Microsoft's Nightmare Scenario 362
unityxxx wrote to mention a News.com article about Microsoft's nightmare scenario - the Web as the next platform. From the article: "The nightmare is inching closer to reality and Microsoft execs are apparently paying attention to the decade-old alert. As part of a management shuffle, Microsoft said Tuesday it would make hosted services a more strategic part of the company and fold its MSN Web portal business into its platform product development group, where Windows is developed. Another memo, called 'Google--The Winner Takes All (And Not Just Search),' is also making the rounds. This internal memo, written in 2005, argues that Google threatens Microsoft and the company's crown jewel, Windows."
Cushy job at news.com (Score:5, Interesting)
The web as a platform? No, thanks. (Score:3, Interesting)
I think about how I use programs like photoshop and flashmx when i'm developing web sites. There's no way those huge-ass programs are going to be hosted and downloaded/run on demand. On the other hand, I need connectivity to upload my work to the web and test/publish it. The internet facilitates a good deal of things we do, but there's no way it could be a platform anytime in my lifetime.
It's like the relationship vehicles and highways have. Everyone owns their own vehicle, and they're responsible for the good running condition of that vehicle, and the highway facilitates the usefulness of that vehicle.
No AV or Firewalling Server Side Apps (Score:5, Interesting)
The article underestimates MSFT's problems (Score:3, Interesting)
However it overlooks the point that Microsoft has extreme execution problems. Consider that even in the operating system "that was fanatically focused on" Microsoft lags Linux
Microsoft's real problem is that with a stagnant company they can't motivate their employees; so all the good ones leave for places like Google. Back when MSFT stock was doubling every few months, it was quite reasonable and fun for a microsoftie to work 18 hours and see his 1 million dollar option package multiply to 2 million and on to 10 million. Now, however, Balmer yells at his developers only to have them check their underwater options from Jan 2000 and realize it's just not worth it.
Could microsoft change? Yes, by sharing some of the billions of profits they make with their employees. But will they? Nope - they're busy saving that money for their shareholders.
If you're a decent engineer, there's no reason to work for microsoft anymore. You're far better off quitting, competing with them, and letting them buy you back. That's the only way to get your fair share of the billions that microsoft's been hording over the past few years.
And that is the problem with Microsoft today.
Re:Microsoft will be just fine. (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, it would be good if all the world did have access to these things, but even though it's not the case, we not only do but in fact have become so dependent on these things that we can hardly imagine a life without them. It doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that broadband Internet access, and applications built on top of it (not applications as in "computer programs", but applications in a more general sense), will soon become... well, not quite ubiquitious, of course, as certain groups will probably not have an interest in these things (my grandmother, for example, while being quite fascinated by computers and the Internet has categorically said that she won't ever get one), but widespread enough that they will reach the same level of fundamentality (I hope that's a word *s*) that electricity, water etc. do.
But to stay on-topic a bit, I think that M$ is, above all, showing one thing here: namely, that they still don't understand that not everything is "all-or-nothing" and that it's perfectly possible to coexist and compete without every player but one going bankrupt or being bought after a couple of years. It's understandable that they don't understand, of course, given their history (they were effectively granted a monopoly by IBM, and have since tried to maintain that monopoly at all costs and to also expand it into other markets), but it ain't true: it *is* possible to coexist.
I wonder if they'll ever understand that.
Re:Microsoft will be just fine. (Score:3, Interesting)
If you assume this innovation will disrupt MS's core business, then it is a little more complicated. It not only has to acquire a company that can, but it has to let that company cannibalize MS's existing business. Historically, most market leaders have a hard time doing this.
Nothing new here. (Score:3, Interesting)
So it breaks down into a browser war again. He who controls the viewer controls the world.
nightmare for us too (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds pretty damn scary to me, too.
...to name a few problems individuals and corporations will have.
Why does everyone try to make the web more than what it is- an interactive information platform? Just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD.
What has microsoft done lately? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't wait to install that baby and stay up all night playing with it and then show it to all my friends and family.
When I read "google" in a headline, I pay more attention...I am thinking "what cool thing has google com up with now?" google earth, cool , installed it, showed it to my elderly parents and they were impressed; Adwords,Adsense - cool how can I earn some extra bucks playing with this.
google wifi? google tv? sounds interesting. Go Google.
Re:Cushy job at news.com (Score:5, Interesting)
What does that mean? Well, skip ahead four years, and Microsoft has crushed Netscape, mostly due to actually creating a better browser. I'm not defending their monopolistic practices, but, having been a web developer since around 1998, I can remember distinctly loving Internet Explorer 5.0, especially when working on the Mac, and hating development for Netscape 4.x. Of course, now the inverse is true, with Gecko and KHTML browsers being (mostly) a pleasure, and Internet Explorer development a royal pain.
My point? Microsoft has been late to the table before. But when they want to catch up, they can.
Well... (Score:4, Interesting)
Has anyone asked Joe Sixpack yet? (Score:2, Interesting)
Meanwhile
Re:Popular theme today... (Score:3, Interesting)
Software is just better suited to be a service, since maintenance is the largest part of the cost, and maintenance is the very part that follows AFTER you make a sale. With services, maintenance is part of the service rental fee, making the business model saner, and less front-loaded.
I think most software is well suited for web conversion. Especially leveraging flash and java. You could write equivalents of microsoft word or adobe photoshop in flash or java, and except for printing get pretty much identical operation (and even printing wouldn't necessarily be that awful). Imagine a photoprint service online where you have a full blown photo editing app right in the webpage, so you can upload your pics, and remove red eyes, adjust contrast, retouch small areas, even draw little moustaches, and then have the pictures printed as professional-quality photographs and have them shipped to you.
Or imagine an online document editing service, with functional implementations of word, excel and powerpoint in flash or java, allowing you to upload your files, edit them, and redownload the edited versions. Imagine if you got this as a freebie with some ISP's. Or for a low fee. Most people would not bother with MS Office anymore. Especially since if something went wrong with their PC, all their documents would still be on the server, ready for editing, printing, whatever.
Imagine if your google account held all your office-type documents, including photographs, and provided editing apps for them from the webpage. Imagine it tied into gmail. Imagine these office style apps were no less capable than regular desktop apps. Do you think people would pay money for such a service? Do you think it would attract users?
I think it would be a smash hit, if done right. And believe me, with current technology you can do it right.
Google and NX No Machine or FreeNX (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The article underestimates MSFT's problems (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Popular theme today... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm just not with the soothsayers who think completely distributed computing is coming back. Too many advantages for the providers, too little control for the users.
Google only sells ads (Score:5, Interesting)
What it comes down to is Google sells ads. That's its core business. Google is a media company. Reinventing a company is expensive and dangerous, few survive reinvention, that's why Google will always be a media company and Microsoft will always be a software company and Ford will always sell cars.
Re:The article underestimates MSFT's problems (Score:1, Interesting)
In the third case the price was low because he had started the company while sitll working there; and claims he was in negotiations to be bought back even before he quit.
For some wierd reason MSFT thinks that paying someone 50 million is cheap if they can do a press release; but paying someone $170,000 to do the same work directly for them is too expensive.
Code Red article in today's WSJ (Score:3, Interesting)
They are trying to consolidate the platform into a small core with more of an add-in technology--it looks like they are starting over with a different core based on an enterprise-only version of NT.
They also had some great new procedures like continual builds and automated testing. (Can you imagine that those are NEW in Microsoft??? What kind of stupid kid-games have they been playing???)
One concept I really liked was BUG-Jail. When too many bugs are found from a single developer, that developer is not allowed to write code for a while. They didn't say what they did with 'em, but I think an appropriate task would be to put them on the QA team for 6 months.
I wonder if some of the changes mentioned in this article are more a result of this restructuring...
Re:Popular theme today... (Score:5, Interesting)
We're only just now beginning to see #4 and #5 come into play. For example, FireFox has clearly hit #4 with respect to MSIE. Linux has done a good job at chipping away at Microsoft in the server market. MySQL has left Oracle bleeding red (even though they're only at #3). Apache has decimated the market for commercial web servers like IIS. OpenOffice has significantly chipped away at MS Office in some circles (but not in the general user case yet). Audacity has become a mainstream app on home recording bulletin boards (even among non-geeks). The list goes on
I'm not saying I think commercial software is dead. Far from it. But companies that treat customers like a revenue source (e.g. web services to replace software) are not a direction that can reasonably compete with open source. The only way to compete with open source is by doing a better job. Where web services -can- compete is by providing useful services that can't practically be provided by most individuals in their own homes---email, web servers. e-commerce sites, maybe even data backups.
Re:Microsoft will be just fine. (Score:3, Interesting)
So what exactly is innovative about them? All I've ever seen (as you said) are vague summaries that don't really sound all that innovative.
Care to enlighten?
Keyboard shortcuts... (Score:4, Interesting)
And I know that you can make custom command shortcuts that the *app* not the browser responds to. But that's retarded. I have to now think of my shortcuts like nested namespaces? Is this the mnemonic for the hosted app or the host? No way.
ZUL is the best bet here, I and I applaud that effort. But traditional HTML web apps simply don't cut the mustard. They aren't applications, in my mind, if they don't behave the way applications have behaved for 20 years. And frankly, it's not like I need to just get with the program and accept the new. The new sucks, it isn't as good as what we've got today. I refuse to adapt to an inferior process.
Wake me up when they can make an app as rich as Flash MX, or Photoshop, or XCode run in a browser.
Re:nightmare for us too (Score:4, Interesting)
Making things that depend on stable electricity supply was out of thought some decades ago. Today nobody will question to create a device that requires a power connection to function.
Requiring a network connection to work won't be a problem in the (hopefully near) future. In fact already, I do most of my work on the Internet today: phone, mail, banking operations, etc...
Google smoogle. (Score:3, Interesting)
The one's to watch are firms developing toolsets like those of Salesforce.com and then selling local, turnkey solutions for businesses to host in their own data centers. MS has been talking about a subscription model for a decade now, and they could just as easily move this way.
BUT...hubris is a mighty nemesis. MS's current leadership is focused on monopoly above all else, and this limits their freedom of movement and ability to develop cool stuff for the sake of developing cool stuff. Everything is developed within the prism of how does this reinforce the monopoly. Bring a new breed of internet-savvy,leadership into MS, who can ignore monopoly to develop unbundled, boutique products (high margin, high "it-factor")and you will have a monster on your hands.
To be brutally honest, Google offers me nothing that I just "can't live without". They offer nothing that I have not seen before, although they do have elegent implementations. The best thing I can say about Google is that at least their directmarketing ads are not as annoying as Yahoo!, but at the end of the day they are a direct marketing firm whose sole purpose is to monitor my behavior and bombard me with ads. I despise that business model.
And when turning on your computer... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Microsoft will be just fine. (Score:4, Interesting)
That would be VERY scary to Microsoft, not to mention a whole bunch of other players in the market. NX delivers a pretty good desktop experience (if you aren't a game player) in around 5KB/s of bandwidth. If that were guaranteed virus-free, with backed-up storage for a modest monthly subscription - like a Hotmail or Yahoo but doing your computing not just your email - I know a lot of people who would sigh with relief, happily accept a lightweight thin client and throw out that hideous, malware-ridden fat-client piece of junk in the corner that they never understood and rarely worked properly.
Linux Nightmare Scenario (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What has microsoft done lately? (Score:1, Interesting)
Oh wait, that's right, Microsoft doesn't actually innovate. Google must've made that one.
When you have a hammer... (Score:3, Interesting)
Google Maps work because people don't want to allocate terabytes of storage for maps of the world. Web-based mail and homepages work because most people don't want the work of maintaining their own mail servers and web servers.
However that doesn't apply to an office suite, when you get down to it, or something using a local database on your machine. There aren't a huge number of advantages to hosting your office suite on a remote server and pulling the apps down the network when you want to run them, and there are a number of downsides.
I'm not saying that Google isn't going to become a major player in the web services business, or that MSN in time won't become an equally big player. But what I am saying is that locally hosted applications aren't going to go away either, and ultimately, the security of the PC depends on the security of the operating system running on it.
Windows MS crown jewel? not exactly. (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't buy it (Score:3, Interesting)
What I consider the first part of MS nightmare scenario is working itself out in Massachusets right now: the state government has established a policy on open formats and protocols that wipes out Microsoft's ability to lock people into applications. The second part will start rolling in within the next five years, as Open software starts to establish itself on the corporate desktop.
Microsoft's main profit center is the symbiotic lock-in between Office and Windows. Those two business units support all the other development Microsoft does. People buy Windows in order to run Office, and they buy Office because, among other things, they have to buy it to maintain the investment they've sunk in thousands of documents over the years.
Micorosft got rich targeting the corporate desktop, because that's the low-hanging fruit of the software industry. It offers large numbers of machines all doing basically the same thing. The required feature set is well-defined, and it tends to remain stable over the years. They managed to hold that market by locking users into Office with proprietary formats, and by making Windows a more or less necessary requirement for running Office.
Thing is, OSS is heading for the very same market, because once again, it's the low-hanging fruit of the industry. It's so easy to build a positive feedback cycle around an office suite that you'd almost have to work *not* to do it.
OSS applications are on the leading edge of being mature enough for regular desktop use, and as more people adopt them, you get more pressure to make them even more mature. Sooner or later (and getting sooner all the time), OSS products will be be seen by the regular public as suitable competition for Office and Windows.
When that happens, Microsoft's main revenue stream will be under attack by a set of products that can't be killed by normal business methods. And to be perfectly honest, Microsoft has a lousy track record of trying to diversify into other markets. Its core markets will start drying up, and it won't have any new markets to move into.. certainly not at a level that will replace what it's losing from its core markets, at any rate.
When the money goes, so does the support for peripheral development, experimental products, and just plain 800-pound-gorilla domination tactics. Microsoft won't have the resources to fight an indefinite war against Google, try to edge its way into the online music market, subsidize its Xbox foothold in the console market, and so on. It will have to tighten its belt and fight to hold its ground, and sit around watching opportunitiues pass by because it just can't afford to take a strong, committed risk outisde its core market.
*That's* Microsoft's biggest nightmare the way I see it.
Re:nightmare for us too (Score:2, Interesting)
Here goes my karma, but think about these points before modding:
Service outages? When was the last time Google was down? Gmail? Slashdot? Your online bank? I'd bet the average home user has a much better image of the stability of the web than that of her own computer...
Platform issues? How about the millions of webpages which look, feel, and work the same in basically any web browser, even textual ones? Sure, you don't get "pixel perfection" all the time, but when did you last worry about that "thin" border being 2px in your less-than-favorite browser?
Version control? Ever heard about XML? ODS? I generally expect more of web services than programs, if only for the simple reason that there is actual competition out there.
Licenses? Well, how about the thousands of services which are free to use, but still make money? This isn't 1996, friend.
Death of PC gaming is Microsoft's REAL problem (Score:3, Interesting)
The true threat to Windows continued prosperity is the Xbox 360 and the PS3.
PC sales have been dominated by growth since 1998 in two sectors:
1 - Home PCs
2 - Notebook sales (which has just this past year also shifted to personal use notebooks and away from business use notebooks as the main growth factor in main growth)
Business desktop sales no longer lead market growth and there is no reason to believe that is going to change anytime soon. There is simply no killer app which requires it. There are none on the horizon either.
The new sales of personal use PCs critically depends upon continued hardware evolution and "killer apps" to fuel demand for those platform upgrades. It is those upgrades which is the source of all Microsoft's future growth.
Home sales rely upon PC games as their primary killer app with evolving hardware requirements. It's that simple. Reduce demand for that natural hardware churn and you have a REAL problem with your bottom line in Redmond.
And that business is seriously imperiled.
Make no mistake: PC Game developement of Triple A titles is essentially dead in the water. And I don't mean maybe. I mean STONE COLD FUCKING DEAD. It's a mere FRACTION of what it was even five years ago. Piracy is the perceived problem and the publishers have bailed en masse from funding development for the PC platform in favour of the PS3 and Xbox.
We are NOT in a market lull in PC games. We are in a wholesale abandonment of the market by hundreds of game developers and virtually every software publisher. It's been happening for three years and the effects are really starting to show up now. From here on in for the next 36 months - it only gets worse and worse.
Introduce Windows Vista? To that market? Dream on guys. Dream on.
Without new PC Games fueling demand for new PCs - there is a vastly reduced need for new operating systems. Microsoft's sales of Windows Vista OS are already sharply imperiled.
If Redmond wants to worry - worry about that. Google is a hiccup in history. The disappearance of the renewable killer app which has fueled continuous platform upgrades, on the other hand, is a grave and serious problem for the entire PC industry.
They's better hope business takes to Skype in a hurry - or the whole industry is in for a wave of depening red ink and contracting sales.