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."

Comments

Hardware and open source quotes

[Lord Satri]

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).

Mutilation of the English language

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if his technical arguments are correct, but what the hell was the author thinking when he wrote: "clipping the wings of this digital golden goose"? The golden goose was so called because it laid golden eggs. Its ability to fly is totally irrelevant to its value. In fact, one would WANT to clip the wings of a golden goose to keep it from escaping the farm. Way to mangle a perfectly good metaphor.

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.

Re:Why do we need it?

[rts008]

Unfortunately, where Vista will get it's foothold is by way of the likes of Dell, eMachines, HP, etc. when Joe Sixpack buys a new PC with Vista preinstalled. This tactic is what got MS to where they are now, and I don't see them slacking off in this department lately.

The sad thing is, all of this discussion is just preaching to the choir-the major influence (as usual) is "teh lusers"

P.S. To mollify the mad modders, we are all "teh lusers" outside our respective fields of expertise-ie: in an office enviorment I would be "teh luser", as I've done almost exclusively construction work most of my life- I doubt I could operate a copier withou having to ask for help fer christ's sake! (yes, this has happened to me before)

Re:Wow!

[arkhan_jg]

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.

Re:MS and the future

[rts008]

"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."

I think this is an important point-good insight, IMHO.

I just had a clent ask about alternatives to WinME (she did not want to pay for XP just to check here email and browse the internet). Her PC (Dell Demension 8200) had ME preinstalled, she had deleted the restore partition somehow thinking it would give her more HDD space, but could not figure out what happened to the storage space she had started with. (yes, it WAS that infested!)
I did my best to get her PC useable again, and gave her an Ubuntu Live cd to tryout. Two days later, I get this call from her:
"What would it take to install this Ubuntu thingy on my PC?-I really like it!"
Needless to say, I went right over and installed Ubuntu for her! w00t!!

I just don't see MS making as much of a killing on Vista that they are expecting/wanting- they have cut too many of the features that were toutewd when it was still Longhorn. (WinFS was the only one I had any interest in)
Now it seems that Vista is just WinXP SP3 with eye candy. I would rather see them release most of Vista as SP3 for XP, and use the time to finish Longhorn with all of the hyped features.

If it wasn't for my clients, I would ignore Vista completely, but I guess I'll have to download the "beta" mentioned earler on /. and run it on VMWare so I can help some of my older clents. (not client's age- how long they have been clients!)

Trollery via illogic (was Wow!)

[davecb]

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

Re:ban the term wealth creation

[zenhkim]

> 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?