None of those "includes the notion of current dominant market posistion".
Okay, I agree that "like" can be logically interpreted more broadly than I originally intended. I retain my point, though, that MS is in an unstable position and will very likely decline as a company in the near future (five or ten years or so), if they are smart enough to prevent a total collapse.
Except that libertarians like ESR don't want the government to intervene via antitrust law, so it doesn't matter how many governments MS pisses off.
I wasn't really referring to pissed governments regulating MS to death. Instead, the governments are among MS' biggest customers. There have been many governments around the world who are at least using Open Source software as a negotiating tactic against MS, and some are considering legislation to encourage consideration of Open Source software in future projects.
I'm sorry, you can argue that microsoft's dominant market posistion is "short-lived", but that's not what you're saying. You're saying that "companies like microsoft are short-lived". I would like to know what the thought process was that brought you to that conclusion.
"companies like Microsoft" includes the notion of current dominant market position. Separating a company from its actions is hard to do. Perhaps, in the future, Microsoft will not go out of business, but my estimate is that it will be nothing like the Microsoft we know and love today.
Singing: How many people must Microsoft piss off, before they go broke and reform? How much data must get lost today, before customers see the scam and run?
(I'm really very sorry if my singing disrupted anyone's work)
The annoying opinion of an drooling anti-Microsoft linux geek?
It correlates with one of the Liberatarian things ESR says that actually makes sense. Monopolies are unstable in a free marketplace, because, eventually, people will find new options or new ways of doing things. Microsoft can piss off only so many people and so many nations before, well, they either wise up or go out of business completely.
They're far beyond the level of market share where they have to concern themselves with trivialities like consumer satisfaction.
This just goes to show that companies like Microsoft are short-lived in the grand scheme of things. Intuit responds to customers to survive as a business...it really shouldn't be any different for Microsoft. It's just that, for Microsoft, it is a matter of long-term survival, otherwise they will simply burn up in their arrogance after just a few more years.
When will MS stop having to reissue patches and stop slowing down and screwing up systems because they can't figure out how to make software with some decent security built in?
A while ago a former MS intern posted a story about how lots of Microsoft software is written by cut-n-paste. I estimate that $40 billion, or any amount of money, for that matter, is not sufficient to fix the speghetti-rat's-nest they have created. It is simply impossible without starting from scratch with a whole new system architecture layering low-level assembly and C code with some sort of safer high-level language to truly fix Windows. I also wouldn't be suprised if MS employees have to sell their soul away in an NDA contract that super-glues their mouth shut with respect to the quality of the Windows code base. Opacity is Microsoft's #1 tool in keeping their users in blissful happy-ness while not revealing that underneath the buttercream icing lies a stinky turd.
But, overall, Windows Update has provided me with an extremely easy and painless way to keep my systems updated.
Will it be so painless when you suddently get that super-duper DRM update or WU sets your Media Player settings back to "uniquely identify myself to the world and send all my browsing habits to the Mother Ship".
Will it be so painless when the EULA is further updated such that MS can do even more of anything it wants at any time?
BTW, is it really just a coincidence that MS stands for both Microsoft and Mother Ship? (I'm serious above, but I couldn't pass this one up)
Yeah, but they only work when the aftermarket mini-turbochargers are attached and a fiberglass spoiler is added to the heatsink. The resulting turbo lag adds latency that really defeats any advantage of the second FPU. It's really too bad, because the 970 could have pushed Photoshop easily into the 12s.
Also, you take a shot at CDE rather than Solaris? Wow.
Well the original post was fair by saying "Nice hardware," and, really, CDE is still the default offering in Solaris 9. Sun's GNOME 2 is very promising and looks great, but they are still refining it until it is worthy of being the default desktop.
Sun's workstations really are great machines, in spite of what SPEC zealots say. For example, few people mention that typical PC graphics cards look like crap relative to even the elderly Creator 3D (translation: the cost differential between really good PCs and Suns is generally smaller than PC zealots will admit).
Regardless, Sun had better keep their heads up, because Opteron-based workstations are a genuine threat to the Sun Blade line. Opteron+a gig of RAM+SCSI+a really good OpenGL card=a compelling workstation.
Where do more-sophisticated people get their food?
I forgot to say "on average." A person doesn't have to be literate or educated to shop for groceries. The bar is set slightly higher at a books store--literacy at minimum, and the more education the better.
Microsoft knew that (I mean, come on), and like a drug pusher, made sure the buyer was hooked before they started charging...
It goes both ways, too. Not only are users addicted to Microsoft, Microsoft is addicted to the plentiful stream of revenue. That's the only explanation for much of their behavior. They are so accustomed to having hundreds of millions of dollars per employee in the bank that anything less makes them feel cheated.
For example, consider a spoiled kid used to getting literally everything and then some, whose rich daddy went poor, and, now, that kid cries every time he gets a strip steak instead of a filet.
Microsoft could continue being a thriving--yet modest--business. However, I think they will go down in a tantrum, instead.
The only reason Apple will surive is that they aren't complete assholes.
I also forgot to mention that other companies, such as IBM, HP, Sun (hopefully), Intel, and AMD will still be with us, too! The future without Microsoft really isn't all that bleak, because, figuratively, once you take away the thatch, the underlying grass fills in for a nice healthy lawn.
I don't like Microsoft's history or how they do business, but I'm racking my brains here to find a way that they're evil and my favorite business OS, Linux, is good.
How about this: operating systems are a mature technology, as are office suites. At this point, there is basically no justification for companies to continue to make large profits off of them--they are commodities. For Microsoft to continue charging high prices is unwise, if not evil. For Microsoft to match the price of Linux, well, let's just say they basically go out of business once that $32 billion is used up. Put simply, there isn't any money to be made selling operating systems, office suites, web browsers, etc. anymore.
The only reason Apple will surive is that they aren't complete assholes. People actually choose Apple--what a concept! They sell sexy hardware, too, which certainly is a hedge.
It was a great plan in 1981, and might still be a great plan today if Linus had decided to go to art school instead of doing what he did.
I disagree. Open Source seems to be the natural conclusion of certain types of software. Remember, Richard Stallman predates Linus with the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation. OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD also came about independently of Linux.
It just seems that GNU, Linux, the BSDs, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, etc. all fill very important roles signifying the end of the line for particular types of software. Why implement another 'ls', when GNU provides what we need? Why continue using non-portable proprietary file formats, when OpenOffice.org's XML files are so much safer in the long-term? Why continue using a half-assed web browser, when Mozilla better implements web standards and is free?
Open Source, in the long-term, preserves technology, so that humanity doesn't have to keep reinventing the wheel. Now that the office suite has been more or less perfected, for example, let's move on to new challenges.
In that case, I call it the Luser's fault, not the company making products.
Actually, expert marketing can coerce people into buying something without even realizing they don't want it. I remember taking a social psychology class in college. People do some pretty freaky stuff, ranging from simply wanting fashionable clothing all the way to feeding their own children cyanide-tainted kool-aid.
Unlike IBM, Microsoft can't adopt free software and live off hardware sales and technical services.
Well, it's Microsoft's own fault for basing their entire business off of commodity software products. Thanks to Linux and OpenOffice.org, operating systems and office suites are reaching maturity in the marketplace as genuine commodity products. Making money off of office suites will soon be like trying to make money off of paper clips. Some money can be made...but perhaps just enough to keep from going under completely.
How dare a company try to increase its profits and make more money?! How dare a business try to best its competitors in the marketplace?!
I for one am disgusted and only hope that this evil is vanquished!
To aim for increased profits at the expense of the health of the global free marketplace is downright evil, in my book. Microsoft is the enemy of free trade and must be brought under control.
Companies aim to make as much money as possible -- excluding not-for-profit & charitables -- so why should anyone be surprised that they do anything within their power to make their software as widespread as possible?
Yes, but to do this for the long-term requires a modesty that Microsoft seems incapable of. Business is always give and take to make sure the customers willingly come back. Microsoft, on the other hand, is pretty much just take-take-take, where customers come back willing or not.
Well, bookstores mostly do use a single queue, to make everyone file past all the potential impulse items along it (rather than just the few at a given register).
This may be due to the enormous diversity of readers, where there needs to be more books to achieve an acceptable hit rate. Grocery stores can use a simpler sweet-salty-skanky model for impuse buying, perhaps also due to the fact that grocery shoppers are less sophisticated.
Imagine a stacked-up line of 14 gilled carts, complete with young kids leaning on half the cart handles.
I find it much more annoying being marooned in a line behind some loser who can't write a check or asks for cigarettes at the last possible moment or needs a price check on their Twinkies. At least with one line, the loser ties up only one register while the other registers keep going strong.
Slashdot Mirror
None of those "includes the notion of current dominant market posistion".
Okay, I agree that "like" can be logically interpreted more broadly than I originally intended. I retain my point, though, that MS is in an unstable position and will very likely decline as a company in the near future (five or ten years or so), if they are smart enough to prevent a total collapse.
Except that libertarians like ESR don't want the government to intervene via antitrust law, so it doesn't matter how many governments MS pisses off.
I wasn't really referring to pissed governments regulating MS to death. Instead, the governments are among MS' biggest customers. There have been many governments around the world who are at least using Open Source software as a negotiating tactic against MS, and some are considering legislation to encourage consideration of Open Source software in future projects.
Geez, I fail to see how a couple of DECADES isn't long-lived...
Twenty years or so is but a blip in the history of the world economy.
I'm sorry, you can argue that microsoft's dominant market posistion is "short-lived", but that's not what you're saying. You're saying that "companies like microsoft are short-lived". I would like to know what the thought process was that brought you to that conclusion.
"companies like Microsoft" includes the notion of current dominant market position. Separating a company from its actions is hard to do. Perhaps, in the future, Microsoft will not go out of business, but my estimate is that it will be nothing like the Microsoft we know and love today.
Singing: How many people must Microsoft piss off, before they go broke and reform? How much data must get lost today, before customers see the scam and run?
(I'm really very sorry if my singing disrupted anyone's work)
The annoying opinion of an drooling anti-Microsoft linux geek?
It correlates with one of the Liberatarian things ESR says that actually makes sense. Monopolies are unstable in a free marketplace, because, eventually, people will find new options or new ways of doing things. Microsoft can piss off only so many people and so many nations before, well, they either wise up or go out of business completely.
They're far beyond the level of market share where they have to concern themselves with trivialities like consumer satisfaction.
This just goes to show that companies like Microsoft are short-lived in the grand scheme of things. Intuit responds to customers to survive as a business...it really shouldn't be any different for Microsoft. It's just that, for Microsoft, it is a matter of long-term survival, otherwise they will simply burn up in their arrogance after just a few more years.
How soon until they don't tell you that and just start reporting your web browsing favorites and selling that information to others?
All it takes is a EULA update. I'd say not long at all.
When will MS stop having to reissue patches and stop slowing down and screwing up systems because they can't figure out how to make software with some decent security built in?
A while ago a former MS intern posted a story about how lots of Microsoft software is written by cut-n-paste. I estimate that $40 billion, or any amount of money, for that matter, is not sufficient to fix the speghetti-rat's-nest they have created. It is simply impossible without starting from scratch with a whole new system architecture layering low-level assembly and C code with some sort of safer high-level language to truly fix Windows. I also wouldn't be suprised if MS employees have to sell their soul away in an NDA contract that super-glues their mouth shut with respect to the quality of the Windows code base. Opacity is Microsoft's #1 tool in keeping their users in blissful happy-ness while not revealing that underneath the buttercream icing lies a stinky turd.
But, overall, Windows Update has provided me with an extremely easy and painless way to keep my systems updated.
Will it be so painless when you suddently get that super-duper DRM update or WU sets your Media Player settings back to "uniquely identify myself to the world and send all my browsing habits to the Mother Ship".
Will it be so painless when the EULA is further updated such that MS can do even more of anything it wants at any time?
BTW, is it really just a coincidence that MS stands for both Microsoft and Mother Ship? (I'm serious above, but I couldn't pass this one up)
Mot actually had a G5 on the roadmap.
Wow, ditching a whole CPU has got to hurt. At least Motorola, however, knows how to steer around the iceburg to focus on their core business.
Did anyone else catch the bit on the twin FPU's?
Yeah, but they only work when the aftermarket mini-turbochargers are attached and a fiberglass spoiler is added to the heatsink. The resulting turbo lag adds latency that really defeats any advantage of the second FPU. It's really too bad, because the 970 could have pushed Photoshop easily into the 12s.
Also, you take a shot at CDE rather than Solaris? Wow.
Well the original post was fair by saying "Nice hardware," and, really, CDE is still the default offering in Solaris 9. Sun's GNOME 2 is very promising and looks great, but they are still refining it until it is worthy of being the default desktop.
Sun's workstations really are great machines, in spite of what SPEC zealots say. For example, few people mention that typical PC graphics cards look like crap relative to even the elderly Creator 3D (translation: the cost differential between really good PCs and Suns is generally smaller than PC zealots will admit).
Regardless, Sun had better keep their heads up, because Opteron-based workstations are a genuine threat to the Sun Blade line. Opteron+a gig of RAM+SCSI+a really good OpenGL card=a compelling workstation.
Where do more-sophisticated people get their food?
I forgot to say "on average." A person doesn't have to be literate or educated to shop for groceries. The bar is set slightly higher at a books store--literacy at minimum, and the more education the better.
They are so accustomed to having hundreds of millions of dollars per employee in the bank that anything less makes them feel cheated.
Actually, I think millions of dollars per employee is more accurate.
Microsoft knew that (I mean, come on), and like a drug pusher, made sure the buyer was hooked before they started charging...
It goes both ways, too. Not only are users addicted to Microsoft, Microsoft is addicted to the plentiful stream of revenue. That's the only explanation for much of their behavior. They are so accustomed to having hundreds of millions of dollars per employee in the bank that anything less makes them feel cheated.
For example, consider a spoiled kid used to getting literally everything and then some, whose rich daddy went poor, and, now, that kid cries every time he gets a strip steak instead of a filet.
Microsoft could continue being a thriving--yet modest--business. However, I think they will go down in a tantrum, instead.
Microsoft does not care what happens to your data; they've already got your money, stupid!
Well said! Not only do they have your money, but you took off the shrink wrap and are stuck!! Bwahahaha!!!
Seriously, whoever came up with the concept of a EULA is a cunning genius.
The only reason Apple will surive is that they aren't complete assholes.
I also forgot to mention that other companies, such as IBM, HP, Sun (hopefully), Intel, and AMD will still be with us, too! The future without Microsoft really isn't all that bleak, because, figuratively, once you take away the thatch, the underlying grass fills in for a nice healthy lawn.
I don't like Microsoft's history or how they do business, but I'm racking my brains here to find a way that they're evil and my favorite business OS, Linux, is good.
How about this: operating systems are a mature technology, as are office suites. At this point, there is basically no justification for companies to continue to make large profits off of them--they are commodities. For Microsoft to continue charging high prices is unwise, if not evil. For Microsoft to match the price of Linux, well, let's just say they basically go out of business once that $32 billion is used up. Put simply, there isn't any money to be made selling operating systems, office suites, web browsers, etc. anymore.
The only reason Apple will surive is that they aren't complete assholes. People actually choose Apple--what a concept! They sell sexy hardware, too, which certainly is a hedge.
It was a great plan in 1981, and might still be a great plan today if Linus had decided to go to art school instead of doing what he did.
I disagree. Open Source seems to be the natural conclusion of certain types of software. Remember, Richard Stallman predates Linus with the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation. OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD also came about independently of Linux.
It just seems that GNU, Linux, the BSDs, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, etc. all fill very important roles signifying the end of the line for particular types of software. Why implement another 'ls', when GNU provides what we need? Why continue using non-portable proprietary file formats, when OpenOffice.org's XML files are so much safer in the long-term? Why continue using a half-assed web browser, when Mozilla better implements web standards and is free?
Open Source, in the long-term, preserves technology, so that humanity doesn't have to keep reinventing the wheel. Now that the office suite has been more or less perfected, for example, let's move on to new challenges.
In that case, I call it the Luser's fault, not the company making products.
Actually, expert marketing can coerce people into buying something without even realizing they don't want it. I remember taking a social psychology class in college. People do some pretty freaky stuff, ranging from simply wanting fashionable clothing all the way to feeding their own children cyanide-tainted kool-aid.
People are disturbingly sheep-like, sometimes.
Unlike IBM, Microsoft can't adopt free software and live off hardware sales and technical services.
Well, it's Microsoft's own fault for basing their entire business off of commodity software products. Thanks to Linux and OpenOffice.org, operating systems and office suites are reaching maturity in the marketplace as genuine commodity products. Making money off of office suites will soon be like trying to make money off of paper clips. Some money can be made...but perhaps just enough to keep from going under completely.
How dare a company try to increase its profits and make more money?! How dare a business try to best its competitors in the marketplace?!
I for one am disgusted and only hope that this evil is vanquished!
To aim for increased profits at the expense of the health of the global free marketplace is downright evil, in my book. Microsoft is the enemy of free trade and must be brought under control.
Companies aim to make as much money as possible -- excluding not-for-profit & charitables -- so why should anyone be surprised that they do anything within their power to make their software as widespread as possible?
Yes, but to do this for the long-term requires a modesty that Microsoft seems incapable of. Business is always give and take to make sure the customers willingly come back. Microsoft, on the other hand, is pretty much just take-take-take, where customers come back willing or not.
Corporations and governments are willing to pay the price of Windows to ensure that they have support and stability.
Don't forget the opacity, near-beer standards compliance, and rushed-to-market buggy code.
Well, bookstores mostly do use a single queue, to make everyone file past all the potential impulse items along it (rather than just the few at a given register).
This may be due to the enormous diversity of readers, where there needs to be more books to achieve an acceptable hit rate. Grocery stores can use a simpler sweet-salty-skanky model for impuse buying, perhaps also due to the fact that grocery shoppers are less sophisticated.
Imagine a stacked-up line of 14 gilled carts, complete with young kids leaning on half the cart handles.
I find it much more annoying being marooned in a line behind some loser who can't write a check or asks for cigarettes at the last possible moment or needs a price check on their Twinkies. At least with one line, the loser ties up only one register while the other registers keep going strong.