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. "

Comments

Re:The future is now!

[AKAImBatman]

That's nothing. You need to read his Web 2.0 page:

A DotCom business plan:

Since everybody loves animals, we'll grab animals.com and
make it the premier site for selling animals and animal
byproducts like pet food and leashes on the Interweb.
 
We'll acquire massive funding to buy a fleet of trucks
shaped like dogs. Products bought by the customer will be
delivered to him or her in those trucks, immediately
strengthening brand visibility.
 
New Interweb technologies allow entirely new forms of
marketing. For example, we can send electronic Em@il
letters to every single person in the world at the click
of a button, at a fraction of the cost of a single
newspaper advert!

Anyone looking back at this business plan recognizes three glaringly obvious problems. First off, animals.com is a stupid name because it's already registered.

Second, how would a cat owner feel about her new cat being delivered in a dog shaped truck? At bare minimum, you'd have needed trucks in the shape of America's top five pets: dogs, cats, gerbils (which double as hamsters), parakeets and snakes.

Not these problems couldn't have been solved. But how come no one recognized the most fundamental problem of the plan? Nobody in their right mind would ever buy anything on the Interweb! Hello!? Enter my credit card number in a little box on some anonymous, random computer in the former Soviet Union? I don't know how many digits credit card numbers consisted of in the 90s, but mine has like a zillion and would take me about 15 minutes to type.

Re:Dvorak is a Goofball Gasbag

[IntlHarvester]

Oh, there's been a metric shitload of bitching about the OS X UI as well. Maybe if you just switched you missed the first three years of OS 9 Backlash.