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The Only Way Microsoft Can Die is by Suicide
Bitseeker writes "Robert X. Cringley's latest article is online. He opens with: 'When I wrote last week about my conclusion that the legal system -- any legal system -- is unequipped to change Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, I had no idea that within 24 hours, Sun Microsystem would be throwing in the towel, trading its so-called principles for $1.95 billion in cash. So I guess I was right. Only now, a few thousand readers out there expect me to blithely produce an answer to the problem of what to do to bring Microsoft into the civilized world. Well, I say it can't be done.'"
hmm... What's new?
He's right. Nothing can be done. Lets all give up.
I think that the public needs to be more educated about the alternatives to the monopoly which controls the machines all around us, as well as about the monopoly itself and the harm that it does. Then again, there have been such attempts made on various scales, yet on the whole, apathy seems to be the victor.
trading its so-called principles for $1.95 billion in cash
How many people wouldn't trade their principles for almost 2 billion dollars?
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
The Only Way Microsoft Can Die is by Suicide
So is there anything we can do to help?
The smartest reader of all suggested that companies be taxed on their market share so that a company like Microsoft with 90 percent share would pay 90 percent sales tax.
The simply response to the smartest reader, as an Economics major, is why in the hell would I even try to get market share in the first place since I now have a strong fiscal insentive NOT to try to.
Imagine a world where the better you get at something the more punished you are. Why would you get better? It's like smacking a child every time s/he tries to walk. Why would s/he walk?
Someone please explain why saying "bad" for being "good" at something is a Good Thing. Please! I want to know...
1. Pwn Bill's box
2. Mass email his private confessions to Steve B.
3. PROFIT!!
4. Watch as Bill takes on a malicious, narcissistic revenge complex that causes him to invoke the DMCA on all Windows users
5. In their fury to preserve the law, the Feds decide to have Windows declared illegal
24 hours from now, Bill Gates is gonna commit suicide!
The King Is Dead, Long Live The King
I for one, think we should just let Microsoft be. Let Linux take over in its natural course. Linux would not be a widespread if it were not for Microsoft.
Anyway, microsoft could go for 40 years without earning any money at all =)
I for one welcome our old microsoft overlords.
afterall, can you imagine how difficult it would be to write 10 different versions of the same virus! agh! it would be horrible!
The industry needs a good dictator to keep peace, snuff out resistance, and generally keep order in an otherwise disorderly arena.
Yes, Microsoft is Bad like saddam hussein, but are we willing to replace him with a viable alternative?
We will end up bleeding like we do today.
Microsoft is a necessary evil. Period
that modern civilization sucks. I wish i were an indian pre-1500, life was so much simpler.
The thing is if Longhorn isn't secure out of the box they will be. That means no open services binding to interfaces other than 127.0.0.1. Whilst this won't kill them outright people are now starting to learn just how fundamental some of the problems with windows are and just how futile it is to try and keep a system up to date on a dial up modem.
Based on the way SP2 for XP is looking they may finally be learning this lesson, but if they don't it may not be a question of running out of money and more a question of running out of customers (one leads to the other I know but they have a LOT of money to spare even without customers)
Normal people worry me!
Would be to have a new company come along and actually produce something new rather than recycle old and existing ideas.
Rather than try to bring Microsoft to its knees so that others can compete, why don't we put more effort into actually creating competition?
I think Bill Gates himself has proven that it only takes someone in a garage with a damn good idea...
Mod me down if you wish, just an honest opinion from someone sick of hearing about Microsoft's monopoly.
Having said nothing important, I'll now go read the article.
But possible. The only problem is human stubbornness-namely those users who don't know and aren't willing to use/learn/try anything other than Microsoft products. This includes narrow-minded PHBs obsessed with bottom lines, and home users who've been conditioned through past experience and marketing efforts to jump at anything with the Microsoft logo and that bears the words "New," "Better," "Best," or the like. They use Windows, they know Windows, and they'll keep feeding the beast their dollars to get the latest Windows (or other MS product-insert your favorite here).
This is where we really, really need advances made in Linux GUIs-so that they're intuitive enough for Mom and Dad to use and say "Oh, gee, this is just like Windows," and for the PHB to say "Oh, okay, training costs will be minimal." If Linux (or, again, insert your favorite OSS solution here) can break into the areas MS controls the most tightly, namely the home desktop market, then OSS will pose a threat to MS on more than one front, and it will (hopefully) lead to an adapt-or-die scenario. They'll have to do something to compete with free software, and it will become evident that the 800-pound gorilla can't outmaneuver the chimps...so to speak.
It's like Leia said in Star Wars: the more they tighten their grip, the more potential customers will slip through their fingers. The only real way they can try to ensure their market dominance without some severe adaptation is to buy more DMCA-esque laws and hope for TCPA to take hold and be their savior. And even then, there'll always be underground movements to hack TCPA hardware, distribute OSS applications and operating systems...it's too late for them. Unless MS wants to play fair with the rest of the software world, it's only a matter of time before more progressive, open, versatile solutions outpace the Windows/Office/.NET juggernaut.
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
http://www.tsanewsblog.com
One thing you have to admit, MSFT is both good at playing catchup and has enough resources to play catchup after it has missed the boat. There are plenty of examples:
1. MSFT ignoring TCP IP, saying it is inferior to NetBIOS as well as charging a small fortune for a minimal add-on IP Stack ported from BSD. That was only 10 years ago. They caught up on this one
2. Same with browsers - IE 3.0 was nothing but mosaic repackaged. It took them less then 2 years to catch up.
3. Mail clients - I still remember the days when Pegasus and Eudora were the de-facto corporate standards as far as Email on windows is concerned. 3 years to get from 0% market share to 90%+ market share.
4. Microsoft ignoring wireless, thin clients, etc.
In every one of these cases they caught up before the rest of the market could do anything about them.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
The smartest reader of all suggested that companies be taxed on their market share so that a company like Microsoft with 90 percent share would pay a 90 percent tax rate. The nice part about this idea is that it actually would encourage competition as well as industry alliances. The naive part is that it assumes legislative resolve that does not exist and also assumes Microsoft actually pays taxes which, for the most part, it doesn't. Still, the idea is clever.
What? That's the silliest thing I ever heard. I'm as anti big-business as most moderately anti big-business people are, but taxing businesses according to market share seems stupid and doesn't give them much incentive to want to grow, as least how I see it. If you want to go after corporations, start cracking down on tax shelters and loopholes that get them out of paying anything at all.
I know MS sucks donkey balls, but changing the entire tax structure and the market just to take care of them seems a little excessive. Hell, I'm using Windows but I still have Apple and Real products on my PC. Is it really that bad?
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
I had no idea that within 24 hours, Sun Microsystem would be throwing in the towel, trading its so-called principles for $1.95 billion in cash.
Does this mean that ESR was right? Or at least, that his critics were wrong?
So much for Sun needing to hang on to Java...
I have discovered a truly marvelous
"Bill Gates will again turn his corporate supertanker and add full power, but this time the competing ship will not only have a head start, it will be able to accelerate faster than Microsoft."
At that point Microsoft buys the other ship.
Anyone want to explain why try and slay Microsoft? I don't know about you, but I'm happy with the little market Linux and open source has. I think it's all we need.
A common way for a person to lose at chess is by assuming eminant victory and staying ones course without further thought. So it is entirely possible that Microsoft could now see themselves as above the law and grow more bold in their arrogant disregard of law, and on the consumer level by simply going about business as usual with windows while the world slowly starts to realize that having a computer doesn't mean constantly getting hit with a daily exploit.
Personally, if looking at their core product is any indicator, it looks like MS is already on the decline. I think in 2006 the public will be underwhelmed to license XP-redux and give a look at those 2ghz G4 iMacs running OS X Ocelot over at the Apple store...
It is my theory that capitalism, or more precisely free markets, lead to monopolies and oligopolies. As long as you keep introducing good products, have good marketing, have a lot of capital, keep trying hard, and/or have good employees, you will aways dominate. Companies like Microsoft, IBM, ExxonMobil, BP, Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, and others, will always dominate.
A lot of people in the tech industry, and in particular on Slashdot, are very anti-Microsoft. But the fact of the matter is that Microsoft has not done anything that other companies don't do on a regular basis. If anything, Microsoft is one of the better companies relative to its size (companies like Intel and IBM are far worse). If you think Microsoft is bad, you know nothing about Wal-Mart, ExonMobil, and others. A company like Walmart, for example, has far more power and is more monopolistic than Microsoft ever was. What you refer to as Microsoft's monopolistic behaviour is a total joke compared to the clout Wal-mart has over suppliers and consumers.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
What about by a well-placed highly skilled sniper?
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. That's the only way to be sure.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Instead of turning down increases in your salary outright, if you want to donate them to me I'm sure we can work something out.
Your post glosses so much that is complex about taxation and incentives and comes to such a simple-minded and obviously wrong conclusion that I'm not going to address those other issues.
I dont think it really matters how big a company is they all eventually die. I mean really how many large annoying companies are around that were around in the 1920s for example????
None!
...when will they committ another small act of hari-kiri? Their death won't be by one grand mal act of stupidity (they have proven capable of at least flubbing through those) but will many small errors eventually provide enough drag to make them vulnerable to many attacks running in parallel (when you have as many enemies as MS does this is a real possibility with more of a "when" rather than "if" looming overhead...but what other acts of shitheaddedness will MS have to do to drive enough of those parties over the edge and into the breach?)
What this article misses is that SUN really isn't the threat they were, it's IBM. SUN is small beer, now look at IBM, Novell, and all the non-US/EU countries turning to alternative platforms. Look at Apple and how you can now buy a very nice and usable Mac for cheap PC money and drop all the MS platform problems. MS can only control the market if everyone agrees to it, they cannot really force upgrades, they cannot really force us all to use MS platforms. There will always be competitors and MS will just keep on being hated if they don't start to cooperate with standards and stop expecting to control everything.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
OK, just checking...
But the only way they can regain any honor is by seppuku.
I think Microsoft already saw the writing on the wall, they are moving towards home appliances and entertainment. They are moving into music, video and games. HDTV will have Microsoft media format for recordings, Music will be some DRM'ed version, and video games are out in the form of the Xbox. There already into PDA's, Phones, and Tivo clones. Microsoft will be around in all forms of entertainment. The OS market is dead, its time to move towards the bigger, larger honey pots.
As for software, besides the XP OS so I can run video games, all most applications are open source or free. Mozilla, Thunderbird, putty, Winamp (free version), Open office, cygwin, opengaim, windows player classic. iTunes, PowerDVD and Nero are pay, but they could move to Linux easily enough.
Besides free software for PC, everything else costs for most entertainment. Xbox games, HDTV DVDs, DRM'ed CDs, whatever. Microsoft will be a monopoly in other markets.
You just switched from software to hardware. Unless I am mistaken, MS has not jumped into the Hardware/Cellphone/Cable TV/Telephone/Blender/Kitchen Sink buisness.
That's Walmart.
if microsoft continues it's path of clouding everything with their money, it's only a matter of time till their suizide is complete.
trust me.
this sig is useless
Or in other words, they missed the boat on just about everything. We'll see what happens with PocketPC and the X-Box.
Obviously, the only way is to kill Bill Gates. Not figuratively, but literally and personally.
Dude, Bill Gates is already dead.
MSNBC
Los Angeles Times
You're kidding, right? Ford. General Electric. DuPont. Most of the seven sisters of Big Oil. Ericsson. And those are just off the top of my head. There are thousands more. When they get to a certain size, they go zombie. Nothing really kills them - they just merge, spin off daughters and re-brand. Maybe some kind of silver bullet would work, like for Enron. But even if Microsoft did invent that kind of accounting, they have the cash flow to prop it up, almost indefinitely.
Money for nothing, pix for free
But the difference is that they choose NOT to play catch up, at least for now. Which is good for open sourcers. We don't know about later strategies, which I think Microsoft will someday reconsider. Even then, it's a very different playground and it's a lot harder because what can you do to recoup lost market to beat a free price? You bet it bundling a whole lot of another package in... But can MS escape from DOJ's eyes? I'd say it's very hard...
Of course there are technology that open source provides and MS doesn't and vice versa. So, future can't be outright easy to predict.
What we need is to make open source be a tempting platform for (all) companies to build new technologies in, not just porters. Once we managed to do that, MS would be forced to play catch-up in a hard way or die...
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
You are correct of course. Companies grow and fail, powers rise and fall, empires are built and crumble and through it all everyone thinks that whatever they have now will last.
Whether it's the Roman Empire or the Cold War or dominance of this or that country or continuation of this or that alliance or the domination over an industry of Ford or of IBM or of Microsoft, there's a determination that now things are different because this is NOW and how can things ever be different to that?
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
hmm, i think they tried suicide several times
nothing happened
.plan
1. Research a way to create earthquakes.
2. Trigger one in the Cascades.
3. Watch Redmond slide into the Pacific Ocean.
4. Profit!
5. Oh yeah: Warn the Japanese about the tsunami. (Note, maybe we should bring this item up higher on the list?)
Money for nothing, pix for free
According to Linux Business Week yesterday, Sun is going to cut not 9% of its staff (3,300) but 30% - all in the next 12 months. So Redmond basically just has to wait a year and...pouf!
Ideas like that make microsoft india sound like a good idea.
When did that happen?
Is that you, Lex Luthor?
it's called vendor lockin. someday the p1r473s will actually pay for it because it's the only software they know how to use.
In every one of these cases they caught up before the rest of the market could do anything about them.
I wouldn't call it catchup. What I would call it is leveraging a monopoly position to force a product (that's often inferior i.g. outlook express) onto customers whether they like it or not.
That's what they did with the browser by integrating it deeply with the OS. That's what they are trying to do with the media player.
Standard oil tried to do it with refineries and railroads. The movie companies tried to do it by owning the movie theatres.
The only difference between now and then is that then politicians had enough spine to stand up against it, and take action that would promote meaningful change.
It is questionable if the EUs recent actions will be effective because the fine, as large as it is, represents a very small part of Microsoft's fortune that they can afford to pay.
I do not see anything on the horizon that would change their current business practices.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Only mentioned Apple twice. Is anyone paying any attention to what Apple is accomplishing? OS X is incredible. The G5 workstations are incredible. iTunes is beyond incredible. iPod, Apple stores, Cinema Displays, iPhoto, Powerbook, GarageBand, Keynote, etc. etc.
How much more does one company have to accomplish? What was the last really cool product Microsoft made?
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
You a chick, but you're like a dude!! Awesome!
I think Mr. Cringley underestimates the long term power of an open and easily shared computing environment. I just tried Mandrake 10 out for a few days. Mandrakesoft has pulled itself out of bankrupcy (not easily done these days). Other Linux distros are shining brightly too. I think Microsoft should be very worried.
Empires always crumble, with no exception. It's just a matter of time. Like the Buddhist philosophy, nothing lasts forever; change is inevitable. Sandcastles can only be built so high.
I've got things in the works...give me 10 years
Complaining about Sun giving up it's principles is pointless- they are a business. Their sole purpose is to make money. And for $2kkk they probably got their money's worth given the circumstances.
> How can you stop or strike down something that is largely unaffected by large wads of cash?
Patents, copyrights, lawsuits: Microsoft's three weapons against open source.
1: Patents - Target the programmers or companies supporting Open Source by patenting as many basic technologies as possible then ensuring that the Open Source community cannot use them without a license from Microsoft (this stuffs all software released under the GPL).
2: Copyrights - Claiming copyright infringement (even where none exist) - Sony did a good job of this one against BLEEM a couple of years ago: basically the cost of the legal action can soak up all your funds before you have finished defending yourself.
3: Legal Threats - (a variation on 2): Threatening individual programmers with legal action citing patents/copyrights infringements as the main reason.
Could YOU afford to defend yourself?
Now bear in mind that (a) there are challenges from all sides coming at Microsoft (they have failed to gain much of a foothold in markets outside their core products of Windows and Office, both core markets now under heavy attack from Free alternatives) and (b) the price of MSFT has almost halved over the past 5 years (in fact, it was almost touching $100 a share in Feb 2000) and you might just think it's not all rosy in the MSFT garden. So much so that co-founder Paul Allen sold all his MSFT stock and got out whilst the going was good. This is also why MS decided last year to pay a dividend on their stock for the first time - they have to prevent institutional investors from jumping ship. The stock setup is their one (big) weakness.
I've seen several people have posted messages with the common idea of "educate the public about the evils of monopolies". Which, on the surface, is a good idea.
But in the end, I don't think the general public really gives a damn. Radio, newspapers, TV, the music industry, etc, are all run by a handfull of companies with the same morals as Microsoft. And I sure don't see any public outcry against it.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Nobody ever really discusses computers? Notice how the media almost never has a story on the real details of Linux, Mac, Windows, Sun, Java, .NET, etc., even though hundreds of millions of people use computers every single day?
Some of the most entertaining television or radio is when a host detects that an interview/conversation is starting to become detailed and interesting (read: technical terms being used), and they raise their voice/interrupt/babble/act like a complete asshole/try to make it an unfunny joke in order to return the conversation to stupidity-land.
Part of the problem is the inability of society to think about something for more than a few moments, and also to "glaze over" (which is a bullshit excuse) whenever technical details are discussed.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
hmm, i think they tried suicide several times nothing happened or to be more accurate: they tried suicide several times their enemies dies :)
it's more than a streetname
-- for undocumented cisco commands, take a peek @ dotu
Cringely makes some good comments. One thing I can think of though, if as he says MS manages to kill off its competitors in the US (or bashes them to tame submission) and the software industry in the US as a whole is paralysed because investors are afraid of the "Netscape effect" when MS notices your niche and decides to compete with you - it may be possible that the next leap in innovation he thinks that will kill MS may come outside of the US. If MS suffocates the US software industry the next big innovation will have to come outside of the US. Which means that the hub of the software industry may end up moving out of the US into probably Asia - maybe China or India. And then the job losses we see in the US IT industry now would be nothing compared to what would happen then...
Parent should be modded up. It's an insightful answer to the guys question. Stallman had chances to sell out before, but doesn't because for him, it really does seem to be about principals.
It's not 'playing catchup' really. It's a strategy: wait until someone else creates a market which is larger than the first couple of tech-people. Once it hits a majority of 'normal' users get in and take over. It's risky, but if you have enough money you don't have to take the risks of R&D and trying out if people like your new stuff. Sometimes they're a bit late (xbox, etc.) but it's the same idea, they see the market is ready and is of importance so they enter it without having to create the market.
"2. Same with browsers - IE 3.0 was nothing but mosaic repackaged. It took them less then 2 years to catch up."
Spyglass, not Mosaic.
- I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. That's the only way to be sure.
This post is obviously coming from somebody who has never seen Aliens.This suggestion is obviously coming from someone who does not live in the northwest US. As someone who does, I think the sniper is a much better idea.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
At one point in time, IBM was the megacorp that Microsoft is now. The thing that caused them to change was economic forces; having near-monopoly control became relatively more expensive as new unit sales dropped. The only difference I can see with Microsoft is that they have the OEM's and EOL'd some of their products much soomer than IBM would. I don't think that's going to last forever though; consumers already don't like the licensing or the EOL's and the financial pressure will eventually be reflected back through the OEM's and directed at Microsoft. After all, they have to have at least some profit margin. Just an idea.
C|N>K
It was about this time 20 years ago when Apple released those Mac ads taking aim at the monopoly of IBM. "During release of Mac a programmer said to an Bill Gates, "Little does he know it not IBM he's fighting- its you."" (Pirates of silicon valley) I dont know if this is a true story or not but it does show that monopolies come and go, and it doesn't take a miracle.
How do u do it, "with great difficulty"
How can you be wrong on every one of these?
>>1. MSFT ignoring TCP IP, saying it is inferior to NetBIOS as well as charging a small fortune for a minimal add-on IP Stack ported from BSD. That was only 10 years ago. They caught up on this one
Where did this come from? TCP/IP on Windows NT (starting in 92 at least) was a core part of the OS. I specifically remember that TCP/IP for Win 3.x was free. WTF are you talking about?
>>2. Same with browsers - IE 3.0 was nothing but mosaic repackaged. It took them less then 2 years to catch up.
IE 1.0 fits this description, but IE 3.0 had CSS in it for heaven's sake! It had ActiveX controls and Netscape plug-ins. It was way more than (Spyglass) Mosaic.
>>3. Mail clients - I still remember the days when Pegasus and Eudora were the de-facto corporate standards as far as Email on windows is concerned. 3 years to get from 0% market share to 90%+ market share.
Back when this could possibly have been true the corporate standards on Windows were cc:Mail and Netware-based products. Eudora and Pegasus have never actually had any meaningful market share.
>>4. Microsoft ignoring wireless, thin clients, etc.
Ignoring Wireless? They built it in to Windows XP. How long before that could they have been "ignoring" it? Every wireless vendor ever (except Apple) has released Windows support for their products. And Microsoft has had their own thin client product since the mid-90's.
One thing that I have noticed from using Gentoo is that Microsoft actually do hide a lot from the consumer. IMO when you have a good distro of linux up and running its a lot easier to operate successfully than windows.
While I can't see an immediate end to MSOFT, I think the key would be in gaming (like loads of other people). Maybe a great game could also be bundled with the company's fave distro of linux, when that happens more people would try it out because they wont fear losing support for games.
Any market share shift would trigger more developers to make more cross platform apps so realistically people may switch because it would be beneficial.
Maybe I'm a tad optomistic...
hey are not a monoploy? Are you crazy? All their actions over the recent years are monopolistic. Their intergration of applications into the OS, their delibrate concealment of standards. Remember Netscape? The real problem now (at least in USA) are corporate fat cats who destroy competition and force people to buy their products. Even in a free market economy once you get 50% market share it should get harder and harder to 60%, 70% and so on. But in real life it becomes easier, thats wrong! I am not a communist(even though I live in Russia), however American corporatism scares me. You people allowed a group whos sole purpose is take money to take power. Don't youconsider that crazy? You put people in life-imprisonment for stealing, but at the same time you allow corporation to add 30% on life-saving drugs. This notsome stupid cough medecine, this stuff saves lives, how can you make so much profit on such things? Treat corporations good only when the treat the consumers in the same manner!
Interesting article ...
http://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/Top10Challeng esFor2004.html TOP Challenges for 2004
Microsoft's Top 10 Challenges for 2004
1. Managing a maturing company in a maturing industry
Microsoft's decision to offer a dividend is subtle recognition that the company is operating in a maturing industry where both hardware and software upgrade cycles are lengthening and growth rates slowing. It has become harder and harder for Microsoft to introduce updates that offer compelling new value and customers perceive many older products such as Office 97 as simply "good enough." At the same time, customers are more reliant on Microsoft software than ever before--so reliant that a software failure such as a rampant virus infection can have a greater business impact than an extended power outage or a loss of telephone service. Customers are placing a greater value on making sure systems they already have run reliably, and less value on new products and capabilities.
Microsoft's challenge is to adopt business models and business processes that reflect these realities. However, despite all the signs of a maturing marketplace, "Microsoft still has the same basic business model as it did in the 1990's--a model that is largely predicated on creating software grand slams that compel customers to upgrade." says Paul DeGroot, Lead Analyst, Sales & Support Strategies at Directions on Microsoft. That is the reason why so much more development resources are being poured into Windows Longhorn compared to service packs for existing products such as Windows XP and Windows 2003--efforts that are arguably more in demand by customers than Longhorn. "With the largest installed base of any software company, Microsoft is in an enviable position. But, short of selling customers on product upgrades, Microsoft hasn't found an effective way to convert that huge installed base advantage into a steady revenue stream," explains DeGroot.
2. Security, Security, Security New security vulnerabilities in Microsoft products are discovered on regular basis, and thwarting hackers requires customers to evaluate, download, deploy, and install a steady stream of software patches--a complex and time-consuming process. And, by the admission of Microsoft CFO John Connors in the most recent quarterly earnings report, security issues are hurting Microsoft's bottom line by redirecting IT resources that might otherwise be spent on evaluating and deploying the latest generation of Microsoft products and technologies.
Currently, Microsoft's patch-management technologies and processes are themselves a patchwork. For example, various product groups use different patch formats and installers, and patch test and release processes differ across groups. The result? The presence of some patches can be reliable detected, others cannot; some patches can be uninstalled, others can't; some patches require reboot, others don't; Windows patches are available from one site, Office patches from another; and some patches subsequently require patches themselves, revealing inadequate testing. Furthermore, many of the company's patch update technologies don't work well for the many consumers on dial-up connections, who simply don't have sufficient bandwidth to download megabytes and megabytes worth of patches.
Significant progress has been made in 2003 and the company has made a strong commitment to improve the security situation in 2004. "Microsoft knows exactly what it needs to do to improve the security of its products. The main challenge is one of discipline--enforcing a consistent set of patch technologies and procedures across traditionally independent product groups," said Michael Cherry, Lead Analyst, Operating Systems at Directions on Microsoft.
etc...(see rest of article)
Karma simply means reaction, every action inevitably causes a reaction. Linux is in existence as a consequence of M$'s existence, a reaction (as it turns out: as a reaction, it could not have been in the hands of a better crowd than it is)
The more obvious M$'s dominance and abuse, the stronger the reaction, simply by (fundamental esoteric) law.
In other words, if M$ (and really the whole system it is an exponent of) does not get to inflate sufficiently, it will be made to blow up, sky-high, as every overly dominant power has been throughout all of history. -NOT to compare Bill with the Hitler- but the nazi's were overly dominant and abusive (to say the least), and the world armed itself and blew it up.
It WILL happen, M$ is NOT here to stay. May take some time, though we might even be surprised at how quickly it might demise.......
1: Patents - Target the programmers or companies supporting Open Source by patenting as many basic technologies as possible then ensuring that the Open Source community cannot use them without a license from Microsoft (this stuffs all software released under the GPL).
Try to enforce their patents against Linux and IBM would enforce their patents against MS. MS couldn't write a line of code without infringing some IBM patent (not that I think this is a good thing).
2: Copyrights - Claiming copyright infringement (even where none exist) - Sony did a good job of this one against BLEEM a couple of years ago: basically the cost of the legal action can soak up all your funds before you have finished defending yourself.
Might have worked if they hadn't chosen such a half-assed frontman (SCO) and warned the OSS world of the danger. Everyone is being more careful now.
3: Legal Threats - (a variation on 2): Threatening individual programmers with legal action citing patents/copyrights infringements as the main reason.
Shown to be ineffective unless there is some substantial grounds behind your threats (SCO).
Governments the world over can do something about Microsoft, if they so choose to. It's quite simple, and some have already taken the first steps: adopt Open Source software built to open standards.
Microsoft is only as powerful as it is because it's software is ubiquitous. Governments are probably the only entities in the world capable of mandating the necessary changes to:
a) require the use of open-source software that implements open standards unencumbered by patents and proprietary technologies
b) force other entities it deals with to ensure electronic interactions are compatible with the open standards this requires
Of course, it takes decidedly forward-thinking and egalitarian politicians to venture down this road. However, the benefits to their nation(s) would be significant, including higher Balance of Trade (no MS tax to pay), bolstering the local IT industry, and simultaneously reducing the influence of Microsoft nationally and internationally. It's also a self-fulfilling prophecy, insofar as the first governments to do this can find themselves in a position where they literally lead the world in terms of IT years down the track.
Notice this is a possibility, but there's no kidding myself here that this would be easy to achieve.
There is however a problem. The problem is that IBM existed in a different world then MS does now. IBM technology was a small world populated by the techs. MS however exist in a world in wich IT is now used mostly by non-techs. These people are far less prepared to switch from MS to Linux as before the techs switched from Mainframes to DOS.
So what can happen?
Security
One is security. So far all the security problems have been mild. Nothing really major happened. People are not going to switch because of a few virusses (I am talking the non-techs here) or because they loose a little bit of data. Just ask youreselve how many cars have been produced that were so faulty that they killed people and what happened to the companies that produced those cars? Are those companies still around their cars still selling? Right. Apathy. People are stupid, lazy, shortsighted, greedy and gullible.
A major worm that really wipes out a large percentage of windows machine would be required for a shift to take place. Is this likely? Well so far it hasn't happened. None of the worms are really destructive enough.
MS missing the boat
This is mentioned in the article and I think it is wishfull thinking. MS has missed every damn boat out there. So far without result. People do without or pay extra or pay others. Just look at tcp/ip, browsers, png support in browsers, games (once Apple was the PC with games), and many many others.
Competition
Now we are talking. Linux itself isn't really competition as linux is not competiting. If Linux is used by 1 person then it still is a 100% success.
But there are others willing to use Linux as the base from wich to launch their own offensive.
I don't think companies like IBM or Sun or HP are any real threath. They had their change and goofed. But look to the east and you will see one huge evil empire who has everything to loose by MS being dominant and nothing to gain. China may for a lot of reasons become the bastion of freedom for the west ruled by DMCA/RIAA/MPAA/MS. People always talk about the richness off MS but forget that 50billion is peanuts to goverments. America is only so corrupt because its leaders are so cheaply bought. Just look at the donations given and the profits of the companies making the donations.
China however has a rememedy for that. A bullet paid for by the relatives.
Red flag linux run on a dragon chips would be a very nice way for china to first gain independence at home and second be a nice export article to those willing to break free from Longhorn/Blackcomb or whatever.
I think this is the only real threat to MS. A country wich cannot be bought, threatned or outsold. An asian pact would also break the MS office version deadlock. Want to trade in the east? You will comply with their standards or you will not trade.
Is any of this likely to happen?
Apart from the far east revolt I doubt that anything will change soon. We live in a world where only a tiny percentage of people even can be bothered to vote. Expecting those people to lead a revolt against a company is to much.
Of course that is no excuse for those of us who know better.
This article written on Linux
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Genuinely good products?
This is the year 2004, and STILL people need anti-virus software, registry cleaners, spyware removers, and all sorts of other crap to baby an OS with. I mean, you'd think a $50 billion software company could sort out a few of this problems, right?
Microsoft products are poor in comparison to others, and OK at the very best. If you really believe that all the hassle need to maintain a Windows system doesn't say anything about quality, you've not spent any real time with BeOS, Linux, MacOS X, etc. On top of that, Windows XP is hideously slow too, but again, you'd have to spend time with some other OSes to find that.
As for "not a monopoly", I've no idea where you're coming from. This company holds 95% desktop market share, is known to strong-arm OEMs and vendors into bundling and not supporting other OSes, was found guilty of anti-competitive behavior in the USA, and was recently fined 500 million Euros.
How on earth can you ignore all that?
Looks like Apple may have the answer!
http://homepage.mac.com/mattbrook/macbihap.html
Microsoft Net Assets
2001 $47,289,000,000
2002 $50,511,000,000
2003 $57,508,000,000
Growth of 21% in two years.
Did your wealth (and income) grow by 21% over these two years?
What other ship? Linux? It not for sale in that kind of way, yet it is free to all. See the problem?
Does anybody know where Kerry stands on this? We sure know where Bush stands.
A good start would be to uphold court orders and penalties and force Microsoft to obey the law. The only penalty it ever suffers is that it promises to obey the law and then it doesn't.
He's a tough guy and generally has the power to detect novel trends and to summarize converging events.
Just now, I guess he's too much inserted in his surrounding reality. His vision, at least in this case, is of a typical north-american (i.e., USian or Canadian). It almost is like that guy who said the Titanic was unsinkable.
Come on, forget abut M$ itself. How long do you think the US will be allowed such an exclusive domination in the IT world? I'm not talking about Politics here, just about Economics. This is totally unacceptable from an economic POV. For this to work, M$ should be slashing prices everywhere (and not just in a few Asian countries).
If you slash prices, so must be done with costs -- and here comes outsourcing into play. Other countries (like India) become IT-proficient, the rest is like the auto-industry.
It is happening now, with that China-Japan-Korea OS agreement. And it would happen without Linux!
The Major part of the problem is the way people are educated in computers. They are shown Windows, Word, Excell, Power Point. Once they are proficient at them then they are labeled Computer Literate. The real trick is to change the educational system to teach computers more fairly and balanced. Sure they can use Use MS Office and Windows. But don't bother teaching them how to use Word teach them how to use Word Processors, all of them are about the same A button is here vs. there or use alt b to make something bold or sometimes it is ctrl-b or open apple b. Show them how to figure things out for themselves how to check the menu bars to see what features are available. What commonalities are between systems. If someone is computer literate they should be able to be productive on GUI and not be afraid of the CLI, I am not saying we should teach them how to compile things, or program, or understand all the administration needs, but allow them to find a program and run it because they are comfortable with the controls that they give.
For schools I would recommend that they actually have apple hardware with virtual PC. With W2k, WXP, And one of the friendlier Linux distribution installed. So that way they can get their hands on 99% of the environments (In usability Linux is extremely similar to other Unixes so a Linux install will help with the unix ones too). Now these people will have their feet wet with other OS's and then can make informed decisions on what OS they really like the best. And yes some of them will choose Microsoft products but other will choose the others as their favorite depending on how they think and they work. I don't care if Microsoft goes out of business or not, I just want people to realize that there are different tools for different jobs and using these tools isn't wrong.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This is the year 2004, and STILL people need anti-virus software, registry cleaners, spyware removers, and all sorts of other crap to baby an OS with. I mean, you'd think a $50 billion software company could sort out a few of this problems, right?
Are you suggesting that Linux is perfectly secure out of the box? You obviously have not studied computer science or software engineering, otherwise you would know that there is no way to prevent this kind of stuff for any OS, your blessed Linux crap included.
Microsoft products are poor in comparison to others, and OK at the very best. If you really believe that all the hassle need to maintain a Windows system doesn't say anything about quality, you've not spent any real time with BeOS, Linux, MacOS X, etc. On top of that, Windows XP is hideously slow too, but again, you'd have to spend time with some other OSes to find that.
Poor in what way? Linux is more of a hassle to administer than Windows (I know because I just finished a comparison in my lab over several months.) Not sure what performance measurements you have to back up you claim that XP is "hideously slow", but then you would have to actually do some real tests to find that out.
thanks e6003 for the interesting link but it may be less profound than it thinks.
Many companies do not have enough cash in the bank to buy all their own stock...This is not normally referred to as a pyramid, just the normal way of external financing.
Of course every company can have a crisis of self confidence, but if MS makes USD 10,000,000,000 profit then it is doing a lot better than 99.999% of companies on this planet.
That is nearly 2 dollars for every man and woman on this planet, or 30 dollars for every American.
Well, as Cringley pointed out, things do eventually change. Microsoft will fall, eventually, and probably of its own accord. (Longhorn looks like a good start...)
And an observation that is not a troll, but is likely to get me modded down for the first time anyway: by 1983, I was tired of hearing people say that this was the year that *nix would start to take over. It's taken me many years to become a believer, and I have learned patience along the way.
Microsoft is positioning itself to battle linux. To do so, they cross license IP with Sun for Solaris innards with its excellent scaleability and enterprise class functionality. This means a new class Operating system derived from Solaris and Windows with quite possibly a small piece of the pie to SCO.
Meanwhile, Sun is going to migrate away from Sparc. They simply cannot compete in the proprietary CPU market. Look for them to adopt and have a hand in developing AMD processors with multi-core CPUs that run the new hybrid OS. Then Sun will market the server, workstation, Desktop based systems. Microsoft will get a cut of the hardware business as Sun gets a cut of the software business. Sco get residual license fees, and Linux gets another 10 years to catch up.
how many ISPs are you running now, and why are you still writing your column if you are a tycoon?
Something like the dude in the tow truck giving free tows just for the fun of it, even though he owns his own island?
"The CEO got tired of getting the 'please re-send in XX format' so he ordered other projects put on hold and the office upgrade to be top priority."
What a stupid example of a stupid CEO. Wouldn't it be simpler to uninstall the new copy and install the old one to resolve errors? Cringley is clueless, should've stuck to writing about something he knows.
The western legal system needs a *major* overhaul, but it's not going to happen any time soon, because the people who stand to lose the most from change are very same people who run it!
You must think in Russian.
MS got to be market dominant (which is NOT a true monopoly) by making genuinely good programs.
This whole post is such a load of karkfum that I hardly know where to begin. Let me just address the most egregious point:
Microsoft became a monopoly (yes, they are--check the legal definition) through enforced pre-loads, period. Every single bit of their success has descended from that.
I need to calm down before I can deal with more of your ... post.
This story might seem like more of the same obvious injustice in the world that Slashdotters bemoan every day. But this is a fringe attitude. Linux zealots are far more marginalized than say Mormons. Nobody takes them seriously but themselves. Partly because of the ridiculous demonizing of a successful company that sells what to most people amounts to office products. People don't care? You bet they dont.
There is no better way to sound like a nut to the mainstream than to try to tell people that Microsoft is taking over the world. Look how rich they are you shout. Ok, MS has what, 50 billion in the bank. We spent twice that much in Iraq this year. That is not even a rounding error compared to the national debt. Korea is threatening Nuclear holocaust, the military is quagmired in Iraq and Afghanistan, bodies everyday, the Euro is crushing the dollar, and Global warming is going to doom us all. And oh, you should get excited by Microsoft selling too much software to business dorks.
Get a grip. Nobody cares not only because it doesnt matter, its a "good thing" that somebody has their act together.
Where is the competition for Microsoft, which has this great 90% monopoly?
MS products come with easy to use GUIs and lots of documentation.
What can you provide for 700 dollars (XP OS plus Office XP Applications) which is equivalent to this product?
If someone wants to challenge MS, they need to provide a bundle of easily managed and installed and documented software for under 700 dollars which includes:
System Management
Browsing
Document Management, Spreadsheets,
Presentation Data Production
Basic Movie Editing
XML integration
other fancy bits...
The Only Way Microsoft Can Die is by Suicide Why oh why is assisted suicide illegal?
ease of use this, ease of use that... everywhere i turn arount "windows is easy to use" while "linux isn't".
;-)
which simple isn't true... a common secretary was skilled enough to use unix tools 20 years ago just to write a simple letter, or to send an e-mail. and 20 years ago unix (whichever flavor you like it) was far away from where linux/bsd/whatever is today in terms of "ease of use". you just can't tell me that over the last two decades people got so incredibly stupid that they cannot handle a linux-pc anymore, they really _do_ _need_ win32... aw... c'mon!
and anyway... (well, this isn't a fact i can prove, it's just my personal experience): most the people today who can't use a linux can't use a windows either. they can write their texts or send their emails if they were shown where to click, but as soon as someone changes their email-client over night, or they need to attach a picture for the first time to an email, they're on their backs. have you ever tried to put a common user in front of a (file-) explorer window and watch the clueless look on his face?
You have to remember that profit (income-[cost+expenses]=profit) is not the same for every product or company. Right now PC retailers are making little more than $10 per PC they sell. How much should Dell be penalized for selling the most PCs?
Your bell curve gets distorted very quickly based on market, and more specifically, product.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
Microsoft isn't like IBM. IBM was in the driver's seat because of hardware, and built their empire on hardware. Then clones came in, and competition appeared. Bye bye IBM empire.
No one can realistically (maybe not even legally) create a software product that is fully compatible with Windows. Without full compatibility (which, remember, the IBM clones had) no Windows addicted workplace will risk the chaos of a switch. Software is a natural monopoly by virtue of the vast size and inflexibility of its user base. Microsoft has the world addicted. They're not going away unless they do it to themselves. Linux can dent them, but linux isn't based on traditional commercial models and is thus very suspect to a lot of businesses who don't believe there can be a "free lunch." It could take decades to demonstrate otherwise to them, and that's an eternity in the software game.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
The Roman Empire.....
The British Empire.... (ok, some will argue on this)
The Empire.... (luke did it single handly)
The Titanic.....(jake could have laid on top of rose)
folks, things are like a stack of cards, once one card falls, the rest follow...
My 13yo duaghter has "computer classes" at her Middle School. Are they teaching her programming? No. Are they teaching her basic principles of technology? No.
They're teaching her Microsoft PowerPoint and FrontPage.
I'm not anti-Microsoft; in fact, their software often offers features not found in FOSS applications. PowerPoint is not evil; what's evil is how PowerPoint is used to turn complex ideas into empty summaries.
Yet I find it disquieting that the schools are teaching kids with proprietary software (probably donated) to make business presentations. Most kids don't have a resource at home who can etach them about programming and alternative software. It's not my kids I worry about so much as the corporate monoculture that they're going to live in, populated by ignorant cogs created by an assembly-line school system.
It looks like my middle daughter will follow her 15yo sister into the world of homeschooling. But what about other people's kids? In my mind, Microsoft is no better than a drug peddler, creating a dependancy in youth that leads to addiction in adulthood.
Cringley is right about one thing -- for the most part, the people who care about FOSS are those who know how to use a compiler. And the advocates of FOSS still lack the attention to users -- non-compilers -- that is required to create a valid alternative to Microsoft.
One thing I've learned from being on the frontlines of social activism -- being "right" means nothing. The success of any revolution depends on the ability to engage the passions of the common folk who do not understand (or care to understand) the issues. Geeks can look down their noses at the unwashed masses, but unless you can attract the interest of common folk, your revolution is doomed, and Microsoft wins.
All about me
...you'd make two companies, that of *course* doesn't collude to take half the market each. No sir. A simple split would be one "consumer-friendly" OS, one "power-user" OS.
Tune it a little and you'll easily make it happen, and you couldn't exactly claim they were selling the same product under different names, that one would be a bit too obvious.
This one reminds me of the suggested Tobin tax on cash exchanges, designed to stop speculants and still let "valid" transactions alone. Tbat too is trivially circumvented by instantly purchasing and selling gold in a non-participating country.
I sell gold for X USD, buy for Y GBP. Oh and the company? Since they're trading goods for cash, they dont have to pay any taxes. They only trade the net surplus in long-term deals, which aren't taxed much.
The bottom line is that there's usually a host of ways to circumvent such rules, you see this every time there's a tax reform. New rules, new loopholes. The current antitrust laws are much better suited for this, if only they didn't react so slowly, and only to correct, not to punish.
By the time they actually do reach a conclusion, the basis for the case has long changed. Just look at Windows. First there's the browser (US). Then the media player (EU, soon now). Then zip/firewall and lots of other middleware. Soon it'll be DRM. The whole Java VM also is in there somewhere.
By the time they fix one abuse, there's two new ones. There should be a temporary injunction against such abuses, not just a court decision a decade later. Otherwise the courts are just making a mockery of themselves.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You forget that this has to be done in alot of countries and not just in the States, you do it in the States and all software dev moves offshore, do it around the world and In Soviet Russia it DOES you!
Jonathanjk.com
While it might be seem unimportant, I think Linux has been responsible for a lot of innovations that people simply take for granted...
* Live on CD Distros (Still a very "Linux" thing)
* Apache (Majority of Apache Servers are Linux now, it seems)
* Lack of an (easily) exploitable framework (oh, those Outbreak and Internally Explored warnings? Not a big deal... no spyware here..wait..what happened? Oh NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!)
* In addition to the previous point, open sourced... People can see the code, therefore, they can find exploits (and issue patches) before they are discovered by some script kiddies.
* Significant support from the big guys... IBM, HP, Redhat and Suse are two major distros that are well respected. Novell is putting its support into Linux, and it just seems to keep growing and growing... (Read: Exceeded Apple's share of OSes.) I'd say with confidence that the majority of the servers out there are NOT running Windows. This might play into the "Not ready for Desktops" argument... Obviously those people have not installed a rather recent distro as of late.
May not be worthy of announcing everywhere on a TV commercial, but those are some pretty SIGNIFICANT accomplishments over Windows... for several years ongoing now.
It seems to me that Microsoft, after many years of poor performance and an anti-trust conviction and a multimillion dollar fine in Euroland, may already be dying. Doesn't anyone with more than a couple of years of computing experience already hate them? I've been working with computers for 25 years and I started using Linux when it finally had a reasonable set of desktop applications and resolved some of the hardware compatability issues. Many US companies are dying --but it's from the inside so many don't see the decay until it far along. Can a company really survive in an environment where the potential customer base hates them, when they write crappy code that any 14 year-old can break into, and their business practices send even normally sedate government bureaucrats into a frenzy? Do they really have that much money? I'll bet the executives are clueless about what's really happening on the shop floors too --another common problem in companies these days.
Fuckin' A :)
A company that depends on 2 non-unique expensive products does not have a good business model.
As 90 percent (maybe 9 Billion Dollars of 10 Billion Dollars) of the profit of Microsoft is derived from 2 products:
1 An operating system which has a number of competitors
2 Office products, also easily replicated,
then the company is in an very precarious position. All it needs is for the mass switch over of companies to cheaper alternatives and the Microsoft Corporation will start to stagger...
A situation where Microsoft's valuation drops from the current level of 300Bn to about 60Bn is quite conceivable within the next 3 years.
Maybe it is a good time to sell a portion of those Microsoft shares you inherited!
The day Microsoft dies is the day the United States of America dies. They are both the two greatest empires of our time, two towering beasts of stagnation and corruption. But these towering cespools will both inevitably collapse, giving way to the new. I only hope it happens within my lifetime. May we never forget the greatness of the Romans, the Brittons, AT&T, and IBM.
OM MANI PADME HUM
http://homepage.mac.com/mattbrook/macbihap.html
The only way to enable true competition would be to force Microsoft to open up all of their windows API's, and allow the emerging of an open source Windows. Once there will be a free OS that runs all the windows-apps people have become acquainted with, they *will* be using it. And they will become aware of Open Source in general. It's then up to microsoft to develop stuff like WinFS and see if people are willing to pay the extra money for it... Seriously, why can't this be done? Why do governments just keep on fining Microsoft and make up silly punishments (like forbidding shipment of WMP with windows), when there's a solution that's so much more elegant. I for one believe open APIs are the only way to healthy OS-competition.
My dad's always complaining about pop-up windows in IE, and I just say "Dad, why don't you use Mozilla?"
I've explained Mozilla to him in the past, and he still doesn't use it. Why?
"My business doesn't use Mozilla. I can't use something my business doesn't use."
Same deal with OpenOffice. Nobody else is using it, why should he?
Joe User is just being fooled by Microsoft FUD when it comes to Open-Source. What the open-source community needs is some central point for Microsoft-FUD-dispelling. Just a (professional looking) site that answers Linux questions.
WANTED: Multinational corporation interested in committing suicide and satisyfing my life-long curiosity about cannablism.
Are you a multinational corporation generating at least $60 billion in revenue each year? Are you feeling a bit down? If any of these things describe you...
* Governmental agency forced you to agree to limits on business practices
* Governmental agency fined you $500 million
* Competitor literally took $2 billion of your hard-earned cash
* Your product has zero-dollar marginal costs, and competitors are pushing the street-prices down to zero-dollars.
Then you might want to consider suicide. If you do decide on suicide, please help me fulfill a life-long dream: eating another multinational corporation.
I am your average multinational corporation, netting $125 billion in revenue each year and ranked 32nd on the Fortune 100. For a long time, I've salivated at the thought of consuming another multinational corporation, but I've always been too afraid to act on it because killing a multinational corporation could be illegal in some jurisdictions (e.g. Delaware, where I'm incorporated).
I actually don't want to kill another multinational. I just want to eat one. So, if you're feeling down, please realize that your liberation could make me happy. Before committing suicide, contact me with relevent information about your incorporated status and your assets.
Take a look at this business plan:
1. Write a software product that can't compete because Microsoft are abusing their monopoly
2. Send in the lawyers and keep fighting until you get offed a nice big payoff
3. Profit
In essence, that's what Sun just did.
The problem for Microsoft is that OSS makes the cost of step 1 tend towards $0, and precedents and case law are sending the cost of step 2 in that direction too.
So, what's stopping you?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Sorry, but I SO disagree. You said:
In every one of these cases they caught up before the rest of the market could do anything about them.
In these cases, other people HAD the market. Nobody had to catch up except MS, and they did, and then used their OS monopoly to turn these products into defacto standards by including them for free with the OS while the competition was still selling their products with no OS to package it with.
Linux really needs to take advantage of the delay in Longhorn and use that to really do their best to produce something better and easier to use. And it's going to have to be better enough to provide people with a really compelling reason to change their desktops.
Honestly, here's one idea. And it's not an easy one, but someone ought to come up with the next "killer app" and do it for Linux. Do it non-open source so it can't be easily ported to Windows. It should be released free, but a Windows version shouldn't exist, at least not soon. Maybe the "killer app," whatever it is, could be compelling enough to get people to switch to Linux.
Like I said, not an easy one, but it's an idea.
I'm not only a compiler user - I'm a compiler writer - and Cringley's comments about the naivete of my kind are not entirely off the mark.
However, he neglects to mention that Linux has powerful allies: China, Japan, and a legion of lesser developed countries who will strongly resist Microsoft imperialism. Hope lies with them.
MS got to be market dominant (which is NOT a true monopoly) by making genuinely good programs
That's debatable. Some of it might have had to do with Word/Excel/VbDos and other MS programs being preferred by users, but I doubt that was the whole story - in the MS-DOS days there was still a lot of competition in these areas, some very strong and obviously preferred by users (eg, WordPerfect). I don't know if you are aware of the extent of Microsoft's underhanded tactics, which goes way back to the company's first days.
MS Basic was ripped off from Dec Labs (Gates worked as an intern there), Gates used his uncle's position on the IBM board of directors to wrangle a deal for MS DOS (originally Q-DOS, bought by Microsoft from another company, called Seattle Software Products), and from there they've tightened their grip on the desktop market ever since. There is abundant documentation of their illegal tactics used against the makers of DR-DOS (Digital Research DOS), their illegal tactics that basically force OEMs to accept only Microsoft, and their illegal tactics forcing against competing products such as Netscape, Java, etc. Capitalism is one thing, but what Microsoft have done is not right. The sad thing is, although these are all proven facts, even Governments seem to scared to punish Microsoft with anything more than a (relative to Microsoft) slap on the wrist, because Microsoft has become such a powerful entity.
I apologise in advance.. this is going to be long ;-)
;-) ) in that people want something that is easy to use. But the thing is that microsoft *defines* what is easy to use.
I think Mr Cringely has a clear view of things.. let me respond to some of the posts here (if I come over a bit opinionated.. please forgive me and put it down to my being an old and bitter IT hack..)
Jin Wicked is quiet right in what she says (that girls got sticking power.. I can remember her being lambasted by slashdotters over something.. but she's still here!
People are educated that the way microsoft products work is how computers work. Anything different is "unfriendly". I work in industrial automation. Many people who work in factories and warehouses cannot handle gui interfaces. The find them too complex. They want to type stuff in all the time! However.. these people are not regular computer users, hence the standard for gui interfaces is defined by office workers all trained that microsoft office is how computers work.
Hence.. anything that is going to compete with ms is going to have to follow the ms look and feel slavishly.. it doesnt matter if doing things in a new funky way is better.. people wont take the time to learn it. They will want to stick with what they know and what they know is microsoft.
But its not just the investment in learning that people have made.. its also.. as Jin points out.. the investments in software. Companies in particular own large amounts of expensive software that runs under ms. If an 'alternative' platform cannot run this software just as well as MS can.. then they arent interested.
People speak of security. I see someone saying that unless longhorn is secure out of the box (it wont be) then microsoft is in trouble. You are wrong. I wish it were so.. but no-one cares about security. No one understands security. Oh.. I'm sure everyone posting and reading on slashdot does. But we are a tiny elite people (an I.. for one.. have always wanted to be part of a tiny elite). Out in the workaday world most people do not know what slashdot is. Many dont really know what linux is and even fewer understand security. For them computers are magic, pure and simple, and I'm not just talking about mom and pop home users here. I'm talking about CORPORATE IT MANAGERS. Of the companies we deal with most have it departments full of 'point and click' it personel. These people might have an MSCE to their name.. but most of their knowledge comes from reading 'PcPlus'. They simply do not understand computers.. but they do so more than the rest of the company, and in the land of the blind..
These people care not one whit about security.. so long as nothing too disasterous happens to their network (and you know.. the amazing thing is.. most of them get away with it.. oh yes, they get hit by worms and viruses frequently.. but they always seem to recover). And as for their unencrypted WiFi networks.. dont get me started.
When longhorn comes out the issues of 'is it pretty' or 'does it have funky features' are vastly more important to its sales than 'is it secure'. People are quite happily using the monstrously insecure MS operating systems currently available.. why should they suddenly start caring with longhorn?
When longhorn comes out companies will be told that their current OS's are no longer supported.. and will race to upgrade to longhorn, as they will have no clear alternative upgrade path available. Their whole way of working will be so based around MS (viruses and all) that they will be quite unable to build an alternative infrastructure.. and they wont have the time anyway, they have a business to run dont forget. Home users may be more reticent.. but the big thing in the home market seems to be games.. and when you upgrade your computer to play the latest games, then you will also get longhorn pre-installed on it.
I see people talking about apple. I dont know if this is because I'm in the UK and things are diffre
One way to obviate the MS monopoly is for someone to develop a system that supports fully portable executables. Java is clearly too slow for this purpose, and as an assembly coder I would argue against any JIT system. It would have to compile at installation so that sufficient time can be spent, be encrypted to make reverse engineering more difficult, and contain tags for high-speed routines so that the compiler can spend time only where it gives the most performance. Obviously high level wrappers would have to be used for OS specific functionality. OpenGL would make sense for the 3D graphics end of things.
Microsoft got its market share because (a) Bill Gates had better foresight than IBM about the potential of the PC market (b) Bill Gates and his mother wrote a contract (for MS-DOS, which of course at that time didn't exist) that outsmarted all of IBM's team of super-lawyers and allowed Gates to take advantage of point a.
A very very smart thing to do I will grant you. But nothing Microsoft produced was "better" than its competition until the 2nd or 3rd version of Excel for Windows, and not much since (compare Netware 4.11 to Microsoft's current F&P offerings for example). All of Microsoft's success has been based on that MS-DOS tax, leived with the assistance of IBM and now enforced by the network effect.
Microsoft has been found to be an abusive monopoly by a United States Federal Court, affirmed by the Court of Appeals and review denied by the Supreme Court. I therefore must disagee with this statementsPh
The people who run corporations have principles. They also have an obligation to make money.
The people who own corporations have principles. They also have some money, and want more. If the corporation is publicly traded, it will be owned by other corporations. Again, the ow ning corporations would have no principals.
Two external factors contribute to the principals of a corporation: good will and the law. 'Good will' is the value of the reputation of a company. The law defines specific penalties for specific actions.
A corporation will take a repugnant action when the expected return exceeds the diluted princ ipals of the owners and managers, the perceived cost to good will, any opportunity cost, and the expected legal penalty.
The opportunity cost of getting out of a legal battle is usually negative. Settlement, even with Microsoft, can be worth it.Well, I'd like to agree with you, but nearly everything you could do could be ported if the geek out there wants to do it. Case in point, the GIMP. The gimp was ported so well that you don't even need a X server (UNLIKE the Mac OS X Port). It waas ported because the negative scanner that the main developer owned was not supported under Linux (Minolta Dimage). The only way that Linux can compete is if IBM or some big, powerful OEM starts showing new users what Linux can do for the, Essentially, a distro of Linux has to be made very similarly to the way Mac OS X is made. Do that, and I bet the new users would go for it.
Gorkman
I have to comment on your defense of Corporations.
Seems that your understanding of the difference between a Citizen and a Corporation, and why the differences are important is kinda weak..
FACT #1: Corporations are ARTIFICIAL LEGAL CREATIONS. As such, they do NOT have the rights of Citizens, they merely enjoy benefits GRANTED by The People (via the Legislature, of course).
FACT #2: When applying to the State for Incorporation, they PROMISE (as a condition of their very existance) to act in good faith and to abide by all of our rules.
So it's more like:
"Who the fuck to you think you ARE"? "KNEEL BEFORE YOUR LORD ELSE FACE JUDICIAL DISSOLUTION, 'Corporation'!", he spat contemptuously.
Some Anti-Corporate types just want them to remember their place. They ain't people. Stop treating them like they are.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
There would be no linux desktop issue if they hadn't been so successful.
Jeoin
MS got to be market dominant (which is NOT a true monopoly) by making genuinely good programs. For a business-person's definition of good, that is. They work well enough, their cost is reasonable compared to their utility, their faults are known and can be planned around, and the qualified user pool is huge.
Circular reasoning. How did the user pool grow huge unless they already had a monopoly? They cut deals to preload DOS and Windows on computers. All computers. Monopoly.
They hold market dominance solely because it would be uneconomic -- wastefully expensive -- for anyone to replace them.
A total lie. Ecomomics thrive on competition. Monopolies stifle competition and hurts the economy.
The theories of the anti-corp types would see all success dragged low, deliberate waste foisted upon the productive in the name of "fairness", and the result would be economic ruin.
We're not anti-corp, we're anti-monopoly. We'd like to see all success promoted, not only Bill Gates'. If someone else sets up shop, innovates and provides a service that in a working economic system would create prosperity and success, Microsoft either scares them off or buys them out. There are numerous examples of this. Check out Go for one of the most glaring ones - they saw an opportunity to innovate -- Microsoft responded by creating a similar vaporware product, spread FUD and drive them out of the market. The economic value that would have resulted from Go prospering, creating unique customer value and success was wasted . Deliberately wasted by none other than Bill Gates himself. IBM used to be the big bad boy, but they learned how to behave responsibly in the marketplace and play by the rules. Why can't Microsoft?
Microsoft is a monopoly. They own the desktop.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Well there is a very simple way to get rid of the MS monopoly once and for all ...(door knocks) hang on wait a minute while I answer the door... ....yes Mr Gates sir, I'd love a research position paying 200,000 dollars a year, based anywhere I'd like? OK then.
Anyway, what was I saying...Oh err never mind.
...it may take several centuries but one day, Microsoft will be gone. There's still hope for our children's children, or maybe our children's children's children's children, or.....
"That is nearly 2 dollars for every man and woman on this planet, or 30 dollars for every American."
But it is almost nothing for the average Microsoft small investor.
Thanks to all the stock options of the past, Microsoft has billions of shares outstanding, and I mean billions with a "b". You can look it up in Yahoo finance. This means that Microsoft's cash per share is not impressive even while the absolute amount is intimidating. It also means that Microsoft cannot ever pay a large dividend PER SHARE, and if they did most of it would go to Microsoft employees, past and present, thanks to all of those options.
Again, remember how investors think. Absolute numbers are not impressive, per share values are everything! Beating the market is very important to investors but it is obvious that you can't beat the market if you ARE the market and Microsoft is practically the whole high-tech industry. Growth of a company is important, especially to American investors who have been oversold on the idea, but how can a company grow if it already has nearly 100 per cent market share?
Just ask yourself, "Yes Microsoft, but what have you done for us lately? What could you do for us, even if you wanted to?!".
>>4. Microsoft ignoring wireless, thin clients, etc.
Ignoring Wireless? They built it in to Windows XP. How long before that could their have been "ignoring" it? Every wireless vendor ever (except Apple) has released Windows support for their products. And Microsoft has had their own thin client product since the mid-90's.
The parent poster probably wanted to point to they ignorance over mobile wireless solutions. Never wondered why you need a thirdparty program to make use of bluetooth under Windows? Especialy since he also mentions thin clients etc.
Under basicly every other networked OS you can use the same computer simulatiously via remote login. (Yes yes, there are products and hacks that add that to Windows NT/2k/XP too)
Microsoft doesn't want people to see their PC+Windows as a center to their computer system, they want full blown Windows on every device. Why else didn't they promote their wireless remote-desktop handheld LCDs more?
"MS got to be market dominant (which is NOT a true monopoly) by making genuinely good programs."
False. Microsoft gained such enormous power by using both legal and illegal (hard to prove though in some cases) methods. Simple question, why is it that when you buy a computer from Dell, Gateway, or some of the other major brands that you can not get the system without a Microsoft operating system? Need I say more to show monopolistic dominance? No, they are not a 100% complete monopoly, but their control of the market of consumer operating systems is far too great to be considdered anything else but a monopoly.
"Wasted money can't be invested. Investment benefits everybody, by increasing opportunity. Investment in infrastructure is the reason you have a roof over your head instead of a cave. The theories of the anti-corp types would see all success dragged low, deliberate waste foisted upon the productive in the name of "fairness", and the result would be economic ruin. As it always has been in any country or group that embraced envy as a moral."
Did you learn economics from small phrases you heard on the side of cereal boxes? What are these theories of anti-corporate types? Problem is, no person can say for certain what any other system than the one we have now would produce. One thing is certain though, our current system is neither perfect nor sustainable for too much longer. We will see many consequences in the future to come as the system we now have in place begins to show its really ugly side. Envy? Do you REALLY believe that is the reason people are attacking Microsoft? You simplified this entire thing down to envy? So do we all envy Enron or SCO? Do we envy Martha Stewart? Is that why she is in court right now, fighting all the people envious of her?
Question everything.
Now wait just a second...... aren't predictions like this easy to make? After Microsoft goes down, you can say "Look! They had 40 gazillion dollars! Obviously it's their fault... they should have seen this coming!"
Furthermore, nothing lasts forever (I dare you to find a company that has stood since the days of the Romans). _nothing_ Microsoft will die, either because of themselves, a market change, an asteroid, the outlawing of electricty, the rise of the machines (all Bill Gates look-a-likes), or some other thing that none of us can predict.
Where is the news?
(Disclaimer: I'm not the grandparent AC)
Are you suggesting that Linux is perfectly secure out of the box? You obviously have not studied computer science or software engineering, otherwise you would know that there is no way to prevent this kind of stuff for any OS, your blessed Linux crap included.
The whole UNIX design and mentality sets a higher security baseline compared to Windows. Of course, many of the problems in recent Windows versions (the NT family) has come about because of some software being unable to run with anything but admin privs. Also, there is no use in calling Linux (or anything else) "crap". Keep it civil.
Poor in what way? Linux is more of a hassle to administer than Windows (I know because I just finished a comparison in my lab over several months.) Not sure what performance measurements you have to back up you claim that XP is "hideously slow", but then you would have to actually do some real tests to find that out.
You find Linux hard(er) to admin than Windows, most likely because you've been using Windows for quite some time now, right? A person who's used UNIX for as long as you've used Windows would find Windows very hard to admin, so that argument is somewhat moot. Of course something new and different is going to require learning new things.
On my machine, Windows needs to be pampered constantly. I have to check for spyware and viruses quite often, even though I don't use IE any more. Also, it seems to lock up now whenever I try to change my IP address (which I do quite often, actually), requiring a reboot every time. There is no other fix for this than a reinstall. Sometimes I can handle it by just restarting explorer.exe, but lately it seems that the "Run..." box I can get through the Task Manager locks up my keyboard. And it's not like it's a highly tweaked system either. I've only tweaked a bit with the swap usage, that's all. It's on a 20GB partition of its own, and the only programs installed are a couple of games, Ad-Aware and AVG Antivirus.
I have never had these kinds of problems using Linux or *BSD, and even if there was some problem with TCP/IP in those systems, I could easily replace the offending program (ifconfig) or perhaps update the kernel. But I would never have to resort to a reinstall.
Eat the rich.
You are correct RE free markets & monopolies, although I'm not sure it's a new idea. It pretty much follows from first principles - there are economies of scale that are good (product gets cheaper to produce) and economies of scale that are bad (power to crush competitors), but the landscape is heavily tilted in the same direction by both of these. All else being equal, bigger always wins - although it is exaggerated in the software field where once you've written something the marginal cost of one more copy is basically zero. All else not being equal, big enough still always wins unless it is prevented from engaging in anticompetetive practises.
The logical conclusion (borne out by observation) is that over time "free market" is an oxymoron - anti-trust regulation etc is required for the prevention of otherwise inevitable monopoly formation in any finite market. A true "free market" is a transient phenomenon, someone will always find a way to profit by killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, and if the "free" part isn't restricted enought to prevent it, someone will.
On the other hand, capitalism in the form of regulated ("semi-free?") markets can be a stable, non-monopolistic system, provided the regulations are adapted to give appropriate feedback control.
As opposed to, say, cater to large campaign donors.
Dear Slashdotters,
If we at Microsoft pay each of you 1 million dollars, will you shut up criticizing our products.
Regards.
Bill and Steve,
Microsoft Corp.,
Redmond.
Well he misses the point that MS has learned from their mistakes! They 'missed the boat' a number of times before - (ie. the browser, java/Virtual Machines) but luckily for them they've managed to catch up. They won't make this mistake anymore, they have an answer to each and everyone that could remotely challenge their dominance - they'll embrace and acquire everything software. Just look at what they're doing around the w3c, xml, blogs, ... So look out yahoo, google, real, and others like intuit. You're next on their list. They have answers (like msn) and 53 billions $ war chest. They just did to Sun what they did to corel and others - Put them on life support, bought out their lease on life.
Very soon, as Cringley points out the difference between linux and windows will be price.
why should microsoft die?
they have brought some kind of standards to a computing environment applicable to the masses,
they have a stable company with employment for thousands ( face it, unlike many others they know how to keep a company running and bleeding jobs to cheaper locations - their operations in india are expansions, not job transfers )
they have given the average joe something he can probably take care of himself for most part, instead of wondering about device drivers and screen refresh frequencies.
trust me, not every one is made out to do kernel recompilation. nor would it be fair for one to expect them to.
"Linux needs to do something *groundbreaking* that Windows doesn't"
It already does something groundbreaking, compared to Windows. It's free and open source. The more promiscuous products in a market win out over the less promiscuous, and Linux is a slut compared to Windows.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Cringley can't see the forest for the trees.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Microsoft, when commiting suicide, if you slit your wrists, remember it is "Down the street, not across it" /gets to make this comment because I have slit my wrists and am always severly depressed. It really sucks being a paranoid android, I tell you.... A brain the size of a world....
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
If Governments start to stop M$ from selling their products in their regions.
If M$ was found guilty of anti-competitive practices in the US, and was then told they would not be allowed to sell (or giveaway, distribute in any way) any of their products for five years, imagine what chaos would develop.
What survived would be M$ in name only.
The only way we're going to break up something like M$, or any a cash bloated behemoth (remember Unsafe at Any Speed ), is when something really B-A-D happens; like people dying as a direct result of using it; as if the /0 error had happened while the ship was under fire from terrorists...
Until then... Learn to cope with the beast.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Like in our own country, there's a little project called Skolelinux (School Linux). In itself it is nothing, it's so far below MS's radar it's not even funny. But there's not one of these projects.
There are countless of them around Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, Africa, North America less the US, and perhaps even a few in the US itself. Why? All the product qualities aside, local spending, local needs, free as in beer and free as in freedom. That in itself has a value compared to lock-in to a US company.
If Microsoft was facing a single company, they would wipe them from the market. Instead they're fighting a million tiny little insects coming at them from every direction, each sucking a little bit of their lifeblood. Against that, even an 800lb gorilla has trouble.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
People would bitch till a client for Windows was released. The creator of the program would get 90% e-mail from people wanting it to work on Windows. The only thing that would make me consider switching to Linux would be a great P2P client with encryption and a massive user database. Sadly Linux doesn't have that large of a user database, so it wouldn't be that great of a P2P client anyhow.
Linux, BSD, all those other OSes need to do one thing. Force Microsoft in court to be called a monopoly and be allowed to compete by using technology that would make using Windows programs usable in Linux. I hear WINE does this but it isn't perfect. It needs to perfectly replicate Windows without infringing, a daunting feat to say the least.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
I think its pretty downright stupid to want Microsoft to collapse. People who put forth this idea need to have their heads examined.
/.
Open source is not in any position to compete in the marketplace simply because it is not ready. Quit showing immaturity by wishing Microsoft to fail, bringing them down isn't going to make Open source or free software any better.
You want to beat Microsoft, fine, quit making neat things and start making real applications that do what users want and not what geeks want. Users are the primary market and Microsoft knows exactly how to cater to them.
The OS community is a pretty nice group but you would never know that from reading
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Linux may not be the answer. But Linux is the garage from which the answer will come. Skill, luck, imagination, and business sense will combine in some currently unknown way to slap MS down to the second-rate position it deserves. Cringely used to wax nostalgic about nerds in garages. Well Bob, grab Knoppix, and take a look at what's going on in the garage.
Force Microsoft in court to be called a monopoly
You do remember the whole anti-trust trial right? They were declarded a monopoly, they just didn't get a very significant punishment for it.
Those drugs take a lot of time and money to research, test, get FDA approval, and market. Thus the reason they cost more.
Rather than try to bring Microsoft to its knees so that others can compete, why don't we put more effort into actually creating competition?
I think Bill Gates himself has proven that it only takes someone in a garage with a damn good idea...
Ha ha ha ha ha... I haven't laughed so hard in a long, long time... Phew. Yes indeed, Bill Gates himself showed it only takes one guy in a garage with a damn good idea... and one other guy to bilk him out of it and liscense it to IBM.
When faced with an overwhelmingly superior opponent, you don't face them head on. You destroy their supply trains, you attack their soft targets and when they try to strike back, you are never, ever where they think you are.
This pretty much describes how free software in general works in the market, it's very much guerilla business. Nothing else survives against MS, not Netscape, not Real and not any company who think they can stand up in front of them and try to make a profit.
When it comes to law suits, Microsoft have by giving Sun 2 billion dollars, opened the gates to more such law suits. A billion here, a billion there and suddenly 50 billion dollars doesn't look like so much.
The sharks are circling and the way Microsoft will die is by a thousand bites.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The home user doesn't figure worth a crap in M$ strategy or in their monopolistic behavior. All that stuff is just added to the long litany of crap they put up with at the office on a daily basis.(1)
It will take major corporations deserting to make any dent in Redmond's unethical behavior. And that will only happen when they see the $ benefits.
The ideology in a corporation starts at the top. We just happen to have the bad luck of a capo or a consiglieri in the mafia.
1) I "almost" worked with/for somebody who'se PC was a veritable virulence factory. There were live examples of almost every [expletive deleted] virus on her desktop. She didn't even know that anti-wirus software had to be installed. That it wasn't enough to just go and buy a CD-ROM...
And this was NOT just some bovine piece of fluff with a room temperature IQ. But computers were indistinguishable from magic. (Nothing to see. Nothing tactile to grab onto.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
You could write a web browser... and sell it to them.
You could write a flight simulator... and sell it to them.
You could write a source control system... and sell it to them.
Has Microsoft ever written anything in-house?
Nowadays they've bought up the brains (e.g. herb sutter) and the brawn (e.g. anders hejlsberg) of the computer industry, but not much has come out of that yet (perhaps soon) apart from C#.
From the point of view of a developer, coming up with a good idea is great, if you get a good deal from them when you eventually sell out.
I thought Cancer had the potential for a terminal ending.
Takes longer than most suicides but the results the same.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
>>Linux needs to do something *groundbreaking* that Windows doesn't, that Microsoft can't suddenly copy, *and* that the public actually care about.
LiveCDs sort of do this. Msft doesn't have anything to compare. Maybe the public doesn't care that much (until they boot from their hdds) but a step in the right direction.
>>Never wondered why you need a thirdparty program to make use of bluetooth under Windows? Especialy since he also mentions thin clients etc.
Microsoft was pretty explicit that the blew off Bluetooth because it wasn't ready, and they were right. What does that have to do with thin clients? Thin clients use protocols like RDP, which Microsoft brought out, I believe, around
'96 or so. Yes, they were later than Citrix, but they were relatively early in the industry and they have been leaders in thin client products.
>>Under basicly every other networked OS you can use the same computer simulatiously via remote login. (Yes yes, there are products and hacks that add that to Windows NT/2k/XP too)
Obviously they see this as a server option, since they've supported it there in every version since NT4. You can disagree with that policy, but the only connection it has to what the poster said was with respect to thin clients, and Microsoft has a long history of thin client support. I'm writing this on a Windows-based thin client right now.
Cringley wants to end on a good note by suggesting that somewhere along the line something will happen and Microsoft will be too large to compete with some probably tiny but very agile rival.
That won't happen for the very reasons he spends most of the article enumerating. MS is hugely powerful at this point. MS is vastly wealthy. As Cringely probably correctly notes: MS can compete for a period of *YEARS* with others while making absolutely zero profit. Just let that one sink in a moment.
When thinking about these issues people make some common mistakes.
One of them is to mistakenly identify a corporation with having the exact same sorts of rights as do natural persons - and they don't! Corporations are fictitious persons that are legally created entities with specific benefits and obligations - those benefits and obligations are whatever we as a body politic write into the laws governing the creation of corporations. If any single corporation gets to a point where its practices are so anticompetitive and monopolistic that nothing but control after control must be implemented to stop it - then so be it. The corporation is not a natural person, we can do that.
The other mistake is to think that a corporate entity like Microsoft can be challenged by a few weirdo geniuses in a garage somewhere building some kind of "MS-killing" product. That won't happen either. Why not? Look at the history of Apple computers - that seemingly small and nimble rival has failed to take away from MS any significant market share. I'm not knocking Apple - to the contrary, I'm saying they make an objectively better product. But that doesn't matter. Read it again, because that's the big problem right there: it doesn't matter that a competitor has already produced a machine that is better! [N.B. This is a possibly subjective argument because lots of people will now argue issues like Apple's price point, whether it really is better, etc.] Microsoft's monopoly status has largely prevented Apple from gaining market share (and thereby also dropping its prices because of what is recovered by volume sales, putting huge profits into further innovation, etc).
A third problem is that people always make the error of thinking that large monopolistic corporations are necessary for technological advancment. Obviously, one could write a book about this subject, but in the main I'd suggest that the claim is simply false. Many things move forward incrementally because of research in numerous fields. Who might have suspected that Xerox might be investigating revolutionary ideas in computer technologies (as related to photocopy machines??!!!) but that those ideas could best be exploited by a then relatively small company called Apple Computers. Don't forget that *ONE* scientist had a dream about the structure of DNA. Sometimes all you need is one Einstein to keep moving things forward for a really long time - an no team of really bright physicists equals one Einstein.
Someone else has already made a comparison to Walmart, but it's worth repeating. These huge monopolies have more political pull and economic gravity than do most governments (amongst which I would personally include that tiny one we call the United States). To ignore that fact is supreme folly. We'll all end up working for corporations as our literal masters if we are not careful.
We have to take these HUGE corporate players out of the game, not just bench them or pretend they even give a shit about some weeny penalty they may have to pay. The way the business game works now is that the penalties are worked into the price of doing business any way they damn well please. Once you understand that, you will get the problem.
OK, better phrased: Free operating systems need to do something visibly groudbreaking to the non-technical user that Windows doesn't.
Why wish that on anybody?
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
What did you expect from a company? Did you expect that they will fight for freedom? As far as I know a company's primary goal is to make their shareholders rich. Nothing more. This is very simple isn't it?
So it is very naive to think they would fight for the right thing. The only one that can do that is you! Obviously not alone but all together can do that.
The open source project was very successful 'til now to fight companies like Microsoft or SUN or IBM. That's why IBM and SUN joined the open source movement. Because they startet to loose customers to open source.
It might happen that open source is stopped by patents for a while. But even that kind of attack won't break the movement.
Only in a world where all ideas are owned by a few companies, open source cannot survieve. But it is up to us to fight for our freedom.
They work well enough
Debatable.
their cost is reasonable compared to their utility
Debatable.
their faults are known and can be planned around
False.
and the qualified user pool is huge.
Circular.
..and I think we all know what kind of track record *those* people have throughout history...
If you don't like Microsoft now and are afraid of Linux's learning curve, but a Macintosh now, and "upgrade" to Linux when it's ready for your needs. The Mac has all the apps you're likely to need from Windows, and it's extremely well put together. The Unix underpinnings will introduce you to stability and more advanced free apps so that when Linux finally catches up, it will be an easy transition. Linux also runs marvellously on Apple hardware, since it's all nicely standardized.
All that has been said before about windows and the point and click / incredible ease of use is the reason windows will not die. Compatibility "killed" Apple(yes Imac brought them back from the dead, but as of now their expansion has halted) because Apple attempted to become a total monopoly and failed. By total monopoly I mean computer/software all in one. The reason Windows succeeded isn't because it was more user friendly in the beginning (think pre Windows 3.1) but because the other computing companies (intel, HP, IBM, Compaq, etc...) supported them because it represented the only alternative to Apple. Windows as it stands is the only reason these companies still exist today is because Windows used them as a platform. Linux is a great OS, its customizable (as well as extremely powerful), solid, and best of all free. But its "techiness" absolutely stops its expansion. I have used linux, i know that for most of my software needs I can find an opensource program that suits me. But its almost impossible to use if u don't know what to do. Imagine trying to drive a car without ever seeing one before. Most people will never have the bare knowledge to even load Linux without a nice GUI loader. And they don't want to learn. Its as simple as that.
How can Microsoft continue to succeed when 90% of the best minds in the world understand them, and hence loathe them? Evolutionary pressure alone should undo Microsoft.
Let me remind you all of East Indian Company:
It was a British company with the unusual distinction of ruling an entire country. It saw its birth 31. December 1600. It ruled the India over 200 years. It was dissolved 1856 by the Crown, which took over the control of the India. I think that the size and the power of the East Indian Company puts Microsoft in shame.
History has not ended. Microsoft will die eventually. If you don't belive me, just think of the East Indian Company and its fate.
They simply have to be cheaper and more available. I like the term "promiscuous" to describe it.
Open Office is a good example. It's *so* easy to just point people to OO. Every single person I have mentioned Open Office to has gone "Oooh", then downloaded it and installed it. Sure, they're still running it on Windows... For now...
Each one of those people will now, never buy a copy of MS Office. It's *Microsoft* who have to produce something groundbreaking to take market share back from what is free software, not the other way around.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Its because its *just fucking computers*. Jesus christ, you people have the most warped sense of perspective ever. Get a grip. MS is just some company, about as interesting as IKEA, and nobody gives a shit but trainspotter nerds, who somehow think it the most important thing int he universe. What bullshit.
Looks can be deceiving, I didn't picture you as much of a slashdot reader.
I like the part of the ceo and how microsoft gave them free software and now everybody has to upgrade.
I wish ceo's would get a real conscious and do what is right for the company and not for themselves
I mean god dam how fancy do your documents have to be. It should be the content and not the way it is presented.
This is the whole problem right here with the IT industry. I just read a document from my CIO but I had to use word to view it - nothing in there had needed word - this could of been a text document and gotten the same message accross.
This is the whole problem with IT - why the fuck is the head of an IT organization using a goddam proprietary format to send a message to the whole company.
Because they are selfish pricks and don't care about anything except them fucking selves.
They say they care about the company but all they care about is keeping it running for their fucking stock options.
Sorry if I sound a little rough but I am tired of political bullshit - nobody cares about the company and the employees anymore. All they want to do is make deals with companies like mirosoft so they can say they spent so much money in a year and it looks good on their resumes. Then they go destroy another company and leave the employees to clean the shit they left behind.
... how about an audio installation? It's a gimmick, but might be nice. The installer asks the questions and gives a few potential answers for you to pick from -say Jin's frustrations with making dualboot work. Just that might help I think.
Besides that, and it's an oft observed and still true deal. it really has to come pre installed on new boxes. OR the law is significantly changed so that boxes are only offered with clean empty disks, and the consumer is forced to make a choice of OS/apps package at the retail level, but I know that will never fly so there's little point to speculate on it. It HAS to come on the box and be visible. ISPs HAVE to say that they "support" linux and be able to do so in terms of getting new customers on the net. Heck, the last place I lived when I went to get net service claimed they didn't "support" Mac! True facts! I told them I was my own support on something like just getting online, to just give me a dial in number and some DNS addys, etc, and I called their help desk,to tell the dude there "look man, this is easy, copy this down,this is what you tell Mac people if you get asked", etc. That actually worked, the ISP (local telco) started "supporting" Mac. And this was in 1999, think about that.
I digress, linux has to come on the machines and work as well as "the big guys" with normal stuff for normal folks. People who have exact specific software requirements will figure out what they need "extra" accordingly. People who just "get a computer" need the choice directly at the retail level, and it better work and not be hidden away in the back room, it has to be upfront along with all the other stuff. "computer" with MS =X, same computer -X but + linux = 100$ cheaper, staring them right in the face. The first linux OS should be free to them or they won't care, few people will (at this point in time) bother with it unless it's free, easy, relatively painless, and they aren't forced to "give up" their accumulated windows knowledge. That dual boot option is critical now for most people, they honestly do NOT want to bork their machines that they finally understand well enough to struggle by with. It has to be that significant to people or they won't make the switch. First time I made a dual boot I literally unplugged the windows hard drive and tried Linux on a spare drive. Of course, I didn't have real dual boot then, but I got to play with it to see if I liked it well enough to persue. Then I did it again with both drives plugged in. Even then I was still concerned I was going to really mess it up, because it's a little screwy for a newbie. There were too many options at first, all I wanted was a dang button to click, " do you want linux on this hard drive over here, and windows to stay on the hard drive over here where it already is?' Yes/no binary would have been psychologically easier. Of course I went ahead and screwed around with it a lot, using different swap sizes, putting it here, no there, etc until I was happy with it, but I re installed everything sever times in a rtow before I got cvomfortable with it. Joe paycheck ain't gonna be that patient usually. One or the other or a real easy way to dual boot, using one drive or two drives. I know initially I didn't want to lose my ability to have a "computer" that ran *at all*. It's a valid concern that I think most people would have when contemplating "the big switch".
That's for joe paycheck. The business world knows about linux now, and Mac and yada yada. That nut gets cracked by this "bottom line" thing they always talk about, and there it's happening, as much as it will. Two different things there, similar, but more different than not.
I have some so called principles I'm looking to trade for 1.95 billion.
I believe that the reason that Apple is still around is mainly to do with their control over their own hardware, and as the article points out the real treat to Microsoft will never be a software-only thing.
Most likely a few years in the future some chinees firms will think of a cheap and useful mobile gizmo, which will represent for many people all they really need. Think collaboration tool. Apple will make a usable version and others will see it and try to do the same (like always?).
Because most business data and applications are fast becoming web based (the new word for good old client-server) the desktop will become less important and after a while people will not upgrade their desktops anymore but buy in to the new market.
Microsoft will keep dominating the desktop market forever... it's just that the desktop market will not last very long and will be replaced in the next decade. The desktop is irrelevant.
If Microsoft is swift they will still be around, taking a page out of Apples book and produce a beter usable devices and such. Apple will most likely hang on and continue to lead in design and innovation; just not in market share.
The future is not the desktop; its tabs, pads, and boards. Even Microsoft knows that.
What I cannot create, I do not understand
MS got to be market dominant (which is NOT a true monopoly) by making genuinely good programs
Out of curosity, how old are you, and how long have you been using small / personal computers?
Oh, I'd say he's about 49 years old and has been using personal computers since 1981.
The only people who deny that Microsoft is a monopoly are Microsoft itself or its apologists. You can make the argument that the web browser SHOULD be part of the OS - after all, that's what Netscape was thinking at one point, to build a platform on the browser, and Mozilla has a good start in that direction - and you can make arguments against a number of the other cases that lead to the monopoly judgment; but you can't dismiss them all. Microsoft is a monopoly which has illegally leveraged that monopoly to drive competition out of most of the markets they've targeted. Those are the findings of fact produced by Penfield Jackson, a judge who was cherry-picked by MS after they claimed the previous judge, Daniel Sporkin, was biased against them; and then, of course, when Jackson judge ordered a break-up, Microsoft successfully got him dismissed for defending his ruling before the pro-Microsoft business press, helping Microsoft to stall the case long enough for a pro-MS administration to come in and pull the prosecution's fangs - as Jackson actually predicted (see the com.com link above)!
If the monopoly ruling had been used to enforce the imposition of standard formats for a handful of document types, to force MS to release their flagship applications for competing platforms, or best of all to divorce the applications product line from the platform product line via a break-up, we might see for all aspects of computing a degree of integration similar to what the web provides (common protocols that promote and ensure interoperability). Instead, we have hydraulic despotism - the entire world economy is beholden to Bill Gates' whims, because the only way a company can interoperate effectively with its corporate partners is through Microsoft on the desktop, and Microsoft on the desktop doesn't interoperate well with anything other than Microsoft on the network, except where Microsoft's competitors have made heroic efforts toward interoperability.
It's also possible that the world is flat. Then you take your head out of your ass.
Ignorance is not strength. The original poster is only wrong about versions. XP's security failures have already nailed Microsoft. It's taking time for people to notice the plethora of free and superior alternatives, but the examples have been made and the rush away from M$ crap is on. Microsoft can milk a few more contracts from big dumb companies and government agencies, but even that will fail them soon. Longhorn is all vapor and it will be cheaper for companies to use free software AND finish paying M$ contracts than it will for them to continue on with M$ software. Companies that have already dumped M$ will enjoy a considerable IT cost advantage over those blowing money on M$ band-aids. As Microsoft's money dries up, they will no longer be able to pressure ISPs into stupid port block policies nor will they be required. Microsoft has already killed itself, they are just too stupid to know it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Where did this come from? TCP/IP on Windows NT (starting in 92 at least) was a core part of the OS. I specifically remember that TCP/IP for Win 3.x was free. WTF are you talking about?
Anyone remember when NT was released? My recollection of 92 is that OS/2 was significant in the PC multi-tasking world (though Desqview was dominate), and NT wasn't released until latter, but I don't recall when. In any case 3.1 never had TCP/IP from microsoft. FTP software, humminbird, and several others had WinSock clients that you could use if you wanted TCP/IP, but they typically charged $79.99. (Trumpet had the home market, IIRC they were shareware)
Back when this could possibly have been true the corporate standards on Windows were cc:Mail and Netware-based products. Eudora and Pegasus have never actually had any meaningful market share.
Microsoft mail was big too. You paid big bucks if you wanted to connect any of them to the internet though. Not that most companies cared about the internet yet. There were only a couple years between exchange and outlook where people cared about the internet.
The public already knows the alternatives to monopolies.
As proof, tell someone, "I have great news. In order to serve you better, all car manufactures have merged and will be now produce one standard car that have only one colour and one standard set of features."
Or even better, "I have great news. In order to serve you better, all restaurants have merged and will now be called Taco Bell. There will only be one food so you don't have to worry about choosing."
-----
JoLo-Cartman "I've got a hunger only tacos can stop. I know exactly what I ordered. Three tacos two tostadas and a soda pop."
Your analysis does not take free software into account. The dismal scenerio you predict has already happened to commercial software. The jobs are gone and they won't be back. Nor can that offshore work really compete with Microsoft because they are offshoring too. Free software is blissfully free of all that nonsense, has already out innovated Microsoft and will supplant them entirely. The "Netscape Effect" won't do anything bad to KDE or Mozilla.
There will always be jobs making software work for people and money will be made. The difference is that you won't be able to screw your customers with silly EULAs, product lock-ins and all that other badness. The money will be right where it belongs, meeting individual company and private needs.
This post is brought to you by Konqueror 3.2. Assides from tabbed browsing, vastly improved CSS rendering, and sftp drag and drop file browsing, it offers spell checking for web forms such as this one. Even Twitter can spell on Slashdot now. IE might have something to compare in 2006 ... pththfit.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
... because of one supreme court decision that was a huge mistake. the granting of "personhood" to a corporation. the case is US supreme court, santa clara county vs. Southern Pacifici railroad company, 1886, 118 U.S. 394. It sucks, I mean, realy, realy, really bad. I would be a large sum there was a serious cash payoff connected to that case, it's so blatantly skewed and stupid. It allows corporations to get all the benefits of being a "live" human with "born with rights", but it lets them get away with a huge near-uncrackable firewall for accountability for their actions. It is EXTREMELY difficult to get a human being in jail for decisions that a "corporation" makes, fines are hard enough for any proven malfeasance. Whereas with a "private citizen" it's really EASY to get a human being in jail for being a fug-up. Get that one single law changed and Corporate abuse would slow down considerably. They literally get a 99.99% guaranted "get out of jail free" card that no corporate executive or groups of them will ever see the inside of jail no matter how much that corporation abuses a person or another company. It occassionaly happens, but not near often enough, IMO. In my opinion it is in the top 3 or 4 worst decisions that the supreme court ever made in general (miller decision is my pet worst abuse ever, that and the creation of the IRs and income taxes with the fed reserve crap), and it's the top one that lead to monopolies,near monopolies, un accountability, rampant fiscal responsibility abuse, and a seriously bribed and paid-off governmental structure. I can't think of anything else that comes close in that regard.
This blog post in Advogato deals with issues across the pond from MS home - but there are some interesting points about how the Open Source License is just as bogged down in terms of how different interfaces cannot *interoperate*
For instance - "In other words, the Wine team are entitled to write to the Samba team to ask them for their "interface" access points, such as the DCE/RPC and LANMAN and SMB file / print sharing interfaces. The Samba team responds by saying "you can get the code from here". The Wine team responds by saying "the license is incompatible, I cannot use that code". The Samba team responds "sorry, we cannot help you there".
I work in a Pro Audio store, and I'm a script level nerd. I work on Macs, X and 9. I work on PCs with windows. In 2000 I installed a small redhat server that shared 20 gigs of space, and also acted as a firewall and dhcp server.
.deb work in yellowdog? Does emerge work in Fedora? Do you realize how few people can even comprehend why there's a difference, let alone what the differences are?
I have installed and used: Slackware, Redhat, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, and unsuccessfully tried to install yellowdog on an old (and apparently unsupported) Mac clone.
This is the reason I have no problem in saying that the ease of use in Linux is absolutely the reason it isn't popular. People are cheap, and they love free anything, and they'll deal with a lot of headache to save money. A free Linux desktop that was easier to use than windows would be more popular than windows. But there isn't one.
Here's the bottom line:
1. You won't win the desktop until you have a solid GUI platform where a completely encapsulated installer requires ONE COMMAND to begin the install process.
2. You won't win the desktop until you have POLISHED and COMPLETE business applications. QuickBooks, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and the like have absolutely no equal in Linux.
3. For the above to happen, there need to be standards in Linux. It's really that simple. Windows may be bad, but it's consistent. I can write an application that will work in Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP. Will a
If you make Linux better than windows and keep it free, it will become more popular. Just remember that 95% of your audience doesn't give a shit about games, or how fast pieces of backend code work, or how revolutionary it will be for them to have a limitlessly configurable desktop. They're at work. They want to sell things, communicate with their customers, keep track of their finances, stay organized, and then turn the thing off and go home.
I vastly prefer PBS over commercial TV networks too, but do not expect that PBS will ever displace them.
I cannot imagine Scott McNealy giving MS a single line of Solaris source, apart from that necessary to enhance interoperability (which is another component of the deal). And why did you add SCO to the mix - looking for karma from brain-dead moderators, or what?
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
The US gooberment should take over Microsoft on the basis that the entire country, and most of the world could be held to ransom by Gates, if he so decided.
Sadly this may have to wait for the dems.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
I really have to agree with the article, because it's become clear that antitrust measures simply won't work on Microsoft. As an example, look at the old Bell monopoly. In that case, there was a clear, simple way of breaking up the company: geographically. In the case of Microsoft, how would one break it up? Geographically wouldn't work, not in today's globalized world. Breaking it up into OS and applications companies wouldn't work, because both companies would still be juggernauts. And as much as people want, no breakup would require the Windows source code to be opened up, because the government simply doesn't think that way. No, the only way Microsoft will die is by their own hand, thinking they can dictate terms in the computer industry. I sure hope Linux (and the BSDs) are the instrument that causes Microsoft to fall upon its own sword, but I'm not buying Cringely's within-this-decade estimate; Gates is just too savvy to what happened to big companies like IBM to let that happen to his baby. If it's going to happen, it's going to happen after Gates retires at the very earliest.
Fortunately, the open-source communtiy has an advantage Microsoft can't match; sheer collective power. No closed-source company can possibly compete with that forever, so what the open-source community needs to do is to keep plugging away, keep innovating, keep making the projects and products better and better, keep chipping away at the monolith. This community has the speed and maneuverability to be that "faster ship" Cringely refers to. But it's going to take a lot of hard work and a lot of time.
Okay, I made my subject something that would draw people into the comment. Flame me if you wish. Cringly has written a well thought out, thourough article on the state of Microsoft today. I hope he is wrong but suspect that he may be right.
Microsoft is a business, it isn't run by a bunch of geeks, it is run buy a bunch of geeky businessmen who plan for the future. Business is war and cash reserves are ammunition. Microsoft is laying plans for war against all, including open source. It is good business practice.
Would Microsoft be justified in giving away free software to beat open source? Sure, they would be meeting their competition head-on. Even if everything else were equal, Microsoft would probably win because of their PR budget and their name recognition. Open Soure can't win on price alone. Open Source still has to compte in other areas as well. Areas like quality, security, ease of use, availability.
Can Open Souce beat Microsft? Maybe, maybe not. North Vietnam beat the US and that was a David vs. Goliath battle. David beat Goliath. Yes, it can be done. But the battle isn't on cost alone. It is a hearts and minds kind of battle and on that front I'm afraid that Open Source doesn't have much of a market share (yet).
I'm not trying to say that all of this is right or as it should be but I am saying that this is the way that it is. At least today.
I am concerned from a global level that Microsoft has too much power. With so much of the software market they are in a position to dictate how, where, when, and why computers are used.
I don't think this is a good thing and I think that in a sense it constitutes a global security threat. If computing becomes a Microsoft oriented mono-culture, vunerabilities in the software can (and probably will be) exploited by governments, crime syndicates, and even individuals. I'm not talking about worms and viruses here, I'm talking about people seriously interested in destroying an entities economic existance.
If for no other reason, this is a reason enough for people to work against Microsoft's owning the world!
There is another question that needs to be asked. What happens if Microsoft finds that it has reached the limits in software and in order to continue to grow it decided to diversify? We know the kind of machine it is. Perhaps, they would gobble up someone like AMD and go into building computers? Controling the hardware like they control software would allow them to grow into that industry and control it quite quickly. Especially if they made their software run better on their hardware.
Think of what Walmart has done to merchants in many a small town. When Walmart comes to town, family owned merchants (clothiers and hardware stores especially) who have been in the community for generations have simply had to close their doors. The communities don't die but there is less choice and more money leaves the community and enriches a few people in Bentonville AR.
This is the kind of thing that could happen to computing if Microsoft wins. Only it would happen on a global scale. It would mean that Microsoft would be a superpower.
You and your nerdy friends do not equal "More and more people".
Give me break.
Everyone does this. Your kidding yourself if you think otherwise. 2 examples, KDE, and OS-X. Apple is utilizing OS-X to force safari on people wheather they want it or not. The same is said for quicktime. KDE does the same thing with Konquer. Please, stop with the utilizes monopoly crap, its really sad.
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
in the uk, the NHS is the biggest employer. They are considering moving from windows to linux.
The NHS are a run by the government - once linux desktops mature they might start recommending it to schools. If schools start using it, a whole generation will grow up not knowing what Windows is. It could become very common in the UK in the next few decades.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
seeing this as it is, i don't see why we get our collective panties in a twist as to what the rest of the world uses. me, i'm just smug knowing that i can do what the others can do (and probably can do it better and faster) and definetely a lot cheaper. does the 90% have *all* of the following (i mean, do they *all* have *all* of the following):
- a compiler for all imagenable languages? (gcc)
- a sound editor? (audacity)
- office tools (OOo)
- internet suite (mozilla/firefox)
- development libraries for everything ranging from crypto to i18n to what-have-you
- the list would go on and on..
for the 90% of people, to put a system like that together would cost them thousends.So, really, the MS monopoly has just kept my compititors from running a business with a superlow operating cost. hasn't kept me from running my operation on a low operating cost. if that means i'll have to break my web pages to work in IE. hey, small price to pay for that competitive advantage. All i can do is thank MS for spending all their time and money creating a coke-habit for the other 90% and letting me have this edge on them. Thank you MS!!
Seriously folks. Premise #1: PCs do not matter. Premise #2: What monopoly? Premise #2.5 Who cares? Not to be trite, but I am happy that our government is "unequipped" to strip a private enterprise of all its sovereignty. Which is the only "solution" to the supposed problem raised by Cringely. To me, that guy sounds like a wacko inventing a problem so he's got something to write about in his blog. Serious. Premise #3: Just use Linux and tell your family to just use Linux. The rest of the world will catch on eventually. Premise #4: Companies don't commit suicide, people do. Until you've mastered Premises 1 through 4 I don't care what kind of half-formed and twisted ideas you write.
What it is going to boil down to is economics.
As profit margins get tighter and tighter in the PC industry, PC makers will be forced to move to Linux, in order to stay competitive.
It may still be some years off, but I can't see any way that Microsoft escapes the inevitable.
Just as they beat Apple by undercutting them (with an inferior, but "good enough" operating system), so will they be undercut.
IMO, of course.
I'm talking about high schools and (especially) small colleges where budget cutting has become not only a tradition but mandatory. No one is increasing spending on schools right now and that trend will continue.
Does this mean that Open Source software will take over? No, probably not. Linux and OpenOffice will fill niches (we've installed Linux on two of ten machines, OpenOffice on all the machines (along with Office), and had some success) but what will happen is that MS will give away software to schools.
This is already happening at the secondary school level by a quiet agreement. Schools ignore licenses more than they pay attention to them. My school has fourteen unlicensed copies of Windows, thirteen of Office, and a host of other software. We buy one copy and it ends up on all the machines, go figure.
Will Microsoft bust us? I would love it if they did because there simply is no money to buy licences and we would have to move to Linux. But what will happen is that MS will ignore it because most of our kids want Office at home and XP too. That leads to more sales of PCs with licensed, paid for copies of Microsoft software.
In fact, it leads to computers running nothing but MS software.
Still, MS has to give away software to get people using it. Too many places where computers are used by the next generation of software buyers can't afford to buy the software. If MS gives it away, most folks will choose it over Linux and OO.o.
Well, they will unless people like me are in the schools suggesting that it is better on many, many levels to not be tied down to any one software product.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
> Sco get residual license fees, and Linux gets another 10 years to catch up.
More like Linux gets to eat the Windows market after it is finished with Solaris. Merging Windows and Solaris would be such a colossal job so unlikely to succeed, that Linux would just take over while the brilliant people at MS and Sun were banging their heads against assorted walls. Developing the features of Solaris in Windows or vice versa independently in each code base would almost certainly be easier than merging. Nevermind trying to get Sun people to work with Microsoft people.
Either you're too young to have worked in the IT field at that time, or you're a troll. Either way, the moderators are idiots for giving you points. Why is it so often that moderators seem hell-bent on ruining this site?
>TCP/IP on Windows NT (starting in 92 at least) was a core part of the OS.
No it wasn't. I managed about 30 NT servers in 16 locations on a large corporate network, and Microsoft didn't support a single routable protocol for years after NT came-out! We had 30 NT servers without a way of getting any of them to talk unless they were on the same network. We had to keep our old DEC UNIX machines around for about four more years than the Microsoft salesmen convinced us to plan for.
> I specifically remember that TCP/IP for Win 3.x was free.
No it wasn't. Microsoft finally released a free version of TCP/IP for 3.11, but for 3.x, they never did. I worked for an ISP from 95 until late 96, and it was a major hassle to get 3.x connected to the Internet. You had to use third-party tools since at that time Bill Gates didn't think the internet would ever be important. I admire the way he admitted his mistake and got Microsoft to quickly fix that, but they didn't support TCP/IP until very late in the game.
That's the real problem with some people here. They think the only alternative to Windows is Linux, while completely ignoring Apple's offerings, which are focused on ease of use.
Great point.
The reason they stick with Microsoft is that they have no choice. That's the power of a monopoly. They have no choice because the software they need in their work doesn't run on anything else. They have no choice because their employers have mandated that they use Microsoft software. Their employers have no choice because there is very little in the information industry that doesn't in some way involve Microsoft - and once MS software gets a foothold in a business, it metastasizes into every part of the company.
No, Cringley is right: all we can do is hunker down and way for Microsoft to make a fatal error. It won't be for some years - I think Cringley is far too optimistic in saying that it will come within a decade. In the meantime, we who believe in software freedom will have to build our virtual monasteries and wait for dark times to pass. (Yeah, maybe I'm being too apocolyptic, but it's been that kind of day.)
[this
How can anyone take Cringley or PBS seriously? He is actually suggesting all incentive for market success should be eliminated. I'd love to see Cringley present an argument for how this economic model would work. Perhaps we should move to Twinkies as our currency soon after putting a Success Tax of 90% in place. Play some Sim City and see how well this works if you don't understand how disastrous an idea this is.
I usually like controversial people because they at least bring an interesting element to a discussion- but Cringley no longer is in the group that I enjoy. Intellectually, he's wasting everyone's time if he thinks this idea is the "smartest." Chairman Mao is in his glass case, waiting for your next visit, Cringley.
Microsoft's lifespan only ensures that Slashdot will forever be active and that everyone will forever have something to bitch and cry about. Meanwhile we can have "Linux is heading for the desktops!" articles once every month like we do right now.
:)
In other words, its business like usual! That's what we all want!
China won't allow Microsoft or any other foreign company to dominate their markets, especially in technology areas. They will use Microsoft tools/software to develop their own tools, then drive MSFT out.
...the only way out is death or education.
If the other product was so damn good then who the fuck cares if they include it in the OS? No one switches until the competing product starts to suck.
So it really *is* catchup. Sure it's included in the OS but 2 years later the product is finally worth a damn. For example Media Player over RealAudio or Quicktime. It's a no brainer why Media Player is dominant now and it has little to do with it being embedded in the OS.
It's also a recommended download...not a built in one.
1. Arrogance, including manipulation of customers, disdain for torpid judicial processes, etc. This mode misestimates human hubris when pushed.
2. Greed. So Mr. Gates' cash stash is to carry the company through 5 years of zero sales: does he have the buy-in of the stockholders on that? The monoplists of the last century had the great advantage of personal ownership of their enterprises.
3. Self-delusion: believing own truthspeak, e.g. that embracing and expropriating others' innovatons is innovation.
4. Narcissism: the thought that everyone else is a reflection of oneself and thinks like oneself or can be made to so think. E.g., in this case, that all competitors are driven by the same cravings as Microsoft.
5. Egocentrism: the thought that the world revolves around oneself, and all users, students, universities, hardware manufacturers, governments, etc., have no independence but inherently so revolve.
6. Hierarchy: the thought that the whole of society is composed of master/slave power relationships and no equality, independence, or voluntary conferacy can exist.
"Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad."
That the behavior of a company takes significant direction from its CEO. If a new CEO was in charge of microsoft (say if bill gates and steve ballmer were to die tomorrow), then the behavior of the company could change very quickly.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Redmond Washington (AP) - Bill Gates announced today that Microsoft was shutting down. "We just aren't good enough to be this dominant", said Gates. "So as a public service, we are voluntarily going out of business. We suggest that our customers switch to Linux." In other economic news, the unemployment rate for software engineers jumps, Apple increases prices 50%, and the U.S. trade deficit worsens.
"Are you suggesting that Linux is perfectly secure out of the box? You obviously have not studied computer science or software engineering, otherwise you would know that there is no way to prevent this kind of stuff for any OS, your blessed Linux crap included."
Funny, seeing as my computer science degree taught me the opposite.
TCP/IP for Windows NT 3.1 is described in this document
Nothing irritated me more than people who refused to respect my interest in computers, and then many years later ask me questions about the problems theirs was having.
Nowadays only my family gets my help. Everyone else can just suffer they kharmic payback.
Win 3.10 and initially 3.11 did not include TCP/IP, it was an add on with a separate license. Initial pricing for TCP/IP was something in the 100-200 $ per seat range (I even a price list somewhere in my archives). It became free sometimes through the lifetime of 3.11 due to marketing pressure from OS2 Warp which had it included day one.
cc:Mail and Netware-based products. You are right on these as far as larger coprorates are concerned. You are wrong as far as SMBs are concerned. They were Pegasus and Eudora territory and this is what Windows took over before going after the larger fish which had solutions in place.
Ignoring Wireless?. It is also once again several years after the tehcnology went mainstream. 802.11 came out way before XP. MSFT once again ignore it for a while.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
#1: It is there. rpm -Uvh . NVidia installer. Loki Installer... As for Windows, what's that crap when you uninstall?
.... As for Windows, there are *some* applications you can install on Win9x to WinXP. There are a *shitload* that you cannot. Drivers also don't exist for XP for some items, and no Win9x drivers for others.
#2: So people not writing apps for Linux is Linux's fault? If MS actually gave *correct* API information for Win32, then this would not be a problem, since Wine would work.
#3: LSB, POSIX, OpenGL,
Ralising that there are problems with Linux ought to show you that those problems exist in Windows too.
Why doesn't it?
"...there are significant numbers of other cars besides GM..."
No, there are a limited number of car manufacturers. Try starting up a car company, and see how long it takes before you're sent broke by uncompetitive practices. Sure, there are penalties for this kind of behaviour, but the penalties are like a flea bite to a rhino.
"...there are a significant number of other viable merchants besides Wal Mart"
However, where WalMart (and bulk retailers like it) moves in, small business go to the wall, freeing the bulk retailers to charge pretty much whatever thay like.
"...automobiles represent technologies and economic systems that are past mature and on their way to becoming defunct"
Really? I've been hearing that since the 1970's. Its yet to come true, and even if the technology is surpassed the only companies positioned to mass produce the replacements are the existing car manufacturers. Customized short-run production has been promised for years (since the introduction of CAD-CAM systems); it still hasn't happened.
I just wonder if Microsoft will be too successful after Bill Gates and Ballmer die. Well, unless they bribe the devil...
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
that, when it comes down to it, it really isn't innovating. Sure it is improving, and it is breaking new ground, but so far, it doesn't seem to be trying to grow beyond a desktop/server OS as much as it should. I really think that computers as we know them are on the verge of being rethought, its just a matter of who does that rethinking. I hear a lot of people talking about how Linux needs to beat MS on the desktop front. It doesn't. Getting rid of an entreanched and well organized entity like MS is extremely difficult at the least. Linux/OSS should probably look at being the first one to get to the post-desktop and own that. I'm not sure what that will be, although I think that networked small devices is probably a good bet. The technology for all of this is available, it just needs to be put together. The other advantage of this is that it plays heavily on Linux's strengths, namely security and stability. Joe Blow may not care if his computer crashes every once and a while but if his TV or fridge or microwave stops working because he got hacked by his neighbor's 8 year old kid, security and stability will suddenly become strong selling points. Not to say that this approach would guaruntee success, however, even if we did get there before MS. What needs to happen first is some campain finance reform, so we could at least have a chance of having a president who isn't actively working against the public intrest.
Sig is a crazy old German guy.
>>4. Microsoft ignoring wireless, thin clients, etc.
Ignoring Wireless? They built it in to Windows XP. How long before that could they have been "ignoring" it? Every wireless vendor ever (except Apple) has released Windows support for their products.
Wow, Microsoft built 802.11b support into Windows XP, released in 2001. Well, that's only two years after Apple fully supported it, but what's two years in computer industry time? And even in XP, Bluetooth support is subpar.
And WTF are you talking about when you claim Apple wireless products don't support Windows? The AirPort and AirPort Extreme base stations will work just fine with Windows clients, or pretty much anything that supports 802.11b/g. If it's the AirPort cards you're complaining about, then you're just a fucking retard^2. Those cards are made to interface with the internal wireless antennas built into every Apple computer made since about January of 2000-- they are not normal PC Cards, which is why they don't work in anything but Macs. You've got ~100 vendors to choose from to buy a wireless card for a Windows computer, but you're knocking Apple for not making them?
Imbecile, thy nick is "lseltzer."
Straying from the topic slightly ... this post applies remotely to the topic, in that MS has helped drive software licensing and compliance enforcement to the point where a software must be managed by the companies lawyers.
... Microsoft pioneered COM, which I now believe to be the root of all installation evils. It's really entertaining when some app requires an out of date version of MDAC or COM.
Legal reviews of licenses actually occur at my company. Software purchasing, licensing, and distribution to desktops is mostly centralized. Yes, it's a good idea to have someone who understands legalese manage licenses, and a desktop engineer manage installations. However, it has some nasty consequences.
1. My departmental software gets held hostage by the enterprise software group for extended periods of time. Legal reviews the licenses.
2. When I lived in a condo, I was in the habit of having personal packages delivered to work, so I didn't have to go to the post office. These also got hijacked - the mail room automatically rerouted software to the desktop engineering group.
3. Trying to get back on topic
4. We are a 10,000 desktop company. Thanks to legal and install issues the DE group MUST manage all software, but only has the resources to adequately test installation of software with 250+ users. Smaller departmental applications are regularly obliterated. At times, we've resorted to users having 2 computers (overpowered to run Windows) so that the departmental apps.
Here's my Orwellian vision of the future of software:
MS decides to make software licensing easier. All Software is licenses are managed via an extension of MS's passport and that hardware based DRM thingy. Licensing rules are managed by BizTalk. Your software communicates with the central MS server every time you log in (requiring all users to have 10GB internet connections). MS provides components for software developers to use that enable licensing. It starts denying usage of this component to products that directly compete with its favored produces, until court cases force it to come up with a more clever scheme.
My motto: "A cat is no trade for integrity."
I was talking about profit margins when I mentioned 30% (as in cost-plus pricing methods).
In Soviet Russia, your market share eats you...
Me too, but I found several on-line tax sites this year that worked as well as the boxed stuff, cheaper too. All I needed was Mozilla.
I'm almost positive that TCP/IP was an add-on product for OS/2 at the 2.0 version, which was the version from that era (92-ish). As others have pointed out, there was a 3rd party market for Windows TCP/IP stacks at the time. It's typical that people would criticize Microsoft for not having a TCP/IP stack or charging for it, but as soon as they include a free one they're being monopolists.
>>cc:Mail and Netware-based products. You are right on these as far as larger coprorates are concerned. You are wrong as far as SMBs are concerned. They were Pegasus and Eudora territory and this is what Windows took over before going after the larger fish which had solutions in place.
This is rich. First of all, you did say "corporate" initially. Second, in the early 90's the Internet e-mail client market for SMBs was about as big as the "trip to space on a Russian rocket" market is today. It was a token market at best.
On the wireless point, as with TCP/IP, and unlike with other operating systems, when Microsoft doesn't have a product their customers aren't screwed, since anyone who wants to make a living in that market sells Windows versions, and 802.11 was like that.
Windows 2000 went gold at the end of 1999 and was more or less finalized in 98, long before 802.11 was mainstream. They addressed it when it was worth addressing.
MS got to be market dominant (which is NOT a true monopoly) by making genuinely good programs.
When was this? Microsoft's history of dodgy deals with PC suppliers goes back quite a long way.
Operating in a competitive marketplace appears to be something Microsoft has put a lot of effort into avoiding.
Go all or nothing man! That. Is. Your. Problem. What is a computer good for? Calculations. Systems. Storage. Communication. Keep it simple, stupid! K.I.S.S. Linux is all you need. But I DO like Windows XP.
The problem with the computer industry is that the average joe has now idea what a computer really is. He sees that most people use MS Windows, and so goes with the flow, not knowing any better. Cars, retail stores, are all relatively simple concepts to understand, but still, in this day and age, computers remain an elusive subject for most people. If they can't make up their minds as to what operating system they want, they have others do that for them, resulting in a domino effect that leads to a 95% market share. What needs to be done is for the government to step in, and break MS apart into little pieces. Then, they need to establish a standards organization that will create a *Standard* hardware structure for all computers that is able to interpret and compile 5 of the top programming languages. If everything is standard-ized, then it will be simple for all programs--Mac, Windows, Linux--to compile their program for any OS. Only then, will the computer industry be fixed, and choosing an OS will be equivalent to deciding between Window Managers or Desktop Environments such as KDE/Gnome. Finally, the quality of OS's will increase greatly due to the competition.
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
>>Anyone remember when NT was released?
The first pre-release version of Windows NT was released at the July 4, 1992 PDC in San Fancisco. I know, I was there and I wrote the first hands-on review of it for PC Week. The shipping version, I believe, was in 93.
You can quite creatively cook your books, ensuring via your $30,000 wardrobe and $500,000 limo rentals that all the child companies (which the studios happen to have stakes in) make money, while the film itself makes nothing.
In this way, they avoid a lot of taxes. If you taxed the income of the companies, they'd all just stop making money. They'd break even, sure, but no profits would be recorded except by mistake.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
"A tax is a fine for doing good, a fine is a tax on doing wrong."
A tax can also be seen as the price the wealthy pay for societies support of their money-making ventures. Courts aren't free, patents clerks aren't free, financial institutions aren't free. So why do we see it as wrong to tax the wealthy so these support institutions can go on, and other people can have the opportunity to be wealthy?
"Frankly, people ARE "punished" for being successful, check out the tax schedules, the tax percentage increases as the income increases. I am NOT arguing against progressive tax schedules..."
Actually you are. But another way to look at the situation is NOT as a punishment, but an expectation of meeting one's increasing social responsability. In other words, the better you do, the more responsabilty to the society you incur(1). This also ties in with the progressive power advantage that increased wealth brings. Increased taxation can be seen as the moderator to the financial reaction, much like a nuclear reaction needs a moderator. We would think it foolish to pull the rods all the way out on a nuclear reaction, so why do we insist it's OK to do the same when it comes to money?
(1) There's really nothing wrong with this. Nothing happens in a vacuum, including financial wealth. Society has contributed in a myriad of ways to your success, from the legal, and financial framework, to the basic support we all enjoy e.g. Health, Property, etc.
I shouldn't be surprised that so many SlashDotBots would go along with the assertion that Microsoft will never die, but it is kind of amazing. "Never" is a pretty long time, you know.
This is a similar article to one written by someone else a few years back which Slashdot ran. Basically the person threw up their hands and said there was nothing to be done then either. It is a defeatist attitude. True, maybe he does not have the answer. True that at some point in time an alternative may appear which will remove Microsoft from the foray completely or even in a major way.
The question here is - is it Linux/BSD/Unix? To me, the answer is yes. Although, as one person here has already said, there isn't an income tax program available unless you are running Mac OS X - that is besides the point. Because that is a void which, as more companies come onboard Linux, will be filled.
What I am trying to say is - is that I think of this need people have for an OS which is stable and programs which, when they crash, do not take the system with it (as well as just plain good software) is a void. Surrounding this void are the various OSs available. With the help of major corporations such as IBM, HP, and the like - the people who have fallen into the void are finding their way out and into Linux. These are people who used to be in the Windows area but became dissatisfied with everything that has been going on for the past ten or fifteen years. So they slowly but surely drifted into the void. Where, no matter what they did - they were unhappy about their situation but could not figure out what to do about it. Well, let me tell you that these people, once they have seen just how much free software is out there as well as how many people there are out there who want to help them get unstuck and back to being productive - they just go "Wow" and it really affects them deeply to know that there are others out there who share their beliefs, needs, and passions for doing things.
So my message is - don't give up, throw up your hands, and quit. We are making a difference and no matter what - Microsoft can not go forever without making a profit. True. They may seek to take on Open Source Software. But you can't stop it because then you would be taking on the whole world. And since the world is who is footing the bill for Microsoft to even be around - you can't bite the hand that feeds you and expect that hand to feed you again.
So - so what if he doesn't know the answer. No one person will have that answer. It is only going to come - from all of us. Working together. To achieve the common goal of making things better in the world.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
Surely the best way to make M$ play nice is to legislate that a monopoly holder can't declare itself free from liability for the behaviour of its products. If my TV decided to catch fire during normal use and burn down my house I'd definately be suing.
It's easy to stop Microsoft. It's not likely, but it is easy. Here are some things just off the top of my head:
Federal Marshals. "Mr. Gates, Mr. Balmer, come with us please."
"FBI & DHS! We're here for the source code. All of it. OK geeks, fan out, find it, put it up on Source Forge."
Shame. (won't work for every employee of MS. Some people are born to lick boots and forget the rest of the world as long as they get theirs. Look at spammers.)
"Note to all US fininatial institutions. Please remit all Microsoft balances to the government."
OK, so how is Cringly right?
Well, he's right that MS can't be beaten in court under current laws. The law takes too long and is subject to tinkering by elected officials that can be bought. By the time a court can nail 'em, they've wiggled out of it one way or another. And that assumes that the prosecution is vigiourous in it's persuit.
He's right that a better product won't beat them. MS's market share is too strong. Look at Java vs MSVM, IE vs. Netscape, Kerbros, NTFS, loads of other things I don't even know about. MS just covers them in a tidal wave of geegaws, freebies, and propritary technology that no one else can interoperate with. They get tied up like a fly in a spiderweb with suits, patents, copyrights and trade secrets.
OK, so why is a monolithic MS a bad thing? Ask the shippers when railroads cooperated in pricing. Ask interurban railroads about Firestone and their tactics. Ask yourself when you buy gas if OPEC is a good thing for you. Look at the telephone choices you have now vs. when AT&T ruled the roost. Ask chicken ranchers about ADM.
If you are one of those people that can ignore history and current events, then nothing I'll say to you will change your mind that a MS monopoly is a bad thing.
History shows that a better product won't beat a monopolistic product without the government stepping in. I can't recall a single instance when something with the largest market share lost that share without governments stepping in and putting a stop to it and opening up the market to free trade. Most of the time I do not trust the government, but this another instance when there isn't any other way.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
"But the thing you and other posters except Jim Wicked seem to be missing is "why should they care?" And the answer is not some idealistic belief in shutting down unreasonable monopolies. The gas company in most areas is a monopoly. Ask your neighbors if they really think about that on a daily basis."
They thought about it last winter, when gas prices went up. They're thinking about it with gas prices at the pump went up. The problem with the MS tax is that it's hidden. Only the OEM's truely see what it costs their customers. I'm willing to bet more people would think about it, if they knew what it was. So why didn't the court case address that?
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
First, take a look at this article
v il _firsts/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/07/witty_e
At least as I understood the article [not being a IT security professional or even a programmer], this analysis of the Witty worm suggests some possibilities.
Imagine if you will, a worm similar to Slammer with rapid saturation but with a self-destruct timer. The host computer is nuked at a specified time. Say 2 hours after the worm's release into the wild through some of those zombie bots the article mentions. Or if the host computer is rebooted before the deadline, on reboot the hard drive is formatted. Or the computer could be nuked 2 hours after infection.
What would happen if umpteen kazillion windows machines stopped working all at the same time, or at least within a few minutes of each other?
How do you think Microsoft's future would look, considering that Mac, Linux & Unix users would be largely unaffected? As I have explained to colleagues, friends, & acquaintences, the single most effective way to avoid these kinds of worms, viruses, et al, is to avoid Microsoft products whenever possible.
And given how much Windows' "security" model aids in the propagation of worms, AV & firewall vendors wouldn't be in much better shape either. There wouldn't be enough time to 1) become aware of the threat 2) prepare fixes & AV/firewall signatures 3) make the fix available 4) make the general computing populace aware of the necessity of applying the fix immediately 5) have enough bandwidth on hand to provide the fix to all who would need it.
Again, as I understood the article, this doesn't seem to be impossible as a matter of principle. From the article, it just looks like no one has thought of trying it yet.
While, I hope it doesn't happen, I don't see why it can't either.
"Your absolutly correct when it comes to COMPUTER USERS. But we are talking about the need to make the shift to computers as appliances."
And yet our Windows PC's aren't appliances. Not even close. So here is MS with a +90 marketshare it didn't gain by being an "appliance". Looks like being an "appliance" isn't the force you think it is, and the reality is that any alternatives will not gain by playing by a rule that MS didn't.
Good point. The old steel companies have been complaining for decades that they can't compete, that they need tarriffs and gub'ment subsidies, and here comes this upstart company that is basically running circles around them. What the old steel mills really meant was that they couldn't compete doing business the way they'd always had, and they were too big, old, and slow to think their way out. So we, the taxpayers, rewarded them for being stupid and inflexible, when we thought they were competing efficiently but still losing thanks to the big bad foreigners. Stupid them, but even stupid(er) us.
" happen to think you're dead wrong. If ease of use weren't attractive to the average consumer, why did AOL dominate?
"
"Those who forget history..."
Anyway the answer is price. Remember the old days of BBS, and 9600 Baud, when it costs an arm and a leg to get onto the Internet? Remember when AOL introduced flat rate, all you can eat pricing, couldn't keep up with the demand, get a busy signal, lawsuits abound? That and bundled content is why, not this ease of use.
But then "Those who forget history are doomed to making bad conclusions"
Microsoft employs a city. They don't need everybody working on Windows. They don't need everybody working on Office, etc. They have very large, very dedicated and well paid teams working on those products.
They're simply branching out. Claiming they're afraid of losing their OS base because they're branching into other areas is as a silly as claiming they thought Windows was going out when they started working on Office.
What do you do when you have more money than you know what to do with? Find more ways to spend it. You can't just throw money/people at a software program and expect it be better. There's a point where throwing more money and people at a project just hurts the project. So, you take all these extra people and get them going on other products.
If you think of all their products as stock, they're diversifying their funds. It's not that they expect Windows to fail. It's that they don't care if it does but they're going ahead with it as though it's not.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
If you can't see what the Cobra has that the Saturn does not, then you should indeed be happy with your choice. And no, it is not "glitz".
Sure, he's right about things here in the US, and possibly large chunks of Europe, but there's a move afoot to migrate from Micros~1 products. He mentions a big herd coming after Linux, towards the end of the article, but I'm of the opinion that Linux + OSS adoption is the event that cripples the MonSter.
Having said that, we should have expected that Gates would not take the revolution lying down. Swallowing or gutting Sun is certainly good strategy for him.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
If you want more people to use Linux, the best tool by far will be to make it usable by the general public, as easy and understandable as Windows is.
Usability isn't really what's going to sway the masses over to using Linux, because the fact is that any switch between any two operating systems is always a hassle, bringing costs long before the ease of use of the new system can have an effect. The more computers are involved in the switch, the greater the inertia against it. The rule of "good enough" is that systems that satisfy basic requirements, even if not in the most efficient way, will not be replaced by systems which can satisfy those same needs more efficiently, because of the cost of the switch. There has to be significant motivation, significant improvement for uprooting your way of doing things, and I don't think Linux usability will ever provide that kind of improvement. That's what I think because, while Windows ain't pretty like Mac OS, it's still very easy to do most things in it, the OS has been stable since win2k, and though it's got security problems, the steps to make windows mostly secure are well within Jane Sixpack's ability to learn (if he only would).
Do you buy different brands of toothpaste or do you stick to one brand? Answer that and you have answered why people continue to use windows et al.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
KILL BILL
You do realize that most places you actually have to pay extra to not have a Microsoft OS preinstalled when you buy a new computer? Don't you?
HAND.
Usual Cringley nonsense. Sun haven't given up on anything. They get access to MS APIs. They get billions of dollars. Why? They agreed to an out of court settlement from Microsoft, which Microsoft wanted as a way of trying to look good so as to calm down the Europeans.
Sun won. They sued Microsoft and got paid by them.
Teh TrollCorps thanks you for your participation.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Everyone is doing it, yes. The difference is that if you're a monopoly, then it's ILLEGAL to do it, whereas it is legal to do it if you're not a monopoly. Being a monopoly is not illegal per se; abusing the monopoly power is. That's the extent of US anti-trust legislation, essentially.
A funny thing is that does actually occur in the MS-published Halo 2. The first trailer for the game shows nukes falling from orbit to hit the Earth, and a pretty blatant one lands in Redmond. :D
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
I share your suspicions, partly because Microsoft set its own precendent. During the last anti-trust trial in the US, Microsoft was found to be planting false "grass-roots" letters to the editor and other fake testimonials from so-called "concerned citizens".
Keep in mind A LOT of people own Microsoft stock and stock options. Anytime someone stands to make or lose 5-6 figures on the future direction of a company, expect some of them (even if only 0.5%) to stoop to some pretty unethical behavior so they can make their money. Even Bill Gates himself has most of his wealth tied up in Microsoft stock. Tech stocks are heavily influenced by hype and public perception. And the "Slashdot Effect" doesn't just refer to overwhelming underpowered web servers. They astroturf here because the money they stand to gain makes them believe they can win a few converts or at least do some damage control. Based on Microsoft's past behavior, would it really surprise you to learn they'd retained the services of a PR firm to post pro-Microsoft propoganda on Slashdot, CNET, and other websites where readers go as much to read the comments from other readers as the articles?
Or to put it another way: _EVERY_ time an anti-Microsoft story is posted on Slashdot, dozens of organized, rhetorical, and accurately proof-read pro-Microsoft posts appear and get modded up by _somebody_. Do we really believe that Slashdot readers, in their haste to post and flame, can actually _spell_. (I have an English degree, that's my excuse.)
Democracy. Whiskey. Sexy. Pick any two.
I just don't understand why it is not offered as an option on customization packages... it would help save the consumer money. Just like if you have the option between a onboard sound card, or a pci add on. If you choose the PCI addon card (say a audigy), you would pay $100 (or so) more. Same thing with Windows and Linux OEM installs... have it default to Linux (the cheapest configuration) and then have Windows as a selectable option that would add $100 to the price of the overall package.
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
That's a very, very good point. My excuse is that I'm not a native English speaker. :-)
Money for nothing, pix for free
How? Consider the computing needs of the user of the future. Primarily, they will need to read mail and browse the internet. (Oh, and play games, and DVD's, etc.) The average user won't care what operating system is underlying their equipment - you could do most of these functions with WinCE, or stripped down LINUX.
What else do you want to do?
- Run compute-intensive, graphic-intensive tasks? buy a module for that. Use a form of browser-based terminal to connect and use the service it provides.
- Storage, read, write CD/DVD/BlueLaser media? Use a network-attached storage device for that.
- Printing - use a network attached printer.
- Timer event devices?
- Web servers? - a feature of storage devices...
Watch for the complex computer to decompose into a number of devices; none of these are going to need a full Windows OS, and the functions will be so trivial that most will make do with very stripped version of public or licensed software. USB functionality will evolve into full network functionality.
When to many such devices are too prevelant, a retailer or service provider can try to impose change at their peril. Do you deliberately want to lock out 30% of your customers? What advantage would any replacement for, say, Flash as a protocol/file format have to have to displace it? Same for real networks; not to mention HTML, etc.
The whole computer succeeds for now because the cost of dedicated devices is about the same for less functionality; and the interface/protocol is not quite fixed enough. When a browser tablet can connect as easily as your pC (because every home has a home router with DHCP, the first building block in this new world order) and when that device can be made for signifcantly less than a computer - then Microsoft will truly be doomed.
I know exactly how you feel. Everything at home is Linux, everything at the customer site is Windows. It's like going from a sleek private jet to a C-130 on a daily basis. Everything in Windows seems so...lumbering and noisy by comparison.
What was funny was being in .NET class a while ago and all the workstations had XP. The teacher was like okay, now set this and that, I was totally lost. Everything is 2000 at the customer site and it was the first time I'd actually had to do anything besides use IE on XP. I caught up, but the initial disorientation was a little flustering.
Although I have the best excuse in the world for not helping friends with their computer problems. The biggest gripe seems to be XP slowing down over time. I just say, "Sorry, I don't do Windows."
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I think this is a better socio-economic metaphor... Asking Joe Average to only use Linux and OSS is as realistic as asking Americans to only buy american-made products and items that are "Made In The USA".
Many people feel that these are the right, healthy, responsible things to do on many levels, but the norms of buying global products (@ WalMart, etc) and using MS software are too entrenched and frustrating for most people to work around.
Microsoft got its market share because ... Bill Gates and his mother wrote a contract that outsmarted all of IBM's team of super-lawyers
Having a very simplisitic view of history must be nice for you. Bill Gates & IBM signed a contract. The End. How nice and easy for small minds to understand.
Unfortunately, the reality was a lot more complex: Microsoft betting on GUI apps when nobody else would; Microsoft outmarketing a giant ten times their size with OS/2; Microsoft pounding Novell and it's LAN monopoly; Microsoft scaring the UNIX Workstation market into virtual sucide; Microsoft credibly taking on Oracle and IBM for mail and database services; etc etc.
Now, I'm not saying they aren't monopolistic bastards, but even the the most simplistic account should contain a lot of things that they did right since 1981.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
You'd be amazed at what could be accomplished with a .45 and a full 12-round clip.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I think you mean Dartmouth BASIC, which was in the public domain and designed for minicomputers, not 4K Micros.
And by "rip off", you meant "inspired by".
It will take a lot of time and a lot of competition from other sources. That's why I'm a big fan of both Linux and Mac OS X right now. I understand that this attitude gets under the skin of some open source purists, but so be it. Every Linux and Mac user has to quietly advocate the advantages of these options compared to MS's offering in every situation we can. I turned an all-Windows dept. into a 50/50 Mac and Windows dept. where I work doing Web development and I'm trying to figure out how to bring a Linux machine into the fold (have to word it just right to our IS dept who are all prefer Windows.)
Prior to that, my colleagues and I fought off an effort by management to get rid of Macs in our dept. (not just for the principle, but it was a graphic design dept. so it made no sense to us to jump to Windows.)
A friend of mine who had previously worked in that same place in the IS dept. managed to get a few Linux machines brought in.
These small efforts matter and it's what will wean people off their MS dependence and gradually shift things. Already my own boss has noted how often the OS X machine trumps the Windows machines, particularly in terms of graphic and design work. He's also been blown away by how much busy work I can get done on the Darwin command line with just a few simple commands.
Little by little it will happen. Years and year maybe, but not overnight.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Games. Computers that aren't $1000 more expensive than thier PC counterparts would also help.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Was this Verizon? They started a service in my apartment where they provide DSL at a discount rate which is tacked onto the rent. There was an open house where the apartment managers were encouraging people to sign up for the deal. They had two techies from Verizon demoing the service (the usual side-by-side next to a modem), and one of them assured me it works with Linux and he uses Linux at home. He seemed to know what he was talking about so I signed up.
I got some standard kit which included the DSL modem and one of those install disks that only works under Windows. The install instructions had a password (different for each subscriber). But the password was not for the PPPoE link -- it was only to let you into the install program, which would only run on Windows. The sheet explicitly said, "if you run Macintosh you need to call tech support."
I called tech support, told the lady I was running Linux, and after some initial confusion she cheerfully gave me all the info I needed to configure pppd. I haven't had any problems with the service.
But I can't figure it out. Most companies consider tech support an annoying expense, something they'd rather outsource if possible. They could've added the necessary info to the instruction sheet (it was already customized for each user) and saved themselves the expense of the tech support call.
I wonder if Verizon is involved in some "partnerships" with MS, and their "no support for others, unless you sneak in through the back door" attitude may be just to grease the wheels.
Each one of those people will now, never buy a copy of MS Office.
Unless the user discovers that OO.o cannot interpret the complex formulas and macros in Excel documents from work. Even if OO.o's macro system does turn out to be more powerful in the long run, it's not compatible with Microsoft's, and many companies have found that conversion of the scripts would cost even more than several years of Licensing 6. There needs to be some way to get work to use OO.o instead of Microsoft Office in the first place. Such inertia is why many critics claim that free software needs to be groundbreaking in order to displace even 20 percent of proprietary desktop software published by a convicted monopolist.
"I bought a new 2002 Saturn SL"
Each choice has its own punishment associated with it. Saturn is its own unique brand of pain. Like S&M, you can find somebody who likes it.
P.S. Are you, in fact, a B or S/M lover?
At the end of Cringeley's article, he says that Microsoft will enter a phase where it misses the next big thing because it's so complacent about dominating the industry. He expects that after Microsoft does it's usual round of raping its customers, its customers will be less afraid of going somewhere else once this happens.
The problem is that Microsoft has already been there and done that with Netscape and the Internet. It's now on the lookout for its existing and new competitors to do something totally new and outrun it.
However we all know that the problem with that is that noone can outrun Microsoft. It's like trying to run away from the Mafia. Sure, you might have a nice lead at first, but Microsoft's ship is not only really fucking big, but really fucking fast and has big fucking guns. Once this ship notices you, you don't have a prayer, no matter how fast and how far ahead you are.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
More like the MS-DOS 2.11 of cars. The equal in every way of a 1988 Corolla.
Hey, spend the time you wasted reading this and replying to this ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING, and the combined effort can get us to the "tipping point" which surely is the most likely and most unpredictable way MS will Kevorkian itself.
I'll be spending this beautiful day researching and packaging open source apps for delivery to real people, and writing propaganda based on "real life" experiences of MS and other proprietary code strangling perfectly good business plans.
What causes "tipping points" to happen? Damned if I know at this point, and I'm making a determined study of the matter.
I can't say what will work for you, but my approach is to stop beating my head against a wall dealing with my PhB, who responds only to hype and FUD, and to look on my own for REAL problems to answer, and to answer them.
All companies over a certain size (an most under that size) are answering imaginary problems (or trying to create them) or are just trying to justify their own phony-baloney jobs or "answers" by trying to redefine the questions; unfortunately, this applies even more to institutions.
Name one company, school or government that's more committed to meeting peoples' needs than their own entrenchment. Perhaps the tipping point comes when people just "realize" this and find another game.
Sell at a reasonable resale value.
Repeat.
I have done this for the last 20 years with cars for my Wife and myself. We've owned Toyotas and Hondas and never spend a dime on repairs. We leased a Ford van once (cash flow issues) and at the end of the two-year lease were were ready to be rid of the odd-squeaking, noisy turning, rattle trap.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Sometimes Bob can be so stupid! Actually, that's not fair. He could be just an incredibly bright person trolling for idiot readers.
It's entirely possible that Microsoft will never die. So what? The problem that people have with Microsoft is not they exist, but they have an inordinately large market share (monopoly) on certain classes of software goods. If Microsoft were reduced to a tiny mom-and-pop providing tech support in Redmond, they would not have died, but neither would anyone care about them anymore. The goal isn't to "kill" Microsoft, but to fracture that huge block of marketshare into nice competitive chunks.
The reason government can't seem to do anything about Microsoft, is because it wasn't the government that gave them their monopoly. The marketplace handed out that monopoly, so it's up to the marketplace to take it back.
Some people will say that because Microsoft now has that monopoly, the marketplace cannot do anything about it, and the government must do something instead. But there's not much the government can do to stop people from choosing Windows or MSOffice. Sure, the feds could start throwing users in jail, but that's not going to go over well come next election.
The marketplace can, and will, remove the monopolist crown from Microsoft. But it won't do it today. Everybody is looking for a quick solution, but there is no quick solution, because the Microsoft monopoly wasn't created overnight. It took them ten years to get it.
Maybe it will be Linux that drives them from the thrown. Maybe it will be the Mac. Or maybe the desktop itself will go away leaving Bill Gates the king of nothing. But it won't happen today, or this month, or even this year. So stop crying about it.
However, you don't have to use Windows today. You don't have to use MSOffice this month. You don't have to buy any Microsoft product this year. You have a choice. You might not want to exercise that choice, but it is still yours to make. You can use Linux today if you don't demand a perfect Windows clone. You can use OSX today if you don't demand commodity hardware. You also have the choices of FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD if you want a Free Software OS, or Solaris if free-beer is good enough. You can replace IExplorer with Mozilla, Opera, or Konqueror. You can replace MSOffice with OpenOffice. I won't even bother listing the dozens of suitable replacements for Media Player.
Microsoft might never die, but why should you care?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
The only way to get me away from windows, is if there came another OS with as good support for games as windows have. I use windows because I can play my games on it. If I just used programs I had lots of other alternatives. But I also plays games. Hence I stay on windows. And so does alot of other people. As long as MS got the sole monopoly on games on the PC OS's then they are gonna stay big and survive.
Most boards can be identified buy the stamp on their side. Like 3Comm always stamps the id numbers in yellow on the boards edges.
-n
"What do you do with the mad that you feel when you feel so mad you could bite?" - Mister Rogers
Richard Stallman might not be the person the best temperament to take tea with the Queen of England, but when everything is said and done, he ends up being right, which is probably the real reason so many people here hate his guts. He has been right a along, and the events we are watching just confirm this a bit more every day. And when push comes to shove, the BSD license and all the oh so helpful people that turn out software under it are Microsoft's life insurance, just as they were for Apple.
I know you are supposed to be nice to the BSD people and smile and be friends, but everytime Microsoft grinds another competitor into the dirt (bye-bye Sun) or prevails over another government (bye-bye Europeans, you could have made it count), I remember who handed Microsoft their TCP/IP stack on a platter and who knows what else, I come another step closer to the conclusion that they are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Giving Apple a free ride might be seen as an act of charity, but helping Microsoft make money...
Armed rebellion
Kill Gates, Balmer and anyone else who works for MSFT. Burn it to the ground and salt the earth.
But most geeks are pussies, so they won't think of that option.
How can you show someone a "Word Processor" without them learning "That Specific Word Processor". Back in the day of WordStar, Microsoft had this funny cursor. See, the Microsoft cursor could change size and shape... we call this a selection today, but at the time it came out, it was a big deal. Some people loved it, others hated it. Of course, the mouse really masked this. Today, both mechanisms of applying formatting (selecting a region and applying formatting as well as changing the current format and typing and finally turning off the format) are in widespread use in any decent word processor.
Your point about different tools is useful. There are different tools. Most people Google for whatever they need, and play with a bunch of tools until the right one does what they need. Then they just use that.
Open Source Software may be a good thing. It will put constant pressure on for-profit software to compete, but don't expect it to create a standard that closed source software will adhere to. Expect exactly the opposite. It will become a form of standard that non-OSS will avoid using simply because there is no profit in it. OSS will drive the push from big businesses on for-profit standards bodies and patents.
Microsoft's recent deal with Sun is an example. You might see Microsoft do this deal with IBM and other big businesses. As they say, "Business is business." I expect that Sun will soon stop throwing their money away into OSS because it gives them no returns.
but you are, if you're really lucky. in fact most p1r47es are well below average in the skill department. you just tell yourselves that you're good. almost every single 1337 h4x0r, p1r473 and w4r3z d00d i've ever had the misfortune to encounter has been a clueless idiot...installing linux and using firefox to surf pr0n and w4r3z sites is not proof of skillz...and using some pos virus-by-numbers toolkit slapped together with vb does not make you clever either. software pirates really are the ultimate frikken lusers. it's why we call you skript kiddies.
Surely you jest. Apple. Amiga.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
"Bill Gates has been quite clear that his company's need for huge cash reserves is to keep it going for up to five years in the face of ZERO sales. So Microsoft could match Open Source pricing without the Open Source and while the compilers might not be swayed, everyone else (the other 98 percent of the market) would be."
Well guess what, we have been going for tha last 13 years on ZERO sales and we can go the next. And let me remind you, most of those years it was just us "Compilers".
Maybe a lawyer in the community might want to comment on this, but mightn't the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) apply here? It's intended to promote "the elimination of the infiltration of organized crime and racketeering into legitimate organizations operating in interstate commerce."
It'd be a bit of a stretch to construe Microsoft's behavior as extortion, but if it were, then in addition to the extortion per se, the conspiracy to commit extortion would be addressed by RICO:
(See http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cri18.htm)
There is also civil provision that allows private parties to sue for triple damages. This might incent a private party with deep pockets who was harmed to the tune of a couple of billions to turn down the "take a billion and go away" deal.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Being an ex-Microsofter, I'm pretty sure NOISE wasn't "Novell, Oracle, Intuit, Sybase and Everyone else." Sybase? C'mon, do you think Microsoft worries about Sybase?
NOISE is an acronym from the mid 1990's that meant: "Netscape, Oracle, IBM, Sun, and Everyone else."
Sybase? Please.
First of all, you're looking at 1999 data. The stock price of MSFT is a little lower now, so many of those options are worthless. Further, MSFT doesn't issue options anymore, so the risk of this is virtually gone.
/. account.
If he's an accountant, he should know better than this.
First, I'm betting many of those options were granted in the 1998-2000 years when everyone was option crazy. Now that the stock is half of what it used to be, those options are now worthless.
So, you're telling me MSFT has granted 53 billion in options to it's employees? Hardly. Assuming the options were granted at FMV, and assuming MSFT's stock price increases to say, $30.30 and it's $25.00 now, that means they have issued 10,000,000,000 options to employees? Give me a break.
Not only that, but those cash reserves are coupled with zero debt. A company like MSFT and it's proven revenue stream can significantly lever up. Just glancing at MSFT they made an ebitda of 12 billion, indicating to me they could probably hold debt with an interest of 4-6 billion a year. Assuming they get a 7% interest rate (that's a random guess, it's probably much lower for MSFT) that's like, 80+ billion in debt they could easily hold with their company. So, unless these dangerous outstanding options are going to have a value in excess of 120 billion, I think MSFT is just fine.
Me, I'm not even an accountant (Finance and International Relations Major) and I can give a rough estimate in looking at Yahoo's analysis of MSFT in a few seconds. *Please*, don't listen to this guy, and don't listen to me. If you want reliable information on a subject matter, go to a trusted source. Not someone with a website or with a
> No one had to show me how to do it, I figured stuff ...
/usr/bin/, read man pages, and played with anything that looked interesting.
> out on my own.
>
> I've taught myself almost everything I know by trial
> and error and just intuitively figuring things out,
When I wanted to know how to use my family's first computer (an Apple ][+), this is EXACTLY how I learned. No one sat down and held my hand. My dad made one copy of the system master disk for me, pointed to the stack of manuals on the bookshelf, and told me to learn how to use the thing. And, at the age of six, I tought myself how to use that Apple ][+, and, over the next few years, how to program pretty well in Apple BASIC (and a bit of 6504 assembler).
When we got a C64 to go along with the Apple, I taught myself the same way (and formed a love/hate relationship with sprites).
Ditto, when we got out first Macintosh.
Likewise, when we got our wintel.
When I went off to college, I took the 486 with me, becoming temporarily Mac-less. There, I was first introduced to Unix (SunOS, Irix, and AIX mostly). The CS department's sysadmin was one of those scruffy old "RTFM" types. And most of the programming classes assumed you already had a working knowledge of Unix. So there was no one to hold my hand through the "learning how to use Unix" process, either. Mostly, I poked around in
And after windows finally ate one-lab-report-too-many, I bought a blank CD-R from the campus bookstore, had our sysadmin burn me a copy of slackware's latest, went back to my dorm, and (yes, after some trial and error in getting it installed and running properly) wiped microsoft out of my life. You know how I learned Linux? The exact way you describe yourself learning windows, and the exact way I learned every other OS.
And when the public beta of Mac OS X (my current primary OS) came out (and, truth be told, I had a few burned copies of the developers' previews too), I got a copy immediately. And I "intuitively figured things out" "on my own" and "by trial and error".
See, the thing is that I am *gasp* WILLING TO LEARN NEW THINGS. There is no reason in the world why *I* can learn new things, and others can't. beyond plain and simple apathy, laziness, and unwillingness to learn.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
Both platform companies that had a lot of trouble finding application developers.
Keep in mind, at this time, Lotus and Borland were much larger companies that Microsoft. Neither supported Mac/Amiga. (Well, Lotus actually beat Microsoft to market with a Mac office suite called "Jazz" -- but they forgot about it after a year.)
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
may this story serve as an example to the linux hippies out there... MICROSOFT WON'T DISAPPEAR AFTER ALL!!!!.
"At this poitn it still can't compete at the level of the average user."
That's why I've said every time this subject comes up. Linux needs an abusive monopoly. We need to have an exclusive contract with OEM's that have strong-antitrust terms (per processor licensing). We need to have Marketing that twists the truth to our own ends (damn Halloween memos). We need to buy a couple politicians to keep the laws favourable to us. We need to have licenses that punish people for leaving the fold. We need file formats that force users to upgrade constantly. We ned evangilist that will do fake grass root campaigns. We need patents that we can use when we get desperate enough to fight back scared. Once we've done all that, then "ease of use", and all that "hippie talk" will be unnecessary. Oh alright we'll do a litte, but just to make people think we're a good company with good ideas. We invented Al Gore by the way.
Yes, there's a little extra cost in running an extra set of wires to some of the customers. But it turns out that running the wires is a small part of the overall cost of running a utility business, and competition leads to savings in all aspects of the business that dwarf those costs. Also, not all duplication of effort is wasteful; there is a large potential benefit to be had in extra reliability. People who really need reliable power can subscribe to two or more suppliers and flip a switch when there is an outage due to a tree bringing down a cable somewhere.
Consumer Review magine did a survey of similar cities with and without cable television monopolies, and found that in the relatively laissez-faire cities where multiple providers were allowed to coexist, customers had more channels available at about half the per-channel cost than in the regulated-monopoly cities.
I play Nerd-Folk!
I can't believe there are so many posts that completely miss the mark. The problem is not Linux, the problem is not a lack of understanding. I'm sorry, it is apathy (as one of the first posters said) and more.
Why do you drink coca-cola? It tastes better at 4 times the cost? No. Because everyone else does it.
Why do you eat McDonalds? Because it's everywhere else? No. Because everyone else does it.
People want to do what everyeone else does - because by our very natures we are pack animals. We all believe that everyone else uses Microsoft, so we do.
This has added benefits. We belong (to what, I don't know). We can learn from others who think/act the same way. We work together in what ever we do as a society. These are the things that define us as humans.
The fact is, we will continue to be pack animals. Live in cities, wear our Reboks, drink our coca-cola and use Microsoft. Not because we can't think, or that these things are better - but because a) we just don't care [it does the job] and b) we belong.
You can make up all of the horse shit excuses under the sun - usability, better taste, better quality, better marketing, does what I want it to do - but at the end of the day, Joe average wants more than anything to belong.
Microsoft can be taken out, but some factors need to happen first:
;) Do some real surveys and research on the TCO and ROI on Linux verses Windows, not the BS stuff that Microsoft did. For example a Mainframe costs more to own and operate than PC Server, but Microsoft has Linux on a mainframe verses Windows 2003 Server on a PC Server, so WTF is wrong with this picture? Run Linux on the same PC Server as Windows 2003 and get a better idea of a comparison.
#1 Linux and open source software needs to get certified by official certification standards comitties. As of yet they do not certifiy anything but Microsoft software. Some companies that depend on the certification for their business or line or work only by certified software.
#2 More business software that is easy to use and install and configure needs to be made for Linux and other alternative platforms. It also needs to be affordable (priced under Microsoft's prices) and offer a good tech support plan.
#3 Lindows is a good start to get the consumer market to buy something that is not Microsoft but can use the same file formats that Microsoft software can. Lindows is also easy to use, install, and configure but due to using Non-GPL code to do all of that, Lindows is commercial for $50USD to $60USD for the basic Lindows OS. Wal-Mart sells PCs that use it for $400USD to $300USD each, 'nuff said. More companies need to follow Lindows' and Mac OSX's lead and make an easier to use, install, and configure OS.
#4 Non-MS software needs to be bundled with new hardware. So far I have only seen Lindows do this with PC hardware, very few cases of other operating systems being bundled.
#5 Companies like HP need to learn to support Linus all the way or no way at all. I bought a HP Laptop because I was told that HP supports Linux, and that buying a HP system and Linux from HP will protect me from SCO. The reality of it all I found out was pure 100% BS. After buying the laptop, HP told me there was no Linux drivers available for it, and no Linux support for it even if I buy Linux from them. I went to look for Linux drivers for my modem and wireless Ethernet devices and found that there are companies that offer them for $15USD and $35USD respectfully that are not the OEM, and that they are not guaranteed to work with all flavors of Linux. So HP gets two thumbs down from me for their p*ss poor Linux support. Other companies are not that much better. We need the big PC makers like Dell, Gateway, HP, etc to 100% support Linux, not just on selected machines and not just for certain hardware. This is the same BS that happened to OS/2, don't let Linux suffer the fate of OS/2.
#6 Get more organizations to consider alternatives to Microsoft products. Take the PHBs out and shoot them if needed to get a better choice of software to use.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I don't know as much about Einstein, but he didn't unify physics, and I'm sure that the field couldn't have gotten far without the likes of Neils Bohr and the many others who helped define quantum mechanics.
Innovation never happens only as the result of one lone genius pushing a field forward. Google for "standing on the shoulders of giants" for a good quote on the topic.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
At the end of his article he claims that this process of self-elimination through suicide has ALWAYS happened. Where?
I can't think of any Business history where this might have happened in the past. The closest things I can think of that are similar tend to be Standard Oil (broken up monopoly) and the Bells (broken up monopoly). I missed something.
About the only place I see anything like this is in Political History, but I'm not certain that this applies to Corporations. They have different forces driving them and as such, have a different quality of focus.
If anyone can cite an example please do.
Personally, I think we are going to be entering a very dark age.
Funnily enough, this thread is on topic. Like MS software fans, there are adherents of "american cars" who are unaware that their favorite attributes exist in other cars. I think that the Toyota Supra is rear wheel drive. In fact, I'm pretty sure of it. The MR2 is definetly rear wheel drive - it's rear engined.
In a like vein, a friend of mine actually works for MS, and he is totally unable to see beyond the "shareware junk slapped together by a thousand idiots" line. He even runs an extremely successful website for a subset of car nuts, and has no interest in making his websites accessible to that 'tiny minority of nuts who don't run IE'.
He's an OK guy, but he just can't see outside of the box he's in.
Interesting note: there's another parallel between cars and computers. Toyota has been working on the "Toyota production system" for 40 years now. It is a completely different way of building cars (and everything else) and it has some amazing parallels to open source software.
The system, also called "Shingo" after the man who started it, has saved Porche from bankruptcy. Toyota makes no secret about their system, and even sends out instructors to anybody who wants them.
In a nutshell, it's continuous improvement with totally flexible production systems and just in time manufacturing.
No long production runs, because you're buried in useless parts if you make an engineering improvement. Kind of sounds like "release early, release often" doesn't it?
Software is easy to change and update, because the incremental production cost is close to zero. Physical car parts cost money, but if they're only made in runs of 1/100th the normal size, it only costs 1/100th as much in obsolete parts to change something.
Those actually in production are able to make changes in the manufacturing process to suit their own needs (required to, actually). Kind of like free software lets you make changes too.
Toyota's Shingo system and Free Software's open system do have many things in common, and it's no suprize that they're both taking huge bites out of their competition.
Toyota has an advantage, however, in that it makes oodles of money, and is competing in a still-fragmented market. MS is a behemoth, and has the power to write it's own laws in the US.
P.S. I see the above in action every day where I work (Not Toyota, just a company consiously emulating them)
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
Should MS share prices dive, MS will use some of that $60B to repurchase stock when it bottoms, then sell it when they run the price back up.
That will be just an added bonus when the time comes.
You can do a lot with 60 billion dollars. Really.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
Linux is a pirate ship! arrr....
...to Scott McNealy's own incompetence in dealing with Microsoft.
Anybody who thinks Microsoft can hold off Linux forever is an idiot.
And within the next twenty years - regardless of Jaron Lanier's nonsense - new hardware and software technology will appear which will bury current technology and Windows (and probably Linux and Unix) with it.
Of course, there will always be some moron companies running Windows in the year 2030 just like some companies today (like the IRS which according to a recent report is running code written in the 1960's, fer Baron von Christ's sake!) are running obsolete crap.
But Microsoft will be GONE in twenty years.
Have a nice day, Microsoft trolls. And fuck you very much.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Linus: It's you!
Gates: How are you gentlemen? All your platform are belong to us.
Linus: Move every zig.
Gates: Ha ha ha.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
This "One Genius" myth is based on an intelligent (perhaps even a genius) person synthesizing the information currently available. Consider that the calculus was invented/discovered almost simultaneiously and independently by both Liebnitz and... that other one. Newton.
If Einstein had not discovered/invented relativity (both special and relative), someone else would have. Maybe not that year, but a few years later.
This is the same myth that surrounds Microsoft-- a lot of people tell me (when I'm badmouthing MS), "If it wasn't for Microsoft, the computer revolution never would have happened!"
To which I respond:
"Bullshit."
The computer revolution was happening. Apple. Commodore. Even Radio Shack. The computer revolution was going to happen with or without Microsoft.
"But they made the computer easy to use!"
Yeah, by ripping off Apple, who ripped off PARC, who ripped off demonstrations of computer applications from the late '60s, early '70s. The point is, this was going to happen.
The time was right. The situation was right. The synthesis was going to happen, because the parts were there, and the lightening was striking.
Microsoft deftly used the naivete of the typical geek against the geeks themselves. Microsoft made it by being the most ruthless bastards around.
And, if this epitomizes the ideals of capitalism, you can have it. If you have to fuck over as many people as possible to succeed, welcome to it. Just don't say that everything was made possible by the most predatory, the most ravenous.
This was going to happen no matter what. It's just that Microsoft grew strong by feasting on the carcasses of those it slaughtered, not by any craft of its own.
Sorry. Didn't mean for this to turn into an anti-Microsoft rant. It's just that I've been saying they are unstoppable for years. (I've also said they don't stand a chance, and they don't; but I can't wait a hundred years to see them felled.)
Really, I just intended a "me too!" for the parent post.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Microsofts main tools for survival. Linux is a threat to that.
I think that the public needs to be more educated about the alternatives to the monopoly which controls the machines all around us, as well as about the monopoly itself and the harm that it does.
First of all, they should finally learn about the monopoly itself. The most important facts can be found on the Microsoft Financial Fraud Update website by Bill Parish. MSFT is basically a pyramid scheme. It has to collapse some day. I find it much more likely than the suicide.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Several problems with this theory. OSS means that Microsoft can simply copy your software (ie. embrace) and incorporate it into their environment (ie. extend). The lawyers cannot do a thing about this. :(
Only now, a few thousand readers out there expect me to blithely produce an answer to the problem of what to do to bring Microsoft into the civilized world. Well, I say it can't be done.
Not so fast.
Microsoft is a huge company with its foot in many different parts of the computing world. Yes, it dominates the OS market, and, for now, the browser market. But I do think that there is one company that, years from now, others will look to as a sign that Microsoft is beatable.
That company is, of course, Google. They are now recognized as the top search engine. Microsoft even tried to buy them before, and they refused. Everyone here knows about gmail...with 1 Gig of space and the ability to search through your emails with Google technology, that's quickly going to overtake Yahoo and Hotmail and become the number one free email service. How much longer until Google comes out with GIM -- Google Instant Messanger -- with search capabilities on each conversation? That could surpass AIM, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger.
Google will eventually dominate the Internet world, starting with gmail. A world that Microsoft is very much a part of. Years from now every company will aspire to become the next Google. They are the one company that Microsoft will not beat out.
A not-so-minor correction here:
Microsoft can survive for years with zero revenue, no money coming in. That is an enormously strong position to be in.
Purchase id and Valve software and release their games exclusively on Linux.
Coming to US theaters in April of 2004 !
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
> In any case 3.1 never had TCP/IP from microsoft.
This can be disproven by going to ftp.microsoft.com and downloading TCP/IP for WfW. This came out in 1994, did not include a PPP driver, so most home users ignored it.
Ok - on second thought, can someone please mod that as "funny" in case they don't find it humorous and they send their legal wolves after me?
Disclaimer: the preceeding comment was intended ONLY as a joke and while I wouldn't necessarily be bothered by the death of Bill Gates, I certainly would never condone it (publicly or privately) nor would I ever ask that anyone perform such an act even if they thought it would help society for the greater good.
Killing is bad. Dying is worse.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Do you hear a loud sucking noise? That's the sound of a huge portion of Old Steel's revenue being swept into the pensions of retired workers. What company can compete when they have this kind of overhead to deal with- especially a fresh, new one without anywhere near the same burden?
Idiot. We make BSD freely available to all comers, for any purpose. We are practical people who believe in true freedom, not some fabricated GNU farce.
If Microsoft is so evil, they'll steal whatever code they want, GPL'd or not, and you'll be none the wiser.
BSD. Excellence. Freedom.
If you guys are wondering for the meaning, it stands for Customer Relationship Management, and that's the key of success for ANY bussiness. Let me give you guys an example:
Lets say that you have this brand new os, which is super secure, super fast, free, ultra reliable, multi platform and open source, but it doesnt bring any manuals, its too hard to use, and you don't have tech support at all.
On the other hand, you have this old but well known os, which is slow, not reliable at all, its not free, but its not expensive, its really really simple, it has a lot of manuals and a great tech support number.
The point is, why do i have to break my head in pieces trying to understand how the first one works if i have the second which is really easy to use and also has a great TECH SUPPORT phone number? I can call them anytime from anywhere and they'll fix my problem. I dont know you guys, but ill keep the second. Be real, its useless to have something which will take you like 10 years to unleash its total capacity.
The key is the tech support. Im totally sure that if a bunch of 200 geeks team up together and they make some publicity as a "linux tech support group phone number", im sure that it would raise linux popularity a LOT and people will actually start USING it, because they will feel that if they get stuck somewhere, they will have someone to call to give them a hand.
You guys want to destroy microsoft? do that and ill convert windows into a myth.
You have to work as a tech support over the phone to know how dumb the people using computers...
They've taken a lot of lessons from FOSS community, and the main lesson was to innovate where the competitor can't or won't - frameworks, managed runtime, consistent set of APIs, hardware accelerated UI, sql based FS, better shell scripting, better management/monitoring, etc. - all these things will blow up in FOSS community's face in year 2006 when Longhorn comes out. Suddenly everyone will find that FOSS is based on 10 years old technology and costs too much to develop for and maintain.
.NET Framework/CLR and a bunch of other things. Longorn is the biggest bet of them all, bigger than Windows 95 was in 1995.
Longhorn is Microsoft's big bet, and they have an extraordinary history of delivering on those. They've done this with Windows 95, IE, Media Player, SQL Server, Exchange, NT,
Cringley needs to take his prozac and quit writing the morning after eating too much sugar. Linux is forever, free, pervasive, and can sell for free longer than Microsoft can afford to give away dust.
Clue = for you, Cringley.
Not if your software is GPLed.
A paid CD distro of Mozilla for exapmle would fit the bill perfectly.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
There are 10 billion shares of which Gates and Ballmer have 1.5 billion between them. Gates has around 1.1 Billion and Steve Ballmer around 400,000. The current share price is 25 dollars, which values the company at around 250 billion dollars.
Annual profit works out at 10 billion dollars.
That means that profit is currently 1 dollar a share, which at 25 dollars a share means a return of 4%.
If the market in Office collapses due to open-source alternatives, that could take 2 billion off the bottom line, which would bring the return down to 3.2%.
Assuming that MS is no longer seen as a strategically important stock, and given that after the US elections later this year interest rates will start to rise, to maybe 5, 6 or 7 percent...then the MS stock is going to look very overvalued, and could conceivable take a tumble to around 15 dollars a share, which would be a loss of capitalization value of 100 billion....
While I understand this, and I agree that abusing monopoly power is wrong, It really irratates me that the other companies can do the exact same thing only because they are not a monopoly. There is a difference between abusing monopoly power and bunleing extra features. I think people in general have forgotten that.
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
Phone rings in Windows Land
"Hi Dad"
"Hi, I love this new Windows box. It's so easy to use, but now I have a slight problem."
"What's that, honoured Progenitor?"
"Well, a nice man from Russia sent me an email and now someone called Ivan owns my house, my credit card is currently being used to purchase Beluga caviar in St Petersburg, the FBI are checking my hard disk for kiddie pr0n and dirty bomb instructions and the guy from my ISP just called - something about Open Relays. Oh yeah, and my modem's lights are all on and the dial code looks a helluva lot like the Chinese mainland. But other than that, the ease of use is fantastic."
[PUNCHLINE]
"OK. So what's the problem again..?"
[/PUNCHLINE]
I wish at was Friday, but I dont want to wish my life away. So I wish it was last Friday.
You can read more here.
I play Nerd-Folk!
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
Microsoft, as well as Sun, Cisco, HP, Dell, have become "Gorilla Companies". (see "The Gorilla Game" by Geoffrey A. Moore). His premise is that the actual products are not nearly as relevant as the market penetration and the fact that the products become Industry Standard. How well a product works is only a small part of the equation - whether it can be supported - by many - on demand - is far more important. I am a consultant working for at least 250 clients - small businesses, too small to have IT depts. that do a range of things - from manufacture clothing, to graphic design to retail, to property management. Not one uses sun anything. 2 or 3 use Macs. A small business that relies on Jenny's 17 year old son to support their IT systems is a small business heading toward an IT train wreck. I see it all the time. The business costs (including down time) to untangle a geeky experiment in egotistical empire building can be astronomical and devestating. Knowing how to overclock a system and keep linux working on it does not mean you understand what a business needs to keep it's day to day functions running smoothly. I'm not a huge microsoft fan, but until you understand the above, there is no way to move toward a different world. It's not about control. It's about the money....follow it, and you will understand.