Laughable

Sorry, I was going to write something about my impressions of Brazil so far, but I read this and I can't help but laugh at it and pass it on:

Microsoft execs struggled with Vista too, say internal e-mails

It discusses that even Microsoft understood the mess that they were creating releasing Vista "this early" (although it was very late according to their initial plan). Very tragic, but funny at the same time.

Microsoft is a great company that needs a paradigm shift. It's stuck to this self-centered world of major releases that aim on putting out a piece of software that is easy to obtain (it comes inside your operating system when you buy a new computer) that just has parity to the basic of what is out there. Their hope is that people will be lazy to go and get the better things, just because they aren't that behind anymore.

I've felt this when I got home and realized that all my parents' computers had only IE7. I just couldn't deal with it, so one of the first things is that I've installed Firefox, mouse gestures and ad block and now life is so much better and faster. Yes, you can claim you can do it all with IE7 and I did try some of it. I just thought that, from my limited experience, the large amount of very mature solutions that exist for Firefox are just easier to use. IE7 has things like IE7Pro that does a lot of it for you, but it is a huge bundle of different things and not only what I want.

Finally, I was discussing this today: the future lies on integration. Building solutions and hoping everybody in the world with integrate with these solutions is not the direction to go. Even if you open your formats (like Microsoft did with a lot of its Office products). The winner of this fight will be the one that is the most proactive about it, hunting to understand the other and be understood by others. This is an aspect that I actually admire Google for. Look at their Google Docs and Spreadsheets... You can import and export to many formats including MS Office formats and OpenOffice and StarOffice. Do they have a format of their own? No!

My dream is still on a paperless world. But I feel like there are still way too many integration obstacles to get to it. I can share files and sometimes printers between two computers. But any other type of sharing that I want to do (event based things like "open this document, generate a PDF and let me see it on this other computer") takes a good amount of work. Without those seamless integrations we can never achieve the basic infrastructure that I consider needed for getting rid of this isolated interface that is the paper.

Ok, wrote too much already. Time to go to sleep and hope that I'll have time before my trip to Salvador to finish my post about my impressions of Brazil/São Paulo.