There's a couple of problems here.

The first is that Microsoft still assumes that the world wants to do nothing better with their devices that make Word docs and spreadsheets and PPT presentations, and "consume media" (I hate that expression). Meanwhile, the world has found lots of other fun things to do with their devices, and tablets and smartphones are great at doing a lot of them. And those same devices are not that great for doing a lot of serious number crunching, presentation making, and so on. (It's not impossible, but I think power users of ipads etc. would tell you it's not a better experience).

The second problem is that there are other suites out there that work pretty damn well, even off line. I'm a huge fan of softmaker office on both the desktop and on Android. I use it on my Google Nexus 7 to take notes in meetings, then transfer to my desktop for finishing up and distributing, etc. It works perfectly well with no wifi connection available, and is a pretty damned powerful bit of software that's getting good reviews.

The third problem, as mentioned above, is the fact that publishing a sub-standard product for the competing product might work when you've got the market lead and people are already interested in your platform. But when you're playing catch up, it's a loser's strategy. Who wants to buy a crappy version of Office365 only to find out it works better on a platform few others use, with hardware you don't like and don't want to buy, etc.?

This losing strategy is sponsored by Steve "Anchor" Ballmer, sinking Microsoft since the day he took the helm. Watch out for those rocks ahead, captain!

Gimme a break. All we learn from the transcript (I don't watch videos anyway, but definitely avoid them when all my bandwidth goes to sucking down an obligatory advertisement) is that Timothy isn't a great interviewer. Surprised? He's a geek, not a journalist. I think, despite all the hoo-haa about how blogging is going to destroy conventional journalism, etc. the fact is that quality journalists are trained in how to ask good questions and shape an interview, and there's value in that. Here's what you get when you don't have quality, trained journalists doing an interview: it's weak, poorly worded, not that fun to read. This bodes poorly for that company that decided to do away with its photographer team and give journalists an iphone to capture a couple of pics. It's the same mentality that is making good quality journalism harder and harder to find, but more worthwhile when you find it. I pay for a subscription to the NYT and don't regret it, and the BBC is still high quality. But anybody who thinks you can give a geek a laptop and an iphone and get the same results is seriously deluded.

Was wondering what the hell those dogs eat. They're always loafing around the house, stinking up the place with their nasty farts.

Oh. Now I get it.

I'm seeing a lot of snarky "well, I never heard of them so ..." posts here. The fact is, the H was a source of some pretty great journalism. They're German and they had a lot of German content too. I discovered them through some insightful articles about SUSE Linux, which was (obviously) closely linked to Germany at one point.

This week I've seen several niche news providers I like shut down, always because they find it's too hard to make money off it. I can relate - I've got a site that struggles too.

I wonder if we're not headed to a generation of uninformed people and shitty, community-run group-think blogs straddled by a couple of old-school, pandering-to-the-masses traditional media.

What happened to the Internet? Oh yeah, everyone decided they should be able to have things - especially information - for free.

So, if unicode characters are now a legitimate part of website names, I'd like to register a new domain:

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm

Imagine all the fun I could have with it: microsoft.pile-of-poo, oracle.pile-of-poo, mostgovernmentrepresentatives.pile-of-poo and so on. It would make blogging so much more satisfying. Who wants to be a dot-com anymore? So 90s. Be poop instead!

I love reorganizations. They're often the kind of fundamental shake-up that make sleepy bureaucracies wake up, and shock companies into better performance. Ballmer's definitely right that Microsoft needs big changes.

That said, Ballmer's f*cked up basically everything he's touched in the past 10 years I've been paying attention. So I will pour myself a cold beer and enjoy watching him fubar this too. Knowing Ballmer, the new "one company, one strategy" mantra will coalesce around the WRONG strategy, and he'll drive Microsoft off the cliff (while BillG, still alive and watching, quivers in anguish from the wings).

Gentlemen, start your flamethrowers: it's about to smell like flamed-out monkey-man!

I installed it in a Virtual Machine, since my modern hardware would be unrecognizable to a distro from 2001. But it's freaking FAST. Imagine all those fat libraries that used to be thin, from the era when your distro came on a set of CDs instead of online repositories, and you accessed the 'net over a telephone line.

To be clear, I like the modern apps better - things like clementine and kontact and I guess even evolution. But as a desktop, Gnome1 was tweakable and useable and interesting and geeky (and gasp .. unrefined) in ways that I find useful. And sawfish as a window manager was really interesting and hugely configurable. Gnome2 may have been more refined but it was also less tweakable. And to this geek anyway, the reason I run Linux is so I can tweak to my liking. Any distro (ahem Gnome3) that reduces my options in order to guide me to some developer's personal vision of computing nirvana makes me say "no frikkin' way." If I wanted untweakability, I'd use OSX.

Just for fun last week I reinstalled one of the first distros that really got me cooking on Linux: SUSE 8.0, running KDE3.0 and Gnome 1. And you know what, I think Gnome 1 is the version that worked for me - sawfish windowmanager,hugely tweakable, some cool themes, and so on. Yes, the apps were in an earlier and less-useful state, but as a desktop, it was pretty cool.

I had a fun time going down nostalgia lane with apps like Balsa and Spruce and even the early versions of Nautilus file manager (long before they went nuts on the "spatial" metaphor etc.) and even early version of the Pan newsreader.

Maybe it's nostalgia, but that was a pretty good desktop. Gnome 2 never really floated my boat. And Gnome 3 can wither and die, as far as I'm concerned. It makes me so unproductive it drives me to turn off the computer and go read a book or something.

Dude, why so surprised? You read it here first:
http://dictatorshandbook.net/book/node237.html

From the dictator's handbook, chapter nine:
You own the hardware. Internet access passes through the infrastructure of your state-owned telecommunications systems, or at least the infrastructure of private telecoms that depend on your goodwill for their existence and continued operations. As such, you have a high degree of control over what information enters and exits your national territory. The Chinese have proven you can safely filter out âoeharmfulâ information from the outside without stifling economic activity.[180]

You control the purse-strings. The Internet is run by corporations, and corporations are most influenced by economic, not political considerations. Google was forced out of China by economics, not human rights concerns; both Twitter and Facebook have refused to join the Global Network Initiative (an organization focused on the right to expression and privacy). Research in Motion (RIM) offered access to its otherwise encrypted and protected messaging servers as soon as Bahrain asked for them, prompting other nations to do the same.9.1

No better resource than the Internet has ever existed with which an individualâ(TM)s life and movements can be tracked via their cyber footprints by any curious autocrat. Imperial Russiaâ(TM)s Okhrana, the East German Stasi, and the Soviet KGB: each was feared for its ability to track and monitor its prey. But they would be astonished with how much easier technology has made their work.

Ha ha, I recognize this comment was intended as a lighthearted joke. But the fact is E17 currently offers fantastic usability, and customization. It starts with sane defaults and a very usable and efficient desktop with good workflow. But if you want to get under the hood and start tinkering, the options are there for you. Even stuff like "full screen everything" is possible (and easy to configure) without it being forced down your throat like a sh*t sandwich, like gnome3.

I've been using it on BodhiLinux for over a year now, and I love it. Especially on my netbook, it makes great use of screen real estate.

So, back to bashing Gnome 3!

These last couple of years are taking the shape of a creepy social experiment in which calloused developers working for billionaire corporations, see just how far they can go. "New app lets you share with all your friends and social-network-acquaintances the consistency of your last poop." Wow! Now with new icons and a fantastic new color scheme! Available for iphone, android, Blackberry, but not Winphone (sorry, folks)!

Then watch everyone rush out and coo over the new app, forgetting the fact they're now publicizing something even more personal than the last time.

How far will they go? I dunno - how far will we let them? Me, I'm going anti-social, and fast. This new social network trend is a recipe for disaster, and I plan on laughing about it from the safety of my underground weapons cache and tinfoil hat collection.

I still dabble with BSD on the desktop but usually revert to openSUSE or Bodhi Linux. But on my servers I reach for FreeBSD first, every time. After learning Linux, I found it wasn't hard to grasp the nuances of the system, and there was lots more to like: I find it gives preference to security over desktop conveniences as a default, ships a well-locked down system out of the box you can then add the minimum to as you need (rather than having to strip down a Linux install). I love its documentation, and despite all the hoo-hah about the user community, I have had great experiences with the BSD crowd: they're friendly and knowledgable and supportive. I've got a personal server running FreeBSD 9 and serving up postgresql and mysql databases, usenet newsgroups, email, and four different websites. It's chugging along beautifully with lots of RAM to spare, and it was super-easy to write a few scripts to do things I do regularly. Yes, you can do all this on Linux too (and I do prefer Linux for the desktop) but on FreeBSD you're forced to be methodical and explicit and really think about which services you are going to offer, what resources you're going to make available, and how it all fits together. It's been a great OS for me and I wish it another 20 years of life.

It seems like I read a version of this article about once a month. Seems like Wordpress is always not-too-far-away from some amazing catastrophe that will cause Western civilization to collapse.

I have been looking around for a new blog platform in order to redo my personal website, which is an aging Joomla 1.x system (and actually works fine, thank you very much, I just wish the URLs weren't so awkward). As far as I can tell, the entire rest of the world abandoned everything other than Wordpress, but actually I'd prefer something that didn't seem to be semi-permanently at risk of critical vulnerabilities due to crap plug-ins or whatever.

Right now, I'm looking favorably at serendipity, which seems simple and relatively safe. Joomla 2 isn't better in ways that interest me and worse in ways that do. I want no part of Drupal, and a lot of other stuff out there just isn't right for me. So, still looking actively at everything other than the blogging platform that is apparently in continous state of near catastophe.

Let's see:

replicated posts, no central point of failure, high degree of anonymity, no obvious mechanism for relating a single email address to a name or address, free software: sounds to me like Usenet.

I know it's fashionable to jump on the "Usenet is dead, long live social networking" bandwagon but the fact is Usenet technology was developed by people who felt strongly about these things and built a system that would allow free expression and no single point of attack for those who would try to silence the conversation. Over 30 years later, it's still around (although slightly battered, thanks to spammers and douchebags).

When I built the forums for conversation at http://www.dictatorshandbook.net/ I chose Usenet because if you're going to discuss dictatorships and autocracy, Usenet technology gives you more (although not total) anonymity relative to, for example, a discussion group on Facebook. You can even access the dictator.* hierarchy on whatever NSP you want, or use an anonymiser or get there via Tor. It's all the same.

Point is: Usenet has been doing this for ages. The fact that a bunch of young nerds are finally waking up to the inherent weakness in social networking is really funny to us neckbeards who started out on something that provides everything you guys seem to be looking for.

Agreed, but they're both parts of a joint strategy. Google is helping make the stuff unfindable ... which makes it go more underground, raising its value, which gives a much bigger incentive to the dirtbags that do this stuff. So ... oops ... this is the digital equivalent of the Prohibition laws of the 1930s.

Imagine if this leads someone to build a custom search engine that specifically goes out to find child porn, because the Google search engine is functionally crippled. Oops.

I started this post thinking it would help and by the time I got done typing I'm now convinced it will actually make things worse.

Besides, imagine the person that has to look at CP all day trying to figure out how to fine tune the algorothim? I remember reading an interview with a cop who had to look at the stuff all day to help with investigations. He found the stuff so disturbing it really messed him up and he had to get transferred to a different unit.