Phone, Tablet and Gizmo Thread #0x02

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 05 Jan 2013 02:11

Yes they do and it is pretty good too. Might have helped fill fruit's war chest (fruit's profit margins are lot higher on their HW than what M$ can get out of their Office).

But the point here is that they are whining about somebody doing to them what they have done to others. It is amusing to see them whining when it is business as usual where everybody wants to stick it to their competitors. Instead of working behind the scenes with the law makers in EU and US to convince them to have better oversight on "do no evil", they chose to whine against the current darling of aam janata there by looking utterly stupid.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 05 Jan 2013 02:59

negi wrote:Note2 is awesome except when you make/receive a call.

Call quality is awesome on the Note2 with great sound that is loud and clear. It beats most everything out there. I guess you mean that it looks uncool to put a big device up to your head? Use a BT headset and you'll be ultra cool where you can read this dhaaga on BRF in one window and check email in another, all while taking your call. Better yet, while on the phone with GHQ/SHQ have her talk dirty to you and you can do some mijjle malish paalish, watch pr0n in one screen, and read the L&M dhaaga all at the same time.

Muppalla · Post by **Muppalla** » 05 Jan 2013 04:47

matrimc wrote:
Muppalla wrote: I have ordered Lenovo Twist (Tablet/Laptop) and will come in 2 weeks time. CoreI7 with 500GB harddrive and 24GBSSD. Win 8 64pro with five point touch.
How much RAM, if I may ask? and what is the max? I would like to get one to test some of our applications on Windoze ... err realized that you like this version ... Windows 8.

8GB

Here is link for all twists:
http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/cont ... twist00744&

However I bought the following one:
http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/cont ... 8C3A1EC325

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 05 Jan 2013 05:35

Thanks, Muppalla garu. That looks very good. light weight too.

Better than my 18 month old Asus G73JH Win7 machine. Of course, that has pretty big ( > 17") screen which is a pita as I cannot find a bag for it. All I need is to run some command line computation application to run.

One more Q. The i7 is quad core, right?

Muppalla · Post by **Muppalla** » 05 Jan 2013 05:46

It is dual core
http://ark.intel.com/products/65714/Int ... w=i7+3517u

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 05 Jan 2013 08:00

putnanja wrote:Microsoft does have Office version for Macs.

Actually that's used to be (and probably still is) the #1 selling software for Macs.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 05 Jan 2013 08:03

matrimc wrote:Yes they do and it is pretty good too. Might have helped fill fruit's war chest (fruit's profit margins are lot higher on their HW than what M$ can get out of their Office).

But the point here is that they are whining about somebody doing to them what they have done to others. It is amusing to see them whining when it is business as usual where everybody wants to stick it to their competitors. Instead of working behind the scenes with the law makers in EU and US to convince them to have better oversight on "do no evil", they chose to whine against the current darling of aam janata there by looking utterly stupid.

All that whining (by any big boy) is just part of the act. Folks like Mickey and ChipZ are also defence contractors and know how to navigate the lobbying channels. Back during the Mickey anti-trust proceedings the guy in charge of the investigations actually went to the Mahdi's house and had 1-1 sessions with him in private - aal's fair in love and war!

----

Chacha ups the ante

Many Windows Phone users report being cut off from Google Maps (update)

Update 2: Google has issued a statement on the situation to Gizmodo:

The mobile web version of Google Maps is optimized for WebKit browsers such as Chrome and Safari. However, since Internet Explorer is not a WebKit browser, Windows Phone devices are not able to access Google Maps for the mobile web.

But Chacha's maps work on Mozilla Fennec which is not a WebKit browser either. Looks like a deliberate middle finger from Chacha to Mickey.

Muppalla · Post by **Muppalla** » 05 Jan 2013 09:49

More they do, more they will be increasing the Mickey's share and apps. But Nokia maps and driving directions are very good. I don't know HTC uses which app for driving directions.

Prasad · Post by **Prasad** » 05 Jan 2013 09:57

QQ: Is the nexus 4 going to be in stock at all anytime soon? Think it was in stock early december and thats it.

manish · Post by **manish** » 05 Jan 2013 10:29

Anujan wrote:
While we are on the subject of developing apps for rival platforms, how about a high quality office app for Linux, iOS and Android from M$?

They seem to be just around the corner...
New leaks suggest Microsoft Office for iOS could launch soon

Exclusive: Microsoft Office for iPhone, iPad, and Android revealed

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 05 Jan 2013 21:01

For tablets it may be useful. I guess its a good move on MSFT's part so they get sales and MS Office becomes entrenched.

negi · Post by **negi** » 05 Jan 2013 21:06

Btw for those who think AT&T or Eaten up fruit co suck; I became a shikar of their pakiness on this trip. So as per some prilliant lahori logic the prepaid data plans from AT&T are for all smart phones but the iphunuwa. Without a data plan the thing is as useless as a brick.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 05 Jan 2013 21:07

Prasad wrote:QQ: Is the nexus 4 going to be in stock at all anytime soon? Think it was in stock early december and thats it.

I don't think LG can keep up with demand. Every time the Nexus 4 shows up on the Play Store, its sold out within hours or a day. I think Google mishandled the release and rumors seem to indicate only 375,000 units sold.
Don't know when more will show up, and the Google X phone, exclusively from MOTO, will come out some time this spring.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 05 Jan 2013 21:09

negi wrote:Btw for those who think AT&T or Eaten up fruit co suck; I became a shikar of their pakiness on this trip. So as per some prilliant lahori logic the prepaid data plans from AT&T are for all smart phones but the iphunuwa. Without a data plan the thing is as useless as a brick.

I thought ATT had pre-paid data plans that will work for the iPhone? Please explain.

negi · Post by **negi** » 05 Jan 2013 21:39

^ Well so I walked into AT&T and asked them for a prepaid sim for iphone ; I bought the one with 25$ plan. I asked if I could get data , he said 'No, not for iphone'. I asked if I could purchase it separately he said 'No, not in prepaid'.

I did some googling it looked as if you have to do some fckn setting changes and what not to get it working; so I decided against it. I mean seriously WTF are these guys upto ? It is a clear case of service providers trying to milk the lalloo junta here in US. They just don't want prepaid to get popular amongst the people here but since they can't do away with it they have this nice handicapped prepaid system for namesake.

SwamyG · Post by **SwamyG** » 05 Jan 2013 21:54

The Nokia City Lens app seems to be good, my son was using it to find restaurants during our vacation.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 05 Jan 2013 22:24

negi wrote:^ Well so I walked into AT&T and asked them for a prepaid sim for iphone ; I bought the one with 25$ plan. I asked if I could get data , he said 'No, not for iphone'. I asked if I could purchase it separately he said 'No, not in prepaid'.

I did some googling it looked as if you have to do some fckn setting changes and what not to get it working; so I decided against it. I mean seriously WTF are these guys upto ? It is a clear case of service providers trying to milk the lalloo junta here in US. They just don't want prepaid to get popular amongst the people here but since they can't do away with it they have this nice handicapped prepaid system for namesake.

Doesn't make sense to me. You get a pre-paid SIM card with voice and 4G data. It should work on any compatible device that is capable of supporting the voice and data frequencies.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 05 Jan 2013 22:33

SwamyG wrote:The Nokia City Lens app seems to be good, my son was using it to find restaurants during our vacation.

The main guy who had the idea and did the implementation is local and works for mickey.

----

Negi beta, itne din US mein raha aur saale akal ab aai??! Ofcourse the prepaid plans are deliberately handicapped by carriers in massa. Cable, internet, telephony are all scams in massa.

negi · Post by **negi** » 05 Jan 2013 22:45

^abe it is different, when I first came here the smartphones were not the norm at max kalajamun was in use that too coy owned coy paid. On short visits how can you expect people to be on postpaid ?

member_20292 · Post by **member_20292** » 05 Jan 2013 22:57

^^^ bahut chor, madarchod companies hain USA ki...in terms of mobile . ATnT is the most chor company in the world.

Saala..Indian services and prices points are faaaaar better. Prepaid is AWESOME in India.
My entire months bill is 750 Rs including 3G....this is 15 $.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 05 Jan 2013 23:07

Raja Bose wrote:All that whining (by any big boy) is just part of the act. Folks like Mickey and ChipZ are also defence contractors and know how to navigate the lobbying channels. Back during the Mickey anti-trust proceedings the guy in charge of the investigations actually went to the Mahdi's house and had 1-1 sessions with him in private - aal's fair in love and war!

Bose babu, sure. But in their haste they should not turn in to a PR disaster for themselves. They are not the darling of the public anymore. The sooner they recognize that the better for them and the consumers in that they land on the ground with all technology guns blazing increasing consumer choice. If not, it would be a redux of the case of their guru (big blue).

Muppalla · Post by **Muppalla** » 05 Jan 2013 23:47

The phone/data companies in massa are like a mafia and rip off. They did not even allow WLL technologies to make mobile plans cheaper. There is lot of holdback from FCC too on allowing any competing technologies and smaller mobile circles. The contracts with phones is the killer.

Muppalla · Post by **Muppalla** » 05 Jan 2013 23:51

matrimc wrote:Bose babu, sure. But in their haste they should not turn in to a PR disaster for themselves. They are not the darling of the public anymore. The sooner they recognize that the better for them and the consumers in that they land on the ground with all technology guns blazing increasing consumer choice. If not, it would be a redux of the case of their guru (big blue).

There was never a time when they(Microsoft) are darling to the public. So your whole point is invalid. In fact if you are a Microsoft admirer you are called as someone working on the dark side.

Whether Microsoft goes down or rises up again with some new funda, there is nothing for them to recognise this or that.

Added later:
Microsoft just gave to the industry that is cheap and working for them to run business easily which rest of the crowd not on the dark side did not give. Even the hate MS crowd of companies have fewer options. The company did not grow out of "likeness" or "love". They grew because of the IT industries ROI factor. As long as the non-MS companies (individually or by forming an allaince) did not bring down ROI of IT implementation, while abusing MS the industries will still use its products.

ShauryaT · Post by **ShauryaT** » 05 Jan 2013 23:55

mahadevbhu wrote:^^^ bahut chor, madarchod companies hain USA ki...in terms of mobile . ATnT is the most chor company in the world.

Saala..Indian services and prices points are faaaaar better. Prepaid is AWESOME in India.
My entire months bill is 750 Rs including 3G....this is 15 $.

Talk about it. Just spent 35 mins on the phone to reactivate by data plan on the lone android tablet i have to get transferred 5 times, only to find out i have to go to a frickin store to get a new sim. Ofcourse, ATT will not allow hotspot from my iPad

No hotspot from iPhunwa's unlimited plan on ATT too. So, essential royally fu(Ced

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 06 Jan 2013 00:56

matrimc wrote:They are not the darling of the public anymore. The sooner they recognize that the better for them and the consumers in that they land on the ground with all technology guns blazing increasing consumer choice. If not, it would be a redux of the case of their guru (big blue).

They were never the darling of the public - c'mon, they are a bunch of fat bald business who just know their business inside out, they were never glamorous. Mickey survived the big blue stage already, their probability of survival is now based on other factors.

Surya · Post by **Surya** » 06 Jan 2013 01:05

mupalla

let me know how the twisting mechanism holds up

Muppalla · Post by **Muppalla** » 06 Jan 2013 03:33

Surya wrote:mupalla

let me know how the twisting mechanism holds up

I will as soon as I receive. It is on its way from Lenovo. It looks like a 10 day wait from China for a two day shipping order.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 06 Jan 2013 03:38

Marten wrote:Is no one here using Tmo? They offer a 35usd smartphone plan that works for the iPhone.

Yes, I am and have no problems with it. Similarly I have no problems with ATT SIM cards. I have not used an ATT pre-paid SIM card in an iPhone though. It would appear if Negi is correct, then ATT is deliberately hobling IMEI numbers specific to the iPhone which are registered to ATT. I'll have to investigate that. I don't what is going on with Negi.

Mort Walker · Post by **Mort Walker** » 06 Jan 2013 03:39

ShauryaT wrote:
mahadevbhu wrote:^^^ bahut chor, madarchod companies hain USA ki...in terms of mobile . ATnT is the most chor company in the world.

Saala..Indian services and prices points are faaaaar better. Prepaid is AWESOME in India.
My entire months bill is 750 Rs including 3G....this is 15 $.
Talk about it. Just spent 35 mins on the phone to reactivate by data plan on the lone android tablet i have to get transferred 5 times, only to find out i have to go to a frickin store to get a new sim. Ofcourse, ATT will not allow hotspot from my iPad No hotspot from iPhunwa's unlimited plan on ATT too. So, essential royally fu(Ced

That is more of a function of the iPad and iPhone. I know of people who are using the Nexus 4 with ATT and are using it as a hotspot.

negi · Post by **negi** » 06 Jan 2013 03:40

Mort sir you can google up for 'how to get data on prepaid simcard on iphone' a lot of people are having issues. There is conflicting info on the web, I simply have no time for all that it should have been plug and play. When I enable cellular data the 4G icon is shown however there is no internet and it says 'could not activate cellular data network'.

Fwiw it is 4S which is not jailbroken or purchased from grey market; I was with AT&T contract for about 2 years (before that I had E71 on TMob) before I RTI'd; AT&T gave me the unlock code when I formally terminated the contract and it works fine in India.

Muppalla · Post by **Muppalla** » 06 Jan 2013 04:24

Raja Bose wrote:
matrimc wrote:They are not the darling of the public anymore. The sooner they recognize that the better for them and the consumers in that they land on the ground with all technology guns blazing increasing consumer choice. If not, it would be a redux of the case of their guru (big blue).
They were never the darling of the public - c'mon, they are a bunch of fat bald business who just know their business inside out, they were never glamorous. Mickey survived the big blue stage already, their probability of survival is now based on other factors.

Absolutely. I do admit to have bias towards MS but it stops there but no emotional atyachar type stuff. Most of these who oppose MS are unfortunately emotional atyachar type arguments. The arguments start from MS looting from IBM and then stiffling competetion etc etc. Currently (past three years) I work on an environment that do not even have any shred of MS tech and I am still firmly is the application developmet domain even though I did some manager vanager stuff in between.

The folks who hate MS need to remember a point in time (1996 to 1999). It was just like the current fruit company with no respectable networking/enterprise level software to brag about. The entire area is wide open and MS had just created something called a Windows NT (a very small lowlevel entry into network/enterprise world). The competing money was there with IBM, Oracle and host of others. SUN was doing extremely great.

What stopped all these greats to really comeup with a strategy that could have stopped the rouge called Microsoft. Anti-trust stuff itself is disgustingly hypocratic. At that time MS bundled the IE4.0 along with Windows 98, Windows 2000 and that was the complaint by Netscape. Today Microsoft is being criticized because it is still not throwing out Office for free. By the way google is now charging for the same(slow and low but a start).

Sun Microsystems, IBM, Oracle and Netscape did combinedly decided to promote J2EE as a competing platform to the Mickey Mouse. MS technology at that time in both web based as well as client server was extremely crappy with COM/DCOM based registry hell. Instead of hating MS, people should introspect why the juggernaut of IBM+Oracle+SUN+Netscape failed? IBM is having Websphere and DB2 and a hillarious thing called as OS/2, Oracle has Database and was forraying into its own OS and net computer. Netscape is the browser company. SUN is Java and good hardware company. All they needed was to create a tightly integrated product suite with Websphere+Java+Solaris+Oracle+Netscape. Instead they started giving fundas and MS-blaming interview and meetings. They did not want because they are all selfish and wanted to see light to their own platforms because IBM does not want to shed its DB2 while Oracle does not want to integrate into Solaris because it has ambitions of its own hardware. The most trecherous thing is Netscape being bought by AOL instead of cash-rich SUN. Oracle has its own UNIX too.

While all these dogs are fighing like factions of Taliban, WinTel(MS and Intel) has built from ground up a new OS (Windows XP, Windows 2003, most successful Microsoft .NeT achitecture that is completely adhering to open standards set by open organizations such as XML.org etc. It has spent 30% of its expenditure in the past decade just on improving the SQL Server (engine was brought from another egoistic company called as Sybase). Today you can write stored procedures in any .NET framework languages. XML is integrated in SQL Server and no other database has such native integration. Regarding embracing open standards, it even integrated Google's hadoop and maprequest in its latest SQL Server 2012 and it does have appliance based parallel datawarehouse (MPP technology) in wintel architecture (to compete with EMC Greenplum and IBM's Netezza).

All the above junkies are not even in the rareview mirror of MS in its strategy of slow and steady methodology of building brick by brick on a single OS instead of jumping on to Least Common Denominator (earlier Java integration into these products).

In terms of development tools, all these Eclipse, Javabuilder or even database tools such as Toad are all just pure BS infront of Visual Studio or SQL Server Management Studio.

My gripe with these junkies is that they did nothing but just whining about MS. The tools to develop, manage servers, schedulers in non MS world are very very expensive and integration is a rocket science. In MS world it comes in the OS.

The real good competetor of Microsoft is Google and it did embrace the open source like the other junkies but it does have a strategy and it buys and it rewrites before integrating into its ecosystem. It is also in the same path of building brick by brick and I am sure it is slow but surely getting into enterprise software world. It is a realistic competetor for Microsoft and if one day it loses out to google, the world is still a better place than the other french fries sellers.

Not that any of these obese french fry sellers will die. They will survive under the shadows of Microsoft and Google with their product lines but with their current short term visions they don't have a chance in the core architecture business. By the way these junkies still have visions of creating their own platforms including OS in their labs. If Oracle one day charges for Java because it bought SUN then that will be the day of dhoti dance. (I am not kidding because it even thought so).

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 06 Jan 2013 04:46

Raja Bose wrote:
matrimc wrote:They are not the darling of the public anymore. The sooner they recognize that the better for them and the consumers in that they land on the ground with all technology guns blazing increasing consumer choice. If not, it would be a redux of the case of their guru (big blue).
They were never the darling of the public - c'mon, they are a bunch of fat bald business who just know their business inside out, they were never glamorous. Mickey survived the big blue stage already, their probability of survival is now based on other factors.

I did not mean IBM - M$ was the darling of the public (because of TINA) thereby becoming darling of the street. The streetwallas are talking them down now demoting them from M$ to MS. Since they might be talking from insider info (we all know that the stock market is not efficient), the market trends might be pointing to M$ losing its mind share in the medium to long term. Not saying they would not do well but their profit margins will fall just like all mature companies (like for example IBM). But then IBM reinvented themselves as a services company after HW (Mainframe) margins went down from 60% to 30% and on a downward trajectory in the foreseeable future at that time. M$ dodged the bullet once with the Internet by developing IE very quickly on the back of Spyglass, Inc. (but sticking it to them in the end though). The second bullet they dodged was the buy-out of Yahoo!. They were stupid to contemplate a deal which would have been second only to Time-Warner AOL deal, if measured by "disaster quotient". Lucky for them the deal fell through due to Yahoo!'s greed. Let us see if they dodge the bullet this time around in the mobile space. If they don't, they are history. Who in the consumer space needs all the doo-da features of full fledged office? A couple of memos, some quick letters, a few club newsletters or homeowner association stuff can be done very easily with chacha docs anyways. They will be limited to the enterprise market and the myriad applications that are run by SMBs. Not that there is no money in it but margins are going to be split by the OS/platform makers (M$) and the ISVs (or service providers). Also, the market size counts too. Tablet and mobile market is two - if not three - orders of magnitude larger and the customers in this segment are impulse buyers who would drop large amounts of money without realizing it. $0.99 per song or $5.99 per book is going to add up very quickly. M$ is a late comer and they need to have a compelling product line. At this point it is anybody's guess whether they would be one of the big boyz or not. Next two years is critical for M$ in spite of good news like the following. Only time will tell and all that.

The agreement is valued at > $600 M.

U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force and DISA Expand Access to Microsoft Technologies Through Cost-Saving Modernization Agreement

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Jan. 4, 2013 — In an effort to modernize technology infrastructure, reduce costs and foster new levels of cross-agency collaboration, the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) are expanding access to Microsoft solutions by entering into a transformative three-year Joint Enterprise Licensing Agreement for enterprise licenses and software assurance. The agreement provides all three organizations with a single vehicle for accessing the latest Microsoft technologies in support of top IT priorities around datacenter consolidation, collaboration, cybersecurity, mobility, cloud computing and big data.

This is the most comprehensive licensing agreement Microsoft Corp. has ever established with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), covering nearly 75 percent of all DoD personnel. The net new contract was awarded to Insight Public Sector, a division of Insight Enterprises Inc., one of the largest global Microsoft Large Account Resellers.
...

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 06 Jan 2013 04:50

Do you think Mickey ever cared for the french fry sellers?

Like I said earlier Mickey and ChipZ are two companies who know their business very very well. They became juggernauts not becoz of lack of competition but becoz they are ruthless calculating businessmen and they have institutionalized those practices (that is where the Billu Dada succeeded and the Mahdi failed, he was brilliant but he couldn't formalize his brilliance into an organization which can operate like he did). Whether Chacha has the capability to be a businessman like that.......we will have to see, its not a slam dunk.

In the end all companies die in one form or the other, nobody is permanent and the only thing constant is change.

Muppalla · Post by **Muppalla** » 06 Jan 2013 04:56

^^^^
matrimc garu, the above link is too big a news for Microsoft. That is a tectonic shift in the mindset of federal government. See the words there (datacenter consolidation, collaboration, cloud and big data). And also see they are doing to save money because US government is going to cut defense budgets. When the moneyies went down, the corporate went bigtime into invesiting in MS application development. Now the government is thinking because its spending power is coming down too. The entire strategy (good one though) that was run by Vivek Kundra of embracing open source is falling flat because of the huge integration costs.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 06 Jan 2013 05:27

Muppalla wrote:There was never a time when they(Microsoft) are darling to the public. So your whole point is invalid. In fact if you are a Microsoft admirer you are called as someone working on the dark side.

Muppalla garu, they were when "half eaten fruit" (Copyright negi mulla) becoming totally unbearable with their pricing on the PC front. Around this time they came up with a half-assed Windows coupled with the PC Open Architecture, they ate Apple's lunch, breakfast, and dinner and dessert.

When I say public, I am including the 1-10 people SMBs for whom a low-cost PC that can be expanded in stages was a god send. See, when there were no mobile/tablets, i.e. when phones were phones and computers were computers and Internet was in its infancy (mostly limited to Usenet newsgroups, email within edu, gov and org domains), M$ had the killer apps (by leapfrogging over Lotus and Word Perfect) and added the PP. During that time they were darlings alright. There was some doubt when Netscape went public. Their detractors (mainly Netscape's Andreesen who ears were probably filled by the VCs and Jim Clark) wrote them off too early without realizing that they themselves were not that strong and there are no killer Internet apps nor the infrastructure. Browser being the universal interface was all BS because there was no bandwidth to support the kind of applications they were envisioning. Moreover the access devices were bulky and unwieldy. M$ was not very late to the market with IE developed from Mosaic's code base licensed through Spyglass. Also, please consider that if they were not darlings, xbox would not have made headway in the market share game (though not very profitable for M$ till now).

When Scully was fired and Jobs took over Apple, shortly afterwards the exact reverse happened at M$ - Gates stepped down and soap salesman took over. Couple this with iStuff and rise of the mobile platform, blurring between mobile/tablet and laptops, and M$ slipped in the "darling" department. Today SMBs are still heavily dependent on M$. We have to wait and see if ISVs are going to come up with apps for SMBs on non-M$ mobile/tablets or M$ mobile/surface.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 06 Jan 2013 06:03

Muppalla wrote:The arguments start from MS looting from IBM and then stiffling competetion etc etc.

No, no, no, no. MS never looted from IBM. IBM thought they can grind MS down butt Gates proved to be too machiavellian for that.

What stopped all these greats to really comeup with a strategy that could have stopped the rouge called Microsoft. Anti-trust stuff itself is disgustingly hypocratic. At that time MS bundled the IE4.0 along with Windows 98, Windows 2000 and that was the complaint by Netscape. Today Microsoft is being criticized because it is still not throwing out Office for free. By the way google is now charging for the same(slow and low but a start).

Please look at Wikipedia article on Spyglass, Inc. to see what kind of games MS played to develop IE.

Sun Microsystems, IBM, Oracle and Netscape did combinedly decided to promote J2EE as a competing platform to the Mickey Mouse.

Sun was lazy and Netscape was hubris filled. For example, Sun's man pages were direct copies of man pages from Berkeley - spelling and grammatical mistake and all. Their CDE was a joke - for example any error notification box was so wide that the right edge would go a couple of screen lengths off of the physical right edge of the screen. But Sun's hardware was excellent.

All they needed was to create a tightly integrated product suite with Websphere+Java+Solaris+Oracle+Netscape.

Netscape was beholden to M$ (as TINA) but they were filled with hubris of having a very large "darling quotient". When they did not come up with anything good, they went crashed and burned (though the original group hired by Jim Clark did well in that they came out with tens of Millions of green backs).

While all these dogs are fighing like factions of Taliban, WinTel(MS and Intel) has built from ground up a new OS (Windows XP, Windows 2003, most successful Microsoft

Nothing was ground up either at M$ or at Intel. For example, NT was designed by a ex-DEC engineer from DEC VMS. A lot of fab tech was licensed to Intel by IBM when Intel was getting off the ground. In fact, IBM had a big share in intel (even controlling interest, IIRC) at that time so that they could have a say in the board. IBM did divest their share eventually and did make a lot of money.

In terms of development tools, all these Eclipse, Javabuilder or even database tools such as Toad are all just pure BS infront of Visual Studio or SQL Server Management Studio.

I am not a fan of IDEs. But then I do not develop any user facing stuff. Why does one need IDEs for server development?

IMHO your trust in chacha is misplaced. Is it because they say "do no evil"?. They are no better or worse than M$ or the Netscapes and Suns of the past. The only difference is that they are not hubris-laden like the has-beens.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 06 Jan 2013 07:00

matrimc, Sun was truly thinking it was knife fight when it was gunfight. Their slogan "computer is the network" when it was software that is the network.

So yes hardware was good but it didn't matter.

webex wouldn't use their servers for they could be remotely system administrated.

When things started going south lumpen elements were promoted.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 06 Jan 2013 08:36

Chief Lumpen Element would be Jonathan Schwartz.

matrimc wrote:Also, please consider that if they were not darlings, xbox would not have made headway in the market share game (though not very profitable for M$ till now).

You sure?

Actually XBox is an example of why Mickey is a ugly warthog rather than a nimble sexy ballerina (like say Mahdi's Fruit Co.)....nobody thought they would succeed and they didn't initially and finally they did after grunting through muddy nullahs and swamps. Its funny that nobody mentions XBox when they talk about AppleTV/GoogleTV ityadi yet that is a set-top box which has more consumer penetration than both combined!

Anujan · Post by **Anujan** » 06 Jan 2013 09:11

It is not as simple as M$ dominating IBM and being dominated by Appil and fighting it out with Chacha.

M$ is a business focussed company. That means two things: They need products that fit with enterprise laws, needs and practices and they need development tools for developers to develop and customize products for businesses. They are fantastic at doing this (and also at allied things like sales and distribution). But whatever is outside of these two competencies, they are bad at doing it*.

Take consumer electronics for example. It involves finding out what users want and selling stuff directly to them**. M$ is bad at this, appil is good at this. Therefore they put out duds like Zune, Kin. And "tablets" which were the exact same windows with a pen

On top of it, they seem to have not realized that missing deadlines is deadly in consumer electronics with short product cycles. Not feeling the pulse of users directly meant that BillyG made a famous speech where he said WWW was a fad (businesses are always conservative, they never jump on to the next greatest thing). Ballmer came out and said about the iphunwa: 500$ for a phunwa!!?!! Our phunwas have keyboards!! They can do email!! And consequently M$ missed the 3 big boats of the last decade: Internet, Mobile and Social.

Chacha right from its inception started as a company that gave services to users directly. On top of it, they have a product from which users can switch quickly without effort. That meant they need to feel the pulse of the users and respond quickly. Chacha is bad at selling things to businesses.

Now it is clear that for companies to succeed they need to both sell to businesses and sell to users directly. Chacha is learning how to sell to businesses. M$ is learning how to sell to users directly. It will be interesting to see who learns quicker and who can execute faster.

*"Bad at something" is not an absolute statement. They simply dont see value in acting otherwise. Take ChipZ for example. They dont have mobile parts (in any significant volume) for tablet/phunwa ityadi. Analysts (with liberal arts degrees) come out and grandly say "Intel is bad at mobile chips". What does that even mean?! They dont have designers and architects? They cant hire talent? They dont know how to manufacture or sell them? The real reason is they dont see real value in them and the margins are super low. Now they see value in them, I bet they will be good at them in a year or two.

**Success of Xbox is not a counterexample. As far as Xbox is concerned, it needed to be a platform where game developers can show off their best. The box itself could be ugly (first Xbox was ugly) and users wont care as much.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 06 Jan 2013 09:29

I don't know about AppleTV/GoogleTV but I gather XBox had been a loss leader till recently.

Sun founders were smart but there were/are several in the industry at that level while not being complacent and rest on the laurels. Only IBM and Apple - Sun excluded - have seen the following smart complacent people come and go.

AT&T with their 3b2 where they were losing $700 Million/year for 3 years in a row before they pulled the plug (this was when million$ meant something, i.e. 1986-89 time frame), SGI getting sold to Rackspace for literally peanuts (what ... $25 Mil) and bringing down with them the whole concept of RISC, Thinking Machines an unmitigated disaster, Symbolics which was unfortunately was ahead of its time trying to run LISP on totally under powered hardware, VLIW architecture despite very good parallel architecture never taking off, HP regressing from the vanguard of Si valley to becoming the dunce of the valley, DEC in spite of having the fastest CPU at that time (500 MHz Alpha) getting into bed with M$ and completely getting screwed and being sold off to - is it Compaq? - for peanuts (though it serves them right - those buggers had one of the industry's worst support staff - would not answer phone messages for weeks on end), not to speak of DG of Eclipse fame (but I give you that I enjoyed Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine tremendously), Burroughs and Univac merging to create "the power of half" instead of the claimed "power of two", on and on.

We don't know yet M$, Chacha, Amazon is going to be counted among the IBMs, Apples (and FLOSS moment) of the world or SGIs and DECs although I would bet dollars to donuts that Facebook and Yahoo! are in the latter category.