Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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.
um.... Paint .net?
or is it the other way?
This is my opinion. Everyone has a right to my opinion.
There is a big thing you are missing here. In a lot of markets Linux is making small inroads in the form of a the dual boot systems. At my place of employment everyone who doesn't use Linux straight out dual boots. They haven't switched over completely yet but for the purposes of compatibility they dual boot and spend some of their time using Linux.
Often this turns into a lot of their time. The fact is that when using Linux I can read any document you give me, and mount/use any drive on the network, I have full compatibility. Windows hasn't got this important feature because they are being deliberatly obtuse and not interoperating. The guy down the hall starts to feel outmoded when me with my Linux machine and Betty with her Mac can interoperate together completely and can both interoperate with him, but his machine can't do the same.
MS simply has to change this practice. They also have to get serious about supporting more applications. A lot of the publishing work we do is in TeX because TeX is pretty much the defacto standard of professional publishing. MS has rudimentary at best support, whereas Linux and Mac make it easy as pie.
There is a serious growing threat here, and as has been shown numerous times the idea that it costs more to switch platforms is false. It costs nothing more to dual boot, and often the cost of switching is zero or less, especially in an environment that has been dual booting for a while.
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.
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.
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'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".
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