Microsoft should starve on radical penguin diet When the mouthpiece of American capitalism calls a company a dog, it's time to re-evaluate that company's chances. In Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, columnist Holman Jenkins, Jr asks if "Steve Ballmer is a failed CEO?" then forecasts Microsoft's feeble future even as it banks record profits. Microsoft is a company stuck in …
...with the bones of businesses who partnered with Microsoft.
Will MS be as successful in the future? Balmer should pay close attention to history. When a company becomes too successful they think that they can do no wrong, they begin to believe that they will succeed in whatever they do. MS is in this frame of mind now, and if they don't wake up from their reverie they stand a good chance of, not going down in flames, but not being able to be a bully anymore either.
At one point Novell was the Big Cheese of networking. Then Mcirosoft nommed thier lunch. IBM was once the 800lb gorilla of all things IT once upon a time. Now they are slowly fading to black. I wouldn't bet against Microsoft; if they smarten up they havet he resources to become the next big thing!
What the chances are of that however...
When Microsoft did those things, it wasn't a giant multinational corporation.
When they pulled the rug from under IBM, Bill Gates was a 20 something year old geek with poor personal hygiene practices who had the smarts to only license DOS to IBM. A product that he bought from someone else, and hacked to work on the PC.
Today, they would have had to run that by legal, and this would have given IBM time to think.
When they rolled networking into Windows, they had an established product at the dawn of easy networking.
That was all what.. 20+ years ago?
Today Microsoft has caught the corporate disease. Middle management sprawl. Like an oil tanker, they can't change direction on a pin like a small company.
Breaking the 640k limit.. One guy.
DirectX, a personal project.
Would they have got done today? Would they have been patented and forgotten about? This is what Microsoft has lost. And will never get back while everything has to go through so many corporate filters.
"Bill Gates was a 20 something year old geek with poor personal hygiene practices who had the smarts to only license DOS to IBM. A product that he bought from someone else, and hacked to work on the PC."
Special order from Bill's mom, who sat on the board of the IBM.
That small fact puts things into much better perspective than any other explanation. I don't think Bill had anything to say about these deals.
Your facts are slightly flawed... Mary Maxwell Gates, Mother of Bill, never served as a director of IBM, nor did she ever serve as a director of any technology company, save Pacific Northwest Bell Telephone Company which after the AT&T antitrust smack down became one of the 9 RBOC's that eventually became Qwest communication.
She spent most of her working life in high level / director positions in the banking and education industries as well as many non-profit organizations and charities, which is where Bill gets his roots in philanthropy.
The reason your facts are only slightly flawed is: one of her most notable accomplishments was becoming the first female chairman of the national United Way’s executive committee, members of that committee were many and included John Akres who at the time was the CEO of IBM. it doesnt take a rocket scientist to figure out why IBM was favorable to microsoft at the time. Yes the demon mum pulled a few strings to help her demon spawn along in his plight to rule the world, but she never served as a director for IBM.
No, as I think I've posted in these forums, before, Microsoft stopped looking like an 800lb gorilla, sometime at the start of the last decade, and suddenly started looking like Mr Blobby.
The behaviour was the same, but the outcome was now strangely, and embarrassingly, different.
'nor am I suggesting that Microsoft replace Windows with Linux as its desktop and server operating system. That would be madness'
But why shouldn't Microsoft develop their own Linux distributions for server and desktop? They might not replace Windows but they could be sold and used alongside it. Then they could easily develop a compatible mobile version of Linux too. That might solve various problems in one go.
"But why shouldn't Microsoft develop their own Linux distributions for server and desktop?"
Because such Microsoft Linux distributions would need to run MS Office and that would potentially allow other Linux variants to do the same and therefore, present viable alternatives to a windows desktop for corporate use. That may be for the common good but it would be suicide for Microsoft.
MS Office is often a key reason why corporates reject alternatives to a Windows desktop and, with this reality, it is difficult for competitors to get to the critical mass needed to get their products in the door. Having said that, Microsoft seem to be keen to annoy their users, if recent versions of MS Office are anything to go by.
"Because such Microsoft Linux distributions would need to run MS Office and that would potentially allow other Linux variants to do the same and therefore, present viable alternatives to a windows desktop for corporate use. That may be for the common good but it would be suicide for Microsoft."
It would, there's no doubt about that, licencing policy doesn't give other options. Losing not only one, but both cash cows would be a commercial suicide and I doubt that they are dumb enough to do that.
It wouldn't bother me much, though: MS strenghts are in marketing and lawyers and both are a nuisance in any modern society, just cost and no production.
I mean they already do, though they may have similar roots - but there is no harm in them keeping the cash cows they have and outright buying Novell and having a Linux variant as well... They would probably destroy it, but if they made it succeed then they would garner the faith of the OS crowd, increase interoperability between Linux and MS, and all sorts of good would come from it, I'm sure half of which they could monetise!?
I've always said that if Microsoft was truly savvy, it would develop the next version of Windows as a Linux distro with proprietary Windows API's on top of it. The said distro would be able to run both Windows and Linux apps natively. That would all but shut down Linux and improve Windows greatly. This is similar to what Apple did with the release of OS X. However, they'd be eating crow and admitting Linux is superior than Windows by doing so, and Ballmer is too stubborn to admit that!
"That would all but shut down Linux and improve Windows greatly. "
No it wouldn't.
No-one in their right mind would use "MS-distro" while there are reliable distros who don't report you to Redmont on every update and on the other hand MS can't make a such distro and same time obey the licencing.
It would make a better Windows, maybe, but unless it has DRM, Ballmer can't use it. And I don't see any way DRM could be integrated into Linux kernel, it slaps on the face every principle Linux is built on.
While I believe the author hits the nail on the head in terms of what the prospects for MS are, his solution is unlikely to work (even if there is an attempt). Here is why.
1. There is so much bad blood between MS and 99.999 of the open source community that there will be a significant opposition at many levels.
2. The business model of MS (which I doubt is going away) of embracing/extinguishing (FAST anyone?) is just going to ruin even Novel before achieving anything.
3. So many egos must be squashed at MS before this could happen that it would be easier to make GOP vote for healthcare.
I actually blame Bill Gates- he infamously claimed Internet is of no interest to MS. They could not create a monopoly in the new market and since this is the only way they know.....
That's what happened when they bought Danger. You remember Danger? Used their own fast lightweight OS that ran on Java? Very much similar to a mobile linux in terms of strengths. Whatever happened to them? Oh. Yeah. Kin.
The really telling bit was the quote from an ex-Danger employee that Mini MSFT reposted.
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2010/07/kin-fusing-kin-clusion-to-kin-and-fy11.html
Can you see any mobile linux devs faring better at MSFT instead of, say, going Android? Actually, that'd be an interesting tactic.
What would happen if MSFT pulled out its old 90s playbook, and did embrace and extend? Fork Android's core (like the OPhone), put in Mono to replace the Android JDK, and voila, a mobile linux that runs MSFT technology and competes against Android. It can even be installed on the same hardware as Android, commoditizing the mobile phones.
Windows's brand is rather poisonous right now, not Vista poisonous, but XBox has better loyalty. So call them after the other brand associated with XBox: Live Phones.
Then put in new MSFT-only tech, use a patent portfolio that would make it more expensive to ship Android phones than Live Phones, and in this current market, they are not a monopoly nor using the desktop monopoly to unlawfully leverage the phone market, so that would keep the US DoJ at bay.
Gah. That's kind of scary. Fortunately, egos are so strong that this would never fly within MSFT.
... has an amazing gem hidden in the comments. It goes like this:
"There is so much technology can do today! I still hope that being a microsoftee is the best way to do technology for the masses and make a difference!"
Did a double take. If that isn't cargo cultism, I'm billg himself.
An article in today's Wall Street Journal illustrates why MS should not be allowed within a country mile of Linux. The product planners working on the development of IE8 intended to harden up the security of the browser by including a default option that would block tracking companies from creating user profiles which would then be sold on to advertising groups.
Executives from MS's own advertisment division got wind of the proposed change and strangled it at birth after "consultations" with the product planning guys. End of story.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383530439838568.html?mod=WSJEUROPE_hpp_LEFTTopStories
***"In Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, columnist Holman Jenkins, Jr asks if "Steve Ballmer is a failed CEO?""***
Title says it all really.
When Gates was in charge, Microsoft could do no wrong. Do evil, yes, but not "wrong" as far as their business was concerned.
Since Ballmer took over they seem to do nothing *but* wrong. There's the Vista fiasco for starters, and then there's the way they have been caught with their pants around their ankles in the Mobile OS field.
Seems that Apple have stolen the "Evil Empire that can Do No Wrong" title from MS.....
iPhone 4 / iOS4 upgrade fiasco(s). And the iPad doesn't seem too good, though it will probably improve as time goes on.
And the evil? That's definitely there with Apple.
But yeah, MS is losing because it lost its "golden boy", but is still alive thanks to its corporate momentum. Apple will just collapse when that happens to them- it's a fashion statement, and when they turn out the same crap 3 generations in a row their customer base will be all but gone.
It wasn't the open-source stuff that killed Sun. The other things they did are, if you ask me, quite sufficient to explain their failure, and plenty of people have seen it coming for years:
* Explosive growth of unnecessary departments and personnel during the surge of profits just prior to 2000 and expansion into all sorts of markets Sun didn't need to be in; "There's low-hanging fruit everywhere", as somebody said at some point about marketshare. They got arrogant and thought they could do everything. They kind of turned into DEC and got all matrix-managed.
* Multiple expensively failed chip projects, such as UltraSPARC V and RK, on whose outcome their future depended. The best they could do was squeeze more life out of UltraSPARC IV and, too late in the game, use Fujitsu's chips for their high-end products and sell Niagara chips on the low end.
* Sun lost their bang for the buck. UltraSPARC II may have had it, but UltraSPARC III sure didn't--I think I remember a comment on here a while ago about a manager saying something like "I'm never buying this expensive purple shit again."
* Several billion dollars' worth of completely unnecessary acquisitions, such as StorageTek ($4.1bn) and MySQL ($1bn), and those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. Sun didn't need to be in those markets, and counted on being able to make gobs of cash after making a costly entrance; it never happened. All those billions bought Sun were higher operating expenses and pitiful beachheads in markets they shouldn't have entered.
* They didn't want to get rid of departments that weren't pulling their weight. While Sun's reluctance to lay off employees was admirable, a bush that doesn't get trimmed gets ugly and full of dead branches--but at least a bush doesn't have to pay its dead branches.
* Sun got lazy about selling things. What happened to their sales force? Oh, and why did they fire a bunch of StorageTek sales people if they wanted a chance in hell at making money in that market? Acting like DEC again.
They got sloppy, uncoordinated, and generally started acting like a typical failed bureaucracy. They forgot how to keep afloat in their own core businesses and, while they neglected that, they distracted themselves with delusions of entering the storage market and pretty much whatever else they thought they could do. Open-sourcing a lot of their software, however, was not such a bad idea, because it attracted thousands of developers (or did until this Oracle deal) who otherwise wouldn't have given Sun or Solaris a second thought. The availability of ZFS, coincidentally, probably gained Sun more ground in the storage market that Schwartz was so obsessed with than any of their ridiculous acquisitions. Attracting mindshare isn't a horrible thing for a server company to do. It gets people thinking in terms of your product line and gets them to consider you as an option, whereas otherwise they'd probably just stick to what they knew. Forgetting how to sell servers, however, is a fatal mistake, and that's the mistake they made.
with all of Microsoft's failed projects.
For all the shine and bluster of the pyramids of cash that Windows and Office have brought to Microsoft, there are acres of fields full of the bones of past (and soon-to-be-past) projects that have failed more or less miserably.
In fact, one might say that there is nothing that Microsoft touches that does not wither and die, or live a stunted and limited life.
And I'm not talking about C# or any other programming "initiative". I'm talking about products that were supposed to bring in money. Next to none of them have, and the (very) few that have not been miserable failures have not had the shimmering success that they were supposed to at launch.
Not by a long shot.
Windows and Office are still around because of businesses that can't do without them. That is the Microsoft lifeline and I believe it will last for a while yet. But the market is becoming diverse on this point, which is something that Microsoft worked very hard to stamp out in the past and will not be able to do in the future.
Thus, yes, Microsoft is now on the decline and desperately needs to find a new cash cow, if you admit that desperate is living on top of a Himalaya of money with a badger nibbling away at the bills from the bottom.
What's this guy talking about? How do you make money from open source? So it attracts developers, to do what, sell MS Visual studio for free? The one thing with Windows is you never need to contact Microsoft cause either it works or the forums are great. What financial model to make money the Ubuntu guy is suggesting? There is only one left, sell support as ubuntu or redhat does. Persoanlly, I would like my software to just work and need no support whatsover. Otherwise he is suggesting Microsoft should become a charity, which mean they make no money at all. That wasn't the point of the article.
"Persoanlly, I would like my software to just work " Should have bought a Mac then. As someone who made a very nice living for a number of years babysitting and nuturing various varieties of windows, I can say that MS stuff does NOT just work. It needs to be massaged,fiddled with and have its hand held on a continuing basis. What I guess you might be getting at is, you want your OS preinstalled and ready to run, that's different. Anyway, as a Linux user I smile at the CDs included with pretty much every peripheral and spare part I buy. Most of them appear to contain drivers and so on, I can't say for certain as I never need them. With a Linux distro these days all the housekeeping is done for you. You might say it "just works" !
"Persoanlly, I would like my software to just work and need no support whatsover."
I'd like too, but have you ever seen such software?
I haven't. And I've been looking since early 80s. I've seen a huge amount of different software and _all_ have bugs. Every one of them.
You can _buy_ support from MS but 1/10th of the money hires you a linux-expert in-house and he can not only support you, but make fixes to those problems which annoys you.
Good luck on that with MS: Their support fixes those problems which are important to them, not you. No matter how much you pay them.
Sorry but Microsoft is making huge leaps and bounds in territory others only dream of right now. They just building a larger empire all at once instead of piece mealing it together over years. What I mean is Microsofts huge push for their cloud based services that connect all of your devices seamlessly. Their big push is get windows 7 mobile out, use it's silverlight / XNA capabilities to drive a centralized code base for developers. Since silverlight will work on pcs, phones, xbox, tablets, and laptops, and lets you tie data to the cloud. You quickly unify all of a users systems into a streamlined unit. A demo recently showed just how perfect this system can work. Contracter goes out to a job site, takes pictures with his phone and stores them with onenote, synched to the cloud. He takes a few notes about what needs to be done. He goes to lunch opens his laptop and there are the pictures and notes he just took with his phone, he starts working on his estimate, but gets called away hits save, and goes on. Later that night he is sitting at home fires up his tv and uses his xbox to connect to the document and finishes out his cost analysis and emails it to the client. No flash / pen drives, no complicated 3rd party software, no "there is an app for that" deals, its good to go out of the box.
Also with project natal aka kinetic you can turn any TV into a touch screen. Also since win mobile 7 will work with XNA you instantly get options to buy thousands of games that are already finished, sitting around bored waiting for you.
Not to mention MS is already going way of Open Source and simplifying development for the web. They just released betas for webmatrix which provides a simple easy to use coding language and a file based database which is portable with the application / software. Their goal is to add self containing web applications / sites that can then be ported over to their web publish platform. While also giving a free version of an easy to use software to develop web pages and forms.
The list goes on and on. If anything the only thing to complain about MS is they might have too much to try and release. It's hard keeping up with Microsoft's development house, nearly impossible the second you read about something the next version is about to start alpha.
"huge push for their cloud based services "
Microsoft is already a cloud also-ran.
"that connect all of your devices seamlessly"
As long as they're all from Microsoft.
"Their big push is get windows 7 mobile out"
I have my doubts about whether their big push can be automatically presumed to translate to great success. They're squeezing this one out after their last mobile attempt fizzled pathetically, in a market they've never dominated with a couple of big, cut throat players already in it.
"use it's silverlight / XNA capabilities to drive a centralized code base for developers"
Developers already well into the iPhone and Android excitement. Sure, .NET people might show some interest, but unless the phone shows signs of taking off I don't think the developers will be piling in to the minority platform when they can tap huge user bases with Linux and on the iPhone.
"Since silverlight will work on pcs, phones, xbox, tablets, and laptops"
Time will tell. It's really just a flash wannabe isn't it? I haven't felt the need to install it yet.
"and lets you tie data to the cloud"
Certainly has nothing to do with that, unless I'm much mistaken.
"You quickly unify all of a users systems into a streamlined unit"
With MS? That would certainly be a first. Sounds like the sort of thing Apple are pretty good at. Also, unifying all my systems into a streamlined unit is a mixed back I'd say, not a major selling point. I don't really see why my games console and business workstation and phone need to be unified.
"A demo recently showed just how perfect this system can work"
This just reminds me of the Win98 bluescreen presentation.
"Contracter goes out to a job site, takes pictures with his phone and stores them with onenote, synched to the cloud. He takes a few notes about what needs to be done. He goes to lunch opens his laptop and there are the pictures and notes he just took with his phone, he starts working on his estimate, but gets called away hits save, and goes on. Later that night he is sitting at home fires up his tv and uses his xbox to connect to the document and finishes out his cost analysis and emails it to the client. No flash / pen drives, no complicated 3rd party software, no "there is an app for that" deals, its good to go out of the box."
No complicated third party software? Does this contractor not have a PC at home? The x-box is agonisingly shoe-horned in there.
"Also with project natal aka kinetic you can turn any TV into a touch screen"
Thought it was a gesture input system?
"Also since win mobile 7 will work with XNA you instantly get options to buy thousands of games that are already finished, sitting around bored waiting for you."
So once again it's a toy?
"Not to mention MS is already going way of Open Source"
Lol, nice one.
"and simplifying development for the web"
They're nowhere close to the ease and speed of Ruby on Rails, or even PHP with CodeIgniter.
"They just released betas for webmatrix which provides a simple easy to use coding language and a file based database which is portable with the application / software"
Hmm? Sort of like django with SQLite?
"Their goal is to add self containing web applications / sites that can then be ported over to their web publish platform"
Innovation? Must be some in here somewhere.
"While also giving a free version of an easy to use software to develop web pages and forms."
Big deal. Fantastic, powerful, scalable web frameworks already out there, and properly Free, not just free.
"The list goes on and on."
But few, if any, of the points have any substance.
"If anything the only thing to complain about MS is they might have too much to try and release. It's hard keeping up with Microsoft's development house, nearly impossible the second you read about something the next version is about to start alpha."
Yeah, right.
You said, 'I don't think the developers will be piling in to the minority platform when they can tap huge user bases with Linux and on the iPhone.'
Does that mean you bet against Android when it was a minority platform against the huge user base of iPhone?
All this integration "it just works" is great.
But what about inter-operability with external systems?
What standards are they developing that others can use that are free and available?
It is far easier to throw a lot of money at a set of products and make them work together in-house.
Microsoft have never had a problem with making their own software inter-operate internally.
People are fed up of the MS tie-in now that they see there are other options.
The question for business is do they continue with the MS-only shops and pay the MS tax year-on-year, or do they do with what some might call second-best and get it practically for free (not including the support costs of course).
More and more, business are saying that GNU/Linux and other open-source and free options are good enough and save them a packet. Given that money if short and budgets getting cut at the moment, this is a very relevant issue.
"A demo recently showed just how perfect this system can work." So you saw the demo!
I saw a demo at Microsoft in 1994 (yup....1994) showing a really great integrated communications client on a Windows desktop. It looked like an email client, but it integrated email, voice-mail and faxes in a single tool. It looked and worked like an email client, but brought all the various media items together in one place. Fantastic demo.
......but I never saw anything else like it ever again! That's the thing with demos....sometimes you never see anything ever again.
Webmatrix - don't make me laugh
Did you ever use the original one - it was inadequate for writing anything above 'Hello World' type stuff. When I went on the NG's for help all the devs were saying 'You mean you don't have VS - then we can't help'.
I wanted to use Webmatrix to keep the code clean - but even a couple of basic requirements weren't possible. So the company bought VS and we installed it on the dev server - after which .NET apps stopped working altogether. Project limped along until the company went bust cos they'd been sold MS servers to run three call centres VOIP based mass dialling - and the system never worked properly.
Four hundred odd staff sacked on payday without being paid. All cos the management were non-techie and were sold rubbish from MS. Still, at least MS had their licenses paid for up front. It still amazes me how a company can sell such rubbish and never get sued - ususally cos it's caused the death of the companies I suppose.
"Since silverlight will work on pcs, phones, xbox, tablets, and laptops, and lets you tie data to the cloud."
"Works", not works. There, I fixed it for you.
Tell me, what happens when your internet connection breaks and all of your data is in the "cloud", ie. inaccessible?
Right: Nothing happens. Everybody just sits and plays solitare. Most stupid move anybody could do from the technological perspective.
Slow access, no reliability, no security, no nothing: Plain stupidity. Or hype, same thing.
but open up. Even contribute.
Open up to get your code fixed and while you're reeling from that have your big thinkers (not marketing) read a shit load of cyber punk novels. Think past Web2.0. Don't run the marathon but play leap frog. You have the cash to be a bit fruity. Drink Tequila and Red Bull every morning and get rid of those woolly jumpers.
No one is going to type their legal documents on their IPAD, no one is going to post their financial spreadsheets on a could app when their customized pivot tables are all on MS Excel. The desktop is still where 99% of the work will be done and the cloud is a joke compared to mature desktop apps. That's why there are still folks on mainframes. Business goes with what works.
You are living in a techie dreamworld is you see anything like this happening in the next 20 years.
Basically 95% of the users in this world can barely type in their first name as a password, let alone live in the non-automatic, non-wizard world of the cloud. They won't change stuff unless the cloud offers something the desktop can't, which it won't in the foreseeable future.That is why Linux hasn't replaced Windows as the main OS of the desktop world. The app's in Linux are just about as good as anything MS has out, it's stone stock stable, takes less hardware to run, and is massively cheaper. The desktop is easy to use and pleasant to look at.
But it's not automatic, it doesn't auto configure, you don't just click on setup.exe and get everything run automatically, etc., etc ... Until it's as easy as windows to setup, maintain and run, then it won't replace it. If the MS Centric world actually didn't work pretty damn good, then you might have a chance to replace it. The only place Linux has penetrated the corporate world (where 90% of the revenue is driven from) is at the server IT level where techies rule. Why, it's stable, cheaper, more versitile .. just like how MS Windows NT replaced Novell ... but on the desktop - not a prayer!!
It make nice news copy, but it's not a realistic scenario.
Being in England it would certainly benefit ARM for MS to focus on mobile. However, why give up such a vast amount of possibilities when talking about the desktop. Take Azure for example and if you simply implement our own personal desktop that we have at home as our own personal cloud computing service for us to manage and control and store information from our mobile phones then a new world is reborn again. The possibillities are endless the tools are there its a matter of vision and goal that will make any of these techonologies shine and become relevant and all from Microsoft, or as some call them now 'the Vole'. It would be cool to have MS turn around and actually come out with a division called the Vole and have it make holes thru the competition and take Google, Apple, and all others head on tic for tac. Superman didn't have an S on his chest he had MS. Lol.
You're exactly right that Microsoft could use a third pillar to it's revenue stream. But with Windows 7 being the fastest selling operating system EVER and Office 2010 continuing uptake of Office as the primary business productivity suite, they have some comfortable room to investigate exactly what this cash cow could be. The problem is that Microsoft has had a few too many "me-too" products rather than true investments in new technology.
However, I think the above posted comment is right that if Microsoft successfully builds, brands, and expands its cloud-connected ecosystem, they will have found that new cash cow. Problem is that this hugely depends on the success of Windows Phone 7. At the surface, WP7 appears to be another "me-too" product. It comes significantly late to the game in terms of modern mobile platforms. Nonetheless, few would argue that ditching Windows Mobile was the right thing to do. They could still win here if they can create a cloud backend that ties together the Windows, Office, search, and (to an extent) Xbox products people already own.
Nobody else is currently capable of creating this level of symbiosis between desktop, server, mobile, and gaming-- every other company out there is missing more than one of these critical componants that can be part of a cloud-connected environment.
There's no need for Microsoft to get in to open-source when it comes to desktop/server OS's. They have a strong hold of that cash cow. There's little evidence that that's going away anytime soon. There's even less evidence that open-source could somehow make Microsoft money.
Rather than release their products as open-source, Microsoft should focus on building a fantastic API for this cloud (which they're doing with Silverlight and XNA). Win32 made developers embrace Windows. A similar approach with a Windows Cloud API could make developers latch on to it.
In short, if Microsoft can make a cloud ecosystem that connects its already proven products (Windows and Office) with its emerging technologies in search, mobile, and the web, then they'll have found that third pillar. They don't need the next flashy software suite or the hottest new gadget. They need an ecosystem that makes all of their products light up when used together.
You buy or already own one or more of their products and instantly the cloud makes you desire the other peices of the puzzle you don't own yet.
"But with Windows 7 being the fastest selling operating system EVER"
PR-mathematics, ie. meaningless numbers.
1) How many windows 7s MS has actually _sold as retail_? OEM versions are not sold by MS, but OEMs. More than 10 000?
2) When the Vista is the only other option, who would buy that, at any price?
3) How many of those "sold" is actually paid by customer and registered to be in use?
These are simple questions which MS-PR isn't answering. Shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
Microsoft is a shell of it's former self that exists purely on the inertia of it's glory days as the article describes. As individuals and companies wake to the alternatives to Office and devices other than PCs that run non-Windows operating systems, that inertia will not simply slow, it will vanish.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think that MS will simply disappear from view, but they will undergo a sobering shrink and have to refocus on being a smaller, leaner organization instead of an organization so bloated and multi-focused as to represent their own bloated OS. In truth, PCs aren't going away, but the days of charging between 1/3 and 1/2 of the cost of a PC just for the OS are disappearing fast and MS needs to understand that. When they started the cost of the OS was perhaps a tenth of the overall cost of a typical PC. with Pcs now commodities, it's just not acceptable to charge $200 for the OS that will run on a $300 piece of hardware. the same is true of office. What does it say when the retail price of the OS and office productivity suite is $600 and the cost of a decent desktop PC without OS is $500-$600 for a decent system?
Back in the days of PCs that cost $2000-$3000, dropping $600 on the OPS plus office was more acceptable since it was a fraction of the cost of the system. Today the reason a typical business PC costs approximately $1000 is the cost of the Office and Windows licenses.
That's just not sustainable, especially when there are *free* alternatives, or even simply lower cost alternatives in the form of handhelds.
Reality bites, especially when a company has defied reality for so very long.
"One big bet Microsoft should make is on open source, the tool of the underdog, a label that is coming to fit the Redmond giant"
Why? This really bugs me about the FOSS fanboi's. Why does the publishing the source code increase the bottom line? It makes feck all difference.
Microsoft are making record profits, Windows 7 is a huge hit, XBox is a massive brand that's profitable (and with more units that ex-market leader Sony), SQL Server, Exchange and SharePoint keep gaining more and more ground, Bing is slowly gaining market share (very slowly!), and Windows Phone 7 has a huge amount of 'buzz' around it prior to launch.
Huge profits, a slowly growing (but growing) online presence, a new mobile platform with huge hype out shortly, record breaking and critic approved OS, growing server OS sales and the killer - more profit that any any open source company (to my knowledge).
I couldn't care less if I could see the code for any of Microsoft's products. I wouldn't make a difference. I'll still use VMWare for my visualization until / unless MS can match it on price, performance and features. I'll continue to use Juniper for my firewalls unless by some magic Windows and ISA can beat it. (and pigs may fly). Seeing the code won't change what I buy.
Why on earth do Canonical ($30 Million revenue) think they can advise Microsoft ($62 Billion revenue) that open source is some silver bullet to re-invigorating a large multinational when they are 250 times smaller?!
Meh - don't care for the code. I want something that works. (As my employer needs systems that work, regardless.)
"Meh - don't care for the code. I want something that works. (As my employer needs systems that work, regardless.)"
Two things:
1, I'll bet you give your employer the code. If there is a problem someone (maybe even you) will fix it. You maybe even have your code go through a buddy inspection so that someone else can look for potential bugs. Microsoft do not release their code, it's not open. This is one reason why it's a security nightmare and so bloated.
2, If you want something that works, you probably shouldn't use windows...
"Why does the publishing the source code increase the bottom line?"
How do you compete with somebody who gives his product away and _has much better product than you do_?
It might not increase the bottom line but it let's you _have one_. Quite simple.
You know, you have to have customers who are willing to give you money for something and you won't have if your product is mediocre and they have other choices. MS seem to have lost this about 25 years ago, so far they have succeeded to keep their monopoly on desktop-OS on momentum only(with the help of US government).
Expanding that monopoly has failed miserably, because frankly, MS hasn't ever been good at competition, in any area. Dirty tricks-department is good but that's not enough anymore.
There is no need - most of them are easy to install and they DO work.
I was using desktop Red Hat YEARS ago working for a major pharma doing complex protein modeling in 3D and data manipulation on huge (7 million records) datasets.
At home I use OpenSUSE on workstations/laptops/fileserver/netbook and it does everything I want including processing video, RAW DSLR file processing, programming, protein modeling, PCB layout etc.
Microsoft's last quarter showed total revenue of $16.04 billion, of that $4.5 billion was windows, 5.3 billion was Office and $4 billion was server software. The online services division was about $600 million, which left more or less $1.6 billion for Microsoft's entertainment division, the part that includes the Xbox gaming division. So the total revenue of that division amounts to 10% of Microsoft's total revenue, and not all of that $1.6 billion came from the Xbox 360 in any case.
In terms of the operating income, which is how much did you spend minus how much you made selling stuff. The entertainment division made an operating LOSS of $172 million. The mobile devices division made an operating LOSS of $696 million.
So, I'm not sure, but you may be utterly wrong, blinkers and fanboyish when you content that the 360 and Zune are massive income sources for Microsoft. Between them they account for perhaps as much as 10% of the revenue and a net loss of income. That's not really an income *source* is it?
Sure, MS has a dream (finally!) to build this wonderful, all-connected and all-the-same-on-every-device utopia, but Google's way ahead of them, especially on the back end, and is giving it all away for free. Why? Because that's not where they make their money. In fact, the more they give away the more it feeds the money-making side of the business. It really is a brilliant strategy - too bad MS never understood the looming threat.
Unless MS comes up with a way to make all these tools, OSs and back end features free, they don't stand a chance of competing with Android/Chrome. Why would you pay for something that you can get for nothing?
(And no, privacy is not free, but most users could, unfortunately, care less.)
This article essentially says the very things I have been saying in my Microsoft comments on this site for the past few months or so.
Hmm. I should start checking my router config, there's obviously some lag being induced...
Okay, that's maybe more than a little tongue-in-cheek, but I still find it interesting to read an article on here that serves as a reasonable summary of several of my comments, from someone who in all likelihood has never read a single one. It proves to me I am not alone in my thinking.
Maybe as some of these opinions are now being expressed by important folk they finally have a chance of getting heard by someone who has the power to enact change. All I can do with my many and lengthy comments about Microsoft's catastrophic failure to execute, (although I seriously could level many of the same complaints at Canonical, Novell and quite a few other Linux disties,) is make the odd commenttard stop and think. (Well, periodically they run an article by me that has a similar purpose, but I am pretty sure I produce far more text as a commenttard than as a writer.) It is a fun way to spend time while the back of my brain works on other projects.
Either way, good piece from the author; I hope to see more of the same!
It's all about trust, after the Vista+DRM shenanigans I don't trust them and never will again.
@pan2008 "Persoanlly, I would like my software to just work and need no support whatsover."
You Twat! On this Ubuntu + Firefox out-of-the-box machine the spell checker "just works" as I type this post!
"One idiot rules them all? That explains a lot."
No. That's the problem. Dave's no idiot, but Marketing & Management have oversight. The actual NT kernel is quite secure, relatively minimalistic & extensible. It's the crap that Marketing & Management insist on grafting onto it that is the problem.
"No wonder their OS is so insecure and bloated."
You, Sir/Ma'am, have an incomplete grasp of the big picture.
"He probably looked at unix and said "that's quite a small install and relatively secure - ours needs to be the opposite!""
::snort:: Compare source for VMS and BSD at around the time Dave (and myself, BTW) left DEC ... I think you'll be mewling out of the other corner of your mouth.
I wouldn't call the man who lead development of VMS (among other DEC operating systems) an idiot. You'd hate Unix too if you'd written an OS that, for years, was ahead of Unix's technology and in some regards still is, only to see it eclipsed by inferior "worse is better" technology on account of market politics. Bear in mind, however, that Cutler is a kernel hacker. Indeed, he did a good job on the NT kernel, but what was he to do about everything above that? Perhaps you forget what's wrong with Windows. It ain't the kernel.
Take a look at VMS for a moment. It doesn't have a registry that everything can screw with. It has several bolted-down databases that can only be administered through simple, secure frontends that have been debugged and debugged again since 1979. It has a security model that's arguably more extensive and fine-grained than that of Unix, it has kernel-level support for clustering--even across different architectures--and it has a filesystem that is just amazing. Additionally, VMS' API was famous for how easy it is to get code written in different languages to play together. (I say 'was' because nothing about VMS is exactly famous anymore.) It doesn't have CMD.EXE. It has the DCL command line, which makes CMD looks like a relic from the stone age. (Oh, and you can SSH into it, unlike Windows.)
Ideas like that don't agree well with the Windows Cutler was put in charge of. Sure, he could make a fine kernel, but whatever OS was built on top of it--and whatever features it offered--still had to be Windows. It still had to look to developers like Windows and generally act like it. Even if the NT kernel was pretty much a reimplementation of VMS technology (minus VMS' clustering capabilities, alas), everything above that was more or less beyond Cutler's control, and it's the stuff above that--the Windows API, the monstrosity that is the registry, and, perhaps worst of all, the abhorrent practices of developers who still treat Windows like it's 1995--that makes Windows slow, bloated, and insecure these days.
One idiot in charge? I'd say one brilliant kernel hacker in charge who isn't really in charge at all. If he were in charge, Windows would be a very different OS.
As a LAMP developer, I curse every time I see an ad for ASP/.NET, but its immensely popular and those people are not going to want to relearn their skills (just as I don't want to learn ASP/.NET). So Microsoft need to put their effort into making the "Microsoft mindset" work on every platform. I have no idea what the current state of Mono/Moonlight is, but its clear Microsoft should be developing it in-house alongside Silverlight.
M$ should adopt open source at lease using BSD style licensing.
They should consider replacing NTFS (DOS) with something akin ZFS and gain scalability and robustness.
The problem is the ego of the top brass.
For all of the talk the money did not come so much from innovation but from business hardball/illegal monopoly type activity.
Can't imagine why this guy's getting downvoted so much. He's right.
The Linux kernel is pure spit and string as far as the eye can see, and its development is more about tacking on features than making sure they actually go there. It's schizophrenic and littered with the debris of years of indecisive ideological conflict. Complain about some problem with it and the community's answer is "Well, screw you, buddy. If you don't like it, why don't you just fix it yourself, because we sure don't give a shit." They care that it mostly works. They don't care if it works any better than it needs to work. They don't care if the design is neat or elegant or finished--just that it compiles and that it runs without crashing too much. Look at ext3. Look at the sound system. Look at how the kernel handles disks. Look at how the kernel handles memory. The Linux kernel is a fractured clusterfuck stem to stern, and the people who design it do not act like engineers. It was none other than Linus Torvalds who said of Linux recently: "The kernel is huge and bloated and our icache footprint is scary."
The NT kernel, however, follows a more consistent design philosophy and is basically a reimplementation of a kernel that was technologically advanced beyond Linux years before Linux even existed. There are Unix kernels these days that can measure up to that, but Linux is NOT the one.
Now, don't confuse Windows with the NT kernel. By no means does Windows as a whole share the merits of its kernel; indeed, I'd say that everything above the kernel in Windows is about as broken as the Linux kernel; one is screwed because too many corporate cooks have spoiled the broth, and one is screwed because of a culture of mediocrity that can't decide on how to solve a problem right the first time--which, coincidentally, produces nearly the same bad results, but amplified with the arrogance and zeal of the free software zealots and their belief that Linux can do no wrong as long as it's free, good engineering be damned. Don't lump in the NT kernel with that or get silly ideas in your head like the idea that the Linux kernel is, by any definition of the words "good" and "design", a "good design".
Linux is not designed--it is accreted. It grows organically, like one of those tumors with teeth and hair in it. If you're going to stick up for open-source Unix, couldn't you at least pick one of the ones that was written by actual software engineers? Did you have to put your money on /that/ horse?
News just in from Microsoft Public Relations Dept...
> Sorry but Microsoft is making huge leaps and bounds in territory others only dream of right now. They just building a larger empire all at once instead of piece mealing it together over years. What I mean is Microsofts huge push for their cloud based services that connect all of your devices seamlessly.
Which territory others only dream of? Do you mean dreams like Ubuntu One, or DropBox. Oh wait, they are available free. NOW. Not at some point in the future. There's already an App for that!
> Also with project natal aka kinetic you can turn any TV into a touch screen.
Why the fsck would you want to have to sit within arms reach of a low quality big screen, and then put your greasy grimy fingers all over it? What's the point of that? Do you own shares in Windolene?
> Blah blah blah, Their goal is to add self containing web applications / sites that can then be ported over to their web publish platform.
Oh right. Would that be "their" Open Sauce Web Platform. So the file spec will be open saucy too? With Mac and Linux versions? Or just Windows 7?
> The list goes on and on. If anything the only thing to complain about MS is they might have too much to try and release. It's hard keeping up with Microsoft's development house, nearly impossible the second you read about something the next version is about to start alpha.
With the beta being Released To Manufacturing probably. And how many great things have they developed and released in the last 15 years? Rather than their usual 3E approach?
Does the phrase "Jack of all trades, master of none." mean anything to you?
I think you will find, when you awaken from your Microsoft induced hallucinations, that most open sourcerors take everything Microsoft say regarding "opening up" with a rather large lorry-load of sodium chloride.
Stop. Look. Listen. Think.
Everybody else, keep calm and carry on.
If MS does not port Office to Linux, it risks losing any influence they could possibly have over Linux. Right now, Open Office has one feature that MS office does not, and is becoming more and more important-- sufficient cross platform compatibility. More and more users are switching to Open Office, EVEN ON WINDOWS, not because it's free, but because it's more compatible with their entire enterprise-- which has begun to include Linux on the desktop. And even where it does not, many servers (often which are Linux) have need for compatible office tools, for importing database information into spreadsheets and documents, etc. Servers are used to generate and distribute documents, even if users don't normally type them in on them.
MS has an opportunity to influence Linux on the desktop, by running with it themselves. If they do not (and their egos suggest they will not), they will be dragged kicking and screaming there, late to the game again, once the exodus towards greater interoperability finally hits them in their wallets hard enough for them to take notice.
... that we all have to live with...
That's how I see Microsoft - no longer the 800lb gorilla, but the 500lb embarrassing uncle "dad dancing" around the room.
We have to deal with him, because everyone else does. We can't take him outside and shoot him, because, well, he's family - that wouldn't be the done thing.
Unfortunately, he's going to be around for a while, sticking his foolish ugly head where it doesn't fit, nor is wanted. Nobody likes him, but he doesn't care, sticks his head in the sand and acts like the buffoon - the guy in the loud shirt with the loud hailer that nobody likes "Hey, look at me, I'm frikkin cool dude!"
But hey, who knows, once Balmer is out of the way... then maybe things will change.
;)
The only good air plane Is the air plane that flies,
MS plane is a civilian one that flies acceptably.
The Linux plane runs and fly, sadly it does much better as a NASA-Scientific plane than as a good civilian air plane.
The reason is simple, the MS one has lots of sensible add-ons and high-quality mods that help regular people get their jobs done.
The Linux one has lots of scientific instruments, but the number and quality of civilian add ons and mods is smaller and the quality leaves a lot to desire on many of them, which are sometimes not even fit for purpose.
What I mean is: the only reason Windows is kept around is for the software it allows people to run.
As soon as the required windows software runs "proper" on Linux the need for windows disappear. It doesn't matter if it is natively ported or wine emulated.
It is as simple as it sounds.
"MS plane is a civilian one that flies acceptably."
Bullshit. It's more like North Korean airways where you fly with what you are given and you are happy with it or else. The leaders of course use their own airplanes bought from west.
In a big company people who are making buying decisions aren't using MS-products for anything except some personal e-mails, everything else is handled by a secretary.
When MS salespersons offer lunches to these people and talk a lot of bullshit (they are very good at that), sale is agreed and no-one, who understands about IT is asked. That's the way it goes and talking about "acceptability" is rubbish: PHB's buy _something_ they don't understand from salespeople who lie as much as they can to get a deal.
Then MS delivers something and when it doesn't work at all, company scraps the project silently, errors are not public in any company.
Linux hasnt' salespersons as such, at all. So they have to compete on other fronts, like scalability, portability and stability and of course, open source. None of which MS has.
You could configure any Linux-distro look like some version of Windows if you wanted, so your argument about overly technical UI is very uninformed or just trolling. But why would somebdoy do that, MS UI is thoroughly unconsistent and fragmented.
On the other hand, Linux has plain text configuration files and MS has binary registry and oh so simple 56 hexadecimal numbers long keys, that's simple?
You _need_ to change those, too. Eventually.
If the inner workings of airplanes were as confused and MacGuyvered as those of Linux, there'd be more craters than airplanes. (To be fair, the same would be true if the cockpits of airplanes were properly analogous to the Windows userland and API, or if airplane pilots acted like Windows developers.)
I posted this piece from the NYT to Slashdot. But I think it will bear repetition here.
"MEASURED by profits, Microsoft trounces Apple and Google. In the most recent three months, Microsoft earned $4.52 billion, versus Apple’s $3.25 billion and Google’s $1.8 billion. But, dear investors, where is the love for this beaten-down company?
"Lost from view is what arguably is Microsoft’s very best story — its transformation into a powerhouse supplier of the specialized software that meets the complex needs of large corporations, what the trade calls selling to “the enterprise.”
Microsoft’s enterprise software business alone is approaching the size of Oracle. But despite that astounding growth, Microsoft must accept that, fair or not, victories on the enterprise side draw about as much attention as being the No. 1 wholesale seller of plumbing supplies. Microsoft won’t receive the adoring attention that its chief rival draws with products like the iPad."
The gadget market is quirky and fragile.
That is why you need the high-wire artist, the sky pilot like Jobs. But even he can take a fall - and he won't be around forever.
"MEASURED by profits, Microsoft trounces Apple and Google. In the most recent three months, Microsoft earned $4.52 billion, versus Apple’s $3.25 billion and Google’s $1.8 billion."
Microsoft own what percentage of the OS market and Apple own how much?
You may want to look at:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/apple-microsoft-market-cap-2/
I would be sleeping in the garage if I suggested to the spouse that Open Office is just as good as Microsoft, you just have to work around this and work around that. Given that four months here are too hot for that and five too cold, I haven't chosen to play open source evangelist.
But when the kids that grew up with Google Apps make it into management, what then? Will the Powerpoint ninjas appalled at OO's presentation tool look like the folks who grumbled about Windows 3.x's lack of pre-emptive multitasking and waited for OS 2's ship to come in?
"I would be sleeping in the garage if I suggested to the spouse that Open Office is just as good as Microsoft, you just have to work around this and work around that."
What version of Open Office you were talking about, again?
As far as I know, MS Office needs a lot of workarounds as it can do million things but none of those well -> workarounds. You have to do whatever you were doing just the right way or it won't work. Of course the "right way" isn't documented anywhere.
Applies to Open Office too, sometimes, but not on every operation.
Are you a man or what? I told my wife she'd be sleeping in the garage if I couldn't finally put Ubuntu on the laptop instead of that pile of cr@p called Vista (last MS machine in the house). She reluctantly agreed and I bought a new hard drive and installed it, she used it for a while of course but complained after a few weeks that she didn't have desktop widgets and didn't want the screensaver password lock to come on when she put the lid down. Basically she just wasn't used to it, so I put the old hard drive back again... It was two days before she begged me to put Ubuntu back on it again! She had forgotten how bad Vista was. So I put the old hard drive in and I explained to her that we can fix/customize anything that she's not happy with. She's been happily using it for months now, complete with widgets and minus the sceen lock. Being entirely MS free is so liberating and has extended the life expectancy of all my hardware because it doesn't need 4GB of RAM and 4CPUs to open a document....
MS had it so good in the Wintel years (1994-2004) because most of the software made for Windows wasn't interoperable, and the open source alternatives in the mid 1990's weren't comparable at all. (Sawtooth was more disgusting to look at than Windows 95, and I hated KDE.)
Now, approaching the 20th year since Windows 95 was released, and look at what we have: Apple's alternatives are equal or better than Microsoft Office 2003/2007 in a lot of areas, Linux has gotten plain gorgeous as well with Gnome/KDE (I looove KDE 4, it is a great improvement over it's prior versions!), Google's Chrome OS is the first proof-of-concept of a Cloud-centric operating system.
While Windows 7 has caught up to Apple in terms of UI appearance and fixed a lot of problems with Windows Vista, it's not inherently different since Windows XP... or 2000, or Me, or 98, or 95. All of the above operating systems (except Goog, of course) have done a lot of work on user experience, whereas Windows' best UI improvement in the last 6 years is Windows Media Center.
Applications-wise, the only reason why to buy Windows 7 is the same reason to buy X-Box 360... most games still require Windows to run well (well, there's Wine/Cedega/vmware, but let's face it, it would be easier if game developers/graphics card manufacturers wrote for multiple platforms to begin with.) If you don't play graphics card intensive games, there is nothing tying you into Microsoft except that either you can't afford a Mac (PC still whips Apple on pricing, but even on cheap hardware, Linux is there to fill the gap), or you're afraid to leave Windows.
It's easy to evangelize open source, but it won't change Microsoft's bread and butter... their stance is exclusivity: Most of their hardware is certified to work on their machines with sparing support on other platforms, Apps only work on Windows by mutualistic license agreements and developers who write Windows-only code, and Microsoft doesn't play nice with Linux or Apple, period. (Try networking a Mac Mini and a Windows 7 PC together... you'll need to spend five or more hours, plus a couple of bottles of Rogaine to replace all that hair you ripped out... And even if you figure out how, if you post it online there will be 100's who won't be able to follow what you've done for some reason or another.) While it would be possible for them to monetize Bing and use it for more Google-esque pursuits, it's not likely to happen.
I know, right?
I had this discussion with someone on Ars Technica who was sure that Steam coming to Mac/Linux would end this in 2011 and knock Microsoft off of it's last pedestal.
With DirectX11 on the newest cards only and XBox360 as a tie-in to developing with DirectX. Hmmm, write one game, port it to two platforms... yeeeah, I think I'll go with Ballmersoft on that one. I think MS will be king for a eensy bit longer. Mac hardware comparatively start off with weak NVidia cards (Geforce 310... meh), and most Mac users (NOT ALL... hold those torches, fanbois, I know you better than you think!) are so stuck on Easy Mode that opening the case seems like cutting open your pet to see how they work. (See, it wasn't that mean.)
@Misguided Fool, Microsoft has been good all along at coming up with ideas on paper, hyping the hell out of them, and making it sound like release of products to do what they demo is imminent, then not shipping or stripping back features until the result is uncrecognizable compared to the demo. Until they ship, this is vaporware, they have done this over and over and over for at least the last 20 years. They can say they'll have a cloud, all this junk that ties into it, and claim they'll eventually have .NET running on all these platforms. But they don't! They have basically hosted exchange and SQL server, calling them "cloud" to hype them up.
Second, how is this "territory others have only dreamed of?" "Cloud" is a vague term that is far overhyped (in particular, OneNote is *not* "cloud" in any meaningful way, it's just a fancy content management system, and from what I've heard a very temeperamental and slow one). But easy online storage and synchronization has been around for at least 15 years (the being able to put photos "into the cloud" in your terms). And products such as Google Docs (starting a document on one device, and seamlessly continuing work on it on a second device...) have existed for a while now, versus Microsoft's equivalents being vaporware.
------------------------------------------------
As for the article... as a few people have said, Microsoft really can't just go from where they are now to being a member of the open source community -- there's so much bad blood, Microsoft could be a fully productive member of the community for 10 years and some would assume it's still a trap, they are just waiting to spring some patents or to assert copyright over the code they've produced or something.
I won't tell them what to do. Frankly, some companies have so much inertia in computing infrastructure, Microsoft could probably quit coding a thing now and hold on for 20 years by just selling copies of (increasingly obsolete) Office, Exchange (for internal use once it became unsuitable for external use), SQL Server, and Windows 7 (which some companies would keep using downgrade rights to Windows XP on). Just as hospitals and companies keep buying IBM AS400 s, Unisys mainframes, and so on (I exclude IBM zSeries mainframes from this assessment, a lot of that is inertia, but they are also actually pretty good for the types of workloads they are used for compared to the complexity of the setup needed to replace one.)
"Microsoft could probably quit coding a thing now and hold on for 20 years by just selling copies of (increasingly obsolete) ..."
As far as I know, they did that about 15 years ago and no-one noticed.
MS has > 50 000 workers around the globe and windows+office+ie -development teams are less then 200 people put together, half percent of the workforce.
"Fixing bugs isn't making profit" as BillG himself said.
I (as a Linux user) would be very, very afraid. It would be like being embraced by a 800-pound gorilla.
In the long and bloody saga of the rise of the MS empire I seem to recall the phrase 'Embrace, extend...' cropping up somewhere - what was the third word?
Thing is, Open Source is based on the idea of free competition and people building cooperatively on each others efforts. This is not a concept that leaps to mind when contemplating MS. It would be nice to be able to trust MS but their history militates against it.
Oh, they did support a 'Linux' company once though, IIRC. They bought a licence from SCO. :)
Oh yes - the third word? It was 'extinguish'.
'tother road about. They bought a licence from AT&T and shipped an OS called 'Xenix'. They sold the whole thing to the Santa Cruz operation.
http://wapedia.mobi/thumb/4cf814822/en/max/470/360/Ms_xenix.png
I spent months trying to support an OS called Xenix on a multiple Z80 machine from Tandy. Could not be done at all.;
I'm always surprised why hardly anyone focuses on the non-tech failures of Microsoft. Sure MS makes "record" profits, but the use of that word clouds the aweful truth that, as an investment, MS stock is a poor performer. It's PE ratio is embarrassingly low for a company with the resources it has and it's Market cap is now less than Apple (which has a much lower OS Market share).
That is why Steve Ballmer is being questioned. Shareholder don't give a crap that xbox is supposedly such a "money-spinner" when those profits are being frittered away, time and again, on failed R&D projects. On top of that is the abject failures in market timing. Windows Mobile 7 is a thorn in the side for many investors.
They called their mobile OS "Windows".
The natural reaction is to wonder why you wanted a bloated OS on a mobile device
In reality, Windows CE is a very different OS, more different than were WinNT and Win95 from each other. Names matter, and even the people selling the stuff seem to think that Windows is Windows.
Microsoft have three options:
1. Continue their slowly decline as their leaner competitors eat away at their market share, because they are stuck in stagnation.
2. Do a major management restructure like IBM had to i.e. replace most of the management and streamline the business.
3. Get destroyed by a new "Black Swan" competitor!
I've seen all their mobile platforms fall flat on their face, I expect the Windows Phone 7 thing will fail too, and bad management will kill off the latests brands after years of shareholders money have been wasted on them e.g. like Kin etc.
As pointed out on the blog link, Microsoft executives don't seem to understand that you can't lump all your products and grades of products under the same "Windows" brand, a pretty lame brand at that! Only one brand seemed to have escaped this lack of executive imagination, and that was "Xbox".
Management is only helpful if it helps workers to get things done for customers, once it become an end in itself a business is doomed e.g. Microsoft and lots of other big business; this is why Corporations should only be temporary, so management don't have enough time to get really comfortable and waste shareholders money!
... called Apple?
They are alive today because of a $5,000,000 cash transfusion a few years back provided by none other than Microsoft. Why in the world would they do something so "generous" for a competitor?
There was a sole reason. If Apple had gone belly up, the percentage market shares of all the survivors would have changed. The greatest change among them all would have been in desktop OS software, i.e. Windows and the Apple OS of the time. By comparion, with Apple out of the picture, Microsoft's share would have skyrocketed very quickly into that area of virtually no competition at all and that is a textbook definition of monopoly: one supplier; many buyers. If you even remember the event you likely were suckered in by statements about Microsoft just being a good citizen and keeping Apple afloat for some brotherly love reason. Don't believe it. Microsoft hated having to do what it did, but it did so to keep the federal prosecuters off its back.
So you want Microsoft to fail and other businesses to rise to the top. You want Microsoft to feel the pain others have felt in a downward spiral of lost business and failing products. Well brothers and sisters you better change your attitude. This comment forum is litered with obviously extremely competent IT types. But the sad fact is those so well geared to IT here are basically ignorant of way large corporations work and interplay from a non IT business perspective. If Microsoft fails utterly there will be choas in the market place and when that happens, one of the very first areas to suffer in every corporation is IT. Hell, you've bitched and moaned about it on numerous occasions right here. And then after that, well ,,, it ain't going to be pretty.
Typically there will be a large number of down votes and a lot of pseudo-business like retorts. Have at it ,,, that changes nothing.
Microsoft is suffering and struggling to stay relevant, That's obvious. What's not so obvious, is that one should never underestimate the resolve of a giant. They are sluggish and slow to respond but once they get going they are a steamroller. And when that steamroller has the deepest pockets in the IT world they have a total resource bank others only wish they had.
The only problem with your analysis is that what businesses, consumers and even governments are demanding of their IT suppliers is anathema to the behemoth that is MS. People aren’t demanding a given product. They aren’t demanding open source. They aren’t demanding any specific thing. What they are demanding is flexibility, rapid adaptability and vision.
Microsoft is too big and has too many entrenched internal warring fiefdoms to be able to turn a dime, but the ability to turn on a dime is what people are demanding. What everyone who enjoys sitting around armchair commentating on IT companies seems to completely miss is that in the past ten years both computing and rapid access to information (the internet) have become commoditised.
For 90% of the functions a consumer would require of a computer, and probably well north of 75% of all business functions the underlying operating system or selection of applications doesn’t really matter. There is such a wide variety of “good enough” out there that the only way to remain relevant is to carve out niches. Currently, Microsoft retains stranglehold on servers, Apple on the high-end/high-margin fashionista market, Google on access to information.
There are also a lot of also-rans that are dangerously close to being real competitors. Red Hat and Oracle are legitimate threats to servers. HP/Palm may well be a legitimate threat to the high-end/high-margin fashinoista market if they play it well. And for access to information…okay, Google doesn’t actually have a competitor at the moment.
Each of these companies try hard to break into the other’s markets if for no other reason than the chance to kneecap them. They are all infiltrated into several other markets because by doing so they can build an “ecosystem” around their real money makers. They funnel people from their peripheral works into the core market and this is just the way business is.
The issue is that in a truly commoditised market, one where all these major money makers for these big companies are populated by many and varied “good enough” competitors, the smallest innovation or disruption can mean billions of dollars. Let’s look at the iPad:
We’ve known about the iPad for ages before it finally showed up. We knew also because it was Apple that the execution wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be sufficiently awesome to get the general public actually excited about an IT product. Microsoft, Google, HP, etc. all had well over a year to pull a rabbit out of their hat and they failed miserably. By the time they get themselves into the game, Apple will have sold millions of the damned things, and be on the verge of launching the second generation. They will always be a full generation ahead of everyone else in a highly commoditised market which means they win.
Sure, this time next year there will be many Android, WebOS and Windows tablet/slate/whathaveyou’s. Who cares? They’ll still be a generation behind, and won’t have the name recognition. Even if one or two manage to be technically superior to the iPad, it will be nothing more than “an iPad competitor.” Even today virtually every news organisation talks about new android phones as “is this the new iPhone killer?”
Apple certainly didn’t invent the mp3 player/smartphone or the tablet or what-have you. Google didn’t invent search, and Microsoft didn’t invent non-mainfraime servers. What each of them did was take advantage of a stagnant market where the dominant players at the time were so bogged down in corporate crap that they shouldn’t react to a disruptive competitor on the scene. They rapidly established a monopoly in the area based on a significantly easier to use/prettier device that did the exact same thing as previous versions from competitors. They then viciously protected their monopoly and built an empire.
What I, and everyone else in this thread is saying about Microsoft is that they have become that curmudgeonly old, slow to react, visionless behemoth that gets taken out by some arrogant pretentious punk working out of his momma’s garage. Usually because they don’t think the little twerp is a threat. Sometimes it’s worse; they recognise the threat, but spend so much time arguing about how to deal with it that by the time they are ready to react to it the moment has passed.
How much money, how many bodies, what kind of resources Microsoft has…not a single iota of it matters unless they have the internal political will to react rapidly and correctly to change.
Sadly, they aren’t even the only ones. Novell is for sale because their management suffered the same thing. Canonical, Red Hat, IBM, HP, and a slew of others are positively glacial in their responses; unable not only to react to the changes occurring around them, but restricted by previous set-in-stone decisions and the prejudices of their management.
Google and Apple are in the IT darlings entirely because their business model relies on defining and driving change; if the change isn’t from within their companies, they ruthlessly hunt it down and murder it. If the change is from within their companies they throw it into the wild, because they need to be seen as “innovative.”
What the people with the money right now are demanding is innovative. Microsoft, and so many others simply aren’t appearing (and appearances are key) to be so.
"Microsoft retains stranglehold on servers"
Not "servers" in general, but specifially Exchange-servers. That's their stranglehold of many companies.
Other people use standard email-servers like sendmail on Linux/Solaris/BSD/whatever.
IIS is almost dead and only MS-only companies use it (.NET does nothing without), others use Apache on whatever they happen to have, more often than not, Linux.
On the other areas, MS is practically dead in servers, no-one uses it. Why would they?
A server which uses 50% of cpu-cycles and memory to display a pretty GUI? Mindbogglingly stupid idea. And don't forget the modal popups on console which prevents anybody doing anything remotely. Brilliant.
" They are sluggish and slow to respond but once they get going they are a steamroller. And when that steamroller has the deepest pockets in the IT world they have a total resource bank others only wish they had."
Even a steamroller needs a driver and MS hasn't any. Ballmer is so lost he wouldn't find his own ass with two hands in his back pockets.
Pockets are deep but when you are throwing the money in to drain your pockets will empty before the drain fills.
that a payment of $10,500 from the two Steves to Bill and Paul in August 1977, for part of the license fee for BASIC, rescued Microsoft from certain insolvency? Didn't think so. Also the "cash transfusion" was paid in part to settle a previous suit over Microsoft's *theft* of Apples IP (QuickTime source code). I'm sure that Microsoft did indeed hate doing what they did, but they owed Apple BIG! In fact it can rationally be argued that were it not for Apple and the Macintosh, Microsoft wouldn't exist today as it does! Doug, this is all well documented.
As for Microsoft feeling pain, isn't that what *you* want to befall Apple? That's the impression I get from your other posts, but I apologise if that isn't the case. I, and I'm sure the more reasonable posters here wouldn't wish job losses on anyone. Shame that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer didn't feel that way about the employees of Netscape before they essentially 'steamrollered' them out of business with their anti-competitive practices, was it. This is where the whole "JOBS IT TEH EVILZ SKELETOR" stuff is just bullshit. Sure, he's a snake-oil salesman, but put him up next to Ballmer and Gates (pre-philanthropy) and he's a frickin' saint!
I'm not going to say that Microsoft haven't done anything innovate as that is just a stupid position to take, but their business practices are at least as questionable as Google or Apples; I'd go so far as to suggest that Bill Gates wrote the play-book himself.
Like him or not, Gates knew what he was doing, he new computing, software and the markets that he was engaging in, much like Jobs does today. Ballmer contrastingly is a used car salesman that has lucked out in getting where he is; get rid of him and Microsoft problems should disappear! Replace him with someone that will focus on what Microsoft are doing, what they are good at and like Gates, understands computing (*ahem* Ray Ozzie), rather than someone that looks to what Apple and Google are up to to inform the business strategy and direction, then maybe Microsoft will seem more relevant again instead of looking like the catch-up merchants that they are becoming.
"Typically there will be a large number of down votes and a lot of pseudo-business like retorts. Have at it ,,, that changes nothing." in other words, 'I'm right, whatever the facts actually say...'. Whatever...
This article lacks facts and insight. Predicting Microsoft's demise is lame and intended only to stoke the hatred & get more readers. As other commenters mentioned, not only is Microsoft HUGE in open source, but they have XBox and many other relevant divisions.
If you hate Microsoft, you should ask yourself, 'Why?'
- If your answer is morally based, then you can't complain that Microsoft spends too much time on doing things the right way. After the antitrust trials, no corporate entity has been more responsible than Microsoft.
- If your answer is that Apple makes cooler hardware, then remember that Microsoft doesn't make computers. It creates software that *enables* dozens of other companies to create hardware.
- If your answer is that they are a greedy, money-hungry, hyper-competitive corporation, then make sure you're not an investor -- because that's what investors *demand* of the companies they invest in.
- If you think Microsoft is too closed or too proprietary AND you own something made by Apple, than you are a walking contradiction.
Don't get me wrong, I have Apple hardware, RIM hardware, and I run Mac OS, Windows, and Linux. But they all have advantages and disadvantages.
If I could only make one point here it is this: You simply cannot sum up Microsoft in a one-page article. They are too deep, too broad, and too complex for any one person to understand. People usually don't want to give them the benefit of the doubt because of their history - but that's just silly and short-sighted.
"If you hate Microsoft, you should ask yourself, 'Why?'"
No, I don't. They are a convicted criminal and that's why _you should hate them also_.
Only criminals love the company of other criminals.
Not to speak about other illegalities they werent' convicted.
How about:
-Illegal abuse of monopoly
-shady bussiness practices
-vendor lock-in
-extorsion of the hardware makers
-cartel with Intel
...
How many factual reasons do you want, instead of opinions?
Why you fanboys _always_ leave the most obvious realities out?
"They are too deep, too broad, and too complex for any one person to understand. "
Bullshit. MS is one-man show and this time the man is lost. Any army doesn't do anything the leader doesn't want to and that's not complex at all: One man show.
Windows is only usable if you have someone to fix it when it breaks. Businesses have paid IT departments. Everybody else relies on the billions of unpaid hours donated by the geeks that they know. When I get a crashed Windows PC to fix nowadays with XP or Vista, it goes back with a fresh Ubuntu install. No way I'm spending 40 hours looking for Windows drivers and coaxing all those hundreds of Windows updates to install themselves. When Microsoft loses their army of unpaid Windows repairmen (and women), they will no longer be viable. That's why Microsoft needs Linux, because they need the geeks that come with it.
MS might also want to figure out a way to include Cygwin while not violating the GPL. They might want to include other development tool chains that would allow developers to work on OSS projects in the WIndows environment, now something that is often easier to accomplish on Apple kit.
MS made life difficult when it went with C# instead of working with the Java platform. While this may have been justified from a technical perspective, it also meant that MS was fighting a tide of interoperability to maintain a monopoly. It needs to fix that so that businesses can choose MS products as part of the solution, rather than having to exclude them
Finally, developers should not be treated as a profit center. If developers are essential, then make them feel that way. MS development tools must be nearly free. At a minimum that means that MS Windows Pro must include a Visual Studio License. If MS wants developer to link to MS databases, a license should be included for that as well. If these tools were as free as Eclipse, students would learn them and want to develop. MS can still shaft developers with MSDN subscriptions.
Look at it this way. To develop for linux costs only a computer, which can probably be a hand me down. To develop for iPhone costs less than $1000 plus $100. For MS there is the machine, plus $1,200-10,000 to access MS development information. While MS believe that it provides value to support at a 50% price premium on development on it's platform, times they are a changing.
Microsoft was/is able to make so much money because their products are closed source.
Going opensourse on any of their main products would mean losing lots and lots of money.
And adopting linux in any form will only mean they become one of the many instead of the big fish they are now.
I hope they will go opensourse and go belly up. BUt lets face it, they won't
@nematoad
"Persoanlly, I would like my software to just work " Should have bought a Mac then...
Oh really? The last time I connected my Kodak camera to a friend's Mac it threw up. When I tried to write with a different keyboard it only had 8 keyboards pre-installed. Not the one I wanted. Or should I mention my nephew’s mac book that couldn't render well some pictures with a £800 price tag? Enough said.
@R Cox
Have you heard of Visual Studio express? Last time I checked it was free. SQL Server express is free too. So stop your FUD. Using sub-standard software to develop is costing business money. The biggest expense a company incurs is Developer's time so having the best Development Software makes perfect sense. Even if it costs $1200 so what? Visual Studio Ultimate is around £500 which is hardly the daily expense of a good programmer. I am fed up with companies that don't understand that their developers needs their best software tools cause it's them losing money. I will never forget a boss of mine who kept asking us, is anything else that you need for software tools?
> Why do people spout the bs about MS being a convicted criminal.
Because most people simply are not anal rentive lawyers.
Calling them convicted monopolists captures the essence of the situation even if it leaves room for Lemming to quibble about minutia.
Microsoft has been persued by the US Department of Justice on multiple occasions for anti-trust activities. A judicial finding of fact has even been made against them on these accusations.
Even civil jurors are prone to use the term "guitly".
I'm just curious as to the ratio of expert predictions that have actually (mostly) come true and those that haven't.
Especially when it comes to this kind of arena, markets. I have a niggling feeling, that they're inaccurate more than accurate.
It would be nice if the retail cost of the gear came down for sure.
Likely what you're reading are personal convictions in disguise. There are a couple blatant ones in here; some linux fanbois, some micros~1 fanbois. Personally I wouldn't mind seeing micros~1 crash and burn, good riddance I say. Though I wouldn't advocate replacing all windows boxes with some linux or other. Whether it'll happen anytime soon? I had hopes back when they were before the beak on monopolism charges. No such luck.
If you feel like counting, turf up all the predictions, then look in a year, two, five, how much turned out true and how much turned out false. The wider the diversity of opinions, the more must necessairily be false.
It's pretty clear micros~1 is still mindbogglingly big but no longer the fear of the neighbourhood. They're no longer owners of the hearts and minds, and that's good. It leaves room to come up with new things. The best you can do is do exactly that: Come up with new things, and don't rely on these guys. They want us to need them, but we're better off not being tied to any one single source. Independence from that would in fact help bring down costs.
Now as a student at a private training institute, I have been granted a live.com email, which is all-but useless to me at home, because I run Linux and connect to the Internet with linux - Microsoft's Windows is too flaky and unsafe to connect to the Internet except via a *Nix box.
Yep, that's right - Microsoft has tied the success of its online Office product to its MS Windows product. If Microsoft keeps up its habit of tying its Internet email client to its disktop cashcow, it's going to lose quite severely on the mobile front. Because, if the greater majority of mobile phones are not runn9ing a Win32 API, but instead some form of Linux or Java, their entire market's going to fall out from under them.
Poor Microsoft. Flow my tears!
"It should be looking for ways to aggressively woo the Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python crowd to Windows plus AMP and, frankly, to embrace LAMP developers for everything but Windows."
I can't see it happening. LAMP has such a foot hold in Linux that I can't see any serious developer turning to Microsoft; the tests that I did some while ago showed that there was a performance hit ... a hit bad enough to make me want to learn Linux in the first place.
Microsoft are just too heavy for this kind of environment. If the rumour I've heard that Microsoft run their web facing systems on Sun kit are correct, then this tells the whole story.
This is an article written, in my view, by an econmic illiterate. About the time Ballmer took over, Microsoft changed from a company rewarding investors with an ever climbing stock price to one providing dividends. The difference is that pension funds could then invest in Microsoft. This a mutually beneficial arrangement. Microsoft gets a stable set of investors, the funds get cash each quarter.
Those "record profits" are what is needed. Glorying in a rocketing stock price that is yet to crash is the gamblers pleasure not that of the head-headed investor. Apple is being talked up at the moment because it suits the gamblers.
But Apple (as an example of the genre) has to show it's built a long term business to justify its valuation. It's in a market just about any company with enough cash can enter. The iPhone advantage is slim while those trying to create an alterative OS and office productivity suite has struggled to succeed for two decades.
I can hear the argument "Yes, but they missed search". Well, thankfully, they did. Can you imagine the world if Microsoft and Google were one? The DoJ would break it up anyway.
The stock price has been FLAT for about 10 years (Steve Ballmer's reign about the same, coincidence? You be the judge!). In years before 2000, Microsoft's chart was straight up (almost), and people got used to it. Now that Microsoft changed into a silly dividend stock, investors lose interest. Apple has the upward slope now, and rags like the Wall Street Journal have taken notice.
Yes, Microsoft has the cash (and sacred) cows. Yes, they work, but have no sizzle. Places like that are boring and the business world loses interest. Soon they will lose interest about their product as well.
It will probably happen sooner when the itemized price tag on a WinTel box shows the price you pay for the nicely installed Microsoft software.
Matt, as always, a provocative story. But please, do the professional thing - when you reference Linux and ESPECIALLY when you single out a Linux distribution as you did with SUSE, acknowledge that you work for a competitor. Otherwise, you start to come off as shilling. Don't pretend you are objective. You're not.
The reference to SUSE and the link to another story about market share deserves comment: http://www.novell.com/prblogs/?p=2802
Ian Bruce - Novell.
""Microsoft could probably quit coding a thing now and hold on for 20 years by just selling copies of (increasingly obsolete) ..."
As far as I know, they did that about 15 years ago and no-one noticed."
Oh I know, I just didn't want to fan the flames that much 8-)
@Doug Glass, "Well brothers and sisters you better change your attitude. This comment forum is litered with obviously extremely competent IT types. But the sad fact is those so well geared to IT here are basically ignorant of way large corporations work and interplay from a non IT business perspective. If Microsoft fails utterly there will be choas in the market place and when that happens, one of the very first areas to suffer in every corporation is IT."
I disagree. IT got along fine before Microsoft dominated, and will do fine after they are a bit player. Microsoft tends to sell a mass of software that is tightly coupled, so if there's bugs or problems (either performance or functionality) with it, it's just something that has to be worked around as much as possible. Because of the tight coupling, once a result is achieved no one is going to want to upgrade that whole mess, since it has to be upgraded in lockstep. In contrast, there's plenty of reasonable software already that is not reliant on Microsoft, it's usually not quite as tightly coupled but as a tradeoff, each component does the job it's meant to do very well, and tends to be well documented. (Of course, there's lots of poor and poorly documented stuff to but it's easy to not use it.) Honestly, an IT world without Microsoft would not be as bad as you think.
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