Micro$oft

So I was checking out CNN today and I found this article titled Mac share grew after Windows 7 debut.

In the article, you’ll see some gems such as this:

If Microsoft (MSFT) was hoping that the launch of Windows 7 would halt the erosion of its operating system market share — and curb further inroads by Apple (AAPL) — there is no evidence that it’s working yet.

In fact, preliminary data released overnight Sunday by Net Applications show Mac OS X’s Internet share growing by 2.73% in October, from 5.12% to 5.26%.

As you’ve read before, I’ve had a variety of battles with the Hosted Messaging and Collaboration framework from Microsoft.

Today was another day for battle. And an interesting battle it was.

So here is the situation that I was running into. Within my code in the customer portal, I have a notification that is sent out that has a full back trace of what happened on the system, what was inputted and what was the error message that was returned. I of coarse try to give the user a friendly version of the error message to the screen before sending off this plethora of valuable detail. Out of this pile of data, I find the following error message has been returned:

Ready for some numbers this morning? Some scary, scary numbers for Xbox 360 gamers? Game Informer, current king of the smoldering ruins of the print gaming magazine empire, polled about 5,000 of its readers to get a feel for their gaming experiences, including just how many of them had unlocked the fabled “Red Ring of Death” achievement. We’d heard estimates ranging from 16 to 30 percent, but even the most pessimistic guesses don’t line up with the survey’s findings of a staggeringly high 54.2 percent failure rate. That’s five times higher than the PS3’s 10.6 percent, with the Wii coming in at 6.8 percent. Mind you, the Xbox 360 was the most played console, with over 40 percent of Xbox gamers button mashing for three to five hours a day, compared to 37 percent of PS3 gamers, and less than an hour’s worth of gaming per day for 41.4 percent of Wii owners. However, game consoles should be designed to shrug off marathon sessions and just keep on spewing polygons, something that the first revisions of Microsoft’s baby obviously couldn’t manage.

I’m not sure how many people have picked up on an announcement that Google made last week, but it definitely caught the attention of my dev team. (For those that may be new to this blog, I work for a company that offers Hosted Exchange and Hosted OCS services.)

Here’s the announcement.

Google has developed a way to help companies move onto Google Apps–and away from Microsoft’s Exchange e-mail software–without forcing a migration to the Gmail user interface.

Microsoft’s Outlook has been the dominant e-mail client within the business world for years, and Google’s new Apps Sync for Outlook plug-in acknowledges that some business workers just aren’t ready to give up that familiar interface, even if their CIOs are anxious to get everybody onto Google’s version of the cloud. Businesses who have already signed up for Google Apps Premier Edition–as well as Education Edition customers–will be able to roll out this plug-in across their networks and allow Outlook messages, contacts, and calendar appointments to sync with Google Apps.

Google is trying to expand its presence inside the world’s corporate IT departments with products like Google Apps, which the company says offers a cheaper and more reliable alternative to traditional IT software companies. Quoting data from Forrester, Google’s David Girouard, president of Enterprise products, said companies who chose to use Google’s hosted Gmail service save about $17 per user per month as compared to companies that build and host their own e-mail servers.

Over the past couple of years, I have been able to tolerate Microsoft a bit more than I used to. When your primary income relies on people purchasing Exchange and OCS accounts that you provide the back end provisioning and automation for, you quickly realize where your bread is buttered.

But this sort of crap really needs to stop. Yes, its their operating system. But that doesn’t excuse installing add-ons to 3rd party applications and disabling the uninstall options. I’m with the writer of this article, this is a great way to get your customers to not trust you and precisely the reason I haven’t had windows on my desktop for 8 years.