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Google Challenging Microsoft For Business Software
SternisheFan tips a report at the NY Times about the progress Google is making in its quest to unseat Microsoft's position atop the business software industry. From the article:
It has taken years, but Google seems to be cutting into Microsoft's stronghold — businesses. ... In the last year Google has scored an impressive string of wins, including at the Swiss drug maker Hoffmann-La Roche, where over 80,000 employees use the package, and at the Interior Department, where 90,000 use it. One big reason is price. Google charges $50 a year for each person using its product, a price that has not changed since it made its commercial debut, even though Google has added features. In 2012, for example, Google added the ability to work on a computer not connected to the Internet, as well as security and data management that comply with more stringent European standards. That made it much easier to sell the product to multinationals and companies in Europe. ... Microsoft says it does not yet see a threat. Google 'has not yet shown they are truly serious,' said Julia White, a general manager in Microsoft’s business division. 'From the outside, they are an advertising company.'"
"....Swiss drug maker Hoffmann-La Roche, where over 80,000 employees use the package." - Which package?
"Google added the ability to work on a computer not connected to the Internet...." - Really? This is a Google invention?
Context is everything. Simply snipping an article excerpt, without correct context, is poor editorial work.
Brought to you by the author of such childrens' classics as "Some Kittens can Fly!" and "All Dogs go to Hell."
Microsoft says it does not yet see a threat.
Isn't this what happened to Microsoft in the mobile/phone/tablet space? Now they are playing catch-up to both Google and Apple. Complacency is a dangerous copilot.
From Language: Microsoft Business Division Marketspeak
"Google has not yet shown they are truly serious. From the outside, they are an advertising company."
To Language: Reality
"We have shit in our pants about this and aren't able to figure out how to avoid destruction, so we'll try to dismiss the threat. We always say the same about real threats. And worst, our bad dreams always turn up true (see previous dismissals about Linux, Apple, Facebook and Google before)"
Now gmail and to some extent also video chat in Google are pretty impressive. But the rest of the Google Apps are pretty pathetic feature-wise compared to MS Office. Except for collaboration features that just work out of the box.
But the problem for Microsoft is that with more and more business communication never going through paper, many of these features are actually not terribly important compared to effortless collaboration, in fact their existence just make the products more complicated.
An exception here might be Excel and the support for extending Word/Excel/Outlook - some people integrate their workflow toolchain into Office rather than the other way around. But still, a sizable chunk of Microsoft's market could probably switch and be happier.
I guess that's why Microsoft is jumping on the cloud bandwagon too. Which strikes me as a smart idea, I do think that most organizations would probably prefer to continue to pay Microsoft, even if it's a bit more expensive.
Google 'has not yet shown they are truly serious,' said Julia White, a general manager in Microsoft’s business division. 'From the outside, they are an advertising company.'
From: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh506371(v=msads.10).aspx
Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows 8
The Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows 8 allows developers to show ads in their apps. You can use your Windows 8 apps to make money by including ads from Microsoft Advertising. The Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows 8 along with Microsoft pubCenter enables you to create apps that:
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Microsoft says it does not yet see a threat.
Isn't this what happened to Microsoft in the mobile/phone/tablet space? Now they are playing catch-up to both Google and Apple. Complacency is a dangerous copilot.
Google are a huge threat! Oglviy migrated all its users to "GMail", the employees really hate it vs proper exchange, outlook, office stack. But when a few massive companies like Oglviy migrate Google will improve to the point where they become more solid contenders.
Actually ironically Google is simply doing what MSFT did in the past, which was taking a market from morons. How did MS Office become dominant? Because Wordperfect was run by morons who thought that even though Windows was the dominant platform they could just sit on ass and repackage their DOS version and made a buggy POS that bombed. Same thing happened with IE and Netscape, Netscape put out the disaster that was NS 4 and gave MSFT a market by default, same again with Windows VS BeOS, which chose first a lame AT&T CPU that bombed, then the Motorola chip that was already fading before finally getting the sense too late to make an X86 version.
Now MSFT is being run by an absolute moron named Steve "What is Apple doing?" Ballmer who is about to make a move that will make the Osbourne effect or HP buying Palm look like minor boo boos. For those that don't know what I'm talking about look up "Windows Blue" where Ballmer laid out his "game plan" for MSFT past Win 8. in it he says Windows will get YEARLY releases (just like Apple) Microsoft will take over the production of hardware (just like Apple) stop selling to the low end (see a pattern here?) and tie every single thing to an appstore (Can Apple sue for plagiarism?) while making their own phones (ditto) laptops (uh huh) and desktops (Ray Charles could see through this plan) at high markups like they are doing with the surface, which they had to slash orders for in half because nobody is gonna pay $800 for a Windows device that won't run Windows programs.
So if the board doesn't stop smoking weed and wake the fuck up but quick I predict in 5 years we are gonna see the low end and a HELL of a lot of the businesses move to Google, after all Android has tons of apps and Google has already said they are gonna combine ChromeOS and Android so it really wouldn't be hard for Google to simply bake in something like Crossover to support some legacy Windows programs, Apple will keep the high end, although frankly i think their stock is gonna take a serious tumble when everyone sees that Cook can't pull new markets out of his ass like Jobs did, and MSFT will be relegated to legacy installs and a bunch of MSFT stores that will look like ghost towns.
In the end it won't be because Google made this truly amazing thing, although I give them credit in that they are putting in the work, nope its because Steve Ballmer drank too much eggnog and got it in his head you can take a Pinto, slap a coat of paint on it along with a $100,000 price tag, and it will magically compete with a Porsche. MSFT is a Walmart brand but because Ballmer cares more about what Wall Street thinks than in making good products he is just gonna copy every damned thing Apple is doing and think that people will buy windows...why? Because they like the WinFlag? He butchered the UI, his appstore is a joke, and just ask Intel about how well those crazy high Ultrabooks sold, they got warehouses full of the things.
At the end of the day Windows 8 just doesn't work, the new office will probably end up all metro and ribbon and it won't work, so frankly all Google has to do is make something that works and that lets you do things easily and they can take the Walmart shoppers and the small businesses simply by virtue of MSFT thinking they can take Apple's customers, how retarded. want a perfect example of Ballmer thinking? He said when he canceled Windows Home Server "Oh we have all those features in windows SBS now so we aren't leaving the market as people will just switch to SBS". Hmmm...Windows Home Server..$40, Windows SBS? $400!!! But that is Ballmer in a nutshell, he thinks he can take a brand that has sold at Walmart prices for damned near 30 years and just jack the living fuck out of the price and people will go "Ohh Windows is a hip brand now so we'll pay!" yeah the reason that Google is gaining is because Ballmer and his marketing drones go over about as well as a shit brown Zune.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world got pwned by an advertising company. lol
ftfy
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Here's a quick paste from the article:
Google Apps Challenging Microsoft in Business By QUENTIN HARDY Published: December 25, 2012 Facebook Twitter Google+ Save E-mail Share Print Reprints SAN FRANCISCO — It has taken years, but Google seems to be cutting into Microsoft’s stronghold — businesses.
Virginie Drujon-Kippelen for The New York Times
Jim Nielsen, center, of Shaw Industries calculated that using Google instead of similar Microsoft products would cost, over seven years, about one-thirteenth Microsoft’s price.
Google’s software for businesses, Google Apps, consists of applications for document writing, collaboration, and text and video communications — all cloud-based, so that none of the software is on an office worker’s computer. Google has been promoting the idea for more than six years, and it seemed that it was going to appeal mostly to small businesses and tech start-ups.
But the notion is catching on with larger enterprises. In the last year Google has scored an impressive string of wins, including at the Swiss drug maker Hoffmann-La Roche, where over 80,000 employees use the package, and at the Interior Department, where 90,000 use it.
One big reason is price. Google charges $50 a year for each person using its product, a price that has not changed since it made its commercial debut, even though Google has added features. In 2012, for example, Google added the ability to work on a computer not connected to the Internet, as well as security and data management that comply with more stringent European standards. That made it much easier to sell the product to multinationals and companies in Europe.
Many companies that sell software over the cloud add features without raising prices, but also break from traditional industry practice by rarely offering discounts from the list price.
Microsoft’s Office suite of software, which does not include e-mail, is installed on a desktop PC or laptop. In 2013, the list price for businesses will be $400 per computer, but many companies pay half that after negotiating a volume deal.
At the same time, Microsoft has built its business on raising prices for extra features and services. The 2013 version of Office, for example, costs up to $50 more than its predecessor.
“Google is getting traction” on Microsoft, said Melissa Webster, an analyst with IDC. “Its ‘good enough’ product has become pretty good. It looks like 2013 is going to be the year for content and collaboration in the cloud.”
Which AT&T CPU was BeOS originally on? And when the BeBox was made, the PREP boxes from Motorola were already making their rounds - the PPC was nowhere near fading. Be's mistake was in jettisoning the BeBox before Motorola, Power Computing and Umax endorsed BeOS. When Apple pulled the plug on the clone business, Be could have offered them the choice of making BeOS the default OS for their PREP boxes - in that case, Power Computing would have survived, and PPC, despite this setback and despite OS/2-PPC coming unhinged, would have had a better chance at being successful.
x86 was never a good platform for Be - anybody who had an x86 ran Windows on it, or at a distant second, Linux or OS/2. There was hardly room for a third, fourth or fifth OS. Putting BeOS on one of the alternatives, like PPC was a good move, as was coming out w/ a whole new computer such as the BeBox. Just that as a new OS, there was little native software for that platform (would have been the case on either PPC or x86) and the BeBox itself was more of a home/hobbyist computer, much like the Amigas or Ataris. Had Be kept that platform going and released essential software for it, from money managers, games, office suites, et al, instead of abandoning it just b'cos it could be adapted by clone makers, they may well have been more successful.
"We are not planning on doing anything until it is too late." said Julia White, a general manager in Microsoft’s business division.
I've never understood the point of SharePoint. Maybe I've never seen it implemented properly, but I don't see how a company could come up with a valid cost/benefit justification for it. OTOH, marketing promises and the lure of moving all IT to low-cost sites probably makes it very attractive to corporate heads; (often unmeasured) worker productivity be damned.
... but rather, walled garden and locked devices
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
But Google would have to do better than putting Android on desktops - it won't work any more than Metro does. And ChromeOS is available today, but hasn't taken off. A better idea for Google would be to take ReactOS, make a distro/clone of it that's compatible w/ Windows 7 for 64-bit and XP for 32-bit, and offer it to the market. Heck, they could even buy AMD to keep Intel honest. What Google could do is offer ReactOS - call it something like 'Google Windows' - and offer it on x86 PCs, while at an even lower end, offer ChromeOS on ARM based Chromebooks for those who prefer the discount to the ability to run Wintel apps. Google would then have both the low and mid range covered, while Apple will have its loyal following in the high end.
There is absolutely nothing in the NYTimes story that points to any new development that justifies the headline. Google Apps has been chipping away at the incumbent MS Office for a few years now and, at best, could be building momentum. Like many "stories" released during the Christmas season, this most likely was one of those weak story ideas that had once been shelved and has come to the rescue of some lurking journalist.
Are Microsoft managers deluded, or simply dismissive?
Remember this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U&feature=youtube_gdata
$50/year/user. Over the course of 5 years, that's $250.
We still have computers that are happily using Office 2007 without a hitch....and the licenses cost us less than $250/computer
Sure, you have the "new features" aspect of Google's apps....however, a majority of my company's users aren't power users who use a majority of the features in Word/Excel/PP anyways....so new features generally aren't used anyways.
More simply, BeOS was never in the category of being (or trying to be) a windows replacement, unless you looked extremely far down the road. That should have been evident by their choice of hardware to run on. The worst threat be posed was to next, as to Mac fans everywhere, they were the leading contender up until Steve jobs walked across the stage.
Netscape and WordPerfect are different stories. and even so, if not for tactics such as making os updates that broke their competitors software or simply integrated it into the operating system, both might still be around today. There was a time that Microsoft really took its gloves off... Like the Microsoft of old would have produced an update that redirected attempts to access google sites elsewhere, or just caused files downloaded with the name "chrome" in them to be hopelessly corrupted...
What a great plan. I'm pretty sure Microsoft would love this, and there would be no lawyers involved.
Unless Google do a really decent alternative to Excel, I don't see them stopping companies from owning MS Office. The company I work for has moved from Outlook to Google, including the Google Docs etc and whilst it's nice to do collaborative work on Google Spreadsheet, it simply isn't that friendly as Excel for solo use.
Meh I've felt for the last year that MS and Windows are on the way out. Windows 8 was there attempt to get people used to Metro and attempt some relevance in the touch space. The desktop is dead and MS know that, the new market is in the touch devices and using task-based UIs over file-based ones. My house mate is anxiously awaiting his new Nokia phone, and believes MS can manage to capture 30% so we have a good conversation about their new actions most days.
With Android expecting to hit 90% market share next year I believe their only chance is to get on the augmented reality bandwagon and hope Apple don't have something in development yet. With rumours that the next Xbox will have an AR addon it's quite possible they are doing this.
I've never seen it implemented properly either. From my experience I've seen document versions disappear and the whole checkin/checkout thing seems to get confused. So people end up doing a save as and giving the new version a different name than the previous one...defeating the purpose of SharePoint. It seems to be quite slow as well. Again, maybe this was just the way it was being managed but I'm still looking for a correctly implemented version.
That's funny... I've never had gmail lock up... or tell me I had too much mail and I couldn't send until I deleted some... Outlook is a dinosaur and it's time for it to die.
That's the sticking point for me as well. It seems to me that if someone wants to perform a security breach they are going to go for a big target, not little old me. They are not looking for one credit card number they are looking for millions. So it's only a matter of time before one of these big cloud vendors get violated. Then these big companies are going to get mighty nervous.
You predict 5 years, huh? I like the part where you're a moron, but stating your opinions as fact and someone modded you up.
I like the part where you got modded into oblivion for making and ad hominem attack while stating your opinion as fact.
Actually only seldom have 100% backwards compatible applications or OSes succeeded. UNIX was not the same as Multics. MS-DOS was not the same as CP/M. Microsoft Word was not the same as Wordperfect and Excel was not the same as Lotus. You will probably notice some patterns here. The new entrant was cheaper or the incumbent did not bother switching platforms as the market shifted. ChromeOS has failed so far but Android has not. Microsoft managed to alienate their OEMs with Surface enough that Chromebooks are actually starting to be pushed to the end client in a way I personally never believed would happen. So who knows.
That's not Outlook, that's an Exchange setting. If you were using Outlook as your gmail client you wouldn't get that either.
Don't forget the whole internet thing and how they ignored it.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
How did MS Office become dominant? Because Wordperfect was run by morons who thought that even though Windows was the dominant platform they could just sit on ass and repackage their DOS version and made a buggy POS that bombed.
That is not at all what happened. First off Microsoft Word for DOS at the time of the Windows switch was already a rather good product and quite popular. While it was clearly in 2nd / 3rd place it wasn't coming out of nowhere.
WordPerfect was heavily focused on cross platform and many non DOS versions. They were working on a Windows versions and came out within about a year of Windows 3.0's release. DOS was still the dominant platform when WordPerfect for Windows came out. It wasn't all that much more buggy than any of the word Processors were. Word was a bit faster, and better integrated the all around best experience but AmiPro, WordPerfect... were better and frankly DeScribe was likely the most feature rich least buggy word processor of the time.
Where Microsoft won was price pure and simple. $129 "competitive upgrades" for an entire office suite when most of the competition was selling each component at $495 (retail) was devastating. WordPerfect was hit with a common problem where it made economic sense for them lose marketshare rather than immediately cut prices by 90%. They eventually did offer a product mixed with Borland's Paradox and QuatroPro but by then it was too late.
While Microsoft did pull every scurvy trick you can think of with IE, it is both true and important that Netscape 4 was such a rickety piece of shit that IE was actually better to use; that Netscape passed up the chance to release an open source Netscape 5 based on the old code base; and that Mozilla took just too fucking long.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I might want some of what you're smoking.
Microsoft made their money on Windows and Office. When they lose that base, they are on the way down. When the fall starts, it will accelerate rapidly.
On second thought, no, I don't want any of what you're smoking.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The other thing about Google Apps is that it's designed for Chrome and if it works on anything else that's nice but they don't care and it's Not Supported. (You can also use Chromium.)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
2013 is the year of the Linux desktop
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
has sold at Walmart prices for damned near 30 years
IBM compatibles did not sell at Walmart prices for damned near 30 years. Commodore, Synclair, Atari owned that market slice during the 80s and the early 90s. Apple was lower end than Microsoft. Microsoft was positioned nicely in the middle range with the "junky" systems beneath them and the "too expensive" systems: DEC, SGI, Sun, IBM RISC/6000 ... above them.
The Walmart pricing is a product of the 2000s where corporations stopped upgrading rapidly and thus applications had to support older machines, and discount machines offered the capabilities of older machines. That's a nasty cycle that Microsoft partially created by allowing for a pause with Windows XP. They realize their mistake and they are fixing it.
And yeah, the bottom 1/3rd of the Windows market, which shouldn't have been part of the midrange in the first place might go for something cheaper.
> same again with Windows VS BeOS, which chose first a lame AT&T CPU that bombed, then the Motorola chip that was already fading before finally getting the sense too late to make an X86 version.
You mean the x86 version that Microsoft prevented the PC makers to install (otherwise the PC makers would have to pay more for Microsoft software)?
It seems the market likes Google's chances of muddling through.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Microsoft says it does not yet see a threat.
Luke: I don't believe it!
Yoda: That is why you fail.
2012 WAS the year of the Linux phone. No irony whatsoever. M$ craps into their pants. See Win 8.
Microsoft Live is not yet Google Docs, and Google Docs are a long way from Microsoft Office (though each is getting closer).
For a large volume of uses Google Docs is sufficient. If you need to create a simple memo or even a modest legal document Docs is certainly good enough. But it is not remotely getting closer to Office in the larger picture. Office is moving forward much, much faster in high-end business applications. Just take the example of Excel: the new data analysis and reporting capabilities built in to Excel are simply amazing. They exceed anything available from the best vertical reporting apps just a few years back, and are accessible to advanced business users for "playing around" with the data in ways that formerly would have required advanced data warehouse experts. These features in Excel are game changing in the corporate environment where Excel is a stock application for all business user desktops.
But still, there is a reason pretty much everybody I know use some kind of web based email, gmail probably being the most used. I don't think it's because they hate it. While I don't know how many uses Google docs, you have to be some kind of hardcore office nerd to really need something else.
I greatly prefer GMail over exchange/outlook. Centralizing email searches on a powerful server makes a lot of sense. My Outlook searches take forever in comparison to GMail.
I doubt that desktop is dead though. Could you imagine cubicle farms where everyone programs/admins from tablets? *shudders*
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Not sure why that is the case, can you elaborate? I do Outlook searches in Windows 7 from the command text box on the Start menu, inside Outlook using the box above the inbox on Windows 8 (that is an area Microsoft failed in; the search from the OS does not include data inside of Outlook); and inside of Outlook on the mac. In every case it is less than a second and I have 9,000 emails on average in the inbox, and 20,000+ across all folders including an archive.pst file. What do you see?
no comment
What about using a cloud based product without internet?
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Yeah right
First off do not tell 90% of corps who standardize on IE 6, 7, and 8 to go hell! Google docs is absolutely useless. Not even IE 8 which is the defecto standard for every single Intranet app in existence. I could see dropping IE 6 (that itself will cost business). Corps must use IE only as it is the only one with group policy, active directory, mass deployment, and a slow release cycle. Before the IE haters mod me down, ask yourselves why aren't you writing extensions to Firefox and Chrome for these features?
Also GoogleDocs is a glorified wordpad in functionality but with sharing. It is great to share something simple for a group project for college students but it is not as functional as LibreOffice or MS Office.
Office 365 has more features, integrates with the MS ecosystem, and supports older versions of IE where upgrading is out of the question and would cost more than savings with free Google Docs.
Google needs to .msi, active directory, group policy, and deployment tools that are centrally managed to Chrome
1. Update Chrome every 1 - 2 years
2. Add
3. Support ancient versions of IE. Yes, we hate them and yes HTML 5 features like drag and drop is nice, but javascript and css3pie can emulate them. With $500,000 worth of ancient apps that browser is not going away! XP users are stuck at IE 8 not to mention IE 8 is targeted for WIndows 7 users as well as it is the universal browser that works with both operating systems.
http://saveie6.com/
I wasn't talking about challengers. I don't expect OS/2 to be compatible w/ Windows, or even 64-bit Windows to be compatible w/ 32-bit Windows. But I do expect Windows 8 to be compatible w/ Windows 7, Windows 7 to be compatible w/ Vista, Word 2007 to be compatible w/ Word 2003, Linux 3.3 to be compatible w/ Linux 2.6, and so on. Essentially, if I could run something on, say, Mint Maya, I expect it to run on Mint Nadia. If I could run something on Windows 7, it should run on Windows 8. If it ran on PC-BSD 8, it should run on PC-BSD 9. It should not depend on which versions of GTK+ or glibc a particular version comes w/. All that stuff should be abstract, and well hidden from the end users.
Problem in Linux is that there are several points of incompatibility @ several places, which exacerbates the incompatibility issue. First, there is the kernel itself. Then there are the libraries - the glibc, gtl+ and Qt, as well as the compilers. Then there are potentially others, such as the X11 versions that are being used. Any change in one can throw one off in terms of compatibility, but when you have several things changing, as is usual for distros to do while going from 1 generation to another, it's a guarantee that an application that worked in RHEL 5 won't work in RHEL 6 w/o re-compilation, and that too is not guaranteed, given what else might have changed.
For Google's ChromeOS, since it's based on Gentoo, they may either just follow that, or they may fork and follow their own roadmap. If they do the latter, they may well have a good handle on the compatibility issue, since they are the ones who will be writing most of the applications for their platform. The advantage w/ ReactOS is that w/ such a solution, they could also leverage older apps that Microsoft itself no longer supports, but which people have lying around. That way, they could give legacy customers added reasons to try them.
IBM is today more of a service and consultancy company, aside from the R&D they do on their high end computers, like POWER and Z-Series. They are a leading partner of SAP - there is no way Microsoft could challenge them there. With Oracle, Microsoft has some change, but there too, Oracle has an advantage of being multi-platform on Unix, Linux and Windows, as opposed to Microsoft, which is Windows only. Microsoft could do well by getting into applications services, but there too, they've killed off products which could have helped them be successful there, such as NT/RISC or Windows Server/Itanium. If they had an Alpha or Itanium farm in which they'd host applications specifically ported, such as SharePoint, Dynamics, SQL Server, et al, and sold services based on them w/o pricing people arms & legs, they'd have been better off.
But they're not gonna do it by just mimicking Apple.
It's not the e-mail part that is the problem with gmail at work, it's the calendar.
Here's the other thing a lot of people miss when discussing this issue, as well:
Many (bigger) companies would rather have "one office suite to rule them all" than "two separate office suites - one for 'type a memo' guy, and one for 'i need deep and powerful data analysis tools built into my spreadsheet' guy." Especially when those two office suites may not be easily inter-operable.
There is additional support costs associated with having two different packages, and there is an additional "waste" cost associated with it as well - not everybody who requests an MS Office install is going to strictly need it; not everybody who has Google Apps only will be able to get everything he needs done easily.
So, purchasing decisions are made in the interests of simplicity and giving everybody a standard tool to work with, and I'd be surprised if Microsoft's Enterprise Agreements weren't reasonably competitive with this on a per-user basis, especially when you figure in the additional features and functionality available that Google Apps simply doesn't have.
Not sure why that is the case, can you elaborate? I do Outlook searches in Windows 7 from the command text box on the Start menu, inside Outlook using the box above the inbox on Windows 8 (that is an area Microsoft failed in; the search from the OS does not include data inside of Outlook); and inside of Outlook on the mac. In every case it is less than a second and I have 9,000 emails on average in the inbox, and 20,000+ across all folders including an archive.pst file. What do you see?
I'd check if you're actually getting good results. I work in an office where we use the built-in Outlook search a decent amount and it is fast but very inaccurate. I can copy a string from the preview pane, pop it up in the All Mail Items search and very quickly get "No matches found". Mostly seems to happen if a string is entirely numeric (we deal with a lot of product serial numbers).
We are searching significantly more items than you had mentioned, which shouldn't matter but does. Depending on how long the employee has been working here they can be searching 600,000+ emails.
Bottom line is the built-in search in Outlook is bad and shouldn't be compared to an actual search since it is not accurate.
Ultimately, executives at companies like Microsoft keep their jobs by making the stock prices 'go up'. Acknowledging that Google is an upcoming major competitor in the business software market does not do Microsoft any sort of good as far as stock price goes so what should we expect them to say? "Yeah... Google's constantly improving software suite and low prices are already a cause for concern at Microsoft and we foresee that our proverbial ass will be handed to us in this market segment in the years to come." Never going to hear that out of Redmond, ever.
It wasn't just the competitive upgrades. They also struck deals with OEM's so that, for a while at least, it was hard to find a Windows PC that didn't come with MSOffice 'for free'. That was the point where the company I worked for switched from WordPerfect to Word. And people complained for the next 6 months about the lack of WordPerfect's show codes feature. Of course, they eventually got used to Word, but victory didn't come because of quality or desire - it was monopoly bundling deals pure and simple.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Good point. It was the focus on being willing to sell so cheaply both retail and via. OEM bundling.
Something to consider... cubicle farms themselves are starting to die.
In my current job, I telecommute most of the week. I live within literal spitting distance of the Pacific Ocean, so on nice days I wander out to the edge of my WiFi signal on the beach itself, snag a signal at the coffee shop in town, or basically do my work anywhere I can get online for a VPN hookup. Still have cubes, but they're open now, and most of the time in the office, I drag the laptop from desk to conference room, and sometimes out to a common area in a (semi-) comfy reclining chair for informal bull sessions.
In my last job, they ditched all the cubicles and replaced them with an open desk environment - even the managerial offices had massive glass walls. If you wanted privacy (e.g. sorting sensitive data, seeing the spam filter email feeds, etc), you swiped a conference room or you hid in the server room. Only the CEO got an office that a casual office drone couldn't see into.
Previous to that, I worked for Intel, who launched the "How We Work" initiative, which began cutting the cube walls down to just above desktop-height. No idea how that turned out, but I can see it being pushed...
Long story short, the typical cube farm is either evolving, or is being killed off completely (depending on company culture).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
For me, the issue is about compatibility. It's not a personal preference for Word. For example, I actually used LibreOffice to create the documents for a presentation and I saved each document in a different Word & Power Point format. Each file had around 3 copies. I then made PDF copies of each, just in case the files were not compatible. LibreOffice claims compatibility, but that doesn't mean that it will be and of course they were not compatible. The files simply would not open in Microsoft's products, regardless of the file format that I tried.
It can be debated that this is Microsoft's fault, but I honestly don't care. At the end of the day, what matters is that the presentation works and can be shown to the people that need to see at the time that I need to show it to them. Finger pointing isn't going to make that happen.
The PDF files worked.
The article is wrong and misleading. I work for Roche. Posting anon for obvious reasons.
Roche is replacing Exchange Server with Google mail and calendar and the project hasn't even left the pilot phase. That's it. Everyone will still use MS Outlook although Google will be the new web mail interface. Everyone will still use MS Office. Everyone will still use SharePoint. Everyone will still use Lync for IM. Roche is only changing out the back end for mail and calendar.
Genentech, which is a company owned by Roche, uses Google for email and calendar and has done so for some years. They make up about 30K people. But as of now nobody else in Roche or it's other companies is using Google for anything except a handful of pilot users.
There are people in Roche that would like to see us use other Google services like IM, Google drive, Google Apps and that stuff but it's just talk. Nothing has been approved. There aren't any projects in IT moving forward to do any of that. Even if there was it can take years before it reaches production because of the number of validated systems and processes that we have which integrate with MS Office. It would be hard to replace. Hell, we just finished upgrading everybody from XP to Windows 7 and Office 2010 at the end of 2011. We're just now starting to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 from 2003.
Microsoft isn't going away in Roche anytime soon. Roche is so conservative and slow moving that if we ever move everything to Google we will probably be one of the last companies on earth to do it.
That's an interesting point. However, in terms of coding effort it doesn't seem that hard to copy the functionality. (And if you're truly serious about data analysis, R and the like are actually better suited.)
Servers and business systems are where the money is at. Licensing is like printing money. Retail markets are ugly. The only reason Microsoft is getting into new businesses is to protect their big products.
Retail markets are competitive but the consumer space is where there is a great deal of money. MS seems to think so: Zune, Wp7, Surface are all plays into the consumer market. MS just sucks when it comes to consumers.
They thought they had it locked up when they controlled the OEM computer market. What is going to hurt MS now is that consumers just are not buy new computers as they used to in the past. Instead they are buying tablets and smart phones to supplement their desktops and laptops.
Here's something that may have escaped your attention: The iPhone takes in more revenue than ALL of Microsoft. A product that didn't exist until 2007 makes more money for Apple than Windows, Office, SQL Server, etc. combined. Now we are not even talking about profits yet. This is plain revenue. So where do you think the money is.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Since ReactOS is clean room reverse engineered, MS wouldn't be able to do squat. Love the irony, since Compaq's reverse engineering of IBM's BIOS launched the clones era...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
It's because of attitudes like this that things take so long to improve and people end up getting locked into platforms and formats.
Not to mention that clean room or not it would STILL be in court for most of the decade, thus making sure that Google missed their shot. My plan is MUCH better and frankly could be in stores by the end of next year as it really wouldn't take much at all to give Chrome OS a true "offline mode" and buy Crossover and triple the Crossover team and just bake that into Chrome OS.
Right now this very minute Crossover already runs a good portion of the programs folks want, MS Office, World Of Warcraft, so you combine that with a true offline Chrome OS and I'd say you'd have a winner. Hell look at the Chrome OS netbook Acer has been selling, dual core Celeron, 4GB of RAM and a 320GB HDD for only $200? I'd say the only reason that thing isn't backordered until doomsday is because you can't run your Windows programs on it and its useless without a net connection. fix those two problems and I bet those would be flying off the shelves!
This is the first time since the 80s where anybody has had a real shot at taking a good chunk of the market away from Windows and if Ballmer goes through with his retarded "Windows Blue" plan frankly there will be a HELL of a lot of windows user looking for an out. I mean what Windows user is gonna want yearly updates, everything tied to an appstore, and the hardware coming from some overpriced MSFT store? Hell if they wanted that they would already own a Macbook. The ONLY things holding people back are their need to run whatever Windows program they consider a "must have" and the ignorant way Chrome OS won't do shit offline. Fix those 2 problems? i could easily see Google controlling 30% of the market in less than 2 years. Hell Chrome OS now looks like Windows more than Windows does, it really wouldn't be hard to switch.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Dude don't believe the bullshit. Was MSFT under gates seriously douchey? Yes they were but all they did was kick programs that were already falling down the stairs so they'd fall a little faster.
I actually had both WP and Netscape, in fact until NS 4 I was a DIE HARD NS user. Here let me give you my impression of NS 4: "Alright! I got it installed and am ready to surf the world baby! I'll just go to my favorite site../crash/...huh. Well maybe the site was iffy, I'll just pick one I've surfed a million times with NS 3 and.../NS 4 causes a hard system lock, forcing a reboot/..son of a bitch. Well now that I have my PC up I'll just choose a simple site to../NS 4 causes BSOD/...&%$^$&$!!!! And with WP it was run one instance, pray to God it didn't crash, get halfway through something only to have it crap itself because it was just a DOS program with a DOS for Windows wrapper and when you went to do something like change your volume you had a 50/50 chance of when you switch backed the program would hard lock or crash, and when it did it would nearly always corrupt whatever you were working on.
So I'm sorry you can't blame MSFT for NS 4, nor can you blame them for WP just being a DOS program until nearly 2000. Certainly they weren't being helpful or giving them early access to Windows builds but I can tell you that frankly NS 4 ran like dogshit under DOS as well and WP was a little better in that regard but it was still waaay behind the times. As another pointed out the NS team wouldn't open source NS because they were ashamed of the old code base. I can tell you that I actually had to go and download IE 4 to get it and when I did and was able to surf for a whole hour before it crashed? Well it was like manna from heaven compared to NS 4 which I swear I never did get to read a single article all the way through before it would fuck up somehow.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I've been using Google docs now for the past 6 months as part of my class study-groups where we routinely edit documents together in real-time. I am amazed at how well the interface works. We can see each other's cursors in different colors, highlights and edits in real time. The excel app is the most wanting as the copy-paste from excel does not work that great and one has to enable formula view prior to pasting. There are reasonable workarounds for those interested in making the move and saving some $$. Along with Google drive one can see how this has the potential to becoming an attractive package for students.
Where Microsoft won was price pure and simple. $129 "competitive upgrades" for an entire office suite when most of the competition was selling each component at $495 (retail) was devastating.
Exactly and this happened because the suits took over at Word Perfect. If you think about it, they were charging customers nearly thousand dollars per head in today's dollars for a freaking word processor. This left the door wide open for a competitor to undercut them heavily in price and still make a mint.
Which is exactly what Microsoft did to Word Perfect, just like Borland had done to Microsoft in the compiler market a few years earlier. So it wasn't like this was a novel (no pun intended) move. But back then suits just didn't understand the concept of lower prices.
Ironically today they seem incapable of understanding the reverse concept of higher-quality-at-higher-prices which left the door open to Apple's revival to the tune of $500 billion market cap, but I digress...
The desktop is NOT dead, it is NOT going away, you like many in the press are just looking at raw data without the facts BEHIND the data. As someone that has been working PC sales and repair let me explain what is REALLY going on.
You see the reason the desktop sold in the numbers that it did from 95-07 was NOT normal , it was because Intel and AMD were in the middle of the MHz war and that barely 2 year old computer would literally struggle to run the latest programs. The reason for that is that writing for a faster single core CPU? Very VERY easy. So naturally all the programs and games simply took advantage of all that extra MHz and it wasn't more than a year that it would start to struggle to run the latest stuff.
Now I want you to look what I was selling as my "low end" build FIVE years ago, okay? AMD Phenom X3 or X4, 4GB of RAM, and a 300-500GB HDD. Before anybody says "You weren't selling that five years ago" remember the first gen Phenoms had the TLB bug which allowed me to score them a lot cheaper, so once I bought one and put it through its paces and found you had better odds of hitting the lotto than hitting the TLB bug I snatched them up like a fat kid snatching candy. Now YOU tell me friend...what does you average user do that is gonna stress that system enough they think "Boy I need to buy a new system" huh? hell I have a customer that was running the latest Solidworks making complex as hell 3D robot models using a Phenom I X3 and a $30 HD4650 GPU and he could whip that model around and zoom in and out all day, no stutters.
Just look at me, I was the guy that ALWAYS had to build himself a new system every year and a half like clockwork so I could play games, now what am I using? An AMD hexacore that was released more than 2 years ago, with 8GB of RAM, 3TB of HDD space, and an HD4850 I'm about to retire for an HD6850...why would I need to build a new one? Neither my OS or my games are using up all my RAM, I have everything just whip along on that 6 core even with it running stock clocks, and even that HD4850 isn't having any trouble with the latest games, I'm switching because of the heat. My netbook is nearly 3 years old but still handles like the day it was made, has a dual core AMD with a powerful enough GPU that just for shits and giggles fired up several games like L4D and Torchlight II and they ran just fine so...why would I need a new one again?
The reason PC sales are down is NOT because people are "switching to cellphones and tablets" its because less than 2 years after AMD and Intel switched from the MHz wars to the core wars they frankly began building machines waaaay overpowered compared to what the user actually does. That is why the smart ones are branching into other things as well as just selling boxes, in my case its HTPCs and security systems. Its not because people don't want or don't use computers, although Win 8 certainly isn't good for the market which is why I don't carry it, its because people are happy with what they have and see no reason to blow money on a system that won't feel any faster than what they had.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The Microsoft tortoise beat the hares as far as I'm concerned (as a hardcore gamer, a CPAN brogrammer, and a professional gadget fiddler).
You've managed to box yourself in to a demographically trivial corner. Nobody really cares about you. Not Apple, Not Microsoft, Not Google. They're going for where the money is and you ain't it.
So we're all happy your happy and now existentially complete as to your computing needs and desires. But the market doesn't give a damn.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I was talking about the price of the OS, nobody would consider PCs of even 15 years ago to be Walmart priced, but windows damned well was.
Up until Win 7 it was widely reported that MSFT sold Windows for less than $30 a pop to the OEMs, with Vista and 7 they raised their prices but still you have WinHome for around $50 and basic was around $30, that is Walmart pricing.
And the simple fact is it don't matter what they want anymore, its ALL about public perception and to the public Windows is the OS of those $300 Dell special at Walmart and Best Buy so there is no way in hell people are gonna start treating them like a premium brand like Apple, never gonna happen. that is why i said when WinPhone came out the best thing they could have done was spun off mobile, call it Metro OS or whatever, and allowed it to get away from the public's perception of Windows.
So sorry if i didn't make it clear, talking about the OS and people's perception of it NOT the hardware.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
And where does the "good enough" problem stem from? Survey says -> lack of improvement on the hardware / software side.
For instance, it's 2012, soon to be 2013, and our CPU speeds are stuck. We've gone multi-core, but last year's Phenom II was arguably a better buy than this year's FX. The number of stream processors on GPUs may be increasing, but not by much. In short, the tech sector has run into the problem that plagued the American automative industry -> your products this year are essentially the same as last year, with minor improvements / updates; a 2005 Ford Mustang, in this case, is the same as the 2010 Ford Mustang, with the latter sporting an iPod connector as the big difference.
Personally, I want a Phenom III with 20 cores, running at 5 Ghz with a liquid cooling shim pre-attached. Instead, I will probably be getting an AMD company being driven into the depths of the ocean, and will purchase an Intel processor, right before they screw the market ("x86 is old, everyone is doing ARM now!"), with front seats to watching the tech industry destroy itself. That's what will probably happen.
As for Windows...it was nice knowing you. The current CEO has already engaged the company in a spiral of doom, and looks unlikely to pull out of it before all is lost. This Windows Blue thing...it is what it appears to be: a cash grab. We've seen this before with the Software Assurance stuff, where companies ended up paying year after year, and getting little in return (would have been cheaper to buy everything retail). MS is not Apple, stop trying to be Apple! Apple may have been a Wall St. darling, but its time is over.
I am John Hurt.
So, purchasing decisions are made in the interests of simplicity and giving everybody a standard tool to work with, and I'd be surprised if Microsoft's Enterprise Agreements weren't reasonably competitive with this on a per-user basis, especially when you figure in the additional features and functionality available that Google Apps simply doesn't have.
You'd think that, wouldn't you?
But it's not true. Office has always been a cash cow, and Microsoft have quite clearly decided that anyone who's buying a site license is ripe for the milking. You can't get any of the cheaper "versions aimed at someone who might otherwise go for OpenOffice" under site licensing, which means you have to get the expensive versions with all the features, including those you might not want.
Since ReactOS is clean room reverse engineered....
That works fine for copyright, but has no affect on the patented bits. If you violate a patent, despite the manner of your solution, you are liable.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
THIS! It's the one thing that makes Google Docs useless to me, and any client I deal with.
You've never seen it properly implemented? Are you kidding? Has *anyone* seen Sharepoint properly implemented? *Can* anyone implement Sharepoint properly? All positive I hear about Sharepoint is akin to: "Sharepoint is great because of X, Y and Z! Unfortunately you need a team bigger than your current development team just to do less than you currently do! Yay!" Of course, most of the people who push it are Microsoft crackheads...
The success cases for Sharepoint are slow and fragile web sites. It is simply the latest Microsoft sham for deluding irresponsible CEOs into tying their companies to them.
I don't know about the "the suits". The pricing had been in effect for many years, there was no change for WordPerfect. A good quality professional typewriter could cost up to $5000 at that time. Word Perfect was cheaper than the mini computer systems for mass production. Their were cheap Word Processing programs aimed at the amateur market that were much cheaper.
Microsoft has always shocked competitors by cutting margins. Right now it is doing that in the data-warehouse space and the ERP space.
Most everyone uses a web based email for home and for continuity. Also many of the advantages of Exchange don't exist without corporate setup and management which doesn't do anything for home. Microsoft is starting to explore creating a consumer oriented version of Exchange for Hotmail / Outlook.com That may very well change things.
Compatibility is good but not great. If your #1 need is to support Microsoft clients, buy Microsoft.
Good points. Though 10 meg clip art laden emails should be stationary and thus tiny from Exchange's standpoint.
That's not Outlook, that's an Exchange setting. If you were using Outlook as your gmail client you wouldn't get that either.
Strange, I've never seen the "Lock Up Outlook for x Seconds" check box in Exchange, do I find setting under Hub Transport?
If you used Outlook as your gmail client you'd still get freezes and crashes.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
That's not related to GP's point. Most complex mail clients crash. I doubt Google's web based clients could handle 10% of what Outlook does and not crash, and yes Outlook should still be more stable than it is.
I was talking about the price of the OS, nobody would consider PCs of even 15 years ago to be Walmart priced, but windows damned well was.
OSes have mostly been a vehicle to sell hardware, IBM paid Microsoft for the early versions. I don't of almost any expensive OSes. I picked up SCO at its height with the custom 486/i860 dual processor and compiler for $1k. Solaris the worst I ever paid was $2k.
That being said, most retail customers have no idea which parts are expensive and which cheap. Yes I agree Microsoft Windows OEM is very cheap. Microsoft isn't greedy though with Windows 8, they aren't charging more for Windows they are driving up hardware costs.
____
As for Metro OS. Yes they could have done that, or they could change the public's perception. Microsoft has a full line of server product which while cheap are not "Walmart". Once the $300 Dells don't exist and those customers either move up market or go elsewhere, the perception of Microsoft as the Walmart brand will end.
I've never understood the point of SharePoint.
Sharepoint is a product that promises the world and delivers most of what it promises in a very poor fashion. Imagine if I offered you an Argentine steak with some French wine and Belgian chocolates. Yet what I delivered you was a steak that had been left in the fridge for 2 weeks, a bottle of 4 penny dark (cheap wine) that had been left open for a week and chocolate I'd left in the sun. That is SharePoint.
I've heard SharePoint described as a Swiss Army gun. It does a little of everything, none of it well and why the fuck is it even a gun. What purpose does that serve?
Maybe I've never seen it implemented properly,
I'm not sure this is even possible.
.net developer AND you need them all at once, preferably in one person as you need to know exactly what the other person has done. Even migrating databases is an utter PITA which sucks when you want to upgrade the 2005 SQL on 2003 Server.
I've never seen a SharePoint set up that was done well, by this I mean well enough for me to consider a production system for client access. To set it up you need a DBA AND a Web developer AND a Sysadmin AND a
I've had consultants in for a sharepoint install who spent six weeks and weren't able to deliver a working site. They promised us that SharePoint could provide what we wanted right up to the last day when they said "Oh, sorry, SharePoint doesn't do that". These were from a very, very large consulting firm, not just some dodgy 2 man outfit.
I generally try to avoid SharePoint like the plague. Most peoples DR plan for SharePoint is "Prey it never fails". I've gotten as far as "backup the VM's and DB's, then hope we can restore".
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The Wang word processor was $5K, which had already come down first to $1K on the PC and then $500 with wordperfect. The writing was on the wall that prices needed to go down, but at the time people had a really hard time lowering prices. You can read about the epic battles in every microcomputer company back then when it came to lowering prices and cannibalizing your own products.
They still have those problems. And quite often it makes sense when faced with a price war to lose the market rather than cut prices. Oracle and DB2 have been losing data-warehouse market for years to SQLServer that doesn't mean it is a good idea to cut prices to compete.
That being said had WordPerfect have known:
a) How fast the market would grow
b) That the market would standardardize around a Windows only product
c) That OS/2 was dead
d) That Unix and VMS support wouldn't matter
e) How good Word was going to become
They might have done things differently. But it is excusable they didn't guess all that.
Nonsense about usage. I adore Outlooks task manager integration with the calendar. The ability to create tasks with dependencies, show them in Gantt format, have them automatically schedule and be integrated with coworkers is far far beyond anything gmail does.
Another area is OLE based editing of email. That allows for vastly more complex email than gmail.
Public folders are managed databases with full ability to set backup and retention policies.
Automatic disclosure detection and warnings for users which help be compliant with things like HIIPA. On the other direction the ability to flag messages to particular legal holds.
There just is no comparison between the feature set of Gmail and Outlook. Sure Google is good at search. That's a nice feature. That is one advantage among whole areas where Google doesn't even offer a product.
Yeah, anybody that tries to compete with Microsoft will see their laywers. For whatever reason they invent that has any chance of creating a delay.
Now, why is this plan worse than the Chrome OS alternative? (Because of the cruft they get from Windows compatibility, maybe?)
Rethinking email
Your plan will also put Google in a court for the best part of a decade. It just doesn't make it clear how, but MS will find a way, you can be sure of that.
Rethinking email
Hum... WP are currently suing MSFT arguing exactly that MS is the one that delayed their Windows version of WP untill near 2000.
Rethinking email
The correct answer normaly starts with "We have a plan". But then, you must follow it with an actual plan, and you must be sure people will be able to hear your plan, instead of laughing since the begining of your speech.
Rethinking email
You probably won't be surprized to learn that the Sharepoint versioning system is a descendent of Source Safe. But MS seems to have fixed the most obvious bugs.
Somehow, people also can't backup it, just like Exchange.
Rethinking email
But any team of 50 need 6 months to produce what a 16 years old kid can do alone in a week. You can't blame the plataform.
Rethinking email
Untill they stop using the Open Document Format, they won't own your data.
Rethinking email
GMail is pretty good but it still doesn't tell you when you're logged out. About once a week or so I'll notice the inbox isn't loading and I haven't gotten any new emails in a while, then it dawns on me... oh right password timeout.
Same thing happens to Reader in the next tab. Refresh both, back in business. But imagine how many non-tech types that confuses everyday.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
WP was the worst. It was slow, both the Windows and DOS versions. It's font support was absolutely terrible. Then there were tons of incompatibilities with printer drivers. Layout of complex pages in Word Perfect (wrapping around images, etc) was difficult. We TRIED to stay a WP shop, but it didn't take that long after we allowed our documentation and marketing departments to switch to Word that we decided to switch the entire company over. Long gone were the printer issues, the speed issues, and the font issues. I heard that WP finally solved most of those a couple years later... A couple years too late.
I have to agree with the majority of what you've said. I'm not using my desktop any less than I have in the past, but I AM upgrading less often, and I don't see myself upgrading again in the next 3-5 years where I was always upgrading the guts of my system every 18 months, and my video card ever 12 months.
Now I've got a 6-core hyperthreaded system running at 4GHz, 64GB of RAM, 2 128GB SSDs in RAID-0 for boot/operating system, and 30TB of disk space in a RAID-6 for applications and media. Most of which I don't really need, but I wanted because I could. I'm still using my 2+ year old NVidia 580 video card, and I have no intention of upgrading it any time soon. There just isn't a compelling reason to. My monitor is now 8 years old, but it's a 1920x1200 LCD, so unless there is a compelling reason to change it or it dies, I won't be changing that out any time soon either.
Most of my friends are in the exact same boat. They used to upgrade like clockwork, but are no longer doing so because there simply isn't a reason to. Not for home use anyway.
Or you could just carry LibreOffice portable along with the documents.
The company that I work at is not large (150 people), but has 8 offices scattered around the country. People from various groups in various offices need to work together, sharing documents, staff and schedules on multiple projects. One of our managers set up SharePoint on his own initiative, and right out of the box it did pretty much what we needed it to do. Unfortunately a few months later our crack(head) IT staff got wind of it and shut it down, shoehorning everyone into the officially approved and supported kluge that they've cobbled together. From my limited exposure to the product I don't think that it would be appropriate for a larger organization, but for our needs it was pretty good.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Exactly KingMotley, you reach a level VERY quickly where you go "what is the point?" and even those of us who don't have monsters as big as yours (lucky bastard) find we reach a point where the upgrade treadmill makes no sense.
I mean lets take my use case and treat it like I would a customer: what do I want to do? I want to play games, edit and transcode A/V, and do basic tasks like chat and surf. Is there ANY advantage to be gained for swapping this Phenom X6 for lets say your chip? Well I'm sure it would shave a couple minutes off here and there, but the jobs I'm doing rarely pegs what I have so short of timing everything with a stopwatch would be so little difference that as a user I certainly wouldn't "feel" the change like I did when I went from a 300MHz to a 1.8GHz in less than 4 years, so what is the point in buying or building a new one?
Heck I even handed down my Phenom II quad to my youngest and he plays the latest MMOs with more cycles to spare than he knows what to do with. The chips, even the cheap chips like this $100 X6 are sooooo powerful that a good 90% of us simply won't max it out. Then you have 8GB of RAM, plenty of HDD space, what is the point of switching?
So the only upgrades I'm doing in the coming year is upgrade the 4850 for a 6850 and I'm probably gonna swap out my 20 inch LCD monitor for a 32 inch LCD TV, I've had several customers do that and it makes a great monitor but I don't NEED either, I just want it. And that says it all right there, there just isn't any need to upgrade anymore, only want, and most people aren't geeks so they'll only upgrade when they need and they won't be needing upgrades for quite awhile. To use a /. car analogy it would be like everyone using a top fuel funny car to go to get milk and the makers of the funny car trying to sell us a new one "now with dual jet engines!".
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Once the $300 Dells don't exist and those customers either move up market or go elsewhere, the perception of Microsoft as the Walmart brand will end.
But that is the problem, isn't it? Its quite obvious looking at the figures that given the choice of an Apple priced Windows or going elsewhere they will just go elsewhere and thus MSFT slits their own throats for customers that won't buy their products. It would be like raising the price of a coke to a million dollars, sure if you get one taker you'll make a huge profit but more likely you'll be stuck with a warehouse full of cokes that won't sell.
The person spending $1k+ on a PC isn't gonna buy Windows, they are gonna buy Apple. Not only does Apple have the upscale branding but it retains a high resale, that Windows device won't be worth squat 2 years from now. Then there is the fact that there are probably 3000+ that buy a PC at $400-$550 for every one person buying $1K units and the math is clear, MSFT is gonna torpedo the company trying to raise prices when in reality folks will just go elsewhere.
Mark my words if they don't change in 5 years MSFT will be but a rotting husk, Google will put out $200 ChromeOS laptops with an offline mode and that will be that, the high end will go to Apple, the low end to Google, and like RIM all MSFT will be left with is legacy business installs that will be looking at exit strategies. They can want to be a Macy's brand all they want, its just not gonna happen.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Not sure why this post got modded Troll, unless there are a couple of Google fanbois with mod points today. I agree 110% with your second paragraph. I wish they'd fire Ballmer and get a CEO who listens to what customers want, rather than one who has decided what the customers SHOULD want.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Then there is the fact that there are probably 3000+ that buy a PC at $400-$550 for every one person buying $1K units and the math is clear,
The numbers aren't remotely that bad. $700+ Ultra books were 11% of the laptop market 2Q2012, and the $700+ market is 14% of all laptops. Average selling price of corporate / home machines was up $13 year over year and that was before Windows 8 driving up the midrange. Windows servers 2Q2012 were $8.7b in server sales with 1.9m units sold i.e. average selling price of $4600. I think your customer base has biased you. Yes Windows has a pricing problem, and a cheapskate customer base but they can be moved.
Microsoft says it does not yet see a threat.
Isn't this what happened to Microsoft in the mobile/phone/tablet space? Now they are playing catch-up to both Google and Apple. Complacency is a dangerous copilot.
===
Living in denial. I read that with Apple and Android, Linux, Google, etc. MS is now only 20 % share of the market.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Might want to look at the Win 8 figures again friend, Its clear that Windows 8 is a failure and sales are down more than 13% compred to this period last year and the OEMs are putting the blame squarely on win 8 and the new upscale marketing strategy. Also MSFT themselves are cutting surface orders in half because they can't move what they have. Is Ballmer gonna look at the numbers and wake the fuck up? Nope instead he is going full steam ahead in making their own PCs and phones proving that Ballmer is fully prepared to go full retard.
I'd say the numbers are clear as a bell and the consumer has spoken, given the choice of a $1000 Apple ripoff and the real thing they are gonna choose Apple, its better branding makes Windows a non starter in that market. Again its like slapping a coat of paint on a Pinto and expecting it to compete with Porsche, its just not gonna happen. Mark my words if they don't fire Ballmer and bring somebody in who has actual vision that consists of more than "What is Apple doing? We'll do that" then in 5 years MSFT is gonna be in the same boat as RIM, with a dwindling legacy base and no growth. The OEMs aren't gonna jump off a cliff to please MSFT, they'll crank out Chromebooks and Android units before closing the doors and Google will be more than happy to take that business. History will put Ballmer right next to the Pepsi guy as "worst CEOs ever" and MSFT will be just another footnote in history. Either you listen to your customers or you die, simple as that.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
There is a huge difference between "not going to happen", "slapping a coat of paint on a pinto" and a 13% drop off. Windows system sales were dropping at about 10% year over year for the last 2 years for most OEMs. And in terms of revenue for much longer than that. I'd say the Windows 8 drop is 3% not 13%, but regardless of which is right 13% is well within the acceptable margins of customer resistance.
Microsoft's customers are cheap. Microsoft's customers are satisfied with low end systems running Windows 7, running software that still works fine on WindowsXP - 32 bit. I'm not arguing that Microsoft's customer's base is going to like the shift to Windows 8. Rather what I'm disagreeing with you on is whether they will be willing (excluding the bottom 1/3rd of the market) to walk away from the Windows franchise all together rather than accept a higher price, higher margin, rapid update strategy. That's the point of disagreement.
The data does not support your contention that there is no market at the $1000 price point for Windows machines. The data does not support your contention that customers simply will not pay more for Windows machines regardless of how good they are. We had these arguments six months ago when Microsoft began moving towards this strategy and now the data is in. Average sales prices of Windows OEM systems are up. Average margin is up. Sales are off a tad, there is resistance, but nothing like the sorts of drops in marketshare RIM has experienced the last 3 years, to use your analogy.
And most importantly, it really doesn't make very much difference how much sales are off for Windows 8. Windows 8 is important for OEM's to create target hardware and developers to have access to target platforms. This system is rightfully targeted at advancing the Windows ecosystem, not selling computers. Very much like the early days of Apple after OSX where Apple's marketshare plunged. Or the problems Sun had in the move from SunOS to Solaris. I'm not sure it would matter much if Windows 8 sold 0 copies to end users, other than Microsoft needed to get OEMs to start making more expensive machines capable of running Metro/touch applications comfortably. The important desktop OS are the non-transitional systems for the OEMs and developers which are loaded with Metro applications and run Win32/.NET applications in some sort of legacy guest OS style. Those are the ones that transition end users.
The strategy is accomplishing its objectives. 6 months ago nothing like the: Lenovo Yoga, Dell XPS12, Samsung ATIV, HP Envy, Lenovo IdeaPad, Thinkpad twist, Microsoft Surface Pro... did exist or could exist. Heck I've got a $2500 Retina and I'm a bit jealous of the $1500 Windows market. I might pick one up soon: so as someone who has been buying Apple for 10 years, no it is not the case that people will automatically choose Apple once the price goes over $1000.
As for the Surface as an expensive Windows RT tablet. No argument, that's overpriced. It is not remotely as good a tablet as the Apple iPad, nor remotely as cheap as the Android tablets which are comparable in quality. Expensive crap won't sell even with Windows 8, I'm not arguing that this will change. I should say the 2nd generation Microsoft keyboard (what they call the "type cover" as opposed to the first generation "touch cover") is far far better than the first generation (which was IMHO unusable). I don't know if Microsoft is really interested in becoming an OEM or mainly wanted to build the surface as a target model. I suspect the latter but if they do really want to move units their problem is pricing not Windows 8:
Price the Windows Surface RT tablet at $300 with the touch cover and it would fly off the shelves. Price it at over $600 and no it won't sell much. Office just isn't enough.
Price the Windows Surface Pro at around $1K and now it is directly up against the Macbook air and other Windows ultra books and frankly the specs aren't so hot. Price the Window Surface Pro at $600 and put it up against the iPad and the mid range Windows 7 machines and it would fly off shelves.