Thursday, January 05, 2006

Not going to distance with Vista

This year's Cosumer Electronics Show (CES) is on in Las Vegas. As a gadget-lover, I follow the show and the slew of new products that are being announced at the convention. I just happened to watch the now-obligatory Bill Gates' Keynotes Speech yesterday and frankly I am unimpressed. Following are my observations:

What's up with Microsoft Webcast? Webcast was spotty most of the times, with frames freezing almost every minute or so (I have a 6 Mbps broadband connection). It's ironic that a keynote speech which touts blazing-speed-bleeding-edge services (like MTV's Urge and Starz's Vongo) cannot be webcasted properly to a worldwide audience. Maybe that's why I came out to be unimpressed :)

Ofcourse, the star attraction of the day was Windows Vista and how "cool" it is. Frankly, if you ask me, I didn't see anything in the demo that was shown that I cannot already do. OK, I can't have transparent 3D windows. But why do you need it? Microsoft's answer: It's cool and we can do it. Oh, btw - you need to have atleast a 256MB Video card (top-of-the-line) to get those effects. And there's a SideBar (the one which looks almost like the one released by its-not-so-main competitor Google). I am not sure how MS is planning to convince the home users (they will scare the corporate users into upgrading in 5 years) to upgrade to Vista from XP. I know people who still use '98 because they dont see any problems with it.

What MS should do is to have a feature set that'd completely change the user's experience. WinFS could have been one of that feature, which has now been dropped from Vista. They should identify 5 biggest problems with Windows currently (Security, Cumbersome Patching, Lack of Media Center, Slow Startup & Non Intuitive UI) and take them head on. Here they are free to borrow heavily from another non-competitor Apple.

As rightly pointed out here at eHomeUpgrade, MS should stop replicating after others -- they will never be able to catch up. Live.com, Sidebar, MTV Urge are good examples. Come up with something totally unique, capitalize on the areas where they are leaders (Media Center is actually quite slick although I have my rants about that too. See below).

[BTW, I am not a MS Basher. Infact I have defended them in quite a number of discussions at work and elsewhere. I have followed them for a long time (about 7/8 years) and have quite a number of friends working there]

Generic Rants about MS:

  1. I use a Windows Smartphone (Audiovox SMT5600). Why can't microsoft use pictures (icons) instead of long (unreadable) names for various features.
  2. How does MS come up with names for their products? There is a name 'Microsoft Windows Mobile for Smartphone 2003 Second Edition" -- whoever came up with that name must be starved!
  3. Why can't MS acknowledge their competitors? They go to great lengths to avoid using/mentioning iPod (which happens to be the most popular Digital Music Player out there) in any of their presentations. Who the hell uses Toshiba Gigabeat?
  4. Has anyone tried calling MS for tech support? Do they even have a tech support number to call if I have some issues with say, Internet Explorer?

7 comments:

  1. How about if I say that MS will go open source by the thrid quarter of 2008? and yes they will be providing paid tech support for their open source suites!

    Well MS is supposedly on an open source roadmap, MS EMEA at least, and i hope their OS path works out -- MS decides to flicnh out of the open source road, - like they always flich out of almost everything! :-D

    BTW, my info that MS is going open source comes from MS Belgium :) You'd be better off talking to folks there than anywhere else, they seem to be more user friendly with divulging info about future MS road maps ;-)


    Those who still use IE -- must have been living under a stone all these years, developers are tweaking apps to go with mozilla, some corporates are even migrating from IE to opera!

    RIP IE -- soon i hope!

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  2. LOL... seems like Bala has been paid a shirt visit by the aliens from spam world :D

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  3. Haaa... Don't they know that Google (which owns Blogger) has stopped crawling the blogger comments?

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  4. i don't think it works that wat Bala. Am pretty sure google crawls the comments section.. but blogger gives you the option to eliminate spam yourself... using the captcha feature before submitting a comment.

    As I've used this template before, i know that the captch part of blogger doesn't work right with this template :D


    makes sense mon ami? or have i got the wrong end of the chocolate? :-D

    ReplyDelete
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