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Ernie The Attorney blogs “Microsoft guy switches to Apple and guess what?.
Jeff Riefman writes about his experience with Windows: I began using
Microsoft products 23 years ago, at age 11, and I worked for Microsoft
from 1991 to 1999 as a technology manager. For many years, I was a
Microsoft loyalist.” Yawn! Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Yes,
yet another switcher story. This one has some interesting variations,
but really, folks, let’s get over it: most people who try out
Microsoft’s competition stay away.

But wait. If you can plow thorugh his whining that he has to reboot his
Windows XP machine every day and that Outlook locks up on him (sounds
like his machine could use some work), eventually he gets into a
discussion of the economics and business model of Microsoft that
actually has some merit. Very interestingly, he cites the “fact” that
less than 3% of the installed Office base has upgraded to the latest
version. Do any of my readers (yes, both of you!) know where he got
that statistic? I’d really like to learn some more about that.

Steven Levy posits the Internet of the future in this article in Newsweek:

Chilling. Levy goes on to describe the downsides of Digital Restriction
Management and TMCA and Microsoft’s Palladium, now renamed “Next
Generation Secure Computing Base.”

Like shopping anonymously in a grocery store (if you don’t use the
store card) or eating at a restaurant without identifying yourself,
there is no justification for broadcasting your digital identity to any
who want to know. Law enforcement can track down your addresses and
electrons and bits should they need to, but every vendor doesn’t have
the right to know everything about you, to be able to turn on or turn
off your access at their whim. We are in a slippery slope where
Internet citizens can lose some of the features that make the internet
the great place that it is.

DRM: A Bad Business Move for Microsoft.
“Invited guest Doctorow told the Microsoft Research staff that DRM
systems don’t work; are bad for society; are bad for business; and are
bad for artists. In short: “DRM is a bad business-move for Microsoft,”
Link from Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley.

Great speech linked on the Microsoft Watch site: a simple and clear
explanation of why Digital Restriction Management is dumb and
impractical. Copying things for backup, time-shift, place-shift and fair use should be easy; stealing things is wrong. Let’s work out how to make that happen instead.

Joel Spolsky opines on “How Microsoft Lost the API War“