10.14.08

Gemini version available ♊︎

Eye on Microsoft: Being Booted from Land of the Lobby

Posted in Courtroom, Google, Microsoft, Office Suites, Servers, Windows at 5:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

We have lost pace and also lost track of this series of posts which readers have requested, so here is a fast catchup.

Bye Bye, Miss American Pie

One of the headlines that stood out was about Microsoft losing the very same place it’s manipulating like no other technology company. Yes, Washington has decided to say farewell to Microsoft Office and shortly we will do another post about OpenOffice.org.

Washington D.C. has joined 500,000+ businesses and organizations in moving its communication and productivity tools into the cloud. Vivek Kundra, CTO for the District, signed an agreement with Google to migrate the organization’s 38,000 employees to Google Apps, the search giant’s web-based offering of communication and productivity tools. Washington D.C. is a not-insignificant win for Google, and yet another blow to Microsoft’s incumbent Office suite, as a surge of web apps steadily replaces their desktop counterparts.

Realty Check

The sub-heading at the very top is a bit of a stretch, but amid these troubling economic times, the following among 20 quotes is still fascinating:

19. “There is such an overvaluation of technology stocks that it is absurd. I would include our stock in that category.” Ballmer comments on the dot-com bubble, back in 1999. It burst not long after, proving him right.

At least Microsoft’s CEO is being honest. Sometimes. And with very heavy buybacks approved to be issued, Microsoft may fall into debt pretty soon. Bill Gates expressed deep concerns for the economy a day or so ago, so he must know something (inside information) about Microsoft, which Steve Ballmer openly insisted is not immune to the financial crisis. That was over a week ago, just before the most horrendous week or trading.

Super VIsta is Still Just a Vista

Colleagues of mine had the ‘pleasure’ of working with Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. Back in 2006 I sat down and wrote my thoughts about it. It went like this:

“…Been in a meeting just a moment ago. It was comical.

“Some folks have decided to experiment with Microsoft’s latest ultimate super
ultra high-processor/computing offer. Guess what?

“The computational server can — for whatever reason — accept only two
connections at the time. To make matters worse, one has to log off, so being
idle is out of the question. Even then, there are bugs that leave sessions
hanging, IIRC.

“It gets worse.

“40 nodes are available but sometimes only one is actually used. With two
users logged on, one would sometimes keep 39 nodes occupied while the other
gets just one.

“I am told it’s buggy. I am told it’s unstable (even from people who favour
the use of Windows on the desktop). People who wanted to take this gamble
with Microsoft on the server are complaining and probably have regrets. “We
have informed Microsoft”, they say, but what do they expect? Microsoft holds
the code and it’s too arrogant to take care of bugs upon the customers’
demands (just look at Internet Explorer). Bill Gates, who is the mastermind
that insisted on releasing the product, will soon retire. The product was
released half-based after long delays.

“Problems only on the server? You bet it ain’t the case. A colleague of mine
is spending weeks (if not months) trying to run experiments on a Windows XP
laptop. Hibernation fails, jobs are crashing after long runtimes, and
certain movements of the laptop (e.g. the jerking in a car) lead to crashes
as well.

“Thank you, Microsoft, for reminding people why software you produce is going
down the dustbin. It’s better to produce a reliable desktop before deciding
to take entire clusters down.”

That’s what I wrote back then. Now comes SJVN with some testimonials from customers.

Microsoft, after spending decades paying no real attention to high-performance computing, wants to be an HPC player with the release of HPC Server 2008. Can you believe it? Yes, there was Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. After a long search, I found one user. He told me, “Updates that require reboots are far too frequent for production-use systems,” “Jobs randomly crash,” and “Few HPC applications actually support Windows compute nodes.”

It does not sound as though much progress has been made since then. There are more urgent issues to address, mainly using vapourware techniques.

Taking Another Company to Court

Microsoft, having amassed so many cases against it, has just sued DHL.

Microsoft Sues DHL After Train Dumps 21,600 Xboxes

Microsoft is suing U.S.-based cargo-delivery service DHL Express for allegedly losing 21,600 Xbox game consoles because of a train derailment in Texas, according to court documents.

The XBox business has already accumulated billions of dollars in losses. Where will it end and why it Microsoft hiding the truth?

“If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.”

Bill Gates, Microsoft

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Reddit
  • email

Decor ᶃ Gemini Space

Below is a Web proxy. We recommend getting a Gemini client/browser.

Black/white/grey bullet button This post is also available in Gemini over at this address (requires a Gemini client/browser to open).

Decor ✐ Cross-references

Black/white/grey bullet button Pages that cross-reference this one, if any exist, are listed below or will be listed below over time.

Decor ▢ Respond and Discuss

Black/white/grey bullet button If you liked this post, consider subscribing to the RSS feed or join us now at the IRC channels.

A Single Comment

  1. Jose_X said,

    October 14, 2008 at 9:16 pm

    Gravatar

    Seeing DC move to online google apps doesn’t put me at ease.

    Maybe they will keep the really important stuff within internal networks and FOSS.

DecorWhat Else is New


  1. Links 04/06/2023: Azure Outage Again (So Many!) and Tiananmen Massacre Censored

    Links for the day



  2. Links 03/06/2023: Qubes OS 4.2.0 RC1 and elementaryOS Updates for May

    Links for the day



  3. Gemini Links 03/06/2023: Hidden Communities and Exam Prep is Not Education

    Links for the day



  4. Links 03/06/2023: IBM Betraying LibreOffice Some More (After Laying off LibreOffice Developers)

    Links for the day



  5. Gemini Links 03/06/2023: Bubble Woes and Zond Updates

    Links for the day



  6. Links 03/06/2023: Apache NetBeans 18 and ArcaOS 5.0.8

    Links for the day



  7. IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 02, 2023

    IRC logs for Friday, June 02, 2023



  8. The Developing World Abandons Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux at All-Time Highs on Desktops/Laptops

    Microsoft, with 80 billion dollars in longterm debt and endless layoffs, is losing the monopolies; the media doesn’t mention this, but some publicly-accessible data helps demonstrate that



  9. Links 02/06/2023: Elive ‘Retrowave’ Stable and Microsoft's Half a Billion Dollar Fine for LinkeIn Surveillance in Europe

    Links for the day



  10. Linux Foundation 'Research' Has a New Report and Of Course It Uses Only Proprietary Software

    The Linux Foundation has a new report, promoted by Clickfraud Spamnil and others; of course they’re rejecting Free software, they’re just riding the “Linux” brand and speak of “Open Source” (which they reject themselves)



  11. Links 02/06/2023: Arti 1.1.5 and SQL:2023

    Links for the day



  12. Gemini Links 02/06/2023: Vimwiki Revisited, SGGS Revisited

    Links for the day



  13. Geminispace/GemText/Gemini Protocol Turn 4 on June 20th

    Gemini is turning 4 this month (on the 20th, according to the founder) and I thought I’d do a spontaneous video about how I use Gemini, why it's so good, and why it’s still growing (Stéphane Bortzmeyer fixed the broken cron job — or equivalent of it — a day or two after I had mentioned the issue)



  14. HMRC Does Not Care About Tax Fraud Committed by UK Government Contractor, Sirius 'Open Source'

    The tax crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ were reported to HMRC two weeks ago; HMRC did not bother getting back to the reporters (victims of the crime) and it’s worth noting that the reporters worked on UK government systems for many years, so maybe there’s a hidden incentive to bury this under the rug



  15. Our IRC at 15th Anniversary

    So our IRC community turns 15 today (sort of) and I’ve decided to do a video reflecting on the fact that some of the same people are still there after 15 years



  16. IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 01, 2023

    IRC logs for Thursday, June 01, 2023



  17. Links 02/06/2023: NixOS 23.05 and Rust 1.70.0

    Links for the day



  18. Gemini Links 02/06/2023: Flying High With Gemini and Gogios Released

    Links for the day



  19. Links 01/06/2023: KStars 3.6.5 and VEGA ET1031 RISC-V Microprocessor in Use

    Links for the day



  20. Gemini Links 01/06/2023: Scam Call and Flying High With Gemini

    Links for the day



  21. Links 01/06/2023: Spleen 2.0.0 Released and Team UPC Celebrates Its Own Corruption

    Links for the day



  22. IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, May 31, 2023

    IRC logs for Wednesday, May 31, 2023



  23. Tux Machines Closing the Door on Twitter Because Twitter is Dead (for a Lot of People)

    Tux Machines recently joined millions of others who had already quit Twitter, including passive posting (fully or partly automated)



  24. Links 31/05/2023: Inkscape’s 1.3 Plans and New ARM Cortex-A55-Based Linux Chip

    Links for the day



  25. Gemini Links 31/05/2023: Personality of Software Engineers

    Links for the day



  26. Links 31/05/2023: Armbian 23.05 Release and Illegal UPC

    Links for the day



  27. IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, May 30, 2023

    IRC logs for Tuesday, May 30, 2023



  28. Gemini Protocol About to Turn 4 and It's Still Growing

    In the month of May we had zero downtime (no updates to the system or outages in the network), which means Lupa did not detect any errors such as timeouts and we’re on top of the list (the page was fixed a day or so after we wrote about it); Gemini continues to grow (chart by Botond) as we’re approaching the 4th anniversary of the protocol



  29. Links 31/05/2023: Librem Server v2, curl 8.1.2, and Kali Linux 2023.2 Release

    Links for the day



  30. Gemini Links 31/05/2023: Bayes Filter and Programming Wordle

    Links for the day


RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channel: Come and chat with us in real time

Recent Posts