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Microsoft: The Faint Smell of Rot

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the could-happen dept.

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.""

6 of 903 comments (clear)

  1. ABC Columnist Confirms: Something Is Rotting by fembots · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  2. Comparison? by Saige · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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."
    1. Re:Comparison? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Its funny how many MS employees visit Slashdot. It must be like reading an Iraqi blog during the war years.

      Apart from the side-taking, I find it very interesting how an iron curtain has developed between MS-crowd and OSS-crowd. Even in other companies there are MCSEs and MCSDs on one hand who insist .NET is the future, and the not-so-well-dressed OSS crowd. Working on cheaper hardware, trying always to run their latest game on gentoo.

      Its a war of Nerds vs Geeks. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Regardless of all bias, both sides are fully functional, both producing products and distributing it to the world. Somehow it does remind me of the cold war days, MS being the USSR simply because its closed, considered sinister, has a big arsenal, and has citizens who want to emigrate.

      Different people enjoy working different places. I always enjoy work when I know I'll get paid for it. I also sometimes enjoy starting little OSS projects, my pet projects that I very excruciatingly design, plan, and start... just for the kicks and to see if I can make something better, but most of which die before beta. At work, we use both OSS and commercial OSes and software. Both philosophies are at war in every quarter, and despite what the slashdot (or microsoft) crowd might think, right now neither group has the overwhelming strength. Thats why so many companies HAVE to run a linux/BSD firewall, and a windows domain controller. Sure I can run a samba domain controller, but in some ways (beside security) its like running a Windows 2000 professional firewall.

      I wouldnt mind working at Redhat AND at Microsoft. Given the options, I'll choose whichever pays me more. I suspect I'll hate the work at MS, because I'm biased, have been since 96 when I tried slackware 3.0. Theres also a kind of an addictive nomadic freedom related to opensource programming, which occasionally makes up for the lack of $$$.

      I dont think Microsoft will disappear, just as I dont think the x86 architecture will disappear. There are far too many games for me that arent ported to Linux or MacOS. There are far too many applications that require win32 API to run, and running them in WINE makes em less stable not more. The whole reason why Microsoft is bigger than Apple, is why Microsoft will stick around... but Linux will certainly come of age. This competition is bound to intensify.

      I love Linux. It probably will not make one man extremely rich, but it will not only bring more freedom, yet complexity to desktops, it will also bring with it BSD and all other OSes which never had the chance before. Linux actually is a favor to Solaris and MacOS. Currently theyre competitors of sorts, but Linux will make portable applications the fashion. The huge source base that Linux and BSD have created will all run perfectly on both OSX and Solaris and the rest, giving them life (would you rather run Netscape 4.75 or Firefox 1.0 on AIX?), think of the free databases we now have.

      As much as we love to bash Microsoft and hope Linux will be the saviour, too many of us still log onto slashdot from our Windows machines, to bash Microsoft. We've only paid hard cash to Microsoft.

  3. Interesting Cringely article from 1999... by otis+wildflower · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... here..

    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? ... 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.

    "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...

  4. Capital is to be USED not OWNED by jgardn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  5. A Parallel: The Collapse of Communism by Nova+Express · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This story reminds me a bit of the conditions right before the collapse of communism. 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, that co-existence rather than opposition was the only way to deal with it, and that Ronald Reagan was a fool for building up our military and seeking to fight it.

    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/