I was doing a Bayesian network assignment for school, minding my own business, when I encountered the following typo (screenshot below). This eventually pushed me over the edge to rant out this blog post you are reading now. Well, I agree that typos happen, we all know about HTTP 1.1 standard specs "Referer" and how that happened, but there is more to it, it's about competition and excel in innovative drive. Heck if Scobelizer can do it, I can do it too.
(Notice the netowrk?. Yes, it's an old app, I didn't conveniently forgot about it)
No serious; lets see what Joel Spolsky mentioned a while back.
"Look at how Google does spell checking: it's not based on dictionaries; it's based on word usage statistics of the entire Internet, which is why Google knows how to correct my name, misspelled, and Microsoft Word doesn't"...
Competition is always good; but we have to keep the creative ingenious high, right? That's why imagination is more important than Knowledge I assume.
Joel further says
"Like A very senior Microsoft developer who moved to Google told me that Google works and thinks at a higher level of abstraction than Microsoft. "Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement," he said."
Google's practice of academia and industry coherence is thrilling. I remember reading Bill Gates' interview a while back in which he mentioned the importance of being vigilant at the top. He said that anytime there could be a competitor which can challenge MS's might. At that time there weren't many big players around to stand Microsoft's fierce competition which made me think that it's just something cool to say but later on time proved the statement to be correct. Windows Live and Office Live are cool starters but there is some serious catching up to do for several missing opportunities. "Microsoft is different" excuses aren't good enough. I love Microsoft, it's products, innovation, ease of use and ingenuity it offers but like it's being said:
"Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things."
-Winston Churchill
and
"Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing"
-Aristotle
