Slashdot Mirror
OSS Officially On Microsoft's Financial Radar Screen
seldo writes "More news from Microsoft's latest quarterly filing: according to eWeek, Microsoft says it may have to lower its prices in response to competition from open-source software. From the filing: "To the extent the open source model gains increasing market acceptance, sales of the company's products may decline, the company may have to reduce the prices it charges for its products, and revenues and operating margins may consequently decline". This is a fairly major revelation from Microsoft, and if it happens, it may be one of the biggest wins yet for open-source software: what do you know -- competition works!"
Linux was on the space shuttle, and look what happened to it! Linux proliferation will only cause more disasters. Fuck linux!
Don't talk crap. NASA uses embedded BSD for their critical stuff. Anyway, the disaster was a hardware fault, not a software fault.
At my university (www.unbsj.ca) there are posters everywhere that advertise MS products for 90% off of the 'estimated retail price'.
But who wants XP anyway?
Windows does have a huge monopoly, but don't forget that there must be a reason why it has it. The reason is probably that it's very easy to use and it doesn't consume as much time to set up as, for instance, most UNIX flavours.
My point is that Windows sometime in it's existance must have shown some good sides, compared to other operating systems.
Microsoft knows that they are doomed (that's why Bill Gates and all the other executives with a clue sell thousands of shares each month) and that it's right now just a matter of how much they can milk out of their customerbase.
Ummm... Gates sells "thousands" (he actually sells about a million) of shares every month because 1) He's got 600 million of them gathering dust, 2) MSFT didn't start paying dividends until recently (even at $0.16/share that's only $96mm per year), and 3) the guy needs to live. Can you get by on a mere $96 million per year? I didn't think so.
Gates sells a fixed amount of shares every month - he always has and likely always will. One major reason is so that people can't draw weird conclusions from his personal stock sales.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
This has nothing to do with what the common citizen is thinking.
This is because of governments such as Germany's opting to mandate open source instead of mandating using the best available package, regardless of what that is*
* = Could be OSS, could be MicroSoft, could be a proprietary UNIX, could be Mac, etc.
Um, no. It's a release to the SEC. It's to notify their owners (shareholders) why the share price may go down. It's a financially and publically responsible thing to do.
Microsoft has only two profitable products (Office and Windows) that strongly depend on each other.
I adore how cute it is when some FUD is propagated on Slashdot, and soon you can hear it being repeated verbatim as stone-cold facts time after time by Slashbots. Microsoft has three profitable divisions: Client, Server Platform, and Information Worker. I'm hardly surprized that some dullards interpreted that as "Office and Windowz!", yet in reality those three divisions account for the overwhelming majority of products with the Microsoft name on it. SQL Server? Yup. Visual Studio? Yup. Visio? Yup. SNA Server? Yup. Indeed, if you looked within even the unprofitable divisions you would find a bevy of highly profitable items: The Home and Entertainment Divison encapsulates Microsoft hardware, such as mice and keyboards, which themselves are highly lauded and tremendously profitable, however their profitability is being masked by the xbox.
This is all so laughable anyways, and indicates the core naevity of most open sourcers. Egads Microsoft mentioned open source! The reality, of course, is that such filings must include forward looking risks of any sort, including potential lawsuits, and envisioned risks by the pundit community. The fact that open source is mentioned in there is a given. To make this even more hilarious, though, the prior quarterly report included the same risk statement, while the quarterly report before that included the statement "the availability of competitive products or services such as the Linux operating system at prices below Microsoft's prices or for no charge" as a risk factor. Looking at the annual report from 3 years ago yields the statement "With an increased attention toward open-source software, the Linux operating system has gained increasing acceptance. Several computer manufacturers preinstall Linux on PC Servers and many leading software developers have written applications that run on Linux. Microsoft Windows operating systems are also threatened by alternative platforms such as those based on Internet browsing software and Java technology promoted by AOL and Sun Microsystems. " and " The Company continues to face movements from PC-based applications to server-based applications or Web-based application hosting services, from proprietary software to open source software, and from PCs to Internet-based devices.". I'm sure I could go back two more years and find similar forward looking risk statements.
I suspect that someone read an SEC filing for the first time in their life and thought they found a real revelation (as did the Slashdot editors when they posted this), when it's the same thing that has appeared in their filings for years now.
This is the actual radio transcript used as the basis of the parent joke.
In Microsoft's case, they are following the SEC's guidelines like many other companies. This is a change for many companies. In Microsoft's situation, we have seen these very recient changes;
Years ago, they should have issued dividends...now they plan to.
Decades ago, they should have broken out each division of the company and discussed profits and losses in each...now they do.
Decades ago, they should have discussed all reasonable impacts on thier profits for each division...now they acknowledge open source.
Don't think this is a new thing for them. Open source has been a potential impact on MS's profits for a couple years. The only thing that has changed is that MS must acknowledge it as a possibility. If they have suffered an actual loss due to open source, the SEC will pressure and eventually require MS to report the loss after it has happened. As of now, no loss is obvious. Microsoft is speculating and has not acknowledged a loss due to open source -- yet. f they did not point this out, it could be the basis for a future lawsuit if a loss occurs.
Thank the SEC, though late themselves, for doing things now that force transparency...that forces some information into the open so we have a better chance to judge on merit not PR.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Slashdot is reading way too much into this. It is common knowledge in the financial industry that 10-Qs are little more than a way of management teams protecting themselves from shareholder lawsuits. It is common practice to state virtually every conceivable risk, no matter how unlikely it is, no matter how far beyond control of management it is to minimize that risk, no matter how unlikely a different investment is to minimize that risk, etc..., so that management cannot be so easily sued if, god forbid, that event actually occurs. Unfortunately in our overly litigious society managements teams have been destroyed financially by frivilous lawsuits like that. In any event, as a result of all of this, it is really a mistake to read anything into 10-Qs. The shear volume of all the disclaimers and the generalities that they must make prevent management from being able to make an honest assesment of the far more likely threats; they get lost in the clutter and in the generalities. They are practically pointless to read these days. In other words, this is not proof that MS takes OSS seriously.
It's no so much PR, as it is one of those cautionary statements that businesses are required to make. Basically if there's the possibility that this will occur, MS is required to talk about it. Doesn't mean that they think that their empire is suddenly threatened, because it isn't.
Unless I'm mistaken, VB was the first programming tool which allowed programmers to build applications with a click and drag GUI interface.
You're *very* mistaken. The first incarnation of graphical interface builders was probably at Xerox PARC in the late 70s. I say "probably" because there may have been an earlier one that I don't know about. Through the 80s there were at least two different competing Smalltalk development toolsets, each with a graphical UI app tools.
I personally worked with a half-dozen different tools that pre-dated VB. One of the best (*still* one of the best, over a decade later) was the NeXTstep UI Builder. Fantastic tool. Even back in the days of DOS applications, prior to Windows, I used a number of click-n-drag UI tools to build both text and graphics mode interfaces. I would imagine there were some early tools for the Mac as well, although I didn't use them.
In the research world, there have been a number of attempts to build *purely* graphical programming environments, in which you never typed any code whatsoever. The earliest of these that I'm familiar with was completed in the mid-80s (unfortunately I forget the name -- can anyone help)?
So, no, MS did not invent click-n-drag app development. I'm sure that somewhere along the way MS must have invented *something*, but I can't think what it might be.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
It's a SiS motherboard, with audio/video/nic/usb on the motherboard. The best I've found is Mandrake 9.1 beta 1 has no sound but the network works; beta 2 and 3 are the reverse (no network, but has sound). Red Hat 8.0 has sound but no network.
This machine works fine with Windows 2000, so it's not a hardware issue. And this machine is several years old!
I really want to switch over to Linux but it's not a no-brainer.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Yes, and I am sure that they make money off the gumball machine out in their front lobby too. That doesn't mean that the proceeds from said gumball machine have any great effect on Microsoft's bottom line. Last quarter Microsoft generated an operating income of $1.97 billion on revenues of $2.44 billion. MS Office had similarly ridiculous profit margins with an operating income of $1.88 billion on revenue of $2.41 billion. There are plenty of companies with those kinds of revenues, but only Microsoft has the combination of high revenues and ridiculously high profit margins. Even Microsoft's server software margins are only about half of the Windows and Office profit margins. I can guarantee you that, compared to Windows and Office, the profits on keyboards and mice are insignificant. What's more, there is no possible way that Microsoft could ever be even a tenth as profitable selling hardware.
Thanks to Windows and Office Microsoft is the software powerhouse, without the huge profit margins from these two products they probably wouldn't even be competitive.
Can you reasonably compare the proffit bassed on M$'s O$ to keyboard sales?
If you could read, you would know that he was not comparing the "proffit" on Office and Windows to keyboards, he was just pointing out that Microsoft has many profitable products, not just Office and Windows.
The fact is that there is nothing new here but failure. M$ gets into each new market the same way, by dumping
No, Microsoft gets in each new market by offering products that people want. The didn't get the largest OS market share by "dumping". They got there by making a product that everybody wants so bad that they wait in line to buy the next release of Windows at midnight the day it is released. Do you seriosly think that "big dumb corporations" would "stick Office on every one of their 7,000 peons desks" if the corporations and peons didn't want to use it?
People are realizing that free makes economic sense. blah blah blah marketdroid blah blah proprietary blah blah blah blah
Who are these "people"?? The 2% of users who use Linux? Or the 95% who use Microsoft? I'll tell you what makes economic sense. Buying a product that everybody knows how to use, from the senior engineers down to the HR secretary. Why is it better to transition to "free" software if you have to spend thousands forcing people to learn how to use it, even when the majority do not want to learn?
Slammer, Code Red, Nmedia, SirCam, I love you, Klez, la te da te da
Are you suggesting that Linux would be any better if they had a 95% market share?
Oh, and quit with the freeking dollar sign whenever you mention Microsoft. You look like a damn fool.
You have better luck with Red Hat Linux in terms of hardware drivers because it is pretty much the best-known commercial distribution of Linux here in the USA, and the last thing Red Hat Software wants is being buried in tech support requests to get drivers for even relatively recent hardware.
:-(
But still, look at all the hardware manufacturer sites; just about all of them have necessary drivers for Windows Me, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. A lot of the hardware manufacturer sites seriously lack Linux drivers, so if you're a newbie user it could end up being a aggravating experience finding Linux hardware drivers unless the commercial Linux distribution manufacturer is really on the ball about this. Red Hat's support for the more common PC hardware is quite good, but when you get the oddball stuff, that gets troublesome fast for newbie users.
There is some issue about the amount of stock options that should be showing as a current expense, but no one wants another market crash, so don't worry.
Additionally, even without the initial cost of the product being taken into consideration, a Linux sysadmin can do more for less than a Windows admin. MCSE gets you a job, but no skills.
All the arguments I've seen in which Linux doesn't beat the crap out of Windows are simply lies.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Something to notice is that just about all of them need drivers for ME, 2000 and XP -- you need different drivers for every version of windows (OK, a bit of an exaggeration -- but only a bit!).
I don't remember having to hunt down a Linux driver for something since RH5.2. Windows, on the other hand....
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.