Slashdot Mirror
The Future of the Software Industry
madro writes "Remember 'Does IT Matter?' a while ago? Nicholas Carr is back with an editorial in today's New York Times following Microsoft's decision to dramatically reduce its cash stash. Carr's take: Microsoft is admitting it can't find better uses for its cash, due to the growing maturation of the software industry. No mention of open source, although Apple's consumer-targeted model of free iTunes driving iPod demand is one listed alternative." Reader CodeArtisan submits another piece about Microsoft's loot distribution, and Newsforge (which is part of OSDN along with Slashdot) has a story about the future of commodity software.
MS's giant cash pile is too deep of a pocket for international juries and governments to ignore. The disbursement is being directly driven by the fact that the company has enough cash on hand to be able to shrug off $600M judgements.
What, did you think the timing was accidental?
--Dan
And your everyone? The iTunes interface is a reason for the iPods success, perhaps not at first, but if iTunes was a pain to interface the iPod with, a lot of people, as in people who wont whip up a perl script to do it if its not what they want, would have thought twice about it. The iPod took off in part because the word of mouth about it had nothing negative to say about it.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
It think what is happening is that it is getting very hard to charge premium prices for software that implements old solutions.
Precisely. I think we are indeed going to see an explosion of software, especially niche software -- and this is possible exactly because platform software is becoming commoditized.
Nope, it's not new wisdom. It's covered by Eric Raymond in his essays and it's all over the place... but for some reason, only a few people seem to understand this.
Tweet, tweet.
MS went for years without paying any dividend, because stockholders were able to get their returns in price appreciation. Now, expect flatter pricing, with more dividends. That's good news for stockholders, but bad news for stock option holders.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
We don't need MS to fall over. It wouldn't break my heart if they did...and I think an IBM style market beating followed by reformation is more likely in the long run.
We just want to get enough market share that they can't push us around with polluted file formats and comm protocols. For that matter, we need enough share that buying politicians and filing frivolous patent suits would be a bad idea. SCO is a trial balloon as much as anything. Hopefully, they're getting the hint. As flaky as ESR is, his last little missive was right to point: We really don't care about destroying MS. We just want to write code and solve problems. On the other hand, MS DOES want to destroy us. Peaceful co-existance is still an option but it is their move.
The problem is that innovation can't be bought with money or scheduled or be driven by market forces. Innovation is a social and cultural phenomenon. It requires that an entire society values education, thinking, reflection, and analysis. Even Microsoft's cash reserves can't fix the social and cultural problems we have in the US.
It also requires that a society frees its creative members from having to worry about whether they are going to have a job in six months--someone can't afford to spend time thinking about something that may become a big thing in 10 years if they need to help their company survive this year, every year. And, despite Microsoft's cash position, they are not a company that you can count on being secure in the long run: companies like Microsoft can fumble and face hard times.
The best thing Microsoft has done for innovation has probably been to create a few thousand people that made enough money to leave the company and pursue their own interests without having to worry about money. But that number is far too small to make a big difference to innovation overall: innovation and breakthroughs are rare events, even among a population that is perhaps smarter than average.
$40B is a budget for sending people to Mars, not writting a new version of Solitare. Companies should return the money not immediatelly needed to make more money to investors. Otherwise stock market is just a big casino.
I really don't see why Microsoft paid out big dividends instead of investing in R&D -- trying to create something truly monumental, something truly visionary.
For years, we've had better and faster hardware for cheaper prices, but in the last five or seven years, it seems to me (and this is no original thought) that there have been no real exciting new applications that make use of this new hardware.
Sure, there are games. Sure, there's exotic multimedia stuff like video editing.
But where is the new software that revolutionizes how most people interact with their computers on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis? Where is the software that makes deep use of the 3 Ghz computers, the 512mb of memory, the (relatively) lightning-fast, huge hard disks? Where is the software that gives us smart, integrated voice and gesture recognition, powerful and startlingly beautiful new interfaces, extraordinary ways of creating new things and dealing with what we already have--in other words, a more intelligent, pleasurable, coherent user experience?
I know that internet-based applications have been a fountainhead of innovation. But what about the power that resides on the desktop computer? Have we really made the most of it -- is this all that's possible?
It seems to me that Microsoft has lost an opportunity to truly redefine this horizon--and create new reasons for billions to buy its products.