Empower Program for ISVs

> Then they did something which surprised me: they made every one of those questions optional. Not just for me, for everyone.

And why would MS waste your time with typing in this info, when they could just extract it from your Excel and Word documents and send it to microsoft.com behind your back?

Martin A. Boegelund
Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Oh, grow up.

Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Admitted, it may look like a troll.

But think about it:
President Bush comes home from a visit to China, and tells he has struck the deal of the century: China will deliver all the weapons the US will need, at a fraction of the "real" price, _and_ they will maintain all railroad tracks and airport runways in the US as an extra bonus _and_ they will stop asking questions about how many soldiers there are in the States. Deal of the century!

How can Joel claim that he is sitting in his safe place, untouchable by his biggest could-be competitor (Microsoft), when they deliver/own 99% of his cyber-infrastructure?

Martin A. Boegelund
Thursday, October 23, 2003

Watching too much X-Files.  MS doesn't have some secret government plan.  They're not mining your data.  Bill Gates does not have a underground lair with paid thug guards.

Mulder wakes up to reality; works at McD's
Thursday, October 23, 2003

Yeah, you're right. I guess that's why they didn't ask questions about these things in the first place.
But wait... They _did_ ask questions about annual revenues and number of employees...

How strange that a company wastes it's own time and the time of its customers with questions they don't really need the answers for...

Martin A. Boegelund
Thursday, October 23, 2003

The reason they took the questons off was that they realized they were stopping people signing up for the program.

The information they were asking for is standard when you do something as simple as sign up for a free newsletter.

You've simply got an internal confilct here between marketing which wants to have as much info as possible, and the more technically oriented guys, who want people developing software ror them because that's the way they've always assured the suprmacy of the platform.

You see the same thing over Linux; do a search on the MS site and you will find the marketing department with documents bashing Linux, and the developers department with articles on how to communicate with it, and even how to install a virtual Linux partition.

Stephen Jones
Thursday, October 23, 2003

Just today I was talking with Unisys, and they were asking the same questions about employees and yearly revenue, etc.  And that was just for international licensing of GIF, whose patent is already expired in the US.

Are they planning world domination too?

Mulder wakes up to reality; works at McD's
Thursday, October 23, 2003

"when Bill Gates woke up one morning and decided to do a SQL query to find all the software companies that were ripe for a little friendly competition from Redmond."

Did I write this? Gosh, no, I didn't! It was actually Joel.

Giving his little paranoia towards Redmond an extra push, I just noted that Joel is not home free just because he doesn't have to answer some questions. MS products is still the tree he is leaning up against - he's as vulnerable as before.

But what does Joel know about how MS competes? He just worked there...

Martin A. Boegelund
Friday, October 24, 2003

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