Sometimes, the sheer size of a company like Microsoft can make it quite hard to see and realise just how large and profitable such a company can really be. In these kinds of situations, there’s nothing like a clear graph to make all those pretty numbers tangible. Up to a point.
BusinessInsider has a chart of the day thing going, and a few days ago they published a very intriguing graph that shows quite clearly how each division within Microsoft, still the largest and most profitable software company in the world, contributes to the company’s overall profit picture. It’s important to note that the graph denotes operating profit – not revenue (just in case the numbers didn’t blow your mind enough already).
As you can see, Microsoft still makes most of its money from its Windows and Office divisions, with the Server and Tools division doing very well too. Entertainment and devices is interesting; you can see it doing well during the holidays, only to lose money during the rest of the year. Online services are still a money pit – but it’s peanuts compared to the profits gained by other divisions. The two spikes are caused by Windows releases – Vista, and more recently Windows 7. Especially the latter is raking in a lot of money for the company at the moment.
For years now, I’ve been amused by those “Microsoft will die at the hands of Apple and Linux!” claims people have been making (and continue to make) on the internet. I think these people fail to realise just how incredibly stable the income stream is from the Windows and Office cashcows, and just how much Microsoft is really worth.
Like any other company, Microsoft has had its fair share of very nasty business practices, and since it’s a company, I am unable to like them – but I do have to admire what Bill Gates and his fellow Microsofties have built. This is a massive empire that has had – and is having – a tremendous amount of impact on the world (for better or worse), and for a college drop-out that ain’t half-bad.
At least Bill has some coding cred – unlike that acid-popping Steve guy in Cupertino.
I know that MS made nearly 6.66 billion (6.62 actually, but the number of the beast is so fitting I couldn’t resist) this quarter and 3.57 in the one before that.
The way I read this graph it looks like MS made around 8 (subtracting the below zero stuff).
Businessinsider seems not to be be very accurate with their business numbers ..
Edited 2010-02-12 23:47 UTC
Might be a difference between GAAP and non-GAAP, but I dunno, I don’t usually follow MS’s earnings.
Hmm… worse, those appear to be monthly profits, not quarterly.
Yes, that’s an average of $7 *billion* dollars, each *month*, just from MS Office. Blows my mind.
You’re reading it wrong… each of the color bands is separate amounts stacked on top of each other. That means MS Office is making ~$2-3 B each month
Oh, I’m sorry, I always thought those kinds of diagrams were supposed to mean that the one at the top actually made the top figure.
Anyways, $3 billion each month is still a *lot* of money.
Ugh, now I’m the one that was reading it wrong..they were quarterly amounts (damn, I’m blind!)
A stacked bar chart with Labels of total profit, per month and each bar representing a percentage of the profit, per month on the Y axis would be much clearer to discern.
I’m not sure I explained it completely clear:
Y-axis: Total Profits
X-axis: Month
Each bar a percentage of the profits per month.
X-axis: Quarter (it is in 3 month steps. Monthly would not make sense because MS does not post monthly numbers and then the profit in the chart would be totally wrong)
That would obviously be false.
Here are real quarterly revenue and profit numbers for the WHOLE company:
2/05 10.818 Mio. 3.463 Mio.
3/05 9.620 Mio. 2.563 Mio.
4/05 10.161 Mio. 3.700 Mio.
1/06 9.741 Mio. 3.141 Mio.
2/06 11.837 Mio. 3.653 Mio.
3/06 10.900 Mio. 2.977 Mio.
4/06 11.804 Mio. 2.828 Mio.
1/07 10.811 Mio. 3.478 Mio.
2/07 12.542 Mio. 2.626 Mio.
3/07 14.398 Mio. 4.926 Mio.
4/07 13.371 Mio. 3.035 Mio.
1/08 13.762 Mio. 4.289 Mio.
2/08 16.367 Mio. 4.707 Mio.
3/08 14.454 Mio. 4.388 Mio.
4/08 15.837 Mio. 4.297 Mio.
1/09 15.961 Mio. 4.373 Mio.
2/09 16.629 Mio. 4.174 Mio.
3/09 13.648 Mio. 2.977 Mio.
4/09 13.099 Mio. 3.045 Mio.
1/10 12.920 Mio. 3.574 Mio.
2/10 19.022 Mio. 6.662 Mio.
Mio = Million
. = ,
And they really made 6.66 billion, that is proof that MS is evil!
(and I disagree that all companies are not likeable .. some companies have a really good ethics and products based on strong principles and then I find myself liking those companies)
Edited 2010-02-13 00:21 UTC
Talk about a retarded comment. Microsoft’s business practices have been closely regulated by the USDOJ and EU for nearly a decade. The only thing evil are anti-capitalist morons.
They are regulated in the areas where they have a monopoly, but practices like using profits from windows/office to pay companies to pull themselves from Google’s search engine and list exclusively with Bing are pretty evil.
I also think they work pretty hard to make office a moving target to prevent serious competitors from gaining ground.
You lived such a sheltered life. That’s a business tactic and at worst is a little-underhanded. It’s hardly evil. There’s no ethical requirement to be on any search engine index and certainly no ethical requirement to be on Google. It’d be more legit if Bing could get better hits of its own accord, of course.
How do you figure that is evil? All, I repeat, all companies (with more than one product) do exactly that. There is moral or legal requirement to treat different products as stand alone business that are not connected technical, or from a business perspective.
-Foredecker
How, exactly, is that evil? Google has a near-monopoly in search. The market would benefit from increased competition, even if that competition is promoted by buying market share. Ultimately, everyone benefits from increased competition — not less — so your assertion is bogus.
Priest, meet competition. Competition, Priest. Look, it’s simple. Microsoft has to add value with subsequent products, or customers won’t buy its products. Given that Microsoft has continued to add value in each of the successive releases of Office — Ribbon is a far better experience than previous releases — you can’t argue that this hasn’t benefited customers. Certainly, it has made competitors’ lives more difficult, but WTF cares about the ease of competitors’ lives? I’m more interested in the benefit to customers.
Wait, what? It’s ‘evil’ for Microsoft to buy other companies?
So … the companies being bought that accept the offers, are they ‘evil’ too?
Gotta love life in Freetardia.
Edited 2010-02-13 22:14 UTC
… that it constantly makes 1+ $billion more than desktop Windows is something I didn’t realize.
seems like area normally taken for granted when thinking about Microsoft, for me at least
Edited 2010-02-13 00:11 UTC
Well what it does go to prove is that the hype by Linux advocates years ago of ‘Microsoft dying in the server world’ is greatly exaggerated in the same way that one see’s Mac advocates claim that Microsoft is doomed because Apple is getting a lot of press (ignoring the fact that Mac sales grew slower than the over all market).
Microsoft server sales ever since Windows 2003 has been on an upwards growth path with Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 further re-enforcing the server side of the Windows equation have their act together. When you couple the Windows server with the Office system components and the technology they’re bringing onboard it would be unwise to make statements regarding Linux apparently ‘eating Windows up for lunch’.
Edit: Amazing, under 5 minutes and someone moderates my post down; anyone surprised? Talk about fascists on this website silencing descent.
Edited 2010-02-13 00:42 UTC
For what it is worth, I don’t think your appeal to victim status makes the strawman in your post any more valid.
Again, you’re reading the chart wrong. It consistently makes less than Windows, it’s just a thin strip on top of the windows profit there.
So where did you get the information we’re supposed to read the graph by subtracting the bottom neighboring edge from the top edge for each division? I could not find anything in the original article indicating that.
(and it would seem irrational to make a graph like that unless they wanted to deceptively inflate Office profits by 300 – 400% for example)
It’s a common graph type (apparently called a “Stacked Area Chart”)… so call it irrational if you want, but it’s not uncommon.
Also important to note, Microsoft didn’t create this graph.
Edited 2010-02-13 02:23 UTC
I thought it was pretty clear that it was just a stacked graph. How else would everything look so nice and nothing cross over at all?
Maybe I phrased that wrong. I mean, everything trends the same way at the same time. And just look at the way the electronics division magically skips from a somewhat negative number to a positive number without crossing over the online services division.
Edited 2010-02-13 02:42 UTC
Ah ok, thanks for the information. I’ll keep that in mind.
I was surprised to see that 6% of their income came from clubbing baby seals.
Me, too!!
I would have expected it to be at least 9% by now!!
I guess the ever increasing costs of clubs is hurting Microsoft’s bottom line just like everyone else…
–The loon
Yes, but is it profitable?
Or clubbing baby Penguins
There’s a new i-app for that, so MS stake is going down from past years.
Isn’t it kind of funny that all of the sales parallel each other? Looking at this chart one could interpret that it’s almost a sure bet that if someone buys a copy of Windows (on a PC or retail/oem) or Server, they are going to buy a copy of Office with it.
Then again the average user doesn’t realize that there are alternatives to anything but Windows, Office, and Windows server. It still amazes me that in a tech world where everything is constantly changing, more than a decade later, MS is still able to rely on Windows and Office sales OR making people believe that Windows and Office are the only way to conduct ‘real’ business on a PC.
There are alternatives but they are not as good.
Office is still the best product out-there, and it’s more or less the only way to conduct real business on. It has most features and best UI. IBM has the next best offer with Lotus.
Yeah, either that or its a stacked area graph. I thought that “there’s nothing like a clear graph” was a joke! This is one of the least clear graphs I’ve ever seen!
1. The y axis isn’t labelled correctly. Should be Billions of dollars *per year* (or month or whatever).
2. I suspect it *is* a stacked area graph. It doesn’t say, but they do show filled areas rather than lines, and the ‘office’ and ‘servers and tools’ areas don’t vary in width at all really.
3. If it is a stacked area graph, wtf is going on with ‘entertainment and devices’? Seriously?
Business week seems to be somewhat shit at graphs… for example check this so-called graph out:
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-total-cash-and-st-i…
The sales parallel each other because most of the “sales” are actually filling existing contracts. At this point Microsoft doesn’t do all that much retail sales and has very few new sales (in general, actually, their per-unit sales are decreasing). Most of this is software assurance, OEM contracts, etc. The reason they go up at the end of the year is mostly an artifact of the Windows 7 release date and the contract cycle time for OEMs and software assurance / enterprise licensees (when they offer a new licensing structure, they tend to convert large numbers of their licensees around the same time). Note that the “sales” here refer to license units, not installed units.
Microsoft’s problem continues to be: they are now almost entirely dependent on the continuation of their large structured license agreements, and that they have been largely unsuccessful in adding novel products and services (that they pull revenue from). They profit from momentum, depending on organizations to purchase their products because that’s what they’ve always done before. That’s not a bad strategy since they’ve succeeded in raising the cost of migration away from their products to the point where it’s simply not reasonable for most clients to attempt.
The other problem Microsoft is facing is that, for the first time, the installed units is lagging the licensed units by a pretty big margin. That is worrying, not because they’ll loose customers, but eventually those customers are going to negotiate for fewer licenses and lower cost packages.
Where they are losing out is in nascent markets not already dominated by them. They’ve consistently failed to break into these areas and never profited from them (so the incentive to put effort in is low). Not only do companies not consider Microsoft in these areas, but they actively discriminate against them.
Actually, that’s not accurate. Microsoft has made serious inroads into markets that it didn’t control; for example, smartphones (Windows Mobile), game consoles (Xbox 360), and servers (Windows Server). However, it rested on its laurels in smartphones, failed to innovate, and allowed Apple and Google to wrest market share away. That doesn’t mean Microsoft is out of the game, though. The irony of having Apple and Google battle one another over the smartphone market is that there probably won’t be a single competitor that dominates in that space. It’s more likely that each major competitor will control a small portion of the overall market, and that leaves the door open for Microsoft; although, frankly, they better do something ground-breaking, or their brand will be permanently damaged.
Their income is a mix of patent racketeering (“Some people violate some of our patents, maybe you should cut a deal with us and avoid any problems”), FUD-based marketing, lock-in, and dodgy “donations” to schools from the part of Microsoft’s money that’s in Microsoft’s “Gates Foundation” account.
Regarding software patents, I’m trying to build a picture of Microsoft on this public wiki, help welcome:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Microsoft
Perhaps your comment title should read:
All cred revoked due to tinfoil hat being to tight…
MS gets sued for patent issues just like any other company, they just lost a big one over xml and word.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10420391-75.html
Then they lost that huge one to Eolas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolas
That one cost them 521 million big ones.
I hear this claim a lot, but try naming some patents in its portfolio that Microsoft has filed infringement lawsuits.
The FAT32 long filenames lawsuit against Tomtom (coincidentally, a feature that IIRC Tomtom got from using a Linux kernel)?
ciaran-tard:
2003 called. They want their anti-MS hype back.
Wake up.
“At least Bill has some coding cred – unlike that acid-popping Steve guy in Cupertino.”
What a way to end the article! “Well, at least Bill was never a hippie.” Heh.
Bill co-wrote Microsoft Basic (v2.0 appearing on the Commodore 64). Everything from then on he bought and sold on (DOS included).
I would hardly call Microsoft Basic worthy of ‘coding cred’. If you want cred, look at Woz’s insane code in the Apple II, the guy was a programming wizard.
Heey.. don´t forget the first version of gorilla.bas :p
EDIT: Added “first” … damn brain, thinking faster than I can type…
Edited 2010-02-13 20:28 UTC
So, what’s your point? That technology companies — Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc — acquire other companies and leverage their investments? That acquisition doesn’t yield innovative products? You’ve got a tough sell there. Many, if not most, of the most widely used software products originated in acquisition targets. Quite frankly, I applaud any company that sees a shortcut to the future, and takes it, in the interest of getting an innovative product to market faster — and leveraging the strength that comes from scale.
I don’t think you fully understand the constraints that both Gates and Wozniak were operating under — and it’s the constraints that set them apart from today’s innovation. Gates and Allen squeezed a full-featured BASIC interpreter + data into only 4K of memory. They did this with a variety of innovative tricks — opcode alignment and jumps, self-modifying code, etc — using 8080 assembly language. You may like to think that this doesn’t give them “street cred” but, frankly, you’re full of crap. Most devs today couldn’t accomplish the same thing; especially, if they had to use the crude tools that Gates and Allen used at the time. It’s a lesson in economy that modern devs would be well-advised to absorb. I’m not trying to minimize Woz, either. He was and remains a brilliant guy, and Apple wouldn’t be where it is today without his contributions. Steve Jobs never had the “street cred” to create what either Gates or Woz created.
Edited 2010-02-13 21:50 UTC
tomcat, please. Don’t you realize that some freetard’s opinion on some random comment section trumps anything Gates did 30 years ago? After all, the commenter was there, wasn’t he?
http://tmrepository.com/trademarks/ihatebillgates/
Some of these people weren’t even born or in diapers when Gates created the BASIC interpreter. They take their compilers, memory, and CPU horsepower for granted, not even possessing the slightest context to understand how difficult some of the constraint problems were.
Ironically Gates also took memory and CPU for granted. Since the machine they used to develop the interpreter, a DEC PDP, was used without permission from Harvard. In fact neither Bill nor Paul Allen really “dropped out” of Harvard, like they like to wax poetic about, but it was more an issue of being asked politely to take a leave of absence or face the disciplinary actions associated with their “commandeering” of a minicomputer which was not theirs. At the time, the machine they had been using was worth a pretty penny. So this was not an “innocent” transgression.
Which made the Gate’s bitchfest regarding piracy during the 70s even more hypocritical. After all, Microsoft did not really paid any royalties or negotiated any licensing with Harvard regarding the code they had developed on machines/property which were not Microsoft’s. Also there is also the issue that their “original” BASIC interpreter, which wasn’t really original since it was a port of somebody else’s work.
Bill Gates is a great marketing person, also aided in an interesting way by his functional autism… and a personality which seems to be unencumbered by certain moral dilemmas. As a technical person, he has no cred to speak of. And neither does Jobs really. Wozniak and Allen deserve most of the technical merits regarding the founding of Apple and Microsoft respectively. Ironically both ended up burned out and stabbed in the back by their respective partners.
Edited 2010-02-14 00:09 UTC
Harvard didn’t have a policy about usage of the PDP. So, the rest of your comment is nothing but hyperbole. They couldn’t have been disciplined or expelled for violating a non-existent policy. But thanks for playing, anyway.
That’s a nice fairy tale you’ve created, but it’s just that. Gates and Allen were students when they were using the timeshare system. They had every right to use the system and, as I said above, Harvard had no policy governing its use. Microsoft wasn’t incorporated until November 1976 in New Mexico. If you seriously think that any innovation which has its roots in academic research is tantamount to piracy/theft, then you’re seriously nuts. Add Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google fame to your list. They were working on doctoral degrees at Stanford when they created the first search engine. They followed a similar course to Gates and Allen. And there’s a world of difference between developing an innovation while a student — and having somebody pirate your work product.
BS. Complete utter BS.
Here, we agree.
Yet more hyperbole on your part. It’s very easy to criticize Gates in hindsight based on rulings that Microsoft had a monopoly in operating systems and, therefore, whatever it did would eventually be considered illegal. But Gates and company were operating prior to that ruling and, therefore, anything they did was done without the knowledge that they would be violating the law. That’s one of the ironies of antitrust law: You CAN’T know you’re violating antitrust until a court rules against you. So “morality” had nothing to do with it.
None of them have “technical cred” today. Their innovations took place years ago, long before you were wearing diapers and sucking your thumb. So, really, trying to say, on the one hand that Allen and Wozniak deserve praise, while Gates and Jobs don’t, smacks of hypocrisy or idiocy. Take your pick.
Just for giggles, you should read an interesting book called “Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire,” by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. The authors took a pretty even-handed approach on their coverage. Reading that book puts a lot of things in this thread into perspective.
http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/0887306…
I have read that book.
Writing an interpreter is hard enough but even harder when you don’t have access to the hardware. Bill Gates wrote most of BASIC for the Altair on paper and then tested it in an emulator that Allen created. It took a lot of work and was a huge gamble. Sure it wasn’t like the Woz who put together a computer in his garage but it was impressive for the time.
Edited 2010-02-14 00:32 UTC
You’re right, but none of these people will ever acknowledge that anything Gates did was innovative, because they simply hate him to the core. They hate that he outmaneuvered them. They hate that Windows is the dominant desktop operating system. They hate that they can’t give away Linux for free, and take market share. They hate that people charge money for software.
When I was 12 I was writing assembly on paper and bitmaps on graph paper (calculating the bytes manually). This was common with the Commodore 64 and earlier computers. What Bill did was good, but he had an education and a lot of years on me, but I could have done the same in the same situation. Tron was animated on graph paper, this sort of thing is familiar to me—it really was manual before the first IDEs came into being.
Oh give me a break, what do you think his education was in?
It wasn’t as if there was a class available on how to write a Basic interpreter for the Altair and keep it under 4k.
I don’t see any programs on your website so why should I assume you could have done the same? Is it really that hard to accept that Bill Gates was a good programmer in his time?
Bill Gates did code back in the day and wrote the Dos boot loader on the plane ride to the first client meeting where he had to demo Dos. The boot loader worked though the demo was also the first test of it.
Steve Wozniac was a hardware hacker that had been designing circuit boards the way the current gamers spend time playing through titles. He literally designed and build the Apple computers in the early days.
Steve Jobs was a charismatic kid with a nack for making deals and selling. He did the managing and the dreaming up of where products could go but no hard good development.
Bill had code cred though first blew out his street cred with the now famous open letter. Steve had hardware and code cred as the product development side of apple. Steve had the entrepreneurial drive to try and make it a business.
Then there is the investor that gave Apple the money to move from a garage chip board vendor to a personal computer manufacturer.
That is if lore holds true.
The only thing you can really see is that they still make a lot of money, the rest is marketing talk.
For the moment their just isn’t an OS that will take over the market. As long as that isn’t the case the marketing strategy of MS will work like it does now.
I’m pretty sure Apple doesn’t want to become larger (much more market share). It would change the company too much.
The group behind linux should change their principles, otherwise they will never convince the major hardware companies to deliver good drivers and major software companies to deliver equally good product for it. Off course there are examples, but those are just a small percentage of the whole market.
Making something that isn’t centered around Windows is Microsoft’s biggest challenge. I believe that Windows is becoming increasingly irrelevant to consumers as they migrate to the web and other better, easier experiences (iPad / ChromeOS).
Consumers don’t *want* Windows, they are forced to need it, due to market forces and the Windows monopoly. They just want a computer that works the same everytime they switch it on and doesn’t randomly break, slow down or constantly confuse them with indecipherable messages.
Consumers don’t want Word, Excel or Powerpoint–they want to write letters to their friends, they want to calculate their expenses, they want to impress their boss at the meeting. They don’t give a crap about what they use to do that as long as it’s easy.
If something easier than Windows and easier than Office comes out, and it isn’t sidelined by the OEMs and by crappy sales staff, then Microsoft are screwed. The iPad is this device, I believe–or, the iPad in two years, as it will take that long to improve and to filter through the geek crowd and down to consumers.
OEMs have been selling consumers crappy workstations that are good at nothing consumers want to do. Look at what Apple can do with 1GHz in the iPad. PCs hit 1GHz in 2000, when Windows98 and Netscape were king.
*Desktop operating systems are toast, finished, done with* in the consumer space. Workstations and desktop OSes are for geeks and businesses, they do not serve the majority’s needs.
If the iPhone is anything to go by, OEMs are going to be seriously feeling the competition as Apple come to dominate the market whilst HP and Co prat about with Windows 7 tablets.
At first I found myself agreeing with your comment, but then I thought about my older sisters and their families and I think they wouldn’t like to live with the limitations of the Ipad.
I think you are so used to clueless customers that you don’t see the people that manage to do quite a bit on Windows with limited interest they have in tech, but also without needing professional support.
First of all the Ipad is not a primary device. It cannot update itself, you need Itunes for that. (ChromeOS can though)
My sisters need to work with cameras and printers .. at the moment the Ipad does seem to be able to work well with those. (ChromeOS might be a bit better, maybe those kind of devices will make WLAN printers with PDF or PS support more popular where you just send a file to that device it prints it exactly like the PDF/PS)
They are used to a few tweaks (adblocking, form fillers etc) that they really would miss.
And those are just the things I can think off of the top of my head .. there certainly is more.
So the Ipad as a primary device .. not likely, ChromeOS maybe (combining it with Android would help) but it will take years and years. Just look at the most popular programs on Windows, a lot of those would have to be developed from the ground up for tablets.
I agree though the Windows is getting more competition and will have to adapt.
I see plenty of those too. They do very well for themselves, and I should have worded my post to say “geeks, power users and prosumers”. Windows does work for these people, those that are interested enough to make it work, but that’s not the majority unfortunately.
This is the single biggest flaw with the iPad (that it cannot easily be your one and only computer). I think that if it gets popular enough, Apple will realise that the iPad needs to operate independently. Also I hope there will be good competition in this area in the form of ChromeOS / Android and others.
If the iPad / ChromeOS become popular enough the printer manufacturers will be forced into doing things in a standard way. Google are trying to force this with ChromeOS by asking manufacturers to supply a standard protocol and CUPS drivers and no more of that .MSI crap.
Apple badly need the competition to get them to open up the device and let it function with anybody’s equipment and no more “Made for iPad” restrictions.
edit: s/baldy/badly
Edited 2010-02-13 15:59 UTC
I thought the baldy was a Freudian slip.
I sat here reading your post thinking “but I am here with my netbook, running Windows 7, Java and JBOSS so I can do development work while I travel…” before realizing DOH! I am one of those power users.
I definitely think there will be a “split” in computing. PCs and even laptops relegated to business and gaming use, then all kinds of internet “devices” for the people who make use of email, social web sites, etc.
I guess this means lower production and higher prices for the old guard equipment… and competitive pricing and larger quantities of the 3G/4G generation of devices.
Better build my gaming/development power house at home up while I can afford it.
I agree. It’s going to be in the ten to twenty year timespan, but it could be workstations for developers, and tablets and other devices for consumers. It depends on whether we come up with a new programming paradigm to suit programming on a multi-touch device (Bring back HyperCard!
)
This isn’t interesting. It’s true that people don’t want a thing itself, they want it for what it does and for how it benefits them. Well, DUH! So saying “users don’t want Windows, they want a computer that works” is not interesting in the slightest. Nor does it say anything about Windows. Windows works, it’s easy, everyone knows it and so it fulfills people’s needs to have a computer that works. Just typing that last sentences makes the tautology clear.
Believe it or not, people do actually like Windows and Office and other MS products. I know the Linux community has nurtured this idea that they only reason those two are around is because of OEMs or “people don’t know better”, but that is patently false. MS won fair and square and continues to win fair and square by providing products that people want and that do what they need. They aren’t perfect. But then again, neither is a lot of FLOSS software.
If Windows worked then I would be out of a job. Instead, I spend 40–60 hours a week helping people. I get two Mac jobs a *year*.
Nothing “just works”. But Windows is a hell of a lot closer than Linux. Macs generally work pretty well, probably better than Windows, but they are expensive and not compatible with a lot of what people want to do. I’d rather Apple allow OS X to be installed on any machine. It’s a very pleasant experience, IMHO.
siride:
Verily. And affirmed by many at http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/
rockwell, you managed to be an idiot once again! You managed to bring up a blog filled with offensive language and incorrect facts (and I’ll admit some truth too), in a conversation that has nothing to do with Linux!
I know you find Linux fanboys annoying, and you like to use your childish “freetard” word to describe them, but you are definitely more annoying than just about any type of fanboy or troll I can think of.
I wonder what you’re like in real life. Do you have any friends? You seem like a pretty offensive, hard to get along with, type of person. You really need to calm down and understand that everyone is titled to their opinion and it’s okay to voice your opinion calmly and appropriately, but not to interject at every moment you can to call people offensive words and make people angry.
(By the way, I am quite proud of your post at http://www.osnews.com/permalink?409234 ; you actually didn’t say anything stupid, and weren’t offensive! You have proved that you are capable of intelligent, productive thought.)
I like how you take offense to rockwell’s oneliners but say nothing when lemur posts his usual 500 word snake oil salesmen pitch for FOSS.
Actually, lemur’s posts do annoy me quite often, since they are filled with inaccuracies and are sometimes obnoxious. However, lemur’s posts are not at all offensive. lemur doesn’t go around calling people, basically, retards, for believing in something.
Pretty much all rockwell does is call people “freetards” and post links to LHB. Personally, if I were an admin, he would be banned.
Struck a nerve, didn’t I? The truth hurts.
Linux belongs on servers. On the desktop it is an utter mess of a failure. You would have to be “retarded” (look up the term in a dictionary, it’s far from offensive) to think otherwise. Thus the term “free-tard” or “freetard.”
Stop me if this is over your head. Millions agree with me, and I do my best to post the truth on this bastion of freetardia that is OS News.
Lol! Yeah, right!
You really are a barrel of laughs, rockwell. The way you label anybody who doesn’t agree with you a “freetard” really shows off your debating skills as well as your maturity. Not being able to qualify your statements has never been portrayed with quite your level of childishness. Well done!
Now run along. Like I said last time, we adults want to have a real conversation.
Desktop Linux doesn’t belong on servers. I have Arch Linux running KDE SC 4.4, which is current desktop software, and it is a far better desktop system (running on the identical hardware) than any version of Windows.
Edited 2010-02-15 01:12 UTC
AFAIK you can’t get oil from snakes. I have never attempted to sell any software to anyone.
Edited 2010-02-15 01:14 UTC
Verified by many at Linuxhaters…How very objective!
Usage of Windows is broader and vaster. Not a really good comparison. And who are you helping and how are you helping (ie. what are the problems you market yourself to resolve?)
Anything and everything, that’s the amazing part. You would think that it’d always be the same problems, but honestly, it’s not. Every person is different, every computer is different, every scenario is different. I’ve seen Windows break in incredible, weird and wacky ways and dealt with everything from 93 year old ladies starting out with computers for the first time to young professionals in audio and video engineering.
In most circumstances Windows (and to put the blame where it needs to go—third party Windows software) gets in the way of what people want to get done.
Windows 7 is a great product, I’m truly glad that I don’t have to setup Vista machines any more, but it’s just a prettier version of a 25 year old computing concept. I want to see some change.
As with a post I responded to yesterday (claiming that “XP is dead”), your statement will probably be borne out in the long term – but stating it in the present tense is a teensy bit premature. Remember that minicomputers didn’t suddenly become irrelevant the second that microcomputers became available.
And it’s hard not to be skeptical about predictions of the “death of the desktop,” when we’ve been hearing those exact same predictions for the past 15 years. Remember when “network computers” were the latest sure-fire “desktop-killer”? Or “Internet appliances”?
🙂
edit: What I mean is that I think there’s not much more than can be done with mouse operating systems beyond polish, and making them better web clients. Even with OS X they’re just improving APIs to allow flashier apps, and polishing the overall experience, but I can’t see how OS X could radically change into something else and not be just a continuation of the point and click desktop. At the end of the day it needs to run Photoshop and XCode the way it does. What more is there to add?
The long term future is the ’Web and the Internet device, everything in-between is transition.
Edited 2010-02-13 17:56 UTC
You should talk to Sun. This whole network web computer thing has been working out so well for them, you see.
An idea has to fail first before it can succeed. Sun made a long list of mistakes that marginalised Java, they were always second fiddle on the OS and so couldn’t ever innovate. With ChromeOS and the iPad there is no middleman for content, nothing that has to be download and installed to then download and install something else. No multi-layered mess.
Sun were never putting the average user first, they were trying to appeal to businesses and developers. The awful Java installer and runtime are still clear indicators that they have little clue about the end-user. If Oracle have an ounce of sense they will clean that crap up quick.
Sun failed because they tried to change the web from the middle out. Apple and Google will succeed.
Nonsense. For the iPad, the experience will be the same as the iPhone; where you have the “Managed Web”; that is, local native applications that consume content from the Web, but provide a better experience than a Web browser. Google is trying to create programming environment within Chrome OS where devs can access Web content primarily via HTML5, but also have local device access via Javascript. Spending a few minutes in Safari or Chrome browser on one of these portable devices is all that it takes to convince you that, while Google’s proposed platform is more “open” (unless you consider its native OS Javascript extensions), Apple will provide a better user experience with local native apps. Apple is not really interested in marginalizing their platform with HTML5. They want to make the Web accessible, but only to the extent that it doesn’t cannibalize their ecosystem.
Sun is not a consumer-focused company. They are first and foremost a workstation and server company. It’s their DNA. It’s why they failed.
Agree. For Sun, “the network is the computer” really meant “buy our server hardware and just use thin client software”. Complete non-starter which ignored the reality of how people use portable computing devices.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft will all succeed in varying ways. Of these 3, Apple and Microsoft are the most similar: They want you to use local native apps that consume Web/cloud content. Apple wants to lock you into a closed ecosystem, which limits your choice and flexibility but offers greater security/robustness. Microsoft doesn’t mind where apps come from, which provides flexibility but limits security/robustness. Google wants you to primarily use Web technologies to consume Web content, and also access some local capabilities. None of their separate strategies can possibly satisfy all broad-based market need.
If you assume a future where infinite bandwidth exists, then the differences between local and Web start to fall away, and what starts to matter is ubiquity and standards. So Google probably aligns better with the year 2030. But it’s not clear whether HTML5-based apps can match the local native app experience. Google is betting on that happening. It’s the only way they can continue to grow the search market; without it, Google knows that Apple and Microsoft will only benefit.
Aye, that. “The Network is the Computer.”
Really, Sun? How’d that end up for ya?
I’m sorry but that is a misuse of the word irrelevant.
Windows will be a mainstream OS for at least the next decade. That’s not irrelevant. ChromeOS and the iPad are targeted at portable use.
A good portion of Microsoft’s earnings come from the multitudes of corporations that utilize and have, ‘volume,’ and/or, ‘enterprise,’ licensing agreements with Microsoft. Either directly or through a support vendor.
These licensing agreements are usually written for a locked-in (minimum)number the company has agreed to pay. If they don’t utilize the number of licenses they purchased, they still have to pay. If they exceed the number, they make up the difference.
I actually saw such contracts & agreements when I worked contracting for a major insurance company. There are multiple ways to enable the contract.
1. Windows OS only.
2. Windows OS with MS Office.
3. Windows OS with other MS offerings, etc.
4. Server Platforms, etc.
The pricing scheme surprisingly was quite reasonable. Due to the volume (more than 6,000 seats at this company) the cost, per seat, was only about $65 for the company to put Windows and MS Office on a desktop or laptop computer.
The contract I saw had the company paying MS $390K for just those licenses.
If an MS sales rep worked the contract, there was always better price negotiation. When we dealt with a support vendor, they had their middle-man mark-up to & profit margins consider.
Not a bad pay-day for MS, no matter who works the deal.
As long as individuals, companies & corporations are willing to pay the prices that MS charges, then Microsoft will continue their pricing models.
Is it wrong? Not really. It’s business. Microsoft has never claimed to be a Non-Profit company.
Probably wouldn’t be a money pit if they had anyone over there who understood HTML/CSS, and didn’t require more hosting than god herself to handle the complete bull of poorly written code using hundreds of K of HTML, CSS and javascript to deliver single digit K of content. Javascript inlined in the markup, CSS inlined in the markup, presentational markup AND div’s thrown at code willy-nilly…
Hell, just look at a search result page from BING – 50k of HTML just to deliver ~3k of CDATA… or Hotmail using 122k of ‘documents’, and lord knows how much javascript (since they load it in such a convoluted manner the web dev toolbar can’t even figure it out) just to show 3.4k of CDATA that makes up the average inbox page.
They can just barely make a browser, for a web presence? They just don’t get it and the people they have working on it are OBVIOUSLY not qualified to hold their jobs…
as evidenced by such wonderful gems as:
<script>Browser={isFF:true,isFF2:true,isFF3:false};</script&g t;
<script src=”http://gfx6.hotmail.com/mail/15.1.3028.1103/cmpt0.js“></scri…
or
<div id=”c_header” class=”c_hb” style=”min-width:987px;”><div class=”c_hta”><div class=”c_hg” style=”background-image:url(http://gfx1.hotmail.com/mail/uxp/w4/m1/pr06/h/g.png);padding-bottom:7px;”><div class=”c_h” style=””><div class=”c_hl” style=”top:12px;”>http://shared.live.com/“” <span class=”c_is” style=”padding-left:18px;font-size:17px;line-height:17px;vertical-ali gn:middle;margin-right:3px;”><span style=”clip: rect(0px 18px 17px 0px);left:0px;top:0px;”><img src=”http://gfx1.hotmail.com/mail/uxp/w4/m1/pr06/h/s3.png“ alt=”Windows Live” /></span></span><span class=’c_hbrnd’>Windows Live<span class=”c_tm”>â„¢</span></span></div><div class=”c_hc”><div class=”inCenter” style=”margin-right:4.5em;;”><ul class=”c_ht”><li>http://shared.live.com/Live.Mail“” Home</li>
Ineptitude, they name is Microsoft web developers.
As I said on a blog entry about a year ago:
http://my.opera.com/deathshadow/blog/2008/11/05/rubbish-code-from-a…
What they did to hotmail with the new version they shoved down everyone’s throat should have resulted in people getting FIRED.
AJAX for nothing and your scripts for free – huh, that ain’t working…
Edited 2010-02-14 08:59 UTC
Addendum – was just taking a closer peek, get a load of this ****.
<tr id=”85f268c8-1465-11df-9a01-002264c15ace” msg=”msg” mad=”44|0|8CC76896CAB7390||” ><td class=”Chk” name=”msgChkCell” unselectable=”on”><input type=”checkbox” name=”msgChk” title=”Select message”/></td>
What’s wrong with that? ID’s cannot start with numbers, the following attributes – msg, mad, unselectable – do NOT EVEN EXIST in HTML, those a pure made up gibberish. They have NOTHING on th eID to make it part of a set or to identify itself as unique meaning they are likely pulling the unique information from one of it’s parent elements making the javascript ten times more complex than need be… there is NO reason to ever put NAME on a TD since that’s NOT even a valid property of TD, shall I go on?
They don’t even know enough HTML to be MAKING websites in the first damned place! How the **** do these people get and keep their jobs, are the suits really THAT ignorant, or do the people writing this crap just have their noses so far into the brown they can see teeth and are deep-throating Ballmer’s tonsils?
Edited 2010-02-14 10:03 UTC
Microsoft’s ineptitude with HTML is legendary. That’s why I hold out zero hope for Office:Web and expect it to be nothing but a trojan horse for Silverlight.
So is this in here to suggest that Microsoft make their profits in those areas because Gates once wrote a bit of code and Jobs didn’t?
Oh wait, I see. This is one of those “make sure every article has something negative about Apple” comments. Right. Got it now…
You may be amused, but it is your lack of understanding of the markets. Sure they may seem stable, but if anything destabilizes it – the whole boatload sinks.
The “Office” and “Server and Tools” divisions require the stability of the “Windows” division. If they lost the Windows division, the other two would be equally devastated. This could be mitigated if Microsoft ported those things (e.g. Office) to other platforms (besides Mac, in the case of Office); but Microsoft won’t do that. Their arrogance will be their downfall.
Those that see Microsoft failing in the future also see a coming significant decline in the use of Windows and Office – the mainstays of Microsoft.
ODF right now is eating Microsoft’s lunch in the Format-war. Sure, it’s not out in the open any more, but Microsoft is not winning any national standards with OOXML – everyone is turning to ODF. That means, their Office empire is threatened aside from its Windows foundation. Give people the opportunity to use a difference office suite (IBM Lotus Symphony, OpenOffice, KOffice, etc.) and they’ll eventually move from Windows too if their other software allowed them.
It’s just a matter of time. Microsoft will not be dominant forever. Their days are numbered. Who replaces them is a different matter, but it will likely be ODF-based for the file format, and Linux-based for the OS.