It can be argued that Microsoft has changed the way everyone does business in the last 20 years. What you may be surprised to learn is that the company’s success is as much about perseverance and endurance as it is vision and talent. Yes, Microsoft has been blessed with the brilliant minds of leaders like Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer.
The Persistence Principle: An Inside Look at Microsoft’s Strategy
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I refuse to believe that Bill G or Steve B are geniuses. They are definately better deceivers, and definately luckier. They were at the right place at the right time, while I was crawling on my hands and knees and crapping my diapers.
And you are in the right place at the right time for the next revolution of computing: AI.
The OS doors have been closed, AI is the only “big discovery” is yet to be created. If you got the guts — as they had –, do it. Bring usable AI to our OSes, and you might become more rich than Gates himself, instead of crying foul.
A man that pisses others off is a “monopolist” but ends up making a lot of money. A man with a vision and a good OS is a “fearless leader” but ends up selling his company for $11 million. Which one would you like to be more? Maybe this post here ( http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/am-info/Week-of-Mon-20020211/0… ) can tell you more why Bill is up there right now.
More power to the lucky ones.
I just have a real problem with people claiming that the two are the end-all be-all in brains. There are plenty of highly intelligent individuals who never become rich, either by their on volition, or by circumstances out of thier hands. If you’re lucky, great for you, but don’t expect me to sing your praises.
must be lots going on w/ MS b/c I have seen a hella big ammount of articles about them here lately….
AI would rock.
And last week we had a hella big amount of Linux articles. That doesn’t say anything. Depends on the day. Some days we got more news about Ms, another day we will have more Linux, other days more Apple etc. Depends on the weather too.
> I refuse to believe that Bill G or
> Steve B are geniuses. T
> hey are definately better deceivers,
> and definately luckier. They were
> at the right place at the right time
I’m sorry, that’s unbelievable. Those two executives have the hearth of champions. They have also built a company that is both hard working and full of champions and smart strategists. Microsoft does a lot of illegal things, but more importantly, they have one of the best managed places on earth. They have some of the smartest people. They have some of the most determined champions in business. That’s why they will here for the long haul.
Very well said Dominic.
he heh tornados outside you can’t go gather news, eh? heh
What I have seen from Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer like in ttestimonials or many other statement they had made over the years with regard to future computing, I most certainly don’t see them as geniuses.
But they have done an amazing job with regard to marketing. Simply fabulous, a much worse OS than MSDOS is hardly imaginable for desktop systems, and boy did they know how to sell it to consumers and manufacturers. If someone can sell ice to eskimos it must be Microsoft!
I can imagine that IBM executives felt very foolish after they finally understood what might they had given to Microsoft. In a addition, during Microsoft’s uprise they created many good partnerships and eventually they assimilated many of these “partners” or turned against them when they weren’t needed anymore.
This is combination with huge tax cuts from the US goverment allows Microsoft to make a Billion USD per month. Amazing actually, let the little guy pay and give the tax cuts to one of the wealthiest companies on earth… Not very fair IMO, but everything seems to be possible in the US.
Thank you Eugenia, for posting a most interesting article.
I am not so sure that it was “luck” that gave Bill his billions, rather than the stupidity of IBM. Intel also “benefitted” from this. IBM created the PC and then MS and Intel have taken all the profits! That has got to be one of the dumbest business moves in all of history. Of course MS and Intel have “worked hard” and deserve a lot of what they have gotten. But it’s also true that MS engaged in anticompetitive conduct, broke the antitrust law, and the billions they now make are in part attributable to that. Sorting out whether it was 60 percent IBM stupidity, 20 percent “perserverence” and 20 percent “breakin’ the law”, or some different breakout is interesting but ultimately impossible. There are usually many factors contributing to a given outcome.
What I found most astounding was the following statement: “Office will bring Microsoft $10 billion in revenue in 2002, with pre-tax operating income north of $8 billion in profits. ” Holy shit! 80 percent profit. Let me tell you folks, no way this is a “functioning market.” The only reason there are not more competitors — and therefore lower prices and better product — for you and me is the COMPLETE AND UTTER LACK OF COMPETITION. This is due to MS’s lock down on proprietary file formats. They achieved this partly by uncompetitive conduct (eg not dislosing APIs to Wordperfect as quickly as to their own programmers).
But even if MS got this file-format enforced monopoly through “perserverence” it’s still VERY VERY bad for consumers. Sun, Apple, IBM, where are you? We need the whole industry to gang up on these guys and take it away from them – with an industry standard file format. If that doesn’t work, it’s time for government intervention. Rewarding success is great, but sometimes the price is just too high and we have to draw the line (that’s my personal view, you can disagree).
Maybe very well said, but still doesn’t reflect Bryan’s points, that there are also plenty of other and real designers, who will probably never become as famous as B.G and S.B. I just hope I am not “crying foul” just because I have different opinion 🙂
I think that when we want to compare, we would have to set equal conditions first – is anyone else so rich as MS to afford to buy clever brains? And – what practices were used to win those positions? Is it so easy to forget?
Well, we all favor this or that … in general, it does not matter. I am amigan, I will never forget the platform, but nowadays I am lucky if someone comes with some new and interesting concept, product, etc. – being it MS or Intel. The only thing I ask the companies for – is to use fair practices …
And as for the news message itself (although I haven’t read the linked article yet). The question, otoh, could be as well – if multitasking, nearly real-time, efficient, 32-bit platform called Amiga would take off in 86′, where would we be today? So yes – Win95, 32 bit system … ten years after? 😉
Cheers,
-pekr-
> And last week we had a hella big amount of Linux articles.
> That doesn’t say anything. Depends on the day. Some days we
> got more news about Ms, another day we will have more
> Linux, other days more Apple etc. Depends on the weather too.
So it’s Isidore’s fault?
I LOVED THE AMIGA! Past tense: loved.
That computer was the sh|t. Had an A1000, then A1200. I’m a junkie for OS X now (replacement zealotry?), but I still wish I had my old full screen video, live MIDI streaming, audio samples syncing to the video, ALL WITH 8MB of memory and 16mhz! Those programmers were true geniuses [i]! ! ! Great machine, terrible company (Commodore that is). OKay, back to 2002 … =)
-spider
It is no one’s fault. It is just normal.
OSNews is about ALL OSes, including Microsoft’s. If there are days that we have more news from one side, we post them. Next day, it would be another day and depends what news are available that would be interesting for osnews, we post them too.
Hey Eugenia,
I don’t know about the other readers but I love to read the “View moderated down comments.” just see what type of stuff is getting slammed. Is it possible to make a comprehesive page that lists, exclusively, all the mod’ed down comments? No sorting (qsort?) necessary, just a page with a bunch of rif-raff that’s been hosed down. (Like this post since it is no-doubt way OT)
Just a thought on a lazy Friday at work…
-spider
Appleforever, I generally agree with your statement. Most importantly I agree with the fact that currently there isn’t a fair and competitive OS and webbrowser market. Consumers and developers *are* heavily paying the price for this, regardless if these people know this or not.
As geist said on IRC some days ago, Microsoft is doing the same things that any other company would be doing in their place. Apple would be doing the same thing, Be Inc would be doing the same thing, anyone else too. Admit it, even you would be doing it!
“Mom, everyone’s doing it, can I be an evil genius too?”
Not to be too harsh, but what difference does this make? The company that could have easily been in MS shoes was IBM. OK, let’s pretend that happened. If IBM were making 80 percent profit, 8 billion of profit on Office through a file format enforced monopoly (on top of billions from Windows itself), then we would need an industry standard file format (and an industry standard open OS). If company X, Y, Z were making that money, then we would need the same thing.
Office and Windows are remarkably low tech software today, not exactly “cutting edge.” The open source movement has replicated 90 percent of it. It’s commoditized. There’s nothing special about it warranting an 80 percent profit rate. It’s an uncompetitive market, plain and simple.
What we have is an uncompetitive market, except that Linux (boosted by the likes of IBM, Sun, Red Hat, and many many others), MAYBE making it into a competitive one.
All without government intervention (well some, since the antitrust trial is putting some limits on MS’s conduct). Neverthless, it will be remarkable if Linux makes this happen.
An interesting parellel to make from that article is that while Microsoft does indeed persist in everything they do, so do Open Source project. In the article there’s a sentence that sums it up quite well : “In 95 MSN sucked, but we kept at it, and it’s getting better all the time”.
Does anybody remember when Mozilla just came out ? It “sucked” for a majority of people. So did KDE, GNOME, etc… I believe one of the reasons Microsoft views open source as a major competitor is that it does persevere in everything it does. Just look at the WINE project. When they started everybody thought they were crazy. Now it runs Office 2000 almost completely, major new games, IE 5.5, etc.
I’m all for persistence. For me that’s the true recipe for success… Believe in what you do, don’t let anybody or anything change your mind, and if you keep at it you will get the opportunity.
My opinion about Bill.
(Disclaimer: I’m a third world CS student and GNU guy, so I’m biased. Don’t take me too serious.)
Bill _is_ brilliant. Very brilliant. He’s a wonderful at administration, marketing and related areas.
But is he a “computer visionarie”? No. Donald Knuth is a computer visionarie. Gates is not a good programmer, nor a good scientist. He is a good moneymaker, and this has nothing to do with contributions to or proficience with computer science.
If my goal in life were making money, people like Bill Gates and L. Hon Hubbard would be my heroes. Since I don’t belive in money at all, I think they are just unethical.
Microsoft is many things – it is and always has been fiercely competitive, hires good people, as the article said. They have abused their monopoly and they should pay for that. The article speaks of Microsoft not getting things right the first time, but their perseverence wins out in the end. I think this is true. So, although this is a seeming paradox, the genius of Gates and Ballmer and company is that they somehow are always ahead of the curve but behind the curve at the same time 🙂
Commercial software has one advantage – people get payd to do something instead of cooking up half-baked free software in their kitchen. (ok, too much cooking references, you get the idea)
In a company like Microsoft, Bill can walk up to a coder and say “Jack, make the taskbar to look more funky!” and Jack will do that because he gets paid for it.
In the land of free software, people write portions of code just for fun. They follow their own ideas, instead of doing things by the specs. In other words, they produce uncompatible crap.
However, a commercial company pushing a free OS like RedHat and other Linux vendors are doing right now, is the way of the future. We just need a user-friendly OS that’s pushed by commercial vendors but is either free or very cheap.
Microsoft’s Plan
From Steve Ballmer’s latest speech to the MVPs, it sounds like they concede they can’t compete with Linux (sold by commercial venders) on price. That much seems obvious. I heard that Lindows.com has 40 employees, and Lycoris has 25. Microsoft has 50,000 and most of those salaries are being paid by Office and Windows revenue. Even if Microsoft reduces its profit to zero on windows and office (which they could do for many years), they still have to cover those 50,000 salaries. Plus, their stock price would tank if they had no profit or even losses (unimaginable for MS!)
So Steve Ballmer said they would “outsmart” Linux, by offering better products to consumers. OK, but how much better will they be? Will they be worth the “Microsoft price”? Imagine you are a CIO and you are faced with an $800,000 bill for Windows and Office licenses (compulsory), or Linux and some open office suite for $50,000. (Let’s assume support costs are the same, so it’s a wash there). Will you pay $750,000 for the ability to have people sitting around a conference room see each others’ Powerpoint presentations in real time on your screen (I have heard this is one thing MS is planning, which Linux office suites presumably wouldn’t have)? Or use video and voice-enabled email (which your network infrastructure may not even handle). In today’s cost-cutting IT environment, I don’t think so.
I think we have some wishful thinking going on here. The only thing that would make CIO’s really pay would be something revolutionary that really and obviously would improve the bottome line (e.g., like using PCs to wordprocess rather than an IBM typewriter, or letting salespeople crunch numbers on their desktop using 1-2-3 rather than begging for time from the guys running the company mainframe). You see, the cost advantages of the PC and office software are great, but you get those from Linux for a lot lower price. How does Microsoft justify its 80 percent profit?
Maybe they are banking on the consumer market. But how many consumers buy Office? It seems they are going to take a hit.
Some people seem to believe that Microsoft is the richest company in the world (and if not just the richest overal, the richest technology company), however, they are FAR from it… in fact, IBM spends more on R&D than Microsoft and Intel combined
I said maybe Ballmer is banking on the consumer market as a continued source of profitable sales (for at least Windows). After all, Wall Mart is selling their Microtel Lindows PC for $199, and the Windows version is $299. Won’t people pay $100 bucks more for Windows?
Well, I’m not sure the Wal mart customer will pay 30 percent more. Especially when they see there’s a lot of free software for Lindows on Click and Run for only $99 more. Sounds like a good deal. And soon it will run AOL. Very interesting.
One problem is that some percentage of the “will pay more for better” computer has gone with Apple (like me). I seriously doubt Microsoft is going to come up with anything that will draw me away from Apple anytime in the near future. I think Apple offers better stuff because they make the whole thing, from hardware to OS to application to (increasingly) net services. Nice package I don’t think MS will be providing anytime soon, if ever.
Also, if a lot of the consumer market that “won’t pay more for better” moves to Lindows.com and similar distros, then soon more commercial publishers will start writing for Linux. Then how many power windows users will go totally with Linux? What if more games are ported to Linux?
I’m sorry, but open source has not even replicated 50% of Office’s features, much less 90%.
CPU guy said: “I’m sorry, but open source has not even replicated 50% of Office’s features, much less 90%.”
Yea, I guess if you use number of features, maybe it’s not 90 percent. MS does keep adding features and features. But how many are really important to corporate users? People more familiar with Star Office, Openoffice and Ximian’s Evolution than me need to speak to this. Openoffice (installed on my work PC just for kicks) looks pretty feature complete to me. I have heard the macro language in the open source stuff is not up to snuff for corporate users.
I am going to buy Lindows soon and try out Staroffice more and see what the differences are. Or you could enlighten me what the important ones are.
Greetings.
I have the following opinion: we can´t implement AI because we dont´t know how to define its elements even abstractly.
AI is just a dream…
A marvelous dream…
But just a dream…
This is combination with huge tax cuts from the US goverment allows Microsoft to make a Billion USD per month. Amazing actually, let the little guy pay and give the tax cuts to one of the wealthiest companies on earth… Not very fair IMO, but everything seems to be possible in the US.
Everything’s possible in a corporatocracy if you have enough money.
I refuse to believe that Bill G or Steve B are geniuses.
Feel free and refuse to believe. That doesn’t change the fact that they have achieved things that geniuses achieve.
Consistently.
Apple was in shambles with idiotic political infighting while Microsoft was hiring some of the best in the world. Commodore was similarly idiotic with the Amiga. Xerox Parc? Don’t get me started. Symbolics?
As for programming, programmers at that time were impressed at his bumming instructions to get Basic to fit in tiny space requirements.
I guess being a genius makes things look easy.
Microsoft is to computing what Charbucks is to coffee. Half-arsed products with really really good marketing…
appleforever says “One problem is that some percentage of the “will pay more for better” computer has gone with Apple (like me). I seriously doubt Microsoft is going to come up with anything that will draw me away from Apple anytime in the near future. I think Apple offers better stuff because they make the whole thing, from hardware to OS to application to (increasingly) net services. Nice package I don’t think MS will be providing anytime soon, if ever”
Here is the problem, you contradict with yourself. You appreciate Apple’s bundling with everything together, even the hardware, but you say Microsoft shouldn’t bundle even the browser, which is a very important component of an OS. Apple bundles Quicktime with its Os, but when Microsoft does the same thing, it becomes a problem for you.
You want government interverence for Microsoft, yet you support Apple’s properierty hardware, software. You say Microsoft own the file types for Office, so nobody was able to compete with them, but you support Apple’s actions.
Tell me tell you one thing, when you write something, be serious about it.
We can not let Apple sell expensive software and hardware to us. Governments are here to help us not hurt us. Thanks to Microsoft we have free browser, consumers are paying the price of Microsoft’s bundling by having a much more better browser for free.
Microsoft made lots of innovations, people always lie about Microsoft, claiming stupid stuff, they never prove it. This is a fact, and reading your posts clearly show that, you are not serious about Microsoft at all. You want anti competitive environment, by hurting and damaging Microsoft, and letting Apple be the only player.
I love Linux, and I want Linux to win the desktop, but they have to win by being superior than Microsoft, not by false claims, or government intervention. Otherwise, I would end up either having to pay Apple thousands of dollars, or having Linux and trying to figure how to setup or fix something for hours. This is the future you want for people.
I think the secret of Microsoft’s success is persistence, vision and unity. First, too many companies give up on a product within the first year or two. Microsoft assumes their first version won’t be a market leader but they keep pushing and improving it. Usually the competition gets greedy or lazy and they move in. Second, Microsoft has always wanted to be the low cost high volume seller, often forgoing maximum profits for maximum market penetration; except for a few exceptions like the old Hewlett-Packard and Japanese companies this gives Microsoft a huge advantage as their competition keeps the prices high to maintain sales volume in dollar terms while letting market share slip away. Finally, Microsoft is tremendously aggressive and has no problem leveraging their advantages in one area towards assisting other products; in most companies the various subdivisions often work independently or at cross purposes.
Windows Client: “Basically the competition is clear: a huge install base and a slow growing PC market” – translation: the competition is ourselves. Oh, the troubles of having a monopoly.
Office: “This year we are hiring 500 additional sales people just to sell Office and the value of Office to organizations.” – translation: a WP is a WP is a WP. We can’t hire more programmers and make it better; just hire more sales personnel to convince people that it’s $500 better than OpenOffice.org
Servers: “it is hard to compete with free …Unix is shrinking, Novell is dying, and basically we have to grow market share as Linux also grows market share. We need to have more total value to organizations than Linux” – translation: we’re trying to catch up with Linux technically; we can’t beat it on price either. Let’s imply that we’re killing off other Unices so there seems to be a plus-side here…
“We’re growing about twice as fast in the database market as Oracle is; as Oracle loses the database market, it is in difficult shape” – see “Windows Clients” above, though Oracle do not have a monopoly, just a good product
Desktop: “We kept at it, and WordPerfect stumbled” – translation: We gave our Word developers more information about the Windows API than we gave WordPerfect, and WordPerfect stumbled.
“we developed NT, kept at it, and Novell gave that market to us by its mistakes.” – granted.
Commodity:
Xbox:”we have a competency at building platforms….bring our TV efforts together with Xbox over time, and our e-home initiatives for home networking. If we do that right, we can have a pretty good business in five years.” – too scary for me to think about for too long:)
Mobile Phones: “That’s a challenge because handset manufacturers are not interested in becoming captive to a technology that will ultimately place a burden on their own profits.” – translation: d’oh! These guys aren’t as stupid as Joe Public
“Second, Microsoft has always wanted to be the low cost high volume seller, often forgoing maximum profits for maximum market penetration…”
I think this is the best point of this discussion so far. Amiga computers, NeXT cubes/stations and BeBoxes were all ridiculously superior to the typical PC of their day, but they always cost a lot more money as a direct result of this fact, IIRC. NeXT never made a profit at any point during it’s history and only sold a few hundreed thousand boxes overall in all that time. The cost of engineering perfection was just too high for the market to bear. It’s as simple as that.
I took a look at an old NeXT brochure (from 1992) recently and it seems like absolutely everything about that company was damned near perfect in terms of aesthetics – the operating system, the hardware design, the look-and-feel of the GUI, the development tools…everything! When I look at Apple today I just don’t feel the same way about them aesthetically as I did about NeXT.
The NeXT cube pictured in that 10 year-old document gives you the impression that it is a prototype for a machine that is going to be produced 10 years into the future from now, it still looks that slick even today. But we all know NeXT failed because its products were too good, just like the Tucker Torpedo (look it up).
Stop frothing at the mouth. I never said MS couldn’t offer a browser. In fact, I have argued on this board that MS should offer a complete lineup of iApps, rather than rely on the third-party crap that’s currently available for editing movies and organizing photos on Windows.
The difference is MS makes it impossible to remove their stuff, and back in the Netscape days took all kinds of steps to bury them including exclusionary deals with hardware guys. Even now, nobody in the antitrust litigation is arguing that MS can’t offer software, just that they can’t make it impossible to remove theirs.
And MS is back at it again. In the NY Times yesterday, there was an article about how if you cannot remove Windows Media 9. You have to do a system restore and thereby lose all the apps you installed since you put in WM 9. Oh boy, there they go again!
Your assertion that I want Apple to somehow take over the world and charge high prices too everyone is absurd. I think I have been quite clear that it’s Linux that has the possibility of displacing the current dominance of MS. Apple is a niche market, like a BMW or Mercedes. They are offering stuff on the leading edge for people who will pay for it, also a more complete package for people who know less about computers and want it all together (the hardware, the OS, the apps, the web services – that’s worth more to some people). Corporations (except graphics guys) have no need for Apple.
Linux doesn’t have to beat MS by being, as your put it, “superior”
They can beat them by being almost as good and a whole lot cheaper.
“I refuse to believe that Bill G or Steve B are geniuses. They are definately better deceivers, and definately luckier. They were at the right place at the right time, while I was crawling on my hands and knees and crapping my diapers.”
Hating Microsoft ? Yes, there’s plenty of reason to.
Saying they are funtamentally evil ? Depend on your point of view, so yes, someone can.
When some peoples start a company from scratch in a domain no experts give a dam, and over *20 YEARS* just keep growing and become an empire, saying it is simply “luck” and not “brilliant” at all, it’s just crap.
All this talk about Persistence, and Hard Work by MS is missing something.
It’s a whole lot easier to be “persistent” when you have an untouchable cash cow Windows monopoly. Yes, you can keep lowering your prices to gain share and bleeding your competitor dry — when that competitor doesn’t have that cash cow to fall back on (Novell, Wordperfect anyone?)
Consumers only benefit from predatory pricing in the short run. MS forced down office app prices initially, but now they make 80 percent profit (8 billion a year) from — that’s right — a word processor, a spreadsheet, a slide program and an email/calendar program.
appleforever, are you kidding or what? You are getting angry with the fact that it is impossible to remove MS stuff, but you don’t even know that Quicktime is built into the Operating System. It is more impossible to remove Quicktime from Mac OS X, than it is to remove MS Media Player from Windows. Quicktime is right in the OS.
Right at the time I think you are saying something totally unreasonable, you come and say something even more unreasonable.
By the way Apple is not a niche market. Apple is good at keeping loyal customers who are willing to pay more for less, thinking that they get some sort very nice computes, some exotic computers. Believe me after 20 years, Apple will not be here anymore unless they do something really good. The difference will be so obvious that, they will go bankrupt. I have seen Mac OS 10.2, its response time is terrible, even with this new Quartz. Resizing a window takes approximately 0.5 second, I realize that computer is doing something to resize the window and this computer is top of the line mac.
while BG and SB might be brilliant at running their company, that still does not negate the fact that they were lucky to be choosen by IBM. if CP/M or BSD had been choosen, then I wager that BG would have gone back to get his MBA and be working at IBM or some other large corperation in middle managment.
>>>while BG and SB might be brilliant at running their company, that still does not negate the fact that they were lucky to be choosen by IBM. if CP/M or BSD had been choosen, then I wager that BG would have gone back to get his MBA and be working at IBM or some other large corperation in middle managment.
There are too many if’s….
The one big decision Gates made was that he insisted in keeping the rights to DOS.
Even if IBM had chosen CP/M, there was no indication that the CP/M owners would insist on just selling licenses of CP/M to IBM. If IBM chose CP/M and bought it outright, there would not be the PC clone.
They were really lucky that IBM was under anti-trust investigations at the time, so that IBM didn’t insist on buying the IP assets of DOS (and instead of just getting a license for DOS).
We kept at it, and WordPerfect stumbled” – translation: We gave our Word developers more information about the Windows API than we gave WordPerfect, and WordPerfect stumbled.
You don’t think the fact that Word was $89-129 while WordPerfect was retail $495 might have had anything to do with it?
I think I made clear that apple is not really relevant to the question whether MS will continue to dominate. Linux is the only threat to MS, and Ballmer has identified it as such.
I think you are confusing Quicktime player with Quicktime services in the OS. The player is a video viewer, like Windows Media 9 (WM 9 also is audio). But you can drag Quicktime player into the trash at any time (just like iTunes, iMovie, etc.)
Quicktime also is embedded in Apple’s OS, but that’s just an underlying service that any application can take advantage of. For example, After Effects stores stuff in a quicktime format. Graphicconverter (a shareware photo editing program) uses quicktime. It actually helps 3d parties develop multimedia apps for the mac, since they don’t have to write all the code to handle the different formats and so on. I don’t think adding these services to the OS, and allowing any programmer to use them, can be viewed as anticompetive.
Why not stop being an idiot?
As I said, predatory pricing means lower prices at first, until the competition is eliminated, and then higher prices later than would otherwise exist. That’s what we have now with MS’s 80 percent profit rate on Office.
elver: A man that pisses others off is a “monopolist” but ends up making a lot of money. A man with a vision and a good OS is a “fearless leader” but ends up selling his company for $11 million.
Be Inc. lack business foresight, and is ran by engineers, not businessmen. Heck, JLG forgot the main marketing rule: make something to sell, not sell something you made. He was also very market share/ expansion orientated, not bottom line orientated.
Plus, he tried to depend on the good will of other companies.
While yes, he had great ideas for his products, but among those suing Microsoft for antitrust violations, this is the most pathetic.
What I have seen from Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer like in ttestimonials or many other statement they had made over the years with regard to future computing, I most certainly don’t see them as geniuses.
Your idea on geniuses is who can make the best product, not he who is the best businessmen. Guess what? Welcome to the capitalist world, the best is always the one best marketed.
The only reason there are not more competitors — and therefore lower prices and better product — for you and me is the COMPLETE AND UTTER LACK OF COMPETITION.
AND THAT YOU SHOULD BLAME THE COMPETITION, not Microsoft. I have a thousand times why Microsoft won to IBM and Mac OS (mainly because it was running on commodity hardware)
appleforever: They achieved this partly by uncompetitive conduct (eg not dislosing APIs to Wordperfect as quickly as to their own programmers).
Funny, they never released any of their formats before they got the monopoly. I think you should blame the competition, rather than Microsoft, for their failures. For example, on WordPerfect, it was Novell’s fault it can’t run properly on Windows, not Microsoft’s. Notice as soon Corel bought it from Novell, (Corel, BTW, was a competitor to Microsoft), it ran perfectly on Windows.
appleforever: But even if MS got this file-format enforced monopoly through “perserverence” it’s still VERY VERY bad for consumers.
I think it is very bad for consumers that competitors just sit around and whine while the market get’s no choice. For example, let me take Sun StarOffice. Go and count how many people that are working on reverse engineering Office’s file formats. You don’t even need two hands to do so.
It is that bad.
It is really up to their competitors to do something right, not Microsoft.
appleforever: If that doesn’t work, it’s time for government intervention.
Government intervention is always bad.
Office and Windows are remarkably low tech software today, not exactly “cutting edge.”
While we have debated about Windows being better or worse than their competitors A LOT of times, I wonder WHAT FUCKING PRODUCT HAS AS MANY FEATURES AS MS OFFICE?!?
appleforever: All without government intervention (well some, since the antitrust trial is putting some limits on MS’s conduct). Neverthless, it will be remarkable if Linux makes this happen.
If weren’t for the antitrust courts, things would be much better for Linux in the long run. Because one of the settlement requirements is that Microsoft what charge evenly between OEMs the price of Windows based on the quantity they are selling, and without this, this would open a lot of doors for Linux in the Asian market.
Leonardo Boiko: Gates is not a good programmer, nor a good scientist.
How would you know whether he is a good coder or not? the last thing is coded was in the late 70’s.
Since I don’t belive in money at all, I think they are just unethical.
Amazingly, they would be ethical just by reducing their market share to 70%.
appleforever: I said maybe Ballmer is banking on the consumer market as a continued source of profitable sales (for at least Windows).
Hardly. The consumer market makes around 1/4 of the sales of Windows and Office combined.
Yea, I guess if you use number of features, maybe it’s not 90 percent. MS does keep adding features and features. But how many are really important to corporate users?
Bang, there’s where every open source projects go wrong. They *think* their target market DOESN’T need those features. My dad and my aunt uses Excel. They won’t be moving to anything from their competitors anytime soon, because of lack of features. The funny thing is that they both depend on different sets of features.
One person mentioned it about a month ago that the feature in Word to do biblography (or was it biography, or something like that) was reason enough to buy the software. And I never heard of that feature before in my life.
99% of the users use 1% of the features Office provide. But each group of users uses a different 1%.
Sergio: I love Linux, and I want Linux to win the desktop, but they have to win by being superior than Microsoft, not by false claims, or government intervention
They would win much faster without government intervention. And they would win not by being superior but by just being a commodity. I love Linux myself, everytime I hear good news about it, my heart leaps up for joy. But that doesn’t make me make false claims on MS.
Steve: We can’t hire more programmers and make it better; just hire more sales personnel to convince people that it’s $500 better than OpenOffice.org
LOL. Anyway, Microsoft doesn’t need sales people to tell them Office is $400-600 better OpenOffice.org, people using it would know that themselves. For me, OpenOffice.org suites my needs. But when I’m doing something simple, I find myself using KOffice. When something complex, I find myself booting into Windows and using Office.
Steve: We gave our Word developers more information about the Windows API than we gave WordPerfect, and WordPerfect stumbled.
Then i wonder, why was Corel more successful with WP Office port to Windows than Novell? (This was pre-truce Corel, they were competitors to MS)
appleforever: In fact, I have argued on this board that MS should offer a complete lineup of iApps
Oh really? What me to remind you of one thread where you did so? http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=1737
appleforever: The difference is MS makes it impossible to remove their stuff
Because it is. For example, IE. The entire Windows shell depends on DLLs provided by IE. Plus, tonnes of applications depend in some way or another on IE, other than help files in which all new products do depend on IE.
Removing IE is like removing the GDI, or kernel32.dll. It would cause havoc.
appleforever: It’s a whole lot easier to be “persistent” when you have an untouchable cash cow Windows monopoly.
They were persistant before they had that much money. Besides, their main cash cow is Office.
Sergio: The difference will be so obvious that, they will go bankrupt.
This time I have to disagree with you. Apple bottom line is brought in by their niche market, and as long they can keep these niches profitable and their’s only, they would survive.
Sergio
This thread is not about Apple.
But you are confused about Quicktime. It’s two things. First, Quicktime player is like Windows Media 9 player (except it’s only video). You can delete it by dragging it to the trash, just like you can delete iMovie or iTunes.
Quicktime also is a set of multimedia services in the OS (that’s what’s embedded and can’t be removed). But any app can take advantage of those services, including 3d party apps like After Effects, Graphicconverter, etc.
You can delete IE without breaking apps by deleting iexplorer.exe, but you won’t save much space.
appleforever:
Windows Media Player 9 is also in beta stages.
“This is not about Apple”. Look I don’t know what to say about this. You couldn’t answer my questions about Apple and defend it, you come and say “This is not about Apple”. Of course this is not about Apple, but we are talking about Apple in the MS context of course. You are accusing Microsoft of something, which is exactly done by Apple on its own OS. You can’t defend Apple, and you come and say “This is not about Apple”. That’s it, right? This is not about Apple, Apple can do whatever it wants, it is ok for them to do that, but we are discussing Microsoft here, so we can throw whatever we want to it, we can accuse Microsoft of everything, but even there is an example in another company, we can’t talk about it, because this is about Microsoft.
Anyway, obviously you couldn’t find any reasonable explanation of it. Your only explanation of removing Quicktime is laughable. You can also delete Media Player by simply deleting its executables. It is that simple my friend. You can also disassocaite any file type of media player.
Your explanation of removing Quicktime is really funny. You say you can remove Quicktime player. Now as I remember it right, some people was complaining about new Windows XP feature, which is hiding MS software, such as explorer and so on, and choosing other software. They were saying that, even you hide it, you really don’t delete it. It is still there. Now, according to the same logic, removing Quicktime is the same. You can never delete Quicktime, because it is right in the OS. Also I can not use Windows Media Player with Apple, because Apple used Quicktime in its Os. So no developer will write any application for Windows Media player. Instead they will all use Quicktime in their applications. Well obviously this is very very uncompetitive as you put it, because this was your logic against Microsoft all the time. Apple actively prevents any other media format to compete in its own platform. This is an evil stuff of course. Now as an evil company Apple, puts its own proprietary media format in its os, but you don’t even complain about it. Why, well obviously we are not discussing Apple here, right?
Ok then let’s discuss Microsoft. Microsoft is putting its own proprietary media program in its os, and this is wrong in the first place because it sacrifices other programs, but it is even a bigger sin because now you can’t remove it. Here is the only nice thing to tell is that it is a convenience if I find the same program in every Windows, because it makes it easier for me to use these programs, instead of using different programs for listening to music, I will know that there is at least one program which I know how to use. Also Windows Media Player make it possible for third party developers to implement software which will use Windows Media Player. This is also a plus for me as a consumer. I am sorry here, but my mind still goes to Apple example, because it is very wrong to be incosistent in your logic system. If you say that it is ok for Apple to bundle stuff, but not ok for Microsoft, you become pretty biased. You have to a consistent logic. Trying to defend this thing with the monopoly thing is also not correct, because in the software business we never had similar cases. You can not throw a simple idea without explaining why it should be the case. You have to lay down the facts why a software monopoly shouldn’t be allowed to include certain other software stuff. You need to be very very careful about what you are allowing and what you are not allowing. These rules are not only for Microsoft. Once you lay down such rules, many companies may get sued because they are monopolies in their respective markets. For example, I think Apple is also a monopoly in its own industry. For example, once I buy a mac, I am stuck with mac os. The only other option is linux, which is not as strong as mac os. Now once you lay down such rules with careful considerations, you can say anything you want, but determining such rules is pretty hard. Why don’t we include virtual memory manager, why don’t we make the OS that much modular.
Amiga was more expensive? I bought an Amiga 500 w/ 1MB RAM in 1989 for 1500 Australian Dollars including a screen and a tonne of games. Considerably cheaper than an IBM-Compatible. I suggest that you give your memory a quick clean.
this coming from a guy who said the internet is a fad or 640 k is enough.
Lets face it once IBM chose microsoft as the supplier of the PC OS the game was over.
IBM was the company most companies trusted at the time and bought their computers from.( actually they’ve been a favorite for decades.) For business PC’s apple ,atari,commodore et al were dead from the start.
Once you control the OS that are installed on most business workstations, than forget about competing against MS on their OWN OS.
Sorry i give then as much credit as people who win the lotto.
Anybody else would have gotten to monopoly status alot sooner( bill gates isnt the only smart,sneering,treacherous geek), but MS’s OS and software were so damn kludgy it took them longer.
Actually it still is kludge. a bunch of hackers got a hacked up unix to be stable faster than MS could.
A disgrace to the field of computer science. As compared to other engineering fields, as long as microsoft as at the helm, you might as well as call the field junk science.
As I said, predatory pricing means lower prices at first, until the competition is eliminated, and then higher prices later than would otherwise exist. That’s what we have now with MS’s 80 percent profit rate on Office.
The fact is the prices on office today are not much higher then they were during the “price war”. Prior to the price wars: word processing and spreadsheets were $495 and databases $595; presentation sofware like Harvard Graphics was in the $395-595 range… Microsoft cut the price by 80% and even today the complete office suite is a few hundred dollars.
I seem to remember a lot of people buying Atari ST’s at the time simply because Amigas were substantially more expensive, even though they probably would have preferred to own an Amiga if they could. Price was the only thing Atari could compete on and the only reason they sold any ST’s at all back then, IIRC.
Very hard for me to believe that Amigas were as affordable as vanilla PC-clones back in the 80’s, let alone moreso, as you claim. You may be right I guess, at least as far as Oz is concerned (although I don’t know why prices should be any different down there). This was so long ago now that it seems like another life to me, so my memory of it may be wrong.
Sergio: So no developer will write any application for Windows Media player.
And that would be quite impossible. The Mac version of WMP, IIRC, is a mostly Java app made to play WMP formats. It isn’t built in the same design as WMP for Windows. (Correct me if I’m wrong).
But even with that, your point still stands.
Matthew Gardiner: Amiga was more expensive? I bought an Amiga 500 w/ 1MB RAM in 1989 for 1500 Australian Dollars including a screen and a tonne of games. Considerably cheaper than an IBM-Compatible. I suggest that you give your memory a quick clean.
True. While current AmigaOnes is more expensive than PC counterparts (what isn’t?), back then before Commodore bankrupted, Amiga prices were lower than the equilevent PC. Amiga prices shoted up when Commodore bankrupted.
grecoman: For business PC’s apple ,atari,commodore et al were dead from the start.
Apple, for a long long time, didn’t targeted the corporate market. Even know, they have no target over it. The same goes for Atari. As for Commodore, it was used in many companies, and the same goes for Amiga. Commodore bankrupted not because it had a bad business plan, or bad products or bad marketing, but rather two greedy old men.
grecoman: Actually it still is kludge. a bunch of hackers got a hacked up unix to be stable faster than MS could.
Until recently, Microsoft never bothered with security. And even with Trustworthy Computing in place, it is hard to change a corporate culture. Even Alkin said that he was dissapointed with Win .NEt Server 2003 security.
Gil Bates: Very hard for me to believe that Amigas were as affordable as vanilla PC-clones back in the 80’s, let alone moreso, as you claim.
Vanilla PCs back then isn’t as commodotized as Amiga’s hardware and require many expensive custom parts. In fact, during Amiga best years, Compaq didn’t exist (the people that made clone PCs possible).
But heck, unlike you guys, I wasn’t borned back then, this is just what I read in history. 🙂
The only PC companies in Oz at the time, like NZ, were the large, name brand ones like Compaq, Digital, IBM etc etc.
Atari’s were pretty good, and I quite liked the GUI. One nifty thing was that many of the hardware parts that worked on the Amiga also could be plugged in and used on the Atari. Mice was the best example of that.
Also, during that time, they had a major hold in the Education market, along with the old BBC Micro’s.
Hence, when I compare retail pricing, people say that Macs are more expensive, even though when you go into Dick Smiths, if you were to include all what you get with a Mac on a PC, the price is even.
bill gates isnt the only smart,sneering,treacherous geek
Bill Gates is actually a good speaker, and kind as long as you’re not trying to put Microsoft out of business. Charity? Bill Gates is by far the best contributor. Even dividing by his net worth. He doesn’t even need to compete anymore.
Do you know how backstabbing Silicon Valley really is? No, you do not. Did you know how arrogant Netscape was, and how horrible they were to their partners? No, you do not. Do you really want an Apple charging far higher prices than the commodity boxen you have? You know the answer.
You probably smoke cigs from Philip Morris, a far worse monopoly, drive cars from General Motors, a company which destroyed the US light rail system after WWII, eat at McDonalds, and get medicine from a large pharmaceutical. All of these companies have done far worse to the world than offend your software engineering sensibilities and given you cheap computing.
If you want docmentation for all these charges I’ve made against these companies, I’ll post them when anyone asks.
Its seems your post has broken rule number one in the osnews terms of use.
You shouted F*** in your post.
Eugenia, please proptly mod this post down.
Like it or not, U.S. antitrust law allows nonmonopolies (Apple) to do things that monopolies can’t do. The idea (common sense) is that companies with a small share can’t really do as much that can hurt compeitors as a monopoloy
Apple does not legally have a monopoly in desktop computers or OS because they have less than 10 percent share of the market. You can call Apple a “hardware monopoly” all you want, but you would get laughed out of court if you filed a suit alleging Apple had a monopoloy.
Apple will be lucky if it survives. It almost died in 1997. How can such a company do anything that harms the market (like MS can do)? If you don’t like the law, talk to your Congressman (assuming you are a US citizen).
appleforever, I am sorry to say this but your reasoning is very weak. You just mention about something very briefly, without any depth and comprehension.
I mean you say something that doesn’t have a good point.
I was saying that Apple could be considered as a monopoly if you prove that Apple has its own industry. For example if I am a software developer, I need to determine which platform I am writing for. It is not so easy to change platforms. I need to know which platform I am targeting. Assuming that I am writing a software like Watson, and Apple decided to imitate what I am doing. Like the Netscape vs IE Explorer example, this could be considered to be a violation of law. Now you say that, since Apple is not a monopoly it does have the right to do that, but effectively by shutting down my company it does eliminate the competiton in this area in this market. I can not rewrite my software for the other platform right away. So basically in Mac OS people would have less choice.
Now regarding being a US citizen or not, I don’t know what does it have to do with our discussion. I bet you didn’t read any of those laws, you have no idea about the details of what is considered to be a monopoly and what is not. You just think that Apple can not be considered to be a monopoly, because you never considered, or even thought about it. You define a desktop OS market, what happens if I define the market as the OS market. I mean these are very technical questions which you didn’t think about at all. First show that you considered the cases and show me that Apple is not a monopoly.
Look before DOJ picked up this anti-trust case against Microsoft, another government organization investigated the allegations and they dropped the case, but even this was the case DOJ picked it anyway.
Now states want some remedies which are not possible to implement, and I think that it doesn’t matter what law says. Look at the judge’s break down decision. The upper court reversed that decision, and it seems to me that these decisions are like somewhat random. Sometimes they are not necessarily based on the law at all. Sometimes those decisions are highly subjective. A judge says that this company should be broken down according to the laws, and others say that, no this is not the correct remedy, and you also seem to say that law is whatever you say, without even thinking about it.
By the way, your idea that Apple can do whatever it wants because the law permits it is not correct. You never analyzed the situation at all. Here is the thing, suing a company is a long process, very costly. Now what will people really gain if they go after Apple? Not much, it is already a small company. But what will people gain if they go after Microsoft? Got the point? It is as simple as that. There is nothing magical about it. If there is a possibility of making any profit or money, any lawyer will go after any company. It is not necessarily the law, it is the process of suing some company, somebody. There is always a chance of persuading the judge that you are right. Take fast food example!
Anyone with total lack of ethics and moral could rule the big game called capitalism, it just takes some cheating, and some luck.
But to me cheating kills the fun, and I can’t find any pride in winning a game if I cheated. It doesn’t matter if noone knows about it, cause I will know about it.
And everyone hates the guy who wins by cheating. I think that’s where part of the hate against MS comes from.
A smart man is a man who wins the game by playing along the rules. He is very tactical, and his main goal is to win the game. But cheating is not an option.
A brilliant man is a man who doesn’t care about winning, he just enjoys being in the game, and he enjoys the company of the other players. He is even ready to loose a few rounds just to keep them in the game.
I’m not an expert on what libraries are available under Windows, but I picked up a bit from the faq for DivX. It implied that Windows has a generic OS level codec managing media API (stretching on definition there), suporting Video for Windows files ( http://support.divx.com/cgi-bin/wonderdesk.cgi?db=faq&uid=default&f… ). That would be QuickTime’s peer, *not* Media Player. I don’t see anyone arguing that MS should rip out their media API from windows.
The other half of this is that you can write your own player to compete with QuickTime Player, and you get *all* of the media formats it supports for free. Another part of the DivX FAQ leads me to belive that Media Player contains the code to play several formats internally, and does not share them back to the OS ( http://support.divx.com/cgi-bin/wonderdesk.cgi?db=faq&uid=default&f… ). I know it certainly doesn’t do it for Mac OS.
So while we are asking for major chunks of API to be removable, I think microsoft should be forced to make DirectX removable and allow for competing APIs to be hooked in, like SDL.
QuickTime does so many things in Mac OS, and is probably used in the majority of Mac Apps. It’s a lot easier to make a couple of QT calls than to distribute libpng with your App.
Matthew Gardiner: Hence, when I compare retail pricing, people say that Macs are more expensive, even though when you go into Dick Smiths, if you were to include all what you get with a Mac on a PC, the price is even.
Not really. I could get a Dell at a much cheaper price than an eMac, and the only thing it would lack is a redudant gigabit ethernet port (comes with 10/100 NIC).
Oh wait, Dell isn’t retail…
Robert Hanlin: If you want docmentation for all these charges I’ve made against these companies, I’ll post them when anyone asks.
Email me about your charges against McDonalds (I know what GM, Morris, and medicine companies did/does).
Anonymous: You shouted F*** in your post.
Ironically, i never sweared at anyone but Speed and appleforver and Stof before.
Besides, Eugenia used the f-word several times, I’m sure Eugenia would understand. Eugenia made that rule so you won’t get those perveted posts Slashdot always get. Plus, even if she mods my post down, the main point of the post is already fulfiled, appleforever read it.
appleforever: Like it or not, U.S. antitrust law allows nonmonopolies (Apple) to do things that monopolies can’t do.
Apple is certainly a monopoly over the PowerPC workstation market, with more tha 70% of the market share. Plus, Apple successfully manage to kill off most competition off this market (PowerPC workstations), by, among other things, failure to abide by previously agreed standards fast enough and killing of Mac clones.
appleforever: How can such a company do anything that harms the market (like MS can do)?]
It did plenty of harm. It removes a lot of potential demand for PowerPC processors by chasing Microsoft away, and killing Mac clones. As the result of the lack of demand, they are killing the entire market as PowerPCs gets more and more left behind.
Plus, other damages include almost killing Karelia….. (I think you get the point by now. You now realize that Apple would be in deep trouble if a sourgrape sues Apple in court).
appleforever, you still haven’t proven your pro-antitrust stance.
rain: Anyone with total lack of ethics and moral could rule the big game called capitalism, it just takes some cheating, and some luck.
You don’t need to be unethical to become rich or dominate under a capitalist enviroment. Just smart and know a great deal about marketing.
Besides, Microsoft wouldn’t be called unethical if weren’t for the courtcase and the whole media frenzy over it.
nnooiissee: That would be QuickTime’s peer, *not* Media Player.
It is
1) Part of WMP they want out.
2) Isn’t the only part of WMP that is in the OS.
nnooiissee: So while we are asking for major chunks of API to be removable, I think microsoft should be forced to make DirectX removable and allow for competing APIs to be hooked in, like SDL.
Why must DirectX be removable. DirectX is used is so many applications, especially games, and would be used in the shell in Longhorn (if all goes well). SDL is a library that can be installed in Windows, and in my experience, it is faster on Windows than on Linux. So I don’t see the problem here.
Game developers would never move away from DirectX, no other API is as good as it in making games.
nnooiissee: It’s a lot easier to make a couple of QT calls than to distribute libpng with your App.
In the same vein, it is much easier making a couple mshtml.dll calls, than distributing Gecko with your app.
Sergio, I am a US lawyer and have studied antitrust law. Monopolies are subject to greater scrutiny than nonmonopolies under U.S. law. We can argue about whether that is right or wrong, but it is the law.
Sure Apple can break the antitrust law, but they get a lot less scrutiny under the law simply because they can’t push the market around like MS can.
Rajan, you seem (correct me if I am wrong) to think antitrust law, in its entirety should be done away with. That is not a mainstream view, it is very unlikely to happen anytime soon. I am pro-antitrust law in that I think the law should not be done away with and should be enforced, appropriately. Whether it is being applied to MS appropriately is a difficult question that I don’t think we can really settle in this thread.
A monopoly, one that is subject to greater scrutiny under US antitrust law, has to exercise what is called “market power”. Rajan and Sergio may not know this, but under US law 3 producers can get together and agree to fix prices, but if they lack market power (the ability to actually force prices up because they collectively have a large enough portion of the market), then they will not be liable for antitrust damages.
Sounds strange but it’s true under US law. You have to have a large enough share of the market to actually force prices up, or force out a competitor (with an exclusionary deal, for example). US antitrust law has simply decided that, if you have 10 percent of the market, you just can’t do enough harm typically because your competition keeps you at bay. If 3 producers try to raise prices, but there are 4 other producers that are not part of the conspiracy, then prices typically don’t go up.
Apple doesn’t have market power in the PC market, which is the relavant market. That’s what Apple makes – PCs with OS’s. You can’t say Apple has a monopoly for “Powerpc” workstation because you are defining the market too narrowly. Yes, VW has a monopoly for Bugs. Yes, Ford has a monopoly for Explorers. But such ideas are just dumb from an an antitrust law perspective.
You would get lauged out of court if you filed a lawsuit alleging that Apple had a monopoly. I am not arguing about this anymore with rajan and sergio about this because they are just ignorant about the law.
Sergio, take a look, someone else is saying exactly what I did. Quicktime, first, is a set of open APIs that any app can use, including 3d party apps.
Quicktime PLAYER has the word “Quicktime” in it, but all it is a player. And you can delete it.
I know this is difficult for you sergio — you have to get past the fact that the word “quicktime” appears both in connection with the APIs and the Player. But if you think real hard Sergio, you might be able to figure it out. One more time, there’s APIs that can’t be removed, but any program can use, and quicktime player you can delete. Got it?
As I understood the NY times article, the only way to remove the player was to do a system restore.
On the mac, you delete Quicktime player or iTunes by dragging them out of the dock and out of the applications folder into the trash.
This is just a question, but couldn’t MS do something similar? I have no problem with some DLLs and so on being left behind (that other apps can use). But what about the player app itself that you double click. Why should removing that from the start menu, etc. require a system restore?
rajan r: Why must DirectX be removable. DirectX is used is so many applications, especially games, and would be used in the shell in Longhorn (if all goes well). SDL is a library that can be installed in Windows, and in my experience, it is faster on Windows than on Linux. So I don’t see the problem here.
Game developers would never move away from DirectX, no other API is as good as it in making games.
I was actually making a joke here. I don’t endorse removing APIs (unless, of course, they are undocumented and allow unfair cometition of first party Apps, which is something apple is doing at the moment).
All this seems like the .Net/My.Net review debacle. QuickTime Player uses the word QuickTime in its name, and uses QT, but it is nothing more than a convient tool shipped with QT. It provides no unique functionality.
<<Without the operating system being a breakthrough, the PC industry won’t grow>>.
Well, I guess what MS means by breakthrough is a costly launch on tv, along with an ad featuring some guy flying over his colleagues, …, forget about technical innovation. Did anyone notice that Windows XP SP1 is the same size, approximately, as NetBSD 1.6 (i386 iso, for the entire OS) ? Now, that’s quite a feat to accomplish. It’s strange to see that the article doesn’t even mention the BSDs when talking about the server market. Obviously, if you don’t sell something, you’re not considered as a threat by Microsoft.
Hotmail sucked in 1995 and still does in 2002. I haven’t checked it but I guess it’s worse than anything else when it comes to spam.
Etienne, I have to agree with you.
But oh, I forgot, I’m just bashing MS so MS must be innovative. Let’s be real, this company’s main focus is on achieving lock-in. Sometimes they innovate a little to get to the point of lock in (Office in the early days), but then once they got the lock in, it’s time for those non-upgrades that cost $$$$ forever. Great business plan, as long as you don’t mind your customers hating you.
appleforever: A monopoly, one that is subject to greater scrutiny under US antitrust law, has to exercise what is called “market power”.
Apple has a great degree in market power in the desktop PowerPC market. They manage to secure deals with IBM and especially Motorola to jack up the prices of their top ends used in Apple’s top ends in what can be assume as an anti-competitive manner.
The entire PowerPC market in fact would be a thousand times difference if Apple had to follow anti trust laws (for example, PowerPCs would still be able to keep up with x86, they would be MUCH cheaper, and well, much BETTER).
appleforever: Rajan and Sergio may not know this, but under US law 3 producers can get together and agree to fix prices
Price fixing isn’t the only anti-competitive act banned under antitrust laws. Stop acting as if I don’t know ANYTHING about antitrust laws.
Anyway, IBM, Apple, and Motorola successfully chased many companies out of PowerPC and into other architectures. One of those companies is currently suing Microsoft for antitrust violations.
Apple doesn’t have market power in the PC market, which is the relavant market.
Unless you haven’t notice, Apple ISN’T part of the PC market. The PC market, for example, uses x86 processors.
My point isn’t in a PC market, but in a PowerPC market. It would be just the same as Microsoft saying in court, “We don’t have a monopoly, we don’t control the overall OS market”.
The entire computing market is divided into different markets. Each of these markets is also divided into new markets.
appleforever: , VW has a monopoly for Bugs. Yes, Ford has a monopoly for Explorers.
Unless you haven’t noticed, VM and Ford are sole providers of this vehicles. Apple isn’t a sole provider of PowerPC machines. Call me when Ford gets a monopoly in cars, okay?
appleforever: You would get lauged out of court if you filed a lawsuit alleging that Apple had a monopoly.
Actually, no. Apple does have a monopoly in the PowerPC desktop/workstation market because they have more than 70% of the market share in that market.
The reason why nobody sued is that Apple is
a) a small company, how much can you get?
b) Most of the companies hurted by Apple is too poor to sue and get noticed by the DOJ.
Now, you haven’t prove me wrong in this case, just repeated your claim that Apple isn’t a monopoly.
appleforever: As I understood the NY times article, the only way to remove the player was to do a system restore.
This is only for Windows XP and Windows Me, and would be fixed in later beta releases.
Also, the entire player itself won’t be able to be removed from the OS if it is bundled with the OS, but you can hide it via “Set Program Access and Defaults”, which is just as useful as removing QuickTime *Player* from Mac OS X.
You may save more space with deleting the front ends of Quicktime, but heck, QT is bloated (more so than WMP), so the space difference isn’t that great.
appleforever: This is just a question, but couldn’t MS do something similar?
This method may be great from the usablity and UI stand point of view, but isn’t so from the technical point of view. This methods causes applications’ binaries to be larger.
Etienne Girard: Did anyone notice that Windows XP SP1 is the same size, approximately, as NetBSD 1.6 (i386 iso, for the entire OS) ?
Did you notice that while NetBSD gives a lot of functionality for a UNIX guru, it gives little of the features – many of whom takes a lot of space, compared to Windows XP.
I can say, isn’t NetBSD bloated, cause my Palm OS installation takes much less space…
Etienne Girard: Hotmail sucked in 1995 and still does in 2002. I haven’t checked it but I guess it’s worse than anything else when it comes to spam.
Hotmail sucks for you because it is used by a lot of people (most used BTW), therefore it becomes a target for spam. once upon a time, spam on RocketMail is a rare thing, but as soon it was bought by Yahoo, spam became a comman place.
appleforever: Let’s be real, this company’s main focus is on achieving lock-in.
And Apple doesn’t? LOL. I could always move to another office suite anyday, the problem is that no office suite is AS GOOD as Office XP. You should blame the COMPETITORS, not Microsoft themselve.
appleforever: Sometimes they innovate a little to get to the point of lock in (Office in the early days), but then once they got the lock in, it’s time for those non-upgrades that cost $$$$ forever.
If Microsoft innovated a little in the early days of Office, then Apple never innovate anything with Mac OS in the past few years. Anyway, for people that are happy with their current installation of Office and its features – they stick to that version, until there is a compeling reason to upgrade. Most of the Office users I know still uses Office 97, not because Office XP sucks, but just because Office XP doesn’t offer them any features that would justify the cost. I know also of a group of Office XP users who upgraded from things like Office 95 and Office 97, and one even from office 2000 because of various features.
The same people that buy “PowerPC desktop/workstations” could buy an intel itanium workstation. People that buy a XP-loaded Dell could have bought a mac. I could sell my macs on ebay and buy a Dell. These are all competing products. Competing products are in the SAME market, they don’t comprise different markets.
Microsoft does not have to have 100% of the market to be a monopoly under the law. It has 97 percent or whatever of the PC market (for the OS component of the PC).
It is silly to say that “IBM, Apple, and Motorola successfully chased many companies out of PowerPC and into other architectures.” No, IBM, Apple and Motorola formed a joint venture of sorts to make a microprocessor, which then competes with Intel and AMD processors.
By the way, nothing stopped MS or anyone else from making OS’s to run on Powerpc. There is powerpc linux. It appears that the Powerpc guys did not offer a compelling enough product to MS and the others (given the legacy x86 code, they would have to have been a LOT better). MS and the dells, etc. collectively chose AMD and Intel.
Defining what the market is under antitrust law is very important. A market is made of competitors that make products that are different in some respects (jaguar might choose a ford engine, rolls royce a bmw engine), but they still compete so are part of one market. Jags and Rolls compete just like Apple and MS do. But the level of competition between MS and Apple is attentuated because most people won’t consider macs because of “incompatibility” (some perceived and some real) and other reasons including cost.
I can’t “prove” you are wrong about what the “relevant” market is without going out and tracking down the caselaw and citing it for you, which I could do. But why should I do this for you? I doubt that would change your mind. You seem to need to be able to say Apple is a monopoly.
On lock-in, what I mean is achieving a very high percentage of the market (approaching 100%), and then using interoperability barriers to prevent users from switching. You know, “all the software is for windows, everyone uses Word so if you want to exchange files, you have to buy Office.” This is the MS market strategy, and it has been very very profitable for them. Apple is a niche player and cannot begin to think about such a strategy.
The reason Office has lock-in is file formats. It has nothing anymore to do with the quality of the program. If there was a universal open file format, MS would not be making 8 billion profit on 10 billion of Office sales per year. If you don’t realize that, there is no hope for you.
You said: “If Microsoft innovated a little in the early days of Office, then Apple never innovate anything with Mac OS in the past few years.” I do note your fudge word “OS”. Apple innovation is primarily in the app area today. Also, in hardware working with the OS. Let’s see, easy wireless networking, Final Cut pro, iPhoto organizing and sharing, the seamless integration of the iPod and iTunes (by far the best music experience available on computers), Rendeveous auto TCP/IP networking, first integration of Bluetooth. OS X is real nice and a job well done, but let’s face it, OS’s are kinda boring today. It’s getting to the point where things like a windowing GUI (even one as nice as OS X) can’t really be called some kinda huge innovation.
Actually, this makes my point. MS makes primarily two things. A boring (and still flawed in key respects) OS and an Office suite that half the world would stop buying if there was an open file format. Yea, really exciting tech from them!
The same people that buy “PowerPC desktop/workstations” could buy an intel itanium workstation. People that buy a XP-loaded Dell could have bought a mac. I could sell my macs on ebay and buy a Dell.
I could sell my car, and buy a lorry. Does it means that the lorry is of the same market as my car. NO! PowerPC and PCs are competiting standards. Just say some Japanese company becomes the monopoly of anything VHS, while 50% of the market is using Beta. Guess what? That Japanese company hold a monopoly in VHS.
No, IBM, Apple and Motorola formed a joint venture of sorts to make a microprocessor, which then competes with Intel and AMD processors.
The joint venture also fixes pricing. Apple recieves their processors in much more cheaper prices than their competitors, and this has nothing to do with bulk.
By the way, nothing stopped MS or anyone else from making OS’s to run on Powerpc. There is powerpc linux. It appears that the Powerpc guys did not offer a compelling enough product to MS and the others (given the legacy x86 code, they would have to have been a LOT better).
Microsoft ported Windows NT 4 to PowerPC. It left because Apple successfully chased them off by making barriers in the market and hindering the adoption of standards. Linux for PPC don’t have to make money, that’s why they are on PPC. Tell me one Linux company that made money out of PPC desktops, just *one*….
Microsoft, be and a slew of other companies have to make money in order to survive, unlike Linux.
A market is made of competitors that make products that are different in some respects (jaguar might choose a ford engine, rolls royce a bmw engine), but they still compete so are part of one market.
However, I’m talking about the PowerPC market. Different competitors uses different “engines”. For examples, Terrasoft computers uses Linux, Eyetech uses Amiga (and Linux), BeBox uses Be OS and so on.
The reason Office has lock-in is file formats. It has nothing anymore to do with the quality of the program. If there was a universal open file format, MS would not be making 8 billion profit on 10 billion of Office sales per year. If you don’t realize that, there is no hope for you.
Well, sorry for me I don’t realize that. Perhaps it is because every damn Office user I know uses it because of one or more features NOT AVAILABLE from competitors. I given my dad’s and my aunt’s example so many times, I don’t want to repeat myself.
As for formats, I retake my stand on who makes the best filters. Corel does. Sun makes the fastest evolving ones. Guess what? Sun hires 2 people to reverse engineer the formats, quite certainly less employees than Microsoft hired to reverse engineer their competitor’s formats.
If Sun was to hire 20 or 30 people, would they have a complete filter? Quite certainly, yes (mostly, the filters also depend on OOo’s features, so just say OOo doesn’t support WordArt, don’t count on it being availble via filters).
Let’s see, easy wireless networking
I wonder why I’m bringing myself to this, but Apple wasn’t the first one at this. It was the first to bring ideas together with Airport, but for easy to configure WiFi, it was nothing new.
Final Cut pro
Final Cut Pro for a good combination of features from their competitors. They manage to bring all these features and package it, but certainly not “innovation”. How they did it without infringing patents, maybe that’s “innovation”.
iPhoto organizing and sharing
Numerous shareware on Windows and Linux did similar to iPhoto before the term “Digital Hub” was ever concieve. Apple just took ideas from that, add digicam support, give it a nice easy to use interface – would I call that innovative? nah.
the seamless integration of the iPod and iTunes (by far the best music experience available on computers)
I wouldn’t actually consider this to be an “innovation”.
The list goes on and on. And if you are serious enough to consider these innovations, (which I actually do), then Office in the early days and now is innovation.
and an Office suite that half the world would stop buying if there was an open file format.
My dad found all his documents and his office documents opening properly on OpenOffice.org. Did he use it? No.
Look, I’m not for pressing antitrust charges against Apple, I’m just showing how antitrust laws in general is flawed.
Rajan,
I think if writing perfect conversion filters for Word, Excel, and Powerpoint (let’s leave Access aside for the moment) was trivial, then it would have happened already. I think it is probably very difficult to make the filters perfect, and that’s what they need to be (at least in a lot of businesses like ours, a law firm — we can’t afford to send a client something they have difficulty opening. They might just hire another firm).
As you point out, companies need to make money to stay in business. Well, who would invest in a business to make a serious suite today as full featured as Office? Not many. Such a business would have little to no hope of displacing Office, even if their product was better, because of the file formats (also things like macro languages – our firm uses a lot of these Word macros). So we get no other serious packages.
Word is a terrible program from a UI perspective, yet it lives on virtually unchanged and unchallenged because everyone “has to use it.” This may be changing as Linux on the desktop becomes attractive to some corporate customers and Office is now a roadblock to using Linux on the desktop (to some degree, I know you can run Office 2000 using Wine maybe).
As to antitrust law, you seem to be saying the law should change. That’s fine. But there really is no antitrust case against apple under the law as currently defined. They have 4 billion in the bank and somebody would go after that if there was a case (there are hordes of plaintiffs lawyers out there that specialize in antitrust). MS on the other hand was found (all the way up to the Supreme Court of the U.S.) to be in violation of the antitrust law.
Always been this way, always will be until the company dies.
It’s not about being first usually with Apple. Sure there was wireless networking before Airport, but not as easy for your grandma. Still Airport is easier than those Linksys, Netgear options. Apple’s core value is ease of use. The iPod wasn’t the first hard drive mp3 player. But it’s been widely recognized by umpteen press reviewers as the best, largely because of its ease of use.
Here’s a review on how iDVD is still blowing away the Sony bundled competition, what almost 2 years after it came out? “But for all its virtues, {Sony’s new} Click to DVD can’t hold a candle to Apple’s iDVD, especially the recently released version 2.1 of the Mac program”
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/business/technology/person…
Here’s the Register on the iApps: “Apple’s default suite of applications plays a starring role. These are much-mocked as ‘wannabee’ apps, but the “out of the box” experience they offer is far superior to a Windows PC.”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/26830.html
1) Export filters in OpenOffice.org and WordPerfect Office is perfect. Your clients would be able to read your files even if you don’t use Office. Plus, most law firms uses WordPerfect anyway (at least in Malaysia, Singapore, and possibly Australia).
2) Sun has a lot of money. Why does it hire only *TWO* people to reverse engineer Office formats? Why? There is a law forbiding them from hiring more than two people?
Besides, IIRC, WINE and Gnome-Basic manage to reverse engineer the language used for macros, using them in an office suite is trivial.
3) Well, the competitors are stupid. It would be much easier for people consider to move if they HAVE features. They would most certainly move if they have features THEY WANT. I’m not bloody ignorant as you are, I’m planning to compete with Office one day, based on a lot of features NO OTHER OFFICE SUITE HAS. And with the surveys I have done, a lot of people are receptive to the idea, and would move if it comes out as promised. (Some didn’t want them, but heck, they are using Office 97 or 95, who cares about them?)
Heck, I even have a 50 page business plan whom I plan to edit and send for a venture competition, Venture 2004, when I’m 18.
4) Word has one of the best UIs around, perhaps second only to WordPerfect Office. I’m not going to compare with the likes of GobeProductive and AppleWorks because they are in completely different markets. The only problem I have with Office’s UI is that it is so god damn ugly, compared to Wp Office and other apps using Windows XP’s Ui. Esepcially the icons.
But the last I checked, business people don’t bother with how it looks.
5) Yes, there is an case againt Apple, the problem is no so-called “victim” had sued Apple. Why? BECAUSE THEY DON’T GET ANYTHING FROM IT. I’m quite certain that Netscape sued while in discussion with AOL (a sale this big wouldn’t happen just by AOL calling Netscape, “Hey, we wanna buy you,” “Okay!”). Netscape had something to gain – a weaker Microsoft for its new parent company to compete againt. The same with Sun. Be is a different case, but I bet their case wouldn’t be bothered with if there wasn’t an on-going antitrust case against Microsoft.
I have nothing againt Apple, I ABSOLUTELY DON’T MIND THEIR BUSINESS PRACTICES. As I said before, I COMPLETELY disagree with antitrust laws. And would you stop taking me as someone who haven’t studied antitrust laws?
6) As for your innovation stuff, I have seen easier configuration (trully plug and play) in PCs before the trademark “Airport” was registered. The only thing Apple came up in this regard is how it manage to make it afforadable enough for normal consumers.
As for your bundle apps, I’m not going into the topic again, there was an thread about it. Like I said in the earlier thread, the only good app (comparing with all its competition) is iPhoto, mainly because on how it combines good management and good camera support. Some apps have good management (many times better than Apple), others have good digicam support, but I haven’t found one that is close to Apple’s except for Sony’s one (which has worser management than iPhoto).
For the DvD argument, a few months back TechTV’s Call For Help did a review on DVD burning. They did not showcase iDVD at all, and how they present the software being introduce makes it looks more easier to learn and use than when Jobs introduced iDVD.
This was surpising, especially since the show is hosted by a Mac user, and 2 out of 3 of the permanent live cast uses Macs.
The software was called MyDVD, IIRC.
Why can’t you just admit something that is so clear. Apple has done something great with the iApps (and is now at work at doing the same thing for the Address book, iCal and mail and chat). It hasn’t been replicated YET on the PC. I think MS should replicate it on the PC.
What’s great about the included Apple apps. For one thing, they all work in a similar way. For example, in the far left column, you can create “playlists” of sorts for music, events, photos, etc. So if you know how to use one, you can use the others more easily.
Plus, there’s no hunting around for the best solution. Apple already gives it to you.
So many people have said so many positive things about these apps, comparing them to the 3d party stuff available on the PC. The Apple apps virtually always come out on top.
I love these apps, and I just can’t order a Dell with anything like them, in terms of overall consistent quality. And why should I waste so much time assembling a bunch of third party stuff on my Athlon that every reviewer says is inferior. It’s a waste of time.
I keep reading reviews saying they work for simple documents, but complex ones with tables and nonstandard stuff are another story. Plus, even if you get the filters working right for one version of Office, how can anyone (Sun included) assume MS won’t change the file format in the next version of Office.
MS is signing up some accounts for regular upgrades (subscription model called Software Assurance). So there will be some significant number of people using the newest Office. Maybe more now (at least MS is trying to encourage/force this).
Reverse engineering means always being behind. Look, I don’t know for a fact it cannot be done. However, I think I will not take the assumption of an 18-year old that it can easily be done over the market reality that no one has done it. Sure, I could be wrong here and you may be right. But forgive me if I need a little proof here.
Since Office 97, Office formats haven’t changed significantly. It added support for a few features, but that’s it.
Office 11, from what I heard, would be a huge departure in terms of the standard format. It was be a mishmash of binary and XML, IIRC.
And BTW, for StarOffice, in StarWrite, for example, the thing that always StarOffice gets wrong is WordArt and macros – features StarOffice doesn’t support for its native formats anyway.