Brian J. Celenza

Today was another perfect display of my problems with Microsoft.

The media made big fuss over their revolutionary user experience tool called WorldWide Telescope, which allows users to view high-resolution images captured by many telescopes in the sky today. Really neat idea, except… it’s already taken.

Google Sky has been around for… 6 months now? And their implementation within Google Earth has all of the features WorldWide Telescope does, albeit without the pretty interface. I have to give M$ credit for the interface in Telescope. It’s fantastic. Back to the rant…

Different initiative, same old Microsoft. It seems like they’re in a perpetual mode of catching up to the industry leaders now. I would hate to be an employee there. “Gotta stay competitive or Steve Ballmer will throw a chair at you,” or something.

Windows Vista was a less-than-classy attempt at bringing a better user experience to Windows. Except it brought DRM, horrible driver support, high resource utilization, poor performance, and worse security than XP. I’ll stick to Ubuntu/Compiz and OS X, thanks.

Silverlight is, I guess, supposed to give Adobe Flash a run for it’s money. At first I thought this was a horrible idea, since it only ran in IE. But they’ve since opened it up to cross-browser and cross-platform users. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, but with AS3 being widely adopted now, the only plus Silverlight has is that it rides on the .NET framework. That’s good if .NET is all you know, I guess. I’m really stretching with that though. Did I mention that WorldWide Telescope uses Flash on it’s website?

Windows Server is a very, very poor excuse for an efficient machine. At least in my experiences, the resource utilization is ridiculous. On top of that, you still have to deal with Microsoft’s security issues. I will however admit that they’ve been a lot faster at putting patches out. I guess that’s worth something.

X-Box/X-Box 360, Microsoft’s attempt at dethroning Sony as gaming king. Honestly, X-Box is a fantastic machine, and I’m not surprised at how well it’s done. I even owned a regular X-Box for a little while and loved it. But it rings in a much stronger point.

The point is, if you spend all your time trying to be the best at everything, you become the best at nothing. With limited resources, you can only accomplish so much. Microsoft, the once undisputed king in software, has given up that title to chase down all the pretty new girls down the street. Google, Yahoo, Sony, Adobe… the list goes on. Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office still dominate the corporate scene, but even that is beginning to slide. But they should dominate that market, because they can. But they won’t. They’re too focused on everyone else.

Of course, this is just an opinion. And an incredibly biased one. Microsoft is still a great company to work for, and a great competitor in a lot of markets. But they’re either bored with being the business software giant, or just have no direction anymore.

For more information on how I feel a business should function, check out Google’s Philosophy — pay close attention to #2 on that list.

I’ve had a few days to try Ubuntu’s new release of their very popular desktop software, and so far I’m loving the differences (albeit subtle ones). Here’s a few new things:

1. Performance — Updated Linux Kernel in 8.04. Although the difference is small, I can definitely feel an improvement in overall system performance.
2. Refined Compiz Effects — One of the things I really loved, and hated, about 7.10 was the built-in support for the popular Compiz package. I loved it because it gave my system a much more OS X like feel, but hated it because there were obvious bugs and performance issues. This became especially true if you chose the custom route and turned on all the over-the-top special effects. Hardy Heron appears to resolve at least most of the bugs and performance flaws I saw on my nVidia card, but I can’t speak for the community as a whole.
3. FLAWLESS Upgrade/Installation — Again, I really can’t speak for everyone on this, and my experience with Ubuntu upgrades in the past has been similar. I had absolutely zero problems during upgrade. I’d love to say the same for Windows Vista.
4. Xorg 7.3 (AKA better display management) — This is one of those features that was LONG overdue for Linux as a whole. Seems like no matter which distro you choose, you are still screwed trying to configure mutliple displays (or even one display in some cases). In 8.04 the setup is much easier, although I still encountered a few glitches while trying to enable dual monitor support. I was able to resolve these quickly, and without having to edit the xorg.conf file. Thank you Ubuntu contributors.

Overall, I have nothing really bad to say about the upgrade. My only concern is having Firefox 3 Beta 5 installed as the default browser. This has been frustrating for me, since none of my addons seem to be working properly (even with compatibility checking disabled). But I’ll be over that as soon as 3 is officially released.

Before I begin, I should probably mention that I’ve never been laid off. And more specifically, I’ve never been part of a large-scale corporate layoff. Both very interesting events to take part in, but not something I’d like to be “good at” (if there is such a thing).

The irony of being unemployed is I’m actually a lot busier than I was when I was employed. The 32-40 hour work weeks have been replaced with endless emails, phone calls, and interviews for new jobs. There has to be a way to profit off of streamlining the resume-application-interview-hiring process. Maybe I should look into that.

Anyway, if you’re in need of some front-end, PHP, or flash development, and are willing to cater to a part-time schedule, please feel free to view my resume and contact me. I’d greatly appreciate your time.