aceperry

If anything, Nadella presents a vastly different attitude from MS than the previous CEOs. For one thing, I haven't seen the incredible arrogance towards other companies and technologies that MS has had in the past. Such as when Ballmer promised to kill linux, and called open source software a cancer. Now MS is open sourcing a lot of software.

Another thing that Nadella is doing is pushing new technologies and ideas which is not usually seen from MS. As the article mentions, MS was usually playing catch up or me too. These are promising changes, but still, because MS has been a fierce competitor who pretty much screwed over a lot of their partners and other companies that they've done business with, they became one of the most feared companies in the tech field. I'm left with the sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe one of the reasons for that is the way MS pushed Windows 8 and their tablets. I've seen the corporate speak and boosterism that their people have been spouting when it first came out. Although it was still under Ballmer's reign, they are recent enough to make me wonder how quickly MS people can change under Nadella. Or if they'll even change. Nadella needs to make a huge impression to both the public as well as to MS employees if he's going to really change the culture and business practices of MS. In summary, Nadella seems to be the best person to do this job.

"In the cases such as Google, they also tend to create a monoculture which probably feels right at the moment but I think really hurts the company in the long term"

I would agree with you about the monoculture aspect where they tend to hire new college grads from mostly the top colleges. I thought it's a little bit too inbred, but they also buy a lot of companies and get a much broader set of employees that way. Although, they might dump a lot of the acquired employees instead of keeping them on permanently once the acquisition goes through.

It seems to me that the focus at HN is on startups that aim for huge growth, and not really small businesses; especially not small, stable businesses that don't have much potential to grow very large. The subject of the article is a small business that won't really scale well. One of the biggest topics of discussion at HN is around the topic of scaling a business.

I'm glad to see an article like this which reminds us that small businesses can be an important part of our society. I also see some efforts by some people in the ycombinator network to expand beyond the mechanics of doing startups. I attended last year's startup school and was blown away and inspired by one of the speakers, Danae Ringelmann: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPbHf4i6CrQ&list=PLQ-uHSnFig...

Great article. Also brings up an aspect of the tech startup mentality that bothers me from time to time. From my reading of pg and ycombinator's focus on fast hockey stick like growth curves, it seems that you can easily dismiss/overlook small and steady businesses like Klippers which can perform very important roles in our lives.

I'm not criticizing pg and the ycombinator crowd, in fact I have much respect and admiration for what they're trying to achieve. But I think small businesses don't get the respect that they deserve.

Nice setup. I've used vnc before, not x11vnc so I'm not sure if it's similar. But vnc seemed to require a lot of bandwidth to run. But it's definitely nice.

Pretty cool idea, I never thought of remotely admin into an Ubuntu laptop. I know it's easy to do, just never thought of it.

I know that's what a lot of industry does for windows systems, but hey, you got to do a lot to keep windows on line.

The only engineering management program at our school is a graduate degree for engineers with undergrad engineering degrees already. One of the attractions of Comp Sci was the availability of jobs, which was why they tried to complete a traditional engineering program in the first place. It was kind of hilarious to see a frustrated student complaining about one of the simpler classes, but then explain that he was enduring the pain because of a job at the end of the tunnel.

Your comments about the software development process reminds me of the arguments from a few years ago, against open source software, like linux. One of the arguments for professionally made, closed source, proprietary software (like Microsoft windows), was that; programmers getting paid by a corporation would obviously develop better software than a bunch of unpaid, unprofessional, part-time hackers. Funny how much that argument has changed today.

"Hardware people see software as just hardware that can be easily reconfigured"

Not really, not if you have a realistic view of software. When I was an EE student, about half of my classmates loved software, the other half didn't like it and weren't good at it. And in silicon valley, a lot of EEs ended up doing software at all levels. I've always been jealous of how creative software could be, and didn't have the same limitations as hardware. Lots of hardware is usually programmed at low levels by EEs, which essentially ends up being drivers, and other board support software. They also realize that their training and education is not at the same level as software engineers in software.

BTW, it used to be that if you couldn't cut it in engineering, EE/ME/ChemE, and you wanted to pursue a technical degree, most people would go into computer science. I realize it's not like that today, but that's how it was back in the day.

The xcode problems sounds almost like Google's change to Android Studio from eclipse. Except, Android Studio was never as bad, and it got better very quickly. In fact, Andoid Studio is probably at least as good as eclipse for Android development.

That's an amazing story. I had no idea how screwed up Radio Shack's management was. I knew they didn't have much business sense, but this is required reading.

I always call the store to confirm if the website is correct. And half the time, they don't have in stock what the website claims. That may be why the employees are so eager and helpful in looking for the part.

It's a shame. RS doesn't really have much anymore in the way of electronics components, but they have some parts which cater to the arduino/maker community which helps when in a pinch. I really missed being able to get just about any electronic component when I moved from the southbay to SF. RS is now the only place where I could get the bare essentials in San Francisco.

Very nice pic from your Canon A610. Fully agree about P&S cameras today. I wouldn't run down the quality of today's top of the line phones, they're very good.

Not being sarcastic. The cyanogen guys don't have the support such as early releases, drivers, etc that LG and the other manufacturers have.

Damn that's quick! These guys are fast.

You mean javascript right? :-)

The top end smartphones have cameras that are at least good enough to replace casual point and shoot cameras. Their excellent quality is worlds apart from the new Nokia phone's camera. While the vast majority of people use smartphones for calls, sms, and the camera, there is huge growth in mobile based purchasing, gaming, and social network usage. There are lots of different things that people do with smartphones, maybe not everyone uses the same app or game, but the flexibility of the smartphone makes it possible.

The inexpensive feature phones have much better battery life, less expensive than the cheapest smartphone, and are probably more rugged/durable. They do get the job done as a phone and a few other things. If you don't have much use for a smartphone, then this is perfect. I'm sure there are still a relatively large subset of people who would rather have a feature phone than a smartphone.

Pretty sure whatsapp is on that platform.

I don't think it has a touchscreen. Didn't see them touching on the video.

I think it's Symbian, series 30+.

The new Nokia model numbers keep getting smaller, along with the shrinking feature set and capabilities. They really are aiming for the low end/budget demographic. Although I wonder if the subsidies will help or hurt sales in the low end though. Its got the retro Nokia look which probably helps sales. Since it has only 8MB of RAM, it's no surprise that Microsoft didn't put WinPhone on it.

Yeah, kind of new to this. Not to the internet though.

Nice writeup, especially if you already learned this stuff a while ago. I suspect that if you're not familiar with the x86 architecture, you'd be lost very quickly.

LOL, more downvotes? That's bad form.

"I'm sure if everyone switched to Linux today, they'd start by talking about how much faster it is and within a few years be complaining about how the same system is slow and unreliable"

Not at all. Linux isn't windows. I don't know if that happens to OSX, but adding slow software to linux only slows the system when the software is running. The best example of that would be flash, which will bring a linux box to its knees. Once you kill the flash process, everything is back to normal.

No justification for the downvotes? I'll chalk it up to fanboism.

"There's big ticket improvements for performance"

Unfortunately, the improvements were negated by the lame ass UI, which thankfully Microsoft will be ditching.

Must be lots of windows fanbois here, otherwise I'm not sure why I got downvoted. Really, they may not want to hear this, but Windows 8 really sucked. Microsoft knows it, and that is why they're running away as fast as they can from it.