Even if this particular explosion was indeed a misfire, there have been many other attacks on health infrastructure including convoys since then, according to the UN.
After Israel had an (apparently justified) prolonged media war to combat the claims that it bombed that particular hospital, the IDF then deliberately bombed several other hospitals and even went to the lengths of publishing a 3D animation of an alleged underground complex to justify their intent to bomb the largest hospital which at that time was known to provide shelter to hundreds of civilians. Israel then also posted pictures of piping it misidentified as a tunnel entrance in the debris of a part of the hospital that it had bombed.
The problem with the disinformation and lies is that just like killing civilians this is somewhat anticipated coming from Hamas but catches people off guard when Israel does it and especially when Israel does it so blatantly that it's hard to pretend they're not doing it. Heck, there are now multiple incidents of fabricated evidence relying on the audience's inability to understand Arabic or ignorance of heavy accents that have been shared by official Israeli social media channels. This includes the supposed radio communication demonstrating that Islamists accidentally the entire hospital before it became obvious that it was likely not an Israeli attack and the damage was constrained to the parking lot. Heck, Israel's Twitter account even shared an IDF-affiliated account celebrating and justifying the attack on the hospital prior to this.
So, yes, the IDF most likely did not drop the bomb that apparently blew up that hospital's parking lot. But the IDF most definitely did drop bombs on other hospitals and has stated its intent of doing so and has justified doing so, both before and after this particular explosion. And Israel government social media accounts have incorrectly claimed the explosion as an IDF attack as well as shared fabricated evidence to the contrary and general mis- and disinformation.
In this war more than any others so far, everybody lies and no-one can be trusted. And strangely not only can Israel not be trusted when it denies wrongdoing but also when it explicitly claims it. At least the anti-Israel and pro-Hamas propaganda is normally more predictable. Israeli propaganda at this point feels more like an evolution on Russian propaganda which infamously tries to DDoS any attempt at fact checking by making multiple mutually contradictory claims in short succession.
Growing an already massive company company by 3x in revenue is the important thing, which is the 'bottom line' in which missteps have to be contextualized.
Any company in tech is going to make mistakes, this should be happening, so listing them off doesn't so much help - what matters is how all of this works out in the mix.
I worked in mobile during that time, it was vicious. Surely MS could have done better, but I view it more as lost opportunity than failure.
Remember that 80% of acquisitions fail. Google spent $3B on Nest. Apple spent $3 Billion on Beats, it remains to be seen if they'll make that up in profit.
Trying to compete in mobile and failing is a misstep. Microsoft missed out on smartphones, one of the fastest growing and most lucrative market segments in tech industry history.
Trying to compete in search and failing is also a misstep. Bing is just not as good as Google.
It's arguable that Azure would not have been successful under Ballmer either, because it's unlikely he would have embraced Linux to the extent that Nadella has.
The bottom line is that Ballmer was good at growing existing business but Microsoft was late to the game on a lot of industry trends under his watch, and when they did try to catch up they did not do a very good job -- Windows Phone is a perfect example.
It's impressive to grow existing business, but companies that do not successfully innovate eventually stagnate and that's not what investors want to see.
I agree that mobile and search were missteps, specifically putting themselves into a position of competing so poorly in those areas overall. It's also unrealistic to think that one company could own desktop, mobile, search, office, etc.
Microsoft was going to own desktop, mobile, search? $300-$400 billion in revenue? $130+ billion in profit?
No. That's absurd. Holding Ballmer to account for not conquering planet Earth is not a fair premise. Of course there were lots of 'missteps,' what's described is impossible. Their biggest mistake was attempting all of it in the first place.
Microsoft had mobile in its pocket - original win mobile that competed with Palm had the dominant market share, and it would've had more if they didn't nuke it with revamped win mobile.
> Growing an already massive company company by 3x in revenue is the important thing, which is the 'bottom line' in which missteps have to be contextualized.
Yes, he managed to creatively squeeze revenue out of existing markets. This is what he was known for.
But as far as finding new markets or growing existing markets, he failed and that's all Wall Street cares about.
> Surely MS could have done better, but I view it more as lost opportunity than failure.
> Remember that 80% of acquisitions fail. Google spent $3B on Nest. Apple spent $3 Billion on Beats, it remains to be seen if they'll make that up in profit
Ballmer's failure rate on major acquisitions may have been 100%. (I'm not even kidding)
> Apple spent $3 Billion on Beats, it remains to be seen if they'll make that up in profit.
Apple made $17.5B in revenue in FY18 in "Other Products". A sizable chunk of that is bound to be headphone revenue (and homepod may also have profited from the Beats acquisition).
Given the healthy margins that Apple tends to have across all its products, it seems plausible that even under quite conservative assumptions Apple easily made a billion or so in profit from that segment. And that's not even counting Apple Music.
Regarding Skype, it's acquisition has been argued to have been more in order to allow for NSA interception of VoIP traffic than it making business sense, though the truth behind that statement is highly debatable.
To me it was more interesting to get a glimpse of Satya Nadellas thought process:
> "as a CEO you need to create that continuous balance between the multiple constituents [that] is the real job"
and
> "Ultimately, if we don’t want to have a race to the bottom, we need to have some laws and regulations that govern how participants in the marketplace can make sure we don’t do things that have unintended consequences."
and more.
One might argue that thinking like this can be obtained in a two-day management course, or an afternoon with the corporate head of PR - still, many leaders don't even seem to understand the benefit of putting such into words, let alone use it as guiding principles.
>still, many leaders don't even seem to understand the benefit of putting such into words, let alone use it as guiding principles.
What you're looking at is a second-generation CEO. Nadellas was bred through the executive training program of an established organization, having received many two-day management courses, and he knows that an afternoon with the PR group is a good idea. This is in contrast to Gates and Balmer, which were first-generation "founder" CEOs.
The problem is they are no longer best-of-breed for any of their markets, except maybe Office.
Microsoft doesn't break out Azure revenue, but by all accounts it's quite small compared to AWS.
And Office is very much under threat. If you work with young people you'll notice they tend to prefer G Suite apps over Office - most likely because Google has done a great job getting their software into schools.
Did you know that most enterprises who had "tried" gSuite actually switched back to Office? Office is very much not under threat. By many estimates, Office revenue is over 20X that of gSuite and growing. I agree with you that a lot of young people grow up with gSuite because Google has done a fantastic job getting gSuite into schools and colleges. But when these young people go into corporate America (which is a lot bigger than just Silicon Valley), they quickly have reality handed to them, which is that most real work is done in Office.
And sorry, G Suite is a joke compared to desktop Office for serious work. It doesn't matter what the youngin's prefer, what matters is what gets (or facilitates getting) real work done in the enterprise, which generally revolves around Excel and PowerPoint in some fashion.
Microsoft includes a bunch of non-Azure products under their cloud revenue. And they do it to confuse people and falsely claim they're outpacing AWS, which as you just proved, works.
Because SaaS isn't cloud computing. SaaS is essentially a fully available software application that you don't run on your own machines.
There's similarities, but key differences that you can easily look up to better understand. Hence part of why most aren't huge fans of including O365 to claim Azure's bigger than AWS.
If the claim is that Azure is generating more revenue than AWS, then yes I would say that is misleading.
If the claim is that Microsoft's cloud revenue is bigger than Amazon's, I would assume that includes Office365. Office365 isn't just Word and Excel on the desktop, it's Outlook, Dynamics CRM, Sharepoint, Teams, etc.
Whether or not a company is taking full advantage of Outlook, Flow, Sharepoint Online, etc doesn't really matter in terms of revenue. If a company is paying for cloud products, that counts towards Microsoft's cloud revenue.
Even if the bulk of the Office365 ecals they're selling are for the lowest tier offering that still includes Outlook and Onedrive which a lot of organizations use fairly heavily.
Exactly! Microsoft is exploiting the “cloud” buzzword when including Office 365. I’m sure old baby boomer investors/advisors/managers couldn’t tell the difference. They want to be in the “growing cloud space”. Office 365 is just a continuation of the monopoly Excel and Word have on the business software market
I'm pretty skeptical of your claim there. I'm happy to admit I'm wrong if that's truly the case, but let's see some reputable references that backs that up first. I haven't been able to find anything that substantiates that claim.
If there is one area where I've been consistently wrong, it is betting on "powerful/serious tools" rather than simple, ubiquitous things that handle most of what people need. 'Simpler' tends to win vs 'better'.
Simply put, different markets. Students are now using Google Docs, and Sheets works well enough to plan out your holidays.
For someone that spits reports or jangle number all days, G-suite is a poorly thought-out joke.
A simple exemple: it's impossible to make custom styles in Docs. You can just redefine existing styles. And you can only apply one of these styles per paragraph (you can however, manually bold or change the font of some span within the paragraph... but not apply a premade style on a span of text smaller than a paragraph).
Even if the basic issues are fixed, Office is a powerhouse of features for power users, who'll keep paying good money for it, because it's well worth it.
My only uses of G Suite are for tracking expenses and one page letters, stuff that even Lotus 123 and Word 2.0 would be too advanced, and I have used them when they were modern.
For anything more serious I drop down into Office.
Or, if corporations like Microsoft did before, bribe the govn't to enforce the use of their products in schools and gvon't institutions, like they did in the '90s and early '00s.
> A Hungarian Government bid, worth $25B Hungarian Forints, roughly $157M was allegedly skewed towards MS
I clearly remember in the late 90s, when all the computer literacy exams were phrased explicitly to use Exel, Word, Explorer. The official European computer competency test (ECDL) until 2013 was explicit about Microsoft products as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Computer_Driving_Lice...
It is hard to convince people like me, who grew up in such level of corruption, that the people who were working for Microsoft as a high-level executive that time, they are not relying on public money any more.
G Suite is all fine for internal communications, but grossly incompetent for making a presentation for anything where aesthetics is for concern. Same for text documents.
That seems more like an entrenched opinion that you've continually looked to reaffirm instead of opening your perspective.
First, serious work & powerpoint? Really? Yeah in an enterprise organization that's largely stuck doing what they've been doing because it's worked - sure, but that's not a technology issue, it's a culture issue.
For example, Google Sheets covers 80-90% of the use cases for Excel. But that's not what you should be comparing. A lot of what folks use spreadsheets for to do complicated calculations, have built lengthy, stitched together macros to automate processes, etc. would be much better in many cases to consider a completely alternate approach.
i.e a data warehouse, hey use a service like BigQuery that requires minimal adminstration and requires users to really only have SQL knowledge.
In order to effectively work across a large organization across different functions, product lines, etc., you have to remove every point of friction that prevents collaboration, etc. Desktop Office is great for individual work, but in today's dynamics, it really seems like you put a ceiling on productivity by sticking to it.
Business users are not going to learn SQL. They're not going to move all their data into the cloud, setup access, manage resources and spend money to run queries that take a few seconds on their laptop. They're not going to use 20 different services to break out scratch work, analysis, charting, and BI from what runs in a single portable file that they can manage and backup and extend in unlimited ways from meeting to meeting.
There are billion dollar businesses that run on Excel, and many workers in all kinds of industries live in it all day because nothing else comes close. Those macros and automations are what empower them to get things done and drive business forward instead of worrying about the "right way" to do something.
This perspective that they're all naive and should use better tools just fails to understand how people actually work, and explains why G-Suite as it is today will never beat Excel.
I used Excel for several years, mostly doing development work for financial services companies. I now work at a small/medium-size tech company that uses Google Sheets. Sheets is fine for most of the things we need to do, but our needs are modest. Sheets' overall functionality pales in comparison to Excel, and it often feels laggy even on a good network.
The finance companies I mention above also had data warehouses, but that's a completely different use case and not what Excel is used for. It would not work as a replacement even if everyone knew SQL.
I wouldn't call G Suite a "joke", but I have to second the sentiment. For example, Google Slide still doesn't let you adjust the size of the arrowhead of a connecting line: it's tied to the line width.
And this is one of countless random things I could do with PowerPoint 15 years ago, when I was drawing slides for a freaking CS conference.
You ever tried actually using Azure `services`? What a joke! On the surface they try to have feature parity with their AWS analogues, scratch the surface any that illusion quickly evaporates. Nowhere close. As for O365 - old mode, still nowhere close to GSuite for new ways of working.
There is a gigantic market for basic office work that can be done in the Google apps, the Apple apps or the OpenOffice apps just as well as in Microsoft Office. Nobody cares if you think that isn’t ‘real’ work and if Microsoft thinks it's safe because they have the only product for ‘real work’ they are in for a rude awakening. They aren’t however, they have their own online suite that can’t do ‘real work’ either but works good enough for a lot of people.
How is G Suite a joke? It can definitely do some heavy lifting and a lot of enterprises are using it. Granted I've worked at a lot of places and most use office, but the ones that have used G Suite have way more collaboration. Its easier to share, collaborate, and not have files get lost in the shuffle. I much prefer it, plus I love using Sites vs Sharepoint.
Every slide deck ever that a director or VP has used to justify their budget for all that great Excel work. Every pitch deck to win a deal. Every teacher or professor that gives a presentation with PowerPoint. I hate endless slides, but fact is millions of people build and present them every day.
Well point one I think it's a shit way to disseminate information. Point two and more seriously, the alternatives aren't much worse in PowerPoint's case.
I don't disagree with you at all. But that is real work that millions of people get paid to spend millions of man-hours on. Specifically with PowerPoint. That's all I'm saying.
The question is what counts as "real work". Certainly work done with Google's office suite counts as well, considering that Google and many other companies run their businesses using it.
> The problem is they are no longer best-of-breed for any of their markets
Operating systems? I personally love Windows 10 (now its more mature), and Windows Server 2019 is embracing containers.
On cloud, AWS is very entrenched, but Microsoft can capture a lot of the enterprise market. I've worked extensively with Azure, and I think it's a fantastic product. TBH, I'm not sure there is a "best of breed" cloud provider - they each have their strengths and weaknesses, and there is plenty of room in the market for all the big players as well as smaller, specialised ones.
The same! Windows 10 seemed like it started out stable enough, but it’s been getting flakier by the year for me. I’m now keeping a log of things that go wrong with it, just for fun. Every once in a while I look at the list and ask myself, how on earth did they screw up start menu search?![0]
There are ways for us "end-users" to get a hold of LTSC. First download the demo from microsoft then go to ebay to buy a key from some shady guy for 14$. Seems to work for me :P
Windows operating systems are just a gigantic bloated and underperforming mess.
Server 2019 is no exception.
At the company I work for IT ops deliver VMs as a service. The windows ones have huge disk footprint and take at least 3 times as long to deliver. Moreover dsc is not featureful enough compared with ansible. So it's also a pain to script/automate for. The failure rate is higher.
And let's not forget the need to put antivirus on them.
Lots and lots of reasons to escape from that platform, I could go on for a while.
Yes, and they are plenty fast. The API could be more elegant, but it works fine. Mysql for example uses io_submit. So do oracle, sybase.
It's just a matter of developer comfort. They work around it for us.
Deployment-wise, linux runs circles around windows.
Office and windows go hand in hand though. Windows is a clear winner over ChromeOS. For comparing it to MacOS its debatable what is qualitatively better, both systems are full of tradeoffs.
Personally I lean towards MacOS because homebrew and terminal.app are pretty good. Updates are pretty unobtrusive and wifi is easy to manage. I'm not sure that these are hard hitting features for most users.
G Suite is very appealing over MS Office with the collaboration and version history features until you experience waiting MINUTES for spreadsheets to update. If Google moved some of the processing from the user's browser to their servers then, I believe, more people would make the switch.
Office on the web also has the same collaboration features now, and has had for years. Google's real time collaboration is slightly better, but I've worked in organizations that use Office and organizations that use Google. gSuite offline mode makes for many unproductive business flights (ie it simply does not work properly). Large spreadsheets choke up Sheets as you mention.
>And Office is very much under threat. If you work with young people you'll notice they tend to prefer G Suite apps over Office - most likely because Google has done a great job getting their software into schools.
It is not. Many are switching to Office 365, those who tried GSuite in Enterprise are moving back.
Young people may prefer GSuite, but then they learn the whole world is built on Excel. Eyes opening for every generation of people coming into work how multi billions dollar of revenue dependant on Excel and no one wants to touch it with a ten foot pole.
There were once kids were using Snapchat and said only old people use WhatsApp. I laughed and replied yeah you are right. Then they left their fantasy youth and join the real world, look at what they use for business? WhatsApp ( Or WeChat in China ).
I live in India, and after years of 'ahem' using office, I started paying for their 4000 Rs (50 USD) per year subscription for 5 PCs, 3 or 5 Tablets/Mobiles pack.
Speaking as an OS engineer who's worked on both kernels a lot, Windows is way better under the hood for low-latency, responsive end user stuff than linux
Then again, WinMo 7 was way faster and more responsive than Android at the time, and look how that turned out..
The PREEMPT_RT patchset (sometimes confusingly referred to as RT-Linux) is slated to improve the kernel quite a bit wrt. "low-latency" and "responsive" workloads.
> Speaking as an OS engineer who's worked on both kernels a lot, Windows is way better under the hood for low-latency, responsive end user stuff than linux
Still it's probably a lot cheaper to fix some latency issues on linux that to maintain your whole kernel.
The main issue with linux is the GPL for drivers, a long with kernel API instability.
Yeah I remember reading this particular comment when it was new.
It mostly feels like “ok guys this is the best we get out of this” to me though. If they do not go with a different approach, the filesystem will always be an issue with WSL.
I planned ditching my mac in favor of WSL. Due to MBP hardware issues and the fact that a git status would take 10x time drove me away.
I keep a Debian VM around with Samba exporting my ~/src directory to the Windows host. That way it’s possible to avoid file system issues while still being able to use editors and other tools (Adobe CC apps in my case).
git status maybe 10x slower on WSL than native Linux - I wonder how much slower it is than macOS - in my brief use macOS filesystem never felt anywhere near Linux fast to me.
Never been bothered by it in practice but good question. The newish filesystem (apfs) feels faster in daily use so your experience might be outdated by now.
Why would it need to be Linux? I love linux, but mostly because it works well and is open source. I'd love for a big tech company to put their weight behind SEL4. That would go a long way for Microsoft: formally proven security, tiny footprint, good performance, etc. It's something that has massive potential for super computers all the way down to IOT. It just needs a proper ecosystem behind it.
Or maybe buy QNX off of Blackberry and make it open source again. That would also be nice.
I think as long as Microsoft holds onto Windows tightly the better bet in the future will always be a Linux or UNIX-like OS. Like many other things, the thing that works more like evolutionary systems tend to prevail. Linux might be the dominant race of the UNIX ancestry tree at the moment, but it may not retain that dominance and the thing that will overtake it will probably come from the same UNIX evolutionary roots, e.g. the BSD side where FreeBSD, Darwin, MacOS and iOS came from or the other Linux side branches like Android and Chrome, or somewhere less unexpected. The only way Windows tree OSes will prevail over this is if they allow more branches to evolve, even open source parts of it. User interfaces tend to do better if owned by an organisation with a concentrated purpose and commercial vision, but the stuff under the bonnet seems to do a lot better from being more open and evolutionary.
Looking at the embedded market OSes, everyone is pretty keen in moving away from Linux into RTOS, mbed, NuttX, Tizen IoT, RIOT, eventually Fuchsia, ....
Who knows which ones will survive, however they all have two things in common, they aren't GPL based and just enough POSIX to keep C and C++ happy. Additionally some of them do have stable ABI for drivers.
Linux's long term victory might be constrained to the server room, and even there it is debatable, given the increase in managed runtimes for micro-services, which could even be running bare metal for what I care.
Microsoft already has a lot invested in Linux support. They're not going to switch to something with a fraction of the community and ecosystem even if it has a lot of good qualities.
The Phone OS is still my favourite UI and was incredibly unique when first introduced. Live tiles in an era of pages of icons was way ahead of it's time. The phone hardware was/is great too; the lack of apps destroyed them though
I'm super loyal to the Microsoft Basic mouse. It lasts forever whereas all the Logitech M100's that I've purchased (and I've purchased a lot of them) don't last more than 6 months. Sad!
+1, had a Microsoft Mouse 5000 for the last ~5 years. Good for larger hands, love the smooth scrolling having got used to it. Needs the odd teardown to remove fluff from the optical wheel sensor, I can live with that fine :)
Actually, most of Microsoft is still a huge sales organization. Any technical role that is part of a subsidiary and isn’t in support is under sales, and they have been relentlessly driving Azure because that’s their top priority.
I'm not really seeing software, more services including Azure and online versions of apps and even Windows as a subscription. I'm sure there's lots of consulting in there too.
It's a drop in the ocean though, I'm aware there's is a little of that but if you look at revenues you can say that without being too wrong. The in-house stuff is mostly a function designed to enable customers better more than a way to squeeze money out of it. It doesn't even crack the billion dollars (it's around 300M last time I checked).
But yeah, I should have known that given the crowd on hacker news I should have protected my statement from the "actually..." crowd.
The stat (more drug addicts than students) is actually true for all of America's population as well, so I'd imagine the same is true in just about any major US population center.
> It's not even really a city, but more just a place where exurbanites congregate from 9 to 5 to conduct commerce.
Definitely not the case. Lots of people live in the city of San Francisco, though it's also true a lot of people commute in from the South and East Bays.
There are good things about the city, but the homeless problem (and really, that's what I think this is about) is a very serious issue that makes the place much, much less desirable.
>Even if they added this feature, the API bug would still remain (it would just be covered up by the UI).
It's not really a bug though. It sounds like DS shows a dashboard for the user absent an instruction to show a different page. That's a reasonable default.
>A sophisticated enough client user would still have access to the all data associated to the API user.
If you use one account to access an API then of course it's your responsibility to control access. How would the API provider be able to do that?
I think the part that you may be missing is that View 1 (embedded view) is hosted on DocuSign's domain.
So the view may be designed by the client, but it's not hosted by the client. It's hosted on DocuSign.
Then View 2, is the "dashboard" view which of course isn't designed by the client.
In an ideally designed embedded View 1, it should not be possible to get to DocuSign's "dashboard" (View 2). Sessions should be tracked in DocuSign's API and View 1 refreshes should return the user to hosted View 1 or should return an error.
I thought OP was embedding something from DS in their page. It sounds like they are redirecting a user to DocuSign.com. I agree that the user being able to access the requester's DS is a massive security issue. So massive that it seems implausible that it actually works that way, but I don't have any experience to know one way or another.
The US is actively terrorizing their homelands.