Interesting Opinion On Ms Status

[George]

Not a bad assessment of the situation IMHO.

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/stor...d=mktw&dist=nbk

[outerlimits]

Not a bad assessment of the situation IMHO.

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/stor...d=mktw&dist=nbk

spot on...of course, george, we don't care, do we.

[BritinUSA]

Microsoft is now in the same position as IBM. Any new products that come out of either company are met with a resounding yawn. When Apple launches a new product, it's on the 6 o'clock news.

Marketing is an essential part of business but behind the hype has to be an exciting product that people want to buy. Microsoft is losing the marketing war and they have nothing that the public wants to buy.

Their new OS has been delayed so many times it is becoming an embarrassment. The problem with Microsoft is that they insist on making it backward compatible with everything from the latest XP to DOS. This causes the code to get bigger and more complex with each new release.

Apple avoided this problem by trashing their old OS 9. They realised it had nowhere to go and re-designed their entire OS. They can do that, Microsoft can't.

Years ago, IBM was seen as the dinosaur of the computing world. Microsoft is taking over that position, it is too big and too unwieldy to compete.

[George]

we don't care, do we

What! Me Worry?

A.E. Neumann

[Adam B]

I am no microsoft fanboy but I hate to say it but Dvorak is full of it. Microsoft is so deep in the business world it will take 10 or more years for anything major to happen, such as a platform switch. Dvorak writes these articles just to get reatctions out of people, you may remember the one article that stated the apple would start selling windows and drop OS X all together.

[Vlad]

I don't think he was saying that they're going away or predicting their death. You will note that he repeatedly notes that they are profitable, stable, and with a healthy market.

I do kinda think he is right in the sense that they can't seem to find their next great project. I think by now MSN has cost them billion in losses. What is their solution? We'll try a new version of the same and call it "Live!", that exclamation point will make it so much better. The Xbox is their only bright shinning star.

[BritinUSA]

I don't think the XBox is all that great either. It was rushed to market and within 48 hours there were bug reports and problems with over-heating. In my opinion Microsoft does not produce quality products.

They have the market share so they don't put the effort in any more. Apple is fighting for every percentage point of the market that it can get so it tries harder. I am not saying that Apple is perfect but they are kicking MS all over the floor when it comes to innovation and quality.

[George]

It ain't the 1990's anymore and OS releases like Windows 2.0 and Windows 95 aren't revolutionary steps anymore, just mundane acts that have to happen every year or two, or you stagnate.

Take a look at Apple's recent OS release history with OS X.

Since 2000, Apple has released 6 complete versions of OS X.

Public Beta

10.0

10.1

10.2 (Jaguar)

10.3 (Panther)

10.4 (Tiger)

Each and every release was a huge leap forward from the previous version and each release version also had at least 3-4, if not 6 or 7 major updates to it's core. Apple is now less than a year away from another major OS upgrade release.

In the meantime, MS has released absolutely no new OS versions since 2001 (XP). In the meantime each and every Apple OS X update has been as big a step forward as the steps from W95 to W98 to 2K to XP were.

It's time for MS to remember that they are a shark and they need to swim or die. Right now they are just drifting with the current IMHO ;-)

[Loves2Shoot]

How many programs are there for the Mac compared to MS?

The biggest problem I see with a platform so huge is that it makes it harder to pull an Apple and just release a new OS that requires you buy almost all new software for your new machine (personal exerience.)

A closed OS on proprietarty hardware will always work better than a fair OS on about any POS hardware.

A big hurdle is to come up with features that people actually want and will use. Computers are so fast and functional right now that most people aren't that unsatisifed in general with where technology is.

[George]

Ever since OS X first hit the skids in 2k, there have been almost no instances of 3rd party and Apple software being killed by any of the frequent waves of OS X updates. I am running 3rd party apps in OS X right now that were first installed under the Public Beta back in 2000 and these apps are still working fine in Tiger (10.4) just as they were back then.

The number of applications (including shareware and freeware) that are available for the Mac running OS X number in the tens of thousands. There are almost no instances of an application that is only available for PC not having an equivalent of some sort for the Mac.

MS Office and ALL major browsers are available for both platforms. PS, Acrobat, Quark Xpress, Illustrator, etc.. all run on both platforms with 100% file compatability.

I won't even get into the (literally) millions of Open Source apps and utilities that will run in OS X at the command line because OS X is just a prettified version of Free BSD (UNIX).

BTW, because it is running under Open Firmware and is based on FreeBSD, calling OS X a closed OS strikes me as just a bit ridiculous ;-)

MS OS code is closed, not OS X.

Check it out: http://www.opendarwin.org/

I see no issues here ;-)

[Loves2Shoot]

Maybe I should have the local Mac "guru" give you a call because that's NOT the story I get from him

It took 3 weeks and several thousand dollars to get Tiger straightened out when we converted the advertising department. Maybe that just left a sour taste in my mouth.

[outerlimits]

Microsoft is so deep in the business world it will take 10 or more years for anything major to happen, such as a platform switch.

maybe, but real businesses with real apps still go with unix.

[AZ38super]

maybe, but real businesses with real apps still go with unix.

I can see this posting as a major flame starting to grow wild... I am not trying to add fuel but there is way to much bias going on here.

Mac users say thay have the best and PC users go on as well. Last time I saw numbers Mac had what 3% of the computer market and mybe it is up a little from there but it is still a small percentage.

As for real businesses using Unix...

I worked with and know lots others that do as well and they only use Unix for legacy apps they don't need to take time to update, everything else new is running on MS based OS and programs.

It's funny that Mac is now using the same Intel chip design as Windows has for decades and yet it is supposed to be so much better.

The one major factor to remember before everyone keeps fighting back and forth...

It is Microsoft that has brought the computer world where it is today....not the long list of open source projects that have come and gone, and if you don't believe that then you are fooling yourself.

[outerlimits]

The one major factor to remember before everyone keeps fighting back and forth...

It is Microsoft that has brought the computer world where it is today....not the long list of open source projects that have come and gone, and if you don't believe that then you are fooling yourself.

almost forgot al gore invented the internet as well...

[George]

The only main point is that NIX based systems are Open Source and MS based ones are NOT.

As far as Tiger goes, it does change core graphics quite a bit in preparation for future performance upgrades in this area, but that didn't kill any apps on it's own. There were lotsa issues with apps that used Quicktime and the update to QT7 from 6.5 is what caused the most trouble Mac users have had for years.

If you are doing Video Production or Desktop publishing or any high end process requiring carefully setup and configured computer systems and you jump into any updates on these systems without an offline testing period first, you deserve what you get ;-)

I still have most of my clients doing critical Video and Photo/Publishing work running in Panther just because Tiger (10.4.x) offers little, or nothing to them. Unless you are running apps that take advantage of the new graphics handling capagilities of Tigers Core Service improvements, there is no reason whatsoever to move smooth running G4 and G5 systems up to Tiger.

I never do any upgrades on production systems doing day to day work without testbedding on duplicate systems doing non-critical tasks first. I absolutely never update critical systems until I am SURE there are no issues whatsoever. This procedure saves a lot of time and money that is better spent making more money ;-)

Hopefully your Mac IT guy learned his lesson there.

[Loves2Shoot]

LOL, I wish. Working for a huge company that wouldn't let you test the sytems first really sucked. Being commanded to do things that weren't possible on budgets that were too small make me glad I'm not there anymore.

Mac's don't need testing right? That's the line I got. Please don't drink Koolaid.

[George]

Mac's don't need testing right? That's the line I got

Dang! Whoever said that is who needed to get let go!

All computers are similar in that they all need testing whenever ANYTHING is changed.

The old mainframe saw about "changers will be shot" is still a good one to this day.

[EricW]

Dvorak is the same guy that predicted the end of the Qwerty keyboard, and the market failure of the printer/scanner/copier/fax combo machine.

[p99shooter]

Maybe a bit OT, but when I was teaching tech classes, one of my students would inevitably bring up Linux / Open Source, and how it would be the end of Microsoft. I would respond with the following true story:

Not too long ago, I installed Red Hat 9.0 onto a laptop, dual-boot with Windows XP. The resolution of the desktop in X-Windows was 640 x 480, and I wanted to change it to 800 x 600. I tried for about a week to figure out how to do that seemingly simple task. I looked through every "control panel" applet on the desktop, searched through the internet, to no avail. I finally figured out that you had to edit some text file.

OK. I got a Master's in Physics, and have been in IT for over 10 years. If I can't figure out how to change my desktop's resolution in less than 10 seconds, there's something wrong with the OS. Microsoft has figured out that computers and software are tools used, for the majority, by non-skilled people. NIX / Open Source companies have to learn that in order to capture that market, they are going to have to "dumb down" their platforms in order to compete. Companies can't absorb the lost productivity / training costs to make the switch to a product their user's can't comprehend.

The above all applies to the desktop market. The server market is a whole different story. MS has an advantage here again because (I almost hate to say) it is easier. The real costs of IT are in personnel, not capital expenditures. Whatever you save in going to OpenSource (free) OSes and software, you will lose in having to hire more skilled people, at higher salaries, to maintain those systems.

[bgary]

The real costs of IT are in personnel, not capital expenditures.

Totally true. I work for Microsoft <gasp!> and have spent a lot of time doing financial analysis with global enterprise customers as they work thru their technical strategy... really quite an interesting gig. I worked with a fair amount of customers who were looking at Linux because they heard it was "free"... and when they figured out that even if it *was* free (which it really isn't), they'd still have to have infrastructure, and systems management, and desktop support, and help desk, and, and, and... and that introducing a new OS into an environment adds complexity (which is expensive) and transition costs (which are expensive) and, and, and...

Speaking as a Microsoftie who does *not* drink the kool-aid, I'll share my only-partially-unbiased perspective. Microsoft does a *really* good job at a few things that they choose to do, and a really crappy job at other things... which, one could argue, are the things they choose *not* to do.

Microsoft has done a really good job at what I would call "commodity computing". Whether it is XP on the desktop, SQL in the data center, or more robust end-to-end systems management solutions, the core of the Microsoft business is *not* innovation. It is about putting "good" products that "work together" onto the market at a price point that allows people to standardize on them.

I have worked with the CIOs and senior IT staff of a *lot* of organizations, over the last several years, all over the world, and I have never met one who had implemented an end-to-end Mac environment (desktops, servers, data center, infrastructure, management, monitoring, etc). Or an end-to-end Linux environment. Or an end-to-end *nix environment (Unix, AIX, whatever). Why? because none of those solutions play end to end (are there even server-class Mac-OS machines?), or because an end-to-end environment is prohibitive for cost or other reasons (really want to put a secretary or admin person on an expensive Unix workstation?) *That* is the niche Microsoft goes for - the place where you can reasonably deploy a solution to hundreds of thousands of desktops across a widely-distributed enterprise environment, at a reasonable price, and have reasonable expectations of reliability and scalability and usability and manageability and a whole host of other "-ilities".

Microsoft has never been an innovator - not from the very beginning. MS-DOS was a derivative of an OS developed by somebody else, which Gates and crew figured out how to *extend* and *market* - a model that continues thru today.

So... to compare MSFT against Apple, when they have such *completely* different business models and *completely* different operating priorities, is interesting but not particularly meaningful. If Apple wanted to gain market share, they would *stop* innovating, stabilize their product releases to match a 3- or 4-year refresh cycle (to match corporate buying patterns), and license their stuff to run on other hardware platforms. But, then, if they did that, they wouldn't be Apple anymore, would they?

I will say that Microsoft *does* innovate in some really interesting ways, but... they are ways in which the average consumer or desktop-PC user will never care about. Take systems management for example. Systems Management Server has become not only the defacto method for pushing software updates out to a distributed computing environment in a corporate space, it also has utility in doing lots of other stuff that corporate IT orgs care greatly about but never seem to have ability to execute on, like asset management, configuration control, policy compliance monitoring, etc. When the next version of Microsoft Operations Manager includes desktop monitoring and alert handling, I expect we'll see a quantum change in the ways enterprises are able to handle desktop support and help-desk functions, which tend to be a *huge* cost to large organizations. Not something the home user will care about, but... the Fords and Boeings and Siemens and other enterprises who have - or want to have - well-managed and cost-effective environments will be paying a lot of attention.

Having said all that (hang on while I turn my badge face down), I *do* worry about the Microsoft of the future. I, unfortunately came in 5 years ago, when the "work here for 7 years and retire as a millionaire" days were already over. The stock has been basically flat for about 5 years, which is a distubing indicator. More than that, there is another indicator that bothers me greatly - when I joined, it was the most energetic, IQ-rich place I had ever been, and you could look around any group and *not* see any "dead-wood" - everyone was bright and signed-up and passionate about what they were doing to change the world. In the last 5 years, Microsoft has grown from 40,000 to 70,000 people, an awful lot of whom seem to be "marketing" people rather than geeks, and the trend has changed... now I *can* look around a room and identify people who just don't seem to be contributing anything of value. Both as an employee and as a shareholder, that bothers me a lot.

Last thing, from a macro-economics view.... MSFT started off being all about "market creation"... as someone noted, they are the ones that made a "PC on every desktop" real. Over the years, that creation of new markets has had a disruptive influence on a whole lot of things, not just the tech industry - adoption of MS stuff has, in some cases, proven to be a competitive advantage that has changed the landscape of an industry. Look back 10 years and ponder the companies that built a web business on MS-based servers, compared to the companies that could *not* effectively build a web business because they were still mainframe-centric. $.02 The thing that worries me is that MSFT has shifted from "market creation" to "market protection" - job one, around here is to *not* upset the "windows and office cash-cow", and *big* decisions are being made not based on whether they are good for MSFT 10 years down the road, but based on whether they will detrimentally affect the anticipated cash-flow curve for Vista and Office.

I think that's really dumb... because, *somebody* is going to be the next "market creation" engine, *somebody* is going to be the next "disruptive influence"... Microsoft has the resources, both people and assets, to be ahead of the next wave.... I just don't know whether they have the will.

$.02

B

[D.Hayden]

maybe, but real businesses with real apps still go with unix.

I have to think most of the big stuff is really still on IBM hardware and OS's - whatever OS/390 is called these days.

There's huge investments in that stuff, that will not change that fast.

Middle tier and smaller apps on AIX, SUN and Linux.. but they're still second string.

In the meantime, MS has released absolutely no new OS versions since 2001 (XP). In the meantime each and every Apple OS X update has been as big a step forward as the steps from W95 to W98 to 2K to XP were.

But they have done a ot of work on the server side.. Windows 2003, SQL Server 2005...

Edited May 7, 2006 by BerKim

[George]

(are there even server-class Mac-OS machines?)

Yes, and Apple X-Serve hardware and OS X Server software is a great way to run enterprise websystems and replace IT systems already running on any type of Nix because OS X Server is Nix so there is no real transition, just a little re-configuration to match the new path's and BAM, you are up and running again.

I am a big fan of the Mac as a "personal computer", but only because they went to X. I hated the old Mac OS just as much as I hate Windows OS. I also recognize that big biz will never run Mac end to end, that will always belong to the entrenched players for the time being. Unless their entire business is doing printing, or handling graphics/audio/video, no corporation will ever go that way. Real computing is another story and it not only ain't a Mac story, it ain't really an MS story either.

Dave makes a good point about how many corporations are still using mainframe based systems (and not just IBM hardware) as their computing mainstays to this day. IBM really does still run the corporate world, we just don't remember that as well as we should.

The thing Apple has going for it right now is that their OS can do anything MS's OS's can and they are running on Open Source to boot. You can run X11 inside OS X and you can run OS X on the command line right through Terminal without losing the pretty GUI and your MS like productivity apps. This model is the wave of the future for the personal computer. Choose the OS according to the app set you want, not the hardware set you can afford/have.

Open Source and a comprehensive GUI. Cake, eat it and lot's more too!

Apple finally made the right move and got onto the same hardware as everyone else. An Apple hardware user can have a triple boot machine right now (X, Linux, & XP). Let the fun begin! Let's revisit this issue in say, 3 years ;-)

[bgary]

Apple hardware user can have a triple boot machine right now (X, Linux, & XP). Let the fun begin!

That's sorta my point (although I made it badly).

Us "geeks" think that is really cool. it really is (my tablet-PC right now is triple-boot, XP-SP2, Vista, and RedHat...)

But businesses? Not so much. you get over about 50 seats, and the biggest cost in an IT environment is "complexity". you get over 5000 seats, and that "complexity" gets measured in millions of dollars per year.

That's why an awful lot of business customers are not interested in the latest/coolest stuff, no matter how cool it might be. Taking your example, running an environment where a user can have a triple-boot machine is going to cost (ball-park) somewhere on the order of $4k per seat per year, when you figure in the cost of supporting app-payloads on three different environments, inter-app and intra-app compatibility issues, configuration management, resource management, IT skillset development and maintenance, desk-side trouble-shooting, tier-1 help desk, tier-2 support staff, etc, etc, etc. Tripling the options *more* than triples the cost of operations and support.

Conversely, you put a plain-vanilla XP machine into that environment, lock it down with Group Policies, manage configuration-drift with system management tools, audit disk use (or, better, force data storage off onto a managed share, with automated/centralized backup), and do some other things that *reduce* the amount of complexity the IT staff has to deal with? Now you're talking under $500 per seat per year to support... probably well under.

So, pretend you're the CIO or CFO of a company with 5000 employees. do you want an environment that costs $20M a year to operate and maintain, but it is "really cool? Or would you rather have a desktop environment that costs $2.5M a year to operate and maintain, and would that "saved" $17.5M be "cool enough" to make up for a plain-vanilla, "boring" IT environment?

Reality is, that's how businesses think, and... that's the market priority that Microsoft goes after. IMHO, they do it pretty well.... albeit, it isn't very cool.

B

[BritinUSA]

That whole Linux thing is growing into large business through the mainframe environment.

IBM's z/OS (new name for OS/390) runs Linux quite nicely and there's a bunch of it being used in the commercial market. IBM's new Z9 stuff may be a way into the smaller and mid-size businesses.

[George]

Bruce is right on the money about why the Mac will never penetrate the corporate desk worker market, or the disposable retail terminal market. It will do well only where the user wants exclusive hardware, sortof the BMW market if you will. But now, the choice about whether the Apple hardware is an XP box, or a Nix box is in the users hands as will be the choice of whether to run in XP, Nix, or real soon now, OS X on your new Vaio ;-)

That's where I am going with my hopes and I hope the world follows. One hardware architecture, any OS you want/need/have to run and the choice of what level/style of hardware you want to buy into.

I run Apple hardware because I like OS X and Nix, end of story. If Apple had not moved to OS X (BSD UNIX), I would have jumped to a Wintel box 5 years ago. I would rather build a machine up myself, only problem up to now was I would have had to run MS's OS to use real productivity applications (sorry Linux, luvya, but you are fer techies who want to get techie work done, not regular folk doing day to day business things).

Bill ain't gonna go broke real soon, but he may wind up running the next has-been giant of the industry.