The Underscore Archives

On 13 Feb 2008, at 09:28, Aaron Trevena wrote:
>
> You have to bear in mind that Microsoft has so far failed to make any
> of it's online media  very successful - they've all been trounced by
> competitors and haemoraged money (in fact pretty much all MS ventures
> except office and windows make huge losses) - if you had shares in
> Yahoo, would you want MS to come in and totally kill the value of the
> assetts (especially goodwill, which is the biggest asset of online
> media like Flickr, etc)


It always staggers me how consistently wrong Microsoft manage to get  
it, considering their experience (good and bad) and their resources.   
Even their Office and Windows projects don't get much respect from  
their users and peers... relying on inertia more than anything else.   
Most of the successes Microsoft has had are thanks to aggressive  
business tactics than actual product superiority.

There's only been one piece of tech out of Microsoft in the past  
decade or so that's actually impressed me: that PhotoSynth thing,  
which IIRC used Flickr as the photo source.


On 13 Feb 2008, at 09:43, Oliver Humpage wrote:

> Anyone found a good way of not ending up decrepit and broke in old  
> age for
> not ridiculous amounts of outlay?

Die young.  Given the medical histories on both sides of my family,  
I've probably wasted the money I've put into my grotty pension plans  
over the past X years.  Should've spent it on drugs and hookers instead.


Tom

-- 
Tom Gidden
http://gidden.net/tom/