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Seattle Weekly article on future demise of Microsoft
Rich Kulawiec writes "
Microsoft's Last Day. Spotted by Kathy Gill, who passed it
along to the web-consultants' mailing list. "
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An apple-fanatic reporter 'making up' the future. The idea that Apple could ever purchase AT&T, heh! I guess it would actually require computer knowledge to write a factual computer article. And the idea that UNIX will die? I've heard that before. It survived VMS, it'll survive WNT. Ya know, this is no better than Jesse Burst's no-computer-skill-havin articles. A Mac idiot journalist is just as bad as a MS idiot journalist.
Why do you hate MS? In the early 80s, when DOS 1.0 was a tour de force, a computer could only be purchased by a large corporation. The software was an even bigger purchase.
Along came BG, with an OS that cost only a C note. It was an amazing concept. He followed, pushed, cajoled, and bullied hardware manufacturers to constantly do better. Hard disks have gone from 5 Mb and the size of a large refrigerator, to whatever TigerDirect has on firesale today.
Just compare something like MASM or ROMBasic to the ease of use of todays computer languages, Bill drove all of that.
In fact, there wouldn't even BE a computer market for you to take over if BG hadn't invented it. Be grateful, you snivellers.
The only thing I could see happening to Microsoft is the same thing that happened to IBM in the 80's and early 90's. That is, a series of product failures leading to a loss of pre-eminence, followed by a re-organization and a refocusing on a buisness model that is less risky, less rewarding, but ultimately better for the long term existence of the company.
20 years ago IBM was despised much as Microsoft is today, but now there is a whole new generation who have grown up with an "almost benevolent" IBM, and so they are not nearly as hated.
The prediction of Apple taking over the industry is laughable. Apple is the absolute worst example of a long term viable company that I have seen to date. The only reason they haven't gone the way of the Amiga is because they have a much larger installed base to keep selling upgrades to.
I'm amused by the naivete of those simple souls who beleive microsoft was the driving force behind the pc revolution. No, microsoft just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and got a free ride.
And FYI, Phillipe Khan was the one who created the affordable IDE - there was once a product called microsoft pascal, and it was a 20 floppy install. it was not much fun to work with either - but then along came Phillipe Khan, who wrote turbo pascal and founded Borland! Turbo Pascal was the killer IDE! 2 floppies and you had the best thng going - and it was lots cheaper than the microsoft product too.
No, microsoft has never been an innovator - only an imitator. others create the new technologies, and microsoft comes in later with a "me too" product which they dump on the markey while attempting to destroy the innovators. This is how microsoft punishes innovation - until now. There is a new and growing market, the Linux market, where innovators are welcome and where there is no microsoft to smash them if they become too successful. Corel has discovered this wonderful new promised land, and others are following - Netscape, Oracle, Informix, etc.
The fatal flaw in this article is the total lack of any mention of Linux - this alone puts it into the fantasy category.
Balloons can burst surprisingly quickly. Microsoft could go bust pretty fast: revenue streams start to dry up and the PE ratio becomes too extreme even in today's stock market. Share prices start slipping and all those MS employee stock-options get exercised at once to cash out before the price slips too far. This kills MS's cash reserves and they have to start cutting back on a lot of the cash-intensive marketing that that's been propping up the sales of their mediocre products, further reducing revenue streams.
It goes into a downward feedback spiral as more and more journalists jump on the "Microsoft is dead!" bandwagon (remember Apple 2 years ago?).
Heck, that Microsoft is the size it is, is the only reason it might stretch out a whole 20 years. It could happen in 5.
Why doesn't Jobs release a MAC with Linux
pre-installed (as rumored), instantly converting
some 15 Million Linux users into allies.
Then when the G4 comes out, there will really
be a viable alternative to the x86.
"Apple Telephone & Telegraph"
bwahahahahahaha
I don't need to read any further. Even with Microsoft gone I don't want to live in a future where a company as incompetent as Apple runs the phones.
i don't want to live in a world where the America's have a united currency with a name befitting of a children's cereal.
I can think of one guy specifically - William Crapo Durant (I love that name) - who owned a major auto company and lot's of other stuff in the 20's and died the owner of a bowling alley. But if you think of tech as the modern gold rush - go back and look at what happened to nearly all of the mine owners in California, Nevada or Alaska - they mostly died penniless.
> When's the last time you heard of a company as big as Microsoft
> going from full steam ahead to nothing in 20 years?
Hmm..
Does "Pan Am" ring a bell?
>Along came BG, with an OS that cost only a C >note. It was an amazing concept. He followed, >pushed, cajoled, and bullied hardware
>manufacturers to constantly do better. Hard disks
>have gone from 5 Mb
You actually believe this bullshit?!? Manufacturers like Commodore, Apple, Atari and others would have continued to grow if the PC market did not. For years, these manufacturers had the edge on the PC marketplace, no doubt in my mind that things would be different, yet we would still have the same (if not) better technology than we do now.
>Just compare something like MASM or ROMBasic to
>the ease of use of todays computer languages,
>Bill drove all of that.
False again. BG drove nothing, give an example. VB, Foxpro, Access were all aquired and would have stood on their own two feet. Microsoft has asimilated these products and their manufacturers.
>In fact, there wouldn't even BE a computer market
>for you to take over if BG hadn't invented it. Be
>grateful, you snivellers.
BG invented the OS? Hardly. You're completely ignorant about computer history, read up. It would be better is MS hadn't halted the entire industry with MSDOS for 10 years.
M$ made computers so easy to use even the non-techies buy them for everything from web access to quikiebooks to tracking church memberships.
Bill Gates also did a second thing - he taught computer buyers that change was inevitable, even if his change wasn't always synonymous with immediate improvement.
BG's latest argument for change is the leap from Win31/95/98 to Windows NT/2000/whatever. This is a huge leap for non-techies, at least as large as the leap from DOS to Linux. The important point is that he will convince 80 million customers to make that leap willingly, for about $100.
Your challenge, should you choose to pursue it, is to convince the willing leapers that since they are leaping anyway, to hop the Linux way, because it will offer mucho benefits more than the leap to NT.
This is where Xerox/PARC and Apple failed. They couldn't persuade the masses to jump. Bill could.
Now I'll be the first to concede that if lemmings really jumped off cliffs, it was Gates that taught them that trick.
You need to convince folks to act in the own interests by jumping onto Linux. This is a much easier job, because you are asking folks to jump in the direction of their own best interests.
I bet within the next 3 years you will see microsoft selling off products in order to keep managable costs. No company has successfully held on to a myriad of products, Microsoft will be no exception.
Once hardware vendor realize (or have the ability) to distribute different software other than microsoft, ms is in big trouble!
does on the G3.
uh... NO!
My own real world case: Had used NT for 2 years,
crashed 5 times (I kept count). Have used Linux
for 1.5 years, has never crashed. Five times in
two years is not bad, but none is better.
Apple makes most of its profits from the hardware, not the software. Linux pre-installed is a great idea, but probably won't happen because their tech support people (until a couple tiers up) are novices. They would be too afraid of having to support people with LinuxPPC problems.
If Apple were to split into 2 companies (OS/Software & Hardware), then selling multiple OS's directly would be more likely.
Xerox made computing easy? Since when? Name a Xerox Computer with a mass market following? They can barely sell their laser printers as an alternative to HP.
Apple? I've used Apple computers. They are great for publishing posters and single page memos. The Adobe Illustrator/Pagemaker combo that so many print shops use on the G3 require a gigabyte of RAM and more tweaking than even a winblows user has patience for.
These 2 companies are lusers, total lusers, in the PC market.
And notice how all the "successful" corps end up in Silicon Valley... The writer of that piece is probably a freaky freaky Mac evangelist
It's time to read the rise and fall of the roman empire again, in at least one of its forms. (either the original or the Isacc Asimov foundation series one)
Empires too big to fail fall, but the decay is noticed at the edges before the center. They fail when the creative drive is gone and all new knowlege is rehashing the old masters. They run out of biomass, and they erode leaving only a shell.
Microsoft will have its day, but in a way history is inevitable. What ever you do, you will be history. The scope of history is too grand for one entity to rule forever. Of course, history being what it is, it may be another 20 years before the cracks show enough to convince the masses that the magic is gone and Elvis has really left the building.
I work in a government office and we switched to NT nearly a year ago. And its never been stable. And all we do is you a word processor, Office 97 with all the latest fixes, and a network HDD because everyone is required to save to the secure network drive and not our own HDD.
Bill Gates commits suicide.
Who said Apple bought AT&T. From what it looks like in that article they merge. Why change your name if you got bought out, keep the brandname and make it a subdivision.
Not only that they got some great researchers. They advance the industry like no one else. They got like 2700 U.S. patents last year up 40% from the previous year and way more than anyone else.
When's the last time you heard of a company going from nothing to as big as Microsoft in 20 years?
What goes up, must come down?
No. They are plenty fast with only 32megs of ram, but the more ram you throw at them the faster they (Illustrator/Pagemaker) are.
SHUTUP! you know, the times are now that a person making blanket comments about apple computer is a sign of the lack of intelligence. Mac bashing is nice for the guys in LinuxJournal but that's because they haven't seen light since the 68k. Give all of us a break on the mac cracks. It's just not funny anymore, it's stupidity.
llh
It looks like they are refering to the possability of all the free *nix OSes being integrated into one. Not such a bad idea if you can do it.
MacOS X *could* be that OS, but Apple is too dumb to release it for x86 (even though all the developer releases of OS X Sever were dual platform!). Imagine what MS would need to do to compete with MacOS interface and apps, Unix power and reliability, and NeXT ease of development all rolled into one and running on the same hardware as windows. And if Apple were to release OS X under the GPL windows would be gone in a few years for sure.
Remember that...
Let me do all I can to help MS go down.
round and round it goes
In my work we have over 20 of NT stations and around the same of NT servers we can play with (and even mroe that we cant)..
My NT workstation needs a reboot once a week (I just leave it running overnight). Its a stupid box, not heavyliy used (office, TextPad, WinAmp, IE4, WinCmdr). When I would boot the system, 33 megs of ram would be used by kernel, winamp wincdr and textpad.. after a week of work, I would turn all the apps off, and get around 55 ram used..
I haveto admit, that it never crashed for me, just was grinding to halt after more than a week of use.
As per the servers, we use them mainly for File serving (dies not too often, around every 2/3 months). The IIS server (production) needs a kick once a month. Our development servers need to be rebooted once a week to clear out (what strangly seems to remove lots of random errors).
These stats are true for the 40 systems I have access to (officially that is)...
Other servers I am not supposed to touch (as I am supposed to be a coder not a Sysadmin) need to be rebooted once a month to 3 months. Exchange goes bad, and for strange reasons it does not feel like workin on random days (sometimes it requires to restart service / system / or reinstall)..
Also I need to complain as to how much the MSCE means.. it means shit..
We have a CDR station.. we often use it to backup our sources, but at 4x through network it sometimes got BufferUnderruns, so we left doing Cd Images in the temp.. The sysadmins concluded that some 'virus' was taking all the space the first time they noticed 5 gigs missing. Second time they said that it must be a conflict of SCSII with a motherboard that also has IDE... Boss got so pissed those poor SysAdmins now ask us (me, and this other dude) to burn stuff for them..
Cant say how stable Linux is.. People say its stable, but I did got RedHat5 basic install to crash (YES).. dont know how much of this was my fault though (as it was my first try)..
pointless and off topic but interesting(maybe):
The dollar is from the German 'thaler' which is short for Joachimsthaler, coined from silver mines in Joachimsthal, bohemia in the 1500's
the worst part about american money is the fact that coins dont have arabic numerals on them. I dont understand that egregious error of design.
ps- nickel is named after the metal it is/ was made of. (Nickel came from the german word Kupfernickel - 'Old Nick's Copper') and dime was named by Thomas jeffersonfrom latin decima ( tenth)
>Euro is cool, though. If only some ignorant
>Americans would stop referring to it as
>the eurodollar.
most americans have no clue as to what a euro (or the european Union is(im surprised by how many europeans dont have a clue about the eu) Would it be better if they called it euromoney or "the funny euro money the is circulating only in the form of chocolate coins" -yum-.
The Commodore 64 was something I actually used, but they never did get the CPM card to the retailers.
Uhm.. I had C/PM in my Commodore 128d... And before c64 there was Vic20... They all were COMPUTERs used PERSONALLY... Didja ever use GeOS on Commodore.. the best office tool that had everything.. Word Processor and PaintBrush and supported multiple input devices and so and so on.. and where the whole Demo/Music/Art scene start? Commodore (even though amiga got it even further)
You missed the Amiga, still a great computer. There was one slip up with it, though. You couldn't lay hands on the video cable in 1987. It was listed at $300, but by the time it was available, Commodore had antagonized its use base.
If I am not mistaken Amiga's worked on TVs just like Commodores did.. And the monitors they build (commodore) were some of the finest.. I am still using them to watch tv as they provide a superb quality after all those years.. Sony should be ashamed of itself.. And dont tell me amigas were for games.. Ever seen Deluxe PhotoPaint? And it was a system widely expanded (harddrives, radios).
Atari, you mean the 2600
There were other Atari's.. First were similiar to C64/vic20.. I still remember playing at friends Montezuma's Return, and then hacking it to have unlimited lives.. Then came Amiga's, and Atari made its series.. 1024STE I believe was one of the finest.. and still widely used at music studios for its superior Midi capabilities...
---
And there were others... ZX Spectrums.. systems with built in speaker.. Remember a friend trying to get to say something...
Bill Gates didnt do anything on my scale of things that would be great.. Nothing.. It always copied others, or if it tried to do sometihng by themselves it failed....
Lets look at Quick pascal? anyone?
GWBasic? later QBasic (copied lots of features from Borland Pascal).. Windows (remmber, they did it first with IBM)...there is nothing... Nothing...
And I would have bought Amiga, if it would be that I moved to US and couldnt find an Amiga store.. (damn you)...
The problem with MS is they don't know when to add/drop stuff. Its all fine and dandy that windows 95 can run Dos stuff, assuming the dos stuff can understand all these plug-n-pray devices. Even Apples is dropping some of its older APIs for the new Carbon APIs in MacOS X.
And after they get a good version they always add more crap or change something that was good as is.
Because of the pioneering work done by Bill Gates in the computer hardware industry, the computer's logic "gates" are named after him.
Yeah, that's it. And the dollar "bill" was named as a tribute to Gates' financial success.
"While MS isn't going to do something as clever as TCL/Tk anymore"
What are you talking about, you fool? TCL was invented by John Ousterhout of Sun Microsystems.
I'm going to have to disagree with you. The pc used a cpu with 20 address bits instead of the apple/commodore/atari's 16, giving it 16 times the memory capacity. Also the chip had i/o ports that were distinct from the memory ports, as well as 8 different interrupt levels (as opposed to two). The pc was designed around a more capable chip. Remember the quote, "Nobody will ever use 640k of memory"?
History would be a lot different now if there was a 16 bit data, 32 bit address version of the 6502 back in the early 80's
For a software company, Microsoft makes some pretty good hardware. :-)
I've had no problems with my mouse, and I haven't heard of any keyboard problems. (I'm not saying they don't exist, I just ain't heard of any.)
Yeah, and I can get a Panasonic bicycle to go with my 32" superflat.. ;)
Just curious, but has anyone else noticed that the new innovations that Jobs has come up with (Lisa/Mac/Next) have all been black and white, even when color was readily available?
Is Jobsey colorblind?
Well, market-cap wise, IBM + GM MSFT ...
Well, market-cap wise, IBM + GM < MSFT ...
Winblows (in all forms) is about 15 years old. Linux is at the level of usability that Windows 2.0 (286/386) was in 1989, only its reliable, unlike the crash-prone Win2.0 (and 3.0, 3.1, 95, and 98). This is the year that Linux GUI's should stablize no matter what the window manager is. The apps are improving (Netscape still needs work), and hopefully, Red Hat et al should stop including v0.x software in its distributions soon.
Believe it or not, the breakup of AT&T has led to greater cumulative growth among the baby bells + AT&T + bell labs than they would have achieved within a single company..
Competition is _GOOD_! Don't let anyone tell you any different..
Just curious:
Does anybody know how much it will cost the DOJ to continue this case if it gets all the way to the Supreme Court?
Also -- what other lawsuits are pending against MSFT other than USDOJ, Caldera, Sun, and Bristol?
Guess there isn't much to do for scandinavian geeks during those long winter nights....
;)
Well, with a bloated gui, and a pathetic core... anything's possible. :-)
Where do you want to reboot today?
Anyone notice the author's name? D. S. Topia -> 'dystopia' -> antithesis to 'utopia' or as Webster puts it: "An imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives".
Actualy, PanAm is back now, so go figure :)
Apple has not done much with the MacOS interface since the origin, true more or less...
You state that as being behind the curve. Maybe, but not in the way you think..
MacOS was so far ahead of its time Apple could AFFORD to sit on their ass and do nothing for so long. And unfortunately, they did, and they charged users up the yang for their systems. In 1985, I bought an Atari ST because it was very Mac-like, but affordable. I resented Apple's overpricing, and when it came to switch platforms, I went with a PC. But I still knew the MacOS was a MUCH better interface than DOS and Windows 3.0. Even today, Windows is still far behind in some usability areas (yes, yes.. and not in others).
Have you even added a hard drive to Windows? If the "C:" drive was partitioned into C: and D:, the old D: moves to E: and the 1st partition on the new drive becomes D:!!
This huge bug then illustrates another Windoze issue: you can't move apps once they are installed - if you do they almost always break. So when Windows moves your partitions around as in above, oops... time to reinstall a few gigs worth of apps.
There are no REAL reasons for Windoze bugs like this in 1999. If Microsoft had not exhausted all their energy subsidizing market-splitting apps that generate NO PROFIT FOR THEM - like Money, Java, and IE to name a few... they could begin to address the bloatedness and bugginess of Windows.
Apple at least has had the sense to cut its losses and retrench, ditching things like the Newton, and are on some kind of comeback. Microsoft is spread much thinner than Apple ever was.
The whole Microsoft Empire sits on a foundation of Windows and Office... nothing else. This makes them EXTREMELY vulnerable, and Bill is right to be so paranoid. But they can't change since this will level the playing field, and they're not prepared. The field will change without them, however, and when it does be prepared for a huge Wall Street crash. All those fund managers will sell MS like a potato, and the frenzy will harm other companies having nothing to do with them.
Of course all tech stocks are overpriced now (except maybe Apple..) . But a crash like that could seriously harm the economy..
I once saw a quote from a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who said Microsoft is like a roach motel for geniuses - they check in, but they don't check out.
Pretty telling that Word 6.0 for Mac was a completely fucked up bloated Windows port. :)
fdisk disk druid is the perfect example of user-friendly vs idiot friendly. fdisk is really great at what is does. Only hippies use disk druid, and hippies suck.
yep - but it's true
There are some fine applications that only run on
M$ - but if the developers would just wise-up and
port them to Linux - instead of bitching to DOJ -
then M$ would go bye-bye.
As an *operating system* Linux rocks!
Could be that Linux will be the iceberg that
sinks the Titanic?
What!!!?? No, it can't be sinking!
This ship is UNSINKABLE!!!!
Can you see it the other way round?
If hardware prices had been then what they
are now, M$ would never have happened -
DOS would never have happened -
Windows would never have happened.
DOS was speedy and elegant - no matter the
limitations of the unfortunate chips it had to
contend with. But as a foundation for Windows?
Plainly insufficient. Given the limitations of
the proprietary paradigm - the secrecy - Windows can't be fixed
Perhaps you are thinking of the Apple ///? It was very unreliable due to improper ventilation which caused it to overheat.
I had a Lisa for a few years, and although I only used it to run the Lisa 7/7 Office System (Apple's office suite*, which provided one of the best user interfaces I have seen), I cannot recall it ever crashing. I eventually `upgraded' to the Mac OS, which annoyed me by crashing quite often. The lack of multitasking and more primitive user interface under Mac OS were also annoying.
The Lisa hardware design was quite nice (unlike the original Mac), and the machine could be completely disassembled in a few minutes without any tools (no screws, only small knobs). The system consisted of functional boards (CPU, memory, I/O) which could easily be removed from the backplane module (which could itself be removed from the case for easy access; again with no tools). I have yet to see another personal computer with such user-friendly hardware.
* Lisa 7/7 Office System:
1/7 LisaWrite (word processor)
2/7 LisaCalc (spreadsheet)
3/7 LisaGraph (plotting graphs)
4/7 LisaList (database)
5/7 LisaDraw (drawing)
6/7 LisaTerm (terminal emulator)
7/7 ???
I posted this replay, I now apologize for the rudeness of it, I relay have nothing against MAC
users/advocates.
Are you talking about the ergonomic keyboards? MS didn't invent them. Goto the Smithsonian and look at their hardware display and you see an Apple keyboard that could switch into an ergonmic one, I believe it was invented in the 80s. My bro bought one for an insane amout of money but its so cool, wish they made one just like it for the PC.
I'm glad to see not everyone is blind. People's hatred/support for Apple/Linux/Microsoft whatever often clouds their judgment. They ignore the facts and spout some line. Fact is Apple has done little innovation recently compared to their early years.
And I agree about it looking the same. MacOS hasn't changed much. It is old, antiquated and limited and most people I work with find that after a few months of use they prefer Windows and can work far faster in it. (Of course studies sa y otherwise but I like real world experience) And as John Carmack succinctly put it the: "The low level os just plain sucks."
A colleague of mine spent a few weeks being taken around IBM. The statement that impressed him the most was that if IBM stopped selling things tomorrow, they would still make 30-40% of what they made the year before on royalties alone!
Bullshit numbers. You're looking at what people are willing to pay for a piece of stock, not what that stock is actually worth. Look at the ridiculous numbers that Netscape generated when it went public. People invest in stock because they think/hope that the company will make enough money to generate dividends that will repay their investment and then generate income -- anything else is speculation (buy hoping that you can sell later at a higher price.) At $146 how long will you have to hold that piece of paper to get your money back?
MS is surrounded by a lot of hype that attracts "shadetree investors", whose numbers have increased drastically in recent years. Being less than savy investors, they tend to invest the same way they buy software, i.e. get whatever is popular. Of course, this drives up the cost of stock.
Now tell me, if you take an equal valuation of stocks from all companies (price = 10yr ROI), would
While I would have to say there are MANY things about the article that are laughable, and I imagine Microsoft will always be around in one form or another, the author makes an interesting point, and a rather simple one.
Microsoft is over-extending themselves, too many product lines, and most of them sub-par. Its not about overextension in financial terms, but in product lines. The industry is becoming more than just about the desktop PC now. Just how many turfs does MS think they can fight on? It only takes one company with the proper funding and drive to provide a superior product IN THAT PARTICULAR FIELD to out-do MS in that field. And more and more companies are starting to do exactly this.
For that fact alone, I find that article to be extremely eye-opening. I'd appreciate comments from anyone who agrees or disagrees with me....
-C.A.W.
On the off chance you were really serious and not just being too subtle with your sarcasm, your points in reverse order:
There wouldn't be an MSDOS/Windows market if it weren't for Apple. One, the threat of Apple II and VisiCalc is what prompted IBM into the business, giving MSDOS its start. Two, the Lisa/Mac GUI (which was indeed an advance over what Xerox had at PARC) got Windows started.
BG invented nothing. He swiped BASIC to sell on the first 8080 machines to get started.
Ease of use of todays computer languages - you mean like C (Bell Labs, early 1970s) or like any
number of 'pile up the blocks' visual languages that date back to the early 80s on midrange systems?
Cheap OS? Like CP/M, CP/M-86, OS-9, etc, etc?
Early 80s? Apple II etc series, Lisa, Northstar,
LSI-11 based machines, Commodore, TRS-80 and
later the TRS Xenix machine (OK, Xenix was a
Microsoft product, but based on AT&T source code)
et bloody cetera. Not to mention minicomputers
that were still affordable by less than "large
corporations". You're thinking perhaps of the
early 70s -- but that would be when Gates was
still a student.
.. the guy doesn't seem to really understand much about the computer industry from the inside, as seen by techies.
... airing of those taped excerpts, competing products ... began making inroads against MS. First Linux, then BSDi". This is nonsense. Linux has since years before been steadily (and exponentially) making inroads in the server market --- because it is *good*, and technical people recognize that --- not as an after-effect of any change in the way people view Bill Gates. Techies have *always* been able to recognize good products and bad products, that's what they do, not look at "company image".
"Microsoft brand name, which had once been synonymous with 'best of breed'" - when? I can't remember a time when people who HAD technical knowledge actually thought of MS products as being good.
"UNIX, that now exists only in a version called BSDi"
"almost immediately after the
Apart from such points though, the article isn't bad. He makes some good points, and has some interesting insights. History has shown just how difficult the computer industry is to predict, so taking a stab at predicting 21 years down the line is quite "brave". Probably the most valid point in his article is the subtle shift of MS's stance from being on the offensive to defensive.
- David Joffe (djoffe@geocities.com)
I was a scientist at the dawn of personal computer history. I actually had to use this stuff to do useful work. Data reduction like you can't believe. I lived and breathed SAS.
The IBM PC was wonderful, but IBM was hidebound like Apple. Bill snatched away DOS and turned it into something usable. My favorite compiler was TurboPascal, and it ran on MSDOS, but the programs I ported were written in the well thoughtout (for its time) BASIC.
I've never even seen Encarta, my sense of history comes from being there. While MS isn't going to do something as clever as TCL/Tk anymore because it has turned into another IBM/Apple, neither is P.Kahn. Keep in mind your treasured Corel Wordperfect is another product whose glory days are in the past. It may regain popularity, but isn't it deserving of the same contempt you heap on MS for bungling missed opportunities?
These companies time has passed, but that doesn't mean these companies always deserved the scorn being heaped upon them.
Besides, have you looked at sales figures lately?
There are a great deal of differences between the early MacOS and the current MacOS. The differences aren't as apparent because the MacOS has _evolved_. Sometimes too slowly for my taste, but it keeps getting better. There is no reason, other than being a UI idiot, that you should have to redesign your previous GUI from the ground up with each new version. MS products, in general, have a horrible UI that piles more crap on (can you say Win98?) until they have to start over.
By evolving your GUI you long time users will still be able to use your product right away. All the advances will just add to the experience. You don't have to relearn how to do the basics.
The Lisa never worked, it crashed even at computer fairs. The Northstar never got much past the photo op stage. Atari, you mean the 2600? No way. Apple I/II/III? You do remember the III?
The TRS-80 ran something not-so-affectionately called Trash-DOS. The Commodore 64 was something I actually used, but they never did get the CPM card to the retailers.
You missed the Amiga, still a great computer. There was one slip up with it, though. You couldn't lay hands on the video cable in 1987. It was listed at $300, but by the time it was available, Commodore had antagonized its use base.
No, His Bilgeness not only had a product, but got it into the stores. His mommy should get some credit for that, though, she being on the IBM board and all. I'm sure she knew about distribution.
AOL dies in 2003! Just 5^H4 more years!
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
What? BSDi? Whatever...
I think free software will be the name of the game for a lot of people from now on...
Oh well, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
I think the article's 'predictions' may be off base, but I think it's right about Microsoft's decline. Microsoft has put itself in a position that makes their long-term future precarious. They put on this big marketing show to sell the management on their products. Then they cajole the management into a contract that makes it difficult and expensive to switch from MS's product line. MS's don't perform quite as advertised, but despite the fact that they're buggy, bloated, and less-than-rock-stable, the management continues to do business with Microsoft, because they are practically locked in. Since the customers are locked in, Microsoft gets a steady revenue stream and continues its dominance. However, since MS's products are mediocre, the customers end up saying to themselves, "If we could only get out of buying MS stuff." The customers end up doing business with MS because they feel they have to, not because they really want to.
The trouble is that this situation is ultimately bad for Microsoft, because it means that for Microsoft to continue to make money, it has to keep itself in a position where it can dominate the customer and keep the customer locked in. If Microsoft shows weakness, if it shows signs that its dominance is slipping and that its customers don't have to do business with it to continue to work, then it's sunk. It may bleed slowly rather than hemorrage, but it's sunk.
Microsoft puts itself in a Win-Lose relationship with its customers. That's not healthy business.
Posted by modefan:
Looking at the power that MS wields, it would take something much more powerful other than the DOJ to make MS fall.
MS will slowly slide, a slow one, but a very noticeable.
When we start hearing of layoffs, then we'll all know.. =)
Posted by modefan:
Getting rid of the contractors/temp/permatemps is easy, heck, we won't even read about that in the papers.
When MS starts getting rid of "their" workforce, then we know the sh*t is hitting the fans.
Sorry, but you're wrong. Microsoft products aren't easy to use. The reason most people think so is that every computer they've ever used has had that software on it. People who have been using U*ix for 2/5/10+ years, as many of these people have used MSDOS, then windows3, then windows4 have, feel it's far easier to use than anything else. Ditto for mac users, etc. It's all what they're used to.
As for windows4 -> windows5 (NT/2000/whatever) being a big leap, that is true in some cases, but not for the reason you think. Large corporations with hundreds or thousands of systems to "upgrade" have a difficult time with any large-scale change in software. But as for the user side of things, the differences are fairly small between windows 3.0 and any "OS" microsoft is likely to sell in the next five years.
The similarities:
1. Low reliability. Microsoft-based systems need frequent reboots, reinstalls, and other manual maintenance.
2. High per-seat cost. Microsoft hasn't sold system software for less than $70-300 per seat, and they won't start now. Even commercial Unices are usually cheaper than this.
3. High support cost. Microsoft products are difficult even for seasoned IT professionals to understand. Hence costly tech support contracts are a must even for small (as low as 1 seat) installations.
4. Awful UI. Although DOS presented a difficult-to-use UI, it was at least fast. Since then, ms UIs have gotten slower, more confusing, and less consistent.
5. Minimal security. Although NT[45] is better than windows4, the security level is nothing like what even a basic U*ix offers, and "trusted" versions of high-end OS's like Solaris and HPUX offer more than NT ever will.
So, for home buyers/users, and for users in any environment, the changes will be small, as they always have been. Simply adding a few features, some new drivers, another layer of residue to UI, and a large supply of new bugs doesn't constitute a major leap.
Finally, as for willing leapers: anyone willing to leap simply because they are told to is going to leap in the direction his most conservative advisors instruct him to. These people are lost and should not be allowed to own or use computers at all. The right target for Linux upgrades is the set of people who feel compelled to leap because the products they use don't meet their needs. These people can be tempted by Linux over both NT (Linux is just all-around better) and commercial U*ix (Linux is cheaper, and sometime better in ways that might (not) matter to the buyer). And let's not forget that many of these people either need something other than Linux, or don't need computers at all.
I agree...
I'm not going ballistic, I just wonder how in the world they thought BSDI... Considering they're not a major player, and they're not doing anything new...
FreeBSD, Linux, and even Slowaris are still developing quite well... BSDI just seems to me like Free/Open/NetBSD but commercial and lagging behind its free brethren.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I agree, but for other reasons.
The author seems to have not noticed that AT&T is currently in quite a bit of a positive turnaround...
Right after they spun off Lucent and NCR, AT&T started going downhill, but they're already back on track. They seem to be very forward-looking compared to the other LD companies. While most of them bitch about VOIP (Voice-over-IP) technologies, AT&T has been pretty receptive to it, and has pretty much embraced it. While it makes no sense in their current business model, I think that they see their model going obsolete, and want to be in on the ground floor when the other companies are just getting a clue that they might have a problem.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The GS was a good machine that could address several (8?) megabytes of memory. It was an advanced design, stable, capable of running legacy software, and much more stable than the Lisa. It had a GUI long before the PC.
Technically, it had it all *over* the PC. But the PC was the shining star of business by the time the GS came out.
But as far as functionality goes, the Apple ][ was as capable as the PC for the first several years of the PC's existence. Functionality wasn't the issue-- name recognition was. Sure, Apple did nothing to make the Apple easier to use; it put all its resources into Mac development. But the PC was not easy to use then, either. The catchphrase of the day was, "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM."
The PC was designed around a more-capable chip, but the design hobbled the chip. The original PC couldn't even use 640k of memory-- there wasn't enough room on the motherboard.
Anyway, you are right-- the PC had more potential. But Apple had the Mac coming out soon (after the Lisa failed-- or was killed by Jobs, who's pet project was the Mac. Actually, it was someone else's pet project, but Jobs usurped it, and used the failure of the Lisa to run Wozniak out).
Anyway, that's all old history. There are many ways to interpret it-- all of them correct. The PC had more potential, technically, but the Apple had better software and a better foundation. In fact, where Apples were snuck in the back door, business people could bring IBMs through the front door.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Microsoft will be in business much later than 2020, but they'll lose market dominance much sooner. By this time next year Microsoft's share of the server market will be in rapid decline. Their share of the desktop market will fall slowly, but noticably.
The most important thing that is already happening is that MS will find it difficult to leverage OS dominance in new markets (palmtops, content, real-estate, whatever). The DOJ might have a hand in this, but the real killer will be that potential partners will realize that there are viable (and profitable) alternatives.
MS in 2020 will still be huge, but they'll be huge the same way MacDonalds is huge. Everybody will know them and most will use their products on occasion, but they won't control the market.
... Ami.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
"Why do you hate MS? In the early 80s, when DOS 1.0 was a tour de force, a computer could only be purchased by a large corporation. The software was an even bigger purchase."
You must get your history lessons from Microsoft Encarta. The Apple II preceded the IBM PC by about four years, and wasn't the only competition for the PC in its early days. C and C++ were developed by AT&T, again without the aid of the PC. The rest of your article is equivalently nonsense.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
"These extreme linux advocates produce far more FUD than Microsoft does."
MS FUD gets spread far more than Linux FUD, which rarely makes it out of Slashdot. Whose FUD gets to the PHBs?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
>I remember that worthless piece of scrap known as the Apple II.
But you apparently have forgotten the Apple III, available before the PC. 80 columns built in, 128k memory, substantially more sophisticated Business Basic. The original poster claimed that Gates invented the PC, despite (a) Apple, Commodore, etc. having personal computers before the IBM PC, and (b) IBM invented the IBM PC, not Microsoft -- note the name? Microsoft developed (from a purchased base) just one of the original choices of OS for it. (Anyone else remember the UCSD P-system? A better language than PC Basic.) OSes were available for less than a C note before the PC.
The PC had 20 bit addressing, rather than 16 bit plus bank switching, and IBM's name behind it. So the PC won that battle.
"BillG pummelled computers into something so easy to use" -- Macs were easy to use 10 years before PC users could stop making custom boot disks to get enough conventional memory available, 7 years before mice were a worthwhile peripheral for PCs. If Apple hadn't been in love with 100% profit margins, they would be the ones the DOJ would have in court these days.
Bill Gates is not an innovator. He is *brilliant* at seeing opportunities and positioning his company to take advantage of those opportunities. He has also managed to keep Microsoft flexible, and always working towards a common goal. (Much of IBM didn't want the PC encroaching on their minicomputer business, and likewise the PC jr was a deliberately crippled product.)
"Try balancing your checkbook with that." -- Why wouldn't I have used Visicalc?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
"I'm a linux user like all of you, but how can you think that Linux even competes with Win95?"
Linux is still gathering momentum, and thus developers. If you count the current number of developers, even if only a small fraction of Linux users will help in development, the group dwarfs the 24,000 Microsoft employees. Linux developers are likewise focused on making stuff work, not making it marketable. And all this for an OS that was started around the release of Windows 3.1.\
So just give it a little time.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
The chances of there being exactly *one* UNIX in the far future are about as likely as MacOS replacing Windows with all future computers looking like iMacs on steroids.
(and a commercial UNIX? Get real... Like anyone will want to buy a source license again after Microsoft fades out.)
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I remember my dad installing Microsoft Word 4.0 on our XT and us fighting over which was better, Word or Wordstar. After giving Word a go I realised he was right - it was much better. And it was better than any other word processor at that time (for PC) that I saw. Of course, this was obviously a very, very long time ago but still it's good to remember that Microsoft software was once GOOD. It became bad because the company's monopolistic desire.
There's a distinction between innovation & invention, similar to the distinction between R&D and pure research.
Invention is creating a new idea & prototype.
Innovation is being the first at successfully taking the invention and creating a marketable product.
Apple innovated what Xerox invented because Xerox's upper executives had no idea how important PARC's technologies were. They were too busy being the "photocopy people".
Microsoft copied what Apple did. They didn't innovate because they obviously were not the first "successful" person to bring GUI's to market.. Though Microsoft would debate that point, pointing to the "level" of success it has achieved.
-Stu
sine when did linux? *everything* in linux is ripped off, there's not ONE SINGLE original idea - if there is, let me know.
Actually, given the current overpopulation of BSD-variants, I would bet that one of those isn't going to be the last one standing.
I am a Linux user, but since Unix is Unix is Unix (as a general rule, my prior SunOS/X experience helped a great deal in getting to know Linux), I don't really care which one wins.
Nevertheless, from a philisophical as well as practical standpoint, I would prefer a GPL'd version of Unix (or some other superior OS). The simple reasons for this are that I distrust the uber-capitalist Tech industry (O-we-o, IPO) to not screw things up from a technical standpoint for their own short-term profit, the GPL license -- when combined with someone who knows what they are doing -- prevents the variant-o-the-week thing so prevalent in BSD-based projects from getting started (Free/Net/WhateverBSD, XF86/AccelX/MetroX/whatever -- you get the idea), and I like the idea that someone can't come in and steal everything, copyright and close it, and then resell it without any contribution.
Jim Cape
http://www.jcinteractive.com
Jim Cape
http://www.jcinteractive.com
But Billy didn't invent the personal computer market as we know it. Apple did with its original systems. Then it reinvented it with the Mac (FUN FACT: Though it didn't last very long, very early on in the history of the Mac it was the dominant operating system; DOS would not overtake it until later). Even before Apple, personal computers existed, though they were so different from what we know today that I doubt they could really be called personal computers.
Gates stole the market (almost literally, actually); he didn't invent it.
Dollar is absolutely the worst possible name for money.
Um, quick question: why? I've never noticed anything wrong with it.
Heck, the dollar bills don't even feel like money, just pieces of paper.
Another question: what is money supposed to feel like? By the way, there is a reason that dollar bills feel the way they do. It's the first line of defense against counterfieters. You'd be surprised at the number of counterfieters who were caught by cashiers who noticed the money "didn't feel right." Enough, apparently, to convince the government to keep the bills, and you know that must have taken a rather impressive feat.
I was just given a Classic from the early 80s, the interface looks _exactly_ the same as it does on the G3.
You'd better hide whatever it is that you're smoking before you mom gets home...
The Adobe Illustrator/Pagemaker combo that so many print shops use on the G3 require a gigabyte of RAM...
I don't know what alternate universe you were using these G3's in, but to me it sounds like you've never even touched a Mac. I learned my trade (graphic design) on a Mac IIsi that maxed out at 17 megs of RAM. Both Pagemaker and Illustrator ran fine on it. It's true that the memory requirements are much higher on the current versions of those programs, but neither is above 30 megs.
Here's an idea: before you post, have a slight clue as to what it is you're talking about. Your silly hyperbole just makes you look like an ignorant dork.
Do you understand how large a typical professional print shop project is, in terms of sheer data storage?
What??
I currently work as a designer for a publishing company and a large amount of the work I do is magazine ads. Before that I worked in a high-voulume prepress in San Francisco's media district.
The most amount of ram we had in any one Mac was approx. 300 megs in our color correction/scanning workstation. This was mainly because PhotoShop is a notorious memory hog. It's also because Macs have problems with virtual memory. It slows them down horrendously. If you're dealing large, hi-res scans, or rasterizing postscript files to a hi-res, having alot of ram is a must. But that's only if you're dealing with large bitmapped graphic files. The average designer wouldn't even be dealing with these large files. They'd usually just use a low res FPO to place in their Quark, Pagemaker, or Illustrator files. The prepress would then replace the FPO just as the the postscript is rasterized at a unix RIP and sent to the imagesetter. It's not necessary to have vast amount of RAM in this case.
The main thing a good amount of ram does on a Mac is that it let's you open more applications at once. Unless you're dealing with extremely complex eps files, Illustrator does fine on the default RAM allotment. Because Pagemaker and Quark are vector graphic programs, and use lo-res proxies for their placed bitmaps, they don't need a huge amount of memory.
A typical magazine ad is at least over 2-3 gigabytes.
If it takes that much memory for one of your magazine ads, then you're just overbuilding your files my friend. And anyone that works in prepress would tell you the same.
SCO? I thought the Unix trademark was owned by The Open Group.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
"Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots." - Jonathan Nolan, Memento Mori
All Unices may not currently come packaged with GNU tools, but it has certainly been my experience that the tools somehow manage to appear on all of them shortly after installation. :)
"Credit where credit is due" is a fine concept, but I think people tend to go a bit far with this whole Microsoft brought us the PC thing.
Bill Gates does deserve some credit though. He was smart enough, or lucky enough, to recognize the beginning of a trend, and was able to capitalize on it. Congratulations to him. But let's not mix up cause and effect please.
IBM was broken up by the government and forced them to re-organize. And now they are back in a strong financial position. True, they do not own the computer industry like they did in their early days, but they are setting directions for the industry with their R&D in things like hard drives and copper chips, etc. (real innovating, not MS 'innovation')
I have heard the argument that IBM's anti-trust deal was one of the best things that happened. I don't know if this is true, but it keeps sticking in my mind as I see MS and where it is at now.
Just something to think about...
"Shaw's Principle: Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it."
Sounds like a pretty big market to me.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Yeah, that is curious. He offers BSDi as the only UNIX left standing without any hint as to why that might happen. Maybe it was just to get all our knickers in a twist...
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Not so. BSDI is basically a commercialized version of FreeBSD; any improvements made to FreeBSD will be improvements to BSDI also. Contrast this with Linux, where the GPL prevents companies like SCO from making proprietary versions.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
We have three NT servers on our network - our web server generally reboots once or twice a week, our file server once a month, and our MS Proxy about once every two months. My own NT workstation is rebooted once every week or two.
We have one Linux box on the network - uptime 147 days and counting (since the last time I powered it down to change the network card). At my previous workplace (an ISP), the main web server ran Digital Unix. During the two years I worked there, we never had to reboot it except for hardware changes.
Not FUD, just my own experiences. I wouldn't call myself an "extreme" Linux advocate, but I see what works, and what doesn't. If it weren't for the fact that the company has invested heavily in MS technologies (Exchange Server, Proxy Server, Internet Information Server / Active Server Pages, FoxPro, SQL Server), I would have had everything switched to Linux long ago.
________________________
Corporate Jenga: You take a blockhead from the bottom and you put him on top...
If someone mailed out Linux CD'slike AOL mailed out coasters. If OEM offered Linux/BSD at a lower cost than Win98/NT. MS's cash cow would be dead in the middle of the road.
Microsoft is one car or airplane acident from being led by Steve Balmer. Think about it.
Thirty mumble percent of outstanding MS stock was given to employees as incentives. That's the highest percentage of any large company. If the employees decide that $148/share is the right time to cash out, the downward pressure on MS stock would be immense. That could start a complete collapse of it market value. One of MS's big plusses now is it huge market capitolization. If that starts to erode, they would become extremely suseptable to FUD. Just like Apple was when it's stock was at salvage value and Jogs took over.
If, for some insane reason Gates would be forced out of control, no other leader could manage anything more than an orderly dismemberment of MS.
They keep a lot of employees because the stock price keeps on going up. They keep investors happy for the same reason; M$ stock is a legal pyramid scheme. Once it stops climbing for a quarter or two, a few investors will bail, the stock price will stumble around for a short while until everyone else realizes it ain't gonna recover, and then it's gonna dive like you've never seen. And then employees will abandon in droves, and M$ will have no attraction left for anybody.
--
Infuriate left and right
It 2020 we'll probably all have quoptical (quantum/optical) processors behind our ears with a natural language audio user interface. These devices will all be connected by a transparent wireless network type which has not even be thought of yet and the operating software will be writen by Linus' children while on a beer run to finland for their father.
Umm... yeah, someone tell me to go to bed.
Andrew
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
Free/Net/OpenBSD is to BSDI what Linux is to SCO: death.
Replacement prediction: All Unices will employ GNU tools by 2005 to tap into the vast Linux user base.
and the "voluntary simplicity" movement in software, first identified by name in late 1999, had consumers
turning away by the millions from the bloated Office suite and adopting various simplified freeware solutions instead.
Hmm... I like the term. Good slogan.
All of us (up here in Seattle) read the
article and instantly thought Fred Moody.
They also invented a pile of other stuff - the mouse, for instance. Unfortunately, according to a couple of books I've read on the topic, Xerox management at the time was particularly clueless and let everybody else get rich exploiting technologies they invented.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Redhat 5 is known to be unstable...
:)
Redhat 5.1 is far more stable after what I've heard. I use Slackware myself, and our online web/name/other-server (a 486) will soon have it's 256 day anniversary.
During it's uptime we've upgraded the webserver, added many accounts, set up mailinglists and Hypernews, added new domain, set up nameserver, installed qmail instead of sendmail, etc. etc.
"The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages." - Tao of Programming
Heh. Ever notice that the only Microsoft fans in these flamewars are Anonymous Cowards?
Say, Rob, suppose you could pull out the hostname logs for them? I want to see just how many come from microsoft.com...
Look! FUD against microsoft! how amusing. A taste of their own medicine.
It's easy to contrast microsoft with other great "innovative" startup companies of the time. Let's take Apple as an example.
Microsoft never had innovation in it's products. What MS had was little tricks, doodads, and whizbangs (does it sound like a Roald Dahl book yet?). When steve and steve got together, they said to each other: hey, lets get together and make this really cool product. When microsoft started up, it went something more like: hey lets get together and make some money.
In it's 15 years in microcomputers, what has microsoft created that is new, something "innovative", to use an already overused term. The spreadsheet, the wordprocessor, multitasking, speech recognition, the intenet, or ANY of the new and old fields that made computing what it is today, did Microsoft ever contribute one iota to that? NO!
Microsoft will die, it will be slow, but it will happen. The average joe might be happy with running "CD player" and changeing his backgrounds to his favourite rock group every now and then, but as competing technologies and paradigms (such as OSS, and specifically, the zealous, nearly paranoid GNU community) the average consumer will become aware of better products at better values. When they realize that Microsoft doesnt offer anything new, but simply the old with a new slogan, the interest will slowly start dying.
On a side note, I think Apple will actually become a player in the computer industry again, now that Jobs is at the helm. Jobs might have a lot of ego problems, but he has something that businesspeople dont have, that spark of ingenuity. Whatever you want to say about the iMac, you have to admit that it looks cool, it will fit perfectly along with the nice new VW beetle (that is an AWESOME car).
anyway, those are my 1.25 cents (2 canadian cents)
-Laxative
Heheh. I'd probably settle for one of them Commodore Coupes, personally.
Actually, it's kinda nice that Apple are back in action, (lets face it, before the G3 and iMac, well, they looked a bit green around the gills.)
since they don't want to take over everything.
Graham the Happy Scum
... so sprach Graham the Happy Scum
I'm not sure how big they were (and some are still around in altered form) but ...
...
DEC, Prime, Data General, Wang, Computer Vision, NCR, Cray, Amdahl, Thinking Machines, RCA, CDC, Hayes, Ashton-Tate, Software Publishing Corp,
What were the companies that produced VisiCalc? CP/M?
Non-computer related companies include the entire US television industry and much of the consumer electronics industry. American Motors. The British aerospace industry. Digital watches pretty much wiped out the Swiss mechanical watch industry.
Bad business decisions, complacency, market chages and reluctance to change with it, delusions of grandeur, loss of focus, dabbling in businesses outside your core competencies, and inertia all can lead to business failure. And it can happen quite fast.
So, where does Microsoft want to go today?
SteveM
I used NT Workstation for over a year (I no longer have that job) switching from OS/2. I shutdown everynight and booted up every morning.
Over that time my system crashed on average once a week. The other NT users in the office experienced similar problems.
Unfortunately, it was a corporate directive to migrate from OS/2 to NT.
We also used AS/400s. Not very sexy. But very stable.
SteveM
Hmm... it seems that only about a year and a half ago, we were seeing Apple death stories. Now, it seems that the press is calling them one of the greatest comeback stories of the decade. Is Microsoft doomed? Probabily not (DAMN). I think that it is still way to early to be writing anyting like this. However, when the time comes, all I would have to say is: "Where's your Steve Jobs, Bill?"
-Sol
Such obvious trolling......
Given the larger and still growing numbers of hackers, crackers and wannabes, I don't think computing in 2020 will resemble anything like we have today. I may be wrong, but hey, I may be dead too!
My 2 sense
The Linux zealots are going to go ballistic over this "prediction"...
Rich
Oh man,
M$ dying would be SUCH a nice present on my (then) 46th birthday...
Of course them dying next year on my 26th woud be even better.
When's the last time you heard of a company as big as Microsoft going from full steam ahead to nothing in 20 years? I realize this is the tech industry and things can change quickly, but this just doesn't seem realistic.
-jason
Did MS invent the wheel-mouse? Or was that Logitech, or somebody else?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
While I would agree that Apple dropped the ball for a while, the fact that the Mac interface has remained consistent is a testament to its remarkable design. Kind of like the Constitution. It has even remained consistent across an entire platform change when they went from 68k to PPC.
As for technology, how about Quicktime, Firewire, the 3.5" floppy, open doc etc. etc.
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
Off course there would be a computermarket without M$ ! It could have been a different one without them, but it would have been there. A free-market economy creates new markets wherever they see fit. Once the technology is available, the computermarket is also. Profit rules the world, also without M$ !
If go this URL, you can read how according to Microsoft, Windows will meet its demise by the year 2004, perhaps replaced by Linux.
http://news.bbc. co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_253000/253592.st
Malta Network Resources search engine/portal/ directory
In the early 80s which you mention, a computer
could be purchased for under $300! The software
was supplied for free or available at low cost.
Remember the days of the ZX81, the Spectrum by Sinclair? Then Commodore of course with the Pet
and 64. That was the original market before
Gates came and "purchased" DOS from Seattle Computers.
No, everything was better before Gates, in my opinion. There was also Digital Research's CPM operating system at the time.
Oh well, it does not make sense to keep thinking
of the past, we should look at the future to see
what we can do to get rid of Bloatware.
They went from totally dominating the entire computer industry, to be smaller than a startup run by a college dropout...
And with Netscape in 3-4 years: Going from being the fastest growing software company ever, to becoming a struggling software/services/portal company worth a fraction of what it was worth after their IPO.
The biggest fault of this article is it's continued insistence that Micro$oft was once innovative! The conclusion is also wrong, M$ will continue to be around in some way, shape, or form for a long, long time, for the same reasons that IBM is still around. The main reason being that they can afford to lose $1 billion/year for 20 years and still remain in business! However, M$ may become irrelevant in many markets, like the server market, in much the same way that Banyan is irrelevant in the corporate network market, despite the fact that it is still being supported and used. (Banyan was still being used at Intel and Tektronix the last time I checked.) Linux is already a better Windows server than NT is, and Micro$oft's shift to per-seat pricing provides even more incentive to switch. The price/performance numbers for using NT as your server simply cannot compete!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I don't know if Microsoft will fall , but I know it will never be the same again.