I've been thinking about this all morning, and laying 800 people off as a blackmail to pass a certain political desirable just doesn't make sense. It actually doesn't ring of BillG's style, and its bad business - what were those 800 people doing? Its not like Microsoft doesn't have release schedule problems with its products already.
If I had to make a guess, I'd say one of two things actually happened - First BillG may have threatened to MOVE the company, which isn't quite the same as firing them all but it just about as bad morally. Unfortunately, companies do this all the time, especially manufacturing companies - hell, its half the reason auto makers have unions.
The second option is that he was planning on axing the workforce for valid business reasons and offered to throw them a bone and keep it open if the PM supported software patents.
Neither is too many shades better than the extortion reported in the article, but both are common tactics in the business world. Personally, I think we should say screw them all to all the companies that try to pull off BS stunts like this. Starting with Microsoft.
Live in girlfriends / wives don't like lots of boxes cluttering up "their" living room. That's wasted space where you could put another coffee table or something.
There's a company called PatchLink that has an agent which does much the same - their product not only includes AV, firewall and patch scans, but also common misconfiguration scans. Their agent also allows allows a network admin to instantly deploy OS and software patches, as well as remote product installations, AND it collects a complete hardware/software inventory of every machine's system and keeps the central console informed of any updates.
I can't say enough good things about what they can do.
I actually gave them too much credit - NT hashes by default are MD4, but SHA1 has been available for a couple years now. SHA1 is the default setting for all DoD installations which covers where I work, so I mistyped it - my bad, sorry, its late.
Actually, his blog is a rehash of an article the guy wrote back in 2003 - in the article on MSDN (too lazy to look up) he specifically mentioned one of the words on the passphrase should be mispelled, and you should have one random character in there.
Moot point - Win9x on an Active Directory domain not only transmits but also stores the password hashes in the LanManager format, as opposed to SHA1 on the NT series. All you need to break LanManager hashes is 30 seconds, an abacus and a monkey. Monkey and abacus might be optional.
I'm too lazy to Google for it, but last fall Microsoft modified their liscense for every product to state that dual core were NOT to be treated as dual processors.
On rare occasions, their secret desire to drive intel sales actually does help the rest of us out.
I'm not saying that MS needs to force every app being written in.NET - I'm saying that the transition to x64 was the perfect oppurtunity for their to go back and redo their C API smartly and move Win32 into virtualization - I thought that was the whole reason they bought Connectix in the first place!
My beef with Microsoft is that the engineers wanted to make Longhorn the most modern operating system in the world, and they had the technology, drive and willpower to do it - I think BillG would have done it. Bill always wanted Microsoft to be a more successful Apple. SteveB seems much more interested in making XP version 2 and transforming Microsoft into a higher-margin big blue.
The problem is that market says that companies should try to become and maintain their position as monopolies. Capitalism works best when execs go home and dream about smashing their competitors into goo. While its certainly better for the market (and better for Microsoft longterm probably) if Microsoft has competitors, its better for Microsoft to be a monopoly. Of course Microsoft's execs are interested in maintaining their monopoly at all costs - that's their job! SteveB and crew need to be focussed on being as profitable as possible, and they're doing their job spectacularly.
The system works when companies are money grubbing whores - Unless you're a libertarian, most people agree its the invisible hand of government that is supposed to keep companies honest and the market moving. I blame the DoJ, the Fed and the Bush Administration for not doing their job, because from a business perspective, Microsoft IS doing theirs.
I wholeheartedly believe that Microsoft can play nice - the tech heads at Microsoft tend to have the same beliefs as the techheads outside Microsoft, and when the market or the fed decides to finally step in and force the company to shift into the natural state of internal balance, I think you'll see a whole new MS emerge. I just hope that the EU is strong enough to do it, because Uncle Sam sure isn't.
I've seen a number of local tier1 and tier2 schools begin to offer students the oppurtunity to do the 200-300 level classes in Java or.NET, and from what I've heard, the.NET option is becoming more popular every year. I'm not sure if today's college kids hate Microsoft nearly as much as the kids in college through the antitrust trials. I hope this group of college kids looks and compares technologies and platforms based on their merits, not on zealotry. Microsoft WILL change over time, and a large pool of developers who want to use Microsoft systems but are inches away from switching to Linux will be the catalyst for massive changes in Redmond.
On a somewhat related sidenote - Microsoft has those tv ads where they say "We see a rock star/business owner/designer/caterer" - I've never seen an ad where they say "We see a programmer".
Actually, if you remember back to August 97, that money was a complete bailout for Apple.
Sure, it was only 150 million, but it was also 100 million in patent settlements and cross liscensing fees. Apple lost 700 million the previous quarter, its stock was in the low teens, and investors were beginning to sell the stocks off to scrap companies owned by Motorola. The stock was so low and the future of Apple looked so dim that the company was only a month or so out from being scalped and its hardware and software IPs auctioned off by the board, at which point Apple would have closed doors and its 1.5 billion in liquid assets (not 2, that was after) would have gone back to the shareholders.
Microsoft's 150 million in preferred nonvoting stock raised Apple's shareprice from $13.68 to $26.31 in two days - the investors that were hording the stock to scalp dropped it back into the market for a tidy profit, Apple in turn sold off some more of its own shares, and its liquid assets went from 1.5bil to 2bil, which gave them the money to finish OSX - also, it redistributed their shares across the common market, and no organizations besides Apple itself and Microsoft (which only had nonvoting stock) had a sizeable block of shares.
By the way, if memory serves from my old investor reports, MS' direct RoI on that 150 mil was close to 1.2 bil when they sold it back.
A lesson Microsoft would be apt to remember - Just because you've got tons of cash in reserve doesn't mean that Wall Street isn't going to kill you anyway.
If you read the MS bloggers, I think they're basically saying just that - every product at Microsoft was thrown off by XPSP2, the 120 day project that took a year and a half because people just couldn't figure it out.
Unless Microsoft comes up with a novel way of providing backwards compatibility for older applications and reinventing their core ala OSX, I think the writing is on the wall.
Microsoft may be a 800 pound gorilla, but IBM is still a 8,000 pound monster that is going Linux [and still pissed off]. After recently comparing OS/2 to XP side by side I understand.:)
In the years to follow, I think it will become known that the smartest decision Bill Gates ever made was to bail out Apple Computer. They don't interfere with the operations of Apple at all, but they own just the right amount to make it nigh-impossible for IBM to buy Apple out.
IMHO the US had better wake up or we'll technologically have out shorts eaten by the rest of the world as they continue their migration away from Windows.
Given that Red Hat, IBM, Novell and Apple are all US companies who sell internationally but earn the majority of their revenue in the US, I think we've got our bases covered in the event of a technical revolution.
Just out of curiosity, based on the Spolsky measurement of Microsoft employees, are you in the MSDN Mag camp or the Raymond Chen camp?
I have the oddest opinion of Microsoft - each day, I either love them or hate them. I love looking at the real innovations in.NET 2.0 or SQL Server, and looking at my dreams for my software and realizing how those technologies radically change and simply the way I intend on fulfilling those dreams. The days I hate them, though, are violently passionate days, that are steadily increasing in number, where the bloat, the unwaivering fetish for maintaining perfect backwards compatibility, even with old buggy apps - I can't stand those days.
What I wouldn't give for an NT kernel with a newer, much smaller, well-designed API layer with WinFX strapped on top and Win32 virtualized off to the side. Security built in from the bottom up. Well documented, open standards for formats and protocols integrated throughout a desktop shell seperated from the core system. A standards compliant browser that's updated frequently, even in the years there isn't competition. Linux couldn't beat that - they don't have the organization, and for every passionate member of their community, there'd be an equally firey defender of the Redmond banner - actually, that's a bad analogy, because the two camps wouldn't be nearly as inspired to hate each other as they do now.
But the Raymond Chens in Redmond always win out. I don't know how long an MSDN Mag person can live in that environment before they just get jaded and wonder why Microsoft hasn't delivered a single improvement to the consumer experience since 2001. Why Microsoft has missed every wave since the introduction of Windows 95/98. Why nearly every Apple product is capable of inspiring loyalty in a way that no single Microsoft application has done, ever. And you wonder how its possible you miss every boat, surely you'd have caught one by accident by now.
I don't think Microsoft wants to ride that boat anymore. They're insanely profitable being old dependable (insert MS reliability joke here) and honestly, there is no competition for Microsoft products in the office. But Microsoft is going to have to work damned hard if they want to beat Apple in the home, and honestly, I don't think they're up to it anymore.
My favorite part about that search is that if you click on the "Recording Industry Association of America" response, the URL is shows as their website is "http://boycott-riaa.com"
Apple's office suite is geared to a very different audience. Although very well done, Pages is a very streamlined word processor in comparison with Word, aimed more at consumer than business customers. Also, they don't have an answer to Excel, which some people consider more important to Office's success than Word.
Microsoft makes a killing selling Office for Macs, and no one is trying to intrude on that market. They'd lose a ton of money if they dropped Office for Macs, and they'd risk attracting back the attention of the Fed.
Microsoft has indicated that the entire macro system for future Office versions is being reworked to run on the.NET framework so that it can have a consistent security model with the rest of the OS - I can't see how they would be capable of continuing to sell Microsoft Office for OSX without releasing an official build of at least a portion of the CLR for Apple.
Bill Gates has said that in ten years, there will only be two operating systems - Windows and Linux. Given that Microsoft has officially recognized that Linux is its principal competition, how do you plan on combatting the release schedule of open source software? As a Gnome user, every six months I'm treated to incremental improvements and features - As a Windows user, I have to wait years for a single large batch of improvements to Windows.
I understand that Enterprise customers prefer large updates on a long timetable, but consumers tend to want new features now - I don't want to wait three years for a feature that Gnome, KDE or Apple has to show up in Windows. How do you plan on preventing the Windows brand from becoming "stale" when viewed in relation to a community with a much more rapid and dynamic release schedule?
Personally I just want to know why he wasn't using a Microsoft TabletPC with OneNote. I thought the whole idea of that was so that people wouldn't have to do paper doodles anymore.
Larry Osterman wrote an article once where he talked about a presentation he had with Bill about a portion of the IPX stack in NT4. Bill wasn't familiar with the project prior to the meeting, so it started off with Larry just telling him what was supposed to be accomplished.
After a couple minutes, they got into the technical part and after Bill had spent two or three minutes looking over stack trace information he abruptly starts screaming at the team about how the memory footprint was too large, and then stopped, thought a minute, and accounting for a dependant project off the top of his head, spit out what he thought was the appropriate memory size for the stack. Everyone in the room stared at him slack-jawed - he quoted a number that was too small by half. No one outside the marketing department would make up a number like that.
But they had an explicit order from BillG to rewrite the stack to that size, so they went back to the drawing board and, after bringing in some more BSD hackers, realized that not only was his number achieveable, but he'd hit the number they could theoretically reach given the dependencies with other portions of the system right on the head. Although that section of NT has been revisitted in every version since NT4.0, no one has been able to improve on the memory footprint of that section of the kernel.
That's not neccesarily the sign of a genius - I know people who can look at a database and give the same sort of summary judgements. But when a man can make realizations like that within 10 minutes of having learned about a technology, at a bare minimum you have to give him credit for being a geek.
... if you're in a public area, you're fair game for being photographed?
Not really - If you're distinct enough to recognize, you can be photographed by anyone, but those photos can't be distributed for profit without your consent for the most part. For instance, no one can snap a picture of you and use that in an ad or commercial without your consent, but a journalist can publish photos of you in a newspaper. I'm not sure about how the law works around it, but I know that it can get pretty complicated if you sell digital photos because you need stacks of waiver forms.
Actually, they didn't print all 600,000 copies at release. They printed around 200,000 if memory serves, and expected that to last until early 2005.
Those 200,000 sold out almost instantly (do you remember the problems around Thanksgiving trying to find a copy?), and the publisher Vivendi printed the excess more and sold them. Although its Blizzard's product, keep in mind that the publishers really drive the sales of a product. Blizzard asked Vivendi repeatedly to stop printing new copies until they had time to scale to little success until the performance hiccups finally transformed into complete crashes across most of the servers. At that point, Vivendi realized that it was smarter to wait out a couple months, and they FINALLY stopped printing copies after going over their original volume a couple hundred percent.
Blizzard isn't exempt from responsibility entirely, but the majority of the blame really falls on the publisher. To their credit, Blizzard has offered substantial quantities of comp time to most of the players, which bites into their profits, not Vivendis.
If the article is correct, the only thing that distinguishes this dbms from more traditional is that it doesn't serialize its writes to the disk. If that's true, I don't know what the selling point is. Both MS SQL Server and Oracle have the capacity to run a database in commitless mode, in which changes aren't recorded to the disk (they can optionally be serialized on a timed interval). The military applications they talk about being difficult with traditional dbms' are already largely implemented today - most the examples Forbes offered are perfect candidates for read-only databases, which are screaming fast. What makes them different?
Not to mention that he sides with Tivo and the consumers every time the content industry came calling, with the exception of the copy bit, which although he allowed to be implemented, did not fully standardize. When the NFL complained that TivoToGo violated their decades long control over their market with blackout dates, he ruled in favor of the consumer. He never interfered with cables versus satellite's ability to compete with each other fairly. He sat back and let the markets push broadband into almost every willing home with very limitted regulation. He expanded the available bandwidth for wireless carriers at a low cost, ensuring that even with the recent corporate mergers, there's still 5 major carriers for consumers to choose from.
We may not like everything he did, but I agree - lets give the man some credit for leading the only part of government to not completely screw emerging technologies.
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If I had to make a guess, I'd say one of two things actually happened - First BillG may have threatened to MOVE the company, which isn't quite the same as firing them all but it just about as bad morally. Unfortunately, companies do this all the time, especially manufacturing companies - hell, its half the reason auto makers have unions.
The second option is that he was planning on axing the workforce for valid business reasons and offered to throw them a bone and keep it open if the PM supported software patents.
Neither is too many shades better than the extortion reported in the article, but both are common tactics in the business world. Personally, I think we should say screw them all to all the companies that try to pull off BS stunts like this. Starting with Microsoft.
Live in girlfriends / wives don't like lots of boxes cluttering up "their" living room. That's wasted space where you could put another coffee table or something.
I can't say enough good things about what they can do.
I actually gave them too much credit - NT hashes by default are MD4, but SHA1 has been available for a couple years now. SHA1 is the default setting for all DoD installations which covers where I work, so I mistyped it - my bad, sorry, its late.
Actually, his blog is a rehash of an article the guy wrote back in 2003 - in the article on MSDN (too lazy to look up) he specifically mentioned one of the words on the passphrase should be mispelled, and you should have one random character in there.
Moot point - Win9x on an Active Directory domain not only transmits but also stores the password hashes in the LanManager format, as opposed to SHA1 on the NT series. All you need to break LanManager hashes is 30 seconds, an abacus and a monkey. Monkey and abacus might be optional.
On rare occasions, their secret desire to drive intel sales actually does help the rest of us out.
My beef with Microsoft is that the engineers wanted to make Longhorn the most modern operating system in the world, and they had the technology, drive and willpower to do it - I think BillG would have done it. Bill always wanted Microsoft to be a more successful Apple. SteveB seems much more interested in making XP version 2 and transforming Microsoft into a higher-margin big blue.
The system works when companies are money grubbing whores - Unless you're a libertarian, most people agree its the invisible hand of government that is supposed to keep companies honest and the market moving. I blame the DoJ, the Fed and the Bush Administration for not doing their job, because from a business perspective, Microsoft IS doing theirs.
I wholeheartedly believe that Microsoft can play nice - the tech heads at Microsoft tend to have the same beliefs as the techheads outside Microsoft, and when the market or the fed decides to finally step in and force the company to shift into the natural state of internal balance, I think you'll see a whole new MS emerge. I just hope that the EU is strong enough to do it, because Uncle Sam sure isn't.
On a somewhat related sidenote - Microsoft has those tv ads where they say "We see a rock star/business owner/designer/caterer" - I've never seen an ad where they say "We see a programmer".
Sure, it was only 150 million, but it was also 100 million in patent settlements and cross liscensing fees. Apple lost 700 million the previous quarter, its stock was in the low teens, and investors were beginning to sell the stocks off to scrap companies owned by Motorola. The stock was so low and the future of Apple looked so dim that the company was only a month or so out from being scalped and its hardware and software IPs auctioned off by the board, at which point Apple would have closed doors and its 1.5 billion in liquid assets (not 2, that was after) would have gone back to the shareholders.
Microsoft's 150 million in preferred nonvoting stock raised Apple's shareprice from $13.68 to $26.31 in two days - the investors that were hording the stock to scalp dropped it back into the market for a tidy profit, Apple in turn sold off some more of its own shares, and its liquid assets went from 1.5bil to 2bil, which gave them the money to finish OSX - also, it redistributed their shares across the common market, and no organizations besides Apple itself and Microsoft (which only had nonvoting stock) had a sizeable block of shares.
By the way, if memory serves from my old investor reports, MS' direct RoI on that 150 mil was close to 1.2 bil when they sold it back.
A lesson Microsoft would be apt to remember - Just because you've got tons of cash in reserve doesn't mean that Wall Street isn't going to kill you anyway.
Unless Microsoft comes up with a novel way of providing backwards compatibility for older applications and reinventing their core ala OSX, I think the writing is on the wall.
In the years to follow, I think it will become known that the smartest decision Bill Gates ever made was to bail out Apple Computer. They don't interfere with the operations of Apple at all, but they own just the right amount to make it nigh-impossible for IBM to buy Apple out.
IMHO the US had better wake up or we'll technologically have out shorts eaten by the rest of the world as they continue their migration away from Windows.
Given that Red Hat, IBM, Novell and Apple are all US companies who sell internationally but earn the majority of their revenue in the US, I think we've got our bases covered in the event of a technical revolution.
I have the oddest opinion of Microsoft - each day, I either love them or hate them. I love looking at the real innovations in .NET 2.0 or SQL Server, and looking at my dreams for my software and realizing how those technologies radically change and simply the way I intend on fulfilling those dreams. The days I hate them, though, are violently passionate days, that are steadily increasing in number, where the bloat, the unwaivering fetish for maintaining perfect backwards compatibility, even with old buggy apps - I can't stand those days.
What I wouldn't give for an NT kernel with a newer, much smaller, well-designed API layer with WinFX strapped on top and Win32 virtualized off to the side. Security built in from the bottom up. Well documented, open standards for formats and protocols integrated throughout a desktop shell seperated from the core system. A standards compliant browser that's updated frequently, even in the years there isn't competition. Linux couldn't beat that - they don't have the organization, and for every passionate member of their community, there'd be an equally firey defender of the Redmond banner - actually, that's a bad analogy, because the two camps wouldn't be nearly as inspired to hate each other as they do now.
But the Raymond Chens in Redmond always win out. I don't know how long an MSDN Mag person can live in that environment before they just get jaded and wonder why Microsoft hasn't delivered a single improvement to the consumer experience since 2001. Why Microsoft has missed every wave since the introduction of Windows 95/98. Why nearly every Apple product is capable of inspiring loyalty in a way that no single Microsoft application has done, ever. And you wonder how its possible you miss every boat, surely you'd have caught one by accident by now.
I don't think Microsoft wants to ride that boat anymore. They're insanely profitable being old dependable (insert MS reliability joke here) and honestly, there is no competition for Microsoft products in the office. But Microsoft is going to have to work damned hard if they want to beat Apple in the home, and honestly, I don't think they're up to it anymore.
My favorite part about that search is that if you click on the "Recording Industry Association of America" response, the URL is shows as their website is "http://boycott-riaa.com"
Microsoft makes a killing selling Office for Macs, and no one is trying to intrude on that market. They'd lose a ton of money if they dropped Office for Macs, and they'd risk attracting back the attention of the Fed.
Microsoft has indicated that the entire macro system for future Office versions is being reworked to run on the .NET framework so that it can have a consistent security model with the rest of the OS - I can't see how they would be capable of continuing to sell Microsoft Office for OSX without releasing an official build of at least a portion of the CLR for Apple.
I understand that Enterprise customers prefer large updates on a long timetable, but consumers tend to want new features now - I don't want to wait three years for a feature that Gnome, KDE or Apple has to show up in Windows. How do you plan on preventing the Windows brand from becoming "stale" when viewed in relation to a community with a much more rapid and dynamic release schedule?
Personally I just want to know why he wasn't using a Microsoft TabletPC with OneNote. I thought the whole idea of that was so that people wouldn't have to do paper doodles anymore.
After a couple minutes, they got into the technical part and after Bill had spent two or three minutes looking over stack trace information he abruptly starts screaming at the team about how the memory footprint was too large, and then stopped, thought a minute, and accounting for a dependant project off the top of his head, spit out what he thought was the appropriate memory size for the stack. Everyone in the room stared at him slack-jawed - he quoted a number that was too small by half. No one outside the marketing department would make up a number like that.
But they had an explicit order from BillG to rewrite the stack to that size, so they went back to the drawing board and, after bringing in some more BSD hackers, realized that not only was his number achieveable, but he'd hit the number they could theoretically reach given the dependencies with other portions of the system right on the head. Although that section of NT has been revisitted in every version since NT4.0, no one has been able to improve on the memory footprint of that section of the kernel.
That's not neccesarily the sign of a genius - I know people who can look at a database and give the same sort of summary judgements. But when a man can make realizations like that within 10 minutes of having learned about a technology, at a bare minimum you have to give him credit for being a geek.
And actually, everyone I've ever met hates SUVs until they drive one.
Not really - If you're distinct enough to recognize, you can be photographed by anyone, but those photos can't be distributed for profit without your consent for the most part. For instance, no one can snap a picture of you and use that in an ad or commercial without your consent, but a journalist can publish photos of you in a newspaper. I'm not sure about how the law works around it, but I know that it can get pretty complicated if you sell digital photos because you need stacks of waiver forms.
Those 200,000 sold out almost instantly (do you remember the problems around Thanksgiving trying to find a copy?), and the publisher Vivendi printed the excess more and sold them. Although its Blizzard's product, keep in mind that the publishers really drive the sales of a product. Blizzard asked Vivendi repeatedly to stop printing new copies until they had time to scale to little success until the performance hiccups finally transformed into complete crashes across most of the servers. At that point, Vivendi realized that it was smarter to wait out a couple months, and they FINALLY stopped printing copies after going over their original volume a couple hundred percent.
Blizzard isn't exempt from responsibility entirely, but the majority of the blame really falls on the publisher. To their credit, Blizzard has offered substantial quantities of comp time to most of the players, which bites into their profits, not Vivendis.
If the article is correct, the only thing that distinguishes this dbms from more traditional is that it doesn't serialize its writes to the disk. If that's true, I don't know what the selling point is. Both MS SQL Server and Oracle have the capacity to run a database in commitless mode, in which changes aren't recorded to the disk (they can optionally be serialized on a timed interval). The military applications they talk about being difficult with traditional dbms' are already largely implemented today - most the examples Forbes offered are perfect candidates for read-only databases, which are screaming fast. What makes them different?
We may not like everything he did, but I agree - lets give the man some credit for leading the only part of government to not completely screw emerging technologies.