Month: September 2003

Microsoft and Office Innovation

As a thought for today, Microsoft really hasn't managed to add too many compelling features to their Office monopoly. On top of that their recent licensing games have certainly given customers an incentive to look elsewhere. At the high end Office is still the best there is. But the majority of customers are no where near the high end. There are now a large number of competing products, many available for free, that more than meet the needs of most users.

The irony is that Microsoft has traditionally killed off the majority players in any market they enter by offering a product that is 'good enough', lower priced and leverages their existing monopolies. The Office alternatives has reached the point where they have certainly nailed two out of three. Given Office's institutionalized refusal to base any of its code on Windows it doesn't even get to take advantage of the Window's monopoly beyond getting first access to new versions and getting its bugs fixed NOW. But given how mature the office market is and given the generally low rate of new features it isn't clear how much of an advantage that really is.

In the short term none of this matters, no body gets fired for buying Microsoft. But in the medium and long term the change of events spells interesting times. How long until some CIO becomes a hero by slashing the company's Office budget to near zero and the pattern is set? I realize training and support is a bigger issue but anyone who knows Office will be comfortable with the alternatives and I suspect the support for the free/low cost choices are generally better then anything Microsoft can offer.

Microsoft's lack of innovation and pricing games is exactly the sort of help its competitors need.



Debian… oy.

This weekend I installed Debian on an old computer. Most of the install was just blindly pressing return but I ran into a problem getting X to start. It turned out that in the configuration they suggested uses a frame buffer setting that doesn't work on my machine but it took me an hour or two to figure this out. I am still setting Debian up with features I was able to trivially get on Windows. For example, I have a utility called Tardis on windows that uses NTP to set my clock. Of course I could get the NTP client for Debian. It was just a matter of doing a quick package search and then using apt-get. But I then had to go find a list of suitable NTP sites and type them in manually. Tardis came pre-configured. Tardis also shows me that it is working but I can't be sure the NTP deamon is running (I haven't checked) and even if it is I'm not 100% sure that the KDE clock is listening to it. I'm sure everything works just fine but there is no pro-active indication of this. (BTW, I like KDE a lot more than Gnome) No, none of its a big deal, it's just that everything is a little harder on Debian. Still, with crossover I'm hoping to become Windows free within the next few weeks. I need the crossover plugin to get things like Quicktime and Crossover office to get access to Quicken. I'm happy to pay the software fees required to get Crossover. Other then that there seem to be reasonable alternatives for everything else. I will keep y'all informed.

A Review of the Waterfront Seafood Restaurant in Seattle

Service in Seattle is about as fictional as Sleepless in Seattle so when one experiences an exception it is worth writing about. My family decided to hold a major family dinner event in Seattle. We needed to find a place that could host 14 people for dinner, in a 'special' location befitting the occasion. We selected the Waterfront Seafood Restaurant and we are glad we did. Everybody had a great time, everything went smoothly, the prices were reasonable, the view was wonderful and the food was good.

Continue reading A Review of the Waterfront Seafood Restaurant in
Seattle