A concession speech from Kerry merely indicates that he isn't as bad at mathematics as Bush is at grammar. Kerry *lost* Ohio. Yes, there are still provisional ballots uncounted, but the numbers still just don't add up. Even if 90+% of the provisional ballots are found to be valid (not likely under the new rules) Kerry would still need to get nearly 90% of the provisional votes to go his way, and that's just not going to happen.
Heck, even DC didn't vote that Democrat.
Don't worry, they are going to count the votes, but those votes aren't going to make Bush go away. Pretending that Kerry still has a shot at being President is nothing more than a poor grasp of algebra.
I am not sure that a Democrat would win "every time" if we went with a pure popular vote, but there is no question that the current system forces the candidates towards moderate positions that appeal to a wide range of voters.
If the Presidential election were a popular vote the it would be far too easy to simply play regional political games. A President could simply make promises to urban voters (tax credits for city dwellers) and get enough of the vote. Voters in smaller states or rural areas would effectively become disenfranchised.
The present system actually works, and it makes for some great drama on election night as well!
Yes, I understand the difference. I also just know that historically the low end of the spectrum has *always* pushed the the expensive high end stuff towards the margins until there isn't enough market to sustain it. That's what happened to Cray, that's what happened to the LISP machines, that's what happened to the minicomputers, and it is what is happening to VMS, mainframes, and now commercial UNIX.
As Linux (and even Windows) becomes "good enough" to do more high end jobs it is stealing market share from the more expensive alternatives. This encourages more investment in Linux (and the commodity hardware it is running on) which in turn fuels more market share grabs.
Now, you can discount Microsoft's hold on the server market if you will, but the fact of the matter is that Microsoft servers are everywhere and every year they get more and more capable. Plenty of "old hand" admins have never really used anything but Windows, and technologies like Active Directory and Exchange have been pushed right into the heart of the enterprise. If it wasn't for Free Software Windows would clean up and UNIX would be dead.
Yes, lots of people think that Microsoft is likely to return to being a growth stock. Of course, lots of people thought that Lucent was a good buy at $50 too...
That's the problem with companies with a high P/E ratio. When investors do get wary the bottom drops out.
Microsoft went from owning none of the server market to being the biggest server player, and it continues to grow faster than the market. That's a very interesting definition of "completely failed."
This is how it works. The solution that is "good enough" for low end work, and has the best price is the system that ends up winning in the long run. The stuff that the cheap bastards are running today will rule the world tomorrow. That's why Microsoft has done so well over the years, and it is also why Linux has shown such legs.
Lets look at M$. Their stock price has tanked since 2000 (allowing for their 2:1 split in 2003), and really been static since 2001. (see etrade. Their profit is very good, they are viable, but their dividends are anaemic. Their stock price is holding because people (IMHO) expect their share price to increase - that is they are purchased for capital growth.
You are missing the point. The "magic force" that makes stock prices go up is the promise of future growth. Profits are well and good, but Microsoft made a profit of $0.75 per share last year. Even if Microsoft distributed all of their profits as a dividend MSFT would still have yielded less than 3%, and that's without dividend taxes, and Microsoft says next year is going to be worse. My point is that without a *lot* more profit Microsoft isn't going to tempt any sane investor at their current price point. The days when people rooted for stocks like they root for college football teams are over. EPS is king.
So the question becomes where exactly is Microsoft going to get the profit increases that it needs to justify its current price point? You believe that Microsoft is going to achieve greater profitability by putting their thumb down on software piracy. I've lived in the third world, and I personally think that would backfire badly. In countries where $100 is a good monthly salary the price of Windows is a significant cost. Linux may be more harder to use that Windows, but it isn't *that* much harder. If Linux catches on in the third world then Microsoft is in big trouble. I think that the best Microsoft can do on this particular front is use tricks like the Windows Starter Edition knowing that people are still going to wipe the Starter Edition and replace it with the real thing. At least that is better than having computers pre-loaded with Linux.
Besides, I don't think that Microsoft's paying customers are going to appreciate being treated like thieves.
Microsoft is already cleaning up. The question is whether or not they are going to grow significantly over the next few years. I don't see how that is likely to happen. I think that MSFT is overpriced and a risky investment. I also think that when MSFT does go down significantly it will open a lot of doors for Linux that are currently closed.
In the old days the mantra was "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." In more modern times that has switched to "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft."
Let's face it, in many business environments Microsoft is the de-facto choice for basically any software. You point to Novell as an example of an "established" system, but Novell got absolutely slaughtered by Windows NT 4.0. Windows (and now Linux) have threatened Novell so much that they have essentially thrown Netware to the wolves and remade themselves as a Linux company. Likewise UNIX was losing marketshare to Windows long before Linux made a big splash.
Since the release of NT 4.0 Windows has had a lot of momentum in most businesses. Linux, on the other hand, has been perceived as a "hackers OS" built by tinkerers, students, and hippies. The business perception of Linux has come a long way over the years, but you can't really pretend that there aren't lots of IT folks that are still openly hostile to Free Software.
Yes, Microsoft and the analysts that cover Microsoft have done an excellent job of spinning the fact that Microsoft's profit growth was the smallest it has been since the company went public. Yes, it is true that Microsoft has a fat pile of cash (although about $30 billion of that cash is going to be distributed via dividends over the next several years). Microsoft is an excellent company, in every senses of the term, but all of the numbers that you talked about have been priced in to MSFT (and then some).
Microsoft simply isn't a company that is worth it's current Price/Earnings ratio of well over 30. Not if 2004 is supposed to be a good year with forecasts down for 2005. No matter how you slice it to deserve its current price Microsoft has to produce a lot more growth than its current paltry amount. When you are as big as Microsoft growing enough to deserve a P/E ratio of 30 is ridiculously hard. Like the article said, Microsoft has gone ex-growth.
And that's going to work in Linux's favor in the broader marketplace.
Good point. Microsoft has to do what it takes to keep their stock price up. Microsoft execs and employees have too much invested to see MSFT drop too precipitously. Microsoft's cash hoard is barely a drop in the bucket compared to the billions in market cap that MSFT has.
This is largely due to MS's product strategy -- if they think of a new idea, it appears "for free" in the next version of Windows or Office rather than a seperate revenue product. Rather than a weakness, this seems more like a strength -- that MS can and does use its Office/OS monopolies to defeat competitors.
You have a funny idea of "for free." Last I checked, Microsoft charged handsomely for these new versions of their software. Heck, that's one of Microsoft's biggest problems. They have over half of their customers on previous versions of their software. In many ways Office 97 is a much bigger Microsoft competitor than anything in the Free Software world. Not only does Microsoft have to worry about Free Software, but it also has to compete with previous versions of their software that are "good enough" for their low end users.
Here's what the article had to say about this phenonmenon;
In a nutshell, Christensen and his co-authors argue that when modular commodity products such as the Linux kernel are "good enough" for the jobs of price-sensitive market tiers, those commodity products are positioned to take market share from integrated solutions that "overshoot" the performance demands of customers in any given market tier, particularly the more price-sensitive lower market tiers.
The important thing to remember is that Microsoft has made a living out of targeting low-rent customers and then growing their solutions into general solutions. I remember when PCs were laughable toys, when nearly every business in America used Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect, and when no one thought that businesses would replace perfectly good Netware and UNIX boxes with Windows NT Servers.
The solution that is "good enough" today for a small business will (if it survives) become good enough tomorrow to run a big business. Linux, and the rest of the well-known Free Software projects like Apache or Samba are perfect examples of how this works.
In otherwords, Linux can be as cheap as can be, but if it doesn't "integrate" well into Microsoft infrastructure, it will be stuck on the margins forever.
When all that is keeping people from migrating to your competitor are the costs of switching then you are as good as dead. Free Software gets better and better all of the time, and Microsoft can't ever rest on its laurels. Every few years Microsoft has to get you to rip out all of their software and replace it with new versions, and that gets harder and harder to do with every iteration. Meanwhile Linux waits in the wings picking up stragglers.
And like I said in my original post, Microsoft can't afford to simply do as well as they are doing now. If Microsoft doesn't *grow* the Wall Street is going to crucify it.
I look at it like this, M$ can be at 0% (zero) profit growth for the rest of eternity, since they are raking in about $5 to $8 billion in profits every quarter, earning additional profit doesn't really matter to M$ (except for maniacal egomanic reasons).
Microsoft earned $0.75 per share in its 2004 fiscal year. That's hardly impressive for a stock that sells for nearly $28 a share. If Microsoft is done growing then its investors are going to be very unhappy. That's a return of just under 3% a year. A year with no revenue growth would be even worse.
Not to mention the fact that there is little guarantee that Microsoft will continue to be able to rake in the kind of money that they are currently pulling in. Unearned revenue continues to go down, and Linux continues to gain marketshare. Eventually MSFT investors are going to get tired of waiting for the growth to return and MSFT is going to drop like a rock. When that happens Microsoft is going to *look* vulnerable. Right now the folks selling for Red Hat and Novell have to convince their clients that they aren't crazy when they forgo the safe path of purchasing Windows. Folks that roll out Linux solutions are still taking a fairly big risk. They are betting on a David facing up against the biggest Goliath in the history of industry, and the reason that the story of David and Goliath made it into the Bible was because in real life David's get squashed. Everyone likes an underdog, but only when they win.
A serious drop in MSFT would be hitting the behemoth right smack between the eyes, and such a drop is overdue.
Microsoft will adapt, but no matter what they do their glory days are done. Heck, Microsoft routinely posts profit margins of over 80% on its MS Office and Windows businesses, and as the market moves more and more towards commodity software those profit margins are going to evaporate.
Microsoft's real problem is its own success. Microsoft is crawling towards single digit growth, MSFT has a Price/Earnings ratio over over 30, and everywhere you look Linux is taking the profit margins out of potential Microsoft markets. Eventually the analysts aren't going to be able to spin Microsoft's lack of growth into a scenario that justifies MSFT's stock price and things at Microsoft are going to get truly ugly. Bill Gates and his cronies have structured Microsoft around the idea that the stock price always heads up. They have made stocks a huge part of their incentive plan, and everyone at Microsoft has a huge percentage of their personal wealth wrapped up in MSFT. When the stock price corrects itself then Microsoft is going to look vulnerable, and Linux will be waiting in the wings looking for wins. Every time Microsoft wants to push another upgrade on the public Free Software will be there to pick up stragglers.
In the past Microsoft has been able to adapt because they had ridiculously lucrative businesses to back up their crazy plans. Microsoft has lost billions on the XBox (they lost over a billion last year alone). Instead of throwing in the towel Microsoft is instead rushing their next gen hardware so that they can throw more money down a hole. In a world where Microsoft has to lower prices on Windows and MS Office to compete with Free Software it is going to be much harder to convince investors that the billions wasted on the "next big thing" is truly a good idea. Investors are going to demand growth, and Microsoft simply hasn't delivered in recent years, and things are getting steadily worse.
Don't get me wrong, Microsoft isn't going to disappear in a puff of smoke, but for a high flyer like Microsoft being relegated to one solution of many turning a 10% profit margin is a long step down.
Heck, my boss just asked me to set up a wiki, he even suggested I take a look at mediawiki first (which was a bummer, because there isn't a Debian package).
30 minutes later I was editting the main page. Now all I need is an Emacs front end and I am in love.
Microsoft is dominant in the software industry because they control the client. No matter what kind of software you write chances are excellent that it is going to have to deal with Windows clients, and that gives Microsoft a tremendous amount of leverage.
That's why the web scares Microsoft so much. If all you really need from your operating system is a web browser then it becomes easy to replace those expensive Windows clients with something else. Microsoft pushed so hard to win the browser wars because they were very afraid that the web browser was going to make their client side APIs irrelevant.
That's why Microsoft next generation web services infrastructure is based not on the web browser, but on a set of Microsoft-only "rich client" APIs that just happen to use the HTTP as a transport protocol. Microsoft wants the web to go away so that they can replace it with technology that only runs on Windows.
Mozilla is the industry's best bet to cut Microsoft off at the pass. Not only is Mozilla an excellent web browser, but it is also a pretty sharp platform for building rich client applications. More importantly Mozilla levels the playing field. As long as Mozilla is a viable alternative then Microsoft has to pretend to care about open standards.
Well, that assumes old granmama isn't too senile to check her ballot, but that's neither here not there.
If Grandma is too senile to be able to read a straightforward ballot (ie President: George Bush), then there is little chance that any voting system is likely to help. We don't currently have systems that are clairvoyant.
There is a (somewhat complicated) human-readable system that allows you to check that your individual ballot was cast and not lost after the election. It also prevents anyone from being able to link your vote to you, and detects fraud at all levels of the vote-counting machine.
Yikes! I don't want any system where people are allowed to take a "receipt" home with them. That opens the system up for all sorts of abuse. It would become possible to sell your vote, and it would be possible to "coerce" people to vote a certain way and then verify that they actually did as they were told.
Basically what is required is an fancy ballot-making machine. You vote. The machine prints out a ballot with your votes recorded on it (human readable). If the ballot looks good then you put it in the little metal box. If it doesn't look good then it is destroyed and the person votes again. At the end of the election the little metal box holds the official record of the vote. If someone doubts the computer generated tally then all you have to do is crack open the ballot box, and manually count the votes.
I don't want a system that matches people with votes cast, and I certainly don't want a system where it is possible for the voter to verify his or her vote after the election.
Yeah, that's precisely what we need. Such a system would allow for quick tabulation of votes, while still making it difficult to tamper with election results electronically. Plus you could put a much fancier front end on the entire system than you can the butterfly ballots I have used the last few years.
I would personally rather continue with the butterfly ballots if the alternative was a paperless system.
The point is that these machines would allow for faster tabulation of the votes (no running the ballots through a scanner) and would allow you to put a fancier front end on the optical scan ballot (apparently some voters are easily confused). The important thing is that these machines wouldn't give up the one thing that paper ballots do better than any electronic system, a human verifiable paper trail.
All things considered I would just as soon stick with the optical scan ballots. I don't find them confusing. However, there are apparently lots of folks that are really pushing for polling machine upgrades, especially after the last presidential election. The problem with any solution without a paper trail is that you can't prove that the election wasn't fixed. Can you imagine the fallout from the last Florida presidential elections if the ballots would have been destroyed after the intial count? No matter which candidate you favored you would be forced to wonder if the fix was in.
It's seems funny to me that people demand a paper receipt when they put $20 worth of gas in their car, but are happy to "trust the machine" when it comes to something as critical as electing public officials. To me that seems odd. As long as I have a paper ballot that counts as my official vote I don't care what kind of software is used to create the ballot. In most cases the paper ballots wouldn't actually get used. It's fairly rare that a count gets contested.
The problem with that is if I can't verify the printed output how do I know that the machine actually voted how it said it was going to. It would be a trivial thing to change these computers so that every third vote for "foo" became a vote for "bar" and then change the computers back after the election. If there isn't a voter-verifiable paper trail then fixing elections becomes as easy as learning a little visual basic and applying to be a polling machine "technician." You don't actually think that the average citizens that the counties hire to oversee elections are going to question the tech setting up the polling machines, do you? Without a paper ballot that counts as your official vote it is simply too easy to put one result on the screen and another in the database. Once you've left the building how is anyone supposed to verify that your vote was counted correctly if the only trail is digital?
This is how the thing should work. You walk into the polling location, and you enter the polling booth. You vote. At the end of your voting session it shows you the "this is how you voted screen" that you specified in your post. You choose yes and your vote gets printed out on a paper, human verifiable ballot. At the bottom of the ballot there is a barcode for maching reading. You then verify that your ballot matches what you saw on the screen. Since your paper ballot is your official vote you pay careful attention to what it says. The polling machine is simply a front end for the creation of the ballot. What was on the computer screen doesn't count. What counts is what is on the piece of paper.
If you don't like what's on the piece of paper you go to the polling booth attendant and you ask for another ballot. Your bad ballot gets scanned and your previous vote becomes invalid. The ballot is then shredded, and you are given a new ballot. You vote again, and hopefully this time the ballot looks good.
When you are done and the ballot looks like you want it to look it is deposited in the locked metal box, and you go on your way.
When it comes time to count the votes the computers do all the work. They know which votes are valid and which votes are invalid and they simply tally the results. The beauty of this system is that you don't have to trust the machines. If fraud of any sort is suspected you simply open up the ballot boxes and you manually count the votes. In a system without human verifiable ballots there is no backup to easily modifiable electronic record. If you can subvert the polling machines so that they print one thing on the computer screen and put something else in the database then you can steal elections. With human verifiable paper ballots that sort of trickery is impossible.
Not to mention the fact that all gamblers think that they are "better than average," and are "winning players."
From the way that poker players talk poker games must have an element of spontaneous value creation because I have never even heard of a poker player that classified him or herself as a "loser." Unless money is being created out of the void someone must walk home with empty pockets.
I don't care if the code is public or not as long as the polling machine prints out a human verifiable ballot that counts as my official vote in case of suspected fraud. Heck, the actual software that does the polling can be top secret obfusticated C generated by an Intercal front end for all I care. As long as I can look down at my ballot when I am done voting and verify that the machine tallied my votes correctly I am perfectly happy.
Public availability of the source code doesn't guarantee that the polling machine that I am using is working correctly, or that it hasn't been tampered with. Hard-copy ballots that can be hand verified in case of suspected fraud guarantee that folks wishing to fix an election at least have to work at it.
The only safe paper trail is one that can be checked by the individual voters. If you are going to tamper with the electronic record so that every third vote for foo goes to bar then it is a trivial matter to make sure that the paper that you spit out at the end of the day matches the fiddled vote tallies.
That's why the only sane way to do electronic voting is to use whatever fancy dan front end you want, I couldn't care less, but at the end of the voting session you spit out a human verifiable paper receipt that is the official vote. This vote gets put in the ballot box and if anyone questions the integrity of the vote then you open the ballot boxes and count the votes by hand. In most cases the electronic count of the vote will be the one used. However, in cases where fraud is suspected there is a verifiable paper trail that can be followed.
This gives the voter a chance to read his ballot and make sure that his or her vote was cast correctly, and it makes it much more difficult to "hack" the vote.
About a year ago I thought that perhaps IBM might have actually done something wrong. However, as the courts have dragged the facts out of SCO (kicking and screaming mostly) it has become clear that SCO originally filed the lawsuit in the hopes that it would trigger an IBM buyout, and that IBM called SCO's bluff.
At this point if IBM had actually done something wrong then SCO would be able to point people at some SCO source code in Linux. Not that such an action would truly be likely to get IBM in trouble. After all, SCO can't pretend that they didn't knowingly distribute the Linux kernel for years (including versions with IBM's modifications). After all, SCO is really the Linux company Caldera. In short, Caldera (err.. SCO) never really had a case against IBM, that's why they keep telling different judges completely different stories. All of SCO's really good arguments (MIT professors "deep diving" the Linux code for "millions of lines" of code infringement, etc.) came in the press, and have been subsequently destroyed in the court room. SCO's entire case, at this point, rests on a very very strained interpretation of a contract with IBM that doesn't withstand scrutiny of any sort of a logic test and requires a reinterpretation of what is considered "derivative" copyright, and IBM has gone back and deposed the folks that originally drew up the contract (on both sides of the table) and they all have testified that SCO is full of crap.
The fact that/. readers like IBM better than Microsoft really has nothing to do with it. IBM gets good/. press in this article because they are sticking up for Linux. The kernel hackers didn't steal SCO's source, and IBM is out to prove that. If Microsoft did something similar (in some other alternative reality) then Microsoft would be praised by the Free Software community as well. Instead, however, Microsoft paid SCO millions of dollars for an arguably bogus IP license, and then put SCO's management in touch with the folks at Baystar and RBC that gave SCO the money to finance their bogus lawsuit. I think that it is only natural that/. readers would see that as yet another reason to be wary of Microsoft.
On a side note, it seems to me that religious missions would be the only way to do so, because few people from other groups would be willing to put themselves in serious danger for no earthly rewards.
I wouldn't say that the time I spent in South America on my own mission was "without earthly rewards." I learned Spanish, I got to meet some very interesting people, and when I came home I had made it through one of the trickiest parts of young adulthood without any serious mistakes. By the time I was 21 and back in school I was prepared to seriously buckle down to my studies. Most importantly I got to see first hand what real poverty looks like. It makes it a lot easier to be happy with what you have when you have seen what the average person in Huancayo, Peru has to look forward to.
Interestingly enough, its not just the missions to foreign countries that teach this kind of thing. My little brother is currently on a mission in Texas, and he sees much of the same stuff there. A lot of the people that are interested in talking to LDS missionaries are going through very difficult trials (which is probably why they don't slam the door:). The insights into life that you get by dealing with people in these situations are almost certainly worth the price of admission.
Heck, even if I wasn't religious myself I would probably consider sending my own children on some sort of mission. It's a good experience.
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A concession speech from Kerry merely indicates that he isn't as bad at mathematics as Bush is at grammar. Kerry *lost* Ohio. Yes, there are still provisional ballots uncounted, but the numbers still just don't add up. Even if 90+% of the provisional ballots are found to be valid (not likely under the new rules) Kerry would still need to get nearly 90% of the provisional votes to go his way, and that's just not going to happen.
Heck, even DC didn't vote that Democrat.
Don't worry, they are going to count the votes, but those votes aren't going to make Bush go away. Pretending that Kerry still has a shot at being President is nothing more than a poor grasp of algebra.
Just make sure you take all the rest of the telephone sanitizers with you.
I am not sure that a Democrat would win "every time" if we went with a pure popular vote, but there is no question that the current system forces the candidates towards moderate positions that appeal to a wide range of voters.
If the Presidential election were a popular vote the it would be far too easy to simply play regional political games. A President could simply make promises to urban voters (tax credits for city dwellers) and get enough of the vote. Voters in smaller states or rural areas would effectively become disenfranchised.
The present system actually works, and it makes for some great drama on election night as well!
It would appear that Kerry's mathematical skills are as poor as Bush's grammatical skills.
Yes, I understand the difference. I also just know that historically the low end of the spectrum has *always* pushed the the expensive high end stuff towards the margins until there isn't enough market to sustain it. That's what happened to Cray, that's what happened to the LISP machines, that's what happened to the minicomputers, and it is what is happening to VMS, mainframes, and now commercial UNIX. As Linux (and even Windows) becomes "good enough" to do more high end jobs it is stealing market share from the more expensive alternatives. This encourages more investment in Linux (and the commodity hardware it is running on) which in turn fuels more market share grabs. Now, you can discount Microsoft's hold on the server market if you will, but the fact of the matter is that Microsoft servers are everywhere and every year they get more and more capable. Plenty of "old hand" admins have never really used anything but Windows, and technologies like Active Directory and Exchange have been pushed right into the heart of the enterprise. If it wasn't for Free Software Windows would clean up and UNIX would be dead.
Yes, lots of people think that Microsoft is likely to return to being a growth stock. Of course, lots of people thought that Lucent was a good buy at $50 too...
That's the problem with companies with a high P/E ratio. When investors do get wary the bottom drops out.
Microsoft went from owning none of the server market to being the biggest server player, and it continues to grow faster than the market. That's a very interesting definition of "completely failed."
This is how it works. The solution that is "good enough" for low end work, and has the best price is the system that ends up winning in the long run. The stuff that the cheap bastards are running today will rule the world tomorrow. That's why Microsoft has done so well over the years, and it is also why Linux has shown such legs.
You are missing the point. The "magic force" that makes stock prices go up is the promise of future growth. Profits are well and good, but Microsoft made a profit of $0.75 per share last year. Even if Microsoft distributed all of their profits as a dividend MSFT would still have yielded less than 3%, and that's without dividend taxes, and Microsoft says next year is going to be worse. My point is that without a *lot* more profit Microsoft isn't going to tempt any sane investor at their current price point. The days when people rooted for stocks like they root for college football teams are over. EPS is king.
So the question becomes where exactly is Microsoft going to get the profit increases that it needs to justify its current price point? You believe that Microsoft is going to achieve greater profitability by putting their thumb down on software piracy. I've lived in the third world, and I personally think that would backfire badly. In countries where $100 is a good monthly salary the price of Windows is a significant cost. Linux may be more harder to use that Windows, but it isn't *that* much harder. If Linux catches on in the third world then Microsoft is in big trouble. I think that the best Microsoft can do on this particular front is use tricks like the Windows Starter Edition knowing that people are still going to wipe the Starter Edition and replace it with the real thing. At least that is better than having computers pre-loaded with Linux.
Besides, I don't think that Microsoft's paying customers are going to appreciate being treated like thieves.
Microsoft is already cleaning up. The question is whether or not they are going to grow significantly over the next few years. I don't see how that is likely to happen. I think that MSFT is overpriced and a risky investment. I also think that when MSFT does go down significantly it will open a lot of doors for Linux that are currently closed.
In the old days the mantra was "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." In more modern times that has switched to "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft."
Let's face it, in many business environments Microsoft is the de-facto choice for basically any software. You point to Novell as an example of an "established" system, but Novell got absolutely slaughtered by Windows NT 4.0. Windows (and now Linux) have threatened Novell so much that they have essentially thrown Netware to the wolves and remade themselves as a Linux company. Likewise UNIX was losing marketshare to Windows long before Linux made a big splash.
Since the release of NT 4.0 Windows has had a lot of momentum in most businesses. Linux, on the other hand, has been perceived as a "hackers OS" built by tinkerers, students, and hippies. The business perception of Linux has come a long way over the years, but you can't really pretend that there aren't lots of IT folks that are still openly hostile to Free Software.
Yes, Microsoft and the analysts that cover Microsoft have done an excellent job of spinning the fact that Microsoft's profit growth was the smallest it has been since the company went public. Yes, it is true that Microsoft has a fat pile of cash (although about $30 billion of that cash is going to be distributed via dividends over the next several years). Microsoft is an excellent company, in every senses of the term, but all of the numbers that you talked about have been priced in to MSFT (and then some).
Microsoft simply isn't a company that is worth it's current Price/Earnings ratio of well over 30. Not if 2004 is supposed to be a good year with forecasts down for 2005. No matter how you slice it to deserve its current price Microsoft has to produce a lot more growth than its current paltry amount. When you are as big as Microsoft growing enough to deserve a P/E ratio of 30 is ridiculously hard. Like the article said, Microsoft has gone ex-growth.
And that's going to work in Linux's favor in the broader marketplace.
Good point. Microsoft has to do what it takes to keep their stock price up. Microsoft execs and employees have too much invested to see MSFT drop too precipitously. Microsoft's cash hoard is barely a drop in the bucket compared to the billions in market cap that MSFT has.
You have a funny idea of "for free." Last I checked, Microsoft charged handsomely for these new versions of their software. Heck, that's one of Microsoft's biggest problems. They have over half of their customers on previous versions of their software. In many ways Office 97 is a much bigger Microsoft competitor than anything in the Free Software world. Not only does Microsoft have to worry about Free Software, but it also has to compete with previous versions of their software that are "good enough" for their low end users.
Here's what the article had to say about this phenonmenon;
The important thing to remember is that Microsoft has made a living out of targeting low-rent customers and then growing their solutions into general solutions. I remember when PCs were laughable toys, when nearly every business in America used Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect, and when no one thought that businesses would replace perfectly good Netware and UNIX boxes with Windows NT Servers.
The solution that is "good enough" today for a small business will (if it survives) become good enough tomorrow to run a big business. Linux, and the rest of the well-known Free Software projects like Apache or Samba are perfect examples of how this works.
When all that is keeping people from migrating to your competitor are the costs of switching then you are as good as dead. Free Software gets better and better all of the time, and Microsoft can't ever rest on its laurels. Every few years Microsoft has to get you to rip out all of their software and replace it with new versions, and that gets harder and harder to do with every iteration. Meanwhile Linux waits in the wings picking up stragglers.
And like I said in my original post, Microsoft can't afford to simply do as well as they are doing now. If Microsoft doesn't *grow* the Wall Street is going to crucify it.
Microsoft earned $0.75 per share in its 2004 fiscal year. That's hardly impressive for a stock that sells for nearly $28 a share. If Microsoft is done growing then its investors are going to be very unhappy. That's a return of just under 3% a year. A year with no revenue growth would be even worse.
Not to mention the fact that there is little guarantee that Microsoft will continue to be able to rake in the kind of money that they are currently pulling in. Unearned revenue continues to go down, and Linux continues to gain marketshare. Eventually MSFT investors are going to get tired of waiting for the growth to return and MSFT is going to drop like a rock. When that happens Microsoft is going to *look* vulnerable. Right now the folks selling for Red Hat and Novell have to convince their clients that they aren't crazy when they forgo the safe path of purchasing Windows. Folks that roll out Linux solutions are still taking a fairly big risk. They are betting on a David facing up against the biggest Goliath in the history of industry, and the reason that the story of David and Goliath made it into the Bible was because in real life David's get squashed. Everyone likes an underdog, but only when they win.
A serious drop in MSFT would be hitting the behemoth right smack between the eyes, and such a drop is overdue.
Microsoft will adapt, but no matter what they do their glory days are done. Heck, Microsoft routinely posts profit margins of over 80% on its MS Office and Windows businesses, and as the market moves more and more towards commodity software those profit margins are going to evaporate.
Microsoft's real problem is its own success. Microsoft is crawling towards single digit growth, MSFT has a Price/Earnings ratio over over 30, and everywhere you look Linux is taking the profit margins out of potential Microsoft markets. Eventually the analysts aren't going to be able to spin Microsoft's lack of growth into a scenario that justifies MSFT's stock price and things at Microsoft are going to get truly ugly. Bill Gates and his cronies have structured Microsoft around the idea that the stock price always heads up. They have made stocks a huge part of their incentive plan, and everyone at Microsoft has a huge percentage of their personal wealth wrapped up in MSFT. When the stock price corrects itself then Microsoft is going to look vulnerable, and Linux will be waiting in the wings looking for wins. Every time Microsoft wants to push another upgrade on the public Free Software will be there to pick up stragglers. In the past Microsoft has been able to adapt because they had ridiculously lucrative businesses to back up their crazy plans. Microsoft has lost billions on the XBox (they lost over a billion last year alone). Instead of throwing in the towel Microsoft is instead rushing their next gen hardware so that they can throw more money down a hole. In a world where Microsoft has to lower prices on Windows and MS Office to compete with Free Software it is going to be much harder to convince investors that the billions wasted on the "next big thing" is truly a good idea. Investors are going to demand growth, and Microsoft simply hasn't delivered in recent years, and things are getting steadily worse.
Don't get me wrong, Microsoft isn't going to disappear in a puff of smoke, but for a high flyer like Microsoft being relegated to one solution of many turning a 10% profit margin is a long step down.
Heck, my boss just asked me to set up a wiki, he even suggested I take a look at mediawiki first (which was a bummer, because there isn't a Debian package). 30 minutes later I was editting the main page. Now all I need is an Emacs front end and I am in love.
Microsoft is dominant in the software industry because they control the client. No matter what kind of software you write chances are excellent that it is going to have to deal with Windows clients, and that gives Microsoft a tremendous amount of leverage.
That's why the web scares Microsoft so much. If all you really need from your operating system is a web browser then it becomes easy to replace those expensive Windows clients with something else. Microsoft pushed so hard to win the browser wars because they were very afraid that the web browser was going to make their client side APIs irrelevant.
That's why Microsoft next generation web services infrastructure is based not on the web browser, but on a set of Microsoft-only "rich client" APIs that just happen to use the HTTP as a transport protocol. Microsoft wants the web to go away so that they can replace it with technology that only runs on Windows.
Mozilla is the industry's best bet to cut Microsoft off at the pass. Not only is Mozilla an excellent web browser, but it is also a pretty sharp platform for building rich client applications. More importantly Mozilla levels the playing field. As long as Mozilla is a viable alternative then Microsoft has to pretend to care about open standards.
If Grandma is too senile to be able to read a straightforward ballot (ie President: George Bush), then there is little chance that any voting system is likely to help. We don't currently have systems that are clairvoyant.
Yikes! I don't want any system where people are allowed to take a "receipt" home with them. That opens the system up for all sorts of abuse. It would become possible to sell your vote, and it would be possible to "coerce" people to vote a certain way and then verify that they actually did as they were told.
Basically what is required is an fancy ballot-making machine. You vote. The machine prints out a ballot with your votes recorded on it (human readable). If the ballot looks good then you put it in the little metal box. If it doesn't look good then it is destroyed and the person votes again. At the end of the election the little metal box holds the official record of the vote. If someone doubts the computer generated tally then all you have to do is crack open the ballot box, and manually count the votes.
I don't want a system that matches people with votes cast, and I certainly don't want a system where it is possible for the voter to verify his or her vote after the election.
Yeah, that's precisely what we need. Such a system would allow for quick tabulation of votes, while still making it difficult to tamper with election results electronically. Plus you could put a much fancier front end on the entire system than you can the butterfly ballots I have used the last few years.
I would personally rather continue with the butterfly ballots if the alternative was a paperless system.
The point is that these machines would allow for faster tabulation of the votes (no running the ballots through a scanner) and would allow you to put a fancier front end on the optical scan ballot (apparently some voters are easily confused). The important thing is that these machines wouldn't give up the one thing that paper ballots do better than any electronic system, a human verifiable paper trail.
All things considered I would just as soon stick with the optical scan ballots. I don't find them confusing. However, there are apparently lots of folks that are really pushing for polling machine upgrades, especially after the last presidential election. The problem with any solution without a paper trail is that you can't prove that the election wasn't fixed. Can you imagine the fallout from the last Florida presidential elections if the ballots would have been destroyed after the intial count? No matter which candidate you favored you would be forced to wonder if the fix was in.
It's seems funny to me that people demand a paper receipt when they put $20 worth of gas in their car, but are happy to "trust the machine" when it comes to something as critical as electing public officials. To me that seems odd. As long as I have a paper ballot that counts as my official vote I don't care what kind of software is used to create the ballot. In most cases the paper ballots wouldn't actually get used. It's fairly rare that a count gets contested.
The problem with that is if I can't verify the printed output how do I know that the machine actually voted how it said it was going to. It would be a trivial thing to change these computers so that every third vote for "foo" became a vote for "bar" and then change the computers back after the election. If there isn't a voter-verifiable paper trail then fixing elections becomes as easy as learning a little visual basic and applying to be a polling machine "technician." You don't actually think that the average citizens that the counties hire to oversee elections are going to question the tech setting up the polling machines, do you? Without a paper ballot that counts as your official vote it is simply too easy to put one result on the screen and another in the database. Once you've left the building how is anyone supposed to verify that your vote was counted correctly if the only trail is digital?
This is how the thing should work. You walk into the polling location, and you enter the polling booth. You vote. At the end of your voting session it shows you the "this is how you voted screen" that you specified in your post. You choose yes and your vote gets printed out on a paper, human verifiable ballot. At the bottom of the ballot there is a barcode for maching reading. You then verify that your ballot matches what you saw on the screen. Since your paper ballot is your official vote you pay careful attention to what it says. The polling machine is simply a front end for the creation of the ballot. What was on the computer screen doesn't count. What counts is what is on the piece of paper.
If you don't like what's on the piece of paper you go to the polling booth attendant and you ask for another ballot. Your bad ballot gets scanned and your previous vote becomes invalid. The ballot is then shredded, and you are given a new ballot. You vote again, and hopefully this time the ballot looks good.
When you are done and the ballot looks like you want it to look it is deposited in the locked metal box, and you go on your way.
When it comes time to count the votes the computers do all the work. They know which votes are valid and which votes are invalid and they simply tally the results. The beauty of this system is that you don't have to trust the machines. If fraud of any sort is suspected you simply open up the ballot boxes and you manually count the votes. In a system without human verifiable ballots there is no backup to easily modifiable electronic record. If you can subvert the polling machines so that they print one thing on the computer screen and put something else in the database then you can steal elections. With human verifiable paper ballots that sort of trickery is impossible.
Not to mention the fact that all gamblers think that they are "better than average," and are "winning players."
From the way that poker players talk poker games must have an element of spontaneous value creation because I have never even heard of a poker player that classified him or herself as a "loser." Unless money is being created out of the void someone must walk home with empty pockets.
I don't care if the code is public or not as long as the polling machine prints out a human verifiable ballot that counts as my official vote in case of suspected fraud. Heck, the actual software that does the polling can be top secret obfusticated C generated by an Intercal front end for all I care. As long as I can look down at my ballot when I am done voting and verify that the machine tallied my votes correctly I am perfectly happy.
Public availability of the source code doesn't guarantee that the polling machine that I am using is working correctly, or that it hasn't been tampered with. Hard-copy ballots that can be hand verified in case of suspected fraud guarantee that folks wishing to fix an election at least have to work at it.
The only safe paper trail is one that can be checked by the individual voters. If you are going to tamper with the electronic record so that every third vote for foo goes to bar then it is a trivial matter to make sure that the paper that you spit out at the end of the day matches the fiddled vote tallies.
That's why the only sane way to do electronic voting is to use whatever fancy dan front end you want, I couldn't care less, but at the end of the voting session you spit out a human verifiable paper receipt that is the official vote. This vote gets put in the ballot box and if anyone questions the integrity of the vote then you open the ballot boxes and count the votes by hand. In most cases the electronic count of the vote will be the one used. However, in cases where fraud is suspected there is a verifiable paper trail that can be followed.
This gives the voter a chance to read his ballot and make sure that his or her vote was cast correctly, and it makes it much more difficult to "hack" the vote.
About a year ago I thought that perhaps IBM might have actually done something wrong. However, as the courts have dragged the facts out of SCO (kicking and screaming mostly) it has become clear that SCO originally filed the lawsuit in the hopes that it would trigger an IBM buyout, and that IBM called SCO's bluff.
At this point if IBM had actually done something wrong then SCO would be able to point people at some SCO source code in Linux. Not that such an action would truly be likely to get IBM in trouble. After all, SCO can't pretend that they didn't knowingly distribute the Linux kernel for years (including versions with IBM's modifications). After all, SCO is really the Linux company Caldera. In short, Caldera (err.. SCO) never really had a case against IBM, that's why they keep telling different judges completely different stories. All of SCO's really good arguments (MIT professors "deep diving" the Linux code for "millions of lines" of code infringement, etc.) came in the press, and have been subsequently destroyed in the court room. SCO's entire case, at this point, rests on a very very strained interpretation of a contract with IBM that doesn't withstand scrutiny of any sort of a logic test and requires a reinterpretation of what is considered "derivative" copyright, and IBM has gone back and deposed the folks that originally drew up the contract (on both sides of the table) and they all have testified that SCO is full of crap.
The fact that /. readers like IBM better than Microsoft really has nothing to do with it. IBM gets good /. press in this article because they are sticking up for Linux. The kernel hackers didn't steal SCO's source, and IBM is out to prove that. If Microsoft did something similar (in some other alternative reality) then Microsoft would be praised by the Free Software community as well. Instead, however, Microsoft paid SCO millions of dollars for an arguably bogus IP license, and then put SCO's management in touch with the folks at Baystar and RBC that gave SCO the money to finance their bogus lawsuit. I think that it is only natural that /. readers would see that as yet another reason to be wary of Microsoft.
Thanks for the compliment.
I wouldn't say that the time I spent in South America on my own mission was "without earthly rewards." I learned Spanish, I got to meet some very interesting people, and when I came home I had made it through one of the trickiest parts of young adulthood without any serious mistakes. By the time I was 21 and back in school I was prepared to seriously buckle down to my studies. Most importantly I got to see first hand what real poverty looks like. It makes it a lot easier to be happy with what you have when you have seen what the average person in Huancayo, Peru has to look forward to.
Interestingly enough, its not just the missions to foreign countries that teach this kind of thing. My little brother is currently on a mission in Texas, and he sees much of the same stuff there. A lot of the people that are interested in talking to LDS missionaries are going through very difficult trials (which is probably why they don't slam the door :). The insights into life that you get by dealing with people in these situations are almost certainly worth the price of admission.
Heck, even if I wasn't religious myself I would probably consider sending my own children on some sort of mission. It's a good experience.