Stewart Alsop: Alas, Poor Microsoft ... You Used to Be So Interesting

Stewart Alsop: Alas, Poor Microsoft ... You Used to Be So Interesting "Will Longhorn rock the world? I don't think so. For one thing, the computer industry has dreamed of universal file systems since the days of the Nixon administration or even earlier. Microsoft won't be any better at achieving that dream than IBM, Digital, Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, or any other company that has attempted the same thing.
Even if Longhorn is a big improvement over Windows, it still won't ignite a revolution. Why? Because—and believe me, I never thought I'd say this in a million years—Microsoft's software is good enough. We all bitch and moan about one shortcoming or another, as I've often done in these pages over the years. But there's not a whole lot Microsoft can do to make its programs so much better that they justify the suffering we have to endure any time we upgrade to something new. Longhorn might get geeks all sweaty with desire, but to the rest of us, it's still just an operating system."

Via Ray Ozzie