This way to the stars

This is a serious blog

Gone are the days when a blog is just my online diary. Gone are the days when this blog is merely a dumpsite of all my jumbled emotions, experiences, failed goals, whatever.

I am declaring this blog a serious blog. I mean it.

It's about time I do something meaningful with this worthless excuse for a webpage. It's about time I attempt to establish some sort of commentary of recent issues that take the world by storm. It's about time to kill the perceptions of people that a blog is an excuse to freely commit wrong grammatical errors and not have a teacher subtracting points every time you do. It's about time I take this blog to the next level, somewhere beyond the mediocre levels of dot-dot-dot and one-whole-yet-discontinuous-sentence-per-post blogs.

Why am I doing this? I got inspired, man (no, I don't have a new crush, haha). During my (relatively) long hiatus from blogging, I encountered really great blogs such as The Sassy Lawyer's Journal (which is one of the greatest and most-visited Pinoy blogs), Mini-Microsoft's blog, and Molly.com whose posts really say something other than the ordinary humdrum of "Today I did [fill in the blanks]."

For starters, let me get started on a much talked-about (and blogged-about) feature from BusinessWeek about the migration of Microsoft employees to Google.

Indeed, there are areas of excitement within Microsoft. One is MSN, the Internet operation, where the search group is the underdog competing against Google. Another is the Xbox group, which is racing full speed against Sony Corp.'s (SNE ) leading PlayStation 2 to win over the next generation of video gamers. It's launching Xbox 360 this Christmas, months ahead of PlayStation 3. "If you take a look at where we're going with innovation, what we have in the pipeline, I'm very excited. The output of our innovation is great," says Ballmer. "We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web."

Here's a blog about that from Molly.com:

The Web is not a prize to be won, and Mr. Ballmer’s attitude is deplorable in the light of what the Web means to the world, to users, to designers and developers and to put it into Microsoft parlance, customers.

The Web belongs to everyone. The Web’s core vision and value is to be platform independent. Microsoft has no right to think it can win a tool that is for the people, of the people, and ultimately - by the people.

No Mr. Ballmer, you will never win the Web for one very good reason: We the people will make sure you never do.

Although Molly (whoever she is) has an admirable People-Power-ish attitude, I can't help thinking that Microsoft actually did somewhow "win" the web, and the people actually allowed it. Case in point: the vast majority of web users around the globe continue to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser even though it sucks (see one of my previous posts). People do have the option to use Firefox/Opera/Safari, but they still use IE, and what's more, they even tailor their websites to be "best viewed in Internet Explorer". Admittedly, monopolizing the browser used to view the web is a far cry from "owning" the web itself. But still, given Microsoft's history of bashing out the competition and hogging all the customers with its cheesy virtually-the-same-after-ten-years software (think the Windows OS and the MS Office apps), would the day come when it will actually "buy" and "own" the Web (gulp!).

But then, maybe Ballmer's "deplorable" statement is actually just a pep talk to his not-so-happy shareholders. Haha.

But how dare he say that "the output of our innovation is great"? What innovation? Microsoft nowadays is considered as a big, lumbering, slow fuddy-duddy company that follows on the heels of other smaller yet more creative companies.

One reason some employees say Microsoft isn't innovating enough: It's too busy upgrading Windows. With some of its key breakthrough features gone, Vista's improvements include better handling of peripheral devices, such as printers and scanners, and cutting in half the time it takes to start up. Those are needed improvements, and there's no doubt that hundreds of millions of copies will be sold as people upgrade to new PCs. But the changes are hardly the stuff of cutting-edge software engineering. "So much of what Microsoft is doing right now is maintenance," says Mike Smith, a former software architect at Microsoft who left the company in 2003 to work for a Bay Area startup.

And that leads to an even more worrisome problem: discontent among its software programmers. Instead of coming up with the next great technology, Microsoft programmers have to cater to its monopolies. But top-flight engineers want to tackle the next great challenge. "They want to create new worlds, not defend old ones," says a former senior executive at Microsoft. "They want to storm the Bastille, not live in Versailles."

I can't blame Microsoft employees for wanting to shift to Google/Yahoo. Finally we have the answer to why the Start button on the Windows taskbar has never disappeared since Windows '95. Finally we have the answer to why each update of Windows seemingly brings only software facelifts and nothing more.

posted by steph @ 10:12 PM