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The Return Of Microsoft: Part Two
from the sometimes-they-come-back dept.
Microsoft is not, as the new administration has made abuntantly clear, about to be broken up. It has cashed in on its enormously profitable near-monopolies for desktop and server software. Analysts believe it will soon return to 20 percent revenue growth, up from 14 percent today, which already is nearly double last year's.
The company is also launching a mind-boggling series of sweeping and expensive new initiatives:
- .Net services, software that permits unrelated Web sites to talk with one another and with PC programs, without the user having to open new programs or visit new sities. This is the company's wedge into Web services.
- XBox. As we know, this is the company's huge leap into the $20 billion game console business, scheduled for launch on November 9. XBox is supposed to be three times more powerful than Sony's or Nintendo's boxes, and Microsoft says it plans to spend $500 million on advertising in the first 18 months alone.
- Small Business Software. For the first time, Microsoft will jump into the $19 billion small-business software arena, says Business Week, having bought accounting software specialist Great Plains Software for $1.l billion in April. The company says it then plans to offer customer-relationship, human-resources, and supply-chain software.
- Stinger, Microsoft's latest effort at software for cellphones, begins trials in Europe later this year.
- Ultimate TV. Described by industry analysts as a "set-top box on steroids." For less than $400, this box will allow people to surf the Web and interact with TV shows, and record progams on hard drives for storage and later viewing.
On top of that, Windows XP, the biggest update in more than five years, is scheduled for late October. The company is also breaking out of the low end of the server market with Windows 2000, which began shipping last year. Services running Win2000 claimed 41 per cent of the market, says Business Week, up from 38 per cent in l999.
There's much more. MSN is now one of the most heavily-trafficked sites on the Web, the msn.com portal ranking second in this country behind Yahoo. Hotmail is the world's most used free e-mail service, and MSN Internet Access second only to AOL as the most popular consumer route to the Web. This from a company much criticized for failing to perceive the Web's importance a few years ago.
The rise of MSN demonstrates just how difficult it is to compete with this company. Were it owned by anyone else, the long-struggling MSN would have gone belly-up long ago. But Microsoft can subsidize its products through good and bad times, creating an environment in which it's difficult, if not impossible, for competitors to survive. Microsoft now operates under its own notions of Darwinian business evolution. That is, the rich prey on potential competitors and hang on until they win.
Microsoft is also getting serious about the handheld devices market; its Pocket PC has begun eating into Palm's market share. According to Net market researcher IDC, Pocket PC should hold 19 percent of the market by year's end, up from 10 percent two years ago.
The market for Windows servers grew 32 percent this year, while sales of servers running Unix grew only 14 percent.
Furthermore, Microsoft will spend $4.2 billion on research and development this year, while unleashing the above cavalcade of significant new products and initiatives, starting this week with the launch of Office XP.
Waiting in the wings are Microsoft's "pipeline initiatives," under development or planned for later launch: the first table PC; natural-language processing (talking to computers the same way you talk to people); face mapping (using digital camers to scan a PC user's head into a 3D image so that software can add a full range of emotions for gamers); information agents (software agents that sift and sort through information for businesses and consumers).
It seems almost silly to argue that this is too much power for a single company to wield over something as central to the country's business, entertainment and cultural life as the Net and the Web. But Microsoft's power is barely mentioned in politics or the popular press, and seems of little concern outside of the open source and the boardrooms of some competitors. No company has ever dominated so enormous a part of the country's economy as Microsoft is about to do. The company is moving far beyond the ability of competitors to challenge it, and thus offer consumers any real choices. In fact, the company has grown much more monopolistic than when the government sued it.
Since almost everyone who goes online intersects with a Microsoft product, there are substantial privacy concerns. It follows that MS knows more about the Web habits of Americans than any other company. And should the company ever decide to impose political or cultural values on its users and properties, it could have an enormous impact on speech and the transmission of political ideas.
The return of Microsoft, and its ferocious onslaught on well-funded new initiatives and projects is re-writing both government and civic history. We now have the Unaccountable Company, bigger than the government of the nation in which it resides, beyond the reach of legislators, regulators, citizens, critics, victims, or more individualistic and entrepeneurial competitors. People who need the Net and the Web in their personal loves or workplaces will do business with Microsoft, or they won't do business.
That returns Gates to his pre-lawsuit position as the pre-eminent figure of the Internet, invincible as Frankenstein's monster, the creature that really can't be vanquished or driven off.
Note: Here's Part One of this piece, if you missed it.
Re:when will slashdot learn? (Score:3)
Your problem John... (Score:5)
"Microsoft is not, as the new administration has made abundantly clear, about to be broken up."
Really? I follow this case closely, and I've never seen the administration say that. It's not only a political dead-end, but they don't have control. It's in the courts. And the states AGs will pursue no matter what the feds decide.
Even if they aren't broken up, they still face a strong possibility of other remedies. It will be very difficult for them to be exonarated.
"Anaylists believe it will soon return to 20 percent revenue growth..."
Again, not what I read, and I read a lot. Most stories I see project single digit growth, at best. Some of their divisions have had declining revenue.
"The company is also launching a mind-boggling series of sweeping and expensive new initiatives:"
Keywords here: mind-boggling, as in "consumers are generally unfamiliar with any of them" and "expensive", as in "how do we (MS) maintain expected profit growths when we're spending billions on new products, our money-makers are slowing, and the PC industry is now predicted to show its first annual sales decline?"
".Net... the company's wedge into Web services."
.Net isn't even released yet, and it's already facing competition from the other big players (IBM, Sun, Oracle). Also, it's not entirely clear the MS will be able to lock people into their own web services due to the fairly open nature of that market.
"XBox... huge leap... three times more powerful... Microsoft says it plans to spend $500 million on advertising."
First off, that's wrong. MS is spending $500 million on _marketing_, of which the bulk of that will be spent on non-advertising sources like wooing developers. Do you think Sony and Nintendo spend nothing? It's only an interesting amount b/c it's coming from Microsoft.
Also, it's the games that count. XBox will face fierce competition, and speaking as a hardcore gamer, I see no buzz about XBox around at all, other than that cooked up by ZDNet.
"Small Business Software..."
Microsoft just made a whole score of new enemies who are going to be more than happy to put up a fight.
"Stinger... for cellphones..."
Who cares? Who wants to write apps for specifically for Stinger phones when Java is already becoming the lingua franca? Many, many millions of phones are shipping with Java, and according to Nokia's president, they alone will ship 100 million of those in only a year or two.
"UltimateTV"
Only works with satellites, thus limiting its adoption, and a massive money drain on the company, just like WebTV...
Most of the rest of your points are just as ridiculous, but I've got more important things to do -- hey, I'm off to develop software that competes with MS! -- to waste any more time responding. I'm sure the other Slashdotters will pick up the slack.
So John, quit pushing this defeatist idea of Microsoft inevitability.
Re:They Don't *Always* Win (Score:3)
Wow that is not true. Microsofts sole purpose in buisness is to make money. I agree to that but the way the do it is not been by making good products. It's been by maintaining their monopoly. PERIOD. The money they spent on licensing Java from Sun and corrupting it on the Windows platform didn't make them money. Or how about the Millions they paid SpyGlass for Mosaic only to eventually rewrite it as Internet Explorer v3(?). Remember, they gave that product away too while Netscape was selling theirs for $50/ea and had a massive amount of the market.
These are just some of the examples of the fact that Microsoft makes money by monopoly and their business goal is always to maintain that monopoly so they can do to the competition what they did to Java on the client, to Netscape Navigator, etc. .Net, etc are just another example of them protecting their monopoly. They will never call the Xbox a PC, but that is what it is, and mark my words it will someday run full MS Windows applications ( most of the FROM MICROSOFT ). They don't install the dll's now so they can call it a console and keep the label "PC" away from it. The DOJ wouldn't like that.... Anyway, there are many battles today that Microsoft has to fight because of the Internet. The INet has allowed for so many new innovations in how we and our "tools" interact that each has a potential of changing Microsofts monopoly status.
These other "ventures", Xbox, UltimateTV,
That is the only reason they are backing these products/services ( or many in the past ). Making money is their goal. By protecting the monopoly the goal is a given.
Until now. ;>
Lob
Re:FUD and misconceptions (Score:5)
Every Compaq or Dell server that I've seen come out of a box comes BLANK. In fact, the drives are often packaged seperately. If you don't install the OS, you can certainly pay an 'integrator' to do it for you, someone who is also happy to install NetWare or Linux.
Now, I have no doubt that there's low-end server bundles with NTS pre-installed. However, at $500 for the base licence, that's not an insigificant sum to pay if you don't want it. It has to be easy enough to order a version without NT installed.
Bundling has been Microsoft's practice in consumer space. But the server market has always been too diversified for this to fly (has MS ever had more than 50% marketshare?). There is no "Microsoft tax" for servers.
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Re:They Don't *Always* Win (Score:4)
Oh, I agree. They aren't guaranteed a win here, if we fight hard enough.
For instance: ".NET". If I understand correctly, this is a software subscription service.
Problem:
What we really need here is:
Give a company the option of using that stuff for free, or
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First table PC? (Score:3)
But I already have a PC on my table.
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Re:FUD and misconceptions (Score:3)
They don't really care if you buy them and throw them away. It pumps their market share statistics just the same; it makes Compaq and Dell believe that you wanted a Win2k computer; it is one less computer that Rackable, VA Linux or whatever would have sold.
-pos
The truth is more important than the facts.
FUD and misconceptions (Score:3)
The market for Windows servers grew 32 percent this year, while sales of servers running Unix grew only 14 percent.
It's amazing how people always try to argue some broken facts about the server market and Microsoft. Let me add something to this thread that many people don't see in write ups by news agencies.
Many companies I've worked for including the one I do work for surely purchase MS based servers, but that doesn't mean that the company who purchased them will be running Microsoft on them. E.g. we've purchased hundreds of Compaq Proliant servers with MS only to wipe the entire contents of it and place a Unix base system on it.
Lets look at another angle here. Not too many vendors are shipping servers with FreeBSD or Linux pre-installed and instead your likely to find about a 4-1 ratio of servers being pre configured with MS on them. How many of those servers are wiped and a Unix based system thrown on them? There are no stats for this, nor can you say more MS is being sold when many of the Unix based OS' are free.
So for those who follow these so called stats, there are always other sides to the issues which never see the light of day.
line by line (Score:3)
Microsoft has battled back to the top of the Internet heap, with more heavy-duty products coming to market this year than ever before, profits soaring again, and more research and development money in the bank than most of the world's nations can ever get their hands on, not to mention Microsoft's many out-maneuvered competitors.
Microsoft is not ontop of the internet Heap. The server side of the internet is still heavily weighted by *nix platforms runing open source software. Microsoft is a minor player in the ISP market compared to the likes of AOL and Earthlink. They also are not driving the content of the web, nor do they have any presence as one of the major web retailers.
Microsoft, reports Business week in a thorough report in its June 4 issue, and discussed in on Slashdot two weeks ago, is drowning in cash: $30 billion, more than any other company in the Corporate Republic formerly known as America.
FUD. Microsoft put 4.8 billion in cash on the books last quarter. They have over 30 billion in current assets (cash, short-term investments, stocks). However, most major banks and large investment houses have hundreds of billions in current assets.
Microsoft is not, as the new administration has made abuntantly clear, about to be broken up. It has cashed in on its enormously profitable near-monopolies for desktop and server software.
Server software monopoly? cough cough Apache cough Linux cough Java cough Perl cough cough Send Mail cough... etc. You are the Wotan Master of FUD.
Analysts believe it will soon return to 20 percent revenue growth, up from 14 percent today, which already is nearly double last year's.
Good for them.
The company is also launching a mind-boggling series of sweeping and expensive new initiatives:
Well, if they practice what they preach, this is the first place-nice integration MS has ever done. Exporting their software with soapy xml (w3c standard) is actually a step in the right direction. If they don't f-it all up. As for
XBox. As we know, this is the company's huge leap into the $20 billion game console business, scheduled for launch on November 9. XBox is supposed to be three times more powerful than Sony's or Nintendo's boxes, and Microsoft says it plans to spend $500 million on advertising in the first 18 months alone.
Those same analysts say that if X-box every turns a profit, it wont be for at least 4 years out. Not to mention, MS has always failed in consumer electronics, and they are up against Sony. Plus, alot of that money being pumped in to the X-box is going to the game designer companies, that view this as a win-win.
Small Business Software. For the first time, Microsoft will jump into the $19 billion small-business software arena, says Business Week, having bought accounting software specialist Great Plains Software for $1.l billion in April. The company says it then plans to offer customer-relationship, human-resources, and supply-chain software.
You're in some fuddy waters again. I would call MSOffice small business software, and frankly Office is MS's most profitable and lucrative monopoly. However, Microsoft's small business software suites that you are referring to have all landed them as duds. Sales are relatively dismal for this unproven market which nobody has had any success with todate. As for Great Plains, anybody that has used this software welcomes the change. Maybe we can finaly upgrade our NT 3.1 boxes now that Great Plains is being run by Microsoft. Great Plains is good stuff, but man was it always behind the OS times or what?
Stinger, Microsoft's latest effort at software for cellphones, begins trials in Europe later this year.
Oh my god how terrible. R&D in a new market. The way I see it this is fine. They aren't leveraging any monopoly here (and because of it they will get their ass's toasted).
Ultimate TV. Described by industry analysts as a "set-top box on steroids." For less than $400, this box will allow people to surf the Web and interact with TV shows, and record progams on hard drives for storage and later viewing.
Boy this market is on fire too. Let them piss their money away. a) nobody uses it or is going to use it. b) good for them, they aren't leveraging their OS or Office software here either!
On top of that, Windows XP, the biggest update in more than five years, is scheduled for late October.
XP is just Win2k with some extra crap thrown into it. Win2k is just NT with some bug fixes and a cleaner UI. Microsoft's NT OS versions are just like their Word product (nothing different, except that you'll spend a few hours configuring it after you upgrade). Plus, XP signs the end of the shitty win95/win98/winMe kernel. Thank god! Poor suckers have been living with that unprotected piece of sh*t for 6 f'ing years now!
The company is also breaking out of the low end of the server market with Windows 2000, which began shipping last year. Services running Win2000 claimed 41 per cent of the market, says Business Week, up from 38 per cent in l999.
Mixing your facts up. Microsoft is trying to get into the high-end (traditional RISC you know what the f I mean) market. Tred softly MS, because these guys are serious and they mean business. There names are IBM, SUN, HP to name a few. I see this as good news and hopefully will drive down some of those sun fire prices! As for this Services figure, thats the back-office stuff, not the high end market. That stuff is priciply driven by MS's monopoly on Office software.
There's much more.
Uhg. I'm getting tired.
MSN is now one of the most heavily-trafficked sites on the Web, the msn.com portal ranking second in this country behind Yahoo. Hotmail is the world's most used free e-mail service, and MSN Internet Access second only to AOL as the most popular consumer route to the Web.
FUD FUD FUD. MSN's traffic is driven mostly by idiots browsing to it after they install windows for the first time. Earthlink is #2 for internet access, not MSN. Hotmail has the marketshare of the free-email services (free mind you) but the competition is still present (competing for what I wonder?)
This from a company much criticized for failing to perceive the Web's importance a few years ago.
True, they were scared sh*tless, because the web was driven by servers (*nix) not windows 95.
The rise of MSN demonstrates just how difficult it is to compete with this company.
Compete for what? Portal space? Yahoo is #1. AOL in a wierd way is also #1 if you think about it.
Were it owned by anyone else, the long-struggling MSN would have gone belly-up long ago.
True because it is just a website. Websites alone aren't a business (/.)
But Microsoft can subsidize its products through good and bad times, creating an environment in which it's difficult, if not impossible, for competitors to survive.
Yes, this is true, however any large company can also do this. Sun subsidizes its lowend servers and software from the highend sales. IBM is subsidizing all of its current Linux spending with sales from its other businesses. Subsidizing is not nessessary evil; leveraging however is. And Microsoft does leverage its OS and Office suite.
Microsoft now operates under its own notions of Darwinian business evolution. That is, the rich prey on potential competitors and hang on until they win.
Actually that is the socialist theory. Microsoft believes the most productive will survive and that they are the most productive.
Microsoft is also getting serious about the handheld devices market; its Pocket PC has begun eating into Palm's market share. According to Net market researcher IDC, Pocket PC should hold 19 percent of the market by year's end, up from 10 percent two years ago.
Suprizing what color screens will do. Again, MS is not using any leverage from its OS or Office suite here. Palm integrates pretty well with Office.
The market for Windows servers grew 32 percent this year, while sales of servers running Unix grew only 14 percent.
Grr, back here again eh? Think carefully... Oh yeah, linux is free. No OS... Hmmm. When you add in the OS-less server sales the figures quickly change in favor of Non-Microsoft servers.
Furthermore, Microsoft will spend $4.2 billion on research and development this year, while unleashing the above cavalcade of significant new products and initiatives, starting this week with the launch of Office XP.
Just whose side are you on? Spending 4.5 billion on R&D. Releasing significant new products and initiatives. Hmmm, whats the problem here?
Waiting in the wings are Microsoft's "pipeline initiatives," under development or planned for later launch: the first table PC; natural-language processing (talking to computers the same way you talk to people); face mapping (using digital camers to scan a PC user's head into a 3D image so that software can add a full range of emotions for gamers); information agents (software agents that sift and sort through information for businesses and consumers).
Great. Meanwhile, on the Open Source front, Star Office is still trying to read a f-ing word file. No offense to Open Source and Star Office, but the intiatives you just mentioned are all good things.
It seems almost silly to argue that this is too much power for a single company to wield over something as central to the country's business, entertainment and cultural life as the Net and the Web. But Microsoft's power is barely mentioned in politics or the popular press, and seems of little concern outside of the open source and the boardrooms of some competitors. No company has ever dominated so enormous a part of the country's economy as Microsoft is about to do. The company is moving far beyond the ability of competitors to challenge it, and thus offer consumers any real choices. In fact, the company has grown much more monopolistic than when the government sued it.
Blah blah blah. Too much power eh? Hmmm, maybe we should set up some sort of Committee to oversee it. Some kind of Vangaurd Elite Committee. You could be... Chairman. All kidding aside, I agree with you on the OS and Office issues. Its a monopoly and they are abusing it. On all other counts you are smokin crack.
Since almost everyone who goes online intersects with a Microsoft product, there are substantial privacy concerns. It follows that MS knows more about the Web habits of Americans than any other company.
FUD. Its a concern, but one that watch groups are constantly monitoring, just like the Intel serial numbers.
And should the company ever decide to impose political or cultural values on its users and properties, it could have an enormous impact on speech and the transmission of political ideas.
Too bad this wasn't the crux of your arguement, because I do feel there are some issues here surrounding IE. I wouldn't characterize the impact as "enourmous" however.
The return of Microsoft, and its ferocious onslaught on well-funded new initiatives and projects is re-writing both government and civic history.
What the f are you talking about? Dude, you are seriously paranoid.
We now have the Unaccountable Company, bigger than the government of the nation in which it resides, beyond the reach of legislators, regulators, citizens, critics, victims, or more individualistic and entrepeneurial competitors.
Bigger than the government again eh? Whatever FUD master. I wish it was bigger than the government. It shames me to think how big our government is. It would be nice if there were some private enterprizes that spent more. Also, Microsoft is 100% to its shareholders don't forget.
People who need the Net and the Web in their personal loves or workplaces will do business with Microsoft, or they won't do business.
To some degree yes, principly because MS is still getting payback for unifying the desktop OS.
That returns Gates to his pre-lawsuit position as the pre-eminent figure of the Internet, invincible as Frankenstein's monster, the creature that really can't be vanquished or driven off.
Spare us Katz. You are the monster with this horrible analogy that you keep making.
You really think this is the first time? (Score:4)
Damn ever hear of Morgan, Carnegie, and Rockefeller -- They (and their monopolistic practices as "robber barrons") drove the creation of the anti-trust laws in the first place because they became so dominant the public at large actually was forced to do something about it (instead of the usual sheep role). Hell even after some of the controls went into place Morgan still had enough cash to bail out the New York Stock exchange (can Bill G do that?).
I'm not advocating we should retun to the times of the "Robber barrons" just that this is not the first time corporations and individuals have had such concentrated power, and in fact I believe they had more power in the "Robber barron" period.
What this should do is allow us to learn from our history and try to prevent the kind of concentrated wealth that occurred in this period and hurt a enough people to create a general public outcry. Unfortunately we seem to be quite good at repeating the mistakes of history.
Katz Hypocrisy Part II (Score:3)
Microsoft is neither an unstoppable Frankenstein (in fact I think it is in far worse shape than Katz lets on), and neither is it the wholly benevolent innovator that its worst apologists claim.
This article by Katz is just as distorted and one sided about Microsoft as Craig Mundie's FUD-filled speech about Linux and open source was.
Re:Darwinian? (Score:3)
I'll ignore the obvious troll here and just go for what little you actually said.
Why is it so bad that Joe AOL uses a computer? Just because you're able to write your own OS entirely in Motorola 68K does not mean that that should be the minimum knowledge (notice the word choice, since intelligence implies the ability to learn).
I can think of a hundred reasons off the top of my head as to why Joe AOL should be using a computer. I realise that you're not quite old enough to have experienced this yourself, but find someone who was working in offices before the PC revolution. Ask him or her to describe the productivity level. Now look at today's office, which (though far from the 'paperless office' trumpeted at us 7 to 10 years ago) are immeasurably more efficient and productive. Look at enterprises with more than one office, especially if they're spread out.
Joe AOL, or, if you like, Joe BusinessExec, does not care how computers work or what platform they run on, nor should he care. Joe BusinessExec's job is not to know computers inside and out, and Joe BusinessExec's job (trust me on this) takes up too much of his time already without having to worry about it.
I'm incredibly tired of hearing people whine about the intelligence level of users who use Windows, and I'm sick and tired of hearing how Joe BusinessExec should embrace being able to modify his own source code.
That, my friend, is why there are IT professionals. If you don't want people to use Microsoft, then get a job where you have influence over such things and then change it, damn it.
As for your aircraft carrier analogy, well, if aircraft carriers made the lives of the typical person so much easier that they would ever be in popular demand (ignoring the obvious defects of having millions of aircraft carriers anchored in navigable waters), then you would have two choices: (1) Have someone who knew the aircraft carrier inside-and-out attached to EVERY SINGLE AIRCRAFT CARRIER owner as an employee, or (2) dumb down the aircraft carrier. Which would be better? Probably 1, though it's improbable that that would ever happen. This leaves (2).
You want people to stop using MS products? Go start finding users and training them on other products. I mean it. Now! I'll be too busy doing the same to kill myself.
Zaphod B
Darwinian? (Score:5)
Jon, I don't know where you get YOUR definition of Darwinisms from, but where I come from, the Darwinian model boils down to "the strongest [or most adaptive] shall survive".
And as much as I hate to say it, have you looked at MSN lately? The portal, I mean, not the lame dial-up ISP. It's really not all that bad.
I fully realise I shall be thrown into the dungeon for this, but... <gasp> some of Microsoft's things aren't too bad!
We won't, of course, mention the travesty of a platform that is .NET... not without laughing... but their Windows 9x GUI is a shining example of something that can be quickly grasped by Joe AOL, and their Visual Studio products have made programming accessible to those who shouldn't ever have considered a career in devel...er, wait, never mind, I'm having Freudian slips here. Never mind.
Zaphod B
Here we go again.... (Score:5)
What's so unamerican about a company having the freedom to make and sell products as they see fit? If anything, all the rules and restrictions placed on Microsoft (and our efforts to put more restrictions on them, and in fact to break up the entire company) could hardly be called "American."
The company is also launching a mind-boggling series of sweeping and expensive new initiatives:
Why is that bad? Katz, you're knee-jerking again. They coming up with new projects and products. That's *wonderful*, not terrible. It adds to the "marketplace of ideas." If we don't like them, we don't have to buy them.
But Microsoft can subsidize its products through good and bad times, creating an environment in which it's difficult, if not impossible, for competitors to survive. Microsoft now operates under its own notions of Darwinian business evolution. That is, the rich prey on potential competitors and hang on until they win.
If Linux (or anything else) is going to make it in the marketplace, the people behind it will have to stop whining about not having the market equivalent of affirmative action, and instead will have to develop business models based on something other than "If we make it, they will come."
Since almost everyone who goes online intersects with a Microsoft product, there are substantial privacy concerns. It follows that MS knows more about the Web habits of Americans than any other company.
Uhhh....what about the fact that almost everyone who goes online also intersects with Cisco routers? You're not using any logic, Katz.
That returns Gates to his pre-lawsuit position as the pre-eminent figure of the Internet, invincible as Frankenstein's monster, the creature that really can't be vanquished or driven off.
If it was Linus Torvalds, Slashdot would praise it as the second coming.
This Microsoft garbage is getting really old. Aren't there any important tech topics left in the world?
What was the purpose of this article? (Score:4)
Here are my ideas on possible reasons, feel free to reply with more.
This is not a time to rest on your laurels.
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when will slashdot learn? (Score:4)
Very powerful indeed. (Score:3)
CES Keynote speech by Bill (Score:4)
Bill opened with some self deprecating humor, to loosen up the audience and put them at ease. Then he went on to spell out all the great things the future beheld and how Microsoft would create this technology. Not pausing to mention that there were hundreds of products at the show, which used established technologies (e.g. MP3) and those product lines, if the companies didn't get under the Microsoft Tent, would die. By the end of the evening I was pretty sure he had threatened, indirectly, but most definitely about half the companies at the CES. Not a minor thing to do, when you consider the initiative it would take to do it.
Well, much of that hoopla is coming out, and nobody can't say they didn't have fair warning. Where you want to go tomorrow is increasingly limited to diversity of ideas, which is being whittled down all the time.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
New Initiatives? (Score:3)
Umm, Microsoft is repackaging Back Orifice?
YAWN. (Score:4)
Please please please start publishing stories that aren't just anti - MS. I hate them as much as the next MS hating man (or woman), but I'm bored of x stories a day just bashing MS. Please
IF ONLY I COULD HAVE USED THOSE POINTS ON THIS ARTICLE!!
Re:They Don't *Always* Win (Score:3)