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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
Hey, they still set the standards for server exploits...
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
There are boxes in my shop with uptimes of years.
Mainframe admins strive for DECADES of uptime.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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
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
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.
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.
to the United Subsidieries of the United Coportation of Microsoft. And to the rules of the EULA, for which I agree to never pirate or copy any intellectual property, I Company, under Corporation, for which privacy fails, and laws abound, for lawyers.
-Daily morning speech for employees
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
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.
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.
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.
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
while microsoft sets standards in userfriendlyness
Let me just confirm that the sound that you are hearing is, in fact, thousands of Macintosh users laughing.
jedrek
At first glance, the graph titled 'Redmond Blues' looks like it's showing a decline in Microsoft's earnings. However, the real numbers are quite the opposite - the graph shows how many percent increase the earnings have had since last year, and it is of cours natural for the curve to fall (since an $2.5 billion increase from $25b is only 10%, while an $2.5 billion increase from $6 is almost 60%).
But somehow they have warped the statistics (intentionally?) to make the curves more grim.
To their defense, it is stated clearly in the text of the article, but the subtle difference between text and graphics might be hard to spot.(Especially since it's easier to think up a conclusion from a curve than a paragraph of text)
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?"
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.
It is still in very early development, so I wouldn't suggest you go out and run it (except for purposes of testing and debugging), but if you are looking for a worthy project to contribute to, consider this one.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
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
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
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?
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.
In other words, Microsoft fears becoming what it has done to others. Microsoft fears KARMA, the cosmic "get back", Justice, poetic or otherwise....
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
Just remember one thing - Microsoft considers VB their most important development platform, to quote them "The Cobol of the 90s"
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
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.
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.
It's a great tool for what it's meant for: rapid application development for small businesses where the software will be run on a windows pc and used by someone who wants to do all their work in windows forms. It's very very quick, and there are a lot of developers who know it. It's a good choice for internal company apps.
Some people have such glorified ideas of what a 'programmer' is. You give detailed instructions to a machine. If you spend a week writing beautiful code you cost your company 5x. If you spend a day writing ugly code you cost your company 1x. If both programs meet the functional requirements, the company that encourages spending one day will survive better. I have nothing against beautiful code, but I have nothing against utilitarian functional code either.
The master paused for a moment, held up his hand and said
"Natalie Portman"
At this moment, the zen student was enlightened.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
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.
--How so? Well, look at their taxes. They don't pay any tax on profit because they report no profit.--
Well, checking their financial reports for the last 3 years shows they paid more than 30% of their Revenue as tax. Check the audited financial statements.
-- How? They claim the value of stock options used to pay employees as expense. Between that and cash outlays, they are losing money, and have been for years.--
Actually, what is claimed as a liability is the money reserved for income tax payments on exercised options. Options are considered compensation, but the amount of the compensation cannot be determined until they are exercised, therefore Microsoft has to hold money in a long term liability account to cover the expense of the exercising of options as they occur.
--The stock market is not a source of investment for them, but primary revenue.--
Actually, they lost money on investments this year but still have a positive Net Revenue (i.e. Profit).
-- They are being supported by the wishful thinking of their employees, who still think the stock will resume its growth, and so are willing to accept stock options as pay.--
Microsoft pays salaries on par with the leaders in the industry, and gives employee great benefits as well. The fact that they grant options in addition to that is even better.
I was watching TechTV during the Backstreet Boys segment of the Concert for New York and they were doing a special on MS's "House of the Future". I'm sure we've all heard Bill Gates rather (or is that downright?) stupid idea of networking a TV to a Clothes Dryer so that the TV will tell you when your clothes are done. I suppose it's too much to hear the big loud buzzer or just go back after the amount of time you set the timer for, but they now have what could be the most annoying idea ever. Apparently they want to have a microwave that has a barcode reader. You have to scan all your products and the microwave connect to the internet and automatically sets the time to cook the item. Is it just me or is that the stupidest idea ever?! Is it really that difficult to read the label and type a three digit number? Are we not supposed to eat if the network goes down?
I for one hope MS dies long before it sets our living standards, or I might just have to move out of my house into a wigwam.