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John Dvorak's Eight Signs MS is Dead in the Water
j79 writes "John Dvorak has written an opinion piece on why he believes Microsoft is dead in the water. He discusses Vista, Office 2007, MSN and MSN search, the Xbox 360, Pad-based computing, .Net, and Microsoft's obsession with Google. "
For once, this guy is actually making sense. When was the last time M$ actually innovated something? It's been a while. Win95 was the last thing I remember, and even that was strongly influenced by both X and the Mac. Vista has become XP with Glass; Office 2007 is a new UI to look better under Vista. IE7 is a Firefox clone, and Microsoft has been spewing Google-copycat programs for a while now.
Why the HELL you waste our time with Dvorak's nonsensical jabber?
Not sure if you were intending a /sarcasm tag in there, but I've still got two open positions at my company for VB.Net developers. One entry, one midlevel. Know anyone in the Madison, WI area?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I will just pop in to say, as I have before, that Dvorak is a yellow journalist. He writes outlandish articles to get attention. Every time Slashdot posts his articles they lower themselves further into tabloid territory. If Slashdot doesn't care about credibility and is only concerned with getting as many viewers as possible then more power to them
I don't think Microsoft is in any danger of dying - companies with billions of dollars in their war chest don't tend to die. What Microsoft will do is lose their dominance of the market to smaller, more nimble competitors. Microsoft is in the same position that IBM was in during most of the 1980s - they have a near-monopoly position in a maturing market, but they're struggling to adapt themselves to changing conditions.
Like Microsoft, IBM was a massive corporation with an entrenched and risk-averse corporate culture. IBM had the same kind of market dominance and clout that Microsoft has now. IBM came out with their latest and greatest consumer machine in 1984 - the PCjr - but it was a horrendous flop because it didn't take the needs of users into consideration. I'm becoming more and more convinced that Windows Vista will be the same thing - a flop that came about because of a poor understanding of what users really want. I think that the LUA system in Vista will be as badly received as the PCjr's chiclet keys.
IBM didn't die, but they did lose a lot of money and a lot of marketshare to smaller, more nimble competitors like Compaq. It was only after IBM started refocusing on their core competencies (big iron, blade servers, etc.) that IBM's really regained some of its strength - but even today it doesn't have near the dominance that it did now.
The days of the Windows monoculture are starting to wane - Apple has a product that's more than competitive with Microsoft's offerings. Microsoft, like IBM back then, just isn't nimble enough to meet the demands of a changing marketplace. Microsoft's attempts to do vertical integration aren't working all that well - the XBox Division is bleeding cash left and right despite the popularity of their product, the online division is floundering to compete with Google, and businesses aren't going to retrain their staff to deal with Office 2007.
Microsoft isn't belly up yet, and probably won't be for a good, long time, but their continued missteps may see them lose a significant amount of money and marketshare.
"There is a deep-rooted belief that if a company like Google is successful, then they are an enemy per se."
The reason is that Bill wants everybody else's money - not just his own.
The magnitude of greed in this asshole is mind-boggling.
I'm surprised he isn't trying to have Microsoft make aircraft, cars and nuclear power plants - or maybe tanks - or run his own bank and stock exchange as well.
Bill - fix your fucking operating system before you do ANYTHING else today, okay?
News today is that Gartner is saying no way will Vista ship even to volume licensees in 2006. They don't expect Vista to ship to consumers until at LEAST 2nd quarter of 2007 and possibly even third quarter. The reason is that MS has scheduled only ONE release candidate for Vista. Also:
"The analysts point out that the release of Vista is more akin to the release of Windows 2000 than Windows XP, which was basically a renovation of Windows 2000. Thus, the timing of Microsoft's release schedule, in which the company allots just five months between the beta 2 release, expected in June this year, and the final product has been questioned.
The gap between Windows XP beta 2 and final was release was just five months. However, the gap between Windows 2000 beta 2 and final release was 16 months."
On the other hand, if you view Vista as a gussied up XP, maybe we can halve the difference to eight or ten months. But based on the Microsoft employees who have been bitching on blogs about bad test results being certified as accepted and the like, I'd guess Vista has a long way to go yet.
And if it comes out of the box with the sort of bugs and bad design features Thurriot was complaining about, it could well be dead in the water.
Not to mention it will only be installed on new consumer PCs - most of the old ones won't run it effectively at all. So it's doubtful that consumers are going to drive its adoption.
Even corporationa are probably going to implement it only as machines are upgraded to newer ones via attrition. The article I read about Gartner also says analysts don't expect Vista to be deployed by most corporations until sometime in 2008.
I foresee Vista being adopted by corporations even more slowly than XP was. In other words, in 2010, probably thirty percent of corporations will still be using Windows XP.
My prediction: by 2015, Windows is history.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Lose ground.... so what? Hell, if MS took all of their cash and put it in FDIC insured securities, and didn't sell a single thing, they'd still make more money than all of the other software companies on the planet combined. They don't need to sell anything.
Is where Microsoft stopped innovating. Whenever you get into a "one-up" cold war...
.NET vs Java perhaps.
Really. Like the Wordperfect vs Office battle? Or the IE vs Netscape battle? Or the NT vs OS/2 battle? Or the MSDOS vs PC-DOS battle? More recently, even the XBOX vs Playstation/Nintendo battle, or even
Microsoft has been playing the "one-up" cold war for a lot longer than google has been around, and winning just about every time. But by your metrics, Microsoft stopped innovating long before their obsession with google.
I'm dealing with a lot (!) european training and system houses (look at my nick), Java courses (including J2EE stuff, application servers, Spring, Hibernate, Certification, etc.) here outsell
Same analysis for popular Job search-engines. Demand for skilled Java experts is a lot (!) higher than
Alot of VB6 people are switching to Java here.
my 2 cents
True, but in reality this couldn't work. What would happen is that they'd only make money (off of their securities or other investments) at a rate marginally above inflation. Probably substantially less, once you figured in how they're taxed. This would cause their stock to become a huge bear overnight -- why buy a share of MS that only gains a percent a year when you could buy a share of IBM or Apple? So Microsoft's share price would tank, and the company would suddenly have less market capitalization than they would have in assets. Buyers would swoop in and disassemble it; after they got done with the cash they'd sell all the fixed assets and real property, until nothing was left. Nobody is going to keep money invested in a company when their returns are worse than they could get if they took that money and invested it elsewhere.
Something like MS can't stop moving forwards, or it'll fall and never get up. And once something that big falls, the vultures swoop in, and it's all over.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
But Sony does seem dead in the water, sure its big and has lots of money, but what is the last few interesting things they did? Lately I know I've only heard of failures, combined with statements of Sony having profitability problems. If anything Sony is floundering based on this, they might recover, it certaintly wouldn't be surprising for them as hardware corporation but they arn't doing well right now.
As such I vote your example as being horrific or very insightful based on wether MS is going the way of Sony or not. I personally find it likely that MS is in a bit of trouble right now though, they've had trouble expanding into new markets at the very least and now their core buisnesses have come under increasing pressure as well due to OSS. In the end ofcourse it is likely both will rise again, but not necessarily as powerful as before or as well off.
The best example I can think of this right now would be IBM, once a monopolistic superpower, now perhaps richer then before, I wouldn't know how rich they were before actually, but they in anycase don't have complete control of any markets I know of. And as such have lost quite some relevance compared to their old levels.
Quickshot
Which is sad, really. Several hundred dollars worth of software is used by the majority as nothing more than glorified Notepad.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
So Dvorak missed a point or two.
Having a new UI for Office is not (in itself) a reason for another sign MS is dead in the water. I agree that re-training would only involve those who were trained on the earlier version, not on new trainees.
It's important to throw all the "eight signs" out on the table, because of the hit the stock (MS) has taken this week with the new spending directions "mostly designed to head off the likes of Google" as WSJ puts it (May 3, 2006, Marketplace, B1 column 1.
WSJ goes on to say,
Shares have been stagnant for 3 1/2 years, and the shareholders thought that bringing out Vista and a new Office would reward them for their patience.
So, there are "shareholders", and they expect a return.
Office runs on Windows, not linux, so the underlying problem of Windows being insecure when on the Internet is behind it all. Solving those security problems may be what is delaying Vista, not just designing some more eye-candy.
Will the shareholders start to move away from Microsoft?
Good thing that the problems are being discussed openly here, for Microsoft needs to get something to market, and have a product to sell. Not just promises.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
Nope. I was unable to quickly find the appropriate options I wanted in OO.o Writer despite knowing *exactly* where they were in Word.
Learning curve yes, I can deal with, but too often Linux and OSS alternatives - whilst in most cases being equally stable and useful products - are marketed as being "Just like Windows" or "Just like Office".
I've been working with the Vista CTP for a while now, and the learning curve from even Windows 2000 is virtually non-existant. Getting used to a similar level of functionality I'm used to in Windows in Linux took me a good few days.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
I can hardly think of an application that would suffer more latency and "slow link" issues than an office suite running via AJAX in a web browser. Nobody is going to want to use it. Well, I guess an AJAX version of Worlds of Warcraft might be worse... but hey, you can play it from anywhere and you don't have to worry about your character getting out of synce between... oh, wait, WoW manages to keep data in a central location AND take advantage of a local application, imagine that...
That's just it, the application is still "local" in the "AJAX Office" world, and the data is still "somewhere else." The whole point of AJAX is to pawn off a lot of work to the client. By the time you're done downloading all the javascript, HTML, and CSS to run the behemoth, you're no better off than you were when you were running the application from teh "Start" menu of your operating system. And in many ways you are worse off because now you have network dependencies. No offline work. Why add network dependencies to something that isn't essentially network oriented? Not to mention the fact that there is currently no good way to build a robust application such as an Office suite inside a browser. Whatever technology you are talking about just doesn't exist.
It is the ultimate vendor lock-in when you start storing your data with a specific external entity. In the current office environment, one can easily swap out MS Office for OpenOffice (given good enough OpenOffice support for MS file formats). With a browser based office suite, small companies have almost no way to tailor the applicaitons because it is all managed by the vendor you've locked in with! Do you think they are going to make it easy for you to pick up and switch to another vendor?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I think this puts it almost perfectly.
Quite frankly, when I look at the Microsoft monopoly, I see a monopoly that's actually in very poor health. It isn't going to fall over soon, but it isn't going to last too many more years either.
As far as I can see, Microsoft has two core products:
1. Windows - it's a good product to have as a cornerstone, because everybody will need to keep it updated to be current. However, it's a product that is under siege. Every malware writer out there has it in their sights. And, they've fallen very badly behind with Vista, while Linux and Mac OS X have been proving themselves more current and stable. But, even more to the point, when was the last time you saw a big line-up for a Windows release a la Windows 95? People aren't using the product because they want to, they're using it because they need to, and that means that once they think there's a viable alternative, they'll switch. And, as you pointed out, Microsoft knows that.
2. Office - here the problem is just as you said - Office 97 was good enough for a lot of people. It's a solid product, and not one that really needs to be updated, and so the business for each new version runs the risk of getting smaller and smaller.
It's hardly a surprise that Microsoft is trying to diversify a la IBM - quite frankly, it's probably their best chance for survival, and I think they know it...
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive