Dental Student, NYC: http://schofam.blogspot.com/

Education Consultant, Santa Fe, NM http://www.linkedin.com/pub/lyle-schofield/14/649/b36

Dentist, Louisville, KY http://www.spoke.com/info/pEpDf4N/LyleSchofield

Guitar Hero Player, CA http://www.myspace.com/letschorock

Not sure what I’ll plug them into yet…

The greed of the music industry continues to amaze. I thought the popular stuff was always cheaper in the stores…

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I’ll probably leave all this here, but the action is moving this way…

He writes in this entry about how Microsoft “used to know how to ship software”, and he seems to be in Email overload right now over this. The haters probably wanting to chime in with their own Microsoft war stories. The fan boys probably wanting to chastise him for saying anything negative about the empire. Mark’s comments are interesting and first person, and they remind me of a joke (probably old, so forgive me) I heard at a developer’s conference last week:

A developer was confronted by an angry manager about the constantly slipping ship date for a software project. "You know, its taking you months to get this code out the door. God built the entire world in 6 days.", the manager said. The engineer replied, "Yes, but he didn't have an installed base to deal with."

This was told by John McCormick of InterSystems while explaining the challenges of the new security model for Cache 5.1.

Microsoft, of course, has the world’s largest installed base. They need to deal with not upsetting that apple cart, while positioning to lock out other innovators and maintain their Windows/Office cash cow that keeps the whole house of cards up. All the while wondering what India and China and other emerging markets are going to do. It’s no wonder it takes years for a specific line of code to get out the door. Others obviously have the same issue. Intuit, Lotus Notes, Oracle, etc. all certainly deal with trying to get product to customers that are cautious about the amount of work it takes to upgrade the existing data.

The pure new net-centric business models allow for instant publishing of changes. This is also the advantage of the start-up looking at existing product but getting to develop from scratch on new development tools. It seems normal for us to have a leapfrog effect of dominant product getting replaced by new dominant product over time. Microsoft has had a great run of it, as the control of the platform lets them control the pace of advancement. But Java, Linux, HTTP, emerging markets not wanting to be locked into US companies, and other pressures seem to be setting the stage for a more fundamental shift from the Intel/Windows centric computing we’ve become accustomed to.

{edit before posting}

{save to library}

I’ve been updating the travel log more lately, but I need to catch up on news and things here.

I’ve got a few Gmail invites to burn, let me know if you want one.