In defence of defenestration: Microsoft MUST hurl Gates from the Windows Microsoft's investors are apparently sharpening their knives for company chairman Bill Gates. Three of the top 20 shareholders are said to be upset that Gates - tasked with picking the new CEO to replace Steve Ballmer - has too much influence over the Windows 8 giant despite only holding a 4.5 per cent stake. It was one thing …
There could be an act two. They are one of the few companies with enough cash to actually do the right thing and go back to basics and learn from their (many) mistakes and rebuild all their software from the bottom up - the way it should be using modern software management techniques. That's probably 300 of their top engineers spending the next 10 years building the foundation of the next 100 or so.
They could do that - and it would be brilliant.
But there will be no act II - act I has pretty much ruined the theatre for now.
As fun as MS-bashing is, I think you're probably right. The heyday of IT making massive new improvements to corporate functions is probably over. From now on, its incremental - hence the scramble to subscription services to prop up revenue. It's no longer viable to continue to spend the vast amounts on new IT when most functions are already there in some form.
Yes, MS missed some new markets which Apple took, but as new features tail off in the phone market, we'll see a plateau that we've seen in desktops. The saving grace for phone companies is people's clumsiness. However, my guess is that even if MS managed to take the market, the profits Apple made are already gone. MS' TIFKAM fiasco is basically a rear-guard action to prevent Android/linux becoming ubiquitous thin-clients which may become fat clients later.
If the rumors are true the best answer is NOT to replace Ballmer at all, its to break up MSFT and put Sinofsky (who the rumor says was fired for telling Ballmer that sticking a cellphone UI on the desktop was just as dumb as sticking a desktop UI on a cellphone) in charge of Windows/Office and put Elop in charge of WinMo and finally a third division for consumer electronics and gaming.
Its pretty obvious that the problem has been trying to force windows to be something it is not, a "one size fits all" solution to all their problems, along with the higher ups trying to force tie ins where they simply made no sense. I'm reminded of the former inventor of WinAmp talking about why he hated and quit AOL "It was ALL about the service (dialup AOL) and they didn't care about anything else or even if bundling would be smart or a disaster, it was about nothing but pushing the service above all and I could see it would end up with WinAmp trashed as WinAmp users didn't want AOL dialup" and the same is happened with MSFT, they keep trying to force things under the WinFlag, even when they make no sense.
Splitting the company would let each group focus on their target, stop the idiot attempts at making one size fit all, and allow each to focus on their core customers and making them happy instead of trying to do everything under a single banner. if they stick to the current course and merely put Elop in to continue forcing windows to be a cellphone? Stick a fork, sell the stock, its toast. Both Google and Apple have shown that mobile and desktop are different beasts, trying to make it all under one banner just makes messes.
Splitting the co might save it. But when has MS ever cared about making customers happy? Customer happiness is nowhere in the DNA.
Even after a split, I wouldn't expect that to change.
It's more likely MS will continue to be a cash-cow zombie co, shambling across tech land until it runs out of brains and dies twitching in a gutter.
Maybe IBM will buy whatever's left.
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What seems not to occur to most people is that there's no good reason why Microsoft (or any company for that matter) should to continue to dominate. We've kind of done the "PC with Windows" thing, and of course it will linger on for a long time, but it's not where the really exciting things are happening any more. The talented people who worked there should go find jobs at other companies who are doing more interesting things.
I think you might be onto something here, "mobile and desktop are different beasts, trying to make it all under one banner just makes messes". I have contemplated this in the past many times myself , desktop is just that, a desktop somewhere in a quiet room for doing the heavy lifting like it does in the shop. Meanwhile mobile is totally different. I think if Ubuntu eventually comes through on their promise, the mobile phone will be replaced by a PC the size of Zippo lighter. Had N900 in the past and connecting it to the projector and to mouse and keyboard via Bluetooth made it a real computer. But a desktop workstation will always be around, even more powerful than ever for the heavy lifting. So no, the mobile to desktop will likely never happen but the other direction is where that is going, scaling down the desktop so it can be used efficiently while on the move. And Ballmer is a fool for not realizing and executing on it properly.
Its pretty obvious that the problem has been trying to force windows to be something it is not, a "one size fits all" solution to all their problems
Now now, it's not "one size fits all" -- the official Microsoftspeek is "ONE EXPERIENCE"
You're not allowed to talk about Microsoft products without including the word "experience." Bonus points for using it several times in a row.
And yes, the not-Metro UI "experience" -- bad as it is on a touch screen -- is practically unusable on a computer with an upright screen and a mouse+keyboard. Elements of that UI have even crept into Office, making those programs unusable even if you run them on Windows 7.
You could use the same engine for desktop and mobile; but the user interface needs to be completely different for the different uses. A desktop assumes a separate keyboard and pointing device; and the mobile is usually driven with just the screen; so you need to tailor the interface to the device it's being used on. A halfway house interface is no good to fucking anybody...you need the right interface for the right job.
> And yes, the not-Metro UI "experience" -- bad as it is on a touch screen --
> is practically unusable on a computer with an upright screen and
> a mouse+keyboard
And it's interesting that an open-source project, one of that family of products that MS and other proprietary companies claim is incapable of such innovation, has actuallt gotten the concept right. In KDE, they can actually *CHANGE* the interface you're using to fit the type of hardware you're using. You have a desktop, you can use the Plasma Desktop Workspace. You have a netbook or tablet, they have the Plasma Netbook Workspace. Yet the underlying system is much the same between them. So why couldn't the highly-paid geniuses at MS figure out the same thing?
http://kde.org/workspaces/
It seems to me that what this move is really all about is for the 'capital reallocation' set to gain control of MS, kill off investment in the future of the company and its various franchises and then drain the body of blood in the form of fat dividends for shareholders.
Drain its cash and let it languish? Good. (Accompany this with a photo of Grumpy Cat.) Microsoft has been a parasite on the technology world for way too long. Removing the abusive monopolist from the picture will allow innovation to happen faster and better.
Well, according to yesterday's article about aging XP machines (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/01/six_months_end_xp_support/), there's still 1.6 billion PCs out there, so I'm guessing that's still a bigger market than smart phones or tablets. Nothing wrong with selling 1.6 billion Windows licenses at what, $30 a pop, every few years. That's good money. Too bad their current version of Windows is such rubbish. And that's why MS should stop worrying about this "Act II". They've got a huge user base that isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and trying to merge the tablet/phone world with the PC world is obviously something they have no demonstrable skills or talent at. They should focus on the PC and make that their Crown Jewel again. If they want to do tablets or phones, fine, they've got plenty of money to spin out child companies to take care of that.
Even if they stop "growing" and just maintain current revenue for the next ten years, they are still making a shitpot full of money every 5 seconds.
"Even if they stop "growing" and just maintain current revenue for the next ten years, they are still making a shitpot full of money every 5 seconds."
That's what the boards of Nokia and Blackberry reckoned. And the board of HP are currently on the same hymn sheet. In tech, when people realise a company is in decline, they flee like passengers on a stricken cruise liner, and soon that incredible cash flow is waning, nobody wants to do business with you, and soon your yesterday's FT/WSJ headline.
In the corporate IT space, MS have a monopoly largely because nobody clever and agile challenged them. But I wouldn't want to be as MS shareholder if Google really meant business in enterprise, for example. Or even Apple. In the corporate space iPhones and iPads have cracked open the door. What if they got off their fat-margined bottoms, and started looking at what would make a secure, reliable enterprise client? MS are still hide-bound by the need to milk the cash cow. The company that defeats them won't be playing by the same rules.
In the corporate IT space, MS have a monopoly largely because nobody clever and agile challenged them.
Well, actually Microsoft has irresistible momentum. My company literally RUNS on SharePoint and Outlook 2010, as do my suppliers and customers. Everyone uses it for messaging each other, scheduling, project planning, you name it. And to their credit Microsoft is very aggressive in soliciting feedback and new feature suggestions.
To move from Office 2010 would be the equivalent of changing which side of the road we all drive on, including relocating the steering wheel. Everyone would have to change at the same time, including all our equipment. It's just not going to happen.
To move from Office 2010 would be the equivalent of changing which side of the road we all drive on, including relocating the steering wheel. Everyone would have to change at the same time, including all our equipment.
Really?!?
You'd have to change "all your equipment" to install a standard POP3 or IMAP server? All your PC's would have to be shit-canned to install a standard mail client like Thunderbird? You can't exchange mail between Office XXXX and POP3/IMAP servers and clients? (Hint: I do it all the time...).
Of course a wholesale change between Office and something else would be disruptive -- probably just as disruptive as the change from the Windows interfaces we're all familiar with to Win-TIFKAM (which I'm sure your enterprise is all ready to do, right?). That said, I don't know what flavor of Kool-Aid you're drinking out there, but please don't bring any of it around here...I'm not a fan of bitter almonds.
Err, that is rather simplistic....
In the enterprise Outlook is far more than an email client.
What about corporate calendaring, scheduling, tasks.
Then there are the miriad of applications that expect Outlook to be installed just to provide integration.
Outlook is the front end to Exchange, proabbly the single most important and used service in any organsiation. Then there is the AD that provides authentication and authorisation, what do you propose replacing that with?
Thunderbird et-al are just a client, nothing more. Without a back end they are comnpletely useless.
The orignal post is correct, to take MS out of the corporate space is currently next to impossible as there simply are no other alternatves.
Why has Novell died?
Arguably, eDirectory & NSS are far superior to AD, GroupWise provides the same functionality & if you have actually used the recent versions, is proabbly better than Exchange.
There simply isn't the integration and MS have almost total monopoly on the back end infrastructure. They are more than Office and a Windows desktop.
That you know of.
Active Directory is not the only authentication tool available. The biggest network on the planet is called the Internet, it runs fine and Active Directory is not part of it. Check out the technologies that allow the Internet to work and you will find that Microsoft is not the one-stop shop you think it is.
As for calendaring and scheduling, well I have to agree that Outlook has the market pretty much sewn up, but there are actually alternatives now, for those who don't have MS blinkers on, and there will be more in the future because, like it or not, FOSS is here to stay.
The Internet is not a company network. Inside a company network you ned far more control and management (and ease of use) than on the Internet. Some of the technologies that still make the Internet work are old and inherently unsecure - think about SMTP.
FOSS is here to stay - but MS too - you may like it or not because there are also people who wear FOSS blinkers, but it is true.
@Hoola - "Arguably, eDirectory & NSS are far superior to AD, GroupWise provides the same functionality & if you have actually used the recent versions, is proabbly better than Exchange. There simply isn't the integration and MS have almost total monopoly on the back end infrastructure. They are more than Office and a Windows desktop."
I'm a Novell admin, there is no "arguably" to it - eDirectory is far superior to AD. Very stable and you only need 2 tools to fix most problems - dstrace and dsrepair. Groupwise vs Outhouse/Exchange is a tough one though. I've never used Outhouse in my 20+ years in IT (yeah, amazing, I know), and I do (mostly) like Groupwise as client and server. The client is good for mail, and folks who use it for calenders are OK with it. The GW server (at least on Netware) is freakin awesome - lots and lots of self-healing abilities that the admin only knows kicked off when he gets the Post Office Maintenance email saying the problem was fixed. Oh, and single-storage for attachments, something the new versions of Exchange lack. My users generally don't like Groupwise though, because NOTHING ON THE PLANET integrates with it without 3PO's or other strange tweaks - it doesn't "just work" with stuff like Outhouse does. And there are a few spots in GW that I wish Novell had tweaked (like letting the admin set proxy access or rules for a user).
But your last sentence nailed it - it's the integration, or lack thereof, that's finally moving us off of eDir/GW to AD/Outhouse. It's pretty dead simple to setup RADIUS on Windows so that an Aruba Mobility Controller can use it for user authentication. Not so with eDirectory - you either have to pay through the nose for something like SteelBelted, or bung around with FreeRADIUS until you finally find the magic combination that makes it work (hint: it takes a liberal dosing of pixie dust, three virgins, and the pre-compiled radiusd that ships with SLES. Don't EVER try to compile your own). On the Groupwise side, my users have been bellyaching for years that they can't buy off-the-shelf software and use it to do mail merges. So we have special-purpose desktops running Outlook that relay through our GWIA just for this. But we are leaving all that behind over the next 4-5 months and moving to AD and Office365 (yikes, that part wasn't my idea...) where things will "just work" and my users can finally feel like they're modern and up-to-date.
You'd have to change "all your equipment" to install a standard POP3 or IMAP server? All your PC's would have to be shit-canned to install a standard mail client like Thunderbird? You can't exchange mail between Office XXXX and POP3/IMAP servers and clients?
Much like a neutered dog, you don't get it. This is waaaaaay beyond using email.
Office 2010 and SharePoint is used for scheduling, task management, document approval and workflow, meeting requests, manage the schedules of thousands of people at the same time, project management, and a whole lot more. If you haven't used Outlook 2010 or SharePoint then you don't understand how it's built-in functions are used for workplace collaboration and coordination of complex projects. I can receive an outside email from a customer that integrates with my project planning on SharePoint and update project status with that and all other related projects.
If all my clients, customers, and suppliers are using Office, I damn well better be so I can interface with them.
If you are actually uneducated enough to think that this is only about POP3 email, then I suggest that you take a few IT classes and upgrade your knowledge.
Actually I think its about the non-sequitir that you'd have to change "all your equipment" to support a different environment. And I think that its about the false assertion that there are no worthy alternatives to Sharepoint and/or LookOut. No amount of ad hominem invective is going to improve those two falacies presented as fact.
And what would you do with a POP3 server? That's an outdated protocol which lacks basic functionalities when you access your email from more than one machine. IMAP4 is better, but it still lacks features compared to Exchange. Have you ever administered an Exchange server? Download a trial, and spend some time to understand what it can do. You will be surprised.
If all you can do is a basic mail server, IMAP/SMTP will do. If your needs are more sophisticated, believe me, they won't. That's why Notes first and then Exchange got so much market despite the availability of free IMAP/SMTP servers.
"SharePoint and Outlook 2010 . . . Office 2010"
Never used them. Despite having loads of windows PCs, we either stuck with older versions or found alternative ways of doing things, more reliable and cheaper.
There was simply no compelling reason to upgrade (with associated pain), based on the amount asked for, when the existing solutions worked.
MS were much too late coming up with a subscription system, at a reasonable price.
MS had better have a killer app up their sleeve or we won't be using them at all in less than 5 years.
Exactly. The only thing that has slowed my transition from Windows is Audio Editing...not something I've found a solution for in the Linux space yet... (welcome to ideas, btw)...and gaming...although Valve's Steam Client is trying its damnedest to correct that issue for me...
Come on Magix...make a Linux client!!!
All very well down-voting the guy who reckons he's stuck on Windows platform but this is a fact of life in a lot of industries. Have you supposedly clued-in down-voters actually spoken to middle-managers in most firms? Obviously not else you'd know it's easier to get Miley Cyrus to put her clothes back on than get middle-managers to start looking at alternatives.
I work in a shop where 90% of managers and a lot of techies still refer to FOSS as "shareware"! "Oh no we're not going to install any of that shareware open-source stuff. What happens if the trades stop running and I have to explain to ( next manager up the chain ) that we used something we didn't fully understand?". After a few attempts over several years, we gave up trying. You can get the odd Apache, maybe bit of Python or Perl in the door but anything else and you'll get severely beaten with the Win7/Win8/Win2k8/Sharepoint/Office stick until you learn to fall in line!
Well, actually Microsoft has irresistible momentum. My company literally RUNS on SharePoint and Outlook 2010, as do my suppliers and customers. Everyone uses it for messaging each other, scheduling, project planning, you name it.
Well, actually IBM has irresistible momentum. My company literally RUNS on CICS and TSO 1980, as do my suppliers and customers. Everyone uses it for messaging each other, scheduling, project planning, you name it.
Although there is no open source equivalent to Exchange, your IT Department should be more than capable of providing an open-source solution that is more secure and more flexible.
The main problem with Microsoft is people like you (sorry, not trying to offend...honestly); people who are so adept at seeking MS for solutions first, that you don't consider other platforms...even when you may not be the one implementing the overall service.
LibreOffice is a great Office-related product, and Ubuntu Server is flexible and more than capable with less equipment demands than MS Server. I run MS Server in a virtual machine that I used for file transfer between members of my company, and it worked great. However, something more simple and open (such as Ubuntu Server) would have done the trick had I lacked hardware resources.
The issue here is not that MS fits the bill (or not), it's whether or not people (Americans, mostly) can change their habits. Personally, I think they can. It wasn't long ago that Americans were joined in the cause of Civil Rights and the rule of law...it only took one false-flag event to change that...now we're reporting each other to "authorities" and laughing at the dismay of families who have people incarcerated for crimes without victims (here's looking at you unconstitutional drug statutes and unconstitutional pre-emptive arrests in DUIs)...
So yes, people can change.
My fiancée and I were looking forward to buying Windows 8, Windows Surface, and Windows Phone 7/8. However, as I began to see that Microsoft was not providing options to their interface (as I had so clearly experienced on Linux distros) it was clear that Microsoft was not going in the direction I would like. Add in their intentional back-doors and cooperation with the mostly-privately-owned "National Security Agency" (as "National" as the Federal Reserve, it seems), and it appears that my observations were correct...not something I would like to be correct about in this case...
I'm rambling...you get the point... If Microsoft died today, the other options would be clear to your IT Department and you would be better off for it...
The difference between Microsoft and companies like Nokia and Blackberry is highlighted by the "500 million PCs on XP" story from the other day.
The lifetime of the investment for those PCs was around a decade, but how many people are using a 10 year old phone? The companies that have invested in Microsoft desktop and server operating systems as well as server applications like Exchange aren't going to jump ship to anything that doesn't offer similar levels of support, so Microsoft have got a longer timescale to develop "Act II". Also, Microsoft is still profitable, so there isn't the impeteus to start throwing out bathwater, along with any useful babies, that some other tech companies have. OK, so the shareholders may feel that MS should have been more profitable, but that's just in 20-20 hindsight.
Apple has no track record in servers, server applications or any of the underlying technology; I know it's a bit dull compared to Angry Birds, but all aspects of logistics, inventory control, manufacturing, accounting and financial services rely on relational databases and the systems based on them. Apple hasn't got one, neither has HP. IBM have several, Oracle has a couple and even Microsoft has one. Yes there are some great FOSS databases, but they've not made a great impression on the market (I'm not counting MySQL as it's effectively owned by Oracle now).
Microsoft's main challenger is likely to be Google; they're a company that understands servers and server applications and they have client operating systems ready to sit on desktops or in pockets. Google's main problem is convincing business that cloud services are reliable enough to bet the farm on.
Don't think it will happen, but if Microsoft does not get over its VMware ( we will kill you off like we did with Novell ) current obsession, it will surely be finished off.
VMware shrinks + Google Acquisition of VMware = End of Microsoft.
MS works with VMware + MS concentrate on Office, Exchange = Microsoft survival
Along with Linux survival.
Easy maths :-)
And what do you use VMware for? Do you know how many use VMware to run Windows server and even remote desktops? VMware scares company like Dell and HP that sell far less servers, from a MS point of view it doesn't care if you run one thousand Windows servers (and Exchange, SharePoint, SQLServer, etc. etc.) on physical hardware or you run it in a virtualized one.
Last time I checked (today) VMware doesn't make OS, databases, groupware servers, etc. etc.
And IMHO Google would not be much interested in VMware. Google needs to bring your data on its own servers, not let you run your servers in your own "cloud"...
"Well, according to yesterday's article about aging XP machines, there's still 1.6 billion PCs out there...Nothing wrong with selling 1.6 billion Windows licenses at what, $30 a pop, every few years."
Go back and read that article again, because it documents Microsoft's dilemma quite well, namely, that almost a third of those PCs are still running Windows XP. In other words, they haven't upgraded in over a decade and even the impending withdrawal of support is not moving many users off the platform.
The fact is, Operating Systems (and, for that matter, Productivity Suites) are just not sexy. We used to upgrade every few years in the hope of getting a stable platform (and some more powerful hardware). With XP and a couple of service packs we finally got there and the OS should have faded into the background. But by that time, Microsoft had become addicted to the upgrade cycle and kept pushing new versions even though there was no compelling reason for them.
As far as I'm concerned, the same is true for Office. I haven't seen any new feature since Office '97 that would make me want to fork out for a new version. Not that there haven't been new features, there just haven't been any that really justify the price of an upgrade.
In fact, some of Microsoft's recent moves have been counterproductive, taking a familiar product and turning it on its head (TIFKAM, ribbon-bar). And for little reason that I can see beyond "see! it's different! That must be better." I know TIFKAM was a response to the advent of touch, but throwing out the entire start menu interface for everybody, touchscreen or not, really does feel like just one more desperate pull on the upgrade pipe.
Can Microsoft have a second act? Apple certainly did it, going from near bankrupcy to the most talked about Technology company in the world. IBM did a pretty good job of reinventing itself once Microsoft stole its business computing thunder. Microsoft just needs to accept that the old PC upgrade cycle is dying and move on.
Vector,
I can't disagree with any of your points, other than the trifle of saying "well, that's still possibly 1+ billion PC licenses on the upgrade treadmill"
Microsoft has always been its own worst disruptive technology. Call me a fool, but I thought DOS was a pretty decent OS for what it did - load programs on underpowered, memory limited machines, and manage files. But MS killed DOS once they realized Windows 3.x was getting popular, and they didn't even have the courtesy of throwing a wake. They went straight into poor-mouthing it (as we say here in the States). That lasted, eh, 3 or 4 years before MS decided to sacrifice Win3.x on the altar of Windows 95. Win95 was shit, but it was prettier shit than Win3.x. Win98SE fixed some of those problems, so then it was time to throw 95 under the bus. Then Win2k came out and was so much more reliable and secure than Win98, which was important in the age of high-speed Internet Porn, so Win98 had to get the boot. And when XP came out, you'd have thought Jehovah himself had coded it and ordained it as THE OS for PCs, because Windows 2000 was suddenly the worst OS ever written in history. PERIOD. Why we didn't hear about these massive holes in Win2k before 2003, well, I'll never understand.
MS did misstep badly with Millenium, but luckily not many people cared since Win2k was there to take up the slack. And the second misstep with Vista was tolerable only because XP was still in its glory days.
For Office, I still use 2000 because it does all I need it to do. Sure, I could upgrade to whatever the latest version is, but that's all crap in my book. And I'm on a volume license, so it wouldn't cost me a dime - other than lost productivity due to the Ribbon.
The big problem with a Microsoft second act is that I don't know if they have the "style" to put together a second act. They don't have enough sense to realize that even if they did find a "killer app" or "killer device", they shouldn't burden it down with trying to make it a clone of a PC running Windows and Office. They've done well with Xbox, but that's still tiny compared to the PC market. Apple got big again because they had bling, and they were focused (IMHO) on actually finding out how people used an MP3 player, then making one that was worth buying. They didn't try to make it look or act like a tiny Mac. The iPhone just ramped that up even further, and the iPad sent the whole thing through the stratosphere. I don't think MS has the "people" knowledge to pull off a similar stunt - to them everything looks like a PC running Windows and Office.
The point I was making with the 500 million XP systems out there is that the wheels are falling off the upgrade treadmill. Many companies which would, at one time, have just automatically moved to the next version of Windows are now examining their options and I believe that trend will just accelerate, particularly now that successor platforms are becoming more common.
On the evolution of MS operating systems, most up until XP were steps along a path. Windows up through 3.1(1) was just a shell on top of DOS, but it was a start at a graphic interface which definitely where the industry was going. Microsoft tried next to make the move to NT, but the change was too jarring, since all the applications at the time wouldn't run on NT without a major rewrite. To mitigate this, they came up with Win 95 (which was again just a shell on top of DOS but with NT libraries as well). 95, 98 and millennium were transitional steps which gave developers a chance to move their applications to NT, since those OSes could run both legacy and modern applications, even if they ran somewhat poorly. Win 2000 was the first "unification" OS bringing NT to the general desktop population but it was targeted only at business users (I'm discounting NT workstation because it was really somewhat of an outlier).
Windows XP was the OS that finally brought NT to the consumer. Add a couple of service packs and Microsoft had finally accomplished the goal started all the way back with Windows 95. But, as I said before, by that time, they'd gotten so used to the upgrade cycle and the piles of cash that went with it that they couldn't stop.
Customers, on the other hand, could stop and many did, having grown tired of the time and cost associated with the upgrades when they finally had an OS that seemed to be stable and usable.
As far as remaking themselves, you seem to assume that they would have to follow Apple's path into consumer electronics and mobile. I would argue that, with their continued strength in the data center (for good or ill), they would be better served to follow IBM's path into enterprise services.
Nervousness about FOSS is entirely justifiable. Where would a company go which had fully committed to Gnome have been when the developers chucked away the Gnome 2 interface because they were bored with it? How would a company feel if it had committed to OpenOffice just before most of the developers threw their toys out of the pram and decided to do LibreOffice instead?
Where would a company go which had fully committed to Gnome have been when the developers chucked away the Gnome 2 interface because they were bored with it?
This is a good example for FOSS not against it!
Firstly, in the short term there's absolutely no reason to change what you've got on any particular near-future drop-dead date. Those of us running RHEL5, RHEL6 or the Centos or Scientific Linux free derivatives still have a fully maintained Gnome 2 environment, with guaranteed support for five years after RHEL7 ships.
Secondly, within six months of Gnome 3 hitting the decks, the horde of disgruntled Gnome users had fixed the problem in two ways. They forked Gnome 2 into a new project called MATE - the reactionary route. And they developed Cinnamon, a new UI overlay on Gnome 3 that was far less unfriendly to Gnome 2 fans - the progressive route. I'm happy to move to Cinnamon if / when my platform of choice (Scientific Linux) moves to Gnome 3. I've tried MATE and it works. I've stopped grousing about Gnome devs flouting OSS conventions (ie you do NOT forcibly tear up your user's old way of working, you DO fork a new project and find a maintainer for the old one), because it's gone from a huge annoyance to an irrelevance in under a year.
Thirdly, there were and are are other alternatives. KDE. XFCE. Many other other alternatives. Compare Microsoft's one and only one UI, that they tear up at a whim every few years. (Win 7 was a tear-up, Win 8 a shredder).
Finally, you have the source code. If the above hadn't happened because you were a tiny minority, you could still have maintained your chosen interface for ever, or paid someone to do that, provided your pockets were deep enough. You can't do that with Windows XP. Microsoft has the secret sauce and intends to burn it.
Where would a company go which had fully committed to Gnome have been when the developers chucked away the Gnome 2 interface because they were bored with it?
But the same thing happens with Windows anyway, and on that side we have to pay for the privilege! At least with Gnome et al we get shafted for free.
Our home PC
Quad core, lots of RAM, BD burner, 2TB of HDD, rebuilt from a P4 during Vista so uses XP Pro of course and MS Office 2003 (The last file edit one).
Now I just cannot get on with ribbon menus so that tops out MS Office at 2003. The PC is pretty fast, it does what I need, I still run a couple of MS Dos programmes, which won't run on anything newer.
In our office we have to keep two XP machines around for things we cannot do on anything newer.
if MS did not remove features some of us would go to a newer version.
Quite. The ribbon would have been just fine if MS had given us the option of turning it off. New users for those that didn't care would have used it, maybe even the old die-hard would start to use it if it wasn't a hated non-option. Same with TAFKAM, have it there by default but let us turn off and it would have been fine. I'd have probably bought win8 for my ageing XP laptop instead of trying linux. Ho-hum. As someone else said earlier, why do they always have to trash the old way just because they've come up with a new way?
Unless a sizeable share of companies still running XP / Office '97 decides to either completely switch to a different OS / Productivity Suite (which is time/money consuming) or to give up entirely on getting support from Microsoft by not upgrading (which is risky and potentially expensive from a security point of view), Microsoft still has THAT potential population of users to get upgrade money from. So financially Microsoft still has a captive audience which (willingly or not) is likely to spend money on their products. Maybe some will not upgrade but companies are scared of losing application support and/or spending money re-training users on new systems so a majority will. Whether said products actually improve the business is sadly irrelevant once a client is stuck in the upgrade-because-of-obsolecence cycle...
While this is a lucrative cycle to be stuck in for MS, they haven't been able to ring-fence another market just as well or leverage their desktop advantage into other areas: they've lost the lead pretty much in anything else they attempted to breach in and that is what makes investors uneasy. While they can afford to mess up in the short term because of their deep pockets, they seem to have lost the technological lead and that could cost them dearly in the next 5 years. They may not fade away as quickly as RIM-Blackberry, but Microsoft seem to be quite a dysfunctional entity nowadays (and not just because of Ballmer / Gates) so they would need to be successful in "something else" than just desktop to satisfy their shareholders and guarantee their long term survival.
"They've got a huge user base that isn't going anywhere anytime soon, and trying to merge the tablet/phone world with the PC world is obviously something they have no demonstrable skills or talent at. They should focus on the PC and make that their Crown Jewel again."
That is fine so long as the PC remains dominant. (I have not been seduced by the various tablets) If, as frequently reported, smartphones and tablets are munching and devouring the PC market then Microsoft will have to pull a rabbit from the hat.
It seems as if the initial onslaught has stalled, Apple/Android have held firm. WinRT may severely wounded for tablets.
Microsoft do have Nokia, good hardware and an improved Windows for phone may give the Redmond Cabal the impetus to move forward.
Sticking with Windows for Desktop/Server/Enterprise and polishing each previous version to make it shiny will lead to a death by 1000 cuts.
Microsoft NEED something new
The first thing I would do CEO, would be to ELIMINATE the board entirely.
The MSFT BOARD has become a gateway of a wasteful pursuit of old gentlemen's ideas chasing expired technologies that others have already developed.
A boards relentless need to reduce staff to show gain. Cut quality labor while wearing a fake mask of profit. Pleasing shareholders will new terms spun out of the basement somewhere else. They are the tweety birds of reality. They love to repeat what others say. Having no thought for themselves, they repeat unknowingly ideas spawned by other tweety birds without the applied research needed to determine viability in market.
When you try to talk margins, you only hear loss. If they would ever determine how much the product would make they could determine that theres no money in outdated technologies, promoted and marketed by investor gangs. Jumping on the band wagon of marketed ideas by office flunkies who no n0thing about engineering is the norm.
The release to market is no different, with politicking still at a two-three year development cycle from concept to production. When basement developers can churn out an app over the weekend, MSFT will take three years for the same exact thing! Why..., the tweety birds LOVE meetings. Its their Modus operandi in Redmond, a sign of productivity. Hour long meetings about agendas for the day, which were already covered in an email prior. The development meetings are only about the previous meeting the day before and what is to be done that day. You sit in the meetings for an entire hour, regardless if theres anything to talk about, and discuss the weather, issues that were found prior and whos handling them. A second hour long meeting is about issues and the developers who are already working on them. Why, cause there an app they use called creates TPS reports about employee productivity. And in there, creates work for the suits who have nothing better to do except have more meetings. Each meeting they create, equates to productive time served on TPS reports. So when you look at the end of month numbers you look productive since meetings count higher as productive time then actually developing. So writing code is NOT the priority at MSFT, meetings are. And this has to do with the board.
Then when you look at the reduction of quality labor over the decade to create profit in the shareholders view actually was more detrimental to the core than anything. Another board request, a board created and made up of outside companies and people who do not even work at Microsoft. There only motive is profit at the hands of the workers. Increasing international talent locally, may temporarily provide the mild gains on paper, but after a decade, the board has ruined the core and devastated the industry.
The board needs to go.
Regardless if the entire internet industry has impact with their minuet decisions. They will cut entire products to show a penny gain.
After noticing this, I also noticed that a funded project on kickstarter.com/projects/seattle/sleeping-in-seattle that details the entire Windows 8.1 Blue release from the inside of the NTDEV core. Understand why there will be so many problems with 8.1 users that it will impact the success of the company forever. Looking into it more, seems like a Windows Blue developer, moves out of house and into work, where they lived fulltime at Microsoft Redmond developing core components of Blue. Details about what happened are still unclear, only that the Senior most engineer who worked directly with the very top executives on Windows Blue, was let go the same day Ballmer was. From profile information, they had healed develop every major project Microsoft has released in the last decade. To be blunt, every project that has been released this person has been involved directly.
The board should go. What makes their judgement any better than even Ballmer if their judgement is to leave company profits to the judgement of someone else?
There were days when a board used to contribute ideas and run them past employees, but today employees create ideas and run them past other employees. From and engineering perspective, only the cash flow from the board is needed, the board is redundant along with their judgement.
Skype, if not purchased by MS, would have been taken over by Google and would have been the face of hangout we see at present. Hangout is still miles away from Skype but slowly getting there. MS got themselves some time by blocking taking over of Skype by Google. Similarly Nokia. Armed with a grand handset maker as Nokia who are king of the feature phone market which is still an astounding 85% of the global mobile market, I think things are just starting and there is miles to go. Google having 70% market share of the 15% world phone market is leading the marathon that has only started!
I dont think Gates is idealess, it is just that people have found voices in competitor's successes in different platforms where MS has so far failed or got much less success than many would have wanted. People are forgetting Steve jobs created this smartphone and tablet market in a few months which has raised such a storm. There can be another device or technology round the corner that can make these vanish into thin air and make that device the in thing and craze. Bill is perfect for the job. Creativity of this stature is in his blood. These shareholders are up for his throat as they may be funded and powered by MS competitors also who will have great interest if Bill is unceremoniously thrown out of MS as that will affect the goodwill and market faith in MS. I always try to look who will gain more with today's info and I can only see Google and Apple and Oracle to gain if Bill is thrown out of MS.
Bill is only a Chairman at MS - that position is devoid of any power whatsoever. It is a titular head who is there as an honorary member. He doesnt also interfere unless very rarely needed like purchase of Skype when they didnt get the obvious hint what it was all for.
Bill can easily find a guy most suited for the top job - who will have the capability and attitude to really take MS ahead and not rip it apart. He could find and identify that common passion more easily in another person than any other guy out there. I think he is best suited to find the person to head MS which these shareholders are complaining about.
Fighting Google and Apple also needs market appeal which Bill delivers due to his personal integrity and credentials. I am simply against anyone who wants to take out a person from the equation who is there as an honorary figure and not affecting the results at all in any negative way but adds value by just his presence. These shareholders want to reduce that value addition. Only a competitor will want that to happen - not a true owner (share holder) of any company. I am sure they mean ill and are funded by MS competitors.
Yeah, do away with hat innovative figurehead -- How about John Skully -- he came from a non-techie background to guide Apple to within a few months of insolvency. But Wall Street loved him.
My bet is that once Carl Icahn gets through getting his greenmail from Apple, he will target Microsoft with his 'divide up the company and give the profits to me" strategy.
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Having a founder who now spends most of their time and attention on more pressing problems is another thing again.
It's admirable that Gates wants to devote so much of his time and money solving developing world issues but if I were a Microsoft shareholder I wouldn't want him to overshadow the company while not being fully involved in it.
There's really no place to chair a company of that size part-time and it's no surprise that Microsoft look to have missed several boats under his watch when he's not really watching.
Am I the only one that was gagging to get hold of a MS Courier after seeing the "teaser" vid of it? It was EXACTLY what I was after in terms of a PDA -- essentially an electronic filofax.... and some dopy git murdered it in its infancy. I now have sammy tab 10.1 but it doesn't fold in the middle the way the courier was meant to do but it's all there is......hmph
Microsoft's got problems. It's painted itself into a corner with its two cash-cows, MS Windows and MS Office. Gates was part of that - it was he after all, who painted MS Windows as an essential and inescapable part of the PC. It's a rerun of IBM's success with the IBM PC, which IBM failed to capitalize on because it didn't want to cannibalize its hugely successful mainframe and midrange computer series. Microsoft just doesn't have what it takes to survive away from the cash-cows.
What I suggest Microsoft does is open under the GPL v.3 the source trees of the MS DOS series, likewise the source trees of the MS Windows 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, 9x.x, and the WinNT 3.x and 4.x series; and also the likewise obsolete MS Office source trees up to 1997; also the source trees of the software development toolsets used to develop those products. Then persuade IBM to likewise release the OS/2 1.x, 2.x and 3.x source trees also under the GPL v.3; and persuade HP to release the likewise obsolete source trees of VMS unde the GPL v.3.
The purpose of that would be to break Microsoft out of the corner it has painted itself into. By putting the "software patents" that it uses to leech from Android, under the GPL, it would break it free from relying on those to make some return on its Mobile Phone division - remember that argument that the poor, by relying on the welfare, were losing initiative: it's the story of Microsoft, Windows Phone, and software patents - they've lost all initiative, because they're relying on leeching off Android's success. And by opening the obsolete Windows source trees, it would break free from the psychological necessity to follow that very well worn track - so well worn the trees are now growing over it. :)
Just my 0.02c, but any "Business Analyst" worth his plutonium would be charging like an angry bull ...
... that's sure. Why MS should give away its source code and its competitive advantage? Remember that now Office formats are documented and patent-free (just look for them...), thereby it Libre/Open Office are unable to support them is just because of its developers.
If LibreOffice needs to understand how to code a good office suite, it has to do on its own, without looking at MS source code... and fork from it :-P
But keep on dreaming....
@LDS
"Remember that now Office formats are documented and patent-free (just look for them...), thereby it Libre/Open Office are unable to support them is just because of its developers."
Indeed, ODF is a very good standard, I wonder why Microsoft don't use it .....
Oh you mean OOXML! The "standard" that not even MS Office managed to properly adhere to (may have actually managed since I last checked). Also the standard that the Norwgian standards team (I think) resigned over.
Keep drinking the kool-aid.
MS doesn't use it because Office is the de-facto standard and MS takes advantage of it. Sorry, but when your ahead and your competitors are behind you don't stop to help them. It's not MS that has to be compatible with LibreOffice, is the other way round - if it wants to have any chance to get market share.
That's what everybody else did when Lotus 1-2-3 or Wordperfect were the standards and to gain market share your product had to support those formats.
If you prefer to be be "pure" and don't be touched by "evil" formats, well, keep on playing in your little garden and don't complain if nobody really cares about you but people who only looks for free (aka no money required) software. Others will keep on paying money to use the formats they need, and MS will keep on making a lot of cash from Office.
Most people care about getting their work done, they do not care about open source ot whatever, if you earn a lot of $$$$$$$$ using Excel, you don't really care about switching to something else you're not sure about its compatibility and features - the Open/Libre Office fork doesn't help either, it will just make people more uncertain about what to choose.
Good bye, Mr. Anderson... If we're going to use Matrix quotes.
Ballmer was a great PC salesman and nothing more. If it hadn't been for the non-Hodgkins, Paul Allen would have left just a year or 2 later anyway. He'd completely lost interest in developing anything. He was rich beyond belief, so he had to do something completely different and follow his real passions. Same with Waz at Apple.
Gates never had he vision of Jobs, which why Steve eventually won. Microsoft needs to be broken into 3 separate companies, one for phone/tablet OS, one for gaming plarform and the third for hardware to their own OS and others on. May just 2 then. I contracted there in 2008 when all the "changes" were happening. Everyone was confused and 5 years later it's even worse.
There is no good answer. They've been completely out maneuvered at every turn, so call in the priest, deliver last rites and last one out turns off the lights. What they need is a Gate/Jobs young guy to come in and rip the place apart and from out of the resulting chaos (and expenditure of large amounts of capital which they still have) refocus on something entirely new. What that it, I have fracking idea. I'm of the Gates/Jobs generation -to fracking old and retired to care. But there has to be some young brain out there that can remake Microsoft.
Good luck and good night, Mrs. Mcgillicutty, wherever you are...
This is the second article claiming that 'three' investors want to be rid of Gates. It is claimed that together they own 5%. In neither article are the three named. That speaks volumes.
It suggests to me that if we knew who thet are, we'd be able to workout their affiliations and realize why they are so adamant Gates should go. My guess is that it would have less to do with the benefit to the company and more to do with the hoped for benefit to selected investors. My guess is that there's one of two things playing out.
One is that the call is, or is a front for, Carl Icahn. After the debacle at Dell I imagine his brand is toxic and being connected with a call like this it would never surface.
The other is that some investors are upset that other investors have been given a place on the board and the try the hustle for a place.
Disgruntled investors have an opportunity to voice their disquiet every year at the shareholder meeting. Or sell their holdings.
By the way, despite the news published (by largely California bloggers) my holdings of Microsoft stock has risen 20% in 8 months. That's a petty good performance anyway and given the terrible press they receive all the more remarkable.
Investor like me, who like the way Microsoft is shaping up and have seen good returns from a stable company, are not going to brook AC investors trying to rock the boat for their own, unstated, ends.
I actually think Microsoft could have a second wind with their Surface devices, they just need to increase the specs and lower the prices. I work in financial software and I am starting to see people seriously think about replacing their laptops and desktops with tablet hybrids, and only Microsoft really has the ability to create devices that are fully compatible with their corporate infrastructure. An iPad might be beautiful and lovely (I have one) but you can't do a whole lot with it beyond surf and write emails. The problem is currently specs and price, why would I pay over £1000+ for a high spec surface when I can get a top of the line laptop for 30-40% less? If they can close the gap between laptops and surface tablets spec and price wise MS will be back in the game, and Apple will be in real trouble. The future will not be people having a computer and a tablet as they do now, it will be wanting to have ONE device that is your computer AND a tablet.
... just they weren't good products and didn't take off. Gates was talking about tablets well before Jobs, so there was the vision, but not the execution. Gates failed to understand it had the wrong product but for a niche market. Down the line MS didn't work enough to make Windows Mobile and Tablet PCs appealing products - they delivered barely what was enough for some business but failed to understand the potential of the consumer market - and its driving force. Without real competition, MS didn't care about the tiepid acceptance of its products. Nor it took advantage of hardware improvements (i.e. multitouch) as the others did. Having to rely on third parties to deliver the HW didn't help either - such devices unlike PCs needs far more HW/SW integration in the design phase.
Gates he's not the only one to blame, MS has far bigger issues in upper management. Ozzie, Sinofsky, etc. were probably the wron men in the wrong place - the kind who pursuit their own agenda at all costs, even if the market doesn't respond the way they thought.
I never said it invented it - but Newton was a PDA, not a tablet, at least the version that reached the market. What was dreamed of is another thing.
I just said Gates understood (IIRC around 2001-.2002) there was a place for "keyboardless" devices capable of PC tasks, but MS was unable to deliver good devices - it tried to adapt laptop to a tablet format, instead of designing them from ground up - including the OS, and that was not the way to go.
El'Reg missed out a very important aspect of this article, the board members who want Bill out are the ones who want to replace Ballmer with someone worse.
Alan Mullay is doing a good job at Ford but he's doing a good job of turning around Ford's financial problems and Microsoft's problems aren't financial.
Ballmer was a good money maker, Microsoft have seen continuously raising profits under his leadership, where Ballmer (and Microsoft) have been failing is that Ballmer is not techy enough and as such missed far too many opportunities that Microsoft's competitors have been more than happy to capitalise on. Alan Mullay is not the man to reverse this trend, he's Ballmer 2.0.
Gates is still a tech man at heart, his attention has moved to his charity work but he's far more likely to pick a CEO that will spot or create the next big thing than the activists on the board. Ther prefered CEO is evidence of this.
I can't see the world's richest man, possibly now at the top of his game, essentially invulnerable to loss, etc. being kicked out of anything. Did I mention he is/was the world's richest man? If I were an investor in MS, I would be thrilled to learn that Bill Gates is coming back to take the helm.
There is another side to this: If, in the unlikely event, they *did* push him against his will and they pissed him off, they risk facing him as an adversary. Given his knowledge of MS, his contacts, vast personal resources, track record of success and essentially zero liabilities I would be nervous about facing him in the marketplace.
He put a computer on every desk. Maybe he will now take them all back off.
This just reinforces my view that most bankers are idiots who think because they get to hand out free money from the government they somehow earn that money through business success - give me a break. Yeah get rid of Gates, it worked really well for Apple when they got kicked out Steve Jobs. Then in a few years, when the share price has crashed, they'll beg Gates to come back and he can demands 10% of the company to do so and buy up most of the rest thanks to the share price being so low.
Was never a great visionary, people are kidding themselves if they think he was. He invented nothing. Microsoft was in the right place at the right time and Gates truck the OS deal with IBM that made it. Nothing that has followed since has in anyway been visionary or inspired, rather they have always relied upon using their previously dominant position to buy, bully or steal the ideas out of others. Even when Bill was at Microsoft he showed a real lack of vision when invited to talk about the future of technology, he saw little or nothing of what was coming. If this one trick pony is to survive it needs rid of Gates and his influence. The age when Microsoft could tell customers they had to do it the Microsoft way is over and they need to get over themselves.
People always lose sight of just how good, how fit for purpose, Windows OS is.
Single user, non-enterprise app dependent users can get on very well with Apple; the high costs, restrictions, single solution options etc don't matter to them.
Play users can similarly work very well with Android; the flaws, defects, unreliability and so on, don't affect them so much they give up.
And Linux users with their cookbook approach and endless patience with software issues are probably biologically indisposed to anything that doesn't go wrong.
Phone are moving into the fashion area and there are signs that loyalty to the OS is beginning to break down as consumers increasingly choose novelty and "the latest" when shopping for a new mob.
But if you are running a business where you expect new staff to be able to use your computer system productively from the moment they first arrive; where, when shopping for mission critical apps, you want a rich, competitive marketplace to shop in, where, when working with customers, suppliers and others you must have compatibility and when, above all else your IT stuff has to work, then Windows and Microsoft are unbeatable.
And will be for a long time.
People have short memories and little recollection of what computing was like before Windows. The notion that Microsoft is expensive overlooks the enormous competition that their standard platform has made possible. Because everything is directly comparable and often substitutable, unique or the "only show in town" software solutions have largely vanished. Upset a client and watch your business lose a customer.
In 10 years and in spite of continuous upgrading and enhancement, the ticket price of the software solution I sell has gone from £50k to less than £20k; if it had somehow been an Apple OS based product it would probably be £60K or more now.
I started in IT about the time Joni was singing her song and the lyric, "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone" was right then and it would be right now, if Windows and Microsoft were somehow to disappear.
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