Former Microsoftie Joel Spolsky on "Windows Live Mesh" (that's the real name of the service; it's just so stupid that I had to apply scare quotes as a prophylactic):

I shouldn't really care. What Microsoft's shareholders want to waste their money building, instead of earning nice dividends from two or three fabulous monopolies, is no business of mine. I'm not a shareholder. It sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they're building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact TV dinner that I didn't want in Sunday night, and I didn't want it when you tried to serve it again Monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and I didn't eat that Tuesday night, and here it is Wednesday and you've rebuilt the whole goddamn TV dinner industry from the ground up and you're giving me 1955 salisbury steak that I just DON'T WANT.

RoBros gets results!

A question for RoBros video technology advisor Mr. Perkins: Approximately how much do you think was spent to produce this? Just ballpark it for me.

Microsoft's PlaysForSure brand -- the logo that identifies whether a particular non-iTunes online music service will work with a particular non-iPod mp3 player -- has now been renamed Certified for Windows Vista. Even though it has nothing to do with Windows Vista. I guess they wanted to capitalize on all that successful Vista branding. Oh, wait.

As Ars Technica puts it:

Microsoft's PlaysForSure has always been a model of how to run a DRM ecosystem: launch a new scheme with logo, convince device makers to sign up, launch your own online music store that uses said ecosystem, drop your music store, launch your own device which uses incompatible DRM, launch new music store with same incompatible DRM, then change branding of ecosystem logo. On second thought, perhaps there's room for improvement here.

Gotta love the private sector -- it's so efficient and market-driven.

Paul Graham argues that Microsoft is dead:

No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not dangerous.

The best evidence that Graham is right is that Bill Gates apparently finds running Microsoft less interesting than helping poor people.

UPDATE: Microsoft's Don Dodge replies that the company is very much alive. Graham clarifies what he meant:

Technology companies are projectiles. And because of that you can call them dead long before any problems show up on the balance sheet.

The left hand gives: According to this LA Times investigation, the Gates Foundation's massive investments in polluting industries are hurting the same people the foundation's philanthropy is helping. I was surprised to learn this.

Engadget's review of the Zune is here. It was pretty obvious that Microsoft's take on the iPod was going to look something like this.

Anti-Microsoft conspiracy theories ahoy!

In the course of launching its iPod rival the Zune, Microsoft has made a weird deal with Universal Music. Universal was balking at allowing Microsoft to sell its music on the new Zune-compatible online music store, so Microsoft agreed to give Universal a percentage of the revenue from the Zune itself. Bear in mind: Universal will still get the revenues from the sales of its songs, but now it'll also get revenues from sales of the player.

Medialoper breaks it down:

Basically, what [Universal CEO Doug Morris] is saying is this:

• Every single person who buys a portable media player is a thief and a pirate.
• All music comes from Universal.
• Therefore, you should pay extra for any device you use to store music, you fracking thief.

John Gruber asks:

I don't get it. Why would Microsoft do this?

Why would they enter into a deal that will cost them money and potentially fuck up a market they're trying to enter? The answer, I think, is pretty simple: to the extent that they do fuck up the market, it will be Apple, which owns something like 88 percent of the market for legal music downloads and 75 percent of the market for digital music players, that suffers.

Remember, for Apple the iTunes Store is almost a loss leader: after paying royalties to the record companies, Apple's profits on each 99-cent song are measly. But making most of the popular-music canon easily and cheaply available online sure helps them sell those iPods, which are high-margin items. Ever since this arrangement began, the record companies have been grumbling about having their product turned into a commodity to help Steve Jobs sell iPods, but they don't have much choice if they want any kind of revenue stream from music downloads to replace CD sales. (Remember CDs?) Microsoft is offering them a better deal, and setting a precedent for them to use in negotiations with Apple. (Right now "negotiations with Apple" consist of Steve telling the labels how it's going to work, and the labels saying "Thank you sir, can I have another?" But it won't always be that way.)

The likelihood of this panning out for Microsoft is not huge. But the Zune was always a long-shot bet; the Universal deal is a way for Microsoft to diversify the potential upside a bit, by adding the possibility that they could mess with Apple's profits.

Update: Other people have come to the same conclusion. Gruber disagrees, and I think he's probably right.

If Zack's post below has made you wonder, What is this Microsoft iPod killer: it's called the Zune, and the best thing I've seen on it so far is here.

Breaking technolgy news

(Not really, it's already been written about, but still... ) So my friend Dave helps run this indie music blog called Music for Robots, and recently Microsoft flew one of his co-bloggers (along with a bunch of other buzzmakers) out to Seattle to get a look at their long-awaited challenge to-the-iPod product. They apparently made a big deal out of how it didn't look anything like an iPod, but then it turned it out to look alot like an iPod, with a wheel and screen and everything. The screen is apparently somewhat bigger than the iPod screen, making it better designed for playing movies and TV shows or whatever. And the other big thing is that if you put two of them close to each other (I think like within a few feet or yards) you can "beam" stuff from one device to another wirelessly, but you only get access to it for 3 days or 3 plays, whichever comes first. And there are certain features that encourage you to download stuff from their Microsoft Music Store or whatever they call it, suggesting a broad challenge to the Apple music empire. Also it doesn't work yet so Microsoft couldn't give them any.

Hauling his money out in crates

David Pogue, no Microsoft fan, argues that Bill Gates has mellowed:

Despite Microsoft’s history, I find it almost impossible to remain cynical about Bill Gates’s intentions. I think he’s changed. Maybe when you’re in your 50’s, you start to think about how you’ll be remembered.

I don't know Bill Gates, obviously. (Does anybody really know Bill Gates?) But the impression I get is not that he wants to be loved. He has, after all, been repeatedly diagnosed by the media with some form of autistic-spectrum disorder. (Wired points to "his single-minded focus on technical minutiae, rocking motions, and flat tone of voice." This is more credible when it comes from Temple Grandin, herself autistic: "It is also likely that Bill Gates has many Asperger's traits. An article in Time Magazine compared me to Mr. Gates. For example, we both rock. I have seen video tapes of Bill Gates rocking on television.")

I think what Bill Gates wants is some interesting problems to solve. For a while, he was focussed on dominating the software marketplace and becoming the richest person in the world. And then that got old, and somebody pointed him at global health, and we should all be very glad she did.

Pogue links to an interview Gates did with Bill Moyers in which Moyers basically keeps trying to get Gates to express a non-autistic response, and Gates gamely tries, but acknowledges that it's not really his thing:

MOYERS: It's one thing to read a book, it's one thing to read the statistic, one thing to read a graph, it's another thing to read a human being's face. Did you go into the field?

GATES: Yes. And it's awkward. I'm not you know particularly good at this. Maybe I'll never be good at it. But to walk around to each patient and ask you know what is your problem? And be respectful of, you know, their desire for privacy.

Last Microsoft post for a while, I swear

A while ago I noted early reports of problems with Windows Vista:

The biggest problem, it seems, is that Microsoft's version of beefing up security consists of attaching a warning dialog to every single task, so that whenever anything goes wrong the operating system can say, Hey, it's not my fault! You left me unlocked! This is not security; this is ass-covering.

At the end of that post, I sort of wondered why a company as smart as Microsoft would do something that stupid. Philip Su's much-linked essay "Broken Windows" offers an explanation: an entire culture based on ass-covering.

After months of hearing of how a certain influential team in Windows was going to cause the Vista release to slip, I, full of abstract self-righteous misgivings as a stockholder, had at last the chance to speak with two of the team's key managers, asking them how they could be so, please-excuse-the-term, I-don't-mean-its-value-laden-connotation, ignorant as to proper estimation of software schedules. Turns out they're actually great project managers. They knew months in advance that the schedule would never work. So they told their VP. And he, possibly influenced by one too many instances where engineering re-routes power to the warp core, thus completing the heretofore impossible six-hour task in a mere three, summarily sent the managers back to "figure out how to make it work." The managers re-estimated, nipped and tucked, liposuctioned, did everything short of a lobotomy -- and still did not have a schedule that fit. The VP was not pleased. "You're smart people. Find a way!" This went back and forth for weeks, whereupon the intrepid managers finally understood how to get past the dilemma. They simply stopped telling the truth. "Sure, everything fits. We cut and cut, and here we are. Vista by August or bust. You got it, boss."

Win-win

It's rare that a single event is good news both for millions of dying children in poor countries and for millions of computer users in rich ones, but I think Bill Gates's announcement that he'll be abdicating his day-to-day role at Microsoft in favor of his charity work qualifies.

Michael Specter's October New Yorker piece implied that Gates is turning his genius for systems logic to philanthropic ends, and that this has the potential to make philanthropy as a whole both more internationally focussed and more thoroughly results-oriented. So if Gates is going to spend more time on those endeavors, that's a positive.

But it's also a positive that he's going to spend less time at Microsoft. That's not because Microsoft is dependent Gates's smartness -- there are lots of smart people still there. (And the stock market agrees with me.) It's because Gates is clearly leaving Microsoft because Microsoft is not a fun place to be. Unable to ship its flagship product, lurching embarrassingly after competitors that threaten to upend its entire business model, incapable of generating excitement among investors -- this is a company in decline. And Gates's departure is a symptom of this collapse, not a cause. He's the canary in the coal mine, except that in this case the canary happens to own the mining company.

Since Microsoft under Gates has exploited its monopoly position to pollute the software environment for everyone who uses a computer, signs of its decline go straight into the good-news file.

Vist off

Paul Thurrott, writing in a very appealing Microsoft-fan-betrayed tone, offers a lengthy critique of all the bullshit we can expect in Windows Vista. The biggest problem, it seems, is that Microsoft's version of beefing up security consists of attaching a warning dialog to every single task, so that whenever anything goes wrong the operating system can say, Hey, it's not my fault! You left me unlocked! This is not security; this is ass-covering.

Elsewhere, Jeff Atwood concurs:

The problem with the Security Through Endless Warning Dialogs school of thought is that it doesn’t work. All those earnest warning dialogs eventually blend together into a giant “click here to get work done” button that nobody bothers to read any more. The operating system cries wolf so much that when a real wolf — in the form of a virus or malware — rolls around, you’ll mindlessly allow it access to whatever it wants, just out of habit. [Link via Daring Fireball]

Here's what's strange: Atwood's point is basic, basic stuff. It has been demonstrated and verified in lab tests and confirmed by the everyday experience of millions of users. No one working professionally in interface design can be ignorant of this principle. And yet the biggest software company in history has apparently allowed it to cripple their flagship release of the decade. That's what happens when a company becomes dependent on anticompetitive practices -- on leveraging its monopoly position, rather than winning an actual head-to-head contest for users. This has been the Microsoft story for a decade now, but it's still shocking to me that their competitive skills have atrophied this badly.

The difference between sour grapes and just complaining about something that sucks

Interesting NYT front-pager pushing a Google-is-the-new-Microsoft thesis that I think is totally wrong.

Gary Rivlin cites two reasons why Silicon Valley is down on Google: (1) Google is moving into too many markets, which makes life worse for anyone else who wants a slice; (2) Google is hiring all the good programmers, driving up salaries.

I'm not denying that people complain about Google along those lines -- I've heard them do it myself. But when you examine them, the two points add up to sour grapes: I want a piece of the [local search/messaging/whatever] market, but Google is competing for it! And they've got money and skills! How am I supposed to compete with that? In any industry without a gold-rush mentality, this would be laughed off the court.

So how is this different from the Microsoft-bashing that's been a feature of the industry for decades? The complaints about Microsoft certainly include the two cited above, but they're supplemented and legitimized by a couple of others: (3) Microsoft makes crappy software; (4) Microsoft uses its desktop monopoly to establish its crappy software as standard, preventing superior products from getting a foothold and forcing programmers to work within the ugly, clumsy, bloated Windows framework.

In other words, programmers (as opposed to entrepreneurs) hated Microsoft because it made the software environment massively worse. Google is making the environment better. (Just three examples: (a) Remember pre-Google search engines? (b) Try comparing Google's web apps, like Google Maps and Gmail, with competitors like Mapquest and Hotmail. (c) Most telling of all: right below the jump of Rivlin's article is a piece on Google's new IM software, which uses the open-source Jabber standard. For Microsoft to do that would be a 180-degree reversal of their business model.)

To sum up, here's one programmer's take on Google and Microsoft:

Google is much more dangerous to Microsoft than Netscape was. Probably more dangerous than any other company has ever been. Not least because they're determined to fight. On their job listing page, they say that one of their "core values'' is "Don't be evil.'' From a company selling soybean oil or mining equipment, such a statement would merely be eccentric. But I think all of us in the computer world recognize who that is a declaration of war on.