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…

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.

While it sounds great to offer so many choices, part of me thinks this dizzying array of options will actually confuse people. The iPad has its feature set and that’s it. The device works the same no matter where you get it because Apple is the only one that makes it. You aren’t missing a feature your buddy has because they all work the same. The Windows 7 tablets won’t be like that. As Ballmer stated they will have different form factors, some will have keyboards, some will be touch only, others will be dockable, etc. I think the main reason the iPad works and works so well is that you just turn it on and use it. You don’t have to compare one model with another, which features are you going to get, or which can you live without. You really only get two choices, amount of storage space and whether it’s WiFi or WiFi+3G. You just buy it, sync it and you’re done.

I dare say this multiple vendor method may actually muddy the waters too much. Would it have been better for MS to pick one vendor such as Dell, build a single tablet and offer different amounts of storage space? Unfortunately that goes against the way MS does things. They can’t just make a single use version of Windows. They have to make it work on all sorts of disparate hardware making it harder to streamline and optimize.

And Microsoft is still using Windows not a tablet OS. Windows 7 has tablet features bolted onto it, but it’s not a tablet OS. I think it’s going to have a lot of wasted code and plenty of services/features that will go unused and just take up resources.

Strangely I think what we’re going to see is some strange cross between Netbooks and Tablets. But whatever we get they need to act quickly. By the time these guys get their tablets to market, Apple will already be releasing features of the iPad 2.0.

It’s not great when two major players start pulling away from you, but what makes it worse is that you live to up to their bad expectations. The last couple of Flash updates have caused more problems than they’ve helped. This latest one in the 10.x series broke some major functionality and rendered a slew of videos useless. It’s a bad place to put users where they stuck on whether to upgrade and not get any videos or remain where they are and expose themselves to known security exploits.

And the odd thing is, Adobe is making huge strides when it comes to Photoshop and their other editing software, but Acrobat and Flash seemed to be plagued with problems. The security flaws seem numerous and glaring. HTML5 is all the rage and many companies are proving that it can replace Flash for a variety of functionality.

There are hundreds of millions of instances of Flash out there so for it to disappear overnight isn’t going to happen. But these mistakes are certainly chipping away at it. You can’t keep breaking things as you try to fix security issues, that just doesn’t work.

Everyone thought the world would end when iPad didn’t support Flash. Two million units later I don’t think it’s stopped many people. Most sites adapted and many more will. If anything, it just makes people choosy on the sites they do visit and if you want to be one, you need to get your site in shape.

So where does Silverlight fit into all of this? Quite frankly I don’t think it does. It’s being adopted, but it’s no more accessible on mobile devices that Flash is. Switching a site over to Silverlight is just shooting yourself in the foot. I can’t see any sane person switching from Flash to Silverlight, and there seems to be no reason to build a site from the ground up using Silverlight. You’re still alienating way too many people.

Neither one of these is mobile technologies. Flash is at a tipping point. There will be a shift away from it regardless of what Adobe does. Silverlight is far too late in the game (no surprise there) to really gain a foothold. It would take a fundamental shift in thinking from both companies (which I don’t think they will do) to keep them relevant. It’s taken awhile, but that mobile market is really starting to have an impact on that desktop market and how people view the web. It’s been a good run, but I think technologies are moving beyond Flash and Silverlight.

As an aside I just read that Adobe is jumping on the 3D bandwagon for Flash. Can someone please explain to me just what the hell’s the point of all this 3D nonsense?