FOSS Week in Review
The Microsoft saga continues…
Ten or twelve years ago somebody noticed that no one except IBM ever entered into a partnership with Microsoft and survived. Since then a few got lucky, but not many, and one of them wasn’t Nokia. For the life of us, we can’t figure what ever convinced the Finnish folk that hiring Stephen Elop, then head of Redmond’s business software division, as CEO was a good idea. We guess they never really grokked the whole understanding-history-or-being-doomed-to-repeat-it concept.
When Mr. Elop decided to scrap all plans for all mobile operating systems other than Windows Phone at Nokia, red flags should’ve gone up. We figure the only reason they didn’t is that the Finns spent most of the 20th century nurturing an aversion to red flags. In this case, the aversion cost them dearly. They bet the farm on an OS that no one else wanted and now the used-to-be-leader in the cell phone business is just another division of Microsoft.
We’ve grown used to seeing demonstrations of computer tech in these police proceedurals, but rarely anything that looks so obviously like a commercial. In all instances, the camera lingers on a shot of the GUI formerly known as Metro. In some cases we see Skype being used, with the brand conspicously evident. In others, we get treated to watching a handheld tablet turn into something resembling a laptop, perhaps a netbook, when the device is connected with it’s cover keyboard. Wow! Microsoft magic at work.
