All Microsoft needs is for good people to do nothing

[Tim May]

On Tuesday, May 6, 2003, at 08:05  PM, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> "If we don't get hardware I'm done" Microsoft's Biddle said.  "I have 
> no business
> wthout some fundamental changes to the PC architecture.  And if people 
> don't write
> software that takes advantage of those changes, I'm done"
> Peter Biddle, product unit manager in the Security Business Unit at M$
> EWeek, 5 May 03 p 14
>
> ---
> No lieutenant, your serfs are already dead. -Agent Smith
>

A friend of mine (I know him from talking to him at the bookstore) runs 
the computer book section at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Dave told me, without 
any promptings or comments from me, that his results for April showed 
that LISP books outsold C# (C-Sharp, the attempt by M$ to launch a 
.NET-friendly new language) by 5 to 1. Now he has a little sign posted 
to this effect.

This is fairly amazing, as the number of LISP books has remained small 
for many years (Guy Steele, Sonia Keene, a few others) and M$ has 
subsidized the usual shelf full of crap books on C#.

(I used LISP in my AI work while still at Intel, then Scheme for some 
years thereafter, and more recently Mathematica and Squeak (Smalltalk). 
Nothing I am doing depends on one language over another, though some 
are more convenient to use.)

But if this lack of interest in C# holds, it indicates tougher sledding 
for M$ ahead.

(I cannot recall a single mention of C# on this list, as a data point.)

--Tim May