And clearly I’m not the only one. Give this article a read and let me know what you think the future of Microsoft and Steve’s roll in it will be.

Steve Ballmer has one more chance to save his job

Personally I think Steve should step down. He just wants to work on what he personally understands not what the market actually wants. He thinks netbooks are a joke and that bit him in the ass. He thinks tablets are a waste of time (even though they have been trying to make the tablet market world for them nearly a decade). He thinks he will dominate a mobile market ruled by hundreds of millions of other devices. He think he can slap a search engine together and get millions of people using it over night.

Microsoft has been resting on the heels of Windows and Office for too long. They need to get something moving. Sure, Sharepoint is cool, but you need more than one product to keep the company moving.

I think Microsoft should spend more time working with Apple and Google than battling them, but hey, I’m not a egotistical, power hungry, madman…

Brothers In Arms® 2: Global Front HD

While I’m at it, maybe I should get this too…

Underworlds Ultimate Edition

Of course, I stay here much longer, it might be me out on the ledge screaming for help and pelting people with fruit.

Would it look bad if I played Fruit Ninja while waiting for bug reports to come in?

At least we got breakfast this time.

So we lost power at the data center, got corrupted data, fixed the corrupted data, lost power again, apparently got a Russian surplus generator from the Czech Republic and turned everything back on. By that time the sun was coming up and the launch was scrubbed.

Oh well, sometimes you launch a rocket into space and land on the moon. Sometimes your booster rockets go haywire and burn up on the launch pad. At the least the drive in to work was easy. But seriously, who the hell are these other people are where are they going at 4:30 in the morning?

Isn’t this marketing scheme the exact same thing that killed the Kin? Microsoft claimed that device was for everyone and then it bombed within weeks (days really) of being launched. MS seems to have the same mentality about this thing. How can it possibly appeal to hard-core gamers, a 7 year old and grandma at the same time? That’s just stupid!

If Microsoft doesn’t actually define and target an audience (with a slew of spectacular games) then this product will follow in the footsteps of the Kin. Hell, it shares half it’s name already…

Microsoft better turn up the wick, Apple and Google are getting a thousand new apps a day while they’re still struggling to get a thousand apps total.

So who out there is getting a Windows Phone Series 7 unit? Anyone ditching their Apple iPhone for one? Did this latest Apple snafu strengthen the case to switch to another platform or was it insignificant?

And now I see that Microsoft plans to hand a Windows Phone Series 7 device (they *have* to shorten that name!) to everyone in the company. This is part of their "word of mouth" advertising. If nothing else, if they give one to every employee they can always say the number of units shipped was better than the Kin… (Or was it the Kon?)

But as far as features go it just doesn’t have anything I need. I mean seriously, what more can you possibly make Office do? I’ve stated before, Word hit feature saturation in 2003, so did Excel. At this point it’s just being dressed up and shortcuts are being added. The shortcuts are nice but I’m not sure they warrant the massive price tag of the update.

And it looks like Office 2010 might be the first version suffering from market saturation. It seems adoption is a little sluggish for this new version. Again, what is the average user missing? 2010 offers integration with cloud, web and Sharepoint services, but for most folks, that really doesn’t open the checkbook. Most of us are writing standard documents like memos, reports, essays, letters, articles and the like. Hell, you can even do some impressive desktop publishing with Word if you want to. But when you move beyond that your market becomes really small. I really like Word, have for years, even back to the Word 6.0 days which at the time was really quite good. And OneNote is fantastic. I’m only disappointed that it didn’t get more significant upgrades for 2010. Although I rarely use it now, I used to support Excel and it is insanely powerful and useful. I was astounded at the way people would manipulate Excel. It was wondrous, but also a little frightening. And Outlook? Well, Outlook has come a LONG way since it debuted in 2007. I like the 2007 version, but only use about 10% of the features. I check my email and get appointment requests. All those other crazy features really don’t mean anything to me.

But anyway, adding some shortcuts and the ability to publish to the web isn’t going to sell new copies of Office. And even adding all sorts of bolt on packages isn’t going to do it either. Really, what the hell are Groove and Infopath for? Who are you people that are using those apps?

I thought Publisher was really neat back in the day, but is anyone actually using it? I know Powerpoint gets a lot of attention, but what else can you make it do? Is there some sexy dissolve or background we’re missing? Visio is neat, for those who use it (I don’t know anyone who does). Let’s not forget Access. I almost did because I don’t use it.

I use Word, Outlook and OneNote. And if I use 10% of the features available in Word I’d be amazed. Truthfully I wish they would make a bundle of just those three apps and I would be incredibly happy and satisfied.

Office is an impressive bundle, but I think we might already have too much of it…

It’s not like Microsoft hasn’t been patching Win7 though, I get told there’s a new update that I need to install 3 or more times a week. On the one hand that’s a good thing that MS is fixing problems and taking care of issues. On the other, damn that’s a lot of problems and issues to fix.

But the big deal about a Service Pack is that Microsoft has been known to completely change or include functionality with a true SP. However, Ballmer has already stated that this SP won’t be that big a deal. Considering Windows 7 itself is just a massive Service Pack to Vista, yeah, he’s probably right.

I’ve gotten used to Windows 7 now. I’m not saying I like it, because really I still don’t, but I’ve gotten used to the things you can and can’t do with it.

Now, $5 really isn’t all that much to upgrade an OS, but everyone else got it for free, so it seems wrong to charge the iPad folks

If this does turn out to be real, I sense a backlash coming.

Apple to charge for iPad iOS 4 upgrade