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Microsoft: The Faint Smell of Rot
happycorp writes "A business reporter for ABC/Fortune
is asking whether Microsoft is poised to collapse, based on years of industry observation
(with successful calls in the past, he notes) rather than
purely technical considerations.
A short read, with this favorite quote:
"if you sniff the air, you can just make out the first hints of rot.""
This kind of "insight" can be applied to almost every company, and it's about as good as Colin Fry's cold reading ("wait, I think I smell something back there...").
It will however be interesting to see if Microsoft may one day break up voluntarily into different operating units, and thrive in different areas independantly.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I don't think it's "rot" that you're smelling...
They've got enough cash in the bank to run the business for decades if they never made another cent ... They may not be the 800lb gorilla, but I don't know how you could possible predict a collapse.
2advanced.net - Business Quality Hosting
Apple and Sun will be gone by the end of the year. IBM will collapse under its own weight, Nintendo will be out of business any day now, BSD is dead....
Same crap, different company.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Apple is going to be dead by the end of the year.
What a revelation. Next up people that hate cities think small towns are wave of future.
They just gave away 60 billion to stock holders and still have 34.5 billion with zero debt.
is it filthy lucre?
Esp. when its flagship products are monopolies.
The Raven
...about the Roman Empire in the time of Julius Caesar. But it took several hundert years until it collapsed.
... and he might have a good sense of smell, but he certainly has problems with English -- [...]and all I managed to do was make myself persona non-gratis at HP -- even though he wrote for WSJ/Forbes/whatever.
Doomie
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I won't believe it until Netcraft confirms it.
Yeah, and in late 2004 the Register posted that Microsoft was about to file for bankruptcy.
(FYI, no B.S.: That article is printed, laminated, and behind a case in one of Microsoft's lobbies.)
The coolest voice ever.
Potential candidates might be Nvidia, ATI, AMD, Symantec, etc
Microsoft is dying, the same way that Apple and FreeBSd are Dying.
I'd surely be socked if they did die. But I'd bet money they won't. In fact, I have.
Pretty Pictures!
"The faint smell of root" :-D
Sig Nature
% lynx -dump "http://abcnews.go.com/Business/print?id=88655" | wc
190 1650 10463
I'm sorry. That was me.
Five years ago it was a source of pride to go to work for the Evil Empire -- now, who cares? It's just Motorola with wetter winters.
Umm... no. Definitely not.
As I went from the latter to the former, I can tell you there's a lot of difference. Motorola is bogged down, lacking excitement in teams that should be excited. The place was being "SEI/CMM Level 5"'ed and "Six Sigma"'ed to death. The personality of the employees and teams was as interesting as the endless rows of slate gray cubicles. And it was horrid to take an internal class on Perl, and see experienced software developers that couldn't finish a simple basic program in 20 minutes that I had finished before the instructor was done explaining.
At Microsoft, I'm excited about my job and the product I'm working on in ways I never was before. I'm more impressed by both the knowledge and passion of the people here than I ever was at Motorola. It's nothing like anything I saw in my 6 1/2 years at Motorola.
I don't mean to sound like a MS cheerleader here, I just want to make it clear that this is definitely not a valid comparison to anyone who has spent any significant time inside the two companies.
Oh, and the winter here is a hell of a lot better, even if it wetter. And the summers... wow.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
notion suddenly appeared in my mind: Microsoft is dying What?! Even with all the horrible press in 2004 due to all the security issues, MS increased profit by 11 billion dollars... How is this "dying"?
Even so, do I really need to nitpick this uninformed fool's words? It's 95% opinion, and 5% conjecture. Why on earth did this article get green lighted?
does not show any weakness until the storm breaks it in two and exposes the rotting core.Same thing goes for Micro$oft.On the outside,looks like it allways did,inside,dying or dead.
This may not be such a bad thing either.
Geek Hillbilly
And one really expects better from the open-source community.
The situation for Microsoft is somewhat worse than GM in our example. Consider Microsoft Word 6.0. Unlike an automobile that wears out, breaks down, and needs to be replaced, Word 6.0 has eternal life. It does not ever wear out. After you have used Word 6.0 for 15 years, Word 6.0 works just as well as it worked 15 years ago.
So, you have no need to replace Word 6.0 unless you want to upgrade. For most people, the upgrade is unnecessary because Word 6.0 already has all the features that you need.
Other software programs have the same "problem". Microsoft has so relentlessly added feature after feature to its products in order to capture most of the marketshare that most consumers now have no further need for additional features.
The only way for Microsoft to grow is to enter into other markets. Hence, you see Bill Gate's fist print in the gaming market as Microsoft pushes the XBox. Unfortunately for Microsoft, there is no guarantee of success in markets beyond the computer-software market.
As a side note, Microsoft will continue to invest heavily in R&D in order to enhance the likelihood of success in those other markets. I would not rule out the possibility of buying Bell Laboratories.
This article isn't nearly as amusing as John Dvorak's article claiming that Microsoft will totally disolve in 10 years.
As soon as the market opens on Monday, I'll buy a few hundred shares, and watch the tumble.
Get out while you can.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
Interesting read,but I wonder how long the end will take.I'm no fan of MS,but they do have a track record.
The Linux Information Minister is speaking
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I have gone to some lengths to try to introduce non-Microsoft products to various clients. I have tried the wedge approach of introducing simple effective tools that work within Windows (e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird, OOo, cygwin, Apache) but have had little success.
It is a serious uphill battle. How can MS collapse with so many organizations 'programmed' to buy their products?
Yeah, wasn't Apple dead too? Like what, three times now?
'Nuff said, about forever.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
that seeing three articles about the "company" on the front page of Slashdot sorta stinks. Any publicity is good publicity as long as you get the name right. That guy Oedipus comes to mind for some reason. This obsession is disturbing.
Maybe we could try http://www.deathclock.com/.
Put a BMI of 90 or something...fat bastards.
Microsoft is where IBM was in the old days. The excitement that lures glamor-seeking job applicants can't last when you've already grown to fill your entire ecosystem. Ditto the press buzz.
In other words, where Malone sees senility, he may actually be looking at maturity.
And I suppose you have other examples of his writing that suggest the author hates Microsoft? Or are you just slinging mud without basis... you know... the thing that Darl McBride catches so much flak around here for doing?
Microsoft will just buy Glade, the company that makes plug-in air fresheners.
Your computer will emit a little wisp of air freshener the mext time you smell a hint of rot.
You will actually look forward to seeing Clippy...
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
The earth would appear to be eroding away by massive solar winds. Scientists predict the earth to be completely disintegrated in 20 to 30 billion years.
Gimme that booze you little pumpkin pie hair cutted freak!
In 15 years, employers will no longer expect your resume to be in Microsoft Word format.
I think Microsoft will become like J.P. Morgan: still huge, still important, but not what it was.
I know this is the same kind of thing that you'd find on any column, but given the material, I just found it somewhat... apropos.
Certainly this was written to get a bit of attention, but in a way he's just foreshadowing what happens to most businesses, especially those that grow as large as Microsoft has. A brief look through history will confirm this.
AT&T is a good example. Although they were "broken" by an anti-trust suit, they actually volunteered to spin off the Baby Bells as a concession. In their minds, networking and computers were the future. In a way, AT&T had it all going for them. They ditched the tedious Baby Bell system to jump headfirst into a sector that absolutely exploded. Tons of people thought AT&T was the unstoppable 800 lb. gorilla that once it entered the computing/networking segment, it would just dominate it. History, however, has proved us wrong and now AT&T is about to be consumed by one of its children in an odd sort of Darwinist/Oedipal freak of the market economy.
Now, I'm not saying MS will tank tomorrow or even five years from now. What I am saying is that there's always something that destabilizes the status quo. It could be something that they don't see coming; it could even be something they see coming but can't properly react to. In any case, the inevitable will happen and MS will fall. Some day.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
It seems on-topic, I think.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
If you sniff the air, you can just make out the first hints of sensationalistic journalism.
As far as I can tell, "Gloom and Doom" seems to be his usual mode of operation.
It's hard to even make a decent joke anymore.
MS have lost some of their dominance, and will lose a little more. They wont collapse any time soon, not while they have real prospect of a decent P/E ratio and not unless something really amazing comes along to do REAL harm to Windows, Office et al. Famous last words and all that, but such amazing things are unpredictable almost by default.
MS seems to be having poor "leadership and vision" right now, these things come and go. The smell has probably been there since they moved out of Gates' garage, such things dont come and go so easily.
I remember a similar episode with samzenpus a couple of weeks ago. It was actually much worse...
Is he beta-testing the new version of ViaVoice?
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
Of course, Microsoft is too big for that to happen. But "collapse" doesn't necessarily (or even usually) mean total disappearance. It more often means mass firings, loss of market share, plummeting stock price. As happened at SGI.
Speaking of SGI, I worked there during their waning days as a graphic workstation powerhouse. When people talked about where the company went wrong, a common theme was this: Wall Street fell in love with SGI and threw money at the company. All that cash helped them avoid measuring risks carefully or look for efficient ways to do things. By the time money ran short and it was obvious SGI had to reform, it was too late to claim a permanent place in key markets.
That's different from Microsoft, of course, since MS's pile of cash comes from their tithe on every PC sold. But the effect on corporate culture is the same. Cash can be toxic to a good organization.
"if you sniff the air, you can just make out the first hints of rot."
No that is just the huge sweat patches on monkey boys shirt.
stinky monkey:
"Developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers *wheeze* developers developers!"
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Wishing doesn't make it so.
San Francisco Photographers
Perhaps all the scepticism about rot at MS is warrented. But please, this is an article by Mike Malone. He's got to be one of the most respected journalists in the industry. If he smells rot, there is indeed something wrong with the company.
Saying that a company like Microsoft, that not only has a lot of smart people, billions of dollars in the bank and a cream of the cream lab, is going to die is pretty simple minded. I guess you could have said that IBM was dead in the early 90s but is it dead? Nope.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
I can understand microsoft dying because they have issues. But Apple? They are doing some pretty cool stuff right now. Because instead of having to fix so many security issues they can innovate. And its innovation that makes the company. Besides.. how can you deny an operating system as Sexy as Mac OS X. ( even if its kernel sucks )
( my opinion )
And what about Linux companies? I don't see them taking the majority market share real soon but Linux is an outstanding product if it gets distributed enough and it works great in a production enviorment.
If con is the opposite of pro. Then isn't congress the opposite of progress?
Microsoft is not rotting but it is maturing. It is not as nimble as it use to be. The market has matured along with Microsoft. Microsoft is starting to go through a mid-age crisis. They can not sell more OSs and Office suites than in the past, because everyone already has them and the old versions are good enough. Microsoft is changing into a mature old company that will have a steady income but there will be nothing to get excited about.
Where will I get my security updates? AHHH!!
Ding dong the witch is dead Which old witch? The wicked witch! Well, at least shes flying around in the tornado ;)
Some time ago? Maybe two months?
They're not going to fold any time soon. But their stock is overpriced, considering where the company can go, and things will start going a little sour when people realise this. Not so much that the company folds, but enough that it won't be the darling of the tech press for much longer.
... here..
... He explained that Microsoft carried on its books no value at all for its software. Assets like Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office, which might be given some book value and depreciated over time were carried on the books as valueless. This contrasted at the time with IBM, which valued its software assets at billions of dollars.
Basically discussing accounting shenanigans before the bubble burst, and I remember reading it at the time (though this comes from this weeks' article links)..
"The late Frank Gaudette was Microsoft's first-ever Chief Financial Officer. He was also Microsoft's first head of Human Resources, first head of Facilities, first at running just about every department that had to do with operations but not product development, sales, or marketing....
My question was based on the idea that nothing goes up forever and there must come a time when even Microsoft is no longer a good buy. How can we tell when that time has come?
"Watch for any changes in our accounting," said Gaudette. "If I need to I can start, depreciating the software and maintain earnings growth for years on flat revenue. Watch for the accounting changes, wait for the next uptick in the stock price, and then sell.""
Read the whole thing, very interesting stuff...
The smell of VICTORY.
word.
The problem with MS and many fallen technology companies that have gone before it is that the niche to which their entire business model is tailored is gradually being eroded by forces beyond their control. The desktop computer is becoming less important a player in the computing landscape as the true spirit of Moore's law, that equivalently complex chips are becoming exponentially cheaper, begins to drive computing into more specialized devices. On the other side of things, networking technologies are pushing important applications in the other direction to servers. The fortress that MS engineered for itself, the fortress on which their business model depends, is going to be a liability as the definition of computer and computing changes.
it'd be the smart people at Google. They'll somehow make the operating system as we use them now obsolete. And they have an unpresidented mindshare and visibility on the internet. I've never seen anything like it.
Google seem so damn aggressive lately. Microsoft have to consider them their #1 threat.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Is lack of competition. They almost always win, either in price, or in features, or in both. In all fairness, there's no office suite on the market that would be more polished than MS Office. There's nothing to replace Exchange. There's nothing to replace Windows even, because once you move an inch away from windows your hardware doesn't work anymore.
That creates problems for Microsoft itself. Everyone is too attached to "cash cows", they become "sacred", everyone is afraid of making big bets until it's too late. Microsoft is simply afraid to boldly innovate. They have people and money, they simply don't want to.
Sure, the business analysis is sketchy, but it's not meant as a strict business analysis. His main point is, Microsoft doesn't have the attention that they should; and I agree.
Like he says, Microsoft just released their answer to Google, and nobody gave a shit. And other reasons... hell, half of Microsoft's own employees use Gmail rather than MSN. For a company that has enough money to create any product they want, that's a very bad thing.
And their core business is in trouble too. For so many years, the desktop market consisted mainly of grannies who thought that Windows==computer, and internet==IE. Now Apple and Linux and OSS are getting the word out that Microsoft is just one of many alternatives, and they're giving end users cheaper and more solidly built products at the same time.
I doubt Microsoft will ever die completely -- but I do think that within five or ten years, they will be barely recognizable compared to the company they are today.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
"... if you sniff the air, you can just make out the first hints of rot."
There's something wrong with the reporter's nose.
I've been smelling the ugly stench of Microsoft mismanagement since the days of the CP/M operating system.
A lot of business writers assume that, if a company makes money, it is a well-managed company. But that's not always true. Microsoft has had a virtual monopoly. The money comes from the monopoly, not from the quality of Microsoft products.
For example, the Internet Explorer browser is buggy. One-hundred-thirty-three security advisories! It appears to me that either Microsoft has some very, very sloppy programmers, or the U.S. government's spy agencies made a deal with Microsoft so that they could hack into any computer connected to the web.
As users become more knowledgeable, they are not so easily fooled. The beginnings of a revolt are starting to appear in the media. People are disgusted with all the viruses and malware.
He may not have trouble smelling rot, but he sure does have problems spelling root.
i would have already closed the doors, said ferk all, im taking my money and retire. you could reach me at the only house on the new land id buy - sao paulo.
You've forgotten the reason why Microsoft existed in the first place: To *make* a lot of people a heckuva lot of money.
If Microsoft sees no future in its business, it will liquidate its assets and pay off its investors. Sure, it has billions, but if it can't find a way to turn those billions into trillions, then it will be sold and the capital invested somewhere else. This is the core of capitalism.
Companies are the sum of its investors, and nothing more. They can come and go pretty much as they wish. What do you think "corporation" means? It means something made out of many parts, those parts being actual people and their fortunes.
Companies don't collapse. They are abandoned. That is what is happening to Microsoft *right now*, and he sees it.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
It's hard to say how much monetary clout Microsoft has beyond its value on paper. Certainly, they have a lot of value in investor funds available to them, and because of accounting methods that allowed them to exclude stock option grants from their expense statements, they've been able to consistently beat earnings estimates.
But from some perspectives, that looks like a pyramid scheme. Microsoft's single most important product isn't Windows, but Microsoft itself. Or more specifically, Microsoft stock. As long as the stock continues to rise in price, it remains an attractive purchase for investors who (rightly) see that it will continue to increase in value.
But as soon as that stock stops rising, the investor funds will slow to a trickle, and Microsoft will be forced to survive solely on the profits from its software and the actual cash it has in the bank. Is that enough by itself?
Posting as a coward because of proprietary information....
The writer of the article may be correct. MS really HASN'T released any real "killer apps" or technologies in a while. It seems that they are just coasting along. Large companies take a long time to die. Sometimes it can take as long as 10 years for the culture to atrophy and the revenue stream to wither away. Costs begin to escalate, and soon profits turn into losses. It's well known that MS throws a lot of money around at new projects, but, strangely enough, you never hear of any hits:
1. They've NEVER been able to break into the high performance computing market (linux has presence, for God's sake) - and there are plenty of AMD/Intel clusters out there.
2. MSNBC is a bust. They own the web content, but little else. NBC is the managing partner of that relationship. MS has YET to establish itself as a "media" company. WHAT do they control????
3. Apple, over the past few years, TOTALLY revamped their OS and released a whole new line of products. THEY haven't had problems creating media operations (even if it's just a song-download site).
Recently, my company (major multinational) had the opportunity to jointly research a project on one of their platforms. The APIs for this are tightly controlled, so our contact at Microsoft had to talk to the right people to get MS to release them to us. Now, money isn't an object and we've been talking to them for the past month or two. This should have been a no-brainer and we should have started the project. Astonishingly, he can't find the person in charge that can make the decision to do this. This isn't a particularly large or visible project (not yet), so politics shouldn't play into this as strongly The people on my side want this to happen and MS needs our industry contacts to make this happen. This should be a no brainer and the MS representative isn't ignoring us. It really seems like someone CAN'T make decisions over there.
MS might actually be in trouble, but their bloat seems to be keeping them from feeling the pain.
LOL! This guy should smell RMS' sweaty armpits at his highness' next presentation and do a prognosis for OSS based on that!
You have how many shares of MS stock options?
And they're vested when?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Another troll puts the smackdown on the moderators. Good job, troll!
I have a feeling that, in about 50 years, when Gates and Balmer are no longer around, that Microsoft will see its demise.
As much as I, personally, do not like them or their products, I doubt that Microsoft is going away anytime soon or anytime at all. Too many people have invested too much money and time in the MSFT platform. Moreover, MSFT's biggest weakness (security) is not unique to them.
Regardless of the bad architecture decisions unique to Window's, all platforms are vulnerable. This existence of any security weakness in other platforms (even if quantitatively smaller) is used as rationale for staying with "the devil you know."
But the real core of the problem is deeper than any one exploit or architecture mistake. The core problem with security is that the "bad" guys are, in many ways, more motivated than the "good" guys. On the one hand you have the black-hat hacker/spammer/spyware creator/ crime syndicate that is sure that they can make a potload of money off any little crack in a computer's security. Thus, they are highly motivated to search for any flaw and exploit that flaw in however many millions of machines they can reach. On the other hand you have millions of users that don't think that they will have a security problem and thousands of programmers who think their code (or at least their job) is secure. Thus neither the programmers nor the users are as motivated to create security and the bad guys are motivated to defeat security. Thus, the global resources devoted to cracking computers exceeds the local resources to securing computers. Thus all computers have holes and MSFT is unlikely to die because Windows is somehow uniquely insecure.
At worst/best I see Windows slipping to 50%? marketshare before MSFT throws more programmer-hours at security than the entire OSS community could ever hope to muster. With enough of the proverbial monkeys at keyboards, MSFT will regain the security crown or at least through enough marketing dollars to claim it. Morevoer, as Windows loses marketshare, the black hats will attack other platforms. People will soon realize that the new non-Microsoft software is really not that much better than the old stuff and go back to MSFT. At best (for Microsoft's foes), the world will reach some equilibrium point of Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and other platforms.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
We have all seen the curve that shows any organization starting, growing, maturing and declining. We can predict that for any organization. What we can't predict is the timing. I agree that Microsoft's next direction is downward but that could take a rather long time.
I have just read a couple of books by Clayton Christensen, "The Innovator's Dilemma" and "Seeing What's Next". He shows that time after time an established industry giant will be blindsided by disruptive technology, fail to adapt and fall. In this case the disruptive technology is Gnu/Linux/OpenSource. Microsoft probably won't adapt and probably will decline.
On the other hand, IBM managed to remake itself. It was the former industry giant and was nearly as hated as Microsoft. Its re-adaption was wrenching but successful. In fact IBM is doing quite well with this new disruptive technology. I won't say that Microsoft can't do that but the odds are against them.
Ronald Reagan was right, and elite wisdom was wrong. The Soviet Union was already decaying from within, and all it took was a few firm pushes (IRNMs in Europe, aid to the Mujahadeen, SDI) to help push it over the edge.
So it is with Microsoft. Besides Windows and Office, what products do they have that are profitable? Story after story comes out about how Microsoft is going to take over this or that sector of the industry (MSN, WinCE, WMP), but they never seem to turn a profit. Like the Soviet Union, they've overexpanded, they have a restive population tired of chaffing under their iron bootheel, and a few pushes (Linux, iTunes, etc.) may be enough to push them over the edge.
To put it another way: It's no accident that both the Soviet Union and Microsoft are called "the Evil Empire."p.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
YAWN! Another anti-Microsoft article. YAWN! Get over it already.
I think that this guy is right, up to a point.
We see lots of things that tend to loosen up MS's chokehold on the industry.
Large government clients are pushing for open office document formats. People are using more and more software that runs on multpiple platforms (ie., Firefox). New platforms, like phones, set top boxes, media centers, PDAs, and the like aren't panning out.
And many customers really want out. People complain about MS a lot now.
To me, the most significant thing is that they don't seem to be making the right moves. They're not doing anything interesting, and they're not responding to their technical challenges in a vigorous and competent way.
Gates is clearly a genius with business, but I don't think he's up to running the tech side of the company. Since he became the "chief software architect" they've been floundering.
But on the other hand, think about how much money they have. That means that there's no chance of them collapsing or going away. The cash gives them enormous staying power.
I don't think that collapse is a likely scenario. It's more likely that they'll be more like an IT industry Sears.
Sears was mismanaged for decades. Long after the retail industry had passed them by, they were still doing things in the same old dumb ways they had always done it. But they were still there, because they had gotten to be so big and strong in the days when they were on top. They owned a ton of land underneath their stores, and it was worth a lot of money. They had staying power.
I feel really good about the future. I don't think anyone's going to have their boot on our necks the way MS has in the past. Apple is making some beautiful machines, and Linux is a couple of years away, at tops, from being really competitive on the desktop. Windows will probably get cleaned up, and it will probably end up being cheaper.
Couldn't happen. There are UNIX evangelists, Novell evangelists, Apple evangelists, et cetera. And there are Rover, MG, Porsche, Ford, Renault, Honda... enthusiasts too - in some strange parallel universe, there's probably even Volvo-lovers, too ;-). Take a look at this pitiful collection of cars to see how far this goes.
Also - consider the open-source model. Would GM have stood a chance if some other fellow set up a factory down the road and called it automobileforge.car -and started giving away free cars? Sure, that's ruinous to all concerned, but I'm trying to work within the analogy here.
What? Microsoft is sitting on enormous cache reserves, still has a monopoly on the desktop OS market, and has many extremely successful products such as Office.
Not to mention that the xbox is doing pretty good; while they might not make money on the hardware itself, games like Halo 2 make them a heck of a lot of money.
Microsoft might be going through a rough spot, but since when does that mean a company is going to collapse?
How many outstanding shares does MSFT have?
Gotta love seeing the little light bulb turn on over rah-rah MS diehard's heads when the finally do the few lines of arithmetic to arrive at the relevance of that figure to their cash and earnings...
>>Let me ask you, when someone comes up to
>>you and says "I work at Microsoft" , what
>>is your first reaction?
Laughter.
The article is all fluff; everything dies. To borrow from Bill Shatner's "You'll have time":
Live life
Live life
Like you're gonna die
Because you're gonna
I hate to be
The bearer of bad news
But you're gonna die
Maybe not today or even next year
But before you know it
You'll be saying:
Is this all there was?
What was all the fuss?
Why did I bother?
Now
Maybe you won't suffer
Maybe it's quick
But you'll have time to think
Why did I waste it?
Why didn't I taste it?
You'll have time
'Cause you're gonna die
Wrong. MSWord 6.0 has a very definite life as follows:
1: No security patches.
2: No bug fixes.
3: Can't read newer document formats. (Can you really ask all your friends to keep saving in RTF just because you won't update?)
4: May not be supported on newer operating systems. (You say you'll never upgrade from Win98SE, however when you find your new Dell notebook only has the necessary drivers for XP, hey, you'll be running XP too.)
5: CD rot of your only remaining install disc.
6: Lost your serial number.
7: Won't play with other applications you want to run because it's COM model is too ancient.
Need I go on? Yes, it very definitely has a lifetime, and that lifetime is how long you are going to keep your current, ancient, hardware and OS.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
it's more anti-microsoft flaimbait.... Never saw that coming on slashdot...
Or maybe not even that something is wrong- just that something that used to be right isn't there anymore. I think I see what he means. The image used alongside the article is the Microsoft that dominated, that we feared and loathed: the Borg. I can't exactly put my finger on it now, but that's not how I see Microsoft right now. Sure, they're still enormously big, powerful, and evil, but somehow don't seem terrifyingly unstoppable, destined to destroy or eat up everything in their path. There was a time that the mere mention of Microsoft getting into a market was enough to send people scattering. Do they still have that effect? I think the guy is onto something.
Slashdotter buys Microsoft (Microsoft, Software)
From the its-a-bit-too-late-for-that dept.
Spy der Mann writes:
"A slashdot reader also known as 'Anonymous Coward' to protect his identity, just purchased all the Microsoft stock shares from ebay at $1337 bucks.
Not each, ALL. He published in his webpage that he plans to release the Windows source code under GPL 3.0. Frankly, I don't care, Linux just became the mainstream OS. But oh well..."
it stink's
I left MS recently. One reason I did so was because of this stench of rot, particularly in the windows server division. MS used to be very, very good at figuring out what a customer wanted - usually because they looked at what was being done and stole/borrowed/improved on the concept. They also used to be very good at innovation in certain ways.
Now? They either cut the products that are examples of innovation or force them to beg for their life in the next release.
I wouldn't be surprised if something as cool as Monad got cut from the next version, just because it lost out in some office politics or something like that.
And i`am very happy 4 it :)
Think like a hacker, act like a hacker, but never become a hacker !
After all, he's essentially correct in that the world's imagination is on Linux and Firefox rather than Windows and Explorer... at least in what I've seen in my limited scope.
But if I were to interpret what I smell, I'd say it was something along the lines of huge change rather than oncoming death. Microsoft [should] know they aren't moving the way they once did. Their code is too big to maintain backward and forward compatibility and things are breaking around the edges. I can't tell you how many places I've read that Microsoft needs to make a new product from scratch and throw out compatibility if it wants to recapture the hearts and minds of users and administrators. I think we're all very ready for something new which is why we're looking to Linux... well some of us are looking to Apple as well as the author points out.
Microsoft is a lot of things in my book but stupid isn't one of them. Their hearts are in the wrong place though. They need to shift focus away from themselves and back onto the consumer.
Microsoft knows that things can change quickly in their market. Bill Gates has said this many many times. Unlike HP/SGI/foobar, they readily admit that and understand this. Their executives are smart, and are technically knowledgeable, and they have the smart engineers to back it up. HP and SGI have stupid executives, business school grads who have no real background in technology.
I'll bet on Microsoft.
On October 5, 2000, Mr. Malone predicted the end of Apple and the PC.
a lone.html/
But with falling profits and plummeting stock, and having hastened the end of the desktop PC era, Steve Jobs has put Apple again in a precarious position.
http://www.forbes.com/columnists/2000/10/09/1005m
Microsoft may have a few years left too.
I come from a age where you had a choice of MS-DOS or ... Unix. AT&T SysV is where I learned myself -- the goal, of course, was always to get root. I got root.
:). There's a LOT of logic behind how Unix systems work -- and considering the concept/usage is much older than Microsoft I see it as being rather well thought out and mature. It becomes so obvious when dealing with trying to fix something on XP.
:)
If you look at all the major players in the market place today you'll note that they're _all_ getting behind one of the Un*x's or the other (I consider Linux, BSD, and OS X all to be "Unix" regardless of what SCO [or you] may think
Microsoft may be a 800 pound gorilla, but IBM is still a 8,000 pound monster that is going Linux [and still pissed off]. After recently comparing OS/2 to XP side by side I understand.
Of course there's a reason (in our organizations) that as of 2000 it was decided to REMOVE Windows from the mix and migrate all users to either Linux or OS X. I myself [IT admin] use OS X at home for a reason. Others will follow.
It's simple really -- in personal consulting I charge $35/hr for IT work if it's Linux/BSD/OS.X/QNX/Netware based. The rate changes to $70/hr for de-virus'ing your system [again]. Clients quickly learn what the Mac-mini is all about...
Yeah, Microsoft is dying -- and unfortunately (for the US) it'll be a slow death. IMHO the US had better wake up or we'll technologically have out shorts eaten by the rest of the world as they continue their migration away from Windows.
1. Bill Gates said he wanted to give up more control of the company to others (Steve Balmer in particular).
2. Even though MS was not broken up, they were still found to be an abusive monopoly.
3. They started paying out huge sums of money to settle past grievances (SUN, Netscape, California, etc...).
4. The EU is still wants to curtail them further.
5. They are under carefull scrutiny when it comes to purchasing other companies or products.
They are a giant and as such, they can carry a lot of rot for many many years without ever worrying about it. But if this reporter is only smelling the faintest whiff now, he doesn't have a very good nose. I started smelling it over 5 years ago.
And no I don't think they are going to die anytime soon. Just that as Linux and Apple grow, Microsoft can't go for the jugular (with legal and illegal practices) like it did in the past. There is a leash around its neck called "convicted monopolist" (which I only wish was a much TIGHTER leash).
I miss the Karma Whores.
I know some think it's getting hard to tell Fark and Slashdot apart these days, but all you really have to do is read the headlines and you should be a-ok.
I mean, where else do you get headlines like: "Microsoft: The Faint Smell of Rot" and "IT: MS Security Chief Says Windows is Safer Than Linux *Laugh*" and "Micro$oft is t3h new Ev1l!"
I hope so.
Aside from an general market forces or gradual evolution, the scenario to see M$ tumble into oblivion would involve a combination of the following:
Another huge legal/anti trust thing
Massive new destructive or compromising virus or malware that wreaks havock on Windows to a level not yet seen.
Apple and Linux make huge inroads into the home and business markets
Internal scandal at M$ like Enron on something
Personal scandal involving Gates or Balmer
A series of massive bungling software updates from MS that wreck people's machines
A series of flawed new technologies like 'Trusted computing'/DRM/'no software updates to warez users' etc etc that go badly wrong
Huge leak of M$ source code to Windows XP/Longhorn
Problem is as long as people want to write software for Windows then sadly M$ will exist
Um, isn't that a tautology? A well run company that initially succeeds and then fails will carry on making record profits right up until it starts going downhill.
Or perhaps you meant something more subtle?
With $20 billion in the bank and $1 billion a year in interest income, Microsoft could employ 15,000-20,000 people forever even if they never made another cent.
I'm Confused... Who will play the bad guy!??!
I am sick and tired of Microsoft... and so is everybody else. Let their days of monopolist dominance and crappy software be over! DIE MICROSOFT DIE! LONG LIVE LINUX!
Meh.
MS's *positive* cash flow comes from the operating system and office tools. Cut those off and the company is in serious problems.
Office matured almost a decade ago. The tremendous bloat since then is to satisfy increasingly niche markets, 95% of most people can do 95% of their work on the core... and they'll prefer a fast, stable and easy to use application over one that's bloated, routinely eats their work, and hard to use because the menus have become so overloaded that it's a "feature" that most of the options are now hidden by default.
As for the OS, who needs a PC with a legacy OS? The future is hidden computers in your video game console, your tivo, your car, whatever. Linux is free, MS is pushing Windows-CE (iirc) but even a modest cost is going to make a competive difference when the product costs under the $200 sweep point. Toss in perceived reliability issues and WinCE is even less attractive unless you've picked up some bargain-rate windows coders.
Heck, I'm a serious coder/admin and I could do almost all of my work with a <$100 mini xterm box that supports xterm/ssh, a browser, and a mail client. My 'development' box is a colocated server on the other side of a broadband connection. Windows developers need their own boxes, but they're only a tiny fraction of the current user base.
This is why MS has been pushing so hard into new markets (video games, dvrs, etc.), but they're still losing serious money on every unit sold.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
It was only a faint smell of rot? Gee, I guess he didn't open the corpse up ;)
My UID is prime... is yours?
I bet Microsoft will never die/collapse whatever...
And if I'm wrong... Hurray...
More spectacular would be a really massive security disaster that Microsoft got blamed for. That would almost have to involve cracking MicrosoftUpdate, the holy grail of the black hat l33t hackers.
The other big vulnerability I can think of involves market rejection of Microsoft's licensing transition. Some evidence of that in the death of their Passport thing. People do not need or want new versions of the year every year, especially when the new versions are inferior to their predecessors but are still rammed down the customers' throats. (Yes, I'm talking about Word XP and Windows XP.) Microsoft's idea of software subscriptions is very *unattractive* to me and lots of other people, and if they push it hard enough, they may actually manage to push enough people into Linux to make a critical mass. Kind of nice to imagine large scale abandonment of Windows...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Poor, persecuted, fundie Microsoft.
Microsoft makes almost all of their profits on sales of XP and Office. I would argue that both of these products are adequate, but neither compelling nor great. Both continue to be successful because people must endure great pain if they try to choose any other alternative.
/.er. And they know how to build hardware that they can sell *for profit*. The PS3 will own the next generation just like PS2 owns this one.
Lets list the other great applications or product categories MS has pioneered since the beginning of the internet era- the early 90's:
(sound of crickets chirping)
Where have they completely missed the boat?
1. The Web. If it weren't for Netscape we would all be using a closed, proprietary, for-pay MS network much closer to the old pre-internet AOL model than the public internet we have today. And since MS stole the browser market from them how much innovation has happened in the browser space? For all practical purposes - Nada! Hopefully the Firefox phenomenon will convince smart, hungry people that success can be had inovating in this space.
2. Search. Google is kicking their butt back and forth and truly innovating on a regular basis. I never realized how piss-poor the Windows search functionality was until I tried Google Desktop Search. It is a revelation to get results immediately that would take several minutes or hours of searching to find with the MS provided pap. And have you seen the other stuff coming from Google Labs like the new Maps? Great stuff.
3. Music. Tiny little Apple has single-handedly eaten Microsofts lunch on this one. Even though MS compatible players are (or at least were) far more widely available to consumers.
4. Gaming. The XBox seems like a contender, but only because it has been propped up by the profits from other divisions. MS blew it in the first generation - using PC components sealed their fate - the machine was too big for the Japanese market and too expensive to make a profit on. Xbox would have tanked long ago if the division was actually dependent on making money. Switching to G5 chips may help with those issues but will consumers buy a machine that isn't backward compatible? If the PSP is any indicator, Sony has not forgotten how to make hardware that inpires lust in the average
Please somebody provide a single example of something important that Microsoft has truly inovated with in the past decade!
Microsoft is dieing,
BSD is dead
Linux is on the Rise
The internet is ruled by sex
They should know that smell quite well.
Before any liberals are tempted to mod up one of my comments, a word of warning: I'm actually making fun of you.
Their balance sheet at yahoo says they have about 60 billion in cash and short term investments.
According to their income statement, they spend about 27 billion a year (quick math).
So, they could last about 2 1/2 years doing exactly what they spend and receiving no income.
Same guy, right? Yeah, I'm sold.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Yes, but those are mostly network effects. Anyway, you understood the point, you just failed to resist being a pedantic slashbot.
Western Union, of course, was a really big company that was founded on telegraphy, and people paid $/word to send "telegrams" that were sent in Morse code by telegraph operators to other telegraph operators and delivered by messengers in funny hats. As late as the mid '70s, companies that wanted to send electronic messages had Model 33 Teletypes connected via a public switched Western Union network called Telex. You paid cents/word to send messages to another Teletype that had addresses like "CITIBANK NY" or 710-xxx-xxxx. Finally there were PCs and Western Union had a product called EasyLink that allowed PCs to connect to the Telex network. It would have been ridiculously easy for WU to provide this service at a low cost, they would have established a foothold in email by linking the Telex system to PCs, and they would have owned email, at least until 1994 and maybe beyond that. Instead, they made EasyLink so costly and cumbersome that they went nearly all the way out of business, the only business WU has retained is money transfers, they are a shell of their former mighty selves.
I hate to bash MS here on Slashdot because it is so easy and so redundant, but they just do not innovate. They have added few significant features to Windows or to IE, and the same annoyances have been in these products for years. They should have long ago ported their core software products to assembler a la Steve Gibson. The only reason there is not a mass exodus to Linux/Gnome/KDE is because the peripheral makers are afraid to write Linux drivers and print "Works With Linux" on their packaging for fear of angering MS. You can see the rot in MS' stock price. MS would love for their $26 stock to go up, but they can't win for losing. $3 dividend, no change. Stock buybacks, no change. Record quarterly profits, no change. Nobody in their right mind would go to work there, nobody who works there gets rich anymore, they just get prodded and poked into working lots of unpaid OT and ultimately burned out. I haven't even gotten started on non-buzz-generating uncool me-too products like MSN and Media Player, or security issues, or product activation hassles, or the fact that no one in their right mind would call MS support, or the sheer utter depressing hassle of trying to deal with MS at all, even if you want to buy something and give them money you have to wait on hold forever and likely as not your order will be screwed up. I don't hate MS and I really wish it were different, but I agree with whatzisname the reporter.
A business reporter for Slate is asking whether ABC/Fortuneis poised to collapse, based on years of industry observation . . .
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Microsoft community when IDC confirmed that the Microsoft market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all BSD tools. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Microsoft has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Microsoft is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last year in the recent BSD Admin comprehensive OS test.
You don't need to be a Malone to predict the future of Microsoft. The handwriting is on the wall: Microsoft faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Microsoft because Microsoft is dying. Things are looking very bad for Microsoft. As many of us are already aware, Microsoft continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. A river with no windows.
FreeMicrosoft is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Microsoft developers Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Microsoft is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenMicrosoft leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenMicrosoft. How many users of Microsoft.NET are there? Let's see. The number of OpenMicrosoft versus Microsoft.NET posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Microsoft.NET users. Microsoft/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Microsoft.NET posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Microsoft/OS. A recent article put FreeMicrosoft at about 80 percent of the *Microsoft market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeMicrosoft users. This is consistent with the number of FreeMicrosoft Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Redmond, abysmal sales and so on, FreeMicrosoft went out of business and was taken over by MicrosoftI who sell another troubled OS. Now MicrosoftI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *Microsoft has steadily declined in market share. Microsoft is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Microsoft is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *Microsoft continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Microsoft is dead.
Fact: Microsoft is dying
This flies in the face of science.
Savior? More like he will get lynched...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
he would have been right on the money.
Is there an iPod coming out of Redmond?
I wouldn't bet on it.
where ever will i go to here rants about microsoft?
All those who think Microsoft is rotting, is starting to fade away,etc are badly mistaken. Infact it is about to get bigger and powerful when Longhorn comes out. XAML would replace HTML because it will be better. Longhorn is going to be pre-installed on every new computer that ships, whether you like it or not. Face it guys, why would anyone care a damn about Linux on the desktop when they have a '21st century' LOOKING desktop. Would you sacrifice your personal productivity for the CAUSE, to dent Microsoft ? You are using Windows now and you will be using Windows in the future. Linux might be very secure and Mac might look good, but that doesn't matter anymore. Java on the desktop is dead, .NET has supplanted it. Would you as a developer, sacrifice providing a better user experience for the CAUSE ? No, you won't, no one will. Face it guys, Longhorn is the next 'browser' (IE is dead) and we will be developing apps for it in the future and that will mean Mac and Linux will be dead on the desktop by 2010. Microsoft is about to own the internet as we know it. Hats off to whoever devised this brilliant ploy !
Only way this can be thwarted:
-OEMs stop bundling Windows. Why will they ? They got families to feed.
-Someone clones .NET and XAML engine.
- ???
"And though Steve Ballmer is legendary for his sound and fury, these days his leadership seems to be signifying nothing."
Nice to know that some in the main stream press can still call it like they see it...
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
when they dropped the ball on claiming the palmtop/handheld device market.
The dominant platform for hand-held devices is not one of Microsoft's, and it looks less likely today than it did years ago that it would be Microsoft's.
Of course, there is no dominant platform today, but of all of the players, Microsoft's is not too high on the list.
The only thing I can see reversing it is some new earth-shatteringly awesome device coming out that runs Microsoft-something that everyone jumps into bed with.
Microsofts use of BSD TCPIP support!
Hitory has proven that every empire falls. The only question is when.
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
"Now the company seems to have trouble executing even the one task that should take precedence over everything else: getting 'Longhorn,' its Windows replacement, to market. Longhorn is now two years late. That would be disastrous for a beloved product like the Macintosh, but for a product that is universally reviled as a necessary, but foul-tasting, medicine, this verges on criminal insanity. Or, more likely, organizational paralysis."
Or, more likely, Windows, with its backwards compatability, integrated applications, and security flaws, among other design problems, is so sprawlingly complex that it is reaching the level unmanageability. IANAME (MS Employee), nor have I been, but I know they hire the best. If even teams of such people struggle for so long to produce a major upgrade to Windows, then that seems to me to be a sign that they're now dealing with an unmanageable monstrosity, rather than a sign of organizational paralysis. Not that such a distinction matters much to the author's argument, though...
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Actually, I've been smelling the stench of MicroSoft since 1997, but when GNU/linux didn't take over the world by 2001 I had to conclude that I had only been smelling the crap MicroSoft calls software. The borg was alive and well.
That said, the stench has definitely been turning toward rancid over the years. A data point I've noticed is that it is no longer "cool" to be a MicroSoft employee. We interviewed a potential new employee about six months ago and the general opinion was that he was a possible hire, but the fact that he was a MicroSoft employee definitely counted against him. He suffered half-serious ridicule behind his back.
We didn't hold it against him too much -- he would have been taking a pay cut and would have had to leave his newly purchased and remodeled mansion to come to work for us. In the end he stayed with MicroSoft rather than jump onboard a fun startup! 8-0 Nevertheless, I caught the faint hit of rot from his reception here.
It may be dying, but it will be a nice long death. There's plenty of time for it to thrash out its death throws.
Meanwhile... I distribute Knoppix CD's as a hobby.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
is that Microsoft will drop unprofitable products and services and try to take on new things like financial services and other things that are highly profitable and Microsoft's resources can better be used for.
Imagine Microsoft offering its own credit card, and loans, becoming yet another bank or lender or savings and loan. Perhaps get into the insurance business? Imagine a Microsoft supported IRA or some other thing?
Imagine Microsoft phasing off support for older versions of Internet Explorer and Windows. Imagine a lot of Microsoft games being phased out, possibly the unprofitable XBox kicking the bucket, or being sold to a different OEM. Maybe MSN will be sold off to AOL? MSNBC sold off to NBC.
After Longhorn ships, perhaps only Windows XP will be supported in legacy Windows platforms? All others will be phased out and updates no longer offered.
I imagine Microsoft will try to make some sort of licensing deal with governments to try and attack Open Source Software like SAMBA into paying Microsoft royalties for using MS technology or interfacing with MS Technology, as a final stab at OSS's back.
Imagine Microsoft can no longer sell or support Windows, so they develop a GUI on top of Unix/X that runs the Windows API as a commercial application. Then instead of spending a lot of money to support new hardware, they put the support on those Unix platforms and only provide the API to run Windows programs under Unix. Perhaps Microsoft combines Virtual PC with Windows in order to do this at first, and then makes the API layer to replace it?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Microsoft's total cash on hand is 34.5 billion. Their operating costs average around 6-8 billion a quarter. By my math, that means they could operate for anywhere to 1-1.5 years without taking in any revenue, unless they *seriously* scaled back their business ventures.
That is quite far from "decades"
I don't think it is necessary for him to owe any options for him to said that. I have alway agree that m$ guys are very creative and smart, no doubt on that. What makes the software appearing in the market in a "not-so-ready" stage are decisions made by management, not because of programmers themselves.
I am harvesting funny/good quotes. Please help by putting them in your sigs
Sorry, I think I should post this one anonymously.
I'm biased to think of the programming/tech crowd as being
somewhat more rational than the population in general, but the
discussion of stories like this really makes me wonder.
Slashdot has stories all the time about how well Linux,
OpenOffice, Firefox, etc. are doing.
We know that Linux is growing fast, and that many organizations
are aware of OpenOffice and at least considering the switch.
We also know that Microsoft's income (other than investments)
comes primarily from Windows and Office-- Their internet, TV,
Xbox, etc. have not made much money, and are sometimes
operated at a loss. (Yes, Xbox shows some promise, but
it's not enough to support the company yet).
So, duh, Microsoft is in trouble. Yet, when someone arrives
at this (seemingly obvious) conclusion, we all run screaming
that it cannot be.
By the way, the article did point out that the decline will
be gradual, not immediate.
To me the real question is why, even after so many years of being in a wide variety of markets, Microsoft's only reliably profitable divisions are still Office and Windows. The Mac division is really an extension of the Office division.
Your comments about the XBox, directory services, games, PDA, and so on are valid, but from a business point of view that really only matters if they are profitable. The Home & Entertainment division is now profitable but is expected to go red next quarter, and the Tools division is profitable. The real money earners for MS are still Office and Windows.
Add to this the fact that Microsoft maintained profitability by cutting their R&D *in half* and I can't help but wonder if Microsoft is mortaging its future in order to please the stock market today.
They do have a boatload of cash in reserve, and they won't be going away any time soon, but the famously long Microsoft quality cycle (v1 sucks, v2 sucks less, v3 is ok, v4 is good) just isn't going to cut it any more. Smaller, more nimble competitors abound, and they're getting smarter. They're attacking Microsoft at the edges and playing against Microsoft's weaknesses (user experience, security, price, reliability).
Microsoft may be going after the long-term bucks with the XBox, but they can't leverage their OS dominance in that battle, and Sony definitely isn't going to take it lying down. What happens when MS can no longer rob from the Windows and Office divisions in order to keep the Home division going?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
He's right about one thing, or should I say four. Microsoft hyped the "four pillars" of Longhorn over and over again. But the Longhorn about to be released won't have a single pillar. The irony of an OS without any support is quite telling. Microsoft simply can no longer deliver what it promises.
It's simply too distracted. It's worried about Sony winning the living room. So it releases the Xbox (and don't forget WebTV!). It's worried about Google winning the search war. So it spends a lot of resources on its own search engine. It worried way back about AOL so it created MSN. But the problem with all of these diversions is that none of them make any money.
Microsoft is running scared. It senses that it cannot continue getting people to upgrade their OS and Office year after year, so it's desperately trying to find something, ANYTHING to hold on to.
Microsoft reminds me of the extremely well armed troops in the first Predator movie, shooting in every directing and hitting nothing.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
USA is: overextended, not producing anything except movies and music, and is basically living on credit from China's bank.
I stated a similar opinion early last year just after Microsoft announced they were issuing a huge one time dividend. Microsoft is figuring out how to extract as much money as they can before their stock starts the long decline.
Expect to see Microsoft making similar disbursments over the next few years. This will do two things, it will keep a lot of their share holders holding the stock and allow them to stuff their pockets with cash.
It is funny that in the last few weeks we learned that AT&T is being bought up by SBC. AT&T used to be the huge monopoly everyone hated. Their slide started about 6 or 7 years ago. It should have been obvious to most people when they sold off NCR, cable operations, wireless, and the other stuff. AT&T became unfocused on what they were and in order to show profits they started selling portions of themselves instead of stepping into the broadband consumer market and taking over. Maybe they were afraid of being a monopoly in that market and getting broken up again. Of course the most telling indication is when Armstrong duped a good share of the employees into investing in Wireless and then dropping the bomb three days later.
It will take many years for Microsoft to decline. The next telling item will be how long it take longhorn to come out and just how the business world takes to it. I suspect if Microsoft keeps the licensing the way they changed it (yearly lease of the OS and packages) that many companies will opt to try a different OS for their servers and workstations. Linux is good enough on the server end to display Microsoft and arguably good enough for the desktop now. Another year and Linux may become the default standard on the desktop, finally breaking Microsofts stangle hold. At that point the decline will accelarate. Microsoft will thrash around trying to invent the next BIG thing that everyone must have. And each time they will miss the mark, by just enough that others will swoop in and take that market. Look at the tablet PC and thier attempt at the handheld markets. X-box is another example. They only have about 27% of the market running third behind Sony and Nintendo. Will be interesting to see how that develops over the next few years. Of course I hardly think Microsoft can survive at its present scale as just another game box company.
Expect Microsoft to try to "re-invent" themselves several times over the next 10 years. Each time they slip a little further down the spiral just like AT&T did.
Beleagured yet? Did Netcraft confirm it?
"...building high end systems that almost no one but the government will buy."
Government(s) will buy. The US isn't the only government out there.
Market cap = 282 billion
Cash = 60 billion
So, it's 21 cents on the dollar.
That's a lot of cash per market cap!!!
As Neal Stephenson would say, Apple has had "going out of business" signs up in the window for as long as anyone can remember.
Apple died, and was re-born.
The iMac (and more importantly the iPod) are the legacy of the *new* Apple. The old one faded from sight and from mind.
What went wrong with SGI is that they charged tens of thousands of dollars for stupid looking overpriced and massively overhyped hardware whilst a machine costing a tiny fraction of the price could do exactly the same thing.
Everyone in the industry got tired of it real quick and moved on.
tough shit
I hate that. There's no way of knowing when that article was written. At best you can say it's after 1998, when Malone's book on Apple came out. The copyright at the bottom of the page says "2000-2004", which doesn't exactly narrow it down.
When he wrote that would be useful in evaluating his foresight. If it was written in 1998, then he gets some slack, because Apple was in really bad shape at the time, and Jobs' turnaround of Apple was definitely against the odds. If it was written in, say, 2004, then he has the foresight of a mole.
PEOPLE! Please! Put persistent dates on your articles when you post them!
(Note, this is not directed at the parent comment's author. I'm talking to the vague mass of people on the intarwebnets who have editorial control of websites. You know who you are.)
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
To continue were you left of, the US armed the Taliban and Bin Laden, to Fight the Soviet,
some 20 years laters, the Taliban and Bin Laden are the new Evil.
So, who are we (I guess "we" is the Consummer or just the People) helping to fight the Evil MS empire, that will become our next Evil ?
Is Open Source/GNU/Linux/Apple/IBM/Sun the Next Evil we should be aware of?
Will MS push internal reform and become our new friend/partner ?
I interned there last summer, and believe me, the people on my team were genuinely enthusiastic. Remember that money does not buy happiness, at least not in the long run.
PDF
I've already encountered several emplyers asking for it in that format.
And IBM "open sourced" the early *86 PC style computer - which is why there were so many clone companies. Looking back, it seems like that was a Good Thing To Do.
Or are you referring to WW2 when they were making M1 carbines?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Q: Is it true that capitalism is rotting away?
A: Yes. But what an aroma!!!
- Back off man. I am a scientist
Some observations on where MS is at...
I work for an IT our sourcer and we are in the middle of patch hell with Windows XP, we need to constantly patch to maintain our security SLA etc etc, all I ever hear about longhorn these days is that another feature has been cut... Moral: MS is producing lots of patches and losing features. The dude is right; MS are spending more resources patching mistakes than getting ahead with the latest OS
More people in my office use Firefox than IE. Why? Not because we were desperately looking for an alternative, but because FireFox offered a better Web experience than IE and it wasn't hard to convince even avid MS zealots to convert. How did this happen? When was the last time anything significant was done with IE? Seems it has stopped dead at v6 and new browsers were able to scratch out a foot hold with some (IMHO) fairly minor but extremely useful features. Moral: You stand still and people will catch up! I think this will happen with Office, which is an MS flagship product. I don't know who will bring an alternative to the table, (again IMHO OpenOffice isn't quite there and doesn't feel right) but I didn't see Firefox displacing IE as much as it did either. I don't expect any major advances in Office in the next 12-18 months
MS Enterprise products are just not used with the gay abandon as much as they seemed to have been 2 years ago. SMS is a dead duck, MoM isn't being purchased they way they want it to, SQL hits the wall too soon for serious enterprise DB users, ISA is not displacing the industry leaders and is overkill as a proxy server. Exchange is the best product they have but that really relies on Outlook. As soon as someone builds a Firefox equivalent of Outlook and comes up with decent mail storage system for Linux, Exchange will have a fight on its hands. The way they are tackling the SMS and MoM problem is by wielding them together and calling it Application Center instead of re-vamping what SMS does and making them both more affordable. Recent initiatives for desktop deployment systems (WinPE boot disks etc) have required buying a ton of licenses for other MS products to entitle you to use the useful bits. The best product to come from MS in the last 12 months? AntiSpyware. (still beta) Moral: MS a thrashing around like a fish on the deck of a boat when it comes to products outside their flagship windows and office suites. If longhorn slips and office gets over taken they will have start to feel it pretty quick.
In many area's Open Source products are the market leaders, but recently I have noticed that they are winning in a new space and MS is really behind the eight ball. I am talking about Media PC's (which I personally think are a fad that will disappear in about a year in favour of fit for purpose consumer devices). XP Media edition is hideous and the Open Source alternative just beat it to a pulp. MS don't get it at all... OK so the Open Source ones rely on you building it yourself, but you don't even have that option with Media Center, you get it with a PC and you are stuck with the crappy feature set and hideous GUI, sure its all setup and working, but I'd rather have a semi working Myth Box than a fully working piece of Media center junk. Moral: MS is getting beaten to market by open source alternatives with key new technologies that it is actually trying to compete in. Open source options are a threat because MS cant compete with the model and it can't simply buy its way into the market.
My 2c...
I believe you mean, "GNU/Linux on every desktop!" don't you?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Now that firefox has some traction, it's on the radar of the asshats that target IE for their spyware and shit. If firefox is still spyware free in 12 months, it'll mean something. Otherwise, it'll probably have some massive pullback.
The iPod is not a competitor of Microsoft, but of the people that bought into wmv.
Did Microsoft even have a web search offering that was up against Google?
According to the date in the archives listing on the site...
Windows succeeded for a very simple reason. Cheap PC clones. You had "PC-compatible" computers (remember that phrase?) that were getting cheaper because they were clones, and they were appearing everywhere. Windows was a cheap and easy GUI to place on them. I still remember my first thoughts when running Windows 3.1--"Cool, this is like the Macintosh but for PCs."
Windows is only everywhere because PCs were everywhere, and therefore Microsoft made enough money to finally release a good version of Windows some ten years later. And they're still patching it.
But it's not Microsoft. It smells more like the rotting of a tired journalist raising controversy to drive readership. How pathetic. *LOOK AT ME!*
because I bet all my retirement money on Nortel Networks stock back in 2000.
And I am still using Word 5. since the drivel they wanted you to pay for after it sucked so bad that they had to include a 5 option in later versions so it would still work like 5
Reality is all that stuff that doesn't care if you believe in it or not.--Solomon Short
But when was the last time you thought about Microsoft, except in frustration or anger? The company just announced a powerful new search engine, designed to take on Google -- but did anybody notice? Meanwhile, open systems world -- created largely in response to Microsoft's heavy-handed hegemony -- is slowly carving away market share from Gates & Co.: Linux and Firefox hold the world's imagination these days, not Windows and Explorer. The only thing Microsoft seems busy at these days is patching and plugging holes.
What has astounded me is Microsoft's inabilty to flourish in any are other than Windows and Office. Xbox is just beginning to turn a profit, but they have a long way to go before they can make up their losses and actually make money.
Nabisco used to be a cigarette company - that's right, Nabisco the _food_ company. Microsoft must shift away from Windows and Office as their main profit center. But the fact they have been unable to do this is an indication of the market's hatred for their past sins.
Maybe Microsoft wants to be forgiven and move forward, but the rest of the world is fresh out of sweet forgiveness, as am I.
Rot in hell Microsoft.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
May it will turn open source, is it possible?!
What you say is probably shockingly accurate IFFFFF they actually do a complete turnaround and ship the most bulletproof, customer-focused piece of software in MS history. If that happens, I will be the fastest reversal of a dysfunctional corporate culture in the history of man.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
Is anyone else wondering how long it's going to take before slashdot puts out an offer for the microsoftsucks.com domain?
Letely I've been having the feeling that slashdot editors are getting ready for an all out anti-Microsoft news site.
bleh.
using System.Awesome;
include 'std_copyright.inc'
doesn't give much away about the date of publication in this case.I am missing the cohenrent arguement aspect of the article. Most of it is just backstory to convince us that his instincts are right. If he's so brilliant at "smelling" companies then why isn't he making big bucks on Wall Street? His smell test doesn't pass my smell test.
Lasers Controlled Games!
I'm not a fan of Microsoft products and ideals, but I don't think I'll see the company go under in my life unless some sort of scandal comes out (and even then). The amount of cash they have in the bank gives them a great buffer to mess up a few times and not even loose wind.
1) I only meant it as a term of respect. To me,Sir is gender neutered....or something like that...Sorry Ma'am.
..unLESS! THATS IT! MS is taking all of our women!!! NOOOOOO!!!DAmn you bill,damn you to HELL!
2) it wasnt your email address that caught my eye, it was your 5 digit id. everyone knows that no woman would have a 5 digit id. Heck, I am not even sure if there is ANY women on slashdot. I assume they are only in my dreams....
3) you work for The Evil Empire. Since women are holy and pure (or at least I worship them,that counts right?) you must not be a woman.....
What do you say to the man that has nothing? Cast it away!!
Linux is the guerilla campaign against Microsoft.
:-)
If there to be an equivalent of the mujahadeen "blowback", Linux would be the best candidate.
and the CTO of MS, George Spix, just gave a brief to us about Microsofts plans for the future. I asked a question about how they will justify their existance charging fees for software that should be free. He mumbled about how it was going to be a challenge and then sidestepped the issue completely.
MS will fail this decade. I assure you. They have no plan in place to take on the offerings of Open Source. Just keep contributing. Bug reports, patches, documentation. It's all going to help overthrow MS. It will take longer than a decade for them to go under completely, and who knows, they may change pace entirely and actually make a competitive showing in the next few years.
But mark my words, if they don't change, they will be done. George Spix says so.
I am not sure about the rotting smell, but I always smell something fishy about Microsoft.
Consider this. They have a monopoly (the Justice Department has said so) They have $55 BILLION dollars in CASH. To take an example, American Airlines lost about 300million this year. At this rate, Microsoft can keep on kicking for 183 years. And this is a bad scenario. If companies like Dell continue to patronize them, Microsoft will continue to post profits. As much as /. may want it, it probably won't happen. At least until we are dead.
what have you been smoking???
That is that problem. I am making more money now that I switched my consulting company to Linux. The savings is going into my pocket. Not Gate's and Microsoft's. This is capitalism at it's best, pay nothing for something that creates a hell of a lot of wealth. Sales-cost = profit. Sales - Linux's cost (basically service contracts on the cheap) so lets just say for the sake of argument, $0.00. You have made more money. Really simple. I can't understand why corporate America/Europe can't see this. Every shareholder would be richer instantly. The ulimate capitalistic move.
I predict that Mr. Malone will die one day. If you sniff the air, you can just make out the first hints of rot.
Accroding to Yahoo! finance, they only have $34.5 billion in cash. Not $60 billion.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MSFT
Microsoft has as far as I understand two cash cows: Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office.
Now both of those are being challenged by open software.
Microsoft Windows is being challenged by both Linux and Mac. Windows is still king, but Mac is gaining popularity and Linux is becoming ever easier to use. I think Windows will lose substantial market share over the next 3 years or so.
Microsoft Office is also being challenged. Open Office has come along nicely. A main threat here is the fact that users don't use more than a few percent of all the functionality within Microsoft Office. They pay for stuff they don't use or need. Once Open Office comes with some really slick templates and default fonts, I bet it will gain popularity. I think Open Office will start stealing license money in the not too distant future. The 2.0 release is coming up, and then that will become really good after a few minor updates.
Once profits decline for Office and Windows, Microsoft will lose a lot of its current freedom to waste money. They will need to be more focused. Given the impression they have a nasty case of infighting already, this focusing will not happen. They will instead continue to decline.
Stop the brainwash
Here goes an analysis of my own.
MS is rotting simply because Linux is catching up. Yes, I've heard it too many times: Linux is not ready for a desktop, nor does it seem like it will ever be.
Get a grip. Imagine that tomorrow Windows and Mac OS will be gone. Forever. No more Windows or Mac OS. The question to ask is: can Linux manage on the desktop? Is it technologically ready? Let's see:
It doesn't take a degree in CS to see that Linux is fully capable of replacing Windows and Mac OS, even though it may not have all the flourish of proprietary OSes. It is ready today.
MS has only one chance: it should squash Linux right now, stomp it into the ground, bury it, and make sure that it never rises again. Why? Here's the prophecy.
<prophecy>
Two things will happen as soon as Linux gains the critical mass on a desktop: someone of notice will man the dumb user support. Scenario: Dell releases a Linux Dell with killer apps preinstalled and with automated updater preconfigured. Grandma will never know what hit her. On the heels of the support will come niche software development -- most notably, games. Linux starts its millennial rule, Microsoft changes name to Macrohard and cleverly switches to streaming ad-supported pr0n. That's not really a total collapse, but it's better this way, since they will be doing what they can do best.
Oh, yeah, and the mice. I got nothing on MS mice. IMHO, no one does.
</prophecy>
AHAHAUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAHAHAHA!!!
This is the best news article on Slashdot I have ever read in my ENTIRE life. And yes, I am drunk.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
The author of the ABC article basically says that he can just "feel" that Microsoft is in bad shape- Having just finished the new book Blink, I notice there are close similarities between the book and the kind of subconscious feeling the author is describing about Microsoft (I must admit, I feel them, too...)
A Microsoft spokesman was quick to suggest that it was probably just some bad sauerkraut that had been served in the cafeteria.
Are you actually aware of how dumb that sounds? Like MS is a genius when it comes to hiring programmers, but a total moron when they either hire managers, or promote them from within. Which is it?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If Microsoft went under imagine what would happen to the US economy. I bet most tech companies would plummet off the nasdaq. I haven't used windows in years, but I wish Microsoft well. They are invested in the company I work for and have a lot of pull in the IT industry. I like my 90k a year job playing with linux and solaris all day.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
if they started to cruise on just savings, they would almost be forced to buy up hurredly dumped shares so as to try and keep some sort of worth to them. That would drastically increase what they had to spend out of savings.
I am guessing though, but isn't that more usual?
I understand yours is just a strict accounting, I just wanted to throw in a variable that might have to occur.
They still monopolize the conversation around "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
Microsoft is a public company. What you say is (generally) true for a private company. (Their exception is when someone gives them an offer to good to refuse, often about the time the owners want to retire)
For a public company things are different. Remember the corporate raiders of the 1980s? They basically examined companies looking for those who could be bought for less than their assets were worth. Then they bought the company (general only enough to gain control) placed their own people in as the board of directors, and sold everything the company had, distributing the cash to shareholders.
Seeing this opportunity if often hard. Many things are hidden. The $100,000 worth of property might be the price paid in 1935, and today worth millions!
You can bet that people who do this are looking closely at Microsoft. They have a lot of cash in the bank, too much to ignore. Windows and Office are worth a lot to someone (company), when you find the buyer. Not to mention the Microsoft campus buildings. (Unless they are renting) and various other things. Nintendo or Sony are likely to buy the xBox just to make sure there is no xBox2. All it takes is for the stock to slip below whatever that magical price is. It doesn't matter if Microsoft is profitable, just what their assets are worth when sold.
Note for those considering this: You borrow the money to buy the company. Part of your calculation includes interest on the money used to buy the company. You need to factor in that once you start buying stock the price will go up - it will go up more once people learn of your plans, and the SEC requires you to announce your plans before you gain control. You need to have potential buyers for things like Office in place already. (This could be a private company that you start for that purpose with more funds that you borrow) You need to have bankers and other investors behind you. (Nobody does this with their own money)
Microsoft is rotting... Yeah, and hell is
freezing over. This reporter is living in
a fantasy world. Fact is, no one else has
anything to offer for the desktop that's
better than XP. You can throw a fan-boy
tantrum all you want but the fact is that
XP is superior by leaps and bounds to any
Linux offering for the desktop. And oh
yeah, my Gnome desktop locked up on me today
when I right clicked on the desktop to pop-up
a menu. So much for superior software from
the Open Source community that's going to
take down the Evil Empire.
Making sure all their computers run Linux was a pretty neat trick. And may whatever gods are out there bless them for it.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
I don't have anything against Linux. Quite the contrary. But a Linux desktop makes no sense in corporate IT right now. Its too costly to maintain, not because of the software itself, but because of the cost of tech support for network guys. Imagine retooling the helpdesks of the Fortune 500. This is the hidden cost of the Linux desktop in business. Enabling end-user support for Linux desktops would require a substantial investment in retooling a big workforce.
I loved that piece of insigt from one of Michael's articles.
Michael's prognostic ability has been repeatedly called into question. A review of many of his articles reminds me of Devorak's writings from the Byte Magazine articles of yesteryear. He's makedly out of touch in many areas. His saving grace is that he loves to promote the underdogs.
successors to the "imminent death of the internet" in terms of both frequency and stupidity. microsoft owns 90+% of both the operating system and office productivity software markets and is immune from market forces. or hadn't these morons noticed it just finished paying a huge dividend in the middle of a depression?
"Their operating costs average around 6-8 billion a quarter"
MS can't spend $6B/quarter on operating. I mean its literally impossible to spend that. GM doesn't spend that on operating and they're an actual company.
Sun when threw a dry patch with no problems and can run on there money for ever.
Microsoft could do the same but who heres a lot about Sun. A living company not making huge proft could be what Microsoft becomes.
These were sold as MSDOS compatible systems as well, remember.
It was the combination of IBM PC compatible hardware and software that made the clones so appealing.
The MS and PC platforms evolved together and they were not everywhere in the beginning.
When you stand back and look at the entire history of MSFT on a single graph, one feature stands out.
Something happened in early 2000, before that peak, their price made a steady upward progression with barely a setback. During this time the volume of shares trading steadily increased.
After the peak, the price drooped, staggered around a bit and then levelled out at about half the peak price... never to recover its former glory. BUT the volume of trade has INCREASED, and 2004 saw some of the highest volume of MSFT trades in the history of the company. In other words, the whole share trading pattern has shifted into a different mode.
To me this says that during the steady climb before 2000, people who owned MSFT usually hung onto them. After 2000, people have been much more willing to sell. The shares are in the process of being "handed over" to a different class of investor.
Microsoft is dying, right behind BSD...
I changed hardware and nothing works. TCP/IP, ethernet, Bluetooth, 802.11g, my monitor won't work, CDs won't play, speakers quit, mouse won't move the cursor and my keyboard will not create any characters.
WTF?
You are in the IT department and you quit, the company folds? I don't think so...
Your Average Joe
I think Microsoft's focus on maintaining a Monopoly has led to paralysis. Anything that might break some form of backwards compatibility or break some piece of hardware or software is not considered. They aim to please >90% of the market. They have not used innovation to control that market share. I'm not saying they haven't innovated, they have such a huge amount of resources, some innovation is inevitable. But having recently switched to a Mac I can see that all the innovation on the OS side of things seems to be happening at Apple.
Since they've had no strong reasons to innovate, they are stagnating. The have the market. They can make potent threats rather than innovate. Without the threat of MS not developing Office for Mac, surely Apple would have developed it's own innovative office Suite by now. (perhaps someday still iWork will evolve into that). Windows, and office have remained largely unchanged for the past 10 years.
yawn.
I have to say that windows has a bad internal struct of its OS.
Unix was too expencive. Apples where cheeper but windows was cheeper again now linux is cheeper again. Windows is poorly internal constructed. Linux good internals poor config system. Hmm it is simpler to fix good internals with poor config than bad internal with good configs.
The clock is ticking. Either Microsoft will make it or it will die at the hands of Linux just like Unix did before. The Unix group makes Microsoft look tiny at there peek.
Old rule of software the cheepest methord will win sooner or latter.
Basicly Microsoft is Roting from the inside out. If not fixed in time Microsoft will be dead or be facing a unstopable force.
Betting against Microsoft is like betting against America. Windows continues to get better and better.
Here's how it will play out.
Microsoft is on the verge of integrating not only the Services for Unix subsystem, but support for the vast library of fossware right into the next major release. They are keeping hush hush about it, since the ISVs really don't need to know about it.
They will coopt the whole FOSS world with tools they already have- they are just waiting for the right time to strike (e.g., clean up some outstanding legal mess).
People will abandon linux. sad but true.
Microsoft didn't learn the lesson of the late 80's/90's when IBM tried to push us to more proprietary/expensive systems. IBM stock tanked from a high of $84 to $48. My Boss at the time said 'screw em', so did many others, we shifted to Microsoft.
Fifteen years later, Microsoft makes the same mistake. More expensive, not compatible etc.
I've already done twelve new Linux installs this year, happy people too.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
It aint just microsoft that's stinking up the place. It's corporate amerika as a whole.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
It's steadily happening already, but the problems of maintaining a Windows machine in a working condition will cause people to gradually drift away to MacOS and the new GNU/Linux environments.
... the average user is unable to avoid the holes in the road that can degrade and break the experience of using Windows.
;-))
The irony of this is that without the Internet, Windows machines would tick along just fine, but with the proliferation of spyware, viruses, aggressive porn web popups
Slowly but surely, like the continued growth in usage of Firefox, people will migrate to competing operating systems that offer similar usability and software.
We can expect to see Microsoft try and head this process of, but in the long term, it is probably unstoppable. Once I see a Linux version of TurboTax I'll be happy, though arguably we already have this using the online version.
Disclaimer: I use Gentoo. (still compiling
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
Suggestion: figure out who *should* be able to make decisions. Since that person obviously does not exist, find out who their boss *would* be. Ask the boss to make the decision. Repeat until you find an actual person, they can make the decision.
But when this procedure becomes necessary, the corpus corporatum is at best twitching, if not already smelling. I think Parkinson would consider that a case of ingelititis has set in.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
The paradoxism of astroturfing and spin that is unfolding in this thread is truly epic. Now please excuse me while I bask in the glory of desperation and despondence so painfully evident in the sheer quantity of MS sponsored flaming bullshit this thread will produce.
Windows (and Microsoft) succeeded because it gave users what they wanted and needed. They needed a cheap and backward compatible GUI instead of Macintosh or OS/2, and they got Windows 3 (after a couple less successful iterations). The only ones that were not satisfied were Mac and OS/2 users. Users needed simple networking for sharing files and printers as opposed to NetWare or Lan Manager, and they got Windows for Workgroups. They wanted applications that looked consistent with the rest of the GUI, and they got Word, Excel and, later, the Office suite.
At that time, Apple was evil - they had cute computers, but they were overpriced and incompatible with everything else. IBM was evil too - pushing OS/2, incompatible with just about every application written up to that time and with the added FUD that it would run best on the overpriced PS/2 family.
People used to talk about the next version of whatever that came from Redmond - How Word would handle tables better or how Visual Basic (and being able to quickly develop simple business apps was a major factor in Windows' acceptance) would simplify accessing databases or what new widgets people would be able to use.
It is not so anymore. Nobody is really excited about Longtime^H^H^H^Hhorn (well... I am not), MSN Search or the next release of SQL Server. Can anyone tell me what changed between Word 2003 and Word XP? The XBox gaming console seems to attract more attention than the next release of Office.
IBM used to be boring. Now Microsoft is. They have grown predictable and slow.
They may not be dying, but they are sure losing steam.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
MS just made its biggest quarterly profit ever, dispite not having Longhorn ready. Ya, MS is dying all right, by sufficating under all that money.
MS's future in the shorterm is in no way controlled my Longhorn. So many think that the only thing MS does is OS's, gripe about windows, yell and scream blah blah blah while they go on raking in the profits on a hundred other products.
Open your eyes.
Some journalist said the words you want to hear, and you got that warm fuzzy feeling from it.
Reality had nothing to do with it.
Far worse companies have survived far worse circumstances than that dolt thinks MS is in. Record profits without having to roll out a new OS. You all dream of being in such horrible circumstances.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
The collapse has been evident, and although it's surprising to see someone go out on a limb, I think those in the know have felt the tide turning for a while:
1) Stalled growth. The stock price has flattened. MS has thrown out dividends to keep investors interested, but the stock is played out.
2) Tapped markets. Financials show a disturbing trend: the only operations in the black are the Windows and Office units. Despite relentless spending in R&D, acquistions and experimental to expand their market (MSN, WebTV, etc.), nothing seems to pan out.
3) Apathetic customers. Inability to move entrenched (NT, 95, 98, ME) users, especially business users towards new products. The threats to drop legacy OS support have always ended in retreat -- and for a company as powerful as MS, those actions betray their ultimate dependence on Windows sales to stay alive.
3) Longhorn. For a company that makes so much of its money in OS sales, the inability to deliver a next-generation OS on time and as promised (Avalon, Indigo, WinFS moved out either to bolt on to XP or "for the future") is not an indication of engineering failure, but instead management failure. MS is too large to turn on a dime anymore.
4) Security. This is the death knell, and truly the slippery slope that Apple and the Linux community will use to the most advantage. If you can't get your customers to upgrade to a faser OS (see 3), then you're doomed to see them suffer the fate of today's spyware, malware, trojan and virus ridden reality.
5) Dubious "initiatives." IPTV? Tablet PCs? Wired watches? Again a management failure. Someone needs to keep their "visionaries" on an even keel.
And you can add to this list for a long time. Do one or two of these things signify the end of MS? No, but the trend is clear and the "end of MS" meme is gaining momentum. MS has finally become IBM of yesteryear. IMHO, their pathetic "grasp" at Google's share makes this clear.
When a company throws the term "innovation" around like rice at a wedding, you know that's the thing they're most nervous about.
First off, I disagree that there is really such a thing as an "immoral company". Despite the financial/legal reasons for treating a corporation as an individual on some paperwork - companies are nothing more than organized groups of PEOPLE working towards a common goal of earning money for themselves.
You may have "immoral people" who happen to be in charge of others within a given company, but the company itself can't be "moral" or "immoral". It just "is".
I hardly think I'm taking a "defeatist attitude" when I say that very large corporations consist of so many divisions, and produce so many products (or provide so many services) that they're usually a "mixed bag" of good and bad. I'm merely trying to be realistic, and quit trying to view everything as simple "black" and "white".
EG. How "evil" is it that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated large sums of money to further people's education? How "evil" is the "big, bad chemical company" when they produce plastic tubing that's needed for medical equipment in hospitals to save lives? Heck, for that matter, how "bad" is McDonalds Corp. when they do such things as supporting the "Ronald McDonald House"?
Usually, it just depends on which aspects of a business you wish to focus on.... And the bottom line is, I know I could do more good for society as a whole if I was gainfully employed for a telemarketing firm than if I was out on the streets, begging for money and presumably living on the welfare dole.
Its powerbook line has stagnated, desktops are a niche machine and its home machine can't play the hot games.
Yeah, rabid mac fan here, but it's lines like this that show you JUST DON'T GET IT. To wit, powerbooks kick the living shit out of any laptop alive. Period. If that's stagnating, I'm fucking your mom.
Linux began as an opensource movement to replace everything closed source, and for free. But, the number of linux distros that are actually free has shrunk lately. RedHat, they charge for everything. Yeah, it may be a fraction of what you would pay for Microsoft, or another company's product. But, at this pace, you will pay out the ass for an enterprise capable linux distrobution.
:)
Geeks beware, your wishes may come true. Your beloved Linux may become the leader in everything, replace Microsoft, and in doing so become Microsoft.
I just think that is quite amusing
I don't have the specific site but I read this AM that 2-3 computer companies (one of which is Sony) is in talks with Jobs to license OS X for use on their boxes. It sounds like a good idea to me and one that MS followed long ago to become the bloated giant that it is today. If Apple licenses the OS it will make money the way they do best. They are an IDEA company.
This parrot has ceased to be!
They don't do stock options any more. Just straight out stock awards.
And that's irrelevant. I barely even think about them.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Yeah, how evil concentrations camps are. It is just a group of people build roads.
In Malone's article, he only refers to his successful predictions. Thing is, he ran a a weekly column for a number of years, in which he made enough predictions that some of them were bound to be accurate. Here is a gem from May 1999: "But beware of the week after Labor Day. That's when Americans will come back to work and realize that, my God, Y2K is ninety days away. That's when the hoarding will begin. The ATMs will be drained and the loonies will head for the hills...Expensive millennial celebrations will be cancelled as one half of the country goes crazy and the other half hunkers down and holds its breath." True, he does predict the end of the internet bubble, but this is an obvious one, and he predicts its end several months early.
But Malone usually is not so explicit in his predictions. In a column entitled "Apple R.I.P." written shortly after a stock depression in 2000, found here, he says things like "Steve Jobs has put Apple again in a precarious position", but never outright says that Apple will fail. Of course, if it did fail, he would have taken credit for that prediction, but since it did not, no one can claim that he was wrong.
In recent years, most of Malone's predictions about technology are negative. In fact, he has revealed himself to be an anti-technologist. Earlier I mentioned his fear of technology causing widespread hysteria with regard to Y2K. In a column about his late 96 year old neighbor: "To Charlotte and the lost world she represented. May we someday find our way back." In a column about how microprocessors were inspired by war-produced technology: "We need to remember these facts because they remind us that technology is a two-edged sword; that even the chips in our kids' Gameboys bear the bloodstains of their birth." That's about as accurate as saying that the modern VW Beetle promotes the genocide of Jews.
So please take what this man says with a grain of salt.
If M$ can deliver a product that actually lives up to the hype. History tells us - fat chance. They have never deliverd a product that worked "as advertized" on the first try, not once. It normally becomes tollerable after the first service pack and then is ignored in favor of the next one which allways repeats the cycle.
Go back and read the hype about Win 95. When did they actually deliver what was promised for Win 95? I'll give you a hint, it's called XP.
Windows 1.0 almost singlehandedly created the term "vaporware" due to being years late to market, and then being a complete flop. It got usable at 3.0 and decent at 3.11.
Great track record isn't it?
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
I don't remember anyone dying and making you Ms. Manners. Perhaps you should consider that being nice is sometimes less important than upholding one's own conscience and morality and world view? He did what he did and in his colloquium was quite correct in doing so. He doesn't want to be friends with anyone from Microsoft.
One can make a thousand and one distinctions for whom does what where at Microsoft, but the end truth, for the poster, is most likely this: If you support Microsoft by making the lunches or even cleaning the toilets or merely reminding the boss of his meeting; you're as guilty as those eating the lunches, dropping the manure, or bossing others. A truly moral person looks at his employer, large or small, and says "You make me ethically uncomfortable. I'll find a job elsewhere." If the poster doesn't wish to hang with those who support what he feels is a morally dubious employer, he has every principled right to walk away rather than to explain his actions, which might lead to arguments.
Personally, my answer to someone who says "I work for Microsoft", is:
My condolensces.
Then I too would make a charitable excuse and leave the Microsoft employee to his drink. Far better to do so than to follow my first instinct, which would be to tell him to leave me alone; simply to avoid the inevitable argument.
Wrong. MSWord 6.0 has a very definite life as follows:
1: No security patches.
Does Word 6.0 even need security fixes?
2: No bug fixes.
Granted, though I can't remember any Word 6.0 bugs of any real consequence (back in those days, software generally shipped without many bugs, because fixing a hopelessly broken program wasn't just a Windows Update away)
3: Can't read newer document formats. (Can you really ask all your friends to keep saving in RTF just because you won't update?)
Get the latest Word Viewer. Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, switch to Word 6.0, Ctrl-V. I've heard that this is actually a recommended way to avoid getting macro viruses.
4: May not be supported on newer operating
systems. (You say you'll never upgrade from Win98SE, however when you find your new Dell notebook only has the necessary drivers for XP, hey, you'll be running XP too.)
VMWare!
5: CD rot of your only remaining install disc.
Make backups. Besides, I would think that you would be more worried about the 3.5" floppies Word 6.0 came on.
Wait, floppies? Better get working on that backup.
6: Lost your serial number.
Make backups. Does Word 6.0 even need a Ckey? If it does, I would bet that 111-1111111 works great.
7: Won't play with other applications you want to run because it's COM model is too ancient.
VMWare!
Not that you would want to, but I can see how someone could rin Word 6.0 forever if they really wanted to.
You're right -- The world no longer shakes in their boots when MS enters a market now. Personally I believe this began with the X-Box. The world saw MS wasn't invincible. Followed shortly thereafter was the massive amounts of press Linux began to receive and Apple's revival.
The gorilla is more like a lumbering beast now. Still very capable of damage, but not invulnerable and mysterious.
But maybe he caught a whiff of the stagnant air. I seriously doubt Microsoft is about to collapse, but they've saturated their target markets. They have prevented any competition from getting a successful footing in the OEM market, they hold captive the majority of developers who write click-and-drool stuff for casual users, and they've sort of levelled off their sales in the low-end server market.
That's great, but in their current position, all Microsoft can do is sell upgrades to the stuff that people have already bought. That's probably just fine for keeping the cashflow coming in on a regular basis. It's kind of naive to expect Microsoft to continue expanding, and expect a big jackpot from rising stock value.
I'm not worried. When Microsoft's mistakes hit 'em in the pocketbook, they'll change in a hurry.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Are you missing the war on drugs and terrorists ?
Thats where the US spends most of it money now - to aid large oil companies.
Are the 'compassionate' conservatives the real evil ?
M$ keeps me in buisness... with all the holes, worms, tojans, virus's, scumware and problems - I make a fortune.
Just bought a new car too..
"What do you mean!?, M$ is making record $$!!."
Um ya... more people due to sex = more PC's.. Don't be so small minded.
As Dell continues to take over the entire market it will become the key to Microsoft's life or death.
:)
Picture this if you will. Dell ends up with 60-70% market share and it starts to stagnate. As a company it wants profits so it pesters Microsoft to lower prices so that it will get more profit. Microsoft of course says no so Dell brings out the trump, Linux. If Microsoft doesn't lower prices then Dell gains a free OS and Dell wins. If Microsoft says yes, Dell gains more money and Microsoft starts to decline but Windows moves ever closer to extinction.
You never know though, Microsoft may give away copies of Windows and start providing tech support if Dell wants them to, simply to maintain their monopoly. All the while Windows turns even more commodity as Linux gets better and the same with the Mac OS.
Michael Dell is a smart man and he will be conniving when the time comes.
My 2c if anyone wants it.
This article mentions the fact that Longhorn is slipping on its shipping schedule.
There are a number of reasons for this, perhaps most importantly is that Microsoft is trying to do a true X.0 full-rewrite release of the core operating system, with a bunch of "new" features. It is dubious that their "customers" (aka independent software developers and small businesses).
I will also say that for any major software project, when you do a genuine X.0 full code-base rewrite (cleaning out the cruft hopefully and redesigning the base archetechture) it is a major gamble. It is also a situation that tests the mettle of the management to see if the resources are properly applied and available, and if you got a small group of excellent developers or a large group of ordinary developers. This is often what makes or breaks any software company.
From my own perspective, even though I've been using Microsoft operating systems now for close to 20 years (gee.... has it been that long?) I will never personally own a copy of Longhorn willingly. I may even quit a job that forces me into using it, I feel so strongly about avoiding it. I was pushed into using XP, and I've since reverted back to Windows 2000 because I can't stand the direction XP has gone. Transitioning from Windows to Linux (or other Unix-based operating systems) is a huge jump, especially since skill sets are so much different, but it appears as though Longhorn is going to be just as big of a jump so I might as well simply ignore what Microsoft is going to do. My preference would be to go back to VMS, but that isn't an option as a major OS platform for new development.
The only projects I hear that might move onto Longhorn are from die-hard Microsoft computer development groups, and that is more because of "*Rah* *Rah* Microsoft can't do wrong" fans who have an MSDN Universal subscription and have been doing this for some time. Genuine new software development is not being planned in that direction. This situation is far worse than the relutance of moving on to Windows 95 or Windows NT (which had real slow acceptance when it first came out). Or even the fiasco that Microsoft had with Windows 3.0 that somehow they pulled out of when Windows 3.1 came out and fixed many of the 3.0 bugs.
My kids are still abuzz over the X-Box, and if Microsoft is going to have any legs, it probably will be in the electronic gaming industry... where it is largely a hegonomy anyway and difficult for small independent developers to get involved. Propritary operating systems are not a problem in that industry either, and even largely expected.
R.I.P. Microsoft? Thursday February 10, @12:16PM Rejected? Why are my slashdot articles rejected others get accepted? this post appears to of been accepted after mine?
Microsoft makes money on Windows, Office, and Exchange. Most of the other stuff they do is a money loser: MSN, X-Box, Hot Mail, Windows CE, hardware. The other stuff may be strategic and it may help to prop up Windows, but still its mostly a money sink.
If Microsoft were to lose Windows and Office monopoly because of competition, Microsoft would not be a profitable company - not by any stretch. What could cause them to lose Windows and Office. Open source.
All that really has to happen is for Linux to get more usable. And a lot of that has to do with drivers. Once that happens, the big PC vendors will migrate the Linux faster than you can say "Linux Torvalds". The layoffs from Microsoft will be similar in relative magnitude to the layoffs at IBM in the late 80s. I say relative because MS has far fewer employees than IBM did.
Let me say that I would not want to own a house in or around Redmond when this happens. I also would not want to have a lot of MS stock when it happens either.
Within 5 years Linux will become the dominant desktop OS. MacOS X will have a marketshare perhaps double what it is today. Windows will have a smaller marketshare, but will still be around as Microsoft focuses on it as a "core business" for those who can't or won't migrate to Linux.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Holes
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Nearly nine months old already, my most recent Slashdot journal entry was about Longhorn FUD.
The secret I may never learn is how to form such opinions when the world is ready for them rather than long before anybody else is interested.
Then I move on to something else nobody much is ready for and lose the motivation to follow up on what for me is already yesterday's news.
Before you write off this post as self-indulgent, you might at least recognise that at least it isn't self-serving, though it has been a demanding week.
John's funeral at least provided a chance to catch up with a colleague whose big picture analysis is as good as any and who was open to parallels between Longhorn and Apple of the mid '90s, though he still sees the next five years as particularly uncertain times.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
... IBM will buy it out and we will start all over again but this time the evil will be IBM.
True, he makes a good argument for instinct. But he provides absolutely no facts that support his instinct. No big business deal losses, profit losses, internal turmoil, brain-drain....nothing. And OK, the guy guessed right on 2 obviously weak companies. That doesn't make his 'instinct' correct in this case or any other.
See this report from 1999: "We live in extraordinary economic times here in the U.S. and this success could ignite a whole new cycle of economic prosperity. We must first, however, take a hard look at what is occurring at Microsoft. Microsoft is a great company with terrific employees. Sadly, many of these brilliant people have been blinded by the stock price and unable to see that Microsoft is also the key architect of the greatest financial pyramid scheme this century. It is not uncommon for participants in pyramid schemes to lose their emotional bearings. My close friends who work at Microsoft are particularly upset over my work and it is possible that even Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer do not realize the implications of their financial practices." Read more here and here (search for Microsoft). I have been writing about it for years only to be completely ignored, now everyone is surprised but this is in fact nothing new for anyone who has bothered to analyse financial frauds of Redmond. This is really fascinating stuff.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
But none of this happened. Netscape was wiped out, IE dominance is settled even despite IE again looking pathetic in comparison to Mozilla's newest breed. Office still rules and there is nothing to beat it. Open Office? Well, for simple documents and spreadsheets maybe yes. And yes, it has improved a lot over last few years. But still for serious word processing, I'm sorry, but no.
Also Linux is still a great server OS but still can't be considered seriously for the desktop for non-geeks. I've installed Ubuntu three days ago. I was really amazed how little has changed since three years ago when I, sadly, abandoned Linux as my desktop. Again, a few things that can't be done in any other way but by editing config files with, say, vi. I enjoy vi and I still remember what to edit, but does a simple user? And no access to most of applications without reading manuals and adding additional repositories of .deb packages (mostly for ideological reasons). It is not "install and work", it's still "install and then tweak the things around to get anywhere". This is the part of the mix that makes OS X a success - some OS X users I know were not even aware there was a command line on their system until I showed them. Now, that's how a modern GUI OS should be designed. If there is a Linux distro to match this please let me know, but I think I'll end up buying a PB when I'll save enough money to do it.
And in the meantime Microsoft has improved a lot. XP is stable, easy to use and I'm yet to have a virus infection or anything after three years of having it on my PC (which is connected to the net 24/7 on a public address, BTW). Also Office has improved a lot in terms of stability and reliability. I remember using Office 97 which without SR-1 crashed a lot and we had lots of problems with it. Office 2003 I use now is rock stable. This is not exciting, this is nothing new but maybe in these days of computing becoming commonplace (and programming & sysadmining becoming a blue-collar commodity job) what is needed is not excitement but solid, predictable functioning? Can you think of a killer feature now missing from, say, Word that would excite the masses?
So, maybe Microsoft is just maturing with the market. They were a geeky sweatshop when computing was the new, exciting field. They are a solid, respectable, middle-aged corporation now. So, I don't think we will see them sinking anytime soon.
"The bigger they are, the harder they fall?" ?
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
only it's not a faint smell...given the number of security holes, the faint smell of root is now a stench.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
When predicting a quick demise for Microsoft, people might be forgetting about the corporate environments that run Windows. There is a great deal of money in this market, and the revenue from these environments will not extinguish very quickly. Most companies in the world use the Microsoft operating systems and office productivity applications. There are very few that have gone MS-free, and those are easily overshadowed by the number of companies that run only Microsoft servers and clients. Many of the largest companies in the world also invest in developing solutions based on this platform, such as Sharepoint portals, Infopath forms, sales automation applications in Outlook and on and on. A lot of companies make at least a few investments in simple Access database applications or SQL servers. Even if most of these companies decide to ditch Microsoft, how long do you think it will take for these companies to migrate their workflow applications? How much money do you think it would cost to roll out a Linux OS to all their clients? How much would it cost in retraining to teach someone how to recreate their Sharepoint portal? How many companies are prepared to spend the huge sums of money and time it would cost? Even if investments are justified, somehow I sense that this would not happen quickly. Its much more likely that slow movement would happen, which may be the best news of all for Microsoft. Because in the next few years, Longhorn and its associated technologies may make the OS arguments moot by outpacing the Linux development effort and providing features that simply won't be offered in the Linux available when Longhorn ships. In my opinion, huge teams of very good and highly paid developers (MS) will come up with better feature lists than smaller teams of passionate expert developers that are writing code in their spare time for no money (OSS). True, the code may be better thought out and more elegant with OSS (heavy peer review), but for office process automation, features are what drives the business to buy the software solution, not elegant code. If the features of Longhorn are persuasive to the enterprise customers of Microsoft (again, far and away, most companies in the world use Windows), quite the opposite of what the author proposes will happen. Another round of enterprise purchases of Microsoft servers and record profits continue. If not, what the author proposes will not happen either, until most companies have completed a long and painful migration of business process and technology.
Once just before SGI collapsed, once just before HP collapsed and once now. Dude, that's not often enough. Get a check up done, you prophetic fart :)
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
"Don't worry about him, he won't be there. He smelled of death"
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
When you reach the top, there's no where to go but down :)
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
.... for the retraining of people to use new iterations of MS products.
So many people support this completely false dichotomy between not need to train for MS stuff or retraining for other products.
This is nonsense of course since people do need retraining even if you remain a 100% MS serf, er, client.
So my point is, retraining costs are a red herring that MS fanboys repeat incesantly, without noticing the profitable business of the publishers of WIndows for dummies series.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There are def some valid points in what is being said there. I see the biggest issue going against microsoft is interoperability. Exchange is a great product but to really use any of its features you have to use outlook. The License fees for any business are often referred to as extorsion by many small business owners. Open Source Alternatives are few and far between and there are good efforts in that direction BUT its difficult. I am about 95% confident that microsofts "rot" will not be really show its head in any big form for at least another 5-10 years maybe less if there are any bad business choices. However Microsoft is diversifying more and more so that software is not theier only business.
Got a question about UNIX ask it here : Unix/xBSD Forum
The hottest game of late does run on Mac. Dunno about Mac Mini, probably needs mem upgrade.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
I've just applied for jobs as a software engineer. I applied to ay company I could think of that made (or was likely to make) a product that interested me. The one company that I didn't apply to was Microsoft who I would refuse to work for unless they reformed dramatically. One person means nothing but if the best and brightest start to think like I do (and I have no idea if that is the case) then MS will be in trouble in 10 years. (For the record I now work for IBM).
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
... but with him and his baby getting a kicking like that in the respected press, I have this irresistable urge to check my Hotmail account (which predates MS's purchase of them, BTW) and to not click on any adverts there. Mark up a few more spams for reporting, do a few other things to soak up the processor cycles. Increased costs for no increased revenue. Nothing personal, Bill.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
4. Gaming. The XBox seems like a contender, but only because it has been propped up by the profits from other divisions. MS blew it in the first generation - using PC components sealed their fate - the machine was too big for the Japanese market and too expensive to make a profit on. Xbox would have tanked long ago if the division was actually dependent on making money.
Last time I checked, the XBOX division is profitable.
Perhaps you shouldn't be such a blatant fanboy.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Although Microsoft is technically publically held, Gates and Balmer easily control the board. They can do whatever they want to do, as long as it's legal. They may see the value of their stock decay, but they certainly could squander the assets as they see fit.
What most people fail to understand is that everything they did was legal when they were not declared a monopoly.
Declaration has nothing to do with it. Microsoft was a monopoly, whether a court formally declared that or not. They should have known that (it was plainly obvious to everybody else) and behaved accordingly.
But you are putting your finger on the problem with Microsoft: their management is behaving like a bunch of spoiled children who believe that if adults don't tell them explicitly that something is forbidden, they can get away with doing it. If that were the way adult society worked, we'd be living in chaos. Microsoft management needs to start behaving like adults and think about their actions and the consequences of their actions.
How was the highly succesful SGI of the late eighties/early nineties obviously weak? He even makes the point that it was the darling of the financial world, the tech world and the entertainment world. Sure, in hindsight they had no strategy to deal with a shifting market, but in hindsight everything is obvious.
And his HP observation is even better. If everybody in the financial and tech world keeps hailing HPaq as the most powerful PC combo in the market, poised to smash Dell in the low end PC market and using that success to challenge IBM and Sun in the high-end market, and he is one of the few heretics to point out that that scenario is highly unlikely, how is HPaq suddenly 'obviously weak'? You may have a short memory, but prior to 2004, there was very little press about the weaknesses of HPaq.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
If I remember my accounting lessons correctly, a company's size of assets or the lack of liabilities alone doesn't mean that a company is in financial trouble. It is perfectly normal if a company is running in the red, having more debts than assetsm or not making a profit. What kills a company is cash flow, if you can't pay the bills, you won't have the chance to recover from any losses. It won't matter how much assets or cash you have on hand, if your cash flow is a big enough negative.
The government pays people with their own money. It doesn't create any wealth.
I beg to differ on this point. The government absolutely creates weath, but it does so indirectly.
Government spending in education is an investment in the future of the nation. Defence spending, at its best, maintains the rule of law so that business can thrive. Transportation spending ensures there are maintained roads for packages to traverse. Compare these points to a developing nation that has no similar spending. I think it's clear that the actions of the government create weath for its constituents.
Furthermore, when you suggest that taxes are just payment to royalty, remember that we are taxed precisely at the rate we request. The current leadership in Washington is tax averse, and they didn't get there just because some mystery elites wanted them there. If the citizenry decides that no taxes are best, we can vote for that change.
If and when that happens, though, I'll probably move out. What good is a country that cannot invest in its people?
Today I was looking through the Platform SDK documentation (for Visual Studio .NET 2003) at an example purporting to show how to enumerate the files in a directory. The example's help URL is:
f il eio/base/listing_the_files_in_a_directory.htm
// directory specification
ms-help://MS.VSCC.2003/MS.MSDNQTR.2003FEB.1033/
found in the hierarchy at: MSDN Library/Windows Development/Windows Base Services/Files and I/O/SDK Documentation/Storage/Storage Overview/Directory Management/Obtaining Directory Information/Listing the Files in a Directory.
The code sample is:
#define _WIN32_WINNT 0x0501
#include "windows.h"
int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
WIN32_FIND_DATA FindFileData;
HANDLE hFind = NULL;
LPCTSTR lpDirSpec[MAXPATH];
wsprintf ("Target directory is %s.\n", argv[1]);
strncpy (lpDirSpec, argv[1], sizeof(argv[1]));
strncpy (lpDirSpec, "\*", 3);
hFind = FindFirstFile(lpDirSpec, &FindFileData);
if (hFind == INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE) {
wsprintf ("Invalid file handle. Error is %u\n", GetLastError());
return (-1);
} else {
wsprintf ("First file name is %s\n", FindFileData.cFileName);
while (FindNextFile(hFind, &FindFileData) != 0) {
wsprintf ("Next file name is %s\n", FindFileData.cFileName);
}
DWORD dwError = GetLastError();
if (dwError == ERROR_NO_MORE_FILES) {
FindClose(hFind);
} else {
wsprintf ("FindNextFile error. Error is %u\n", dwError);
return (-1);
}
}
return (0);
}
The sample is *utterly wrong* from top to bottom. It will not remotely compile. Almost literally everything about it is screwed up, from the incorrect MAXPATH define (it should be MAX_PATH) to the 'wsprintf' function lacking a string target, to the 'LPCTSTR lpDirSpec[MAXPATH];' which is obviously meant to define a string buffer but which actually defines an array of LPCTSTRs (LPCTSTR is a pointer to a string).
In short, whoever wrote this sample was *completely* ignorant of C and could not possibly have compiled it - nor did anyone else at Microsoft catch this before it made it into the MSDN documentation.
Microsoft's core competency ought to be programming - but if the above is a sample, then I have to agree with the overall thesis of its decline.
Microsoft out of the picture? I mean if there was no Microsoft then who could take all the abuse of all the geeks out there? :-)
Warning, comments may not have been passed by the sanity department of my brain.
Nothing concrete there, just musings. Personally, I think Microsoft is in top form at the moment. Windows XP is stable and popular. They've gotten proactive and responsive about patches. The Xbox is now the console of choice for gamers. The .net platform is generall well thought of among programmers. They've started giving away programming tools. Really, the only place Microsoft has fallen down a bit is in terms of maintaining IE.
Now, in terms of future plans, I think Microsoft's are hazy and I expect to see a lot of revision. No one seems to really want Longhorn. The original plan for it was geared toward late 1990s-style CPU advancement. If nothing else, super high requirements for Longhorn, and needing a high-end video card, is out of line with more and more people using notebooks as their primary PCs. But watch Microsoft tone Longhorn down to just Windows XP+ and it become the new standard.
Microsoft has enough cash to pay 50,000 employees $100,000/year for the next 10 years even if they don't bring in another dime in revenue.
Do the math...
Do you have ESP?
Sure, MS is still making a profit but they are slipping on the slope they had no problem climbing before. Microsoft has its grubby little hands in a lot of ventures. Many of those are wildly unsuccessful. MSN and Xbox have been great ways for Microsoft to lose money. Neither of those divisions has shown a profit. The deep pockets of the other divisions can fund them for some time but for how long?
Microsofts search engine in years past would have had the tech journalists creaming in their jeans but most see it for what it actually is, a rip off of Google with more ads. What has really changed over these last few years is that journalists are not giving Microsoft a "pass" on any product they release just because it comes from redmond. They are treating MS as just another software company and this is long overdue.
I do see harder days ahead for MS. They company will never disappear but they do major problems that are not being addressed.
I think this pretty much sums up Microsofts problems. A friend of mine was a die hard PC user. He was always giving me a bad time for using Macs. I use both platforms but because I had a Mac he was always harping on that. He would bring up the tired old facts, no software.....expensive...etc. I always told him that if he ever tried one for more than a week he would never touch a PC again. He would laugh and say "Yeah right". He surprised me two years ago by getting a Mac, for his kids. Problem was his kids never got it. After about a week he stopped using his PC.
He had all the software he used on the PC...better versions in fact and he did not spend time keeping Window running and healthy. Even he started laughing when he heard another Windows virus was tramping around causing damage. He just ordered his second Mac. A brand new 15 inch powerbook and he is a very happy camper. He will never go back.
What goes up must come down! They've been up for a while, so I expect them to come screaming to the ground fairly soon. We know they'll try to fight it, but it's inevitable.
Purchases 636,000 15
Sales 26,518,000 31
Net Shares Purchased
(Sold) (25,882,000) 46
Total Insider Shares Held 1.49B N/A
% Net Shares Purchased
(Sold) (1.7%)
> 8-Feb-05 GATES, WILLIAM H. III
> Chairman 3,000,000 Sale at $26.17 - $26.3 per share. $78,705,0002
> 7-Feb-05 GATES, WILLIAM H. III
> Chairman 2,000,000 Planned Sale $52,640,0001
> 7-Feb-05 GATES, WILLIAM H. III
> Chairman 2,000,000 Sale at $26.08 - $26.27 per share. $52,350,0002
> 4-Feb-05 GATES, WILLIAM H.
> Chairman 1,000,000 Planned Sale $26,180,0001
> 4-Feb-05 GATES, WILLIAM H. III
> Chairman 1,000,000 Planned Sale $26,180,0001
> 4-Feb-05 GATES, WILLIAM H. III
> Chairman 2,000,000 Sale at $26.14 - $26.36 per share. $52,500,0002
> 3-Feb-05 GATES, WILLIAM H. III
> Chairman 3,000,000 Sale at $26.17 - $26.28 per share. $78,675,0002
> 3-Feb-05 GATES, WILLIAM H. III
> Chairman 1,000,000 Planned Sale $26,460,0001
> 3-Feb-05 GATES, WILLIAM H. III
> Chairman 2,000,000 Planned Sale $52,920,0001
> 2-Feb-05 GATES, WILLIAM H.
> Chairman 1,000,000 Planned Sale $26,390,0001
> 2-Feb-05 GATES, WILLIAM H.
> Chairman 1,000,000 Planned Sale $26,390,0001
> 2-Feb-05 GATES, WILLIAM H. III
> Chairman 2,000,000 Sale at $26.30 - $26.44 per share. $52,740,0002
You're dead on, but the problem is people don't know or care when they buy crap, they just assume it's normal and continue. Bottom line is humans are mostly not capable of determining whether software is good or bad. People bought 95, 98, even Me, then XP, patiently waiting for it to finally become as good as e.g. systems like NextSTEP were in 1992. Why? Because they're clueless about systems like NextSTEP, and thought it was normal.
Re: the edu/career svcs market, consider:
Microsoft's inquiry to STI for collaboration in porting its proprietory Windows OS to the new CELL architecture has been declined, apparently primarily because of conflicting interests with SONY. According to STI the CELL is running SONY's open source Cell OS which is a modified Linux version and there is already some interest among developers to create another Linux version(GNU?) for the CELL platform. This means Microsoft's proprietory Windows OS is dead and so is the company if they don't come up with better products within the next 9-12 months.
Re: customization:
"There has been a huge swing to custom programmes," says Fiona van Haeringen of IESE, who attended a recent annual conference of business-education providers in America. "The market is very aggressive, very competitive and the power is with the buyer." Don Kuhn, executive director of Unicon, a group of about 75 business schools around the world that offer executive education, says that a survey of about 40 members found that three-quarters of them said overall revenues had grown between 2002 and 2003, but the remaining quarter said they had declined. Looking to this year, most saw growth coming mainly from customised education tailored for one company. "It's just knocking the cover off the ball," rejoices Richard Vietor, who was until recently in charge of executive education for Harvard Business School.
The Economist
May 20, 2004
How about having a 21st century WORKING desktop?
Who are these people who demand backwards compatibility in their consoles? I've never met one.
I never felt the need to play any Playstation games on my Playstation 2. Many people actually traded in their old games and Playstation when the Playstation 2 came out. I actually sold mine after getting a Playstation 2 and even with my old games hanging around I never played one on my Playstation 2.
Backwards compatibility in games consoles is a bit of a white elephant, in my opinion. It is also a Playstation 2 fanboy stick to beat Xbox with. However no one ever seems to beat the Gamecube with it, but I guess they have nothing to do with Microsoft.
BTW I have owned an Xbox, Playstation 2 and a Gamecube. The Gamecube is no longer around but I still play the other two.
IMO this is more of a subjective judgement than a compendium of evidence or insight. Nothing wrong with subjective judgements, by the way, just that I like to see them presented in ways that make it clear that the author understands the distinction.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Democratic Senators and the editorial board of The New York Times all said that the Soviet Union was a permenant fixture on the world stage
Blah blah blah. As others have pointed out, so did Nixon, and Reagan didn't have a clue that the USSR was going to collapse. And it wasn't the arms race that caused the collapse, either: glasnost did. For that matter, all sabre rattling does is increase solidarity in your opponent, so all he accomplished was DELAYING the end of communism in the Soviet Union, not speeding its demise.
and that Ronald Reagan was a fool for building up our military and seeking to fight it.
Considering that any conflict between the U.S. and the USSR would have ended with mutually assured destruction, yes Reagan was a total fool to spend hundreds of billions more on the military. The only thing Reagan accomplished with his arms was make us start measuring our national debt in the trillions rather than in billions.
Oh, and just as many Democratic politicians have served in the military, and the Democrats have a far better record on national security over the last century than Republicans do. So you can take all your jingoistic posturing and shove it.
Whether it's senility or maturity doesn't make much difference. In the high-tech world, as soon as you stop growing, you might as well call it a day, because you'll be passed up by someone else before you know it.
What successful companies do is create new ecosystems. That's what Apple, Yahoo!, and IBM have done. If Microsoft can do that, they'll survive. If they can't, they might not disappear overnight, but they won't continue their dominance of the industry.
One of the tools I'm best known for is Folding Table Theory of Start-Ups. It says that when you walk into a new entrepreneurial company and you see a nice lobby and expensive office furniture, that company has its priorities screwed up -- either it is more interested in comfort than success or it is over-capitalized and lazy -- and it will never make it.
This "theory" has virtually no real predictive value. I've seen plenty of glitzy start-ups that succeeded. I've also seen plenty of dirt-poor, cheap-arse start-ups that failed. Classic example of glitzy start-up that prospered: Google. It *never* spared any expense in super-expensive office furniture or expensive employee toys and perks.
Da Blog
Well, that explains all of the security holes in Microsoft products. If everyone who works there is high, how can they write good code? Oh, wait, that's the faint smell of rot, not pot. Never mind.
Last time I checked, the XBOX division is profitable.
Really? So it's made more money than it's lost? No? You're going by quarters you say? How many *years* did it take for Microsoft to stop losing money? How long will this profitability last once they release the XBox 2 and start losing large amounts on the hardware again?
Perhaps you shouldn't be such a blatant fanboy.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
You've forgotten the reason why Microsoft existed in the first place: To *make* a lot of people a heckuva lot of money.
No. Companies exist to fill some kind of need, to create some kind of customer. That's the reason for existence -- creating markets. Markets aren't created by god or nature, they're created by humans. You can't have profit without a market.
Regarding profit, it's more accurate to say that it's the first responsibility of business.
Sure, it has billions, but if it can't find a way to turn those billions into trillions, then it will be sold and the capital invested somewhere else.
Err. "sold"? When major investers "sell", shares shift hands,and there's no impact on invested capital (much of which is already sunk). Perhaps you're suggesting that if lots of people sell, future equity offerings will have a higher cost of capital.
Companies are the sum of its investors, and nothing more. They can come and go pretty much as they wish.
I find capitalist rhetoric fascinating, at times, in that many people describe it in terms that are so abstract and theoretical. Your above quote makes it sound like a simple game of high/low.
In a theoretical capitalistic system, individual economic actors are atomic. In practice, we have blocs of actors -- investors, managers, employees, politicians, social groups, and customers. They're not quite atomic, many of them are not subject to "profit motive", and yet they all have a stake in the system. Thus, the pure capitalist system doesn't really take hold.
So, it's pretty rare to "abandon" a company these days. Otherwise many of america's airlines and auto makers would have long died, as they ceased churning out profitability above the cost of capital long ago. But they're kept alive through corporate welfare. Why? Because of a bunch of mixed motives and benefactors: customers hate losing airfares, employees don't vote for politicians that don't save their jobs, and investors will take any edge they can get.
-Stu
If you put in new batteries, your crap detector will easily identify anything written by Malone, who is one of journalism's largest pompous asses.
I run linux as my desktop and I use the OpenOffice suite, so it has cost them $450 dollars. (/me makes sound of raindrop hitting bucket.)
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
...I'd be surprised if it wasn't spyware free in 12 months.
Keep in mind that you're claiming the "popularity" argument here. A quck comparison between IIS and Apache will show that most of the Website defacements and exploits seem to be on IIS boxes, even heavily secured and properly patched ones. Which one's the more popular web server platform?
In a situation where you're faced with trying to catch a small amount of groupers or a large amount of pihrana by hand or net, which do you go for?
Everyone goes for the easier target, no matter how many of them there are.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Perfectly said.
there is no use surrounding yourself with amoral people.
evil is as evil does
"Microsoft makes almost all of their profits on sales of XP and Office. I would argue that both of these products are adequate, but neither compelling nor great."
.pdf for example), support scheduled indexing, and Copernic and Yahoo Desktop search include document preview, too.
Leaving Outlook/Thunderbird out of the mix, what Office suite (spreadsheet, word processor, and presentation package) have you used that is superior? I've used StarOffice and OpenOffice on my home PCs for about 4 years and they are still far inferior in terms of speed, quality and features to Office. OoO is getting better with every release, but MS Office is still superior.
"2. Search. Google is kicking their butt back and forth and truly innovating on a regular basis. I never realized how piss-poor the Windows search functionality was until I tried Google Desktop Search. It is a revelation to get results immediately that would take several minutes or hours of searching to find with the MS provided pap. And have you seen the other stuff coming from Google Labs like the new Maps? Great stuff."
In my own testing, Google Desktop Search is less robust and less accurate in results than virtually every other desktop search product. Have you tried Copernic, Yahoo Desktop Search (X1), or MSN Desktop Search? They are all able to index more document types (Google doesn't index
I'm a huge fan of what Google's doing in other areas - Gmail is a revelation! - Maps are cool, and they're continuing to innovate, which I love. But don't blindly bash what Microsoft/MSN has done here - their desktop search product is better than Google's right now.
By the way: Invention and innovation are two different things. You're criticizing Microsoft for not coming up with any great innovations, but I think what you're really claiming is that they haven't invented anything new.
I would ask you this: Did Google invent web search? No, of course not: AltaVista was there first. Did Google invent web-based email? Of course not, Yahoo and Hotmail were there long before. Did Google invent desktop search? Of course not: X1, Lookout, and Copernic were there long before. Did Apple invent the MP3 player? Did Sony invent videogame consoles? Of course not: Nintendo was there long before.
More important than invention is innovation, the process of important but non-revolutionary improvements that make a product more appealing, useful, cheaper, etc. It's not who comes up with an original concept, but who better implements the concept that wins.
4. "Gaming. The XBox seems like a contender, but only because it has been propped up by the profits from other divisions." Did you know that Sony's stock fell by 50% because of Playstation 2 underperformance issues in 2000? That the division was only "propped up" by the rest of Sony? See [news.bbc.co.uk] "Playstation woes hit Sony profits"
Full Disclosure: I worked as an intern at Microsoft last summer. I'll be starting work full time at Google this summer.
ROFL - do they have moderation over at ABC/Fortune? I bet all his fellow journos immediatley slapped a "-1 Flamebait" on him.. or even better "-957563, Plain Stupid"
Go jerk off to your shrine of Rand pulp, loser.
Yes, we can get such cards to hand out. They allow the card holder 1 free incident with PSS.
I felt I was in Stepford Wives, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Buncha pod people talking about "being passionate" about...ick.
I tested for a while there, jumped for a couple of cool jobs, then moved back to Seattle. Had to weigh two offers, one was a contract position for Volt at MS testing an Exchange testing tool that would have given me much insight and put me on a lucrative career path. The other as the net admin with a small (ultimately kind of lame) software company for small businesses.
The MS job looked like 50% more money, easily. But working on Exchange...ick. The folks seemed sort of cool and pretty smart, but the product still inspires revulsion and ultimately I think I'd have lost faith in them - they were passionate about crud. How do you bond with someone who can do that?
There was also sort of an anti Yankee sentiment in my decision. I've never understood people rooting for the Yankees. It's not interesting when the overdog wins. "Their payroll is higher than the bottom 10 teams combined - YES! YANKEES WIN! Oh my gosh, never expected THAT!" Or players joining them (listening, Randy?). So what if you win - you were expected to. Winning the world series is pass/fail for you. You can't achieve, you can only meet expectations. Schilling in Boston did something. He made a huge difference. Without Johnson, the Yanks are still probably gonna win it. I knew that my efforts would have no effect on share price, or anything else, really. Except possibly Exchange. Ick.
Don't mean to rag on you - just on your (and formerly my) employer. I freely grant that I'm spoiled.
If that's supposed to be some kind of analogy, I think your straw dummy went up in flames someplace way back there.....
I've never seen a concentration camp where people applied for the positions and worked for wages. Have you?
I'm glad you're perfect. Standards are great, and the higher the better. But place them on yourself not others, or you'll live in a very lonely world.
Well spoken, sir!
To the original poster, who turned and walked away: It's so darned cute, watching folks who are as sure of their principles as you claim to be, the first time they find themselves unintentionally involved in any ethically ambiguous situation. With all sensors tuned for a perfect back/white contrast, they find themselves unable to resolve the varying shades of grey around them, and are effectively blinded. Of course they continue to beleive their vision is 20/20, and find themselves blundering into all sorts of sandtraps, dimly alarmed at their lack of traction.
is IPTV dubious?
i didn't say their manager are dumb. It is just what a company is for, profit. Adding more functions and writing next version is going to bring direct profit thus is the first thing in their mind. Security fix is behind that in the agenda. Their manager knows what is important for the company and how to earn money thus the are smart managers. Their programmers know how to solve problems thus they are good programmers. However, because having to make profit being the top of priority list, they prefer to spend more resource on throwing out new version rather than trying to make it bug free. This is also where OSS is different from properity software.
I am harvesting funny/good quotes. Please help by putting them in your sigs
Let's take a closer look at the signs of rot Malone has found. Boil it down and there are only two of them: (1) that MS isn't generating much 'buzz' and (2) that Longhorn is late. Malone has missed the nail on the first one, and only glancing struck it on his second observation.
... Perhaps it was talking about HP; maybe it was the fact we WEREN'T talking about Microsoft ...
I'll just ignore the leading bits of the article, which are about start-up theory and SGI. These have little relevance to the current situation at MS. Moving on to the meat of the article, I'll be using the dreaded quote-and-response style of writing.
The other day I had lunch with the CEO of a mid-sized semiconductor equipment manufacturer.
MS isn't a huge consumer or user of semiconductors. Sure, their products depend on semiconductors, but there is little reason for MS to be talking about SEMs, or for SEMs to be talking about MS. This entire 'clue' is a red herring.
Great, healthy companies not only dominate the market, but share of mind.
First SEMs weren't talking about Microsoft, now the average Joe isn't. But then when was the last time you thought about Ford, GM, or Toyota? It's true that Apple has generated some buzz lately, and it's been good for them - but Apple is a buzz company (wrongheadedly so, as I'll explain in a moment). Google has somehow managed to keep that underdog buzz tone going even as they dominated their market, but then Google's product is advertising (all the other cool stuff exists to sell the ads). MS isn't a buzz-driven company, and never has been. Maybe some buzz would be good for MS, but it's hard to argue that it's necessary to their survival.
Operating systems and desktop software battles will never be driven into the mass market by buzz. Buzz works great for style-driven markets. Usability is what drives tool markets; operating systems and word processors are tools, not fashion accessories. Apple's attempts to graft style onto tools have never been very successful; it's only when Apple recognized this and got into music players (as fashion accessories) that they acheived anything resembling market dominance. The Linux/Apple/Windows OS war will be decided on usability, not buzz.
(Note that usability is a very large problem-space. It has to encompass backwards compatibility, enterprise manageability, developer mindshare, software diversity, and more. While Apple has a wonderful out-of-box experience, it has a tough time competing with MS' hugely diverse software aftermarket. While Linux can be seen as having a competetive diverse software aftermarket, it misses some other boats. MS is losing developer mindshare. Usability is a very broad term.)
Longhorn is now two years late.
This one hits the nail, but it's a glancing blow. Longhorn is late, and it's costing MS market share every day its overdue. Sure, it's only a trickle at the moment, but trickles have a way of becoming gushers if you don't fix them soon enough.
Here's where Malone really mis-diagnoses the rot. One of the primary reasons Longhorn is late is the huge amount of resources stolen from it by SP2, and the rethinking of every aspect of Longhorn made necessary by the blizzard of security concerns raging around Microsoft nowadays. MS really tripped up in not fixing security issues during the Windows 2000 drive, and they'll continue to pay for it during the next 1-3 years.
Can MS fix the rot? Ultimately, I think they can, but it will not be done in a single master-stroke which makes everyone happy at the same time. The rot is security, and MS knows it. They're changing internal practices and applying lots of resources to the security problem. As always, they balance on the knife edge of backwards compatiblity vs. {whatever the new thrust is; in this case security}, and if they fall off that edge or get cut too deeply by it, someone else will move in. I wouldn't be surprised to see either Linux or Apple move in if MS were unable to fix their security problems within the next three years, but it's still MS' race to lose.
There is more to this than the slip of a date on a single product.
The journaling file system has been dropped as a feature. Exchange has dropped plans to move to a new database (and I believe its release date slipped as well).
I guess the relevant question is: Does a shift in priorities from "getting new products out the door ASAP" to "get it right before release" translates into death of a company?