Microsoft hired IDC to produce some forecasts (PDF) regarding the economic impact that Windows Vista is going to have on the US economy (other studies have been done for other areas, such as the EU, but I’m in California, so I’ll stick with a more local scope). One impressive-sounding datapoint: for every dollar of revenue spent on Microsoft Vista, eighteen dollars will be spent elsewhere in the “Microsoft ecosystem,” creating a great benefit to the economy.
Sometimes I really wonder how it is that Apple hasn’t kicked Microsoft‘s butt up and down the marketplace by now. Witness these ever-so-useful logos intended to help hardware shoppers make the right decisions. Together they’re a coup of non-helpful graphic design cloaked in uninformative marketing noise.
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For the past few years, I’ve been using Firefox. I ran it when it was Firebird. I ran it
when it was Phoenix. I ran it with a silly little extension that randomized its name to the amusement of many. The thrill, sadly, is gone.
When the Mozilla Project released a browser-only version of their client (which was basically just Netscape with a little more nerd-appeal), there were some pretty high hopes. It was highly-extensible, it was a tiny little file you could download quickly over a dialup connection, and was generally an excellent alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer, which many web nerds had grown fiercely dissatisfied. Now it’s time to look at Firefox without that new-browser smell and hopeful aspirations of beta and first-version software.