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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.'"
OSS ranked along side AOL in the battle against Microsoft. Interesting, if not frightening.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
Microsoft is not exactly like IBM. IBM's market was in business whereas Microsoft's market combines both business and consumer. IBM sold hardware as well as software. Microsoft sells only software (unless you count those stupid mice and keyboards). IBM sold huge mainframes for huge price that requires months of sales work to get the dotted line signed. Microsoft products can be grabbed in retail stores. That doesn't necessarily mean Microsoft won't run out of steam with its flattening markets, but the mechanisms and potentials will certainly be different than they were with IBM. IBM didn't have a lot of options it could so easily move into. Microsoft has some more, and is more diverse than IBM ever was in a market that can buy things on a whim. So don't count on what happened to IBM necessarily happening to Microsoft. Maybe it will, or maybe it won't.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I was actually at a dinner party the other night here in Seattle and was able to chat with a high level IT manager for Microsoft...It was pretty interesting to talk to him about where Microsoft is headed from the business perspective: He said basically that Windows XP should be on every computer in the world, no exceptions. When I asked him about the implications of NSA backdoors for other countries governments, he didn't even give an inch. (but said that other OS's can take a small part of the percentage, so long as it remains "very small").
.NET services in the pretty near future...They live in a reality where they believe everybody has a buttload of money to spend on "web services" and software liscenses, and as soon as they open the floodgates its just gonna come pouring in!
Anyway, the wierd thing I learned from this guy was that the upper management at Microsoft actually plans to be collecting revenue from basically every computer user in the world through liscenses and
anyway, I'm not religious, I use Microsoft stuff all the time. More power to them. But its just not gonna happen...Microsoft has had its glory days, and now I am starting to see the seeds of the computer world "moving on". People simply don't have the cash or interest now that the Internet boom is gone to pretend that they are gonna get rich by installing XP server for their company. Those days are gone, now people want the basic functionality they need at the lowest possible prices.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
I was amused by the notion that for Microsoft to follow in the footsteps of IBM, as a company that no longer sets standards, would somehow be the bad scenario. Well, things could have been worse for IBM. They had a near-death experience in about 1993. Sure, they had inertia, it could have taken them decades to finally fade away (a la Control Data, Unisaurus, DEC, and many others), but that they revitalized themselves rather than fade away is thanks to having reinvented the company (including their first-ever layoffs, just to pick one example). The best reference I could quickly find was an article from Business Week, which seems to capture the essential points.
The significance for Microsoft? Well it is pretty early to start pondering a post-Microsoft era and I'm not sure I see any signs of collapse in the various cracks which appear around the sides of the empire. But if a collapse does come, it could be more catastrophic than you'd think.
MS is worried that it won't be setting computing standards ? But it _never_ _ever_ has. Its forte has been ignoring standards and setting out on its own. Its problem now with the concept of the pervasive web and pervasive computing is that its #1 reason for this succeeding, its OS is not longer going to be ubiquidous.
IBM failed because they didn't see the PC revolution, MS have seen the pervasive web, and are trying to get onto it, but their problem is that by its very nature its a non-MS world. Where IBM missed the bandwagon the issue here is that MS want to get onto the one that it has previously tried to blow off the rails. Will Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens, IBM, HP, Sun allow MS to join their tea party.
Hopefully not. But there is no accounting for CEO stupidity. MS have to undergo a culture change, their adoption of XML and SOAP looked good, until they haven't implemented the SOAP stuff to the SOAP standard yet (and they are on the bloody standards body!). That underlying aim of embrace, extend, extinguish was fine while they controlled the OS, but with internet aware consumer devices the bar of quality, reliability and interoperability has been raised.
To quote my wife "So people accept that Microsoft write crap code, and even blame themselves for problems, thats the reason I gave up using the PC"
Its true my wife uses the PC very rarely for a bit of browsing and email... but there is no way she would put up with a mobile phone that hangs.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I think people have a basic misunderstanding about Microsoft. They think:
Microsoft makes lots of money. Therefore it must be a good, strong company.
However, I believe if you ignore the profits, Microsoft is actually a very weak company. Crazy point of view? My logic:
Ignore for a moment the size of Microsoft's profits, and look at where they come from. A hugely disproportionate amount come from Microsoft Office. It's worth thinking about this a moment - despite Microsoft's multiheaded and complex strategy at the moment, a significant proportion of its profits come from a product the functionality of which isn't that difficult to copy. A bunch of people in their spare time have put together software that has much of the same functionality. Sun has a nearly equivalent product that they are giving away for free. Is MS Office really a sound basis for a strong company? Similarly with its operating systems - Linux is an increasingly tough competitor, and it's free. Much of it was originally developed by a bunch of students and enthusiasts (absolutely no disrespect intendended).
Now look at IBM. Increasingly its profits come from providing complex bespoke services at enterprise level to global companies. It also creates hardware, from breakthough advances at the molecular level to the worlds fastest supercomputers. Try copying that.
Bill Gates says he doesn't want Microsoft to become another IBM. I say, Microsoft is a pathetic company in comparision.
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
An interesting comment.
1. Stac Electronics was a patent infringement suit. I thought every good slashdotter was anti patent-abuse? Or are you the odd man out?
MS infringed their patent on compressing data as it is written to the disk/decompressing it as it's read from the disk. Sounds really original and innovative that does.
The same guy is now running this outfit:
X-Sides. Check out their new product:
Scary, huh?
If that doesn't make you sit back and think "OH MY GOD... PERMANENT BANNER ADS!", and then shriek in horror, I don't know what will. This is not the kind of person who shies away from a filing trivial patents.
2. Apple -- see Xerox.
As for the others, I'll let someone else answer them.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Has anyone disected the Xbox far enough to determine if and how it could be used to run a Linux OS?
:) at $299, it could make a nice Xterminal/thin client too. The possibilities are all out there waiting. Just 'cause MS is on the label is no reason to poo-pooh the hardware is it? I happen to like the MS Elite keyboard... the stupid internet keyboards can go the way of the fecal matter though.
I think hacking Xbox into a Linux box in iOpenner fashion might make a few MS executives blink!
Anyway... just a thought... anyone doing this already? Is there any web site to show?
Power is generational. It will be a while before we have a repeat the 80's. In '83 everyone my age disliked IBM, while those my fathers age were IBM heads. I disliked IBM beacuse they were bullies (or so my dad said). Thus, for me everything IBM was tainted. Microsoft, a small little company was on the other hand, very cool. They made DOS, had a Basic interpreter, etc. Another kickn' company was Borland, who made SideKick a very nifty personal organizer and a Pascal compiler.
Anyway, I don't have children, but people younger than me think that Microsofties are a bunch of bullies (or so I tell them). And rather than investing our attention in another company, I think we may have collectively learned our lesson. We are investing our time in open source software that is publically owned.
It took over two decades for Microsoft to catch up to IBM ('75-'95). I think it is fair to give open source a fair shake ('85-'2005). Sometime soon the pendilum will swing away from Microsoft and towards the next monopoly. Guided not by technology decisions, but by personal choice not to support the bullies. This time the monopoly holders will be the public, through licenses like the GPL.
Any large corporation based on the sales of intellectual property is bound to have a rough time of the next ten years. Widespread pirating of music, software, and now even pharmaceuticals occurs all over the world, in some cases with the support of governments in power. It can't be stopped, and it won't be stopped.
IBM has this thought out. Their revenues going forward are more and more service-based. That's something you just can't steal.
Microsoft shouldn't be afraid of becoming IBM. They should be afraid of not becoming IBM.