SteveJ-restore-test

This cartoon lampoons Windows 7.0 Beta. Eerie. It underlines for me that Microsoft is crap at writing Operating Systems code. O/S's need to be correct, secure, robust (resilient to errors internal & hardware) first and foremost. Only after that look to features and 'performance'. How come the Great Unwashed, the home & business users and the media seem blinded in the same way the fanboi's are? Wikipedia's "Time Line of Operating Systems" underscores this point - compare Microsoft's offerings since 1999: Win-2000, Win-XP, Longhorn: abandoned, Vista and 'soon', Win-7. Compare to Annual or Biennial shipping of new releases OS/X, AIX, Solaris, HP/UX, Ubuntu, Red-Hat & Fedora, SuSE, ... Microsoft is the exception, not the rule. Everyone else in their class does better. Apologists for MSFT may add Win-98 SE, Win-ME, Win-server 2003/8, Media Centre, Home Server, Small Business Server and even Win-CE - plus the many 'Service Packs...

The National Broadband Network, NBN, is a chance to correct regulatory deficiencies, address broadband network design problems & high costs and ameliorate past strategic mis-steps. Gas network providers not leveraging their investment in 'holes in the ground' and high consumer connectivity was a huge strategic blunder. Allowing the 80% duplication of cable TV network was a massive failure of Government oversight. It would've been obvious within 2-3 months and should've resulted in quick, decisive action. As was not forcing 'roaming' between mobile service providers. The NBN design reflects that Telco Engineers don't do Data Networks well ... Exactly the same way you don't build a water, electricity or gas network as if its a phone network (hub-and-spoke). The technology choices & network design seem wrong-headed to me . They are not using off-the-shelf commodity hardware, but very expensive 'Carrier grade' offerings with limited scope...

Connecting Australia with broadband/fibre systems is closer to implementing Cable TV than a new Phone network. The $43B estimate is 3-5 times too high based on Cable TV rollouts. That difference completely changes the economics of the project. The $43B NBN estimate is for 90% houses connected, or ~$5,500 per house passed. Stewart Fist estimated in an article, 'Pipe Dreams' , in 1996, that it would cost $10Bn to roll-out cable TV to 66% of houses. That's not the 90% of the NBN, but indicates a factor of three difference in price. Queensland Government in Project Vista ($550M) was looking at around $3,000/house, as was ConnectSEQ ($300M for '3 million people' - for perhaps 1M houses) The Victorian Governments "Project Aurora" was estimating $1500/lot in a new subdivision, confirming the QLD ~$3000/house. The Bis Shrapnel report to the ACCC in 2001 on "Telecommunications Infrastructure in Australia" cites: TransActs' costs for fibre (phone ...

Being too successful leads to failure unless you are aware of the problem and carefully monitor and protect against it. Every large company faces this problem - in I.T. for example, Google and Microsoft. The rule applies at all levels - individuals, projects/teams, companies and countries. Even potentially our species and the whole living planet. I was reminded again of this yesterday by Victor Cook in "The New Battle for Your Desktop" where he analyses the financials of Google and Microsoft (GOOG & MSFT). He describes a problem with Microsoft: The company actually captured 77.5% of combined revenues in the quarter ended June 30, 2007. Sometimes it's great to be the market leader. But in this case it's not. Microsoft shelled out $539 million for that 77th share point. And it was worth only $172 million after total costs. Not a good thing. To maximize earnings (by optimizing total costs) the company should have captured only 60.3% of the market. That's the ...

More on the theme of "Microsoft will experience a Financial Pothole" from a Financial perspective. For less rigorous commentaries, there's Motley Fools piece "The Two Words Bill Gates Doesn't Want You to Hear" (A: Cloud Computing) [Article requires signing-up, but can be found from Your Favourite Search Engine] A commentary on that piece from Carbonite , a 'Cloud' vendor. Victor Cook at Customers and Capital has a series of pieces on Microsoft and its fundamentals. His series on 'Brands' compares GOOG & MSFT at times. The first post in the 'Blue Ocean Strategy' series , the second , third and fourth posts. His analyses of a number of issues are informed and enlightening - MSFT vs GOOG, the YHOO & Double-Click acquisitions... Cook points at a March-19 2009 piece at 'The Wild Investor' called "The State of Microsoft" that starts: Well we are not in the 1990’s anymore, and unless you plan to hold the st...

Update 1 : 26-May-2009 A very kind person @ ABC took the time to read this piece and to give me some valuable comments: We are paid to make editorial decisions ... This is our job. news is about immediate events and happenings and it is short, brief and factual. 'News' is just one kind of ABC broadcast. Don't confuse it with our entire output. As to your specific proposals... - SPAM is a "dropdead" problem (my words) - automatically generated responses are a waste of time... listener input should be read and acknowledged by a real person, - but the problem is that we are all under time pressure. So where to from here? Appears to be end-of-the-road for this approach. How does "The Internet Changes Everything" apply to News and Journalism at the ABC - Australia's national broadcaster? Contents: Background , How the Internet Changes Everything and Proposal What are the sources of Good Stories? Do Journalists have a monopoly on sources and Perfect Jud...

Alan Kay invented Object Oriented Programming around 40 years ago with Smalltalk. Kay not only has a lot to say, his accomplishments lend him credibility. In 2003 he said: "our field is a field that's the next great 500-year idea after the printing press" The ACM awarded him its highest honour, The Turing Award , in 2003. The short Citation: For pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing. Video of his 60min talk on the ACM site , and elsewhere, a transcript . The slides & demo used are not available. This 1982 talk for "Creative Think" brought this reporter reaction (the link is worth reading for the list of line-liners alone): Alan's speech was revelatory and was perhaps the most inspiring talk that I ever attended. This is my current favourite quote of Alan Kay's from Wikiquote: "Point of view...