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Microsoft's Future
cyberkine writes: "The Economist has an interesting article on Microsoft's technology strategies that ends with a very astute comparison with IBM's downfall and resurrection in the wake of its own antitrust battles. 'Microsoft's biggest underlying fear is that it will become like IBM - --a company that still has a strong business but no longer sets computing standards.'"
That is why Microsoft has always sold its operating system cheaply and has done everything to make life easy for programmers.
Obviously not someone who is familiar with the joys of COM - especially pre-ATL. Also, not someone who ever spent weeks trying to get that new shiny feature of NT4, DCOM, working only to find out that it never worked at all (RPC layer broken) until SP3. Not someone who has ever tried to produce a system which runs perfectly on all Win32s. If he means "made life easy for VB programmers", then maybe - but I wouldn't dignify them with the name "programmer".
I could rant for hours about specific instances, but I wont.
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
Some of IBM's basic research (eg. superconductivity and nanotechnology) may produce enormous returns, and have already made the world a better place , but won't be pulling in the money for that immediately. Their earlier research helped make them the big company that they've been for decades. Xerox gave us the PC and workstation desktop environment as research, and not a product in development.
If MS dedicates some effort towards published research (remember, product development is only called "research" if it makes the tax man happy, and real reseach can be done outside a university) that will add to the global knowledge base and may mean that the "next big thing" is owned by them. After all, flouride was added to toothpaste after a company that had a waste disposal problem with it funded a lot of research to find out what it could be used for, and some of it paid off spectacularly. You never know what can be done until you try.
Everything Microsoft ever did since the very beginning was steal ideas from other people and companies and market them as their own. Ask Tim Paterson, Gary Kildall, Apple, Stac Electronics, or Spyglass. They very nearly got away with this with Java, but Sun was watchful, and now, what they're doing with C# and .NET is basically a reinvention of what Java already is. It makes me wonder if the bigwigs inside Microsoft ever had an original thought in their own heads.
Difference here is, IBM actually did set computing standards in its time. They actually did innovate a lot of things in a big way. And they had the humility to accept that while they could remain powerful and influential, they could not remain the force that drove the computing revolution.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
IMO mouses and keyboards are the BEST products Microsoft EVER did.
I'm writing this on a Microsoft keyboard and I'm clickety-clicking on a Microsoft mouse (both hooked to my main Linux box of course).
They have a great thing: they don't crash.
Gates already has his legacy, maybe you are right and he doesn't think so, but think, he was at the top of an era. Gates can probably rightly claim that he brought computers to the masses in a form that they could afford and use. If it weren't for his idea to sell software cheaply to everyone, we might only see computers in businesses and schools where many of the early creators and users thought they belonged.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
From Xerox of course, apple got the GUI from them.
True Apple has turned it in to a piece of art (wheras M$ has turned it into a piece of S$@*).
Unfortunately M$ has set standards.. file extensions. because their programmers seem to think filename extensions are an effective way of determining file types. (yeah renaming a
when everything is working perfectly.. BREAK SOMETHING before something else FUCKS up!
Being a recent convert to Linux I have to see that for front end desktops windows has the edge for now.
The problem is that Linux has reached the 90% syndrome, that is Linux has 90% of the features required for it to be a front end desktop. As we all know it takes 90% of the development time for these final 10% of features. KDE and GNOME are almost ready, Star Office 6.0 will be a competitor for Microsoft office in a few months. Microsoft have always taken existing technology and made it easy to use (legal and moral issues aside). Would you teach your mother Linux or Windows.
Linux is a tool that now can be used in specific requirements in a back office role and for obtaining a cheap UNIX environment where required. It is not ready for the desktop yet (for technical people yes, for ordinary computer phobic users no). The problem is with the Open Source and most Linux companies cannot make money from their products (just look at what can be achieved with Star Office when a large company does get behind Linux).
With Windows 2000 and XP we have finally got rid of that huge mess the 9X product line gave us, and I am considering upgrading (but only to the PRO version and not until XP SP1).
Issues such as Microsoft FUD and support issues for Linux have now been resolved. Based simply on the products Windows has the edge in a few areas for now. Give it another year and I feel Linux will be able to compete (when things like Star Office, Mozilla, and many other projects finally hit a 1.0 release).
I use Linux and Solaris at work and I want to see Linux succeed.
The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head
Would you mind putting this in perspective and telling us what you've done with your life and what your qualifications are? Got a job?
.NET will remove ownership and possession of data and software from the users. These technologies will become the defacto standard simply because Microsoft has 90% of the world's computers under their control. What if someone else or another group of people have a viable idea or set of ideas that might actually be better than the MS way? They don't stand a chance. What you call success I call tyrrany. Hitler was very successful too. Is your name on the facist ballot (of course, that's your choice) by chance? Put things into perspective yet?
I can't resist feeding this troll. I am still in school, attending college as a computer science major. I write open source software, but probably nothing that matters to you. I believe in freedom of choice, regardless of the forum. Microsoft doesn't like freedom, they want everyone to be locked into their way of doing things. They are the opposite of democracy, and even if the US isn't perfect, it's still better than what Microsoft offers. Clarify on the comparison? With Microsoft's power over the Internet, information, and how people use computers, they have a tight grip on how they can control our society. This grip is getting stronger. Passport will require users in large groups to authenticate through them.
I know it's hard, but try to consider the big picture in the long run for a change. Not just that your icons get cool shadows or your menus fade in when you click them. Consider that Microsoft are an entity that really does present the possibility of a "Big Brother" (not to be confused with the misunderstood Orwellian sense) insofar as they can and will control (as well as grant control to other monied interests... RIAA, MPAA, etc.) the information that is the lifeblood of our information driven society.
I guess the only thing I can really say about people who don't understand the danger of absolute power in the hands of a few is this: Get out of my country, you swine. Blood has been shed to acquire the freedom we all take for granted today, and anyone who thinks we should just ignore the right to choices and let whatever great ruling entity exists tell us what to do doesn't deserve what we've got in America.
(There goes my karma for speaking my mind.)
Why bother.
By the time you get to this post, you know all about IBM's near death experience of the early 90s. .. It was far lest costly for them to just toss out a few options and let users go along with them.
.. which is why, in the recent slump, they've managed to stay relatively strong despite losses.
.. IBM's a company that services everything... not just AIX running on RS/6000s or Aptivas or Thinkpads. IBM is huge on supporting and partnering with its competition as well. Global Services has a larger NT support team than microsofts! They support sun too.
.. they seem very pigheaded about continuing on the same route.
Its true, IBM set standards.. and a lot of them. But did you know that IBM still puts out more patents than any other corporation in the world (per year)?
They're still a company that innovates.
What they realized was that instead of innovating and then trying to force that upon users
The moved from the manufacturing industry to a service industry
The thing is
Anyway.. what's the point of all of this?
IBM changed its philosophy to diversify.
I don't see microsoft going down that road. Even though they're strategy is failing (or is at leasted doomed to)
If they stay on the track they're on, they'll spiral down just like IBM almost did.
Imran Ahmed, Linux Inthuziast
-----------
"I like to dissect women. Did you know I'm totally insane?"
Even granted the fact that Microsoft is gaining ground in technical side of the aspect(less crashing) , they are loosing it more rapidly in the feedom and privacy arena, which until a month ago was becoming ever increasingly important to the average Joe.
:)) A project I was working on for windows involving TAPI and Mail Merging in particular was twice as hard as it should have been. At one point I contemplated merging manually into HTML or postscript. Did you know that office quietly truncates SQL queries from the COM interface of mail merge to 512 bytes over 2 seperate 256 byte fields?? Also take a look at TAPI sometime; in order to fully use it properly, you must convelude your code such that you are ashamed to have written it.
Microsoft is not friendly to developers as the artical suggests. There will always be people like Adobe that have to rewrite their applications for other operating systems, and they will suffer from Microsoft's unwillingness to cooperate. The things 3rd party developers must worry about are sometimes as menial as how windows doesn't handle fonts the same as a Mac, to the enevitability that the X-Box won't support OpenGL out of the box. (NVidia's version aside, also, I'm sure someone will play XBill on it in a week
On the other side of things:
OSS can't compete:
The one thing that I notice about all of open source software is the complete lack of good documentation. I don't know about many people on here, but if you've worked with MSDN, then you know that something is definately missing from OSS documentation. No, man doesn't count. There is a lot of documentation on how to use various tools, but its very hard to even find out how to create a window in X without using SDL or GGI. You can't expect a relatively new programmer to grep 1G of source to understand all the API calls to create a graphical version of FTP that takes all of a day to write in VB or Borland Builder/Delphi for windows. The OSS community could make things much more enticing for new developers by giving them a standard that if the software follows it is gauranteed to run on any distrabution without a headache (Quake3 is an excellent example, ID doesn't want to make another version of their software for linux due to tech support issues) Sun does the same for Java and the numbers speak for them, not by users choice, but the convenience to developers. Linux is also prohibitive in the fact that it almost certainly requires hardware manufacturers to release more to the community than windows does, or pay developers to maintain the drivers functionality with every OS change (NVidia chooses to do their own driver, and I can tell they struggle... Promise tries as well, but the SCSI driver code base changes with almost every revisionof the kernel). The result is very poor hardware support, even with IBM's help.
But, then again, OSS software maight get a bit of a kick from the commercial entities:
Microsoft's success or failure might lie in the hands of Apple. Apple's ability to make a stable, secure, OSS underlying OS that is easy for the average person to use, easy for the average programmer to make inexpensive or free software for, and easy for coorperations to adopt without loosing functionality or money, is a variable that still gives me hope that I won't have to run XP on anything but a test bed. Macs are more expensive because of the proprietary nature of the hardware, but if they release a X86 version of the GUI, then they would have much more market. Most of the software I have to use Windows for has a Mac counterpart. Mac OS's reign in compatibility with itself. Also many companies have a few macs and are open to experimentation with them.
The bottom line is: With Bush as president, MS is pretty much given free reign to be as monopolistic and anti-privacy as they wish. Votes tallied with MS Election.NET next term?
Karma Clown
Umm, anyone heard of Mozilla - it happens to be a rather large Open Source Software project funded almost entirely by AOL.
Joseph Elwell.
The problem for Microsoft is it is too heavy handed on owning the OS.
With Linux we all own it, provided we respect it and others.
Microsoft is a phenomenon of the consumer society, it is adequate enough, like a popular brand of hamburgers, but is it cuisine?
Some good comes from the process, but this goodness is a reaction to it, not caused by it.
This company still wants to own everything, can it reform? can it work with others and play fairly?
It is in Microsoft's hands. The courts may set heavy controls, but they won't breathe life into the company. Consumerism is passive, the company is dominant. Linux requires involvement, and to me that is the difference.
They can laugh it up all they want. I have one thing to say back to them. "One button mouse". :)
'Microsoft's biggest underlying fear is that it will become like IBM - --a company that still has a strong business but no longer sets computing standards.'"
Good. I like MS much better in that sense. Leave the standards to committees such as IETF, IEEE, ITU, ANSI, and other similar bodies.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
Was just thinking Msft might like to have a monopoly like AT&T had on phones - you never did actually 'own' the phone, you had to LEASE it (just like you don't OWN Word etc, just buy licenses to use) and while they were good, rugged, tough handsets that were automatically maintained by the telco, they did make a great cash flow out of those monthy lease payments.
My folks have had the same phone on the wall for about 40 years now, and they've probably paid for it 10 times over by now.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
this doesn't mean OSS is a direct threat to MS as a whole. MS' biggest issue with OSS is not that OSS is, or has the potential to be, a creator of vast and large quantities of the top shelf software, but rather that OSS threatens their growth in the server software arena. By creating software that "just" gets the job done, with a minimum of hassle, software like Linux and Apache can take a huge bite out of NT and ISS's profitability. Put simply, MS is realizing that the same economics and influences that lead from mainframes to Unix (proprietary) to NT, can also lead from NT to Linux (or rather Unix to Linux).
OSS isn't going to be fighting a line-by-line feature war with MS. If it does, it'll probably lose, MS has far more resources to throw at it. OSS's best chance to take a bite out of Microsoft is to go the other route: make software that can be purchased, deployed, and supported for far less. This means Linux should focus on things like bullet proof installation processes, automated installations, etc. Then it needs someone like Redhat or SuSe to effectively market it.
The point of the graph is to show what the article pointed out, that the profits are not rapidly increasing at a rapid rate. Microsoft's stock price is maintained at a ridiculous level by rapidly increasing profits. Loss of a rapid increase indicates that a market is maturing or stagnating, which means that the stock value will not rapidly increase in the near future, which means that you might not want to pay much more that what the stock is actually worth.
The graph wasn't there to point out that profits weren't increasing. The graph meant to show that profit increase was slowing down. If you wait till profits are falling before you sell your stock, you will not be optimizing your return.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Stocks are usually grouped as "income" or "growth", income stocks are driven by the % dividend they pay the stockholders every year, growth stocks are pushed by the % increase in the value of the stock. M$ has been a classic growth stock, so investers have bought it for the increase in its market value, as revenue increase declines given the same P/E ratio the price delta will slow, stall or decline. That is why the % growth of revenue is on the graph.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
That is why Microsoft has always sold its operating system cheaply and has done everything to make life easy for programmers.
It's been a long number of years since I've attempted to develop
any sort of software with MS tools/APIs, because every experience
I had was miserable compared to alternatives. The only positive
experiences I've ever had developing for DOS or Windows were because of Borland.
I'm a programmer and part of my beef with Microsoft is that if they
have their way, I'll have little choice but to use their tools and do things their way. Of course, that might be good... it'd provide suffecient incentive for me to become a subsistence farmer or luthier or anti-trust economist and lead a simpler life.
And the OS is cheap? Hardly.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Oh, it's almost definitely going to be done. What's more, executives at MS have almost definitely resigned themselves to the fact that it's going to happen.
Microsoft's deepest fear is that they not only will become "like IBM" but that they will become like ~5 per cent of IBM or less!
In its hey day IBM was a true giant. In data processing they did it all. They had a complete line of hardware, from entry level business computers to high end scientific computers. All their hardware came complete with system software, suited to the particular hardware (hint to Microsoft). At the slightest suggestion they would offer all kinds of application software. In addition to this, if a data processing accessory was available, IBM had a competing model. Does anybody remember IBM typewriters and IBM card punches, collaters, readers etc? The fearful business man could buy 100% IBM. Everyone agreed on one thing about the old IBM. They were the very best at reassuring Mr. Average Businessman about "how wonderful it would all be".
The real clincher was IBM's research department, which was involved in all of computing science. Their output was alleged to be stupendous, and it was claimed that they had reams of patents that they hadn't even used yet. Does anybody remember the Josephson Junction? It was claimed that IBM's marketing department was much more conservative than the rest of the company. They were extremely reluctant to build a new product until the were certain that it would be accepted by customers and that it would never undercut existing IBM products.
How does Microsoft stand up to this IBM "standard"? The answer is that Microsoft is their monopoly, they are little more! And never forget that this monopoly was handed to Microsoft, on a silver platter, by IBM.
Microsoft's monopoly consists of software only, for one class of computer and for one class of CPU within that class of computer. Compared to IBM their product depth is tiny. In Microsoft's other product lines they could be considered a dilletante at best, usually a money loser. Their media efforts are often in joint ventures. Is this an attempt to avoid the hard decisions? Their efforts in the area of hardware are things like mice, etc. and now Xbox. Xbox is a typical Microsoft me-too product, copying Sony and many others.
Microsoft's research department appears to be a small thin shadow of IBM's huge research department. To me Microsoft's research department looks like a giant, expensive perk and maybe a tax break. It appears to be a strange combination of a very narrow focus on computer software and a dabbling in just about everything under the sun with no focus at all.
If Microsoft's monopoly is taken away, what will be left?