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.

Comments

Re:One word reason "Support"

[EpsCylonB]

Then why do they use Windows rather than Linux?

Linux isn't easy.

Obligatory MS isn't dying troll

[dtfinch]

Microsoft is rich. They could give away everything they make for free for 20-50 years before going bankrupt. But for the moment, they're not even hurting. Their profits are still increasing every quarter, and most of their company isn't even focused on their core products. They're working on tons of research projects, most of which will never see the light of day outside of Microsoft's headquarters. They can scale back as much as is needed to protect their margins going into the future. Companies like Red Hat do pretty well earning only 1/300th the revenue that Microsoft brings in. Microsoft isn't going anywhere for a long long time.

Re:Why is it better?

[Gopal.V]

What makes it so much better?

For one, slashdot renders properly in IE. Secondly it does come with my box - not as a 4 Mb download I have to make afterwards. It is not a good product for the sole reason that it existed to kill netscape's "web apps" - which are coming back as Mozilla.

I've been using Firefox for a while now and it seems like more then 'just another browser' to me.

Then firefox has failed. Firefox was meant to be "Just a Browser" , not the "An Application Platform by itself" Mozilla route. That is the what it was meant to do - and it sure does. It's a browser - a good one , but just a browser still.

Except one thing

[Safety Cap]

~ the gimp allows people who want to use a Photoshop alike app to run from MSWindows.

"alike app" is right.

GIMP::PhotoShop
Two tin cans and a string::Top of the line cell phone

Re:Except one thing

[Eagle5596]

More along the lines of: GIMP::Photoshop New Military Technology::Tired old civilian technology Photoshop is ok, but GIMP is better. Have you ever even used it? The interface is a bit rough around the edges, less so these days than the past, but it has an enourmous amount of power behind it.

Re:How is IE better? Can you name 1 reason? Just 1

[kisrael]

An excerpt from the firefox forums I posted to : http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2510 92&highlight=

# IE has a very usable FTP 2-way client, Firefox has an FTP browser only.
# IE has a better password-remembering system.
# Firefox's Ctrl-F doesn't seem to search input form fields.
# IE's "mouse select jumps to word boundaries" is not perfect but better than Firefox's character based model.
# Ctrl-N in IE brings up a clone of the current window, complete with history. Firefox opens up my startpage...redundant, because I can easily launch it from the start menu.
# Ctrl-T in Firefox opens up a new and utterly blank tab...even more useless than the Ctrl-N behavior!
# IE shows undisplayable characters with box placeholders, Firefox uses question marks.
# Tabbing in Firefox doesn't doesn't reset the cursor blink cycle, or something, so you don't get instant confirmation that you're typing in the correct box.
# IE has better drag and drop editing of the toolbars, including the "File Edit View" bar. (I like compressing that bar, 5 small buttons, and the address bar all on one line.)
# Ctrl-O in firefox is the normal file open dialog...not as useful as IE's URL-or-file-browse feature.
# I wish Firefox had an option to let each tab have its own close button...often I want to quickly close a bunch of tabs based on their title, but instead I have to switch to each one and close it seperately.

Some of those are just matters of opinion, none are that that major, but IE does have some usability pluses.