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Motley Fool Writes Off Microsoft
The Vista disaster has caught Wall Street's attention before but I've never seen the popular press understand the issues like this argument in the Motley Fool. The opposing argument is a weak statement of faith, essentially "as it was in the beginning is now and forever shall be." "You don't need to watch the 'I'm a Mac, I'm a PC' commercials to see that Microsoft is taking a beating. You see it in the company's financials where its online unit, incredibly, is operating at a loss; overheating Xbox 360 consoles find the company taking a huge warranty hit for a system losing market share to the Wii; and the upgrade wave of its flagship operating system has been more of a ripple than a tsunami. That last point is important. This was supposed to be Microsoft's final feast, the major last hurrah for its Windows Vista operating entry and its Office 2007 suite of applications before the inevitable embrace of cheaper open source operating systems and Web-based apps... In fact, even Microsoft will tell you that its fortunes peaked several months ago."
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Yet XP has been pushed onto home and business users alike. If XP is the successor to ME, then everyone has been forced to take M$'s very worst. That's the way a monopoly market works isn't it? If you want to see real differences in software aimed at real categories of users you have to look at a really free market. Today's M$ choices are as trivial as branding on US automobiles, exactly the same obsolete engine and body designs with different stickers, paint and price tags. The major new feature of Vista was digital restrictions that no one wanted.
Every M$ change since the mid 90s has been M$ tightening their monopoly grip. The M$ branching of the early 90s was the result of real competition in the non free software world which is now largely extinct. The Win98 register has been followed by WGA and network enabled kill switches. This kind of spy and malware has always been written into M$ EULAs but they now have the technical mechanisms to enforce them. Proof of M$ code recycling can be found in any listing M$ OS remote exploits. Invariably these hit many versions of M$ that the reporting site cares to list because the binaries are largely unchanged i386 junk. They can't afford a rewrite.
M$'s cash has been flowing out at $10 billion a year. At that rate, they have two years to zero. If they had spent that money on code instead of their billion dollar a month marketing blitz, they might have a competitive product. They did not, so they don't. Good riddance.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
> Our only real hope at this point is that they hurry up and release Windows 7, and we can go ahead and stick Vista on the same shelf that ME is using to collect dust.
Windows 7 probably won't really be a new OS. Microsoft has really only release 4 OSs. The dozens of different names are for marketing purposes so they can make you pay again for things that should be released in service packs.
- Dos/Windows 3.1/WFW - Command line OS. 3.1/WFW was a GUI add-on (If they'd stuck with that sensible model, maybe Vista wouldn't crash so much).
- Windows 9x/ME - GUI becomes primary UI. This is where things start to head south. (no offense to Aussies and Kiwis)
- Windows NT/2000/XP/Server 200x - Added true preemptive multi-tasking and NTFS. You shouldn't call any of these distinct OSs because there were no significant differences to OS functions, just features (AD, etc.) that they had to add to keep Linux from taking over, most of which are only useful to some small subset of users, even though all that code bloat gets shoved down everyone's throats.
- Vista - Rewrite the GUI to compete with Apple. Like any new software, it's buggy as hell and crashes often. In fact, the only reason Vista deserves the status of a separate OS is BECAUSE it crashes, indicating they must have made some serious changes from the previous codebase which was finally getting pretty darn stable after about a decade.
Chances are that Windows 7 will just be another (hopefully less buggy) version of Vista. This isn't a bad thing, however, because Windows really is a pretty fully features OS. The only real OS-like thing with any sort of mass appeal that Linux does that Vista doesn't is not crash. (Xwindows still crashes from time to time, of course, but it's back in a second or so without me even pushing a button, whereas Vista starts over from the BIOS after I hold down the power button for 5 seconds.)