Re: "A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead."

On Sun, Apr 08, 2007 at 02:40:52PM -0600, Michael R. Wilson wrote:
> Conrad Knauer wrote:
>
> >He meant "dead" as in "No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They
> >still make a lot of money?so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not
> >dangerous."
>
> The trouble with dead monsters is the length of time after death that
> they can still thrash around and squash bystanders. There is also the
> mental corruption that fear of them leaves; it can hang on as
> near-immortal myth.
>
> Isn't MS liable to continue for decades in both modes? In application
> s/w terms, if not OS, are we likely to see an end to the 'standard' use
> of MSWord, IE, and PP anytime soon, even if Google manages to draw a
> significant number of users into their web-based orbit?

I think what happened is microsoft has been sleeping around in too many beds.
In terms of what Graham said, I think as it stands today, they are dead.
The fact that the flagship vendor and last major holdout of the Wintel
oligopily has kicked both Intel and MS out of the bed is a testament to that.

I think MS has always had some brilliant stuff going on in R&D. The problem
is when it gets to the marketeers they want it to be everything to everyone.
The only game they haven't tried to play is the PC hardware game and that's
only because that marketplace became competitive before they had the boat
load of cash to get in while there was still room.

If MS was an auto-maker, we'd all be driving 5 ton trucks around that double
as our home, car, workplace, movie theatre, restaurant, power plant, grocery
store and school.

Right now, they are fighting battles in nearly every new IT market that's
come along since the IBM PC. Rather than make a killer app to dominate
a vertical or strata of the market, they try to be everywhere at once.
Instead, they are producing stuff that isn't a compelling must-buy item.

If they want to dominate the OS market, they should make a good OS that works
just as well on every possible hardware platform. If they want to dominate
the business software market, don't mess around trying to get it to play
nice with free e-mail services for consumers.

If they put their resources into a small set of focused areas (OS,
development tools and business applications) and make the stuff do what
business customers want, they wouldn't have to bribe vendors to ship hardware
with MS software pre-loaded. Let google play office and capture the consumer
market. I believe piracy in the consumer vertical is more rampant and much
more costly to police so why bother. MS doesn't need a dodgy AJAX office
suite when office can run on a server in a client-server model similar to X.

With the upcoming change in MS leadership which includes an ego so big it
sometimes gets mistaken for Mount Ranier, MS can once again dominate it's
traditional markets.

>
> As for Linux, for all that I admire where Ubuntu has managed to get to,
> it still demands levels of knowledge and effort that nobody else in my
> immediate family is likely to care to invest anytime soon.

The way I see Linux on the desktop, it's a clone of a bad knock off of an
OS that looks pretty but doesn't do much. Until the Linux distro take ten
steps back and figure out what business is willing to pay for and create a
product that does that rather than trying to nip the golliath in the shins,
it will unlikely be a significant part of the desktop OS.
Received on Sun Apr 8 15:12:15 2007