timxu

In exactly twelve hours, I will be sitting in the cabin of a small commuter plane on the tarmac of Newark International Airport. After a short, one hundred minute flight, I will layover in Toronto for three hours before boarding a Boeing 777 direct to Shanghai, China. Once there I will stop in Nanjing, where my father’s family is, then in Xi’an, where my mother’s family is, and then finally in Beijing, where family friends have secured tickets to several less-than-population Olympic events. I’m sure it’ll be bustling and crowded, but it’s still exciting to attend the Olympic games. I’ll be back on August 14th, tired, jet-lagged, and ready to watch the more exciting parts of the games on TV.

In fact, I name them after Greek Goddesses. My main hard drive is named Astraea, goddess of justice. My flash drive is named Iris, the messenger goddess. My external hard drive is split into two partitions: the Time Machine partition is named Soteria, the goddess of safety and preservation from harm and the storage partition is named Eos, the goddess of dawn. The computer itself is named Rhea, the mother of all gods.

It’s not that I’m a fan of Greek mythology or even that I’m more than superficially interested in them. They just have cool names, and it’s certainly less boring that “Macintosh HD; Storage; Flash Drive; Time Machine.” Plus, it’ll confuse everyone, which is always a plus.

Microsoft is, arguably, one of the most powerful companies in the world. Its operating systems drive 90% of the world’s PCs and millions of smartphones. Its video game console was the top of the generation for over a year. It’s one of the oldest and arguably most trusted names in home computing. It commands billions of dollars of cash revenue. Why, then, is it slowly becoming irrelevant? Windows Vista was a failure, ignored by NIST and by the enterprise. At release, it was a bloated, buggy operating system that most computers weren’t ready for. Windows Mobile has slowly lost ground to Blackberry and Apple’s iPhone OS. XBOX 360 has fallen to third in monthly sales. Its attempt to revitalize MSN with the Windows Live system has failed to produce any significant headway against Google and Yahoo! It’s baffling that such a large company with so much money and engineering talent should be falling behind its competitors. That said, how can Microsoft get back to being the clear leader it was ten years ago?

1. Drop the old technology.
Microsoft’s products are mired in the past and old technology. Vista remains on the NT kernel – released in 1993 – and still uses NTFS – also released in 1993. Microsoft just can’t expect to compete with faster, more secure, and more modern alternatives in Apple’s Mac OS X, which runs on a modern HFS+ file system and is based on an open source UNIX core. Windows Mobile looks and feels like ancient technology next to recent offerings from Blackberry and the iPhone. Internet Explorer consistently falls behind the competition in modern speed ratings. Microsoft needs to re-evaluate its product refreshes and make them more significant and more innovative. Each step forward must be a real step, not a crawl. What Microsoft truly needs is to:

2. Take some risks.
Microsoft’s offerings are frequently too conservative. If the XBOX 360 hadn’t been released a year early, it’d be competing with Sony’s PS3 for last place. Ultimately, it suffers from being the middle child. It’s not as family-friendly or as affordable as Nintendo’s Wii, yet it’s not as technologically advanced as the PS3. It falls into the netherworld of being neither, and thus has been last in sales for most of 2008. As for Windows, there really is only one solution. Start over. Microsoft has plenty of money to either hire a new team of experienced engineers, or break off a small piece of its Windows 7 team to begin a new operating system based on new technologies. It’ll have to maintain a legacy system to run NT processes, but the core of the operating system must be new. Microsoft spends too much money and too much talent trying to wrangle a modern operating system out of fifteen-year-old technology. Take a risk. Start over. It’ll only make Windows better.

3. Tame the OEMs.
Microsoft relies on OEMs to deliver their overwhelming lead in the home desktop market. Yet it was OEMs that created most of Vista’s problems at release. The Vista Capable fiasco tore down customer confidence and set Vista back severely. Apple’s Mac OS X can promise the smooth and powerful experience it’s known for because it controls the specifications for the machines that run the operating system. Microsoft’s traditional issue has been a wide range of specifications. However, a quick glance at the websites of popular low-price OEMs such as Dell or Gateway shows that the minimum machines match the minimum machines released by Apple. Intel Core 2 Duo chips and 2 GB of RAM are commonplace even among $400-$500 products. Microsoft needs to work with the OEMs to establish a minimum. Place restrictions in the license in terms of technology. Microsoft has the power of the license, and it needs to use it in way that doesn’t trap the OEM, but makes it mutually beneficial. The success of the OEM is tied to Microsoft’s success, and Microsoft must make that clear.

4. End the over-extension and establish focus.
One of Microsoft’s major problems is over-extension. It has attempted to push itself into too many markets, many of which are now dominated by focused competitors. Mobile phone OS is dominated by Symbian, Mozilla Firefox is rapidly eating away at Internet Explorer in the browser market, Nintendo’s monthly sales far outstrip XBOX 360′s, Google is the clear winner in online search, and the list goes on and on. Microsoft is not the leader, nor is it even second, in almost every market outside of the desktop operating system. Microsoft needs to focus its efforts, and maybe trim down its offerings in failing markets. It doesn’t need to be in the media player market. Expand the Zune into a multimedia portable console and bring it in line with the XBOX 360. It may be difficult to dump one of Microsoft’s many tentacles, but Microsoft needs to slim its offerings and focus them.

5. Cater to the niche.
Mac OS X has done remarkably well among the technophiles, the bloggers, the ones who make their voices heard on the internet. For the average user, the price, availability, and familiarity of Windows make it the attractive choice. However, with the growing ubiquity of the internet, more and more average users are beginning to turn to the internet for information, and once there, they run across the posts and articles written by the blogosphere. Microsoft needs to create hype and buzz among that niche. It needs to release attractive products that are attractive to that population, because they are gaining more power and influence over average consumer.

Microsoft ultimately needs to get off its crumbling throne and revitalize their business. They are slowly falling behind technologically and are in danger of losing relevancy in the fast-paced world of technological innovation. Microsoft has the money and the power to reverse their direction. They just need to be unafraid of failure.

Barack Obama’s somewhere in the Middle East, taking with him most of the national media. Meanwhile, John McCain lands in New Hampshire for a campaign event and one reporter shows up to meet him. The McCain campaign, in a typical GOP-style response, begins slinging the mud, criticizing Obama’s inexperience and naiveté concerning foreign affairs. Of course, they ignore Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s recent endorsement of Obama’s withdrawal plan, as well as McCain’s own gaffe concerning the terrible struggle along the non-existent border between Iraq and Pakistan. However, aside from McCain’s own shortcomings, why is the media seemingly obsessed with Obama? Is it because he is the frontrunner in this very young race? Is it because the media’s liberal bent has become full-blown bias? Or is it simply because such a journey for the presumptive Democratic nominee will be a ratings bonanza?

It may be all of those, or none of those. However, it is possible to look deeper and extract a more sinister reason behind this unprecedented media explosion. A look at election projection blog five-thirty-eight’s data reveals that Obama is in line for a modest victory, with relatively few states in the mix. A further look reveals that many of those states, including Ohio, Colorado, Nevada, Virginia, New Mexico, and Iowa, were states that President Bush carried in 2004. Of the six states listed as “tipping point” states with a percentage above 10%, only one went to Senator Kerry – Michigan – which has 17 electoral votes. The five Bush carried combine for 39. If those were the only states that switched sides in November, Obama would win 273-264.

Of course, several other Bush states are beginning to lean towards Obama, including Virginia and Iowa. Michigan remains the only Kerry state with a significant chance of voting Republican. With the youth of the campaign in mind, it appears likely that Obama is a lock for the Presidency in November. At that thought, the media panicked.

Anyone who witnessed the lengthy Democratic campaign knows that the media drove themselves bananas hyping the race, switching sides and playing all the tricks in the hand to extend the race. They reaped the benefits with each passing week with ratings through the roof. Naturally, they want the general election campaign in the fall to be the same. However, Obama has taken the lead firmly and has refused to make a mistake. McCain has made plenty, but the media has ignored them. They want to bring Obama down a notch, to give McCain the chance to draw even, to make the race more exciting, to rake in more cash. This offers an explanation as to why all three major news networks and their anchors have packed up and traveled halfway around the world to accompany a presumptive nominee. They want to apply pressure on him, and then be there when he makes that critical misstep.

By focusing the lens of every major evening news program on him, by drawing the attention of the world onto this one man, they hope to put unnecessary pressure upon Obama’s shoulders. Obama must calculate every move he makes, every word he says, because at any given moment, the world is watching. They then hope that he cracks under this pressure, makes a McCain-like gaffe, and then jump on it. With this level of attention, a misstep by Obama would make the front page of every major newspaper in America. To the eyes of the public, the air of inevitability surrounding the candidate will disappear. McCain will be back in the public eye. The race will appear close again. The media can then go on repeating the same “historic” story ad infinitum and hyping up the general election, earning millions and millions of dollars in the process. Tearing down Obama would be the first step to levelling the field for McCain and the ailing GOP.

While the reasons for the media’s absolute frenzy surrounding Obama’s trip overseas may never be known, and certainly may be as simple as a ratings opportunity, it is clear that McCain is running out of time to stay relevant. If Obama emerges from this trip unscathed, he will have gotten a tremendous boost, in terms of media exposure, for free. Obama’s fund-raising and online presence far outstrips McCain’s, and the political mood is already straying far away from the GOP. I, for one, would rather see Obama elected by a modest margin, but I admit that it is unlikely to happen. November can’t come soon enough.

After spending the good part of the day taking Digital Disease’s design and making it my own, I’ve finally finished the basic structure of this page. Some parts still have to be done, like the About page, a new blurb for the “About” section to the right, and new Projects and Contact pages, but the hard part is done. It took six photoshop documents, several attempts of trial and error with css and the design elements themselves, and many trips to google, but it’s done.

I started this site not solely as a blog (I’ve started and stopped two already…I wouldn’t be surprised if this one died as well), but as a personal website. I felt that, going into my adult life, it was beneficial to me to have such an online home. I also wanted to nab the domain under my name before any other “Tim Xu” does. You can never be sure when you’ll need a domain for yourself. In the end, the most important parts of this site is the yet-to-be-finished Contact page, along with networking links on the sidebar. Those will be up soon.