...forward looking but also incredibly obvious. Decreasing power of suppliers is busines 101. Pepsi/Coke at one point owned their own steel manufacturing units but didn't use them just to get better prices. Microsoft built an entire web-based Office suite called NetDocs just in case web-only apps took off. Etc, etc.
I have several law firms as clients, and all use WordPerfect. And so do many of the firms they deal with.
Anecdotal. WLRP, CS&M, Sullivan & Cromwell, Kirkland Ellis, etc, etc all use Word. I don't know that there is any public market share tracking available, but I do know that Office was satisfied that they had KO'd WP in the legal sector. However, you're probably right that there are many small shops out there clinging to legacy WP solutions.
Almost all legal industry specific apps are compatible with both Word and Wordperfect, for example, so there must still be a market out there.
Some are, many aren't. DealProof only supports WP up to version 10. Hotdocs has a bunch of Word-only features. Amicus Assembly has native support only for Word. Westlaw Manager only integrates with Word natively. WestKM doesn't support the latest WP version. Et cetera.
As for quality -- I've never met a WordPerfect user who was happy to switch, even in hindsight. I'm sure there are some out there, but it's certainly not clear-cut that the legal industry prefers Word.
Well neither of us can prove this. I'm sure there are many happy WP superusers who have no desire to switch. But I also know that the Word guys worked their asses off to make Word a great tool for legal professionals.
This isn't true, or at least is extremely dated. Years ago, Office began targeting the law segment hardcore, bringing in many, many lawyers/paralegals for feedback, usability tests, etc. WordPerfect's dominance in this sector -- both in terms of usage and product quality -- is completely gone, and has been for almost 10 years.
(And the guy who "runs" Office is Steven Sinofsky...unless you're referring to Jeff Raikes.)
almost certainly vastly more than the number who hack on MS's kernel.
Well, it is perhaps possible that more people are looking at the Linux kernel than the Windows kernel, but I doubt it is even close in terms of total testing hours.
A few points: * The Windows group is large, and they are full-time (full-time at MS = 60-100 hrs/wk) i.e. these are not people putting in a few minutes here and there. * Microsoft has created massive testing centers with lots of machines pounding on Windows builds 24x7. * Many people outside Microsoft now have access to the source e.g. universities, governments, partners, etc.
But...who knows! None of us has hard stats on this.
I disagree. Microsoft attracts and retains many of the best recent CS grads as well as experienced hires. The notion that there are not mature software development processes in place at a $288 billion software company whose core competency is execution is a little silly.
Re:Not Representative of MSFT
on
Microsoft in 2008
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I know what you mean...I can remember a particular occasion where two very smart/stubborn developers had each created largely overlapping technologies and were both intent on proselytizing for their version. In those situations, it's really the job of a dev manager to step in and make a call. My sense is that this sort of conflict happens pretty rarely with the more mature products.
In any case, your graduate student sounds like precisely the sort of bright, pragmatic person that is typical at MS...not a part of the supposed "culture of mediocrity" dreamed up by some contractor.
Not Representative of MSFT
on
Microsoft in 2008
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
There are apparently many current/former Microsofties fuming at the parent post, but I guess everyone wants to post anonymously or not at all. I'm gone and have nothing to lose, so here goes.
The parent post is a superficial and completely unrepresentative perspective of Microsoft. The author seemed to be pandering to Slashdot preconceptions more than anything. In reality, Microsoft is an amazing company full of ridiculously intelligent CS folks i.e. top students from top CS programs. Whereas at many companies I've been exposed to, there are a couple smart people here and there and everyone else is just sleepwalking, Microsoft is almost entirely composed of smartest-guy-in-the-room types.
Some notes:
* This guy is a contractor. Contractors are generally not very well-respected at Microsoft. The quality people are full-time almost without exception. * Almost no one at Microsoft works in a cubicle. Full-time employees have real offices with real doors that close so that you can concentrate. * There is no "acceptance of mediocrity" at Microsoft. In fact, it is entirely the opposite. There is a culture of self-criticism and self-castigation throughout the company, especially in divisions like Office. * The only times I observed the internal network to be "slow" was when the company was dogfooding an early release. If the network were really as slow as the author describes, people would not be able to get their work done. * What internal tools are you referring to? RAID (the bug-tracking system) is pretty great overall and all of the business process management stuff was the best I've seen at any company.
No, your elaborate theory of bandwidth distribution leading to lower perceived switching costs among consumers is not anything close to an economic principle. It's a theory, and one you haven't supported.
The rest of your response is yet another reverse-engineered theory designed to support your preconceived belief that Netscape could not have possibly lost on the merits.
My explanation is a little shorter: Users picked the "better" product; when IE became better than Netscape, users picked it. I think that fits the data a little better.
First of all, everything you just said is speculation. That doesn't mean you're wrong, but we should realize that these are theories.
That said, one question: IE was included with Windows 95. An improved version (IE2) was included in Windows 95 SP1. If your theory is correct, why did Netscape have 70+% browser share for the next 4 years?
Somehow users were "forced" to use IE back when Netscape was alive and well, but they have magically become more free-willed in the age of Firefox? Or perhaps users were "too stupid" to pick anything other than IE back in ~1999, but they have since become much smarter?
Let's be serious. You (and many others) will pick and choose facts to support your foregone conclusion that Microsoft is evil. The truth is probably much more complex and a lot less on your side.
I believe Microsoft won the so-called "browser wars" not because clueless users were stuck with IE, but because IE was the better product. IE had been bundled with the OS since Windows 95. It did not begin to make market progress until IE 4, which won nearly every head-to-head review against Netscape Communicator. Maybe the best product does win after all...perhaps good news for fans of Firefox.
I don't think it's as easy as you say. What does it mean to "do well"? Increase in stock price? Revenues? When Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap became CEO of Sunbeam, he laid off 3000 workers, closed factories, stopped charity giving etc; the stock price rose over 300%. I suppose he would have been considered a "great" manager that year.
Two years later he was ignominously fired after essentially destroying the company with his excessive cuts.
People write whole books attempting to rigorously analyze "great" management. A slapped-together Business Week article designed to move issues is hard to take seriously.
looks to me like an arbitrarily-assembled list of newsmakers and "hot" personalities designed to sell issues. it seems nearly impossible to have much real insight on a manager without working in their organization.
My longtime (and massively spammed) email address was inactive for about six months last year. I reactivated it recently, and the spam poured in just as before (~40 messages/day). I think the people selling/distributing email lists rarely, if ever, purge them for inactives.
Labeling something "beta" almost indefinitely should not be a get-out-of-jail-free card. It seems to me that once a product is in fairly widespread use -- once a product has a marketing plan behind it -- saying "no fair, it's a beta!" is a little disingenuous.
there's only one reason slashdot posts stories like that: to give people an excuse to take cheap potshots at gates and microsoft. bonus points to samzenpus for priming the pump with the bright blue paint comment.
seriously, isn't it time that everyone moved beyond the one-dimensional caricature of gates?
if these statistics are to be believed, doesn't that somewhat undermine the argument that consumers are too stupid to make software choices and microsoft should be forbidden from even exposing their feeble minds to IE?
Steve,
Interesting question, but I don't see how it's relevant. The position he's applying for will have no influence over "quality" or "quantity" as you put it. You'd do better emailing Brian Valentine, the guy who runs the Windows division. For what's it's worth, he's tried to recommit the division to quality with Win2k & WinXP, both of which have pretty good reputations so far.
QED, nothing.:-) Your claim clashes with reality pretty hard. Movie companies would never put themselves in a position where MS controlled the format and therefore their business. Further, these IP companies are already rolling in it, so MS cash isn't a huge incentive to act against their best interests.
Surprising, capitalism usually works pretty well in the end, balancing power & so forth. Interesting stuff, though.
Wazoo, that's an interesting idea, but it ignores the competitive position Microsoft is in with respect to AOL/TimeWarner.
While MS does have a considerable amount of cash (not a crime), they would never ever ever buy a movie production house. Why? Well as you know this would put them in direct competition with other big IP companies, which they are *desparately* trying to court. The "we won't compete with you" argument has so far been very successful, landing them deals with Disney, NBC, etc. Steve Ballmer even stated recently that, if they had it to do over again, they wouldn't have done the MSNBC deal, for exactly the reason I stated.
For the moment, I'll ignore your misuse of the monopoly leverage claim.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
...forward looking but also incredibly obvious. Decreasing power of suppliers is busines 101. Pepsi/Coke at one point owned their own steel manufacturing units but didn't use them just to get better prices. Microsoft built an entire web-based Office suite called NetDocs just in case web-only apps took off. Etc, etc.
As I'm sure you know, what Bill said is true with the prevailing (and I think common-sense) definitions of "Internet Explorer", "uninstalling", etc.
BUT if you redefine "uninstalling" to mean "get rid of the icon and block external access to its APIs" then, yeah, you can "uninstall" it.
In any case, Bill wasn't lying.
What evidence do you have that Gmail has "cleaned deck" vs Hotmail? (Besides your own personal preferences...)
Hotmail is *enormous* and in many parts of the world is synonymous with the word "email."
I have several law firms as clients, and all use WordPerfect. And so do many of the firms they deal with.
Anecdotal. WLRP, CS&M, Sullivan & Cromwell, Kirkland Ellis, etc, etc all use Word. I don't know that there is any public market share tracking available, but I do know that Office was satisfied that they had KO'd WP in the legal sector. However, you're probably right that there are many small shops out there clinging to legacy WP solutions.
Almost all legal industry specific apps are compatible with both Word and Wordperfect, for example, so there must still be a market out there.
Some are, many aren't. DealProof only supports WP up to version 10. Hotdocs has a bunch of Word-only features. Amicus Assembly has native support only for Word. Westlaw Manager only integrates with Word natively. WestKM doesn't support the latest WP version. Et cetera.
As for quality -- I've never met a WordPerfect user who was happy to switch, even in hindsight. I'm sure there are some out there, but it's certainly not clear-cut that the legal industry prefers Word.
Well neither of us can prove this. I'm sure there are many happy WP superusers who have no desire to switch. But I also know that the Word guys worked their asses off to make Word a great tool for legal professionals.
This isn't true, or at least is extremely dated. Years ago, Office began targeting the law segment hardcore, bringing in many, many lawyers/paralegals for feedback, usability tests, etc. WordPerfect's dominance in this sector -- both in terms of usage and product quality -- is completely gone, and has been for almost 10 years.
(And the guy who "runs" Office is Steven Sinofsky...unless you're referring to Jeff Raikes.)
Quoting Thomas Penfield Jackson! Ha! You might as well quote Larry Ellison.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist in the same sense that Nelson Mandela is a convicted terrorist.
Firefox is not faster than Internet Explorer
Or, put differently, Internet Explorer is faster than Firefox...but I guess we aren't allowed to say that on here.
almost certainly vastly more than the number who hack on MS's kernel.
Well, it is perhaps possible that more people are looking at the Linux kernel than the Windows kernel, but I doubt it is even close in terms of total testing hours.
A few points:
* The Windows group is large, and they are full-time (full-time at MS = 60-100 hrs/wk) i.e. these are not people putting in a few minutes here and there.
* Microsoft has created massive testing centers with lots of machines pounding on Windows builds 24x7.
* Many people outside Microsoft now have access to the source e.g. universities, governments, partners, etc.
But...who knows! None of us has hard stats on this.
I disagree. Microsoft attracts and retains many of the best recent CS grads as well as experienced hires. The notion that there are not mature software development processes in place at a $288 billion software company whose core competency is execution is a little silly.
I know what you mean...I can remember a particular occasion where two very smart/stubborn developers had each created largely overlapping technologies and were both intent on proselytizing for their version. In those situations, it's really the job of a dev manager to step in and make a call. My sense is that this sort of conflict happens pretty rarely with the more mature products.
In any case, your graduate student sounds like precisely the sort of bright, pragmatic person that is typical at MS...not a part of the supposed "culture of mediocrity" dreamed up by some contractor.
There are apparently many current/former Microsofties fuming at the parent post, but I guess everyone wants to post anonymously or not at all. I'm gone and have nothing to lose, so here goes.
The parent post is a superficial and completely unrepresentative perspective of Microsoft. The author seemed to be pandering to Slashdot preconceptions more than anything. In reality, Microsoft is an amazing company full of ridiculously intelligent CS folks i.e. top students from top CS programs. Whereas at many companies I've been exposed to, there are a couple smart people here and there and everyone else is just sleepwalking, Microsoft is almost entirely composed of smartest-guy-in-the-room types.
Some notes:
* This guy is a contractor. Contractors are generally not very well-respected at Microsoft. The quality people are full-time almost without exception.
* Almost no one at Microsoft works in a cubicle. Full-time employees have real offices with real doors that close so that you can concentrate.
* There is no "acceptance of mediocrity" at Microsoft. In fact, it is entirely the opposite. There is a culture of self-criticism and self-castigation throughout the company, especially in divisions like Office.
* The only times I observed the internal network to be "slow" was when the company was dogfooding an early release. If the network were really as slow as the author describes, people would not be able to get their work done.
* What internal tools are you referring to? RAID (the bug-tracking system) is pretty great overall and all of the business process management stuff was the best I've seen at any company.
I'll leave it at that.
"It is a well established economic principle."
No, your elaborate theory of bandwidth distribution leading to lower perceived switching costs among consumers is not anything close to an economic principle. It's a theory, and one you haven't supported.
The rest of your response is yet another reverse-engineered theory designed to support your preconceived belief that Netscape could not have possibly lost on the merits.
My explanation is a little shorter: Users picked the "better" product; when IE became better than Netscape, users picked it. I think that fits the data a little better.
Done with this thread, take care.
First of all, everything you just said is speculation. That doesn't mean you're wrong, but we should realize that these are theories.
That said, one question: IE was included with Windows 95. An improved version (IE2) was included in Windows 95 SP1. If your theory is correct, why did Netscape have 70+% browser share for the next 4 years?
IE was included with Windows 95. If your theory is correct, why did IE's market share stay so low for the next 4 years?
How about some intellectual consistency.
Somehow users were "forced" to use IE back when Netscape was alive and well, but they have magically become more free-willed in the age of Firefox? Or perhaps users were "too stupid" to pick anything other than IE back in ~1999, but they have since become much smarter?
Let's be serious. You (and many others) will pick and choose facts to support your foregone conclusion that Microsoft is evil. The truth is probably much more complex and a lot less on your side.
I believe Microsoft won the so-called "browser wars" not because clueless users were stuck with IE, but because IE was the better product. IE had been bundled with the OS since Windows 95. It did not begin to make market progress until IE 4, which won nearly every head-to-head review against Netscape Communicator. Maybe the best product does win after all...perhaps good news for fans of Firefox.
I don't think it's as easy as you say. What does it mean to "do well"? Increase in stock price? Revenues? When Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap became CEO of Sunbeam, he laid off 3000 workers, closed factories, stopped charity giving etc; the stock price rose over 300%. I suppose he would have been considered a "great" manager that year.
Two years later he was ignominously fired after essentially destroying the company with his excessive cuts.
People write whole books attempting to rigorously analyze "great" management. A slapped-together Business Week article designed to move issues is hard to take seriously.
looks to me like an arbitrarily-assembled list of newsmakers and "hot" personalities designed to sell issues. it seems nearly impossible to have much real insight on a manager without working in their organization.
My longtime (and massively spammed) email address was inactive for about six months last year. I reactivated it recently, and the spam poured in just as before (~40 messages/day). I think the people selling/distributing email lists rarely, if ever, purge them for inactives.
Labeling something "beta" almost indefinitely should not be a get-out-of-jail-free card. It seems to me that once a product is in fairly widespread use -- once a product has a marketing plan behind it -- saying "no fair, it's a beta!" is a little disingenuous.
there's only one reason slashdot posts stories like that: to give people an excuse to take cheap potshots at gates and microsoft. bonus points to samzenpus for priming the pump with the bright blue paint comment.
seriously, isn't it time that everyone moved beyond the one-dimensional caricature of gates?
if these statistics are to be believed, doesn't that somewhat undermine the argument that consumers are too stupid to make software choices and microsoft should be forbidden from even exposing their feeble minds to IE?
Steve,
Interesting question, but I don't see how it's relevant. The position he's applying for will have no influence over "quality" or "quantity" as you put it. You'd do better emailing Brian Valentine, the guy who runs the Windows division. For what's it's worth, he's tried to recommit the division to quality with Win2k & WinXP, both of which have pretty good reputations so far.
All patents are inherently govt. granted monopolies. Check out some of Lessig's stuff on this sometime.
QED, nothing. :-) Your claim clashes with reality pretty hard. Movie companies would never put themselves in a position where MS controlled the format and therefore their business. Further, these IP companies are already rolling in it, so MS cash isn't a huge incentive to act against their best interests.
Surprising, capitalism usually works pretty well in the end, balancing power & so forth. Interesting stuff, though.
Wazoo, that's an interesting idea, but it ignores the competitive position Microsoft is in with respect to AOL/TimeWarner.
:-)
While MS does have a considerable amount of cash (not a crime), they would never ever ever buy a movie production house. Why? Well as you know this would put them in direct competition with other big IP companies, which they are *desparately* trying to court. The "we won't compete with you" argument has so far been very successful, landing them deals with Disney, NBC, etc. Steve Ballmer even stated recently that, if they had it to do over again, they wouldn't have done the MSNBC deal, for exactly the reason I stated.
For the moment, I'll ignore your misuse of the monopoly leverage claim.