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General Software Discussion / Re: Help! Ideas for software aimed at 'learning'
« on: June 23, 2011, 09:03 AM »
We are working on a product that covers this and need beta testers. If anyone wants to know the details, PM me.
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The world has changed radically in the past few years. The Internet has continued to free app-makers from dependency on Windows or any other desktop platform (and, thus, from dependency on Microsoft). Apple's iPhone has revolutionized the mobile business, unleashing a whole new wave of personal computing devices. Apple's iPad seems on its way to supplanting the low-end PC business.
Importantly, none of these trends depend in any way on Microsoft's original monopoly and cash cow, Windows. None of these trends generate so much as a dollar of revenue or profit for Microsoft. (Microsoft is nowhere in mobile. Or tablets. And it is reasonable to think that, in these two huge growth businesses, nowhere is where Microsoft will always be).
Google, meanwhile, is trying to do the same thing to Apple that Microsoft did to Apple 15 years ago: Separate software and hardware and create a ubiquitous software platform for the world's developers to build on. This is a smart strategy, and it's resonating in the developer and consumer communities: Google's Android and Chrome started slow, but they're gaining momentum rapidly. What's more, Google is not just undercutting the alternatives on price--it's giving away its products for free.
Once again, the Chrome/Android momentum has nothing to do with Windows. Once again, it doesn't benefit Microsoft in any way.
Now take a look at what Microsoft's biggest Windows customers--Dell, HP, and the other big PC manufacturers--are up to. Dell is in talks with Google to begin developing devices designed to run Chrome (and who can blame it--if it doesn't do this, it will be left behind in the next wave of consumer devices). And HP just bought the wreckage of Palm so that it would have a better mobile operating system with which to compete against Apple. From Microsoft's perspective, these last two developments are disasters.
back to the original topic ...-urlwolf (June 21, 2010, 11:25 AM)
which is what? getting together to slag OO. or sing the praises of MS office? ;-)
i thought the OT comments about possible directions Microsoft could take office were much more relevant.
-Gwen7 (June 21, 2010, 07:01 PM)
I was using keepnote, but now I'm using lyx. You can have it portable on win (LyTeX). Great outliner, and features you don't find in notetakers (tables, equations). Even if you don't ever use it as intended (producing nice latex docs), it's a killer tool. All files are plain text, no vendor lock-in. and autocompletion built-in...After a couple of months of happy use, I found that lyx gets slower if you use it for a gigantic tree (what notes are!). It's screaming fast if you divide your notes into files, but then you have to deal with files (which breaks the flow for me). You can have a master file and then \input subsections, but that adds overhead. The outliner on the side does get the entire thing, which is very cool.-urlwolf (March 07, 2010, 02:22 PM)
The last year has taught me quite a bit about the difference between web applications and downloadable applications. To whit: don’t write desktop apps. The support burden is worse, the conversion rates are lower, the time through the experimental loop is higher, and they retard experimentation in a million and one ways.
