Microsoft Brand In Sharp Decline 399
Amy Bennett writes "A recent poll of about 12,000 US business decision-makers by market researcher CoreBrand found that Microsoft's brand power has taken a dive over the past four years. According to the study, Microsoft dropped from number 12 in the ranking of the most powerful US company brands in 2004 to number 59 last year. In 1996, the company ranked number 1 in brand power among 1,200 top companies in about 50 industries. The CEO of CoreBrand said: 'When you see something decline with increasing velocity, it's a concern.' To add some historical context, IBM suffered a much faster and more severe decline in brand power in the early 1990s and it took them 10 years to rebuild the brand's reputation."
So who is the current #1? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:So who is the current #1? (Score:5, Informative)
- Coca-Cola (same rank as last year)
- Johnson & Johnson (same rank as last year)
- Hershey Foods (up from number 8 last year)
- Harley-Davidson (up from number 6 last year)
- Hallmark Cards (same as last year)
- Campbell Soup (up from 10 last year)
- UPS (down from 4 last year)
- FedEx (down from 7 last year)
- Colgate-Palmolive (up from 12 last year)
- Starbucks (up from 13 last year)
- PepsiCo (down from 3 last year)
This list is measured from a telephone interview among business leaders. Their scores were weighted higher if they had more familiarity with the companies in question. They were rated based on the Brand's overall reputation, perception of management, and investment potential. Note that these are corporate brands, not consumer brands. Apple is not on the list, in case anyone was wondering.Re:So who is the current #1? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I can't believe I'm doing this, but if Harley Davidson is ranked number 4, then this study has little or no bearing on the reliability of products the company m
Re:So who is the current #1? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Since the Evo engine in the 1980s, Harleys have been boringly reliable, and are easy to support with aftermarket parts. You can build a whole motorcycle from such if you wish. Going over 100K miles on an Evo isn't uncommon.
"A lot of people don't ride their harleys to the bike rallies: they dri
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Come to think of it the cycles themselves are nothing but fashion accessories. The japanese bikes are better in every objective criteria.
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Re:So who is the current #1? (Score:5, Informative)
Chances are you have heard of at least some of these products (e.g. Tylenol, KY, Rolaids... the list is long).
Re:So who is the current #1? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know what kind of evening you have planned, but count me out.
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No way! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No way! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the article suggest there are more possible reasons than the one you cited, but speaking of suffering, I'll offer up my own jab to add to the fun: No Recession at Red Hat [nytimes.com]. Maybe not a recognised brand name around the kitchen table, but somebody's noticing.
Re:No way! (Score:5, Insightful)
The job of good executive management is to know the difference, better yet, to make the difference go your company's way.
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So last quarter RH's income was 22m while MS's was 6B+.
That's profit, not revenue but anyway. MS's income depends almost entirely on a government-granted monopoly, whereas Red Hat is thriving even though they allow (in fact want) people to copy their software.
Rich.
Re:No way! (Score:5, Insightful)
Redmond weather alert (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Redmond weather alert (Score:4, Interesting)
Example: When you think "car" you should think "Honda." When you think "Honda" you should remember how your last one ran for 13 years before you couldn't stand it anymore and sold it, how it handled well, etc. (Not to promote the Honda brand, but I know someone this actually happened to, and he bought a new Honda.)
Re:Redmond weather alert (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't always necessarily go for quality. If that were the case, McDonald's and a bunch of other businesses that turn out what are essentially low-quality, cheap or just plain mediocre products would be out of business.
Some people want a brand because it represents an attitude -- like I'm different. Think of Apple's Think Different campaign. People bought Macs just to be different -- they didn't care about features in the OS or available software, they just wanted a different kind of computer.
In the end the average Joe Sixpack buys what he finds familiar. He doesn't make buying decisions based on facts or critical thinking or anything related to clear, precise, logical thought. Kinda scary when you think about it.
Re:Redmond weather alert (Score:5, Insightful)
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Microsoft had relitivly good quality products in the pas
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Arguably, you had two sides of the exact same
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Many of the domestic Hondas are made in Marietta, Ohio by American workers. Similarly for many of the other imports. American workers are capable of making good cars on American soil.
Gee, I wonder where else we can look for the reasons...
(Personal preference, I'd rather not look to the engineers. Nearly every engineer I know *wants* to do a superior job, but is handed (sometimes absurd) constraints.)
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For example, I recently decided I needed a good flashlight. What popped into my head? Maglite. Don't know where it came
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It would be interesting to know if studies such as these actually do factor into the accounting of intangibles and goodwill. Any CPA's out there?
popularity and peer pressure (Score:5, Interesting)
That seemed a little strange to me, since it usually takes a little while to get used to a new interface. Then she said, "My boss and coworkers are so jealous."
That's how you know Apple has turned the corner. When suddenly random people can become cool for owning a Mac. Compare that to a few years ago, my brother mentioned in his university classes he was the only one who had a Mac, and people gave him strange looks. You had to actively go against the flow to get an Apple in those days. Now the flow is starting to head in that direction.
(Heads off to buy more Apple stock).
When you come to the fork in the road, take it (Score:5, Interesting)
(Heads off to buy more Apple stock).
While I acknowledge others' pervious predictions of rough sailing ahead for Apple have generally not come to reality (since the return of Jobs), your tale leads me in the opposite direction.
It reminds of the story of Joe Kennedy knowing it was time to get out of the stock market when he was getting stock tips from the shoe shine boy. Part of Apple's appeal was its status as an outsider. Random people can't become cool for owning a Mac; the point of being cool is you're not just another random person.
With apologies to Yogi, are we reaching a point where no one will buy an Apple because everyone's buying Apple?
Re:When you come to the fork in the road, take it (Score:5, Insightful)
The reality is, being cool is about being cool. Can't be defined. Any attempts to do so peg you as uncool, and you'll probably never know why.
Re:When you come to the fork in the road, take it (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlikely. Apple only owns about 14% of the laptop market right now. Just look at the iPod - initially it certainly did impart some coolness on its owners, but in the end it simply became a hip commodity item, like driving a hybrid.
Until we see another company as consumer-savvy as Apple come along as the next underdog chic electronics manufacturer, I think Apple's position is pretty safe.
As a Mac user I can only see the pattern continue. The Mac has seen an explosion of popularity ever since the Intel switch (the best move ever, really), and that has started to remove the main weakness of the platform: lack of software. Many app developers are now clamoring to port apps to the Mac, and most encouragingly a lot of open source projects now have stable Mac ports as well. As the software barrier becomes removed it will only become easier to switch to the Mac.
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Only: "merely: and nothing more;"
It's a bit more than 'only'. I've always liked Macs since the late 80s. I kind of detested how it took the iPod to get them into the mainstream, but I like the halo effect that it had anyway. I now only use Windows at work and 100% of my time outside of work is spent in Mac OS. I've just got a PS3 today, and have had a Wii for the last couple of ye
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Coolness is about being yourself, respecting other people, and not getting pushed around. It's about learning h
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I get or recommend it for family so I don't have to sit there and fix anything when I visit. Or take calls after work.
Sure, I could install Ubuntu (and do for people with PCs) but that leaves me with the headache of installing printers sometimes. And forget All-In-Ones. With a Mac, there are ready made solutions which most people want.
I can't the number of times I had to reinstall Windows XP on this damned machine over the
Re:popularity and peer pressure (Score:4, Informative)
Wha? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wha? (Score:5, Informative)
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And if so, does that mean that MS is severely underestimating the potential effects blemishes will have on their name/brand and thus worth? I know that MS's entire worth to me as disappeared for this very reason.
Sorry for the disjointed posts (I guess I wasn't done with original thought).
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The way it has been explained to me "brand power" is the value that consumers attach to a brand name in lieu of actually judging a product based on its attributes.
Apple has high brand value (for example) because people associated its name with a certain level of quality, ease of use, intuitive user interfaces, etc. Sure, ACME Computer Co could build a product every bit as good as Apple. You could put an ACME and an Apple laptop next to each other and, after extensive testing, come to the conclusion that
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Another common example is the sharp loss brand for home products with the advent of the power of Walmart. Consumer seem much less willing to pay more for laundry detergent just because it is advertised on TV. Such brands are now must differentiate b
corebrand? (Score:5, Funny)
No suprise... (Score:5, Insightful)
In my opinion they need to stop trying to take over the internet and look internally to focus and improve their core product lines. The release of vista and its lack of acceptance in the business sector was a huge blow to their reputation. I personally am aware of several VERY large companies that were considering Vista a year ago and have completely turned 180 degrees towards open source. I dont know how far MS thinks they are going to get by forcing Vista down the corporate throat.
Im not a microsoft hater, in fact I depend on MS products to make a living, but I know Im not alone on this sentiment.
Re:No suprise... (Score:5, Interesting)
By way of anecdote, being a developer in Seattle you will inevitably work with other who have at one point or another worked at MS. One common thread I've heard (as a developer in the Peugeot Sound) is that the MS company culture is severely dysfunctional (ie: many meetings and decisions are nothing but a contest to see who can position themselves for the next raise/promotion). At first I thought this was a given as these developers, program managers, and executives are EX-employees (if they liked it they would have stayed). However, the universality of their experiences combined with the complaining of those I know who still work at MS makes me believe there's merit to their comments.
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What Microsoft has forgotten.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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They just didn't rank high enough to get on the top 100 list. Apparently a quality product isn't really what gets you to the top.
Re:What Microsoft has forgotten.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Forgotten?
Seriously - at the risk of sounding like a basher - has Microsoft ever produced a product where they focused on providing better quality than the competition?
I've known many people who have purchased Microsoft products for compatibility with existing infrastructure (basically vendor lock-in). I've never personally known anyone who has bought a Microsoft product because they perceived it as having more features, being easier to use, or being more stable than competing products.
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I have (Score:5, Interesting)
E.g., when some people I knew switched the whole company from WordPerfect to MS Word, much against my zealotry at the time. The fact is, the first attempts at WP For Windows sucked hairy donkey balls. Word might not have been a shiny gold nugget, but compared to WP it was at least like polished lead compared to a turd.
E.g., Windows itself gained a lot of market share fast back in the day, because the 386 version was pretty much the only thing that combined (A) preemptive multitasking, at least for legacy apps, (B) a GUI, unpolished as that might have been, and (C) compatibility with those legacy apps. And maybe (D) a price you can actually afford, as opposed to buying an ultra-expensive, and just as proprietary, Unix for that PC. There have been other attempts at one of the three, but they typically missed the other two.
Yes, I know, _nowadays_ Linux exists which fits all the bills and is a viable choice and all. But back then the competition actually had worse products than MS, sad as that may sound. Who was better than Windows? GEM with its max 4 windows and no support for using memory over 640k? The text-mode-only task-switching of DesqView? (Even DesqView/X was too little, too late. Way too late.) OS/2? Heh. Trust me, I used all those, I even was an OS/2 fanboy at one point, but looking back, I can see how Windows won on its own merits back then.
The last genuine competitor to Windows was IBM's OS/2, and even that was a sad story. For a start it was a story of corporate schizophrenia, where half of IBM didn't want to use or sell the OS that the other half created and/or endorsed. But it was also a story of IBM ignoring the users' grievances. Year after year people complained that a single mis-behaved or crashed application can lock up the common event queue, and thus the whole computer. And year after year IBM stuck to its guns that that's the right way to do things, and generally STFU you bloody user. It was a story of such fuck-ups as IBM launching a version of OS/2 with much fanfare, and then discovering that if you were upgrading from a previous version, it would fuck up the config so badly that your newly installed OS wouldn't boot. (Or not make it to the desktop.) It was a story of IBM developer suport being non-existent. Much as we laugh at "Uncle Fester" Balmer's developers dance on the stage, it was a whole other message than IBM's. IBM at felt a lot more like "fuck off and stop trying to steal the market for our own apps for OS/2." Etc. And IBM lost. Why? Because, bloody sad as it sounds, their stuff was actually worse than MS's.
E.g., I remember being one of the last Netscape fanboys in a world which was quickly going IE, and Netscape's Mozilla team had gone in dada land for years reinventing skinned widget libraries instead of making a browser. The fact that everyone kept pointing out was that IE was head and shoulders above the buggy (and rapidly getting outdated) mess that was Nescape 4.x. Both being free, people preferred the MS one as (subjectively) better.
Etc.
I can even tell you the mistake you're making. You're seeing just the years after they became a monopoly, and when they actually could push people to buy just for compatibility sake. But you forget their years of actually fighting uphill in those markets. Before you could have people telling each other "get Word already because we all have it", you first have to convince enough people to ditch WordStar and WordPerfect, _in_ _spite_ of the fact that everyone else has them.
Don't get me wrong, that doesn't excuse MS's monopolistic tactics or anything. That's not what I'm saying. But I'm saying you first have to have enough of a foothold before you can apply them. MS's monopoly isn't based on just one thing, it's an interlocking porcupine of pieces which need each other. It only starts working at all after you have at least a few such pieces which are the de-facto standard. And there must have been _some_ merit involved in getting at least those ramm
Re:What Microsoft has forgotten.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Five years ago, a corporate environment had to use Microsoft word for creating documents and Outlook Express to send/receive E-mail. Now, you can use OpenOffice or PDF files to exchange documents, and use any type of client to send/receive E-mail.
Nobody would really want to buy each item individually when they could get the equivalent applications from the open source community.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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From an engineer's perspective this is absolutely true. From a typical consumer's p
Re:What Microsoft has forgotten.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not convinced Microsoft ever knew that - at least not in the way you mean it.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm sure at some levels there are people trying to ensure that it is, in fact, a quality product -- at least as much as it can be.
But, Microsoft has always been focused on making sure you buy their products, no matter what. They managed to get IBM to make it mandatory, then it became the de-facto standard, then it took a lawsuit to try to be able to buy a PC which MS wasn't paid for. They've not been above strong-arming people and saying that you must do it on our terms, or not at all.
Their entire corporate strategy has been to try to push out competitors by making them not work with their stuff, and try to make sure that top to bottom you use their stuff for everything you do.
Microsoft has never truly been interested in competing purely on the quality and merit of their products. They have always had an evangelical position that essentially said "we're good, we're getting better, stick with us and keep paying us, and eventually we'll deliver something which does what we promised the last version would do". And, they're not above a little deception to do it.
And, quite frankly, Microsoft has never had to compete purely on quality. They started off with an unfair advantage, translated that into an assload of cash, and then they used that to get themselves further entrenched.
Cheers
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Microsfot has forgotten, like many other corporations, is that all one needs to focus on is making a quality product. If you do that, all other things, quartely earnings, shareholder returns, marketing, ect, will take care of themselves natually.
Not quite, and that's the bitch of the matter. Having a good product is maybe three-quarters of the battle but then there's all of the political bullshit that can still sink a great idea. You do need Marketing to cut through that crap, you do need schmoozing, and a lack of these kind of soft skills can see a company fail. But by striking this very faustian deal, the company is doomed. Marketing is no longer the necessary evil in the organization, it metastasizes becomes the prime evil that infects every pa
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2. Take care of your workers.
3. The profits will take care of themselves.
T.J.Watson, Jr.
Interesting.. (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM is at spot #18, which is quite surprising really - as far as I noticed there are no other software companies that high on the list at all. Most of the top 25 seems to be car companies, food/drinks/restaurant franchises and the like.
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Which is hard to believe, given that people are referring to generic MP3 players as "iPods" nowadays.
IBM
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If software was so integral to apple, then why don't they sell licenses for generic PC's? Because it's all about the hardware.
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What the heck is this a measure of? (Score:2)
Ah well. Given Vista, Windows security issues, and Apple's consistent attempts to sell their computers to the high-school and college-age markets, I wouldn't be surprised if this was just a reflection of more and more Macheads entering the workforce and staying loyal to Apple, or Windows users expressing their disgust at Microsoft. Many (most?) middle-aged people think
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Although this wasn't where I was going with my post, it would be foolish to say
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At work, just about everyone here has at least one Apple machine at home - for most people they're the primary machine, and all the new workstations I've seen bought at work have been a variety of MacBooks. Admitadly this is a Unix shop, so there's likely to be more of a skew towards Apple hardware.
However, almost everyone I talk to about getting a new computer is seriously considering Apple hardware. That's not just
Brand Dilution (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Brand Dilution (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, on the other hand, Apple is cool, Linux is for sale at Dell and Walmart, people realize that Windows XP isn't too bad, and there is no great potential for a new OS in the pipeline from Microsoft(as there was with win2000). Yeah, there's Windows 7.....don't hold your breath). Their brand power was good, now it's getting bad. The winds of change are in the air from a lot of different directions.....no company can hold a monopoly forever, it is destiny that there will be a change. The only question is when.
...and that people *don't* have a choice (Score:3, Insightful)
Vista is different, as there is a lack of choice in the MS realm. If you want to run software that runs
Who? (Score:5, Funny)
2018 (Score:5, Funny)
So, Microsoft ought to be selling a decent version of Windows by 2018?
Next in teh news .... (Score:4, Funny)
Saying " our Products sales are doing so well that we can drop Sharp Consumer Electronics from our certified MS OEM's list.
He brilliant! (Score:5, Funny)
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Obvious (Score:5, Funny)
FB (Score:2, Offtopic)
Well now, that's cheery! (Score:2)
On top again in 2014 (Score:2)
So, Microsoft's decline started around 2004...so, they'll be back in the top five by 2014. I'll be installing "Windows Server 2010" by 2014, and testing "SQL Server 2013" to replace my "SQL Server 2008" which I'd been running since 2010.
IBM's decline (Score:2)
Microsoft brand declining? Depends... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm an educator and work with kids (and some university students) all day. Ask anyone aged 10-25 what Microsoft is known for and they'll say Xbox (or Xbox 360). Sit kids in front of a Mac and they'll start messing with it; sit kids in front of a Windows box and they'll start messing with that. They don't "see" the operating system or the cognitive dissonance of the Office ribbon... They're still platform agnostic. And Microsoft is counting on that.
We associate Microsoft with "Computers, Peripherals and Computer Software", we hate their stuff, and we take glee in the decline of the Evil Empire that brought us Windows, IE, and OOXML. If I were to be associated with the Vista debacle and ActiveX exploits forever, I'd want my brand to die, too!
Don't be fooled by the article however, Microsoft still has the mindshare of future consumers - they're the cool company that brought us the Xbox, Xbox Live, and the Halo franchise... In another 20 years, wouldn't you want to buy technology from the guys who brought you all the great memories from your childhood??
Apple went from a declining "Computers, Peripherals and Computer Software" company to a hot mainstream company, and used the iPod halo effect to come back into their old, failed "Computers, Peripherals and Computer Software" market, hotter than ever. Microsoft is simply stealing a page from Apple and guaranteeing its survival for the next 20 years, when the Xbox gamers of today take their turn at being CIOs and CTOs.
MSN (Score:4, Interesting)
Rebuilding IBM (Score:2)
Relevance of Brand Power outside US (Score:2)
Another Columnist Discovers The Real World (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Microsoft isn't Vista or Clippy or XBOX360; those less-than-good products are just the result of the arrogance that runs through everything they do. They've turned out a few good products, too.
If you need to point a finger at them, how about pointing at - well, how about their anti-trust conviction? Did you notice how they changed their ways after this conviction? No? That's what's wrong with Microsoft. It's the anti-competitive way they insure that every new computer has Windows installed. It's the anti-competitive way they bundle other products. It's all the companies who were crushed by Microsoft - but not before Microsoft "liberated" the intellectual property from those doomed companies.
How about their shrink-wrap license agreements that they use to bind you - but if you disagree and try to use the remedy they've provided (return product for refund) you'll find that's virtually impossible to do? How about the way they're currently trying to subvert the ISO standardization process?
Remember when XP went out the door with a list of 50,000 bugs still unresolved? They're still sticking band-aids on it - but rather than complete that product they're off to yet another (arguably less functional) product which was also rushed out long before it was ready.
For those who want to defend this miserable excuse for a software company, here's a question for you: name 10 technologies that Microsoft has shipped that were invented in-house by Microsoft.
Re:Another Columnist Discovers The Real World (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it has more to do with the fact that MS consistently shipped mediocre software, and that fact caught up with them in two ways. First off the internet allowed people to become more educated on alternatives, allowing things like Linux and Apple to gain a small amount of mindshare (which is slowly turning into marketshare), and the internet also exposed Windows to a very "dangerous" environment, and Microsoft was not prepared for all the problems that it caused.
MS has seemed to get a halfway decent handle on the security issues, I haven't seen many news reports about huge global systems being suddenly taken down by worms anymore, and while my mom's computer still manages to get malware on it, it's not rendered unuseable every 6 weeks anymore. But people remember those problems, and those problems were enough of a headache that they got they started looking at some alternatives.
Prior to the internet becoming such a major part of the computing landscape, MS could put out whatever crap they wanted, and nobody really knew any better. The internet served both to expose a lot of those flaws, and at the same time it empowered people, or at least made it significantly easier for them to share their issues and look for solutions. Unfortunately for Microsoft, some of those solutions involve Linux/MacOS/other non-microsoft software.
worthless (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe companies are finally getting fed up with (Score:4, Insightful)
SSH, LDAP, etc. the list of technologies that almost every other OS on the planet supports but XP doesn't(I don't know about Vista, but it's not like XP is that old). Microsoft's client OSs seem to have features that try to force you into buying Microsoft server OSs. Samba is great, and I certainly don't want to denigrate the brilliant people who write the stuff, but it shouldn't be necessary. Maybe back in 1996, when most business networks outside the megacorps consisted of a dumb hub with very little centralized management Windows wasn't all that bad, but the problem for Redmond is that the rest of the world moved on and they didn't. They still seem to think its a Microsoft only world, but the rest of the world thinks differently.
Microsoft will bounce back, windows might not (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft almost seem to have given up on their PC products. They are churning out latest versions of Office and Windows in order to keep milking their core consumers, but their heart doesn't seem to be in it anymore. Its more like rent-seeking than software development for them now. They seem to have bought their own carefully crafted image of immortality and become complacent.
They just haven't cottoned on to the essential change in peoples perceptions of computers since the last time they fucked up good and proper (Windows ME). You used to talk to non-technical people and they would complain about how computers are too slow and computers are always getting viruses and crashing and computers always need reformatting. Now that the majority of the population have been shown there are computers that don't suffer nearly so badly from those issues, they are more and more talking about how windows always gets viruses, crashes and needs reinstalling. The crappiness of windows is no longer assumed to be just a general feature of computers that users have to live with.
The Xbox line seems still pretty strong though, with a certain demographic of gamers (I won't be too insulting seeing as I imagine a lot of the people here own an Xbox or Xbox 360, but my image of the average Halo player does involve a sideways baseball cap). In fact I think it is strong enough to keep Microsoft afloat and in the public mind no matter what happens to windows/office. Whether or not they can make an apple-like comeback and re-enter the OS market if Windows 7 doesn't miraculously save them, remains to be seen.
a = dv/dt (Score:3, Funny)
No, it's called gravity!
MS marketing gone wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
It's a dirty job.
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Re:You don't say... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You don't say... (Score:5, Funny)
Just the other night I was installing Ubuntu onto the computer of a freind's daughter, and I explained to her the benefits of open source software, and how it is inherently superior to closed source software.
Please forgive me for going a little OT here, but, at one point she suggested that Photoshop was better then GIMP. I tried to hold in the laughter, but my mouth was full of cheetos, and I spluttered some soggy crumbs over her keyboard. I used my Ubuntu t-shirt to wipe most of them off, and when I looked up, she was staring at me, and making eye contact. Does this mean she likes me?
Re:You don't say... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You don't say... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You don't say... (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe thats the primary reason behind Windows still having popularity.
You see it all the time.
E.g. Printer wont print just before something urgent is due.
They are annoyed when it occurs but are happy when they fix it (usually by rebooting or restarting the app).
I've been watching people using Windows and most of the time they dont even realise when it crashes.
Its just automatic for them to reboot/restart the program and they edit what happened out of their memory.
I've actually had to tell someone that their computer crashed because they didnt notice.
They have been taught that all computers are like that and they just accept it.
Whenever I make Windows crash (very often with Explorer) I get really pissed.
Which is why I make a point on not using Windows unless absolutely necessary.
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Hah. While you jest, I've seen quite a number of non-techies seriously annoyed with Windows — so annoyed, in fact, that one of my colleagues asked me a number of questions about my MacBook Pro just yesterday. It seems her next laptop will have nothing to do with Microsoft.
Linux has a bit lower penetration among non-technical users... then again, my father, stepmother, grandfather and grandmother are all running Kubuntu. Primarily thanks to me, though — my grandparents have absolutely no need fo
Re:You don't say... (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, using Ubuntu on this machine I rarely if ever have to go to any of those above. Almost anything I could want (except high-end games) is up on Apt/Synaptic with a decent summary, push button installation/un-installation/updates. Configuration is much the same way, with far more options available through nice gui menus than are ever available to the Windows user.
Even those games that I have for linux such as Second Life and Eve Online have been push button to install. Sure with SL I did have to make my own menu button for it but that was filling in a gui form menu and was not strictly necessary.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you read the article, you will see that sales/profits etc.. have very little effect on the phenomena observed, unless you argue that sales correlate directly with investment potential, in which case you might be right. To counter though, MS stock has been virtually static for quite some time.:
CoreBrand meas