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Ballmer Sends Wakeup Call to Staff
Puneet writes "An MSNBC article outlines details of how the world's biggest software company seems to be facing a technology gap. Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft, sent a memo across the company basically saying that with no immediate breakthroughs in technology coming, and with the Linux computer operating system and a batch of other open-source programs biting at its heels, Microsoft will have to do a better job of persuading customers it has something they need.
. Microsoft must "improve business consistency" so that customers are not hit with unexpected - and unwanted - changes. Also covered by Forbes but in lesser detail."
Note particularly:
1980: Bell Labs finally shows interest in BSD Unix
-and-
1991: 05Oct: linux 0.02, first mention of directory-name 'linux' on netnews
There are several important differences between how
Sorry, I haven't seen a failure of .NET. I'm just curious where you're looking. I work for the US Army Corps of Engineers, and we use the heck out of .NET and everyone loves it. There is some Java development here, too, but most of our new stuff is in C# (which is, of course, essentially a Microsoft-ized Java).
.NET on a regular basis. Personally, I think it's great.
I haven't heard any complaints from people who use
Yeah, I know. I am STILL regularly explaining to people what the hell .NET is. Microsoft could have said:
.NET'
.NET *is* XML'
'.NET is a runtime environment and set of libraries for programs written in a bytecode called IL. There are some developer tools that compile languages like C# to IL, and there are some high-level services like ASP.NET implemented in
What they said was, I believe:
'.NET is all about XML.
This is part of what they got for putting Steve Ballmer in charge.
So as a PR thing, yeah, totally mishandled. But for providing solutions, it's very good -- I'd use it over Java whenever possible, and so would several ex-Java people I know.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
they realized they were too late in jumping on the Internet bandwagon, they admitted it and started development on a browser to compete with Netscape.
:) Make Windows perform better by integrating it with Windows? Once the foundation of their business model begins to erode, the emperor has no more clothes. This is a scenario that, until Linux, they haven't really been faced with before, and it's going to obligate them to take a long, hard look at the very core of their corporate philosophy, culture and business model. Institutional momentum being what it is at one of the world's largest companies, I pray with renewed hope these days for the eventual death and destruction of MS :)
You can be damned sure that if Netscape had a stranglehold on the desktop OS market in the mid 90s, I would be writing this post on some incantation of Mozilla right now and not IE 6. MS's eventual triumph in the browser wars had nothing to do with its capacity to innovate and really not even that much to do with it's ability to play catch-up, which it isn't even that good at. I mean, anyone with half a brain will tell you that feature-, speed-, and stability-wise, Mozilla 1.4b rocks anything that MS has ever created, and this after years of Netscape, Inc.'s atrophy and braindeath, to boot. So basically, their ability to bundle and integrate the browser and OS saved their butts from a "war" that by all means they should have lost, and not their introduction a superior, albeit late-to-market, product.
The bedrock of MS's business model has always been the fact that, no matter how much they fuck up in other sectors, at the end of the day they still own the OS market. You mentioned the WordPerfect/Lotus episode, which is another good example of this. WP is arguably superior to Word to this day. How did MS extricate themselves from this particular snaggle? Why, code hooks into the OS to improve performance, of course.
I have a hard time seeing how that dubious technique is going to save them this time. What are they going to do, bundle their operating system with their operating system?
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
"My wife wants something she can turn on, type a letter, click print and then do something else. Windows does that well."
I recently convinced my wife to switch to Linux. She's the same way. With OpenOffice.org she has that. She finds OOo very easy to use and loves it. She used to use IE for her web browsing and business related things, but finds Mozilla's tab'd browsing very nice. She also is happy how much "faster" Linux seems to run for her. (Don't know how true that is but i'll let her believe it) She also hated the whole virus thing with windows, she seemed to always pick up spyware and worms and was always having to run Anti-Virus software. She likes that she doesn't. So far for her RH 9.0 is easy to use, and about install, she wouldn't know how to install windows either, and i found RH 9.0's install a breeze. (Even took less time than Win XP install). Since she doesn't play video games Linux works great for her.
So i feel Linux does that well too, now.
-DarDack
"Life is not fair" -my parents
When Linux can come up with a browser that works as well on every site I use
Mozilla is the most standards compliant browser there is. If you find a site that doesn't work with Mozilla but works with Internet Explorer, it is because the site is broken and not the browser. If you're not willing to complain to the site owners, thats your fault. If you complain and they do nothing, they're clueless.
comes up with 100% Office clone (and I do mean 100%)
You use every function available across the entire Microsoft Office suite? Blimey! Or do you, as I suspect, use most of the basic features and maybe one or two of the more advanced features, yet are really too entrenched in your ways and unwilling to learn a slightly different way of doing it with OpenOffice? If thats not good enough for you, then you can run Microsoft Office with the CodeWeavers CrossOver Office package.
Again: Microsoft is a monopoly, and has been convicted of abusing it.
Apple is NOT and never was a monopoly. Calling what apple has over their hardware and software a monopoly is a joke compared to microsoft.
WordPerfect had been told for years by Microsoft that OS/2 was the future for corporate work. They had a great OS/2 version representing a much larger investment with much fewer framework problems, but which ultimately didn't have enough potential market to even justify release of a final supported version after Microsoft pulled the fast one shifting from OS/2 to Windows for corporate use forcing app developers to use greatly-degraded facilities, which Microsoft had been practicing at a bit longer.
Having to suddenly deal with all the Microsoft "innovations" of Win 16 resulted in a result that was, by comparison with Microsoft's efforts, crap. Sure, Microsoft was better at dealing with the sudden shift and limitations of their own monstrosity (or perhaps you would like to be using it today). This is characteristic of Microsoft's strategy of adding bumps to the road for other developers, leveraging their control of the OS against applications developers.
Of course Microsoft makes a lot of their software, I'm saying that they nearly never *create* anything new. They didn't invent spredsheets, Visicalc (for Apple IIs) did, but they grabbed the concept, features, cloned them and made them into a successful product. That's their force : know how to shape and sell something well to the mass, and that's not a bad thing in itself. They didn't invent word processing either, nor Basic. As for .NET, it's part of their strategy against Java : undermine Java with specific incompatibilities a while ago, then roll their own offering (.NET is a Java clone at the core). The Xbox ? looks like a dedicated PC to me. NT/XP/2000 ? better products or not, where are the major innovations in those products ?
.NET, and that was really pathetic.
And yeah, they invented Clippy. I believe that's the extent of their capacity of genuine innovation (i.e. without acquiring novel companies).
I'm not talking about making software, I'm talking about making innovative software. Note that I freely recognize that most opensource zealots don't do any better, including Stallman who couldn't do any better than come up with dotgnu when M$ announced
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
A linux for school distro was just relaesed here in
... everyone should try and make that in their own state/province :-)
Québec:
http://www.edulinux.org/spip/
it's based on mandrake 9.1 and add some better local french support and many useful tools needed in university or college
Take the rescent Neverwinter Nights fiasco. It took Bioware forever to choose a platform to handle the graphics and even longer to choose one to handle the sound.
This has nothing to do with Linux being inferior in not compatible. Bioware made the mistake of choosing technologies that were not crossplatform with which to build their software. They used Fink for video and some other proprietary sound system for building NWN. Neither of which was ported to Linux and neither made the source code available to make a port possible. As a result, they had become dependent on technologies they had no control over. This was their stupidity, not a failure on the part of Linux.
If Bioware had used SDL and other open and portable technologies, they would be able to run on virtually any platform with minimal porting effort.
This is alagous to saying "I used to MFC to write my application instead of Qt (which exists on most GUI platforms today). As a result, it doesn't run on Linux because there is no MFC for Linux. I do not have the source for MFC and the vendor who supplies MFC will not port it. Ergo, Linux sucks."
That makes no fucking sense.
Join Tor today!
I can't believe you think IE is a better browsing experience than Mozilla. If you do, it's likely that you just haven't used Mozilla. Mozilla's features and standards compatibility are so much more advanced than IE that you've debunked your own post in this one statement alone.
comes up with 100% Office clone (and I do mean 100%)
Trying not to sound like a conspiracy theorist here, but you're already too reliant on MS to notice anything else. This isn't a possible goal. There's no way that reverse engineering the Microsoft proprietary formats can be as quick and accurate as Microsoft designing them. By using MSOffice, you are supporting the very formats which have already locked you into Microsoft for as long as Microsoft remains proprietary (read forever).
Realistically, if MSOffice could open OpenOffice files, I would really have no need to use it again. I don't notice the features it lacks and like many of the features it has over MSOffice and I assume I'm not alone in that. My only qualm is that I have to save files in MSOffice formats and confirm that they look right in MSOffice before sending them to someone using it.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
What you describe is happening in Norway right now. Skolelinux ("School Linux") is a distribution based on Debian, targeting schools by - among other things - customizing the installer for use of thin clients (with LTSP), including and translating applications vital to the curriculums and writing Norwegian documentation. Even though the iso still is in beta, several schools are already using the system. Last thing I heard, some students started making a fork specially for other students who wish to use Skolelinux at home. Schools in Denmark and Germany (and some other countries I can't remember) are also showing an interest for the project. World domination is not far away :)
Did you ever consider contributing to open source? Oh, programming is not "your thing"? That's okay, if you speak a second language, you can help translating software. Here are some links for translation tools ("OversetterverktÃy"), type your language's equivalent to "translation guidelines" into Google, and you are ready to go. Thanks :)
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
audiocd:/ (yes, put an audio CD in your first CD drive before you click)
fish://luscious@your.fave.ssh.server
smb://nearestdozebox/c
There are plenty of others.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Because MSoft only has two money making product sets (Windows and Office) - every other venture they have launched in order to open up a new revenue stream has (so far) proven to be a dud. Lets break these profit centres down a bit...
Windows makes money because it is the default OS solution for the desktop, a position which it inherited from DOS and which arose because it was in the right place at the right time for the personal computing boom. This lock on the desktop has been leveraged to make a creditable showing in the workstation, servers and enteprise solutions space.
Office is a money maker because MSoft were able to leverage their lock on the desktop OS in order to torpedo their competition and/or use the massive pile of money they had accumulated from the desktop OS to aquire niche application products (Visio for diagrams, FoxPro for databases etc).
The pattern is clear. MSoft is extremely bad at bringing products to market or recognising and breaking into new spaces in the competitive landscape. In the near 30 years of their existence they have only managed to pull it off successfully four times (desktop OS, high end OS, Office, the browser wars). Other than the first (which was luck) each time this has been because they were able to leverage their OS lock in order to sharpen their product's edge and/or kneecap the competition.
The consequence of this is that the OS lock is the third rail for MSoft - anything that threatens this lock is a 'kill the company' issue and, more immediately, is a 'kill the shareprice' issue (this is important because MSoft's steroidal shareprice has allowed them to do some extremely aggressive financial engineering around their options in order to massage their after-tax profits stream, the warchest that the OS cash cow provides has been extremely useful as well of course).
Offering Office on their rising competitor in the desktop OS space (something they haven't had to deal with since the late 80s) would be a priceless endorsement of (and remove a significant barrier to adoption for) that competitor. It would be a significant blow to the cornerstone and foundation of every strategic success they have achieved in their history, knock the bottom out of one half of their current revenue stream and poison their shareprice. From Steve Ballmer's perspective these considerations make it far from a no brainer.
Regards
Luke
#include witty_one_liner.h
RedHat, SuSe, and Mandrake have gotten pretty much point-n-click installation. KDE and Gnome are so easy to use that non-technical people can find their way without help.
However, the OS X has got them all beat. It's not perfect, it's still missing multiple desktops, but OS X is stable, easy to use and loads of familiar applications, plus it has exceptionally easy maintenance. That it also looks good, makes ideal for places where you have to look at it a lot -- home or a public reception area.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
it must be noted, however, that MS does a fine job most of the time making things "just work". There lies one of their greatest strenghts. When things go wrong, Windows can get just as complex as *nix to troubleshoot, but when things go right, it's very easy to get things to work.
For example in my workstation, when I added a 2nd video card, Windows 2000 just nodded and everything worked. After a format I installed mandrake and loaded knoppix to see the current state of *nix graphical world. Neither of them worked. Fiddled with it for hours and still did not get decent results. Now, I am a linux user and I like the system so I kept trying to make it work, but I bet many people faced with the same situation would just dismiss it as "it does not work".
~
~
:wq
> 90MHz Pentium with 2GB
/64 mb that is the most prevelent junk at the moment. And probably more likely to run any of the free office packages at a usable speed than the 90 would. (p90 / 16mb / 1gb. nah!)
You abvoisuly we're not around for the p90. 2 GB HD were mostly dreat of!
However you also havn't viited "junk trader's" recently either.
It's 166/200mhz / 2gb
+----------------- | What is the question!
Maybe you should've read something before downloading, and maybe you should think twice about why we didn't say it's good enough (on the Mac) _now_ ..
From openoffice.org, regarding the Mac OS X version:
It is also not a traditional Mac OS X user-friendly application. Consider yourself warned. Always back up files; always take precautions. This build is meant for the Darwin community and Unix-savvy Mac OS X user community and forming a platform for us to build the Quartz and Aqua tracks for the traditional end user.
it's in my head
Kahei,
... in fact, SQL's predecessor.
:[
--It seems to be very unixy. I need a db to do exactly the same thing on linux as on win32, but postgresql seems to be more 'compilable on win32 if you really have time' than 'completely cross platform'. Am I wrong?
Not right now, you're not. However, a Win32 port is in the works, and the main thing holding it up is making sure that it is a reliable and performs almost as well on Win32 as it does on *nix. I don't think the Win32 port will ever "catch up" to the *nix versions just because *nix is a superior server architecture, but it should be invisibly cross-platform from a user perspective.
--It seems to be very quirky -- most people (here) can pick up firebird and use it because it's just like Interbase, but postgresql seems to redo everything from the ground up. \d to list tables? 'Postgres query language'?
I'm afraid that you're badly misinformed. Postgres has supported standard SQL since 1995; in fact, Postgres' SQL support more complete and more standard than the vast majority of DBMSes, OSS or commercial. Before SQL, Postgres used QUEL, which was also a standard language
Further, a lot of Ingres/Postgres technology, like MVCC, has gone on to become the parent of, or be incorporated in, half the DBMSes in the world: Informix, Oracle, InnoDB, Illustra, etc. So Postgres is, if anything, the most "standard" database in existance. And if we're "inventing things from the ground up" it's because in most areas of database technology, Postgres was there first.
It's only natural to think of the technology that *you* first learned as "standard". But it's not accurate. The Postgres/Ingres tree is almost 20 years old, and precedes the datbases you're familiar with.
--It seems to require considerable knowledge of rdb's. For instance, you remove a foreign key constraint my manually finding and deleting some automatically-generated triggers?? That's going to confuse anyone from a SQL Server background... actually, it's not going to happen at all
Also old info. That was annoying, we fixed it. I'm not sure whether this is a 7.3 or an upcoming 7.4 feature, but by the time you transition, you will be able to drop FKs with a SQL command.
However, you should prepare yourself for some significant mental shifts to adopt PostgreSQL if you're used to SQL Server. The Sybase/SQL Server tree of database development pursued a different branch of database design strategy from the Ingres/Postgres/Oracle branch. Fortunately, the SQL standard will help you make the transition.
-Josh Berkus
P.S. if you want to discuss this further, e-mail me: josh -at- agliodbs -dot- com.
Not true -- MSFT split 2 for 1 in February.
Actually, the guts of what became Visual Basic were bought from another company that produced a RAD product called Ruby. (No, not the same Ruby, if you're thinking of the current open-source programming environment.)
Much of the guts of what became Windows NT was based on other OSes - many of the coders were from the old VMS team from DEC, hired along with Dave Cutler.
Visual C/C++ was bought - originally it was Lattice C, and Microsoft bought that, and turned it into their C/C++ compiler suite. They've built on that since.
Word and Excel (originally Multiplan) originated in the Microsoft MBU, and were eventually adapted for use on PCs. Yes, they developed them, but they borrowed many ideas from their competition.
Yes, most of Microsoft's product line was acquired, not developed. Yes, a few of their products were originated by them, but a precious few. It's not hugely surprising that some people aren't impressed about Microsoft's call fora revitalization of "innovation" in Microsoft, considering they've never really been what you could call "innovators". Really, the only product I know of that they came up with totally on their own was Bob - and we know how successful that was. (And who was the project manager on Bob? The woman who's now Gates' wife. How 'bout that...)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
I know others have written helpful replies but I'll add my particular take anyway.
.NET may be a wonderful
.NET. MS encourage others to implement it for other platforms -- indeed they did a (kinda puny) toy implementation for *nix themselves. The standard is very well-documented, although it's big.
.NET to
.NET is often considered more powerful, but is used less because the only good implementation is the win32 one.
.NET's features, I'd use only Java. If .NET ever got Java's portability, I'd use only .NET. Till then, well, the market remains diverse :)
>I can accept that
>platform, but doesn't it only run on Windows by
>design?
No indeed -- only running on windows is a feature of the *Microsoft Implementation* of
>I know about mono and it's work to bring
>Linux, but that's incomplete is it not?
Currently, yes... but it's moving. But then, it's a big task. MS are helping a bit, but I think they'd help more if they were smarter.
>Isn't the cross-platform nature of Java the most
>compelling reason to use it?
For me and many others, yes. However, there is also a large community that came to Java from a Classical Unix background and who use Java because anything is better than writing large apps in C for X-windows, and another community that uses Java because it's easy and a popular language to publish algorithms and academic code in.
>I know there's something that I'm missing here,
>there must be.
Not really. Java is often used because it's cross-platform and because it's popular in Sun-land.
If Java ever got
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Are you kidding? Let's play Match MS's "Innovation" to the product that preceded it, shall we?
Word? WordPerfect, Wordstar. MS was WAY late in the game. Cripes, I was word-processing ten years before Word 1.0. And the Mac had a WYSIWYG word-processor long before Word 1.0.
Excel? Lotus 1.2.3./VisiCalc. Remember, Lotus sued MS (and won) over this point. I don't agree with the decision in that particular case, but still, as for which came first, Lotus has that proven in court.
Access? dBase, Foxpro, Paradox... All were many years ahead, and were not originally MS products.
Visual Studio? Spare me? Borland's IDE beat 'em to it by many years. Even their Turbo-Vision interface for DOS put MSC7's environment to shame, years prior, and when it did come out MSC for WIndows still ran in DOS mode. "Programmer's Workbench" they called it, but impossible to work in as it only allowed one open file at a time. Not viable in C.
Windows? MacOS/Xerox Star. I guess MS innovated doing it so badly, compared to Apple's uber-elegant (for the time) offering.
Windows NT? Early installations popped open clearly visible "OS/2 Windows," so you tell me.
Disk Compression? Stac Software's Stacker 2.0, without the useful utilities.
Disk Defrag? Norton Utilities 4.0, without the advanced features and hex editor. [With a hex-editor, you could fix the Windows 3.1 version checker and make it run on DR-DOS and 4DOS.]
MS-DOS? Seattle Systems' CP/M-86.
Even good old HIMEM.SYS was preceded by 386Max and Quarterdeck's (FAR superior) QEMM product. And MS-DOS didn't get EMM/XMM support until DR-DOS and 4DOS started taking hold. And unlike Quarterdeck's offering, MS's couldn't re-allocate between Extended and Expanded memory on the fly.
Speaking of Quarterdeck, anyone remember Gates's semi-famous quote about it being "impossible" to multi-task MS-DOS? I read it for the first time in a DOS window under DesqView, one of three DOS sessions I had open at the time... MS has never had a firm grasp of how their software works, because it's so rarely theirs to begin with.
Come to think of it, PowerPoint is the only successful MS product that I can't find a clear 1:1 predecessor for. And even then, I knew people who were using Autodesk Animator for that purpose, almost a decade prior. That's not 1:1 so I'll let it go.
Oh yeah, there's also Bob. Who else would have thought of putting a GUI shell on a GUI shell?
Well, the word "steal" isn't quite correct, but if you say "bought" or "borrowed" then all of your examples fall flat. Let's go through them all:
BOB was a rather poor reimplementation of a software product called Lemon Dog written by the Inner Workings company. Microsoft's character in Bob was Rocky Dog, if you recall. Inner Workings sued Microsoft over that one (and settled out of court I think).
Visual Basic was originally called Ruby. It was written by the Cooper Software Company and bought by Microsoft in 1991.
Windows NT was largely written by Dave Cutler's crew who was "bought" en-masse from Digital. It's little wonder that NT and VMS share a fair number of similar design concepts; there are many in-depth articles discussing the similarities. The user interface is actually CDE-based; lots of people seem to forget that CDE was both a standard co-developed by Sun, IBM and Microsoft as well as an implementation that seems now to be associated mostly with UNIX systems. Many other parts of Windows NT were co-developed with IBM as part of the OS/2 project before Microsoft decided to go their own way with Windows.
I don't think anybody could seriously argue that .NET is anything other than a direct ripoff of J2SE and J2EE. Even the architectural diagrams are the same. When you go to a .NET Developer course the instructors start with "basically it's just like J2EE".
Visual Studio is ill-defined. Visual C is just Lattice C bought from Lattice Technologies. Visual Sourcesafe was bought from OneTree Software. The user interface for Visual Studio (the editors and syntax checkers, etc) are obviously a ripoff of Visual Cafe from Symantec; even the name lacks any imagination.
Xbox is a PC masquerading as a console. It was most certainly a Johnny-come-lately to the console market. It was most certainly a "me too" response from Microsoft. I don't see how you can possibly argue that the Xbox is an example of Microsoft creating something new.
Word, Excel, and all the office suites. Well those things are more an evolution than anything else. You can certainly argue that their first versions were ripoffs of existing products (eg, WordPerfect, 1-2-3, Visicalc) but there is little resemblance to those original products in the modern versions. PowerPoint was bought from ForeThought Technologies; and it shows, because PowerPoint has never properly integrated into Office.
I'm sure they have created something new (they are a huge company with 1000s of projects) but I am honestly struggling to find an example. Nothing you've listed is all that convincing. Even their original flagship products - MS-DOS and Basic - were either bought or "borrowed". Microsoft is a good repackager and reimplementor, but they have never been a good creator of software or ideas.