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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.'"
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
A couple minutes with a spreadsheet will show that 1 - 1% is .99, and 99 - 99% is also 0.99 ... but 50 - 50% is 25! It's a bell curve, and there's definitely a sweet spot there.
So under that "extreme" example, you could have two major competitors in any market operating at, or close to, maximum profitability, while a monopoly would basically self-destruct. Perhaps it's a little smarter than some people think.
Of course, the numbers could be adjusted to move the "sweet spot" higher or lower. You could make it so diminishing returns kicked in if a company had more than, say, 75% market share, so there could still be one big player, but leave room for smaller ones too. Or you could put the sweet spot at 33% or even 25%, thus encouraging the existence of 3 or 4 fairly evenly matched competitors in a market.
But yeah, Cringely's right that it won't happen. The folks who create taxes don't have much incentive to do that, considering who's lining their pockets, and besides, the math might be too hard for them. ;)
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!
Slightly OT but, the rumors of a forthcoming "XP Reloaded" release are false. The Register had an article about it recently.
You have made two mistakes here. First, you have missed the point altogether, that we want large companies not to get more market share. So your implicit complaint that we are discouraging growth is in fact the goal of this tax. You ask why this is a good thing. It is because when a company grows too much, it becomes harmful to society instead of helpful. (Or at least so some people think. I'm taking that as an assumption in this explanation, not defending it.) You have implicitly assumed that bigger is better. Maybe it is for the person who is bigger, but that does not mean it is better for society in general. E.g., any individual might make themselves safer by getting a bigger, heavier car, but that could make everybody else a bit less safe. If bigger were better, we should merge all businesses into one big huge company. Obviously, that would be awful.
Second, a tax rate that is progressive on market share does not necessarily penalize a company for being "good," or, more accurately, big. Depending on the tax structure, it may decrease the reward for being big. The specific proposal was a sales tax rate equal to market share. That might mean that if Microsoft charges $100 for Windows 3000 and has a 90% market share, they would have to collect $190 from the purchaser and send $90 to the government. In that case, additional sales would get harder and harder, but each sale would still increase post-tax revenue.
Well, a good idea and a mother who shared a position on the board of United Way with John Opel (the then chairman of IBM).
- Client (Windows XP)
- Information Worker (Office)
- Server Platforms (Windows Server 2003, SQL Server, etc.)
- CE/Mobile (Windows Mobile, etc.)
- Business Software (Great Plains etc.)
- Home & Entertainment (Xbox, Media Center, etc)
- MSN
The only divisions that consistently turn a profit (a couple billion a quarter each) are Client and Information Worker. Server Platforms is usually brings in a profit of some hundred million each quarter, but sometimes (like the first quarter of fiscal 2004, if I recall) loses money. The other four combined lose something like $250 million every quarter.Microsoft gets something like 90% of its profits from selling Windows client OSes and Office. If Microsoft expects to survive (or you expect it to do so) in some emerging segment while the "PC OS Market" goes away, it's going to have to do a lot better in those other segments.
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.
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
Can you name any company besides Microsoft that has emerged into a monopoly by taking over a free market?
Standard Oil
AT&T
Both were broken up by the government into competing businesses which went on to great success as competitors and IMO added more to the economy separately than if they had remained a single monlithic (emphasis on the lithic) entity.
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There would be no linux desktop issue if they hadn't been so successful.
Jeoin
"the fact that buyers have chosen not to buy the alternatives and instead largely stick with Microsoft"
Are you trying to say PCs don't come _bundled_ with MS software?
Weird.
FP.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
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'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.
Right. Hope you like virii, defragmenting, paying for "upgrades" and waiting weeks or even months (or years) for security fixes. Also hope you like not being able to do anything about it and hope you like that skilled programmers out there also can't help you at all. Sorry to troll off like that, but the mentality annoys me (plus I'm pissed off having just read about Sun's sucession).
> When I do the same with this SUSE 9.0 I get zero
> feedback. Zilch. I have no idea if my action was
> successful or not and worse I have no idea where
> this device was mounted. The process with SUSE
> isn't any where as intuitive as it could and
> should be.
This just isn't true. I gave SuSE 9.0 a try, and specifically tested this out about a week ago with a friend's USB drive, and it does the exact same thing you describe in OSX. Plug in the drive, an icon appears on the desktop. I was actually fairly surprised by it.
-Mark
True enough, but the largest retailer in the world says you don't have to.
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.