How low does one's market penetration have to be before one is no longer considered a credible commercial competitor? I think Opera's definitely on the wrong side of that number, but could be convinced otherwise.
And you think the lack of a commercial competitor to IE is meaningless? Who's denying the obvious?
If EITHER a commercial OS competitor OR a browser competitor which could feasibly provide an app-deployment platform as Netscape might have done were around today, Microsoft would not have let things get as bad as they have. That's my only contention. I think it's you who's denying the obvious here, my friend.
The "new features" proposed are, in my opinion, somewhat similar to the list of "new features" Netscape came up with when they were briefly cast as the front-end to AOL.
Mostly new, somewhat features, but definitely having more to do with the other needs of the business than the end-user.
MS is attacking IE holes now for the reason that corporate customers are finally getting nervous enough to _make_ them. It has _nothing_ to do with browser competition and _everything_ to do with companies telling MS they'll think harder about linux.
So, yes, in my previous reply I overstated a bit - there is _some_ competition from FOSS, but only in the sense that there's a failsafe if MS screws up incredibly badly. This is not normal market signals, though; it wouldn't take this near-disasterous state of affairs to get MS to pay attention if Netscape were actually a going concern.
The mass market must buy an OS, and that OS must be Windows. To dispute this is to cast your lot with the flat-Earthers.
Someday down the road, might FOSS be attractive enough to pull away a few more percentage points of the pie? Sure. But don't think MS cares at all about FOSS on the desktop now - it's not even a remote threat on their radar.
Thanks to their monopolistic actions in destroying their for-profit competitors, there is now nobody capable of threatening Microsoft from the direction of browsers. (They only worried about Netscape for the potential of creating an alternative app-deployment platform; Mozilla is not a similar-scale threat).
So why on earth should Microsoft fix any of these problems?
People have to buy Windows. They get IE for free. If they go out and download Mozilla, why should Microsoft care?
One would think at this point that the 85% of slashdotters who cling to their childish cyberlibertarian views would at least acknowledge that this whole IE debacle would be less damaging if there were market incentives to which Microsoft might be more likely to respond.
Actually, it's arguable whether treating options as an expense hurts the company's real finances. Some of us, perhaps including the parent poster, would rather work at companies whose finances are transparent and not subject to short-term executive-induced manipulation.
Dude, if you missed the "at the time" necessary implication when comparing OS/2 to Windows, I can't do a lot for you.
At that point in time, neither OS/2 nor Windows had the concept of users; at least, in the basic client. Both had some degree of it in their somewhat-partially-separated LAN client add-ons.
The comparison I made was between the security issues of that time - which were largely linked to bad apps crashing the O/S.
No, but you disagreed with the parent - MS wrote parts of OS/2 1.x, IBM wrote parts. MS even arguably wrote a few chunks of OS/2 2.x. But anybody who thinks it could be paraphrased as "IBM paid MS to write an operating system" is a complete moron. IBM wrote a hell of a lot more of it than did MS.
I worked on OS/2 at the time, son. Microsoft was an impediment to security and stability - and none of the WNT code (except for a few chunks here and there) came from OS/2; their code was inspired by VMS if anything.
The "lesson" most CEOs learn from an unsuccessful software project which failed due to one or more of the reasons you cite is:
"software people are worthless".
except he'd insert "shit" for "worthless". In this country (USA), the people responsible for the failures of these types of projects are never held accountable in a way that makes it possible to the next executive to learn from their mistakes.
Some days working in this industry feels like the story of Sisyphus
True, what I meant was that java catches possible dereferences of uninitialized variables (which, in java's case, ends up catching a lot of null-pointer exceptions in local scope, but NOT, ironically, the case where you explicitly set x=null).
Good idea, bad example. I can think of a few ways just in ten seconds why a compiler could never match numbers of mallocs/frees successfully.
Java does something like this to prevent an app from dereferencing a null pointer - but it only works in local scope (no way to tell if an object passed in via a paramter is null at compile-time).
If Microsoft hadn't killed OS competiton, IBM _would_ be doing this today. OS/2 had a far more secure infrastructure than did Windows (at the time, of course, the main concern was the ability of a bad app to screw with the system; but one could easily imagine today's OS/2 doing a better job against things like internet exploits).
There's a reason no nation on Earth has developed anything close to a freewheeling utility market - it's simply not feasible given the physical world in which we live. Power lines, pollution from power plants, and the basic requirements of an industrialized economy for a baseline of reliable power trump Randian high-school philosophy any day of the week.
More likely, the executives stand to make (or lose) a ton of money, because they have a disproportionate share of the option pie. (Both of my last two employers have tried these shenanigans).
The idea that they can be trusted to be speaking as the impartial voice of the 'good of the company' seems to be to be the critical flaw in the anti-expense-options argument.
As a former driver developer, I can tell you that 85% of "driver problems" are hardware problems that the driver failed to work around (sometimes because it was impossible to do so without compromising other goals of the product).
I worked on the Savage 2000 driver for S3, for instance, i.e., the one that everybody thinks was broken because T&L didn't work. Of course, the hardware came back so incredibly shitty that it was actually _slower_ to use its pipeline than the one me and another guy wrote in software (originally as an exercise in load-balancing in high-number-of-lights conditions and to handle a couple of D3D7 features the chip didn't support).
The driver writers at graphics chip companies know their stuff. They're good. Fundamentally, with immature hardware and the desire for speed at all costs, I think they're doing the best they can at this point.
It was despite IBM's best efforts at full price. Had IBM not been shackled by the antitrust case, one could theorize that IBM might have sold MCA PC's at a huge loss to drive everybody else out of the market, and preserve more of the mainframe monopoly.
The idea with IBM was that they were unable to squash competitors in new markets (by tying their product to mainframes and then selling them incredibly cheap as loss-leaders). The article(s) point out that IBM was very careful never to engage in this tactic after the Feds started calling. They did do it before then, of course.
That's an incredibly apt analogy to what Microsoft did to Netscape, and tried to do to Real. Use the monopoly as a cash cow; tie your New Product to it; sell New Product at an incredible loss to drive out the possible future competition, and then relax.
The point is that at one time, Netscape + Java could have been a viable platform competitor to Windows (since Netscape+Java with improvements could have run well on any OS) - Microsoft saw this, and quickly destroyed Netscape's hopes of being a viable commercial entity. Netscape, of course, couldn't rely on another market's monopoly cash cow to sustain losses in the browser market.
It's fashionable among those with little exposure to history to claim that IBM's failure to continue its dominance into the PC era means that monopolies eventually fail on their own, but that's simply not the case. The PC market flourished precisely BECAUSE IBM wasn't out there selling PCs at $50 a piece that locked users into an all-IBM shop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM (search on "antitrust").
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-241565.html?legacy=c net
But the company, still fearful of the watchful eye of the Justice Department, took pains to avoid the appearance of a monopoly long after it relinquished its hold on the market.
People who worked for IBM in the '80s and early '90s said the company routinely fell victim to "pricing death strategy"--a reluctance to lower prices below cost, even on products that weren't selling--to avoid what the government would call predatory pricing.
The point is that MS's core area is not eroding; they, unlike IBM, have been able to protect it through monopolistic business practices, mainly because the antitrust threat from this government has never been as credible as it was to IBM.
And they had to catch up with web browsers back in the 90s. So what? You can pretty much catch up whenever you want when you have the advantage of an unregulated monopoly to fall back on.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm not sure what your ulterior motive in denying the obvious is, but you clearly have one."
you lost the right to complain about patronization.
HTH.
How low does one's market penetration have to be before one is no longer considered a credible commercial competitor? I think Opera's definitely on the wrong side of that number, but could be convinced otherwise.
And you think the lack of a commercial competitor to IE is meaningless? Who's denying the obvious?
If EITHER a commercial OS competitor OR a browser competitor which could feasibly provide an app-deployment platform as Netscape might have done were around today, Microsoft would not have let things get as bad as they have. That's my only contention. I think it's you who's denying the obvious here, my friend.
Mostly new, somewhat features, but definitely having more to do with the other needs of the business than the end-user.
So, yes, in my previous reply I overstated a bit - there is _some_ competition from FOSS, but only in the sense that there's a failsafe if MS screws up incredibly badly. This is not normal market signals, though; it wouldn't take this near-disasterous state of affairs to get MS to pay attention if Netscape were actually a going concern.
The mass market must buy an OS, and that OS must be Windows. To dispute this is to cast your lot with the flat-Earthers.
Someday down the road, might FOSS be attractive enough to pull away a few more percentage points of the pie? Sure. But don't think MS cares at all about FOSS on the desktop now - it's not even a remote threat on their radar.
Thanks to their monopolistic actions in destroying their for-profit competitors, there is now nobody capable of threatening Microsoft from the direction of browsers. (They only worried about Netscape for the potential of creating an alternative app-deployment platform; Mozilla is not a similar-scale threat).
So why on earth should Microsoft fix any of these problems?
People have to buy Windows. They get IE for free. If they go out and download Mozilla, why should Microsoft care?
One would think at this point that the 85% of slashdotters who cling to their childish cyberlibertarian views would at least acknowledge that this whole IE debacle would be less damaging if there were market incentives to which Microsoft might be more likely to respond.
Actually, it's arguable whether treating options as an expense hurts the company's real finances. Some of us, perhaps including the parent poster, would rather work at companies whose finances are transparent and not subject to short-term executive-induced manipulation.
At that point in time, neither OS/2 nor Windows had the concept of users; at least, in the basic client. Both had some degree of it in their somewhat-partially-separated LAN client add-ons.
The comparison I made was between the security issues of that time - which were largely linked to bad apps crashing the O/S.
No, but you disagreed with the parent - MS wrote parts of OS/2 1.x, IBM wrote parts. MS even arguably wrote a few chunks of OS/2 2.x. But anybody who thinks it could be paraphrased as "IBM paid MS to write an operating system" is a complete moron. IBM wrote a hell of a lot more of it than did MS.
I worked on OS/2 at the time, son. Microsoft was an impediment to security and stability - and none of the WNT code (except for a few chunks here and there) came from OS/2; their code was inspired by VMS if anything.
"software people are worthless".
except he'd insert "shit" for "worthless". In this country (USA), the people responsible for the failures of these types of projects are never held accountable in a way that makes it possible to the next executive to learn from their mistakes.
Some days working in this industry feels like the story of Sisyphus
True, what I meant was that java catches possible dereferences of uninitialized variables (which, in java's case, ends up catching a lot of null-pointer exceptions in local scope, but NOT, ironically, the case where you explicitly set x=null).
Java does something like this to prevent an app from dereferencing a null pointer - but it only works in local scope (no way to tell if an object passed in via a paramter is null at compile-time).
If Microsoft hadn't killed OS competiton, IBM _would_ be doing this today. OS/2 had a far more secure infrastructure than did Windows (at the time, of course, the main concern was the ability of a bad app to screw with the system; but one could easily imagine today's OS/2 doing a better job against things like internet exploits).
There's a reason no nation on Earth has developed anything close to a freewheeling utility market - it's simply not feasible given the physical world in which we live. Power lines, pollution from power plants, and the basic requirements of an industrialized economy for a baseline of reliable power trump Randian high-school philosophy any day of the week.
No, most people get MS Office with their computer _too_. Same argument applies there.
More likely, the executives stand to make (or lose) a ton of money, because they have a disproportionate share of the option pie. (Both of my last two employers have tried these shenanigans). The idea that they can be trusted to be speaking as the impartial voice of the 'good of the company' seems to be to be the critical flaw in the anti-expense-options argument.
I worked on the Savage 2000 driver for S3, for instance, i.e., the one that everybody thinks was broken because T&L didn't work. Of course, the hardware came back so incredibly shitty that it was actually _slower_ to use its pipeline than the one me and another guy wrote in software (originally as an exercise in load-balancing in high-number-of-lights conditions and to handle a couple of D3D7 features the chip didn't support).
The driver writers at graphics chip companies know their stuff. They're good. Fundamentally, with immature hardware and the desire for speed at all costs, I think they're doing the best they can at this point.
It was despite IBM's best efforts at full price. Had IBM not been shackled by the antitrust case, one could theorize that IBM might have sold MCA PC's at a huge loss to drive everybody else out of the market, and preserve more of the mainframe monopoly.
That's an incredibly apt analogy to what Microsoft did to Netscape, and tried to do to Real. Use the monopoly as a cash cow; tie your New Product to it; sell New Product at an incredible loss to drive out the possible future competition, and then relax.
The point is that at one time, Netscape + Java could have been a viable platform competitor to Windows (since Netscape+Java with improvements could have run well on any OS) - Microsoft saw this, and quickly destroyed Netscape's hopes of being a viable commercial entity. Netscape, of course, couldn't rely on another market's monopoly cash cow to sustain losses in the browser market.
It's fashionable among those with little exposure to history to claim that IBM's failure to continue its dominance into the PC era means that monopolies eventually fail on their own, but that's simply not the case. The PC market flourished precisely BECAUSE IBM wasn't out there selling PCs at $50 a piece that locked users into an all-IBM shop.
I just went to HP's site, and the first batch of PCs I looked at all came with Microsoft Office.
And they had to catch up with web browsers back in the 90s. So what? You can pretty much catch up whenever you want when you have the advantage of an unregulated monopoly to fall back on.