March 22nd, 2006
Forbes: Microsoft Vista: Not "People Ready"
Forbes’ Daniel Lyons was at the Microsoft
“People Ready” event in New York last week. He has a very
interesting take….
No one mentioned the fact that in
1997, Microsoft held a similar event in New York City to declare that IBM’s
“big iron” was dead, because Windows NT–remember Windows NT?–was
going to “scale up” and replace the mainframe. I wonder if Ballmer
ever feels like the guy in Groundhog Day, reliving the same press conference,
over and over. I know I do.Oddly enough, some of the language of
the Microsoft event was eerily similar to language about innovation in
the new huge advertisements that IBM started running a few days later in
newspapers. Did Microsoft somehow get wind of the ads? Who knows. But the
event seemed thrown together to blunt the new ad campaign from IBM.Worst of all, I can’t believe Microsoft
actually held this big nonevent “event” only a few days before
announcing another screw-up in Vista. If Ballmer knew he was about to announce
a delay and still had this event, he’s crazy. If he didn’t know Vista was
about to slip again, then Microsoft is in worse shape than anyone realizes.
So
it seems that Alan is not the only one to wonder, $500
million and you need to steal our slogan?
Link: Forbes:
Microsoft Vista: Not “People Ready”
>
Originally by Ed Brill from Ed Brill on March 22, 2006, 11:16am
