Apple overtakes Microsoft

From DSC:
Years ago people thought I was crazy by purchasing one of the only Mac’s in the entire University. But it was the right call then, and it’s the right call still. Don’t get me wrong. I use a PC w/ Windows XP constantly. I use Microsoft Office and it’s an excellent suite of applications. However, it’s not great for multimedia creation and Microsoft had/has some serious self-imposed strikes against it:

  • Because of their ruthless way of doing business, Microsoft made it’s bed and now it’s lying in it
  • They never lead in the world of the Internet — they didn’t before and they still don’t
  • They didn’t believe they needed to play by others’ standards — they made whatever standards they had/wanted the defacto standards
  • They didn’t innovate nor do they have the culture for innovation.  In many ways, their culture is the wrong one for what’s needed today. The culture of an organization — and how one treats its customers — are extremely important. I always underrated the cultural piece; but in the last decade, I have seen how true that statement really is.

Apple overtakes Microsoft

Apple overtakes Microsoft

Back from March 12th:

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Microsoft releases free classroom interaction add-on for PowerPoint

From DSC:
Note the quote from Ira Snyder that says:

Mouse Mischief is designed to “turn students from passive observers to active participants”

Now let’s play this out a bit. If K-12’rs are starting to use more and more of these types of interactive technologies and are becoming active participants in their learning, how does that affect their expectations when they come into our colleges and universities? To me, change is not an option for those of us in higher ed. Here are my concerns if we follow the status quo:

Daniel S. Christian: My concerns with just maintaining the status quo

From DSC:
A trusted and wise colleague and I agreed many years ago (~2003 or so) that we had seen the peak of Microsoft. This morning, I was reminded of those reflections and conversations when I saw today’s article by Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO salesforce.com:

The end of Microsoft. A door opens to a new cloud.
As apps migrate to the Net, the software giant’s old model looks older every day.

Though I doubt we’ll see Microsoft going away entirely any time soon:

If you are in computer science:
You need to be paying attention to cloud-based computing and begin moving in that direction in terms of your investments in time/efforts.

If you are in business/economics:
Learn the lesson from what happens when you do business like Microsoft did (i.e. dealing ruthlessly and often times unfairly with competitors, while not listening to your customers and those within the standards-setting-bodies of the world). When you make your bed like that, you will lie in a bed like that. Microsoft will have a hard time adjusting to a world based upon creativity, innovation, collaboration, standards, respect for others, working in a platform that they can’t control, and will struggle to keep up with those organizations who are able to move at the speed of trust (Covey). Maybe this same writing was on the wall when Bill Gates made his decision to leave Microsoft years ago.

Microsoft releases an Office add-in for Moodle — Moodle.org

Also see:
When Moodle meets Microsoft
— from Joel Kerr at Synergy-Learning.com

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From DSC:
If you want to use your voice (vs. your fingers) to leave comments within a Word document,
you can do so by following these steps.

   

Adding audio-based comments to a Word document


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Microsoft Research: Areas of Research

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