The Soul of A New Microsoft

BusinessWeek Online is running a front page story today about the new future of Microsoft. By 'looking beyond Windows', the company is utilizing fresh blood to come up with new products like the Zune, the Xbox 360, and various online sites. While the Zune probably isn't getting off to as successful a start as they might have liked, the article argues it's a positive sign that they're at least making the attempt. From the article: "The point is that Microsoft needs to find its un-Vista. Several of them, in fact. The software giant is entering perhaps the greatest upheaval in its 30-year history. New business models are emerging--from low-cost "open-source" software to advertising-supported Web services--that threaten Microsoft's core business like never before. For investors to care about the company, it needs to find new growth markets. Its $44.3 billion in annual sales are puttering along at an 11% growth pace. Its shares, which soared 9,560% throughout the 1990s, sunk 63% in 2000 when the Internet bubble burst, and they have yet to fully recover."

Comments

The market is crazy..

[LilWolf]

Its $44.3 billion in annual sales are puttering along at an 11% growth pace.

Really, 11% growth is considered bad? That's 4,8 billion growth annually!

Stories like this are perennial.

[dpbsmith]

"The software giant is entering perhaps the greatest upheaval in its 30-year history."

Yeah, right. Like the upheaval when they announced a top-to-bottom-all-new-strategy named .NET, and the upheaval when they decided this Internet thing was really important and reorganized themselves top-to-bottom to take advantage of it, and the upheaval in 1995 when Bill Gates said that the "social interface" was the future of computing and introduced the all-new revolutionary Microsoft BOB.

(Social interface? Come to think of it, where have I heard something like that out of Microsoft just recently...)

Microsoft is always talking about upheavals, but meanwhile what they actually do is keep cranking out big bloated monolithic versions of Windows with badly-copied slightly-distorted features in other operating systems, and strong-arming PC vendors into preloading them.

Factoid

[Frosty Piss]

Factoid: Microsoft owns the domains www. anti zune.com / net / org. But they do not own www.zune.com.

The Name is "Gary Kildall".

[reporter]

The name that you are seeking is "Gary Kildall". His work revolutionized the operating system (OS) on personal computers (PC), and many of his ideas survive into the modern PC OS.

To summarize a very long story, an employee at Seattle Computer Products (SCP) cloned (i.e., ripped off) CP/M, which Kildall developed. Bill Gates, the young founder of Microsoft, licensed an OS to IBM, but this OS was not yet under the control of Gates. In other words, Gates sold a product that he did not actually have. After inking the deal with IBM, Gates then bought a permanent liftime license to SCP's OS. That OS morphed over a two decades into the infamous line of Windows OSes.

As for Kildall, he understandably became very bitter. Kildall was financially well off, but he never achieved either the fame or the wealth that Gates achieved. If Gates had gotten the billion-dollar wealth but Kildall had gotten the fame (for his work on OSes), then Kildall would probably have accepted the outcome. However, Kildall achieved neither the fame nor the wealth. The bitterness drove Kildall to essentially commit suicide by drinking himself to death. He died in a bar.

I understand Kildall's feelings. Someone had screwed me in the same way that Gates screwed Kildall.

Re:The Name is "Gary Kildall".

[bogjobber]

Why the hell does QDOS get such a bad rap for ripping off CP/M? As far as I understand it, all they did was clone the API. It had near-identical functionality as CP/M, but nobody working on QDOS had any knowledge of the actual CP/M code. When DRI stalled in discussions with IBM, Microsoft jumped on the opportunity to take their place. If Kildall really desired the fame and wealth, then he shouldn't have screwed up the business deal with IBM. What is wrong with that? Is there something I'm missing? I never hear people complaining about companies cloning IBM PC's. Am I just wildly misinformed?

Re:need to find their heart

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't get to the top by leveraging a monopoly, because when you have a monopoly you're already at the top.

There are so many valid criticisms it's a shame to make them up.

This article gets it totally wrong

[Overly Critical Guy]

By 'looking beyond Windows', the company is utilizing fresh blood to come up with new products like the Zune, the Xbox 360, and various online sites.

Wow, totally wrong. Microsoft is always focused on the Windows platform. What the hell do you think the Zune and the XBox 360 exist for? The Zune only runs on Windows and uses Windows audio formats, and the XBox 360 runs Windows and uses DirectX.

This author is arguing that Microsoft is going outside of Windows with these devices, when Microsoft is actually using them to drive even more dependency on Windows and its related technologies. Every single thing Microsoft does can be viewed through the prism of preserving or extending their platform in some way. The Zune is a response to the iPod's Windows-independent digital media, and the XBox was a response to the Playstation's gobbling up of the PC gaming market, .NET and web services was a response to Java, and so forth. The company exhibits a sort of reactionary paranoia to everything that is always intended to preserve the Windows platform.