I don't take much stock in these articles anymore after being directly
involved in something like this piece from the article:
One of its first converts is Matthew W. Dunn, the
chief information officer at Intrawest Corp.
(IDR ), a Vancouver (B.C.)-based skiing operator
with 10 resorts, including Whistler
Mountain in British Columbia and Copper Mountain
in Colorado. He wanted to set up a single
Web site where skiers could book vacations to any
of its resorts, arranging for lodging, lift
tickets, ski rentals, and classes. But Dunn also
wanted to tie those orders back into
Intrawest's software programs that track customer
relationships and accounting.
SLIPPERY SLOPE. It proved tricky. He ran into
glitches with software from Oracle and
e-commerce software maker BroadVision Inc. (BVSN )
But using early versions of
Microsoft's .Net technology and e-business
software from Vancouver-based Pivotal Corp.
(PVTL ), he got the system running in just 90
days.
I was at a site that is one of the success stories on M$ website.
They claimed it took 90 days to implement M$ wonderful software.
It was 1 year and 90 days on a project that should have been 60 days.
It was way over budget and it didn't work as well as the old system.
Two people took care of the old system, over 10 take care of the new
system.
That's with having M$ engineers on site for next to nothing.
Those geniuses couldn't setup up a backup system.
One person confided to me months after, that they still did not have one
good backup.
Or how about this doozy:
Perhaps the most ambitious research foray is
Microsoft's 10-year march toward solving
natural-language processing. It's a techie name,
but the concept behind it is simple and quite
powerful. It's the idea that computers will be
able to respond to questions or commands in
everyday language, not just computerese or a long
series of mouse clicks. Combine that with
speech recognition--another area where Microsoft
researchers are plugging away--and one
day you'll be able to talk to your computer the
same way you do to another person. Microsoft
has woven rudimentary natural language into such
products as Office. The next step is
delivering more advanced capabilities in the
version of Windows due out in two years or so,
code-named Blackcomb.
M$ and AI. Now that's an oxymoron.
I used to drive one of the CSCI professors at the UofM to work everyday
because he's blind.
He is one of the top AI researchers in the world.
I asked him about this once and he thought maybe in 50 years you might
see something like this.
One things for sure, stuff like this will not be coming from M$.
Unless it involves users getting their licensing fees to M$ faster.
Bob Tanner wrote:
> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_23/b3735001.htm
>
> MS to dominate the 'net.
>
> --
> Bob Tanner <tanner at real-time.com> | Phone : (952)943-8700
> http://www.mn-linux.org | Fax : (952)943-8500
> Key fingerprint = 6C E9 51 4F D5 3E 4C 66 62 A9 10 E5 35 85 39 D9
>
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