Would you invest your hard-earned dollars in a company like this? Its revenues soared an average of 36% through the 1990s, but now it’s heading into miserly single-digit growth. It has long been a powerful engine fueled by major updates of its products, yet the next major one, an unprecedented five years in the making, isn’t expected until 2006. The company hasn’t made much headway in newer, promising markets. And its share price is stuck exactly where it was in mid-1998. Not buying, huh? Well, tough luck: You probably already own a piece of this rock, says Yahoo! Finanace.
Microsoft’s Midlife Crisis
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I was surprised how insightful this article was since most journalists todays doesn’t really have a clue, especially those who write about finance. But this one seems to have gone beyond the MS marketing and actually studied the subject.
I was reading this last night
Taking a closer look at Microsoft
http://www.billparish.com/20030420barronsoped.html
But Microsoft just isn’t the phenom it used to be. After 29 years, the software giant is starting to look like a star athlete who’s past his prime. Growth is tepid. Expansion is stymied.
Well duh. It owns the desktop market so there’s not much growth there, but it’s server market share continues to grow at the expense of proprietary Unix.
Already, execs concede that it won’t debut until 2006, three years after researcher Gartner Inc. (IT) originally expected it to ship
So Gartner decides ship dates for Windows now? No surprise here. They’re always late. Good news for linux in any case. Hopefully, one of the X11s can get some desktop 3d-accelerating goodness going on between now and then.
Pretty amateurish article. The whole crux of it is that the growth isn’t there anymore. Well duh, there isn’t much room to grow except for the server market and 3rd world. The 3rd world is just going to pirate windows anyway or run linux and probably a lightweight window manager since KDE and Gnome take just as much resources as XP does.
Honestly, how often do they expect people to buy a new OS? I mean every 5 years would be what I would think reasonable, certainly not every 2-3 years. Yea you buy new computer hardware that often, but definitely not a whole new OS.
The only reason I upgrade my software that much is because I can do it for free. And to be honest, I plan to hold on to Slackware 9.1 ISO and keep it mostly unchanged on this machine until the thing breaks (laptop).
I upgrade when there is a new feature I desire. I prefer not to upgrade otherwise, it just makes extra work. Also, significant speed increases I consider as extra features
.
Microsoft honestly needs to re-make Windows entirely. A total system redesign (code can be recycled, but the system needs changed).
-No Registry
-No integrated applications
-Command line administration w/ gui frontends
-Multi-user centric (apps that aren’t won’t work)
That’s all I want, they can throw in a gfx rendered desktop on top if they like. Oh, and easy themability with FREE themes would be nice too. Seriously, charging for themes….that’s sick.
Microsoft has sunk into the hole of being a stable big business. It happens to every monopoly. But since they are a monopoly they can still earn a tidy economic profit.
Buy now, when prices and expectations are low,
and sell when Longhorn takes the market by storm!
What makes you think that Longhorn will take the market by storm? Sure if it came out six years ago. It isn’t that much different to XP no matter what MS marketing tries to tell you.
Yea you buy new computer hardware that often, but definitely not a whole new OS.
Most people don’t buy new computers that often either. Most of my non-geek friends still use 120-500Mhz boxes, simply because they work.
And when people buy new computers they come with an OS install. So yeah, most people switch to a new OS as often as they buy new computers.
That’s all I want, they can throw in a gfx rendered desktop on top if they like. Oh, and easy themability with FREE themes would be nice too. Seriously, charging for themes….that’s sick.
So use linux then.
I wouldn’t buy any tech stocks be it Microsoft, IBM, or Google if they ever go IPO. Tech stocks came and went, they won’t make the big bucks like they used to.
Tech stocks might still be a good investment for serious people, people who realize that long term investments is the only way to go.
Even though I personally hate the idea of the stock market I think there are less bad ways to use it.
Anyway, the tech market won’t go away and some of those companies will continue to grow only slowly like any other company.
What’s considered midlife for a company? I mean most of them fail the first few years so MS should be a senior by now
“The 3rd world is just going to pirate windows anyway or run linux and probably a lightweight window manager since KDE and Gnome take just as much resources as XP does.”
KDE works fine on a PII-266Mhz with 64MB RAM. Does WinXP?
“KDE works fine on a PII-266Mhz with 64MB RAM. Does WinXP?”
Yes, it does. I use it like that on my laptop. It’s not very fast, but usable.
I was surprised, too…
KDE 3.2 or Gnome 2.6 or XP does not run “well” on a PII-266 with 64 meg of ram unless your a masochist. You’d be much better off running fluxbox and gtk1.x or Qt apps.
>>”KDE works fine on a PII-266Mhz with 64MB RAM. Does >>WinXP?”
>
> Yes, it does. I use it like that on my laptop. It’s not >very fast, but usable.
>
> I was surprised, too…
a 266 mhz LAPTOP with 64MB of RAM running XP!?
Sorry, but you’ll have to drug me with some really serious sh!t in order to make me believe that.
I have installed XP on a DESKTOP (i.e. faster harddrive ‘n all) 333Mhz with 128MB of RAM and trivial things like popping the start menu took anything between 10 and 30 seconds. It was absolutely unbearable and i ended up going back to win2k which is considerably better.
KDE 3.2 or Gnome 2.6 or XP does not run “well” on a PII-266 with 64 meg of ram unless your a masochist. You’d be much better off running fluxbox and gtk1.x or Qt apps.
running kde 3.1 on a pII266mhz 64mb ram right now!
its a IBM 600 with SuSE 8.2pro and it works fine!
I have installed XP on a DESKTOP (i.e. faster harddrive ‘n all) 333Mhz with 128MB of RAM and trivial things like popping the start menu took anything between 10 and 30 seconds.
I have experienced the same thing after a clean install of XP on a 2GHz box as well. It crawled without any explanation. I reinstalled it twice, and after the second time it worked just fine. Still puzzles me why it behaved that way since there was no changes in the hardware. Was like Win98 all over again.
*yawn* why do people keep saying this? honestly, these people need to wake up and face the facts. microsoft is a huge company with many fingers in many different pies. they’re not going anywhere for a long, long time.
The article didn’t say that “ms is about to go bust” it said that it isn’t a good investment, and I agree.
They aren’t going away for a long time, true, but their position in the market might very well change over the next few years.
i didn’t read the article ’cause it didn’t have any decent screenshots. i just felt like a bit of a rant
microsoft is a huge company with many fingers in many different pies. they’re not going anywhere for a long, long time.
The point is, most of those pies don’t make money. And the two that do, may be in trouble.
Name the only original Dow component still in the index (GE).
One out of nine Americans starts a business of some sort yet look how many last more than thirty years.
The average corporate lifespan in the US is 25 years.
So it makes sense that even Microsoft will hit a speedbump over time.
Their stock is a go-nowhere investment – you can get better dividends or better growth with very little effort. At best, MSFT is a defensive holding – a holdout for that rainy day when the rest of the market is tanking.
No matter, MSFT could conceivably lose 50% of its value in the next decade unless they start pulling new rabbits out of the hat.
“Well duh. It owns the desktop market so there’s not much growth there, but it’s server market share continues to grow at the expense of proprietary Unix. ”
That’s not saying much. Besides I believe it’s Linux that’s doing that. Granted Unix will still be around for a good while, both inertia, and sutability to particular purposes. At least linux will help mend the fence that the fragmentation wars rent.
running kde 3.1 on a pII266mhz 64mb ram right now!
its a IBM 600 with SuSE 8.2pro and it works fine!
Well, you can try to justify in your mind that your vastly underpowered machine will run 3.1 fine, but anybody with any of sense of objective reality will tell you that it won’t. Give that poor machine a break and give it another 64 meg stick.
“The average corporate lifespan in the US is 25 years.
So it makes sense that even Microsoft will hit a speedbump over time.”
Generally, the trouble starts when the founder(s) either retire or become old and obstinate. If the founders are aged about 40 when they start, which would be typical, an average life of 25 years seems reasonable.
Bill Gates was a good deal younger, so Microsoft could flourish for 50 years.
Polaroid would be a good model of the typical company history. Kodak is an exception – the company and its monopoly long survived the death of Eastman.
I was doing an experiment at work a few months back when we had a load of spare pcs.
They were all
IBM M300
300mhz 32mb ram
4gb hdd
I installed Connectiva 9 on one with kde 3.1
UNUSABLE
I was going to give up and reinstall NT4 back onto the machine,( this was what they all had installed ).
I took a 32mb dimm from another machine and put it into it…
UNUSABLE
There was one more slot, so I put another dimm into it, 96mb total ram
USABLE, not only usable, but nippy. It surprised us all at work that there was so much difference going from 64 – 96mb.
So we took another pc, and upgraded the ram to 96mb, formatted the drive and put NT4 back on it.
The NT machine was faster than the linux machine…. until we started to add the apps, IE5.5 and Office were the major killers, and they slowed the machine to a crawl, and this was just with the apps installed, not actually running.
So our conclusion was that a decent distro of Linux, given a small amount of ram, will out perform the same pc, even running older versions of windows and some needed apps.
My email address is up there for all the microsoft fanboys to spam me sensless
and the stock will raise back up. WinXP has been out long enough now that just about everyone who wants it already has it. When longhorn comes out there will be a large boost as people buy the full/upgrade version from store shelfs at full price after about 9 months it will start to go down to basicly just OEM sales. as its been said before MS worst enemy is its own users, the ones running Win98 who have no need or want to upgrade, after all if 98 still runs 95% of the software out there why upgrade. It realy wouldn’t surprise me if longhorn broke a lot of backwards compatabilty just so the 9x users would have to upgrade to use new software ( like the jump from win16/dos to win32 )
Microsoft need to re-invent itself, because it’s obvious ms isn’t growing fast. I wonder on a growth percentage, not on profit or sales, but in percentage of new growth and products Apple might be a head of Microsoft. Now I know right off hand someones going to get this all mix up, they will say,,,but Microsoft is bigger, and has more business. I’m not talking about revenues or profits, I’m talking about growth and new growth in different areas.
After reading the article, I really think Longhorn really is codenamed LONGWAIT on the MS campus. In the meantime waiting for Longhorn, I will continue using OS X, and Linux on my pc’s.
KDE 3.2 or Gnome 2.6 or XP does not run “well” on a PII-266 with 64 meg of ram unless your a masochist. You’d be much better off running fluxbox and gtk1.x or Qt apps.
Well, I would say that spec with at least 128 meg of ram. The CPU doesn’t seem to make much difference to KDE etc., but it does with Windows and I’ve tried to install various incarnations of Windows on every machine you can think of. Windows just seems to be programmed to go even slower when it thinks you should upgrade your CPU….
Gnome does not run on this spec. GTK apps are just plain slow with lesser CPUs, and this has been discussed recently. KDE and Qt aren’t going to be lightning, but you can certainly get stuff done with KDE 3.2.x/Qt3.3.x, a decent amount of memory and perhaps a 2.6 kernel underneath. A 1 gig Athlon with 256 meg I have seen has just had a massive performance boost shot into it. Using a Linux 2.6 kernel alone, it is like having a brand new responsive USB mouse, while keeping your PS/2, for nothing.
Tip: Use KDE 3.2.x/Linux 2.6 on something like a 1 Gig Athlon or above with 256 meg (something you can run XP on), use it for about a week exlusively, and then try to go back to Windows XP. You won’t like the experience. I thought it was down to the mouse pointer acceleration in XP that I wasn’t used to, but it wasn’t. I don’t know what all that talk was about Windows XP when it was released, about the desktop flying. I’ve installed XP more times than I care to mention, and it has certainly been more consistent (not hard), but never faster and more responsive than even Windows 98.
I have installed XP on a DESKTOP (i.e. faster harddrive ‘n all) 333Mhz with 128MB of RAM and trivial things like popping the start menu took anything between 10 and 30 seconds.
That will be the famed Windows XP pre-emption and wonderful memory management at work, making your desktop fly. Linux still has some way to go on this subject (pre-emption seems to make things run fast, and then it will be somewhat slower the next time for no reason), but there are people who are really addressing the thorny issue of pre-emption with Linux. How do you make things in the foreground more responsive, whilst not making background tasks run like a dog when they come to the foreground and become important to the user? Windows has never been any good at this at all. Run a memory intensive game and go back into Windows. Run a memory intensive game on a Linux system and go back to your desktop. I rest my case.
“Run a memory intensive game on a Linux system and go back to your desktop. I rest my case.”
It’s the same with my slower iMac running OSX, it multitasks a lot better than my faster pc running Windows XP. Windows needs to be rewritten on Unix.
” It realy wouldn’t surprise me if longhorn broke a lot of backwards compatabilty just so the 9x users would have to upgrade to use new software ”
Yeah, that’s the sad thing. They’re not content with gouging you on the price, but they’ll even try and squeeze you out of using their own products. MS is just pathetic.
Yeah, that’s the sad thing. They’re not content with gouging you on the price, but they’ll even try and squeeze you out of using their own products. MS is just pathetic.
Yeah, heaven forbid a few poorly written 10 – 20 year old applications break so the other 99.9% of the world has a better product…
Almost all of the major problems in Windows are due to Microsoft pandering to people who want legacy support. If, for the first time in thirty years, they make backwards compatibility a secondary priority, I won’t be particularly concerned.