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Financials Indicate Microsoft Prepping for War
SpaceAdmiral writes "Microsoft has surprised analysts by forecasting significantly higher expenses in the next fiscal year, an indication that the company might be getting ready to do battle with its online rivals. According to analyst Eugene Munster of Piper Jaffray, 'It looks like Microsoft is going to war with Google.'" From the article: "According to Mark Stahlman of Caris & Company, the fact that Microsoft plans to spend significantly more in 2007 was an indication of renewed aggressiveness in its competitive strategy and an indication that the company was returning to the kind of actions it exhibited before the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit in the mid- and late 1990's. 'It's pretty clear that Bill is running the company again,' Mr. Stahlman said, referring to Bill Gates, 'and they are going to remake the business. They are being much more combative and much more strategically managed.'"
Or they could be spending more money on patents
Or they could be spending more money on developing Vista
Or they don't really think they have a chance in their feud with the European union after all...
There are more options than "prepping up for war"...
From the end of TFA:
This may of course change in the future, but I somehow doubt they can touch Google or Yahoo. The whole race for the crown is about the search based ads, not about who uses which search engine. So Microsoft has not only to get a lot of users to use MSN search as their standard search engine, they also have to convince all the advertisers that their system works at least as good or better than those from Google or Yahoo/Overture.
When Microsoft entered a market late in the past, they always could leverage their market position. It was easier to use the already installed IE then to download another browser, it was easier to use Windows Media Player than to download and install RealPlayer or Quicktime. If Microsoft had no leverage in the market, they used their money: They bought shares in cable companies, started cooperations with mobile phone makers or massively subsidized XBOX/360.
But what could they use this time? Desktop search integrated into Vista? Standard search in IE7? Lower prices for advertisers? Most likely all, but nothing will give them a real advantage. They will have to really compete and innovate this time, and that is not something they are good at.
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I fully expect this to get moderated down, but this is great news. Increased competition is almost universally good for consumers. Now, all we have to do is persuade Google to release an OS and an office suite to compete with MS on *their* home turf.
Developers: We can use your help.
Maybe even three.
1. More money to lobbyists and politicians
2. More money for lawyers in more lawsuits and appeals
3. Start paying down the fines in EU that won't go away any other way.
It wouldn't be so bad if the stock wasn't flat to declining over the past five years.
But the lack of growth means Microsoft is having to spend more and more of its large amounts of cash on:
1) Dividend increases
2) Stock buybacks
When you have around 10-11 billion shares issued to fuel your growth over the past couple of decades that ends up being many, many billions of dollars the company needs to keep spending every year just to keep shareholders from dumping the company and putting their money in real growth companies, like Google.
The Xbox project has been the number one financial sore spot for the company for the past five years. The financial press has been wondering when a grownup is going to take charge up there in Redmond and clean house for the company. It sounds like Microsoft is finally starting that process.
The days of the company throwing billions of dollars at marketplace failures like the Xbox and Xbox 360 are going to be coming to an end. Microsoft's core business monopolies are now no longer just being chipped away at but under direct assault. It will be interesting to see Microsoft awoken. The Ballmer era of the past five years or so has had the company acting like a aging and bumbling fool.
And they'll pay for it with the extra revenue from the release of Vista. As usual they'll use their OS and Office money to fund their other black holes. And they'll keep hoping the other money losers eventually turn a profit, or at least help their OS and Office market share.
Developers: We can use your help.
Using Linux was an unmitigated disaster. Things that seem like absolutely basic functionality don't work right. I spent literally 40+ hours poring over online forums trying to figure out how to get pieces of software to work right together. OpenOffice pops up random dialog boxes when you try to save to a file share, Flash doesn't really work right on Linux under Firefox, Evolution doesn't like having its email repository stored on a share, etc, etc.
Then there are the user interface difficulties. Windows and OSX are the only 2 OSes I'm aware of where companies actually have done meaningful user testing to verify what works and what doesn't. Gnome and KDE are nice window managers, but they're just not set up right for office tasks. Sure I can sit around and change everything from the icons' sizes to the taskbar size, but who wants to spend days configuring their computer like that?
And don't even get me started on file associations (what program runs when you double-click on a file with a given extension). No matter what I tried, I couldn't get Gnome to let me change the file associations for files on an SMB share. And, it's absolutely opaque how to change them for regular files too without resorting to editing text files in /usr/share/blahblah.
As for this perceived threat from webapps, I don't think Microsoft should be worried at all. Even the mighty Google knows that trying to reimplement MS Office using Ajax would be an absolute disaster. And, think about it. How would I make my scanner scan files into Word? Does Javascript have an Ajax routine "useScanner()"? How about if I want to fax something to someone?
Personally, I dislike Microsoft's monopolist tactics. But, I have to admit, Windows is a better office OS than Linux (Gnome or KDE), and it's not even close. It's just that simple.
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"I mean, you write as though Microsoft hasn't built itself into a major multinational corporation from nothing, or brought vast wealth to its principals."
HAHA You almost had me going. You made it sound almost as if the company wasn't started by a wealthy individual from a wealthy family with almost limitless startup capital. And then your post would almost seem to imply that Microsoft had become a major mulinational corporation through good business practices instead of lies, theft, and where those failed luck.
Lies and theft got them onboard with IBM, the rest was simply riding the success of the PC. Since they were onboard with IBM when the pc became successful, they were the default choice to load on clones and this carried them through feeble competative OS attempts in the early days. Then of course they have maintained that position since through anti-competative and monopolistic tactics and leveraged that monopoly to spread into other areas.
This is not exactly the story of some guys starting up a garage business on sweat and pocket lint and then making it to the top by providing something needed at the right time. Almost every step of the way Microsoft/Microsoft founders have succeed through acts that were illegal, immoral, or both.
Different distributions have different strengths and weaknesses. Package installation is not one of Fedora's strengths, and never has been. For that, the title goes to Debian and its derivatives (Ubuntu, in particular). So because your mission is different, I think you might do well to look at a different distribution, like Ubuntu.
Dude. That is his point. There shouldn't be mission level granularity. It should just work for some things. I have had similar experiences and I only use linux for development or web-based applications. As far as using it for desktop, forget it. People have jobs, families, wives and girlfriends. Linux is the biggest double-work creation system in the world. Think of all the times people are recreating the exact same problems nearly simultaneously. There is energy being lost to the universe. Some day that will change, but it doesn't appear to be any time soon.