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Microsoft 'under attack' On All Fronts
khujifig writes "The Beeb are carrying a story looking at the challenges facing Microsoft in the next few years.
This includes a brief description of the M.Home (sans Clippy) which the Beeb describes as "a far cry from real life", and a discussion of the next few years competition for Microsoft. They go on to highlight Linux, OpenOffice.org, the GIMP and Firefox (which Gates himself has used: "I played around with it a bit, but it's just another browser, and IE [Microsoft's Internet Explorer] is better,"), and look Apple in relation to Longhorn. Not as bad a read as I was expecting. Their summary: Microsoft is under 'attack' on all fronts, and either needs to innovate or die. "Why use Microsoft if you have a broadband connection and combine Firefox with powerful web services like Google's Gmail?."" It should be said, tho', that articles like this have been written about MSFT for a long time - and there's still billions in their war-chest.
Picture It is Microsoft's competitor to Photoshop Elements...
"Why use Microsoft if you have a broadband connection and combine Firefox with powerful web services like Google's Gmail?." Sadly because i play games, and to play 99% of the games out there you need windows.
Quit being silly, XP is blowing all other OSes out of the water with marketshare, the fact that 95% of all programs run under XP and no others will keep MS alive for a long time, I couldn't live without them, as many others couldn't.
The simple fact is it costs far more to change platforms than MS charges, and for the 95% who don't care what platform they use they will use MS, how can anything go up against a billion dollar advertising campaign? MS will be around for quite a while, learn to live with it, news and articles such as this grow tiring...
you are using My-SQL... something goes wrong... what do you do? Post in a forum, email a friend...
Or you can get support from MySQL...you did buy a commercial license right?
MySQL was a bad example: http://www.mysql.com/network/support.html
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
Most people don't buy Microsft OS to surf the web and check email. Here are the 3 biggest reaons people buy Microsoft. 1. It's the standard, Im sure many don't even understand the options. 2. It 'supports' more variety of hardware then any other system by far. When a customer buys gadget X, it will work with windows. 3. See 2, except apply it to software. Windows has he largest variety of software.
All of these things can probably be tied to market share. So it does matter how good or bad or free and OS.. if it can't compete in those 3 areas, then it can't overtake MS. Many will keep hoping that someone will chip away at the dominance of MS, but I think the opposite will happen. Just like so many websites only working properly in Explorer; it wasnt like that 5 years ago.
I personally have done my part to convert emai/web surfing type people to Macs, but I can't with a straight face tell people in the real world running small business that they are going to be happier with Macs. Because the first time a customer or vendor says, "ya get the image file, its in our proprietary format", just download the software for it. ( it will only run on a Windows machine ).
My two cetns
Mac ownership is still at less than 2% and Linux can't really be considered to be a more secure and desktop-ready alternative to XP or 2000.
According to Gartner Mac market share is at 3.7% for Q1 2005. Not to mention that Macs tend to be used longer (still using a 400mhz G4 from 2000 as my primary computer when my PC from the same time has long been recycled).
As for Linux, maybe not desktop-ready, but clearly more secure than Windows? Oops, I fed the troll.
The Xbox succeeded because it wasn't a console - it's a mini-PC. They got their games because many game developers are familiar with DirectX, which shows as the majority of games are written for Windows. The new version of IE does not have everything FF and Opera have, as the support for CSS is sketchy.
GM, Ford and VW are getting hit currently by smaller, nimbler competition from Japanese car makers, partially because the Japanese makers are more focused than GM or Ford is. Sony lost out on the portable music player scene because it was slow and pitted one part of its company (the music and movie businesses) against another (the audio and DVD player businesses).
While I, too, wouldn't count Microsoft down and out, Microsoft is facing attack on all fronts because it decided to branch into those domains. But don't expect it to win it all.
No, that is because Windows doesn't properly read the memory usage. Tweaking it to read it properly and to limit the cache size, it uses about 35MB here for about 25 tabs. Thats about 15 times more memory efficient than IE.
If you want to play the commercial license game, then there are superior DBMSs, like, pretty much every other DBMS out there (Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, ...). The business case for MySQL is "free as in beer."
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
um.... Paint .net?
or is it the other way?
This is my opinion. Everyone has a right to my opinion.
Microsoft is about likely to go under as IBM(...)
According to Lou Gerstner, IBM was dangerously close to the edge. Read (about) his book about getting elephants to dance; you can find enough info on the web, for instance here.
nice quote: "Gerstner says that few people even understood how perilously close the firm was to running out of cash."
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
Believe it or not, MS does have its range of Photoshop-like products. And no, I don't know anyone who uses them either.
They could give away everything they make for free for 20-50 years before going bankrupt.
So nice to see clueless moderators mod this nonsense up. NOT!
Get your bloody facts straight!
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
M$ is the biggest due to corporate usage -The massess are not going to switch until the systems they work with on a daily basis do. Peolple buy M$ because thats what they use at work. Familiarity and fear.Fear of the unknown and of being "left out". Period.
Linux isn't "harder" and Mac is still out on the fringe of what people will commit their dollars to.
They will remain huge in the same way that Mcdonalds, Starbucks, Nike, and General Motors stay huge. Omnipresence. People just wont commit their hard earned money to something new - experimental. America loves the overdog.
Now, if a few mega-corps switch - then others will follow and the backlash could be huge for M$ because nobody would switch back. Thats the big M$ fear. Once people see the light.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
...while Google's free Picasa will meet the everyday needs of most consumers. :(
But only runs on Win32/IE 5+...
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
and gaming
And for many, gaming is also the web. Freecell.com, Yahoo games, Neopets.com, etc.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I think Microsoft is in the weakest position it's been in in a long time
I'm not so sure. Seems to me the number of exploits in FF and Safari are increasing. (I'm a FF user as well.) Put on the tin foil hat and one might guess that Longhorn is being delayed while exploits for competitive products increase in number. If Microsoft does a good job improving security management in Longhorn, it will be a big hit.
As for VB programmers, those not using VB.Net are either still using VB 6 or went to C#. Where else would they go? C++? Java? Perl? If anything, they might chose Python, but VB.Net would be an easier transistion than that.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
No, I think you are mistaking cash for net worth. MS has (last I heard, though before the big dividend) $56 Billion in cash, where cash is defined as literal money in the bank and short term low risk investments (T-bills, etc). MS's net worth is far higher.
Realistically, how many people get *actual* support from Microsoft?
... very... large company (one of the top five in the Fortune 500) and I'm in the Australian section of one division. Our support is handled by Dell. We don't ever call Microsoft, and frankly I'd be stunned if Dell staff do either.
I mean incidents, not just knowledge-base articles.
I work in a
If Dell switched to RedHat, that would make no difference to the users as far as support goes. We'd still call our HelpDesk and they're either Dell or go to Dell as the next level.
The original OS vendor is neither here nor there. The support comes from other companies.
Even if a company was to call Microsoft and log an issue, there's a big support cost. Windows doesn't come with support for free (possibly a couple of phone calls for personal users though). Businesses have to pay for support. Why call someone when you can get a contractor on-site?
I've dealt with a lot of commercial 3rd party support schemes, and I have to say, my experience has been extremly positive with regards to Open source.
I remember a big CORBA corporation, won't name them or their product, but it was basically an ORB. We had used their stuff for previous versions of our product, but it was unstable and a nightmare to maintain. Just to give you an example, telnetting into their software that was attached to our process, would kill the whole server by just typing a random character!!!
So one day they started asking us "how much money we make" with our product, and wanted to charge us a % of the profits we make! Not only that, they wanted to charge us in the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS, for their new support scam to be renewed in a yearly basis. Oh, and the new version of their orb required us to recode our app!
So when they told us this, one of my co-workers had been testing JacORB. Turns out this our software was faster, more stable and ran in more platforms than the one from the comercial vendor!
Not only that, but when we had problems, we usually got responses the same day. We even got sent code to patch the software for some problems! All of this FOR FREE!
I have no problem paying for tech support, but a lot of this support is not only too expensive, but it's very slow and no, it's not much better than the message boards or mailing lists of some of the open source products. Try dealing with Oracle tech support and exchaging code with them, to see how slow it is to get them to fix problems.
- sigs are for wimps.
There was one reason PCs "could be built at cheaper cost", and it had nothing to do with Windows: The famous reverse-engineering of the "IBM PC" allowed the market to be flooded with hundreds of compatible clones, all competing vigorously on price. I still remember the days when just about every PC's major marketing tack was "IBM compatible".
Most PC purchases at this time were not even for the purpose of running Windows - most business and home users still ran DOS. Microsoft had nothing to do with "making PCs cheaper", they only took advantage of the fact that PCs were becoming cheaper anyway.
PCs also subsequently advanced at a rapid rate, getting more powerful very quickly. Combined with their low cost, flexibility and configurability, they just took off. And MS, as you say, were "in the right place at the right time".
Reminds me a little of some of the discussions about CoreImage in OS X. There was some thought that this could make it easy for someone to write the fabled Photoshop killer.
The replies I thought most interesting centered on the thought that Photoshop isn't about the filters etc. that CoreImage can do. Its about a very refined set of editing tools, and even more important, the way Photoshop has been integrated into the workflow for print and eleectronic publication.
Haven't you heard of OpenOffice.org lately? You don't need Microsoft to do word processing.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
I never called MS-SQL support so I don't know if they really are as good as you claim. All I do know from my past experience a generally issue you can find in a forum easily and can call up and get an easy answer. A bigger problem it may take days to get an answer from support. So yes while the support is there, its not always as simple as "bam ... get an answer or at least a much more educated idea"
Microsoft has sufficient cash resources to re-make itself many times in other industries.
No they don't. They spent 1/3 of their cash last year on dividends and lawsuits. If their stock remains stagnant, expect more dividend payouts in the years ahead. That cash will vaporize faster than you think.
This week two of the former Detroit 'big four' had their investment ratings downgraded to junk status. They also seemed to have plenty in the war chest. Didn't help them design cars people wanted. What is 0% financing or rebate but paying people to buy your product? Well, Microsoft keeps on building on top of old technology - expensive to patch, and not quite state of the art. Why do people keep using it? Because they know how and they feel in control because it's the first desktop tool they learned. But, that attitude won't last forever.
'The longing to be primitive is a disease of culture' George Santayana