Is Vista the end for Microsoft?
Is Microsoft sinking into terminal decline? That question has been increasingly asked over the last year, as the giant haemorrhages to Apple in its PC heartland, while failing to make the expected impact in the mobile arena. Only in the nascent field of IPTV has Microsoft been buzzing with its Mediaroom software.The underlying problem is simply a continuing failure to deliver bullet proof software. This has been most evident with the disastrous Vista operating system, shunned by the business community, and leading to a boom in downgrade packs, as consumer users replace it with its less flaky predecessor XP. The tragedy for Microsoft is that XP was on the right track, with better recovery features, also reducing inflation in memory and CPU consumption. That has been reversed in Vista, which can barely manage with 1 Gig of memory, leaving users the choice between either downgrading to XP, or buying more memory – admittedly an inexpensive commodity these days. But the main problem is abominable performance, with constant thrashing of the hard drive, and house keeping or troubleshooting taking twice as long as with XP. No doubt matters will improve with new versions, but it will be hard to turn the tide against a rampant Apple whose resurgence was funded originally by iPod revenues. Macs now account for one in three laptop sales in the US despite costing more than double the admittedly shoddily built low-end Vista machines from the likes of HP, Toshiba and Dell.
But Microsoft’s problems do not stop with Vista. There is also a simmering backlash against Exchange among business users, driven in part by mobilisation of applications and distribution across portable devices, leading to rising expectations. Users are demanding dial tone performance, which means being constantly available with almost instantaneous switch-on, which Exchange is not close to delivering. Patience is running out with flaky software that constantly falls over and takes ages to reboot. Others, such as unified communications software vendor Communigate, are stepping into the breach with rigorously tested telephony grade products for messaging, calendar and email synchronisation that work with dial tone speed and reliability, even if they do not attempt to tick every single functional box.
For similar reasons Microsoft is failing to make much headway in the mobile arena. Windows Mobile has been shunned by leading operators such as Vodafone on account of erratic performance deemed unacceptable for a mobile device.
The question is whether Microsoft can turn all this around. It has the resources to do so, but needs a change in philosophy away from bloated “one size fits all” software towards lighter products with a greater focus on performance, resource economy and robustness. Those are the products that will succeed in the emerging ecosystem of more diverse lightweight, fragmented, and portable computing devices.
End
Blog
I must say at the outset that I am not a great fan of blogging. I am reminded of Samuel Johnson’s view that anyone who writes except for money is a fool, and not much I read in other people’s blogs refutes this. Nearly all the good writing I encounter has earned money in some way for its creator. There are it is true some good blogs out there, but finding them is about as hard as it would be to locate great poetry by digging amongst all the doggerel that has ever been written.I will therefore blog sparingly. This is no guarantee of quality, but hopefully I will avoid verbal incontinence and at least keep my outpourings terse and to the point.
My first blog expresses my despair at the course of the global warming debate, which has arrived at a so called consensus. The theoretical case for urgent action is I agree overwhelming, and on the whole I am not against the steps being taken, even if some of them seem motivated by hysteria or excessive ecological zeal, rather than the real contribution they are likely to make to reducing atmospheric carbon levels. The faith in wind farms in particular seems misplaced, except as a source of power for remote sparsely regions, or for individual homes in windy locations, but not to supply major population centres. The future lies in solar energy conversion, either via artificial photosynthesis, or from plants engineered to produce hydrogen or possibly even hydrocarbons rather than carbohydrates. Research into nuclear fusion should also continue.
Yet the evidence that humans have already contributed substantially to a warming planet does not stack up, at least not just yet. While some warming has been observed in some parts of the planet, notably western and central Europe, the climate models fail to account for various anomalies that have been observed, such as a slight cooling over a large part of the Antarctic continent over the last two decades. The models have consistently predicted that the Polar Regions would exhibit the earliest and strongest response to anthropomorphic production of greenhouse gases, and this is evident only in the Arctic, and even there with some exceptions. Until the climate forecasting models account accurately for the present situation, they cannot be trusted on their own as sources of evidence for major changes in energy policy. The models need to be upgraded to take account of important inputs to weather and climate that are currently ignored, such as high energy particles striking the atmosphere from the sun and outer space. Such particles exert an influence out of proportion to their total energy by affecting the formation of clouds and thunderstorms that in turn have a more significant affect on the global radiation budget. In other words their affect is amplified by the global weather system. Incorporating these and some other factors will also lead to more accurate medium range weather forecasts over the 5 to 12 day period.
Aerosol Ignorance
Why is it that I find blogging so repulsive and repellant that I have not done any for six months, in fact since my web site went live? During that time I have written well over 100,000 words as a journalist, and earned good or bad money for it. Could it be that I am washed out and do not have an interesting thought in my head? Yet some of the most prolific bloggers are professional journalists more fecund than I, and they tend to be more interesting than the hordes of amateurs sinking in the morass of published anonymity that accounts for much of the World Wide Web. Blogging is supposed to fulfill that insatiable human desire to communicate, but in truth it is a staircase leading to a spiritual wilderness, save for the chosen few whose words have a regular audience and would probably be read or heard anyway. Blogging imposes no constraint of space, thereby encouraging turgiversity, although the best instances of it are trimmed by the exigencies of time.
Having got that off my chest, my spirit can breathe more easily, and I even feel up to a little blog at last. Inevitably my thoughts turn to plastic bags and tungsten light bulbs. I have become a hoarder of both, terrified that within two years I may not be able to procure either. I am of course only too happy to save money on energy, but I resent the heavy weight of the state driven by environmental fascism, or should I say communism, behind over hasty token gestures.
I am accused of being a global warming skeptic, but I am merely skeptical of current climate forecasting models. I am all for a coherent move away from fossil fuels to sustainable alternatives, but panic is pointless because the current forecasting models are virtually useless, failing to take proper account both of the huge role of aerosols, and long term ocean circulation, in weather and climate change. In fact cosmic rays, which trigger aerosol formation by ionizing particles in the atmosphere so that they grow by electrostatic attraction, are not even included in the present models. To be fair there is great ignorance over the link between aerosols and climate via their role as condensation nuclei, although this means there is so much uncertainty that climate experts, in private at least, admit that it is not even clear whether anthropomorphic greenhouse gas production will lead to warming or cooling over the next 50 years, and can only say that the former is more likely.
Even if the models were correct, an over-hasty response is still likely to have more downsides than benefits. We need to increase budgets for long term research into solar energy conversion, and possibly nuclear fusion, while ending this futile flirtation with wind power, which, shackled by the laws of physics, is a pox upon our land and sea scapes.