Microsoft is a dying consumer company? What are people smoking?

The Xbox is massively successful in sales, adoption, and mindshare. Former console champ Sony is playing catch up. My only console is a PS3 but I freely concede that Xbox Live kicks the stuffing out of the lackluster, unintegrated Sony online experience. Microsoft did absolutely everything right with the Xbox and is continuing to do so.

Windows Phone 7? No, it's Windows Phone 1.0. It's a new product with a bad name. (What will the next version be, Windows Phone 7.1?)

Looking at Xbox and WP 7, you see the same page from the classic Microsoft playbook. First, let your competitors spend money defining a market. When you're ready, put together a clone that does most of what the competitors do, and use the Microsoft name to establish a presence in the market. Next, release a 2.0 version in which you throw a drawerful of half-baked new features at the user. Take careful note of which ones get used and garner attention from the press. Finally, release version 3.x in which you solidify the features that people liked in the first two versions, plus streamline the experience and make it slicker.

Windows 1 and 2 were mostly a joke, but Windows 3.x became the enterprise standard despite not being as good as Mac OS. Windows 95 iced the cake.

Windows Mobile originally looked like a practical joke: obscene hardware requirements, desktop UI, bloated. Who would want such a thing over the elegant, trim Palm OS? We know what happened there.

Xbox? Seriously, you're going to take on Sony in the console space? "OMG xbox is hueg!" Yep, it's huge all right ... now.

Now we're looking at Windows Phone 7 and people are saying the same things they've always said when MS is getting ready to (re)establish itself in a market: "Too late, too slow, too derivative, too stodgy, too Microsoft!" The iPhone is the belle of the ball and Android's dance card is full. RIM has the ticket concession and the catering. MS is arriving late, slightly disheveled, and announcing "Me too!"

... but that's always what MS does. They've built a "me too" phone OS with most of the features the other guys have, and a couple they don't. They'll pitch WP7 at enterprise users who want Office apps and guaranteed compatibility with Exchange. They'll pitch it at Xbox owners who want to check their Live epeen while driving. They'll pitch it at anyone and everyone, see who's buying, and then release version 2.0 (7.2?) with features aimed at those people, and then use version 3.0 to polish it all up.

I always get nervous when I see MS entering a market because they have a history of killing the competition, and MS products tend to suck when they don't have competition. I ground my teeth when I installed Win 7 and discovered that, sure enough, Bing was the default (and only) installed search engine. I can only imagine how many people started using it because it was, "meh, good enough." I'm the furthest thing from a Microsoft booster ...

... but I don't count them out just because I don't like them.

... at 75% of its market value.

That's the offer I made people during the Millennium panic back in 1999. I reasoned that if the world were really on the brink of chaos, the wisest policy would be to move somewhere more sustainable than a residential subdivision. When the utilities collapsed, you'd need renewable sources of electricity, clean water, etc., as well as the ability to defend your home and family against looters and thieves. Better to spend all your money before the banks and government collapse and currency loses all value.

Every time I hear about some cult predicting the end of the world, I want to make the same offer. "Hey, you think the world is going to end next year. Shouldn't you spend all your resources bringing sinners to God? What's the matter; don't you have faith?" I couldn't go through with it if anyone said yes, but the temptation is there.

The best way to stave off panic is to throw cold, hard money at it.

See you next Apocalypse.

You'll never get ad-free publications from traditional outlets, at least not for long.

Selling to advertisers first and customers second has been the revenue model in periodical publishing long enough to be a fundamental assumption. They're already charging us to view advertisements; why would we expect them to change their thinking now?

The urge to double-dip is too powerful, especially in media already supported by ads. Even if a newspaper or magazine owner can be convinced to permit a subscription version, sooner or later some marketing droid is going to say to his boss, "Hey, why don't we monetize by putting ads in ... wait for it ... the subscription version!!?" They'll call them 'targeted subscription mediators' or some other corporate gibberish, and sell them to advertisers at a premium.

Saying 'monetize' to a CEO is like saying 'Jesus' to a Christian. There's no way anyone who wears a suit for a living is going to pass up revenue, even if it costs business in the long term.

The linear one-axis window presentation doesn't deal with windows that need to be spatially arranged in other ways. This is problematic for windows of different scale in simultaneous use.

Real example: I recently edited a photograph portrait to fix some glitches around the subject's eyes. I had a 1:1 view of the photo in a window at the top of my screen, and a zoomed-in version of just the eyes in another window at the bottom. This enabled me to make fine edits to the eyes and see what they looked like in the original scale. The zoomed window needed to span the entire width of the screen because ... well, eyes are wider than they are tall. Had the windows been organized side-by-side, I'd have had to scale down the view of the eyes to fit the narrower window. The window manager would thus be dictating the scale at which I can work in a way that a more flexible manager would not.

This would be a problem in 3D apps, too, in which users often need multiple views of the same object simultaneously. If I want to see a model of a head, let's say, from front, back, top, and side views, I need to arrange the windows accordingly. I'd go insane trying to look at them all in tall, side-by-side windows.

And what about apps with tool palettes or timelines? Where do those go? Spacial arrangement is key for these UI elements. Does each window get its own?

The interface as proposed is fine for regular desktop use, but it just doesn't work for windows that need different (x,y) sizing while appearing on the same screen.

Now, if we could have a window mosaic instead of a strip, we'd be getting somewhere.

I took the OP's use of the phrase "relevant opportunities of study" to mean "practical application."

If that's the case, the best thing is to examine what the students are actually studying and find a way to make it concrete.

I can't believe so many people are suggesting electronics projects. The Slashdot bias is showing. Very few of these students will make any use of electronics knowledge. We live in a world of microtechnology, not solder-and-wire. We can't even see some of the machines we use on a daily basis without a microscope. Do you really think it's meaningful to tell a student, "Ok, we're going to illustrate the principles behind your computer and cell phone by making some LEDs light up"?

For all the reverence Slashdotters have for breadboards and soldering irons, basic electronics are completely irrelevant to contemporary students' experience. Maybe ten percent of the class will have any reaction beyond, "Neat, when's lunch?"

Likewise for entertaining displays of chemistry and physics. It's fun to blow up stuff and make solutions change color, but then what? Again, you'll fire up (not literally, I hope) the minority of the class already interested in science, but everyone else will see, "Oooh, shiny."

You'd be better off teaching students to build something mundane. MAKE had a project recently to build a drawer organizer. It's very basic, but it's the kind of thing 90% of students would never consider doing. Need an organizer? Go to Wal-Mart. The project is simple, but it requires skills many students never exercise: planning, measuring distances and angles, evaluating materials, and even making a project aesthetically pleasing.

I loved the idea of tearing down a PC and upgrading it. That's the scale on which students can work without specialized equipment. They'll never build a circuit outside the classroom, but they'll be using PCs into the foreseeable future. It's a plug-and-play process, granted, but how many of them even know that desktop PCs are built from commodity parts, and can be assembled by anyone with a screwdriver and a spare Saturday?

Taking stuff apart to see how it works is the secret origin of every geek. It doesn't matter what you're disassembling, so long as you're disassembling something. Teaching students to break down a project into parts (and then break the parts) is the key to teaching underlying principles.

Free Software programmers and designers tend to emphasize features over workflow. This is understandable given that most of them use some flavor of Unix-alike for their primary OS. They have a command-line mentality. The important thing is that the feature exists; one can always read the man page for the syntax.

This carries over to GUI apps and desktops. Desktop Linux apps are crammed with features, no less than apps for Windows and OSX. The problem is that the designers don't consider what tasks users actually do, and it what order. That's where extensive (and expensive) UI testing pays off for Apple and Microsoft.

Consider Blender. Its UI is much maligned for being a nightmare of contextual button panels, but the UI's density is not the underlying problem. What's wrong is that the designers don't take into account the workflow of actual users. The software's jam-packed with functionality, but much of it is mired in multi-step processes that make the workflow painful. It's almost literally impossible to use the app without tutorials.

Go read the docs and try to figure out how to apply a decal to a model in Blender. It's reasonably straightforward once you know how to do it, but it's weirdly complex. It's a perfect example of the mindset of a designer who's trying to implement a feature--"We can do it with an empty object!"--without considering the task the user wants to perform with it.

You're not going to win over any users by saying, "The function's in there! It's on a par with professional apps that cost thousands of dollars!" If a user runs into teeth-grinding frustration, the app's functionality doesn't matter. It's not what the app can do; it's what the user can do with the app.