Challenges To Microsoft For 2006 224
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.
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
Firefox (Score:2, Insightful)
#1 Justifying Censorship (Score:4, Insightful)
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/weblogs/s
Don't expect realism. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Don't screw it up! (Score:4, Insightful)
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: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.
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.
Re:I like the pretty lights (Score:2, Insightful)
But just how well do they integrate with non-MS systems? Like it or not, but having multiple systems is increasingly the reality, and nobody will want to support or develop for something that can't be transferred or interfaced with other systems.
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 Windows to OS X and none of them are disappointed.
Re:Don't screw it up! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Mostly fixing past mistakes (Score:2, Insightful)
The many versions of Vista appear to be there to try to give an artificially generated sense of value for the high cost of the complete version of the system. Like they have been trying to do with the overseas version - with little success it appears.
Top 10 list if done by Slashdot... (Score:2, Insightful)
9. Do more testing
8. Stop sucking so bad
7. Be more open with your code base and licensing
6. Stop sucking so bad
5. Stop sucking so bad
4. Get a foam chair for Steve Ballmer. In fact, get everyone foam chairs and start having Ballmer Fridays where employees can release stress on each other.
3. Don't be too hasty to start any more new projects; you need to put a lot of energy into existing projects to make them better....with one exception: A Microsoft breakfast cereal with crunchy window banners and marshmallow blue screens could put a couple more dollars in your pockets.
2. Stop being evil
1. It's 2006!!! Where is my flying car!?!?
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",
Re:Where's "Stop breaking the Law"? (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Firefox (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:I like the pretty lights (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
Clever admins... (Score:1, Insightful)
In 2006, corp management wants their IT operation to be able to be run by $24K/yr kids with associates degrees as PC techs. They are sick and fed up with paying large salaries to highly trained, seasoned veteran IT professionals who will invariably position themselves in ways to enforce their own job security and keep the corp at their mercy (ala BOFH, etc). Corp management wants cheap, replicated, easily replaceable IT drones... all of whom can do each others' jobs with point & click GUI Windows with little brainpower needed. Either that or they *WILL* outsource to overseas and/or "hosted" service providers where they can hold a legal contract over the heads of their IT suppliers. A new revolution is brewing in the IT world in the USA, and those who hold advanced degrees, certifications and years of experience in the biz will soon start finding out thet their corporate employers are about to begin a new phase of revolt against them.
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?
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.
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:# 11 Why Flamebait? This is TRUE! (Score:2, Insightful)
I notice that people don't complain that Garage Band is cutting into Reason's profits. Apple is a very forceful bundler, especially when you consider hardware, yet nobody is suing Apple.
I feel that preventing Microsoft from putting whatever they want in the OS is a lighter form of facism. However, Microsoft's early tactics of requiring manufacturers to only provide Windows is totally evil, and Microsoft deserves whatever they have coming to them with that one. That is very wrong, as mentioned above when compared to automobile manufacturers, but it doesn't mean that Microsoft should not be allowed to put whatever features they want in their product.