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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.
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.