Well, I fell off the blog wagon this week. Was far to busy with the project I am on, but since we now have a release out there (wohoo) I can get back to the blog.
- Installed Vista SP1 last night, and it has certainly improved the startup times. I have gone from an average of 93 seconds, down to 65 seconds. From turning on the PC to getting a usable browser is now taking around 70 seconds, down from 90 to 120 seconds. Not too shabby IMHO
- However, the laptop was not as good. Even with all power saving off, it is taking over 3 minutes. It is a DELL Latitude D820 with 3 GB of RAM. I suspect that it is a piece of crap
- Microsoft "Frees" office formats.
- I think I am getting older. I can sympathise with this one
- Looks like the HD-DVD and Bluray war is over, with Toshiba looking to pull out of the HD-DVD alliance. Can' say I am too surprised.
- The Unity Direct Injection application block has been released
- A weird but (I thought) amusing show from the 70's/80's was Quark. Well, now you can see them all online. Cool
- Scott Guthrie has a new post about ASP.NET MVC Road Map
- ThoughtWorks now has a series of podcasts to subscribe to. I saw some of the guys from ThoughtWorks at TechEd 2007, and I think they are some of the smartest people around.
- Looks like News Corp wants a piece of Yahoo.
Slack, I know, but I had to get a release of the project I am working on out yesterday afternoon.
So Microsoft has place a largish bid for Yahoo. (see link). So what does this mean for Microsoft? Well , for what it's worth, here is my 1 cents worth
Microsoft has, in my opinion, been falling in the minds of consumers for the last few years. On one side they have Apple, which produces a great product (although overpriced and locked to one vendor for your hardware, which is kinda sucky), and Google, which *gets* the internet. Now, just for a momnent, let's look at the consumer market that we have now in teh Western world. We live in extremely prosperous times. My generation's kids have not (in general) had to want for much. They have cable TV, they have the internet, cheap music, cheap Chinese manufacturing. They have grown up with a software monopoly of Microsoft.
So, as with all generations, they have grown up with a set of terchnology that is now percieved as "old hat", crusty, and created by and for the "old" people. Leading the charge of those companies that are doing this is Microsoft. So, if I was to put myself in the shoes of a young consumer/adult, Microsoft would seem so stuffy and boring.
Along comes a credible alternative that looks and acts differently. (Apple and Google). So people start looking towards these as agents of change, of "getting" their generation.
So, Microsoft, in an attempt to "get it", buys Yahoo. To me, that is a sign of a desperate company, one that has run out of ideas, one that feels that it is losing, and the only way it sees that it can stay relevant, is to buy a company that is at least a bit more relevant that it has managed to be in an effort to stay in the game.
These will indeed be interesting times for Microsoft and Yahoo employees.
Well, here we are at February already. *phew*.
- Of course the big news is Microsoft's bid for Yahoo. 44.6 Billion dollards (Insert relevant Dr Evil voice). To me, it seems ahell of a lot of money (a friend of mine noted that you could probably buy Africa with that amount of money. It seems almost obscene), and it could quite possibly bankrupt Microsoft, or create a credible alternative to Google. I reckon it will sink Microsoft, and push them into the background as a part of the landscape that won't disappear, but neither do they spark the imagination of the populace in general.
- Rob Caron (VSTS God) has a link to a good article on what you can do in VSTS 2008 that you couldn't do before.
- Funny wway to learn Photoshop.
- Here's one for all of us 80's tragics. shudder And I still think that the music was cool (miond you, there is a lot of awesome music out now, and it sounds vaguely 80's ish)