Some people have argued that Microsoft never invents anything new, and that many or all of its products are either purchased (PowerPoint, Visio, FoxPro, etc.) or copies of other companies’s products. Is that a fair criticism? (Of course one counter-argument is that there are really very few truly new ideas, so many products in the software industry are based on the work of others.)
Thanks for starting the thread. Most of what I’d like to ask, you either wouldn’t be allowed to answer, or wouldn’t know the answers to. One that I’d like to ask about, though, is this:
Doesn’t that bother you? Isn’t it precisely what the Sherman Act was created to prevent: using a monopoly in one market (computer operating systems) to leverage a monopoly in another market (video game consoles) by selling product below cost?
Fair point.
Any MS lawyers - I WAS JUST SPECULATING.
No justification, because I don’t think what you’re saying is accurate. OS’s have become more complex, not because of some evil genious making them so, but because the features the users demand have grown more complex. Reverse compatibility is usually there for 2-3 versions, but the main problem some are having with Vista is that the reverse compatibility isn’t as good as it was and the reason is simple - security has locked down that crappy application code that doesn’t use the OS right doesn’t run.
The main reason businesses wait to upgrade has nothing to do with training the users - it’s purely down to application compatibility. It’s expensive to test for, and upgrading usually means that application vendors have to issue patches or upgrades, and that can get expensive to. It’s a cost and risk justification, not a user experience justification.
There are few really truly ‘new’ ideas; the vast majority of work in IT is either improvements in existing code, or else (very rarely) a new application specifically designed. For instance, google did nothing new when it came out. It’s a search engine. What is new and interesting are the search heuristics, which are really just an improvement of existing and well understood technology.
All that said, Microsoft does some really interesting things with brand-new stuff, as well as some very interesting things with improving existing code. We take out a huge number of patents every year, and whilst many of those patents are down to a new way of doing some interesting bit of code but not a totally new thing, there are quite a few new ones. Just look up Microsoft Research and tell me those folks aren’t doing anything new and interesting
And I another counter argument is that mergers and aquisitions are the norm in IT, not something only big bad Microsoft does. Lots of companies have grown by buying smaller companies and integrating their products into the bigger company; heck, lots of .COMs had that as their central business strategy. There is an argument that smaller companies have the creative talent, whilst larger companies have the economic muscle, but you don’t get mainstream products without both. A notable exception is the boom in what we’re calling web 2.0 products - things like Facebook or blogging. No ‘real’ product in the traditional sense, but IT companies are only ignoring this trend at their peril.
I’d say it’s a fair criticism, but exaggerated b/c we’re eeeevil. Apple came along and more or less copied PPT when they released Keynote, but nobody criticizes them for stealing.
I’d like to think that PPT 1.0 that was purchased from ForeThought 20 years ago is hardly the same product, and everything we’ve done since is 100% new. The Mac group even has features that the Win group does not, and vice-versa.
I can understand this, having done a lot of software development. Let’s take an example: copy and paste. When this first hit the spreadsheet and word processing scene, it was simple. You pressed Ctrl+V (or Cmd+V, or whatever), and it pasted the contents of the clipboard. Now, you have paste with formatting, paste without formatting, paste format only, paste and perform numerical operation, and so forth. As options are added, the UI must grow more complex.
“But wait,” I hear you cry. “You can ignore all of those other options and just press Ctrl+V, and it still works.” True for casual users, and I wish that’s the way development always worked. For power users, the new options are often more useful than the original. When working in Excel, I use variants of Paste far more often than the plain Paste, especially when moving information between apps. I’ve had to create a lot of custom key mappings and macros to keep my keystroke/mouseclick efficiency up. Since Word frequently auto-formats, my single-stroke Ctrl+V is often followed by a backspace to take out the link formatting or auto-capitalization or whatever else it did to my carefully-prepared text.
It’s annoying. It feels inefficient. But in reality the only way a company is going to sell a new edition of their software is to add features and those new features have to be in the UI somewhere, thus adding to the key maps, menus, option dialogs, and so forth.
Can’t fault Microsoft for this one.
It’s not a monopoly, and the XBox platform, other than the fact it’s 32 bit and usese some of the same development tools, has nothing to do with the desktop OS we’ve been accused of being a monopoly in.
We’re selling the platforms at a loss, just like every other game manufacturer, because the real money is in games, not platforms. And also because we started with the XBox only a couple of years ago, and had to fight tooth and nail to get any presence at all in that space - gaming was owned by Sony, Nintendo, and Sega, and nobody thought we had a chance. I think we’re doing all right.
It’s a competive business practice, not a dirty trick.
But I will say this - if I honestly, truly though Microsoft was an unethical, monopolistic company that willfully and consciously did bad things for the end user, I would quit tomorrow. I don’t think that. I do think we’ve been very very competitive, and we basically have something people want or they wouldn’t buy it. Could we be nicer? Sure. But we’re a business, not a charity.
I also think that our relative power allows us to do some really really cool things, that you probably don’t hear much about. Did you know we were on the ground after natural disasters providing IT support to both rescuers and victims, most recently in Pakistan and Indonesia? Did you know Microsoft matches employee charitable giving, to the tune of $20m per year to good causes? Did you know Bill and Melinda Gates have an aid foundation that has a bigger budget than the UN, all for charitable causes? Did you know Microsoft gives away hundreds and hundreds of scholarships to needy kids every year? Heck, in the UK, we’ve given over £6m to the NSPCC over the last 5-6 years - you don’t get a better cause than helping kids. Did you know Microsoft helped fund and set up the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Agency in the UK, part of the Serious Organised Crime Agency, that has helped arrest at least 700 paedophiles worldwide and directly saved at least 20 children from abusive situations?
Our corporate money allows us to do these things.
EEEEVIL. Like the fruiets, of the DEEEVIL.
I disagree, though - it’s not a fair criticism, just because you’ll have to define ‘new’ first. What’s new - a new way of doing things? a new way to write code? I’d argue we do tons and tons of new stuff, especially in the integration of things never integrated before.
In my work, one of the biggest is Dynamic Systems Initiative - super cool stuff for Enterprises. Sure, others have products that do parts of this (BMC Patrol, Altiris, Tivoli) but we’re the only ones doing all of it, end to end, in one place, and integrating it into our strategy for both OS releases and development practices.
I’m not arguing with any of what you (and others) have said about Microsoft’s or Gates’ philanthropies.
If you break what I said into three parts, can you really disagree with any of them?
Microsoft has an effective monopoly in the home operating system market. There are alternatives that either (a) don’t run on standard “PC-compatible” hardware (e.g. Macintosh) or (b) have a negligible effect on Microsoft’s sales to home users (e.g., Linux). I’m probably out-of-date, but the last survey I saw showed Microsoft Windows’ total marketshare in the home at over 90%.
The XBox is being sold at below cost. You confirmed this.
The power of the home OS monopoly–in revenue, cross-marketing, and mindshare–is being used to leverage a monopoly in game consoles. Do you honestly disagree with this?
I see this as the kind of behavior that U.S. antitrust laws were enacted to prevent.
I’m not trying to be argumentative here. I’m just defending my position and asking that you don’t dismiss my point out of hand.
I don’t think Microsoft is violating the letter of the law. They’re watched too closely for that. I do find much of Microsoft’s behavior to be violating the spirit of antitrust and fair competition.
I wish Microsoft well in its traditional core businesses. Generally speaking, Microsoft produces great programming tools. The Microsoft Office suite became an industry standard because it was better than its competitors. Microsoft’s operating systems have had to face down some serious competitors, and they’ve done it on the merits of the product.
I just wish Microsoft wouldn’t attempt to kill industry standards (e.g., Java & Javascript), destroy viable companies in other markets (e.g., Netscape), use software supremacy and compatibility to create instant marketshare in hardware (e.g., Microsoft Mouse), expand into content creation/delivery to spin the news and generate extra publicity (e.g., MSN & MSNBC), actively campaign against open-source software, and so forth.
In other words, take care of the core businesses well and stop trying to control the world like the robber barons of old.
What power? Anti-trust has a very specific meaning. Just having oodles of cash isn’t anti-trust. If they forced people to buy a new Xbox with every copy of windows, that would be anti-trust but the Xbox and windows sides of the business are so far apart from each other they might as well be different companies in the consumer’s minds. If anything, Microsoft’s monopoly in the OS arena has actually hurt them in other arenas such as cell phone OSes because manufacturers are leery of giving them significant market share just in case it MS trys to own that space too.
I heard (or read maybe) that the cost of the Xbox Elite would be dropping to $399 and the Premium and Core systems would drop to $349 and $299 respectively to compete with the price drop of the 60 GB Playstation 3. Can you confirm or deny this?
OK, thanks for that… now on to the meat.
Yes, which is what I am doing.
True. That’s been the case for years, though, and has nothing to do with XBOX as I said.
Yes, but so is every other game platform. Sony PS3 sells at about $150 below cost; Xbox 360 sellls about £100 below cost; I think the Nintendo WII sells at cost, but just barely.
Yes. For the reasons above.
Then so is Sony, Nintendo, and Sega, 'cause they’re all doing the same thing.
Thank you.
Ah, this is a very different thing than the business strategy of XBox. We tried to support Java, but got sued, then got sued for not supporting Java - It’s lose lose for us, Sun just wants to use Microsoft as it’s own personal piggy bank. Look up the history - every time Sun’s stock is doing poorly, or we come out with a product which threaten’s Sun’s attempted monopoly of their own in the server space, they trot out another lawsuit.
Netscape competed with us and lost. We didn’t set out to destroy a viable company because we’re malicious. And I think our product (IE) was superior to Nestcape, as well as our business practices were better.
We took the mouse - a hardware component nobody else was using effectively at the time - and made it a valuable commodity and sold it. This is bad how? This is anti-competitive how? It’s not like there’s not a thriving ecosystm of hardware manufacturers other than MIcrosoft in this space; hell, we’re dilletantes compared to Logitech in peripheral manufacturing.
I don’t think we use MSN / MSNBC as the propaganda arm of Microsoft, so I disagree with you there. Any story that even mentions MS also mentions that MSNBC is owned by Microsoft so the readers can make up their own mind if the story is biased.
Whilst I think we should stop trying to be everything to everyone, that is a business decision I think makes sense, not because I think we’re doing anything wrong or even glancingly illegal.
No, sorry. First, I live and work in the UK, so I’m not familiar with US pricing (ours is more expensive, believe it or not), and second I don’t work in Home and Entertainment Division so not privvy to anything like that.
I honestly don’t know.
Nicely put, and very true.
Cellphones are a bit different, because you don’t have just the manufacturer as you do with regular OS’s. but the carrier as well. Makes it a bit more complicated and tricky to do anything, and the ‘brand name’ that the user sees is often the carrier rather than Microsoft or the manufacturer.
If Microsoft has any intention of manufacturing a straight up gsm phone , both the hardware and the OS , make it unlocked from the start and let us worry about the carrier.
Declan
We kind of have - look at smartphones. We make the OS on them agnostic of network, but the HW manufacturer (HTC or some such) has to sell them to a cell provider who then locks them down. It’s not us, I promise you that - blame the providers.
Sorry, missed one.
Good to know. I was trying on my Darth Vader outfit, recently, though. Gotta diet. Can’t be evil enough to fit into the suit anymore
You’re preaching to the choir, but in our defence we’re a great big company with a lot of different products. I’m sure if you totted up ‘successful products’ vs ‘unsuccessful’ by nearly any criteria we’d have some wins, some losses, and some neutral. But I’d challenge that any similar-sized company would be doign the same. One-hit-wonder companies do just that - one good thing. We do dozens and dozens of good things, in tons of different markets, all over the world. The laws of statistics alone show that we’re gonna fudge up something sometime.
Not gonna touch the Zune, sorry, Don’t wanna get in trouble, and have some strong opinions about it.
Could you be more specific?
Again, could you be more specific? If you’re talking about DRM’d music, that’s more Windows Media player than vista, and something that’s largely the cost of doing business legally in the digital media world, rather than something we’re doing on our own hook. The MPAA / RIAA is pretty powerful, and they have rules on how copyright is enforced. If you’re talking about EFS / encryption / RMS then it’s a whole different ball of wax. But the thing to remember is this - DRM is optional if you buy your music from a store - you don’t have to use it. It’s only required if you buy digital music online.
Not at all. Software as a Service isn’t about keeping documents hostage, it’s about minimising the cost of licenses for small and mid-size businesses. It’s about making applications independent of the OS, allowing users to constantly have the latest and greatest without needing to constantly upgrade. It’s not evil, and it’s not about control. It’s really about trying to allow users to use software the way they want to.
Thanks, I’ll try not to, but I definitely won’t be giving up any confidential / proprietary information
http://techxpress.wordpress.com/2007/04/29/vista-slow-file-copydeletemove-vista-the-woe-starts-now/
Pain in the neck file copy bug. Apparently, and I dunno more, directly related to DRM issues.
Not to mention I’m not happy about how Vista apparently has DRM choking down graphics fidelity. System overhead for useless stuff sucks. “Trusted Computing” my middle buttock.
SaS isn’t about keeping documents hostage, but it does it anyhow. Sure, it has upsides, but the downsides are pretty nasty. Again, the arguments are out there, sure, but I don’t like how some third party can disable my ability to work… I have enough trouble keeping the servers from being exploded. God forbid September 11th happens again and the frame relay goes down for two months, the license server fails to reauthenticate with MS, and everyone loses access to their PCs.
Zune: Again, don’t touch it. It could have been a great product but… well, there you go. I’m sure you have strong opinions. (I actually have a good model for that sort of thing. I call it the Lending Library model)
Seen the Linux version of Surface? It’s not bad for a rush job.
I should note that I’ve been using MS products for… well, I have Win/286 somewhere, and 8" floppies.
I remember the disk compression piracy issue with Stacker. That one was a little blatant. And I remember the DR-DOS breaking Windows issue, too. MS is sometimes a little stupid, sometimes a little unethical, and sometimes someone you want to hit with an axe.
But I have a good story as to why OS/2 died. I’ll tell it later.
I know this kind of argument isn’t why you started the thread. I’m sorry for starting it. I’ll drop the whole thing, except for this one statement.
Netscape did not compete with Microsoft. Netscape built a viable company around a market area Microsoft wasn’t in. Microsoft created a competing product and bundled it into Windows, destroying Netscape’s marketshare through convenience. This was not a case of Netscape intentionally taking on Microsoft.