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Challenges To Microsoft For 2006
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Dec 27, 2005 10:54 AM
from the step-up-to-the-plate dept.
from the step-up-to-the-plate dept.
TekkenLaw writes "Directions on Microsoft, a site which claims to be 'the only independent organization in the world devoted exclusively to tracking Microsoft', has published a list of 10 challenges for 2006 for Microsoft as a company. Top strategic issues in all areas of operation from OS to gaming are covered." From the article: "Windows Vista could offer large organizations improvements in software development, security, reliability, systems management, and user interface. However, public demonstrations have been full of cool graphics effects and consumer features that probably turn off more IT staff than they attract, and sales of Windows upgrade rights to corporations have been disappointing. In 2006, Microsoft has to settle on a feature set for Vista that appeals to enterprises, explain clearly what that feature set is, and reveal what PC hardware and other infrastructure corporations require to reap the benefits." Actually presented in a fairly respectful way, it's interesting to see the overall picture we've reported on for the past year condensed down into one page.
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This is all wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Actually presented in a fairly respectful way...
Fairly respectful!!??? This is slashdot, we want meat with the blood still in it.
Re:This is all wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Reported? This is slashdot! We want baseless speculation, rumour mongering and idle gossip (and possibly links to others reporting)
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Respectful? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like when you have a job interview and they ask you to say something "bad" about yourself.
The answers are "You work too hard", "You often take on more work than you should", "You make too many demands on yourself",
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Re:Respectful? (Score:5, Funny)
It's like when you have a job interview and they ask you to say something "bad" about yourself. The answers are "You work too hard", "You often take on more work than you should", "You make too many demands on yourself",
Yeah, or: I tend to have sexual relations with the cleaning staff, petty cash tends to inexplicably lose money on my watch, when I get angry I open up a console in a random directory and type rm -rf, and I sometimes play WoW when the boss isn't looking.
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I like the pretty lights (Score:5, Insightful)
With the exception of Windows application developers who have been battling with GDI(+) for the last 10 years. The new graphics core of windows has been needed for a long time now.
-Rick
Re:I like the pretty lights (Score:2, Insightful)
True, but don't you think a new file system, API structure, or network stack would bring even more dev/IT people to the table? Consumer sales are nice, but it's IT sales that drive the industry.
Re:I like the pretty lights (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, depends on how you look at it. Microsoft displaced IBM in corporate American because it had broad consumer appeal. Some of those consumers are IT people, and they in turn help drive the decision making process for their companies. So you need broad consumer appeal.
Personally, I think Microsoft has fallen down by focusing too much on corporate America. Don't get me wrong - I'm not an anti-corporate guy and this isn't a corporate bashing session. It's just that if you look at Microsoft's early history, it was all about "sticking it to the man". Word processors, once the domain of large systems, was pushed to the desktop, along with spreadsheets and other corporate applications. I worked in a company where we effectively neutralized our big iron with a single desktop application. So for Microsoft to now ignore the average Joe and focus exclusively on what large companies need is totally stupid. What Microsoft needs to do is return to its roots and continue to focus on what the consumer really needs - a machine that just works. No more reboots, spyware, rootkits, or spam. Plug it in and it runs. If Microsoft could build a PC that's as reliable as my refrigerator then they would once again be in a dominate industry position.
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Re:I like the pretty lights (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I like the pretty lights (Score:4, Interesting)
Corps and individuals want different things from their apps, and they even want different apps in many cases. Corps want everything to be centrally installable, configurable, and controllable by their IT dept to conform to company policy. In the individual case, the only centrally controlled PCs are the 0wned ones hacked by some eastern European crime cartel.
Look at it through the lens of a corp-focused company, though, and there is an opportunity. Many individuals want their PCs to be managed by someone else, either to save the hassle or because they don't know what they're doing. What if Microsoft was the central manager? You'd have to feed them a LOT of data about what was going on in your PC, just like IT management. And you'd have to pay them a maintenance fee. Basically that's what is going on with Windows OneCare [windowsonecare.com].
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Re:I like the pretty lights (Score:5, Interesting)
The changes to the user interface really grind my gears. No, not the transparency and cooler icons, I don't really care about those one way or another because I can turn them off. Vista has moved a lot of the common tasks around for reasons that make no sense. It's harder to find most system settings because they are several clicks deeper in the UI. Who does this benefit? It's not better for experts, who already had figured out the old locations whether they made sense or not. It's not better for Grandma, who *still* can't find or change any settings; now her brainy grandson can't help her either. It's not better for new users--are there any new Windows users anymore?
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Re:I like the pretty lights (Score:3, Informative)
Ever notice how sometimes a window stops responding while an
Firefox (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't expect realism. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Firefox - MS can't beat it. (Score:3, Interesting)
The fight's not yet necessary (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Firefox (Score:3, Insightful)
#1 Justifying Censorship (Score:4, Insightful)
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/weblogs/s
Mostly fixing past mistakes (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok so I exaggerate a little bit. There are hundreds of distributions, but I think there are less than 6 major distributions that have significant desktop share.
Small to Medium Business (Score:5, Informative)
Gee, wonder why that could be?
Perhaps it's the fact that a small business (like the one I work for) that uses Exchange would have to pay approximately $10,000 in software licensing costs for an "upgrade". Not to mention the new hardware that would be required to run the insanely gluttonous software itself.
Compare that to having a clever sysadmin and an installed base of RedHat Enterprise Linux with sendmail? Even with our yearly subscription costs of ~$600, it would take more than 15 years for the costs to equal out.
Give me the OSS headaches and clever admins any day...
Re:Small to Medium Business (Score:5, Insightful)
Who needs wireless email?
Who needs single instance storage?
I can go on and on... Sendmail is good as a mail gateway service, but not much else for a real company.
Perhaps if small businesses like the one you worked for bothered investigating Select and Enterprise agreements (which do exist for even smaller companies) the costs for upgrades is very small over three years.
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Re:Small to Medium Business (Score:4, Insightful)
Using Sendmail does not imply that calendaring is not available.
One quick google search using "outlook calendaring open source" yielded this among other items:
http://openconnector.org/ [openconnector.org]
Hmmm... I guess need Exchange to read email on my wireless phone. Guess I'll have to tell my people that they can't send emails to me any longer because we use Sendmail as our MTA.
Not me.
Who needs to resurrect messages from a corrupt data store?
Not me.
Who needs to figure out how to keep the mail server running once you've filled the disks with a massive file that you can't move to a larger disk (because it's being accessed)?
Not me.
Who needs to figure out why people intermittently can't connect to the Exchange server anymore when all the licenses are used?
Not me.
Who wants to deal with departments of employees calling with the same question while you wait for more client access licenses to be purchased?
Not me.
Who wants to figure out how to upgrade from SBS to an even more expensive version of Exchange (only to find out that you can't "upgrade")?
Not me.
I can go on and on.
Exchange is a fine product for some limited settings. For the rest of us, there are feature-for-feature open source alternatives that will work with Outhouse. They don't entail rediculous licensing problems inherent in Exchange and are engineered better.
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Re:Small to Medium Business (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you USED openconnector before? It's in early Alpha, and requires a whole lot more than Sendmail (as the original poster mentioned, but hey, it's Microsoft bashing, so it's OK not to read the OP right?)
Who needs to resurrect messages from a corrupt data store?
I've been managing Exchange since 5.0. I can count the number of times I've had to rescue anything from a corrupt dat
Re:Small to Medium Business (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Microsoft licensing and Microsoft software can not be distinguished from one another.
2) There is a glut of technical problems with Microsoft software that I touched on as it pertains to Exchange; it is well documented (Google "Microsoft vulnerabilty"). Although part of my post focuses on the inherent problems that Microsoft licensing proves to be, I believe it's un
Re:Small to Medium Business (Score:4, Insightful)
Open source still does not have a good answer to Exchange...You can say Phpgroupware and such, but try to convince people who've used Exchange to use those products? It's seriously uphill, because even though they're cheaper, they just don't work as well on the user end, no matter how well they perform on the server end.
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Re:Small to Medium Business (Score:3, Insightful)
Where are you going to get your groupware from? Don't like paying for exchange, then pay for something like *shudder* Scalix.
Exchange isn't just an email server, it also does groupware, unlike Sendmail. If your company only does email and bought Exchange then guess what? Its your company's fault for buying a Lexus when all they needed was a Hyundai. Sorry, but you can't blame MS for this one.
Independent? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh well. If a country's citizens think 'bipartisan' and 'independent' are the same thing, who am I to complain that the concept of independence has slipped a little?
Re:Independent? (Score:2)
Although everyone has a point of view, independent or not, I would say they're a respectable source of opinion.
Re:Independent? (Score:3, Informative)
Anyone and everyone who has had even the tiniest bit of exposure to something has bias.
" Dude, if you're devoted exclusively to tracking Microsoft, how likely is is that you're independent?"
Independent != unbiased. Independent == not funded by MS or a competitor.
"why would you devote your time exclusively to tracking Microsoft in the first place?"
Because it's too much for one person to track every company? Because it's an area of inte
Promises, promises (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow! Look at that long list of positive attributes! I almost forgot that (A) it isn't out yet and (B) Microsoft has set a precedent against having those things. Look, until its widely released we won't really know the impact of Vista. Until then, it's just promises, promises.
They forgot... (Score:3, Funny)
Don't screw it up! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Don't screw it up! (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever used Mac OS? The bling is there, of course. But the Mac OS right now is considerably more robust (and predictable, for that matter) than Windows has ever been in its history.
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Fast Food Analogies (Score:4, Insightful)
I always considered Microsoft Windows the Budweiser of operating systems, but being the McDonald's is about the same.
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Re:Fast Food Analogies (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, a lot of people buy McDonalds because it's cheap and they can have "dinner" for about $3.
Bye bye, analogy.
I'd say Budweiser is a better analogy (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Don't screw it up! (Score:3, Insightful)
ANY OS will look the same on every machine. I can put gnome on 1000 desktops and make it look identical across every one. But many people adjust visual settings to their tastes. And that's a good thing for individual users. It makes them more productive. Windows changes UIs with every major release, and all I see is users struggling to adjust. I've gotten many people to switch from Wind
Re:Don't screw it up! (Score:3, Insightful)
They forgot one. (Score:5, Funny)
Where's "Stop breaking the Law"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Where's "Stop breaking the Law"? (Score:5, Insightful)
As a business owner located in the EU, I'd be very interested to see evidence of any 'harsh and irrational restraints' that I'm under, as I'm not currently aware of any.
The EU monopoly abuse laws that Microsoft are so dismissive of are pretty much exactly the same as the US, it's just that we might actually be enforcing them.
As for unemployment rates, our 4.7% unemployment rate here in Britain is lower than the 5.5% in the USA. The high rates (which are lower than 10% according to the US Govt. [bls.gov]) in France and Germany have far more to do with local left-wing economic policies and the absorption of communist East Germany respectively than EU-wide laws.
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Mactel Challenge? (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't count them out yet (Score:3, Funny)
Wishful thinking, I say.
They must still have some aces down their corporate sleeves because it appears that they're still hiring people like crazy: a friend of mine who deals in office furniture over in Redmond tells me that they're delivering chairs to Microsoft headquarters as fast as they can manufacture them!
Re:Don't count them out yet (Score:3, Funny)
They'll upgrade, they always do (Score:4, Insightful)
As a matter of fact you could keep the article and republish it every time a new Microsoft OS upgrade is released cause' every time an upgrade is released the media predicts the same thing. For following "blah blah blah" reasons, no one going to move from (take your pick, 3.0,3.1,3.11,W95,w98,w2000, wXP) to the latest and greatest. Eventually, everyone does, they just take their time.
One challenge missed (Score:3, Insightful)
There's one challenge missing from the list, and it's probably the biggest one. It's related to getting Vista into the boardroom, but distinct in a number of ways. It is: convince the CFO that he'll see a positive ROI on the upgrade within 2 years.
That's going to be a hard sell. The CFO remembers the last round of licensing changes, where Microsoft promised that those expensive licenses would cover all the upgrades and then released their major upgrade just after the license coverage ended. IT remembers too, but the CFO had to sign the checks. The CFO also remembers that the Win2K upgrade is only a year or so old, less if they went to XP, and the company hasn't recovered the costs of that yet. He's also going to be looking at the cost analysis from his IT guys, backed up by vendor quotes, for upgrading the hardware in his company to the bare minimums for Vista, and wondering where in the budget he's going to find that big a chunk of change. And last but not least, he's going to be looking at the analysis by the IT guys of what Vista will give that they can use that they don't already have, and despite all Microsoft's hype and whiz-bang features very few of them actually show up for the users. With the economy not so hot and investors demanding profits, the dog-and-pony extravaganza will have a hard time competing with the dollar signs.
Left unattended, each could... (Score:4, Insightful)
And the problem with this is????
It appears that what they're trying to say is that by addressing these Top 10 Challenges, Microsoft can prevent "younger, smaller, and more nimble competitors" from gaining a foothold in the marketplace. In other words, if Microsoft simply rests on its current monopoly status and continue to mis-execute, they're going to have some serious competition.
I still fail to see a problemhere , except for Microsoft shareholders and IT managers who have unwisely over-bought into Microsoft monoculture.
Or maybe they should rejuvenate yet again, and smash the competition, yet again. That'll make computing better for all of us. Right?
TFA misses 3 most important challenges (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh. The three items I think of as the top MS challenges for 2006 weren't even on the list.
Re:What Vista Needs (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, it's type.
Top Ten Goals For Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
9. Fucking kill Steve Jobs.
8. Fucking kill Toaster Strudles.
7. Fucking kill open source.
6. Fucking kill South Korea.
5. Fucking kill the EU.
4. Fucking kill Linus Torvalds.
4. Make love to Sun and...
3. Fucking kill Java.
1. Fucking kill Google.
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Visual Studio 2005 / Office 12 (Score:5, Informative)
Writing as the guy who evaluates new versions of development tools at work...
No, it's not. It would be pretty good if it worked, but it has some unforgivable bugs.
For a start, there's clearly something wrong with the UI code that make it literally unusable on the majority of our PCs at work. (They have varied specs, and some of them very powerful boxes by any standards, so don't even bother telling me we just need another 512MB of RAM or something. Thanks.) It'll go into a trance for minutes at a time one some machines, hogging almost 100% CPU and GB of memory. We haven't been able to isolate the problem, because other machines run it fine, but it seems to be connected to the background updating of Intellisense (on which many of the useful improvements in VS2005 rely, of course) and the processing power or memory size of the machine in question does not seem to matter. On at least one powerful machine, it was OK to start with but performance has degraded to unusability over time, too.
Even worse, there are also some major bugs in the code generation. It appears, based on tests conducted among our dev teams and some colleagues at other organisations, that they introduced some serious performance regressions between beta 2 and the final release. In a fairly large study, co-ordinated between several dev teams with independent code bases, we've measured a 30-50% drop in the performnce of heavily mathematical code since VS2003, for example, and there definitely wasn't anything close to that problem in beta 2.
How they managed not to notice that, we don't know, but the simple fact is that at present, the parts of VS2005 we're using (mainly VC++ for native code, for performance reasons) are not an improvement on 2003. Several of my colleagues have reverted all the way to VC++ 6 as an IDE, with a workhorse machine building the final code using the 2003 compiler; they never used the earlier .Net versions for day-to-day development because useful features like browse info were removed. The whole team is now backing out of the 2005 upgrade because the UI bugs make it a liability for us and the performance bugs mean our customers -- to whom speed typically matters a lot -- probably won't buy anything we compile with it anyway. Needless to say, since we were the first guys to try it, most of our other dev teams have no immediate plans to attempt an upgrade at this point!
If Microsoft released a service pack that fixed these show-stopping bugs early in 2006, we'd certainly consider upgrading at that stage, because there is a lot to like about VS2005 as well. But the simple fact is that right now, there are some bugs so serious that nothing else matters.
Kudos to the economists who recommended giving away the Express versions for free, though; that's a smart move.
Leaving aside the fact that it's not out yet so we don't know what the ribbons will do in the end product, personally I found them annoying as hell anyway. I've been using MS Office on Windows since version -17 or something, and I know how to get things done. What I want is fixes for the awkward bits that make my life more difficult, or improvements and new features (there's plenty a WP program could do to help a lot of people's everyday work that Word still, bizarrely, can't do). What I absolutely don't want is another UI overhaul, particularly one that's going to mean I have to work out where everything's gone so I can fend off the hoards of enquiries from colleagues who know I like to play with this stuff and will probably find things before they do.
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