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Is Microsoft Silent Before a Deadly Storm?
M$FTjack writes "Discussions about Microsoft are all over the place, esp. with its recent delays to Vista. Some consider Microsoft to be doomed, while others say Microsoft is silent before a deadly storm. According to the article on CoolTechZone, the author believes that Microsoft will unleash an abundance of next-generation applications that will take everyone by surprise. From the article: 'So why am I citing all these examples? Simply because I think Microsoft is itself poised for a big leap. Despite all the rumors about Google and how it will topple Microsoft, I don't see that happening in the near future ... people (and I don't mean technology enthusiasts) will continue to purchase Microsoft products simply because of the sheer familiarity and comfort levels (BSoD et al) that they have with Microsoft software.'"
Given the internal conflicts within Microsoft between application teams and the fact that the community gets leaked memos and rumors from time to time about inner goings on, I would say no, they are not working on anything special. The amount of human resources required to develop these "next gen apps" that they allude to within Microsoft would most likely generate some rumors that would have given us such an indication. Microsoft is under too much of a microscope for something like this to slip by. If it is a new development, then it will be a while before we see such apps. Besides, Microsoft's marketing technique seems to be based on people knowing what are going to be in their applications before they are released. I think this is just wishful thinking.
Key moment in the slashdot article:
I think the user community along with the technical community approaches the tipping point with Microsoft, especially with more and more alternatives like web based applications. Microsoft may join that fray, but they've sandbagged themselves, and they may not recover so nimbly this time (though I'll never count Microsoft out).
Microsoft has spent so much ill-will capital, the collective technology users' almost (almost) want Microsoft to go away. Microsoft is still powerful, but a lot of that power today is inertia as Microsoft tries to think of ways to re-invent itself yet again in time to maintain its control. I hope it doesn't.
Meanwhile, users (though they don't quite yet know it) are offered virtually every function as a web application, at least for ninety percent, and in many ways the new applications surpass the old resident application paradigm for convenience, service, and ease of use and maintenance.
Come on, MS doomed? Is the other side of the picket sign "End of the world"? MS is huge, they have a HUGE customer base. They are not going out of business anytime soon. They have TONS and TONS of highly qualified techies who are working to make new products that MANY people will buy.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
From what it sounds like, here's what this article is really saying: Please please please please keep the MSFT stock up so I can sell it for a profit!
I am officially gone from
Indeed. To quote computerworld from 1995:
This has always and continues to be their strategy. As far as I can tell, this time their entire marketing plan is
"Don't buy a Mac or install Ubuntu or else you might miss out on Vista's similar UI candy".
I don't remember MS promising to deliver Vista in 2001, and I doubt you have proof to the contrary...
"What if MS is actually learning something from Apple's success and trying that strategy out?"
That probably wouldn't work because of their sales strategy. They sell companies expensive 3-year subscriptions with the promise that they'll get Microsoft's latest and greatest when it's ready; to make the sale, naturally, they have to hype the products in the pipeline.
If I recall correctly, Vista/Longhorn was supposed to be out in 2004, 3 years after XP. Some corporations paid a lot of money for a lot of nothing in 2001 and the following years, based on empty promises and grossly miscalculated shipping dates.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
However, while they have to be as open as they can about Vista, Office, and other corporate necessities, consider projects like the Origami, or a rumored XBox handheld. They could really benefit from an Apple-style buzz and launch.
It's not mispelling, it's "misspelling"
Back on topic, I have been amazed at big a deal everyone is making about the Vista delays. How often are software projects late? Um, always?
Indeed, system vendors will be irate, but the idea of Microsoft being "doomed" as the Slashdot article states is patently absurd. Microsoft is such a massive empire; their fall would take decades and a long and consistant string of terrible screw-ups. A few products being late, even years late, might scratch their bottom-line, but it will hardly lead to their demise.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I have been amazed at big a deal everyone is making about the Vista delays. How often are software projects late?
It's a matter of scale, really. Longhorn is the biggest failed project in software development history, at least in the private sector. The previous record holder would be IBM Office Vision.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Another one missing the point. While other companies are focusing and refocusing their efforts on eye candy and "sleeker" interfaces, Microsoft continually hits balls out of the park in the enterprise. Windows Vista is about security enhancements and enterprise management. Any techie worth a damn on the microsoft side of things knows that. Anyone on the outside, including Linux fanboys like yourself completely miss the point. Active Directory, Group Policy, and Systems Management Server are what drive Microsoft sales. Enterprise management is what drives sales and generates HUGE revenue streams. They figured this out 6 years ago after NT 4 was a bust. Now they have a 5 year head start on YOU. Good luck catching them.
Get it strait: The new interface is nothing more than a bonus, and a much needed upgrade of a bonus at that. Look under the hood, and you'll be surprised. Now, stop regurgitating the same old BS we've been hearing for years, and tell us something that's of value.
You must be talking about the ribbon.
Still can't open open document formats.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Which means, all the MS haters/flamers posts will get modded up as insightful or interesting (and will by in large be neither), anyone saying anything contrary will be left untouched or modded down. Nothing new or valuable will be said, all the same flames will be rehashed yet again.
And I'm sorry, love them or hate them, but to say MS is doomed and going to fold is beyond stupid, with no basis in reality. If you have any sense of the scope of their software suites and the size of their user base, no one in their right mind would say that. You might WANT it to happen, but hope and reality are not the same thing
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
Anyone on the outside, including Linux fanboys like yourself completely miss the point. Active Directory, Group Policy, and Systems Management Server are what drive Microsoft sales.
Is it just me or is Microsoft actually catching up to where *nix has been for twenty years with Project Athena from MIT.....
Directory services, Kerberos, automated maintenance pushed out to workstations (via GPO's in Windows).... Now if we could only deal with insane file locking strategies that WIndows uses, add symlinks, etc. we would have a real OS. Alternatively, if they could add the really cool clustering capabilities VMS had, that would be cool too.
Right now, Windows is sort of a VMS-lite with a nicer GUI but lacking all the enterprise management features that have existed in the enterprise OS world for twenty years.
The *Only* reason what Microsoft is making inroads here is because UNIX/Linux geeks don't really know what their OS is capable of.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
How often are software projects late? Um, always?
Only when they are managed by incompetents, the kind of losers who think that working longer hours is something other than a euphemism for low productivity.
No software project I have managed has been late by more than 10% of the total schedule. It just isn't that hard to deliver quality software, on time, every time. I've done it with research-oriented projects, whole applications, and feature upgrades, in Java and C++, working alone and managing largish (~10 developer) teams. I have been involved in very late, very large projects that I accurately predicted would be very late using basic quantitative estimation practices. Large projects are even easier to estimate than small projects because they average over so much diversity. Any two large projects are more similar than any two small projects.
There are two major factors that cause software projects to be late: technological optimism on the part of developers, and faith-based management and estimation practices. I hardly need to write about technological optimism here--we've all at one time or another gotten so enamoured of a new technology that we thought it would solve all our problems in half the time and not contain any gotchas.
Faith-based management practices are based on what people want to be true rather than what is true. They are the epistemology of a bible-believing Christian applied to logistics. We've all seen managers who want badly to believe that the schedule will be met, and so they lie to themselves and everyone one around them, and punish anyone who disagrees with their faith.
Quantitative estimation and management practices are not hard to learn or apply, but they continually come up with the "wrong" answers--ones that the bible-believers don't want to hear. When this happens the bible-believers characteristically make exceptionalist claims: "This is the chosen project! It is not not like all those other projects you based your estimates on! This project is special! It is outside the laws of time, space and logistics!"
Needless to say, like all bible-believers, they are impervious to facts, and so their projects crash merrily through deadline after deadline without any response except ill-conceived attempts to force their minnions and themselves to work ever-longer hours.
The solution to all of this is the Law of Common Humanity: We are just like Them. If industry data from the past century across a dozen different fields shows that working more than 35 or 40 hours a week results in significantly lower productivity, then that is probably true of us as well. If the quantitative estimation practices described in Rapid Development gave reasonable values for others, they probably will for us. If the causes of failure identified in Stephen Flowers excellent book Software Failure: Management Failure caused other projects to fail, they will probably cause ours to fail if we let them.
It is clear that Microsoft has never learned this lesson. They have been famous for late projects since Word1.0 two decades ago, and yet like bible-believers everywhere, they keep to the faith of their forefathers despite the wreckage it produces. On this basis, the odds of Microsoft being poised to unleash a river of innovation is simply not plausible.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
More to the point, how often has Microsoft really come out with something innovative that took the world by storm? It's released rehashes of products it bought from other people, but I can't think of many cutting edge, out-of-nowhere advancements that have come from them. It's not really their core competancy is it? Which isn't to say they can't produce some slick stuff when they want to, but rather they're more often riding the coat tails of smaller trailblazers (who they either crush or swallow in the following years).
Wood Shavings!
- Godai