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A Former Microsoftie Forecasts Microsoft Doom
Chris Holland writes "Jeff Reifman, a columnist for Seattle Weekly, has written a toe-curling editorial analysis of Microsoft's past and current missed opportunities, contrasted with its financial success, while covering in fair depth some of the most serious threats to their business model. Beyond the many choice quotes, I've found this article to be a very interesting read from somebody who has not only been on the inside, but also significantly developed his professional career thru Microsoft solutions."
Where exactly does it say it's a "Linux advocacy site"? It's news for nerds. Yes, there are quite knowledgeable Microsoft nerds as well.
Revenue is what you take in. Income is what you keep. (AKA profit) Gives you a clue as to what their markup is (:-0)
with microsoft's focus on enterprise applications and with sharepoint and sql analysis and reporting services being probably the most powerful web portal and buisness intelligence solutions to date, the juggernaut will roll on crushing anyone who stands in opposition as they move and change with the environment, focusing on where the money is. not trying to make the same thing they've done for 10 years better.
Synchronization of our Internet bookmarks across all our computers
Firefox has an extension which does this very thing. Look for "Bookmarks Synchronizer" on the main extensions page.
Trolling is a art,
Because you don't pay Income Tax on your gross sales (revenue), you pay it on your net profits (income). So when companies are looking for write-off's, it means they are trying to find ways to reduce their net profits on paper, so as to to pay less taxes.
It's in the dictionary.
Evolution or ID?
You are looking for OSNews.com where the most unpopular OS in the world for some strange reason also happens to be the most newsworthy.
This should be an editorial, not an "analysis". It's filled with non-factual personal experiences that have obviously given him a bias. I mean, why does this belong in an "analysis"??? (from the article):
My most memorable moment at Microsoft came during a technical review with Bill Gates. I will never forget the moment when I made an apparently obvious point to him. He responded, "What? Do you think I'm stupid?" Everyone was staring at me, and I felt it best not to answer. Like Gates, there were always people at Microsoft who were much smarter than me and more technically skilled. But he's created a corporate culture that sometimes struggles to see the forest for the trees--and I think this is what has led to some of the challenges that it faces today.
So I did a little digging on this guy and found out he really is stupid. And my guess is that he's bitter because he's just smart enough to realize how stupid he is.
According to the July 20, 1999 edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencier,
Jeff Reifman, a 29-year-old former program manager at MSNBC, left behind $700,000 in stock options in April to co-found GiftSpot.com, a 24-person Seattle company that delivers gift certificates over the Internet. If Reifman had stayed at Microsoft just two more months he would have been able to cash in on the stock.
Ahh... now we see why he is so angry about why his Gift Certificate store failed! It wasn't because PassPort didn't take off...
This kind of "article" is exactly why newspapers are going down the toilet today. There's no disclosure.
Imperium means the power to execute authority. Imperator is one who executes authority. These words are from even the very beginning of the Republic. There was no office "emperor," ever. Augustus was "princes interpares" or "first among equals" (first citizen), but held the consulship and tribunition power at the same time with many consecutive elections. The principate gave way to the dominate under Diocletian (Catholic ceremony is based on the Imperial Cult under Diocletian). However, the fact is there never was a "Roman empire" in the sense that there was an office called emperor. Pompey was hailed as Imperator, but was nothing more than a General, Senator, and Consul. Caesar was Imperator, but was Consul, then Dictator for 10 years, later for life, at the word of the Senate. The senate became merely a formality after Octavian, but still, it was always SPQR -- Senatus Publiusque Romanus -- The Senate and the People, in whose name the emperor declared anything.
>> Last time I had to log out was when
>> I put more RAM in
I couldn't agree more. I'm not a Microsoft fan by any means but I run XP on my Toshiba laptop. I only reboot, about once a month, simply out of habit.
I don't recall ever "having" to reboot.
XP is very stable and very usable. I can't comment on Office as I use OpenOffice...
> By "Income" does he mean "Profit" or is MS actually predicting
> a 50% revenue drop over the previous year?
Revenue is the amount of money you bring in due to products that you sell. This normally does not include money from investments and selling plant, property, and equipment (PP&E). So if you sell 1 product for $1, but you sell a building you don't use any more for $1M, your revenue is only $1.
Income is the amount of money left over after all expenses. The first expense is cost of goods sold (this means the cost of the actually sold unit). For software, this is nearly 0. Money left over after the COGS is your direct margin. For Microsoft, I believe this is something like 90+% (but I'm too lazy to look up their income statement at this time)
After that, you subtract off the other expenses, like R&D (this includes software engineering and the like), sales general and administrative (SG&A--including marketing weasels, such as myself), and interest payments (e.g. long term debt).
Whatever is left over is your net income. Here's a simplified example:
INCOME STATEMENT
Revenue
(cost of goods sold)
----------------
Direct Margin
(R&D)
(SG&A)
(Interest Expense)
----------------
Net Income
So Income is your bottom line. If the number is positive, then profit! That means the standard Slashdot cliche becomes:
1. Make revenue from a product or service
2. Minimize your expenses
3. Profit!
What's interesting about Microsoft is they are one of a very small number of companies with NO long term debt (Apple, I believe, just joined this exclusive club). That makes MSFT's balance sheet fairly impressive to look at.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
It looks like the author needs to stop running Windows 98. Seriously, what ridiculously mismanaged system is he running?
The author implies that he's been running XP as well as those other latest and greatest programs that are causing him no end of grief:
While aware of Microsoft?s shortcomings, I always believed that the Soft did its best to improve products over time, as it did with Windows XP.
While there's no excuse for 98 to act that way either, I've found it to be more stable than newer M$ junk. Sitting behind a nice Debian firewall and blinded to my network, my wife's Windoze 98 partition has been working as good as it ever did for the last three years. We use it to operate a scanner and a few USB devices. Most of the time it's booted to Debian testing because my wife mostly web surfs and emails. My little brother's XP box lasted about six months on the same network in part because he unwisely used it for internet stuff but mostly because of the many compounding Microsoft design flaws. It crashed and burned on him one day and he had lost his XP CD and put Fedora on it. Now it works great. Anyone working the PC industry knows that my little brother's case is typical and that Microsoft computing has become more not less frustrating.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
``I think, and others can probably vouch for this, the allure of Mac OS in particular kind of wanes after a few weeks of using it.''
/.), but works a lot better for me.
I can confirm that. Coming from a GNU/Linux background:
1. First thing I noticed that, contrary to what it says on several website, the system ships without a C compiler. To get one, I had to download > 600 MB (big big gasp! that's more than my entire Debian installation was) from Apple.
2. Many applications written for the GNU system won't compile on it. This is because glibc is bloated with all kinds of functions that do get used by developers who target GNU/Linux.
3. Some software just doesn't run correctly. I wrote a webserver that I started developing on OS X, then further developed on Linux. It compiles without warnings, but goes completely insane when run on OS X. Several Java applications fail when trying to use Swing.
4. The OS (including the GUI) eats a *lot* of memory. The iLife apps are also huge.
5. Safari does too many things in one thread; when it's rendering a page in one tab, I can't switch to another tab: the Spinning Beachball of Death appears and the switch happens only *after* the page has rendered. I use Camino now; it has bugs (especially rendering
6. iChat A/V doesn't work behind my NAT box - after a request for audio chat (no connection can be established), messages I send do not get delivered, and eventually iChat loses its connection altogether.
7. The Terminal is sloooow to start, and annoyingly eats the PgUp and PgDn keypresses, sending them to the scroll bar instead of the program that's running. I know, I can use Shift+PgUp, but that's annoying, especially since that's actually Shift+fn+up on my iBook.
8. Quicktime - nah, let's not even go there. It sucks in every way. VLC is the way to go, even though it plays Ogg media at the wrong speed (really hurts the ears) on OS X.
Although all this may sound like I regret buying my iBook, the opposite is true. OS X is still the system that combines compatibility with usability and polish, and the machine is just *great*. It gets over 5 and a half hours of battery life on one charge while programming, which is a great boon to me. As soon as MOL runs under OS X, I will run Linux on it, though - for the games, and for developing kernel modules.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
"Office (specifically Word) is a complex tool. It can do a lot, but with that level of flexibility comes a certain level of complexity and obfuscation."
Which is exactly the problem: how many people really need even 10% of the 'complex and obfuscated' features in Office these days? Personally I've yet to find anything I want to do that OpenOffice doesn't do, and doesn't do in an easily understood manner... so what's the point of Office?
It's because sometimes the cost of not having something now (this includes lost profits) is greater than the cost of interest payments.
Here's a simple example: suppose you have several job offers and the highest-paying offer requires that you have a car, but you do not own a car yet and do not have enough cash to afford one. Your choices are to either to borrow money to buy a car or to take a lower paying job. If the difference in pay between the best job and the second best job is greater than the cost of the interest on the car, then the best (fiscal) decision is to borrow the money for the car and take the best paying job.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
He was there at Microsoft for 8 years.... when you start, you usually get options that vest over 4 years, so that means the options he got for the first 4 years all vested and the last 4 years partially vested...
If his remaining options were $700,000, imagine how much in options he actually did cashed in!!!!! He's probably a multi-millionaire already, and $700k probably didn't mean so much to him as the opportunity at the time.
No direct link since Bugzilla won't allow links from slashdot.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
If you use a browser that an import and export Netscape-style bookmarks, you can use Yahoo! Bookmarks to sync.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
By the way, this is the reason why MicroSoft historically has not done dividend payments. They can prop up the stock more by keeping the money and having the stock price go up rather than distributing the money to shareholders where it will have to be taxed.
Engineering and the Ultimate
"Not that I'm knocking Microsoft for XP needing a reboot after a patch."
FUD.
XP (and 2000 and 2003, for that matter) do not need a reboot after a patch, or at least not after most hotfixes, security updates, and application installs.
Yes, there's a reboot after service packs and some patches, but NT 4 was a long time ago.
Actually, I don't believe corporations pay taxes on profits. They pay taxes on employees (also use taxes and property taxes) and the shareholders pay taxes on dividends. I could be wrong but I think that's how it works out.
You are half right, corporations are supposed to pay taxes on income(up to 1/3 of it IIRC), but they also pay property taxes, and payroll taxes(your contribution to medicare/social security is matched by your employers, but what really sucks for people who are self employed is that they usually have the pay the full 15.4%). Bush removed all taxes on dividends(but not on capital gains, which anymore is the bigger part of the profit from stock)
But a study done recently showed that over 60% of corporations payed no taxes on their revenues(some even got paid by the government), usually by making their headquarters in Bermuda etc.
I've never met a project manager that didn't think they were a lot smarter than he really were
Grammar like this is exactly why Project Managers are necessary. You Developers have to be kept away from the clients, be grateful that PMs are there to deal with them for you.
(just fanning the flames a little...)
Try that:
~/.mozilla/default/lkajsrfl.als/bookmarks.html
The default profile under Windows is at:
Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\default\lkajsrfl.als
Substitute lkajsrfl.als for whatever Mozilla came up with.
And yes, it's still the same basic concept with some odd enhancements. Check before you berate!
Just look at Sony, a company that sells media that it wants to DRM protect as well as devices for copying said media.
Ok, facts first: I've been using Linux since about 1996, and I'm using it for the last 5 years as my primary desktop (Software engineering :-)). I was first using slackware, and did have fun tracking down all the dependencies and compiling from source.
However, I've been using Debian for the last 2 years because its update mechanism is so absolutely user-friendly. While I've been using unstable and there are some hitches, particurlarly when large components such as X or Gnome are updated, these do get fixed within a day or two.
There is indeed logging of crashes and even problems. They've been around for a while. You'll find most of it in the event viewer under administrative tools.
-]Phreak Out[-
Quite a few tech companies have no or a token amount of debt. The rating agencies (companies that assign a credit rating, like a FICO to companies) hate technology companies, they believe them to be very risky and give them low ratings. If MS had debt (even considering their cash flow, growth, size, and cash in the bank) they would probably be A-AA (well below anything with worse credit metrics in other industries). Nice to see another someone who understands accounting and finance on /.
In addition to this most public tech companies (especially software companies) have very low capital requirements and generate enough cash to cover their needs. Old semi companies (that aren't fabless) are the big exception to the rule.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.