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Why is Microsoft Making its Own Life Difficult?
sebFlyte asks: "Asking Slashdot readers what they think of Microsoft's methodology and ethos might seem like a silly thing to do, but a ZD-Net article raises some interesting points. The main one is that: 'Microsoft's behaviour is technically, morally and practically indefensible. It could publish its CIFS specification tomorrow if it so chose, an act that would correspond closely to the spirit and letter of the European decision. The company would then be free to compete through the simple process of making better products, something it claims to favour, while also encouraging precisely the sort of interoperability it says is missing.' The question I'm curious to canvas opinion on is why Microsoft is taking an attitude that is believed by so many to be damaging to their market position."
It's about power and domination, period.
Look at their attitudes from the beginning. They can never accept simple success. They only consider themselves successful when they have destroyed the competition. They have never competed on the quality of their product, or on a level playing field. They compete by force, like buying out their opposition, or giving away products until the opposition goes broke.
While they like the money, it's about a small group of men at the top who want nothing more than to rule the world.
Microsoft's corporate culture, from day one, has been to "game" the system, treat the source as the family jewels and play fast and loose with truth and rules. I honestly believe that they don't know how to behave any differently. Just as Gates used university time on the mainframe to develop his first product then condemned the hobbyists that distributed a few copies, the corporation was built on taking as much out of the community and giving as little back as possible.
BTW, I am aware of Gates' philanthropic endeavors and that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how he treats his customers and the computing industry in general.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
You're making the assumption that Microsoft truly believes what they say about interoperability and whatnot. Also that they believe they're still capable of making better products. If either (or both) of those assumptions is incorrect, then it might be safe to say they're blowing smoke while going right on doing what they've always done, and knowingly so.
And that's why... Because Microsoft actually believes the above post.
As much as I or others on /. rail against MS for various practices that end up costing users money, causing vendor lock-in and upgrade treadmills, the company did not get where it is today by acting foolishly.
All of their recent actions and behavior is consistent with maximizing shareholder return.
If conditions change, either regulatory (EU, DOJ monitoring, broadcast flags), technical (TCPA) or marketplace (Linux, Oracle, IBM) I would count on them adjusting their strategy to continue to maximize long-term revenue, pure and simple.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
It takes a lot of work to be that incompetent. Or do you think their "incompetence" just *happens* to lock consumers into a never-ending cycle of paid-upgrades of their own products?
The question I'm curious to canvas opinion on is why Microsoft is taking an attitude that is believed by so many to be damaging to their market position.
Because their actions have not been damaging to their market position; they have succeeded wildly with those tactics. Why should they change? What could they possibly gain from a change in strategy that they don't already have? "Good feeling"? "Competitive instincts"? You can't take either of those to the bank.
The only interesting question is: if, and this is a big if, if they they ever find themselves to be losing marketshare in a substantial way, will they be able to move fast enough to change and adapt? or will they maintain their mantra to the end?
And by substantial, I don't mean FireFox and it's 3%--I mean, for a serious threat to emerge, it would have to be somewhere above 20% of the market Microsoft wants to own. Otherwise it's just an outlier.
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$tar -xvf
Keep in mind that Bill Gates didn't start the company by writing an OS, he did it by buying one. He changed the way everything thinks about software and making IP the most important part of doing business. It's not about better software, it's about better technology. It's about using the tools you and only you are privy to to edge out other people.
I've never heard of any program that was actually written by Gates. Whatever he knows about programming is marginal compared to what he knows about protecting the implementation. If releasing any information about how MS processes data or how its IP works is required in order to publish a truly open standard then there's no way they would ever do it without fighting tooth and nail.
New technologies may be exciting and the ideas behind them may be easily understood, but they're considered property by many people and any action that abridges that property right will be frowned upon. Bill Gates seems to think he's John Galt, but none of Ayn Rand's supermen were as prone to error as Microsoft has been. He lost his chance at immortality when his company started using clout instead of new ideas to beat out the competition.
Direct away from face when opening.
It doesn't matter whether Microsoft is really interoperable or not. Nor does it matter how secure the OS is, or how stable it is, or anything like that.
How can this be? Because 99% of the population either doesn't know or doesn't care. All they hear is Bill Gates saying "We are focusing on security" or "We are focusing on interoperability", and that's what sticks.
Whether or not the security or interoperability are actually addressed is irrelevant - the terms have been associated with Microsoft in peoples' minds. All it takes is some repetition and maybe an ad campaign or two to drive it home. Then in six months, some poll will come out saying that people associate Microsoft with interoperable products.
And that's what it's all about, boys and girls.
What, the financial record that shows a decline in revenues, while at the same time an increase in profits due to less spending on R&D? Is that the financial you are talking about?
It sounds great to say that Microsoft just posted the most profitable quarter ever. But if you look behind the scenes, you see that Microsoft did less business than the previous quarter.
You have to realize that Microsoft can almost live on its investments alone, without even being the #1 player in the market. I'm not suggesting that MS is not the #1 player right now, but I am suggesting that you have to look at revenues, not at profits. What you see might tell you another story - a different story from the one you are preaching.
I don't study MS financials, so I am no expert. But I do get the impression that Microsoft has reached a plateau, in terms of revenues, with its current product offerings. It seems that people are slowly getting interested in other things: Like OSX. Like OpenOffice. Like Firefox. Like Linux.
Microsoft drove their growth with a certain appeal. It was a cost appeal. Microsoft let you do things with computers for not a lot of money. This was appealing to people who were interested in computers at the time, but not initially to average consumers. Now Microsoft has eliminated its own cost appeal by virtue of its monopoly. The computer enthusiasts have become disillusioned with Microsoft, and have moved on to other things (cheaper, more open, more curious other things). These people are beginning to drive the next wave of technical innovations that will later become the staple of the common consumer. At the same time, MS is cutting its R&D and relying on its monopoly position and same old predatory practices to cast the illusion of growth.
The fact is, there is no room for a monopolist to grow without getting into other markets. Yes, we see that Microsoft is trying this. I think it is because they understand the doom that is coming on the shink-wrapped software front. The good news is that, in these new markets, Microsoft is not yet a monopolist. They will try to leverage one monopoly to build the other, but I don't think they will succeed.
Of course, we will see Microsoft as a big player for many years to come. That just gives everyone more time to see the writing that is on the wall.
This is my first /. posting in gosh knows when- I get fired up, see all the posts, and say, screw it.
But this subject is one of my premier hot button issues.
I don't understand it. If you're confident in your product, trust in that confidence- don't use obfuscated file formats to cause interoperability problems.
The only thing I can think of that keeps this anti-customer attitude going is corporate culture. Off the top of my head, Lotus and Autodesk seem comparable, in their persistence with a worldview. Lotus, at the beginning and for quite a while, used copy protection methods. They'd not use them for a while, but pretty soon, they'd come back again. Autodesk has gone back and forth on using dongles (or at least, until 10 years ago they had- my cad days are behind me.)
Corporate cultures seem to have memes associated with them, and Microsoft's appears to be one of paranoia- regardless of the quality of their products.
I'm Microsoft certified. I even can say I like Word, minus clippit, and I even think XP has its merits. I even think, with Server 2003's installation and granularity, they might even be getting a clue.
But they make it damned hard to stick up for them, and until they open up items such as file formats to all takers, it will be useless to measure the quality of their products.
stored on computers from birth to the grave
Opening up CIFS, or the file specifications for their Office suite, or their ABI spec would really cut into much of their FUD. This is a good part of any dominant player's business model (I won't limit this stritctly to monopolistic behavior). A perfect example is the IBM/Wang situation, where IBM flung FUD about lack of the Wang's compatibility (which was simply untrue). In the end, IBM's sales stayed strong, and Wang went the way of...well...Wang. Microsoft does the same thing with their proporitary formats. "Sure, you can use a Samba server, but are sure you want to entrust your network to a hack of our 'real' stuff?". Same deal with OpenOffice.org (Microsoft actually published some FUD about this, which I can't seem to find) -- Microsoft basically said "Yeah, it'll probably work, but wouldn't you rather have a guarantee than a reverse-engineered hack of our stuff? Besides, you don't get Access with Oo.o, and you need that. You'll also have to shell out to pay to retrain your employees. Lost productivity!"
Actually opening this stuff up would likely cause a major shift in their FUD activities. A good thing, perhaps...but asking why they don't do it is asking why someone hasn't opened up another hole in their head yet. Because it'll hurt!
-Turkey
I am no expert, by Yahoo! finance is always handy for this sort of thing:
Total revenue is up about 28%, and gross margin has moved about the same amount, over the past three years. (Working from their last end-of-year, June '04)
R&D is up about 80%
SA&G (this includes marketing) is up about 91%
These added operating expenses seriously cut into operating income bewteen '03 and '04, cutting about 24% over the three year period
Insiders have sold (net) 31,000,000 shares over the past 6 months. (this is about 3% of M$'s shares outstanding.) BillG has, in this week alone, announced a planned sale of $100,000,000 in MS shares.
On the other hand, looking at the balance sheet.
M$ now has around $16 billion in cash (they've spent about half of this since Jne '04 according to the cash flow, but I haven't been playing close attention, so damned if I know what they bought.)
I'm not sure what any of this means, but it's clear they're taking a big risk on marketing, and Bill would rather have his paper wealth somewhere else.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
The alternatives just haven't hit on a really good strategy yet.
Let's suppose that most computers are bought by either gamers or people who use Word/email/web/IM. We have damn good alternatives to Word/Outlook/IE/MSNIM, and reasonably good alternatives to things like ACT and various niche business-oriented things.
That leaves gaming. When you buy a new box, what game do you want to play? How well do you want to play it? Gamers probably won't settle for wine/cedega, due to slowness/bugginess (teh fps!). So, what to people play on Windows?
I can count the really popular Windows-only game companies on one hand: Valve, Blizzard, SoE, Square, and EA. So, getting them all to port would kill MS. Only problem is, Valve includes a lot of former MS guys who (typical MS) don't care how much they abuse the PC/user/community so long as you can get good screenshots, so they'd be the last to make the port.
That about wraps it up. I think that even a port of Steam/Source would be enough to make a company successful selling new boxes loaded with (say) Linux, especially if they bundled a few apps/games with them that the big guys (Dell, etc) don't, or if they supported some new, faster processor that wasn't x86 compatible.
From then on, it would cascade through the industry. After my own fictional company's market share started to pick up, first HP and then Dell would start selling similar packages. With enough of a user base (50/50 is "enough"), software developers would start writing for Linux, and if it's as good as I think it is, the quality of the end result would either crush Microsoft or force it to (again) improve drastically, which wouldn't be so bad.
Of course, though this plan doesn't require the cooperation of everyone all at once, it requires the coordination of a few major players (chip designers, game developers), and it's not certain even if I got that cooperation. Still, saying "Microsoft is never going to go away" is like saying "Kerafyrm will never die." It took a lot of cooperation, but he did, eventually.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
My point is, maybe the only useful spec is the code, which MS is unlikely to share.
(Anyone able to find the quote?)