Now what Microsoft?

[mike777]

I don't get calling MS monopolistic.

 

I thought the issue is MS is going broke and how do we save it for the owners and pensions.

 

Wow are we on different page.

 

I want to save jobs and pension plans...you seem to care about..well not sure....

[blackshoe]

Given the chance, the market will replace the jobs. As for the pension plans, if they're properly set up and have not been "raided" already, there should be no reason to worry about them. If there is reason to worry about them, then someone at Microsoft is responsible for that. Let him fix it.

[barmar]

Does MS actually have a company-funded pension plan? I'd be surprised if they had a traditional (define-benefit) pension plan, as opposed to a more modern (defined-contribution) 401k.

[Mbodell]

Does MS actually have a company-funded pension plan? I'd be surprised if they had a traditional (define-benefit) pension plan, as opposed to a more modern (defined-contribution) 401k.

 

No pension (unless maybe for folks in the 80s or early 90s).

 

They have 401(k) [with matching 50% up to $6K if I remember correctly]. There is also employee purchase plan where you can put aside 15% of your salary (up to some max, $25K or something) each quarter and at the end of each quarter purchase MSFT stock for a 10% discount.

 

The company does self-fund (but not self-administer) its health care plan.

[y66]

Was just rereading this paragraph about Douglas Englebart in Wikipedia:

 

Engelbart slipped into relative obscurity after 1976. Several of his researchers became alienated from him and left his organization for Xerox PARC, in part due to frustration, and in part due to differing views of the future of computing. Engelbart saw the future in collaborative, networked, timeshare (client-server) computers, which younger programmers rejected in favor of the personal computer. The conflict was both technical and social: the younger programmers came from an era where centralized power was highly suspect, and personal computing was just barely on the horizon.

It looks like Englebart's long term vision is holding up well (change timesharing to cloud-sharing) and PCs are starting to look like souped up typewriters. We obviously would not be this far along if those alienated researchers hadn't left SRI to go to Xerox PARC where they invented bitmap displays, graphical user interfaces, desktop publishing, Smalltalk, laser printing and Ethernet.

 

According to former PARC researcher extraordinaire Alan Kay, who coined the phrase "the best way to predict the future is to invent it"

 

the right way to do a PARC-like effort is to find “two dozen absolute geniuses” in the appropriate field or subfield. He believes that this is “always doable” by selecting at the six or seven sigma level over the entire world. He cited other examples where the same model worked, including the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, Project SAGE at MIT, and the ARPA-IPTO program. Kay cautions, however, that great managers like Bob Taylor are scarcer than genius researchers. And the rarest birds are the executives who have the foresight and courage to give the funds to folks like Taylor to do as they see fit.

$77 billion dollar question.: If executives are not giving funds to managers like Bob Taylor, who are they giving the funds to?

[hrothgar]

 

It looks like Englebart's long term vision is holding up well (change timesharing to cloud-sharing) and PCs are starting to look like souped up typewriters. We obviously would not be this far along if those alienated researchers hadn't left SRI to go to Xerox PARC where they invented bitmap displays, graphical user interfaces, desktop publishing, Smalltalk, laser printing and Ethernet.

 

According to former PARC researcher extraordinaire Alan Kay, who coined the phrase "the best way to predict the future is to invent it"

 

$77 billion dollar question.: If executives are not giving funds to managers like Bob Taylor, who are they giving the funds to?

 

Here's the rub...

 

PARC made billions of dollars for companies like 3Com and Apple.

It didn't do much for Xerox.

 

The central lesson that gets taught about PARC in business school is that these sorts of investments are highly suspect for large companies because they rarely have organization structures capable of successfully adopting all of the disruptive technologies that get generated...

 

In part, this is why MIT has things like the Media lab. The goal of the Media lab is to have create something akin to Xerox PARC. The lab then charges large companies an arm and a leg for the privilege of seeing stuff early. If they pay even more, they can direct research. (I'm not sure whether the companies who sponsor the Media lab do any better than Xerox, but the folks at the lab seem to have fun and then certainly create some insane stuff)

[blackshoe]

"…by selecting at the six or seven sigma level over the entire world".

 

Interesting statement. What the Hell does it mean?

 

The only thing I know about "funds" is that no one is giving them to me. B-)

[akwoo]

"…by selecting at the six or seven sigma level over the entire world".

 

Interesting statement. What the Hell does it mean?

 

This means selecting people who are six or seven standard deviations away from (presumably above) the average, so, assuming normal distribution of abilities, selecting about the smartest one in a billion.

[blackshoe]

Heh. I thought the government had mandated that everyone should be above average. Or was that just about income? B-)

[y66]

Xerox once called itself The Document Company. Now, on their web site, they call themselves "a leader in document technology and services". I guess they can call themselves whatever they want, but it seems to me that companies like Box + Crocodoc are doing really innovative work in the document business. Interestingly, Peter Lai (Crocodoc guy) interned at PARC in 2006.

[barmar]

Heh. I thought the government had mandated that everyone should be above average. Or was that just about income? B-)

There's a well known psychological paradx: Most people think they're above average in expertise at common, everyday tasks. E.g. most people think they're an above-average driver. Which is, of course, impossible: half the people have to be worse than the median, by definition.

 

So if everyone believes it, why not make it mandatory? :)

[Mbodell]

There's a well known psychological paradx: Most people think they're above average in expertise at common, everyday tasks. E.g. most people think they're an above-average driver. Which is, of course, impossible: half the people have to be worse than the median, by definition.

 

That's culturally biased though. There are some cultures where most people think they are below average. Of course almost everyone can be above average (mean), if the few people below average are way below average.

[mycroft]

[M]ost people think they're an above-average driver.

I *know* I'm an above-average driver - I see all the idiocies on the road every day (and not the "not thinking/not noticing" idiocies - we all have those - but the "you know, if you missed something for half a second, as I've been known to do, you're paying in thousands, either sheet metal or hospital bills").

 

Note: I don't say I'm a *good* driver; just an above-average one. I am strongly in favour of "thou shalt retest whenever you renew your license" (possibly "every 5 years"; the truckers and commercial bus drivers who have to renew faster than that don't need even more hassle). I bet 30% of drivers would fail their first retest...

 

Which is, of course, impossible: half the people have to be worse than the median, by definition.

1. Nobody knows what the median is, right?
   
2. unqualified "average" usually implies mean. Having said that, that might be *higher* than the median...
   
3. If the mode is "bad", it could in fact be true that a majority of drivers are above average.
   

[32519]

I think Windows 8 is not doing that bad as he says.

This guy disagrees with you, "How Windows 8 is smashing laptop, desktop sales."

 

Quote 1:

"In some ways, the most interesting thing about Threshold is how it recasts Windows 8 as the next Vista. It's an acknowledgment that what came before didn't work, and didn't resonate with customers. And though Microsoft will always be able to claim that Windows 9 wouldn't have been possible without the important foundational work they had done first with Windows 8—just as was the case with Windows 7 and Windows Vista—there's no way to sugarcoat this. Windows 8 has set back Microsoft, and Windows, by years, and possibly for good."

 

Quote 2:

"Threshold will target this new world. It could very well be a make or break release."

 

Quote 3:

“Windows 8.1, which is a substantial and free upgrade with major improvements over the original release, is in use on less than 25-million PCs at the moment. That's a disaster, and Threshold needs to strike a better balance between meeting the needs of over a billion traditional PC users while enticing users to adopt this new Windows on new types of personal computing devices. In short, it needs to be everything that Windows 8 is not.”

[Vampyr]

Well, I am planning to get a new computer, and have been waiting until there is a better version of Windows available.

 

I know that the better solution is to wean myself off Windows, but doing that is not on the horizon for me at the moment.

[helene_t]

There's a well known psychological paradx: Most people think they're above average in expertise at common, everyday tasks. E.g. most people think they're an above-average driver. Which is, of course, impossible: half the people have to be worse than the median, by definition.

 

So if everyone believes it, why not make it mandatory? :)

In my last 12-board robot tourney I got 48% which may be around my average. But really there were a number of bad boards which I shouldn't count: one was a misclick, once I took a superior line which happened not to work because of a unlikely split, once the stupid robot misbid, and once I lost count of the trump suit because I was distracted by a phone call. And once I decided to experiment with an off-shape 1NT, something I obviously wouldn't have done in a serious tournament.

 

Discounting all those anomalies I hold 66% over. So really, I am above average. (The fallacy is, of course, that all the other 48% players had similar bad luck. So 48% is probably a reasonable estimate of my skill level).

 

I imagine something similar could apply to driving.

[32519]

Microsoft is not alone in feeling the heat, read this.

[32519]

HP launches "Windows 7 is back" promotion.

[Trinidad]

In my last 12-board robot tourney I got 48% which may be around my average. But really there were a number of bad boards which I shouldn't count: one was a misclick, once I took a superior line which happened not to work because of a unlikely split, once the stupid robot misbid, and once I lost count of the trump suit because I was distracted by a phone call. And once I decided to experiment with an off-shape 1NT, something I obviously wouldn't have done in a serious tournament.

 

Discounting all those anomalies I hold 66% over. So really, I am above average. (The fallacy is, of course, that all the other 48% players had similar bad luck. So 48% is probably a reasonable estimate of my skill level).

 

I imagine something similar could apply to driving.

Driving is a particularly difficult example. After all, the idea is that even mediocre drivers will not get into accidents. Many people think they are good drivers because they have had 0 accidents in N years where statistically, they are expected to get into 0.1 accidents in that time, so they haven't really accomplished anything.

 

It is like saying: "I am living so healthy. I haven't had cancer (not even once) during my entire life!"

 

Rik

[32519]

The six worst operating systems in the history of computing

[helene_t]

Heh. I thought the government had mandated that everyone should be above average. Or was that just about income? B-)

No it is education: "The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average."

 

Source: http://www.aei.org/article/education/the-age-of-educational-romanticism/

[kenberg]

No it is education: "The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average."

 

Source: http://www.aei.org/a...al-romanticism/

 

As I read it, they are not quite seeking a logical impossibility. But still they are being unrealistic, and that may be even worse. The claim that I get from the article is that they looked at what was, at the passage of the law, performance at the 70th percentile and mandated that all children would be able to perform that well within 12 years. That's not really saying that all children will be at the70th percentile. But realism is that in any honest assessment, this goal will not be reached.

 

The problem is that the assessments are designed very narrowly in order to show students have reached a very artificial goal. I have mentioned before my experinece with weights when I was 15 or so. Like all adolescent males, i wanted to lift as much as possible. I got very good at maneuvers to get a large amount of weight up above my head. I got so good that I could get more weight up than I could keep up so it all came crashing down. This is the way I see many responses to mandates. I was on a panel onetime that discussed how children could learn to add fractions. The stipulation was that they had to add fractions but they only had to handle those fractions where the denominator was 2,3,4,5,6 or 8. Adding 3/7 to 5/9 was not needed. These narrowly defined skills, like getting weights over my head that I could not stabilize, are of extremely limited use. They allow people to claim that they have done something.

[barmar]

As I read it, they are not quite seeking a logical impossibility. But still they are being unrealistic, and that may be even worse. The claim that I get from the article is that they looked at what was, at the passage of the law, performance at the 70th percentile and mandated that all children would be able to perform that well within 12 years. That's not really saying that all children will be at the70th percentile. But realism is that in any honest assessment, this goal will not be reached.

Setting unreachable goals can have two results. The optimist believes that it will cause people to strive to reach the goal, so they'll try harder; even if they don't actually reach it, they'll get a better overall result. The pessimist believes that they'll just give up, since they know they can never reach it.

 

I haven't read the NCLB laws, but I assume that it isn't an "all or nothing" requirement. I assume there are a variety of milestones below that 70th percentile goal, and schools benefit from achieving them. That should hopefully prevent the second scenario.

[Mbodell]

Hopefully there will be a Windows 9 soon. Usually every other Windows OS from Microsoft is pretty reasonable.

 

 

95 - Pretty good

98 - Not great

2000 - Pretty good

ME - Horrible

XP - Pretty great

Vista - Horrible

7 - Pretty good

8 - I haven't used but the reviews are mediocre at best (at least as a desktop computer OS - maybe better as a tablet OS)

[blackshoe]

Hopefully there will be a Windows 9 soon. Usually every other Windows OS from Microsoft is pretty reasonable.

 

 

95 - Pretty good

98 - Not great

2000 - Pretty good

ME - Horrible

XP - Pretty great

Vista - Horrible

7 - Pretty good

8 - I haven't used but the reviews are mediocre at best (at least as a desktop computer OS - maybe better as a tablet OS)

You neglect Windows 1.0 - which was so bad on the hardware of the day (1986 or so) that although my US Navy command bought 45 computers and 45 copies of Windows 1.0, the latter, except for one copy used for evaluation purposes, never left the closet in which they were stored.

 

About six months after I got involved in "IT" at that command, I met the VP in charge of Federal Marketing of the company with whom the Air Force (the other services just used it, we didn't set it up) negotiated that contract. He apologized, saying "we never should have put that on the contract".