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Microsoft Stock Drops 11% In a Day
Taco Cowboy writes with news that Microsoft's stock price dropped over 11 percent yesterday. The selloff was the biggest since 2009, and during the day the price was down more than 12 percent at one point, making it the biggest single day drop since April, 2000. Analysts believe the drop was due primarily to the company missing its quarterly earnings projections in addition to taking a massive, $900 million write-down on unsold Surface RT tablets. "Microsoft’s decline is both a consequence of the changing dynamics of the tech world and the incredible surge in its stock price this year. Shares in the maker of Windows had rallied nearly 30% this year, leaving both the broader stock market and the technology sector in the dust. It was, it seemed, Steve Ballmer’s year. Until Friday. The sell off was sparked by fears over the declines of the PC market. Gartner data show PC shipments fell for the fifth consecutive quarter in Q2, this time tanking 10.9% to 76 million units. Being the world’s largest software company, 'over 80% of its revenue and nearly all of its profits continue to be derived by its ubiquitous Windows OS, its server business (Windows Server), and the business division (Office),' according to UBS. And indeed that decline in the PC industry is hurting the company’s bottom line."
The sell off was sparked by fears over the declines of the PC market. Gartner data show PC shipments fell for the fifth consecutive quarter in Q2, this time tanking 10.9% to 76 million units.
You have said that the Metro UI is a mistake from Microsoft but it seems like they predicted this happening and started moving to the new direction. So after all, Metro UI might have been the correct decision all along.
Microsoft has tons of cash and is making more. Nobody thinks they're going out of business this year. The panic is that they clearly have no viable plan for participating in the mobile revolution. They have lost control of the platform.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Is probably not helping the companies long term prospects. That said, this earnings report motly reflects a period before Snowden started talking.
HA HA, TIME TO CHANGE THE COMPANY TO HARDWARE AND SERVICES. UH OHHH
Steve SERIOUSLY fucked up hard.
I wonder how long it will take for people to vote to kick him out.
Not only are people NOT buying their hardware, barely anyone is buying their services either.
Meanwhile their OS and Office apps are still the thing that makes them even exist.
And the one thing they depend most on, the business types, THEY SHAFT THEM ENTIRELY WITH THE NEW OS.
Great idea Baldness, great idea. Doing the company proud. And then Technet got killed. Up next, MSDN on the chopping board.
Not to mention Xbone. I seriously thought the whole 180 reversal on the DRM was some sort of reverse bait and switch, "hey, have our shitty product!", everyone hates it, "HAAA, gotcha, here, but seriously, have our less shitty product! We removed the really good features and the really bad features!".
They seriously never done that though, they ACTUALLY designed it like that, and after Don was eliminated from the company floors, that further proves it. And the many thousands to million servers they had for Xbone now being touted for Azure instead probably.
We won't see Microsoft die any time soon, but they will eject the monkey in control if this gets any worse.
Linux will become more popular on the desktop as more games are moving to it, which will take a large chunk of gamers out of their income.
Steam already has a decently large number of games supported now, and it is growing.
People are seeing through Microsofts bullshit, took a while, but finally they are seeing them for what they are.
The stock market isn't based on the real value of a company anyhow. It rarely involves evaluating the technical expertise, the research and development, the long term product development plans, the current or future rational profit projections of the company, or anything like that.
Instead, it's now a bunch of automated systems buying and selling at a furious rate based on statistics and very small margin profits for the trades.
In other words, legalized gambling with the biggest players gaming the system to their advantage.
When I think about how solid or worthy a company is, the last thing I consider is their stock price.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You mean like Google?
office for linux as well they have an mac one
Don't worry; Steve Ballmer's reorg will fix all of this. All of the product groups that analysts used to compare quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year have disappeared. Products have been shuffled around into new groups organized around "engineering." The upshot is that money-losing products like Bing are now going to be lumped in with big breadwinners like Office. You won't be able to look at the Xbox and Online Services divisions anymore and say "they lose money." All those failures will be hidden in the new structure. Without an instance like Microsoft writing down almost a billion dollars on the Surface RT disaster, it will be harder for anyone to gauge how it's doing, at least for the next few quarters. Problem solved!
Breakfast served all day!
The Surface is nothing. We lost a full billion on Microsoft Kin. That was at least a full round number.
How many of the online services you use dependent on any particular platform? The mobile revolution played some role in splitting the nut open and allowing the internet to grow. Now we have an internet built around open standards, and with HTML5, the services we use will be less dependent on the use of any particular company's platform. I think Ballmer's use of the term "devices and services" is an accurate description of where everybody's head is at now. If I just want to use a computer for light work and communications, who cares whose platform I use? I went back and read Negroponte's "Being Digital" recently to see what was in it. I am going to start doing this more because I'm amused by tech prognostication and guruism. One comment in there stayed with me, however, to the effect of , one company can leverage a proprietary technology or standard for a while, but sooner or later, open standards catch up with them. In 2000 I was using IE to use the web. Now there is a range of browsers, iOS, and Android, and they all seem to function well enough or better for most peoples needs.
You mean like practically every major technology/communications company?
I think Win8 slowed PC sales. It's just anecdotal; but you hear people say they were at the store and didn't want to buy a machine unless it came with Win7. Otherwise, they're waiting to see if MS can get rid of the New Coke OS and replace it with Classic.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The traditional PC market has had 5 consequential quarters of decline. This is Microsofts core market, where it makes much of its money.
On top of that Microsoft has essentially failed to gain any traction in the the new growth markets of smartphones/tablets.
So it is understandable that like the PC market, which is adjusting to some new smaller number of annual sales, Microsoft which makes it's income from those sales will adjust down to some new lower level of earnings, and a correspondingly lower stock price.
even after Friday. Ben Berspankme will give you 0.25%. Hmmmm which was better.
And this is why people lose money in the stock market. Just because Microsoft is down 11% does not make it a good buy. Remember that Apple was at one point down 11%, and I am guessing people like yourself would say, "oh this is a market overreaction and Apple is stronger than ever".
Hint, hint, until its not!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Well, at least the office software from Spies R Us (TM) is still somewhat better than Libre Office right?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I was under the impression that the only Windows Phone sales were from Nokia, and they (Nokia) aren't doing too well last I heard. Is there a web site with stats on the windows phone sales vs. Android vs. Iphone? I would be curious to see if they (Microsoft) are doing any better.
What happened? Did Baldmer not die?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You can choose no company, and stil have your (open source) solution and pretty safe. If you don't like some of the open source companies like redhat or ubuntu, you can even roll your own distribution with a lot of tools available for that. Is not the same not having a way out than refusing to pick the obvious choice.
What a crazy world we live in. They make money when most tech companies are losing money, and people dump the stock. Oh well, worked out great for me!
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
Windows Phone has 4% global share. 85% of that is from Nokia. Nokia's margins on Windows Phones is -14%. That means it is not mathematically possible for Windows Phone to be returning a profit to the average builder. Nokia can't keep this up forever. Other builders don't sell enough units to make it worthwhile to continue to produce units. All of Windows Phone ecosystem sells about as many smartphones as Coolpad. Have you heard of them? No. Nobody talks about Coolpad, but everybody talks about Windows Phone and Nokia.
One fun person to read about these with is Tomi Ahonen.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The real problem, at least with the Prism spying, is not on your computer. Well, it might be if you run Windows (the idea of secret backdoors seems more real than ever now), but that's beside the point. It's the fact that the government has chosen to parasitize its chosen host companies directly, right on the Internet, installing splitters right at the source: between the host company and its ISP, with top-secret government-controlled datacenters in between for long-term storage of all of their traffic... everything that goes in, everything that goes out. The only way this can be avoided is by choosing services whose providers are *not* in the United States and therefore not subject to this FISA court crap. I have been running Linux since 2006, but trust me: Linux is no protection against this. The government has penetrated the Internet itself, right where it counts: at the pipes of all the major U.S.-based world-wide communications providers' connections.
2990709.
Oooh, we're nearly up to 3 million Slashdot registrations!
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
you get rid of the start menu, and classic windows UI. they deserve it.
Hi ! This is Paper Clip !!! Do you want to sell M$ now, or wait till you loose all your pension savings ???
Very few sheeple noticed that Microsoft OFFICIALLY cancelled Metro (sometimes called 'new UI' or Windows RT interface). Microsoft merged the phone and tablet divisions, and in a public statement declared that Metro was EOL, and that a new unified phone/tablet UI would be released ASAP (end of 2014 likely). The new UI is also likely to be a major 'selling' (snigger) feature of Windows 9.
However, Microsoft has a new round of tablets (x86 and ARM) released later this year based on Metro. So Microsoft is about to launch a product line they have already pre-announced is obsolete. This is the biggest disaster in Microsoft history. Confidence in developing for Microsoft mobile devices, already at rock bottom, will totally vanish.
The NSA spying platform, the Xbox One, makes this particular situation even worse. There is ZERO migration path for casual games from Microsoft's phones/tablets to the console. Small games developers are told by Microsoft to "get bent" when they inquire about getting their work on the Xbone.
The response to universally hatred of Windows 8 was for Bill Gates to instruct Microsoft to replace large chunks of the OS with the deepest NSA hooks yet seen in an operating system, and this is the form of Windows 8.1. Windows 8.1 can be thought of as the Windows with the in-build NSA keylogger, if by 'keylogger' one means dozens of compromised ultra-low-level services. Bill Gates boasts that almost any software running on Windows 8.1 provides a constant stream of keyboard entry data to 'advertisers' so that the user will receive targeted ads - and like Google, 'advertisers' is a cover word for NSA, even though both do make a lot of money from the ad services as a by-product.
So, using 'Notepad' on Windows 8.1 with an Internet connection means later seeing ads later based on your private text, and your private text ending up on an NSA server, even if you never actually transmitted the contents over the Internet in any form.
Problem is, Bill Gates boasts about his NSA spying at meetings with 'elites' all across our planet. He boasts about his love of eugenics. He boasts about how he intends to place every detail about every sheeple child on his new database system- a system built with his mate Rupert Murdoch (yes, Bill Gates is a partner of Fox News- Murdoch's proudest propaganda operation). You sheeple are told Fox News and Bill Gates are diametric opposites- how your masters howl with laughter at your stupidity and nativity.
But the problem is Bill Gates is too 'in your face' even for the sheeple to take. The public perception of Microsoft is terrible and getting worse. Gates' desire to build the pervert's dream by installing always on camera systems into the bedrooms of millions of children is going to backfire horribly. Bill Gates is on the verge of being known as a 'Jimmy Savile'-like monster on a planetary scale.
The Wintel project, at the time of its greatest threats, has lost all sane leadership. Microsoft and Intel are going to plummet like lead balloons. This should be the age of cheap, functional PC computing, but Intel is off chasing ARM, and Microsoft is off chasing Apple. No-one is flying the plane, so it's gradually turning into a perfect nose dive. The success of Wintel across the last few decades have gained a lot of 'altitude', but neither Intel or Microsoft are constructed to accept a gradual decline.
We should be happy about the turn of events though. Wintel had chosen to allow the PC to stagnate for maybe the last ten years, choosing to milk the public by keeping the average yearly cost of PC ownership far, far too high. Basic PCs should have been built into the keyboard at least 5 years ago, hooking up to external storage. These devices could have been sold for as low as 50 dollars for Internet and homework/small office use. But the major PC players did everything they could to prevent a repeat of the calculator and digital watch phenomena, where the basic item would sell dirt cheap. Microsoft alone wanted far more than 50 dollars per unit.
Correct. MSFT p/e was below ten not long ago and has plenty of scope to get there again. Next on the radar is absolute revenue shrinkage never mind income.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I agree that Linux is no (complete) protection. But is a first step, and in the right direction, and from there you can keep improving things. And is a step that maximizes alternatives, not getting locked into just one solution where you only option is keep tying your own hands. Trying to build a secure solution over compromised (as in "if the government ask, will have a backdoor right there by tomorrow") systems have no future. After that work, you will be safe? With an enemy that exceed the resources of all bond villains combined, will be difficult, but also can put things hard enough to not be worth the trouble.
Spies for Sure[tm]
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
SELinux.
Installed on RedHat & Ubuntu
Brought to you by the NSA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux#Overview
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
True... it is definitely a good first step. But unfortunately, if someone keeps using Internet-based services from Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple, etc., then switching the OS wouldn't help one bit. As a Linux user, this whole Prism thing has really changed the way I think about trusting the companies I give information to in the form of just using their services. Just running Linux saves you from a lot of things... but the NSA, honestly, is not really one of them. Not the way they're leeching raw data from the some of the major cores of the Internet itself.
After Google announced the killing of XMPP/Federation in Google Talk and soon enough the NSA programs were unveiled, I made the decision to create an XMPP account an a Jabber server in another country. I'm currently looking into doing my own encryption with GPG in the future, but I seriously doubt I will have any luck with that. Unfortunately, in both cases it would be difficult if not impossible to get people to join (switch to XMPP, start using encryption). I mean... who would want to add another set of steps just to send e-mail? In my experience... most people just don't care, and this is especially true about things they don't understand (like... this surveillance).
Unfortunately, people are about as likely to switch to something like Linux as they are to give up all U.S.-based major service providers. Which is to say, it's not gonna happen.
Windows Phone has 4% global share. 85% of that is from Nokia. Nokia's margins on Windows Phones is -14%. That means it is not mathematically possible for Windows Phone to be returning a profit to the average builder.
It is mathematically possible if the remaining 15% are sold at 80%+ margin. Realistically possible no, but mathematics have never concerned itself with what is practically possible.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Windows sales are not down because of weak PC sales, PC sales are down because nobody wants the new Windows.
It would have been funnier if it dropped 8.1%
Are you talking about iOS, Android or Windows here? r is it Symbian?
Rethinking email
I'd wait a bit longer. The market is due for a correction and some pundits seem to think this will be soon.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Huffy did Schwinn I am going to roll.
Gee, let's just replace Microsoft with IBM, PC with mainframe, and smartphones/tables with PCs. Class, that gives us:
The traditional mainframe market has had 5 consequential quarters of decline. This is IBM's core market, where it makes much of its money.
On top of that IBM has essentially failed to gain any traction in the the new growth markets of PCs
So it is understandable that like the mainframe market, which is adjusting to some new smaller number of annual sales, IBM which makes it's income from those sales will adjust down to some new lower level of earnings, and a correspondingly lower stock price.
Viola! It's just like twenty years ago. Maybe some of those stock trading boys are old enough to remember way back then . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I can expect to have to reboot my Win 7 machine even more often now. The M$ strategy is to make the old OS so annoying with the frequent reboots and the extended boot-up times that people will go out and buy the latest version.
Just because IBM eventually successfully migrated to a new business model, is no guarantee that Microsoft will.
They will have declining stock values to match declining revenues, until they show some clear signs of reversing that trend.
the enterprise accountants aren't interested, so NO ONE is buying.
I maintained that the proper and fitting punishment for Microsoft's losses at their various antitrust trials was to nail their ass to the desktop.
History is proving that I was right.
Microsoft couldn't sell a damn thing to anyone NOT a PC manufacturer.
ENTERPRISE doesn't acknowledge them except as an expense, CONSUMERS have had quite enough of their shoddy products.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
MIcrosoft is proving that it can't sell a thing unless it can apply some antitrust leverage.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
We got a few HTC Windows Phone 8X from T-Mobile to send with those in our company that travel overseas. From the little I've played with them they are not a bad phone/OS. I can say that it's simple stupid to get Outlook running on them, which is why we got them in the first place.
The interface is responsive and easy to understand if you run Windows all day.
We also got some of the Samsung Windows 8 tablets. Not so happy with those but I'm not really a tablet guy anyway. We got them because we needed a tablet that would run AutoCAD but agile enough for working inside an airliner while configuring/installing the cabin. They work about as good as they can for that application but that's about all I can say.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Somewhere it helps to be ahead of the curve and not chronically behind it. Listening is good, yes, but who was Apple listening to when they created the iPhone?
Decades before Apple came out with the iPod/iPhone/iPad, they came out with the Apple Newton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)
It wasn't Apple which came out with the iPod/iPhone/iPad, it was Mr. Steve Jobs that made it possible.
Apple, without the late Mr.Steve Jobs, is not that much better than Microsoft.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
No, Ahonen is not fun. He is bitter ex-Nokia worker who has now self-promoted himself as an expert Nokia-analyst. His every blog post keeps repeating (in very boring and long way) the same old song - how strong Nokia was in 2010 and how badly is has been since, but he really doesn't offer *any* insight on what should have been done.
He completely (on purpose) forgets that Symbian was in really deep shit. Everyone else had abandoned it, developers generally hated it and Nokia devices were famous for their cost-cutting (too little RAM, slight differences on Symbian releases making cross-device development a huge pain, crashing built-in software) while Apple and Android were offering superior tools for developers and superior devices. Sure, going with Microsoft may have been a mistake, and it can still prove to be a catastrophe if MS does something nasty like decides to ditch WP in the failure bin. But just taking an arbitrary point in time (the end of 2010) and pretending that everything was fine and implying everything would have been fine and rosy also after that (without telling on what strategy) is just delusional.
Another alternative that I think is a bit less rough around the edges: http://www.alfredapp.com/
So it is understandable that like the mainframe market, which is adjusting to some new smaller number of annual sales, IBM which makes it's income from those sales will adjust down to some new lower level of earnings, and a correspondingly lower stock price.
Viola! It's just like twenty years ago. Maybe some of those stock trading boys are old enough to remember way back then . . .
Well, let's turn the way-back machine back twenty years and look at what IBM was doing at the time: making shitty overpriced PCs with a wacky bus which caused as many problems as it solved that only entrenched IBM shops thought were worth buying. And definitely losing mindshare, if not marketshare. If that didn't cause IBM stock to fall it's because analysts weren't paying attention. It wasn't until they pulled POWER out of their arse that they got a new lease on life.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Another factor in the decline in share value is that this isn't an instant 11% drop, it's a slide during which people are thinking to themselves "Hmm, I have a lot of my personal wealth tied up in a company that makes $900m mistakes, and I have just watched the value of that investment has dropped by 5...6...7...8...9... %. I have no idea when this will stop dropping. How much is loss am I willing to bare to get into a stock that isn't dropping?"
(btw. "Voila" is french for "see there!", "Viola" is English for large violin. Yes, there should be a accent on the a of voila, but slashdot mangles them.)
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Here is a good data set from Forbes using the Kantar global numbers.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgTa_2v15KBndFB2TFd2MmhpQXR4UlFhVTM1NE1xalE#gid=0
I like the Kantar reports themselves because they break it out by country.
Where are you getting -14%.
And to boot a great deal of what he says is inaccurate or highly misleading. They combining statistics so that it isn't obvious that he has causes coming sequentially after effects.
Bill Gates is on the verge of being known as a 'Jimmy Savile'-like monster on a planetary scale.
I was pretty sure IWBT before this, but this was the official moment of hand-tipping.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Angela Merkel (WARNING may be NSFW)
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
IIRC you can't, the ARM processor Surface RT has mandatory secure boot which means only Microsoft is allowed to provide signed boot loaders and kernels.
Apparently, with the i386 processor Surface (not-RT) you can jump through hoops and manage to install Fedora, but with the Surface RT it is not possible to put Linux, or anything else really, on it.
Correct me if I'm wrong! (including detailed links of course).
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
I generally agree with you but... No way. The PS2s were, ignoring price far and away the best PCs on the market. The top of the line PS2 was, with the possible exception of Compaqs and then only rarely always much much faster than corresponding top of the line Dell, Gateway, Zeos, Tandem... Not worth the money, I'd agree. Crappy. No way.
As for Microchannel it was IMHO a great idea. There were huge problems with getting decent hard drive and video speeds that took years for Intel and motherboard manufacturers to overcome. There were huge problems with the interrupt based systems that only stopped existing when we finally moved away from PS2 keyboard and mice...
It is funny Microsoft more so than any other tech company is the one trying to create an interface that works for keyboard / mouse vs. touch vs. digitizer. Companies like Apple have been of the opinion that each OS / hardware combination should be more or less unique and non flexible in their interface. You aren't disagreeing with them you are agreeing with them.
One of the whole points of Metro is to get rid of all the bitmaps and DPI assumptions in classic Win32 applications.
I generally agree with you but... No way. The PS2s were, ignoring price far and away the best PCs on the market.
Who told you that? I've worked with many of the PCs of the day and the PS2s were just as bad as the rest. Due to IBM thinking they were clever, they were worse than many.
As for Microchannel it was IMHO a great idea.
Yes, configuration floppies are fucking great! We love those. They also made EISA what it is today.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Who told me. Back then you had good speed tests in things like Computer Shopper and PCMagazine. The results were striking. I also personally used some of the PS/2s in HS / College.
I don't know about config floppies for Microchannel. But Microchannel was the first bus to make plug and play even possible. As for EISA, yeah EISA won OK so happens all the time someone loses. But if you don't like ISA/EISA the alternative was Microchannel. Voting against one is voting for the other.
To quote a German comedian: "Today they're wearing suits and sitting in front of flipcharts. In the good ol' days, the riff-raff wore rags and sat in tents in front of crystal balls. The game's stayed the same, though: Bullshitting people out of their hard earned money by claiming they can predict the future."
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... so I could sing and dance like the commercials suggested. It was _that_ simple.
Clearly MS only hire the best and brightest engineers. The management and marketing folk however, were all bottom of their class ....
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I don't know about config floppies for Microchannel. But Microchannel was the first bus to make plug and play even possible.
Yeah, plug a floppy into the PC before you're even allowed to boot after installing a new MCA card. That was bullshit.
As for EISA, yeah EISA won OK so happens all the time someone loses. But if you don't like ISA/EISA the alternative was Microchannel.
Macs had autoconfiguring NuBus and Amigas had autoconfiguring Zorro. PC had shitty ISA, shitty MCA, or shitty EISA, then shitty VLB until they finally got PCI.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
OK by "shitty" microchannel I assume you mean as compared to ISA. NuBus broke with 16 bit entirely, I agree much better than either technically. This would have been potentially better than MicroChannel for expensive machines.
I remember DOS drivers being a pain. Don't remember the specifics but yeah you had to always mess with settings in config.sys when you made hardware changes. My guess is that was all the floppy did.
Yeah, plug a floppy into the PC before you're even allowed to boot after installing a new MCA card. That was bullshit.
I remember DOS drivers being a pain. Don't remember the specifics but yeah you had to always mess with settings in config.sys when you made hardware changes. My guess is that was all the floppy did.
Nope. The floppy was there because IBM decided it was better to stick the user with the responsibility of maintaining and inserting a config floppy than to stick the makers of option cards with the bill for a config ROM. The floppy contains the information needed to perform the hardware configuration of the card. There was nothing plug-and-play about Microchannel. This permitted "automatic" configuration of cards so simple they didn't have their own CPU or even ROM, just a pile of logic on a board. EISA was the same way, except in a slot that could also accept an ISA card. The EISA contacts were deeper.
The primary thing that was shitty about the PS/2 was the value proposition. They weren't any faster than the competition (which in many case offered higher clocks) and they cost a lot more. Further, they were highly proprietary. Besides their custom and expensive and only nearly auto-configuring MCA bus, they also used ESDI HDs on a custom connector in most models. And let's not forget that the machines were well large enough to carry full-sized DIN sockets, but they chose to go to the tiny PS/2 mini-DIN instead, which offered the user nothing but additional frustration. And they went with the same connector for both keyboard and mouse, yet nobody supported freely interchanging them until Intel did it much later. (On some Intel motherboards, you can swap PS/2 KB and mouse around into the wrong sockets and they'll both still work.)
IBM realized that the market had spoken against their tactic of making Workstation-style machines with PC processors and operating systems, and created the PS/Valuepoint line, but they failed to actually meet the point at which they would have been a good value, and they failed miserably. They deserved to fail, of course. They did have some machines priced competitively with other systems, but they were the lemons of the line. Their only big hit in PCs was the Thinkpad series, which has since been sold out and ruined.
It's ironic that everything after the PC AT was some kind of failure. They even labeled their first commercial RISC processor as a PC, the PC RT. It failed in part due to branding, because it wasn't a PC. It was a workstation- or even server-class machine at the time, but it had an ISA bus.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
FWIW, I owned an IBM Ambra and liked it quite a bit. That was sort of a midway option at the time of the ValuePoint system:
MCA = high end
Ambra = mid range
Valuepoint = compete with Gateway
Anyway in terms of Microchannel being faster than ISA, as far as I know absolute best case it go up to 40 Mbytes/sec which was way way faster than ISA could hope for. As for the floppy that sounds miserable. I guess come to think of it the MCA machines I worked with came that way.
When MS was on top, everyone and his uncle were against their software. XP was best, Vista was horrific, W7 was full of xxxx, W8 is worse.
But now that they are down 11% and they are left to scrap so many tablets, at such a large amount of money, we suddenly are their sympathetic friend.
We in Slashdot need a company to persecute. It has recently moved from MS to Apple. I guess pretty soon it will be for MAC attacks and then go after the Android. Its seems that slashdotters appear to be against whoever or whatever is the most popular. What MS did was innovative. Only the world is not able to pay for their innovations, or to adopt to their mindset when it comes to user interfaces.
I use Linux as my preference, but W7 is just great too. It is just two annoyances for some individuals, a) It is closed source, and b) it is designed the MS way, according to MS's time and ergonomic studies to show what is best. As an example, the ribbon is really great for word, excel, and powerpoint, for example. We had to adjust to it and now the old way with office 2003 is more cumbersome to use.
So, let MS redo its tablet. They will come out with something pretty good, and we will bitch again about it.
Let us ask the DE developers to take that windows ribbon concept and apply it to Linux, and when we click on a menu item, have the icons appear on the screen. We would have the best of both worlds, -- menus and icon accesses. (Something that Gnome had with Fedora 18) or its version 3.6.
All in favour of solving gui interface problems raise their hand.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
PS/Valuepoint IBM486SLCs (and IBMSLC2s) at either 25 MHz or 33 MHz came with VLB slots. VLB was pretty much okay if you only had one card, but a lot of people tried to use VLB video and storage at the same time. This was encouraged by the fact that motherboard makers often put three VLB slots on the motherboard, as if you could actually use them. It's true that ISA bus bandwidth is very poor, which is why we had EISA and MCA to begin with; mostly to run very expensive OpenGL accelerators and to run very expensive storage controllers. Gamers bought lots of VLB video cards and the situation was moderately atrocious, and then we got PCI and there was no longer any reason to buy a "workstation" because PCs finally had a good or in fact great bus and the PCs and workstations were largely being built out of the same parts from CMD or whoever, once you got past the CPU and chipset.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why the stock holders would panic in this way is beyond me. the tablet business is tough to get into. What Microsoft really need is to get ALL of the devopolers of IOS and andriod to make all the apps for windows. Pay them if you have to at first. That way all the apps on the other two platforms can also be on on windows os. Getting software companies on board is key the phone and tablet windows os is the best but the lack of apps makes people switch back to andriod or iOS.
Came with full source? You think noone ever peeked on it to check if is safe or not, specially having the full source and no need to reverse engineer it, that is anyway forbidden by law in closed source? Could you choose to not install it or have it disabled?
MUAHAHAHAHA!!! That will teach you to be a chair throwing monkey Ballmer-Boy!! Your troll-company is doomed! Go make something that doesn't suck.
Microsoft! MicroLOOZERS more like! LOLOLOLOLOL!
Now mod me to hell. I have karma to spare anyway.
Analysts have a clue. What they can't do is predict a chaotic system with any compelling degree of accuracy.
It doesn't take very smart analysts to tell you that a company that have about a billion dollars of kit they can't sell and lower than expected profits it going to take a hit in the stock price.
Also - The sooner Microsoft dies and stops spreading its crapware everywhere the better.
I believe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchy_(theory) is the solution
Casteism
The iphone isn't outselling Samsung in any niche market you try to make up.
Oh well, maybe in amount of units sold in Apple shops, I concede they may be losing there.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... that the growth is negative .... (damn economists and their lingo)...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Your definition of "sympathetic" implies some degree of submissive masochism.
None of the comments I have seen show much sympathy for the quasi monopoly of Redmond.
As for hating Microsoft they did earn the hate. It all started with Bill Gates not playing ball with early software developers, legitimizing closed source software at a time when hackers were sharing. Many people never forgave him, and by extension his company, for that (and as it turned out sharing in the long them would have been the most profitable option for *all* the industry, the open Internet running in open technologies by free software opened many new business opportunities for all, Microsoft included ).
Later on they became a company that wasn't shy to use questionable practices that lacked morals and integrity and which in several situations where plain illegal, so no wonder many of the affected parties feel wronged and hateful towards them.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Lets hope companies keep peddling this secure boot nonsense and have to write off entire lots of unsold stuff.
Shame about the environment tough....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That's not just a fear. It's a reality. It's not that people don't still find PCs useful, but rather that they took a step back and realized that if Win8 wants to treat a PC as a tablet, they were just doing stuff on their PC that would be more convenient on a tablet. That's not to say the PC has no place, but that its place is not as important to buyers as it used to be. And that its replacement for many people is a market Microsoft has utterly failed to take control of.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!