

Is Microsoft Suddenly Cool? - Garbage
http://blogs.forbes.com/elizabethwoyke/2010/12/15/is-microsoft-suddenly-cool/

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SwellJoe
No.

This is an idiotic puff piece, I assume triggered by a nice phone call from
someone at Microsoft to someone at Forbes.

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electromagnetic
Agreed, Microsoft will be 'cool' when it loses 90% of its users, actually
becomes a leader in developing new innovative products and gains a resurgence
through that.

Cool generally requires standing apart from the norm. When you're the biggest
company in your market by a huge margin, you're the norm.

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nailer
And those markets (desktop OSs and desktop Office software) aren't growth
areas anymore.

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electromagnetic
They aren't huge growth areas in the anglosphere anymore, Ed: although
smartphones and tablets may change this, they're still growing in the west
somewhat, but are exploding colossally in the developing areas of the world
like India and China.

These places still have huge piracy 'problems', but these will likely be
resolved in the coming decade as these countries develop stronger intellectual
property enforcement and will force all corporations to purchase legitimate
licenses.

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nailer
> They aren't huge growth areas in the anglosphere anymore, Ed: although
> smartphones and tablets may change this,

These don't run desktop OSs.

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electromagnetic
Yet. Given that smartphones and tablets are now being produced with more
powerful CPU's than netbooks, it's really only a matter of time.

~~~
nailer
If the desktop kernels still remain (which they may not due to realtime needs)
the userspaces still need to change for touch UI. So if it happens, I don't
expect the current desktop champions to suddenly get good at mobile.

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verysimple
It depends of your definition of cool.

Microsoft still host some very cool projects and I think many programmers
would be very happy to work on stuff such as Kinect, Bing and Seadragon to
only name those.

However, if you're talking about general perception toward the company, then
the answer is a big fat NO. I think too many people have been burnt with their
tactics over the years and those stigmas take time to heal.

For all things that microsoft has contributed to the advancement of computing
and its vulgarization, they are also responsible for stalling in many areas
where they couldn't catchup fast enough, using their influence in oft-
questionable ways. Lots of bad karma there and very uncool.

They managed to mess up the single most important application, the browser,
and did nothing to fix it for years, just because they could. Web developers
are only now coming out of this nightmare.

Today, I'm very reluctant to even use something like Bing, that admittedly
works quite well, just because the thought of what microsoft could pull, once
it gets back into a position of power in the search market, makes me shudder.

I know most people have a notorious short memory span when it comes to such
things, but count on people like me, with the ability to hold a grudge, to
remind them what hell felt like.

Microsoft isn't cool and it won't be for a while.

