Microsoft is on fire
posted under category: General on June 4, 2009 by Nathan
Somehow, Microsoft is the new hotness, hitting nearly every shot they throw out there. According to my favorite game (well, from 1994) NBA Jam, the're on fire.
Windows 7
It's Vista. It just is. It took like a year for them to make it, which is nothing in comparison to Vista's decade dev cycle. They didn't re-do anything, and it's not faster, but the fact is, it's what people want, and they're loving it. The only negative things I've heard are from those who are trying to run it on their macs. Hah!
Bing
Stealing, err, rebranding basically everything from Live Search, Microsoft comes through with a word that people like ("Let me Live Search that for you") and a searching experience that, for some unknowable reason, people like. Google may have the first competition since destorying Yahoo all those years ago. Personally, I'm not convinced, but people are talking.
.NET becoming superior
The programmers have been the core of Microsoft for a long time, but it wasn't until the recent .NET framework 3.5 (and service pack 1) that they gave them Linq and MVC. These tools are finally something on par and superior to the competing Java platform. The quick movement of both C# and VB.NET have thrown these languages much closer to the top of the "cool" stack.
XBOX 360
Ok, second to Nintendo's invincible Wii is a fantastic place to be. The recent exclusive content is a real winner, and the games are head and shoulders above anything from Sony, aside perhaps from Little Big Planet. Further, their just-announced Natal project, which essentially gives you the Minority Report interface for your TV, is just, well, "Ka-boom" (in my best NBA Jam announcer voice).
Of course Microsoft has a number of smaller successes, things that have really started to go right but aren't as big. The XBOX update with mii-like avatars, Netflix on the XBOX and Media Center, and the re-invigoration of the browser war, giving us IE8, which, if nothing else, sucks less than IE7 and 6.
That doesn't mean everything they do is the bomb. I'm not about to go out and buy a Zune or a Windows Mobile phone, I'm just making observations.