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Author Topic: Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands  (Read 9677 times)

TaoPhoenix

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Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands
« on: August 31, 2012, 09:46 AM »
This particular post was inspired by their Music side. We all know what happened to PlaysForSure.
This time, let's look even further to their item that cannibalized PlaysForSure - Zune.

From Paul Thurrott:
"With Xbox Music Coming, Microsoft Cuts Zune Features
With its coming Xbox Music and Xbox Video services looming, Microsoft this week alerted Zune users via email about a couple of music-related features that will be dropped as that latter brand is put out to pasture. Among the walking dead are Mixview and channel playlists, Zune HD apps, and music videos.

But the biggest change, perhaps involves some core Zune functionality: Microsoft is killing “sending and receiving messages, inviting friends, sharing the songs, playlists, and albums you are listening to, and viewing past play history.” These features were part of what was called Zune Social."

http://www.winsupers...zune-features-144140

Oh, I'm sorry MS Music people, you just got hosed *twice* in a decade. Let's call it a 5 year Arc.

What Apple apparently figured out that MS didn't, (and see the Linux on Desktop themes), is that *five years is too short for a full brand lifecycle.*

If you want users to be "loyal" to your brand, you can't just rip parts of "their life" away every five years. It makes cautious/lazy/jaded-cynical late-adopters like me look smart. And I'm not all that smart, not like you guys.

So now their big music brand is Xbox-music or something. Okay, Clock starts say about 2011. (Give me a year for not bothering to get swept up in early hype.) Cue 2015, they'll have something else.

I don't have time for that $hit. (Front loaded hyped sales PR machine and all.)


Renegade

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Re: Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands
« Reply #1 on: August 31, 2012, 09:52 AM »
+1

Good post.

MS has burned people too many times. The stranded people with music that they'll never be able to use because of DRM, etc. etc.

Again, this is why DRM is so bad and why free AND open systems are good. (Not all open systems are free.)

But the companies are not satisfied to make a product and sell it -- they want you to be hooked on *their* digital heroin. They have to have you as their fix. Anytime you hear "ecosystem" - think "lock in".
Slow Down Music - Where I commit thought crimes...

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. - John Diefenbaker

40hz

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Re: Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands
« Reply #2 on: August 31, 2012, 12:23 PM »
IMHO the only piece of hardware Microsoft ever really did get right was the scroll-wheel mouse.

And the only pieces of software they ever got mostly right were Flight Simulator X...and maybe (just maybe) Word 6.0. 8)
« Last Edit: August 31, 2012, 03:43 PM by 40hz »

rgdot

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Re: Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands
« Reply #3 on: August 31, 2012, 12:51 PM »
^ OneNote :)

IainB

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Re: Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands
« Reply #4 on: August 31, 2012, 06:06 PM »
^ +1 for OneNote from me. It's a remarkably well-designed piece of software. I was very surprised when I started to use it about 3 years ago. I still keep discovering undocumented features that are quite literally mind-blowing - "How the heck did they do that?" sort of thing.
Mind you, I also reckon that Word and Excel are pretty powerful tools - but we only typically tend to use 20% or so of their functionality.

Anytime you hear "ecosystem" - think "lock in".
Yes, you need to have you BS detector on at all times so as to not be gullible about words like that.

Renegade

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Re: Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands
« Reply #5 on: August 31, 2012, 06:17 PM »
IMHO the only piece of hardware Microsoft ever really did get right was the scroll-wheel mouse.

And the only pieces of software they ever got mostly right were Flight Simulator X...and maybe (just maybe) Word 6.0. 8)

I had an MS ball mouse for about 8 years of hard work. It just wouldn't die. When I went to replace it, I found that you could no longer buy wheel mice. Everything was laser. :( At the time, laser mice weren't really all that spectacular/accurate, and I was rather disappointed. Maybe I've had good luck with MS hardware. Dunno. I'd buy MS hardware again though.
Slow Down Music - Where I commit thought crimes...

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. - John Diefenbaker

40hz

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Re: Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands
« Reply #6 on: August 31, 2012, 10:18 PM »
^ OneNote :)

^ +1 for OneNote from me. It's a remarkably well-designed piece of software. I was very surprised when I started to use it about 3 years ago. I still keep discovering undocumented features that are quite literally mind-blowing - "How the heck did they do that?" sort of thing.
Mind you, I also reckon that Word and Excel are pretty powerful tools - but we only typically tend to use 20% or so of their functionality.

OneNote isn't that bad. I use it although I'm not as sold on it as several of my friend are.

About the only serious complaint I have is how much useful stuff you can do with it goes undocumented by Microsoft. I could understand if it were a F/OSS project. But OneNote costs some decent coin. And Microsoft is a big company. So maybe I can't really get too much behind it because I feel the paying customers deserve better documentation than that.

That said, it is a very nice free form info manager. I use it on project work with some of my clients and it serves its purpose quite well. :Thmbsup:

zridling

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Re: Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands
« Reply #7 on: September 01, 2012, 12:21 AM »
Oh, I'm sorry MS Music people, you just got hosed *twice* in a decade. Let's call it a 5 year Arc.... I don't have time for that $hit. (Front loaded hyped sales PR machine and all.)

I sniffed this customer mugging back in 2002, when I saw that Microsoft kept changing the .doc/.xls formats with every new version of MSOffice. Updating, not a problem. But when I was opening research documents created from earlier MSOffice versions and they weren't formatted the same, I knew I was screwed unless I got out. I couldn't afford to have an entire career tied up in proprietary formats that were being changed to the point of being unreadable a decade later -- and Microsoft made sure no one else could convert them accurately either! By late 2005 I made the move to Linus and open source and by 2006 my transition was complete. Haven't looked back.

But now the cycle is repeating itself for Apple and Facebook users.

TaoPhoenix

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Re: Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands
« Reply #8 on: September 01, 2012, 01:26 AM »
The switch to Docx and Xlsx was particularly bad. I had some contract writing software with a heavy plugin sitting on top of MS Word that *finally* got the patch for the new format ... in 2011. Before that it was only because I have a decent grasp of file extensions that I worked around that glitch.

However I do have to say I like Excel 2010, because the one thing that was missing from the ribbon was customizability. In Office 2010, you can make your own ribbons. So I made one that had my favorite 20 features in approximately the order that a document used them, and it was in fact even faster than the old menus. It was almost like running your fingers down the piano keys. But that's not "loyalty", that's just a user deciding he likes a feature.

Looping back, the Zune debacle was especially jarring because DRM is just tech, but they tried to cash in on the early waves of "social" while getting the entire concept wrong. So for those users who have a Zune, great, hope you like it. But for the ones that went beyond that and tried to "Like being a Microsoft Fan", that's the loyalty that I am talking about that got gutted like a fish.

tomos

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Re: Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands
« Reply #9 on: September 01, 2012, 03:29 AM »
Isn't one of the problems with One Note that you cant export?
... or am I wrong there?
Tom

IainB

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Re: Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands
« Reply #10 on: September 01, 2012, 04:43 AM »
Isn't one of the problems with One Note that you cant export?
... or am I wrong there?
Good question. I would have no idea of an objective answer though, and I bet there are lots more pros and cons.
Sooo...Who's up for doing a OneNote Mini-Review on the DC Forum?
That could be quite helpful for a lot of people.    :)

We might even consider doing a group PMI (De Bono) on it. Collective/collaborative input.
We could do it in Google docs and post the synthesis to the DC Forum.
Just a thought.

40hz

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Re: Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands
« Reply #11 on: September 01, 2012, 05:33 AM »
Isn't one of the problems with One Note that you cant export?
... or am I wrong there?

Starting with 2007 you can. Choices for filetype are PDF, XPS, MHT, DOC and DOCX along with a OneNote section (.one).

tomos

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Re: Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands
« Reply #12 on: September 01, 2012, 01:24 PM »
Isn't one of the problems with One Note that you cant export?
... or am I wrong there?

Starting with 2007 you can. Choices for filetype are PDF, XPS, MHT, DOC and DOCX along with a OneNote section (.one).

Sry, I wasnt clear - I meant to be able to move everything out - in a format that I can import it elsewhere.
Tom

Curt

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Re: Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands
« Reply #13 on: September 01, 2012, 03:11 PM »
-if no other program can do all that OneNote can do, then there is no other program to export everything to, I would say. But of course I don't know.

-----
At the moment I am working with some older documents written in Word 2003, and I am having troubles with my new third-party programs editing them without ruining them. Actually I was thinking this very afternoon (before I knew about this thread) "I wish I had stayed loyal to Microsoft (Office)!"

But of course that is not some music service, or what it is the original post was about.

tomos

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Re: Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands
« Reply #14 on: September 01, 2012, 04:25 PM »
-if no other program can do all that OneNote can do, then there is no other program to export everything to, I would say. But of course I don't know.
good point :)
And it does sound very good/versatile what I've heard about it.

At the moment I am working with some older documents written in Word 2003, and I am having troubles with my new third-party programs editing them without ruining them. Actually I was thinking this very afternoon (before I knew about this thread) "I wish I had stayed loyal to Microsoft (Office)!"

... of course then there's the possibility that you'd have similar trouble in Word 2010 with Word 2003 docs...
Tom

40hz

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Re: Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands
« Reply #15 on: September 01, 2012, 04:34 PM »
-if no other program can do all that OneNote can do, then there is no other program to export everything to, I would say. But of course I don't know.

Actually, that's pretty much the crux of it. Nothing else I'm aware of does work or look exactly like OneNote so Curt nailed it with that observation. The organizational structure of OneNote doesn't really have another exact equivalent. So you can export the assets but not the structure. The closest app I've seen that's similar is probably BasKet on the Linux platform. And even that isn't all that close to OneNote.

 :)

tslim

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Re: Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands
« Reply #16 on: September 02, 2012, 02:58 PM »
I had an MS ball mouse for about 8 years of hard work. It just wouldn't die. When I went to replace it, I found that you could no longer buy wheel mice. Everything was laser. :( At the time, laser mice weren't really all that spectacular/accurate, and I was rather disappointed. Maybe I've had good luck with MS hardware. Dunno. I'd buy MS hardware again though.

See mine, MS Laser Mouse, it is old, dirty, skin torn, serious injured and yes! it just won't die...  :P
mouse.jpg



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