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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.
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.
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.
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
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"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.
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?
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