Slap your own face 10X if you are still using Microsoft

[condom_loong]

http://www.computerworld.com/articl...ows-has-expired--office-has-ceased-to-be.html

Gartner: Microsoft is dead, Windows has expired, Office has ceased to be
More like this

The days of Microsoft's dominance are over, killed by mobile, says Gartner
IDC: Yes, PCs are DEAD, they've ceased to be, expired, run down the curtain...
Surface Pro availability: Sold out? Or not?

Computerworld | Apr 5, 2013 7:20 AM PT

Microsoft

It is an ex-monopoly. Bereft of life, it rests in peace.
Gartner says PC sales down; Microsoft threatened

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is on its last legs. At least according to those happy harbingers of doom, Gartner. The research-cum-analysis firm says Android will smother it into near-joint-third place with Apple, by 2017.

In IT Blogwatch, bloggers think a lot can happen in four years.

Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment.

Preston Gralla gets vicariously grumpy via Gartner:

...shrinking PC sales will end Microsoft's dominance. ... Microsoft hardware will lag Android device sales...and barely squeeze past Apple's share. ...tablets will become people's main computers.

...
The Gartner report says that by 2017...Android will have the lion's share...with 1.47 billion, Windows...571 million, and iOS/MacOS...504 million. That's a drastic change. ... The implications...go beyond Windows. Revenue from Office could be threatened as well. ... Google has just released Quickoffice for Android and iOS [so] it's not certain that Office will dominate on those platforms.

...
The trends show why with Windows 8 Microsoft made a radical decision. [But] Microsoft needs to do much more if it wants to prove Gartner wrong. MORE

Matthew O'Connell lays it on the line:

Alongside the proliferation of mobile devices is the decline of desktop-based and notebook PCs.

...
[It] shouldn’t come as a surprise. ... The advanced engineering of new mobile processors, with...high-quality graphics and consistent data connections, has enabled amazing performance in a portable package. ...advancements in technology have allowed for more competition and cost-effective production along with the incredible leaps in functionality.

...
The day when mobile devices completely replace desktops is in sight. MORE

Gartner's Ranjit Atwal explains himself:

Lower prices, form factor variety, cloud update and consumers' addiction to apps will be the key drivers in the tablet market.

Growth in the tablet segment will not be limited to mature markets. ... Users in emerging markets who are looking for a companion to their mobile phone will increasingly choose a tablet...not a PC. MORE

But Stiggy says it's a shame:

For all those wondering what MS was playing at when they released Windows 8 with a touch interface; [here's] the answer.

...
It's a shame that the Metro/Modern interface is so badly executed. ... It's also a shame as Windows Phone 8 is a great mobile OS, and is likely getting negative press from it's big brother Windows 8. MORE

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[condom_loong]

http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-death-of-microsoft/

The death of Microsoft

Summary:Most companies die. Here's why Microsoft is in danger, despite its seeming invulnerability.

By Robin Harris for Storage Bits | October 3, 2013 -- 07:00 GMT (15:00 GMT+08:00)
Follow @StorageMojo
0Comments
death of microsoft

The seeming permanency of major corporations make it difficult to imagine that they will die. Blackberry and Nokia are today's examples. This week's Great Debate got me thinking about Microsoft's vulnerabilities.

Microsoft's next CEO: Is an insider Redmond's best bet?

The bad news: companies like Dupont, General Electric and IBM that survive as dynamic and innovative companies for over a century are the exception. The good news: multi-billion dollar companies usually take a long time to die.

In the 1920s the Radio Corporation of America – RCA – was a massively profitable and high growth tech company thanks to radio - which no one had in 1920 and everyone had in 1930. They even tried computers after WWII. You still see the trademark in odd places, but the company is long gone.

In the 1960s and 70s multiple billion-dollar minicomputer companies were born, flowered and - mostly in the 80s - died. Names like Data General, Wang, Prime and DEC – at one time the second largest computer company in the world – employed hundreds of thousands of people and sold products all over the world. The PC killed them, just as smartphones and tablets are killing PC vendors - and a big chunk of Microsoft's revenue - today.

A remnant of Data General survives at storage company EMC. DEC was absorbed by Compaq and now Hewlett-Packard. It was inconceivable in the 1980s that H-P would ever be the world's largest computer company.

20 years ago even mighty IBM was headed to disaster. Its old model wasn't working and the then CEO didn't have a clue as to how to change it – not unlike Microsoft today.

Understanding Microsoft's business
Microsoft has several profitable major businesses - and some that suck up huge dollars for no profit.

In their last earnings report they break down revenue and income:
Group FY13 numbers in USD billions Revenue Profits (Loss)
Windows 19.2 9.5
Servers & Tools 20.3 8.2
Online Services 3.2 (1.3)
Microsoft Business 24.7 16.2
Entertainment & Devices 10.2 0.8

Today, by division
Windows revenue is stagnant - and facing decline - due to smart phones and tablets. Google and Apple treat operating systems as commodities rather than cash cows. This is $19B that will be almost gone in 10 years.

Servers & tools. Growing fast, it includes Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Azure (cloud), Visual Studio, System Center products, Windows Embedded device platforms, and Enterprise Services. People get the value of tools and cloud, so S&T should continue to be high growth and profitable. But Amazon owns the cloud today and MS will have to fight harder than they ever have to carve out a competitive position.

Online services. Stick a fork in it: it's done to a crisp. Google owns this market and despite the excellence of Bing, Googling is the verb and Bing is a little-known noun. The normal MS strategy of waiting for a less profitable incumbent to screw up isn't going to work here: Larry Page knows where Google wins and he's going to make sure it keeps winning.

Business division i.e. Office. Microsoft's office suite has been the greatest application success of the last 30 years. But the future looks ominous: Office features overshoot what 99% of users need or want. Google and Apple have introduced free or much less expensive products that do most of what Office does. Keeping Office from iOS and Android and has introduced hundreds of millions to spreadsheets, presentations and word processing on a non-Microsoft platform. Oops!

Entertainment & devices i.e. Xbox consoles and games. Barely profitable by MS standards, yet this is the focus of the newly announced strategy. This is a dying business as we'll see when the Xbox One results come in.
What's Hot on ZDNet

Microsoft's 'Spartan' browser: More details leak
CES 2015: New M.2 PCIe 2.0 drives show off future of solid-state storage
Apple has a serious problem with software quality
Microsoft's advance security notification service no longer publicly available

Tomorrow
Operating systems are commodities that are free or almost free - like device drivers are today. Say goodbye to Windows revenue.

Servers and tools will become more important as apps, computes and storage move to the cloud - public or private - to enable powerful mobile user capabilities. But MS has to move cross-platform or lock themselves out of the fast growing Linux server space.

MS isn't going to win the ad battle against Google. Stop trying.

Office will be the 8-track tape of business apps in 10 years. Few people need what it does - file compatibility is the sales driver, not features - and as Google Docs and other apps proliferate at much lower cost, more people will leave. Solution: make Office a brand with Office/Easy, Office/Business and Office/Extreme versions - and put at least O/Easy on every platform.

Games? Really? Grow up.

The Storage Bits take
Microsoft's major revenue streams and competitive advantages are slipping away day by day. It needs reinvention on the scale of IBM 20 years ago.

But as long as Gates and Ballmer hang around it won't get it. So a great company will fade, its massive capabilities frittered away by timid and blinkered management, eyes firmly on the rear-view mirror as they drive off a cliff.

Waiting for Apple, Google and Amazon to screw up is stupid. Sure, the San Andreas fault could swallow Google and Apple, and Mt. Rainier could bury Amazon - along with Redmond - but hope is not a strategy. Microsoft needs a new CEO who sees the dangers a decade out and positions the company to meet them from a position of strength.

Let's hope the new guy gets it right. Microsoft is too important to waste.

Comments welcome. I've sketched this in very broad strokes, but what is the most important thing you see?

 

[condom_loong]

http://www.cnet.com/news/dead-and-buried-microsofts-holy-war-on-open-source-software/

Dead and buried: Microsoft's holy war on open-source software

Q&A: Years ago, Microsoft's CEO described open source as a cancer. Times have changed. Just ask 22-year Redmond veteran and open-source proponent Mark Hill.

by Charles Cooper
@coopeydoop
June 1, 2014 4:00 AM PDT

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nad.jpgMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella Justin Sullivan, Getty Images

Time was when Microsoft executives thought nothing about publicly dissing open-source software as distinctly un-American.

Everyone has their pet theories. Some even drew a direct line back to the company's early days dating to 1976, when co-founder Bill Gates published an open letter chiding hobbyists for using Microsoft's Altair Basic program without paying for the product. By the time open source began gaining notoriety in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Microsoft saw a threat to the way it sold software and services and went on the PR offensive -- with no small amount of hyperbole.

''Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer,'' former Windows chief Jim Allchin famously quipped in 2001. ''I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business.''

"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches," former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told the Chicago Sun Times a few months later. "That's the way that the license works."

But Microsoft's feud with open source has been sputtering for quite some time, and the senior managers who led the anti-open source charge are gone from the scene -- or at least no longer in positions of authority. Open source is now routinely used by corporations around the world, and the company's sniffy put-downs only fed into the perception of Microsoft as out of touch.

Some of that new thinking reflects the change at the top of the corporate pyramid, with Satya Nadella replacing Ballmer as CEO in early February. Since taking over, Nadella has talked up his vision of a Microsoft whose future isn't shackled to its Windows past.

"There has been a real change," said Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond, noting that while that shift hasn't yet permeated the entire Microsoft organization -- particularly the Windows team -- "it's seeped into enough of the organization that it's more than just window dressing. There are many examples where Microsoft is integrating with, and even creating, open source in an effort to grow market share and support customers.

"The reason is simple," he continued. "The real world isn't black and white -- and there are open-source companies that sell proprietary software (e.g., Red Hat) and proprietary companies that use OSS to augment their commercial software and make it more attractive. As developer adoption of open-source software has grown to the 70 percent-plus level, I think most business units at Microsoft realized that treating it like 'a cancer' was self-defeating -- they lost that battle a long time ago."

Given the new tech realities, Microsoft will just have to pick and choose. Sometimes, it will be better off investing in collaborative, open-source projects like Hadoop or Git that win widespread adoption. Other times, Microsoft will be better off competing head-on as it does with Office vs. Open Office.

Last month, the company finally made official its unofficial decision to incorporate some open-source code into its developer and programming languages. More recently, Microsoft put 22-year company veteran Mark Hill in charge of a global group to cultivate open-source developers to write applications that work with Azure, the Microsoft cloud service that competes against the likes of Rackspace, Google, and Amazon.

I recently spoke with Hill. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Cooper: There was a time when open source was considered an "intellectual-property destroyer," as Jim Allchin once referred to it. What are the new marching orders, and why the change?
Hill: We have a group of individuals who are residents around the world who are open-source practitioners that we've recruited from the community. They are our subject matter experts, and they've been helping us engage -- and help Microsoft become more aware of that community...But given their healthy knowledge of open source and their connections, we're changing roles to try and make Microsoft more responsive and to make sure that we appeal to that community at large.

With the aim being -- what?
Hill: We want make sure that we give (developers) the tools, training, and advice they'd need to run open-source tools on Azure. It's a great platform for them to build their business, and we want to give them everything they need to be successful.

When was the new direction formalized?
Hill: It's been ongoing for a long time. The fact that Azure supports a bunch of open-source apps and frameworks and languages -- that's not new news. It's maybe just a natural evolution...where we want to go out and activate the ecosystem to start using Azure. There's a big (potential) business out there.

And the goal is to win over open-source developers to port their apps on Azure? How do you go about that? What can Microsoft offer?
Hill: All the basics that you would in any IT business. Let's look at the competing value propositions. What are the details? Do we have the right advice, support, and learning? Do we have some free sample code that they can get to and test before they invest? Can we introduce people who are interested to people who have done this before?

There was a CSI job posting in December where the advertisement was "Win share against Open Source Software (OSS) in the cloud, on devices, and in traditional workloads by changing perceptions of Microsoft and winning the socket." So what are the rules of engagement? That is, where does it make sense for Microsoft to compete with open-source products, and where does it make sense to partner? It sounds as if you'll still compete in certain areas but that this isn't viewed any longer as something of a holy war where open source is seen as something evil. Or am I simplifying?
Hill: I don't think that you're oversimplyfing. You're completely correct in terms of there being a mindset change. We'll compete against certain products that are open-source products. But it's not about open source [per se]. For example, we'll compete against Linux when we feel that Windows Server is a better product for the customer or partner. In other cases, we'll certainly want to partner; it's just good business.

Steve Ballmer's no longer the CEO. What's Sayta Nadella's role in pushing for the mindset change?
Hill: I would just say that as a company, Microsoft is very forward-looking and we understand that in a devices and services world, the game needs to change. Many years ago, we began building in very good support for Linux and open source in Azure and this is just a continuation of that. Again, we need to appeal to a very broad market.

Tags:
Software
Microsoft

 

[condom_loong]

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html


Microsoft is Dead

April 2007

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn't understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who?

Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite believe anyone would be frightened of them.

Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow disappeared.

But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not dangerous.

When did Microsoft die, and of what? I know they seemed dangerous as late as 2001, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less dangerous than they seemed. I'd guess they were dead by 2005. I know when we started Y Combinator we didn't worry about Microsoft as competition for the startups we funded. In fact, we've never even invited them to the demo days we organize for startups to present to investors. We invite Yahoo and Google and some other Internet companies, but we've never bothered to invite Microsoft. Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an email. They're in a different world.

What killed them? Four things, I think, all of them occurring simultaneously in the mid 2000s.

The most obvious is Google. There can only be one big man in town, and they're clearly it. Google is the most dangerous company now by far, in both the good and bad senses of the word. Microsoft can at best limp along afterward.

When did Google take the lead? There will be a tendency to push it back to their IPO in August 2004, but they weren't setting the terms of the debate then. I'd say they took the lead in 2005. Gmail was one of the things that put them over the edge. Gmail showed they could do more than search.

Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." And that was the second cause of Microsoft's death: everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.

Ironically, Microsoft unintentionally helped create Ajax. The x in Ajax is from the XMLHttpRequest object, which lets the browser communicate with the server in the background while displaying a page. (Originally the only way to communicate with the server was to ask for a new page.) XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft in the late 90s because they needed it for Outlook. What they didn't realize was that it would be useful to a lot of other people too—in fact, to anyone who wanted to make web apps work like desktop ones.

The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming language that runs in the browser. Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. [1] But eventually the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.

The third cause of Microsoft's death was broadband Internet. Anyone who cares can have fast Internet access now. And the bigger the pipe to the server, the less you need the desktop.

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. [2] Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway.

And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and phones on the way.

I'm glad Microsoft is dead. They were like Nero or Commodus—evil in the way only inherited power can make you. Because remember, the Microsoft monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft. They got it from IBM. The software business was overhung by a monopoly from about the mid-1950s to about 2005. For practically its whole existence, that is. One of the reasons "Web 2.0" has such an air of euphoria about it is the feeling, conscious or not, that this era of monopoly may finally be over.

Of course, as a hacker I can't help thinking about how something broken could be fixed. Is there some way Microsoft could come back? In principle, yes. To see how, envision two things: (a) the amount of cash Microsoft now has on hand, and (b) Larry and Sergey making the rounds of all the search engines ten years ago trying to sell the idea for Google for a million dollars, and being turned down by everyone.

The surprising fact is, brilliant hackers—dangerously brilliant hackers—can be had very cheaply, by the standards of a company as rich as Microsoft. They can't hire smart people anymore, but they could buy as many as they wanted for only an order of magnitude more. So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it:

Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups. They could get substantially all of them for less than they'd have to pay for Facebook.

Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.

I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they suck. They still think they can write software in house. Maybe they can, by the standards of the desktop world. But that world ended a few years ago.

I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is old news.





See also: Microsoft is Dead: the Cliffs Notes

 

[condom_loong]

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2468651,00.asp

Microsoft Believes It is Going to Die

By John C. Dvorak
September 17, 2014
Comments

For years, people have cried out that "Microsoft is Dead!" Obviously, Redmond believes it. What else explains stupid moves like buying Minecraft and supporting the cloud fad? It's about self-confidence—Microsoft has none.
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Microsoft Azure

During the dot-com bubble, a number of fascinating ideas emerged, all of which were thought to be the next big thing. I hosted a cable channel discussion panel on TechTV right in the midst of the boom and heard all of them. Most turned out to be bullcrap.

Here are a few of the trends that were going to change everything.

Grocery stores were going to die in favor of direct home delivery.
Physical retail stores were going to die in favor of online stores and direct home delivery.
There is something called a new economy, so when you judged things using concepts such as profit or margins or practicality, you were wrong.
The browser would become the operating system.
Disintermediation (cutting out the middle man using the Internet) would dominate the decades ahead.

A couple of ideas that pre-dated the dot com era became part of the dot com canon. They continue to this day and are still my favorites:

The future of computing is client-server (today, we call that "the cloud").
Windows is dead.
Microsoft Office is dead.

The client-server meme has been around since the 1980s as a counter-revolution to the personal computer's appearance in the late 1970s. Once people realized that these machines were not toys, as naysayers earlier claimed, but were instead devices to empower the individual, they had to be stopped.

Back in the day, we called this client-server stuff by names like "thin-client computing" or "network computing." But only "cloud computing" could put the PC juggernaut in its place! Yeah, right.

OpinionsThe "Windows is dead" line (along with the Office is dead meme) hit its stride in the late 1990s and dominated the conversation throughout the decade after that. I first heard it explained to me in Boston around 1998 and began to see it used as a "fact" in Silicon Valley thereafter. It's still a "fact" somehow and the proof is entirely in the love affair the world is having with the Google Chromebook—a completely useless machine as far as I'm concerned

Curiously, nothing except the Mac OS from Apple has done anything to come close to challenging Windows in the marketplace.

When someone suggests that maybe a vendor should develop a real strong OS—other than Linux, of course—to challenge Windows the response is always: "Why? The desktop computer is also dead."

In some funny and odd way, Microsoft itself has bought into this nonsense. It keeps wasting money looking for exit strategies but it remains in business. Instead of marketing Windows and Office with a sincere belief that they will be around forever (that's the proper approach) Microsoft believes the meme, which has yet to be proven, and fails to market against them. This is astonishing to anyone paying attention. What is wrong with these people? Buying Minecraft is not the answer.

Microsoft should simply look at Adobe. It's a company with self-confidence about its own products. A meme cropping up that "Photoshop is dead" or "Illustrator is dead" never happens. That's because the company actually likes what it is doing. It keeps its foot on the gas pedal and improves its products at a breakneck speed. This is the antithesis of Microsoft, which prefers to fret about the future and give up on products. As an example: the tale of Microsoft FrontPage, the long-dead Web development tool, is worth a Harvard case study.

This lack of self-confidence dominates Microsoft. It results in a lackluster response by the public to things such as the Windows Phone. That handset OS should be marketed as the only alternative to Apple's iOS. Android should be seen as just an iOS clone, which it is. Yet how is Windows Phone marketed? What is its image? I have no idea; neither does Microsoft. When does Windows Phone come up in the conversation about smartphones? Never. How often was it mentioned during the iPhone 6 rollout? Not at all. Does Microsoft ever leverage the fact that it invented the idea of a smartphone? Nope.

Microsoft is a company that lost its mojo and self-confidence in the late 1990s and has no clue what to do about it.

Maybe defending its turf, rather than surrendering, would be a start. It could fight back with a serious rebuke of the cloud and market against it—the stupid cloud is a counter-revolutionary concept taking us all back to centralized computing, where users have no control at all. But instead it buys into the whole idea! It's mind-boggling.

Well, at least now the Microsofties can spend time playing Minecraft in their copious spare time, in between bouts of worry and self-doubt.

 

[condom_loong]

再用微软不如跳楼。哈哈哈哈 ！

 

[SIMM0NS]

Hmmm... posting old news....

I don't like Microshit but Windoze 9 is on beta

 

[krafty]

office documents and adobe pdf still reign...

 

[Froggy]

Xiaomi da best!

 

[Sinkie]

If microsoft dies, I chop..........

 

[laksaboy]

Hmmm... posting old news....

I don't like Microshit but Windoze 9 is on beta

There is no Windows 9, twit. The next Windows is Windows 10, due for release later this year in Q3 2015.

 

[laksaboy]

If microsoft dies, I chop..........

Not die, but lose its dominance. No more good old days like during the era of Bill Gates. You'll still have a few niche products, but nothing more.

 

[virus]

Google's Android is heading for dearth. Better kick oUt their it chief. It may not survive m version

 

[sense]

Dream on.

MSFT:

GOOGL:

 

[laksaboy]

Dream on.

Your stock price can keep on rising, but it means nothing if you're losing market share to your rivals.

Things change very rapidly in the tech industry.

 

[frenchbriefs]

Losing market share in what?Microsoft still dominate 90% of the PC and laptop market. Mac os is just a gimmick nothing more,only people that uses Mac trash are apple fanbois.apple may dominate the mobile industry but that is secondary.

 

[sense]

Your stock price can keep on rising, but it means nothing if you're losing market share to your rivals.

Things change very rapidly in the tech industry.

Indeed, things change very rapidly in the tech industry.

Blackberry:

 

[laksaboy]

Losing market share in what?Microsoft still dominate 90% of the PC and laptop market. Mac os is just a gimmick nothing more,only people that uses Mac trash are apple fanbois.apple may dominate the mobile industry but that is secondary.

This has nothing to do with Apple.

PCs (and laptops) are losing out to tablets and mobile devices. Yes, there is always a demand for PCs, but many tasks can now be delegated to mobile devices. Already the OEMs are complaining about poor sales (maybe caused by a backlash against Windows 8) and shrinking margins.