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Microsoft Goes Head-to-Head With IBM
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece on Microsoft's latest announcements that it is going after large-business computing, a realm that IBM currently has a stronghold on." From the article: "In both cases, the company has fashioned 'enterprise' versions of the products with additional security and collaboration-enabling features for sale to large businesses. Microsoft has spent $20 billion over the past three years on these upgrades, and Ballmer says it will spend $500 million over the next year marketing them to corporations. 'We're unlocking the next wave of growth for Microsoft,' Ballmer predicted during a press conference after his speech." We've previously discussed Microsoft's plans for IBM.
Ok, they threw $20 billion at it and will throw another $500 million at it. But what it is is a mature market, wherein customers have grown weary of the old business model of turning over buckets of money for software and support. Many big buyers are moving along on old, unsupported versions of Office, which they are loathe to upgrade for no reason other than to buy a pile of features they're not convinced they need. Usually the push for upgrades comes from some brash executive who thinks by the seat of his/her pants that it's about time they got into the 21st century (whatever the hell that is really supposed to mean) just before they, themselves pack it in and move along to their next rung up the ladder (with a new line for their resumee: Modernized infrastructure)
While I was a bit of an IBM hater, back in the 80's, for the attitude their sales people conveyed, I do believe IBM is now a far better company, much wiser and behind the winning hand -- Open Source. Their time in the trenches will serve them well as a the cocky crew from Redmond attempt to strut in like they own the house.
Considering Microsoft's track record, particularly in the press with all the vulnerabilites, I think they've got a tough sell. Some will be low-hanging fruit, easy to pluck, but others will be much harder to reach. It will be interesting to see how much further.
Personally, I'm already advising our shop to dump Microsoft. We simply can't afford them anymore.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
$20 Billion bozo. With a "B". $20 billion, $500 million.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
IBM backed the "Netscape" antitrust case the government won against Microsoft in the 1990s. That decision didn't protect consumers from Microsoft's monopoly abuse so well, but it did protect IBM's Lotus/Notes product line from Outlook/Exchange taking over the Internet. Let's see how well either of them fare, without a Republican government to protect Microsoft and with a real competition between them keeping them too busy to crush the smaller players entering the groupware market, especially on Linux servers. Interoperability is the most likely winner in a multilateral vendor competition.
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make install -not war
Any sympathy I might have had towards IBM in this confrontation vanished upon reaching the word "Lotus". Save me, Microsoft!!!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
For servers, Windows is a poor system (it is for desktops too, but that is another thing). Most server application / services install themselves everywhere in the system and updates things in the OS/Windows folder (this is particularly true for Microsofts own products). For this reason, if you want stable operations you put just one, or a few server products on each server. Combining development/test/production on the same machine is impossible. This is partly a Windows problem - partly a problem about how applications are built for Windows - both things are equally bad. Who wants to VMWare everything just to not have thousands of servers more or less doing nothing but hosting an OS and a single service?
Not exactly. It just requires one that's "good enough for the task", that more technicians have been trained on, and that has enough mindshare for Whoever's In Charge to jump at it.
Microsoft's strategy has never been to be the best, or even to "not suck". They fight for hearts and minds.
Remember the line from Pirates of Silicon Valley?
Jobs: "We have better stuff!"
Gates: "It doesn't matter."
From the article: Microsoft argues that by integrating those user-oriented software packages thoroughly with back-end programs for data storage, communications, and business-process management, it puts companies' ordinary employees, rather than the geeks, at the center of the computing world. "Our innovations facilitate the power of people" in businesses, he said.
It's true that MS is taking a completely different approach from IBM. MS espouses off-the-shelf software products (theirs of course) glued together by the customer's own employees. IBM espouses an army of consultants armed with a collection of applications and CDs packed full of open source, writing your company's custom business software.
Now which approach do you think will win? What does history tell us? Personally, I think things in computerdom always trend towards off-the-shelf standardization. the reasons for this are obvious. There is someone to call when there's a problem. The cost typically drops as volumes are high. And the learning curve is lower because people already are familiar with the building blocks. I can't think of any examples where customization is a longterm solution to a problem. This is why I think MS has a good chance of success here.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I'm not a Troll, it's reverse psychology.
To be honest, I can't be the only person who thinks that this sort of functionality is useless and distracting.
When I want to work with some file that I nominally deal with using a given application, I want to work in the familiar interface of that application. I don't want to screw around with some embedded-editing crap, especially when I need to have the full application installed anyway.
Likewise, being able to 'edit' files in an email is a horrible misfeature, because it encourages very lazy thinking about where data is stored. Where's the lastest copy of my presentation -- in an email? Is it the copy in my home directory? What about the copy on my keychain drive?
And, of course, none of this will be 'industry standard', so it will follow Microsoft's usual practice of nearly mandating an all-Microsoft shop...
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
Not to pick, but being Unix-centric is not necessary. IBM's biggest systems run variations of the (old,proven,legacy,venerable) Z/OS http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/zos/ , and their iSeries (formerly AS/400) run i5/OS, http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/soft ware/os/i5os.html/ the successor to OS/400, neither of which is remotely unix-ish. I'll admit that they can run Unix, that the RS/6000s under AIX or Linux/PPC are unicies, or that at least virtual machines running under the primary OS can run Unix, but Unix-compatibility per-se isn't what Microsoft needs to compete against IBM.
What they need to compete is the high level of handholding, the extensive uptimes, and the absolute reliability and throughput of those IBM OSes. Microsoft will probably make inroads into the small-business market, and the edges of the corporation, but it's going to take more than just new software to displace IBM from the truly big-iron apps. Personally, I think that Sun, HP, and RedHat should be more concerned, as this will threaten the midrange server market.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
The Roman Empire was done in not by an equal country, but by small bands of invading hordes. And perhaps the rules of political empires apply to technology empires, too.
Businesses are like people. Each one is unique and different, each one has specific needs, has specific goals, and the route through life is a little bit different for each one. On one hand, it makes sense for Microsoft to go after the big money that exists in the enterprise market; there is a lot of money to be made there. On the other hand when you go to an enterprise and offer them something, they won't usually take it straight off of the rack, they will want it tailored to meet their specific needs. Companies like IBM and Oracle seem to understand this far better than I expect a company like Microsoft will.
I'm not saying that I am against Microsoft entering the market, competition is usually good. What I am saying is that I think Microsoft will have to learn a lesson or two in order to actually compete. They won't be able to get away with delivering a product out of the box and then providing only a minimal level of support for it. Microsoft will have to play ball like the other big boys and learn to accept some of their rules. I expect that there will be some resistance to this from their end but, they will end up between a rock and a hardplace on the this because their enterprise level customers will simply demand it or look elsewhere.
Microsoft argues that by integrating those user-oriented software packages thoroughly with back-end programs for data storage, communications, and business-process management, it puts companies' ordinary employees, rather than the geeks, at the center of the computing world. "Our innovations facilitate the power of people" in businesses, he said.
Microsoft has to sell software to those geeks in the back office. If the sales pitch is to take the effort out of the back room and dump it onto the employees, how are the geeks (who make the decisions on IT) going to keep their jobs with this decision? Even if they did opt for this, they don't want users building complicated ill-thought-out custom crap and then calling IT for support when the $h|t don't work.
Microsofts customer is not a desktop user - it's the IT manager.
"What does history tell us? "
That IBM has survived for over a hundred years and is still the largest computer company in the world despite predictions of imminent death since about 1924.
It also teaches us that people are kinda getting sick of being forced to do upgrades at Microsoft's pace.
"I want to buy SQL Server 2000"
"Sorry, you have to buy 2005"
"No, I just need to buy SQL 2000, plus I want to make sure you support thsi version for a few years"
"Sorry you have to buy 2005".
"But you just released 2005 2 months ago!"
"Sir, you don't have to apologize for takign so long!"
Microsoft is a software company. IBM is a hardware/service company that happens to sell some software.
Microsoft thinks they understand the "business enterprise" computer market, but it's just the bottom, low-end stuff compared to IBM.
And don't even bother comparing Microsoft customer "service" to IBM customer service, there's just no comparison.
One thing to remember when thinking about what Microsoft does is how important their stock price is to them. (Think of all the compensation in the form of options or stock grants.) It's important to them to keep the perception that Microsoft is a "growth" company. Here's why.
The price/earnings (P/E) ratio for a common stock is a measure of the earnings growth expected by the market: other things equal, a higher P/E corresponds to higher expected growth. At this writing, Microsoft stock (MSFT) is trading at $27.58, which is a P/E ratio of 22.8x the latest 12 months' earnings. IBM is trading at $83.12, which is 17.1x trailing 12-month earnings. If MSFT were to trade at the same P/E as IBM (meaning that it was expected to grow about as fast as IBM), its stock price would be $20.68, a decline of almost 25%. I think that might result in a few unhappy campers in Redmond.
Microsoft's practice of consistently announcing fabulous new products that generally turn up later and with less capability than they were touted with is entirely consistent with their need to keep the stock price up.
That's how I still view Microsoft. They know how to build a Desktop OS, so is their Enterprise system going to be 10,000 Desktops?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This is just another little psychology lesson.
The fact that MS have to spend $500M to tell people that they compete with IBM makes it obvious that they *don't* compete with IBM.
If you are an actual competitor then you don't need to tell people. People already know.
It's like back in the 60's when NCR put up a huge sign in Los Angeles which read: 'NCR IS COMPUTERS'.
But everyone who saw it immediately thought: "No they aren't. IBM is computers".
I expect the $500M will be directly aimed at CEO's, who can make decisions without any technical understanding.
I weep for those of you who get nailed by this.
The biggest story on Microsoft is how they have lost the server market.
Microsoft has had, for over ten years, a monopoly on the desktop. A generation has grown up thinking that Microsoft is synonymous with computing. Microsoft also has billions and billions of dollars to spend on research and advertising. With all of its name recognition and money, Microsoft has not been able to build a serious name for itself in the server market.
This is the type of statement that will generate a lot of comments on both sides: Unix people who say that any version of Windows couldn't be considered seriously at all for a server, and Windows people who will point out XP and Windows Server are now stable and secure enough for mainstream usage.
But the fact still remains, that if you check out netcraft, Microsoft products seem to place a far third behind commercial Unixes and Linux. For a company with Microsoft's name recognition and research resources to not be a dominant player in the server market after 30 years of business and over ten years of market dominance is a staggering fact in itself.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
It will have to learn a few lessons a Cisco first.
They are quite alike. They both tend to trumpet absolutely cretinous marketing claims and beat themselves in the chest senseless screaming repeatedly utterly stupid ideas. Just like a bunch of communists at a party conference. This is where they are similar.
The difference is in the way they perform a 180 degree turn when the party line changes.
When the great Cisco Marketing Bubba declares that it is time to admit that WFQ is worthless without having a clasfull qdisc above it the entire cisco marketing force turns around on tiptoe and starts saying the same. All courses change overnight and people who would have passed the exam yesterday are failed for not following the new party line. There are plenty of numerous other examples. It is just like nothing ever happened.
Microsoft has yet to learn the trick. When they change something they have used to beat themselves into the chest about like GDI printers, kernel graphics integration, etc they try to do it quietly. Their presentation droids are not anywhere as good in dodging questions which are phrased along the lines "Look you just told me yesterday that this design by your competitor is a genuinely stupid idea and today you are presenting the same design".
They have to learn and improve their liar capabilities. Delivering FUD in an enterprise is much harder than delivering FUD in an SME. An enterprise always has someone who remembers the "previous party line". SMEs usually do not. There are two solutions to this. One is to have 30 years of evolution in your current architecture the way Big Iron people do. The other is to turn around and chant the new party line without even blinking the way Cisco does.
With all the architectural mistakes Microsoft has made over the years it has to follow the latter approach and it is very far off from having mastered it. Time to poach some Cisco marketing staff I guess.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
pantent portfolios.
I think IBM will win on that front.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
While they are touting (as always these days it seems) security, it is going to be a BIG hurdle for MS to clear. Many of the larger institutions, such as banks and gov't agencies, using high end IBM apps and hardware are truly paranoid, and IBM has done a good job accommodating that (ever hear of anyone cracking a RACF? I haven't). MS has a huge stigma to overcome before it can really crack that market.
And all this talk of integration makes me nervous. Now we have a set of pipes from Outlook to Office to SQL Server to AD to IIS etc.? Not my idea of a good time trying to secure all the possible attack vectors.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Forgive me for not knowing exactly which Netcraft survey you're referencing, but from my own personal experience it's not that way at all.
Sure, the majority of *websites* are served by Linux/Unix machines. No doubt there.
But if you're talking about typical business servers (ie: print servers, file servers, application servers, email/calendaring servers, collaboration servers, intranet servers, etc) I think you would find most of them are running Microsoft.
This is especially true if you look at the small/mid-sized market. Around here, I can't think of a single business that is running a non-MS server somewhere in their operation -- except for highly specialized services needed in the financal or health industries -- and even then it's one machine among a dozen MS servers.
-David
Judging from the headline, /. could have defied space-time to bring us a 20 year old dupe.