It’s not entirely unexpected, but I do like this quote from Steve Ballmer:
Together we will create the future of real-time communications
And if you were wondering what the future of real-time communications looks like, here’s a prediction:
Browsing Posts tagged Microsoft
From The H via Glyn Moody:
According to the Swiss Open Systems User Group, /ch/open, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court has rejected a complaint by several open source vendors against the awarding of contracts to Microsoft without prior invitation to tender. Last summer, the Swiss Federal Administrative Court had ruled in a first instance decision that only the vendors of Microsoft software could object against the awarded contracts because only they offer the Microsoft products chosen by the Swiss Federal Government.
So if Microsoft finds itself receiving preferential treatment from the Swiss government, the only people that are allowed to object are… Microsoft.
And yes, I do think it’s a shame. Nokia have been the great innovators in the mobile phone space – my N810 is still a useful device and, before anyone starts rewriting history, it is worth remembering that Nokia is the company that pioneered smart phones. For a long time, Nokia was a market leader and could still be one if inability of the company’s management to commit to a decision hadn’t completely flushed their chances.
Symbian. A solid, mobile operating system lumbered with an increasingly messy user interface. If Nokia had bet on Symbian and put some serious investment into cleaning up the UI, they would still be the dominant smart phone company today.
Then there was Maemo. This is a gorgeous OS, well designed, flexible and very easy to use. A smart phone and tablet strategy based around putting Maemo devices into people’s hands (long before either Apple or Google had thought about going mobile) would have allmost certainly maintained Nokia’s market lead.
Even a combined strategy – Symbian at the low end to squeeze every ounce of performance out of cheap hardware, and Maemo at the high end to justify high prices for high functionality – would have worked. In fact, this may well have been the most effective direction for Nokia to take.
Instead they flipped from one platform to the next, back again and on again until no-one – not even Nokia – knew what they were going to do next. It is the company’s indecision that killed Nokia.
According to The Register, the state of North Carolina has become the first US state to implement the Microsoft IT Academy Program for its 628 high schools.
The program offers students and teachers the latest Microsoft software for classrooms and labs, Microsoft e-learning materials, discounts on courseware, access to Tech Net, and marketing resources to help promote the institutions’ association with Microsoft, along with certification in Microsoft technologies.
So Microsoft are giving the schools a bunch of freebies and a certification and, in return, expects the schools to do their marketing for them.
To deal with the last bit first, asking schools to do marketing strikes me as fundamentally dodgy and something that is likely to lead to a range of conflicts of interest. But what of the Microsoft technologies that the students will be learning.
North Carolina’s superintendent of public instruction June Atkinson said in a statement:
The ability to effectively use Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access is an essential skill in most businesses and offices today. I am pleased that North Carolina can provide this opportunity for teachers to improve their skills and for students to be career-ready.
In other words, the state of North Carolina will do Microsoft’s marketing for tham and, in return, Microsoft will these unfortunate students certificates proving that they are capable of rote-lerarning an interface that is supposed to be so intuitive that it needs no training.
The state is not making these students “career-ready”, it is setting them up for failure as soon as their employer introduces an application not on the course list.
According to The Register, Microsoft dropped themselves in a bit of bother after booking the Meter Maids to appear at its TechEd conference on Australia’s Gold Coast.
Some of the 2,700 attendees at the event grumbled that the half-naked ladies’ presence objectified women. One of the key talks at the conference had been a discussion about getting more women to join the IT industry.
Microsoft initially claimed that they had somehow managed to book the Meter Maids without actually looking at their website and that they had no idea what the beach beauties would be wearing until the day of the conference. Which brings me to my favourite part of this article:
But Microsoft’s decision to claim innocence about the booking has angered chief Meter Maid Roberta Aitchison.
She told the SMH that Microsoft in fact chose what outfits the women should wear at the event.
“The garments were chosen specifically by them over a period of two to three weeks of them looking at photographs of the girls,” she claimed.
So someone at Microsoft was being paid to spend two to three weeks looking at photos of scantily clad women. Nice work if you can get it.
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