Tag: microsoft

Categories
personal

Melinda Gates goes public (reflection)

Last issue of Fortune magazine features Melinda Gates (yes, wife of most richest American businessman) on its cover. The article is very interesting reading, as it uncovers not only how she became his wife, but also how and why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has emerged. It is a very interesting reading available here and it made me ponder on a lot of things.

For example – how such decisions are made. It isn’t easy for a person who still remembers what’s it like to live from paycheck to paycheck to understand how people can throw billions of dollars away. Or on some process, the results of which they may never see. Generally speaking, it allows you to see (just a little, though) how rich people feel towards their richness. And that is indeed a good reading.

Categories
microsoft

Life gets a little better…

As it turns out, with the MSDN subscription one of our clients has, we get Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition. They aren’t going to use it on a current project (unfortunaltely), but we get to play with it and see what’s new. Of course, the main beauties are LINQ and .NET 3.5

Categories
windows

Windows Live Installer is going to the computer near you.

TechCrunch is reporting on the evil empire Microsoft releasing Windows Live Installer Suite with whole bunch of goodies (full list available here). Citing NYTimes, that called the release a “Netscape-Level event” TechCrunch boldly disagrees saying that MS isn’t offering anything compelling to users.

So was the case with Netscape. Internet Explorer was much worse by the time it was released. In my opinion, IE now is still suffering from certain “child diseases” comparing to Firefox or Opera. Nevertheless, it’s market share is over 75% roughly. The reason behind it – it comes preinstalled with any Windows system, available immediately (while Firefox/Opera/Netscape requires additional knowledge and download) AND appeared (not anymore, though) as an picture captioned “Internet”. For some people (and I heard this myself), blue icon with word “Internet” and AOL browser were two totally different worlds. “And then my son came and put that Firefox internet on my computer, so which internet do you want me to go?”.

With both XP service pack 3 and Vista service pack 1 coming later on, I can’t help but think that one way or another Live Installer will land on everyone’s computer via service pack or somehow else. So Windows Live Installer is going to the computer near you – whether you want it or not.