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Linux's Role In Microsoft's Decline
nerdyH writes "As early as last quarter, Microsoft admitted that Linux and netbooks were eating into its fat profits. Recently, it came home, with the software giant announcing its first-ever layoffs. LinuxDevices interviewed Linux Foundation Director Jim Zemlin on Linux's role in Microsoft's misfortunes. Zemlin sums it up pretty well: 'Companies can offer their own branded software platform based on Linux. If Microsoft is getting 75 percent margins, you would like some of that high-margin business, too.'"
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Making $4 Billion in one quarter isn't much a decline. Looks like layoffs were induced by greed, so that executives stocks options go up. It would be interesting to see if some of those 4000-5000 employees use linux as a platform for a technology startup.
On the bright side if I were laid-off I'd have plenty of time to juggle.
Not to mention the fact that if companies *did* start selling machines with their own flavors of Linux I'm sure they'd quickly spiral into garbage. Think of the crapware on budget PCs. Now imagine an entire OS bastardized, branded and sold to the highest bidder. I could see custom manufacturer Linux distros quickly becoming a total nightmare.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Well but that's my point. The percentage of people I "meet" online that use Linux is astonishingly high. Yet in person I've never seen it in practice. And the few Linux people I have met first online and then in person really didn't use Linux anymore than I did - which amounts to having it installed in a VM or on a spare box.
In regards to dependancies and app installs, sudo apt-get might be more logical for you than say dragging an application into a folder as you do on the Mac or double-clicking an installer executable on Windows but that doesn't mean its relatable to the average user.
now that our president is a chimp in a business suit.
I wasn't even in a trollbiting mood, but this just made me laugh.
Eight years of misunderestimating the nukeyoular policies of a man who even looks simian, and you think this president is the chimp?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I think that what has probably happened is that MS knows their share has been declining but hasn't had to lay anybody off because the decline simply allowed them to not replace people who left through natural attrition. The economic slowdown made people more likely to hang on the security of their job and forced them to let go the people who would normally have left on their own.
Yeah, it couldn't be because there is a massive economic crisis going on. It's all Linux.
Microsoft is getting beaten down by Apple at the high end and by Linux on the netbook space. Obviously, I don't mean that people are buying linux netbooks. Hold your horses there. But MS's bargaining position has changed because of linux. They could have said in 2002 that netbooks should cost $600, because of the $200 windows copy. But that does not apply anymore. They sell XP for $28-$32. This is a huge relative loss to what they were making.
And at the high end, Apple is all over it. Take a look at bestbuy. It is rare to find a $1000+laptop, Apple notwithstanding. Or take a look at Amazon's best seller list, only to find hordes of netbooks and macbooks, perhaps with a 1 in 20 Vista machine.
To make matters worse (for MS), if these high-end phones and proposed tablets such as the techcrunch one come to life, they won't be using windows. Nothing below $300 can afford windows, even at $32.
Finally, MS's stock price has been walking sideways for years and years and years. They cannot bring the best talent in the basis of money or stock options alone. This is not the year of linux on the desktop. But its presence is being felt in the markets undergoing disruptive innovation, like the netbooks.
that and their reliance on temps. They could close and shuffle offices far bigger than this without a peep. They used to hide "right sizing" in the legions of temps.. but of course now it's better to shed the real employees and keep the temps!
They're just saying this to "look busy" so the stock market will still like them.
The first netbooks were all linux, because they were all sporting 4 GB SSDs. Within about a year, a lot of the models had 8 GB or larger SSDs or 160 GB regular laptop drives, and they almost all came with XP home. I think MS may have put together a special XP-Lite, low cost package to push linux out of the netbooks.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
But how many Vista netbooks do you see? The fact that MS has had to continue to allow companies to us XP in new products is a slap in the face to MS, and really hurts their profits. Microsoft has no choice but to allow XP to be used (and very cheaply) or face those companies moving to Linux.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I think Microsoft will still dominate market share until Google makes an OS based on FreeBSD. Until then, Microsoft's biggest competitor is itself because while their software is over-priced, most people just keep reusing their old XP disk rather than trying to learn something new. Linux doesn't have the marketing power required to take on Microsoft no matter how good the software is. I'm not a fortune-teller, but if I were, this would be my prediction.
Embedded devices and netbooks are going with Linux due to its ability to run lean.
It has been known for at least 20 years that systems-on-a-chip or embedded systems were going to take off - although it has not been until wireless communication and true-color displays have become affordable that this has happened.
For many years, Microsoft could specify the standard of hardware required to run their OS, and the hardware vendors had to obey in order to get compatibility certification.
Linux distro developers did not have that level of influence over the hardware developers and so had to modularize their software in order to adapt to hardware with limited memory and resources.
By not having this evolutionary pressure, Microsoft have really pushed themselves into a very restricted evolution path, and just hope that memory increases enough to run the embedded versions of their OS.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Microsoft isn't reporting billion dollar losses.
Microsoft is reporting a bare 2% growth in revenues, to $16.6 billion dollars in its second quarter.
Microsoft is debt free, with tens of billions in liquid reserves and Exxon-Mobil grade corporate credit.
The last I heard, OpenOffiice.org was down to 24 full time developers.
Sun is hurting.
There are others who have made big commitments to Linux and open source who are hurting.
Before the geek crows too loudly about Microsoft's "dilemma" he might usefully rate his own chances of survival.
Give me an example of what was alternatives that IBM ignored when it chose MS-DOS for the IBM PC. And why they were better (for the target market) than MS-DOS.
I can only think of one OS that was truely better at the time for personal computing, and that was OS-9 (not Mac OS-9)... but I'm not sure that it could have been ported to the Intel 8080 as it was written entirely in assembly and wasn't ported to any other processors until 2 years later in 1983 and not to Intel until 1989.
Sure there were tons of interesting things happening in the personal computing OS space in those days... but when IBM went shopping, there were not really that many choices that would have made good business sense. CP/M would have been the best choice, as it was the most popular... but they wouldn't sign the papers IBM required... hence the reason Gates bought QDOS (a CPM like OS) and renamed it MS-DOS in the first place.
So technically there was nothing for intel processors that was better, and the only os that made better business sense wouldn't sell... that left MS-DOS.
I will agree that MS could have greatly improved on MS-DOS and didn't, favoring compatibility over capability... but don't forget that tons of software of the time was proprietary so it didn't make sense to break compatibility to favor features.
I think if anything, it's IBM's fault for coming into the scene before a decent OS had been ported to intel processors. Hell QNX was only a year later and put DOS to shame... but in technology, it rarely pays to wait.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Hype and marketing.
Real world benchmarks are gradually creeping out and guess what?
"any illusions about Windows 7 somehow being leaner or more efficient than Vista can now be thrown out the window."
Via Engadget
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The problem isn't that the version of XP used on netbooks took some time and effort to create. The problem is that netbooks running XP are being sold instead of netbooks running a much more expensive version of Windows.
Even just a few years ago no OEM had that sort of leverage over Microsoft. You either built hardware that worked with existing versions of Windows (with existing cost structures) or you didn't build a device at all. With the netbook Microsoft showed that it was willing to cave on price if the alternative was a PC running Linux.
Sure, the netbook version of XP wasn't expensive to create, but Microsoft's R&D department is essentially a fixed cost. The bit that this particular set of articles missed is that Microsoft's unit sales actually increased by 1% in this last quarter, but revenue on those sales was down 8%. Clearly this is better than losing those sales to Linux, but it still amounts to nearly a 10% price reduction on the sale price of Windows due to competition from Linux.
Now clearly this isn't going to drive Microsoft out of business any time soon, but it certainly worries investors. If future trends see Microsoft selling less software at lower prices then they'll want to see changes made.
I'm no business analyst, but obviously Linux (the netbook market in particular) is severely cutting into the profits of computer giants like Microsoft, Apple, Intel, and IBM. If you needed a sign for the year of Linux, this is it!
Well, I've got a circa-1998 333MHz Pentium II processor with 128 MB of memory running my file server at the house. If it wasn't for Linux, I'd have replaced it a loooong time ago with some of that new fancy-shmancy Intel stuff. Now it sits there for months between reboots and hardly draws any power. And when that goes, I've got an 800MHz beastie waiting in the wings to take over.
Nope, Linux hasn't hurt Intel at all.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
They used to hide "right sizing" in the legions of temps.. but of course now it's better to shed the real employees and keep the temps!
Ya think? Having been a temp in this whole blue-badge, green-badge continuous reorganization scheme I can speak to this. In this environment the temp's got a lot of leverage. He can afford to call a turd a turd and not say it has potential. He can make fun of PHBs. He can do honest work and contribute without fear his out-of-scale achievements become the flag that gets him targeted for political career assassination. He can take bigger risks without fear of being labeled a 10%er. He has the power of laughter, and oh, what a power that is. He can do this because - what are they going to do? Fire him?
But this isn't Microsoft specific. I've never worked for them and I probably won't - they would have to pay enough more than I was worth to make me feel like I was exploiting them. Seinfeld money maybe. I would for what he got paid, and I think I could give them what they got for what they paid him.
They're just saying this to "look busy" so the stock market will still like them.
Agreed. Do you think anybody will notice their stock is worth half of what it was ten years ago today? Apple's good for 10x your money in the same period. For you 401K folks that's the leverage that investing in a growth company gives you. Companies that have achieved monopoly have no growth potential - the best they can hope for is graceful decline potentially (but rarely) followed by a bet-the company reinvention of process. This is going to surprise a lot of you dollar-cost-averaging investors, but betting that a company will survive the retirement of its founders is a very bad bet. If you start investing in a company at the beginning of your working life, and keep your money in that company throughout your careers, 95% of the time you'll lose it all because founders of companies don't have longer working lives than you do.
Help stamp out iliturcy.