A Cajun-Asian View

The Blue Screen Screensaver from Microsoft.

It looks quite convincing, too!

A coworker was installing Windows 2003 R2 Server OEM 64-bit onto a server. According to Microsoft, you are allowed 4 Windows virtual servers. He needed to have Windows 2003 R2 Server OEM 32-bit (probably for some software that doesn't work in a 64-bit environment), so he was going to install it in a virtual server. Surprise, the license key for the 64-bit version does not work for the 32-bit version, so he calls up Microsoft support to ask how to setup his, according to them, allowed 4 virtual servers with a different version of windows.

Their answer (paraphrased): Find any key to install the OEM 32-bit version in the virtual system, then call the activation center to tell them that he's doing this.

That is kind of amazing... They're basically telling him to pirate a key and tell them.

Paul Graham has declared that "Microsoft is Dead"! Actually, despite his provocative title, my title to this Blog post is much closer to what he actually is saying: Microsoft is "dead" the same way IBM is "dead". IBM really doesn't drive the technology world like they used to anymore, but they are still a major company that makes many millions of dollars of profit a year. And he gives several reasons for why he thinks Microsoft is "dead" in much the same way, including that Google is becoming the "top dog", for better or for worse, in technology, the rise in prominences of Web 2.0 technology (Like AJAX and the software that use it, like Gmail) that work in any browser in any O.S., and that the newer generation of startups that he sees are, increasingly, using Apple OS X, Linux, or otherwise non-Microsoft O.S.es to run their businesses, such that Paul himself is surprised when he comes across a Windows system!