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Microsoft Under Attack - Part 2
bugbeak writes "Part 2 of BBC's report on Microsoft at its 'most vulnerable moment in history' is available. According to the article, there are six battles Microsoft must go through in order to stay afloat and win, ranging from 'sort out security' (#1) to 'get them young' (#3). The first part of the article series was also linked by Slashdot." From the article: "Already Microsoft is spending 30% to 35% of its research and development budget on security issues, [Gates] says. His promise: Longhorn, the next version of the Windows operating system, will make malicious software (malware) that gets onto computers without the users' knowledge 'a thing of the past'."
Obviously going after Apple's iPod world with the line "Windows powered software & devices". MS is a smart company, don't think for a moment they are "that vulnerable" They have the money to market their products and market they will.
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
By using TCPA to lock out all non Microsoft authorized software & just coincidentally eliminate the open software threat to the Microsoft Monopoly.
Sorry, I refuse to play along...
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
bloody formatting.....
the next version of the Windows operating system, will make {insert current scare here}'a thing of the past'
How many stories have I read here stating that "Microsoft is scared!" or "Microsoft is in trouble!"? How long has this been going on?
I'll start believing it when large retailers like Dell start refusing to ship units with a Microsoft OS pre-installed.
Until then, I'm going to regard stories like this as nothing more than wishful thinking.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
By default the OS will keep itself updated, checking for updates and installing them, or prompting you to install them. Turning that off causes a little "You're at risk" icon to appear in the toolbar. Home users just see the updates come down and install.
To reinstall it's put the restore CD in the drive and boot. Normally that will load up the correct 3rd party drivers as the PC manufacturer has put those into the restore process.
Users don't need or want to know how to do these things, but if it becomes necessary it shouldn't take more than 5 keypresses.
Uh, yeah Bill, we've heard this promise before. I'm not holding my breath over any Microsoft promise that ends with "a thing of the past." The past keeps coming back to haunt you with Windows.
However, let's assume this time Microsoft really, really gets it right. If so, it won't be only malware that has a hard time on your computer. With their Palladium-- er sorry, Next Generatio-- er whatever they call it this week, your own software won't trust you. Can I play this music? Dunno, let's ask Microsoft. Can I see this movie? Dunno, let's ask Microsoft. Or more accurately, let's ask the systems Microsoft has put in place to handle permissioning. Yeah, they can isolate malware, but the means by which they will do this will also isolate your own stuff every time it thinks you do not have permission to run/view it.
GETTING a young company to a position of dominance is thrilling and exciting. People get rich along the way which helps too. MAINTAINING that dominance is harder. There aren't as many chances to get rich and it is harder to climb the ladder quickly. In addition to the apathy which is an inevitable result of becoming a mature and established company, MS is now the King of several Hills. Now it is knocking them off that is thrilling and exciting.
If MS diversified more and didn't obsess over absolutely dominating the industry, they wouldn't be such the target. As it is, they are the "Evil Empire" and the Huns and Mongols getting hungry and sharpening their swords.
It'd be interesting what kind of software Microsoft's 'malware' envelope covers. Not that I don't like a bunch of MS software, but this is starting to sound more and more like "you can only run approved software on windows"... though I'm sure that isn't actually the intent... yet.
Erm - if they honestly believe they can sue Microsoft for loss of data or, indeed, anything at all, they are sorely mistaken. Have they read the EULA recently? Microsoft are NOT liable for anything that Windows does - their fault or not.
At least with IBM & Linux you have a support framework in place - unlike Windows, where support is patchy at best.
Microsoft, for all its faults, is still a desirable company for most techies to work at. They pay well, their name looks very good on a resume, and they have a history of having a rather geek-friendly corporate culture.
.com bubble burst and techies finally realized that looking after yourself and your family is far more important than living up to the dreams of your CEO.
No, they can't talk their employees into working past sunset all weekend long like in the 90s... but then again, no company has been able to do that since the
Microsoft's shitty security has been a result of a short-sighted lack of emphasis, not capacity. Now that they are making it a priority, I have no doubt that Longhorn will be a relatively secure OS.
Whenever it arrives, that is. Meanwhile... fuck it, I'm using OS X.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Explain to me, when a company (or anything for that matter) is on top (Come on people, Microsoft has a ton of cash, and a ton of marketshare in lots of areas) logically are they not the most vulnerable? I mean, they have no where to go but down. It seems every so often that reporters need a fluff piece to phone-in so they choose a company in whatever field and do an "investigative" piece to determine the company vulerable.
It is how the market works, when you are on top people focus on your vulnerabilities in order to bring you down.
Market share in almost every market they are in?
.............
Billions in thier war-chest?
Billions in R&D?
HUGE network of partners and providers?
Hey, not saying they are untouchable and couldn't fall but you really have to ask what thier advantages are???????
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
Most of Microsoft's customers are of the completely security clueless variety. The only way to protect such customers from themselves is to take away their freedom to run the software of their choice (because their choices are so stupid - even discounting the choice of MS). This is why trusted/treacherous computing is so important to Microsoft. The end user is the biggest security hole.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. It turns a Microsoft computer into a dedicated appliance rather than a general purpose computer - but there is a market for that. The danger for the free world is that Microsoft would like to make general purpose computers illegal except for (Microsoft) licensed developers.
The obsession and drive from Ballmer and Gates are still there, my point is that the engine that pushes the Microsoft race car forward needs a serious valve job.
A most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a bit.
.stranger things have happened.
The only way a company this big could be gone in 10 years (based on history) would be a major scandal, or a buyout. There's nothing desperate about MS's current position that they can't tackle. That's like saying that Pepsi is coming out with this cool new drink, so Coca-Cola may be dead soon. That's not in any way realistic.
I don't respond to AC's.
Microsoft SHOULD specificaly work on Microsoft Windows AND Microsoft Office. Make them lot a hell better (For example, at least allowing to quickly change the pointer type when I am making a presentation, instead of showing the right-click menu); that way they will be seen better.
Those two things are the only real money makers. Everything else runs at a loss, barely breaks even, or barely makes a profit. The markets for Office and Windows are mature and can't grow very much no matter what MS does; the only real direction those two markets can go is down. No matter how much MS improves those two products, it can only maintain marketshare at best. What is worse for them is that improvements in lower priced alternatives means they have to lower prices. OOO won't go away no matter how much they lower prices. I shouldn't have to paint that picture any further.
Furthermore, vexation at the shenanigans they use their marketshare to pull is only growing. MS is addicted to infinitely growing dominant marketshares in Office and MS and will do ANYTHING to keep that. "ANYTHING" is daily creating implacable enemies. Stories of large customers migrating from MS are even starting to get boring.
My point is that if MS has their fingers in lots of moderately profitable pies then they don't set themselves up as "the enemy" who is in perpetual need of being knocked off. In the long run, decent profits in lot of markets is better than obscene profits in only two.
Microsoft's real product development (not innovation) lately has only occurred in areas that it has been kicked in.
.conf files for easy parsing/reading and maintenance.
Lets have a look at what's hot or not at MS:
Exchange Server - incremental development only recently. 5.5 was the last "must have" upgrade. Domino was a major workgroup compeditor, it's still there, but not dominant. Plenty of F/OSS secure and configurable email servers about.
SQL Server - Really moving. MySQL and Postgres at the low end, DB2 and Oracle at the high end with competing products.
Enterprise authentication - Incremental improvents only recently. Active Directory is dominant, NDS in non-Novell shops is unheard of. Other LDAP based products are just getting a toenail hold.
Browsers - IE dominant and stagnant. With Firefox and Opera (et al), MS is finally ramping up development of a new version.
Office products - Office95/97 was a big improvement, but most users wouldn't use the new features in XP/2003 versions. Various FOSS office products are fast approaching "drop-in" replacements for most uses and users. Don't know where MS can go with this one.
IIS - Apache is market leader by most measures, IIS is too tied to the underlying OS. Not much room to improve.
File and print services. Still a lot of offices will have this as one of the most important IT function, along with financials. Samba/CUPS is a more than adequate replacement. MS's file sharing security-model hasn't improved much since the introduction of NTFS and share permissions. No notificable improvements in speed between NT4 and Server 2003 on comparable hardware.
Issues like security and patching have improved vastly, but still have a way to go.
Management of servers is still mainly point and click, but with improvements in 'scriptability'. Still waiting for the simplicity of configuration of an "/etc" folder with a series of
The big worry for MS is that it is and will continue to lose "mind-share". It's not cool to be working with MS products. It's products are only moving forward where a serious compeditor exists.
The only thing propping MS up is an "out of the box", polished UI. However, it soon pisses off power users and is also too closely tied to the OS. Works fine for Aunt Ethel, and that's fine for Dell (et al)
The lastest generation of net-admins or programmers will be equally experienced on Unix-likes or MS, unless they went to school in a MS-only brainwashing shop.
I'd consider MS will under attack.
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
And "do you really want to have your security issues discussed by the Linux developer community on a public bulletin board," queries Alistair Baker of Microsoft UK.
ummmm.... yes?
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
"MS is addicted to infinitely growing dominant marketshares in Office and MS and will do ANYTHING to keep that. "ANYTHING" is daily creating implacable enemies. Stories of large customers migrating from MS are even starting to get boring."
MS isn't the only area where this is a problem. We see it throughout culture (especially in American culture). Why else do you think there is such a problem in the corporate world of ever increasing "sharholder value" causing CEO's to violate laws and wind up in prison? There is only so much growth anything can do before saturation becomes a problem.
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
And that "obsession and drive" is actually why Microsoft will never change unless both Bill and Steve go down in a plane somewhere...
And THAT is why Microsoft is going to go down...because their management CAN'T change like IBM's did - despite all the talk about "never count Bill out" which is bullshit. He's the world's richest guy - where is his motivation to change? Look at every statement out of his mouth! NOTHING has changed about the way he does business!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
but really , Gates however should stop saying things like Never, and Wont, and Thing of the Past. Sets himself up for failure when that happens.
Numerous times has he done this, only to be thwarted back by the hacker community, and the weak security model of his company.
Lest I remind everyone that if it werent for Gates and Baller , and ultimately all the developers at MS , that we wouldnt have malware, adware, and a large bevy of the numbers of viruses that exist.
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
First of all, Microsoft has a mountain of money, and that will keep them safe for a long time.
But there are people making decisions at the top, and I think those decisions have been flawed.
It's analagous to Intel, where they decided that 64 bits wasn't important for consumers, and that compatibility with x86 wasn't important. Intel is huge, and that's not going to come close to killing them, but it did give AMD a few openings.
There are tough decisions that would have been jarring, culturally, on the Windows platform that Microsoft has shied away from. They should be pushing harder to get people not to run software with administrator privs, even though doing so would cause a lot of old software to break.
ActiveX is a security nightmare. Bagging it would cause a lot of pain and suffering in the short term, but keeping it is going to cost a lot more over the long run.
I think the main strength of open source software is that no one can make those sorts of decisions and force them on people. If you dig in on a bad decision, someone will fork the project.
I don't think that gates has had the guts to make the tough decisions since he's been the chief software architect. I know he's a genius, and he's obviously a lot smarter than I am. But I just don't see his record over the past couple of years as being that strong.
The main problem that Microsoft has now is that the bottom half of their user base (the proportion is just a guess) can't admin windows competently enough to keep the machines running reliably on the internet. Geeks can do it. My windows machines run fine, and have since the second version of windows 98. But an awful lot of people just can't pull it off -- they're bogged down in the muck, because admining their home windows boxes is too hard.
Microsoft is spending a fortune to patch bugs one at a time, but they're not addressing the fundamental architectural problems that make the bugs so damaging.
Compare that to what Jobs did with OS X. People were howling for years while they waited for it to come out. He was willing to piss off everyone by breaking compatibility with the old system. He took the long view, and he took his lumps up front to get things lined up for the future properly.
That's exactly what Gates doesn't have the guts to do. It's weak technical leadership.
Microsoft will not be "defeated" in the sense of vanishing from the field as a software company. Ever. They have achieved what is probably the most pervasive and addictive vendor lock-in situation in all of human history. An incredible amount of the information critical to maintaining our society at its current level is stored on, written for, and run by Windows computers.
g one they will be able to do it.
Remember, users will now INSIST on Windows, because they want it/know it/are used to it. This is even better than making it a legal requirement to use Windows or threatening people (by whatever means) to use Windows or else. A vast number of addicts (the situation is surprisingly analogous) to Windows will DEMAND it in spite of anything else, becasue for them it makes life easier.
What might happen is Microsoft will lower their prices and improve their quality to prevent the beginnings of a migration to another product - if they make their customers unhappy (i.e. take away what they're plugged in to) something might happen. But Microsoft will never do this. Their tendancy towards not changing anything is actually a bonus for most people, who want to learn a computer once and never have it do anything unexpected for the rest of their lives. (Please note that although I find this frustrating, it is neither surprising or blameworthy - I don't want to relearn how to drive or perform basic car maintainance every few years.) Competition does not produce products like that, since change is integral to competition. And if by some chance real innovation becomes a requirement, Microsoft may in fact be able to achieve this. We don't know - they haven't had to try. But Microsoft R&D has some good people, and it may be that if Microsoft's survival suddenly depends on an innovate product rather than an essentially-unchanging-but-incrementally-improvin
Microsoft is here to stay, in all cases where users choose stability/familiarity over performance. There are, of course, areas of society where the choice will go the other way, where people are willing to put in the extra time and effort to learn something out of the ordinary. But those will always be the exceptions, and they will only serve as a minor annoyance for Microsoft. Linux only gets so much press because of the novelty of it's pricetag and philosophy. There is no such thing as an "up and coming" Microsoft competitor. Apple produces an infinitely better product, and their market share is fairly fixed. Linux is decimating commercial Unix, but Unix users are both more familiar with the basic principles of the system and (of sheer necessity) more adaptable.
Linux will have successes - it will displace Windows in some cases, maybe even a lot of them. But most of the market share is businesses, and businesses will avoid risks that are not integral to their core business if they can. Microsoft is The Standard (de facto) and that fact is unlikely to change for the forseeable future.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
One word: Palladium.
Quite.
For example when was the last time General Motors was the best at making cars? They have survived thirty years because of the size of their network and their financial strength despite being regularly whupped by Japanese and Europeanoutfits on a technical basis.
Come to think of it when was Microsoft last at the cutting edge if it ever was?
Hundreds of companies have had technical leads of Microsoft and not lived to tell the tale. All you can say is that anyone who beats Microsoft will have some kind of technical lead but the argument doesn't work the other way round.
Convergence isn't new to Microsoft at all. It's how they've conducted business all along. The reason that Microsoft has succeeded all these years is that they brought something to that marketplace that it really wanted - ease of use. Everything was integrated together in one clean way. Windows was "great", but what really made Microsoft great was OLE and COM and XML. Hook stuff together and make it work and people will pay big bucks. You may not agree, but the marketplace doesn't want to have to think about which UI they want to install or whether it will work with every application. Most people just want stuff to work. (Yeah, I know, this is /. and that we love to build things, but let's face it, we're not "the norm".)
So what's the future of integration? Well, I'd say that unlike Microsoft's vision of throwing everything into one box, we're going to see a pattern of "divergence" away from all-in-one devices. The pattern of convergence has been seen before, like the all-in-one VCR/TV or all-in-one entertainment centers, that have had limited success. If my Windows Media Center PC dies, do I really want to lose my ability to surf the web, play games, pay my bills, and do my homework all at the same time?
What Microsoft is missing is that the integration point isn't in a single box, but in a single network. Bill has already admitted to missing the Internet in 1995, and that's because in his world we bring everything to one place and control it there. But the reality of the situation is that different devices serve different functions for a reason. Sure I can build a PC that does everything, but is that what I really want? Or do I just want to have my different devices talk to each other (and my friend's devices) and share information? Not that I necessarily want to live in the Java world where my toaster tells my fridge that it's toasting the last slice of bread and to order more, but it sure would be nice if I could do something as simple as have my phone exchange contact information with my PC on my desk without having to dock it. That's a far cry from the Microsoft world where I hold my PC to my head to make a phone call because I have to store all my data in one place. At least then I can get more than 30 minutes of talk time on my phone because the CPU isn't sucking up power yet adding no value to the call in progress.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
80% of Microsoft's revenue comes from the top 20% of their enterprise customer base, meaning that 80% of their customers (likely you and I) do not get the attention that the big customers get. This is why security is such a big issue for them. It isn't to make your home PC more secure, that is just a side-effect.
The reason for pointing this out is that it is the largest 20% of the customers in the enterprise space that drive Microsoft's technical direction. Ever wonder why the Mac is better for the home market and novice user? It was designed and is driven by the desires of the home market, not the enterprise market. As long as Microsoft's focus remains on the large enterprise space, the product will continue to be just 'average' on the desktop. This is the crack in the market that Apple is going after.
A most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a bit.
Are you on crack? Firefox is continually gaining ground on IE and Linux has sure as hell made a dent in Windows. What OS do you think those webservers/fileservers/print servers would be using if they weren't using Linux? The desktop is a different story, but corporations have already taken notice of Linux on the desktop and they are being deployed around the world as we speak. Linux on the corporate desktop has been a relatively recent development and it will take time to incubate. This is only the begining of Linux of the desktop.
Time makes more converts than reason
Critics suggest a simple solution: use Apple or Linux to be safe and sound.
But Linux (and Unix) systems have been hacked before, and Apple's brand-new Tiger operating system has already been fingered for a security flaw.
Yes, Microsoft's software has security holes, but hackers mainly love it because there are so many Windows PCs out there. Write one virus and 90% of the wired world could be yours.
Not this again. I can see an ignorant PHB still flippantly throwing this lame FUD around, but a journalist? For the BBC, no less?
Tiger has "a security flaw," so the implication is that it's just as vulnerable as Windows? That's clearly what the article is insinuating.
For those who don't know, all OSes get attacked. Given 100 Windows machines and 100 Linux machines, the success rate with attacks on Windows is a hell of a lot higher.
How can a journalist do even a modicum of research outside Redmond and not know this?
The Internet is full. Go away.
Make malicious software a thing of the past??
I don't think so. As long as there is a will, there is a way...
(and Microsoft is pretty good at providing the will)
Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cou
And do you honestly think Mac is going to ever even hit 10% in the next five years?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
it doesn't seem to be happening
Actually, it is. For the first time ever, Microsoft dumped 1/3 of their cash into a dividend payout to prop up their stock. They paid another 2 billion to Sun. All the other little lawsuits add up to something. The EU is pissing on them for various things. Microsoft has no growth markets left for Office. Outside of the PC, Windows growth is slow to nonexistent.
All the while, Sun licensed more Solaris licenses this year than in multiple years prior combined, Linux growth is enormous, Firefox is at something like 8% share now and still growing. As a bonus, Apple can do no wrong lately, it seems.
Microsoft has been at high tide for much too long.
Mister Balmer:
I will HAPPILY use Microsoft Software 24 hours a day if you meet these following requirements:
1. Protect my privacy.
2. Protect my systems security.
3. Open your damn source-code, so I can be assured that you have done your due-dilligence for #1 and #2 and that I can be assured that the software will move forward after I incur the considerable expense of adopting it, that I can trust that the software won't be discontinued or abandoned, or taken in an unpalatable architectural direction.
4. Open your damn internal Development and Test Procedures to independent audit (ie, become ISO-9001 certified) - so I can be assured that you have done your due-dilligence for #1 and #2.
5. Don't charge me an arm and a leg. (I'm willing to PAY for excellence. I'm not willing to pay for mediocrity, with an "excellence" sticker slapped on, while you tell me with a straigh face "trust me, it's excellent!" - all while the world's computer systems crash and burn around us from vulnerabilities and flaws). If it's mediocre software, I will pay mediocre (free/beer) prices.
6. I own my data. Let me do whatever the hell I want to with my data. (ie. open your file-formats, and stop trying to ram DRM down my throat).
7. Stop buying and trashing other independent software vendors through predatory practices. If you satisfy 1-6, above, I still can't trust that a monopoly with no real competition, has any incentive to continue to do so.
If you do that, I'll happily use Microsoft Software 24 hours a day, and I'll even pay to purchase (not rent) it.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Here is my opinion regarding Microsoft. Microsoft is targetted by far more hackers due to the popularity and "success" by the company by being on the average computer users computer. I'm sure this is obvious and probably mentioned in these comments before. However, Bill Gates promises the following in Longhorn: Malware will be a thing of the past. In my theory, I've gotten the same promises in email that I've received from Nigeria. Anyone with the patience and presistance will be able to exploit software, regardless how well it has been programmed. Surely there was a developer that isn't 100% perfect.
My apologies if this is less than coherent, but I'm not in the best headspace right now...
Convergence is good in the sense, as you said, of everything just working together and not having to deal with mixing and matching and fine tuning your solutions. That is what customers want, and I agree, it's a Good Thing.
What is bad is the way that MS and most everybody else has been going about it: the approach of "everybody wants their word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software to work together, so we'll make an integrated wp/ss/presentation combo package!" This encourages too much interdependency on specific other products, vendor lock-in to whoever makes your preferred end-to-end solution, and compromise in the quality of the individual parts of the integrated package. That's a Bad Thing.
The right way to go about convergence is similar to the old (and sadly failed) document-centric computing approaches like Apple's OpenDoc, or the unix "pipe" concept, and the associated staples of both of the above: standard, free and open formats and protocols and specific tools that do one thing extremely well.
So in a sense, what you're saying is spot on: it's not the one box that does it all that we need, it's the one network that'll make all out boxes work together. But the "network" doesn't have to be just the internet, and all our "boxes" don't have to be separate physical devices. I still want my general purpose computer. Hell, I want a general computer the size of a small PDA that doubles as a cell-phone-alike (ala VoIP). I don't want a thousand special-purpose little devices, I want one device to which to which can add and change functions and have it all Just Work. And I want my data and my processing power to rest primarily with me, and not rely on some remote network to function properly.
The "network" isn't the necessarily the Internet, it's the protocols and formats that let things like the Internet work. The "boxes" don't have to be literal separate devices but any specific components (either hardware or software) that operate together over those protocols without caring what each other are.
It's great that this type of interoperation can scale to remote inter-device levels too, and allow us to take advantage of remote services, but that's not the key factor. The key factor is the protocols and formats. They are the core of integration and "convergence", and they could work just as well in a single box as over the network.
In the history of computing, the death of the document-centric computing concept (where a vast array of different, specialized tools all work together seamlessly as though your whole OS was one application), and the associated stagnation of standardized file formats, has got to be one of the saddest events that I have witnessed.
People think MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite are great because "it all just works together". We were once promised that our entire computers would function like that (again, only now in the graphical environment too). It was companies like MS and Adobe, who refused to support document-centric paradigms (lest people not be locked in to using *their* entire suite when they could mix and match their own just as easily), that saw the efforts of those promises stillborn.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."