promises. Always late, never functioning as promised, and costing far more in the end than you budgeted for. See what it's like to live under the thumb of a monopoly? Unbundling Microsoft Windows -In which someone, this time in the European Union, woke up to the fact that bundling Microsoft's operating system is a bad thing. Gosh. Who'd of thought, after nearly 15 years of abuse, that we'd one day wake up and realize that bund...

Stunning for Microsoft , perhaps, but not for those of us who've had a ringside seat to Microsoft's business practices over the last 20 years. Perhaps the Europeans have stiffer backbones and greater intestinal fortitude than their American counterparts. Perhaps the Europeans can lead by example the more timorous Americans. One can only hope. The company has weathered a series of defeats in antitrust cases in the last decade and sees legal setbacks as almost part of its business model and a price for its near-monopoly. What a cynical point of view. Microsoft is in this position precisely because it has behaved as a predatory monopolistic business. They didn't just stumble into this, they deliberately planned to get here. Microsoft's business history is riddled with examples of market manipulation going all the way back to MSDOS. And they're "downbeat"? They need to be beat to a bloody pulp. Microsoft has already moved to new battlegrounds such as seeking a...

William Shakespeare, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", Act 3 scene 2 With apologies to the Bard. I open up the virtual newspaper this morning, and what should be printed on the front web page but a link to an article that proclaims "US Department of Justice and five States have declared themselves satisfied with the antitrust enforcement efforts taken against Microsoft." The article, from CBRonline, goes on to quote the following reasons why the DoJ feels that competition is increasing: Increased competition from Firefox, Opera, and Safari on the browser front. The only real competitor is Firefox, and its penetration varies region by region. Safari competition on the Windows desktop is a joke, and is there specifically so that iPhone developers can write and test AJAX widgets targeted to the iPhone. I can tell you from personal experience that Safari is a very poor choice for Windows. And need I point out to the DoJ that Firefox has to be given away in order for it ...