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Microsoft Isn't Slowing Down
An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this
Business Week article Microsoft is stronger than ever. Considering this is typical of the kind of Microsoft Rump-Swabbery that Management often use to 'enlighte'" themselves, it's little
wonder that so many are of the opinion that if you can't give
Microsoft money for it, it must be no good." Of course, did anyone expect Microsoft to just roll over?
This just echos what I once read in linux journal, and that is businessmen and journalists have one thing in common; they love big numbers. Notice how this article stated that there were 20000 microsofties at the baseball stadium for the annual meeting. Couple this with all the stories of bill gates wealth(and the size of his house), and microsofts marketshare and I guess an article like this is par for the course for a publication like businessweek.
Its not business as usual at MS. Their current earnings estimates are based on revenues from the new project to strong-arm holders of their "enterprise" licenses into buying more at a higher cost. MS is phoning up enterprise license holders and saying, "well, we don't think your actually living up to your end of the contract and we're going to come and audit you since the license you signed gives us that right. Now if we find that you've got stuff installed that isn't licensed we'll follow the license and you'll have to pay a huge amount or stop using our software immediately. Now of course, if your willing to pay for N licenses right now on this new agreement then we won't bother to audit you since it'll be a good sign that your trying to be honest with us."
Where I work (20,000+ employees) the policy is, "give MS whatever they ask for, because we don't understand the terms of the license, and don't have a clue what an audit means or what it would turn up and we don't want to go to court against MS". The policy is also, "find new vendors in the medium term and drop MS as soon as we safely can"
Now ask yourself, "how many times can MS pull this kind of extortion off before their customers find new vendors?".
MS is looking really rosy now, but they are using desparate measures to keep up appearances.
Using Microsoft products is like taking a bite of a Twinkie(TM) and realizing the creme filling has been replaced with shit.
It's all very well to buy into the myth of invincibility, but they have other problems than just competition. Office sales are stagnating, OS sales are a very hard sell in a 'good enough' world (how many people do you know who are on W98?), and their costs are unimaginable (.NET, XBox). You can talk all day long about how they have an attitude more like Stalin or something than a product vendor, but attitude is not everything.
But because Microsoft is only more powerful and influential than most countries, and fights by causing economic disaster and poverty to its enemies rather than literally shooting them, people are slower to take 'em literally there.
But you should still take them literally there. If you are not with them, they want to kill you. Particularly if you try to earn a living doing stuff that they consider their property. The Gateser wishes that there be only one word processor! And web browser, and internet server, and game console, and official government internet site (which government? All governments!)
You'd think people would figure this out quicker. Is power that much harder to see when it's not wearing a soldier uniform?
Sounds good to me. Let's do it.
And if you are admittedly harmful to the public interests, what business do you have bitching about being destroyed, anyway? The public has a collective will, too. If you won't appease it and subjugate your own raw unmoderated desires to what will work in community with others, you deserve to be destroyed, and quit whining. :)
That is why you are wrong (not that you should sit back and be complacent, of course). However, if you are right, then you're still wrong, because in the event that no government will restrain the new power balance in the world, in the event that it all becomes puppet governments tied together by a 'world citizen electronic ID' sort of system by Microsoft (which doesn't even _care_ about governing, it just wants your money), you still have the option of guerrilla warfare, and so does everyone else.
"Microsoft, kill them!" like hell! I'd like to see how well they like that point of view if, all over the world, Microsoft employees are literally being killed, shot, mugged, bombed, mowed down by people with real weapons who aren't afraid to die themselves. It is my fond hope that it will not take something like that to get Microsoft people to see the societal harm caused by their 'Microsoft, kill them!' attitude. That has got to stop. That will stop. It is just a question of whether it can be stopped without taking them at their rhetoric and literally starting to kill them. That's a hell of a step, there's got to be some way to get the message through without that. Bill Gates getting pie in the face should have illustrated the personal vulnerability, but obviously nobody took the hint. They are NOT BULLETPROOF and they need to STOP with the 'Microsoft, kill them!', immediately if not sooner.
And that's a hell of a big assumption, considering that this is a really stupid thing to do, and that you can just as legitimately claim you 'have' all that scripting even if it defaults to off and does not autorun on incoming email scripts.
If the IBM PC hadn't been open and reproducible we wouldn't be buying IBM PCs at all. That platorm would be as dead as the DEC Rainbow. It would have been buried by the Apples and dozens of other superior proprietary platforms.
It is the openess of the platform which made the PC market worthy. The ready availability of common, compatible sysems, software and peripherals is what made the IBM compatible PC attractive to buy and to produce.
IBM may not have 100% of the market share of the PC but at least there is a market for them to have a share of.
I browse with my threshold at 2 so I can't read my own comments :-)
I can't agree with you enough. IBM recognised years ago the consistent formatting problem that you describe. They invented SGML purely to address the problem! Saving the formatting with the document isn't an obvious mistake, but once you know about things like SGML it's hard to believe that people keep repeating the mistake.
As a side note, I was reading an article on some tech site by a long-time journalist. He had just found that his 5-10 year old documents are no longer accessible! The Word format has changed so drastically that the latest release of Word can't even open the old document formats. He was extremely peeved. This is a strong argument, in my opinion, against closed document formats. XML and SGML are the only reasonable answer.
Time for Microsoft to publish another web page about the XBox to boost moral. Everyone hates Microsoft when an article about big business arises but an X Box ad never fails to rally support.
You sure you can live without an X Box? Given the X Box hysteria, we should all be sucking Bill Gate's dick and asking for seconds.
MIT has been using various UNIX flavors for ages. There are some departments which use MS software, but by and large the impression is that the lack of office applications is not a problem is that other people are discouraged from using office applications. People don't send you Word documents and such because they can't write them, so you don't need to read them.
"Ever hear of someone choosing to switch to windows ?"
:(
HERE!
I switched from Linux to Windows back in 1996. Haven't looked back since.
Once you've worked with Windows for awhile you realize just how incredibly inefficient the Unix model is.
Actually SQL Server does work better with Win2k/IIS. At least if you are trying to do serious software development, the database connectivity to Oracle is problematic.
It's also not Microsoft's fault. Rather it seems to be Larry Ellison who is to blame. He's almost purposefully crippling Oracle's ability to work with Microsoft in a sad idea that people will switch from Microsoft over to his Java application crap.
I know a number of companies who use Oracle now who are contemplating moving pieces over to SQL Server to get better stability and performance.
"exercises oppressive control over the programming powers of its employees"
Does it?
I believe you'll have a really hard time backing that statement up. At least from talking to the Microsoft employees I know, it's still the best tech company in the world to work at.
And not because of stock options. This is a company that realized long ago that giving programmers offices instead of cubicles makes them more productive, etc.
As far as your other comments. The bottom dropped out of the Consulting market last year.
What I felt was inefficient was all the manageability and configuration.
I have looked at the recent RedHat and Debian distributions. Debian has remained virtually unchanged and is still a bear to work with. RedHat has some nice pretty GUI stuff, but still has a plethora of problems. But then those problems are due to the architecture of Unix and not likely to change without a radical shift.
The ILoveYou virus could be replicated on a Unix system exactly like on Windows without any increased security.
It would require the following assumptions to be true:
#1. A well known way to send email from the system. This is mostly true already.
#2. A well known address book system. i.e. Groupware of some sort, possibly using LDAP services. This exists, but not in a standard well known way.
#3. An email system which is designed with user convenience in mind and allows the opening and execution of attachments.
That's it. Everything else can be automated with scripts or binaries in user-mode.
From then on, our new Iloveyou only needs to modify files available to the user. Why modify system files when I have full access to the login scripts in your user directory.
But for the record. I have never spread any email virus from any computer of mine. I use Windows NT/2k, I use Office, I use Outlook.
The reason? I've never been stupid enough to open any such attachments.
There is a difference between Unix and Windows, but it is primarily the types of users. Since Unix is hard to use, it tends to only have users who are either not able to figure out how to save and execute an attachment, or not stupid enough to do so.
It has nothing to do with the security models. At least not in this case.
All good points!
I did not relate this to Go, but I made a similar comment last year after the PocketPC was released.
If you look at what Microsoft did, they looked at the existing climate of Palm domination and then asked, "Great, but where do people want to be in the future?"
They then designed towards that future. More powerful, more capable devices. Color, sounds, fast, powerful, lot's of storage, etc...
The first versions of WinCE were not successful, primarily because they hadn't clearly defined this vision, and the hardware was not capable of it. After several years of refinement and evolution, the hardware began to catch up.
And now you have the iPaq and it's ilk capturing 20% marketshare.
Meanwhile Palm is changing case colors and releasing Supermodel versions of the same device that first came to market back in 1996. Any bets if they will merge with AOL within 2 years time?
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-- Slashdot sucks.
It seems to me that the open source community has not learned this lesson -- possibly because we are so unstructured. Like it or not, open source has not generally produced fundamentally new technologies at the rate Microsoft has. The one exception would lie in the Internet server market (and it is not coincidental that that is the main market where OSS is successful). We tend to spend all our time catching up in other areas.
For example, Microsoft has had a component based desktop for years, and we are just now starting to get workable ones. Microsoft has had easy GUI design for trivial apps (VB) since the early 90's -- and we are just starting to get it (QT Designer, Kylix). Microsoft still has us totally slaughtered in the groupware arena because we can't seem to really understand that groupware and email are not quite the same thing.
When Microsoft *does* miss a beat -- as with the Internet -- they follow up quickly. Once again, this is like Go. If your opponent gets you in an awkward strategic situation, you can often play through it tactically. Essentially, you end up playing just to stay in the game until your opponent makes a mistake. Then you strike out ahead and hopefully recover your strategic error. This is Microsoft's well known practice of always being the second-best product on the market until the competition screws up.
Anyway, one wonders if Bill Gates plays Go. It's relatively popular on the west coast thanks to the large oriental population. It's truly an awesome game -- the Japanese maintain that it teaches character and strategic thinking for real life. And, I think they're right. It penalizes both cowardice and foolhardiness equally, encourages you to think ahead, and has rules simple enough to teach my three-year-old with permutations complex enough to take a lifetime to understand.
</Ramble>
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-- Slashdot sucks.
And so should anyone be, to read that set of articles from BusinessWeek. They paint a picture of a Microsoft without limits to its control over the industry, and without limits as to its profit making power, feeding into greater control, feeding into greater profits..
Of course, the article doesn't even whisper the word 'Linux' or 'OpenSource' or, heck, even 'Java' anywhere. The picture they paint of Microsoft run rampant across the industry would be a completely, perfectly accurate one were it NOT for Linux and the Open Source world in general. Throw in the fact that XP will have the yummy corporate 'rights management' stuff built in, and you've got our biggest nightmare, right?
If the article had talked about how Linux has blunted the Windows 2000 server initiative, or about how Apache still runs most web servers, or about how there are dozens of manufacturers selling Java platforms, this would have seemed a good bit less scary. Fortunately. In my view, this article paints a clear picture, that we have three choices. One, the government slaps Microsoft down in some fashion, to impede its monopoly creation and maintenance ability. Two, Microsoft gets ever more powerful and buys pretty much whatever it wants to. Or, three, that everyone else involved in the industry works together on common standards for fear of their lives. That means Linux, that means Java, that means Mozilla, that means Ogg Vorbis, that means XML, that means an open AIM, that means standardized commodity streaming MPEG2 and MPEG4. And all of that might not be enough to forestall Microsoft if they become or remain the only ones with the ability to monetize the net effectively.
When it comes to service provisioning, the openness of the underlying software doesn't matter so much. Like Tim O'Reilly says, it's the openness of the web services that will matter greatly in the next phase of the net. If Microsoft makes their XML/SOAP protocol based services open enough that a Novell or an AOL or an IBM or an Amazon or a Walmart or a Palm can compete to provide Passport-type services integrated with XP, then perhaps Microsoft won't be such a threat to competition. Anyone feel hopeful?
- jon
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
A few years back, I was one of the people involved in drawing up a plan for our university's choice of desktop OS and office software suite. For the office suite we looked at offerings from Microsoft (the incumbent), Corel and Lotus, and for the desktop OS... well, that quickly came down to an all-Microsoft choice. I should point out that our student labs run over 400 apps used in teaching, mostly win16 but a few win32 (and one or two DOS!)
We consulted our users about the office site and they quickly voted for Microsoft on the grounds that it would be a sheer bloody pain to shift. Corel was on the ropes and Lotus cost almost as much as Microsoft. So we signed Campus Agreement, and it made life a lot simpler, and Mr Gates a lot richer.
I was the local Linux zealot and I did try long and hard to convince myself that:
* We could offer a Linux desktop, with linux-native office apps and browser, and run all 400-odd teaching apps under Wine.
* We could offer a Linux desktop, with linux-native office apps and browser, and run all 400-odd teaching apps under VMware.
* We could offer a Linux desktop, with linux-native office apps and browser, and run all 400-odd teaching apps on a Citrix app server via the linux ICA client.
And the I thought - why?
Once the decision was made, we all thought - "Don't worry, we don't need to renegotiate for a few years, and the DOJ will have broken Microsoft up by then - or at very least imposed regulations to make Mr Gates tame, polite and meek in all his dealings". This did not turn out to be true, did it?
So I suppose it's time to look at putting together a strategy to make Windows 2000/Office 2000 our final Microsoft platform - there's no way we're touching Windows Xtra Pain, that's for sure. Since we last looked at the problem, Staroffice/Openoffice has become pretty viable, many of our teaching apps have been replaced by web-based teaching aids, many new apps have appeared that have linux ports.
Are any other universities thinking along these lines?
george
You can buy a Chilton or a Haynes for your automobile a lot cheaper than aftermarket books on MS software, and they're a *lot* more informative and helpful in fixing problems.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Why are they angry?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
You're completely missing the point, aren't you?
One, I never said this was an issue of closed source versus closed source -- I said it was an issue of software vs. software.
And two, I was trolling? Hmm, as thought I was saying what I think. Tell me, is an attack somehow morally acceptable?
I amazes me how many people miss the point of eveything.
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Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
I know it's essentially suicide to mention anything PRO-Microsoft, but I'm going to take the leap.
As much as some of the 'harrier' open-source and free-software supprorters deride large Close-Souce Companies. the truth of the matter is that having companies like them around *does* foster quality development.
Just think: suppose MS died, and there was no one controlling the desktop market? I'm willing to bet you a herring that feature development on ye' olde' favourite Free OS would slow. There would be no need to improve it at the current rate because you're not racing anyone.
We in the Open Source and Free Software communities would like to think that we're immune from such normal things like sloth, but believe it or not, we are human, and are at risk of getting sloppy if there is no one prodding us on.
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Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Like Ali, Microsoft had absorbed some bruising body blows in its own Rumble in the Jungle, Ballmer told the crowd. "We were getting shots from everywhere. Maybe we even had a little fear in our eyes." Then his voice suddenly rose to a shout: "You know what I say? I say we're off the ropes!" The Microsofties roared.
This statement in a nutshell embodies everything I despise about Microsoft; that they treat everything like a fight.
It reminds me of the old comparison, you stick a PC floppy in a Mac, and it tells you it's a PC floppy and shows you the files.
You stick a Mac floppy in a Windows box, and it asks if you want to format it.
If they could just learn to 'play nice' with the other guy, or at least not break things (I fear bringing active directory up on our network here) it wouldn't be so easy to dislike their products.
Don't forget that Netscape 6 has an online installer that downloads only the components you select, if you opt for a custom install.
This should be modded up to +5 Funny. One of the best things I enjoy about Slashdot is watching the Cult of Linux simultaneously bash capitalism, closed source, etc., while at the same time holding up companies like IBM like a "My brother is bigger than YOUR brother!" kind of ally. IBM is a big company and they will use Linux however they can (trying to sell their hardware for instance, not to mention to try to destabilize the power of Microsoft...IBM hasn't gotten over being pummelled in the OS arena), but where necessary they will bend you over and stick it to you with a baseball bat. I see nothing wrong with that personally [excluding the sodomy imagery...] (because it's what everyone does anyways regardless of the rhetoric. The giving community is a suckers dream and an exploiters fantasy), however it's funny seeing so many Slashdotters hold up IBM as the big ally in the anti-MS fight. Next year when everyone has moved on to NewOS (hehe) IBM will abandon Linux like a soiled pair of underpants. Wait wasn't IBM one of the big enterprise Java evangelists?
You're completely right. We should give up now.
On the other hand... most Linux enthusists aren't playing the capitalist game. We aren't in it for the cash. And jokes aside, we're not looking to take over the world. We just want to work on computers that don't suck. With development tools that don't lock you in. With programs that do our bidding, not the other way around.
As long as I can run Linux and OpenBSD, and can continue to buy hardware for them, I'll be fine. Maybe I'll still maintain a Windoze box for playing games, but that's it. I'm not going to give MS much of my money. And if more people adopt that attitude, MS will wither away and be forgotten.
At any rate, I'm certainly not hoping that one of those other mega-corporations is going to save the day. They are all the same, it's just that MS is the most powerful at this moment.
I agree with you to the extent that if you're trying to play MS's game on their own turf, you're likely to lose. They'd like you to believe that their game is the only one in existance. They'd like you to believe that proprietary software is the only way to achieve quality. But they are wrong.
The only answer is not to play their game. They know they can't play our game (cooperation) because they'd lose status and become marginalized.
(I think I can get flamebait and troll all in one post)
Quote:
"There's no block to people putting features on Windows," he snaps.
Isn't that part of the problem?
1. Putting a feature into Windows means its now a target for embrasure (is that a word?), extension, or imitation. You have just decided to compete with MS. Somehow I doubt their "shared source" will help. Ask Stac how much success they had in putting features into a Microsoft product.
2. This statement is, to me, implicitly saying that innovation is dependant on Windows in the first place. Wasn't it Jackson who said (paraphrased) MS makes a barrier to innovation with this kind of thinking? They hammer the doors shut if you aren't talking Win32?
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Yeah, and Hitler made the trains run on time, too.
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The problem with your argument is that Communism never made anybody rich. The forces that caused the collapse of the USSR were economic more than political; they were just bankrupted by their "business model" of oppressive centralized control.
</i><p>
But this is exactly my point. Microsoft exercises oppressive control over the programming powers of its employees, and when the computer industry becomes conscious of the fact that the bubble has burst, Microsoft won't make anyone else rich. Microsoft is well on its way to being the AT&T of computer software, only without the scarcity of resources. Eventually programmers will realize that working on contract for corporations (like a mechanic) will be the option offering them the most money, more money than central software houses like Microsoft. To put it another way, Microsoft will eventually be revealed to be the inefficient middleman that it really is, and then its fall will not be far behind.
Aren't you dead?
One thing people fail to talk about is stability with respect to scaleability. UNIX/Linux is extremely stable when you have small components interacting with each other. When UNIX/Linux apps start to scale things start to get messy. Currently many linux applications have problems with interoperability with each other. KDE apps work in KDE space and GNOME apps work in GNOME space.
People often complain about how unstable Internet Explorer is, but when you compare it to Konquer you start to see similarities in the frequency of crashes between the two. The problem is while they both crash at the same rate, Microsoft's IE has more features and displays more sophisticated webpages. Similar comparisons can be made about MS Office vs. Star Office. While they are both relatively stable Star Office is a piss poor (featurewise) when compared to MS Office.
The moral of my story is that Microsoft scales better than Linux. This is not to bash Linux in anyway, since I am an avid user/developer of Linux software. The problem is that while I believe the Open Source philosophy is extremely important to our developement as a human race, Microsoft's (Closed Source philosophy) is delivering new and sophisticated technology while we UNIX/Linux coders are playing copy cat.
When I see all this, I find it quite frightening...
I heard that MS planned for XP an online activation of the program (or phone activation ?)...
UCITA provides big software companies with the right to remote-disable pograms and thus, with the right to insert these remote-disable facilities...
Year X : MS Windows 95, MS Windows 98, MS windows NT, MS Windows Me and MS Windows 2000 are not available anymore... By some licencing tricks as well as unneeded compatibility glitches, peoples are forced to switch to XP
Year X+2 : About everyone uses XP. US Law dept decide to start a new anti-trust against MS... MS Answer : "Drop that lawsuit or we'll disable all XP in USA"... US Government can't do anything anymore, fearing that the whole US inductry would fall apart and USA returning to technological Middle Age
Year X+3 : MS controls the world.
This scenario is a little pessimistic... But with more and more being done using computers... and MS Windows... Many monopolies aren't as critical as Computer... A Monopoly in Film, Music or such couldn't destroy the economy of a whole land and make all stop working...
When I see the future, I'm quite frightened...
But, there is another point... Laws were done to protect the people... Now, they become protections of the revenues of the big companies, thanks to lobbying and pots-de-vins.
People stealing other were shown by everyone... Now, people "steal" music (Napster and such) but these are usually not shown as doing something wrong (except by RIAA and such).
When something don't seem fair to people, they don't respect it. And in these times, we see more and more people copying music, films (Region Playback Control enhance this), Software (overpricing and bad quality enhance this one)... They REALLY DON'T THINK THEY DO SOMETHING WRONG... So, it shouldn't be wrong in the laws... When everyone breaks some law, that law becomes unenforceable...
We risk to reach a big crisis in the next years... And it may be sooner that we could think...
By the way, Bill Parish (http://www.billparish.com) had an article telling how MSFT is showing increasing wins but in reality has increasing losses. He tells that by using a pyramidal system in which stock options take a great part, they can do that trick... It's also scary as pyramidal systems will ALWAYS collapse (due to their exponential scheme)...
Ancient greeks knew steam engine (Zenon), knew how to make the big doors of a temple open when someone approach,... then we drooped in Middle Age... Will history repeats itself ?
No it wasn't and Yahoo removed the story that
claimed it was.
Linux may be a better OS, but it's not a better business plan, unfortunately.
:)
Linux isn't a better os.. Linux is the kernel... the whole pacage is named after that..
The quality of the pacage is defined by who assembles it...
Linux isn't a business plan at all.. It's just software
Windows however has a business plan. It has all the elements of a business.. and that business is Microsoft.
"Windows sucks" Of course is only talking about the software... There is a whole business side.
RedHats business plan sucks..
However Gateway is also suffering...
What is to be noted isn't that the evil keeps moving unphased..
Del, Compaq, Gateway, Radio Shack etc.. everyone is suffering...
Microsoft isn't.. Microsoft keeps on moving.
Thats the business side..
We already know software quality isn't in Microsofts buisness plan or Microsoft would pay more attention. The point being in a hurt ecconomy there may be something to mimic..
Microsoft treats employees well but has a well regulated staff. No more than they need.
They can not cut back becouse they never have exess staff..
Bill Gates is a smart business man.. He knew to buy up Dos and position it to suplant CP/M 86 (he was probably not expecting PC clones)
Even if it was shady and underhanded he did manage to push other Dos GUIs off the market and replace them with Windows and you have to admit he had no levrage to push Amiga or other GUI based Non PC systems off the market but they left. Bill Gates knew where the GUI was going even if no body wanted to believe it.
That kind of business skill is what is making Microsoft immune to the economy. Nobody else seems able to do that so it's worth it for CEOs to check them out.
Even if they can not repeace Microsofts success they can get a better understanding of what is happening with the economy by looking at someone who isn't phased by it.
I don't actually exist.
Oni is a Bungie/GODgames product, NOT Microsoft.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Nah. Before that happens they'll devote billions to R&D to find new markets.
Face it folks, Microsoft may be our best bet for interstellar travel, if only so they can find other civilizations that need Windows machines!
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
> Microsoft's XP line will do as well or perhaps better than they are expecting, despite what the /. community thinks.
Like W2K did?
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
David vs. Goliath
Microsoft still beating up on everyone, including the small guy.
Microsoft has a lot of capital. That alone will keep them alive. However, if you look at what they have been producing I see only evolutionary improvements in products they've had for years. The innovation mostly consists of adding features and integrating their various products. While that improves usability somewhat, it is not true innovation. Rather it is inertia. People buy ms products today because they bought them yesterday. Some of them will probably buy them again tomorrow, but some won't.
Of course the underlying question when such an article is posted on slashdot is whether they will continue be able to compete with open source software and the answer is yes of course. MS has plenty of money and can afford to experiment with their strategy as much as they like. Right now they are trying to see how much money they can squeeze out of their customers and it turns out to be quite a lot (and why shouldn't they, I have no sympathy for idiots so lets rip them off). On the other hand they are losing a few customers which is bad in the long term. Probably they will become a bit more moderate if they start losing too much customers. However considering their installed base, they will have a revenue stream for years to come, no matter what they do, no matter how crazy they act.
However, open source has a similar advantage. It's free now, it's free tomorrow. It will always be the cheaper option. The quality of some open source products is also quite good and if MS continues to make life hard for home users (with activation bullshit and all), it becomes increasingly attractive to let mandrake reorganize my disk a bit, removing all dependencies on legacy software such as outlook and notepad.
Jilles
Take a look at this piece in The Register. Basically, Microsoft have implemented a site for the UK government called Government Gateway, which will enable you to use your computer to electronically perform a lot of tasks which previously needed lots of paper work (like Tax Self Assessment). However, if you go to the Gateway you find that they have very restrictive checks on the browser you are using -- and they won't let you use some of the areas which use a digital certificate unless you are using Internet Explorer 5+.
You can still use it if you fake the UserAgent string, but this sort of behaviour from a website is at best crude, and at worst deliberately targeting non-Microsoft OSes.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
I suspect Microsoft is actually deeply worried about the next five years. The top execs know only too well just what IBM looked like to the business press in 1989 - and how quickly they fell from a position of seeming invincibility. The margins in the packaged software business are falling rapidly. Unix server revenues are nearly triple Windows server revenues - and Linux is cleaning their clocks at the low end. To move away from the software license model means going the services route - a la .NET which is untested and a big gamble to say the least.
Unlike the heyday of fawning which accompanied Microsoft in the mid-90s, businesses are becoming very hard-nosed about security, privacy and robustness - especially as more businesses integrate Internet functionality into their business models. Most are deeply disturbed at the idea of a middleware layer of services controlled solely by Microsoft and won't be very keen to move there.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Uhh, what about the dachas, the power, the women?
By any reasonable definition the high end aparachniks were pretty rich. When the system switched over to "capitalism", the system of organized robbery merely continued without the pretext of common social progress.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You should try PemdOS, the new operating system!
Major Features:
- Kernel is lean...0KB! This is a 100% reduction in size from any other kernel!
- Won't crash. Ever. (That would require it to run)
- Completely cross-platform; will run on anything from a DEC TurboLaser on down to an ARM7 core equally well.
All this can be yours for the incredible price of $75,000,000. 40% educational discount available.True. There was an report on one of the busines programs on TV the other day about the latest version of WordPerfect which acknowledged that features or quality are now immaterial to it's success, since Microsoft is now so entrenched. People buy Windows, Word etc because they are the standard - not because they are the best. Of course these things never last - the same was true of IBM at one stage.
Who cares how many they sold--we are looking at it from a business prospective, right? What matters is net profit. If IBM sold twice as many boxes as Apple, but IBM's profit margin was one quarter of Apple's due to competition from clones, Apple comes out ahead.
While you may be of the opinion that Windows sucks more than ever, or that linux/OS X/BSD/BeOS/AmigaOS is more threatening than ever, that's largely irrelevant. Microsoft is a business, and their strength is reflected by business forcasts, price-to-earning ratios, and other financial indicators.
While Eazel is going out of business, Mandrake is asking resorting to donations, and countless other tech companies are hurting, Microsoft is doing just fine. They're not instituting mass layoffs. I know people who work there, and things are the same-old, same-old.
Linux may be a better OS, but it's not a better business plan, unfortunately.
They're the biggest and most profitable software company out there.
Dosn't the kind of stock market "game" Microsoft are involved in require showing constant expansion. Here being the biggest can be a disadvantage.
no...but that would be nice.
a better analogy is the car wouldnt have its hood welded shut AND its plans and drawings locked away.
15 E10000's for SALVAGE ? please please can i have some ? i'll take them ALL off your hands. simply reselling 2 of the CPUs from ONE of those beasts will more than cover any salvage costs.
What I don't see mentioned in the article or in discussions here are other national governments. Will they allow a US corporation to be at the centerpoint of all internet transactions, to have more information about their citizens than they do?
Might other governments institute some sort of tariff whereby it's more expensive to use do business the MS way as a means of fostering local industry?
Clearly, competitors in MS's chosen markets are unlikely to overcome MS anytime soon, but what about non-business aspects of all this? (Government, culture, anti-US imperialist concerns, etc.)
What do yout hink?
(day late and a dollar short but holy shit)
.net strategy, they can knock out *nix one hit at a time. Anything that runs IIS they can update to block any non-IE browser, and call it a bug they're working on. They can load checks on your computer that will recognize non-MS servers (file, proxy, whatever) and give mis-leading errors to make you think it's *nix. T\
Being the paranoid freak I am, I just realized something - with the
They can do to us what they did blue mountain greeting cards, one piece at a time, and at their leisure. By the time they're done, the only thing people are going to care about is whether or not it's compatible with 'the internet', which MS will own hands down. And the DOJ won't be able to afford to go after them because they'll own the software that lets journalists do their jobs.
Shit.
Ctimes2
-soon we're all going to be fully owned subsidiary of MS.
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
Microsoft has indicated that it is intent on continued growth of 20% a year.
:-).
Has anyone calculated just how many years it will be before Microsoft corporate strategy requires that they own everything?
Huh? I have been trying to connect to SQL server from my linux/apache/php box and just can't seem to find any thing to make this possible. MS also does not make a JDBC driver so I can try and use Java.
If I was using any other database I would have been able to connect just fine.
Anybody who bets their business on SQLserver deserves every headache they get.
War is necrophilia.
"That's right, it's democracy"
When I was going to school my professor explaine dthe difference between a democracy and a republic this way.
A lynching is a perfect example of a democracy. You have 10 people for lynching and one against.
War is necrophilia.
Thanks for the tip. For me it's not just java it's trying to connect to SQL server from linux using ANYTHING!. Does this software depend on windows libraries or can it run on Linux?
MS is the biggest lying copany on the planet. Whenever i see their "plays nice with others" ad I just want to spit on all their lying faces.
War is necrophilia.
Do you really want to only be able to run MS Internet Explorer? The reason standards exist is so that no one firm can be a monopoly in a marketplace.
I want market choices. "Catering to the biggest group of users" isn't choice. It is stupidity, not to mention against ADA.
-- Multics
Ever ponder what would have happened if IBM had not been a monopoly for 20 years early in the computer industry? Where would we be now? I'll bet a lot further down the road.
Those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Most /.ers are not wise enough to learn any history.
-- Multics
With W in office, their legal troubles will fade away. It certainly didn't hurt that the first-level judge was at least unwise about his comments. If applications had been peeled off of Windows the world would be a different place. The probability of that happening is about 0.0001 now.
They are talking up Linux to make sure everyone thinks that they are all worried about an O/S with no significant applications that anyone cares about. They are worried like my grandfather (who is 92) is worried that 10 nymphomanics are going to attack him every Sunday.
They will finish their take-over of the web, but getting Steve "kingdom builder" Case to throw away Netscape. Already places like Weather Channel are difficult to use in Netscape and that trend will accelerate violently this year. (And yes, macromedia flash is part of WC's problems)
So what if XP is a failure. They'll change the license for Win2k to a time-based one and poof the monopoly is complete. These guys are classic Monopolists and as soon as they can lock everyone one into their party (they are very very close now), innovation will nearly stop. No monopolist will invest in his marketplace when he has absolute control and a reliable income stream. That is what XP is about. The terminal technology while MS goes off and attempts to dominate all the other software marketplaces. Ever consider what it would take in terms of cash for them to buy Palm and Handspring and just close them?...
The only thing that will stop this mess is Bill quitting and he can't just about as any human can't taking in O2. I wonder if he is at all happy... I'll bet not.
So kids, we're in deep trouble. "Open" people have failed to provide things people want enough to switch away from Windows on the desktop. If "Open" doesn't own the desktop, it is likely that "Open" doesn't own anything.
--Multics
SuperID
Free Database Hosting
This king of leads to the MS 3 rule; no MS product works at all well until version 3. MS can just throw more and more money at a problem until it goes away.
Very few other companies in the world could have afforded or would have wanted to keep MSN going. MS is different though. Once they attack a space, they just keep fighting (and spending). They will not allow defeat.
Take a look at embedded software. Another version of WinCE, 3.0 (aka PocketPC) is trying to push forward and staring to do better. At the same time, NT Embedded has finally spawned Windows XP Embedded (Win2k Embedded never made it out of the gate).
MSNBC keeps pushing forward. The mighty CNN (backed by AOLTime) is now struggling to fight off this (and Fox). Spend enough and keep trying and people watched.
Enterprise software? They have Win2k running on 32 processor intel based systems with 64 gigs of RAM. Exchange is all of the place. SQLServer use is growing.
As a business they do some many things to make sure they win. Every piece is tied to all the others. They tell you that "If you run windows and office at home, you should use a PocketPC! It runs all the same stuff!" They say that "If you run Win2k, than Exchange, SQLServer, and IIS run the best!" They want everything to tie to them. Your windows login becomes your "Passport". Now they own part of your identity. Pretty soon you will have to pay to use your own passport. Just a penny a login...
The fact is that they are just too damn good at this capitalist game. In order to protect the people and not stiffle innovation, the playing field has to be made a bit more fair. The government no longer seems up to the task. Our only hope is that MS's enemies gang up on them. Can even AOLTimeWarner, Sony, Sun, Oracle, and IBM combined beat them? I don't know. I sure hope so because I would have rather have a bunch of powerful companies in specific sectors than one all powerful company in all sectors of the economy.
-- soldack
I attended several Mac World Expos in San Francisco a few years back and Muhammad Ali was a VIP at each. So I think it is great they used him as an example since their example believes one of their competitors is better.
Once again the clueless beast rears its true head.
Yeah, and he said the same thing about Windows ME and Windows 98. If Windows ME or 98 was the most important thing since Windows 95, then shouldn't Windows XP be the most important thing since Windows ME?
>>>>>>>>>
Lets go through a basic tutorial in algebra. If the importance level of Windows 95 was 10, the importance level of Windows 98 was 4, ME 6 and XP 9. Since there was nothing between '95 and '98, '98 was indeed the most important thing since '95, since 4 > 0. Now, '98 is between '95 and ME, but 6 > 4, so ME is the most important thing since '95. Lastly both '98 and ME are between '95 and XP, and 9 > 6 > 4, so XP is the most important thing since '95. Not really that hard when somebody explicates it all nice for you, is it?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
(this was not intended as a troll, btw). /., anything that doesn't extoll all the virtues of OSS programs and condemn MS for being capitalist pigs is taken as trolling. God forbid we should judge anything an technical merit.
>>>>>>>>>>>
Its really sad that you have to state that. On
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
M$ owns the desktop PC market. Now I run RH on my PC at home because I'm a computer professional. But most people can not use Linux at home as their sole computer as it stands now.
What has to change is not us winning on the desktop PC but for the desktop PC to evolve into something else. The promise of the internet is that very expensive, complex desktop PC's will be replaced by very cheap internet appliances (say $50 to $150.) And that massive bloated, complex suites of software will be replaced by free light-weight web-based tools used to manipulate files (documents, presentations, spreadsheets, you know the drill) that use one of a few world-wide xml-based standard file formats. Every death-star has a weakness. Theirs is the fact that their business model depends upon expensive desktop PC's (that have to be replaced every 3 years) and
running complex applications which use proprietary file formats.
I want to be alone with the sandwich
When it comes down to it, support usually has nothing to do with it. The attitude is usually something like:
Since it is free it must be crappy since people weren't paid to make it.
It must be crappy because the people who made it aren't capitalizing on it.
It's no good, so they're giving it away for free.
This reminds me of a manager that I have to work with occasionally. He swore at StarOffice (now OpenOffice). His opinion was that if anything is free, you get what you pay for. The funny thing is that after I showed it to him on my PC at home (we do BBQ's) he asked me to burn him a copy so that he could use it. Maybe this isn't the greatest example but hey, I got one person to convert.
You can be replaced by a very small shell script.
How many people here DIDN'T know that Microsoft was going strong?
:-)
Here? Almost everybody invisions Microsoft HQ going down in flames everytime they see anything running Linux from a PDA to a Server Farm.
That's okay, though. When everybody else goes out of business, Microsoft will switch to Linux and everybody will be a winner here. Now, everybody, let's have a Group hug.
tee hee
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Due to its monopoly on office software and residential OS's, Microsoft enjoys the highest margins in the industry. However, I'm not sure if I'd invest right away. Odds are that .NET is going to flounder. Java has a major head start over the .NET folks as far as courting the developers. Microsoft pissed off a big chunk of its developer community by dropping J++ and moving away from C++. .NET doesn't offer anything that Java isn't offering, except that it is pretty much incompatible with any non-Windows box unless you go to the trouble of exporting XML interfaces. XBox is a mystery question where I doubt their huge cash box will help much. The competition is Sony, who has just as big of a cash box and a lifetime of experience in consumer electronics. I love how every new OS that Microsoft offers is reviewed as the greatest event in History. I'm having a hard time seeing the difference between XP and win2k. Frankly, I'm still having a hard time seeing all of that much difference between win2k and NT 4. Ok, so XP means the death of the old win95 kernel (win95, win98, winMe) for residential users and small businesses. Wow, big deal. I mean who cares about XP? It's just a continuation of the monopoly. Don't get me wrong, Windows is an excellent desktop platform (arguably the best) and many Microsoft products are excellent. But, as soon as they stray from what they know (desktops), they start to suck real bad. DCOM, MTS, COM+ welcome to the hall of losers. My prediction: BizTalk checks into Hotel NoUsers. This whole thing about Windows leaping into the high end server market is laughable. Samba on Linux for Christ's-sake runs faster than NT 4.0 as a CIFS server (an CIFS is in the kernel space on NT). And as for IIS, I can only wonder about what idiots actually use that rat trap. IIS is as secure as convertible parked in the Watts District of LA around 3am. SQL-Server is fairly reliable, but it has its upper limits, and certainly is no gem compared to the other proprietary jobs out there. Think about all of the other crappy products Windows has, like Visual Source Safe (pitty to all who have to bear that piece of shit). Really, it comes down to IE and Office. I'd even throw MSdev in the mix as a great IDE (although the build system sucks and NMake is fucking useless). I wish Microsoft would just say fuckit and drop everything except for OS work, Office and IE work. Those are good products. Skip the rest. Trim out the lame shit. Whatever happened to that forced break up plan? I liked the idea of the Offic stuff being seperate because it would translate into Office for Linux.
Someone you trust is one of us.
This just in:
TUESDAY MAY 29 2001
US banks face huge claims over dot-coms
FROM CHRIS AYRES IN NEW YORK
WALL STREET banks are facing an avalanche of expensive litigation, with as many as 100 class-action lawsuits, demanding tens of billions of dollars in damages. The banks are being accused by investors of allegedly rigging the flotations of Internet companies during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. An investigation by The Times has found that 21 separate lawsuits have already been filed against ten different banks in Manhattan federal courts.
The lawsuits allege that the flotations of Internet and technology companies including Marketwatch.com, MP3.com, DoubleClick and Ariba were rigged.
Securities litigation experts in New York estimate that at least another 60 similar lawsuits are currently being prepared.
...
Seastead this.
When the east coast establishment simultaneously:
- In conjunction with Netscape, activates the antitrust powers of the US Government against Microsoft.
- Agglomerates the AOL/Time-Warner/CNN/Netscape behemoth with the approval of said powers of the US Government.
- Commits institutional investors to purchasing the initial public offerings of almost anything capitalized by Silicon Valley venture capitalists.
I think it is safe to say that no one with big chunks of capital and/or US Government power thought Microsoft was going to "just roll over".Seastead this.
What the heck is that? I have a feeling I not want know?
And just because it's free doesn't mean it's good either.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
Where I work, I'm constantly trying to promote Linux in places where it would be beneficial.
We're a relatively small company, with roughly 250 computer workstations/notebooks and about 20 servers, spread across 7 locations. Right now, everything is running Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 (except maybe 2 or 3 notebooks with Win '98).
I seem to be the lone voice in favor of Linux, though. The rest of the system administrators and support people I work with do nothing more than poke fun at me for trying to stir up trouble with the whole Linux thing.
Their biggest argument against Linux is that it will muddy up the environment. They're afraid of having "oddball boxes, running something completely different than the rest of the systems run". (Translation: We're too unsure of our own abilities to administer a Linux box, and don't want to be forced to learn something new.)
Our company is surprisingly willing to let the techs make the tech decisions. Management isn't forcing us to use MS products at all. They just want to see results, and being rather computer illiterate to begin with, don't care how the results are achieved. The techs themselves are keeping Linux out of our company!
Not surprising for something that has never moved.
"Face the reality: MicroSoft is a damn effective company, that makes good software and knows, how to sell it"
Although I don't agree with the makes good software part, I do agree with the fact that Microsoft has done its homework on business and marketing. Their software is adequate for the most part. I would love to tout Linux as the end-all be-all but just as a saw cannot drive a screw as good as a screwdriver, there are somethings windows is better suited for.
Microsoft is the champ in marketing. Does anyone remember the hype around windows 95? I remember the story of people without computers asking for windows 95 because they thought they needed it. That's marketing.
"Draw them in with the prospect of gain, take them by confusion." Sun Tzu
I'm sure if they're going to loose that much money, we could start sending donations that way a la Mandrake.
(For the sarcasm challenged, this was a pitiful attempt at humor)
"Draw them in with the prospect of gain, take them by confusion." Sun Tzu
Friends come and go, enemies are forever. Most people that use MS's product arent happy with it, that isnt a good situation for any buisness to be in. MS makes more and more enemies all the time, eventually they will get draged under, its inevitable. Ever hear of someone choosing to switch to windows ?
There is a key distinction to be made regarding open source software here.
It is true that there are no phenomenal returns to be made selling free software akin to the kind of profits made by a monopoly on an increasingly essential service (I use my computer more than my telephone and television combined - that has some interesting implications.)
However, there are certainly profits to be made by those smart enough to figure out they can use open source to the benefit of their business. Those businesses have an advantage over their inertia-bound competitors that, in the larger scheme of things, will see them succeed more often, all the marketing drivel from Redmond notwithstanding.
As an aside, does anyone remember the Ted Rall cartoon from a few years back about "tieing" that resulted in
I really think the key event for open source success will be the release of a very low cost appliance. Consumers want convenience at a low cost; no hassles. Such an appliance can be built (Hint: It's not the Xbox.)
"Provided by the management for your protection."
george: did you weigh the pros and cons of each solution on a cost and technical level? Maybe Office XP and Windows are the best productivity system available today *gasp*.
You are so blinded by your love for linux that you forget who pays your bills. Maybe you should look out for the interests of the University you work for.
You wouldn't last one day in my org. Anyone who puts a personal agenda ahead of what is good for the org needs to find somewhere else to work.
--
PaxTech
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
But in space, no one can hear them scream...
hehe...
I'm finally going to convert my standard general purpose machine (Desktop PC) to Linux or BSD...
(From win2k)
I'm not interested in XP.
The article says: "Indeed, there are dozens of markets where Microsoft doesn't play, such as online stock trading and e-tailing"
Wait a minute here. Don't Microsoft own Expedia and others?
Only two examples as well? Wow, a non Microsoft opurtunity of one! Count me in for online stock trading! I'll make Billions!
So I guess Microsoft isn't a monopoly after all. I'm glad thats settled!
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Microsoft's XP line will do as well or perhaps better than they are expecting, despite what the /. community thinks. The average consumer will see, via good ole Microsoft marketing, that they will be able to use their computer more efficiently and effectively and that it will do lots of things for them if they get this new 'Windows XP' thing.
As for monthy subscriptions, I'm guessing most won't care too much because it'll be taken directly from their credit card that they have to pay every month anyways and if it will provide them with a richer experience on their computer they will probably overlook it. I hate to say it, but if Microsoft delivers on it's promises with this new system and provides something that is significantly different than it's previous line of windows products that people will buy it and Microsoft will make more money and extend their monopoly.
So far thay seem to have done everything right with the tight integration they are promissing which should enhance the users experience. It's too bad the Justice Department is letting this happen if they could only see how much this will help and hurt consumers at the same time, not to mention what it will do to competition.
Yes this will help consumers in ways I've already mentioned and that Microsoft has mentioned, but it will also hurt several of them if they are denied the freedom to use what they want to, however I'm willing to bet that 80-90% of the Windows users out there don't care what they're using and will just use whatever someone puts in front of them.
Competition of course will be hurt quite a bit, but this should not be surprising either coming from Microsoft. Microsoft plays hardball, and they have the resources to play harder than anyone.
I'm not pro-Microsoft by any means, but I can recognize that they do have a good business and excellent marketing which has brought them to where they are today and will continue to carry them in the future. As for Linux and other open alternatives, I'm not sure. I personally use Linux as my primary operating system, but I can also see that Linux has no real business model or good marketing and unless that is changed, giants like Microsoft will trample them out of existance.
Having a better product isn't enough.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
OK, Win95 was a big step up from Win 3.1, if only because Win 3.1 was a messy, jerry-built, unstable, bug-ridden pile of crap.
Now, how is XP such a big step-up from W2K, NT, or even W98? Is it the crippled MP3 support? The activation "feature"?
Just what is in XP that I should get it, if I'm already using W98 or some such?
--
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delenda est Windoze
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
From a legal perspective, you're exactly right. However, when you're dealing with Big Numbers (tm), then the EULA is irrelevant in the opposite direction. In other words, no matter WHAT legal protection you have, I'm going to bludgeon you, your company, and your children if your product breaks and takes our data with it!
From that point of view, the execs have a point. It still often leads to crappy software being used because of the 'support.'
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I have a client that was just bought out by a company making business based on what a bunch of clueless execs decide in a little office, somewhere far away. I look at this situation, and understand perfectly well why MS is going to continue to steamroller over everyone they can. Here are some policies.
1) Thou shalt use no free software, because it's unsupported and will therefore break.
Now their main app is serving data up through samba, but because Mother Corp. says so, they're going to have to find something else. The stupid part is, they're outsourcing support anyways, and the company (mine) doing support _will_ support samba! There's just no vendor to blame when it breaks.
2) Thou shalt use (backup product A), despite the fact that (backup product B) is better, cheaper, has been successfully implemented across the company for several years, and is the only supported software for their large tape library.
With decisions like this, it's no wonder that companies (i.e. MS but not exclusively them) can get away with increasing their market share with a crappy product over and over again.
Here's an idea: Let the techs make the tech decisions for tech reasons, then watch bad companies rot and productivity increase immensely!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I was basing my idea on the fact that MS is a group sthat makes a product and Linux is a group hat makes a product(s). But, I see your point as well.
M$ can pay its employees staggering sums of cash to get focus out of its strategy. linux developers get paid nothing so they work on stuff which interests them.
That is, in a way, what i am trying to say. MS has 100 guys on a product. Linux has 25 working on free*, 50 working on gnu*, 25 on open*. And, since the linux programmers do 'stuff which interests them', they may leave the project to go else where. MS programmers, to my understanding, get paid fairly well and will most likely stay until the end of their project/contract.
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Many of these groups may also simply not play nice with each other. Many were formed when one product's developers got into an argument over something that caused them to fork. then we have the various licenses that these are released under. Getting the GPL, BSD, LGPL and others to come together would be next to impossible. No one would want to look like the loser.
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I wonder if MS' continued growth is due to their being able to have a unified front against other companies? MS acts as one while Linux has numerous groups all with the same core beliefs (basicly) but, with their own idea of how things should be done. When MS puts out a piece of software, there is only one version at a time. Often in the Linux world you will have a free* version, a open* version, a gnu* version, etc... MS is once again able to use its unified front against these other (and often times better) products to give the impression that it's product is more popular and thus (in their eyes) better.
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Did anyone really expect Microsoft to start slowing down? They're the biggest and most profitable software company out there. The quality of what they sell is really irrelevant from a business standpoint. What matters is that they know how to sell it, keep selling it, and make large quantities of money from selling it. They do that well. Very well.
How many people here DIDN'T know that Microsoft was going strong?
Honestly, I don't think this article was posted to inform us of anything, or to be interesting. I think the sole reason that this was posted was to see the flames fly at Microsoft. If that's the case, you really need to grow up.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Sorry, since I'm probably gonna be modded down, I had to make the title a little catchy :-)
:-) of all things digital" doesn't quite figure.
The statement that "the internet is now the backbone of most computing" might be OK, but saying that because of that "that puts Microsoft at the centre (I'm a Brit
I seem to remember looking at the last Netcraft survey and seeing Apache (on whatever platform) pissing all over IIS and the like as far as number of hosts out there goes.
Yeap, I'm sure that something 0.1% of those Apache hosts are running Win32, but the general idea is that there are an awful lot of *BSD/*Nix hosts out there on the internet.
Not every device connecting to those servers are going to be M$ (or even Intel) powered - not every handheld/PDA, mobile phone, or new-fangled digital picture frame runs Windoze (CE/ME/XP/Whatever) - especially at the embedded end of things.
There are always going to be some folk that refuse/choose not to/cannot/should not run something that comes out of Redmond.
Just my 2p/$0.02
At the moment the range from the Workstation I'm on now and the nearest MS product (of any form) is at least 30ft and it grows a little each month - I like it that way. :)
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Yeah, I know this is a troll (and a not-great one at that).
But I think any responses to it would be interesting. Or funny.
I prefer the voices of insanity.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
I think that's partially right: the problem with communism was more that it didn't make the right people rich. By allowing only politicians to get rich (i.e. have the perks of society,) you disenfranchise many of your most talented citizens. Microsoft has always been a very talent-based organization, and this has allowed them to prosper (they hired smart geeks when geeks were very unfashionable, and really believed in talent over schooling/family, etc.) Organizations seem to die rapidly when people
- see that the organization's goals and their's are not aligned
- when they have a choice of going elsewhere.
As long as Microsoft continues to shower riches on the employees that do well, I don't think they'll have a problem.MS will probably collapse in time, as do most huge organizations, but it probably won't be because they're evil. It will probably be more like a shift in the economic climate, such as the one that did in the great rail companies.
I think two other scenarios are more likely:
Bill Gates leaves. The power vacuum is filled by politicians and sycophants. Employees see that talent and hard work are less important than politics.
Microsoft uses lawsuits and the courts to such an extent that employees feel their technical work is less important than the business/legal side.
Both these situations might cause the firm to collapse, and if it does, the collapse might to surprisingly rapid.
Microsoft then integrates this code into their Windows products
Interesting idea, but last I heard, you had to actually work for the evil empire to 'take a look' at their source. Since M$, like most any tech company would have made you sign a non-disclosure agreement, I really doubt that you've seen any, or you wouldn't be going on about it in a public forum...
-- If at first you do succeed, try to hide your astonishment. -- Harry F. Banks
Windows is very easy to install, and I've done it a few hundred times. Turn on machine, place cd in drive, boot from cd, enter a few numbers. Not to difficult.
You left out, install chipset driver, reboot, install video driver, reboot, install sound driver, reboot, install modem driver, reboot, configure Dialup, reboot, install Network card driver, reboot, configure network settings, reboot, install DvD software, reboot, install TV Tuner software, reboot, run the Windows update, reboot. Now begin installing applications.
Jesus died for sombodies sins, but not mine.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
Typical, I'm afraid, of business reporting... Hopefully their tune will change once M$ comes in for a torrent of bad customer reactions and reduced expectations due to the XP product line, but until then we'll have to put up with very uncritical reporting.
Wonder if this has to do with the millions that M$ plans on spending to distribute trial versions of Office XP in with several popular newspapers and mags. It's all a conspiracy, I tell ya...
My sig is too lon
IE has over 70% of the browser market now. Its faster and doesn't crash nearly as often as Netscape. Its even smaller. You have to get Netscape in a 20 meg zipfile that includes their mail/usenet/aim/shop features. A minimal IE install takes 7 meg (a few more if you want java). Weatherchannel is catering to the biggest group of users.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
NS is far worse then IBM was, even when the Gov't stepped in to slap IBMs hand.
If IBM had done half the stuff MS does now, it would have been broke up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Buy a mid to high level PC with a Geforce3, it will be more powerfull. All the graphics are sweet because of the G3, not anything the XBox has.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Their .net strategy is a way to avoid all these games. Instead of having to produce a better word processor to convince people to upgrade from Office 97, they develop a steady revenue stream by offering their product as a service, and charging monthly.
Its brilliant, and they probably have the power to do it. Fortunately, as long as their are free alternatives out there (mozilla, abiword, openoffice, etc.), they will not be able to capitalize entirely on their position, EVEN IF THOSE ALTERNATIVES ARE NOT USED BY THE MAJORITY OF COMPUTER USERS. AOL funds Netscape development but uses Explorer because right now, Explorer is a little better, and if they don't have an "Ace in the hole", Microsoft will no longer need to give away Explorer. Microsoft's strategy can be successful at quashing competing companies, but the open source alternatives don't play by the same business rules, and are thus very important for keeping Microsoft in check.
I would have quoted more, but you get the idea. Ok, you're a writer, and you want a system on which to write. That's great, but why would you use Microsoft Word? If you really are a novelist name one "feature" that you actually need. Publishing houses don't run on word documents, so don't tell me about formatting. For a novel I can't really see you using OLE. Graphs? no. Oh wait, tables... no. hmmmmmm Auto spell checking? seems useless when you can save time by running it once at the end. Oooh, wait, the paper clip guy! I knew you had a good reason
Really, I'm just getting to my rant, and it is this. Microsoft Word (and WordPerfect, and any other word processor you can think of) is NOT the killer app. In fact, I would say that programs of that ilk are responsible for some of the worst business practices I have ever seen evolve (the absolute worse probably has to do with the proper use of AutoCAD, but I digress). Most of your larger companies have standards. Fonts, headers, etc... all have some sort of standard look and feel. Comnpanies that do most of their document management using Word Processor software have to open each document and reformat any time these standards change. People writing the documents have to constantly change their formatting as they write to accomdate these standards. Publishers are no different, they have standards to, and even if they don't, they need to change the formatting for a number of documents or several places in a document all at once(as in chapter headers) think they want to scroll through your word document to change all of the 'Arial' headers to 'Times New Roman'? Ask O'Reilly or New Riders how they manage their documents and books (Hint: it's NOT with word).
There are also many times when documents need to be found. For instance, if a key secratary leaves, that person may have been managing hundreds of documents in what ever fasion they had developed over the years. This documentation system might not be obvious to somone coming in 'blind'. With a word processor you have to open each file inside of that word processor to find a particular document you are looking for. There is no easy way to catagorize and index the documents left by that secratary.
Switching from word processors to a well designed mark up language (at one time I would have said SGML but now XML) will fix all of these problems, if implemented correctly. Since your headers, quotes, citations, body text, and everything else is now marked by function and not feel. It is trivial to select a formatting style when you produce output (display or print). If that important secratary leaves, it is a simple thing to take every document s/he had stored and index by date, subject, recipient, or any other field.
Anyone who is using a word processing program is castrating their computer in favor of a slightly more advanced pencil. Word, Word Perfect, etc... are good for keeping your resume, and perhaps writing a letter to a friend (if you were going to print it out and mail it). Even then, I'd stack a good markup editor aginst them any day.
I know I rambled, but this is a pet peeve of mine. In any case, I'd rather show business how much that office suite they love so much is hurting them than try to reproduce the same lump of steaming crap for GNU/Linux.
Politics, Culture, Food?
However, it seems that you're missing the primary reason of the open source movement. I don't expect every open source program to work completely free of and bugs, be more featureful than anything I'd ever seen before, etc. However, look at the number of times that something like Linux pulls a BSOD (or equivalent crash ... kernel panic maybe) compared to Windows.
Also, if I'm not mistaken, didn't RedHat beat expectations on Wall Street? I think VA did as well. These are still extremely young companies, whereas Microsoft has been around a while. Once your overhead expenses are met, you start turning a profit. RedHat, VA, etc., are still paying on all their fancy new pieces of equipment, and most businesses lose money within the first few years. But, they ARE surviving!
Anyway, back to my original statement. Open source is about having the code to modify and work with as you please. Free software takes this a step further. I don't mind paying for my software, but by God I better be able to do with what I purchase as I please. Do you think Microsoft will do this any time soon? What would it be like if when you bought a lawnmower, you were only allowed to mow certain types of grass? Or perhaps it ran not on the fuel you could purchase at most any gas station, but only fuel that the manufacturer sold? Microsoft will eventually run itself into the ground, and I will celebrate the day that software development and usage runs free.
But let the real numbers, not Business Week's, do the talking - check out the 52-week low. 160% of 40 is 64, almost 70! Wow! But a better picture is a 5-year plot (I believe it's adjusted for the stock splits). One story is that the stock was almost at 120, and instead of being dismayed that it was reduced to one-third of its value, Business Week thinks we should be happy that's it's at nearly two-thirds instead - but they forgot to mention that part...
If it weren't M$, then what? KDE? Gnome? It'd still be a monopoly, or there'd be nothing for Word Processor developers to write to.
But who out there wants to be a WP developer? Who'se innermost craving is to write the next talking paperclip? It's been done before.
Computing, as in the stuff M$ don't understand, is in the Data Centre. These places are stuffed full of Sun and HP kit, and some EMC storage, as far as the eye can see.
Now that's somewhere M$ will never get; it's where the big boys play, where no customer will accept embrace-and-extinguish, where the ultimate requirement is, "we buy this from you so long as we are not dependant on you" - open protocols.
Okay, these customers pay a lot for hardware, but they retain their FREEDOM to chose an alternate vendor of CLOSED *PLATFORMS* and code.
Try telling AT&T that their HP boxes are closed; they don't care; the HP/UX they use are similar to the Solaris their closed Sun boxes use. They can swap-and change easily; they all use the same protocols.
If the 1-800 system changed from (say) HP to (say) IBM, you as an end-user would never notice the difference.
Get out of the shallow end. Let M$ have it; let them plough millions into research of which paperclip we want today. The intelligent CS is in the high end, where nobody will take any embrace-and-extinguish suitor seriously.
Steve.
#include <stddiscl.h>
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
The part that pisses me off is that it only gets reported because microsoft is, in fact, making money hand over fist. And Open Source is not. Bear in mind, it's not losing money, bad ideas lose money, Open source just doesnt have the phenomenal returns that selling an OS for 500 bucks and office software for 400 bucks does. Linux IS making money, but just because people who sit on stock commitees dont get to line their pockets with our efforts, as they do with buying into M$, they would rather bash Open Source as much as they can.
It also seems apparent that Microsoft has some sort of stake in BusinessWeek as well, doesn't it? :-)
The whole thing seems kinda like the Tortoise and the Hare, I suppose. The Rabbit running like mad to stay in front, the turtle just plodding along as his own pace. But we all know who won THAT race.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
The beat goes on MS sucks most are too lazy to stop pirating there software. Lets face facts the 20 somethings will agree we grew up Microsoft. It's not hard. Linux is fantastic I us3e as much as Ican but it is a microsoft world. I don't make the rules I just break em. Twiddle
It's a new kind of Hytsteria
That was probably the most difficult post I've ever tried to read. What the hell are you trying to say?
There is still plenty of time to compete in the web services sphere, unfortunately the non-Microsoft world is divided (Sun, IBM, and the open communitieis each taking slightly different approaches), which makes Microsoft domination easier over time.
Every paragraph was about how microsoft could afford to take over virtually every section of the market, and build this disguisting empire.
This really makes me want to cry. Or kidnap bill gates and staple stuffed Tux dolls to his forehead.
What disgusts me the most, was that stupid reference to the Ali boxing match. Here's to taking something way out of context and fucking it up the ass till it bleeds your name.
Ugh.
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#nohup cat
...from the resistance-is-futile department.
A better analogy would be that when you buy a car, you don't presume to have a right to get the drawings and plans that were used to make it?
They're not free, but you can pick up any of a number of excellent reference manuals here
Please inform the posters here where guides of equal quality to Microsoft's code base exist.
Thanx
MAB
It is quite apparent to me that Microsoft will fall down eventually, as all the creations of humanity have downfallen from the greatness they once had had. However I expect their demise to be neither shortcoming nor quick.
Microsoft has occupied very important positions in two vital areas: office software and desktop operating systems. They have also ventured into countless other markets, such as server software and even gaming hardware. However, it is in these areas that Microsoft will face determined oposition.
Microsoft's corporate attitude to problems (releasing often and making the public beleive there are major improvements each time) may work well for their fields of dominance - amid the ignorant public. However, Microsoft does not convince the professionals. It is the reason that Microsoft will never expand its share in the server market.
As to the desktop software area, it might take some time for opposing forces to appear. Microsoft may lose popularity among customers, for things like XP's forced registration. It is also apparent that the level of average knowledge of computers among the population will increase greatly in 10 years. Hardware may also change in such ways that may make Microsoft's activities more difficult (or the opposite - who knows?).
To sum up, remember these words in a language that was once considered to be a part of an omnipotent global culture - sic transit gloria mundi.
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I agree we would be futher down the road, but I would also bet w/o giants like IBM and MS, computers would not be as widespread as they are today.
/. is irrelevant.
It's hilariously short sighted that they would use Ali as their metaphor - I guess they forgot who's in better shape now Ali or Foreman. It's almost as wise a choice as using "Start me up" and forgetting the chorus...
Also startling:
Microsoft has woven rudimentary natural language into such products as Office. The next step is delivering more advanced capabilities in the version of Windows due out in two years or so, codenamed Blackcomb.
Man, hear that all you programmers; in two years you will be obsolete - Billy-bob in his trailer will be able to tell his computer.." Gawd PC, I said I want the Boss on this level to look more like Baal on that diablo game.. but not too much I'z don't wanna get sued or nothin.."
Sic Semper Tyrannis
Who is Bill Gates?
I'm still a student, so my word processing needs are limited to papers I write, but I'm sure this would scale easily:
Emacs maximized to fill the screen, with white enlarged text on a black background. One sentence per line, a blank line in between paragraphs. Nothing beats the navigation capabilities - without moving my hands from the rest position, C-f moves forward a character, C-b moves back, M-f moves forward a word, M-b moves back one. C-d to delete a character, M-d to delete a word. C-k to delete the rest of a line. C-p to go to the previous sentence, C-n to go to the next. C-v to move down a screen, M-v to move up. That's only the beginning of what Emacs lets you do. Once your fingers learn the movements, you'll never want to return to Word. There couldn't be anything faster than Emacs' navigation and editing capabilities.
When I want to see what it really looks like, I bring up my xterm, run the file through LaTeX and look at it in Xdvi. To send documents to other people, or print on printers other than mine I convert to pdf.
All formatting is done through LaTex, a simple but extremely powerful formatting language. Take a look at http://www.tug.org/ to find out more about it. You should be able to get this system running under windows, too, if you want to experiment.
Long live Matriarchy
Initially the bundled office applications were distinct packages: you could buy Word, and Excel, etc for outrageous prices. I recall my dad buying Excel 4 for big bucks. Oh, well, as I said memories :-)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I still use Linux for learning, I've got a second machine for toying around, experimenting with different distributions of with *BSD, but for my daily email I use W2K with Eudora. /. crowd who is able to use exclusively Linux: but I'm not (able to) and I prefer to admit that I'm a lame Windows NT4 and W2K user.
I would love to be one of the
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
/. has a history in this, just recall "Mir is going up"..and two articles later "Mir is going down". Same for Iridium. I think someone at slashdot likes JoJo's ;-)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Windows is very easy to install, and I've done it a few hundred times. Turn on machine, place cd in drive, boot from cd, enter a few numbers. Not to difficult.
I/O, I/O, its off to disk I go, with a read and a write, and a bit and a byte, I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O
I still boot linux, but win2k is a great OS. Some people will say that it crashes but my machine has been up for the past 6 months (damn extended power outage), and the only thing that has crashed is Netscape.
I/O, I/O, its off to disk I go, with a read and a write, and a bit and a byte, I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O
I work as an network admin for a local college. Its one member of 4 sister campuses. We get our marching orders from a head admin. While at the main office they use a few versions of UNIX, everything at the campus level is Windows, and it looks like it will stay that way.
I/O, I/O, its off to disk I go, with a read and a write, and a bit and a byte, I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O
And the original post said nothing about on board computers. I think thats probably all proprietary software thats in a rom somewhere.
I/O, I/O, its off to disk I go, with a read and a write, and a bit and a byte, I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O
Inertia: refining a 20 year old operating system for use in the home, something it was not meant for. Innovation: I have to give it to BeOS or AtheOS. Sure Windows can do most of what these can do, but they started fresh, and made people go "kick ass"
I/O, I/O, its off to disk I go, with a read and a write, and a bit and a byte, I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O
Moreover, it's adding $1 billion a month to its bank account, thanks to its Windows and Office monopolies....
Everyone but Micro$oft realizes they have a monopoly....
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
The biggest problem with companies basicly being counted as people by the law, is that they don;t die like most humans.
"And your both 6 months pregnant by Billy Ray Sirus" "Then why is mom showing and i'm not?" - Married With Children
Please don't feed the trolls..
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Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
You're wrong about IBM. You can often make more money with a small slice of a big pie than with an entire small pie.
Apple has 5% of the personal computer market. PC companies share the other 95%. Even if IBM only grabs 10% of the market for PCs, they can still sell twice as many computers as Apple can.
When you are a superset of a competitor, this gives customers a relatively painless way to switch to you. As an example, PHP on Windows is a superset of ASP in that literally everything that you can do in ASP can be done in PHP, including COM, making ASP a rather silly choice. The only possible missing features, which can be implemented other ways easily (thus still making it a superset) are Application() and the on-load/on-unload events (persistent DB connections that can time out after inactivity do this with less effort from the programmer anyway ;-).
:-). (this was not intended as a troll, btw).
;-). If a non-Windows based solution can run Windows apps, this would make the transition for MS's user base many orders of magnitude easier.
;-).
Apache implements substantially more features than IIS can ever dream of, but, last I checked (and I hope I'm wrong), changes require a daemon restart while IIS can make changes dynamically. For most users, Apache is a superset of IIS, but for those who require dynamic updates but don't have server clusters, such as cheap ISPs, Apache becomes less attractive. If Apache could be updated dynamically, this could make Apache an even stronger superset of IIS
For a few years, I've thought of becoming a developer for the Wine project, but other projects commitments ate away at my time. We as a community should ensure that Wine reaches 1.0 and can actually run the popular applications just as they run on Windows, perhaps even better (no blue screens helps a lot
IBM claims that their AIX can now run Linux apps, but I think, IMHO, that they're missing the boat on this one completely. In Linux and just about any UNIX-like system, the value is usually in the foundation -- the OS level and the underlying libraries and utilities. In modern times, desktops like KDE and GNOME are building upon this strong, mature foundation to provide even more value. AIX is its own UNIX system, and most Linux apps should already run within AIX with a recompilation, so I (personally) don't see much of a point in Linux binary compatibility in AIX. In Windows, however, the value lies within the applications instead of the foundation OS-level. If IBM made Windows apps work in AIX, for instance, this becomes substantially more compelling than having Linux apps work in AIX, as most Windows apps can't be recompiled very easily in another OS. By being able to use the value of Windows apps in Linux, we have suddenly offered users a superset of what they have now while giving them the opportunity to continue to use their existing apps while taking advantage of Linux's superior features.
Just my $0.02.. Take it with a mL of soy sauce
But then, of course, we are getting into the whole area of purpose anyway... computers exist to allow us to do things -- better weather forcasting, space travel, beautifully rendered graphics, amazingly playable games, music that can move the soul, increased business productivity, economic development, increased crop yields, cures for diseases...
...well, I don't know about you, but I only have 24 hours in a day and I spend at least a few sleeping, a couple eating, grooming, etc... the rest of the time I would like to focus on something that matters... reinventing something that has already been done seem just, well, silly... Give me the end results thank you...
The computer is a tool that lets us achieve these ends -- when we put all of our effort into building a better mousetrap when plenty of perfectly capable mousetraps are already out there (or in this case -- when most people simply argue about whether a proposed mousetrap could someday be slightly more (insert (x) here) instead of seeing the tool for what it is...
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
Loss liter? I think you mean loss leader, unless...
Hey, that's not a bad idea! Maybe we should get every Softie to donate a liter of blood! :)
I wouldn't have expected anything less from the behemoth Microsoft. When a company becomes that big, it'll do anything in its power to stay that big, whether by friendly tactics (constant new products and new services) or unfriendly tactics ('nuff said)
"Merrill Lynch estimates that Microsoft will lose $800 million on Xbox in the next fiscal year. "
DAMN!, how about Microsoft just give a country 1% of that, and they'll be set for life.
But I hear those graphics are sweet. I'm gonna go drive my big car to the store, buy it on a credit card, and polish my big american gun.
>Does anyone else find that deeply disturbing? I >certainly do. -Yes, i most definitely do. but I can't decide what's more disturbing: that Microsoft paranoia has reached the level where people actually take comments about them being "at the center of all things digital" or that a one-line post that this bothered someone got modded up to a 4.
MS Office is why PCs got popular???
You're missing some pretty significant history there. The applications that really got things moving weren't from Microsoft, they were WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Harvard Graphics and Ashton-Tate's DB3 Plus. NOT Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access.
Heck, Framework and Symphony were more popular than Office in its earlier incarnations and I didn't much like supporting either of those. But for the first few revisions we literally couldn't GIVE Office away as part of a PC Application bundle; corporations considered it poison. It wasn't until sometime after Windows 95 that we could get any acceptance of it at all and then only with really cut-rate pricing.
Does anyone else find that deeply disturbing? I certainly do.
Beep ... beep ... beep ... beeeeeeeeeeeeeeee....
Nurse: Doctor! We're losing him!
Doctor: No, the heart monitor just BSOD'ed... reboot.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
As the old saying goes: "There is no such thing as bad publicity".
And M$ is getting plenty.
Look, M$ produces suck-ass products and we all know it. But they figured out how to market hard and own the markets they choose. However, the Business Week article - besides being an overt blow-job for M$ advertising dollars - is almost science-fiction in its analysis.
M$ will continue to make lots of money, no doubt. But there are a few issues that need to be understood:
In the end, M$ makes loadsadough and will continue to do so. But they're not poised to dominate the world, me buckos. They're big, they're bloated, and not every pie in which they currently have a finger will taste very good to consumers. 'nuff said.
CrazyLegs
"Pork!!" said the Fish, and we all laughed.
The article could be a reflection on a simimlar article written before Win95 came out, describing MS' monopoly power. Here, this pre WinXP article is describing the comeback kid that MS became.
If MS gets off the hook here, then expect a battle at the Supreme Court, which will have a huge impact on all software because, they'll most issue a blanket ruling on MS which will make sure such cases are brought up again.
The XP suite won't be that successful this year, because no one will want to upgrade their computers for those projects. The XP projects will be more successful in the next two years or so.
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
It can fall because of the net intivative, the rental plan. And as for the net becoming stagant, it is quite fresh, everyday brings something new online, a new page, a new chatter, etc. :-)
MS is another IBM, just in the software sense, and Linux is the Compaq
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
I get free MS software, so I don't pay for it and I don't care about it. I don't intend paying MS any money for their products, EVER, unless I have to buy a PC, which now I'll most likely build my own. (Btw, my university gives out free MS-licsensed software, just so if anyone thinks im a warez dealer, you're wrong! lol)
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
You're right, fuck!
Damn that 1,000 dollar tech fee
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
Someone earlier mentioned the fact that without Microsoft, linux development would become sloppy as there would be noone to race against. Well I think it works both ways. I'd argue that MS was at it's sloppiest when Linux and other competitors were not serious threats. All Linux has done is re-awoken the dragon. It's actually cool for the end user. We get better products from Redmond now because they know they can't afford to slip up. Thank you Linux, for helping to make my Windows2000 box so stable!
No, Bill plays bridge with his main partner Warren Buffett. It's an information game.
Wow, and just a little while ago we were talking about Microsoft going under withing six months.
The rhetoric of the article kind of got on my nerves... BOW!! BOP!! BAM!! MICROSOFT IS BACK IN THE MATCH!!! and so forth.
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Netcraft count hostnames, not servers.
It's entirely possible (and likely) that thousands of hosts would be served from one box. (ISPs and the like).
This seems to be a common place to use Apache.
OTOH, IIS is more common in multiply boxes per hosts. (Commercial sites)
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
Visual Basic
FoxBase
QuickPascal (never made it to version 2.0)
Microsoft Fortran (yes, there was an MS Fortran)
Microsoft orphans products faster than it acquires them.
-mazor
Microsoft is not slowing down...
*mock* No!
There is no such thing as 'world peace'.
It all makes sense now why one of our most advanced nuclear submarines couldn't hear a noisy Japanese fishing boat right above them:
Captain: Navigator, take her up
Navigator:Aye, Aye Captain. Hey Captain, what does it mean when my screen turns all blue? *THUD*
Just think: suppose MS died, and there was no one controlling the desktop market? I'm willing to bet you a herring that feature development on ye' olde' favourite Free OS would slow. There would be no need to improve it at the current rate because you're not racing anyone. One of the main reasons people develop on a free OS is to customize it for their tastes other than trying to bring down the big guys. Competing is what capatilism breeds. Microsoft's existence isn't all cheery. Yes, they made new technology, but most of it was only because they stole the ideas from someone else. Having Microsoft around means many individuals won't spend thousands of hours to implement ideas because Microsoft will just steal your idea and compete you into the ground.
God spoke to me
is the Perl-equipped Tux.
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The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
Of course, I could just say something wittier...Microsoft isn't slowing down, and I'm Bill Gates.
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Microsoft will eventually fall victim to the same forces that destroyed the Soviet Union as well as the old-world monarchies in Europe.
The problem with your argument is that Communism never made anybody rich. The forces that caused the collapse of the USSR were economic more than political; they were just bankrupted by their "business model" of oppressive centralized control. People seem to have much more patience with repression than with starvation, and I'm not seeing too many economic problems over at MS.
MS will probably collapse in time, as do most huge organizations, but it probably won't be because they're evil. It will probably be more like a shift in the economic climate, such as the one that did in the great rail companies.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
"M$ will NEVER make significant money from Internet-based subscription services. People don't like to pay for stuff they think they can get for free off the Web. Lots of companies have tried this route and failed - and M$ doesn't seem to have more clues about the Internet-as-a-business-model than anyone else."
.Net is a junky vision and is just a rehash of ActiveX, DNA, and whatever other names they've used"
.Net in any meaningful way are the same folks who develop with ActiveX, OLE, MTS, etc. today. I don't see any new markets opening up with .Net."
Here's a huge group of internet-based subscription services: ISPs! Also, Fuckedcompany.com, sex sites, a few others can do it if it's done right.
"M$ will NEVER make any serious inroads into the big corporate datacenters - contrary to what their PR and the press will tell you. I work in Big Corporate Land and can tell you that any M$ technology that's snuck onto the raised floor is going buh-bye in favour of Unix.
You can't use anecdotal info versus imperical survey data. For example, in my main office, our huge, massive, enterprise systems used them.
".Net is a junky vision and is just a rehash of ActiveX, DNA, and whatever other names they've used in the past. It's more marketing concept than it is a set of solutions. The folks who adopt
Eh? It hasn't come out yet. Besides, ActiveX is pretty damn cool.
"Finally, M$ on everything we touch? Don't make me laugh! They have screwed up more often than they haven't - settop box software, PDAs, phones. Need I go on?"
In other words, they aren't afraid to take risks. But your examples are pretty bad. Set top boxes? Which one? I know their interactive TV thing isn't working too great, but there are three set tup boxes that are/are likely to command and conquer: X-Box, WebTV, Tivo.
And their PDA's are causing Palm to lose market share an (IIRC) lay people off. And they've got Stinger ready for the cell phone market.
I don't think their big and bloated, either. Investors have a way of knowing better than most people and it isn't reflected in their stock pricse.
"No, I do not want my attitude to be misunderstood. I shall be glad to state it for the record. I am in full agreement with the facts of everything said about me in the newspapers - with the facts, but not with the evaluation. I work for nothing but my own profit - which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it. I do not produce it for their benefit at the expense of mine, and they do not buy it for my benefit at the expense of theirs; I do not sacrifice my interests to them nor do they sacrifice theirs to me; we deal as equals by mutual consent to mutual advantage - and I am proud of every penny that I have earned in this manner. I am rich and I am proud of every penny I own. I made my money by my own effort, in free exchange and through the voluntary consent of every man I dealt with - voluntary consent of those who employed me when I started, the voluntary consent of those who work for me now, the voluntary consent of those who buy my product. I shall answer all the questions you are afraid to ask me openly. Do I wish to pay my workers more than their services are worth to me? I do not. Do I wish to sell my product for less than my customers are willing to pay me? I do not. Do I wish to sell it at a loss or give it away? I do not. If this is evil, do whatever you please about me, according to whatever standards you hold. These are mine. I am earning my own living, as every honest man must. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence and the fact that I must work in order to support it. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able to do it better than most people - the fact that my work is of greater value than the work of my neighbours and that more men are willing to pay me. I refuse to apologise for my ability - I refuse to apologise for my success - I refuse to apologise for my money. If this is evil, make the most of it. If this is what the public finds harmful to its interests, let the public destroy me. This is my code - and I will accept no other. I could say to you that I have done more good for my fellow men than you can ever hope to accomplish - but I will not say it, because I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognise the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life. I will not say that the good of others was the purpose of my work - my own good was my purpose, and I despise the man who surrenders his. I could say to you that you do not serve the public good - that nobody's good can be achieved at the price of human sacrifices - that when you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the right of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction. I could say to you that you will and can achieve nothing but universal devastation - as any looter must, when he runs out of victims. I could say it, but I won't. It is not your particular policy that I challenge, but your moral premise. If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and I were asked to immolate myself for the sake of creatures who wanted to survive at the price of my blood, if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own - I would refuse. I would reject it as the most contemptible evil, I would fight it with every power I possess, I would fight the whole of mankind, if one minute were all I could last before I were murdered, I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being's right to exist. Let there be no misunderstanding about me. If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!"
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
The truth is, when a business becomes as big as microsoft, it cannot afford to stand still. The software industry moves at lightspeed, and either you're an innovator or you're dead in the water. I praise MS for being on the ball and willing to grab standards by the nuts and push them forward (like XML). Microsoft's a "take a chance" kind of company, and while they may not always win, they are refusing to let technology stagnate.
That's what I think Netscape did... it relied so heavily on being the only game in town, plus the geek favorite, that it never bothered to expand its capabilities as a broswer... meanwhile Microsoft supports XML/XLS and came up with Active Server Pages. Microsoft may be big, but they aren't slow. I just wish win2k had better driver support.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
I don't see a problem with the USSR analogy. You mention oppressive centralied control. Everything I have read about XP sounds like oppressive centralized control to me. You wanna make an MP3? Too bad, you're gonna be using M$ proprietary format by default. Wanna upgrade your hardware? Oops, time to re-register your O/S, and so on and so forth. Granted, they're still raking in tons of cash, but there are still, and always will be, some very definite flaws to the way of thinking in Redmond, and (hopefully) that will bring about their ultimate downfall, the sooner the better
Build boards not bombs
Moderators, please, grow up. Flamebait is a deliberately poorly-reasoned and tendentious comment designed to aggravate people. Reasoned comments that do not align with the beliefs of the majority here are NOT flamebait, and they should be ENCOURAGED, whatever your personal views.
A better analogy would be that when you buy a car, you don't presume to have a right to get the drawings and plans that were used to make it?
You are misinformed. MS shares their OS source code with hundreds, possibly thousands of organisations, particularly universities. Of course there is a non-disclosure to sign, reasonably enough. This is all public record.
Are you serious? That's proposterous. If you download an app for your system for free, then a couple years later they make an improved version available that won't work on your system, how on earth does that mean you paid for the original app? It still works just the same. What a waste of bytes. Besides, the latest IE still works on OSes that are several years old, and doubtless IE6 will run on W98 too.
Heh, you blaim Microsoft for other people failures?
Everyone had a shot at this. Some companies even had a head start and still lost.
The only way liberals win national elections is by pretending they're not liberals.
A voice of sanity.
The only way liberals win national elections is by pretending they're not liberals.
All right, it's a troll. Sue me, I coudln't resist.
Statistics say:
I go to a college with 100 people. (This is a very tiny college.) Around five will use Macs, and they want to share disks with someone who uses a PC.
My personal experience says:
I have a friend who uses a Mac. He gave me a zip disk once. I had to use special software to open it.
For some reason, I'll bet I'm not the <I>only</I> person in the whole world who has encountered this situation. Besides, this is all beside the point. The argument was that Microsoft doesn't play nice, and the number of people the company isn't nice to doesn't make it irrelevant. They are still people getting the cold shoulder from Microsoft.
The net is STILL growing! We just find it becomming stagnant because we've been here for so long, and it's not new and fresh.
The future IS Microsoft. The question is, will it become another IBM?
Only time will tell.
Linux is the Compaq :-)
Very true.. but not a comparison I wished to hear.
Micro$oft is nothing more than marketing
I'm quite sure that if it wasn't for their smart marketing m$ would no longer exist. and by the way m$ isn't the company that made the computer as populair as it is it was IBM. The moent I switched to linux I realised my computer could actually do more then I ever expected when i used M$ windows If you are looking for a good OS use don't use windows your PC can do a lot more !!
--- What would software be without Micro$oft reliable and free i suppose, like linux
I wonder if anyone took into account Microsoft's 'creative' accounting practices - y'know, the ones they're being investigated for by the government. All those nasty charges of 'fraud', 'double-booking', and the like might - just might - have some bearing on how profitable MS appears to the public (especially the stock market).
Hey, not that a conviction would make any difference. AOL did the same thing for it's entire corporate lifetime, was convicted of fraud, fined a lousy $3 million (the largest amount allowed under law) and it affected their stock price not at all. Heck, less than a year later they bought Time-Warner with stock that the SEC investigators called "no better than junk bonds", at a time when AOL "should be delisted for its accounting practices".
If it worked for AOL why not MIcrosoft? What's a lousy $3 million if it keeps stock prices up with bogus business reports?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
got news for you, moron, there is NOTHING more 'liberal' than the OSS... and the EFF for that matter. If George Washington was a Conservative, the American Revolution never would have taken place. Liberalism, not Conservative reactionism, is at the heart of the American Revolution, and all revolutions for that matter. Conservatives cling desperately to the 'known' - trusting the powers that be and prioritizing big business and it's interests over individualism... And thanks for ramming W. down our throat. Easilly the biggest moron to ever hold the highest office in the land. You should be really proud...
"..and we can invent our own game where people throw ducks at balloons and nothing is what it seems" - Homer J. Simpson
Microsoft Works came with my machine. One time somebody sent me an important for I had to fill out and send back that was in word format. I really needed to fill it out since it was a job application. Since I did not have Word I tried to open it up in Works which couldn't handle it. I then installed Star Office which was able to handle to document just fine. I thought it was pretty sad that a Free office app was more compatible than Microsoft's own product.
The city is being overrun by a herd of Lucy Liu's.
The big difference in your examples and mine is that yours involved different organizations and companies, while mine shows that Microsoft intentionally makes their products imcompatible.
The city is being overrun by a herd of Lucy Liu's.
<ul><i>If you really are a novelist name one "feature" that you actually need...Auto spell checking? seems useless when you can save time by running it once at the end.</i></ul>
<p>
So, this reply is a little late to change anything unless you personally are checking your user page every now and then, but I needed to reply anyway.
<p>
Okay, regarding auto-spellchecking, I don't mean to sound insulting, but please, unless you've written 500k words of novel don't even presume to suggest that this is not the most <i>incredibly</i> useful feature a writer could ask for. Not only does it save you a lot of time when writing, since you can instantly notice an error and fix it on the run, but to suggest that spell- and grammar-checking a 133-thousand word document once you've finished is it a viable method of doing things is not simply ignorant, it's even a little foolish. It is possible that <i>you</i> do not benefit from auto-spellchecking since you may not touchtype, but for someone who has his eyes on the screen 98% of the time it is nearly the most useful feature of Word I can think of. In addition to this, and expanding my scope to all novelists, some writers are running slow systems. Now, on my Athlon I don't really find spellchecking a huge document slow in terms of checking for errors (manually parsing each suggested error is a different matter), but my old 486 took literally minutes to check even 50 pages, let alone 132.
<p>
Another function the usefulness of which I cannot emphasise enough is auto-correct, which tends to go hand in glove with auto-spellcheck. To have your word processor automatically convert "adn" into "and", "hte" into "the" and things like "noi dea" into "no idea" <i>dramatically</i> increases your typerate because even a small number of errors like that under normal circumstances would mean multiple taps of the backspace key, followed by keying in the correct words, followed by rewriting the word or words that you typed afterwards. This is not the only usefulness however; typerate can be further increased by customising auto-correct. For example, to type a difficult name like Mendelssohn I can simply tell Word to convert "Mn" into "Mendelssohn" and forget about checking the name twice.
<p>
Once again I extol the virtues of blue background and white text for keeping me both sane and relatively headache free after eight hours of typing a day. Notice I said <i>blue</i> background. Not black, as another poster suggested. Blue. It's blue for a reason, trust me on that. Black doesn't work; the contrast between the letters and the background is too high. In fact, I will generally change the text to light grey because even white is too bright after a while (admittedly I do have very photosensitive eyes though).
<p>
Then you mention standards. The only standard for a publisher is that you present your manuscripts double-spaced, left-justified and in a serif font. Generally size twelve. Word happens to do this very well, and it also happens to convert my normal 10-point Garamond, fully justified, into the above-mentioned format at the drop of a hat. I am not debating other standards, or how a decent markup language may be better for the <i>publishing</i> end of the pipeline. That isn't the point. The point is that Word allows <i>me</i> to type documents so they look as I want them to look onscreen, and provides me with a front-end to my book that doesn't give me a headache. The publisher isn't writing my book; neither do I have a secretary whose old files I need to go through. I can change the formatting of my documents at the touch of a widget for when I print; I can save in about twenty different formats, including what is debatably a form of HTML.
<p>
As for saying that headings etc are cannot be predefined and standardised, you evidently haven't used Word. You can customise any type of formatting and turn it into a user-defined setting, changing chapter headings to "Ravaj heading 1" etc. You can jump between them in a document, setting them to match each other and follow a specific layout. I won't argue that it might be more limited than a good markup language, but once again it isn't really necessary to be better. I don't need it, and if a publisher needs it he will use it and that's fine by me.
<p>
I didn't mean to go on so much, and I don't want to sound like I'm ranting. You <i>do</i> make some valid and interesting points, and in some ways you even rebut my points well. It's just that you seem to be working from preconceptions, some ill-founded, some ignorant, and some very reasonable. Unfortunately, the average Joe Luzer still only needs a word processor/office package, not a markup language and, personally, I can't foresee that changing at any point in the immediate future. So Microsoft Office, being the best and most comprehensive office package out there, is still going to dominate the market until someone realises that markup languages are great sometimes, but office products are great other times. Hopefully that will be soon, and I can switch entirely to open source software.
A word can paint a thousand pictures
Well, I wanted to, because I wanted to support an operating system that I believe deserves to be supported. I also didn't want to support Microsoft, even if it was only an implied support by using their product, since heaven forbid I pay for anything made by them. However, each time I investigated options that would give me the same sort of applications etc in Linux that I use in Windows, I came up a little short. It wasn't that there were no applications out there; it was that these applications weren't of the same standard as Microsoft ones. No, I am not trying to troll. I am no fan of Microsoft, believe me.
I am not saying that the applications I tried were less stable than the M$ equivalents. But basically, because I am a writer, I need three things: a good word processor that won't die, a good browser, and a good music program. Okay, when I'm screwing around with other stuff then I want some more, but that's what I basically require of my system. Linux gave me a system that was friendly enough, and the music program was...oki. But there are no word processors out there that can compete with Microsoft Word. Sure, Word has crashed on me a couple of times. Yes, I've even lost a couple of pages of novel a few times. But StarOffice et al do not have the same feature set that Word has, and the features they do have are not packaged as neatly. I might have been tempted to use StarOffice for word processing if only it could use a blue background and white text, because I really like the way that it combines everything into one package, whereas M$ Office is a whole bunch of separate applications.
But the simple fact of the matter is that, when it comes to an operating system that is very stable and a word processor that is very functional and wonderful to use, Microsoft is sadly still on top with Windows and Word 2000. Word XP is even better, despite the fact that the interface looks like a webpage. For anything else...I would have to go third party, and could probably find something equally good in Linux. But the problem is that, especially for luzers, the things I have mentioned here are the things that are used the most. So until some really neet applications are released that can threaten the Office suite, Microsoft will always be either a manopoly or a huge market leader.
A word can paint a thousand pictures
From the BusinessWeek article: "the loudspeakers resounded with a new chant: "Microsoft, bomaye! Microsoft, bomaye!" (bomaye means "kill him".
I always knew Microsoft was a ruthless competitor, but murder? Will hitmen now need to buy Microsoft Silencers to remain competitive?
I'm the stranger...posting to
No, I don't blaim MS for other people's failures. What I do blaim them for if balatantly trying to invade the privacy of their users passport, ignoring court rulings by intergrating more stuff in WinXP, and using a series of EULAs that are illegal in a large portion of Europe, for crying out loud. There's a difference between competition and anti-competitive practices.
I'm the stranger...posting to
"With XP, Microsoft can finally harness its battery of products and Web sites, feeding customers from one product into another in a chain reaction with a potentially explosive result. Test versions of Windows XP include quick access to an easy-to-use browser that has a button that starts Microsoft's Windows Media Player. That browser zips you to Microsoft's MSN Web portal...What's more, Windows XP offers to plug you in to altogether new Internet services, such as Microsoft's alert system that e-mails or pages you when a flight is late or a stock dips low enough to buy."
Um...If the DoJ thought binding IE into windows was illegal, what the heck are they going to think of this?
I'm the stranger...posting to
After reading the businessweek article, I find myself with a pronounced feeling of dread. People used to worry about the government invading their privacy, but there's no check on Microsoft. If the MS split decision is overturned (and it seems it will be) Microsoft seems bent on controlling every aspect of the internet, despite their denials.
Just for starters, the passport "service" scares the heck out of me. Oh yes, let's give windows my personal information and credit card number, and any site that wants it can just access it like a cookie. Good idea!
It seems clear that MS cannot be trusted to control internet standards. Viva Linux!
I'm the stranger...posting to
Or Solaris...
http://www.bleh.org/themes.org/fluffyintuxcantgob
Dan Gillmore made a similar point in his article "Microsoft's dominance may just be beginning".
"WindowsXP: Why you should switch to Linux today!" And do what ? After your first couple of days while your engage yourself in trying to decide which WM would be the best you finally realize that with all this glitz and fancy stuff there are NO decent software to run. Sure there are little shareware quality ( at most) apps here and there but if one needs to get stuff done , well, I guess dual boot is in order.
...and you can't blame meteors for everything.