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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."
. I'm tired of spending the first 10 minutes of my day rebooting just so I can get to work.
I must be very lucky because I typically go weeks without rebooting.
Absolutely
Microsoft admits that one of its biggest challenges is getting users of its products to upgrade to new releases. Fewer than 3 percent of Microsoft Office users have upgraded to the latest version
I can't use all of the features in Office 200 yet....
Synchronization of our Internet bookmarks across all our computers
Now wouldn't THAT be nice?
The article is well worth reading. I agree with most of it. I am not exactly a Microsoft fan but I don't have quite the issues with Microsoft that the author does. My biggest gripe is not their products but rather their predatory business practices.
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
I know most of us on slashdot will enjoy a bit of MS bashing but this article is interesting in pointing out the apparent weakness of the MS mindset. Well worth RTFA.
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
In the past year, I've been split about 50-50 between XP and Linux. I have to say that I MUCH prefer the flexibility of Linux, but there are certainly drawbacks. Hooking up your new digital camera is a hit-or-miss proposition, unless you're willing to spend a couple hours learning about how hardware is mounted. For the most part, if you plug something into an XP machine, it's recognized and runs. It may be unstable, but it normally works.
Recently though, I've looked at the Macs more closely. I loathe Steve Jobs almost as much as Bill Gates, and Apple's policies aren't much better than M$oft's, but the G5 is appealing. The UI beats anything I've seen before, plus it comes with a shell that's darned-near identical to the one I'm coming to know and love in Linux. It's to the point now where I'm considering a G5 for my next machine, even though 5 years ago I swore it would take a full-frontal lobotomy to make me say that.
Speaking as a geek, I guess I dislike Micro$oft in part because it is prevalent, but also because I don't care much for how they've run companies under because they couldn't compete with them technologically. I also prefer being able to get my hands dirty with configuration - XP takes much of that configurability away from you while Linux allows (or expects!) you to get into the middle of it all.
IMHO, for basic useability, I recommend XP to folks getting into computers, or just wanting a machine for e-mail and web surfing. Plug-ins are made for IE first, and pretty much every hardware configuration is recognized or supported. I don't think that Linux (in it's current form) is right for say my grandpa. And I'm afraid that if you make Linux that user-friendly, you'll end up with something not too much different than Windows. The Mac is a useable compromise, but I still believe that the hardware is too expensive for the majority of users. I sure wish Apple would finally allow licenced machines.
Reifman mentions a series of mistakes he thinks hurt Microsoft over a multi-year period. He also interweaves descriptions of mistakes, and why he thinks they are mistakes, with asides about other Microsoft actions, which I gather he means to present as background to the reader. I'm assuming this, because he analyzes some actions as explicit mistakes, and just mentions others uncritically or even in a positive light.
That's not necessarily bad, mind you. If it's not clear whether something is a mistake or not, it's better (IMHO) to stick to the clearcut cases.
Reifman's mention of the MSNBC 'merger' as one of his background bits got me thinking though. What if that's one of Microsoft's bigger mistakes? Was there a way to create a stand alone ISP and content sources, and would it have been bold, inovative, and even profitable? Microsoft is known for an embrace and extend approach to small companies. What if they had built up the Microsoft Network's proprietary content entirely by e&e'ing a bunch of small content owners, and stayed away from 'media giants"?
Dealing with a company as large as NBC means adjusting your views on DRM to better fit with theirs. In Microsoft's case, it moved the company towards the same situation as Sony, in that they have divisions that see DRM mostly as something to be imposed preferrably at the hardware level (i.e. the Windows development team), vrs. divisions that want it in the OS (probably everyone who wouldn't have to code it). The situation also sounds a lot like AOL/Time Warner's, which is also a bit strained.
Who is John Cabal?
Buried in the article (which I thought was very well written) was this sentiment (echoed in a few other places as well):
The company is addicted to the revenue from these flagship products and is afraid to go in new directions that might initially hurt the bottom line.
Most healthy companies have diverse product lines and aren't afraid to compete internally. Just look at Sony, a company that sells media that it wants to DRM protect as well as devices for copying said media.
Internal competition usually doesn't hurt. But it does hurt Microsoft, at least in the short term. No matter how much of a spectacular success one of its other products is, if it even lowered Windows or Office revenue by 5% it would be a disaster. That's really kept Microsoft from expanding its dominance into areas it should have been able to because of its market position.
The author writes (and many others have written) that Microsoft is paranoid. There's a good kind of paranoia. I think at Microsoft it's become the bad kind. After all, they have a $280B market cap to maintain.
ps. I thought the anecdote about Gates at the bottom was pretty funny. All the anecdotes of Jobs and Gates seem to paint Jobs as an inspirational, visionary asshole, while Gates is just an asshole. I wonder how true that is?
The company must protect these core products. "The prime directive at Microsoft is to protect Windows and get customers to buy Windows and upgrades to Windows," says Matt Rosoff, lead analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland-based newsletter.
If this is really the mindset at MS, it is one of the continuing problems with a lot of big businesses, which is based on their "theory of business". The problem that Peter Drucker lays out is that a company continues to use a theory of business that may have been VERY successful at one time in their earlier years, but because the environment changes, it is no longer successful. But the company isn't able to review their theory of business and create a new one that takes advantage of their current environment.
A typical symptom that Drucker points out is sacrificing new business oportunities for old ones. This was a problem IBM had when creating the PC market, it frequently sacrificed PC sales to it's mainframe line, and stunted itself for some time.
One aspect that seems to particularly apply here is Drucker's story about GM. GM apparently was very good at improving the performance of existing businesses (I don't recall exactly how it did this though). Over a period of years, it bought a number of other well established businesses (in a variety of fields and for seemingly too much money) and dramatically improved their performance. The idea is that GM had a great theory of business, which no longer applied to it's own field, but still worked in other areas.
It seems like MS is trying to do this, expanding into MSN, the Xbox and other areas, but that still there is something in it's theory of business that is holding it back from dominating those areas. Perhaps they haven't gone far enough afield from their core business... (or perhaps their ToB is too Windows centric)...
Interesting food for thought.
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
I dunno, whenever my girlfriend blames the computer for not doing "what [she] wants it to do", I usually roll my eyes and figure she's just not doing something right.
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. I've programmed C for 10+ years, but I still make mistakes now and again and can't figure out why the hell I'm leaking memory here or there. It's not the compiler's fault, certainly not the languages fault, it's my dumb ass missing or not understanding something.
I run 2000 at work (we just switched from NT) and at home, and I never have to reboot...I go months without a reboot, and I constaly have Outlook up and running, along with Java development tools, Visual C++, about 5-10 IE windows and version management software. It's not like it's terribly hard to keep Windows stable.
--trb
I think the problem is deeper than he realizes. Even if you don't buy a new machine you can run into this issue: Upgrading.
I recently attempted to upgrade my 2k pro machine to XP pro. I wanted to get slightly better (newer) driver support and play with the newer OS. However, you cannot upgrade from 2k pro to XP pro but have to do a clean install. WTF!? It's the same base NT kernel with some slight tweaks and services and a new front-end. Why exactly am I required to do a clean install? I could understand possible issues if it was from 2k pro to XP advanced server but from pro->pro?
Don't get me wrong, I possess Clue having been a system admin and network architect for many years so my reticence to doing a clean install isn't from a lack of technical ability. But I'll be damned if I can figure out why I have to re-install all of my applications again. Having a easier way to updgrade products and OS versions would go a long way towards Microsoft accomplishing their goal of putting users on the upgrade treadmill. Spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down...
Amoeba
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
This sentence struck me as weird:
/. stories, search is hard. With file sharing and e-mail, it seems to me that those would be easier to scale.
Admittedly, though, creating search engines to serve millions of users is an easier task than offering other remote services, such as e-mail and file sharing.
As has been pointed out by various
In my view, Microsoft got in the door because of the IBM PC and a healthy crop of third party DOS applications, Lotus 1-2-3 in particular. My own employer was building DOS apps when we picked up our first copy of Windows, version 1.03. We laughed at each subsequent attempt, up until around 3.1, when we finally decided maybe it was worth building an app for, just to test the waters.
But did we end up becoming a Windows shop because Microsoft was superior? No. We ended up becoming a Windows shop because our customers already had PC compatible machines, largely because of a legacy portfolio of DOS products. We built software to meet customer demand, and in our industry, it was a gradual platform migration from DOS to Windows 3.1 and onward. Microsoft is entrenched largely because of the hardware.
(That said, Linux also runs on that same hardware. And just as with the shift to Windows development, we'll build whatever customers want. If you're in a position to do so, make sure your software vendors --- particularly their sales reps --- know that your company has an interest in Linux products. That kind of feedback causes more of a stir and will yield more results than a hundred cost of ownership studies or technology articles.)
I disagree that Microsoft got where they are because people loved their products. It has far more to do with simple inertia, followed by aggressive marketing tactics that date back to the days of Windows versus OS/2.
But for Reifman, who owns two non-profit coffeehouses on Capitol Hill, it has never been about the money. It is more about creating a company that makes a difference. "A lot of what I am doing is motivated by philanthropic causes," said Reifman, who is setting up a program at GiftSpot.com so his online customers can donate their spare change to charity. ...
But Reifman also said Microsoft, which has grown to 30,200 employees, is a more bureaucratic company than the one he joined eight years ago. That was part of his reason for leaving.
"Bureaucratic" is a nice way of saying "stupid".
I don't see where you get off calling the man bitter. He is currently gainfully employed and his gushing praise of Macs and Linux is anything but bitter. Indeed, the whole article is carefully considered and constructive criticism. M$ regularly pays for astroturf and smear, but, jmulvey, you really have set a new low standard by accusing a man driven by philanthropy of bitterness about money.
Fanboys never cease to amaze me with their vehemence, twitsted logic and bile. Reifman has argued persuasively that the Microsoft experience is not all it's cracked up to be and that alternatives require far less effort to work and are earning loyalty. Deal with it, if you can, without slandering the speaker. It's a turn off and always has been.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Microsoft ought to consider moving from the software industry into something new. They have the capital for anything. They have enough brainpower to do anything. Commercial space flight comes to mind as one of the most important contributions Bill and friends could make to Planet Earth. It's something no individual needs, sure, but there is big money in it just waiting to be tapped. Imagine going on a space vacation and eating at the 'Restaurant at the End of the Universe.' So cool. Imagine playing Ender's game in space, with lasertag style suites that caused joints to lock. I bet it would replace football on ESPN. And there's a hundred thousand other things people would pay to do on their vacation. That's only the recreation aspect. Then think of science, and paying for lab time in space. And mining the moon or asteroids. Colonization, because such a base would be an ideal staging platform.
But in the software industry, I think they are just about done. They will not contribute anything else important to mankind there. They can only cause damage to the world by crippling the internet they helped create, or crippling software by continuing their current pattern. Time to bow out gracefully and move on.
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