I saw this item in today’s (12/30/2024) edition of the Code Project Daily News letter. What do you think/are you surprised?
Ernie
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Love him or hate him steve balmer was good for microsoft !
Not convinced the same for either the clients or the products.
There are times when a company needs strong leaders to drive it forward he was the right one at that time.
Ok i have just upset 90 % of our members on this site !
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That’s right! How dare you talk positive about Microsoft leadership. 
On a more serious note, though: When does the US government take actual action against Microsoft and split it up in multiple pieces?
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. . . or will they? Remember, we Americans have a significant change in leadership coming up next month. Based on his performance during his previous term in office, the one thing we can’t depend on is what he’ll do about anything that doesn’t have any bearing on his own well-being/level of power.
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Why should a government intervention split a company ?
That goes for google as well as microsoft
Not sure it still exists but in the UK there was a government body that looked at mergers to prevent some joining together and becoming too powerful, but if your company just grows should it be split ?
Honda are in talks with nissan and Mitsubishi to merge, yes it will be a massive company with job cuts no doubt but better than one closing or going under. I am not in favour of that.
But back to steve as a leader, i liked the guy, met him at a conference and what a loud dynamic leader. Great in your corner but would not want to be against his ideas or work for him.
And now aiding others
Respect !
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For me, the thing about Balmer was that he was Microsoft’s CEO when it was being charged with Antitrust violations in 1998. I don’t remember the details anymore, but I do remember being outraged at the time. When Nadella took the reigns, I had hopes that M$ would be changing its ways, but now that appears to not be the case.
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All I know and remember of Ballmer was that infamous sweaty “developers, developers…” rant - and labelling Linux a “cancer”…
Times have changed - Microsoft have embraced Linux to some extent (dragged kicking and screaming mind you)…
This latest doesn’t suprise me at all… “Oh you didn’t like that Falcon Crowdstrike shenanigan? Here’s our answer”… and while there - lets not forget that Falcon Crowdstrike, only a few months earlier had basically killed a bunch of Red Hat and Debian servers running their corporate spyware / backdoor with hooks into the kernel… How bizarre! What ever happened to the “rings”?
There’s some probably fairly easy solutions to avoid using shit like Crowdstrike or whatever Microsoft and Broadcom / Symantec are offering… I don’t know what they are - but - start bringing your shit back inhouse instead of trusting the cloud? Diversify? Deploy Linux to desktop users (most of them - even me - mostly do work stuff through a browser anyway - e.g. stuff like teams is just a webapp basically)…
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I dont remember that being covered in the UK news reports. But like many things different countries and news stories hit the headlines and depends on the bias of the journalist paper.
My feeling too. Need to have control over important data. If that means having some more inhouse staff well so be it.
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The advantage of using a cloud service is that it’s off-site, protecting you from data loss in the event of a house fire or other calamity. That’s why I use MEGA.nz. It’s not M$. It’s not Google. It just works. Of course, I also do regular image backups locally to make it a true backup too.
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Yeah, I see cloud as a good way to archive material, but
a business should not depend on cloud for daily database transactions… they should be local and backed up to wherever.
Even a multi-location business can deal with daily database management, without resorting to cloud.
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Cloud services are great if you continue to have access to the net but there is a cost that’s why Microsoft and Google offer. Big investment up front.
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Sure, it’s a while ago, but we have Wikipedia.
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As a retired home user, I get 25GB of storage for free, because I’ve installed their desktop app. At present, I’m using less than 2GB. As with everything from the Internet, read their privacy policy and terms of service before signing up for an account. My experience has been great while using this service, but YMMV.
Ernie
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I agree. As a retired home-based user, I use MEGA.nz to sync my Documents and Pictures directories, so everything I use regularly are available to me online. This allows me to access my files from all three of my PCs, and if anything goes wrong that I cannot overcome without a reinstall, my files are safe off-site, so I can get them back quickly, and easily. Further, if I suffer a home fire, or any type of natural disaster, when I rebuild my life, I can easily get my files back with no data loss. For me, it’s a win-win.
Of course, I create a full system image backup, stored locally too, so I can recover any inadvertently deleted/corrupted files, or quickly restore my system, exactly as I had it configured, very quickly and easily, in the event of some hardware catastrophe or other unexpected malady.
Ernie
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That offer must be local to you, we dont get anything for free with our service provider hence google and microsoft. Under the free limits they offer.
Because said company has too much power in the market and is has great ease damaging the ability to compete of competitors.
Microsoft has achieved this position through MSDOS and abused this position to sabotage the ability to compete of DRDOS. Later Microsoft sabotaged OS/2 Warp (granted, IBM was sleeping while that happened) by creating their own OS (Windows 95) and used their power in the desktop market to pressure the regular user to adopt Windows. Later they used their dominant position to pressure BeOS (these days Haiku) from the market.
Currently we have arrived at a point where a lot of offices simply can’t function with MS Office (and thus Windows). On the one hand you can say Microsoft is bewilderingly successful, on the other hand you can’t help but wonder how they attained that position, as earlier there was quite a bit of competition in the office segment. Currently there’s virtually none. I’ll tell you how Microsoft maintains this position: through sabotage of competition by either bribing (yes) clients of competitors or *** DRUMROLL *** making their OS - through some update scheme - sabotage the competition.
Don’t believe me? Just take a look at what they did to Netscape. Windows would delete registry keys Netscape needed to function properly, however Internet Explorer functioned just fine. Oh, this only occurred after Netscape had declined an offer from Microsoft to buy them.
Also, Microsoft’s bundling practices are also not OK, given it’s position in the market. Slack and Zoom were dominating the market. All of a sudden Microsoft had Teams and started bundling it with Windows and Office, thus hurting competition. Slack and Zoom have lost clients because of this.
Do I need to continue? Microsoft has received fines and punitive measures time and time again to change its behavior. Microsoft complied for the period they were valid in and then cheerfully continues it’s sabotage campaign.
Microsoft needs to be split up in a lot of smaller companies (in the case of Windows, even a not-for-profit foundation) in order to safeguard the marketplace. Microsoft has simply become too powerful, and its monopoly in the desktop operating system space and the office space needs to be broken.
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MEGA.nz is a cloud service/storage provider, and has no connection to my Internet service provider, if that’s what you’re referring to. I pay for my Internet service, just as everyone else does, but I have set up an account with mega.nz for their free level of cloud storage service with which I get 25GB (free). At the time I set up my account, my initial storage limit was lower, but, because I installed their MEGAsync desktop app, my limit was increased to 25GB (a promotion I think), and remains at that level today. If interested, go and check them out to see what’s offered today.
Ernie
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I have the free 25 GB of space also and it works great.
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And Al Capone was good for the Chicago Outfit (for a while). What’s your point?
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