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Microsoft's Masterpiece of FUD?
walterbyrd writes "Linux Journal has published an article by Glyn Moody, about the Microsoft sponsored study: The Economic Impact of Microsoft Windows Vista (pdf). Apparently Moody feels that the economic effects of MS-Vista being delayed in Europe would not be as dire as Microsoft would have the world believe." From the article: "The implication is that the European Commission would be crazy to jeopardize these wonderful benefits by clipping the wings of this digital golden goose, or even grounding it completely. The white paper looks tremendously professional, and is filled with tables, bar and pie charts; it has suitably serious discussions of methodology, and even introduces a few measured caveats: who could doubt its conclusions? What makes this FUD so impressive is that this attention to detail obscures the sleight of hand that is going on here. The white paper may predict sales by the "Microsoft ecosystem" of over $40 billion in six of Europe's biggest economies, but what this figure hides is the fact that income for Microsoft and its chums is a cost for the rest of Europe."
It is not that I am scared of new programs and technology, but why do we need it? What can we do better with Vista that we can't do today? Except from gamers that have to upgrade to use the latest features in their graphic card.
Of course the artificial need for upgrade will generate some business for those who do the upgrades and those who sells the licenses, but then again I don't really see anyone their existing systems. At a certain point, people will choose to intall Vista instead of 2003 server or XP as their standard client or server package.
FTA: "As the paper itself mentions, half of this cost is down to the hardware." Sounding obvious, I don't see the need of new hardware as innovation. On the contrary. If you need to buy new hardware, it's a cost to the consumer and a cost to the environment. Vista (or any other OS) having higher hardware requirements is 'bad' news. The broken window fallacy was linked in a previous /. article. Would be interesting to take Vista impact and view it from a GPI point of view.
Just wanted to quote "As far as I can tell, the phrases "free software" and "open source" are not mentioned once in the white paper." I don't think I have anything useful to add. Commercial software is not a bad thing in itself, but you must evaluate the TCO and ROI when comparing software (including OS).
Animoog.org
Also, who thinks a report looks professional because it has pie and bar charts? If I see pie and bar charts, I think: business-school know-nothing bullshit.
The white paper may predict sales by the "Microsoft ecosystem" of over $40 billion in six of Europe's biggest economies
If I were an EU IT purchaser, or bean-counter, or CIO, this number would give me pause. It might get me to thinking if there was a better alternative. It might convince me to do a thorough analysis of the benefits of Vista relative to its enormous price tag. In short, this could backfire bigtime!
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
So far Vista looks to be more beneficial to the Linux and MAC communities than MS. I have already been asked by one of my larger clients to look into "alternate" solutions after their company president read an article about hardware requirements and panicked. So far I have seen nothing that really benefits the end user other than yet more "wizards" to make things more complicated for those that already know what they are doing and a pretty interface that puts enough of a resource drain on the system to require otherwise unneccesary upgrades. I guess in the long run MS can depend on "retiring" support on 2003 and XP to force users towards Vista but I dont see nearly the amount of voluntary upgrading as MS seems to expect.
Obviously money has to change hands somewhere, but its the details that are important.
For starters, money spent on licenses doesn't stay in the EU; it goes back to the US. If it stayed locally, as it often does with smaller EU software shops, then it gets spent on salaries, growing the business etc and gets invested back into the local economy. Money going back to Microsoft US is basically money down the drain from the point of view of Europe.
Similarly, replacing currently working computers with more powerful ones, purely to run vista - and with all the extra power being sucked up with the pretty effects - is the broken windows fallacy; i.e. money spent on new computers purely to run vista, with no other advantage is money that could have been spent on other areas instead. Also, most of the PC makers are not european, so the bulk of the money again goes out to the benefit of US and asian businesses, to the cost of europeans.
Finally, retraining and hiring lots of people to manage, maintain and use windows vista and office 12 (or whatever version it'll be) is only a benefit if they end up more productive at the end of it; if they are about as productive as they were on the old software, then the training costs are wasted money caused by being stuck on the windows treadmill. That money will go back into the local economy at least, but it could have been more productively spent on hiring people to expand the business and do new things, rather than just maintain the more complex infrastructure that nobody understands properly.
As the article says, european companies could quite happily spend the 40 billion on other things to grow their business, instead of spending it purely to stand still and get back to where they were but with slightly prettier graphics - something not particularly useful to business workers. If vista brings massive productivity benefits to people upgrading, fair enough - but that's not the reason they're talking about $40b, that's the money european businesses will need to spend (largely overseas) to get through it in one piece. Not a hugely compelling reason to upgrade, in my view.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
The EU has no business whatsoever telling anybody (even MS) what software they should be allowed to sell. It's not like the software contains child pornography or was made with prison labor.
The only reason the EU's considering blocking it is because of complaints from companies that MS is going to cut off their lucrative antivirus/PDF business. These guys just have to face the fact that they're in the buggie whip business, and have no right to complain about horseless carriages.
The worst one I think is Adobe. They have an almost absolute monopoly over the fixed-format portable document market with their PDF viewing and creating software, yet they complain to the EU when MS tries to create its own format. That's like Standard Oil complaining about GM going into the gasoline business!
Although the whitepaper may be stupid FUD, the whole reason they had to make it in the first place is stupid. Symantec and Adobe need to get off their asses and start making better software. Maybe if Norton AV didn't cause more crashes than viruses, and if Adobe PDF viewers didn't take half a minute to start up, people wouldn't have a reason to switch to the versions of their stuff that comes with Vista.
dom
Mr Anonymous said: As for 'anti-competitive', what's that even mean? No one has a problem if Pepsi offers a lower price to a vendor in exchange for an agreement from the vendor to stop selling Coke products. But when a company captures enough of the market, suddenly that behavior is illegal?
Note that he's claimed that "No one has a problem" with paying a vendor to not sell a product.
My former boss did: he was a small-town conservative and regarded that as an attempt to bribe him to do something nether he nor his customers wanted to do. So whenever the pop or chip company drivers tried it, he'd throw them out of the store for 30 days, and post a sign on the racks saying why. You can imagine the consternation every time a new driver took over the route and trid to bribe Jack (;-))
The error here is saying "there exists no person who disapproves of X", when the true statement is "some people disaprove of X".
And, of course, "when a company captures enough of the market, suddenly that behavior is illegal" is very close to the definition of a monopoly. Logically, it might be stated "for any undesirable behavior X, which is dealt with by a free market but which is not ina monopoly, X is illegal when done by a monopolist."
Etc, etc, ad nauseam...
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
> It's wealth *movement*.
Exactly! I remember the uncomfortable feeling I had when I sat in high school economics and heard the teacher lecture the class on the "creation of wealth". It was the exact same feeling I got when I sat in Sunday School while the teacher told us such things as "agape [Godly] love is far greater than carnal [animal] love" -- the feeling that an idea was, as my first software engineering professor would have called it, "highly suspect".
This whole idea of "creating wealth" seems to run counter to one of the most simple yet important folk sayings I've heard: "The money you spend on one thing is money you can't spend on any other thing." (Yes, I know it's possible to returned purchased goods for a refund, but even then there's a limitted return period -- and you may be charged a "restocking fee".) If we generalize the idea, we can say that "the resources you spend one one thing are resources you cannot spend on any other thing."
Now, *that* concept fits nicely with the basic physics principle that energy and matter cannot be created, only converted from one form to the other. Furthermore, if we presume that the universe began in a Big Bang and will eventually collapse in a Big Crunch, then time itself can be seen as a finite resource, one that must be spent carefully. (Heck, don't business people already believe that?)
So, if we view economics from the standpoint of physics / engineering / system theory, then an economy is a distribution system for delivering resources (goods and services) to all the different parts of the system, much as the blood circulation system in our bodies delivers consumable materials and non-consumable benefits (the immune system antibodies and phages are not meant to be consumed, yet provide a vital service to the body).
If we presume that the body is a closed system, then the body's total supply of resources at any given time is finite, and therefore an increase in a subsystem's demand for resources will result in a decrease in available resources for all other subsystems. (Think of what happens to you after eating a large, heavy meal: your digestive system needs so much blood to process the massive influx of food that you feel tired, lethargic, and barely have the energy to get up and plop yourself down in front of the TV / computer / whatever.)
Of course, in real life the body is not perfectly isolated from the outside world. However, in order to acquire the outside resources we need we must spend some of the resources we already have (energy, time, etc.) -- plus there is the chance that we not succeed, or will end up being injured or killed in the attempt (risk vs. gain). There is also the danger of being *too* successful, in which case we can become so bloated, so massively overgrown with resources (morbidly obese) that we will be easily outmaneuvered by smaller, more agile entities.
Then again, I'm no economist, so what the fuck do I know?
"All hands, BRACE FOR IMPACT!"
That's hardly true at all. Just look at this page (http://kde.org/support/) from kde.org. It lists many ways to contribute to KDE, including giving donations, contributing artwork, promoting KDE, finding and reporting bugs, documenting and translating programs, and more. That doesn't involve anything overly-technical for your average user; it mostly only takes some time and dedication.
Since I don;t liek to eb bosmbastic witout looking at the facts, I went back and skimmed the report.
I notice that the IDC report concentrates on only 1 thing:
Revenue of Vista.
Revenue of the Microsoft Ecosystem surrounding Vista.
I have no reason to doubt the numbers.
However, the author fails to state that one man's revenue is another man's expense.
So the author sees Vista simply as a stimulus to the economy.
However, another way to look at it, is in terms of productivity.
And return of investment of capital.
The "Microsoft Ecosystem" is a tax on those who use it.
Vista will significantly increase this tax.
That means a net drop in profitability and productivity.
The best analogy of IDC's message would be a publication by the Saudi government, praising the benefit of increased oil consumption and increased oil prices. Justified by employment and revenue of oil companies.
As a stimululus to the economy, Vista is useless. If this is the main purpose, EU could do much better, by building infrastrucuture, researching energy sources.
Vista makes no more sense than mandating more frequent haircuts, starting banana plantations in germany, etc.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
"The white paper may predict sales by the "Microsoft ecosystem" of over $40 billion in six of Europe's biggest economies, but what this figure hides is the fact that income for Microsoft and its chums is a cost for the rest of Europe."
VAT
Seriously, how does the submitter think the US or Washington governments see any of Microsoft's money? Through taxation, of course! The EU gets to tax all of Microsoft's European transactions and European assets, just like everybody else.
If nothing else, 15%-25% of $40 billion isn't exactly something to sneeze at, which is what the EU will be seeing through VAT.
There are very valid reasons to doubt the magnitude of the impact a Vista delay may mean for the EU, but this... this is something an average teenager should be able to see through.