crenshaw

I once decided to cut cord to the vanity light in my car (long story why). Even though the car was off I was able to get quick a scare. Lesson, electricity in a car is not off when the key is out. I was close to winning one of those Darwin awards.

I don't even think you need to call them jerks. Just say something like, "Our new licensing deals have us moving to a model where we are charged, not for how often you stream video, but for everyone who could potentially stream video. This means that if you're not watching our instant streaming at all today, but only using the DVD service, we still have to count you as a head. So we decided that the best way to handle this was to separate our DVD from streaming service. This way we, and you, pay for the services you use, and not what you don't.

Now you may then ask, 'why the fee hike?' Simply put, the math doesn't add up otherwise. To keep $9.99 pricing we'd have to do something like $4.99 for DVD rental and $4.99 for video streaming. Compare our DVD pricing to Blockbuster -- even at $7.99/month we're still cheaper. $4.99 for video streaming would only barely cover our licensing costs. We found a reasonable price point that allows us to offer great DVD and streaming services going forward."

A couple of points:

* People forget that Microsoft is used to selling Windows that runs on multiple architectures. They had(have?) Itanium, DEC Alpha, PowerPC, and MIPS in the past. Of course those were targeted at professionals, not consumers.

* I don't think MS really cares that much about x86 native apps running on ARM. They care about desktop managed apps running on ARM. Why? LOB apps. LOB apps are managed and they want to support ARM tablet users having access to these.

* Related to the above point, there are actually few native x86 apps that really matter. Look at the Amazon top 20 selling SW list. It's basically: Office, Windows, Intuit, Adobe, and antivirus. Microsoft ships half of the top 20. They'll be shipping antivirus, so effectively shipping 2/3rd of the top 20. The only apps in the top 20 they'd need to get are Intuit (Quickbooks/Quicken/TurboTax) and Adobe Premiere XYZ. MS can probably have at launch 95% of the cycles consumed by native x86 apps on ARM.

With that said, for once, I do think Gruber is generally correct.

The other thing that is interesting is:

"Android and iOS are covered tons in the media, and Windows Phone—surprisingly for a Microsoft product—seems to have missed the boat on brand awareness. An embarrassing 45 percent of consumers surveyed by NPD said they were unaware of Windows Phone 7.

And among the 50 percent of consumers who said they will be buying a smartphone, but didn’t want to buy a Windows Phone, the biggest reason, accounting for 46 percent of respondents, was because they didn’t know enough about the Windows Phone OS."

Basically if you know about WP then you'd consider it. But nearly as many people don't know about it at all as those that have heard of it.

A lot of people wondered why in the world would MS endorse a 4'7" phone (the HTC Titan). From people I know who work retail, including a cousin who works for ATT retail, people come into stores wanting either an iPhone or a smartphone.

The iPhone users are pretty set. Their kids have it, or they had one before, or their wife has one, or everyone tells them it is the best.

For people not set on iPhone, it sounds like the decision is often made in the store. And apparently big screens and thin phones area big deal. Android has dominated the retail presence. If WP can match the retail presence, it can probably start splitting some sales with Android.

Mary Jo Foley just came out and said the exact opposite now:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-desktop-apps-w...

Sinofsky is of course the person to listen to, but I'm concerned that wires aren't crossing correctly -- and I'm not sure from where.

What's this Backberry OS? :-)

Others do have the PDF. Seems to just vary. Most of the ones I clicked did have full papers attached.

Thanks. That is definitive.

OK. And Windows on ARM won't run Amiga apps either. You and I both know that's not really related to what the poster stated. The poster said that ARM will only run Metro apps. You can not run x86 apps and still run non-Metro apps. And you can run x86 apps, but not run non-Metro apps. It's a completely orthogonal statement.

Has that been stated or confirmed?

I seemed to remember reading somewhere that Microsoft weren't going to take a cut,

No cut of legacy apps I believe.

Although Metro apps are HTML5 right?

Some are. Can also be managed code or native.

I don't mind having both worlds, in fact I like it, I just don't want them so intermingled.

When coding, doing a research paper, or going through my finances, I want classic desktop mode. I'm probably at my laptop, and mostly typing, searching files, etc... I don't want to see Metro.

But I'd love to be able to take that laptop and sit on the couch or in bed and either convert it to a tablet or treat it as one (with a touchscreen) and go into Metro mode.

The thing I like about the two worlds is that I like the ability to get disrupted while on my tablet, due to some work email, and be able to quickly address it on the same machine. I like the fact that I could get a link to a Flash site, and drop out of Metro and check it out. I like being in classic desktop and get hankering to play a game and drop into the Metro app store to get some .99 cent game to kill an hour.

But most of the time I don't want the two worlds to collide. And when they do I want to explicitly choose to do so.

And it seems like everyone has this feedback. I can't help but believe MS is going this direction.

There are no downsides when you decline to talk

Doesn't the highlighted section actually note that silence can be used against you? It would seem you need to decline to talk and request counsel, if I understood correctly.

This depends. For most startups what you say is true. You can launch 5 times and most wouldn't notice. But for a startup with a lot of press, a bad launch can hurt momentum (I'd think). Look at Color.

Doesn't work on IE5 mobile. :-) (I did actually try though)

That's horrible. This article did also remind me to cancel my streaming (but now I'll wait until the end of the month ;-). I'm going the surprising route of doubling down on DVDs now.

Congats! I never heard of Etude, but looks really cool. Gonna go get it (if it's still available).

Isn't it amazing to see how much MS is driving the industry. Apple is doing a smartphone, TV focused UI, tablet, and cloud services. :-)

If that's the case then it would be great to hear the reason from one of you who are on the C# design team and reading news.yc :)

I'd second that. Maybe someone @MS could send this to the Async team?

What the C# designers don't seem to have noticed is that async/await is very closely related to LINQ and could have been built as a new syntax on top of LINQ.

Considering the C# designers include Erik Meijer and work closely with Don Syme, I find it hard to believe that they didn't notice this. But you're right, it's not as powerful or general as what is in F# (which I really need to learn better, as every time I look at it, I want to code in it).

I suspect the C# designers looked at what one of the biggest problems they have is, and it is asynchronous computation (especially w/ respect to the UI thread) and said that F# async workflows solve this problem. But too generally. What do I mean by that. With the current C# solution the syntatic changes are minimal to a completely sequential program. It's not as general, but easier to write and understand.

I wouldn't be surprised if C# added async workflows full on in a future version, when they'll point to async/await and say "you've been doing it for years -- it's not hard at all!"

You nailed it. The other thing is that .NET devs generally aren't framework devs. They're app devs.

With that said, there are some nice frameworks that exist, but competing against the top framework vendor, Microsoft, is tough. And while most on HN won't understand this, most .NET devs are actually quite happy with what MS is doing -- and most generally feel like MS actually does listen to the dev community.

I see you confuse being available (as in "I kept a copy around") with being alive and actively developed.

I see you confuse source being available with being alive and actively developed. Sure, in theory, with source available its possible that someone pick it up and keep it alive. But often you either need a critical mass for that. MySQL may go on forever, but I can walk through the GitHub or SourceForge cemetery to find many dead bodies that will likely never be resurrected.

BTW, for many companies, you can often get the code in escrow. So if they discontinue or stop supporting the product, you get the source code.

That's right, photoshop isn't going to be going Metro anytime soon, and neither is Matlab, or Autocad, or Excel, or video editing software, or any "Pro" program (for lack of a better word).

I'd actually be surprised if there isn't a fully staffed team working on a Metro version of the Office suite.

I don't think cohesiveness across these systems needs to be a prereq. In classic mode things should work great. In Metro mode things should work great. Bumpiness in transition, IMO, is acceptable for v1.

To put it another way, I'd much rather have bumpiness shipped on day X rather than a delay to clear up all the transition bumpiness and ship 6 months after X. Although I'd like to see updates that fix the transitions come out a 8-12 months after release.

Metro is actually meant to be "soulless" by design. It's supposed to be distinctly digital. The idea is that your "connections" come from your actual social web, not from rendered wood textured bookshelves. At least, that's the idea.

I think the act of flipping between them is not meant to be a common event. But I do agree they do need to clean up the edges, although I don't think its "critical" for v1 of Metro.

I don't think that's true. Can you point to a source? I've heard and seen only the opposite.

All of the WP7 devices will be able to run Mango. Mango hasn't been released yet for existing phones, but speculation is that it will happen on Sept 23rd. Although I don't know what the roll out will look like.

I'm running into an issue while in the Desktop where links open in the Metro IE, instead of Desktop IE.

This they have to fix. I imagine they will. The only way to go from "classic" back to Metro is either by opening a Metro app (not IE) or by explicitly invoking Metro. Otherwise you should stay in "classic".