The masses - for whom the geek always shows some measure of contempt - have always chosen to communicate with both words and pictures as soon as the technology becomes available.
In 1908 the US Post Office delivered 678 million picture postcards. The population of the US in 1908 was 89 million. A Brief History of Postcards
They could put a satellite dish on their roof, but it's a 300-year-old house and they feel a dish would be as prohibitively ugly as running dedicated lines would be prohibitively expensive
and stop buying oem systems and build your own or do a clean install with out all the oem crap / bloat.
That won't solve the problem when some obscure motherboard driver or hardware failure sends your system into a tail spin.
I'll take the odds that the most difficult problems to diagnose are with the custom builds. The video card that has worked loose from its slot. The driver that hasn't been updated since August 2001.
I wouldn't call it a success, either. I'd wager that figure is 90%+ copies that came with new PCs. The large majority of which probably end up in a corporate setting where it was re-imaged with XP Pro
I might just take that bet.
The OEM system install has been the norm in the home and SOHO markets for thirty years. The bare bones PC is for the enthusiast or the IT pro.
I am not convinced that consumer sales of Vista can be so easily ignored.
These web-based stats show Vista with 15% market share. There is simply no good reason to suppose that a system running any other OS would claim to be running Vista.
Changing the user agent is a Geek thing.
I strongly suspect that any general-interest website [like CNN] would show pretty much the same numbers.
they need to cast Bruce Campbell as the player and camp up the whole thing like the Evil Dead series.
There is a place for comic relief - but sci-fi, fantasy, and horror almost always works best when played straight:
Very likely the world's first singing-cowboy science-fiction adventure, this 12-episode chapterplay features Gene Autry in his first starring role -- as "Gene Autry," the proprietor of Radio Ranch.
It is said that Wallace MacDonald...came up with the concept while under the influence of nitrous oxide at his dentist's office. That seems quite possible, given the screenplay's furious imaginings, which include an interesting kind of television that requires no cameras (but has an inconvenient, floor-level circular screen) and and "radium bombs" posed to destroy the entire planet. What gives "Phantom Empire" its enduring charm is the refusal of the filmmakers to play any of its outrageousness for laughs. As extravagant as the action becomes, the picture never loses its sense of complete conviction.
Long a victim of third-rate, public-domain releases on home video, "Phantom Empire" has been nicely restored by VCI Entertainment for a new two-disc edition. New DVDs: 'The Phantom Empire' [Mascot 1935]
What is the one and only thing that has ever helped companies survive a depression?
Services.
NBC was the dominant radio network in the thirties, so big that it had two AM and one shortwave feed. You might not be able to afford a concert ticket, but big band jazz and the NBC Symphony Orchestra broadcasts were free.
The movie studios had a rough time of it until they hit on the formulas that would draw audiences to a cheap - air-conditioned - respite from the stresses of home and work.
I thinks it's interesting to speculate whether fixed-wing aircraft would be the dominant air transport technology that it is today had the Hindenburg not gone down
Your public library may have a copy of Airship Wreck by Len Deighton and Arnold Schwartzman, the book, quite simply, a photo album of every documented airship crash. [Holt, paperback, 1978]
Consider it the short cure for any sentimental attachment to the dirigible.
The structural integrity of the rigid airship was always a question. It had a very poor record of survival in rough weather.
The materials technology could be in many ways astonishingly primitive. The gas bags, for example, were, quite literally, hand sewn together from slaughterhouse wastes.
The dirigible - like the SST - made economic sense only briefly and only over very long runs.
The South Atlantic was a benign and profitable environment for the Hindenburg. There it could shave something like a month off the ocean voyage to Brazil.
So long as they don't harp on the BS philosophy. I mean, objectivism is complete self-serving crap to begin with, designed to make selfishness and greed look like virtues, and the game even gets that wrong...
Well of course the game gets it "wrong." If this crackpot Utopia had actually worked there is no story.
Translation: I'm for freedom of speech, so long as it is speech I agree with.
Apparently you are not the target audience for freenet. Or the 1st amendment, for that matter.
Freedom of speech does not mean - nor has it ever meant - that I have to open my home to provide services for the pornographer.
I can support the Chinese dissident through other channels and other means and still give the boot to Freetnet - without apologizing to you or anyone for the choices I have made.
The 1st Amendment limited the state's power to regulate speech.
But it did no more than that.
The amendment's roots lie in the desire for unconstrained political debate among citizens. It did not repeal the law of libel and slander. It did not close the door to prosecution of criminal communication.
A crowd that usually embraces and welcomes new technology is cutting this to ribbons.
The flying car - or roadable aircraft - whatever you chose to call it - isn't new tech. It is old tech. You would have seen one in model form at GM's Futurama in 1939.
It sounds crazy to say this, but the XP-based version of the Eee PC 900 (the new version with the 8.9" screen) will actually be considerably cheaper than the Linux-based version. And -- get this -- only the XP-based machine will be sold at mass-market retailers, while the Linux-based model will be consigned to computer stores.
I've never understood why this continues to surprise the Geek.
Walmart has been toying with OEM Linux for years. In the end, it always falls back to the security and simplicity of selling the mass market Windows PC.
For every Linux machine you sell, you can expect to sell 100 Windows systems. No need to build and maintain a dual inventory and support structure.
Not to mention that you can expect to see huge aftermarket sales and profits.
Grand Theft Auto.
MS Office - which alone rakes in 67 cents of new dollar spent on PC software - the multifunction Windows printer, the digital camera and camcorder with the Windows driver...
Microsoft was in fact penalizing, or at least threatening to penalize PC manufacturers who wanted to ship alternative operating systems by charging them much more for DOS and Windows licenses than those manufacturers who basically guaranteed the only operating system that would be shipped out on their PCs would be from Microsoft.
The question remains, what alternative operating system?
CP/M 86 was the high priced spread.
The competitively priced DR-DOS doesn't ship until 1988.
In 1991 DR-DOS and WordPerfect fall to Novell - killing two birds with one stone.
Windows 3 was running at full throttle before OS/2 pulled out of the station. IBM still thinking in terms of the retail box.
While the OEMs and retailers who paid the Microsoft "tax" were crying all the way to the bank. The economies of scale in manufacturing, sales, service and support made it worth every penny.
There is no real doubt that the console is selling well. Is this a serious problem for the Wii? For the Xbox and the Playstation, they targeted hardcore gamers.
It can become a problem for Nintendo.
The XBox and PS3 have larger ambitions than console gaming.
That is why the PS3 has the integrated Blu Ray drive and the XBox a mature online component.
Why the Windows PC, the XBox 360 and products like Windows Home Server are being intimately woven together.
SONY and Microsoft expect to be there when the home market goes "HD-Digital."
Now and forever. Sound and video alike.
Nintendo thought it could put off the day of reckoning a little longer.
But casual gaming - social gaming - is best defined as a style of play or a game genre. It doesn't mean that the game or the gamer will always demand less of the hardware.
It doesn't mean that the next "Sonic The Hedgehog" won't launch on the XBox or PS3.
After fending off months of threats by Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc.'s directors still will have to fight for their jobs as the company's own irate shareholders plot a mutiny.
Eric Jackson, president of Ironfire Capital, is trying to recruit an alternate slate of directors to present at Yahoo's annual meeting on July 3."We are hoping to turn that (meeting) into 'Independence Day' for Yahoo's shareholders."
Yahoo's board wanted $37 per share -- a price that the company's stock hasn't reached in more than two years.
"It's hard to believe the board could let this happen," Jackson said. "I think they completely misconstrued the situation and thought, 'Microsoft is rich, so let's soak them.' They were bluffing all the way and got caught."
The possibility of revived talks helped lift Yahoo shares by $1.35, or 5.5 percent, to finish Tuesday at $25.72. That left Yahoo's market value more than $10 billion below Ballmer's last offer.
Although he only owns 96 Yahoo shares, a sliver of the roughly 1.4 billion outstanding, Jackson has experience rallying stockholders around a common cause.
Jackson spent several months leading up to last year's annual meeting organizing an online protest against Yahoo's Terry Semel, the CEO at the time. The crusade culminated at the annual meeting, where Jackson confronted Semel and asked the CEO if he still had enough "fire in his belly" to do his job. Semel resigned six days later and was replaced by Yang.
Jackson's latest revolt may find two powerful allies in Yahoo's two largest shareholders, Capital Research Global Investors and Legg Mason, whose portfolio managers have both publicly expressed their disappointment with the Yahoo board's demand for $37 per share.
Nintendo slipped in. The Wii already has more marketshare than the Xbox and is profitable.
It hasn't been all peaches and cream for the Wii.
Wii, though less technologically advanced than Microsoft's Xbox 360 or Sony's PlayStation 3, continues to outsell those machines and is now in more than 20 million homes.
So why are retailers having so much trouble selling Wii games? Take Super Smash Bros. Brawl. It was one the most hotly anticipated video games of the year; it sold more than 1.4 million copies during the first week of its release.
But sales dropped more than 90 percent over the first four weeks. A number of games that garnered critical acclaim in recent months, notably the cartoonish action-adventure game Zack & Wiki and the off-kilter action-adventure No More Heroes, have yielded disappointing sales.
Over the first three months of the year, only three other Wii titles broke the list of top 10 best-selling games.
Younger children, women and older consumers, who historically have not been sought by the video-game industry, have discovered video games through the Wii -- just not that many of them.
These new gamers are content with the games they have, often going no further than the Wii Sports game that comes with the machine. They don't buy new games with the fervor of a traditional gamer who is constantly seeking new stimulation.
The average Wii owner buys only 3.7 games a year, compared with 4.7 for Xbox 360 owners and 4.6 for PlayStation 3 owners.
"When you make a game like Zack & Wiki or Boogie, which turns the hard core off and doesn't reach the masses, then you're in trouble."
Wii Fit, an exercise game due next month, is expected to receive more marketing dollars than any game in Nintendo's history -- and the money will not be spent wooing young men. "Wii Fit is just not aimed at hard-core gamers. It's definitely aimed at the Oprah crowd. I bet they sell a million units a week for every pound that Oprah says she lost on it."
Maybe I'm missing the point, but this article seems to suggest that if nobody runs Windows anymore, Microsoft will still be doing just fine
You are missing the point - because revenues from the Windows client {measured in the billions of dollars] were disappointing only when compared to last year.
Windows market share remains spectacularly healthy:
From David Kirkpatrick, senior editor, Fortune Magazine:
Oh how frustrating when the mighty haven't fallen.
Vista is not wowing critics. Nevertheless, 140 million PCs have sold with paid copies installed. Granted, some of those buyers may in fact be clamoring to keep using XP...But Microsoft's problems are merely normal challenges for a still-growing behemoth.
At the Motley Fool, Rick Aristotle Munarriz titled his recent article "I Spit on Vista's Grave." The best part was his lead paragraph, in which he asked "What do the future of computing, a hurricane-ravaged home, and Fred Flintstone's car have in common?" The answer, of course: no Windows. He suggests that Windows is fundamentally in trouble.
Give me a break.
Yes, Wall Street expected the company division that sells Windows to have higher revenue than it did last quarter. Results in the group were distorted by unusually high revenues and profits a year earlier...And sales may have subsequently slowed.
But those dollars flowed in because the product sold a lot, not a little, albeit much later and with fewer features than originally planned. Plus, the Vista disappointments are relatively minor in the larger scheme of things. The company projects a level of operating income for the current quarter which would mean that by the end of the June 30 fiscal year the total would be a minimum of $22.6 billion. That's not only a lot of moolah by any standard, but would represent a 22.1% increase over the previous fiscal year. Your list of $60 billion companies with profit growth that healthy is likely to be rather short.
Let's just say for a minute that you could somehow convince yourself that the Windows business, which in the "disappointing" last quarter threw off $4 billion in operating profit, is at risk of drying up entirely. It's salutary to remember that this group only represents about 27% of company revenue. Microsoft has done a phenomenal job diversifying into a wide range of software businesses.
Says Gates: "Exchange is out there cleaning up, SharePoint is out there cleaning up, doing super, super well." He's referring to the company's messaging software product line as well as SharePoint, an unheralded and little-appreciated dark horse in the company's arsenal.
SharePoint has evolved far from its roots as a mere corporate collaboration tool. Now it encompasses a full range of functions a company of any size might need for creating and maintaining applications on the Web. That means everything from a big-time corporate Web portal to your workgroup's document-sharing site. SharePoint this year will surpass $1 billion in revenues, getting to that scale faster than any product in Microsoft's history. But don't forget - according to the blogosphere, Ballmer is screwing up.
Speculation on whether or not Microsoft will succeed in buying Yahoo, and then integrating it, is rampant. It's a gutsy move and by far the company's largest attempted acquisition ever. Such deals are fraught with peril.
Those who sneer at Ballmer's supposed ineptitude or, as Wired puts it, "mismanagement," are simply engaging in speculation and armchair quarterbacking. They also show a poor understanding of internal dynamics at Microsoft.
The real strategist behind the Yahoo assault is Kevin Johnson, who heads the group responsible for Online Services (and who also oversees Windows). Ballmer was sufficiently confident that "KJ," as he's known, could handle this project that two weeks ago he took a trip to the Amazon which put him completely out of touch with the office for days.
Ballmer, of course, remains the chief corporate strategist and the ultimate decision-maker. But the grown-up company he now heads, soon even to be sans Bill Gates, is one far more decentralized and well-managed than any version that has come before.
It is simply false to say Microsoft is in real trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
The price of gas in 1910 was seven cents a gallon.
The operating cost of your Ford car was one cent a mile - cheaper than the street car or commuter rail.
Rockefeller built his empire on the "standard" product - predictable and safe in ordinary use and sold at retail in honest measures.
the custom builder doesn't have to be a pro. he can be a geek who builds his systems from whatever parts he can buy, beg, or scavenge.
Why?
Because the geek says so?
The masses - for whom the geek always shows some measure of contempt - have always chosen to communicate with both words and pictures as soon as the technology becomes available.
In 1908 the US Post Office delivered 678 million picture postcards. The population of the US in 1908 was 89 million. A Brief History of Postcards
The WildBlue dish is 28x26 inches.
Mounting this jet black dish inconspicuously would not seem to present any particular problem.
That won't solve the problem when some obscure motherboard driver or hardware failure sends your system into a tail spin.
I'll take the odds that the most difficult problems to diagnose are with the custom builds. The video card that has worked loose from its slot. The driver that hasn't been updated since August 2001.
Well of course it is.
There is no standard Windows system.
HP's custom OEM image installed an Intel system file on AMD PCs. Not exactly recommended practice.
I might just take that bet.
The OEM system install has been the norm in the home and SOHO markets for thirty years. The bare bones PC is for the enthusiast or the IT pro.
I am not convinced that consumer sales of Vista can be so easily ignored.
Operating System Market Share {April 2008]
These web-based stats show Vista with 15% market share. There is simply no good reason to suppose that a system running any other OS would claim to be running Vista.
Changing the user agent is a Geek thing.
I strongly suspect that any general-interest website [like CNN] would show pretty much the same numbers.
There is a place for comic relief - but sci-fi, fantasy, and horror almost always works best when played straight:
Very likely the world's first singing-cowboy science-fiction adventure, this 12-episode chapterplay features Gene Autry in his first starring role -- as "Gene Autry," the proprietor of Radio Ranch.
It is said that Wallace MacDonald...came up with the concept while under the influence of nitrous oxide at his dentist's office. That seems quite possible, given the screenplay's furious imaginings, which include an interesting kind of television that requires no cameras (but has an inconvenient, floor-level circular screen) and and "radium bombs" posed to destroy the entire planet.
What gives "Phantom Empire" its enduring charm is the refusal of the filmmakers to play any of its outrageousness for laughs. As extravagant as the action becomes, the picture never loses its sense of complete conviction.
Long a victim of third-rate, public-domain releases on home video, "Phantom Empire" has been nicely restored by VCI Entertainment for a new two-disc edition. New DVDs: 'The Phantom Empire' [Mascot 1935]
Services.
NBC was the dominant radio network in the thirties, so big that it had two AM and one shortwave feed. You might not be able to afford a concert ticket, but big band jazz and the NBC Symphony Orchestra broadcasts were free.
The movie studios had a rough time of it until they hit on the formulas that would draw audiences to a cheap - air-conditioned - respite from the stresses of home and work.
Your public library may have a copy of Airship Wreck by Len Deighton and Arnold Schwartzman, the book, quite simply, a photo album of every documented airship crash. [Holt, paperback, 1978]
Consider it the short cure for any sentimental attachment to the dirigible.
The structural integrity of the rigid airship was always a question. It had a very poor record of survival in rough weather.
The materials technology could be in many ways astonishingly primitive. The gas bags, for example, were, quite literally, hand sewn together from slaughterhouse wastes.
The dirigible - like the SST - made economic sense only briefly and only over very long runs.
The South Atlantic was a benign and profitable environment for the Hindenburg. There it could shave something like a month off the ocean voyage to Brazil.
Well of course the game gets it "wrong." If this crackpot Utopia had actually worked there is no story.
Explain to me why you need Freenet to download a Linux ISO.
I can chose not to be a mail drop for the pornographer. That is also a democratic decision.
Apparently you are not the target audience for freenet. Or the 1st amendment, for that matter.
Freedom of speech does not mean - nor has it ever meant - that I have to open my home to provide services for the pornographer.
I can support the Chinese dissident through other channels and other means and still give the boot to Freetnet - without apologizing to you or anyone for the choices I have made.
The 1st Amendment limited the state's power to regulate speech.
But it did no more than that.
The amendment's roots lie in the desire for unconstrained political debate among citizens. It did not repeal the law of libel and slander. It did not close the door to prosecution of criminal communication.
The flying car - or roadable aircraft - whatever you chose to call it - isn't new tech. It is old tech. You would have seen one in model form at GM's Futurama in 1939.
From a retailer's point of view --
Which product do you think is the safer bet and the better deal when you are buying in lots of 10,000?
100,000? 1,000,000?
Which is likely to generate significant aftermarket sakes?
Which is more likely to gather dust on the shelves, more likely to become a - major - headache to keep in inventory, to service and support?
The product with 0.67% of the market or the product with 93% of the market?
I've never understood why this continues to surprise the Geek.
Walmart has been toying with OEM Linux for years. In the end, it always falls back to the security and simplicity of selling the mass market Windows PC.
For every Linux machine you sell, you can expect to sell 100 Windows systems. No need to build and maintain a dual inventory and support structure.
Not to mention that you can expect to see huge aftermarket sales and profits.
Grand Theft Auto.
MS Office - which alone rakes in 67 cents of new dollar spent on PC software - the multifunction Windows printer, the digital camera and camcorder with the Windows driver...
Decisions in the workplace aren't being made by those who spell Microsoft with a dollar sign.
The geek is going to fret and fume. But - realistically - this is something that will pass unnoticed to the vast majority of players.
The question remains, what alternative operating system?
CP/M 86 was the high priced spread.
The competitively priced DR-DOS doesn't ship until 1988.
In 1991 DR-DOS and WordPerfect fall to Novell - killing two birds with one stone.
Windows 3 was running at full throttle before OS/2 pulled out of the station. IBM still thinking in terms of the retail box.
While the OEMs and retailers who paid the Microsoft "tax" were crying all the way to the bank. The economies of scale in manufacturing, sales, service and support made it worth every penny.
It can become a problem for Nintendo.
The XBox and PS3 have larger ambitions than console gaming.
That is why the PS3 has the integrated Blu Ray drive and the XBox a mature online component.
Why the Windows PC, the XBox 360 and products like Windows Home Server are being intimately woven together.
SONY and Microsoft expect to be there when the home market goes "HD-Digital."
Now and forever. Sound and video alike.
Nintendo thought it could put off the day of reckoning a little longer.
But casual gaming - social gaming - is best defined as a style of play or a game genre. It doesn't mean that the game or the gamer will always demand less of the hardware.
It doesn't mean that the next "Sonic The Hedgehog" won't launch on the XBox or PS3.
Eric Jackson, president of Ironfire Capital, is trying to recruit an alternate slate of directors to present at Yahoo's annual meeting on July 3."We are hoping to turn that (meeting) into 'Independence Day' for Yahoo's shareholders."
Yahoo's board wanted $37 per share -- a price that the company's stock hasn't reached in more than two years.
"It's hard to believe the board could let this happen," Jackson said. "I think they completely misconstrued the situation and thought, 'Microsoft is rich, so let's soak them.' They were bluffing all the way and got caught."
The possibility of revived talks helped lift Yahoo shares by $1.35, or 5.5 percent, to finish Tuesday at $25.72. That left Yahoo's market value more than $10 billion below Ballmer's last offer.
Although he only owns 96 Yahoo shares, a sliver of the roughly 1.4 billion outstanding, Jackson has experience rallying stockholders around a common cause.
Jackson spent several months leading up to last year's annual meeting organizing an online protest against Yahoo's Terry Semel, the CEO at the time. The crusade culminated at the annual meeting, where Jackson confronted Semel and asked the CEO if he still had enough "fire in his belly" to do his job. Semel resigned six days later and was replaced by Yang. Jackson's latest revolt may find two powerful allies in Yahoo's two largest shareholders, Capital Research Global Investors and Legg Mason, whose portfolio managers have both publicly expressed their disappointment with the Yahoo board's demand for $37 per share.
Already, Yahoo stockholders with about 3 million shares have pledged to support Jackson's attempt to replace the board. Yahoo board may face shareholder mutiny at annual meeting
It hasn't been all peaches and cream for the Wii.
Wii, though less technologically advanced than Microsoft's Xbox 360 or Sony's PlayStation 3, continues to outsell those machines and is now in more than 20 million homes.
So why are retailers having so much trouble selling Wii games?
Take Super Smash Bros. Brawl. It was one the most hotly anticipated video games of the year; it sold more than 1.4 million copies during the first week of its release.
But sales dropped more than 90 percent over the first four weeks.
A number of games that garnered critical acclaim in recent months, notably the cartoonish action-adventure game Zack & Wiki and the off-kilter action-adventure No More Heroes, have yielded disappointing sales.
Over the first three months of the year, only three other Wii titles broke the list of top 10 best-selling games.
Younger children, women and older consumers, who historically have not been sought by the video-game industry, have discovered video games through the Wii -- just not that many of them.
These new gamers are content with the games they have, often going no further than the Wii Sports game that comes with the machine. They don't buy new games with the fervor of a traditional gamer who is constantly seeking new stimulation.
The average Wii owner buys only 3.7 games a year, compared with 4.7 for Xbox 360 owners and 4.6 for PlayStation 3 owners.
"When you make a game like Zack & Wiki or Boogie, which turns the hard core off and doesn't reach the masses, then you're in trouble."
Wii Fit, an exercise game due next month, is expected to receive more marketing dollars than any game in Nintendo's history -- and the money will not be spent wooing young men. "Wii Fit is just not aimed at hard-core gamers. It's definitely aimed at the Oprah crowd. I bet they sell a million units a week for every pound that Oprah says she lost on it."
New Wii Games Find a Big (but Stingy) Audience [April 21, 2008]
You are missing the point - because revenues from the Windows client {measured in the billions of dollars] were disappointing only when compared to last year.
Windows market share remains spectacularly healthy:
Top Operating System Share Trend, Operating System Market Share
Oh how frustrating when the mighty haven't fallen.
Vista is not wowing critics. Nevertheless, 140 million PCs have sold with paid copies installed. Granted, some of those buyers may in fact be clamoring to keep using XP...But Microsoft's problems are merely normal challenges for a still-growing behemoth.
At the Motley Fool, Rick Aristotle Munarriz titled his recent article "I Spit on Vista's Grave." The best part was his lead paragraph, in which he asked "What do the future of computing, a hurricane-ravaged home, and Fred Flintstone's car have in common?" The answer, of course: no Windows. He suggests that Windows is fundamentally in trouble.
Give me a break.
Yes, Wall Street expected the company division that sells Windows to have higher revenue than it did last quarter. Results in the group were distorted by unusually high revenues and profits a year earlier...And sales may have subsequently slowed.
But those dollars flowed in because the product sold a lot, not a little, albeit much later and with fewer features than originally planned. Plus, the Vista disappointments are relatively minor in the larger scheme of things. The company projects a level of operating income for the current quarter which would mean that by the end of the June 30 fiscal year the total would be a minimum of $22.6 billion. That's not only a lot of moolah by any standard, but would represent a 22.1% increase over the previous fiscal year. Your list of $60 billion companies with profit growth that healthy is likely to be rather short.
Let's just say for a minute that you could somehow convince yourself that the Windows business, which in the "disappointing" last quarter threw off $4 billion in operating profit, is at risk of drying up entirely. It's salutary to remember that this group only represents about 27% of company revenue. Microsoft has done a phenomenal job diversifying into a wide range of software businesses.
Says Gates: "Exchange is out there cleaning up, SharePoint is out there cleaning up, doing super, super well." He's referring to the company's messaging software product line as well as SharePoint, an unheralded and little-appreciated dark horse in the company's arsenal.
SharePoint has evolved far from its roots as a mere corporate collaboration tool. Now it encompasses a full range of functions a company of any size might need for creating and maintaining applications on the Web. That means everything from a big-time corporate Web portal to your workgroup's document-sharing site. SharePoint this year will surpass $1 billion in revenues, getting to that scale faster than any product in Microsoft's history. But don't forget - according to the blogosphere, Ballmer is screwing up.
Speculation on whether or not Microsoft will succeed in buying Yahoo, and then integrating it, is rampant. It's a gutsy move and by far the company's largest attempted acquisition ever. Such deals are fraught with peril.
Those who sneer at Ballmer's supposed ineptitude or, as Wired puts it, "mismanagement," are simply engaging in speculation and armchair quarterbacking. They also show a poor understanding of internal dynamics at Microsoft. The real strategist behind the Yahoo assault is Kevin Johnson, who heads the group responsible for Online Services (and who also oversees Windows). Ballmer was sufficiently confident that "KJ," as he's known, could handle this project that two weeks ago he took a trip to the Amazon which put him completely out of touch with the office for days.
Ballmer, of course, remains the chief corporate strategist and the ultimate decision-maker. But the grown-up company he now heads, soon even to be sans Bill Gates, is one far more decentralized and well-managed than any version that has come before.
It is simply false to say Microsoft is in real trouble.
Microsoft: Decidedly not R.I.P. [May 2, 2008]