Microsoft CEO Admits to Windows Mobile Mistakes, Promises Better Future

"I think you're giving him too much credit. He's just a troll, plain and simple."

True, but I'm at fault for being overly curious. I wonder what makes a person that way. Inferiority complex in real life that they can pretend doesn't exist when on-line? Severe introversion that leads to a chronic dislike of other people? A pressing need to be loved by one and only one group of people (i.e. upset everyone else, and get bonus points among your very-limited peers, like Cindy Shehan and other fringe activists).

Call me intellectually curious. Granted I'm reading medical journals about leukemia these days, so maybe researching trolling will get more of my attention after the benefit of time makes me less freaked out about other things.

@Christopher:

I think you're giving him too much credit. He's just a troll, plain and simple.

"Who needs a GPS unit when you can just pull out your iPhone and run an app?"

You do realize that handling a phone, including touching the screen to put in data, is rapidly becoming illegal while driving. Unless it can do absolutely everything via voice, directions, dialing, etc, you can't legally use these things in cars. Bluetooth integration will help, but alas the car still needs to run an OS for that.

I know you're basically a schmoe trying to instigate fights with everyone, but you really need to grow up. You're as bad as those political extremists who think one political party needs to rule the world or we're all going to die.

Either you derive humor from this, which means you're not remotely a good person, or you find nothing wrong, which means you have other issues. Seriously, look at yourself in a mirror before you start trying to insult everyone paying for their mortgages, paying off college loans, saving for their kids, etc.

Christopher:

"I never slammed Apple in that regard. What's your point? The iPod port isn't running software. The car is. Tens of millions of people own iPods. That's fine, who cares? Tens of millions of iPods also don't run cars. Competitively though, Windows CE/Mobile sells a lot of units, in the tens of millions annually. Just not all in a smart phone chassis."

My point was that you're trying to claim some victory for Microsoft because their failed software is running in millions of cars, and I pointed out that those cars all have iPod connectors. Eventually, nobody will want or need crashing Microsoft software in cars because it will all be in the phone anyway, and Apple owns that market. Who needs a GPS unit when you can just pull out your iPhone and run an app?

Like a turd sailing toward its destiny, Microsoft continues its spiral down the toilet bowl. Windows--a toy OS for playing videogames. OS X--for getting real work done.

"I don't think that's the case anymore."

Last I was aware, they're running on SAP. Apple needed to do custom clients so that their point of sale systems could interface with an SAP back-end (but I can assure you, the computer on the other side is missing their logo). Their roaming employees still use Symbol/Moto WinMo devices, and their warehouses use the same (plus the aforementioned toughbooks since that's the only computer that a warehouse worker can't kill in 2 hours).

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd think that their back-end is running Oracle on Linux or Solaris.

The biggest ERP system I've customized was probably for about 3-5,000 employees, give or take, and that was on a truly massive amount of hardware for the day. For a company 6 times the size, you'd need something staggering, and the publicly retailed Apple server hardware can't scale out that large. We're talking multiple >=16 processor machines (and I don't mean cores, but distinct CPUs). If you actually take a step back, it's pretty hysterical how much horsepower a company of that size requires for ERP.