Expert Texture

Robert Scoble is spending a bit of time refuting this point. The latest post is here where he refers to responses to the current company meeting.  He is in a good position to refute these claims as he has a broad view of what products are coming at Microsoft.

I do find the premise that “Microsoft is done for” a bit naive.  I'm sure people have reason to be skeptical about recent management changes, execution of new projects, and as far as I know, concerns about company morale and cohesiveness. 

But, so many are so anxious to relate the story of Microsoft's imminent demise that they are not seeing straight.  People keep looking for the next big thing and then making the connection that is the Microsoft killer. 

Linux was going to dethrone Windows.  Well, no.  Certainly very many machines that might be running (and licensing) Windows are running Linux; however, the growth of new machines running Windows is phenomenal.  Microsoft is winning this battle.

• With the best search engine out there?
• With the best mapping / sattellite software?
• A new special-purpose OS (quick, everybody: rewrite everything!  Microsoft will be buried in a year!).  (Dan has recently posted some thoughts on this)
• With new applications for Windows?  A new Word processor?
• In the enterprise? 

I see much more opportunity for synergy between these companies than one destroying the other (I actually have tremendous respect for Google, by the way).  I can understand why there is a battle here starting with the search engine (and going down into the OS).  Microsoft wants to be the top search engine (eyeballs equate to revenues in the search market).  But, this doesn't equate to Google causing Microsoft's demise.

And of course, Microsoft is not sitting still and waiting to be destroyed by anybody.  Not only are they creating new products (and product features), but they are working on a bigger more connected vision that is actually pretty cool.

I think the big problem is that the Microsoft haters will always hate Microsoft.  These people revel knowing that Google and Microsoft are at war and hope they have finally chosen the right horse. 

Anyway, I think the reports of Microsoft's death are greatly exaggerated.  (apologies to Mark Twain).

This post and more can be found on my active blog, here.

When I was at PDC05, I was talking to Faisal Mohamood about some interesting applications for the Digipede Network.  I had a question about Intellisense in VS2005 and he said something like “Really?  That should just work”.

Finally I have gotten to sit down and spend a few focused minutes on this Intellisense issue.  Our XSD works great in VS2003, but not in VS2005.  Lots of warnings that look like this:

Type 'x' is not declared in namespace 'y'.

I made the assumption that the VS2003 schema was actually valid; but it turns out that it wasn't.  Strangely enough, it appears that VS2003 is much more forgiving about errors in XSD than VS2005 is.  I'm happy to say that the XML validation features of VS2005 told me what was wrong with the schema and it was easy to fix.

Note: our original schema had been created using xsd.exe from a class library.   I had to tweak some things in it by hand, but basically VS2003 accepted it as it was generated.  Oddly, it had several problems in it.  The most major one (and the cause of the problem above) is that there were many top-level element nodes that should have been complexType nodes.  It seemed kind of arbitrary whether types were defined or not.  So, don't trust xsd.exe for creating valid XSD.