There has been a lot of chatter on the net lately about Gartner saying that Microsoft Windows is collapsing under its own weight. Elsewhere there are claims that this is why it’s desperate to buy Yahoo. Windows and Office are the cash cows and they are looking vulnerable, supposedly.
I suspect that the end is not nigh for Microsoft, but that when it comes for Windows it may be surprisingly quick.
When did you last buy a roll of film?
I asked my other half the other day. She couldn’t remember. It all happened very quickly. I bought our first digital camera in January 1997; it seems like a lifetime ago. Before Google.
All I seem to hear about Microsoft Office is whether people like the new interface or not (I prefer it). Unfortunately, almost every time I open Word 2007 it crashes–unless I’m opening an old Word document, in which case it works. Microsoft knows this. The software tells them. It’s been going on for a year and it still isn’t fixed. If I persist it eventually gives up and just works.
My copy of Vista is the only one at home that hasn’t been updated to SP1. Windows Update has yet to show that it’s available, seemingly because of some driver problem. Will this take a couple of years to be fixed? Meanwhile, the 3rd update to Ubuntu since Vista was released will happen in a couple of weeks.
Still, Microsoft can do something right. The new Live Maps is amazing.
Here’s a “bird’s eye” view of the neighbourhood. That’s Baker Street on the right, and Dorset Square in green.
I was in Foyle’s bookshop the other day and I asked a girl at the information desk if I could borrow her London A-Z, so that I could find the quickest way to Rathbone Place.
Where do you want to go?
She asked while I was still in the index. Before I could turn to the page she turned her flat screen monitor my way and showed me on Google Earth where I needed to go. I realized there and then that my next phone must have GPS. My Palm Treo 650 will be 3 years old in a few weeks. I’m in no hurry however. I can wait for the OpenMoko or the Palm that will supposedly run Linux.
Related posts:
- Cheaper Microsoft Office Inevitable I thought Apple was hitting balls out of the park these days but Kevin Allison writing in the Financial Times last month quoted Davey Winder...
- Microsoft Worried: Cheap Dogfood, $300m Promotion Who seriously believes Vista is as good as it ought to be? Bill Gates thinks the I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC ads are...
- For Microsoft the Ow! Starts Now There is beginning to be a bit of a buzz about Ubuntu. The better it gets, the buzz as well as the product, the less...
- What Can Microsoft Do To Survive? Open source software advocates like to imagine that Microsoft will fall over and die a painful death. But how likely is this? Chances are it...
- Why Pigs Have Wings There are only 10 days to the next release of Ubuntu Linux, version 7.10 (for 2007-Oct; Wikipedia article here). Much as I would like to...
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My BlackBerry has GPS on it, but it’s pretty useless. Finally I downloaded Google Maps onto it last week. Unbelievable. It does real time position tracking, and can find just about anywhere. It shows either a map view, or a satellite image, with present location within an accuracy of 3m. And it works abroad, too. It gives directions, and it computes distances. Simply stunning – quite the best piece of technology I’ve come across for quite a while.