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Salon Article on MS PR
Richard Finney sent us
a link to an interesting story at Salon about
Microsoft's PR
surrounding the trial. Its a pretty interesting little bit
I'd say. Pretty much sums it up- things are going so
hot for Bill & Co.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Isn't Salon in some way affiliated with MS? It seemed to me to be an awefully negative article, if that's the case.
At the end of the article, there's a reference to a column in fortune. Anyway, I was reading it and there were a few lines worth remembering when I realized that the article is dated November 17!
that fortune column had some specific quotes from the Judge and other players. I really didn't read anything specific about the recent press conference except that Gates only answered three questions. Does anyone know anymore?
Cnet has an article about this leaked memo.
We get an actual "engineer" about 1 in 5 calls. Most of the time it's just some help desk fool who digs up KB articles that aren't helpful or relevant to our problem and that we could have gotten from our own set of TechNet CD's.
Of course we still have to pay $300 USD for each call regardless of its usefulness.
First Microsoft's Ed Muth insults the "freeware" community (and some
/. needs to do a new poll: Microsoft's mis-steps are due to: 1)
of Microsoft's own employees in the process).
Now, in an even more impressive example of astounding cluelessness,
MS spokesperson Greg Shaw insults the *press* *corps* in Washington,
D.C.???
Yow.
Maybe
cluelessness, 2) arrogance, 3) suicidal tendencies, 4) all of the
above.
Reading the Salon article was hard to align with my opinion that they were MS affiliated. It was, of course, Slate that I was thinking about.
You've probably all heard this one, but it's on topic:
A pilot in a small plane is flying into Seattle on a very foggy day. So foggy, in fact, that he can't find the airport. Up ahead in the fog, he sees a building looming. He sees somebody sitting at a desk with his window open, so he flies closer.
"WHERE ARE WE?", the pilot yells to the guy in the building.
"IN AN AIRPLANE!", the guy yells back.
The pilot immediately makes a sharp left, descends and makes a perfect landing at the airport. His flabbergasted passenger looks at him and asks, "How did you do that?" The pilot replies, "Well the answer I got from that guy was 100% factual but 100% useless, so it must've been the Microsoft Tech Support building, 5 blocks NW of the airport."
You know, I really didn't read anything negative except for the tone the author was striking. As for direct quotes and real supporting evidence, there was just the one following tame example:
Everyone I used to talk to when I was there did. Of course there were a couple hundred other alleged support techs there who didn't have a clue; when I wasn't dispensing technical wisdom over the phone, I was bailing them out. None of the good ones work there any more; it isn't hard to guess why.
Heh, look the MicrSerfs finally got here. Did you not consider the parts about lawyers telling bold faced lies to be negative? Is this a positive thing in your opinion?
In the 80s most of the people at IBM were like that. The company was raking in cash, and it took almost a decade before they figured out they were dead. What people didn't realize is that the attitude didn't go away, it just transferred to MS. The press seems to be the last to pick up on these things.
I've long wondered if MS is *trying* to lose. I'm not sure what motive there would be, but that or complete arogance are the only possible reason for what we see.
The pro-MS fanatics don't help the company's situation either. The FUD is amazing. On a ZDNET forum I saw someone claim that XWindows is too unstable to be usable. Now, I'll admit I am far from a Linux expert and have had apps (and even the OS itself on rare occasions, usually after having done something stupid myself) crash on Linux, but XWindows has not been one of them.
"It is not a good sign when executives at America's largest and most important software company begin to act like monotone-voiced cultists."
It's not so hard to believe if you've been to
Redmond. I have, on a job interview. They offered big money. When probed, I found out that they EXPECT a 55 hour work-week minimum. They have several cots throughout the campus, and they have dorm-like accomodations on campus as well.
Many M$ employees work 12-18 hour days, live on M$'s campus, buy their food at M$'s store, go to M$ social events. They sleep with each other, marry each other, they are in each others' wills. All they know is their little world. When you are the only person you know, it's easy to believe you are the best.
(a little off-topic, but close)
While testifying before some govt committee last year, Gates said that they had to act like they do because "its an extremely competitive industry" and implying that if we didn't do what we do, someone else would. Implying that most everyone else in this industry behaves like they do.
Is that really true? I know guys like Ellison, Andreesen, and McNealy tend to talk big, but I've never really seen anything come out of Oracle, Sun, or Netscape as wacked as some of the thngs MS does.
Is the industry really that bad, or was Gates trying to justify his style with a dishonest assessment of the situation?
Eventually the press will realize that corporate press releases are filled with misinformation from nearly every company. MS is just much worse than most.
If MS isn't broken up, they'll be irrelevant within two years anyway. If they are, maybe one or two segments will change their tune and survive the world's collective realization that their products are unreliable and they have no interest in truth or quality, just customer lock-in.
If you could hire a "Baby Bill" to author your products' on-line help, a lot of clue-full organizations would do that now.
Yikes, I just used the word "author" as a verb. I meant "compose".
But of course they get calls from a lot of dolts. After all isn't all of Microsoft's marketing and advertising aimed at the "dolt" market? As for reading the manual, isn't this the company that claims or implies that you should be able to use all of their software without reading the manual?
Isn't this the company who implied that Windows NT was so easy to use that any clown off the street could be a sysadmin or network manager?
If you market your product to "dolts" and build a doltish product, you had better damn well be prepared to answer questions from "dolts" when they call tech support!
Sure Malabar exists. And if you have a strong mind, you might remember that they were an ally last week. Er... someone's here, gotta go.
Newsflash folks - M$ is pulling in more money than they EVER have. Yes, new threats are on the horizon (when has the industry been without new threats?), but a lot of this talk is pretty much pee in the wind.
I don't approve of how they do business, but I'm not going to be so stupid as to pronounce their death while their balance sheets are still giving investors wet dreams.
One thing that strikes me about the attitudes of both Microsoft and Intel is the behind all of their actions and their PR statements is the implied proclamation, "We're high tech companies and therefore we are above the law".
I see a little of this attitude in the rest of the industry but Intel is about 10 times worse than everybody else and Microsoft is about 10 times worse than Intel.
I always had major problems with X on RedHat 5.* systems.
X used to constantly crash, using it for an hour was a major acheivement.
I suppose this might be acceptable on a server (not), but forget about it for desktop usage.
Earlier libc RH and Slackware ran with no probs.
It wasn't hardware problems because it _all_ got replaced.
I was hoping 5.2 wouldn't be broken but as it turns out I bought SuSE 5.3 instead.
SuSE lives up to the hype....
Anyway, the point is just because it didn't happen to you doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Of course this goes both ways, just because it was my
(and apparently at least one other person) experience doesn't mean it happens to everybody.
And most importantly _all linux isn't created equal_
an unlogged-in J4
The real threat to MS comes from the inherent instability of the software market in particular and computer industry in general. That instability has been constant through time. And the received wisdom is that WWW is today's threat to any and all established companies. Maybe that's it. Maybe the stagnation of the software engineering discipline compared with the ongoing revolutions in hardware is more of a threat to MS's health. In any scenario, the threat to MS is that they could become complacent and either not see the changing conditions or not react as quickly as some other entity.
This sort of paranoia is not new to MS and it is not unique to them. My employer has used this sort of institutional fear and loathing to keep us "hungry" and focused, to guard against complacency and pave the way for painful, risky change.
I might loathe MS as much as the next MS customer. (Though there are many levels where I can be sympathetic to them, based on the sorts of paranoid, delusional, gadfly customers our company attracts, with whom I have to interact daily.) But I believe Gates when he says that changing market conditions are ultimately more of a threat to Redmond than the DOJ.
In that vein, I also agree with sphealy that loosing might be best for them. Consider the relative health of AT&T, Lucent, IBM,... Too bad the Reagan's early '80s DOJ never broke up Digital. Some part of Digital could have become Cisco...
At the company I interned with for a summer. I won't go into all of the details, but the problem had to do with peoples personal network drives, Netware, and legacy 8.3 filename problems. Basically, people with usernames longer than eight characters were having problems saving files with more than eight characters. Anyway, I tried the tech support that the company had contracted (not really sure how much all of those calls cost the company in the end) and they couldn't really think of anything that I hadn't thought of. After several days of trying that, and more or less giving up on calling tech support, I spoke to our own director of tech support about it. Turns out she used to work for the company we contracted tech support from. I still don't exactly understand the relationship, but as she explained it, the tech support people we had contracted, for all intents and purposes, _were_ Microsoft technical support. In other words, someone calling MS for support on certain issues would get through to them or something like that. Anyway, the upside of this was that, if I was persistant, and pushed the issue the right way, they would just pass me on to a real Microsoft engineer.
Anyway, after just a few more hours on the phone, they did pass me on. It was great. I explained my problem, and explained all the experiments I'd done to uncover the extent of the problem, and what my suspicions were as to the cause, and she listened, and _understood_!!! She didn't completely ignore everything I said and then just read the pre-prepared questions like I normally get from tech support. She pointed me almost right off the bat to a Microsoft knowledge base article that perfectly described what I was looking for. Turns out I'd actually come _this_ (imagine thumb and forefinger almost touching) close to finding it myself, I just didn't quite know what to call it. She even gave me her e-mail address to follow up with. It was almost something of an epithany. Your mileage may vary.
P.S. Has anyone here who has used the Microsoft knowledge base ever noticed an annoying bug whereby identical searches will return different results within seconds of one another. Usually, what will happen is that you'll search, and find what you're looking for, and then later, if you need to find the same article again and don't have the call number, you perform the same search and nothing comes up. Try it again - nothing. Again - nothing. Again - kazam, all the articles you saw last time show up. Try it again - poof, there they go again. Every now and then, though not as often as simply getting nothing, you'd get incomplete results. For example, you might know that there should be six articles, but only two will show up, then you search again right away, and all six show up (ok, it's more likely that nothing will turn up a few times, and then six will show up). So, anyway, does anyone know what I'm talking about, and have they fixed it?
Maybe we do work 12-18 hours a day sometimes. Who doesn't?
Me.
It is illegal to require overtime of "non-exempt" employees regardless of what they have "committed to". If regular grunt programmers are exempt employees at MS, it's just another symptom of their evil.
Yeah, but are the balance sheets accurate?
Remember the chief auditor got canned for probing MS's non-standard accounting techniques?
"...It is not a good sign when executives at America's largest and most important software company begin to act like monotone-voiced cultists."
/. of late.
SWEET! This restores a lot of my faith in the media. I might even buy a 'script to this rag.
I was so disillusioned yesterday when Washington's bunghole-of-a-pocket-senator put forth a motion in the Senate to cut DOJ funding.
This article boosts my morale, especially after all the AC/pro-microsoft posts that have been polluting
Politicians shouldn't be in the pockets of the wealthy! If the Senator had any ballz, he would have told Billgatus "Have you ever considered that you might be wrong, Bill?"
Just an AC's opinion! Thanks for stopping by!
they have the armed forces and pentagon on their side, and *they* have a lot of pull behind the scenes. the military desperately want Citizen95 to be able to point and click their way to victory. i can't blame them for that, but ms is the wrong answer, computing appliances are the right answer.
other parts of the government have also decided to go "single source" to microsoft for all their software.
it ain't over til it's over. don't forget another big trial of this century -- involving firestone, general motors and (texaco?). they made a fake front company that bought up all the rail/public transportation in several large cities, then they quietly tore out the rails and replaced the transportation infrastructure with GM buses, firestone tires, and (texaco?) fuel. san francisco was able to resist them, but LA and several other cities lost a colorful part of their heritage, as well as a fun way to get to work.
when they were convicted of the deal, guess what the penalty was? $1.00
greed, power, influence, $$$ -- they go a long way. it ain't over til we see MS lose significant market share; either to apple, linux, sun, beos, whatever. let's hope the people don't get a lame ass symbolic victory -- the computing equivalent of a commuter bus.
I can't believe the arrogance of those people! If you're invitied over to someone's house, you don't piss on the carpet in their living room expecting it to be OK just because it's you who did it. The description in the article of the employees sounds like there is a cult-like mentality at M$.
With such a self-perceived self-rightousness and unbelievable conviction of victory they will eventually go down hard.
As far as I know, only "low-level employees" at Microsoft have ever said anything bad about the way the company does business. At least, that's what MS always says, and why would they lie?
i met two MS officials. they just kept grinning like cheshire cats on 100mg. of prozac (taken twice daily)
here are a couple gems from the conference :
"...all non microsoft solutions will be eliminated by 2005..."
...and...
"...our goal is simple. everytime someone uses information, or any electronic device, we get, perhaps, a fraction of a penny...eventually no one will explicitly buy microsoft products, our technology will be implicit in all devices purchased...."
yech! talk abou the borg!
They have the armed forces and pentagon on their side, and *they* have a lot of pull behind the scenes. the military
Uh, no.
If it is a choice between something that is dependable yet very hard to use versus something that is unstable and very easy to use to control, let's say a battleship or fighter plane, what are you going to choose?
This is not to say that Unix is used in such devices, but I think the military is more concerned with reliability than a pretty face. Unix is reliable, NT is pretty. Which would you use to control a nuclear silo?
Everyone can come up with a thousand valid reasons why M$ should have collapsed a long time ago - how come none of them are coming to pass? How come every quarter is better and better? How come they continue to crush any market they get into (go ask sybase and informix how the database market is against sql server these days)?
I don't like Microsoft at all, but the signal-to-noise ratio in here needs to be addressed. Like it or lump it, they are still getting bigger.
NT outgrew unix last year, in case anyone was watching.
The actual damages assessed by GM et al was still a drop, but it was $5000.00.
Its an interesting case - LA was probably destroyed as a good place to live by the efforts of GM and company.
As for M$, yes people in here need to realize that although the company is against the wall in court right now, it is highly unlikely the judge will do anything too drastic. This is still America, and like it or lump it, business is going to be left bascially alone. Whether you like this policy or not, it has served this country fairly well. The government should not be in the business of punishing success. Just remember - this is precedent setting stuff.
"Heh, look the MicrSerfs finally got here."
/. party line (anything against Microsoft must be true without requiring verification, anything for Microsoft must be a lie), and you call him names. Way to go!
I cannot believe this response. This article was about a group of people following a party line -- not allowing outside opinions into their stream of thought. Now someone has an opinion of the article that differs from the
"Did you not consider the parts about lawyers telling bold faced lies to be negative? Is this a positive thing in your opinion?"
This was a competely unsubstantiated (as was most of article) point in the article. If it was true, what was the lie about? And for that matter, it isn't illegal to lie to a reporter.
Don't get me wrong, I don't condone lieing, and if it's true than it is certainly a bad thing. I'm also not saying that I approve of any of Microsofts actions -- what I am saying is that if we're going to hold Microsoft up to the test of stubborness of thought we should at least pass the test ourselves.
Is seem to remember something about Sun writing code spcifically to look good when run by a particular benchmark test.
By the number of installed copies by the end of the year, or by the number of copies, installed within the year?
as in sales - the only thing that matters
Waaal... MS fought and bought to put their
stuff on the Apple OS... Office on Linux
could conceivably marginalize most of the
other stuff - GNU, etc. - especially if
the other major Windoze apps can follow their
porting path... that leaves Linus and his
merry band facing Darth what's his name
almost alone... this is one line of thought
at least... the whole thing is too big/new to
grok well at this time of night...
Let's say MS does do this.
Good.
As long as they don't control the OS and FUCK IT UP, I don't care. The only problem I have with Microsoft is that MS Windows is utter crap trying to pass itself off as cream of the crop.
As long as the OS is not within the control of Microsoft it can only help Linux.
I think that's what Microsoft's problem is. They're holding on too tight to their precious stock options. Microsoft has created thousands of paper millionaires, and none of them are going to riak a penny of that precious artificial wealth on a "misperception." And so from now until the end of Microsoft, and the end will come unless they change their ways, their credo will always be "Hey, everything's great, Gates is great, let's go innovate."
P.S. The only thing that bothers me more than hearing Gates say "innovate" (I'm sorry Bill, did you mean innovate or duplicate?) is hearing him use the word "great." Listen to an interview with him sometime. He uses great all the time. You'd think he was hopped up on Prozac for how great he sees everything as being.
The government should not be in the business of punishing success.
Agreed.
The government should be in the business of punishing companies that destroy other companies because of the audicity of those other companies for being a success. You know, like Microsoft destroying Netscape with exclusive licensing and undercutting which last time I checked was illegal, Microsoft killing competitors with better products by forcing OEM's to pay a higher price if they allow the consumer to make a choice (isn't that what capitalism is supposed to be about - choice?)
A totally free market ends up being a completely closed one. In pure communism, the state owns the companies. In pure capitalism, the companies own the state. Is there a difference?
...oops, i think you mean "rewarding theft", cuz $5000 to GM for polluting our cities and hosing the transportation our tax dollars ended up buying twice is exactly that, and MS is no different with all branches of the military as well as other parts of the government having their heads lodged deep in billy boy's ass no don't give me your bullshit about "punishing success"
as in sales - the only thing that matters
Sure it did. Everybody is replacing 95 with it (or 98 - whatever the case may be). This means that NT is growing, but not in the server market.
at every level of the mil people are rewarded for dumping unix in favor of MS. and yes, i prefer relibility over beauty, but that's not really the point; the point is a massive government subsidy that makes one asshole the richest person in the universe, and i think it's excessive and grotesque to see him subsidized with my taxes -- i'd much rather see my taxes used towards oracle, netscape, sun, redhat, whatever -- i hate kings.
Think it can't happen? Look at OS/2.
OS/2 required big memory in comparison to Windows. 8 Meg was minimum for an installation, it cost a fortune back in the early 90's.
If you think that Microsoft writting a crappy version of Office that is intended to run extra slow will hurt Linux I think you are wrong.
Linux has a reputation for being fast. It's why IT departments and engineers alike love it.
Microsoft has a reputation for being big and slow. It's why IT departments often hate it and most engineers despise it.
Let's say MS does this, the response will be: "Look! Proof that MS can't code it's way out of a paper bag". Not "Linux sucks because MS programs run like shit on it even though everything else runs like greased lightning". MS had some good PR, past tense being operative. They've destroyed their credibility. The end is nearer than you think, nearer than I thought just 3 years ago. I didn't think this would happen until 2010.
MS will be shrinking in less than 2 years. All this for a stupid web browser. They completely fucked up on this one.
Yeah, dude, that rug really made the room...
BZZZZT! Like it or lump it, NT will be the most widely deployed server OS in the world in 1999.
Yes this sucks, but its the truth.
PR, spinning, astroturf and fake posts are handled
mostly by Microsoft's outside PR firm, Waggener
Edstrom. They would be stupid to post from
*.microsoft.com. They buy a cheap ISP account with
possibly fake names at AOL or netcom.
Then they go and post. Another technique: smaller
companies get incentives from Microsoft if their employees are
pro-Microsoft publicly and privately.
But yes, there are dedicated people too at Waggener Edstrom who
manipulate eg. CNN and MSNBC online polls. (the slashdot poll is much more robust)
So far as Microsoft manuals go they came up with the idea of making the manual an optional extra. Calling it a "resource kit" a while back. Even then what is supplied is probably too small to be a complete manual anyway.
Not only do Microsoft market their systems as usable without needing to read the manual it isn't exactly easy for people to read the manual anyway. Since it most likely is absent or not obviously there.
Attempting to put the manual on CDROM is only sensible if it is is something standard (like HTML) also.
The only situation I have encountered with supposed X instability is that certain combinations of video cards and servers will *occasionally* lock up the keyboard when switching between X and a text console.
That or not let them work in the business again. Let them conquer and dominate yarn, or the pickle industry, or Katz's sexbots- send 'em off to Roger Waters' "Fletcher Memorial Home for incurable tyrants and kings" but get their hands off computing.
Yarn??? My mother makes great knit sweaters, and I really, really don't want yarn industry to be dominated by those people. I have seen more than enough of their garbage in software, and it will suck if the next time my mother's sweater will fall apart, turn blue or require me to grow shoulders an inch per year because yarn was produced under the same kind of management.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
NT outgrew unix last year, in case anyone was watching.
By the number of installed copies by the end of the year, or by the number of copies, installed within the year?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
To whom? Most likely more GameBoys are sold in last year than cars. What should I do about it?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
BZZZZT! Like it or lump it, NT will be the most widely deployed server OS in the world in 1999.
If it is server, how come it's used as replacement for Windows 95/98 that are desktop-only? Also note that "Unix" in that study was "Unix" minus Linux, minus FreeBSD minus NetBSD minus OpenBSD -- what is blatantly incorrect way of counting Unix installations.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Or, is this the "Doh, should have pressed Preview first" meme... hmmm...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
All the MS people are crazy- they can't face the reality of what's happening, can't acknowledge that their basic corporate ethic is, in fact, against the law. Wouldn't be if they were just little schmucks, it'd just be annoying- but they aren't, are they? They aren't.
I just read the c/net article (despite a screwed-up link on their roundup page- use the sidebar link instead) where the MS lawyer insists, 'We will prevail' in an internal memo somebody decided to leak. It's freaking weird when lawyers are that off the beam- guy could get disbarred or something for his trouble, going all the way down the line with these people. I immediately pictured a killer editorial cartoon- the lawyer's talking to his secretary, better yet an MS dictation program! And it shows on the screen 'we will prevail' and the guy's going, no, no! 'we will be put in jail'!
Heh.
There needs to be jail time for many of these people. If it was good enough for the top levels of the Nixon cabinet it is good enough for Microsoft- it's not like they wouldn't get very high class imprisonment, these are not people who would be thrown in a drunk tank, but locked up they must be.
Locked up because they are too crazy to be safe running around in the world- and too sane and convinced of their perfect reasonableness to get off on an insanity defense.
It's almost good that they're so far gone- no more conciliation, no more insincerity, now we see the true Microsoft and they are saying, screw you, we've been right all along, we're right now, we own you and the courts and we just win- what's so hard to understand about that?
It gives the government lawyers a solid base for proposing remedies, and I for one really think some of these people had better see jail time to knock their bloody blinders off and make them see the reality for a change. That or not let them work in the business again. Let them conquer and dominate yarn, or the pickle industry, or Katz's sexbots- send 'em off to Roger Waters' "Fletcher Memorial Home for incurable tyrants and kings" but get their hands off computing. How much will we put up with? When do we start demanding that the government be a government and assert power over these people?
FYI, in Apple's 1984 commercial, the last thing Big Brother says before he's smashed by the upstart Macintosh is "We Shall Prevail." Eerie...
...isn't a problem if one is using fbcon (and doesn't have their X server running as root).
Posted by Anonymous Cool Dude:
I heard something on the news this morning about a new memo/email leaked by an "anti-microsoft group". It was apparently from the "chief lawyer" to "the executive group".
What the email contained, however, was just a claim that "the gov't hasn't proven anything."
Sounds like a bogus leak to me, especially as I only heard about it on an extremely kiss-ass Seattle radio station.
--
--
=8^
MS is sounding more and more like a cult. The point being that a cult reflects the leader's personality - and with an unstable leader, the cults self-destructs. Obviously, MS reflects Bill Gates' personality. It's sad, really. I'll bash him and call him names, but in reality, not being able to see anything but one's own view of the world, no matter what, is not healthy. Yes, you've got to be driven to succeed, but when ten people tell you you're drunk, you'd better go lie down and sleep it off. Not that I feel sorry for the man. After all, he's got heaps of cash.
I found it interesting that the article painted a rather ugly scene of the tele-interview. I mean, the reporters were yelling at Gates. Huh. Must be a first for him. Well, maybe not. There was that pie.......
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
MS is sounding more and more like a cult. The point being that a cult reflects the leader's personality - and with an unstable leader, the cults self-destructs. Obviously, MS reflects Bill Gates' personality. It's sad, really. I'll bash him and call him names, but in reality, not being able to see anything but one's own view of the world, no matter what, is not healthy. Yes, you've got to be driven to succeed, but when ten people tell you you're drunk, you'd better go lie down and sleep it off. Not that I feel sorry for the man. After all, he's got heaps of cash.
I found it interesting that the article painted a rather ugly scene of the tele-interview. I mean, the reporters were yelling at Gates. Huh. Must be a first for him. Well, maybe not. There was that pie.......
Also, I just remembered an news piece quite a while ago. Connie Chung was doing an MS piece for CBS or something, and she of course did the interview w/ BG. They did it in such a way as to show how the interview was setup, how it went, and the aftershots - like a documentary. Basically BG came off as an arrogant asshole. Anyone remember that?
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
At that, one reporter completely loses it. "That's just bullshit," shouts Brock Meeks, who works for (of all places) MSNBC.
HA I love it! Finally someone speaks up! I have been feeling like that kid in the Emperors New Clothes!
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
From what I've heard from Ellison and McNealy, they would've done exactly the same things if they only knew how. If Sun had succeeded in their vision of Java Everywhere (forgive me, "Write Once Run Anywhere"), they would've been no different from Microsoft's vision of Windows Everywhere, and we would have just substituted one tyrant for another.
I have more respect for Andreessen because he actually wrote code. I don't think Ellison is even sure what his company *does*, much less have any deeper technical insight than the average PHB-who-wants-to-be-a-samurai.
-Jake
--
Jake
Note: I don't think this is what is actually happening. But I do think it is a possibility.
Keep in mind that although Microsoft has created numerous paper millionaires and a few billionaires, many of them cannot realize that wealth. If billg decides he wants to buy his own space shuttle, or New Zealand, he can't. The moment he tries to sell half his stock (say $20 billion), the value of that stock would drop though the floor.
But if he (and other big holders) was _forced_ to sell 50% of this stock by the feds, that's a different matter. Can't be helped. Not his fault. The two resulting companies are just as good as the old M$ - just smaller. No need to panic.
So it is possible that there are people at MS who desire a breakup, whether or not they acknowledge it even to themselves.
sPh
The funny thing is, Michael Kinsley was one of the more independent pundits when he worked in Washington (DC, that is). Some good original thinking and not much bowing to conventional wisdom. And he promised to maintain that attitude when he left TNR for Microsoft.
But that sure isn't how it has seemed the last six months or so. Slate's coverage of the MS trial is a joke thoughout the world of political journalism. I wonder what happened?
sPh
I think Scott might not ever be as neurotic as Bill, but he could end up more evil.
:-)
I heard an anecdote about how Scott found some Compaq monitors in one of his buildings, went ballistic and demand that they be removed IMMEDIATELY. (Scott's veins bulge out when he gets mad, too).
Someone had to calmly remind him later that his company did make Solaris for the x86
So, no, I don't think he can stand competition any more than Bill can. Which is why I'm a happy Linus supporter.
--
As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
I've heard this theory before too. I guess if you fsck your own defense up enough you can get the case thrown out.
--
As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
It's likely that Judge Jackson will find against Microsoft, but the sentencing is what I'm most concerned with.
It is quite possible that MS may only get fined.
IMO, MS could probably shrug off just about any fine the court could impose.
--
As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Let me clue you in on some harsh realities of microsoft's continued success.
MS does not have much in the way of assets, just office space and vested pseudo-geeks.
It may suprise you, but most MS employees don't make all that much money compared to other software firms. People stay and work there because they can get rich quick cashing in their stock options after a year or two.
So to keep their geeks in line, MS has to break it's own earnings records every quarter. So far it has done so, but its getting harder and harder. This is why they have to overcharge for Win98, why they changed the licensing for Office, and why they will be cripling some (of now 5) versions of Windows 2000 in order to charge more for the high-end versions.
There have also been allegations that MS has been cooking their books.
In a nutshell, MS need only have a couple quarters of expected or below-expected earnings to take a hit in their stock value and completely fall apart. I anticipate this may be the year.
--
As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
'Nuff said.
:-)
Or higaisha-ishiki.
Guilty!
--
As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
that was a great article!
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
--
And Justice for None
They're showing signs of ALL of those...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
poor bill.. his empire slowly.. and i mean SLOWLY crumbles.. and all we can do is mock.. .. yay karma!@!
Victoria Palmer - I brake for unix.boys, Windows just breaks. - http://www.escape.com/~juliet
No. Salon seems to be independent, as well as quite clueful when it comes to technology and Linux. I think Slate is the Microsoft-affiliated magazine site. And Sidewalk, if it still exists.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I imagine you're thinking of Slate, MS's little webzine project that talked of the wonderful profits they'd make by going from a free service to a subscription service. Suffice to say, they're back to being a free service again, so we can figure out how well that one worked.
-mike kania
I think that it depends largely on the particular X Server in question. I've never had my OS (Linux 2.0.36) crash, but I have had my X Server crash/lockup a couple times. If I start switching between virtual consoles, I'm very likely to lock X. (A nuisance, since I love virtual consoles.)
I have a friend who said he had some stability problems with X -- he switched to a more popular video card (ie, a better supported X Server) and it's been very stable for him since.
--
Mark Fassler
fassler at frii dot com
But if MS makes office for Linux, then they need to compete on the actual merits of their software, and the software industry will be much better off for it.
The only reason MS won the office war was because they had control of the operating system that the applications were running under.
An MS Linux would be a strange sight. Maybe they really are planning on doing something like that. But would anyone buy it?
How many hits (and AC comments) anti-M$ articles get from *.microsoft.com
It wouldn't be that hard to implement, methinks...
0 1 - just my two bits
Rob,
You might want to check out www.zdnet.com/zdnn/ right now.
There is a long article there about rumors that Microsoft is right now porting Microsoft Office to Linux. If the rumors are true, then you might as well kiss StarOffice and WordPerfect goodbye, since much of the corporate documents created nowadays are in MS Word/Excel/Powerpoint format.
The more frightening possibility is that Microsoft might be seriously considering turning their ActiveX and DirectX technologies into Open Source programming code; that has considerable implications since it could slow the acceptance of Java and could allow games under Linux to take advantage of the current gaming hardware out there easily.
I've heard of "co-opting the revolution," but this is ridiculous.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
The most telling line in the article, IMHO is
Yet it is so "used to controlling the presentation" that it doesn't seem to know how to deal with a looser environment that it can't dictate to.
Of course, the looser environment the article referred to was Washington.
But... I would venture that the Internet (our home) is somewhat looser still. Boy is Micros~1 in trouble.
--
The Internet is the Suppository of All Knowledge. You get it in the end.
Their support is pretty brain dead, although if you are persistant they might actually get an engineer to try to reproduce the problem.
I can understand why they are brain dead, tho. They get a lot of stupid calls from dolts who didn't RTFM or slept through their MCSE class.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Well, if you go to the bookstore, you'll see a 15 pound set of books called "Windows NT Server Resource Kit", aka, the f*ing manual.
Show me Microsoft marketing that implys you can support NT server without manuals or training. Can't? Then shut your AC piehole.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Not true. Crappy apps can kill the credibility of an OS in the eyes of the pointy-haired bosses out there.
Imagine MS releasing Office for Linux, and it runs 3x slower than Office for Windows. Then their spin doctors go to work, and all of a sudden, magazines warn everyone how Linux is much slower than Windows.
Think it can't happen? Look at OS/2.
everything from Redmond seems to be mostly PR: if you've ever waded through a tech net article not already knowing most of the answer then the the content most likely makes no sense - but it fits the Microsoft answer to everything, absolutely correct and totally worthless. You gotta love those guys.
All I say is by way of discourse, nothing by way of advice
Which is why bugnet exists. Someone with enough contacts to check up on things, post the information to a site, and have an audience that actually reads the site.
For major problems, slashdot and other news outlets embarrass MS enough to get something done. But for the little ones, Bugnet does the job.
Microsoft is going to go down in a big burning ball of fire. It is pretty sad in a way, but they brought it on themselves.
http://vapid.ddns.org
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
That's my Bill--always the do-gooder, fighting for the privacy of his customers against the evil government. Glad he's got the best interests of his customers at heart, even if it means the court-ordered end of his lock on the market...
Feh.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Last fall, my roommate had to go to Microsoft for a week. He came back, and described all the people he met there as extremely arrogant, and they all fully believed in and supported MS, but not because the disliked the alternatives and competition, but because they didn't know any better. In short, all the people who worked there were just there trying to make as much money as they could, as fast as possible. They all had the attitude that anything MS did was correct because they are successful, so therefore whatever they do must be right. It was nice to finally see someone print this. It IS true.
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
There was a mention at the end of the article regarding their "cult-like monotone" or some such thing. This is quite telling. It sounds to me like these people are quite brainwashed into believing they can't lose, that they are "the chosen ones" as someone mentioned here.
;-)
The Cult Meme is a very powerful memotype, rooted very close to some fundamental memes that are hardwired into our brains. It's quite easy for this to manifest itself unintentionally, especially when the organization is under siege. These people are starting to sound like the high-tech equivalent of Moonies!
I think I'll skip the jokes about their soda machines dispensing Kool-Aid...
Ask your doctor if getting up off your ass is right for you! -- Bill Maher
Ellison is not a technical guy, but he knows what he's doing. Oracle got its start by reading IBM's relational DB papers and rushing a product to market before IBM implemented its own ideas. I'm pretty sure that Ellison has been running the show since day one.
In some ways, Oracle might be even more evil than MS. In the beginning, Oracle would do things like ship purposely garbled tapes to customers, so Oracle could have a few extra days to fix bugs. I don't think MS has done that _yet_ (MS usually doesn't fix bugs without making the customer pay additional moolah), but we'll see what happens when W2K ships ;-)
-jon
Remember Amalek.
... Have actually gotten 'real' tech support from the (evil) micro$oft?
(First post with a name behind it... Wasn't expecting that tho!)
Lab test show that use of micro$oft causes deadly cancer in lab animals.
The descriptions in the article are quite apt. My view is that the press has finally crossed the line from where the money from microsoft ads is outweighed by the increased circulation from showing the downfall of the mighty. Like the press has always been, they will not leave this alone until they get their bleeding carcass.
Bill & MS had it coming. The kind of arrogance MS displayed at the trial and especially in their post court PR sessions was wearing thin on even the most pro-MS journalists.
This is one place where the freedom of the press is working in favour of the OSS movement. Go press!. Trumpet the arrogance and greed he's displayed over the years and pronounce it something we need to rid society of.
10 years from now, there will be books on "The Fall of the Microsoft Empire". I wonder if they'll blame it on lead pipes too?
-- Perl Hack, Web Hack, SQL Hack, Guitar Hack
I think the tag for this article should read
"things are not going so hot for..."
I compare MS's "we are winning" bullshit with the bit at the end of the novel: The announcement comes through that "our forces on the Malabar front have just won a glorious victory", and you suddenly realize that, based on what else we've seen coming out of MiniTrue, the chances are extremely high that Oceania just got clobbered. And then you realize that there may not even be a Malabar front in the first place, and the world just implodes around you and you want to be sick.
So I see that quote and I'm actually a bit pleased to see that other folks are noticing what I'm seeing: that Microsoft's execs are living in a whole nother world, one where NT is scalable and 2 plus 2 does equal 5 if calc.exe says it does, one where Microsoft is good for innovation and DNS even stands for "Digital_Nervous_System".
And the more people that see MS' disconnect with the rest of reality, the more people will be equipped to properly understand their propaganda. No, that quote doesn't scare me at all.
Kai MacTane: Web developer for hire in San Francisco
I've also heard an interesting rumor the other way - that the reason the DOJ is after M$ so doggedly is not because of monopolistic practices, but because Gates won't incorporate the US Gov's encryption scheme into their software. From what I've heard, M$ is one of the only major companies refusing.
This is hearsay - I have no facts to point to. I'm also just throwing it in for conversation's sake, BTW. I love watching M$ squirm.
For the most recent entries in the series, go to http://cgi.pathfinder.com/fortune/1999/03/29/mic.h tml
I didn't see if there was anything on the press conference, but there's a lot of links to previous installments. The "Witnesses in Wonderland" segment is very good reading.
I for one ceternally have not and do not associate with microsoft in any way shape or form. If they cannot support their DOS product line or make improvements for their low end users then it really dosn't matter to me. I use Linux. Mr. Gates can take a long walk off a short pier for all I care.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin