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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."
My biggest reason for saying this involves the fact that Microsoft is also too large to just topple outright, and there is too much of the industry tied up in Windows technology for it to just suddenly become irrelevant, not to mention all the legacy apps and documents that'll require continued support no matter what OS or technology eventually rises to new dominance (.doc, ferinstance.)
I guess that, even as an admitted Linux/Mac partisan, Microsoft isn't just going to die in some Nazi-ish 'Gates-eating-a-bullet-in-a-Redmond-bunker' gotterdammerung, as much as it will just become something else, and still hold sway to some extent after it does.
So yeah - out of the two examples you picked, I'd pick the Roman one as being the one most likely to come true.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Yes, Microsoft may be doomed, I thought everybody here has predicted it already. Why do you people care so much?
... pretty well, too.
/., is intended to give us all a picture of what may come to pass ... not what will ...
... heh heh ...
This is a false perception. Not everyone on slashdot wants Microsoft to fail, or is predicting it. Just the most vocal members.
You don't hear from "pro-Microsoft" people, simply because the "anti-MS" people are louder, more 'righteous', and more willing to aubse their essential liberties in order to start a flame war.
I believe that most 'sane' geeks truly understand that Microsoft is a company, like any other, and performs under traditional company rules
But times are changing, and the discourse you may observe on these times, here at
I detest Microsoft. I haven't used their products in years, and I stopped purchasing anything that will in any way give them more control over the computing industry. But, if they were to change their ways, and demonstrate that as a group (rather large), they are capable of cleaning up their act, I would give them a second chance.
But not until "ms_windows.tar.gz" cleanly compiles, straight off the 'net, with my own compiler (not theirs)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
From the article:
Why are Microsoft products so endlessly frustrating to use? Even techno-geeks like me get annoyed by Windows. I'm tired of spending the first 10 minutes of my day rebooting just so I can get to work. Microsoft Outlook 2003, the latest version of the company's e-mail and calendar software, hangs for me about once a day, requiring me to restart my PC. I also have a problem with Word 2003: Whenever I bullet a line of text, every line in the document gets a bullet. Asking Windows to shut down is more of a request than a command--it might, it might not. And recently, Internet Explorer stopped opening for me.
It looks like the author needs to stop running Windows 98...
Seriously, what ridiculously mismanaged system is he running? I reboot my win2k and XP systems maybe once a month, if that.
How many startup services does he have that his reboot takes 10 minutes? On my 800mhz machine (ancient by todays standards) reboot is 2-3 minutes, tops.
Although I've stopped using outlook and IE, in favor of mozilla and thunderbird, in the few times I have to use the apps for compatibility, I never experience instability.
Yes, MS products aren't perfect, but I hate it when people dishonestly paint Window's systems as if they crashed every 10 minutes just to make their point that XXX alternate system is better. OSX is sweet. Linux rocks. But WinXP is also a great system.
Oh no. Because surely if someone who spent 10 friggin' years at Microsoft has problems with the software he must be at fault.
Cause clearly in that many years he never would have had occasion to actually put in bullet text into a document before. And surely he'd never have occasion to double click on the IE icon and have it launch.
I cry horse-shit!! As much as the Microsoft fans and apologists would have us believe that Windows never apparently does something with no understandable reason, I would argue that for the vast majority of the rest of us random flaky behaviour is exactly what we've come to expect.
Over the years I've seen dozens of examples where all of the Kings Techo-Geeks and all the Kings Men standing around a windows box with bad behaviour finally decide to backup what they can and re-install the damned thing because *nobody* can come up with a plausible explaination for what the heck is happening.
Saying in sneering tones that he couldn't possibly be a techno-geek doesn't support your argument in any way.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
``I'd love to see someone factor that kind of crap in in a Total Cost of Ownership study.''
And that, my friend, is a *very* good point. During the time that your system is unusable, you still get paid, but you can't deliver. In an office where people earn > $ 100 per hour, reboot once a day (taking 10 minutes), and lose some time because an essential server is down for a few (let's say 2) hours total each week, that's more than $ 300 per person per week. I have been to such places; I'm not pulling this out of thin air. And that's not even taking into account the occasional virus.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I guess some day it'll have to be payback time for every time when grandma, grandad, mom, dad, uncle{1,2,3} and auntie{1-9} called any respectably computer-educated relative with a question like: "something is wrong with my computer. Can you come and fix it?"
Microsoft tried to spread the delusion that no computer knowledge and background is neccessary to maintain a computer system while making it more and more complex.
Things have reached saturation point these days: every at-least-half computer-literate spends a significant amount of his business and spare time rescuing some system gone bananas.
The fact is that no open source, free as in beer or even proprietary software is much better than any M$ products. The only difference is that these (non-M$) product do not assume self-sufficiency, or praise themselves as the best thing delivered to mankind. Instead of planting the evil seeds of false expectations, it comes natural to people using these product that they need to master a certain level of skill or consult an expert. One knows what one pays for and one knows what one gets!
Microsoft, on the other hand, is simply not transparent. It takes hours of investigation by a computer professional to discover what combination of -khm-features- caused grandma's computer to "start acting funny".
I stopped doing unpaid PC-M$-Win support for my friends and relatives a few years ago, because it was driving me nuts. So, I prepared a one liner fend-off checklist instead:
1. Don't tell me - you are using Windows, right?
2. Who made you think upgrading your system is a good idea?
3. Everything worked fine until recently and gone bizzare for no apparent reason?
4. I have no idea how to fix or even use M$ Outlook. Simply make a choice between using email or running outlook!
5. Other browsers are just fine. When you run onto a site that only opens up in M$ explorer, guess again, who's to blame!
6. Face it - there is no help or anything either you or even a PHD in computer engineering/science can do.
7. Well, that's why Bill Gates is rich and we are poor.
I mean, how deep the world dropped - people started perceiving computers as problems that can only be miracleously solved by throwing money away every few months!
Hopefully, the demise of m$ happens before any kind of world disaster; otherwise, future archeologists from this or another planet will think the dominant planetary religion was playing some solitary card game...
*sigh*
I'm getting tired of comments like this. Just because you derive some sick, deranged pleasure from knowing all the minutiae and strange behaviors of the software products you own doesn't mean that someone else does. Some folks just like to use friendly, intuitive software.
When people complain, Microsoft may choose to ignore them at their own peril. It's capitalism, baby. If they want to cater to the folks who like to "get their windows machine stable", that's fine. The rest of us have a fine selection of OS' to jump to.
If this gentleman uses OS X because he feels it is easier to understand and use, that's his perogative, and it is not a reflection of his skills as a computer user. In fact, I stand right beside him as a Mac OS X convert after years of staunch Microsoft support.
Some of us like to use the computer rather than wrestle with it.
Oh, and you can't tell me that you've never reformatted a windows box because it was just easier than trying to figure out what was wrong.
Sometimes, debugging the issue would take longer than a re-install. Sometimes, it is less costly to just rebuild rather than spend days comparing DLL versions, scanning through the registry, and all the other attendant menial tasks that come with debugging an unstable windows installation. Is it a bad driver? Bad device*? Bad registry keys? Conflicting DLLs? Bah. Who needs it.
Bottom line: When I use my machine, I want to get productive work done. I have better things to do with my time than be an administrator.
*I'm aware that Microsoft supports a "much wider range of hardware". I've heard that argument before. However, as a user, I'm not interested in what Microsoft chooses to support. I'm interested in a stable, easy-to-use machine with a decent selection of compatible periphals.
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
This ugly piece of data structure - without a decent failover strategy is the root cause of most windows problems.
/etc structure should be emulated and config info should be left to flat file structures.
/etc/config folder.
Even the current XP based restore point creation does nothing better.
The
IIS 6.0 did that by abandoning all registry settings and moved to an XML file structure - Everything actually. DotNet has moved in that direction too.
Hopefully Longhorn will have a
This guy can say anything he wants, but it won't change the fact that MS is *definitely* doing things 'right'.
Almost-- and thus, you miss the point of what he is saying. "Microsoft has *definitely* done things 'right'" would be more accurate.
With Windows 95, it created an operating system usable by the masses, with new features that everyone really wanted to upgrade to-- Internet Access. Windows 98 added improved driver support, particularly for USB. Windows ME added diddly-squat... and it's sales were mediocre. Windows 2000 turned the NT branch into an almost-consumer usable product; Windows XP put a pretty coat of frosting on that, and marginally improved stability and usability.
From my understanding of the history of technology, the Windows OS has been paralleling the development of every other technological tool in history, software or otherwise. You come up with an idea for something to do a job; you get it into a marginally workable form, and people try it; you improve it, and if you get lucky and it's useful enough, eveyone beats a path to your door. You may even make a few more "new and improved" versions. But eventually, you have a mature piece of technology, like egrep, or the pocket knife.
And demand peaks-- because a lot of people HAVE one already, thank you, I'll use it until it wears out. Oh, there's a new Swiss army knife with Torx bits? Maybe I'll look into that when my current knife breaks.
Windows (mostly) works. What the bulk of the masses want to do, it can let them do. It could be more stable, but that's something people feel they should get for free with their CURRENT version-- making people pay for that is tricky.
Since the year September Never Ended, the number of people who want to have a computer has been on the rise. Multi-computer households aren't uncommon. But the number of new purchases is peaking-- and the second computer in the house is often a hand-me-down.
Microsoft is at a point where there isn't much more obvious "new and improved" to put on for the consumer, with both their Office and OS-- so upgrade sales will fall off. Instead of people upgrading OS every two to three years, they'll upgrade every five to nine-- by buying a new computer after the old one dies. Of course, M$ could stop supporting the older software... with bad consequences for (in turn) security for those machines using the software, performance for those networks connected to those machines, and network-dependent software performance for any current Windows machines connected to the network. Ooops.
The article isn't suggesting M$ will go away. What it does imply is that there may be a massive correction at some point in the not-too-distant future (I'd guess 5-10 years, but that's just me) that will cost it a large chunk (I'd guess ~65%?) of its current revenue stream and stock value, and that the measures it is trying now to protect its current revenue stream will make it more difficult to adapt to those leaner times.
(Of course, Apple is in danger of this trap, too. With the OS X.2, X.3, and now X.4 upgrades, it seems to be getting hooked on the upgrade revenue stream, and I'm not convinced users will remain enthusiasic. X.3 added two features of substance that my Mac users noticed and drooled over: Expose, and the return of color-coded files and folders. After seeing the price, of ten machines, two were upgraded for this.)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.