Slashdot Mirror

... except they're not.

"The big sales driver: Office 2007, which is selling like gangbusters. When comparing Office 2007 sales to version 2003 during the same early sales period, unit sales of the newer productivity suite are about double the older one, according to NPD.

"Office commands 17.4 percent of all PC software dollar volume, including PC games," Swenson said. "When people go to the store to buy software, there's a good chance they'll end up buying Microsoft Office.""

Office 2007 is doing fantastic. You may want to check on your facts. Quote from: http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/business_applications/pc_softwares_great_year.html

Microsoft had a spectacular first quarter.

Tremendous strength in Windows, Office, and Server products. Revenues in each division up 20%. Microsoft Q1 2008 By The Numbers

Office 2007 at retail "sells like gangbusters."

Office commands 17.4 percent of all PC software dollar volume, including PC games. When people go to the store to buy software, there's a good chance they'll end up buying Microsoft Office." PC Software's Great Year [October 20]

The October OS Platform Stats from w3Schools are suggestive;

Vista at 6%. Up 4% from March 07.
Linux at 3%. Up 1% from March 03.
OSX at 4%. Up 2% from March 03.

Microsoft had a spectacular first quarter.

Tremendous strength in Windows, Office, and Server products. Revenues in each division up 20%. Microsoft Q1 2008 By The Numbers

Office 2007 at retail "sells like gangbusters."

Office commands 17.4 percent of all PC software dollar volume, including PC games. When people go to the store to buy software, there's a good chance they'll end up buying Microsoft Office." PC Software's Great Year [October 20]

The October OS Platform Stats from w3Schools are suggestive;

Vista at 6%. Up 4% from March 07.
Linux at 3%. Up 1% from March 03.
OSX at 4%. Up 2% from March 03.

That Vista still is not surpassing XP in sales

vista will replace XP just as XP replaced 2K, it will just take a bit of time.

Everyone hates Office 2007 so much that it's selling like gangbusters.

http://www.forumpix.co.uk/uploads/1195414376.jpg taken from http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/vista/yes_virginia_there_is_a_vista_sp1.html

I would say that DRM sucks always. But this is beyond DRM, this is the blue monster taking over your computer. I am always amazed at how MS knows what's best for you.

I think Vista was just rushed to be released to soon just like the Playstation 3 and a bunch of other products on the market.

Consumers gripe and complain when companies release buggy products but complain when a company keeps delaying their product as was the case with Vista and now with the new version of OSX. XP machines are still running fine so what's the rush? They should have spent another year on it and made sure it was good to go before releasing early under consumer pressure.

I say shut the fuck up and let the company release when they think the product is ready to ship. Otherwise you get 360s with no built in HD player, bugs in Vista, 360s that overheat, understocked PS3s, and on and on. Granted the companies should have the balls to say "not till it's done" and should not release news of a release until they have the product shrink wrapped and on pallets.

references

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/21/233121 0
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/operating_s ystems/vista_delayed_again.html
http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/04/12/leopard_re ax/index.php
http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/04/12/leopard_re ax/index.php
http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/15/commentary/game_ov er/column_gaming/index.htm

Yeah, because Vista is selling so well...

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/16/165420 2
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/software/pc-makers-to-m icrosoft-vista-is-not-a-seller-you-suck-248336.php
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/vista/vista _license_sales_in_context.html
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39 636

"Journals (Science [biggest journal, of the America Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)], and Nature) have prohibited taking OOXML documents, because they do not correspond to existing standards such as MathML and SVG and are not backwards compatible to Word 2003 and previous. Compatibility packs do not even help.[2][3] As Microsoft will stop selling Word 2003 by July 1, 2007[4], this is a very bad precedent for future-proofing documents.

1] http://www.sciencemag.org/about/authors/prep/docx. dtl "Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science"

"Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision."

"Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations, and because the default equation editor packaged with Word 2007 -- for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us -- was not designed to be compatible with MathML."

[3]http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/04/math-markup -marked-down.html "Math markup marked down"
        http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/12608/1023/
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/archives/20 07/06/04/scientists_hold_off_on_that_upgrade_to_of fice_2007.html

Nature's analysis of OOXML:
"We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 formats. Equations and special characters (for example, Greek letters) cannot be edited and are incompatible with Nature's own editing and typesetting programs"

[4] http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=519 "July 1: No more Office 2003 for OEMs" by Mary Jo Foley"

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/business_ap plications/the_pointless_office_converter_delay.ht ml "The Pointless Office Converter Delay"

"Two important Microsoft topics--interoperability and Office file formats--intersect on the Mac desktop, and they brutally cross like swords.

Two weeks ago, Microsoft broke a promise made in December: The spring beta release of OOXML (Office Open XML) converters for Mac Office. "

MSFT's army of lawyers have said no such thing. They've said that in a press release, but as Microsoft Watch said, they have lied about many things in their press releases.[1]

In any case, they are NOT living up to the obligations they gave to the coupon buyers after they told them they would not sue (except, now, if they include GPLv3 code in SLES). Gee, I wonder how Walmart feels after being used by MSFT in the NOVL ploy; did they pay for nothing? Not to mention what happens if someone takes some GPLv2 or later version from SLES into GPLv3 in a derivative distro, and then asks NOVL for the patent covenant from MSFT.

[1] http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/corporate/s ay_it_aint_so.html

"Microsoft has a long history of saying stuff (expecting people will believe) that wasn't true then or didn't turn out to be true in the future. I've grabbed some random examples:
Software Assurance: In its May 10, 2001, press release announcing the program, Microsoft claimed: "The improvements to Microsoft's volume licensing offerings are designed to match the current acquisition behavior of the majority of Microsoft's enterprise customers, and should result in a reduction or no change in licensing costs for approximately 80 percent of Microsoft volume licensing customers." In reality, based on research from Gartner and other analyst firms, only a minority of customersthose upgrading every two years or lesswould realize cost savings. The program raised most customers' software acquisition costs, as much as 107 percent, according to Gartner.

U.S. Antitrust Case: There are just so many examples, but I chose this one from a December 1998 Microsoft press release. Microsoft's lead attorney said in a statement: "The government may think they're winning on soundbites, but they are striking out when it comes to proving their case. The major elements of the government's lawsuit have already been discredited, and not a single Microsoft witness has even testified yet." The government went on to win the case, with the trial judge ordering the breakup of Microsoft as remedy.

Windows Vista: In August 2004, Microsoft "announced it will target broad availability of the Windows client operating system code-named 'Longhorn' in 2006." Here is a link to one of several slide shows kicking around Microsoft's Web site that clearly identifies the Longhorn (aka Vista) release as "Holiday 2006." Strange isn't that Microsoft set a delivery date and missed it. Strange is Microsoft later affirming that launching to businesses on Nov. 30, 2006, meant the company met its 2006 ship commitment.

A dozen examples would be easy, but hopefully three makes the point. Microsoft says lots of things that aren't necessarily true or ever going to be true. But the company behaves like if enough people believe what it says, then it's true enough. Saying doesn't make it so."

[1] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200706302 30615981
        http://www.vcnet.com/bms/features/tale.shtml "A Tale of Two Press Releases"

"Good morning, class, and welcome to Microsoft Literature 101. Today, we will be examining a short story from the points of view of both the protagonist and the antagonist, and considering how these two characters in a story react to the same events, and what this may reveal about their personalities.

The protagonist in our narrative is a small software company called SCO, otherwise known as the Santa Cruz Operation. The antagonist is the software giant, Microsoft. First, we should sketch out the storyline."

And if you bothered to read further you would have laughed at the idiot that wrote http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/security/mi crosoft_is_counting_bugs_again.html as he makes blatantly false claims and uses data outside of the time period assessed. Please mod parent down as anything but insightfull. but hey this is /. facts don't enter into it.

It's not the most professional writing I've seen, but I believe most of the points made are valid.

There's another commentary here. http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/security/mi crosoft_is_counting_bugs_again.html

No wonder Windows Vista is best in his review.

I am not convinced, next please Mr Jones.

Someone else didn't like the numbers either and provided this link;

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/security/mi crosoft_is_counting_bugs_again.html

There are more patches in a month than there are fixed patches in the count.

I looked at the user comments at the bottem of the article. One juicy tidbit was to this link..

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/security/mi crosoft_is_counting_bugs_again.html

The biggest bug in Windows is between the chair and keyboard. The item in question is gullable, has admin privilages, and can run widely dispensed Windows specific code. As a sample of this, just look at the members of any botnet and the OS in use.

Anything that doesn't run Windows code and has the default of not running admin is more secure than patched Windows in most cases.

Vista still runs Windows code, it's biggest fault, but it seems to be driving towards better system security and user permissions.

The stuff at http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/security/mi crosoft_is_counting_bugs_again.html shows that the Microsoft count is per patch instead of per vulnerability. I don't think it is a fair comparison, and Jones should have admitted that.

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/security/mi crosoft_is_counting_bugs_again.html

Looks like there are several errors with the method the blogger used to evaluate security flaws

This has already been analysed at microsoft-watch, and several flaws are pointed out there, the most basic one being that counting flaws is not a good measure of security anyway.

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/security/mi crosoft_is_counting_bugs_again.html Updated response "Jeff Jones Vista security progress."

Microsoft's claim of 20 million Vista licenses sold simply doesn't add up when trying to assess who realistically bought them in the time frame"in the opening month"stated in today's press release. Further, the press release claims that "Windows Vista made a splash in its debut." What kind of Kool-Aid are they drinking up there in Redmond? Who spiked the Windows Vista-logo soda cans? "Clearly there haven't been 20 million PCs sold worldwide since Jan. 30, and we're really only talking about February," said Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis. License sales are good public relations fodder, but they're real world merits stop there. By every reasonable measurePCs and retail boxed salesMicrosoft's numbers don't add up with the 20 million figure in one month. The company used the 20 million in-one-month figure compared to 17 million Windows XP licenses in two-and-a-half months to bolster its Vista gangbusters sales claim. Just like vulnerability alerts aren't a good measure of Vista security, number of licenses sold is no way to reckon the operating system's sales success. The number's meaning collapses for three simple reasons:

• Microsoft's sales period for the license sales is significantly longer than 30 days - more like four months.
• License sales into the channel do not correspond to actual Vista PC sales out of the channel.
• The numbers don't match up with real world PC sales volumes.

The Inquirer has an article about this.

Is it a commercial success? We shall see. The ME II tag looks like it's beginning to stick. Another new client OS in 2009 makes the comparison even more pointed. Testimonials like these can't help vista.

Microsoft is stacking the channel as this article points out http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/vista/stack ing_vista_licenses_too_high.html

They previously counted XP sales after leaving the sales channel (installed on a machine) instead of just going out to retailers and they included upgrade coupons. So all of that floating inventory that is "in the sales channel" is counting as sales.

They also didn't account for higher sales of PCs.

If you were buying a PC and you could get XP or Vista installed on it, which would you choose. Now if you don't have a choice, then it's a Vista sale, though not a willing one.

Facts Note that article is from March, now they're claiming another 20 million in a month. Living with failure isn't easy and they've apparently been shifting assets and then counting zero cost sales to deceive investors.

I saw my first copy of Vista in the wild just today, the laptop had been discounted at under half the price of the MacBook that the owner actually wanted. Personally I would have still gone with the Mac and I got the impression the owner now regrets his purchase.

They may simply be doing what they did in the past: all "legacy products" are being sold under modified Vista licenses.
So, every copy of XP bought since the launch of Vista?
Count it as a Vista license (albeit modified, as it isn't really a license for true Vista).
Meh... someone else has explained it better than I have.

They scrapped all the new development and retrenched to get something out the door, based on the win 2003 code base. I think this was discussed in the famous, "I'd buy a Mac" email from Jim Allchin.

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/operating_s ystems/allchins_buy_a_mac_email_exposed.html

Everything I have been reading about Microsoft in Redmond and about products surrounding them give me the eerie feeling that Microsoft is struggling desperately. Why else would they put out such false number!?! I think they are desperate to get their stock value up. There are a lot of reasons for this, not solely the fact that their employee's equity in the company is declining and there's no bright future there for new top of the line employees. Give them good value in stock incentives and you can keep them, but if your stock is down and dwindling you do everything you can to make it appear high.

The below article describes nicely how Microsoft is fudging the numbers to make it appear that sales were higher than they actually are. Essentially the conclusion is that sales of Vista are weak. It's just sad that a company like Microsoft has to fib in such a way in order to artificially inflate their stock value.

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/vista/stack ing_vista_licenses_too_high.html

Wall Street thinks the failure is due to crappy software. In part, the author asserts:

Microsoft's stock has been on a record tear -- downward. One more down day and we would have been tied at nine for the longest tumble in the company's 20-year trading history. ... investors are increasingly skittish about Microsoft's Vista. Late, horsepower-hungry, missing some promised features and getting indifferent reviews, the product is nowhere near the buzzmaker of its predecessors, Windows 95 and Windows XP. Analysts and investors are worried that the product is too little and too late, so much so that Vista won't fuel the usual earnings-goosing upgrade cycle that such releases have in the past.

... Vista problems are just symptoms of a deeper Microsoft malaise. Monolithic software -- bits in a shrink-wrapped box -- is a dying business. It is being slayed by software sold as a service, by open source, and by ad-centric online software (i.e., Google).

Competitors now see Windows as a heavy weight around Microsoft's neck, one that keeps the company safely occupied on a treadmill far from their own businesses. That is why the best news for them in the last few days came when Microsoft began talking up a new version of Windows set for 2009. Yeah, go for it guys, knock yourselves out.

Powerful stuff from venture capitalist and CNBC analyst Paul Kedrosky.

And sure enough, sales are falling now that the squirt of ultimate fanboy is over.

The non free software development model is over and the businesses that stick with it are too. It's about time.

I should read more carefully. Not only is M$ responsible for crappy IP laws elsewhere, they actually helped to prosecute this one.

Last week, Microsoft executive Olga Dergunova defended the reseller that provided the computers.

Then you follow that link and find:

Gorbachev's appeal directly to Gates made sense, in part because Microsoft owns the software and only licenses it to customers. In the CNews interview Dergunova affirmed that "Microsoft is the plaintiff in this case; its intellectual property rights have been violated."

Oh yeah, I wonder where the prosecution got the outrageous value of that coppied software at $10,000 instead of the $100 the judge eventually decided it was worth?

You can keep your M$ spin to yourself, Bungi, M$ created, prosecuted and is ultimately responsible for it. If you consider M$'s anti-competitive practices, it's even worse. M$ does everything in their power to make it hard to run anything but M$ so they can take your money, even if you happen to be a no budget teacher in the backwoods of the Ural mountains. Cases like this are the cost of non free software.

Really? Because, your rant notwithstanding, the numbers tell otherwise.

PC sales for the week of Vista's release are up 173% compared to the week previous, and up 67% versus the same week in 2006.

A lot of this is because of the massive FUD campaign against Vista that seems to be prevelent in the media. It is too early for most users to upgrade, but Vista isn't going to destroy the internet or eat your children. It's a solid, stable OS.

One word:
botnets

Then you can explain how it's actually the closed source OS that is the most damaging.
Hell, just show them some apache logs that are still constantly being hit by things like IIS servers still infected with Sasser, years after it should have been eradicated.

In recent years, AOL Instant Messenger and MSN have had widespread outages. Have no fear, people will not stop screwing things up any time soon.

The real deal is that no version of Windows Vista will make a determination as to whether any given piece of content should play back or not. The individual ISV providing the playback solutions will choose whether the playback environment, including environments that use 32-bit processors, meet the performance requirements for playback of protected High Definition content.

When Microsoft comes up with something original, they often fail .. because they didn't work well when other people tried them before"

"The reason why a lot of their "innovations" aren't widely used in the market is not because nobody thought of them before, it's because they didn't work well when other people tried them before"

"It doesn't bother me that Apple is not innovative"

What bothers me is that Apple isn't doing their share to fund innovation

"Microsoft is investing heavily in research, both in their own research labs and grants to universities"

XAML is what??? Just how is it a silver bullet for Flash? This technology is tied to Vista which means that there's no chance of any kind of ubiquity - for example try and make it work on a mobile device, there's no device with enough grunt. XAML is part of Expression which has now been delayed beyond the release date of Vista.

The reality is that not everyone will be switching to Vista, Flash is here to stay.

A friend from college serverd in a support capacity for Microsoft Research (it's called Microsoft Research, BTW not "Microsoft Labs") for over 4 years. His take: smart people get let loose to investigate stupid things. It's a place people go to hide and play academic while getting industry rock star pay.

I'd like to call B.S. on your comparison to Bell Labs on another level: With software, people with good ideas just stand up and do them. It's not like you need massive R&D experiment or new materials development to explore different computational processes and concepts like you do in the physical world (i.e. try to create a transistor from scratch in 195X in your garage).

The EC has been threatening to begin collecting an additional $2.5 million a day from Microsoft (retroactive to December 15, 2005) for what the Commission has said it considers Microsoft's failure to provide networking documentation that would allow third-party companies to connect to Microsoft's Windows operating system.

Jan

Xbox Veteran Adds to Microsoft Departure Toll...

and Micrsoft taketh away

I'm sure it's still not enough for you, but Microsoft is now on-record saying "they (Adobe) are threatening legal action".

This is so sad.

And just when they got their towels back too!

Because anyone that has worked heavily with browser based UIs knows that they have the same issues they have always had.

Here ya go (and yes, this is not the only site to point this out):

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,2180,183 6149,00.asp

Microsoft is evidently going to start shipping a multimedia keyboard for the Mac in June. It will probably work just fine with Windows as well. I don't imagine them shipping any hardware that DIDN'T work with Windows.

Why should he be forced to comment in a manner that is inconsistent with others that post comments that are anti-Microsoft and are *decidedly* subjective?

Anyhow - some clarification from Microsoft on WPF Architecture and where it fits into Vista (pulled from Mary Joe Foley's www.microsoft-watch.com site) can be found in the article at http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,190 2540,00.asp?kc=MWRSS02129TX1K0000535

"Because WPF is largely written in managed code on the common language runtime, it never ran in kernel mode. There are elements of WPF (called the MIL) that are written in unmanaged code, but that code also largely runs (and always has run) in user mode. Insofar as WPF needs to touch kernel mode stuff (e.g., drivers), it interacts with them through the existing DirectX APIs. The user mode and kernel mode aspects of the WPF architecture haven't changed,"

Hence, since WPF is largely managed code facing the CLR, it's nowhere near the kernel level. This process does provide some level of secure isolation between the WPF & GDI/GDI+/Avalon/DirectX/Direct3D code and the kernel and finally gives the UI a managed code platform.

Since graphics cards are vastly more powerful than they were 5 years ago, coupling the GDI in a ring[0] or ring[1] or kernel-level process is no longer needed for graphics performance.

--ScottKin

Why is Google putting together a distro? Because it's the first step in a longer-term plan.

Note that Google recently hired away a Microsoft engineer who believes that Microsoft no longer knows how to ship software and believes in the web-services model. He was one of the principal architects of Hailstorm.

Here's what I see Google doing:

1. Create a usable, simple, Google distro that the masses can use for web/email/etc.
2. Market the hell out of it until they get a certain viable user base.
3. Start equipping a few thousand public libraries with a few Google Distro machines each, and monitor their usage
4. Here's the key step: in all high-bandwidth installations, CONVERT THE GOOGLE DISTRO MACHINES TO DISKLESS TERMINALS with the same UI.
5. People get used to having 'their' desktop available to them in multiple locations, spanning a disked install with networked-synched customizations to the diskless terminals.
6. The era of disk-based installs of OSs dies a well-deserved death.
7. Profit!!

If you think about it, a lot of Google's products (Gmail, the Google Toolbar) are introducing portable features. A new OS distro that they can eventually deploy as a diskless terminal version for high-bandwidth locations is the next logical step. And there will be more tears in Redmond when that happens.