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That's the thing; their Windows 2003 product is actually a good product.



What they're afraid of is decreasing profit margins. They're the only company out there who charges per server installed AND per user who logs onto the server. They might get forced to offer more at their existing price or charge less. Either way, they're going to be challenged on the pricing structure. Their profits may grow but the poor of customers will decrease at the same time.



I'd say its internal slackness more than anything else; Microsoft has become sloppy, lazy and lethargic; there isn't the same level of drive and passion for technology. They have a bloated R&D department developing technology that contributes to nothing in the way of produceable benefits to products - just look at some of the pointless crud money is being wasted on in their labs - each time I ask, "so, how is this going to enter into a product, and thus bring money in to cover the costs of that R&D, and thus, legitimise the expense to the shareholders?"

They have managers who are more interested in grand standing and abusing competition that coming up and confidently outlining where their technology is superior. They would sooner make insinuations to the illegality of competitors who offer compatible solutions which work with Microsoft products.

You have engineers and programmers who seem to have been stuck in a RDF where by they have taken on the arrogant Bill Gates attitude of 'screw you, I'm going home' when it comes to talking to other companies in regards to developing cross platform technologies. One only needs to look at the 'UNIX Haters Guide' written courtesy of an out of touch Microsoft engineer who should spend more time correct the A380 size deficiencies in Windows NT than throwing stones inside the glass house.

The company is from top to bottom a ball of arrogance which permeates from its founder to the existing CEO, and with each manager moulded in the Microsoft/Bill Gates ethos. For Microsoft to change they need to change the culture, and for that to change, they need to move away from this culture of indoctrination and allow those of different approaches to take charge and run it in a different manner.

One where meetings are held where ideas are discussed rather than who can yell, scream and debate an idea the loudest. Where people can sit around like adults and rationally looking at the different approaches - then coming to a compromise between each idea.

An organisation where engineers don't compete for the glory and limelight but instead work as a team towards a certain goal - where management has a direct hands on management rather than remote and out of touch with the reality of what those in the trenches are going through.

Yes, in other words, a complete overhaul.

Edited 2007-12-22 13:08

That is going to kill them in the long run, if they are relying on a continuing revenue stream such as that.

Samba 4 is coming:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/New-Samba-targets-Active-...

The announcement that is the topic of this thread will amplify the effectiveness of Samba 4. Support for Active Directory will be even more complete.

Microsoft exchange connectors are becoming available:
http://www.42tools.com/

As are replacements for Exchange and Sharepoint themselves:
http://www.alfresco.com/
http://www.zimbra.com/
http://www.open-xchange.com/DE/

You can get a decent supportable server distribution which does not charge either per server or per client who logs on:
http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition
http://www.centos.org/

You can get a generic postscript printer driver for Windows which will allow a Windows client machine to print to any printer connected to a CUPS server:
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=pdrv&pla...

You can get a decent ODF plugin at least for older versions of MS Office:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2163405,00.asp

You can get OpenOffice.org and IBM Lotus Symphony which have adequate support for legacy document formats.

You can virtualize XP on your powerful Linux server(s).

There are offerings of heavyweight Linux server support giving the concept of "cloud computing".
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22613.wss

There are very-low-cost low end machines becoming available:

http://www.everex.com/
http://eeepc.asus.com/global/
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2414535067.html

There are people considering the switch, and think that one day it might even become a "no-brainer":
http://temporaryland.wordpress.com/2007/12/21/how-to-make-the-switc...

Governments are starting to mandate moving of the proprietary lock-in treadmill:
http://freeknowledge.eu/blog/wouter/netherlands-in-open-connection

More and more it becomes easier to contemplate avoiding Vista and moving Windows network over to Linux, firstly on the server and slowly (station-by-station) on the desktop.

Interesting.

Wow. That's an interesting indictment on how horrible Microsoft is a place to work. Do you have evidence for this or are you describing your own place of work? Or maybe you work at Microsoft yourself and are speaking from first hand knowledge. If not, then you're just talking a whole lot of nonsense, likely based on some malcontents posting at minimsft's blog.

I say your post is poppycock, and you know why? Because I've watched dozens of videos at channel9 and I can see for myself the things being worked on, the morale of the employees, etc, and none of it jives with your description.



Now, regarding Microsoft's research being bloated and useless, there was a story posted to slashdot a couple of days ago, talking about Microsoft's strength in patents. Evidently, in 2006, IBM had the most patents, with Microsoft coming in second, but Microsoft destroyed everyone else wrt the "science" quality of their patents, and Microsoft was #1 on the "industry impact" of their patents as well.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/20/1951229

So, of course the slashdot discusson talked of Microsoft Research, IBM Research, blah blah, and of course the anti-Microsoft crowd (which is about 90% of slashdotters) chipped in with the "WELL WHERE ARE THE PRODUCTS?" line that you are going with. There were some interesting responses to that, which I'll just summarize now.

First, a slashdotter posted a link to a page showing product contributions by Microsoft Research (last updated in 2005):
http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/pastpresentfuture/contributi...


Other slashdotters mentioned the following Microsoft innovations/research that have been or are being productized:

Microsoft's research on parallel processing was mentioned, and is now producing real products as the Parallel Extensions to .NET, including PLINQ:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/concurrency/default.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e848dc1d-5...

Photosynth
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060729-7381.html

Volta
http://labs.live.com/Announcing+Volta+Web+Development+Using+Only+Th...

And Microsoft Live Labs, in general
http://labs.live.com/

XNA, which won Microsoft two innovation awards, including Innovator of the Year at the 2006 DEMMX Awards.
http://www.demmx.com/demmx/awards/2006.jsp

JPEG XR (aka HD Photo and Windows Media Photo), for which the JPEG working group has formally assigned to Microsoft the task of developing into the next-gen image standard:
http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow/archive/2007/07/31/industry-standard...

Microsoft's graphics research, which has resulted in them being one of the top innovators. See this report on the 2007 and 2006 Siggraph:
http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic...
About which, a slashdotter posted the following:
"Believe it or not Microsoft's innovations and patents quite often end up in other pieces of software that don't cary the Microsoft brand name.

Microsoft's image processing research fund is really quite enormous. Just read all of the Siggraph papers every year and take note of how many are Microsoft Labs projects. Microsoft themselves almost never commercialize those image processing tools because they aren't a graphics software company (with the exception of the very impressive DirectX) and almost always pass off the patents and development to other companies."


Vista speech recognition. Yeah, I know there was a demo fiasco, but that was beta. See what David Pogue (no Microsoft fanboy, he) has to say about it (I've posted this link myself before to osnews :p):
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/03/01/telling-your-computer-wha...

Here's another link on that:
http://inetsynch.podbean.com/2007/09/26/windows-2-apples-episode-13...



A Microsoft employee posted, noting that many of Microsoft's innovations/research aren't consumer-oriented, so consumers wouldn't know about them. He gave these examples:
System Centre
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/default.aspx

Identity Lifecycle Management
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/idm/ILM.msp...

BizTalk
http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/default.mspx

Unified Communications
http://www.microsoft.com/uc/Default.mspx

And of course, VS, WPF, WCF, WF, CardSpace
http://www.netfx3.com

He also talked of great stuff being worked on, targeted for 2009 and beyond.


Other items listed in various slashdot posts as exmmples of Microsoft R&D showing up in products:
XMLHttpRequest
VC1
XBox Live
C#
LINQ
F#
Ribbon
Sharepoint
ClearType
TabletPC/Handwriting recognition
OneNote
Surface
Windows Home Server's data redudancy mechanism

All of which are products or are used in products.


One slashdotter had this to say:
"The problem with all fields of research (as opposed to Development) is that most often, the results are published in journals and papers years before the technology makes it into a product, then when it finally becomes "productized" everyone yawns because "that's so old", when in reality in terms of finished products it's not."

And lastly, a slashdotter posted a link to the list of Microsoft Research projects (I guess you consider them useless, since they won't result in an iPod or something, but I provide it for the other readers):
http://research.microsoft.com/research/projects/default.aspx

Edited 2007-12-22 22:01

There is some truth in what you say. Microsoft does need to reinvigorate itself and drive more innovative technologies. However, characterizing it as a "company from top to bottom a ball of arrogance" is not only a gross generalization but plain wrong. I know quite a few people who work for Microsoft (that's the nature of living in the Seattle area -- it's inevitable to know people working at MS), and these people are not mindless, arrogant, slacking, yelling, UNIX-hating jerks.

Here's my take. I think that Microsoft has some structural problems. Microsoft has what some have described as a Darwinian culture; that is, there are often multiple competing groups within the company which are focused on overlapping technologies. In the past, Gates tolerated overlaps because he seemed to believe that competition produced better overall technology. HOWEVER, since its management structure is rewarded for owning technology, it can be a challenge to get parts of the company to cooperate with others. In a lot of ways, Microsoft has grown too large for its own good and, in my opinion, the only way to make this problem less troublesome is to reshuffle various technologies so that politics has less of an impact. I could give you some examples but, perhaps, that's a discussion for another time.

Why exactly are Microsoft so persistently keen in trying to eliminate even the possibility of a competing product? What exactly are they afraid of?

This may come as a shock to you ... but that's what competitors do. They undercut the competition. They create barriers to competitors. It happens in every market, and the reason is profit. Nobody wants to share a market they can own outright.