Did you see this post at http://www.techcrunch.com...

PhotoShelter Collection online: The newly launched PhotoShelter Collection enables photographers of all levels to benefit from a worldwide image-selling marketplace…

Numbers 1 - 4 in everything they do would ensure their dominance.

Everyone of you here is laughing at Steve Ballmer, well look at your bank account against his and look who’s laughing.

‘…paroxysms of agonizing frustration…” viz Microsoft.

How can we adequately characterize a company that has infinite access to talent, infinite resources, etc., who releases an abortion of an operating systems as it’s coup de gras of years labours, follows and never innovates in the horizontal market, and yet…..profits and thrives?

I call it the manifest destiny of a critical mass. They can’t but make money, even when throwing dung against the wall as a legacy of their previous masterful hegemony of the PC desktop, and to a lesser extent, the back end architecture.

There is one exception and it is no guarantee of anything: Developer tools. They make some decent, well integrated tools that are good for certain heavy client applications. But even this is eroding.

For every Microsoft product profit center, there is an analogue or alternative not only in the open source front, but alternative tools in general. Notice, I have not mentioned Apple, oops, I just did.

I am - was - an XP power user, then on a lark to setup a west coast office, bought a cheap Mac Mini; not because I wanted a Mac, I just needed a package that was easy to schlep back to the office.

Long story short: I installed Parallels, XP, and at first used the Mac side rarely, it was strange to me. But as time went on, I booted Windows less and less, and now, never. I am saved.

And we have Vista machines in my office, so as you see, Msoft got its pound of flesh by virtue of a few new Lenovo Laptops we had to have.

Vista is, my dear friends, an abortion. And I bring that up on this thread, off topic as it is about Microsoft following by years a past and established service that they cannot hope to capture, but to merely illustrate the following:

Even with virtually unlimited time and resources, the Msoft organization could not deliver a product that they should have crushed and seduce to greatness. All other failures are of a piece and follow from that observation.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006.....hotosynth/

This would obviously not be a Flickr competitor in that it has a different audience and purpose, but the job description provided fits the development of this tool as well.

La oferta de trabajo que se puede leer en la web de Microsoft parece que busca crear una competencia directa de Flickr: Come make Windows Live the best place to share your digital memories! Heard of Flickr? YouTube? How about. Mac? This role will work …

It’s downright embarrassing to observe Balllmer in the throes
of what appears the heat of Vulcan mating season, berserk
and irrational wherever he goes, the manifestations of what
surely must be Microsoft’s remarkable ineptitude outside the desktop that weighs so heavily on his mind.

It boggles the mind to consider the litany of loser offerings
they have had the myopic audacity to dredge up in the
megalomaniac delusion that the power they yield like a
Sword of Damocles over their legions of groveling,
subservient desktop users will somehow miraculously manage
to extend itself beyond the hegemony of the desktop death-grip
they rule over with impunity.

The reality of Microsoft in the infinite trail of abject failure outside
the realm of the desktop is its emphatic corporate legacy as
nothing but a usurper of ideas, a pillager of concepts, an imitator, and a poor one at that, an impostor, a corporate charlatan bereft
of a scintilla of creativity, of imagination, nothing but a fierce, fearsome predator-bully, its ability and capacity to strike fear
within us all as its most formidable offering of all.

Admittedly it’s a Flickr rip off, but it’s such a so-much-better-than-original rip off!

No. How about .Mac?

- pj
(it’s subtle difference, I’ll grant you…)

Question is, how can they always be so dumb and unaware of the direction the market is taking?

The Microsoft deal makes it worth over 20 billion. Another opportunity squandered.

odd, why such a response should be… is it in the design?, am i feeling the intention behind the design subliminally?

either way, it felt like it was something they made for their advantage, not mine…. so, thanks but no thanks

MS is a big square - they don’t know how to create appeal.