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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."
Is this connected with .NET failing to deliver its promises and the fact that Smartphone idea met stronger resistance from cellphones vendors (especially Nokia) than MS expected?
These two were - arguably - two biggest things MS pushed in last two years. Does that memo mean they don't have anything else up their sleeve? What then with all the money spent and effort at "Microsoft Labs"?
For quite a while, MS has been in the position of waiting, without much to do, while its competitors gradually catch up with it, adding easy-to-use languages, component systems, and GUIS to their offerings. MS's reaction has been to try and break new markets so that they have a space to innovate in, but their PDA, phone, and game system initiatives have all been kind of mediocre-to-awful in terms of how much opportunity they give MS to create compelling products.
MS profited hugely from the increase in commodity processing power that came with the i386, but they are not managing to profit from the increase in connectivity which we are seeing now. Unless they can do so, they'll find their lead gradually eroded...
--easy to use from Java (jdbc) and COM-based programs
--has stored procs, foreign key constraints, subqueries, etc
--runs on linux and 2k/xp
--either a gui management system or at least easy to manage in general
MySQL will *not* do it. Currently I'm leaning toward firebird but connectivity (odbc and
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Ah! Competition. Don't you just love it?
Monopoly kills the incentive(s) to innovate. Since 'we' are the biggest why should we change? That's why many contries, including the US, have anti-monopoly laws. Somehow Microsoft managed to circumvent these laws. (I wonder why?) And now that the monopoly is slightly fading (it's not gone by a long shot), Microsoft is realizing that if they want to survive they need to innovate.
Let's see how the big M will be doing in the real world.
I think it's odd the article doesn't mention apple. Sure GNU/Linux is the most immediate server threat, but apple is more likely to threaten the desktop. Also, no mention of software solutions threat (IBM, etc).
-t
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
Sudden arbitrary demands outside the scope of one's role, like "Hey, make the customer need us more." Fine, I'll add it to my tertiary goals list (and ignore it). If you want to make a customer need you in a competing market, just telling your staff to make them need you is not leadership.
Anonymous Coward.
The only real advantage that MS has over *nix/BSD is its' easy of use. Don't get me wrong I love *nix/BSD but would I install it on my parents computer or even my non-techie friends computers ... I don't think so. , however they are quickly losing their lead in this area as the other OSes mature.
... who knows soon they may have to realease a *nix version of MS Office just to stay competative ... that will be the day ;)
Maybe this will force MS to write some quality software
We don't need no stinking sig!
"Longhorn will come when we think itâ(TM)s really ready.
you have to wonder whether he thinks some of the changes are too extreme and possibly of little value to the user.
__
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Smartphone sucks all right, but
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
With all OS development concentrated on Longhorn, which is several years down the road, they can't hardly do anything else. They have no new products to present to the consumer, so they have decided to hype up Longhorn instead.
Now, with Mac OS X and several free operating systems doing being able to do jsut about anything you can do with windows, companies are beginning to realise the alternatives. Managers have references of successful OSS-implementations in Office settings, and are willing to do a cost-benefit analysis to determine which suits their needs, instead of merely scoffing at OSS on the desktop.
Their mudslinging campaign agains OSS hasn't proved to be the success they thought it would be, and more draconian licensing schemes are making customers re-evaluate their need for Microsoft Products.
Notice, how I'm not talking about Joe Sixpack. Joe Sixpack will be happy to use whatever his machine comes with, as long as it does what he wants it to do. When computer manufacturers stop delivering OEM installations of Windows, we can talk about a level playing field where each OS will be judged on its own merits.
Have you hugged your penguin today?
First, Microsoft should dump all money losing divisions. As I'm sure everyone here has heard, Microsoft's OSes and Office products generate over 80% profits, which the company uses to fund losers such as WebTV, MSN, the Xbox, etc.
By dumping those loses, Microsoft could drastically drop prices AND continue making the same profits. I'd be a win-win situation.
Second, drop product activation. No one likes being treated like a criminal. And as I've written here before, product activation does NOT stop real piracy, i.e., piracy for profit. The ISO for XP Professional was readily available and instructions for installing SP1 were easy to follow via tweaktown.com's instructions. Simply put, pirates were still able to copy and sell XP Pro without ANY impediment.
The real purpose of product activation is to stop friends and family from sharing copies. If Microsoft's software was lower in price, (see my first point) people would simply buy their own copy.
Third, stop the egregious software assurance type deals that only serve to piss off your customers. If you really want Linux to fail, stop giving your customers a reason to use it!
Fourth, stop with those outrageous deals to stop Linux. You know the ones, when India, China, or Germany wants to switch to open source, Microsoft bends over backwards to give practically free software. This totally pisses off customers paying way too much via software the draconian deals imposed in my third point. Secondly, it gives them an incentive to look into switching to Linux.
Fifth, stop using the BSA police to force deals. When public schools canâ(TM)t afford your software, donâ(TM)t send the police force a deal. When I didnâ(TM)t buy a GM car, they were kind enough NOT to send the police to check out my garage. We expect the same courtesy from Microsoft!
Sixth, I could go on and on and on. But since my boss expects me to work for money, Iâ(TM)ll quit here and let others post some suggestions.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
The issue for Microsoft is that to keep their stock prices high, they've got to show continually rising sales.
.NET - next big thing....
But they're not going to convince anyone to switch to MS product at this point...everybody already runs a MS OS or MS Office, so there's no growth there. The market has matured.
The server market has slow turnover, and growth will come slowly there (if at all).
I see them doing two things:
1) Putting license key schemes in place on their OS's, this will get a marginal revenue increase by eliminating the bulk of casual piracy for the OS
2) I imagine the same thing will happen with MS Office soon
3) Hope to god the console business takes off...
4) Come up with a DRM scheme and convince the record companies and users its a good thing. Unfortunately, they don't have a good reputation as a strategic partner.
5)
6) Palladium - next big thing....
I mean, Ballmer's right, there's nothing there that will mean a big revenue increase for MS; its just a lot of nibble around the edges.
Frankly, MS would have been better off splitting into an application company and an OS company; each individual company would be forced to innovate and take chances. But as they are now, MS is a very very conservative company, and that's not going to lead them to any big breakthroughs.
They are equal to IBM in 1975.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The only reason for this massive "compatibility" that Windows has with devices is due to Microsoft licensing agreements with hardware manufacturers, or hardware manufacturers only developing Windows drivers because Windows is the de-facto standard. This has nothing at all to do with Windows or Linux's being technically superior...
Don't you find it ironic that the worldâ(TM)s biggest software company got there not by innovation but rather by other means, and now they're bemoaning that very fact? They started off by buying OS code and licensing their way into most computers built. As their warchest grew and grew, they simply swallowed up other innovative companies or put innovative companies perceived as a threat to their death.
This company was never based on customer service and now they want to be perceived that way? It's going to be quite tough for this large company to change the corporate culture that has run deep in its veins since the beginning of its existence, if it's even doable at all.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
"I actually think that they earnestly think they're inventing the future, as well as they know how. They've looked at every Microsoft product, from Hotmail to SQL Server, and tried to fit them into a Bold New Vision Thing. But the trouble is that nobody there is actually inventing anything earthshaking. Which isn't surprising: not because Microsoft is stupid, which they're not, but because earthshaking new inventions are so rare and Microsoft only has a finite number of smart people. Only one person in the whole world invented Napster, and he didn't work for Microsoft. Microsoft desperately wants to believe that it can manufacture revolution, but even in the Cambrian explosion of the Internet, there are only a handful of truly revolutionary ideas per year, and the chances that one of them will happen inside the tiny world of Bill Gates and the knights of the Redmond table are vanishingly small. The chances are even smaller when you consider that a typical smart programmer working in the bowels of Microsoft on display drivers for Windows NT, who has a great idea, is probably not going to get his idea listened to." This is a qoute from Joel on Software
r ti cles/fog000000049.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/a
I think this sums up pretty much why MS is stalling.
-P
- To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion -
And commerical UNIX's can be technically superior to BSD + Linux. Ever seen Linux go above 64 CPUs in an SSI? IRIX can and I believe so can solaris
Rus
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To be fair, advertising means more than commercials. For one, you have NO idea what all encompasses a company's advertisign budget. It could very well mean more focus groups / customer visits to understand the customer's needs (aren't commercials supposed to tailor to the needs / wants of a customer?).
Increasing an advertising budget could mean more commercials, and I'm sure more will come -- but it can also mean spending more to learn and react to what the customer wants.
Quoting the article, "...companies have turned to Linux and other open-source software programs, seeing them as cheap but adequate alternatives." I think that this quote paints only a half-truth, and I also think that this quote does not do justice to a lot of the open source developers out there. Some companies may view certain pieces of open source software as "cheap but adequate," but I think many view them as technically superior. As a user, I turned to Linux because it allowed me to do many things that Windows did not. And as a developer, I don't try to produce only "adequate" software. I try to produce the best software possible. :-)
The issue for Microsoft, is that ANY strategy they adopt could backfire. Let's see:
.NET - next big thing....
.Net, except for the Vis Studio. Developers are the only ones who can proudly stay ignorant of what they're letting loose on their customers! BTW, what is .Net?
1) Putting license key schemes in place on their OS's
OTOH, when Joe SericePack gets pissed by the license-key thing, he's likely to switch over.
2) I imagine the same thing will happen with MS Office soon
Joe ServicePack is already running OO.o
3) Hope to god the console business takes off...
That's like retiring from the bread and butter business, and hope to sell lots of jam. Won't work.
4) Come up with a DRM scheme and convince the record companies
Too late, and too little. Apple's already done a good job. And music buffs already have MP3 firmly entrenched. Zero sum game.
5)
Only drawback being, MS is shit scared to brand anything with
6) Palladium - next big thing....
They've already hit a raw nerve with that one, it's got them tons of negative publicity. Renamingit as NGSCB will not make it better.
Now we know why His Baldness sold a million shares.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Wow to be able to write one memo and receive
millions of dollars in free publicity and advertising is pure genius. High profile executives take note. Ballmer is working the system quite well.
1. Insert appropriate quip here
2. Punctuation mark repeated thrice
3. Receive monetary benefits
music lover since 1969
I've had more people thank me profusely when I've handed them a copy of Open Office, just because they didn't have to shell out big bucks for the MS product. They didn't even know an alternative was available.
It's probably even money that they'll bow to internal pressure to get something out, sort of like a WinME for XP or something, a stop gap to make people buy something.
Otherwise, all those people who paid extra to be in the guarenteed update program will be upset, because it will become obvious that they are not getting very much for their money.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Suprise, we now have Microsoft giving the reason they licensed SCO Unix: They believe IBM to be the biggest threat to them.
See these articles on the same memo: here, and here
He also is afraid that there is a "...greater focus on doing more with less" in business, which could spell trouble for Microsoft.
"So, don't just sit back, point your finger, and laugh; take a good look within the open source world and see what needs fixing."
is that they can do exactly that! Sit back, point finger and laugh - when (and if) MS does anything notewirthy, simply implement it in open source, and repeat!
I mean, if something were wrong with Open Source, would MS and SCO be raising such a hue and cry. Don't fix Open Source, simply lie back and relax - it's perfect already.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Those indie games who use DirectInput and DirectSound.
DirectX is more than just a D3D.
Have you ever used WordPerfect 6 or the Windows 3.x versions of Lotus 1-2-3? Yeah, using the undocumented APIs would have made a bit of a speed difference, but those programs were just crap. No magic Microsodt API could of helped those seaming piles of diseased software. WordPerfect and Lotus didn't give a rat's ass about updating their software to work under a WIMP environment. They just wanted to milk their cash cows as long as possible. They had the best selling software and they believed no one would ever replace them. Who was their competition before Microsoft? Apple? A Macintosh with no ability to run their native "IBM PC Compatible" apps? No way.
What is "superior" depends entirely on your needs.
If Windows offers you exactly what you need, Windows is superior for that task. If Linux offers you exactly what you need, Linux is superior for that task.
"Superior" is a bad word to use, though. Try "best suited" or "works best". I am not going to claim that I know exactly what is best at what - I am sure others have their informed opinions, and are probably debating the details as we speak (does Linux really run better with multiple processors, and so on). So I try to stay out of discussions like this. But you are making a sweeping statement based on nothing but ignorance.
Your "fact" is nothing but a badly informed opinion it seems. BSD is a branch of Linux? Please.
Clever signature text goes here.
Microsoft will have to do a better job of persuading customers it has something they need
How can you be this smart and this delusional at the same time? You want to make Linux functionally irrelevant as a business OS? Here are some **REAL** ideas off the top of my head:
1) Abandon Palladium. We really don't want to use our PCs to watch movies - we have $50 DVD players for that -- see #3. 'Nuff said.
2) For that matter, your EULAs are WAY THE F___ OUT OF CONTROL. "Hmmm, it sure is an important OS security patch, but damned if I'm gonna install it because it sez right here that doing so gives MS the right to control my PC." I don't care what you *intend*, that's what it sez. If you want to control what's on my PC and what I can do with it, then you buy it for me, Mkay?
3) Quit stalking your customers like a collections company. Abolish Open Licensing 6.0 and this *STUPID* software-by-subscription idea of yours. (If you want me to re-buy your software every year, those annual subscription fees are going to have to be lower -- a **LOT** **F___'IN** **LOWER**. Office '95 was good enough for me.
4) Admit that your security problems are a direct result of your insistance in violating the #1 rule of software design: YOU NEVER MIX CODE AND DATA TOGETHER. You have specifically engineered every product you sell to be scriptable. STOP IT! Remove the OS-level scripting capabilities from your products and provide patches to your current customers to do the same on previous versions.
5) You guys are acting like the software engineering divisions at HP! Stop trying to improve things that don't need improving and realize that the only perfection is simplicity. Go out and play some golf, maybe take some dancing lessons.
Sure, I like Linux, but I also like Windows. My problem is that even though I have already given you my hard-earned money many times over, I feel like you've nailed a bulls-eye on my back and handed out shotguns to all your beer-swilling pals.
I am exploring alternatives because sticking with you is like being a hostage (as in gun-to-the-head) in a car speeding down a desert highway. If I jump out, it'll hurt, but once I stop rolling, get up, brush myself off and walk back to town, I'll be in control again.
Wow, not-so-ironically, it **really** **is** much more about 'freedom' than 'free'-dom.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Or like the NY Times, where your employees are caught making up stuff. I'll never forget MS using an altered video as trial evidence. They even think "marketing" is the answer to legal problems.
Actually, this raises a very interesting issue. You know, I happened to be chatting with a CEO of a leading Indian software company once, asking him why most Indian software is catered for the international market and not the Indian market per se. In particular, I was concerned about the lack of application development in Indian language software, and asked him why the companies couldn't develop a viable Indian market for their products.
I expected he'd say something about "improverished" India and all that crap (actually went prepared with a few references to squash just that argument), but his point was, to say the least, unexpected. He said, "The world's largest software maker, Microsoft, spends nearly a billion dollars for marketing its flagship product, Win XP, and that too in its home ground. Imagine how much we small fishhave to spend". Or something to that effect.
Since you raise this point about marketing, I'm curious:- what's the view out there in the Valley? How much do you guys have to spend on, or how important is, marketing your software?
More than mere navel gazing.
Hoho!!! Yet another Microsoft apologist liar. I recently helped a friend set up his brand new P4 WinXP Pro system at home. Got it as tight as possible. But I KNEW that he would be complaining within a few months about Windows seeming slower. He just called me last week complaining about exactly that. I asked him "have you installed and uninstalled al ot of stuff since you got the machine"? He said that he had. I explained how he could go through the registry and manually remove the crap that those apps left behind. Now... I will say that this problem is more of a problem that the applications create. However, MS should have worked this one out a long time ago. Why does the registry have to bloat with a ton of crap over just 2-4 months and start slowing the system down? I've seen this from Win9x through to WinXP. And if you have the guts to search through the registry manually, you will know of what I speak when I say that there is nothing but crap in there! Sorry, but Windows has a long way to go before it can be considered stable. I think that a system that has a slowly degrading performance curve with normal user is NOT stable. Linux and other *nixes are much better in comparison. Most package managers do a good job of removing config files, libs and executables. And if you get a tarball of source, most of those follow the standard 'make uninstall' to remove their files. No system is perfect, but out of all the available systems, Windows is the worst at managing the install/uninstall portion of the user experience.
Isn't this what we customers have been saying, nay, *screaming*, for years now?
I recall the days when U.S. automakers tried to sell cars by telling the buyer, "you need what we build", before they got clobbered by the imports with their "we'll build what you need" attitude. I wouldn't be looking elsewhere if Microsoft's products met my needs.
OTOH there's a big *natural* market for a company with the Features Uber Alles culture. If Microsoft would be content with a large, secure slice of the pie, instead of trying to grab the whole pie, they could do very well without revolutionary change.
The trouble comes when you try to *impose* your vision of the market on a segment which holds to a radically different vision. Lose the vision, or lose the ambition to own the market; you'll never achieve both together.
"Death Spiral" is absurdly optimistic when speaking of a company that has $40B on tap. On the other hand, MS does seem to be facing stagnation due to having mature markets in both their flagship products. The only direction Windows and Office adoption can go is down.
I think they may be finding monolithic integration is starting to work against them. They chuck everything but the Kitchen Sink into either Office or Windows as needed. The idea being to take over third-party niche markets and own all the marbles. But then, people are only willing to pay so much for an OS even if it is loaded to the gills with features.
They need cash cows aside from Office and Windows. That means building less into Windows/Office and selling more separate products. But selling separate products causes small competitors to start swarming like ants. They're going to have to take that risk or find another way to diversify. In the long term, diversification may be the best bet.
To keep their current OS and Office monopolies, they have to be utterly ruthless to competitor and customer alike. This is already reaping them a harvest of mistrust. If they had a broader product base, then real competition need not be the fearful spector is to them now. They wouldn't need to be as heavy handed and even someone who loathes them as much as I do now might change his mind and throw a little cash their way.
My lab just bought several Dell boxes with RedHat 8.0 and HP boxes with Mandrake 9.0 pre-installed, including support contracts. The Dell boxes were US$1500+, but the HPs were all less than US$1000.
So some OEMs are ready right now and I was happy to buy from them.
by Balmer? Does anybody see a corelation?
There was an interesting editorial in eWeek recently, that compared Microsoft to IBM of the early 1980s: IBM was the biggest gorilla and for practical purposes, the only game in town, and used that status to bully its customers into higher prices and ever-more-onerous contracts. This eventually backfired, eroding IBM's marketshare and forcing them to rework their business model. The article opined that M$ is going to suffer the same market erosion as IBM did, for the same reasons, and that M$ will likewise eventually have to find a new marketing model, and become a tolerably good corporate citizen like it or not. It predicted that this would occur in the next 4 to 5 years, which I think is reasonable given the deliberate pace at which enterprise customers consider and deploy infrastructure changes.
From what I've read, M$ is already internally run as an OS division and an apps division, in that they are competing workspaces that really don't speak to one another much. So I doubt that being two separate companies would do much for innovation, especially since each would still have the lion's share of its respective market. Now, if M$ actually had to compete on its own merits again, that would likely do it.
BTW, as a M$ shareholder, my observation is that their strongarm tactics are *damaging* my stock value, and as a shareholder I want them to knock it off and let the market (piracy included as a market force) do its own thing. After all, before Activation reared its ugly head, M$'s non-inflated stock value was peaking around $80, and splitting regularly. Now it's lucky to peak at $40 (and in fact is hovering around $25 and hasn't split in a couple years). Coincidence? I don't think so.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
As a metter of fact YES you can just check off some check boxes, but most programes realise that it make no sense to be obliged to start the app in order to configure it, or if you have multiple stations to configure a simple cp of a file can save an enourmous amount of time, or even better an NFS mount of the config files.
What stops you from poping in a CD? Most people get frustrated when an installer starts as soon as they slide the CD in because most of the time they are not installing anything they just want to acces that stupid clip art or such. If you wish it to autostart thats not an issue either, lame but not an issue.
I will stick to my FreeBSD example above;
Install new package: pkg_add
Remove package: pkg_delete
LIst of what is installed: pkg_info
I need something which I have installed but do not remember what: apropos
I could also go on an on and on and on. Windows does some things well provided you give up your freedom but most tasks can be done easier using another OS. I make a living in computers I do not have the time to play on them and most of the time I prefer to play on PS and Nintendo. If you like Windows, good for you, just stop telling me it's great. It took MS 8 years to catch up to Linux in stability, I'm hoping it will take them less time to fix the security.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
AFAIK, Longhorn won't break much, but applications will have to be rewritten in order to take advantage of some of its new features.
Its just like the Win16 -> Win32 changes when Chicago (Win95) came out. Everyone was worried that it was going to break 16 bit apps. In the end, very few 16 bit apps had problems on Win95.
There was one important point reported by the Wall Street Journal that was left of these other accounts of the memo. Balmer mentioned lowering licensing fees to attract young developers to working with Microsoft tools over Linux.
Certainly one of the factors contributing to the growth of free software is that there is no entry fee for aspiring coders to jump in and start working with a range of free tools available. Thus, MS is not only at risk of loosing end users but also pontential contributors to add to the "value" of their products.
Oh, that's true. Microsoft has bought many software companies and stagnated all the code. I could care less what they do outside unAmerican lobby efforts. They can't stagnate free code without bad laws to back them up any more than they can win developers back. It was over about 4 years ago when all of the developers left the M$ community. The result is what you see. Microsoft's employees can only do so much. The free software world is doing much more.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
When Apple releases OS X Panther, it will give Microsoft a few months of new innovations to work on.
The solutions? More adverts and a continued effort of dominate every facet of computing. It's stupid because they can't maintain what the've already got. Though hoplessly outnumbered, they continue to try to take on new projects, X-Box, moble phones, servers, handhelds. Nuts, their greed is their undoing.
It's only going to get worse for them. They have entered the typical downward cycle of a failing company. Their basic model of software development through aquisition and minimal maintenence was never nice but is now dysfuncitonal as fewer people take the bait and develop for M$ platforms. Look for them to become ever less capable of making decisions and more erratic. They will concentrate on silly things like tablet PCs and bet the company multiple times on hardware their software can't support in a competitive way. At some point their declining stock price will trigger panics and layoffs. In the end they will engage in more silly SCO type lawsuits because that's all they will have left.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
From the article: Also, following its recent commitment to delaying software releases until it has ironed out all the bugs â" a marked departure from the companyâ(TM)s earlier practice â" Microsoft seems more than prepared to wait.
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But, what was at the bottom of the ASP page?
Well-written apps that conformed to documented interfaces and API calls are indeed backward compatible. The page you link to gives IIS 5 and Exchange 2000 as examples -- these were not "normal well written apps" by any understanding. They were pushed to customers as being very tightly integrated with Windows 2000 Server ("joined to the hip" was one of the phrases used) and indeed, the interactions between IIS 5/Exchange2000 and Win2k Server was never fully clear to most MS developers. So how surprising is it that these don't work with Win2003? This is like complaining that McAfee's antivirus for Win98 won't work on WinXP.
> As my employer has found out they are in the continual
> process of making customers re-write their applications
> to run on Windows.
Well, gee whiz Sherlock, suppose your app relies on a behavior of Windows (say overwriting %winsysdir%\MSVCRT.DLL) that is no longer available in a new version of Windows (e.g. over-writing files in %winsysdir% will fail in Windows 2000 and above because of SFP), then _obviously_ you have to rewrite.
There are thousands of shrinkwrapped and custom-written apps around which run on Windows 2003 just fine. I can run the DOS Doom just fine on Windows 2003. Ditto every version of Word from v6 to v9. Ditto my old copy of Turbo C. And Notepad v1.0. And Half-Life. Just because yours was hosed means NOTHING. No OS on earth has given 100% perfect binary forward compatibility, and Windows' record in this is actually pretty good.
You're running legacy software on a legacy system. You aren't going to upgrade to Longhorn just so you can keep running your old billing system -- you're going to keep running it on that old IBM mainframe. And you sure as hell aren't going to replace your old IBM mainframe with a computer running a Desktop OS (Longhorn is not a server release...the server release comes out a year or two later).
The 16bit Windows API is over 10 years old TODAY. No decent app written in the last 7 years uses it. Hell, most half assed apps written in the last 7 years don't use it. Nobody is going to miss it. Let it die.
If that's a problem, start planning for the future -- you've been given plenty of notice.