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Microsoft's Nightmare Scenario
unityxxx wrote to mention a News.com article about Microsoft's nightmare scenario - the Web as the next platform. From the article: "The nightmare is inching closer to reality and Microsoft execs are apparently paying attention to the decade-old alert. As part of a management shuffle, Microsoft said Tuesday it would make hosted services a more strategic part of the company and fold its MSN Web portal business into its platform product development group, where Windows is developed. Another memo, called 'Google--The Winner Takes All (And Not Just Search),' is also making the rounds. This internal memo, written in 2005, argues that Google threatens Microsoft and the company's crown jewel, Windows."
Easy life over there at news.com -- pull up old articles from 1996, replace "Netscape" with "Google", "Marc Andreesen" with "Larry Page" and "bring your dog to work" with "20% of employees time working on their own projects". The "nightmare scenario" line in the headline, both here and there, even comes out of a Microsoft memo from 1995.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Yeah that's what I want, all my applications to be server side web-based. That way I can't stop them when they "call home" and report back things like what I'm searching for on the net, the names of the files I'm opening. And I can't stop them from a hacker switching out a DLL on the server side suddenly corrupting or infecting my data. AV and firewalls become useless at that point, and the way modern apps try agressively to monitor what you do and call home, I'm not comfortable with losing the ability to control them.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
Why? As you say, much of the world doesn't have access to gas, water, electricity, telephone and all that, but doesn't that actually show that not all the world has to have access to something in order for it to be the next "big thing", so to speak?
Of course, it would be good if all the world did have access to these things, but even though it's not the case, we not only do but in fact have become so dependent on these things that we can hardly imagine a life without them. It doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that broadband Internet access, and applications built on top of it (not applications as in "computer programs", but applications in a more general sense), will soon become... well, not quite ubiquitious, of course, as certain groups will probably not have an interest in these things (my grandmother, for example, while being quite fascinated by computers and the Internet has categorically said that she won't ever get one), but widespread enough that they will reach the same level of fundamentality (I hope that's a word *s*) that electricity, water etc. do.
But to stay on-topic a bit, I think that M$ is, above all, showing one thing here: namely, that they still don't understand that not everything is "all-or-nothing" and that it's perfectly possible to coexist and compete without every player but one going bankrupt or being bought after a couple of years. It's understandable that they don't understand, of course, given their history (they were effectively granted a monopoly by IBM, and have since tried to maintain that monopoly at all costs and to also expand it into other markets), but it ain't true: it *is* possible to coexist.
I wonder if they'll ever understand that.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Sounds pretty damn scary to me, too.
...to name a few problems individuals and corporations will have.
Why does everyone try to make the web more than what it is- an interactive information platform? Just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD.
Please help metamoderate.
Microsoft is boring. When's the last time microsoft produced a cool product that captured your imagination? What is vista? why should I care? office 12 ? Menus are now "ribbons" .. woo hoo
I can't wait to install that baby and stay up all night playing with it and then show it to all my friends and family.
When I read "google" in a headline, I pay more attention...I am thinking "what cool thing has google com up with now?" google earth, cool , installed it, showed it to my elderly parents and they were impressed; Adwords,Adsense - cool how can I earn some extra bucks playing with this.
google wifi? google tv? sounds interesting. Go Google.
No kidding about not sharing their billions with their employees... you're probably aware that Microsoft grades their employees' performance on a bell curve and pay raises depend on where you sit on the bell curve... one of my friends was ranked in the top 10% bracket and received a 1.5% pay increase in return. Given that the inflation rate last year was about 3.5%, that really amounts to a 2% pay cut in return for being a top 10% employee.
When a company first goes public people are excited and the possibilites are limitless. But as time goes by Google will be increasingly pressured to cut costs, lose the fat, concentrate on the core revenue earner (ads) and kill off any development projects that are not generating revenue, and maximize the revenue of popular features like Google Maps (expect to see advertising attached to the maps sometime in the near future).
What it comes down to is Google sells ads. That's its core business. Google is a media company. Reinventing a company is expensive and dangerous, few survive reinvention, that's why Google will always be a media company and Microsoft will always be a software company and Ford will always sell cars.
We're only just now beginning to see #4 and #5 come into play. For example, FireFox has clearly hit #4 with respect to MSIE. Linux has done a good job at chipping away at Microsoft in the server market. MySQL has left Oracle bleeding red (even though they're only at #3). Apache has decimated the market for commercial web servers like IIS. OpenOffice has significantly chipped away at MS Office in some circles (but not in the general user case yet). Audacity has become a mainstream app on home recording bulletin boards (even among non-geeks). The list goes on
I'm not saying I think commercial software is dead. Far from it. But companies that treat customers like a revenue source (e.g. web services to replace software) are not a direction that can reasonably compete with open source. The only way to compete with open source is by doing a better job. Where web services -can- compete is by providing useful services that can't practically be provided by most individuals in their own homes---email, web servers. e-commerce sites, maybe even data backups.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.