A Former Microsoftie Forecasts Microsoft Doom 1015
Chris Holland writes "Jeff Reifman, a columnist for Seattle Weekly, has written a toe-curling editorial analysis of Microsoft's past and current missed opportunities, contrasted with its financial success, while covering in fair depth some of the most serious threats to their business model. Beyond the many choice quotes, I've found this article to be a very interesting read from somebody who has not only been on the inside, but also significantly developed his professional career thru Microsoft solutions."
IANAFW... (Finance Whiz) (Score:3, Interesting)
Earlier on in the article he says: Yet near the end he says: By "Income" does he mean "Profit" or is MS actually predicting a 50% revenue drop over the previous year?
Re:IANAFW... (Finance Whiz) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:IANAFW... (Finance Whiz) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:IANAFW... (Finance Whiz) (Score:3, Informative)
You are half right, corporations are supposed to pay taxes on income(up to 1/3 of it IIRC), but they also pay property taxes, and payroll taxes(your contribution to medicare/social security is matched by your employers, but what really sucks for people who are self employed is that they
Re:IANAFW... (Finance Whiz) (Score:3, Interesting)
Before tax consideration, their profits are 46% of revenues!!
Basically this means close to half of the money paid to Microsoft is profit.
For your information, IBM, which I think many would consider a services company has a profit margin (before taxes) of a more reasonable 12.2% and after tax of 8.5%.
I suppose when yo
Re:What's wrong with making money? Don't you want (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody has a "right" to profit. The only reason the market system usually works is because of competition, which is supposed to drive down prices on products that are overpriced. In Microsoft's case there's a combination of laws and natural circumstances that prevent pricing pressure
Re:What's wrong with making money? Don't you want (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullshit.
You, me, everyone has a right to profit from their labors. Microsoft can charge whatever it wants for it's crap. If you are stupid enough to pay for it, that's your problem.
Re:What's wrong with making money? Don't you want (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a fine line, but an important one.
Re:What's wrong with making money? Don't you want (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's wrong with making money? Don't you want (Score:3, Interesting)
What about Sun Microsystems? They're losing money, does that mean their rights are being violated?
If you aren't a monopoly, you have a right to charge whatever you want. That's not the same as a right to profit, because if you aren't a monopoly and demand too much money, your customers go elsewhere.
Just try to open a grocery store and swing an 80% profit margin like MS does on their office and OS divisions. Try to run a car company or run
Re:What's wrong with making money? Don't you want (Score:4, Insightful)
You, me, everyone has a right to profit from their labors
Bullshit yourself. M$ only makes a profit because we, the citizens, give them some rights to control copying i.e. copyright law. We do this because we, the citizens, think we will get a fair return in terms of price competition and product improvement. The M$ monopoly is currently taxing the world $35,000,000,000 per year for ten pieces of software it largely wrote more than a decade ago. That is an atrocious tradeoff.
Intellectual property law is completely broken at the moment. M$ gets maybe 10,000 times the reward for writing the same software that another company might write. I don't mind 10-100 times the reward to encourage true competition and inovation but law which allows more than that is wrong and unfair. Yes, the world is unfair but that doesn't mean that in a democracy we the people should deliberately make it more unfair.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Re:What's wrong with making money? Don't you want (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone has a "right to profit".
However, a "perfect market" limits profits to near zero. With no barriers to entry in a business, which is a lot like "neglecting friction", competition will force prices down toward costs.
A 100% markup is only possible if the barriers to entry in the field are high, which they are in this case.
However, the barriers to entry are falling also. Once the OS or Office suite, or whatever are "good enough", the impetus for upgrades evaporate. At that point, competing products have a chance to catch up to the target of "good enough".
Microsoft is suffering from "good enough" now. As are hardware makers. Most people don't use much, if any, more capabiity than was available in computers/software in 2000. Microsoft is dependent on people buying a new computer (and, implied, a new OS and Office suite) every couple of years. This was a workable model until the computers got "good enough", and has been suffering since then.
Re:IANAFW... (Finance Whiz) (Score:5, Informative)
> a 50% revenue drop over the previous year?
Revenue is the amount of money you bring in due to products that you sell. This normally does not include money from investments and selling plant, property, and equipment (PP&E). So if you sell 1 product for $1, but you sell a building you don't use any more for $1M, your revenue is only $1.
Income is the amount of money left over after all expenses. The first expense is cost of goods sold (this means the cost of the actually sold unit). For software, this is nearly 0. Money left over after the COGS is your direct margin. For Microsoft, I believe this is something like 90+% (but I'm too lazy to look up their income statement at this time)
After that, you subtract off the other expenses, like R&D (this includes software engineering and the like), sales general and administrative (SG&A--including marketing weasels, such as myself), and interest payments (e.g. long term debt).
Whatever is left over is your net income. Here's a simplified example:
INCOME STATEMENT
Revenue
(cost of goods sold)
----------------
Direct Margin
(R&D)
(SG&A)
(Interest Expense)
----------------
Net Income
So Income is your bottom line. If the number is positive, then profit! That means the standard Slashdot cliche becomes:
1. Make revenue from a product or service
2. Minimize your expenses
3. Profit!
What's interesting about Microsoft is they are one of a very small number of companies with NO long term debt (Apple, I believe, just joined this exclusive club). That makes MSFT's balance sheet fairly impressive to look at.
Re:IANAFW... (Finance Whiz) (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a simple example: suppose you have several job offers and the highest-paying offer requires that you have a car, but you do not own a car yet and do not have enough cash to afford one. Your choices are to either to borrow money to buy a car or to take a lower paying job. If the difference in pay between the best job and the second best job is greater than the cost of the interest on the car, then the best (fiscal) decision is to borrow the money for the car and take the best paying job.
Re:IANAFW... (Finance Whiz) (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether or not this is the "best" decision actually depends on your risk tolerance - your scenario doesn't include the possibility that you might lose the job, and end up being liable for the loan without any way to pay for it. Borrowing money always involves increasing your personal financial risk.
Re:IANAFW... (Finance Whiz) (Score:3, Insightful)
On the flipside, if you take out a loan at 6-8% on that car, and you can make 8-10% on the money you saved by taking out the loan, you end up ahead 3% +/- because your interest payment on the car dwindles over time as you eat up the principal. Of course, this depends on market fluctuations, interest rates, and your ability to keep investments in the high percentage rates.
Like I said, sometimes it just makes sense to pay
John Carmack's not happy! (Score:5, Funny)
It's almost like the company had troubles or something.
Re:John Carmack's not happy! (Score:3, Funny)
Good heavens. Looks like I'll have to work that defragger after every bootup!
Nice treatise (Score:5, Interesting)
. I'm tired of spending the first 10 minutes of my day rebooting just so I can get to work.
I must be very lucky because I typically go weeks without rebooting.
Absolutely
Microsoft admits that one of its biggest challenges is getting users of its products to upgrade to new releases. Fewer than 3 percent of Microsoft Office users have upgraded to the latest version
I can't use all of the features in Office 200 yet....
Synchronization of our Internet bookmarks across all our computers
Now wouldn't THAT be nice?
The article is well worth reading. I agree with most of it. I am not exactly a Microsoft fan but I don't have quite the issues with Microsoft that the author does. My biggest gripe is not their products but rather their predatory business practices.
Happy Trails!
Erick
Re:Nice treatise (Score:5, Interesting)
Open source has a much easier time convincing people to upgrade to the most current release because in most cases it costs nothing but a little time to move to the latest stable release.
Re:Nice treatise (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nice treatise (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nice treatise (Score:5, Interesting)
Open Source also has a higher common denominator in terms of technical sophistication. Even Microsoft is aware of the "paper MCSE" problem. It is also worth noting that the problems Microsoft faces aren't just upgrades, but getting users to apply patches, patches being free.
User inertia plays a much larger role in uptake of patches and upgrades than I think most would like to admit.
Unfortunately, those of us who play in the Open Source world are faced with our own technical upgrade/migration challenges now. By show of hands, how many out there are trying to figure out what to do with their Red Hat boxes and aren't willing to roll the dice on Fedora Core 2?
Re:Nice treatise (Score:3, Insightful)
To MS, that is not a problem. Having a seemingly important certification easy to get is intentional. Mind share.
And that strategy is not uncommon: CNA and CNE certs from Novell, back in Netware 3.x days, were also intentionally easy to get. It is a double edged sword though: it has taken Novell years to regain respect for their certs.
That's the "churn" of MS's profits. (Score:3, Interesting)
Which, in essence, means that you have to PAY for bug fixes.
This has been a very profitable practice for Microsoft. That way they can keep selling you the same product(Win95) over(Win98) and over(Win2000) and over(WinXP).
I wouldn't have that big of a problem with the practice except for one m
Re:Nice treatise (Score:4, Interesting)
As for crashing, yes, XP IS more stable, but it still suffers from Windows congenital defects. Have you ever tried to figure out why a program was crashing? No logging of any sort. Their "repair" function is anything but on the XP install disc. Viruses, etc. have a nice little home because files are treated differently because of the extension, and all kinds of insecure services are turned on by default, though they do nothing for the end user. I had an XP laptop infected 5 minutes after hooking it live to the Internet... was just testing the connection and boom. The whole system is just badly designed, we're just holding onto it because it's what everyone else has.
Re:Nice treatise (Score:5, Informative)
Synchronization of our Internet bookmarks across all our computers
Firefox has an extension which does this very thing. Look for "Bookmarks Synchronizer" on the main extensions page.
Re:Nice treatise (Score:4, Insightful)
I really just use my laptop for most tasks so that all my settings and files are available to me anywhere (besides, I just ssh into my office computer from home to work...).
The ability to wander from computer to computer and have everything you need to work automatically (whether it is really located on some other computer) is a fundamental, but soluble problem.
Doug
Re:Nice treatise (Score:4, Informative)
No direct link since Bugzilla won't allow links from slashdot.
Re:Nice treatise (Score:4, Funny)
Internet Expl-aaaaaggggh (Score:5, Funny)
"What?"
"Internet Expl-aaaaagggh"
"What is that?"
"His browser must have died while typing it."
"Oh, come on!"
"Well, that's what it says."
"Look, if his browser was dying, it wouldn't bother to transmit 'aaaaaggh'. It'd just pop up one of those ridiculous 'Do you want to report this to Microsoft' dialogs."
" Well, that's what's typed in the Slashdot posting!"
"Perhaps he was dictating to someone using Mozilla."
Re:Nice treatise (Score:3, Interesting)
What happens every few weeks that requires you to reboot? Last time I had to log out was when I put more RAM in my workstation. Before that, it was a powercut round about Christmas time.
Last time I got a new computer, I just put my home directory into a TAR file, and moved it across to the new machine, so I got all of my files, emails, bookmarks, etc. That takes about 10 minutes (including tweaking things for different versions of apps o
Re:Nice treatise (Score:3, Informative)
FUD.
XP (and 2000 and 2003, for that matter) do not need a reboot after a patch, or at least not after most hotfixes, security updates, and application installs.
Yes, there's a reboot after service packs and some patches, but NT 4 was a long time ago.
Re:Nice treatise (Score:4, Insightful)
He didn't say he was a techno geek. He's a typical person trying to get his work done. And why does he have "get it" stable? Why isn't it already that way?
TAKE A COURSE IN MS OFFICE!
If he has to take a course to learn how to use bullets in a word processor, something's wrong with that software.
MOD PARENT TROLL ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh no. Because surely if someone who spent 10 friggin' years at Microsoft has problems with the software he must be at fault.
Cause clearly in that many years he never would have had occasion to actually put in bullet text into a document before. And surely he'd never have occasion to double click on the IE icon and have it launch.
I cry horse-shit!! As much as the Microsoft fans and apologists would have us believe that Windows never apparently does something with no understandable reason, I would argue that for the vast majority of the rest of us random flaky behaviour is exactly what we've come to expect.
Over the years I've seen dozens of examples where all of the Kings Techo-Geeks and all the Kings Men standing around a windows box with bad behaviour finally decide to backup what they can and re-install the damned thing because *nobody* can come up with a plausible explaination for what the heck is happening.
Saying in sneering tones that he couldn't possibly be a techno-geek doesn't support your argument in any way.
Re:MOD PARENT TROLL ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Office (specifically Word) is a complex tool. It can do a lot, but with that level of flexibility comes a certain level of complexity and obfuscation. I've programmed C for 10+ years, but I still make mistakes now and again and can't figure out why the hell I'm leaking memory here or there. It's not the compiler's fault, certainly not the languages fault, it's my dumb ass missing or not understanding something.
I run 2000 at work (we just switched from NT) and at home, and I never have to reboot...I go months without a reboot, and I constaly have Outlook up and running, along with Java development tools, Visual C++, about 5-10 IE windows and version management software. It's not like it's terribly hard to keep Windows stable.
--trb
Re:MOD PARENT TROLL ... (Score:3, Informative)
Which is exactly the problem: how many people really need even 10% of the 'complex and obfuscated' features in Office these days? Personally I've yet to find anything I want to do that OpenOffice doesn't do, and doesn't do in an easily understood manner... so what's the point of Office?
Re:MOD PARENT TROLL ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh. That's funny--my parents, siblings, coworkers and acquaintances who are not tech inclined would disagree. Some of them would disagree vehemently.
This kind of attitude is prevalent at Microsoft--eye rolling and mutterings of "user error". At the end of the day this is your client base, though--if you sell to all the people, you need to support all the people.
I love these kinds of comments. (Score:4, Interesting)
So, anyone who disagrees with that statement is admitting to being less technically proficient than trb001. And there is ALWAYS someone who will post that claim. Regardless of whether the OS is Win95, Win2000 or whatever.
Yet when the NEXT version of Microsoft's OS is released, EVERYONE claims how it is so much more stable and reliable than the last. Even Microsoft got into that with comparing NT and Windows2000 and showing that NT wouldn't stay up for more than a few days of heavy work (sorry, I couldn't find a citation for that yet).
I get dragged in to fix all kinds of Windows problems. From corrupt registries to tons of spyware, I've seen it and fixed it. It is a PAIN keeping Windows stable. Even installing the DCom patch on NT broke apps.
Here's a tip on how much everyone else in the world has to reboot. Call Microsoft tech support with any problem and see what the FIRST thing they tell you to do is.
I can attest to that. (Score:3, Interesting)
Worse, I've had to reinstall Windows simply because I installed one program out of sequence!
Just installing the programs resulted in a system that worked for normal (for Windows) periods of time,
Re:Stable Windows configuration? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nice treatise (Score:5, Insightful)
I've used Office pretty heavily, at the limits of its capability (judging by the increasing likelihood of crashing) to create 100+ page documents filled with dynamic and complext content.
I have not, in my experience seen any geekness or skill that can prevent a stylesheet from becoming fucked, or even to effectively unfuck it when it happens. All you can hope for is to notice when it does become fucked and restore from an earlier version of the document.
Re:Nice treatise (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm getting tired of comments like this. Just because you derive some sick, deranged pleasure from knowing all the minutiae and strange behaviors of the software products you own doesn't mean that someone else does. Some folks just like to use friendly, intuitive software.
When people complain, Microsoft may choose to ignore them at their own peril. It's capitalism, baby. If they want to cater to the folks who like to "get their windows machine stable", that's fine. The rest of us have a fine selection of OS' to jump to.
If this gentleman uses OS X because he feels it is easier to understand and use, that's his perogative, and it is not a reflection of his skills as a computer user. In fact, I stand right beside him as a Mac OS X convert after years of staunch Microsoft support.
Some of us like to use the computer rather than wrestle with it.
Oh, and you can't tell me that you've never reformatted a windows box because it was just easier than trying to figure out what was wrong.
Sometimes, debugging the issue would take longer than a re-install. Sometimes, it is less costly to just rebuild rather than spend days comparing DLL versions, scanning through the registry, and all the other attendant menial tasks that come with debugging an unstable windows installation. Is it a bad driver? Bad device*? Bad registry keys? Conflicting DLLs? Bah. Who needs it.
Bottom line: When I use my machine, I want to get productive work done. I have better things to do with my time than be an administrator.
*I'm aware that Microsoft supports a "much wider range of hardware". I've heard that argument before. However, as a user, I'm not interested in what Microsoft chooses to support. I'm interested in a stable, easy-to-use machine with a decent selection of compatible periphals.
In other news, (Score:4, Insightful)
Thru?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
THRU?!? What kind of site are you guys running?
How hard is it to keep these lazy-teenager abbreviations out of the stories?
in the dictionary (Score:4, Informative)
Re:in the dictionary (Score:5, Funny)
Now repeat after me: "The Oxford English Dictionary is the ONLY accepted reference for English!" Feel free to write it on the blackboard a few times as well, just to make sure it sinks in.
English is English, through is not spelled "thru", night is not spelled "nite", and there is no such word as "burglarize". The verb is burgle. Of course, you chaps in the colonies can do what you like with your language, but don't call it English !
Re:in the dictionary (Score:3, Interesting)
He then went on to talk about how words are added all the time. If I recall, a word has to be used somewhere between three and seven times in published works, with a consistent definition, to be added to the OED. And he defined published works very loosely.
I full
Convergence or divergence (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it is pretty remarkable that the English the yanks, canucks, or aussies speak are as close to real thing as they are. I understand people from GBR well enough when I meet them. An interesting question is whether world English will converge in the future or continue to diverge. I think they will converge, but heaven forbid if "thru","nite", "cuz", "u", or even "hoser" become commonly accepted.
Burglarize? (Score:3, Insightful)
Next thing they'll be calling burglars 'bulgarizers'...
I mean, if you're going to have 'burglarized', why not start doing the same to other words?
"Someone help me! I've been shooterized!"
"Yeah, I went into town the other day to do some shopperizing"
"We're not breaking even. We need some way to encourage more shopperizers into the store..."
Madness!
interesting article (Score:5, Interesting)
Similar to IBM years ago (Score:3, Insightful)
Assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
The article seems to make the assumption that Microsoft got where it is today by having the best products. That's a big mistake. Even if we go back to it's roots and compare DOS with the other operating systems of the time, we see that MS was selling rubbish compared to what the others were.
MS got where it is today by being extremely agressive in defeating its competitors, mostly through business tactics than superior products.
Re:And what was superior to Windows 2.0? (Score:5, Interesting)
In my view, Microsoft got in the door because of the IBM PC and a healthy crop of third party DOS applications, Lotus 1-2-3 in particular. My own employer was building DOS apps when we picked up our first copy of Windows, version 1.03. We laughed at each subsequent attempt, up until around 3.1, when we finally decided maybe it was worth building an app for, just to test the waters.
But did we end up becoming a Windows shop because Microsoft was superior? No. We ended up becoming a Windows shop because our customers already had PC compatible machines, largely because of a legacy portfolio of DOS products. We built software to meet customer demand, and in our industry, it was a gradual platform migration from DOS to Windows 3.1 and onward. Microsoft is entrenched largely because of the hardware.
(That said, Linux also runs on that same hardware. And just as with the shift to Windows development, we'll build whatever customers want. If you're in a position to do so, make sure your software vendors --- particularly their sales reps --- know that your company has an interest in Linux products. That kind of feedback causes more of a stir and will yield more results than a hundred cost of ownership studies or technology articles.)
I disagree that Microsoft got where they are because people loved their products. It has far more to do with simple inertia, followed by aggressive marketing tactics that date back to the days of Windows versus OS/2.
Uh huh (Score:3, Insightful)
This is just a case of dwelling on the negative. Another employee could write the completely opposite review of MS and it would be every bit as convinsing.
The problem with a comentary is that it is generally correct
In MS case, I'm sure they have done many things wrong and missed many oppertunities...yet they continue to make lots and lots and lots of cash. Therefore, this guy can say anything he wants, but it won't change the fact that MS is *definitely* doing things 'right'.
Re:Uh huh (Score:5, Funny)
Not if it was posted on Slashdot.
Re:Uh huh (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy can say anything he wants, but it won't change the fact that MS is *definitely* doing things 'right'.
Almost-- and thus, you miss the point of what he is saying. "Microsoft has *definitely* done things 'right'" would be more accurate.
With Windows 95, it created an operating system usable by the masses, with new features that everyone really wanted to upgrade to-- Internet Access. Windows 98 added improved driver support, particularly for USB. Windows ME added diddly-squat... and it's sales were mediocre. Windows 2000 turned the NT branch into an almost-consumer usable product; Windows XP put a pretty coat of frosting on that, and marginally improved stability and usability.
From my understanding of the history of technology, the Windows OS has been paralleling the development of every other technological tool in history, software or otherwise. You come up with an idea for something to do a job; you get it into a marginally workable form, and people try it; you improve it, and if you get lucky and it's useful enough, eveyone beats a path to your door. You may even make a few more "new and improved" versions. But eventually, you have a mature piece of technology, like egrep, or the pocket knife.
And demand peaks-- because a lot of people HAVE one already, thank you, I'll use it until it wears out. Oh, there's a new Swiss army knife with Torx bits? Maybe I'll look into that when my current knife breaks.
Windows (mostly) works. What the bulk of the masses want to do, it can let them do. It could be more stable, but that's something people feel they should get for free with their CURRENT version-- making people pay for that is tricky.
Since the year September Never Ended, the number of people who want to have a computer has been on the rise. Multi-computer households aren't uncommon. But the number of new purchases is peaking-- and the second computer in the house is often a hand-me-down.
Microsoft is at a point where there isn't much more obvious "new and improved" to put on for the consumer, with both their Office and OS-- so upgrade sales will fall off. Instead of people upgrading OS every two to three years, they'll upgrade every five to nine-- by buying a new computer after the old one dies. Of course, M$ could stop supporting the older software... with bad consequences for (in turn) security for those machines using the software, performance for those networks connected to those machines, and network-dependent software performance for any current Windows machines connected to the network. Ooops.
The article isn't suggesting M$ will go away. What it does imply is that there may be a massive correction at some point in the not-too-distant future (I'd guess 5-10 years, but that's just me) that will cost it a large chunk (I'd guess ~65%?) of its current revenue stream and stock value, and that the measures it is trying now to protect its current revenue stream will make it more difficult to adapt to those leaner times.
(Of course, Apple is in danger of this trap, too. With the OS X.2, X.3, and now X.4 upgrades, it seems to be getting hooked on the upgrade revenue stream, and I'm not convinced users will remain enthusiasic. X.3 added two features of substance that my Mac users noticed and drooled over: Expose, and the return of color-coded files and folders. After seeing the price, of ten machines, two were upgraded for this.)
Speaking from a guy who uses all OSs (Score:5, Insightful)
Every OS excels at something. Mac (still) excels at useability. UNIX stability. Windows excels at recognizing just about any piece of hardware or software I've thrown at it in the last 15 years.
If you think about it, Windows isn't THAT bad. I can't think of a single OS that runs the breadth of programs Windows does from so many years of computing. Sure, console apps still work the same in Linux as they did in UNIX from decades ago, and you can (sometimes) get Mac to run applications prior to OS 7, but there have been a number of times I've loaded up DOS programs from the 80s in Windows XP and was surprised they run more or less perfectly (even when the original app expected full control over the computer).
I think, and others can probably vouch for this, the allure of Mac OS in particular kind of wanes after a few weeks of using it. Again, excellent GUI, but there's definitely a feeling (misguided, I think) that Windows "has" to be bad because it's used everywhere. This doesn't translate to some other consumer products (PS2, anyone) so I'm not sure why geeks hate Windows in particular. Do we hate it because we perceive everyone else hates it (the same way people who use MacOS love it more because everyone else who uses it loves it)? Probably something to bring up in a psychology class.
Re:Speaking from a guy who uses all OSs (Score:4, Interesting)
In the past year, I've been split about 50-50 between XP and Linux. I have to say that I MUCH prefer the flexibility of Linux, but there are certainly drawbacks. Hooking up your new digital camera is a hit-or-miss proposition, unless you're willing to spend a couple hours learning about how hardware is mounted. For the most part, if you plug something into an XP machine, it's recognized and runs. It may be unstable, but it normally works.
Recently though, I've looked at the Macs more closely. I loathe Steve Jobs almost as much as Bill Gates, and Apple's policies aren't much better than M$oft's, but the G5 is appealing. The UI beats anything I've seen before, plus it comes with a shell that's darned-near identical to the one I'm coming to know and love in Linux. It's to the point now where I'm considering a G5 for my next machine, even though 5 years ago I swore it would take a full-frontal lobotomy to make me say that.
Speaking as a geek, I guess I dislike Micro$oft in part because it is prevalent, but also because I don't care much for how they've run companies under because they couldn't compete with them technologically. I also prefer being able to get my hands dirty with configuration - XP takes much of that configurability away from you while Linux allows (or expects!) you to get into the middle of it all.
IMHO, for basic useability, I recommend XP to folks getting into computers, or just wanting a machine for e-mail and web surfing. Plug-ins are made for IE first, and pretty much every hardware configuration is recognized or supported. I don't think that Linux (in it's current form) is right for say my grandpa. And I'm afraid that if you make Linux that user-friendly, you'll end up with something not too much different than Windows. The Mac is a useable compromise, but I still believe that the hardware is too expensive for the majority of users. I sure wish Apple would finally allow licenced machines.
Re:Speaking from a guy who uses all OSs (Score:4, Insightful)
You site Mac "OS X [as having the greatest] usability, UNIX [the greatest] stability"....
OSX has a BSd base. Wouldn't that give OSX the greatest usability and many features from the system with the greatest stability? (Cause let's be honest even with the BSD base, unix it is not)
Where I think MAC OSX really beats out the competition is that it is finally a desktop *nix (kind of, stay with me here). Forever on /. I have been reading articles about *nix on the desktop. Is it ready? When will it be ready? How long until it's viable? Etc etc etc. Well here is a flavor of Unix that you can sit grandma in front of and she can have it mastered enough to do what she wants without any intervention from you. It's hands down more intuitive then any of it's rivals. Oh yeah and it's got a pretty sweet GUI.
What I don't get is the MAC bashing. In my experience MACs (pre-OS X) did not meet the claims. They crashed, and I didn't find it to be the greatest computing experience. I prefer windows to any pre OSX system. However, with OS X many of my issues were resolved, for example:
Lack of Software - now I can run any *nix app
Stability - *nix *nix *nix
Another issue I find is that Windows users know Windows, and well. (At least us /.'ers) For the people I know who are tech savy, to sit at a computer and not know what they are doing is frustrating. So instead of them saying "I should learn how to use this OS", they say "MACs suck, I hate macs. This is stupid." Etc.
I guess I'm asking why do windows users hate MACs? How many Windows users have used a MAC, and I mean used a MAC. Anyone have a founded reason? Or just "They're slow" - not true. "They're too expensive" - not going to argue, but maybe if they gave them out for free, and a pony....
Re:Speaking from a guy who uses all OSs (Score:5, Funny)
Why do so many people write MAC, but not WINDOWS, or LINUX? Maybe because it has 3 letters, like IBM?
Sorry to be snarky, man, but this drives me nuts.
OS X Allure Does Wane (Score:3, Informative)
I can confirm that. Coming from a GNU/Linux background:
1. First thing I noticed that, contrary to what it says on several website, the system ships without a C compiler. To get one, I had to download > 600 MB (big big gasp! that's more than my entire Debian installation was) from Apple.
2. Many applications written for the GNU system won't compile on it. This is because gl
Re:OS X Allure Does Wane (Score:3, Insightful)
Re #8. VLC is slow and ugly, and fails to playback video QT does fine with. Sorry, but QT wins this one for the media it can play. I have a G3-400 Powerbook. Try Cellulo if you really dislike QT's frontend.
Re:Speaking from a guy who uses all OSs (Score:4, Funny)
If you think about it, Windows isn't THAT bad.
Talk about a ringing endorsement! MS should put that tagline on their commercials, you know, the ones where some office lackey supposedly saves the company $500 million by installing Outlook 2003 or something..
Re:Speaking from a guy who uses all OSs (Score:3, Insightful)
The Magic 8 ball says... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm not a Microsoft fan, but, come on... (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 98 was never a stable system (unless the only thing you compare it to is Windows 95).
The guy should at least give XP a shot (hell, even 2000)... infinitely more stable than any of the Windows 9x series.
Win2K was as good as it got (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 2000 works for you. Windows XP works for Microsoft. "Updates are ready for download" (which can appear on machines with no network connection), tightly integrated IE, and more restrictive licensing terms, all make it clear that XP is optimized for Microsoft's benefit, not yours.
There's a good reason that most of corporate America is still running Windows 2000. It's one of Microsoft's most solid versions, probably the most stable one since NT 3.51.
If you're still running anything Microsoft prior to Win2K, upgrade to Win2K. If you're running Win2K, the next available upgrade is to Linux.
The reason (Score:5, Insightful)
Because time and time again (and not just in IT), if you have someone with a significant market lead, they have a tendency to procrastinate because of the lack of threatening competition.
Microsoft doesn't need to fix these issues because there is no viable enough competitor which is affecting their market share enough to make them worry.
stop running windows 98 (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are Microsoft products so endlessly frustrating to use? Even techno-geeks like me get annoyed by Windows. I'm tired of spending the first 10 minutes of my day rebooting just so I can get to work. Microsoft Outlook 2003, the latest version of the company's e-mail and calendar software, hangs for me about once a day, requiring me to restart my PC. I also have a problem with Word 2003: Whenever I bullet a line of text, every line in the document gets a bullet. Asking Windows to shut down is more of a request than a command--it might, it might not. And recently, Internet Explorer stopped opening for me.
It looks like the author needs to stop running Windows 98...
Seriously, what ridiculously mismanaged system is he running? I reboot my win2k and XP systems maybe once a month, if that.
How many startup services does he have that his reboot takes 10 minutes? On my 800mhz machine (ancient by todays standards) reboot is 2-3 minutes, tops.
Although I've stopped using outlook and IE, in favor of mozilla and thunderbird, in the few times I have to use the apps for compatibility, I never experience instability.
Yes, MS products aren't perfect, but I hate it when people dishonestly paint Window's systems as if they crashed every 10 minutes just to make their point that XXX alternate system is better. OSX is sweet. Linux rocks. But WinXP is also a great system.
Re:stop running windows 98 (Score:3, Interesting)
...
Andrews hasn't upgraded his PC from Windows 98 or Office 2000
Is this person REALLY qualified to be speaking about technology, much less writing books about it?
Talk about schlock journalism...
He's using XP, dummy. (Score:4, Informative)
It looks like the author needs to stop running Windows 98. Seriously, what ridiculously mismanaged system is he running?
The author implies that he's been running XP as well as those other latest and greatest programs that are causing him no end of grief:
While aware of Microsoft?s shortcomings, I always believed that the Soft did its best to improve products over time, as it did with Windows XP.
While there's no excuse for 98 to act that way either, I've found it to be more stable than newer M$ junk. Sitting behind a nice Debian firewall and blinded to my network, my wife's Windoze 98 partition has been working as good as it ever did for the last three years. We use it to operate a scanner and a few USB devices. Most of the time it's booted to Debian testing because my wife mostly web surfs and emails. My little brother's XP box lasted about six months on the same network in part because he unwisely used it for internet stuff but mostly because of the many compounding Microsoft design flaws. It crashed and burned on him one day and he had lost his XP CD and put Fedora on it. Now it works great. Anyone working the PC industry knows that my little brother's case is typical and that Microsoft computing has become more not less frustrating.
First paragraph (Score:5, Funny)
I'd love to see someone factor that kind of crap in in a Total Cost of Ownership study.
Re:First paragraph (Score:5, Insightful)
And that, my friend, is a *very* good point. During the time that your system is unusable, you still get paid, but you can't deliver. In an office where people earn > $ 100 per hour, reboot once a day (taking 10 minutes), and lose some time because an essential server is down for a few (let's say 2) hours total each week, that's more than $ 300 per person per week. I have been to such places; I'm not pulling this out of thin air. And that's not even taking into account the occasional virus.
Re:First paragraph (Score:3, Insightful)
That kind of analysis is common, but not really true.
People who earn $100/hr are usually doing tasks that are abstract or creative, or of inconsistent required effort. Unlike factory or foodservice workers, the relationship between time input and value output is nonlinear.
A mental worker, for example, needs to spend some of each day just pondering outstanding problems- an activity that can proceed even though her PC is temporarily out of service. The hour fol
Missed opportunities (Score:3, Interesting)
Now it's more a browser than an os problem : even if the browser is supposedly embedded in the os.
Sorry but this guy wants Microsoft to produce Macs, it's too obvious, he's not credible.
Where's the "ANALYSIS" (Score:3, Informative)
My most memorable moment at Microsoft came during a technical review with Bill Gates. I will never forget the moment when I made an apparently obvious point to him. He responded, "What? Do you think I'm stupid?" Everyone was staring at me, and I felt it best not to answer. Like Gates, there were always people at Microsoft who were much smarter than me and more technically skilled. But he's created a corporate culture that sometimes struggles to see the forest for the trees--and I think this is what has led to some of the challenges that it faces today.
So I did a little digging on this guy and found out he really is stupid. And my guess is that he's bitter because he's just smart enough to realize how stupid he is.
According to the July 20, 1999 [216.239.41.104] edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencier,
Jeff Reifman, a 29-year-old former program manager at MSNBC, left behind $700,000 in stock options in April to co-found GiftSpot.com, a 24-person Seattle company that delivers gift certificates over the Internet. If Reifman had stayed at Microsoft just two more months he would have been able to cash in on the stock.
Ahh... now we see why he is so angry about why his Gift Certificate store failed! It wasn't because PassPort didn't take off...
This kind of "article" is exactly why newspapers are going down the toilet today. There's no disclosure.
Wow, M$ really pays for smear. (Score:5, Interesting)
But for Reifman, who owns two non-profit coffeehouses on Capitol Hill, it has never been about the money. It is more about creating a company that makes a difference. "A lot of what I am doing is motivated by philanthropic causes," said Reifman, who is setting up a program at GiftSpot.com so his online customers can donate their spare change to charity. ...
But Reifman also said Microsoft, which has grown to 30,200 employees, is a more bureaucratic company than the one he joined eight years ago. That was part of his reason for leaving.
"Bureaucratic" is a nice way of saying "stupid".
I don't see where you get off calling the man bitter. He is currently gainfully employed and his gushing praise of Macs and Linux is anything but bitter. Indeed, the whole article is carefully considered and constructive criticism. M$ regularly pays for astroturf and smear, but, jmulvey, you really have set a new low standard by accusing a man driven by philanthropy of bitterness about money.
Fanboys never cease to amaze me with their vehemence, twitsted logic and bile. Reifman has argued persuasively that the Microsoft experience is not all it's cracked up to be and that alternatives require far less effort to work and are earning loyalty. Deal with it, if you can, without slandering the speaker. It's a turn off and always has been.
MS's Mistakes? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not necessarily bad, mind you. If it's not clear whether something is a mistake or not, it's better (IMHO) to stick to the clearcut cases.
Reifman's mention of the MSNBC 'merger' as one of his background bits got me thinking though. What if that's one of Microsoft's bigger mistakes? Was there a way to create a stand alone ISP and content sources, and would it have been bold, inovative, and even profitable? Microsoft is known for an embrace and extend approach to small companies. What if they had built up the Microsoft Network's proprietary content entirely by e&e'ing a bunch of small content owners, and stayed away from 'media giants"?
Dealing with a company as large as NBC means adjusting your views on DRM to better fit with theirs. In Microsoft's case, it moved the company towards the same situation as Sony, in that they have divisions that see DRM mostly as something to be imposed preferrably at the hardware level (i.e. the Windows development team), vrs. divisions that want it in the OS (probably everyone who wouldn't have to code it). The situation also sounds a lot like AOL/Time Warner's, which is also a bit strained.
Bundling (Score:3, Interesting)
This means that Windows customers expect everything to be included in the bundle that they need. The kind of services that TFA recommends MS sell (20$ a month for virual hard drive etc. like
This bundling also affects the lifecycle of the product: 5-6 years between XP and Longhorn is required because they need to do a lot of work! (Could their 're-write' do to them what Netscape's did?). There is so much in the bundle, and MS want to add so much more, that it takes a long time.
This has an impact on EOLing too - MS is still supporting (to some extent) Windows 98(!), 2000, XP. The cost of having a rapid release cycle is supporting many different releases (unless you EOL these releases just as rapidly, cf. Redhat Linux).
Overall, the size of Windows counts against MS in several different ways. It will be difficult for them to move away from it. Perhaps all those companies killed by MS integrating their features into the OS will have the last laugh?
Poor, poor Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
The company is addicted to the revenue from these flagship products and is afraid to go in new directions that might initially hurt the bottom line.
Most healthy companies have diverse product lines and aren't afraid to compete internally. Just look at Sony, a company that sells media that it wants to DRM protect as well as devices for copying said media.
Internal competition usually doesn't hurt. But it does hurt Microsoft, at least in the short term. No matter how much of a spectacular success one of its other products is, if it even lowered Windows or Office revenue by 5% it would be a disaster. That's really kept Microsoft from expanding its dominance into areas it should have been able to because of its market position.
The author writes (and many others have written) that Microsoft is paranoid. There's a good kind of paranoia. I think at Microsoft it's become the bad kind. After all, they have a $280B market cap to maintain.
ps. I thought the anecdote about Gates at the bottom was pretty funny. All the anecdotes of Jobs and Gates seem to paint Jobs as an inspirational, visionary asshole, while Gates is just an asshole. I wonder how true that is?
Migrating files in one step (Score:3, Insightful)
Mr Reifman's curriculum vitae and cover letter were much too long-winded. Next candidate...
Protecting the core business (Score:5, Interesting)
The company must protect these core products. "The prime directive at Microsoft is to protect Windows and get customers to buy Windows and upgrades to Windows," says Matt Rosoff, lead analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland-based newsletter.
If this is really the mindset at MS, it is one of the continuing problems with a lot of big businesses, which is based on their "theory of business". The problem that Peter Drucker [peter-drucker.com] lays out is that a company continues to use a theory of business that may have been VERY successful at one time in their earlier years, but because the environment changes, it is no longer successful. But the company isn't able to review their theory of business and create a new one that takes advantage of their current environment.
A typical symptom that Drucker points out is sacrificing new business oportunities for old ones. This was a problem IBM had when creating the PC market, it frequently sacrificed PC sales to it's mainframe line, and stunted itself for some time.
One aspect that seems to particularly apply here is Drucker's story about GM. GM apparently was very good at improving the performance of existing businesses (I don't recall exactly how it did this though). Over a period of years, it bought a number of other well established businesses (in a variety of fields and for seemingly too much money) and dramatically improved their performance. The idea is that GM had a great theory of business, which no longer applied to it's own field, but still worked in other areas.
It seems like MS is trying to do this, expanding into MSN, the Xbox and other areas, but that still there is something in it's theory of business that is holding it back from dominating those areas. Perhaps they haven't gone far enough afield from their core business... (or perhaps their ToB is too Windows centric)...
Interesting food for thought.
Get past the Anti Microsoft Parts (Score:3, Interesting)
Office and Windows can not provide the revenue stream that they once did. Cheap computers are here to stay and free software that is good enough for the average everyday Joe rocks the world.
So what is going to happen in a couple of years when the Microsoft tax is repealed? What will the company do to replace that revenue stream? I see some serious questions here.
Just consider the Walmart example (which used to run on Lindows). If the average Joe can get by on a (pretty nice) $300 machine that comes chocked full of software, why would he buy one for a great deal more, and get a barebones OS with a couple of little apps? Seriously there is a big difference in what you get with Lindows and Windows. When people start selling that notion watch out. Microsoft should do a full port Gnome and KDE if they had any sence.
I think that the big crush is going to come when the average everyday business wakes up and says no to the Microsoft tax.
payback time (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft tried to spread the delusion that no computer knowledge and background is neccessary to maintain a computer system while making it more and more complex.
Things have reached saturation point these days: every at-least-half computer-literate spends a significant amount of his business and spare time rescuing some system gone bananas.
The fact is that no open source, free as in beer or even proprietary software is much better than any M$ products. The only difference is that these (non-M$) product do not assume self-sufficiency, or praise themselves as the best thing delivered to mankind. Instead of planting the evil seeds of false expectations, it comes natural to people using these product that they need to master a certain level of skill or consult an expert. One knows what one pays for and one knows what one gets!
Microsoft, on the other hand, is simply not transparent. It takes hours of investigation by a computer professional to discover what combination of -khm-features- caused grandma's computer to "start acting funny".
I stopped doing unpaid PC-M$-Win support for my friends and relatives a few years ago, because it was driving me nuts. So, I prepared a one liner fend-off checklist instead:
1. Don't tell me - you are using Windows, right?
2. Who made you think upgrading your system is a good idea?
3. Everything worked fine until recently and gone bizzare for no apparent reason?
4. I have no idea how to fix or even use M$ Outlook. Simply make a choice between using email or running outlook!
5. Other browsers are just fine. When you run onto a site that only opens up in M$ explorer, guess again, who's to blame!
6. Face it - there is no help or anything either you or even a PHD in computer engineering/science can do.
7. Well, that's why Bill Gates is rich and we are poor.
I mean, how deep the world dropped - people started perceiving computers as problems that can only be miracleously solved by throwing money away every few months!
Hopefully, the demise of m$ happens before any kind of world disaster; otherwise, future archeologists from this or another planet will think the dominant planetary religion was playing some solitary card game...
One thing he got right. sort of... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the problem is deeper than he realizes. Even if you don't buy a new machine you can run into this issue: Upgrading.
I recently attempted to upgrade my 2k pro machine to XP pro. I wanted to get slightly better (newer) driver support and play with the newer OS. However, you cannot upgrade from 2k pro to XP pro but have to do a clean install. WTF!? It's the same base NT kernel with some slight tweaks and services and a new front-end. Why exactly am I required to do a clean install? I could understand possible issues if it was from 2k pro to XP advanced server but from pro->pro?
Don't get me wrong, I possess Clue having been a system admin and network architect for many years so my reticence to doing a clean install isn't from a lack of technical ability. But I'll be damned if I can figure out why I have to re-install all of my applications again. Having a easier way to updgrade products and OS versions would go a long way towards Microsoft accomplishing their goal of putting users on the upgrade treadmill. Spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down...
Amoeba
$70 billion in assets should last a long time (Score:4, Insightful)
typical (Score:4, Insightful)
This guy isn't saying anything that an impartial industry analyst (granted, there may not be such a thing) couldn't figure out in a couple of months. The throwing away stock options for a dot com thing kills me, too. What a dumbass. $700,000 in MS stock is still $700,000.
Re:typical (Score:3, Informative)
Grammar like this is exactly why Project Managers are necessary. You Developers have to be kept away from the clients, be grateful that PMs are there to deal with them for you.
(just fanning the flames a little...)
Search is easier than other remote services? (Score:5, Interesting)
Admittedly, though, creating search engines to serve millions of users is an easier task than offering other remote services, such as e-mail and file sharing.
As has been pointed out by various
Registry - root cause of instability (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the current XP based restore point creation does nothing better.
The
IIS 6.0 did that by abandoning all registry settings and moved to an XML file structure - Everything actually. DotNet has moved in that direction too.
Hopefully Longhorn will have a
Generally good article, but (Score:3, Interesting)
I would strongly disagree that Xbox won't bring in billion $ revenues. Whilst it may not be doing that now, MS are looking at the large amount of money made by Sony, Nintendo, and big hitter publishers like EA, who do have billions in revenue from games products.
MS seem pretty committed to the games market, so don't write this off just yet. Look at Sony, whose primary revenue is now derived from the SCE (Sony Computer Entertainment) groups, powered by the PlayStation phenomenon.
Good Enough? (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft ought to consider moving from the software industry into something new. They have the capital for anything. They have enough brainpower to do anything. Commercial space flight comes to mind as one of the most important contributions Bill and friends could make to Planet Earth. It's something no individual needs, sure, but there is big money in it just waiting to be tapped. Imagine going on a space vacation and eating at the 'Restaurant at the End of the Universe.' So cool. Imagine playing Ender's game in space, with lasertag style suites that caused joints to lock. I bet it would replace football on ESPN. And there's a hundred thousand other things people would pay to do on their vacation. That's only the recreation aspect. Then think of science, and paying for lab time in space. And mining the moon or asteroids. Colonization, because such a base would be an ideal staging platform.
But in the software industry, I think they are just about done. They will not contribute anything else important to mankind there. They can only cause damage to the world by crippling the internet they helped create, or crippling software by continuing their current pattern. Time to bow out gracefully and move on.
More like the Romans than the Nazis IMHO... (Score:5, Insightful)
My biggest reason for saying this involves the fact that Microsoft is also too large to just topple outright, and there is too much of the industry tied up in Windows technology for it to just suddenly become irrelevant, not to mention all the legacy apps and documents that'll require continued support no matter what OS or technology eventually rises to new dominance (.doc, ferinstance.)
I guess that, even as an admitted Linux/Mac partisan, Microsoft isn't just going to die in some Nazi-ish 'Gates-eating-a-bullet-in-a-Redmond-bunker' gotterdammerung, as much as it will just become something else, and still hold sway to some extent after it does.
So yeah - out of the two examples you picked, I'd pick the Roman one as being the one most likely to come true.
Re:The bigger they are... (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft is trying to eradicate ideas it does not agree with, by misusing its position of power. Different means, same end.
Some might say that forcing me to use a particular brand of software is a lesser abuse of my human rights than killing me. My point, and the parent's point, is that closed-source software may look trivial -- especially when millions of people have far, far worse things to worry about than choosing
Re:The bigger they are... (Score:3, Interesting)
It may look like a very minor one, but it's a human rights violation all the same. I am no less able to do my job in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt than I would be in a shirt and tie, nor does my wearing a T-shirt and jeans endanger others; therefore it is not necessary that I should wear a shirt and tie to do my job. "What other people might think" is a red herring, since it is a matter of op
Re:News For Slashdot? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a false perception. Not everyone on slashdot wants Microsoft to fail, or is predicting it. Just the most vocal members.
You don't hear from "pro-Microsoft" people, simply because the "anti-MS" people are louder, more 'righteous', and more willing to aubse their essential liberties in order to start a flame war.
I believe that most 'sane' geeks truly understand that Microsoft is a company, like any other, and performs under traditional company rules
But times are changing, and the discourse you may observe on these times, here at
I detest Microsoft. I haven't used their products in years, and I stopped purchasing anything that will in any way give them more control over the computing industry. But, if they were to change their ways, and demonstrate that as a group (rather large), they are capable of cleaning up their act, I would give them a second chance.
But not until "ms_windows.tar.gz" cleanly compiles, straight off the 'net, with my own compiler (not theirs)
Re:News For Slashdot? (Score:3)
No, Microsoft is a monopoly, which is by definition not like any other because there is no other...
Re:News For Slashdot? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:ugh, propaganda disguised as an article (Score:3, Interesting)
Also Mac networking is quite good. I use a 12" Powerbook 867 everyday on a 100%, till I plug up my Mac, network and have no difficulty. I use Entourage to check my work email because we use Exchange servers, but I use finder to browse network shares, I can print to all the printers I need to without hassle. But I put about 3 hours into making the system work because it was worth it to be