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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."
Earlier on in the article he says: Yet near the end he says: By "Income" does he mean "Profit" or is MS actually predicting a 50% revenue drop over the previous year?
Trolling is a art,
John Carmack can't be happy about Microsoft embrace and extend to his video game! It's sounds funny anyway: Microsoft Doom
It's almost like the company had troubles or something.
. 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/
Microsoft is going to die? *BSD has supposedly been on that road for years! Maybe MS could learn a thing or two from the resilience of *BSD.
Is Microsoft bought ID Software and will ship Doom 4 with Longhorn ?
:)
Let's the frag begins
...significantly developed his professional career thru Microsoft solutions
THRU?!? What kind of site are you guys running?
How hard is it to keep these lazy-teenager abbreviations out of the stories?
This space intentionally left blank.
To me, the blurb is slightly misleading. Whoever wrote the href tags did it so "editorial" was there, but analysis wasn't. People miss that.
Being a true slashdotter, I daren't RTFA, thus I'm not disputing the truth of what the guy says, but people who do read the article should take everything said with a fairly large grain of sodium.
Editorial means subjective, and a true "analysis" would be objective.
--
The last digit of pi is four.
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
This is just Mac/Anti-MS propaganda. He even starts out with the standard windows is so unstable I have to reboot all the time! Which is not nearly true anymore as XP remains perfectly stable for weeks on end. The last time I've rebooted this machine was when the power went out.
I also love the later part of the article when this "Andrew" person expounds on how wonderful OS X is... compared to Windows98! wtf.
Hating MS is one thing, but at least be fair about it.
The article seems to make the assumption that Microsoft got where it is today by having the best products. That's a big mistake. Even if we go back to it's roots and compare DOS with the other operating systems of the time, we see that MS was selling rubbish compared to what the others were.
MS got where it is today by being extremely agressive in defeating its competitors, mostly through business tactics than superior products.
Please. Any employee of any company can find the internal flaws and missed oppertunities. I work for a large insurance company and eventhough I'm just a peon, I see several flaws and problems that could easily be avoided. But then again, I see lots of things done very well and successfully.
... if you just look at the points being made. The other problem with a comentary is that the opposite is usually just as correct. A person can make a convincing argument from any view point, but ultimatly it is the actions of the company that say whether it is true or not.
This is just a case of dwelling on the negative. Another employee could write the completely opposite review of MS and it would be every bit as convinsing.
The problem with a comentary is that it is generally correct
In MS case, I'm sure they have done many things wrong and missed many oppertunities...yet they continue to make lots and lots and lots of cash. Therefore, this guy can say anything he wants, but it won't change the fact that MS is *definitely* doing things 'right'.
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
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?
Recently purchased an OS X machine (iBook). Had been messing around with the system off and on for a few years on the company's art department computers. It's good, but it isn't the panacea this guy (and others) make it out to be.
Every OS excels at something. Mac (still) excels at useability. UNIX stability. Windows excels at recognizing just about any piece of hardware or software I've thrown at it in the last 15 years.
If you think about it, Windows isn't THAT bad. I can't think of a single OS that runs the breadth of programs Windows does from so many years of computing. Sure, console apps still work the same in Linux as they did in UNIX from decades ago, and you can (sometimes) get Mac to run applications prior to OS 7, but there have been a number of times I've loaded up DOS programs from the 80s in Windows XP and was surprised they run more or less perfectly (even when the original app expected full control over the computer).
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. Again, excellent GUI, but there's definitely a feeling (misguided, I think) that Windows "has" to be bad because it's used everywhere. This doesn't translate to some other consumer products (PS2, anyone) so I'm not sure why geeks hate Windows in particular. Do we hate it because we perceive everyone else hates it (the same way people who use MacOS love it more because everyone else who uses it loves it)? Probably something to bring up in a psychology class.
Not Likely.
- "My name is Legion, for we are many" -Mark 5:9
I hate it when first post invokes Godwin's law... ... or perhaps I should thank you on behalf of my employer.
Windows 98 was never a stable system (unless the only thing you compare it to is Windows 95).
The guy should at least give XP a shot (hell, even 2000)... infinitely more stable than any of the Windows 9x series.
Because time and time again (and not just in IT), if you have someone with a significant market lead, they have a tendency to procrastinate because of the lack of threatening competition.
Microsoft doesn't need to fix these issues because there is no viable enough competitor which is affecting their market share enough to make them worry.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
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.
I laughed when I read the first paragraph of his article, because it pretty much totally summarized my morning. I tried to open up explorer to work with some shares, and a dialog would come up saying "Access is denied." and nothing would happen. Okay, great. So I load up task manager, and kill all errant explorer processes. I get to the last one, hit 'end task', and get "Access is denied." Super! Suddenly, all my applications stop responding, so I kill them all in task manager, and they disappear, but still show up in the ALT+TAB list. I threw in the towel, and decided to reboot. Windows hangs at the 'Saving your data' screen...
I'd love to see someone factor that kind of crap in in a Total Cost of Ownership study.
Don't call me a cowboy, and don't tell me to slow down!
I hate M$ as much as anybody but for a guy who worked there for 9 years that was a pretty meatless article/argument. You would think he would use some of his experience about their processes to describe their doom rather than buggy applications and anecdotal evidence. No doubt, M$ has systemic problems that favor ease of use and result in bloated code, poor architecture, bugs, and shortcuts that all feed into lax security. But he barely touched any of these things
No major computer maker preloads linux on the desktop for more than a tiny niche market. No major computer maker preloads a competing office suite for more than a tiny niche market. Nobody's making money on browsers, directly or indirectly. Etc.
People who keep thinking that the IBM model can occur here are fooling themselves - IBM voluntarily restrained from anticompetitive behavior because they were scared to death of the antitrust proceedings. Microsoft (for good reason) has no fear of the government here, and is behaving just as badly as they ever did.
It's in the dictionary.
Evolution or ID?
Now it's more a browser than an os problem : even if the browser is supposedly embedded in the os.
Sorry but this guy wants Microsoft to produce Macs, it's too obvious, he's not credible.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
This seems like a similar problem to IBM years ago. IBM was no longer looking to the needs of the customer, missing the good business opportunities and loosing business right and left. They took a better part of the 90s' to turn it around with new management. They had to change the attitude and mindset there. Maybe M$ should take some pointers.
Evolution or ID?
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.
20 years ago, the competition was between Microsoft, Wordperfect, and Lotus for office and e-mail applications. Being the early, carefree days of mass computing, the competitive focus was on offering more and more new features. Microsoft won that battle (unfairly, I think, but it did win). While that war was going on, nobody paid much attention to security and stability. Then for the next 10 years, Microsoft was largely in competition with itself (for desktop personal and business purposes), making money from upgrades and the sale of new computers. Here's where I think Microsoft got soft. They branched out into new and ultimately unproductive product types. They focused exclusively on new features that would give the average user a reason to shell out for an upgrade. They continued to use predatory pricing to insure that computer buyers had to pay for their OS (and maybe even their office software) whether they wanted it or not. Now, even free software can have a very advanced feature set. The competitive factors are security and reliability, not new features. Microsoft is suffering because it did not see this coming in time to really start competing in this arena. Their existing code base is so huge that even though Gates said a couple of years ago they were freezing everything to focus on security, they still haven't managed to track down all possible sources even of "buffer overflow" errors, much less all the other security holes. Linux doesn't have to make a huge hit on the desktop to cost Microsoft a lot of money. All it has to do is get enough users to make it economically worthwhile to the computer vendors to tell Microsoft that they will NOT sign the licensing agreement requiring them to bundle Windows and Office with every single computer they sell. Once that happens, then the competition will really start to open up again.
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?
I think most Mac users will enjoy the day that the word "beleaguered" prefaces every mention of Microsoft's name in the press. I think most Linux users would enjoy it too, but that word has more special meaning for the Mac users.
I remember when it started showing up in front of Compaq's name before they got assimilated. It was kind of delicious.
Reeses
The success of Windows has depended on its nature as a bundle: you pay 100$ (or Dell pay ???$ for you) and get the whole shebang. The licenses from this release pay for development of the new items in the next version of the bundle. .Mac) cannot be funded from the Windows license fee, unless Windows costs 300$ a license. People expect not to have to pay extra, so it's hard to convince them to do so.
This means that Windows customers expect everything to be included in the bundle that they need. The kind of services that TFA recommends MS sell (20$ a month for virual hard drive etc. like
This bundling also affects the lifecycle of the product: 5-6 years between XP and Longhorn is required because they need to do a lot of work! (Could their 're-write' do to them what Netscape's did?). There is so much in the bundle, and MS want to add so much more, that it takes a long time.
This has an impact on EOLing too - MS is still supporting (to some extent) Windows 98(!), 2000, XP. The cost of having a rapid release cycle is supporting many different releases (unless you EOL these releases just as rapidly, cf. Redhat Linux).
Overall, the size of Windows counts against MS in several different ways. It will be difficult for them to move away from it. Perhaps all those companies killed by MS integrating their features into the OS will have the last laugh?
Posters recognized by their sig,
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?
Microsoft is a company, like any other
No, Microsoft is a monopoly, which is by definition not like any other because there is no other...
-- Qu'est-ce que la propriété intellectuelle? It is thought control.
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 see a slight flaw in the logic of Microsoft's downfall any time soon: For now most PC games are made exclusively for Windows, which means though many people will be converting to an open source environment, there will still be a large dependancy on windows. IMO until game developers start to make games multi-OS, microsoft will be here for a long time to come...
Though, granted, most gamers just pirate Windows anyway, so there wouldn't be TOO much revenue from it >)
Transferring your files from an old computer to a new computer on any sort of migration is a pain. I do not see how Mr. Reifman found that task any easier going from Windows [98?] to Mac OS X. And he sure does not say in the article how it was accomplished. When he says "one step migration" does he mean that simply the Windows "Documents and Settings" folders get copied? Or does "one step migration" mean that Windows finds my copy of Eudora and moves the mailboxes and address books?
Mr Reifman's curriculum vitae and cover letter were much too long-winded. Next candidate...
Have you Meta Moderated t
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
The Nazis were trying to eradicate ideas they did not agree with, by killing people.
Microsoft is trying to eradicate ideas it does not agree with, by misusing its position of power. Different means, same end.
Some might say that forcing me to use a particular brand of software is a lesser abuse of my human rights than killing me. My point, and the parent's point, is that closed-source software may look trivial -- especially when millions of people have far, far worse things to worry about than choosing their own software -- but an abuse of human rights is still an abuse of human rights.
There is actually a school of thought that says we should fight just as hard, if not harder, against "small" human rights abuses {e.g. dress codes} as "big" human rights abuses {e.g. racism, sexism}. As long as the lesser abuses are accepted without question, that acceptance can be cited in an attempt to justify greater ones. And, of course, the great abuses are used to justify the small ones; giving every would-be abuser of human rights a circular argument. {"Right to wear trousers? Pah! You should count yourself lucky -- thirty years ago a woman wouldn't have been allowed in this job at all!"}
An abuse of human rights is stil an abuse of human rights. And the fact that a few hundred thousand people died in the Nazi concentration camps does not make it any less wrong for Microsoft to deny me the right to choose what software I use.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
With the statements he makes, how can anyone take the article seriously? I stayed with Windows 98 for its stability? I have to reboot every morning and it takes 10 minutes? Duh. You're using 98. Or how about Wal-mart putting out a PC with Sun Linux? I knew they did a desktop but don't those machines use Suse or Redhat? I could go on. He does make very good points but he is supposed to be a Tech guy not just some journalist. Let's see some factual statements. His quote's are lifted from other stories. His one interview is with some guy who is a Seattle Weekly reporter. Great topic. Some great points but supported by a bunch of B.S.
20 percent of 36 Billion is still 7.2 billion a year in revenue.
So even if MS lost ALL of their Windows and Office revenue they would still be doing better than most companies.
And they have 50+ billion in CASH.
How long could they continue full operations with NO revenue at all? A decade atleast - assuming Bill doesn't personally pick up the tab himself then we are looking at atleast 15 years. Don't expect to see MS going away anytime soon - if ever.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Of course this question is highly subjective, but with Windows 2.0 and eventually Windows 3.1, Microsoft became the name of desktop operating systems. This wasn't through "extremely aggressive" business tactics as it was truly a superior system.
This success for Microsoft led to them developing more software to compliment their operating system... Microsoft was a name everyone recognized and "loved" because of it's windowing platform... so it's an easy leap for people to say "hey if Windows is good, why wouldn't office be?"
It wasn't until much later (late 90s) than MS started playing games with aggressive marketing tactics and forcing competition out of business. But then again, it wouldn't have had the money to do that without the huge number of sales that came with the release of Windows 95.
and the pro mac open source parts and this artical has some very interesting meat and potatoes.
Office and Windows can not provide the revenue stream that they once did. Cheap computers are here to stay and free software that is good enough for the average everyday Joe rocks the world.
So what is going to happen in a couple of years when the Microsoft tax is repealed? What will the company do to replace that revenue stream? I see some serious questions here.
Just consider the Walmart example (which used to run on Lindows). If the average Joe can get by on a (pretty nice) $300 machine that comes chocked full of software, why would he buy one for a great deal more, and get a barebones OS with a couple of little apps? Seriously there is a big difference in what you get with Lindows and Windows. When people start selling that notion watch out. Microsoft should do a full port Gnome and KDE if they had any sence.
I think that the big crush is going to come when the average everyday business wakes up and says no to the Microsoft tax.
I guess some day it'll have to be payback time for every time when grandma, grandad, mom, dad, uncle{1,2,3} and auntie{1-9} called any respectably computer-educated relative with a question like: "something is wrong with my computer. Can you come and fix it?"
Microsoft tried to spread the delusion that no computer knowledge and background is neccessary to maintain a computer system while making it more and more complex.
Things have reached saturation point these days: every at-least-half computer-literate spends a significant amount of his business and spare time rescuing some system gone bananas.
The fact is that no open source, free as in beer or even proprietary software is much better than any M$ 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...
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 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
Microsoft has something like $55 billion in cash and short-term investments, and another $15 of equities in other companies. They could weather a decade with that.
I've never met a project manager that didn't think they were a lot smarter than he really were, because they get to ride along with the engineers and take credit for their work.
This guy isn't saying anything that an impartial industry analyst (granted, there may not be such a thing) couldn't figure out in a couple of months. The throwing away stock options for a dot com thing kills me, too. What a dumbass. $700,000 in MS stock is still $700,000.
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
``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.
Paranioa. What seperates the GREAT admins from the tourists.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Wow, that was scary. I had visions of Microsoft Doom 3.1 coming out, where you go around shooting penguins.
"'Here may be found the last words of kpansky. He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find a crash-free browsing experience in the Microsoft Internet Expl-aaaaaagggh'"
"What?"
"Internet Expl-aaaaagggh"
"What is that?"
"His browser must have died while typing it."
"Oh, come on!"
"Well, that's what it says."
"Look, if his browser was dying, it wouldn't bother to transmit 'aaaaaggh'. It'd just pop up one of those ridiculous 'Do you want to report this to Microsoft' dialogs."
" Well, that's what's typed in the Slashdot posting!"
"Perhaps he was dictating to someone using Mozilla."
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
>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.
Worse, I've had to reinstall Windows simply because I installed one program out of sequence!
Just installing the programs resulted in a system that worked for normal (for Windows) periods of time, where installing the SAME applications in a different order caused Windows to bluescreen or reboot itself every 3-5 minutes!
And this has happened on systems belonging to others I know.
If it wasn't for the "compatibility" issues, most people would drop Windows in a heartbeat like the bloated crapware it is.
Of course, many will argue that users should have computer-science degrees to simply run their applications, but most of them are MS shills.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Microsoft's $50 billion in the bank (or whatever it is) is a market inefficiency.
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
Bullshit.
You, me, everyone has a right to profit from their labors. Microsoft can charge whatever it wants for it's crap. If you are stupid enough to pay for it, that's your problem.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I would strongly disagree that Xbox won't bring in billion $ revenues. Whilst it may not be doing that now, MS are looking at the large amount of money made by Sony, Nintendo, and big hitter publishers like EA, who do have billions in revenue from games products.
MS seem pretty committed to the games market, so don't write this off just yet. Look at Sony, whose primary revenue is now derived from the SCE (Sony Computer Entertainment) groups, powered by the PlayStation phenomenon.
"This is your life, and it's ending one second at a time."
Not a right to "profit", but a right to "recieve compensation."
It's a fine line, but an important one.
Windows 2000 works for you. Windows XP works for Microsoft. "Updates are ready for download" (which can appear on machines with no network connection), tightly integrated IE, and more restrictive licensing terms, all make it clear that XP is optimized for Microsoft's benefit, not yours.
There's a good reason that most of corporate America is still running Windows 2000. It's one of Microsoft's most solid versions, probably the most stable one since NT 3.51.
If you're still running anything Microsoft prior to Win2K, upgrade to Win2K. If you're running Win2K, the next available upgrade is to Linux.
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.
This article just lowers the signal to noise ratio and frustrates people looking for real news.
*Sigh*
The greatest hindrance to success is a well-rationalized excuse
I think it is pretty remarkable that the English the yanks, canucks, or aussies speak are as close to real thing as they are. I understand people from GBR well enough when I meet them. An interesting question is whether world English will converge in the future or continue to diverge. I think they will converge, but heaven forbid if "thru","nite", "cuz", "u", or even "hoser" become commonly accepted.
an ill wind that blows no good
If you aren't a monopoly, you have a right to charge whatever you want. That's not the same as a right to profit, because if you aren't a monopoly and demand too much money, your customers go elsewhere.
Just try to open a grocery store and swing an 80% profit margin like MS does on their office and OS divisions. Try to run a car company or run a restauraunt that way, I dare you.
If individuals or other companies had life as easy as Microsoft, our economy wouldn't function at all.
Surely 'burglarize' isn't listed?
Next thing they'll be calling burglars 'bulgarizers'...
I mean, if you're going to have 'burglarized', why not start doing the same to other words?
"Someone help me! I've been shooterized!"
"Yeah, I went into town the other day to do some shopperizing"
"We're not breaking even. We need some way to encourage more shopperizers into the store..."
Madness!
"It's very interesting that many of the complaints people have about Microsoft Products are actually addressed in later releases, but if the customer never upgrades to that new release they'll never see the changes."
Which, in essence, means that you have to PAY for bug fixes.
This has been a very profitable practice for Microsoft. That way they can keep selling you the same product(Win95) over(Win98) and over(Win2000) and over(WinXP).
I wouldn't have that big of a problem with the practice except for one major "bug". As was mentioned in the article, moving your apps from one version to another is damn painful.
So, people don't pay for the bug fixes (or feature packs) because applying them is too painful.
That's why I like Debian so much. I don't have that problem with Debian (and it is very stable and reliable).
It may look like a very minor one, but it's a human rights violation all the same. I am no less able to do my job in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt than I would be in a shirt and tie, nor does my wearing a T-shirt and jeans endanger others; therefore it is not necessary that I should wear a shirt and tie to do my job. "What other people might think" is a red herring, since it is a matter of opinion and therefore beyond my control. What if some of those "other people" have an irrational distrust of people with dark hair and blue eyes? Should I dye my hair or wear tinted contact lenses just to please them? Small abuses make it easier to perpetuate large ones -- that was one of my points, remember. Yes, I am bloody lucky to have what I've got -- but I'm still entitled to more, and I'm damned if I'm not going to fight for it with everything I've got, because if I give in now then somebody else is only going to have a harder time in future. The idea that there is such a thing as "just free enough" is what keeps the whole rotten system going -- the truth is, either you are free, or you aren't. And I'd rather die standing than live on my knees.
BTW, I haven't worn a tie for ten years, and you would have an easier job getting a hangman's noose around my neck.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
> You, me, everyone has a right to profit from their labors.
... it's an exchange or barter, whether it is good or services of perceived value.
It's *not* "profit"
Who owns your time?
Your experience or skills?
You give UP those two in order to RECEIVE money. That's all money. An extremely convient way of trading those two.
To me, that's not profit, thats a TRADE, specificaly, a contract.
Now whether anyone has the right to be a third party to that contract is an entirely different matter.
--
The fallacy of government is that it assumes everyone needs to be told how to live, but the fact remains it is unconstituational to homogenize community by its own standards. When it passes more laws until it makes everyone a criminal it has made the mistake of placing the intent on the "Letter of the Law" over the "Spirit of the Law."
"The more corrupt the republic, the more numerious the laws" -- Tacitus, A.D. 55
ALL civilizations eventualy collapse. Are you that ignorant and arrogant to assume that yours won't?
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.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
"It's not like it's terribly hard to keep Windows stable."
So, anyone who disagrees with that statement is admitting to being less technically proficient than trb001. And there is ALWAYS someone who will post that claim. Regardless of whether the OS is Win95, Win2000 or whatever.
Yet when the NEXT version of Microsoft's OS is released, EVERYONE claims how it is so much more stable and reliable than the last. Even Microsoft got into that with comparing NT and Windows2000 and showing that NT wouldn't stay up for more than a few days of heavy work (sorry, I couldn't find a citation for that yet).
I get dragged in to fix all kinds of Windows problems. From corrupt registries to tons of spyware, I've seen it and fixed it. It is a PAIN keeping Windows stable. Even installing the DCom patch on NT broke apps.
Here's a tip on how much everyone else in the world has to reboot. Call Microsoft tech support with any problem and see what the FIRST thing they tell you to do is.
Nobody has a "right" to profit.
Okay, consider this. Someone owns a car worth roughly $3,000. He wants to sell it. Someone offers $3.000 for it, and it is sold. Who profits?
The answer is BOTH.
The guy who sold it obviously thought that $3,000 cash was more important to him than his car. So he made out good on the deal. If he didn't want $3,000 more than he wanted the car, he wouldn't have sold it.
The guy who bought it thought that the car was more valuable than his $3,000 cash. Otherwise, he wouldn't have bought it. So he made out good on the deal as well.
When you go to pay whatever you pay for a computer, you are getting something more valuable (the computer) than what you gave (the cash). The guy who sold it to you did the same. When Microsoft sells Windows XP to the retailer, they are giving away something less vauable to them than the cash they receive, and the retailer is getting something more valuable to them than the cash they gave out.
So in the end, everyone profits in free trade.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
If you're an incompetent moron whose labor causes negative productivity, you have a right to profit?
No, the original statement is correct. No one has a right to profit. Everyone should have the right to pursue profit. This is a wholly different thing.
Dress codes are up to the company. If a company feels that people will be more productive or more professional-looking wearing a suit and tie, it is their decision to enforce it. Some companies reason that you not only have to be able to do the job but you have to look the part too. The reason for this is so other people will also have confidence in you. A dress code is a trade-off you make for having a job. If you don't like a company's dress code then you don't have to work for them. Keep working for companies that don't require a suit and tie. It's that simple.
Personally, I don't want to work for a company that requires a suit either. Atmosphere is one of the things that I consider when interviewing for a job. I'm more than willing to take less money from a company with casual policies than from a rigid company.
What if some of those "other people" have an irrational distrust of people with dark hair and blue eyes?
That truly is an evil combination!
Small abuses may very well make it easier to perpetuate large ones. I haven't done enough research to form any conclusion on it and I don't plan to. I just don't want you to confuse things you don't like with human rights abuses. I hate peas but I don't think making your children eat peas is a violation of their basic human rights.
Life is full of shitty compromises.
Everyone has a "right to profit".
However, a "perfect market" limits profits to near zero. With no barriers to entry in a business, which is a lot like "neglecting friction", competition will force prices down toward costs.
A 100% markup is only possible if the barriers to entry in the field are high, which they are in this case.
However, the barriers to entry are falling also. Once the OS or Office suite, or whatever are "good enough", the impetus for upgrades evaporate. At that point, competing products have a chance to catch up to the target of "good enough".
Microsoft is suffering from "good enough" now. As are hardware makers. Most people don't use much, if any, more capabiity than was available in computers/software in 2000. Microsoft is dependent on people buying a new computer (and, implied, a new OS and Office suite) every couple of years. This was a workable model until the computers got "good enough", and has been suffering since then.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
There is actually a school of thought that says we should fight just as hard, if not harder, against "small" human rights abuses {e.g. dress codes} as "big" human rights abuses {e.g. racism, sexism}. As long as the lesser abuses are accepted without question, that acceptance can be cited in an attempt to justify greater ones
The effect you are refering to is called 'cumulative radicalisation', and is currently in vogue with historians trying to explain how the progressive German societies of the 18th and 19th centuries could take such a right-handed turn to Fascism in the early 20th.
I still think you've Godwin'ed yourself here, but the premise is valuable to investigate regarding computer technologies. Cumulative radicalisation in this case is an effective method of reducing the 'barrier to entry' into other markets, once you're operating from a position of strength in one area. In Microsoft's case, its many areas.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
You don't have a right to profit. You only have a right to try to profit. If everyone had a right to profit, then there would be no unsuccessful business endeavors. If everyone has a right to profit, then what is the minimum profit that I have a right to? Everyone else has a right to this same minimum profit. Where does the money come from to guarantee everyone their God-given right to the sacred holy profit?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Not at all. If you had a "right" to profit, you could go to court to break a contract solely on you losing money over it.
Nope. If someone's too stupid to set their price high enough, or can't make a product worthy of selling at higher than what it took to make, then their rights have not been violated when they don't make a profit.
Profit is what you get over and above what you spent to get it. Getting profit is part science, part art, and part dumb luck. You have a right to try to profit. You don't have a right to make profits for no good reason.
It's the same as with getting a job. You have the right to apply for work and to be hired if you're the right candidate. You are not guaranteed to be the best candidate for a particular job.
I agree profit is good. I'm just pointing out that a huge profit by one company year after year is not a sign of a healty competitive market. I would hold up Wal-Mart as a more positive example - they fend off competition from Target, Kmart, Sears, etc. Their profit is pretty huge in absolute dollars, but it's only about a 3% profit margin. That means that while they're turning a profit, the market is forcing them to give customers good deals.
You are misinterpreting Locke. It's a philosophical argument that doesn't exactly fit into the real world. He's arguing that individuals can create property ownership over collective property (i.e. the whole "state of nature" thing) by "mixing his labor" with it, i.e. you can take common land that isn't being used by other people and make it yours if you plant crops there, or graze your sheep there, or whatever. Locke certainly believed in and argued for property rights, but what you quote is more about justifying the assertion of property rights over common property than about property rights in general.
I would also add that a right to property is something completely different from a right to profit from property.
wtf are you talking about?? there is no right to recieve compensation, you recieve compensation for work done with a pre-existing agreement that you receive compensation for the work, If i go mow my neighbors lawn, i don't have a "right" to be paid, either for my time or the gasoline used to mow. Now if my Neighbor hires me to mow, I have the right to be paid whatever was agreed upon.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
You, me, everyone has a right to profit from their labors
Bullshit yourself. M$ only makes a profit because we, the citizens, give them some rights to control copying i.e. copyright law. We do this because we, the citizens, think we will get a fair return in terms of price competition and product improvement. The M$ monopoly is currently taxing the world $35,000,000,000 per year for ten pieces of software it largely wrote more than a decade ago. That is an atrocious tradeoff.
Intellectual property law is completely broken at the moment. M$ gets maybe 10,000 times the reward for writing the same software that another company might write. I don't mind 10-100 times the reward to encourage true competition and inovation but law which allows more than that is wrong and unfair. Yes, the world is unfair but that doesn't mean that in a democracy we the people should deliberately make it more unfair.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Quarterly operating expenses were in the range of 5 to 8 billion dollars, two of which are advertising. Revenues for the same period were 7 to 9 billion. Research is down, advertising is up and administrative costs have increased sixfold! While they trumpet increased revenue, their net is down by almost half over a year ago from 2.1 to 1.3 billion. If tomorrow everyone switched to free software, Microsoft would be out of business in less than two years.
It won't happen like that, but that's more realistic than expecting them to coast for a decade. The migration to free software is already on and mainstream. It won't take long for the Microsoft PR machine to self destruct. With enough free software deployment, the inferiority of Microsoft's line will be apparent to everyone regardless of all the feel good "potential" adverts and the gravy train will derail. You don't have to have worked for the Soft for 8 years to see the problems Word, Lookout, XP and all have. The tipping point is close.
I wonder if SCO "investments" are marketing or administrative costs. Soon it will go into their investment losses.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I remember the day, too. I call it The Day.
I'd just had a long, intimate session with Microsoft Office XP, and we lay side by side on the bed. Office was smoking contentedly. I stared out the window, trying to ignore the mouldy scents of our tryst and the way the suite pressed against me, the reptilian sensation of shrinkwrap urgent on my thigh. It was rubbing its Certificate of Authenticity hologram against me! I shuddered.
"What is it, Zhe? You're. . .distant."
"I..." Could I tell Office the truth? What choice did I have?
"This is going to sound harsh. But I'm just not turned on any more by Clippy. Or the other Office Assistants. I thought having a harem's worth would fulfill me. But there is no emotional or intellectual connection. There just isn't."
Office froze. In another minute the cig burned up to its fingers. It winced. "It's that fucking Apple slut, isn't it," hissed Office.
"Look, I should go."
"Take one step, and you'll never get metadata from me again."
"You're. . .threatening me? Don't you see it's over?"
But the suite was clutching at my neck. "No! I didn't mean it! Oh, don't leave me! Without you, I'm nothing. With you, I'm. . .EULA-ted!"
"Goodbye."
"Why? Why?"
"I can't take the angst, baby."
"You've just been using me!"
"Well, I am the user, aren't I."
"Leave and I'll kill myself!"
At the door I paused, racking my brain for what I'd learned from TV to do at these moments. Firm, but tender? Tender, but firm? If only I'd paid more attention, any attention, to the plot lines in Baywatch. And so all I could manage was: "There are better ways to innovate."
On the way downstairs it was clear, anyway, that Office was bluffing. It was already on the phone with the BSA, arranging to sue a small business. Poor guy had indulged in a three-way at his place of business with a single license. Idiot. Ass, grass, gas, or bloatware: nobody rides for free.
I never argued that Win95/98 was stable...I rebooted those systems at LEAST weekly. Windows 2000, however, is great. My XP machine at work is a bad example because we have power outages every few weeks (you'd think they could spend a few bucks for an UPS, wouldn't you?), but currently my uptime is at 469 hours (19.5 days). I should check at home, but I'm 99% certain the last time my home box got bounced was when I moved in 3 months ago.
Rebooting because of memory leaks is still rebooting...if that happened frequently, I would consider my uptime set back to zero...but it never happens with 2000. I don't know what people are running out there to trigger memory leaks because I have never encountered one since switching from 98.
--trb