According to Russell:
ANY company/person who wants to ignore M$ is being stupid.
I'm being stupid. It's not that I want to ignore them, I simply do.
Ya know what? I'm fine with that. I really don't care what they're up to. Microsoft is largely irrelevant for me.
Posted by jzawodn at March 23, 2003 10:37 AM
I don't think it's at all stupid to *want* to ignore Microsoft. I think it's one of the sanest things you can do. But I think it's not as smart to actually do it. They're going to control mainstream computing for a long time to come. Anyone who truly ignores them in the high tech world is liable to become a dinosaur. It's not to say that everyone needs to go out and learn .Net, but it's a Good Thing to at least know what the big deal is, and why. Microsoft is succeeding in changing the web, and could make the likes of Yahoo! (and my company) irrelevant unless we pay close attention to where they're leading the mainstream masses.
Remember the mainframe folks at Marathon who used to be sought after programmers back in the day, and are still doing their thing without hardly knowing what the "Start" button does? ;-)
Thanks for the link Jeremy! I think the quote's a bit out of context though since I was talking about mobile developers and competitors to the Smartphone. I'm sure there are many, many people (like my Mom or yourself) who are blissfully unaware of what Microsoft's business plans are. ;-)
But is Microsoft really that irrelevant to you? Don't 90+% of Yahoo's customers use IE and Windows? Aren't any of the things you do affected by this? I can't imagine working in technology being 100% unaffected by the borg...
-Russ
Hey Russ,
Yeah, I purposely took that out of context.
I saw other bloggers pointing to you by using only that quote and figured I'd do the same with a bit of a twist. I agree with you in the context you're discussing, actually. I just saw it as a good opportunity to call myself stupid. :-)
As for Yahoo, yes. But the stuff I've been working on is all behind the scenes and completely browser/platform agnostic. The world could switch to Mac OS X running on AMD hardware and it wouldn't change the work I do. Of course, it would have a lot of impact on the company as a whole.