jducoeur

For those interested in the history of the Borg, there's an amusing article now online, with an interactive timeline of keywords from Microsoft's history. Basically, they've taken a bunch of articles, ads, and interviews from Microsoft over the past several decades, and analyzed each one into a tag cloud, so you can see what they were most concerned with at the time.

It's a small enough data set that it's not fully representative -- each article has its own concerns, which often overwhelm the broader historical trends -- but it's still an intriguing way to quickly examine how things have changed over the years...

The latest buzz is that Microsoft, having entered the consumer-security market, is planning on diving deeply into the enterprise-security one as well, selling their own security software in competition to Symantec and the like. Quoting the article from ZDNet:

"This is a rather safe play," said Charles Kolodgy, an analyst at IDC. "It is easier than building the security into products and not being able to directly capture revenue."

Uh-huh. So let's rephrase this -- Microsoft has decided that it's too expensive and difficult to ship secure products. Okay, yes -- we all knew that they felt that way. But tacitly admitting it, and then charging people extra to get the fixes to those broken products is rather breathtakingly cynical, even by Microsoft standards...