Speaking of Entrenched Tech Companies, Why Didn't Microsoft Die? (nytimes.com) 223
"Why didn't Microsoft die?" And what does that mean for other entrenched tech companies today? That's the question being asked by the New York Times' On Tech newsletter:
For a decade or so, Microsoft botched so many significant technology trends that the company became a punchline. But Microsoft more than survived its epic mistakes. Today, it is (again) one of the tech world's superstars... Understanding Microsoft's staying power is relevant when considering an important current question: Are today's Big Tech superstars successful and popular because they're the best at what they do, or because they've become so powerful that they can coast on past successes? Ultimately the angst about Big Tech in 2021 — the antitrust lawsuits, the proposed new laws and the shouting — boils down to a debate about whether the hallmark of our digital lives is a dynamism that drives progress, or whether we actually have dynasties. And what I'm asking is, which one was Microsoft?
Let me go back to Microsoft's dark days, which arguably stretched from the mid-2000s to 2014... The company failed to make a popular search engine, tried in vain to compete with Google in digital advertising and had little success selling its own smartphone operating systems or devices. And yet, even in the saddest years at Microsoft, the company made oodles of money. In 2013, the year that Steve Ballmer was semi-pushed to retire as chief executive, the company generated far more profit before taxes and some other costs — more than $27 billion — than Amazon did in 2020... On the healthy side of the ledger, Microsoft did at least one big thing right: cloud computing, which is one of the most important technologies of the past 15 years. That and a culture change were the foundations that morphed Microsoft from winning in spite of its strategy and products to winning because of them.
This is the kind of corporate turnaround that we should want. I'll also say that Microsoft is different from its Big Tech peers in a way that might have made it more resilient. Businesses, not individuals, are Microsoft's customers and technology sold to organizations doesn't necessarily need to be good to win.
And now the discouraging explanation: What if the lesson from Microsoft is that a fading star can leverage its size, savvy marketing and pull with customers to stay successful even if it makes meh products, loses its grip on new technologies and is plagued by flabby bureaucracy? Was Microsoft so big and powerful that it was invincible, at least long enough to come up with its next act? And are today's Facebook or Google comparable to a 2013 Microsoft — so entrenched that they can thrive even if they're not the best?
Let me go back to Microsoft's dark days, which arguably stretched from the mid-2000s to 2014... The company failed to make a popular search engine, tried in vain to compete with Google in digital advertising and had little success selling its own smartphone operating systems or devices. And yet, even in the saddest years at Microsoft, the company made oodles of money. In 2013, the year that Steve Ballmer was semi-pushed to retire as chief executive, the company generated far more profit before taxes and some other costs — more than $27 billion — than Amazon did in 2020... On the healthy side of the ledger, Microsoft did at least one big thing right: cloud computing, which is one of the most important technologies of the past 15 years. That and a culture change were the foundations that morphed Microsoft from winning in spite of its strategy and products to winning because of them.
This is the kind of corporate turnaround that we should want. I'll also say that Microsoft is different from its Big Tech peers in a way that might have made it more resilient. Businesses, not individuals, are Microsoft's customers and technology sold to organizations doesn't necessarily need to be good to win.
And now the discouraging explanation: What if the lesson from Microsoft is that a fading star can leverage its size, savvy marketing and pull with customers to stay successful even if it makes meh products, loses its grip on new technologies and is plagued by flabby bureaucracy? Was Microsoft so big and powerful that it was invincible, at least long enough to come up with its next act? And are today's Facebook or Google comparable to a 2013 Microsoft — so entrenched that they can thrive even if they're not the best?
Why didn't microsoft die? Very simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
... money and they had a lock on gaming on the PC. No other operating system had the games the PC had once 3D acceleration took off in 1996 with quake/descent and other early 3D accelerated games.
Re: Why didn't microsoft die? Very simple... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Why didn't microsoft die? Very simple... (Score:5, Interesting)
Being the gaming os of choice, with little to no alternative, must have counted for something. But it's the corporate sector where MS is both entrenched and raking in the billions. I'm talking about volume licensing and cloud services. Look at how long IBM and Novell persisted on the back of corporate infrastructure.
There's a big word which is missing here; "criminal". It's not used once in the article and that's a bit of a shock.
If other alternatives had been allowed into the market then there could have been change. OS2 was at heart a better operating system than Windows. Given a basic customer base IBM could have learned. Instead, Microsoft used underhand tactics which only worked because of their illegally earned monopoly, blocking IBM's ability to distribute the system. Apple has demonstrated clearly that, when Microsoft is limited from actual criminal actions (which it has been partially after some court judgements), competitors can succeed.
Microsoft Research is actually excellent and looks great, when you don't understand it. Once you understand that it's main aim is to buy up researchers that might otherwise help their competitors it becomes less so.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Interesting that you blame MS for OS2's failure. I used OS2 back then, pretty much until IBM stopped supporting OS2. Was quite happy with it. And MS never onc
Re: Why didn't microsoft die? Very simple... (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting that you blame MS for OS2's failure.
It used to be a quite well known story. When OS/2 was first produced and needed it's biggest hype cycle, OS distribution was actually still done on floppy disks. Microsoft bought all the capacity available meaning that IBM literally could not deliver the operating system to the developers who needed it to port software over.
Of course, this didn't stop some people using it later, once they had it, but without applications it's very difficult to build success. This wasn't the only failure, however the low initial sales destroyed confidence in OS/2 and meant that it was only used in corporate environments which IBM PCs could be delivered to.
Microsoft used to boast about this, I believe; it's not like it's some big industry secret.
Re: (Score:3)
Interesting that you blame MS for OS2's failure.
It used to be a quite well known story. When OS/2 was first produced and needed it's biggest hype cycle, OS distribution was actually still done on floppy disks. Microsoft bought all the capacity available meaning that IBM literally could not deliver the operating system to the developers who needed it to port software over.
This sounds like urban legend
Re: Why didn't microsoft die? Very simple... (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft charged OEMs per PC sold, not how many were sold with MS-DOS and/or MS Windows installed.
IBM's marketing sucked, but it went well beyond that to cause the demise of OS/2.
Essentially to get OS/2, you had to pay for a license to OS/2 in addition to one for MS Windows even if you didn't use MS Windows. So whether you bought from Compaq, Dell, Gateway 2000, or a shrink wrapped copy of OS/2 separately from CompUSA, you paid a license for an operating system you may have even tried to actively avoid.
The only way to avoid it was to build your own, which was not going to happen on a large enough scale to influence the market.
And yes, I happily used OS/2 from v2.1 all the way to v4. The antitrust case against Microsoft ended the predatory per-computer-sold OEM licensing terms, but far too late to save the likes of DR-DOS, OS/2, and Be.
Re: Why didn't microsoft die? Very simple... (Score:4, Informative)
You must have not ever ran any Win 3.1 programs, mostly those using WIN32s. For a while it was like an arms race, with MS updating WIN32s to break WinOS2 and IBM fixing it. With the last WIN32s, version 1.30, MS hard coded some important DLLs to load above the 1GB barrier where OS/2 couldn't access them due to 16 bit compatibility. This also stopped Win95 programs working under OS/2, which in theory IBM had a license to. Actually up to Windows 4.0 which is why Win95 was version 4.095.
Then there was the not playing nice with others thing. IBM with its boot manager happily co-existed with other operating systems, though you had to be careful with Linux how you installed due to OS/2's dependency on CHS and partitions being aligned on a cylinder. Linux came with various howtos so it wasn't hard.
Installing Win95 or Win98 on a hard drive shared with OS/2 would literally end with a message about your OS/2 install being wiped, no warning earlier and not the decency to set the active partition back to the Bootmanager. If you were a little bit knowledgeable, it was easy to fire up fdisk under Win95 and change the active partition but how many at that point started swearing that they had lost everything on their OS/2 install.
Win2k was the first Windows I installed which did tell you how to re-enable OS/2.
Then there was the business decisions, including ones others mentioned but the killer was MS refusing to sell IBM OEM Win95 if they kept shipping OS/2 on dual boot systems.
OS/2 was a better DOS and Win3.1 due to a much better file system, HPFS vs FAT.
I'm typing this on OS/2, actually ArcaOS, an OEM version of OS/2 and it still works, even on the newest hardware if running the latest beta for UEFI and GPT drive support.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh... IBM fought tooth and nail to try and stop Compaq from creating a clean-room-reverse-engineered BIOS to create PC clones and other manufacturers to create compatible non-IBM hardware.
Your point being? Originally Microsoft developed MS-DOS ("PC-DOS") at the request of a team from IBM which was only meant to be run on the IBM PC. IBM's biggest historic failure is that they allowed Microsoft to maintain a license to do what they wanted with the code so that, when Compaq did finally manage to clone the IBM PC, they were also able to run the same software under MS-DOS.
Sure, this can be seen as a strike by Microsoft against the monopoly of "Big Blue", however at that time there were already
Re: (Score:2)
IBM's biggest historic failure is that they allowed Microsoft
You can't call what Microsoft did "criminal" and yet call IBM's inability to do the same a "failure". The behaviour is either wrong, or right. If it's wrong when Microsoft does it, then it's wrong when IB
Re: (Score:2)
My point being that IBM was a major factor in their own demise in the PC market. That part of it has nothing to do with Microsoft, and IBM was "criminal" in the way you claim Microsoft was. There's no real difference between Microsoft shenanigans to close off the PC market and IBM's attempts to do the same.
By coincidence, just before your comment I also posted pointing out that I don't believe IBM to be squeaky clean [slashdot.org]. However it's really important to examine details.
IBM's biggest historic failure is that they allowed Microsoft
You can't call what Microsoft did "criminal" and yet call IBM's inability to do the same a "failure". The behaviour is either wrong, or right. If it's wrong when Microsoft does it, then it's wrong when IBM tries to do it. Wrong vs right does not depend on whether they are successful at it.
Both companies were investigated by the anti-trust authorities. Both ended up with some level of settlement, however IBM was specifically not found to have indulged in criminal behaviour whilst Microsoft was found to actually have. Now, you and I both know that the legal authorities are imperfect, but they are about the best we have. Furthermor
Re: (Score:2)
My issue at the time with OS/2 was that the libraries was a purchase. I seem to recall it was a couple thousand bucks. At one of my programming jobs, we were using BASIC for a surveying program and a couple of jobs later, I was able to get Borland TurboC for $50. Granted, perhaps IBM wasn't courting the likes of me but still, there was no possible way I could pay to hack code on OS/2.
[John]
Re: (Score:2)
My issue at the time with OS/2 was that the libraries was a purchase. I seem to recall it was a couple thousand bucks. At one of my programming jobs, we were using BASIC for a surveying program and a couple of jobs later, I was able to get Borland TurboC for $50. Granted, perhaps IBM wasn't courting the likes of me but still, there was no possible way I could pay to hack code on OS/2.
[John]
Have to say, I never used it. At the time both Microsoft and IBM were pretty much the spawn of the devil evil monopolists and maybe IBM the worse of the two. It's only with retrospect that you realise that IBM, whilst pretty nasty corporatists were still following the laws of the land and that, relatively speaking, they weren't that bad after all.
Re: (Score:3)
EMX and GCC was available for OS/2 (and DOS) right from the release of OS/2 2.0. Did take a while I believe to have a good toolkit clone and do things like build DLLs. There was other choices as well but you are right, they charged a fortune for the toolkit at first and didn't ship it with the OS until after Warp v4.
Re: Why didn't microsoft die? Very simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of their cloud revenue was also gained by leveraging their corporate lock-in. It's unlikely azure would have been anywhere near as successful otherwise.
Re: (Score:3)
Part of that is, "as long as it's not Amazon/Google". Giving anyone who is competing with you control over your assets isn't a good idea.
Re: Why didn't microsoft die? Very simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the corporate sector, MS benefits from the old "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" spiel. Nobody ever got fired for buying MS. You could get fired for daring to try something else. If that flounders, so do you. If MS does, well, who could have foreseen that, right?
MS is today what IBM was in the 80s and 90s. A household name in corporate IT. Your management knows them, they know that they worked in the past, your staff, especially your admins, have experience with it, and so even if the product you get is crap, you won't get fired for the man-months wasted on getting it to work somehow. Because your superiors think that's simply how it has to be, and going an alternative way would have been a gamble.
Yes, managers prefer the evil they know to one that may not be as evil but they can't gauge.
Re: Why didn't microsoft die? Very simple... (Score:2)
And making that choice does not make them bad managers necessarily. Their job is to evaluate that risk-reward trade off, and picking MS over Startup X is often done because MS's cost can at least be evaluated. Most of us can cite bad managers deadlocked by fear of unknown⦠I am not talking about them. But there are plenty of good managers who do try new things, but how often they can risk and at what scale are both very budget limited.
Re: Why didn't microsoft die? Very simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
(a) Businesses, not individuals, are Microsoft's customers and
(b) technology sold to organizations doesn't necessarily need to be good to win.
(a) is the secret to Microsoft's success. Retail sales of Windows are insignificant. Microsoft's revenue (from Windows) comes entirely from OEMs who install Windows on the computers they sell, and volume licensing by schools and businesses. This translates into guaranteed sales of around 200 million copies of Windows every year. Same thing with Office. Retail sales are insignificant but Microsoft sells millions of copies to businesses and universities.
(b) is partially true. But, when it comes to things like Windows and Office, Microsoft still has no meaningful competition. There are products which are cheaper than Windows and Office but there aren't any that are better in any meaningful way, and not better enough to make companies spend millions of dollars to switch.
Re: Why didn't microsoft die? Very simple... (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft also killed Nokia in the course of their smartphone wars.
One more (Score:2)
Internet Explorer. Crucial internal government and corporate web sites were built specifically to run on Internet Explorer. It's why, to this day, you can enable Internet Explorer on Windows 10 (though it's going away shortly)
Not the PC, the XBox (Score:3)
Gaming PCs are a financial irrelevance compared to the corporate PC market in Windows sales, however XBox has certainly helped fill MS's coffers as they get the money for the hardware (though it might be cost, don't know) and commision on every game sold which isn't the case for the PC.
Re: (Score:2)
You've got your facts pretty jumbled up here.
Sony didn't start off letting the PS2 run Linux. Linux for PS2 came out in 2002, two years after the release of the PS2. Nobody really bothered much with it, it was charming for hobbyists but sort of pointless.
The PS 3 started off being able to run Linux, but support for that was pulled in 2010, four years after release. It had nothing to do with Microsoft and everything to do with the fact that people had figured out how to use the OtherOS mode to boot pirated
Re:Why didn't microsoft die? Very simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would argue business and government dependency on Windows is a much bigger factor than games.
MS is all but incapable of building brand awareness in the minds of consumers (XBox is their one fluke), but is fully entrenched in the IT of any significantly sized organization.
MS is still coasting on the momentum they built up in the 90s, yet somehow they never innovate (platform churn doesn't count).
Re: (Score:2)
I would argue business and government dependency on Windows is a much bigger factor than games.
Yup yup yup. Microsoft’s leadership has always known how to schmooze with the best of them. I can’t count how many times my friends in tech would grouse “we (IT) have been working for months to implement Product X, which was the consensus pick within the company; but the CEO had lunch with someone from Microsoft and just announced we’re switching to their inferior offering instead.”
Its marketing. (Score:3)
LInux is an available, superior, and more-affordable product.
Microsoft wins, has won, and continues to win, on superior marketing. Microsoft has the best marketing team in the world.
Re:Its marketing. - NOPE (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Especially after 30 years. Just 3 years is an eternity in the PC industry, so if Linux hasn't found a widespread audience after 3 decades, there is but one explanation: people hate it.
I wish the Linux community would stop being in denial about this and work on fixing the actual problems so I could finally make the switch. I've been trying for 15 years, and every time I try a new version of any distro something goes wrong or it otherwise ends up being a huge disappointment.
Re: (Score:2)
I would argue business and government dependency on Windows is a much bigger factor than games.
I would agree. Gamers don't get dedicated reps, sales staff willing to make sales calls, access to developers, etc.
MS is all but incapable of building brand awareness in the minds of consumers (XBox is their one fluke), but is fully entrenched in the IT of any significantly sized organization.
The thing is MS is still entrenched in consumers' minds simply because most PCs run Windows. If they're looking to buy a new PC chances are it's a Windows boxen.
MS is still coasting on the momentum they built up in the 90s, yet somehow they never innovate (platform churn doesn't count).
MS has always been a fast follower, willing to buy or copy things that look promising rather than trying to be on the cutting edge. They'll let someone else establish a new market and jump in, spend a lot of money, and see if it succ
Re:Why didn't microsoft die? Very simple... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just gaming. They had a lock on business applications too. Whatever weird field-specific software your company uses, it was probably only available on Windows. They also had the only Office suite guaranteed to work seamlessly with every other business you trade documents with, in part because the old pre-2007 Office document formats were a (likely deliberate) mass of undocumented binary garbage that no other program could reliably open without layout errors and other compatibility fun.
MS benefit from the type of chicken-and-egg entrenchment that comes with dominance in software:
- Can't use anything other than Windows in the office, because none of the software you need is available on other platforms.
- Software won't be ported to other platforms because hardly anyone uses them, and porting costs money.
Even today, when linux on the desktop is a lot more viable than it used to be in the 2000s, it's still practically unheard of in business environment. Servers, yes - lots of those. Home users? Sure, people do that. The office desktop? No.
Re: Why didn't microsoft die? Very simple... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you run Linux in a company as a software developer, you have to run Windows virtually to run for instance Office. And even that solution brings you at odds with a often MD centric It department.
Haven't run a windows VM in years. There are plenty of companies out there that will support you and most of big tech guarantees you won't have to run a Microsoft product. Even if this just means providing Office356 it's better than losing the time from having to maintain two operating systems. Think about whether you wouldn't get more done and get better rewards if you found a different company or just simply got your management to protect you from anyone who creates incompatible documentation.
Re: (Score:2)
15 years as the only Linux desktop user, never had issues w/ using OpenOffice/LibreOffice. And now w/ Office365 on the web through Chromium/Chrome it is even less of an issue.
I had to go to Win 10 3 years ago when I took a dev position, we can't reimage our computers because the IDE we use for some ancient IBM stuff isn't available to download anymore... but the Linux version is. Instead of setting up a proper Linux desktop, our support person spent months copying registry entries around, etc. to get new
Re: (Score:2)
That is not true in Western Europe. Businesses are now also hand out Macs and Linux PCs to their employees and in operations Linux is more or less the standard operating system.
Re: (Score:2)
MS benefit from the type of chicken-and-egg entrenchment that comes with dominance in software
Is is much more than just a chicken and egg. It is a whole web of entrenchments. Microsoft's strategy of Embrace, Extent, Extinguish was a very, very successful strategy. The article itself is asking the question of why during the period of mid-2000s (2005 or so) to 2014 despite blunders were they able to continue. Later in the article, the author basically answered: at no time during that period was Microsoft unprofitable. A company won't go away if they are still making money.
That doesn't really answer wh
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. And that put them on servers and PCs aimed at office work. People are stupid.
Nobody ever got fired buying IBM (Score:5, Insightful)
And it's the same mentality that keeps MS coffers full. Until one day it doesn't, but it takes a long time.
Re: (Score:2)
Not to mention, if you want Excel, you have no choice but to buy Microsoft. And that is true for a lot of other software as well.
Re: (Score:2)
Not to mention, if you want Excel, you have no choice but to buy Microsoft. And that is true for a lot of other software as well.
When 99% of Excel users actually use about 5% of Excel features, I'm left wondering just how hard of a task it really was for OpenOffice to compete for a solution.
The power of bundled solutions I guess.
Re: (Score:3)
Not to mention, if you want Excel, you have no choice but to buy Microsoft. And that is true for a lot of other software as well.
When 99% of Excel users actually use about 5% of Excel features, I'm left wondering just how hard of a task it really was for OpenOffice to compete for a solution.
The power of bundled solutions I guess.
"99% of people only use 5% of the program's features" is true of just about any software.
Businesses could save an enormous amount of money by switching to something like Open Office. The fact that they don't tells you just how much Open Office sucks.
If it sucks so bad, then why does it still exist? Linux can't seem to command a respectable spot in business or consumer PCs after decades of trying. Is that because it sucks too, and sucks worse than rampant (Windows-based) virus and malware attacks taking down companies left and right?
The brainwashing argument, was far stronger than this weak-sauce.
Re: (Score:2)
There's the crazy notion that Microsoft actually does some things right, and their dominance reflects that. The thing history will never tell us, is on a level-playing field would any competition have succeeded?
Re: (Score:2)
If it sucks so bad, then why does it still exist?
Because Sun Microsystems subsidized development since 1999, and because Apache currently subsidizes development so they'll have an office suite to deploy along with their Linux distro for enterprise users.
Re: (Score:2)
If it sucks so bad, then why does it still exist?
Last major release was in 2014.
A child conceived in a fit of wild excitement on the evening of its release is now old enough to walk, cross residential streets, attend school, and ask daddy why the book-report-typing-program on his computer sucks so much more than mommy's.
And yet, immature developers tried for over 15 years. Not to mention the toddlers at Apache who took it over in 2011 for some childish reason.
And I guess tiny little start-ups like Google and Apple don't count. Or LibreOffice. Must be damn hard to replicate a whopping 5% of features.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Both LubreOffice Calc and Gnumeric are superior in basically every aspect.
Re:Nobody ever got fired buying IBM (Score:5, Insightful)
According to Wikipedia, "pivot tables and Visual Basic for Applications macros are not yet supported" in Gnumeric.
Businessy types live and die by pivot tables. And anything that doesn't support the gazillion lines of existing VBA code that nobody understands yet many depend on is not going to usurp Excel.
Re: Nobody ever got fired buying IBM (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Pivot tables are the bread and butter of basic analysis. Also, anything less than 100% compatibility will be a concern. People need to send and receive files internally and externally. The safer bet is to go with the standard.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Nobody ever got fired buying IBM (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally (after watching my company switch from Linux/Google to Microsoft and More Microsoft, it is much more complicated than that. We added a Windows domain controller because people were not changing their passwords. We ditched Samba for Windows Server over (broken) promises of DFS. We ditched a simple (but extremely effective) snapshotting backup over rsync to a monolithic service provided by one of the big companies. We switched from Google to Microsoft because people complained about Outlook compatibility issues. All of this is because our (fantastic) consultant changed jobs and we couldn’t find any backup for myself to manage and improve the Linux side of the house.
Microsoft is where they are because of Outlook and a select few other applications. If you didn’t want them to become a $Trillion company, you needed to split Office from OS back in 2000. Then, in about 2010 you would have needed them to spin off XBox and gaming. But, the wrong things would have also likely been spun off at the wrong times, and you would lack some of the other innovations the company has made.
Bottom line is that size and scale lets you take risks that lean and mean does not. You are either going to put the power in the hands of Vulture Capitalists or the Monopolists/BigTech. The latter is likely a better solution to a point, but very difficult to control.
Operating Superiority (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as their OS is installed on nearly all non-mac home computers they'll have plenty clout and opportunities for profit.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, the OEM agreements.
But, they're not installed on most handsets, so it is arguable how relevant it is now.
Due to programming (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Of the consumer, that you must use Windows and you must use Office.. Nothing else will do... completely brainwashed.
By consumer I assume you mean businesses. You're right about nothing else will do but brainwashing has nothing to do with it. An individual can find plenty of alternatives to the MS ecos.... no there's no ecosystem, there's just Windows and Office. But, a company doesn't have much of an alternative to the full MS ecosystem (which deserves to be used there).
For all it's faults, nothing comes close to Exchange, nothing comes close to Sharepoint, and above all nothing comes close to how well these integrate wi
Re: (Score:3)
Of the consumer, that you must use Windows and you must use Office.. Nothing else will do... completely brainwashed.
By consumer I assume you mean businesses. You're right about nothing else will do but brainwashing has nothing to do with it.
Uh, exactly how many consumer PCs pre-built with *NIX operating systems have you seen for sale in a Wal-Mart or Target over the last 20 years? Or even Best Buy? Hell even when CompUSA was still around, only way you were walking out of there with a Linux machine is if you built it. Brainwashing can easily be created out of a simple matter of availability.
Rather shocking that I have to remind anyone of that within the very crowd who's been bleating on and on about the Year of the Linux as if it were part
Re: (Score:2)
Uh, exactly how many consumer PCs pre-built with *NIX operating systems have you seen for sale in a Wal-Mart
This isn't a question of popularity, it's a question of money. The entire discussion is predicated on the question of why won't MS die. The answer has nothing to do with computers at Walmart, and everything to do with the $billions being paid by corporations to Microsoft.
As you speak of individuals I'm reminded of Agent K's infamous analysis; "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."
If you're reminded of that then you missed my point. That an individual can find a replacement but simply won't again is irrelevant to the discussion as it is not some crappy home use that nets Microsoft its billions of dollars in revenue.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Due to programming (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux (and specifically Linux Mint) is now already so user-friendly (more user friendly than Windows I'd say since you never have to install any device drivers) that it's more than a match for Windows these days.
Everything works with it, my printer, my scanner, my videocard, Netflix, WebEx etc. For Office documents you can use LibreOffice, which is sufficient for the needs of most home users' word processing and spreadsheet tasks.
It's free. You can install it on as many machines as you want and you don't need to fear being spied upon by your operating system. Viruses and malware are also a thing of the past.
I assume the word simply isn't out there yet. But it's basically a case of the word needing to be spread.
Re: (Score:3)
Dunno. To this day I have never had a laptop where Linux reliably handles the opening and closing of the screen. Frequently this simple task led the laptop to crash entirely. And other issues like the built-in simple GTK text editor not being able to handle editing large files without unacceptable lag. And copy/paste STILL don't reliably work after decades of debate. I know Microsoft has suffers from telemetry and update churn/roulette, but at least all the basic features are there.
Re:Due to programming (Score:4, Interesting)
It's out there, and it works. But what can it do?
Is it good for creators? No, GIMP is a laughable replacement for Photoshop and Illustrator. Video, Jesus Christ no, Shotcut can get the job done if you're patient, but for anyone used to Vegas it'll feel like a journey into a third-world shantytown shithole. For audio, maybe things are a bit better - about as stable and low-latency as Windows, and maybe about as much bullshit required to get to that point, and at least you can run a couple of the mainstream DAWs. Problem being that very few VST plugins are released in Linux versions, which means you're either scrambling about with janky wrappers (which kill the stability factor) or restricted to a very small list of tools.
Is it good for gaming? Well... it's not as bad as it once was, but Windows is still the easy #1.
Is it good for the enterprise? No, bad spreadsheets, no Outlook, security mostly through obscurity.
Is it good for just logging on, playing a quick game of Checkers while you check your email, and maybe watching a movie or two? Yeah, but no better or worse than the alternatives.
Is it good for one-man hobbyist programmers? Hell yeah, this is where it shines. But all of these people already use Linux.
People know Linux exists. They just don't care.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes. If the market share was flipped you'd see a huge increase in Linux-targeting exploits. Hell, there was a heap overflow exploit in Sudo [qualys.com] that wasn't discovered until a few months ago. If Linux was on 90% of workstations for professional idiots, this would have been decimating (and probably wouldn't have lingered around unpatched for literally over ten years).
Heartbleed proved that open-source is only part of the solution. There simply aren't enough qualified and interested "many eyes" to serve as a panac
Re: (Score:3)
Linux (and specifically Linux Mint) is now already so user-friendly (more user friendly than Windows I'd say since you never have to install any device drivers) that it's more than a match for Windows these days.
Bullshit. I'm still reeling from the experience of trying to update Mint 18 to Mint 20.
Yeah, the update utility is a GUI and supposedly "just works", but it doesn't install a lot of stuff on its own. The way to truly update the system is with an upgrade, which has to be done exclusively via a command prompt. You need to install the upgrade packages manually. When I tried to do so, I kept getting obtuse security errors, only to find out that some root certificates were out of date. Naturally, the GUI up
Re: (Score:2)
As soon as the engineering software I use on a daily basis offers Linux or Mac builds I will switch.
Very simple: IT-Departments and legacy (Score:5)
People never bought Microsoft's products because of new features, they bought them because their old software still ran on the newest version of their OSes. MS-DOS had compatibility for CP/M. Windows didn't get popular before it could run multiple DOS applications at once. Windows NT had to run WinAPI software and so on.
Also IT-Departments today mostly know about working around the most common problems of Microsoft's software. They don't really know how computers work or what other software is around to reach their goal. They just upgrade from whatever version of Microsoft's offering someone installed in the 1990s believing that somehow moving to something else will be more work and cost than their usual upgrade troubles.
Once you have your market share in some area that's infrastructure-like, you can typically defend it even with very mediocre products.
Re: (Score:2)
Also IT-Departments today mostly know about working around the most common problems of Microsoft's software. They don't really know how computers work or what other software is around to reach their goal.
I don't think you can really blame the IT department for that. They have to give their users what they want. Also, I think most IT departments can handle Macs (and even Linux) these days.
Re: (Score:2)
That is a big part of it— support has hit lowest-common-denominator. “The Cloud” should have broken up that hegemony, but it is still too fractured/fragmented to beat out some of the core issues.
I blame cost of many of the cloud solutions for keeping entrenched strategies in play. I don’t know how businesses justify the expense of some of them, but at the same time they provide a value that is hard to gain elsewhere
They sort of have... (Score:2)
If you consider MS as an operating system platform, then maybe they have
died. Can you buy a non-android, non-iso phone? Are there MS Windows
web servers, in the real world?
Admittedly there's still xbox, for the moment. I'm surprised that Steam is
doing well on linux, I didn't predict that, but according to Linus Tech
Tips, games can run better off Windows.
The reason MS Azure is doing well, I think, is for organisations where
they already have an Active Directory setup and can easily move
corporate access from on
Re: (Score:2)
why are supers and exascale machines all running linux and not windows ? now THAT is real work on a real computer. ..
i dont get it
oh true .. we don't have spyware all over the place that tracks everything we do on our machines and send detailed reports ( telemetry ) and send our personal files to MS ..that must be what you call real work.
Its about trust, and they needed it back then. (Score:5, Insightful)
Its about trust. At the time no one "liked" Microsoft. The whole Linux movement was taking off and there was no way Microsoft can convince larger company's to use Windows Server. So the could was kind of a last dich effort to stay relevant. Change the pricing model on the Server side, charge a little less than the competitors for their cloud service, maybe make their Server's as cloud local nodes for your organization.
That's not what made the real change. Something must of happened internally. Maybe a new generation got in there, but they seemed to remove the "Extinguish" from their core motto. They open sourced .NET for gods sake. They have approved ways to run Linux in windows along with bash. Edge runs on chromium and they are damn trying to make their C++ compiler follow the latest standards. Hell, I don't know anyone who is even hating on "Visual Code" Granted, this is more of a personal perspective as I have no idea how their server side model has changed.
Whoever is organizing this, its NOT the Microsoft of even 10 years ago. Maybe its all the people pushed out of Google when they turned into a leach.
Re:Its about trust, and they needed it back then. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not what made the real change. Something must of happened internally.
Ballmer left. He was an angry little attack muffin. Even when he's happy he looks angry.
Who wants to follow that kind of leader? Only sycophants.
Re: (Score:2)
That's not what made the real change. Something must of happened internally.
Ballmer left. He was an angry little attack muffin. Even when he's happy he looks angry.
Who wants to follow that kind of leader? Only sycophants.
Or WWE wrestlers. I mean after all, they're pretty good at throwing chairs too.
Re: (Score:2)
but they seemed to remove the "Extinguish" from their core motto.
Don't ever think that any large corporation doesn't think about extinguishing other companies. It happens all the time -- and large companies are the worst offenders. They may pause the trend for PR purposes, but every large company will happily buy up a smaller company that is doing better, gut that little company, and discard the carcass. We see it happen over and over and over again even in today's world.
Re: (Score:2)
I am not saying they won't gobble up somone else and assimilate them. Its that they are selective what becomes the cube and what gets light touches.
Github is a good example, they could of rebranded it hard like they did to Skype back in the day but instead you hardly see changes. Foreground at least. Background seems to be a "if you have bad words in your code, your repo is going on notice" kind of thing. I am sure they are gobbling up AI startups like potato chips. I just think Microsoft will be carf
Re: (Score:2)
Granted, this is more of a personal perspective as I have no idea how their server side model has changed.
Their server prices have come down, but they are still comparatively expensive, to the point we have a team at our company that, yearly, evaluates licenses and tries to figure out how to consolidate as many servers as possible to bring operating costs down.
MS today isn't the MS of yesterday (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft saw they were dying as an OS and software maker, looked at Google and how they were successful, and reinvented themselves as a surveillance and big data powerhouse.
The difference between Google and MS? Google put together a wildly successful mobile OS for the emerging cellphone market and used it as a trojan to put the users under surveillance. Microsoft used its existing PC OS and successful Office products to put their existing customer base under surveillance.
Re: (Score:2)
The PC market has barely changed. It's still huge. M$ certainly haven't changed. M$ owns the PC market, end of story. Xbox helps too.
Lock-Ins & Dubious Practices (Score:5, Informative)
Steve Ballmer
Ballmer took over from gates in 2000 and held the CEO role until he was succeeded by 2014. In fact, he made quite an impact as CEO. See here [youtube.com] and here [youtube.com]. You will note that Microsoft experienced their worst performance during Ballmer's tenure. In fact, it is fair to say that Microsoft survived and remained profitable despite everything Ballmer did, not because of him.
As to why they didn't die... it has nothing to do with gaming. There are two reasons: they locked in their customer base and they controlled the platform.
When you're a technology customer the size of a global bank, or a government, you purchase PC's in lots of 10s or 100s of thousands at a time. You very quickly create inertia for your platform, because all those employees of the companies using your products get familiar with your software, so it means that transitioning to a competitor product isn't just a question of licensing, but one of converting all your files to different formats and retraining your entire workforce to learn new technology. Most Fortune 500 companies would balk at that as being too risky.
But if that isn't enough, Microsoft also have, as platform "owner", the ability to control what others can do to compete with your core products. So for example around the time that Windows 95 was introduced, Microsoft shipped beta code and developer platform code that included new features for desktop applications, including the "Explorer View" API. Novell, who had the competing "Word Perfect Office" suite at the time, used this new API to produce an all-new version of their Office productivity suite that was way better than Microsoft's.
So Microsoft pushed back the release of Windows 95 and moved that API code from the base OS in to their Office product, meaning that Novell couldn't use it. This is well documented - and at the time it was litigated [findlaw.com] by Novell. They lost.
There are likely hundreds or thousands of other examples where Microsoft used their control of the platform - and the huge revenue streams that their OS and Office products generated - to control the competition. And when a competitor got a bit too good - say like Visio - well, Microsoft had the cash to buy them out.
Re: (Score:2)
There's a reason that MS used to be nicknamed M$ or Mega$haft, and that Slashdot's logo for MS-related stories used to be a picture of Bill Gates wearing Borg implants. Their approach to business ethics firmly established them as a company that everyone in technology hated, but had no choice other than to use.
Re: (Score:2)
Leveraging a de facto industry monopoly for decades w/ a predatory, anti-competitive business model didn't hurt either.
MicroTrash is still doing it w/ government departments, government contractors, city governments, “Microsoft development funds”, etc. Their lobbying tentacles and megadonor cudgels sustain them.
Sickening.
Familiarity =/= Profitability (Score:2)
As the CNBC table shows, the products that Slashdoters know and love/hate to talk about are not necessarily those that make the big bucks:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/2... [cnbc.com]
Free market (Score:2)
What if the lesson from Microsoft is that a fading star can leverage its size, savvy marketing and pull with customers to stay successful even if it makes meh products, loses its grip on new technologies and is plagued by flabby bureaucracy?
That's basically what critics of the "free market" like me have been saying all along. The "free market" is a pipe dream that quickly devolves into monopolies/oligopolies where "free market" principles do not apply.
Oh boyâ¦more anti-trust stories (Score:2)
The anti-trust litigation and media machine sure pumps these stories out constantly nowadays.
The article basically says Microsoft shouldnâ(TM)t have survived given its mistakes. Then it says Microsoft only survived due to its size. Then, it says that, given the editorials flawed premise, Google and Facebook must clearly be thriving merely because of their size.
Has anyone else noticed that Apple isnt named in the story? Or defense contractors? Or Amazon?
What a stupid question (Score:2)
Botching technology trends that you play with has *zero* to do with your business success when you have a very solid cash cow... cash farm with several cash cows in it to milk. It doesn't matter what they botch as long as they have a stranglehold on the corporate desktop, email, and office.
Also they didn't botch every key trend, just the consumerist the NYT thinks is important. We like to mock the "developers, developers, developers, developers" dancing monkey, but he was 100% correct. That was one of the m
wait what? (Score:2)
I was amazed to learn from this that the company pays taxes. Or am I reading too much into an implied statement? If not, I wonder who they had to "lobby" to be able to do this.
</sarcasm>
You get what you pursue unremittingly (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked in software (tech and marketing) for 13 years, and then studied the software market as a consultant/journalist for a further 15 years before becoming an editor of software books. So I have a fairly broad knowledge of how software companies have arisen, thriven, weakened and died.
Microsoft stands out from every other corporation that has sold software for one simple reason. At all times and in every situation, it put the bottom line first. Not just the current and next quarters, like so many, but long-term profit. To maximise long-term profit, Microsoft was smart enough to offer adequate products at relatively very low prices; its executives understood clearly that such a strategy would expand the user base rapidly to a huge extent; and that with a gigantic user base many things become possible that are not open to smaller companies with less cash.
IBM and Oracle have pursued similar strategies, but without such a pure, relentless focus on profit. Both - hard though it may be to believe sometimes - occasionally put quality, corporate pride, or customer satisfaction first. Not so Microsoft. Study any important decision it has made, and you will find that it optimised long-term profit at the expense of everything else.
I could have wept many times when I saw magnificent software, wonderful customer focus, and brilliant innovation in smaller companies and startups - only for those companies to perish for sordid practical reasons. In the few cases where a startup got everything right and showed signs of growing into a major player, one or other of the big corporations would either buy it, or ruin it.
Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that Microsoft is never motivated by quality, corporate pride, or customer satisfaction. Often it has been; but only as a means to the end of amassing still vaster mountains of cash in the long term.
And that is all you need to know in order to understand Microsoft's lasting dominance of the software market. There is no need to look at technical matters, or customer issues - just money.
Re: (Score:2)
In the few cases where a startup got everything right and showed signs of growing into a major player, one or other of the big corporations would either buy it, or ruin it.
Nokia, Zune.
Oddly enough MS gets some praise for it's hardware endeavors. Lambasted for others.
Why would they? (Score:2)
Their key money maker, the Office suite was never threatened, and their position as dominant OS vendor never under any real pressure.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
They've experienced _some_ pressure. Their theft of the VMS kernel to create Windows NT was vital to their ongoing success. They've copied Apple's interfaces several times, and are doing so again with Windows 11. And Linux is giving them business trouble in the server market. "Windows for Linux" is an attempt to sidestep that problem without relying on virtual machines.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
And remember the anti-trust case of the late 90s/early 2000s? There were to cases against Microsoft for illegal monopolistic practices, one was the web browser and the other was MS Office. They knew they needed to save just one of
IBM (Score:4, Interesting)
What if the lesson from Microsoft is that a fading star can leverage its size, savvy marketing and pull with customers to stay successful even if it makes meh products, loses its grip on new technologies and is plagued by flabby bureaucracy?
If you’re going to make this brain-dead assertion, you need to consider why IBM didn’t stay successful. IBM today is a shadow of its former self, plagued by endless levels of management and tight restrictions on what their income-generating employees can actually do.
Balmer’s time as CEO are known as “the lost years” for a reason: his clueless leadership basically destroyed the company; only its entrenched position kept it going. Microsoft got lucky; not many companies can survive that level of stupidity and keep going. Heck, Apple managed it mostly because of Microsoft during the dark days, and then only because of Steve Jobs.
Re: (Score:2)
If you’re going to make this brain-dead assertion, you need to consider why IBM didn’t stay successful. IBM today is a shadow of its former self, plagued by endless levels of management and tight restrictions on what their income-generating employees can actually do.
IBM also, IMHO, was to enamoured of what made it great and unwilling to adapt to the changing times; and also failed to look at how what it did could drive the future. Take cloud computing. IBM's big iron was doing that in the 70's and 80's, we just called them terminals instead of PCs. While the internet and connectivity did not exist as it does today, IBM could have moved to a more client server based model with MS-DOS and been at the forefront of cloud computing as technology advanced. Then they decid
Yes, it's called a monopoly (Score:4, Interesting)
poor research on the articles part. (Score:2)
Antitrust, and not being held accountable (Score:3, Interesting)
The USDoJ found that Microsoft abused its monopoly position in basically every way [il]legally possible. They then were told "that was very naughty, don't do it again" instead of being punished for holding computing back a decade through bundling, tying, bankrolling fraudulent lawsuits against Linux, etc etc.
Immediately after this, Microsoft turned Windows into the worst piece of spyware ever conceived, with a license permitting them to do basically anything they want with any information on your machine, including sending it to third parties.
The conspiracy-minded (and remember, conspiracies are literally the norm and not the exception — any time two people get together to screw a third out of something, it's a literal conspiracy) might reasonably suspect that the deal that kept Microsoft intact was that they become a tool of the USA's national security apparatus, and that the spyware functionality was made available to the federal government for their use without oversight.
I could go into how the other thing that happened after that was bill put his ill-gotten gains into a tax dodge called the Gates Foundation, actions of which have helped enrich him personally to the point where he is personally worth more than he was before founding it, but I can see eyes simultaneously rolling and glazing over already. Suffice to say that they have accomplished zero of their stated goals, for example they have not eradicated any illnesses because their policies cause some nations to reject their "aid". Literally none. This doesn't stop them from claiming otherwise, though.
what i think is (Score:2)
The desktop era is over (Score:2)
All these comments and not a word about browser-based apps. If "99% of Office users only use 5% of its features", then I guess that means that 99% of Office users could be using Google Docs and Sheets.
I develop every day, and my entire toolchain is hosted either in a terminal shell or a browser shell. And increasingly, even my terminal shell now runs in a browser tab, as I use AWS's excellent Cloud9 development environment instead of a local one. With Cloud9, I can roll as many dev environments as I need. I
because they're smart (Score:2)
They were about to be broken up, the way Congress is trying to break up Google and Facebook now. But they were smart; they caved and made concessions, and kept their structure.
And yes, one piece of leverage they had was that every computer in the world at the time that mattered was Windows. If they had broken up, you'd be putting at risk the very foundations of what was at the time a brand new world. Nobody wanted to kill the golden goose, they just wanted their pound of flesh. And they (sort of) got it.
Tec
It's simple (Score:3)
Simple answer: (Score:3)