Microsoft recently announced that they would be spending over a billion dollars to deal with the high failure rate of the Xbox 360. You would think that the bad press Microsoft has been getting over this issue and the high cost of dealing with it would mean that customers who got the “red lights of […]

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Last September I was browsing in a book store and looked at a copy of Entrepreneur magazine. The cover story that month was titled “Next-Gen Innovators” and the blurb on the cover read:

Forward-thinking entrepreneurs are making strides in promising areas—from nanotech to biotech to semiconductors. Will any of them build the […]

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In 2002 I led a team that was building a non-trivial system using .NET. Most of the code was written in C# with some low-level code written in C++ and a few legacy components implemented in VB 6. On that project we used several open source tools such as NAnt, NUnit and NDoc. Visual Studio […]

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Ars Technica notes that Microsoft has finally given up on WinFS (for now). The piece does a good job explaining the history behind WinFS and why it has been abandoned as a stand-alone product. What interests me more is the implication that this is a sign that the operating system is becoming less relevant.

This may […]

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A common complaint about Java desktop applications is that they do not have a look and feel that is consistent with the operating system. Is this really a problem? Does anyone really care about UI consistency? Microsoft doesn’t, at least not in the same way as the complainers, and in this case I agree with […]

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