Sorry it was a failure. MS admitted it and canned it. End of discussion on this one.
MS made billions of dollars on Windows ME, a substantial portion of which was from retail. In what world is that a failure? Galling it "Canned" because they're upgrading versions is like saying Linux 2.0 was canned because they brought out 2.2.
MS has started giving away CE and that's why it's growing. For any other business this would be considered a failure. No return on investment. Only MS can afford to keep dumping this product on the market at below cost.
What if but what if they had invested money in applications, tools and servers that specifically supported CE and made more money on that than CE could have provided by being ubiquitous? Further, CE is given away in certain situations, but it more than covers its costs where it's not given away.
They won't get out of the market that's exactly my point. They were losing money at $300.00 per box and they are now losing more money at $200.00 per box. Don't give me that shit about production prices going down the price of production could not have possibly went down 33% in six months. They are dumping this on the market just like they do with most other failed products. They can afford to lose billions which is a luxury shared by no other company on the face of the planet.
Actually, that's not your point. According to yourself earlier in the thread:
Further, you have no idea into the internals of MS's game production. Games have been coming out at a much faster rate, perhaps they're seeing larger games sold than expected (thereby recouping the cost of reducing the price). And price of production absolutely could come down 33% in 8 months, that's just moore's law. Same price, 2x performance in 16-18 months. Do you know how much 8 GB hard drives are now? Or 733 Mhz Celerons? Or Geforce 3 chips? They're certainly not the bleeding edge any more.
Fastest growing is a neat marketing term. If I sold no products this year and then sold two next year I would be growing faster then anybody else. Please use real numbers indicating market penetration.
Happy to. Gartner tracked Windows Database revenue at $2.5 Billion last year, of which MS had 39.9% up from 35.3%. Overall database revenue, IBM was #1 (~33%), Oracle was #2 (~32%), SQL was #3 (~16%) fastest growing up from 14% (IBM gained 0.6% and Oracle lost 3%). Further, Unix database revenue is down y/y, while NT/2000 database revenue is up y/y, which means the share of the $8.8B database market will be more NT based than Unix based by 2004 (Gartner and Dataquest). That's what fastest growing means.
Also consider the fact that MS SQL server is being sold below cost. No other company could afford to sink that much development into a database server and sell it for that cheap (if they could have they would have). As for the market share of free databases is concerned nobody even attempts to measure them. Mysql may very well be use more then MS-SQL server but who is measuring that? BTW. Since interbase became open source I bet it's the "fastest growing" because it's market share probably doubled ot tripled (it was pretty low to start with after all).
This is the most outlandish comment of your entire response. MS SQL made more than $1B dollars last year. How could you possibly think that it's being sold for below cost? At $200k per employee, that'd be 5000 employees purely dedicated to SQL server, more than 1/4 of MS's total non-sales employees. That's amazing!
Further, IDC does track open source database share, and it's not good. Sorry to disappoint. Most recent IDC tracker says that the total share (based on installed base, not revenue) of free databases is IIS generates no revenue for MS yet MS continues to dedicate a team of developers to maintaining and re-writing it. Measure the ROI of that. Same as CE for any other company it would be a failure. So if IIS had new features in new versions of Windows and encouraged people to upgrade, that would not be any return on investment? What about if you had a new version of IIS that reduced support calls? That would be a return on investment as well. You're not making sense. A product doesn't have to be sold to give you a return on investment.
The price of all other office software has dropped significantly, some are selling for as low as $50.00 while the price of MS office (and windows) get's higher with every release. Windows and office are the only two software products whose prices increases as time goes on if that's not monopoly pricing I don't know what is.
You don't know what monopoly pricing is. First, your information is wrong. In markets where MS did not compete, prices fell an average of 18% over 8 years. In markets where MS did compete, prices fell an average of 65% (Newsday, Nov 1999). Further, office and Windows have actually been growing significantly slower than inflation, meaning that you have to pay less (as a percent of your pay check) to buy an OS or office than you did before. Third, StarOffice went from $0 to $99. How is that lowering price? Finally, monopoly pricing is an exact economic term, which is far to complex to be explained here. Briefly, even a cursory analysis indicates that it massively benefits MS to keep the price of Windows low. If they can keep it low, then the profits in that market place will not be as large, and the barriers to entry will be high, which encourages others to compete in other markets. If they were charging too much, then the profits would be enormous and other competitors would want to enter the market, ultimately leading to prices higher than those are today.
How about this calculation. Spend more then zero dollars developing and maintaining a product. Give it away for free. It does not take a MBA from harvard to calculate that ROI does it?
See above. Suffice it to say there are lots of ways to calculate the R in ROI, and you've only chosen one. Try a different one and you'll get a different answer.
The problem is that you're not supporting your points with facts.
1) WinME sold millions of retail copies, not only ones that were attached to machines. These people were not forced to upgrade, unless you consider "forced to upgrade" to be the same as "being convinced through marketing". If that's the case, you were "forced" to buy the car you bought (assuming you own one) or the jeans you wear (assuming you wear jeans) or the soap you use.
2) CE has no monopoly power and continues to gain marketshare at the fastest rate of any embedded OS (IDC embedded market share numbers 2002) In fact, the monopoly power in this market is Wind River, who is being investigated by the FTC.
3) If MS gets out of the xbox market, then i might say you are right (assuming no other factors are at play). However, i wouldn't consider competitive price reductions to indicate anything other than costs of production went down and they wanted to put additional pressure on Sony and Gamecube. PS2 had slower sales when it first launched, and less games.
4) SQL server is the fastest growing database (IDC worldwide database tracking numbers 2002). Faster than Oracle, faster than IBM. Unless free databases change their share and growth numbers dramatically, the people who are going to suffer are DB2 and Oracle, not MS. Free databases are flat, not growing. In fact, Access share is growing faster than free databases (again, IDC WW DB market number 2002). "Expecting declines" is not really a debating point, other than stating your opinion. SAPDB? Interbase? These are below 1% in share numbers. At least use alternative low end databases to make your point that have some standing (Progress DB and Pervasive are two examples). Unfortunately, their market shares are shrinking as well.
5) IIS certainly is not #1, but is launching with a 2 year lag on Apache (not including first versions of NCSA 1.3 which became Apache... ultimately more than 5 years from the first launch of NCSA/Apache to the first launch of IIS). Also, certainly you would not consider MS to have a monopoly on servers all that time (even now). Flavors of Unix, until recently, were the primary OSes for servers, and though Windows is now #1 (IDC server operating system market share numbers 2002), it certainly does not have a monopoly.
Your point, about the investment style of MS, is invalid because many many companies develop this way (Merck, Amgen, J&J, Ferrari, HP, Xerox) where you develop many technologies, see what sticks, and then run with what does. They also have not been shown to exercise monopoly pricing (where marginal cost = marginal revenue). This is a fine but important point. Monopoly pricing is an exact term used by economists to indicate a condition where price of goods and restriction of output. This has not been shown to be the case on Windows, though Windows is a monopoly, and, though intuitively it seems to be the case, the have not been proven to have a monopoly on office at all, let alone to be engaged in monopoly pricing.
Also, unless you have insider information, you do not have MS's return on investment numbers for these projects. How could you measure them (and then determine success or failure)? Further, this is not the only way to measure success. There are lots of reasons to make investments, and direct revenue ties may only be one of those reasons (improved branding, adoption of the platform, competitive pressures, etc).
Counter argument because no one else will
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MS Palladium Patent
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· Score: 2
I'd just like to repost some comments from the interview given by the GPM of Palladium a few weeks ago, and posted here.
For some reason people seem to ignored this article and all the content provided therein. The most important bit follows:
DIDW: So flexibility is a big goal, with nothing traceable locked in and no specific required PKI structure it must be part of?
Juarez: The architecture is designed to be an open platform and open environment. As an ISV or service provider you can build anything you want on top of this platform and offer up a value proposition with consumers, or with other businesses. It can do all kinds of interesting things. But there's nothing in the system that says, for example, that if you run something in one of these vaults that you've got to have the code signed, or you have to have things authenticated. It's a very basic, open environment and we're not trying to build any elements of it that are going to require verification or the participation of anything other than the ISV and the person who is using the services want to have happen.
Again, if you don't want to use it, you don't have to. It's your choice. Only the content creators will be able to force this on you, NEVER microsoft. If SAP, or Sony, or id wants their program/mp3/game to run in this trusted environment, they can require it. But MS can never require it. They cannot prevent you from installing an OS on the machine that does not support this either. Does anyone read these things?
No one will deny that MS has had products that did not succeed. But you're being silly if you include the following:
Windows ME = #4 selling OS of all time before XP (Win95, Win98, WinXP are larger). Made MS multibillions in revenue or so (they don't report breakout of sales by OS) Windows CE = #1 or #2 embedded OS (depending on market) Xbox = 0 to 4 Million sold in 9 months. Faster sales than PS2 on month by month basis post release. SQL Server = fastest growing database. 0 to $1.5 B in revenue in 7 years. Largest DB installed based on Windows, #3 DB overall; grew at 22% or so y/y when Oracle and IBM (minus growth due to Informix acquisition) were flat or down overall. IIS = #1 Webserver on E-commerce sites. #2 webserver overall, dwarfing #3 (at between 1-5% depending on where you look). Be sure to cut netcraft numbers correctly, they bunch a fair amount of things overall.
#1 or #2 in markets is hardly failure. The rest of the items on there are either dead (with limited investment), never launched (Hailstorm did not launch, but pieces of it are forth coming), or are in hibernation (UltimateTV will be incorporated into next gen consumer device).
I also don't agree with your premise. Drug manufacturers work along the exact same premise. Develop a lot, use your warchest of older developments to fund new developments, get one product to hit it out of the park and you win. SQL Server or Exchange are great examples of this... SQL Server will surpass all DBs in revenue by 2005 (Gartner), Exchange went from 0 seats to 100 million seats (surpassing Lotus) in 10 years. This is how large companies grow businesses.
No. You will be able to install Linux. It is unlikely, however, that Linux will support this feature. You're not required to use the feature, even in Windows, unless the creator of the content requires it.
It says "Download" automatically, not "Install". Also, though this is not specified, it much more seems focused on the disabiling of the features that allow secure content, rather than everything else.
Does anyone read the articles?
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Analyzing Palladium
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I realize this is slashdot, but does anyone even READ the articles?
It can do all kinds of interesting things. But there's nothing in the system that says, for example, that if you run something in one of these vaults that you've got to have the code signed, or you have to have things authenticated. It's a very basic, open environment and we're not trying to build any elements of it that are going to require verification or the participation of anything other than the ISV and the person who is using the services want to have happen.
Allow me to repeat for emphasis. "... there's nothing in the system that says, for example, that if you run something in one of these vaults that you've got to have the code signed..." You want to run GPLed software? Fine. You want to run your unsecured mp3s? Fine. This seems like only upside to me, so that IF I want to buy a secured mp3 or write a document that can only be read by one person on this computer I can do that. Plus they're publishing the source so if I don't trust them, I can view it myself! SHEEESH.
I think the one problem with measure patch release speed is that open source programs do not undergo the same regression testing that closed source programs do. Open source programs are designed to be tested by the community, which happens, but much more slowly with a slower feedback loop than a standard testing labs. Not that closed source programs haven't missed testing scenarios (they all have at one time or another). A patch does me no good if I can't be sure whether or not I can apply it to my servers.
Lots of great questions and answers but iI disagree with this response:
In the OpenSource world having to modify a driver because something changed in the kernel, is an advantage not a disadvange, both economically and techically. Proprietary software goes at the tariff of US$ 50-200 per line of debugged code. No such price applies to OpenSource software.
this is only true if an open source programmer's time is worth nothing. in fact, I believe that espousing this belief will ultimately lead OSS down an unmaintainable path. There are a finite amount of developers in the world and assuming that there will always be enough to manage every line of code is a fallacy.
first, i completely and totally agree with your first paragraph. markets should be allowed to determine the ultimate fate of companies, not the government (any government! all those news stories about china adopting linux are just red herrings for them wanted to design their own software and generally being isolationist).
secondly, i completely and totally agree that the government must be watched carefully for spending. aside from the massive market power the government has, it is also using public dollars, and must be examined for abuses.
however, i contend with your point about their being demonstrable harm. yes, you were not able to access the forms you needed. but at the same time, producing a program or form which is freely accessible on the majority of systems out there (and certainly accessible from the computers in your local library) is pretty much as wide an offering as we can expect any company to make. i have a commodore 128 at home gathering dust, but that doesn't mean that if i was browsing the web with it that i would have suffered demonstrable harm because i couldn't access a form. the form is publically available, and i do not have to purchase any special software to access it on the vast majority of machines.
a differnt agency i was working for had this type of problem. they very much wanted to move their forms online (they were a pension regulator with hundreds of forms to fill out). html forms were and are unacceptable due to their lack of printing exactness (different font sizing causes movement of the boxes and fields on the form) and at the time, pdfs didn't have the ability to enter in information in the forms. many of the forms used were jetform type forms, and they did not have an internet license for it, so each client who accessed it had to pay a fee. having 250 million americans pay a fee was not only unlikely, but also illegal. government policy is that anyone must be able to access the forms without incremental cost (how this factors in the cost of a windows license, i am unsure about). but to be sure, as they worked on a solution, they didn't even have to consider macintosh as an alternative platform (let alone linux). the government has to support the majority of the people with no incremental cost, but not everyone.
for the agency that purchased the mri (i believe it was an agency purchase (the nih) and not the group i was working for (the nia)), i feel that the mri machines are exactly the same situation as the file format scenario we have been discussing. first, i believe that it's the government's responsibility to invest tax dollars in ways that improve the public good. investing many millions of dollars in the nih, and then some percentage of that in the nia, and then some percentage of that in a research fmri. these are purchases that cannot be made by individuals and they benefit the public good much more than the 1 cent i had to give to the government to purchase it would have done for me. so i don't consider the fact that my tax dollars were diverted to that purchase to be a negative.
second, for the file format, let's say that ge decided to leave the medical imaging business. updates and patches would no longer be available and the machine would probably have a limited life span there after (no techs to work on it). however, i do not agree that the file formats or programs internal to the mri should have been opened before ge made this decision (and possibly afterwards, they could always sell them). because ge could work on these problems with reduced risk of siemens copying their design, the overall purchase by the government was improved. siemens had to work hard on the problem and ge had to work hard on the problem and the purchase by the government was the best one available in the marketplace, regardless if the actual dollar value was potentially higher than if everything was open sourced (to answer your question about acquisition of the film, a patient could request their scan on film just as in an hospital, but, to the best of my knowledge, the file formats were proprietary to the individual machine manufacturer). cheaper dollars or available file formats, in the short term, do not necessarily = better purchasing. what if ge opened the formats and said write the software to read and write it yourself. they charged $100k less for the machine (i believe it was about a ~$2m purchase) but were willing to have a 10 year support contract for software for $1m or you had to hire a tech for $120k/yr to write it yourself? this is where i think flatly requiring open formats tends to fall down.
as to ms's file formats, opening file formats, i agree that it is less draconian than requiring open source (though nader, et. al are also requiring alternative platforms), i still believe that it's ip that's developed that hurts ms for a limited consumer benefit. the license a company buys (and it is a contract, not a lease) to the software is good forever... it's up to ms to convince people to upgrade. the browser problems aside, having a monopoly is not illegal. if the way they designed their formats allows them to write undos in a special way or open a file ultra fast then that is a distinct benefit to the consumer. and they would have no (or significantly reduced) incentive to do those kind of developments if they were forced to reveal those techniques through full disclosure of the file format. i don't believe there's a free lunch. if a company gives up one thing, they're much more likely to not focus on that in the future. that's why sun, redhat, unitedlinux and ibm are working towards proprietary add-ons to linux. there's gotta be something to differentiate you from your competitors.
ah but then this becomes a debate about the open source and the viability/efficiency of that market, and has no bearing whatsoever on microsoft. if the government chooses to move to a system which evaluates vendors on their open sourceness, then that's fine (though i don't like that either). what the government cannot do is single out a single vendor, *any* vendor, and say you must do this and no one else is required to. but that's exactly what nadar, et al. are proposing. when they come out and say photoshop or spss must come out with public file formats (both of which i used while a salaried regular in the government) and must port to linux and beos, then the government will be behaving fairly and regularly.
the problem i see is there are hundreds of things that the government buys that are entirely proprietary that nobody on/. or in the oss community seems to care about. of the many examples i personally experienced was the purchase of a ge functional mri machine for many millions of dollars. inside the massive machine were hundreds of chips and programs that ge designed to get their fmri operating and performing better than their competitors. why aren't people up in arms about that? to say that it is because ge doesn't have a monopoly in the fmri market misses the point. having a monopoly doesn't imply culpability or wrong doing. according to the courts, ms behaved illegally only in regards to the browser market and no where else.
companies spend billions of dollars designing software/hardware/business processes/etc to make their products better/faster/etc. why must they be turned over to the public just because they want to sell to government? as long as there is an open market place there will always be competitors and, if they can do it better/faster/cheaper than the competitior/ms/whomever, then the taxpayer wins out. i personally would rather have a 100% proprietary solution that was more expensive for purchase than a solution which required hiring hundreds of government techs to build every last thing for every last need. i've seen the government work, and more people is definitely not what's required.
look, for better or worse, ms put a lot of time and money into developing their file formats. and they are theirs to do with as they wish. being convicted of improperly using monopolistic powers in regards to the browser wars is totally separated (by the courts) from the office productivity markets. honestly, taking aware intellectual property by forcing them to turn over file formats is crazy. if the [star|open]office people want file formats, then either reverse engineer them (legally), or make your own.
happy to oblige. reporting is theoretically about giving facts on a news item, not opinions, otherwise it'd be called an op-ed. the following comments would be removed in journalism 101, based on injection of unvarnish opinion into the story:
"Some of Meijer's questions, which you can find here, are frankly a little weird."
"But 'Is.NET Passport registered with national agencies supervising the application of privacy legislation?' seems to us a fair, reasonable and possibly tricky one."
"We'd guess the answer is not exactly, but we're prepared to be surprised."
"The EU polices privacy via legislation, whereas the US goes for a more laissez faire self-regulation approach (we do not at this juncture propose to make any observations about henhouses and foxes)."
"Not of course that they are, necessarily, really. Have they been independently audited? Or have they just promised to be good?"
"If it transpires that Microsoft Passport isn't compatible with EU law, then Mr Meijer might do well to ask questions about how come this could possibly apply to a company that had successfully signed up to Safe Harbour."
isn't saying the register has a nice summary a little bit like saying exxonmobil has a nice briefing on global warming? for those interested, a *relatively* unbiased version can be found at:
i would respectfully disagree. the register article is biased as always.
back in the olden days (i.e. 1997) there was a great application for the mac called internet config. it was a centralized place to handle all the handlers for a given os, and was *super* simple to configure. i haven't used a mac os in a long time, but if i remember right, this was brought forward into future mac versions as well.
to me, this seems to be *exactly* what ms is doing, except rather than listing their own middleware first, they're not listing it at all if someone else has correctly registered.
so what is "correctly registered"? it's incredibly simple; it's even built into the default installer that comes with vs.net. the register is making a big production out of nothing.
man i'm so happy someone finally said SOMETHING. i read slashdot as much as anyone, but michael's completely one sided commentary is absurd. for those that say it only matters what the people who are running the site think, i would unequivocally agree EXCEPT that the other moderators never (or at least much more rarely) use the kind of juvenille jabs at MS that michael does.
obOnTopic: one line i absolutely agree with in the article is the "pendulum has gone far to the side of single player games". i found this to be spot on. many many millions have been made by watching the standard ebb and flow of marketplaces and betting the platform on the network is probably safer in this case than sticking with the status quo.
there is no evidence anywhere that ms is storing any of the data. in fact, there is substantial evidence that ms is not doing that in that the tool must send the version of each of the files on your computer. if they had stored that information, they wouldn't have had to check it, because presumably, it'd be tied to your cookie.
given this valid reason, i'll assume you no longer think that it's an attack on ms privacy.
"When you search the Internet using the Search Companion, the following information is collected regarding your use of the service: your IP address, the text of your Internet search query, grammatical information about the query, the list of tasks which the Search Companion Web service recommends, and any tasks you select from the recommendation list."
"Search Companion does not record your choice of Internet search engine, and does not collect or request any personal or demographic information. Information collected by the Search Companion cannot be used to identify you individually, and is never used in conjunction with other data sources that may contain personal data."
This is absolutely no different than sherlock. IF you hit the tab that says "Search Internet" it passes the search terms along, and identifies you so it knows who to pass the item back to! I'd love it if someone could figure out any other way to execute a search, but this seems like the bare minimum.
http://www.sqlmag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Article ID =23166
http://www.sqlteam.com/item.asp?ItemID=128
There's almost no way you can get the performance you need with a NAS. Avoid NAS for the near future, and go with SAN. And don't listen to NetApp... they claim they can support database access, but they can't.
Slashdot Mirror
Further, IDC does track open source database share, and it's not good. Sorry to disappoint. Most recent IDC tracker says that the total share (based on installed base, not revenue) of free databases is IIS generates no revenue for MS yet MS continues to dedicate a team of developers to maintaining and re-writing it. Measure the ROI of that. Same as CE for any other company it would be a failure. So if IIS had new features in new versions of Windows and encouraged people to upgrade, that would not be any return on investment? What about if you had a new version of IIS that reduced support calls? That would be a return on investment as well. You're not making sense. A product doesn't have to be sold to give you a return on investment. You don't know what monopoly pricing is. First, your information is wrong. In markets where MS did not compete, prices fell an average of 18% over 8 years. In markets where MS did compete, prices fell an average of 65% (Newsday, Nov 1999). Further, office and Windows have actually been growing significantly slower than inflation, meaning that you have to pay less (as a percent of your pay check) to buy an OS or office than you did before. Third, StarOffice went from $0 to $99. How is that lowering price? Finally, monopoly pricing is an exact economic term, which is far to complex to be explained here. Briefly, even a cursory analysis indicates that it massively benefits MS to keep the price of Windows low. If they can keep it low, then the profits in that market place will not be as large, and the barriers to entry will be high, which encourages others to compete in other markets. If they were charging too much, then the profits would be enormous and other competitors would want to enter the market, ultimately leading to prices higher than those are today. See above. Suffice it to say there are lots of ways to calculate the R in ROI, and you've only chosen one. Try a different one and you'll get a different answer.
The problem is that you're not supporting your points with facts.
1) WinME sold millions of retail copies, not only ones that were attached to machines. These people were not forced to upgrade, unless you consider "forced to upgrade" to be the same as "being convinced through marketing". If that's the case, you were "forced" to buy the car you bought (assuming you own one) or the jeans you wear (assuming you wear jeans) or the soap you use.
2) CE has no monopoly power and continues to gain marketshare at the fastest rate of any embedded OS (IDC embedded market share numbers 2002) In fact, the monopoly power in this market is Wind River, who is being investigated by the FTC.
3) If MS gets out of the xbox market, then i might say you are right (assuming no other factors are at play). However, i wouldn't consider competitive price reductions to indicate anything other than costs of production went down and they wanted to put additional pressure on Sony and Gamecube. PS2 had slower sales when it first launched, and less games.
4) SQL server is the fastest growing database (IDC worldwide database tracking numbers 2002). Faster than Oracle, faster than IBM. Unless free databases change their share and growth numbers dramatically, the people who are going to suffer are DB2 and Oracle, not MS. Free databases are flat, not growing. In fact, Access share is growing faster than free databases (again, IDC WW DB market number 2002). "Expecting declines" is not really a debating point, other than stating your opinion. SAPDB? Interbase? These are below 1% in share numbers. At least use alternative low end databases to make your point that have some standing (Progress DB and Pervasive are two examples). Unfortunately, their market shares are shrinking as well.
5) IIS certainly is not #1, but is launching with a 2 year lag on Apache (not including first versions of NCSA 1.3 which became Apache... ultimately more than 5 years from the first launch of NCSA/Apache to the first launch of IIS). Also, certainly you would not consider MS to have a monopoly on servers all that time (even now). Flavors of Unix, until recently, were the primary OSes for servers, and though Windows is now #1 (IDC server operating system market share numbers 2002), it certainly does not have a monopoly.
Your point, about the investment style of MS, is invalid because many many companies develop this way (Merck, Amgen, J&J, Ferrari, HP, Xerox) where you develop many technologies, see what sticks, and then run with what does. They also have not been shown to exercise monopoly pricing (where marginal cost = marginal revenue). This is a fine but important point. Monopoly pricing is an exact term used by economists to indicate a condition where price of goods and restriction of output. This has not been shown to be the case on Windows, though Windows is a monopoly, and, though intuitively it seems to be the case, the have not been proven to have a monopoly on office at all, let alone to be engaged in monopoly pricing.
Also, unless you have insider information, you do not have MS's return on investment numbers for these projects. How could you measure them (and then determine success or failure)? Further, this is not the only way to measure success. There are lots of reasons to make investments, and direct revenue ties may only be one of those reasons (improved branding, adoption of the platform, competitive pressures, etc).
http://www.didw.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=N
For some reason people seem to ignored this article and all the content provided therein. The most important bit follows: Again, if you don't want to use it, you don't have to. It's your choice. Only the content creators will be able to force this on you, NEVER microsoft. If SAP, or Sony, or id wants their program/mp3/game to run in this trusted environment, they can require it. But MS can never require it. They cannot prevent you from installing an OS on the machine that does not support this either. Does anyone read these things?
No one will deny that MS has had products that did not succeed. But you're being silly if you include the following:
Windows ME = #4 selling OS of all time before XP (Win95, Win98, WinXP are larger). Made MS multibillions in revenue or so (they don't report breakout of sales by OS)
Windows CE = #1 or #2 embedded OS (depending on market)
Xbox = 0 to 4 Million sold in 9 months. Faster sales than PS2 on month by month basis post release.
SQL Server = fastest growing database. 0 to $1.5 B in revenue in 7 years. Largest DB installed based on Windows, #3 DB overall; grew at 22% or so y/y when Oracle and IBM (minus growth due to Informix acquisition) were flat or down overall.
IIS = #1 Webserver on E-commerce sites. #2 webserver overall, dwarfing #3 (at between 1-5% depending on where you look). Be sure to cut netcraft numbers correctly, they bunch a fair amount of things overall.
#1 or #2 in markets is hardly failure. The rest of the items on there are either dead (with limited investment), never launched (Hailstorm did not launch, but pieces of it are forth coming), or are in hibernation (UltimateTV will be incorporated into next gen consumer device).
I also don't agree with your premise. Drug manufacturers work along the exact same premise. Develop a lot, use your warchest of older developments to fund new developments, get one product to hit it out of the park and you win. SQL Server or Exchange are great examples of this... SQL Server will surpass all DBs in revenue by 2005 (Gartner), Exchange went from 0 seats to 100 million seats (surpassing Lotus) in 10 years. This is how large companies grow businesses.
No. You will be able to install Linux. It is unlikely, however, that Linux will support this feature. You're not required to use the feature, even in Windows, unless the creator of the content requires it.
It says "Download" automatically, not "Install". Also, though this is not specified, it much more seems focused on the disabiling of the features that allow secure content, rather than everything else.
I think the one problem with measure patch release speed is that open source programs do not undergo the same regression testing that closed source programs do. Open source programs are designed to be tested by the community, which happens, but much more slowly with a slower feedback loop than a standard testing labs. Not that closed source programs haven't missed testing scenarios (they all have at one time or another). A patch does me no good if I can't be sure whether or not I can apply it to my servers.
I'm sure you meant "ISS" and not "IIS" :)
first, i completely and totally agree with your first paragraph. markets should be allowed to determine the ultimate fate of companies, not the government (any government! all those news stories about china adopting linux are just red herrings for them wanted to design their own software and generally being isolationist).
secondly, i completely and totally agree that the government must be watched carefully for spending. aside from the massive market power the government has, it is also using public dollars, and must be examined for abuses.
however, i contend with your point about their being demonstrable harm. yes, you were not able to access the forms you needed. but at the same time, producing a program or form which is freely accessible on the majority of systems out there (and certainly accessible from the computers in your local library) is pretty much as wide an offering as we can expect any company to make. i have a commodore 128 at home gathering dust, but that doesn't mean that if i was browsing the web with it that i would have suffered demonstrable harm because i couldn't access a form. the form is publically available, and i do not have to purchase any special software to access it on the vast majority of machines.
a differnt agency i was working for had this type of problem. they very much wanted to move their forms online (they were a pension regulator with hundreds of forms to fill out). html forms were and are unacceptable due to their lack of printing exactness (different font sizing causes movement of the boxes and fields on the form) and at the time, pdfs didn't have the ability to enter in information in the forms. many of the forms used were jetform type forms, and they did not have an internet license for it, so each client who accessed it had to pay a fee. having 250 million americans pay a fee was not only unlikely, but also illegal. government policy is that anyone must be able to access the forms without incremental cost (how this factors in the cost of a windows license, i am unsure about). but to be sure, as they worked on a solution, they didn't even have to consider macintosh as an alternative platform (let alone linux). the government has to support the majority of the people with no incremental cost, but not everyone.
for the agency that purchased the mri (i believe it was an agency purchase (the nih) and not the group i was working for (the nia)), i feel that the mri machines are exactly the same situation as the file format scenario we have been discussing. first, i believe that it's the government's responsibility to invest tax dollars in ways that improve the public good. investing many millions of dollars in the nih, and then some percentage of that in the nia, and then some percentage of that in a research fmri. these are purchases that cannot be made by individuals and they benefit the public good much more than the 1 cent i had to give to the government to purchase it would have done for me. so i don't consider the fact that my tax dollars were diverted to that purchase to be a negative.
second, for the file format, let's say that ge decided to leave the medical imaging business. updates and patches would no longer be available and the machine would probably have a limited life span there after (no techs to work on it). however, i do not agree that the file formats or programs internal to the mri should have been opened before ge made this decision (and possibly afterwards, they could always sell them). because ge could work on these problems with reduced risk of siemens copying their design, the overall purchase by the government was improved. siemens had to work hard on the problem and ge had to work hard on the problem and the purchase by the government was the best one available in the marketplace, regardless if the actual dollar value was potentially higher than if everything was open sourced (to answer your question about acquisition of the film, a patient could request their scan on film just as in an hospital, but, to the best of my knowledge, the file formats were proprietary to the individual machine manufacturer). cheaper dollars or available file formats, in the short term, do not necessarily = better purchasing. what if ge opened the formats and said write the software to read and write it yourself. they charged $100k less for the machine (i believe it was about a ~$2m purchase) but were willing to have a 10 year support contract for software for $1m or you had to hire a tech for $120k/yr to write it yourself? this is where i think flatly requiring open formats tends to fall down.
as to ms's file formats, opening file formats, i agree that it is less draconian than requiring open source (though nader, et. al are also requiring alternative platforms), i still believe that it's ip that's developed that hurts ms for a limited consumer benefit. the license a company buys (and it is a contract, not a lease) to the software is good forever... it's up to ms to convince people to upgrade. the browser problems aside, having a monopoly is not illegal. if the way they designed their formats allows them to write undos in a special way or open a file ultra fast then that is a distinct benefit to the consumer. and they would have no (or significantly reduced) incentive to do those kind of developments if they were forced to reveal those techniques through full disclosure of the file format. i don't believe there's a free lunch. if a company gives up one thing, they're much more likely to not focus on that in the future. that's why sun, redhat, unitedlinux and ibm are working towards proprietary add-ons to linux. there's gotta be something to differentiate you from your competitors.
ah but then this becomes a debate about the open source and the viability/efficiency of that market, and has no bearing whatsoever on microsoft. if the government chooses to move to a system which evaluates vendors on their open sourceness, then that's fine (though i don't like that either). what the government cannot do is single out a single vendor, *any* vendor, and say you must do this and no one else is required to. but that's exactly what nadar, et al. are proposing. when they come out and say photoshop or spss must come out with public file formats (both of which i used while a salaried regular in the government) and must port to linux and beos, then the government will be behaving fairly and regularly.
/. or in the oss community seems to care about. of the many examples i personally experienced was the purchase of a ge functional mri machine for many millions of dollars. inside the massive machine were hundreds of chips and programs that ge designed to get their fmri operating and performing better than their competitors. why aren't people up in arms about that? to say that it is because ge doesn't have a monopoly in the fmri market misses the point. having a monopoly doesn't imply culpability or wrong doing. according to the courts, ms behaved illegally only in regards to the browser market and no where else.
the problem i see is there are hundreds of things that the government buys that are entirely proprietary that nobody on
companies spend billions of dollars designing software/hardware/business processes/etc to make their products better/faster/etc. why must they be turned over to the public just because they want to sell to government? as long as there is an open market place there will always be competitors and, if they can do it better/faster/cheaper than the competitior/ms/whomever, then the taxpayer wins out. i personally would rather have a 100% proprietary solution that was more expensive for purchase than a solution which required hiring hundreds of government techs to build every last thing for every last need. i've seen the government work, and more people is definitely not what's required.
look, for better or worse, ms put a lot of time and money into developing their file formats. and they are theirs to do with as they wish. being convicted of improperly using monopolistic powers in regards to the browser wars is totally separated (by the courts) from the office productivity markets. honestly, taking aware intellectual property by forcing them to turn over file formats is crazy. if the [star|open]office people want file formats, then either reverse engineer them (legally), or make your own.
isn't saying the register has a nice summary a little bit like saying exxonmobil has a nice briefing on global warming? for those interested, a *relatively* unbiased version can be found at:
Yahoo news -- straight off the reuters feed
i would respectfully disagree. the register article is biased as always.
back in the olden days (i.e. 1997) there was a great application for the mac called internet config. it was a centralized place to handle all the handlers for a given os, and was *super* simple to configure. i haven't used a mac os in a long time, but if i remember right, this was brought forward into future mac versions as well.
to me, this seems to be *exactly* what ms is doing, except rather than listing their own middleware first, they're not listing it at all if someone else has correctly registered.
so what is "correctly registered"? it's incredibly simple; it's even built into the default installer that comes with vs.net. the register is making a big production out of nothing.
man i'm so happy someone finally said SOMETHING. i read slashdot as much as anyone, but michael's completely one sided commentary is absurd. for those that say it only matters what the people who are running the site think, i would unequivocally agree EXCEPT that the other moderators never (or at least much more rarely) use the kind of juvenille jabs at MS that michael does.
obOnTopic: one line i absolutely agree with in the article is the "pendulum has gone far to the side of single player games". i found this to be spot on. many many millions have been made by watching the standard ebb and flow of marketplaces and betting the platform on the network is probably safer in this case than sticking with the status quo.
I remember the story, but wasn't it just *COMPILE* and not *RUN*? Just curious
who the fuck is hilter?
i hate to rain on your parade, but the chance that ebay is going to open up any of the code you list is about 1e-10%.
My question is how much of websphere is really open source? I mean, i know about apache, and the USE the java apis, but what else is there?
you can already do remote record through the beta of Ultimate TV. That plus picture in picture was what sold me on it instead of Tivo.
I would hardly call Perens's commentary a "news article". At best it's an editorial.
there is no evidence anywhere that ms is storing any of the data. in fact, there is substantial evidence that ms is not doing that in that the tool must send the version of each of the files on your computer. if they had stored that information, they wouldn't have had to check it, because presumably, it'd be tied to your cookie.
given this valid reason, i'll assume you no longer think that it's an attack on ms privacy.
I quote:
"When you search the Internet using the Search Companion, the following information is collected regarding your use of the service: your IP address, the text of your Internet search query, grammatical information about the query, the list of tasks which the Search Companion Web service recommends, and any tasks you select from the recommendation list."
"Search Companion does not record your choice of Internet search engine, and does not collect or request any personal or demographic information. Information collected by the Search Companion cannot be used to identify you individually, and is never used in conjunction with other data sources that may contain personal data."
This is absolutely no different than sherlock. IF you hit the tab that says "Search Internet" it passes the search terms along, and identifies you so it knows who to pass the item back to! I'd love it if someone could figure out any other way to execute a search, but this seems like the bare minimum.
SQL Server does not support NAS because it's got some serious latency and performance problems in comparison to SAN.
s /q 304/2/61.asp
e ID =23166
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/article
http://www.sqlmag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Articl
http://www.sqlteam.com/item.asp?ItemID=128
There's almost no way you can get the performance you need with a NAS. Avoid NAS for the near future, and go with SAN. And don't listen to NetApp... they claim they can support database access, but they can't.