Slashdot Mirror
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."
You would've expected a global economic meltdown by now.
But it's Genuine Microsoft FUD!
Isn't that a bit like saying "Rembrandt's Masterpiece of Art"? There are so many to choose from, each one brilliant and unique in its own way.
Unless the title is referring to the piece of work a journeyman turns in to become a master craftsmen, in which case he's scaring me.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
It's wealth movement.
Deleted
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.
Microsoft will delay shipping Vista to the EU until after SP1 this means European organisations will
1) Not have the "benefits" of learning about the early security holes
2) Not have the "advantage" of paying the launch list price, they'll have to wait until Microsoft slash prices as Vista doesn't fly
3) Have a mature support market to fall back on
4) More time to work out if its actually worth it
Brilliant, its like testing something dangerous on lab rats but we get to use Americans instead.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I know you are trolling, but no company inherently deserves to make money. Monopolists who engage in illegal anti-competitive behavior especially do not deserve to make money. Europe should puts its $40 Billion behind an open source operating system and see the real benefit of spending money on something that gives you back real returns, not just returns to Microsoft's coffers. In summary, the American company Microsoft has no inherent right to do business in Europe and if Microsoft continues to break the rules here and abroad they can expect to be tossed aside. I, for one, welcome the time when real competition returns to the computer software OS marketplace. As it is, Microsoft sits on its laurels and just expects people to buy Vista no matter how shitty and bug-laden it is.
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.
Wow, hit Slashdot for the first time today and surprise surprise, its the daily MS bitching thread.
I challenge everyone to take 80% of the time they spend complaining about Microsoft and devote it to something else such as contributing to an OSS project.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
According to the information in the pdf file the author was someone named 'akotsopoulus'.
a sp?AgencyID=9&city=95&qid=-1
A quick google does turn up someone with that name working for a PR firm called Brodeur Worldwide in Boston. A coincidence?'
http://www.prfirms.org/findafirm/company_details.
"For a company to make money, it costs consumers money."
While this may seem obvious to you, it's a fact that most proponents of intellectual 'property' in general prefer to utterly ignore.
They get a much more compelling argument if they say 'we can create X amount of wealth in your economy if you give us monopoly rights', instead of 'take X amount of money from everyone else and give it to us so we make more money'.
It may amount to the same thing, but the presentation is important.
See, as long as they can hide the actual cost they dont have to justify it, nor will the public and politicians question why these specific costs give so little value for the money.
I mean, how would it look if they had to justify a cost of $40 billion of what is essentially public funding and produce something that can barely compete with free opensource software? That'd buy a lot of healthcare, education or infrastructure, were those resources spent elsewhere instead.
"Thank goodness we have guys like this to point out these secrets of the Economy."
With the amount of willful ignorance and intentional misdirection going on among the IP related lobbyist crowds, unfortunately it does seem necessary.
A poster on the linked page (http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000097) gave the best possible reply, IMHO:
k en_window") to be significant?
"How does it help?
Submitted by Bozikins (not verified) on Wed, 2006-09-20 17:58.
Why is it beneficial to anyone that a new operating system will require 100,000 new jobs to support it - couldn't they be better employed improving the human condition? Should we consider the parable of the broken Windows mentioned elsewhere ("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_bro
"
If your not familiar with the broken window parable, follow the wiki link-perfect reply!
I was not aware of the broken window parable until just a few minutes ago, thus fell enlightened;It is a good day for me!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
they have taken it to completely new levels. they are so far off the scale the world lacks the tecnology for instruments that can actually measure it
...if everyone gets to own it in the FOSS way. Two different beasts in this discussion, even though it's all about software. There are just so many ways to build a system now with FOSS, and with various degrees of cost from free as in beer to expensive, that it is doubtful any one system or way or pricing level will ever become dominant like MS has become, and being open, you can't get locked in, in the same manner. Here's an opportunity for europe-say-to only drop 5 billion on mass adoption of FOSS, and save the other 35 billion to use in other areas.
Open source leads to open standards as well, and that is a critical issue now, especially with governments and business. A document you make today with open standards will still be readable for free any number of years from now.
Look at that reference in the latest vista candidate article, MS will still hose any other system you have on the disk, on purpose, if you go to install it(guru tweaking not applicable, I mean for joe regular). What would they do if it was the opposite on purpose? That's the different mindset we are facing, MS is their way or the highway,their monopoly status will remain and it will be serious folding money no matter what you are talking about, or FOSS which is primarily free and Free for the most part. A monopoly (note: a monopoly does not mean 100% when speaking legally) signifies abuse in the market place, as in "costs you money" with little recourse, then it becomes an abusive monopoly and starts to get into the illegal areas, which they have been provbven to have done. and it wasn't an accident either.
That's one of the main issues if you use the word monopoly as it relates to current business practices, abusive behavior leading to your wallet getting lighter. MS is saying if you don't stick to their monopoly expensive products it will cost you serious money, that's the FUD part, because STICKING with them costs you serious folding money, and for most purposes today, there is no longer a need. For some, yes, for most, no.
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.
I've actually downloaded the PDF, and I've been reading through it. It's only 16 pages, and there's a hell of a lot of white space. There's also a lot of space taken up with a bunch of rather unimpressive bar charts.
The problem is, they have absolutely no justification for any of their numbers. For instance, on page 5 they claim, "In 2008, IDC predicts that 80% of Microsoft client operating systems shipped into enterprises will be Windows Vista." But they can't back it up!
They also admit they've only been looking at these numbers since 2002, so they've got no basis for comparison. In order for their 'study' to have any meaning, they'd have to compare it to the relative effects of the introduction of XP, compared to previous Microsoft operating systems. But they admit their data doesn't go back that far!
Their 'predictions' have as much weight as those you'd get from your local psychic.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Including bar and pie charts labeled "pure flowing bullshit" would still make any phone-flipping corporate hairpiece fuck nod their head and say "it supports our core synergies."
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
This is quite amusing. If the effects of delaying vista are "dire", then the obvious conclusion is that XP doesn't work. Satisfactorily....
It is not going to work that way.
Microsoft will make sure that it has agreements with all major computer suppliers to have Vista installed on all newly sold PCs, and make XP available only as a special option (maybe at additional cost).
There will be notices like "Dell recommends Vista!" prominently placed on every product page.
Ordinary consumers will be wary if their new machine will work with XP, especially when it is indicated that this is not guaranteed.
So, even when consumers do not need Vista, they still will buy it. Just as they now buy XP even though alternatives are available.
Just point out that the entire article is entirely about additional costs imposed by Vista. There's no mention of benefits in that article. None. It's all about additional costs and planned obsolescence.
Mention that when talking to your local EU politicians.
The wealth being moved must have been created somehow, isn't it? Where do you think it comes from?
So let's see:
Looking at how 'fast' XP spread after launch, a massive buying spree just for the sake of upgrading is unlikely. Add to that hardware requirements (meaning simply upgrading your computer is not an option in far too many cases) and I would say people will buy Vista preloaded on PCs that would have been otherwise bought with XP anyway. Then this looks like MS issuing Win XP SP3 and calling it a major reason for 'new' cash flow. Now, given that MS is spinning "this is the cash flow we expect Vista to generate" into "this is the excess cash flow we expect Vista to generate and you'll never get it it you don't allow us to do whatever we like" I would indeed call it a major piece of FUD.
On the other hand, I don't see why MS should have mentioned F/OSS in this paper. Certainly one is not supposed to make a case for the opposition in such cases. My problem is with them grossly misrepresenting their own case.
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!"
It shouldn't take an economist to look at the world today and compare it to the world a hundred years ago to recognize that wealth has indeed been created through trade, innovation, and exploitation of resources.
Your comparison to a sunday school theory doesn't hold much weight given that wealth creation is an observable phenomenon. If all that ever happened was wealth movement, then everyone else in the world ought to live in stone age conditions given the lifestyles of industrialized nations. Regardless of the hyperbole used by anti-capitalists and others with anti-west agendas, that is not the case.
Err
Mono = one duo = two. It would be a duopoly which is half as bad. And if Apple and Linux could get a better market share it would become much more like a competitive market place.
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.
Most of it goes back to the US, yes. However, don't forget that MS does employ people in Europe, so some of that money will stay here in salaries. Also software (and the hardware to run it on) is taxable (at least in the UK), so some of the money goes to the government, too.
it could have been more productively spent on hiring people to expand the business and do new things
Chances are, it'll be spent by the training company to expand their business, and for them to do new things.
I'm just playing devil's advocate, to an extent - I don't buy MS's claims either. However, I'm not entirely convinced that things are quite as you describe them either. I agree with the overall point though, that the EU would be better off buying EU-produced software. That's not entirely practical right now, though...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
This won't get modded up since the article is too old, so I'm just posting it for your elucidation.
Anyway, unlike energy, wealth can be created and destroyed. Consider cookies, for instance:
I take some flour, sugar, butter, chocolate chips and other miscellaneous goods. The total value of these goods is only a bit more than a dollar.
Using them in various arcane ways, I craft, say, a dozen chocolate chip cookies, the likes of which anyone would pay $.25 and think it was a good deal.
So, we started out with about a dollar's worth of goods, and ended up with something like three dollars worth of cookies. There's now two more dollars worth of value in the economy, and it's all mine. This is what people mean when they say "wealth creation".
If I were to, instead, just set all those ingredients aflame, the world's economy would be poorer by about a dollar. That would be the destruction of wealth.
Of course, it's true that in a closed system, it would be impossible to create more than a certain amount of wealth. It's a good thing, then, that there's this big giant flaming ball of gas up in the sky spewing an unimaginable amount of energy in every direction, some of which fortunately falls on us.
In a more universal sense, you could make the case that there's only a certain maximum amount of wealth possible; however, reaching that would involve things like dyson spheres and asteroid farms.
Someone aught to mod you up...
the American company Microsoft has no inherent right to do business in Europe and if Microsoft continues to break the rules here and abroad they can expect to be tossed aside. I, for one, welcome the time when real competition returns to the computer software OS marketplace.
Worth repeating. How come it is so hard to get a PC WITHOUT a Micro$oft OS in North America!!! That is like if I buy car I must use defective Firestone tires. The problem is that of all tech companies Micro$oft donates the most so enforcing US anti-trust laws goes by the wastebasket. So I too welcome the return to a free market.
I recently wrote HP and got this:
Dear xxxxx xxxxxxxx: Thank you for contacting Hewlett-Packard. To the best of my knowledge, HP has no plans to begin offering desktop or notebook PCs with anything other than a Microsoft operating system. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Accessories and consumables for your HP products can always be purchased directly from Hewlett-Packard in Canada, please visit our web site at: [snip, the rest was sales jargon...]
Yet HP sells them with Linux in China.
They happen simultaniously:
For customer:
Value of $X dollars: X
Value of Windows Vista: Y
For Microsoft:
Value of unsold copy: 0 (the plastic disc has essentially no value, if were were talking about a car it'd be non-zero)
Value of sold copy: X
Now, assuming Y > X (client actually wants to buy copy):
Before total value was: X (client) + 0 (MS)
Afterwards total value is: Y (client) + X (MS)
What just happened here?
X was wealth movement.
(Y+X)-(X+0) = Y was wealth creation. It shows up as two components (Y-X) for the buyer, and (X-0) for Mircosoft.
In business, you normally call that wealth, with consumers you usually call it utility (because we measure so many other things other than money). What happens when you buy a burger at McDonalds? There's a transfer of wealth, but utility is created - your utility of that meal is greater than the utility of the cash, otherwise you wouldn't have bought it. That is the way pretty much ever non-forced transaction works. Even with things like the broken glass paradox paradox it is the same - you had the choice to leave the glass broken, but the value of having it fixed exceeded the value of leaving it broken.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Wow, imagine that. For a company to make money, it costs consumers money.
If I have two hundred and fifty dollars and I exchange it for an older violin worth two hundred and fifty dollars, I have a violin that can be resold for two hundred and fifty dollars, or maybe a hundred if I'm in a hurt, five hundred is am not.
I have exchanged my money for real wealth. Maybe even made an investment.
If I have two hundred and fifty dollars and exchange it for Vista, I: Go hungry.
Well, ok, that's a trade, not really consumption (the violin will be handed down to my grandkids, not consumed. Well cared for they can last hundreds of years).
So, If I have two hundred and fifty dollars I can buy two months worth of food: life itself. Although a consumable, real wealth.
If I have two hundred and fifty dollars I can buy Vista and: Go hungry.
Are you beginning to get the idea? I'm not concerned with Microsoft's ability to make a profit, I'm concerned with my ability to accumulate wealth.
The idea behind a business transaction is that both parties should come away feeling satisfied that what they gave up was no more valuable than what they recieved in exchange for it. Maybe even both parties can legitimately feel they came out ahead, due to oversupply/scarcity ratios.
Windows will have an oversupply of Vista (indeed) and shortage of money (they will not). I will have a shortage of Vista (I will not) and an oversupply of money (I will not).
So where do I benefit from the deal? Where does Microsoft suffer if I do not give them my money?
They can bite me. I'm buyin' a fiddle.
KFG
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.