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Microsoft Fights the Flab as it Turns 30
Alain Williams writes "This review of Microsoft, as it enters middle age, looks at it's problems in maintaining growth." Discusses the recent Kai-Fu Lee/Google debacle, as well as things like Apple's iPod.
...red midlife crisis sports car?
When Microsoft hits its midlife crisis, what's it going to do? Patent the Porsche?
Thirty is not middle aged.
Love,
Gaz (age 32)
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
How can microsoft continue to grow with it's current market share? Granted it still has competition, but that's not going to change much.
Tons of people use windows, the people that don't aren't going to switch any time soon. Most people (in the US at least) have computers (and probably running windows)... so the only place I can see microsoft going is into a new market section, or just down.
With embedded media centers not taking off that fast, I'm assuming the latter will most likely happen.
I lost 44 pounds, perhaps MS should sign up and lose several pounds of chair-throwing, monkey-dancing flab.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
Kai-Fu Lee and the iPod represent MS's biggest problems, they have nothing to worry about.
Microsoft getting fat isn't news, Microsoft being fined half its cash reserves, further restricted and split into 2 would be news, good news.
ROFL
as opposed to previous versions, which only came with Access and Outlook.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Even if Microsoft has slowed down, I'd be very suprised if they all of a sudden went belly-up.
The increase of competition is a good thing, as companies have to make their products better than their competitors, and sometimes selling them at a cheaper price.
I just wonder how many small companies with great ideas were too intimidated by Microsoft to put those ideas into action (a certain Simpsons episode comes to mind, no?)
Only this week /. posted an article about how vulnerable Firefox ('our' best hope for the majors) was. Linux on the desktop is as far away as it when I started using it four years ago (ask your non-techie friends), MS are still kings of the hill.
Sure, our little guerilla band has got a bit stronger: MS know they aren't going to get rid of us, so they just hop to contain us - and so far they are winning.
Indeed, the competition helps them with all that anti-trust stuff. Basically, I am not as optimistic about a free and open future for computing as I was even 18 months ago, though we have come along way since Byte declared Windows NT was the "death" of Unix.
Or are people worried because they bought a stock which was far overvalued due to fervor and hype which was known to everyone at the time to be unstable, unsustainable, and a bad risk?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
"Apple's iPod" is only a "debacle" for Microsoft beacuse they decided to make it one. If they concentrated on making good software that plays well with other children, rather than defining each actual innovation in the wider marketplace as a threat to their core competencies - or rather, redefining their core competencies to include any actual innovation as it turns up in the wider marketplace - they might be a "mature" company in two senses of the word.
yes, we have no bananas
Ok, so let's speculate for a bit. Assume that Microsoft's reign is over. They'll still be around for years to come, and they may stay a major player, but they won't be the f[r]iendly monopolist that they are now.
What about Google, though? It seems they are showing many of the traits that made Microsoft so strong. They're relatively new, innovative, providing useful products to the masses for cheap, and attracting talented people by good working conditions (including high salaries).
Where Microsoft dominated the world by virtue of virtually everybody using their OS and office suite, Google is getting hold of people through their Internet services; search, email, instant messaging, voice over IP, and videoconferencing all being key parts of the current and (near) future Interent and computing experience.
There is also the risk of vendor lock-in; you can access your emails stored in Google Mail only as long as Google allows you to, their VoIP and videoconferencing services are currently only available to users of the proprietary Google Talk client (Google states that they will release protocol specifications, but not a hint as to when this will happen; even with the protocol specifications out there, it's still possible for them to block other clients), some key parts of their search technology are patented, making it difficult for competitors to match the efficiency, etc.
Note that I am not saying Google is evil or will turn evil, but I am worried at the potential for doing nasty things. I remember the days when Bill Gates was every nerd's idol (except fringe figures like Mac-using nerds and the FSF); look where we are now. A wise person said it this way: "The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern."
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I'm not just harping on one company here, I'm thinking organizations in general. Just as individuals have a natural birth, aging, and death cycle, the same seems to hold true with other phenomena. Organizations become victims of their own success. They get larger and more unwieldy, and the presence of excess resources seems to create its own economy of waste. Internal empires form. Departments carve up the pie, and defend turf. As waste increases, the survival of the organization tends to trump whatever purpose it originally formed to serve. With hundreds or thousands of individuals depending on the status quo, or at least the continued existence of the organization, there is a convergence that takes place that makes one soul-less organization or government look much like the others after a while.
Software bloat we all know about. Features get added by divergent interests who don't fully understand the limits of the paradigm, until the structure starts to sag and/or crumble under the weight. Loose ends and bugs multiply and begin to take on a life of their own, like cancer cells multiplying out of control.
Sometimes organizations or programs can be "born again" and rise from their own ashes in a completely different form. But sooner or later, some kind of major destruction is inevitable, and maybe necessary.
Sigh, this is typical of the current level of debate on the internet. One article of four pages of which two and a half pages are about the company's history, leaving only a page and a half for comment and analysis. The article just reprises what 1001 other articles have said: Microsoft is too big to be a growth stock any more and these days it has some competition, although despite both alleged handicaps it is still makes stupendous profits.
No one seems to ask whether these vast sums sucked out of the IT industry could be put to better use. It would be interesting to add up the annual profits of the top six IT companies and then see how much they spend annually on fighting spam, phishing and malware. Probably a fraction of one per cent of their profits? I guess if you're a top IT exec then worrying about malware and spam is what the little people do.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
IBM went through similar growing pains.
Their heyday was the 50's to the 80's and then the bottom dropped out of the equipment market. But IBM adapted.
Microsoft shows some signs of adaptation with the X-Box line but I don't think it will be enough. The bigger they are, the harder they fall and it's usually 30 or so years of the good life, followed by the remainder being rough.
Netcraft confirms that Microsoft is dying ...Oh, wait! Never mind.
May 1990 Launches Windows 3.0
Aug 1995 Windows 95 launched
Jan 2000 Steve Ballmer becomes chief executive
2001 Office XP and Windows XP launched
Jan 2003 Company declares first annual dividend
I just can't believe they left out Windows ME.
I've been using this OS for years.
I don't see why everyone hated ME so much, seriously. Not only can I download the internet in 13 seconds with it's networking capabilities, but I've never had my computer cra
(Neil Blender cited this blog on the earlier M$ story.)
you had me at #!
iPods are NOT cool anymore if every Tom, Dick and Harriette has one... you want coolness??/ get yourself one of these babies... while they're only listening to music, you can be watching movies... playing games, reading a book or listening to music as well...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
You do realise that Microsoft couldn't give a 5h1t3 about you and your PIII...they got their money off you long ago... there's plenty more fools about that will believe their hype about their wonderfull new version of windows... as PT Barnum is famously misquoted as saying, "there's a fool born every minute", Microsoft will continue to exist purely because of these new fools...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I heard the new exercise to remedy this problem consisted of clapping hands and the incessant yelling of "Developers! Developers! Developers!"
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
But that lack of quality plus the oil embargo encouraged consumers to try smaller, more fuel efficient foreign cars, specifically Japanese models.
Consumers discovered that the reputation of Japanese cars being cheap and poorly made was not true. Not only did they get better gas mileage, but they were really reliable cars. My first import was a Toyota Tercel and the only things I put in that car over 100,000 miles were gas, oil, a set of tires and brake pads. Today you couldn't give me an American car, even though the imports are made here and most American cars are assembled elsewhere. Impressions last a long time.
That's how I see MSFT. For years they were turning out crap and people are in the process of discovering that the alternatives are pretty good. I'm typing this on a Linux box. A few years ago I hadn't even heard of it. I'm never on the bleeding edge of technology and rarely even the leading edge. If I'm using Linux it's because it works. It works for me at home and, where appropriate, for my business customers.
MSFT will still be around for a long time, but I believe the market will change to include more alternatives and those alternatives will have a following of their own. There are a lot of people walking around with a MSFT chip on their shoulder that they'll never forget.
If it's one area MSFT has really fumbled it's inspiring customer loyalty. They're one of the few companies inspiring their customers to outright hostility. They've abused their market position by treating customers as a revenue stream. Most people will get tired of being porked after a while. We're there. MSFT traded short term quarterly gains for long term loyalty. That's what happens when bean counters run your company and Republicans run your country. And I believe people will remember a long time.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Whether they're cool or not is irrelivant.
People buy them because they have the best mixture of features, quality, weight and size.
To imply that everybody has one simply because they're popular negates the reasons why they achieved that status in the first place.
Basically all this hubla about Microsoft's employee culture imploding is FUD. While everyone has things they hate about their job, you talk to most any MS employee and they love their jobs.
It's as if all the tech writers got bored and turned this little Google/Microsoft fiasco into a big blown up epidemic.
I do wish Microsoft would downsize a little and perhaps shed a little of its "running around like its head is cut off" way of marketing and developing products and not intercommunicating well enough between product groups. I can't even remember how many versions of Vista are slated for release, but its nuts.
In an interview very reminiscent of that other fool, Ballmer struggles to stay 'on message', repeats his key words and phrases out of context ('Innovation! Innovation! Innovation!') and generally makes a fool of himself.
you had me at #!
MS will only be able to further penetrate the market if they lower the price of ALL Windows products. I'm mean, come on, $300 for the full version of XP pro? Rome: Total War is just a complicated as as XP pro (if not more so) and it sells for just $50!
Microsoft will continue to lose market share, however slowly, as long as their prices remain sky high. They are already losing to Linux with governmental agencies.
Granted, MS wants to keep its bloated profits, but I have just one question: How much profit do you need? The answer: Some. You always need some profit. The only place you get profit from is your customers. Would you rather get less profit from those customers and still retain the "King of Software" title, or lose ALL profit because your customers are leaving your software for alternate choices?
Like I said at the start of my post, MS will need to lower the price of their OSes to penetrate the market any further.
fine words from an "anonymous coward"... nuff' said... as far as I'm concerned, iPods are for the herd...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Features??? all they can do is play music... that's all... mp3 players are two a fscking penny nowadays... they'll be giving them away with the cornflakes next, just like calculators... if you want to do anything else with an iPod, you've got to hack them... all iPods have now over the other MP3 players, is a perceived image of coolness... but that's gone now as everybody and his dog has got one...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
If Google releases an online office suite, it's over for Microsoft. Imagine an office productivity suite that doesn't require installation, is always up-to-date, and is integrated with the 'net.
"Sufferin' succotash."
If we had listeded to all of the idiots depicting the fall of Microsoft over thepast 5 years, Microsoft wouldhave crumbled years ago.
It amazes me that ignorance is so prevalent. You go right ahead and hold your breath; Microsoft will fall soon.
Jamey Kirby
What I don't understand is why the enormous, bulky, clunky, heavy, mechanical, spinning magnetic metal iPod is popular at all. The small solid state players that go for a month on a single AAA battery are a whole lot better.
Oh well, what the hell...
``+4, Insightful for a dupe''
:-)
Welcome to Slashdot.
I felt I had to post it again, because it probably didn't get the attention it deserved in the other thread. It also fit better in this discussion. Instead of typing essentially the same again, I figured I could just use the old text.
In the same vein, I'm also putting more and more essays on my website, so that I don't have to repeat arguments next time one of my pet peeves pops up, but just copy from and link to one of my essays. Plus, people might come accross them outside of Slashdot, giving them more attention.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
they got their money off you long ago
No they didn't! I bought my first PC with a pirated version of MS-DOS included and then bought pirated versions of Windows afterwards. Now I'm happily using Ubuntu 5.04 and I'm waiting for 5.10.
Me too, welcome to the real world... :)
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I've never had Google go down on me for anything. Most of an office suite could be client-side code anyway with not a lot of load on the server once loaded.
I'll give you an example where MIcrosoft has already lost to an online competitor--Salesforce.com has been eating Microsoft CRM for lunch. As their CEO put it, Microsoft still wishes the Internet had never been invented. Some vague new update to Microsoft CRM is scheduled for 2006, but I doubt it will happen.
"Sufferin' succotash."
We all did once [for about 12 months]...
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. But I don't work in IT and in the last three places I worked there was no OSS in use whatsoever - nobody can pay for techies with enough brainpower to even hack Firefox. In my professional experience, it's just not there.
When I am let off the leash then the Linux servers appear immediately - a quick and cheap way to build a server and so share filkes with the Windows clients and get a web presence on the end of an ADSL connection (with the help of dyndns) but these opportunities are few and far between and it seems everywhere I work I know more about computers than the IT staff.
As soon as they get laid without paying for it.
Is there any other reason nerds need that much money?
[or...]
You're only as young as the girl you feel, and a few billion buys a lot of 18 year old hookers.
Blank until
Haha nice yes let's...I was going to say the same thing but look someone beat me to it! "It's" is the contraction of "it is" and "its" is possessive. strange, I know.
The unsinkable Vistanic is launched. ;)
(Written from the safe deck of a Debian cruiser.)
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
Nine year old children can get that right. What does that say about Slashdot 'editors'?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I find the comment from George Colony at Forrester that it was a mistake for MS to drop stock options hilarious! WTF! MS was FORCED to drop stock options because thier stock was not climbing anymore therefore options were not as attractive to prospective employees. It wasn't a mistake on thier part, unless you are going to argue the whole business model is flawed because they weren't growing as fast anymore. It was beyond thier control, what do you expect? Indefinite growth? In fact if anything they compensated with options for TO long they now have unhappy employees (my friends included) who are on cash poor option rich employement and are leaving in droves after believing they got "screwed" by MS.
When I interviewed with MS out of college I (and many others) specifically refused option loaded offers. Simply put we could get a better return investing more cash elsewhere in place of those options.
All of us here on Slashdot know is just downright economically IMPOSSIBLE for MS to get the kind of growth that Google can and will over the next several years, the market is simply not that big! Therfore options as MS has traditionally granted are not really even a CHOICE for MS. They will have to resort to ane ESPP style structure. Any changes in MS stock price from now on will be small potatoes compared to the past, options will make no more money for MS than they can for any other large company. And eventually Google will reach this point also. This is just another marketer who has lost all touch with reality. *end rant*
No need to worry about future company profits.
First they're going to make the same promise they've made for years and tell people that the latest version of Windows is going to be so much more secure than the previous version. And people will buy it. They they will buy the latest version of Office other necessary software packages.
Then they intend to keep reselling software to people. That includes updated versions of Office to support DRM. Updated versions of Windows to support DRM. As the DRM "standards" are updated the can keep selling updated versions of the software because they will be able to hold people's data as hostage. Especially when they move to a subscription only model. Which will happen eventually.
Thanks to their DRM software they will be able to effectively keep people from writing "free" software because they will sell a digital signatures to keep Windows from screaming about unverified or unlicensed software. If you do decide to license their digital signature software, you will eventually have to pay a maintence fee to keep the signature current. In fact you may even have to pay a maintence fee so that you can send out patches for your own software.
In short DRM will ensure future profits, while reducing the corporate need for innovation.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
" I'll give you an example where MIcrosoft has already lost to an online competitor--Salesforce.com has been eating Microsoft CRM for lunch. As their CEO put it, Microsoft still wishes the Internet had never been invented. Some vague new update to Microsoft CRM is scheduled for 2006, but I doubt it will happen."
I don't know about that...
Microsoft doesn't really have a strong CRM presence so I don't know if salesforce.com is doing much to them. If anything, I think salesforce.com is probably hurting the main CRM vendors, as well as database companies like Oracle, Siebel, etc.
But it looks like MS is going to push hard in the low to mid CRM market so we'll see what happens. As far as I'm concerned, MS isn't even a major vendor in the CRM market...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Gmail actually craps out fairly often, something like once a month. At least it does for me.
I highly doubt that... Google is primarily a web based business with literally no development tools or software. Microsoft, in contrast, is primarily a development company. Google is more like a quasi-media company than a tech company right now. They make nearly all their money on advertising--not on software or services--so they are not really directly competing.
Just to see what I mean, consider this. Microsoft is highly influenced by the sales of PCs, software, and computer services. If computer sales goes down, Microsoft is negatively impacted. In contrast, Google doesn't really depend all that much on computer sales, etc. Instead, Google is heavily impacted by the advertising market. If there is a downturn in the economy and advertising gets cut (eg. recession causing many small and medium businesses to close; large corporations cutting back advertising; etc) then Google will be negatively impacted.
I'm not saying that Google doesn't use software development, or have any R&D or stuff like that. All I'm saying is that Google and Microsoft are almost in two different industries. It's sort of like comparing Amazon to Microsoft. Even though Amazon spent a lot on R&D and hires a lot of programmers and so on, they are really a retailer.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Salesforce has something like 75% to 80% of the market compared to Microsoft CRM's 35%. Microsoft CRM hasn't been updated in ages.
See this Forbes article for the statement from Salesforce's CEO. This info also comes from blogs like Mini-MSFT.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I'm not disagreeing with your number. Salesforce DOES dominate. All I'm saying is that Microsoft hasn't really done a targetted push yet. The real battle is after Microsoft actually decides to start focusing on this area--all this time they really haven't cared much...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
I hate that rule. It is silly and illogical. In english the apostrophe operator is overloaded. It can indicate the possessive case, or contractions.
Thus when a conflict arises (what does the apostraphe indicate in a particular instance), it is reasonable to make a rule explicitly declaring what the apostraphe means.
In english, the rule says that the apostraphe operator, when applied in "it's" indicates a contraction. This leaves an ambiguity in the word "its" between the possessive and the plural. Does "its" refer to something belonging to "it", or does it refer to multiple it entities?
Consider the fact that contractions are fundamentally slang. Although they have been incorporated into the language, in formal writing they are still discouraged. Thus it is surprising that distinguishing between plurals and possessives (both full-fledged elements of formal writing) is considered less important than distinguishing between plurals and contractions.
Furthermore, the rule for "it's" breaks from the standard rules for apostraphe use in other words. Joe's house belongs to Joe.
It is like the people making up the rules got it right in the general case, and then they decided to make a random stupid exception to the rule specifically for the word "it".
And can't be used without an active internet connection.
Not to mention there's that whole "renting software" thing that is supposed to be A Bad Thing (but presumably it's ok when Google does it ?).
On the upside, it would allow for a whole new range of excuses students can use for not doing their homework....
So, it's more like the rule-plus-exception you inferred simply isn't the real rule at all.
The difference is that our, his, her, etc aren't nouns in their own right, whereas 'it' is.
nobody can pay for techies with enough brainpower to even hack Firefox.
You're on to something there, except its not that nobody can, its that nobody will. But they're getting what they paid for.
There are actually quite a few Linux advocates in IT my company (a very large company). The only problem is that a lot of the Windows people here are actively hostile to linux and refuse to look at anything new. I have to (or choose to) know both Linux and Windows, but they don't have the guts to even try Linux.
I'm pretty sure that some businesses would realize that they were already just renting, only from Microsoft. If they don't upgrade (and agree to before even knowing what they're getting) for $$$$$$, lots of things break. Google would possibly offer their office suite for free, or, at least, much cheaper than M$$$$$$. Even if it was a small monthly fee, it would be much cheaper than Microsoft, and it would probably be better and updated more.
Waiiii!!!!!! I have bad karma!
Geeze guys.
But "her" IS just as much of a noun as "it" is: "I saw her" and "I saw it". I hope that you'd write "The ball is hers" and not "The ball is her's".
It is not a true noun as it can only be used as an object. "The ball hit her", OK. "Her hit the ball"? Doesn't work.
OK, here's the pronoun chart of subject nouns (I am here), object nouns (Give it to ME), adjectives (That is MY ball), and possessives (The ball is MINE) as best as I can render them without a table:
subj obj adj poss
I me my mine
you you your yours
he him his his
she her her hers
it it its its
we us our ours
you you your yours
they them their theirs
Not an apostrophe in sight! As you move from the third to the fourth column, you generally append an "s" without an apostrophe. So, none of the possessives that end in an "s" (yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs) take an apostrophe.
It's true that the only third-column word that already ends with an "s" is "its", so maybe that's where the confusions comes from as you move to the fourth column. (Well, actually, there's also "his" which doesn't turn into "his's" or "hi's" or "he's", either.)
The "hers" example was supposed to help make this point; your subject vs. object objection makes your proposed rule even more special-casey than the (incorrect) one you were arguing against to begin with.
If English were more regular, perhaps we'd be discussing the incorrect apostrophe in the possessives you's / he's / she's / we's / they's.
You need more digits. Or a google search as opposed to a calculation.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.