Challenges To Microsoft For 2006

TekkenLaw writes "Directions on Microsoft, a site which claims to be 'the only independent organization in the world devoted exclusively to tracking Microsoft', has published a list of 10 challenges for 2006 for Microsoft as a company. Top strategic issues in all areas of operation from OS to gaming are covered." From the article: "Windows Vista could offer large organizations improvements in software development, security, reliability, systems management, and user interface. However, public demonstrations have been full of cool graphics effects and consumer features that probably turn off more IT staff than they attract, and sales of Windows upgrade rights to corporations have been disappointing. In 2006, Microsoft has to settle on a feature set for Vista that appeals to enterprises, explain clearly what that feature set is, and reveal what PC hardware and other infrastructure corporations require to reap the benefits." Actually presented in a fairly respectful way, it's interesting to see the overall picture we've reported on for the past year condensed down into one page.

Comments

This is all wrong

[endrue]

Actually presented in a fairly respectful way...

Fairly respectful!!??? This is slashdot, we want meat with the blood still in it.

Re:This is all wrong

[tpgp]

it's interesting to see the overall picture we've reported on for the past year condensed down into one page.

Reported? This is slashdot! We want baseless speculation, rumour mongering and idle gossip (and possibly links to others reporting)

I like the pretty lights

[RingDev]

"However, public demonstrations have been full of cool graphics effects and consumer features that probably turn off more IT staff than they attract"

With the exception of Windows application developers who have been battling with GDI(+) for the last 10 years. The new graphics core of windows has been needed for a long time now.

-Rick

Re:I like the pretty lights

[inphinity]

With the exception of Windows application developers who have been battling with GDI(+) for the last 10 years. The new graphics core of windows has been needed for a long time now.

True, but don't you think a new file system, API structure, or network stack would bring even more dev/IT people to the table? Consumer sales are nice, but it's IT sales that drive the industry.

Re:I like the pretty lights

[JanneM]

True, but don't you think a new file system, API structure, or network stack would bring even more dev/IT people to the table?

But just how well do they integrate with non-MS systems? Like it or not, but having multiple systems is increasingly the reality, and nobody will want to support or develop for something that can't be transferred or interfaced with other systems.

Re:I like the pretty lights

[toddbu]

Consumer sales are nice, but it's IT sales that drive the industry.

Well, depends on how you look at it. Microsoft displaced IBM in corporate American because it had broad consumer appeal. Some of those consumers are IT people, and they in turn help drive the decision making process for their companies. So you need broad consumer appeal.

Personally, I think Microsoft has fallen down by focusing too much on corporate America. Don't get me wrong - I'm not an anti-corporate guy and this isn't a corporate bashing session. It's just that if you look at Microsoft's early history, it was all about "sticking it to the man". Word processors, once the domain of large systems, was pushed to the desktop, along with spreadsheets and other corporate applications. I worked in a company where we effectively neutralized our big iron with a single desktop application. So for Microsoft to now ignore the average Joe and focus exclusively on what large companies need is totally stupid. What Microsoft needs to do is return to its roots and continue to focus on what the consumer really needs - a machine that just works. No more reboots, spyware, rootkits, or spam. Plug it in and it runs. If Microsoft could build a PC that's as reliable as my refrigerator then they would once again be in a dominate industry position.

Re:I like the pretty lights

[kawika]

Hey, rework the APIs all you want, if you think that's what stands between developers and quality applications. If you're talking about the behind-the-APIs code, change all that too since it shouldn't affect developers or users. No matter what, though, all the old APIs have to stay there for compat reasons.

The changes to the user interface really grind my gears. No, not the transparency and cooler icons, I don't really care about those one way or another because I can turn them off. Vista has moved a lot of the common tasks around for reasons that make no sense. It's harder to find most system settings because they are several clicks deeper in the UI. Who does this benefit? It's not better for experts, who already had figured out the old locations whether they made sense or not. It's not better for Grandma, who *still* can't find or change any settings; now her brainy grandson can't help her either. It's not better for new users--are there any new Windows users anymore?

Re:I like the pretty lights

[Luscious868]

"If Microsoft could build a PC that's as reliable as my refrigerator then they would once again be in a dominate industry position."

Apple has already done it but price and compatibility matter. As long as a Dell w/ Windows is cheaper than a Mac w/ OS X companies that run Windows will probably continue to run Windows. It has it downsides, but I think for most corporate types unless there is a large cost savings they think the devil you know is better than the devil you don't.

Re:I like the pretty lights

[RingDev]

The GDI API was revamped a while back (for XP I believe) to GDI+. It's nothing fancy, it still uses the processor only for all work, there is no hardware acceleration, and all graphics are handled by an application's primary thread. GDI's craptacular performance requires developers to create double buffers and perform some nasty cross thread work to keep a GUI seemlessly updated while preforming proc intensive or IO wait threads in the background.

Ever notice how sometimes a window stops responding while an app is accessing a network share or disk? That's because the primary thread is running both the IO process (which hits a wait state while waiting on the stream) and the Graphics process. There are kludges that have been getting stuck into GDI to make it smoother arround this. It is still a piece of crap, a nicely polished and well used piece of crap, but a piece of crap none the less. I unfortunately haven't had much time to developer in the new graphics system, but if it can do even just a fraction of what I have heard, it will be a huge boon to windows application graphics. Good bye grey boxes!

-Rick

Re:I like the pretty lights

[kawika]

I think Microsoft has fallen down by focusing too much on corporate America.

Corps and individuals want different things from their apps, and they even want different apps in many cases. Corps want everything to be centrally installable, configurable, and controllable by their IT dept to conform to company policy. In the individual case, the only centrally controlled PCs are the 0wned ones hacked by some eastern European crime cartel.

Look at it through the lens of a corp-focused company, though, and there is an opportunity. Many individuals want their PCs to be managed by someone else, either to save the hassle or because they don't know what they're doing. What if Microsoft was the central manager? You'd have to feed them a LOT of data about what was going on in your PC, just like IT management. And you'd have to pay them a maintenance fee. Basically that's what is going on with Windows OneCare.

Firefox

[HUADPE]

Nowhere in the article does it even mention Firefox or indeed, any browsers at all. I would say that fighting for market share of browsers is now (again) a real challenge for Microsoft.

Re:Firefox

[TopShelf]

That's because in the grand scheme of the business, the "browser war" is a border skirmish that has very little to no effect on the bottom line. Delivering Vista to market and actually getting businesses on board with it is far more important.

#1 Justifying Censorship

[digitaldc]

#1 Convincing people that their software truly allows people to innovate and create (as it does in some countries,) yet at the same time doing the opposite by censoring and restricting users in other countries.

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/weblogs/st ory/0,14024,1506602,00.html

Mostly fixing past mistakes

[olddotter]

I would add to the list, cut down on the number of different versions of Vista. If they don't Windows will be more fractured than the number of distributions of *BSD and Linux on x86.

Ok so I exaggerate a little bit. There are hundreds of distributions, but I think there are less than 6 major distributions that have significant desktop share.

Re:Mostly fixing past mistakes

[Anonymous Coward]

"I would add to the list, cut down on the number of different versions of Vista."

The many versions of Vista appear to be there to try to give an artificially generated sense of value for the high cost of the complete version of the system. Like they have been trying to do with the overseas version - with little success it appears.

Don't expect realism.

[SatanicPuppy]

I mean, one of their goals is "Take Vista into the Boardroom"...A reasonable company would say, "Make sure Vista gets released this year."

Small to Medium Business

[inphinity]

Microsoft upgrade license sales disappointing?
Gee, wonder why that could be?

Perhaps it's the fact that a small business (like the one I work for) that uses Exchange would have to pay approximately $10,000 in software licensing costs for an "upgrade". Not to mention the new hardware that would be required to run the insanely gluttonous software itself.

Compare that to having a clever sysadmin and an installed base of RedHat Enterprise Linux with sendmail? Even with our yearly subscription costs of ~$600, it would take more than 15 years for the costs to equal out.

Give me the OSS headaches and clever admins any day...

Re:Small to Medium Business

[MSFanBoi2]

Never mind the fact that your install of Sendmail doesn't have 1/5th the features of Exchange 2003 that most companies use quite often and are dependent on. Who needs calendaring?
Who needs wireless email?
Who needs single instance storage?
I can go on and on... Sendmail is good as a mail gateway service, but not much else for a real company.

Perhaps if small businesses like the one you worked for bothered investigating Select and Enterprise agreements (which do exist for even smaller companies) the costs for upgrades is very small over three years.

Re:Small to Medium Business

[SatanicPuppy]

I agree with you, but you're comparing apples to oranges. The pointy hairs all want shared calendars and the other flashy sparkly crap that Exchange provides.

Open source still does not have a good answer to Exchange...You can say Phpgroupware and such, but try to convince people who've used Exchange to use those products? It's seriously uphill, because even though they're cheaper, they just don't work as well on the user end, no matter how well they perform on the server end.

Re:Small to Medium Business

[gad_zuki!]

Only on slashdot would that comment be considered insightful.

Where are you going to get your groupware from? Don't like paying for exchange, then pay for something like *shudder* Scalix.

Exchange isn't just an email server, it also does groupware, unlike Sendmail. If your company only does email and bought Exchange then guess what? Its your company's fault for buying a Lexus when all they needed was a Hyundai. Sorry, but you can't blame MS for this one.

Re:Small to Medium Business

[tres]

Who needs calendaring?

Using Sendmail does not imply that calendaring is not available.

One quick google search using "outlook calendaring open source" yielded this among other items:
http://openconnector.org/

Who needs wireless email?

Hmmm... I guess need Exchange to read email on my wireless phone. Guess I'll have to tell my people that they can't send emails to me any longer because we use Sendmail as our MTA.

Who needs signle instance storage?

Not me.

Who needs to resurrect messages from a corrupt data store?

Not me.

Who needs to figure out how to keep the mail server running once you've filled the disks with a massive file that you can't move to a larger disk (because it's being accessed)?

Not me.

Who needs to figure out why people intermittently can't connect to the Exchange server anymore when all the licenses are used?

Not me.

Who wants to deal with departments of employees calling with the same question while you wait for more client access licenses to be purchased?

Not me.

Who wants to figure out how to upgrade from SBS to an even more expensive version of Exchange (only to find out that you can't "upgrade")?

Not me.

I can go on and on.

Exchange is a fine product for some limited settings. For the rest of us, there are feature-for-feature open source alternatives that will work with Outhouse. They don't entail rediculous licensing problems inherent in Exchange and are engineered better.

Re:Small to Medium Business

[MSFanBoi2]

One quick google search using "outlook calendaring open source" yielded this among other items: http://openconnector.org/

Have you USED openconnector before? It's in early Alpha, and requires a whole lot more than Sendmail (as the original poster mentioned, but hey, it's Microsoft bashing, so it's OK not to read the OP right?)

Who needs to resurrect messages from a corrupt data store?

I've been managing Exchange since 5.0. I can count the number of times I've had to rescue anything from a corrupt data store on two fingers (in 12 years). Each time only took a few minutes cause I was intelligent enough to follow standard/best practices.

Who needs to figure out how to keep the mail server running once you've filled the disks with a massive file that you can't move to a larger disk (because it's being accessed)?
Again, if one were to follow standard best practices, this ISN'T an issue. It's also readily apparent you've never used Exchange before, because moving mailboxes is simple. VERY simple. Move to a new storage group, or even a new server with a couple of mouse clicks. Yes it is that easy. Again, hell it's bashing Microsoft, so don't let little things like the truth get in your way m'kay?

Who needs to figure out why people intermittently can't connect to the Exchange server anymore when all the licenses are used?

Licensing is part of the Microsoft world, it's not that difficult. Nor does it take much time. Most companies that use MS products know how licensing work...

Who wants to figure out how to upgrade from SBS to an even more expensive version of Exchange (only to find out that you can't "upgrade")?

You know how easy it is to add new Exchange servers to an SBS Exchange environment? Very. Buy a new copy of Exchange an add to the SBS Exchange org.

Exchange is a fine product for some limited settings. For the rest of us, there are feature-for-feature open source alternatives that will work with Outhouse. They don't entail rediculous licensing problems inherent in Exchange and are engineered better.

If that really was the case, why are not more people moving to them...

Re:Small to Medium Business

[tres]

Thank you for your response. I'd like to elucidate my point of view for a moment as it appears that I've done a poor job of explaining myself.

1) Microsoft licensing and Microsoft software can not be distinguished from one another.

2) There is a glut of technical problems with Microsoft software that I touched on as it pertains to Exchange; it is well documented (Google "Microsoft vulnerabilty"). Although part of my post focuses on the inherent problems that Microsoft licensing proves to be, I believe it's unfair to characterize it as if it is exclusively focused on the licensing problems.

It seems that my mention of numerous technical problems was not enough, or was not focused upon in my response. I will work to provide a more robust set of technical as well as licensing issues. I took it for granted that the copious documented technical problems that Microsoft software has historically suffered would provide an analog to my focus on licensing.

There is at least one well known (at least in my circles) alternative to Exchange. Take a look at this:

http://www.novell.com/products/openexchange/

Feature for feature it has everything Exchange has (except the licensing :) ).

Re:Small to Medium Business

[jschoenberg]

Careful of promises by Novell! That product, without any doubt whatsoever, does not support many features that Exchange has, as mentioned in many other threads on the Slashdot article. Including my company's absolute requirement: Cellphone access to the email server, including email, schedule, contacts and tasks.

Independent?

[fuzzy12345]

Dude, if you're devoted exclusively to tracking Microsoft, how likely is is that you're independent? I'm thinkking you come to the table with a POV (i.e. bias), otherwise why would you devote your time exclusively to tracking Microsoft in the first place?

Oh well. If a country's citizens think 'bipartisan' and 'independent' are the same thing, who am I to complain that the concept of independence has slipped a little?

Re:Independent?

[Red Flayer]

"I'm thinkking you come to the table with a POV (i.e. bias)"

Anyone and everyone who has had even the tiniest bit of exposure to something has bias.

" Dude, if you're devoted exclusively to tracking Microsoft, how likely is is that you're independent?"

Independent != unbiased. Independent == not funded by MS or a competitor.

"why would you devote your time exclusively to tracking Microsoft in the first place?"

Because it's too much for one person to track every company? Because it's an area of interest?

"Oh well. If a country's citizens think 'bipartisan' and 'independent' are the same thing, who am I to complain that the concept of independence has slipped a little?"

Pot, meet kettle. Political independence/bipartisanship is not comparable to journalistic independence. Until you understand what independent means in terms of journalism, please don't bother ranting about how everyone else's view of journalistic independence doesn't meet your flawed idea of what it is.

It's one thing to say that the author in question doesn't have journalistic integrity for reasons A,B, and C. It's another thing to say they are inherently biased because they choose to focus on one subject. The best journalists will focus on a subject and still maintain objectivity, which is totally different from independence.

Promises, promises

[bradbeattie]

Windows Vista could offer large organizations improvements in software development, security, reliability, systems management, and user interface.

Wow! Look at that long list of positive attributes! I almost forgot that (A) it isn't out yet and (B) Microsoft has set a precedent against having those things. Look, until its widely released we won't really know the impact of Vista. Until then, it's just promises, promises.

They forgot...

[elbenito69]

Where's my Flight Sim 2006, damnit?

Re:Firefox - MS can't beat it.

[JLavezzo]

Perhaps they've concluded that Firefox will continue to erode IE's market share?

Don't screw it up!

[bms20]

Actually, I'm a bit worried that they will wreck what is great about windows: Its the same (for the most part) where ever its installed. It might be hard for the slashdot community to recognize a non-computer expert, but there are a lot of them. Many of them run windows XP in the 2000 look-alike mode - specifically so that they need not learn a new "look and feel". MacOS concentrates on bling only - and this is where it fails - general users don't want zoom up icons, pan out desktops etc. What they want is just a simple environment that looks good and works the way they expect it to - and with M$ changing this it could cause many more people to stick with XP or win2k then they expect. I really wish that they'd fix the security in XP, and improve it rather than concentrate on the bling. -Brett

Re:Don't screw it up!

[llthomps]

MacOS concentrates on bling only - and this is where it fails - general users don't want zoom up icons, pan out desktops etc.

Have you ever used Mac OS? The bling is there, of course. But the Mac OS right now is considerably more robust (and predictable, for that matter) than Windows has ever been in its history.

Re:Don't screw it up!

[truthsearch]

OS X does not concentrate on bling only. But I won't argue the point with someone who obviously hasn't used it much.

ANY OS will look the same on every machine. I can put gnome on 1000 desktops and make it look identical across every one. But many people adjust visual settings to their tastes. And that's a good thing for individual users. It makes them more productive. Windows changes UIs with every major release, and all I see is users struggling to adjust. I've gotten many people to switch from Windows to OS X and none of them are disappointed.

Re:Don't screw it up!

[C0rinthian]

What they want is just a simple environment that looks good and works the way they expect it to

You know, that's exactly how I would describe MacOS.

The fight's not yet necessary

[truthsearch]

They still have 85%+ market share. And it's still installed by default in every Windows install. They may loose a few percent here or there, but as long as they make their browser the fastest in the next release of Windows they won't have to do anything else to fight for market share. You give users too much credit.

Fast Food Analogies

[Tony]

So, you're saying Microsoft is the McDonald's of computing? I'd have to say you are right. It's're everywhere, the most-used, not very good for you, give syou diarrhea, and really doesn't taste that good. But, it's everywhere, and people (who are afraid of change), choose to use it because it has familiar icons.

I always considered Microsoft Windows the Budweiser of operating systems, but being the McDonald's is about the same.

Re:Fast Food Analogies

[mattwarden]

Actually, a lot of people buy McDonalds because it's cheap and they can have "dinner" for about $3.

Bye bye, analogy.

Google?

[vrta]

Where's the f****** kill google objective? "Microsoft's online strategy has had more facelifts than an aging movie star. The latest strategy could deal with the Google threat, but..." Ah... they are waiting for Duke Nukem to do it for them...

Re:Google?

[yuretz]

Nice topic for the next slashdot poll.
Who will f****ng bury google in the near future?

1. Duke Nukem
2. Steve Ballmer
2. I will do it
4. Steve Nukem, Duke Ballmer and Cowboy Neal

Biggest Challenge For 2006? Xbox 360

[Anonymous Coward]

The software upgrade is a larger and more serious long term problem for Microsoft.

However, if we are talking about just 2006, the biggest problem for Microsoft is what to do about the 360 problem.

They really have three options:

1) Pull the plug on the whole thing. Take the short term PR and ego hit and make a clean break and move on.

2) Pull out of Japan in some hopefully face saving way and try to survive on just the US and European markets.

3) Pull the plug on the 360 hardware and refocus the Xbox group on trying to create a revenue stream out the 360 dev tools and online stuff for the existing x86 game market.

None of those are attractive options, but option 4) of just soldiering on just isn't a realistinc option.

The days of throwing billions at a market are over for Microsoft. If you don't believe that, you need someone to explain to you about the 11 billion shares of Microsoft stock out there, Microsoft being forced to keep raising the dividen they are paying to those 11 billion shares, the current stock buyback, an so on.

If you can get a grasp of the magnitude of what is going on with Microsoft's financials right now, you will quickly see how little cash Microsoft actually has throw around.

They forgot one.

[FrankieBoy]

11) Stop being evil.

Where's "Stop breaking the Law"?

[Andy_R]

Microsoft have royally pissed off the EU, and many other jusrisdictions with their continual and unrepentant monopoly abuse, but are still in denial. Their current strategy seems to be to drag the court cases out forever, and hope they will go away. Eventually, they will have to face up to the law, pay huge fines and (here's the challenge) change their culture to a more law-abiding style.

Re:Where's "Stop breaking the Law"?

[Andy_R]

It seems that rampant Xenophobia is alive, well and being modded up on Slashdot.

As a business owner located in the EU, I'd be very interested to see evidence of any 'harsh and irrational restraints' that I'm under, as I'm not currently aware of any.

The EU monopoly abuse laws that Microsoft are so dismissive of are pretty much exactly the same as the US, it's just that we might actually be enforcing them.

As for unemployment rates, our 4.7% unemployment rate here in Britain is lower than the 5.5% in the USA. The high rates (which are lower than 10% according to the US Govt.) in France and Germany have far more to do with local left-wing economic policies and the absorption of communist East Germany respectively than EU-wide laws.

Top 10 list if done by Slashdot...

[Anonymous Coward]

10. Stop sucking so bad
9. Do more testing
8. Stop sucking so bad
7. Be more open with your code base and licensing
6. Stop sucking so bad
5. Stop sucking so bad
4. Get a foam chair for Steve Ballmer. In fact, get everyone foam chairs and start having Ballmer Fridays where employees can release stress on each other.
3. Don't be too hasty to start any more new projects; you need to put a lot of energy into existing projects to make them better....with one exception: A Microsoft breakfast cereal with crunchy window banners and marshmallow blue screens could put a couple more dollars in your pockets.
2. Stop being evil
1. It's 2006!!! Where is my flying car!?!?

Respectful?

[Uukrul]

Windows Vista could offer large organizations improvements in software development, security, reliability, systems management, and user interface. However, public demonstrations have been full of cool graphics effects and consumer features

This isn't be respectful, this is an advertisement.

It's like when you have a job interview and they ask you to say something "bad" about yourself.
The answers are "You work too hard", "You often take on more work than you should", "You make too many demands on yourself", ...very bad indeed.

Re:Respectful?

[mattwarden]

It's like when you have a job interview and they ask you to say something "bad" about yourself. The answers are "You work too hard", "You often take on more work than you should", "You make too many demands on yourself",

Yeah, or: I tend to have sexual relations with the cleaning staff, petty cash tends to inexplicably lose money on my watch, when I get angry I open up a console in a random directory and type rm -rf, and I sometimes play WoW when the boss isn't looking.

Mactel Challenge?

[Trurl's Machine]

I think MacOS for Intel will be a major challenge in 2006. Even the cracked developer built has already gained some popularity. This January we are likely to see the official end-user release. Should it be cracked as well, it might seriously challenge Windows domination among home users who don't worry too much about legal issues, don't want the whole Windows hassle but still want to run natively "Photoshop" or "Warcraft".

Don't count them out yet

[frozenray]

I know most people here would like to see Microsoft going down in flames and F/OSS taking over the world.

Wishful thinking, I say.

They must still have some aces down their corporate sleeves because it appears that they're still hiring people like crazy: a friend of mine who deals in office furniture over in Redmond tells me that they're delivering chairs to Microsoft headquarters as fast as they can manufacture them!

Re:Don't count them out yet

[ngm]

Enh, those are probably just for the Ballmer-mandated, company-wide chair throwing sessions. They break a lot chairs that way you know...

;)

Re:What Vista Needs

[amliebsch]

cat (isn't there a DOS equiv to cat...?)

Yes, it's type.

sleeping at the weel.

[CDPatten]

So many of you guys have been bashing MS so much you missed what they've done. You are so busy saying everything they do sucks and is going to fail, but history shows us that is not the case. They have started to successfully expand into seemingly everthing and you guys are still hung up Windows 95.

Microsoft is now in our cars (e.g. BMWs), and before you idiots say it's just windows media player let me stop you. It is not. I own a new 5 series and it controls climate (heat distribution in the seats, individual vent temp and power, etc.), navigation, alarm and lock settings, media, and countless other settings, including pretty good voice activation with cell phone integration.

Microsoft is in our ATMs, and some pretty impressive stuff coming out soon too (take a look at some of Bank of America's projects).

Mobile 5 for the PDA has push and perfect outlook/exchange integration. Not to mention it seamlessly integrates photos with contacts in outlook and the phone. Mobile 5 integrates the CE and Smartphone platforms and is FAR MORE STABLE then previous OSes. RIM isn't going to be able to beat that, and even Palm has started to give up on the Palm OS (Treo 700 anyone?)

Xbox 360 has a big lead on PS3 (millions of units) and despite your gripes, it is a good platform. PS3 may have blu-ray, but I will be able to buy a player for a couple hundred bucks. PS3 does not have LIVE. LIVE is a kickass groundbfreaking online community, and Sony has announced they will not be doing anything like that. That is a good reason why MS will overtake or drastically close the gap with this next gen war. Online gaming and updates are a big deal and one account one bill one reputation is way better then a new one for every game you have. Also note that the majority of current games use about half of 1 side of the dvd. That gives MS's dual layer about 4 times the space of current generations. Blu-ray is bigger, but if its not used its not a big plus.

Media Center, IPTV, etc. Media Center is decent, sold millions, but in Vista it kick ass. It is also going to be standard with every version of windows except corporate. That is big news, it means MS will be tightly integrated into home entertainment selling 100s of millions of home installations of Vista. IPTV, what can say other then Verizon and SBC were so blown away with MS's next gen platform they agreed to exclusive contracts to use MS technology for almost a decade (this is why we are getting fiber to our doorsteps out here in the east. Verizon wants to start using MS's IPTV.)

Vista, despite much of the nay-saying is great. You can say they are playing catch up or whatever the hell you want, but your tantrums mean nothing to end-users who will be very happy with it. From built in anti-spyware, to great IE upgrades, to cool screen effects. Forget all that, and take a look at the Home Automation Vista will enable... its great. MS and GE have been working on this stuff for years and much of their hard work will be debuting in Vista (not OSX or Linux).

Development tools. Visual Studio 2005 is really good. Some of you can say it bloated or whatever, but the fact remains you can program in dozens of computer languages natively for windows. That is cool. The controls, the database tools, etc. are all very good. Check out Sparkle, pretty cool. Forget webuse, you can put that in your Apps without any problem. OSX offers no tools comprable to Visual Studio, and while Linux has some good stuff, it just isn't on the same level. Not to mention developing for all the distros sucks.

On the Server side. Windows 2003 is making big strides; 64 bit alone is excellent. You can run 32bit apps with no degradation on the 64 bit server OS. That is real nice. They are starting to get into clustering, and don't think for a second that Longhorn server isn't going to steal some Linux clustering market share. You can still cry that Linux is better, but just like on the desktop market people will use windows.

SQL 2005 is great.

They'll upgrade, they always do

[bob2cam]

The whole concept of making something visually appealing and powerful seems to be lost on many Linux/Windows techies. That accounts for why IT doesn't understand the visual value of Windows Vista while consumers will love it. But eventually, IT will upgrade. They always do.
As a matter of fact you could keep the article and republish it every time a new Microsoft OS upgrade is released cause' every time an upgrade is released the media predicts the same thing. For following "blah blah blah" reasons, no one going to move from (take your pick, 3.0,3.1,3.11,W95,w98,w2000, wXP) to the latest and greatest. Eventually, everyone does, they just take their time.

One challenge missed

[Todd Knarr]

There's one challenge missing from the list, and it's probably the biggest one. It's related to getting Vista into the boardroom, but distinct in a number of ways. It is: convince the CFO that he'll see a positive ROI on the upgrade within 2 years.

That's going to be a hard sell. The CFO remembers the last round of licensing changes, where Microsoft promised that those expensive licenses would cover all the upgrades and then released their major upgrade just after the license coverage ended. IT remembers too, but the CFO had to sign the checks. The CFO also remembers that the Win2K upgrade is only a year or so old, less if they went to XP, and the company hasn't recovered the costs of that yet. He's also going to be looking at the cost analysis from his IT guys, backed up by vendor quotes, for upgrading the hardware in his company to the bare minimums for Vista, and wondering where in the budget he's going to find that big a chunk of change. And last but not least, he's going to be looking at the analysis by the IT guys of what Vista will give that they can use that they don't already have, and despite all Microsoft's hype and whiz-bang features very few of them actually show up for the users. With the economy not so hot and investors demanding profits, the dog-and-pony extravaganza will have a hard time competing with the dollar signs.

Top Ten Goals For Microsoft

[MightyMartian]

10. Fucking kill Linux.
9. Fucking kill Steve Jobs.
8. Fucking kill Toaster Strudles.
7. Fucking kill open source.
6. Fucking kill South Korea.
5. Fucking kill the EU.
4. Fucking kill Linus Torvalds.
4. Make love to Sun and...
3. Fucking kill Java.
1. Fucking kill Google.

Re:Top Ten Goals For Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

2. Get MSWord to number enumerations correctly :)

Left unattended, each could...

[dpilot]

"Left unattended, each could ultimately interrupt Microsoft's 25+ year run of growth and profits and leave the door open for younger, smaller, and more nimble competitors."

And the problem with this is????

It appears that what they're trying to say is that by addressing these Top 10 Challenges, Microsoft can prevent "younger, smaller, and more nimble competitors" from gaining a foothold in the marketplace. In other words, if Microsoft simply rests on its current monopoly status and continue to mis-execute, they're going to have some serious competition.

I still fail to see a problemhere , except for Microsoft shareholders and IT managers who have unwisely over-bought into Microsoft monoculture.

Or maybe they should rejuvenate yet again, and smash the competition, yet again. That'll make computing better for all of us. Right?

TFA misses 3 most important challenges

[po8]

Huh. The three items I think of as the top MS challenges for 2006 weren't even on the list.

1. Come to terms with the international market on pricing and control. Foreign governments are increasingly unwilling to have the hand of a US corporation around the neck of their IT infrastructure. At the same time, potential non-governmental customers in foreign countries, who have traditionally defaulted to pirated MS software, are reacting to increasing MS pressure to pay untenable sums for crippled SW versions by fleeing to Linux in droves. The international market is very important in 2006, because the US market is fairly saturated and the Vista upgrade is not looking like it will take off that soon. Finding an international strategy that continues to capture real (non-pirated) market share without compromising US strategy may be MS's toughest 2006 challenge.
2. Develop a strategy for dealing with Open Source. In 2006, Linux, Firefox, and OpenOffice will again gain some percentage points on the desktop in the US and especially internationally. In the past, these gains have come at the expense of old-school UNIX; they're now starting to erode MS's customer base. Microsoft has a lot of options for dealing with this problem in 2006. It can: try to use its patent power to cripple open source; embrace open source and try to find business models that let it continue to make money; ignore open source until it's a bigger threat; try to use its illegal monopoly power to keep open source from going mainstream; embrace, extend, extinguish; etc. However, the worst thing it could do in 2006 is to continue to mix elements of all of these strategies to form an incoherent whole. MS incoherence so far has been a key contributor to open source success at their expense.
3. Figure out how to deal with US governments. By avoiding the consequences of their illegal monopoly conviction a few years back, Microsoft has put themselves in a position where the US Federal government is constantly breathing down their neck. While the President and key administration officials have acted to shield MS so far, this is a precarious position to be in for another year. Meanwhile, state and local governments are finding open source a quite attractive alternative. Since governments are a driver for enterprise software due to interoperability, and since governments have a lot of power to influence MS business practices, MS needs to get their US government relations in order. 2006 would be a good time.

Visual Studio 2005 / Office 12

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Writing as the guy who evaluates new versions of development tools at work...

Visual Studio 2005 is really good.

No, it's not. It would be pretty good if it worked, but it has some unforgivable bugs.

For a start, there's clearly something wrong with the UI code that make it literally unusable on the majority of our PCs at work. (They have varied specs, and some of them very powerful boxes by any standards, so don't even bother telling me we just need another 512MB of RAM or something. Thanks.) It'll go into a trance for minutes at a time one some machines, hogging almost 100% CPU and GB of memory. We haven't been able to isolate the problem, because other machines run it fine, but it seems to be connected to the background updating of Intellisense (on which many of the useful improvements in VS2005 rely, of course) and the processing power or memory size of the machine in question does not seem to matter. On at least one powerful machine, it was OK to start with but performance has degraded to unusability over time, too.

Even worse, there are also some major bugs in the code generation. It appears, based on tests conducted among our dev teams and some colleagues at other organisations, that they introduced some serious performance regressions between beta 2 and the final release. In a fairly large study, co-ordinated between several dev teams with independent code bases, we've measured a 30-50% drop in the performnce of heavily mathematical code since VS2003, for example, and there definitely wasn't anything close to that problem in beta 2.

How they managed not to notice that, we don't know, but the simple fact is that at present, the parts of VS2005 we're using (mainly VC++ for native code, for performance reasons) are not an improvement on 2003. Several of my colleagues have reverted all the way to VC++ 6 as an IDE, with a workhorse machine building the final code using the 2003 compiler; they never used the earlier .Net versions for day-to-day development because useful features like browse info were removed. The whole team is now backing out of the 2005 upgrade because the UI bugs make it a liability for us and the performance bugs mean our customers -- to whom speed typically matters a lot -- probably won't buy anything we compile with it anyway. Needless to say, since we were the first guys to try it, most of our other dev teams have no immediate plans to attempt an upgrade at this point!

If Microsoft released a service pack that fixed these show-stopping bugs early in 2006, we'd certainly consider upgrading at that stage, because there is a lot to like about VS2005 as well. But the simple fact is that right now, there are some bugs so serious that nothing else matters.

Kudos to the economists who recommended giving away the Express versions for free, though; that's a smart move.

Office 12 really is a new product. It's not an update like the other versions have been. The ribbon menu system is WAY better then the current drop down menus.

Leaving aside the fact that it's not out yet so we don't know what the ribbons will do in the end product, personally I found them annoying as hell anyway. I've been using MS Office on Windows since version -17 or something, and I know how to get things done. What I want is fixes for the awkward bits that make my life more difficult, or improvements and new features (there's plenty a WP program could do to help a lot of people's everyday work that Word still, bizarrely, can't do). What I absolutely don't want is another UI overhaul, particularly one that's going to mean I have to work out where everything's gone so I can fend off the hoards of enquiries from colleagues who know I like to play with this stuff and will probably find things before they do.

I'd say Budweiser is a better analogy

[Lifewish]

Cos using Windows all night gives me a fucking awful headache by morning.

Re:# 11 Why Flamebait? This is TRUE!

[jschoenberg]

You are really just pointing out the differences between the ITPro/Geek market and the consumer market. Consumers WANT everything bundled. They don't want to have to download one program for this and a different program for that. Can you imagine what would happen if you were not allowed to buy a car with a Turbo....if you were required to buy it separately from a list of manufacturers? A car manufacturer should be allowed to include whatever they want in their car (unless they force consumers to buy their car...see below).

I notice that people don't complain that Garage Band is cutting into Reason's profits. Apple is a very forceful bundler, especially when you consider hardware, yet nobody is suing Apple.

I feel that preventing Microsoft from putting whatever they want in the OS is a lighter form of facism. However, Microsoft's early tactics of requiring manufacturers to only provide Windows is totally evil, and Microsoft deserves whatever they have coming to them with that one. That is very wrong, as mentioned above when compared to automobile manufacturers, but it doesn't mean that Microsoft should not be allowed to put whatever features they want in their product.