1FPS|by David Chartier

You saw the movie, now play the game.

via Didn’t You Hear?

ActiveWin notes that Microsoft’s shareholders are finally beginning to catch on to something I’ve been saying for years: Steve Ballmer is out of ideas. I further contend that he probably never had any to begin with.

Duncan Riley for TechCrunch:

Microsoft is a company with a lot of good people doing amazing things, but those people are like a horse that has been handicapped out of the race with the baggage of Microsoft old. They are putting up a good fight to be seen and listened to, but it’s a hard [sic] ask. Microsoft is clearly a company that is changing, the only remaining question is will the whole organization transform into the new Microsoft quickly enough to survive the rapidly changing way companies and individuals interact with technology.

I know Microsoft’s a massive beast, but I am increasingly being convinced that Ballmer is one of its largest problems. I know competition is healthy and all, but the way the guy handles himself in public is more akin to a full-of-himself jackass bully on a grade school playground than an intelligent, reasonable CEO. He often spouts on record a sort of egotistical shit you would expect to find only in the bowels of digg comments. Another good quote from Riley sums this up:

Steve Ballmer at keynote two made fun of Apple products, joked about Apple’s market share, and constantly justified Microsoft’s position based on its domination of the market. No serious talk about moving forward, improving the end user experience with Windows…as long as Microsoft has the dominant market share the rest doesn’t matter much to Ballmer.

You typically can’t blame an entire company’s behavior on a single individual, but I’m beginning to wonder if Microsoft is an exception. Perhaps Ballmer’s bullish, frothing-at-the-mouth, dominating, and blindly competitive nature is attracting all the wrong people to all the wrong positions at the company. In this new period where the attitude of “anything but Microsoft” is spreading not-so-slowly but steadily throughout the world, perpetuating Ballmer’s behavior—or simply allowing it to continue unmediated—is precisely one of the things that is not helping the company right now.

ReadWriteWeb quotes Karim, one of its own commenters, who was responding to a pro-Google Docs piece on the site a few days ago. Setting aside the fact that the public barely knows about online office suites in general, there are just too damn many great quotes in here about the significant functionality problems that plague Web 2.0 apps, such as:

Open a Google doc. Paste an image. Oh, that’s right, you can’t Ctrl-C copy, Ctrl-V PASTE an image into a document. Ok, so INSERT an image. Now proportionally resize the image so it retains its aspect ratio. Oh, that’s right, you can’t. Now crop the image. Oh that’s right, you can’t.

and

Now type some text and select it. Choose one of the fonts on your computer instead of the six fonts Google licensed from Microsoft. Oh wait, you can’t. Create a new paragraph style. Oh wait, you can’t. Change the font color and background on some text. Now copy that formatting to another paragraph. Oh wait, you can’t.

and

People just love to use software where some incredibly basic feature like “search & replace” is marked with “WARNING! EXPERIMENTAL! Use eye protection! This could blow up in your face!”

and

Finally you tell us that “Google will win this battle” is because “they have the economic engine,” meaning, they have advertising in all their stuff. Yay capitalism. I know the last six times I used a word processor, I kept thinking it needed more advertising.

I know I quoted about half the entire comment, but head over and read the rest; it’s all good stuff. Karim’s right: Google Docs and similar offerings can certainly do the trick for people who need some of the absolute basic office features. But they consistently fall short when you get to the rest of the basic features, never mind anything even marginally more powerful that most of the real world uses.

Considering all this, and being the fan of desktop software’s power and integration, I see a lot more potential in services like Microsoft’s new private beta Office Live Workspace which I wrote about for Ars back in December. It’s more of an online conduit for sharing files and offline collaboration; there’s no web-based editing right now, though limited features are on their way. Never mind the fact that Office is one of Microsoft’s largest revenue generating products‚ÄîOffice Live Workspace provides an easy way for home and small business users to share and collaborate on documents, yet still harness the vast power of the desktop Office suite.

Sure, some day we’ll all have flying cars, ubiquitous, terabyte Internet connections, and web apps with all sorts of super powers. Until then, and web apps for making lists of things to get done notwithstanding, desktop software is where the real power for getting things done lies.

Rory Blyth, a former Microsoft .NET developer and podcaster, has a few gripes about the painfully clunky install process required by Windows Live Writer. In “Windows Live Writer Team and Microsoft - You Bunch of Dummies” (hat tip to Chris Pirillo for the link), Blyth gets into the gory details of downloading an installer for an installer, which eventually turns into a 20+ minute ordeal just trying to install a measly 10MB application (and I agree with him that Windows Live Writer itself is actually pretty good app, especially coming from Microsoft). In the rest of the post, however, Blyth offers insight on the inner workings of Microsoft and some of the management hell that causes so many of its could-be-good products to turn out like shit popsicles.

Blyth also recommends the same thing that Mini-Microsoft (allegedly penned by a knowledgeable insider) has been saying for a while: Redmond needs to do some serious gutting if it wants to get its products back on track. There’s a ton of management (and who knows who else) in that company that has lost all sight of the user experience, and there are still no solid signs that anything has changed.

So many of the things Microsoft touches lately turn to crap. This Microsoft Flickr Live picture by Flickr user dr_lopbot in the Microsoft: Keep Your Evil Grubby Hands Off of Our Flickr pool is great embodiment of why. This is exactly what would happen if Microsoft’s ridiculous buyout offer for Yahoo ever goes through.

Never mind that most of the world’s top PC manufacturers have been forced into offering XP as a pre-built option again. A small town computer shop is making money by removing Vista post-sale:

Shop manager Aaron Kaplan said they were prompted to put up [the sign] because so many people were having problems with Windows Vista, including compatibility issues with older software and trouble adjusting to the interface.

[From A computer shop's sales pitch: 'We remove Vista']

Redmond must be proud.

Microsoft put together a great video with which to send Gates into his retirement. Pretty funny and lighthearted. It debuted at CES yesterday:

Opera vs. IE: Round One, Fight! | Read/WriteWeb

Opera, a Norwegian company, filed an antitrust complaint with the European Union against Microsoft. In addition to the typical IE-bundling issues, the company demands a fairly unique argument that, in my opinion, should have been brought a long time ago:

According to Opera, the makers of an alternative web browser, Microsoft is using its dominant position to unfairly influence the web browser market by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and by “not following accepted Web standards,” which Opera says causes developers to create web pages specifically for IE that break in other browsers — and thus lowers the incentive for users to switch.

Considering Microsoft’s lackluster enthusiasm for supporting web standards, I would love to see at least that half of the complaint get somewhere. The other half‚Äîaltering the company’s bundling of IE with Windows and exclusion of other browsers‚ÄîI’m less optimistic about. Don’t get me wrong: I want to see some change with this particular behavior. I’m just skeptical as to whether this complaint will escalate into something that will help make it happen.

WM6 Sux: First Moto Q9m Unbox and Grope (Mini-Review and Gallery) - Gizmodo
Sounds promising:

For starters, Windows Mobile 6 is a piece of crap. Case in point: I plug in my freakin’ Hotmail account to set up email, and it tells me it can’t do it, and refers me to a web link that I can’t open.

It sure is a good thing people are still willing to put up with this kind of crap. After all, they are only on version 6 now. Give ‘em a few more tries; they might actually get something right eventually.

[via digg]