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Is Microsoft dying?

It’s been a week of no updates. I’ve had one hell of a busy schedule, and I don’t remember the last time I was this exhausted. Can’t talk yet about what the work was for, but it shouldn’t be long before I can start flapping my gums.

Anyway, I was reading Slashdot on my phone this weekend when I saw a post linking to an article titled “Silicon Insider: R.I.P. Microsoft?”

Now that I’m one of the b0rg, I have a slightly different perspective on this stuff than I used to. I mean, this is the company I’ve decided to join, so I’ll admit I take it a little personally when someone talks smack about it.

For those of you who don’t want to read the article, I’ll summarize it for you here:

Microsoft is going to die because it has lost a couple employees and missed some deadlines. Open source r0olz. All your base are belong to us.

While I can understand concern over losing key employees, I don’t see where the author, Michael Malone, is coming from regarding the deadlines.

For a while, I spent most of my time in LinuxLand. I was surrounded by a few PCs and was constantly trying out new distros, reading the latest news, and generally keeping up on what was happening in the world of open source.

During that time, I noticed something about your “average” open source project: Major updates are few and far between. You can get your pickers and stealers on nightly builds as long as you can type “cvs,” but getting something with an incremented major revision number was a treat that didn’t come along all that often.

People occasionally griped about this, but some great sage of the OSS community would always come along and say, “Well, you can have your major revision now, but it won’t work. Would you rather have it next week or when it’s usable?” This response typically shut people up. It makes sense. Deadlines are important, but shipping a product prematurely isn’t worth meeting a target date (in my opinion).

This makes me wonder: Why is it a good thing that software ships “late” in the OSS camp, but a sign of death to a journalist when it ships late in the Microsoft camp?

Published Monday, February 14, 2005 2:52 AM by Rory

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Comments

 

Ralph Loizzo said:

I couldnt disagree with this guy more.

I read the linked article, to hear his misguided words.

Microsoft is not dead, nor dying. .NET and the efforts of Microsoft to link developers over the entire planet has and will pay off.

Microsoft technologies are being utilized by an ever GROWING community, and so with that, will continue to grow itself.

Sounds like Michael Malone got turned down for a job.
February 14, 2005 3:09 AM
 

Ze@l0ts roxor said:

Obviously you fail to grock the one true way. Repent, or be damned to mediocrity!
February 14, 2005 3:48 AM
 

denny said:

I think there is a room full of wanabe's that have a thing going on how totaly bad they can mis-quote stuff about Microsoft and still get it presented as "NEWS".

February 14, 2005 3:54 AM
 

Dean Harding said:

People have been predicting the "imminent" death of Microsoft for as long as I can remember. I'm sure they'll be doing it for years to come as well.
February 14, 2005 4:13 AM
 

Ian said:

This and the whole java=safe,.net=not arguement are just another couple of nails in the slashdotty coffin.

I stopped reading a long time ago. I get the headline email sent to me daily but most often just delete it. I never go read the comments - total waste of time.
February 14, 2005 7:28 AM
 

Ian Dixon said:

I read Slashdot just to have a laugh at some of the comments. As well as beening a .net fan I am a IT Manager and see my costs going down when we migrated from Lotus Notes to Exchange 2003. The Slashdoters are not in the real world

Ian
February 14, 2005 8:59 AM
 

Rick said:

Its just easy to target MS. How are you going to target linux? Who do you point the finger at? There are more distros than I care to count, and even if I did, by the time I was done there would probably be another one.

It easy to say "Well, with all that money, MS can't even keep its employees....", but you cant really say the same about linux or other OSS because noone can figure out who is working on it.


P.S. If none of this makes sense, Im sorry. Its 3 in the morning, and I havent had much sleep.....
February 14, 2005 11:24 AM
 

Rick said:

"Can’t talk yet about what the work was for, but it shouldn’t be long before I can start flapping my gums."

It's rocket-boosters isn't it?
February 14, 2005 11:28 AM
 

SBC said:

Malone has his head up in the sky (usually it's head up his...) since he had predicted the inevitable H-P & Fiorina debacle but then again, that was a no-brainer to predict.

The article feeds the slash-hooters' oral fixation who prefer anecdotes and crystal balls to see the future. (They flunked math & stats in their schools).

I wouldn't worry about "sensational journalism".
February 14, 2005 2:17 PM
 

Rob Miles said:

Hmmm. I don't think that you have to worry much. Lines like "Great, healthy companies not only dominate the market, but share of mind. Look at Apple these days." don't do much for his credibility.
February 14, 2005 3:02 PM
 

TomB said:

I had to stop reading, it was just too painful. How many times was NT5 delayed? It's not only common, it's expected.
February 14, 2005 3:36 PM
 

Josh said:

I agree - that article was garbage. You were actually generous in your summary, I would have summarized it as "I think Microsoft will die because something smells funny". That's what I took away from the great expose.

Regarding your last line... I think it is a lot more dangerous to a software company that depends on software revenue to be late with a release, compared with an open source project.
February 14, 2005 4:19 PM
 

private said:

My husband works on longhorn and avalon at MS and read the same article. He completely agreed with it. He says MS software is a bunch of patches over silly mistakes, no one takes the time to do anything right, the managers are low IQ mornons, the review system is fatally flawed where only incompetent brown-nosers get any recognition.... I could go on. He has, btw, a 15-year award sitting on his desk.
February 17, 2005 5:28 PM
 

Jason said:

when you call someone a "MORON", you might want to spell check it...it looks really foolish when someone make a typo on a word like that.
February 18, 2005 4:48 PM
 

4Jason said:

Thanks for pointing out a typo. That was SO helpful, Jason. It really brought a lot to the conversational flow that was going on.
February 18, 2005 4:56 PM
 

No Joke said:

True story: I work for a huge multi-billion $ international company that just last month choose java over .net just because java can run in linux. We in the US division made a great unified communication product using all msft: .net, lcs, exchange, you name it we bled msft. then our euro guys said that .net cant be the platform cuz it only runs on windows.
the enterprise customers want unix,linux, windows and we as a software division must be unified in the dev language and tools. I think msft will be hurt by this limitation. i talked to every msft person i could talk to in vslive 2004 about this. And every msft person was just arrogant who missed the point. The msft response was: "well, just resign and look for a company that does .net."
February 20, 2005 4:41 AM
 

Roberto J. Dohnert said:

(sarcasm) When an OSS Project is late they are adding innovative features trying to turn the finished product into the ultimate killer app. When Microsoft misses a deadline, Microsoft is sneaking around trying to find out how to lock the user into their inferior crap... LONG LIVE OPEN SOURCE !!!!! (/sarcasm)
February 21, 2005 4:24 AM
 

Mark Miller said:

Looks like the link doesn't point to the article anymore...anyway...

A couple years ago OSS zealots were saying this all the time: "MS is going to die!" When I confronted them on the billions MS was making, like in the article <a href="http://slashdot.org/articles/05/01/28/133250.shtml?tid=109&tid=98">here</a> I would get one of two responses. Some would respond, "It's inevitable. Someday it's going to die. OSS will be around forever." Uh, yeah. Okay, so OSS will be around forever. I can see that, though OSS folks probably won't be running anything remotely like Linux 100 years from now. And it's likely that 100 years from now OSS will still occupy the minority niche it has always had.

The other response I would get would be from the "pissy discouraged types" who would rant about how "stupid" people were being duped into giving their money away to a predatory monopolist for inferior technology. Then I reminded them how many "stupid" people there were (the majority of computer users out there), and that it's not productive to insult the people you're trying to convert. :)

The "logic" that the zealots exhibited was the same logic that said "I.T. is dying in the U.S. It's all going to go to India. It's inevitable," because they work for $6/hr. After all, how can anyone compete with that, right? Well I finally found work as an ASP.Net developer last year after being out of the "I.T. loop" for a couple years.

It's interesting. What the zealots haven't discovered yet is logic only gets one so far. After that, life experience is a much greater source of wisdom. It's not very logical, but it's often right.
February 22, 2005 10:08 AM
 

Donna said:

to No Joke:

It is amazing, the hubris of MS employess, they corner the market on it. And it will be their downfall.
March 1, 2005 12:32 AM
 

Rory said:

Donna -

"It is amazing, the hubris of MS employess, they corner the market on it."

We all sign contracts saying that we're going to do our best to uphold our company's values. It doesn't mean that what we always say is inline with what we believe, but rather what we've agreed to promote. However, we're given a great degree of freedom to interpret what we think is "best for the company," so some of us might think quite differently than others.

There are many MS employees, myself included, who would *not* have reacted to "No Joke" as those mentioned did. When I encounter this attitude internally, I find it counter-productive and irritating.

In other words, try not to generalize on the midsets of 55,000 employees - one person's experiences do not reflect the opinions of everybody else within the company.

Had I been approached, my response would have been very different, although I wasn't at VSLive, so that wasn't even an option.

"And it will be their downfall."

I doubt it.
March 1, 2005 1:56 AM
 

Donna said:

It *is* their downfall. They are falling fast. Notice your stock portfolio lately? Notice the negative press and the amazing success of firefox? Ever put any thought into that?
March 6, 2005 7:08 AM
 

Rory said:

Donna -

"It *is* their downfall. They are falling fast. Notice your stock portfolio lately?"

The stock has actually been relatively stable over the past couple years. We've hardly hit a low point.

But don't let me ruin your argument with facts.

"Notice the negative press and the amazing success of firefox?"

Even with FireFox's amazing success, it still leaves us with the *vast* majority of the world in terms of browser adoption.

The negative press has always been there and always will. It's tough to be as large as Microsoft without generating press of all kinds. There's plenty of good stuff, too, but people don't pay attention to the good stuff the way they pay attention to the dirty laundry.

Apple's getting a lot of bad press right now, and I have serious doubts that they're going to crash because of it. I certainly hope not, anyway - I love my Mac.

"Ever put any thought into that?"

I put thought into doing the best that I can do for the company. I grew up with Microsoft, and I've seen it from the inside. The "hubris" to which you refer is just an obvious flaw that you will find anywhere you find success. I hasten to point out that there's hubris-a-plenty at places like Google - ever seen their "Google Aptitude Test?" It's incredible.

Anyway, Donna, you're not exactly an industry expert with the knowledge to make accurate predictions about where companies are going, and especially about one as complex and far-reaching as Microsoft.

You've experienced (perhaps - I'm guessing that you've probably just "heard") some negative attitudes radiating outward from Redmond, but, as I said before, those people are the exception. Most of us are "real" people who love their jobs and want to succeed.

That's probably why this company still kicks so much ass in so many areas.
March 6, 2005 9:19 PM
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