Episode 2: MS

Am late for my blog update .... thanks to the no-day-no-night Assignment 1 working schedule our group have came up with. Been working my head off for the past few days and nights, with only a few hours of sleep sandwiched in between.

On Microsoft
A decade ago, Microsoft was like THE Company to take on the world. Today, much of its reputation has been swallowed up Apple, with another considerable fraction getting taken up by Linux.

In the recent years, Microsoft has been getting quite a bit of bad press all over the place, with issues such as security breaches and bug fixes. Tons of people out there literally despises Microsoft as a company.

What's wrong here ... i really wonder all the time. Is it real that Microsoft products are simply inferior to its competitors, or is the source of all these hoohahs limited to the marketing arena? I'm not a staunch fann of Microsoft, I do use Linux and carries around an Ipod Touch, but I'm just a little puzzled about the validity of claims such as "MicroSoft sucks".

Microsoft may have poor marketing skills, especially with this guy around:




Also, the first version of Vista is known to not be too popular ... with issues of premature release and all. However, are these negative aspects truely sufficient for us to overthrow the benefits Microsoft has come up with over the years? A surgeon may have his good name removed for prescribing a wrong drug by accident, but that doesn't mean that his skills are inferior to the rest.

I'm not sure if my doubt is founded, but I am pretty satisfied with my Microsoft products so far. True that there are small crashes here and there, but I choose not to condemn the entire company/product package for that.

We can only see how Windows 7 go.


XNA X-Box Live
The gaming industry is notoriously hard to enter, especially for people who graduated from a not-so-prestige University such as MIT. Its great that Microsoft has provided a platform for gamers to share their content freely. I'm not too sure of the profitability aspect, but what I do know is that it encourages innovation. As long as your product isn't too uncool, the system links you up with audiences and critics who'll be playing with your work.

How cool is that?

WPF
I believe that more can be elaborated on WPF, on top of what Apurval has talked about the other day. Interactivity aside, WPF allows designers and programmers to work concurrently on a same project. In simple terms, designers can work on thier own design files, and programmers have their own set of logic implementations. At the end of the day, WPF allows both parties to seamlessly combine the 2 components. If one party should update the software later without informing the other party, there won't be any fears of breaking the overall software.

This is a step that Microsoft has taken to emulate Apple to some extent, I believe. The same goes for their Deep Zoom feature. All along, I believe that Apple products has emphasized on style over substance. I'm not such if the logic and feature implementations are better than Microsoft's, but their product presentations are definitely world-class. That factor alone, has won over many avid fans and consumers to worship Apple products.

There has been alot of debates online on whether Silverlight is better than Flash. Both have their pros and cons I believe, (Flash's major con is that the programming can get super messy) but the major issue that will hamper Silverlight's entrance is that the market is already dominated by Flash packages. I once come across a file format who's trying to take over the PDF market ... I didn't really believe in it. Can the same be said for SilverLight? Then again, there have been multiple examples that the first movers in an industry may not be the permanent winners. We can only wait and see.