tdaxp

The collapse of HD-DVD (and victory for Bluray disk) in the past week also scrambles the Microsoft XBOX 360 v. Sony PS3 race for second in the console wars. Microsoft has been benefiting from the next-gen video wars because, not only did XBOX 360 support HD-DVD through an add-on while the PS3 had integrated BluRay, XBOX 360 also supported on-demand video downloaded. Thus Microsoft benefit from a win or a draw, while Sony needed a knock-out. (Sony created the Bluray technology, int the same way that company created Betamax.)

Sony got its' knock-out.

Up until now, PS3 sales have been depressed because of the BluRay add-on (who wants to gamble on the next-gen video tech when buying a game machine?), but now its benefits. The XBOX 360's HD-DVD player is now worthless going forward, while the PS3 both will play next-gen movies. You're now longer gambling when you buy a PS3. You're buying a next-gen player that will play filsm that come out a decade or two from now.

Hard to believe this won't increase PS3 sales, which will in turn lead to more game development, which would lead to more sales.

Sony gambled big by including a BluRay player on the PS3. Sony won.

This morning, I have had four browser crashes in Microsoft Windows Vista, in both IE and Firefox.

Choosing Vista instead of XP on this laptop was a mistake.

Comparing the pain that Vista regularly causes with the "it just works" niceness of the OS X machine I use while editing vista is staggering.

What a joke.

Phil Jones doesn't update it enough, but one of my favorite blogs is Platform Wars. Nowadays, two high profile platform wars are being fought in the living room:

• Microsoft XBOX 360 v. Sony PlayStation 3


• HD-DVD v. Sony BluRay

Sony's PlayStation is behind the XBOX, partially because of the high price of inculding a BluRay disc palyer (the XBOX onl plays regular DVDs, though an HD-DVD add-in is available). However, the same thing that turns the PlayStation into an expensive game machine also means that, for those that buy it, it's also a free BluRay machine: This has allowed Blu-Ray purchases double HD-DVD disc buys.

As The Economist says:

Why, then, have Blu-ray discs lately been outselling HD DVD versions by two to one? Because Sony cannily included a Blu-ray player in its latest video-game console, PlayStation 3. And while PS3 has not met expectations of selling 6m consoles in America, some 1.4m have nevertheless been snapped up since their launch last November. Market researchers reckon that most—90% by some reckoning—of Blu-ray discs are played on PS3 consoles.

If Sony's big gamble pays off, including a BluRay player into the PlayStation will allow them to win the war against HD-DVD, and then (as all PlayStations will double as Blu-Ray players) allow them to seamlessly publish games in Blu-Ray format while Microsoft scrambles to think of something new. If it doesn't work, however, Sony will be left with a uselessly expensive console on top of a re-run of the beta-max fiasco.

Interesting times!

Over the past few days, I had the great pleasure to savor a 1989 speech by Bill Gates to the Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo. My previous exposure to Bill Gates' thought had been rather disappointing -- Business @ The Speed of Thought has to be one of the emptiest collections of cliches ever written -- so I tuned in mainly for the nostalgia.

Little did I know that I was in for 93 minutes of brilliance.

Bill Gates speech in 1989 reveals two things: he is an expert at technology and an expert at strategy, both theoretical and applied. Except for the parts of his speech which deals with the specific environment of the late 1980s, most of Gates' technological statements are timeless. Listening him to talk about his vision for programming I kept having to tell myself that .Net wouldn't be released for another 14 years. Likewise, listening him to how he structures teams at Microsoft, and how he forms goals and sets release schedules, I kept being reminded of Chet Richards' Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business.

The grand view of Gates' ability is emphasized through his repitition of a near-disasterous decision. At the time, Microsoft and IBM were collaborating on a new operating system called (with typical IBM finesse) OS/2 (short of Operating System / 2). The relationship would collapse the very next year. IBM and Microsoft have very different operating philosophies, and Microsoft assisting in building and promoting IBM's "successor" to Windows was in retrospect unimaginably dangerous. It was as if Queen Elizabeth I had supplied timber and workers to build the Spanish Armada.

Of course, like in that war, it didn't matter.

IBM's islamic, top-down, one-true-way philosophy was outclassed by Microsoft's theory of embrace and extend. Just as the British defeated the Armada, not because of luck but because of the Spanish inability to change in respond to changing events, Microsoft defeated IBM because of International Business Machine's inability to change in respond to changing event. On paper IBM had the advantages

• Man power


• Hordes of cash


• Business Contacts


• Experience (IBM had previously been outmaneuvred by Microsoft in the release of DOS)

But Microsoft had a unity of purpose, iterative design, and flexibility. IBM had none of these.

Within half a decade, the war was essentially over. IBM released the last commercial version of OS/2 in 1996. The overwhelming power & success of Microsoft Windows, by contrast, needs no elaboration.

My final post in Jesusism-Paulism -- "Embrace and Extend"" -- is getting good press throughout the blogosphere. Castle Argghhh, Dreaming 5GW, and Spooky Action have already commented on my comparison between Microsoft and early Christianity. Now I will give a specific example of how "love" can be given too strongly and too early - in other words, inappropriately -- if one's OODA loops is too slow.

But love conquers all, and resilient love -- love that, when rebuffed, merely loves stronger -- unexpected love -- is a powerful weapon.

In the words of Ecclesiastes 9:11-12

I have seen something else under the sun:
The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.

Moreover, no man knows when his hour will come:
As fish are caught in a cruel net,
or birds are taken in a snare,
so men are trapped by evil times
that fall unexpectedly upon them.

The message of Christianity, and the means of Microsoft, is this: your enemy expects resistence. A fool fights fair.

Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it and struck the high priest's servant, cutting off his right ear. (The servant's name was Malchus.)

Instead, give your enemy love.

Jesus commanded Peter, "Put your sword away! Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?"

Conquer him.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying Big Blue."

For years IBM's strength rested on vendor-lock in and vendor-compatibility. A company that wished to buy electronic computer equipment had one choice, Big Blue, which offered complete systems that were entirely under the control of IBM. IBM keyboards communicated in IBM EBCDIC to IBM terminals, connected through IBM wires to IBM mainframes, IBM harddrives, IBM tape backups, and IBM power supplies. The complete solution set took the world by storm, offering One Ruleset (Buy IBM) which entailed numerous sub-products. The system worked.

In the same way, the One Ruleset of the Koran swept aside the old Roman world, tearing up the Orthodox and Arian peoples it subjugated, rolling back much of the Christian 4GW revolution. Islam did this almost as an afterthought, as it also spread into formerly Zoroastrian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Animist countries. No one ever got fired for buying Big Blue, and no one ever got beheaded for embracing Islam.



But IBM met Microsoft.



And Islam met Catholocism.

I am generally skeptical of Microsoft's Franco-Soviet development process. Nonetheless, I have been using a number of common Microsoft programs, such as

• Windows XP
• Windows Live Messenger
• Wordpad

because they work better than competitors. Yet when competitors are required for certain jobs -- such as Jedit for editing programs or Google Talk for online message logging -- I use those as well.

With that in mind, I have now modified Firefox to use Microsoft Windows Live Search instead of Google. The moment of truth came when I was searching for my article on Citi MasterCard's reward cuts. Of the top five Windows Live searches, four bring you to my page. Further, the very top result is exactly the one I'm looking for. However, on google there are only four results, and while three will take you there, none are a direct page link.

(I also found through my experiment that spammer sites are now using "tdaxp" as a junk keyword. Before I started this blog, the only pages that contained "tdaxp" were the raw output of some statistical program. So I guess that's a move up in the world, heh).

I've already noticed this with my evolutionary politics notes, with google typically taking you to the category main page while Windows Live Search brings visitors to the actual post.

I began using google back in the google.stanford.edu era. From then to now, I have never had another primary search engine, or recommend that anyone else do so. Now I can say this: I use Windows Live Search. You should, too.



I have installed Stuart Marshall's Windows Live Engine for Mozilla Firefox, and have changed Firefox's default behavior by making Windows Live my default search engine (a now removed copy of Yahoo Messenger sneakily changed this behavior and refused to change it back).

I will still use Google apps as they are useful -- Google Talk, Goolge Scholar, and GMail especially --- but Google Search is no longer the best in the business. Windows Live Search is.

Update: The side search box has been updated to use Windows Live instead of Google. It now looks like thing like:



Additionally, in both Google and Live Search, my friend Mike's blog "Spooky Action is the 2nd result. Let's change that, and make Spooky Action #1!

"Microsoft's eye on open source," by Eileen Yu, CNET News.com, 20 July 2005, http://news.com.com/Microsofts+eye+on+open+source/2008-1082_3-5796496.html?tag=nefd.ac (from Slashdot).

I have been discussing 5th Generation Warfare, a type of struggle very similar to waterfall development. In 5GW, programs / war are planned, analyzed, and designed in secret and then unleashed all ready to go. By contrast, 4th Generation Warfare (4GW) is like prototype development: programs / wars are released in "beta," it takes many years to get it right, everyone knows about it.

The same knowledge that we learned from development software can be used in creating wars. Programs created through waterfall development are brittle -- if a requirement was not known ahead of time, it is extremely difficult to add it later. In software, the most famous example of this is the hapless development of OS / 360, chronicled in The Mythical Man Month.

Because of the 360 debacle, and similar problems with the first version of Microsoft Word for Windows, most companies now use prototyping. Prototyping - or "4th Generation Software Development" -- is extremely flexible. While the program will not be perfect right away, it will get "out the door" fast. Major Open Source (Linux, OpenOffice, &c) and Microsoft (Windows, Office, &c) programs use prototyping because of its flexibility.

Which is why Microsoft's latest "pot calling the kettle white" is so bizarre

 

You can build it, design it, and it will work great. The trouble begins when you want to add things to it, add some services and things like that. Because of the brittle nature of the [open source] platform, when you do that, other things break. We see that in the labs all the time, and our customers see that as well. So that has a (total) cost of ownership impact on it.

 

This would be like an angry 1960s statement by North Korea calling Mao a "capitalist." It makes no sense. And it shows once again by Microsoft has almost no credibility in the software development community.