Microsoft Corp. today announced that Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer has decided to retire as CEO within the next 12 months, upon the completion of a process to choose his successor. In the meantime, Ballmer will continue as CEO and will lead Microsoft through the next steps of its transformation to a devices and services company that empowers people for the activities they value most.
“There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time,†Ballmer said. “We have embarked on a new strategy with a new organization and we have an amazing Senior Leadership Team. My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company’s transformation to a devices and services company. We need a CEO who will be here longer term for this new direction.â€
This was long overdue. Microsoft needs fresh blood at the top – not a salesman, but a visionary.
There is practically nothing being made at M$ one would want to buy. What would you do if you were to take over?
1) Immediately come out with windows 9. It would be very similar to Windows 7 but there would only be one version and it would not have all the difficulties of moving it to another computer as you upgraded hardware.
2) Produce a new phone line made in America and a new version of windows 8 called “Mirrors 1”.
3) Rework the pricing and usability of office. Needs to work off the net and on the net. Needs to be a fixed price unless using the monthly upgrade which should be less than $10 a month. (Or $40 a year.)
4) …
Sure. Next time instead of Exchange my company will suggest to buy some Linux Exchange equivalent and then we’ll go bankrupt.
Well, no offense, but if Exchange is the only thing keeping your company from going bankrupt, then I think we’ll all be better off with it gone.
None taken, I just don’t get what’s so wrong with having one department for Exchange support..
Exchange is not the only game in town… lots of companies running without it just fine (even using Outlook on the desktop). If, however, you’ve built your company around the specifics of Exchange then you have a different set of problems.
Except that no other solutions offer everything Exchange does. There’s tons of companies doing fine with Access or even Excell as their main databases. So? Exchange just plainly has no competition and is quite an awesome thing to have in corporate enviroment.
If any linux zealots might reply to my post saying Ubuntu Server has something to offer – no, it doesn’t. Nope. No. Nooooo.
Edited 2013-08-23 17:13 UTC
Your comment makes no sense … exchange isn’t a “database”. It’s a messaging platform, as it’s name “exchange” implies. Morons that use exchange as a database are the ones that run into trouble. When you have a 20+gb mailbox, it might be due to the fact that you are raping a messaging platform into doing something it was never designed to do. Those people are also the first to cry when something goes wrong.
Exchange uses msjet (now called ESE, or whatever) as it’s storage “back end”, so you’re wrong … it IS ms access … with some glitter on top.
Exchange is a shitty product, always has been. It’s just that people have found many shitty “uses” for it, and are now locked in … or so they think.
Give zimbra a try some day.
Oh, and before you ask/rant … yeah i’ve administered many exchange platforms in my day. I make a good living now from migrating those to something more sensible.
Edited 2013-08-23 17:31 UTC
He saying that for some companies use Access as a database and that works fine for them … not that Exchange uses Access.
Re-read my comment.
I read it.
He said that companies use Access and Excel as databases.
Edited 2013-08-23 18:02 UTC
You’re being deliberately obtuse.
No I am not.
Implying that Exchange is a database platform
A scary thought but also unfortunately true. I worked for a medium-ish company a while back (1000+ employees) whose payroll system was…Excel spreadsheets. I kid you not. It was a nightmare of course, having to manually handle payroll paper sheets for all employees every month.
The only thing not easily replaceable in Exchange is the shared calendars. There are even solutions for that but few that are integrated with everything else. There are likely 100’s of applications that can serve as an email back-end in companies of just about any size. What are you using Exchange for that you think nothing else can do?
Unfortunately part of the reason why Exchange has such a stronghold in certain corporate environments is due to the unconditional approval and support it receives from people who don’t know what they are talking about, like the poster you were replying to.
Zimbra supports shared calendars, even when using Outlook add the client.
He said that you would WANT to buy, not what you are forced to buy due to legacy.
If you didn’t have to buy Microsoft products would you still choose to do so?
Edited 2013-08-24 01:36 UTC
Ohhh, so clever man. M$! I’ve never heard that one before… Also, have you ever run an actual business? If not, you don’t know what you are talking about.
I like the “made in America” idea for the new phone line I think that would be the only way anyone could get me to buy a phone made by Microsoft
Port the Windows userland to the Linux kernel.
Or, of course, reimplement it and give is a recursive acronym like WINE Is Not an Emulator or something…
I would merge windows 7/8 into a single product. I’d have the installer make you choose at install-time whether to turn metro on or off. That would finally unify their tablet and Desktop OSes. Microsoft are morons for trying to shove metro down desktop users. I’d leave the current product lineup as-is and explore some new research avenues for new products.
Really really didn’t like steve ballmer as CEO he is absolutely useless. He should have brought harmony to Microsoft and it’s platforms, software and services, instead every team and staff member is competing against each other, it’s ridiculous they should be all focused together on competing against apple and google. The fighting shows in their products, how the Win RT crowd wait for the office crowd to do something for touch office, how skydrive is only just being picked up and used even though it’s been a hidden gem of microsoft’s for ages.
And as for the staff ranking system it’s absurd, i can’t wait for the guy to leave, i only wish that Sinofsky had’nt already left, i know he was a bit tyrannical but he did bring the teams together into a single focus.
I just hope the next person has the single vision and the ability to bring Microsoft together, to make it into one working harmonious whole.
Ballmer actually did very well as CEO of Microsoft, not from the hyped driven (partially-informed) point of view of blogsphere, but from the business point of view. During his tenure MSFT has double its cash generation and more importantly diversified its business (less than 25% of MSFT’s cash comes from Windows).
Eh Office is the cashcow…
I’d like to see the figures for the revenue streams before and after he took off. He’s getting killed online because of two factors: revenue growth and consumer facing products. Investors are upset that revenues haven’t grown at the same rate they did in the Gates era and they were over taken by their rival Apple in new markets. Consumers don’t like him because he hasn’t really given them good products other than the xbox under his tenure.
The cash increased from more people and businesses using computers. Their cash flow has long been from Windows and Office which had market locks thanks to the work of Gates. Their cash flow would have increased even if they stuck with XP.
Furthermore their enterprise products all stem from their market locks. You’re running Windows anyways so you might as well have your custom software developed for Windows and you might as well use SQL Server since it works easily with VS and you might as well write your web software for ASP.NET since half the code is already in the desktop version and so on and so forth.
Though I despise the Win8/Surface line I think their development tools are top notch and I also like SQL Server but if Apple had the market lock there is no way Microsoft could charge what they currently do for their enterprise products.
*Microsoft has a server business, a server applications business, a cloud business grows, a develoepr tools business, a productivity software business, a entertainment business! Azure and Office 365 are expanding. Servers are doing well.
This is probably going to be a contrarian view, but I really reckon Ballmer wasn’t at fault here. I think the idea of convergence — of a phone, tablet, and PC device as one converged device is not a bad one, and one that Ubuntu is pursuing fairly aggressively. Windows Phone and the new UI also generally receives a lot of praise, as does the Surface Pro, for all its failings. In contrast to everyone else, I think Ballmer had the right vision all along, but he had two problems.
The first was the “technology”. I could waffle here about how “the world wasn’t ready for the idea of a converged device” like it wasn’t ready for the Apple Mac or Newton, but this is OSNews. The fact is, Intel fucked MS over. You and I both know it. They took way too long to get their architecture in gear for MS to have a usable way to have a powerful x86 device with good thermals and battery life. They had a solid go at the Surface Pro, but it was far too little, far too late.
The second is I believe Microsoft itself, which (and I’m guessing) is probably a fiefdom. Everyone is in it to grow their little empire, and to maximise their piece of the pie. Ballmer probably had to contend with Game of Thrones level intrigue on a day-to-day basis just to keep the company going. All the VPs were probably vying for the top job, and so were screwing over each others technology stacks. This is probably why XNA got killed. This is probably why Windows 8 switched to a completely new way of developing apps. Instead of having devices and ecosystems converge and work together, all the lords in MS-land are actively trying to sabotage each other to make their product succeed: Windows phone at the cost of RT, Office at the cost of RT, or XBox at the cost of Windows.
And that brings us to the real reason why MS is flailing: No one trusts them. No one trusts them to converge the devices, even though that’s the Ballmer vision. No one trusts them to keep the damn dev APIs consistent, because they’ve been removing and chopping and changing everything, and no one trusts them to have a coherent ecosystem. Right now, you could have a full MS stack — PCs, tablets, XBox, and still be better off with an iPhone than a Win Phone, because the XBox head actively wants the Phone head to look bad.
Microsoft has problems. I don’t believe those problems are Ballmer. I reckon we’re about to see Microsoft enter a freefall rather than a rally. Here’s hoping for better though, $pple is the new Micro$oft.
Ballmer battled every possible sucessor they could have. now that he’ll leave, who will take the lead?
Maybe they’ll get down on their knees and beg Sinofsky to come back.
Agreed the next tier down are vision-less execs, that are ruthless enough to keep their positions.
Anyone that was a genuine threat to Balmer has been given the elbow.
Hopefully at least they will get over their mid-life crisis and settle down to boring but needed work, rather than looking like Doctor Evil trying to be down with the kids.
The first thing the new person needs to do is get rid of the backdoor in WIndows 8.
http://investmentwatchblog.com/leaked-german-government-warns-key-e…
now that this stuff has so much publicity, the final nail in the coffin for Win 8 would be for a whole country to ban windows 8 on grounds on ‘National Security’.
Now that I would like.
Popcorn anyone?
You mean like this?
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2290640/germany-warns-agai…
Share that popcorn, it’s gonna be a great show!
nice trolling.
… For the entire Open-Source universe.
Who will sink the M$ ship now !?!
Frankly, I will remember him as an aggressive CEO, who used the FUD, and dance like a monkey at show events. That’s it. No more no less.
And the mere mention of his name was the most sure-fire, effortless way to troll both GNU/Freetards AND iFanboys at once – who will fill that role now?
A sad day, guess it’s time to change my username to “EatSchmidt”…
And I remember him as a sweaty, cocaine addicted used car salesman as per his ad for Windows 1.0 and the monkey developers video.
Nothing about him was good, which is why it’s bad that he’s leaving, we need someone even more inept then him to run Microsoft into the ground.
Now all the Microsoft fanbois will get mad because they don’t see that Microsoft’s failure is better for humanity on the whole since it opens several voids that must be filled by other players, some of them old companies that we would prefer not to see anymore of like Oracle but likely also some new players that don’t even exist yet.
A visionary? How about an engineer to run a tech company?
I would hire Joel Spolsky.
Oooooh
No, Microsoft is like a wallstreet firm, it’s not to big to fail, it just needs to fail.
A good engineer does not make a good CEO any more than a good CEO makes a good engineer.
Bill Gates was a good engineer, and a good CEO, wasn’t he?
I wouldn’t bet on the “good engineer”part but that wasn’t my point.
Being a good engineer does not automagically make you a good or even decent CEO. They’re two completely different jobs that requires completely different skills.
Edited 2013-08-24 09:14 UTC
I dunno, apart from Jobs all the best tech CEOs have an engineering background. Although they need a lot more different skills to be good at both.
Jobs was also an engineer, albeit a mediocre one perhaps. In any case he called himself an engineer. After all he had worked at HP and Atari as such.
Jobs worked as an intern at HP. He worked part time for Atari, where he was assigned a hardware design task. He paid Wozniak $350 to do the design and then took credit, and $5,000 for it.
Jobs, despite what he may have called himself, was not an engineer. He was a visionary and marketing genius.
That’s why you need an actual visionary — to sort out the wheat from the chaff. It’s how you avoid investing a fortune into dumb ideas like the Surface RT, Windows 8, and the Zune.
Microsoft doesn’t need a “manager.” They need either a visionary or a brilliant business leader (and I think that it is much more likely that they can hire the latter).
The Zune didn’t fail because of poor management. It failed because no one wanted a feces-colored, big, heavy music player over the elegant, slim iPod. The Zune’s FM radio feature turned out to be a complete flop in a market that viewed FM radio something for senior citizens. Consumers didn’t want to subscribe to hear music (the Zune model); they wanted to buy music. They didn’t want a Zune that could “squirt” (seriously, that’s what Microsoft called it) songs to other Zunes — if you ever found anyone else who actually owned a Zune.
Apple tried exactly what you’re proposing: They put an engineer in charge. They hired Gil Amelio as their CEO. He was a Georgia Tech graduate who had worked at Bell Labs, Fairchild Semiconductor, the semiconductor division of Rockwell, and then most recently as the CEO of National Semiconductor. He was considered to be an outstanding manager. Amelio drove Apple into the ground, practically to bankruptcy.
Though Spotify sees some success lately…
That sounds great to me. But that’s because I own 400 shares of Apple stock.
So, please don’t put a visionary like Steve Jobs in charge of Microsoft.
Let Microsoft continue in its me-too, catch-up role when they fail to anticipate what consumers want. That’s worked so well for them with the iPod-killing Zune, iPhone destroying Windows 8 Phone, and their iPad-beating Surface RT tablet, right?
Microsoft’s biggest problem is that it continues to be run by engineers.
— Office has become an incomprehensible, bloated mess because Microsoft is so busy engineering in new features that less than 1/10th of 1% of users want.
— Windows 8 is a disaster because the Microsoft engineers don’t understand why a UI that works on a 24″ monitor should be different than one for a phone or a touch-screen tablet.
— The proliferation of versions of Windows is because Microsoft engineers think that customers will intuitively grasp what the ability, or lack thereof, to join a “Windows domain,” have a “Group Policy,” or to utilize “BranchCache” means.
— The Surface RT has a Windows 8 interface that leaves consumers confused when it can’t run the Windows applications they already own.
— The Surface RT and Windows Phones have few apps because the engineers at Microsoft didn’t understand economics. Why would developers flock to a newly-introduced platform like the Surface RT when they could develop for the 500 million iOS devices in use? A visionary would have seeded the Microsoft app store by paying leading iOS developers to port their apps to the Surface RT so that they would be ready at launch.
But you’ve got to love Microsoft’s argument that it’s Surface tablet, with it’s 16:9 1080 HDMI movie screen is a ‘serious business tool’ but the iPad, with its A4/Letter-like screen proportions is primarily for watching media.
Everybody considers himself a “visionary”.
Microsoft went downhill once the “suits took over” (S. Jobs). Same as Nokia, when all the MBAs started to run the show.
Engineers can actually be quite good managers, not only at tech companies. There are lots of examples.
because he should not has been promoted to it from the start.
Microsoft needs to retire after him as well. Time to go.
Just remember to find other sponsor for all open source projects that are paid by Microsoft Research.
Worthy projects will endure. The damage to open technologies and standards caused by Microsoft way outweighs any sponsorships they offer.
Yes, yesssssssss…. let the trite, overblown hyperbole flow through you.
But please, don’t let me stop you from ranting about all the damage that Microsoft has done to open technologies and standards… despite the fact that you are most likely posting from a computer using a hardware architecture that was created specifically for Microsoft’s operating systems, and which became widespread entirely because of Microsoft’s success.
Really no different than the creationists who use computers and the internet to endlessly ramble on about how science has only had negative effects.
Pure bunk. First of all x86 (originating in Intel 8086) was not created because of any Microsoft.
While PC industry grew well, the rise of one huge monopolist there (operating systems wise) was the worst thing that happened to it.
Edited 2013-08-23 16:52 UTC
As if Microsoft was the only one to blame.
Sure not, by they became the de-facto monopoly for a long time.
Okay, then I’m sure you’ll have no trouble providing list of computers that used x86 & the PC BIOS, that pre-date the IBM PC, and weren’t built for a Microsoft operating system.
(Waiting….)
So having a standard hardware architecture, and compatible implementations from multiple vendors… that’s a BAD thing? Because that wouldn’t have come about if there hadn’t been a single dominant OS/OS vendor to necessitate a standard hardware architecture.
Except that was IBM that promoted the standard and Microsoft was asked to build an OS to run on it and not the other way around. If was not for MS-DOS we probably would have been served CP/M, but there is no value on trying to rewrite history now.
It is a wonderful thing but, it seems to me, his point was that MS was irrelevant, to a degree, to what happened then, if was not for it, would be someone else. Microsoft only started to be a true power force way latter, around MS Winwdows 3.0 and got total power with Windows 95, from there it started to really flex its muscles.
Edited 2013-08-23 18:51 UTC
And…? That doesn’t change the fact that virtually every PC that has been actually built & sold was intended to run a Microsoft operating system. Or the fact that the PC’s success went hand-in-hand with Microsoft’s success.
Let’s imagine if, back in the day, Microsoft had, say, kowtowed to IBM and introduced measures to prevent their OS from running on non-IBM PC clones. By your reasoning & shmerl’s, that wouldn’t have had any impact on the relative success of the PC platform.
This is a kind of futile experiment isn’t it? History is done. Anyway, what could MS gain from it? Also, I bet Bill Gates would avoid the trap even if IBM asked.
IBM wanted PCs to be a driving to its big computers, Bill Gates and others were smart enough to see them as something way bigger than that.
Sure, just as futile as unfounded speculation about what an unspecified “someone else” might have done in Microsoft’s position, right?
If IBM had properly grasped what they stood to benefit/loose, do you honestly think they couldn’t have made it worth Gates’ while?
Exactly, and there’s no guarantee that anyone else would have had the same degree of vision or the independent will to avoid simply being IBM’s puppet.
Microsoft rode it’s success off the IBM PC. dos was never Microsoft’s invention, it was Gary Kildall’s. Their licensing deals with desktop manufacturers to have their os be the most widely used, any company would have done if ms never existed. Remember ms-dos was a buggy piece of crap compared to other dos operating systems like dr-dos. And Microsoft never standardized anything, the IBM PC was not Microsoft’s invention, and neither was dos.
Microsoft got lucky because a deal with Digital Research and IBM fell out, and so IBM told MS to find a CP/M like clone which would eventually be dos. The IBM PC became a huge success, and MS profited from the success and that allowed to break them off from IBM and start their licensing deals with desktop manufacturers. In other they piggy backed off IBM.
What MS did was never either innovative or beneficial to consumers overall. What MS did was it allowed them monopolize the market and standardize the destkop in their favor. And now they are the gigantic monopoly you see today.
Edited 2013-08-24 18:18 UTC
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but it’s been almost 20 years since DOS was the primary OS for any new computer sold in any significant volume. Since the beginning of the 90s, Microsoft’s flagship OS has been something called “Windows”, perhaps you’ve heard of it?
So unless you’re running a 286 or older, my original point stands: it’s hilarious to watch people impotently rail against Microsoft, while using a computer where nearly every component was built with the specific purpose of running Microsoft’s operating system (and which wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for that purpose).
Seriously?!?!? You’re holding up software from the company that later became SCO, as an example of “what could have been”? If your goal was to argue that things would have better without Microsoft, then congrats – you just completely torpedoed your own argument.
When it comes to Apple, people always overstate the contributions of the individuals involved, while pretending that the circumstances were irrelevant.
But when it comes to Microsoft, people like you are desperate to make the exact same error, just in reverse: you exaggerate the importance of the circumstances to the exclusion of all else, while dishonestly trying to pretend that the individuals had no role. Same bullshit, just a different pile.
A for-profit corporation doing something in their own favor?!?!?!? No shit, welcome to remedial economics. Of course, what you and the other anti-commerce ideologues fail to grasp is that individual businesses are not isolated islands – and that good fortune for one business can lead to good fortune for other business, as with the case of Microsoft and the various PC OEMs. Shocking, I know.
You don’t get it. Microsoft’s monopoly is a combination of the network effect and the intellectual property laws (copyright/patents/trade secrets).
Microsoft can standardize the desktop market because A) having the most widely used OS garners most of the supports as you can see today. And B) The intellectual property laws allows them to standardize the desktop market while ignoring open standards and making sure their software is incompatible with the competition. You’ve seen it, MS makes it difficult to inter-operate with their closed file formats and network protocols, MS dismisses and tries to destroy open standard APIs such as OpenGL, ignoring web standards such as what they did with IE6. Microsoft most likely learned how to abuse the market and IP laws probably from IBM. Also Apple played a part in helping Microsoft’s monopoly when they sued everyone back in the 1980s for copying the look and feel of their GUI (the Apple Lissa).
It was very important for Microsoft to get those licensing deals with the PC makers and to make sure their OS is the most widely used in the world, that’s why I made a big deal about. But once they did MS was able to lock the consumer to using their OS thanks. After 30 years MS is still a monopoly, some things never change.
To put is shortly Microsoft is a monopoly because of copyright and how Microsoft abuses the copyright to standardize the desktop market in their favor. This article will help you understand.
http://rudd-o.com/monopolies-of-the-mind/what-makes-microsoft-a-mon…
IBM PC was developed not because of Microsoft and not for Microsoft, it’s other way around. Do you get the idea?
Edited 2013-08-23 20:08 UTC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts [/q]
Ah, so you’re one of those people who think that there’s nothing to an architecture except the CPU. Noted.
Just because they did things that doesn’t fit into your value system, doesn’t mean that they were the worst ever and doesn’t mean they weren’t/aren’t beneficial.
Today my knowledge of Microsoft tech has got me a well paying job in a tax haven after I was head hunted.
Microsoft tech is not the only tech I know well, I’ve been learning node and Django on Fedora 19. But overwhelmingly that is where my experise is and where the money is in the industry I work in.
There are a lot of developers like me that think Microsoft have improved the ecosystem.
But I am sure you will continue to be blinkered to anyone elses feelings on the subject, because that fits your belief system.
Edited 2013-08-23 17:59 UTC
just mention MSMQ and poison messages to my team and see what the reaction is.
MSMQ – Developers Dream, management nightmare
Just about sums up MS products in general IMHO.
I’ve been told by the guys that work on the data warehouse there are some Microsoft tech that should be a lot simpler than they are for sure.
I think the ASP.NET stack has a very different set of people working on it.
MSMQ is just neglected, its last real update was in the Vista era.
Ever since Azure got AMQP support in Service Bus its been the new shiny for Microsoft. Different sets of guarantees and trade offs, but it checks a lot of the tickboxes a lot of enterprises need. MSMQ was in a way overkill for a lot of the use cases.
Yes some people got rich and benefited from Microsoft’s success, and I quote “some people”. The real value in Microsoft is if they benefited everyone, and they haven’t. They are still a monopoly, one that is destructive to the market and harmful to the consumers. Think back in the 1990s and even today on how much money it cost for businesses and consumers to repair PCs that have windows preintalled. How much money businesses waste to pay for over-inflated windows licenses because of their monopoly. Think back of the vendor lock-in tactics that Microsoft did over the years (such as the case with IE6) to kill off open standards and incorporate their own standards which is “every software will only be compatible with Windows”.
Think of the all the garabge operating systems that Microsoft released (Me, XP SP1, Vista) while profiting millions or even billions of dollars off of bad software.
Microsoft is probably the most notorious and destructive monopoly in the history of the U.S.
Edited 2013-08-27 19:32 UTC
IE6 was better (also more standards compliant) than its competition, at the time it was released
Don’t you get it? For some people it would be better if you’d be begging on the street, as long as you’d be using OSS… (on a library computer)
MS was fine for a while. The reason they initiall rose up was because the unix vendors and apple wanted to control everything and charge outrageously for that control. MS allowed quite a bit commoditization to occur and did start needed changes in the market.
Things didn’t get nasty until MS starting using their control of the OS to leverage MS office (not a huge deal since their competition was sooo slow in porting their own office suites) and MS started making under the table deals which strongarmed all the OEMs. At that point MS generally switched from innovation to consolidation and protection of this cash cow monopoly.
Ballmer’s main failure was that he followed this monopoly protection policy to the point that it hindered MS’s ability to create new markets for fear those new markets would cannibalize their cash cow. And now MS are mostly followers and not leaders in growing markets.
So MS caused the market to go from computers costing 10’s of thousands of dollars to thousands and hundreds of dollars. Now they are being threatened on the PC side by systems costing 10’s of dollars.
Edited 2013-08-23 18:55 UTC
Alternatively, you could say that Microsoft’s success is due the how cheap and available the PC hardware was.
Like…?
Just out of my head, Haskell and OCaml.
If I bother to search I can easily provide others.
That’s a ridiculous comment to make. It would be crippling were Microsoft to disappear tomorrow. Microsoft is deeply entrenched in government, military, and financial markets.
It would be crippling were Microsoft to disappear tomorrow.
Possibly.
Microsoft is deeply entrenched in government, military, and financial markets.
You’re not entirely helping your argument there…
Sure, it won’t go away overnight. It was a sarcastic remark. Penetration will go down, together with Microsoft losing relevance in the future.
Whoever is ill prepared to achieve a transition from Microsoft in this instance to another company will go down as well and should be fired for mismanagement. London Stock Exchange had that hard lesson, remember?
No doubt if that were to happen a big software company would buy them out and continue to develop Windows and Office (IBM? Oracle?) and probably do a better job of it.
They aren’t going to “retire” just because you don’t like them. No hubris at all in your statement…
No, they are going to retire because they lost the interest in innovation and stick to their dinosaur monopolistic practice. What helped them in the past will become their doom.
Edited 2013-08-23 20:02 UTC
You are utterly foolish if you think that.
Pretty much every large business I’ve worked with use Microsoft kit and there isn’t any discussion about moving away.
Not just Microsoft – RIM is a mainstay for both major corporations and the government. No freaking WAY they would ever become irrelevant in the mobile email space!
Oh, wait…
Except Windows and Microsoft aren’t embedded in the mobile space, it is actual business IT … not what some exec or VP happens to fancy.
Here’s my shoulder to cry on…
Windows 8 and Surface have been manna from heaven for Microsoft’s competitors.
And to think that so many Microsoft defenders are still sticking by Sinofsky’s “One Annoying Windows UI To Rule Them All” plan even though it has royally failed.
Pay attention next time when the overwhelming opinion of Windows developers is negative. Gee whiz that might not be a good sign.
This will probably be rated as trolling but hopefully one or two people will find it funny.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE
One of Steve’s memorable moments
Edited 2013-08-23 15:47 UTC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk
Windows 1.0 commercial with Steve.
Makes you wonder how that idiot got to the top of the company.
Edited 2013-08-23 16:42 UTC
That’s awesome. At least he doesn’t lack enthusiasm.
I mean, come on. Could you muster up that much enthusiasm about Reversi?
Edited 2013-08-23 17:08 UTC
“Cocaine’s a hell of a drug” — Rick James
He obviously isn’t an idiot if Bill Gates kept him around.
He was obviously acting up for the commercial.
Though it wasn’t a bad commercial, he told me some of what it can do, how much it costs and where you can get it from. It better than the inspiration bollox I see on the TV these days.
He kept him around because he is a close friend. Wouldn’t you do the same for your friends?
No
There is nothing wrong with helping your friends … but carrying them is another thing.
Bill Gates didn’t carry anyone.
And how do you possible know that? Could you care to explain? I am all ears.
Oh comon, people like Gates, Jobs, Ellison etc, are very driven people .. I would have thought it would be obvious.
“Obvious” things have been proven wrong hundreds of thousands times throughout human history.
Lets leave it where it stays, you can’t prove your assertion.
Know but I suspect it strongly.
Anyone that is a professional knows that even one bad team member can cause a lot of problems, it is obvious they are detrimental and it doesn’t matter if you like them or now they need to be dropped.
I doubt a man that was at one point the richest man on the planet would put someone who was an idiot at the top just because he liked him.
Well, I had the opportunity to work close to some top executives for their companies (of course, not even a fraction as close as big as Ballmer) and what I saw (oh no, anecdotal and singular experience again!) was that trustfulness played a very important role, together with being reasonably smart. Ballmer, very probably fitted this role.
Anyway, these conjectures are an easy thing to say when you are not directly involved on big decisions and people that we all portrayed as much more capable have failed spectacularly on computing business.
So, I really don’t think Ballmer was an idiot, but for a very fast changing industry like computing is and for a company like MS, he, probably, was unfit to drive the company to the future in my humble opinion.
Microsoft’s decision to force laptop/desktop users to use a handheld OS in Win 8 was driven by marketing but was technologically unsound. Mr Ballmer’s failure to understand this cost him his job. He put the laptop/desktop monopoly at risk for a shot at handheld market share, without results.
The list is much longer.
Snickered at the iPhone, did nothing but sit on his hands as it gained popularity.
Claimed that no one wanted the iPad after it was a success.
Letting Sinofsky trash Windows and break trust with developers.
Xbone, Xbox 360 RROD, Vista, Zune, Kin, Surface, the list goes on of faulty products he allowed under his watch. He may not have designed them but he is the CEO and has the final say over whether they enter the market or not.
The guy just plain sucks. He only held the job by being the college buddy of Bill Gates.
But Gates isn’t in control of the company and shareholders can vote.
The spectacular failure of Surface was plenty of ground for ValueAct, the activist investor company that wanted him out. He would’t have been able to survive a shareholder alliance against him. My guess is that ValueAct gave him the chance to retire in a closed door meeting.
I hear the last step in the confirmation process for the new CEO will be the distance contest. They will measure how far you can throw a chair.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_EbFdwqlRM
I wonder if he announced that in conference room going:
Retirement, retirement, retirement!
Edited 2013-08-23 17:14 UTC
Too bad i already commented. Complimentary +1 for you!
Now is Elop’s turn to “retire” from Nokia!
… the armchair CEOs are coming from basements everywhere.
I have yet to understand why people develop such emotional vestment on products they don’t own, made by companies they don’t work for, led by people they don’t personally know. Neither Microsoft nor their CEO (specially) give two shits about any of you, you should perhaps think about returning the “favor.”
Edited 2013-08-23 18:19 UTC
YOU from “gives two shits about any of you…” includes you also. Right?
Indeed it does, if it makes you feel better, substitute the “you” in my post for “us.”
There is a very good TED talk here, explaining exactly that.
http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_acti…
1. This website is called OSNews where people give their opinions of OS and other tech related news. #dealwithit.
2. The armchair CEOS have been right for years. Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum (Ballmer and Sinofsky) would have been voted out long ago by armchair CEOs that actually pay attention to how much damage those two have done to the company.
But by all means go ahead and defend Steven “No one wants the iPad even though it sold over 100 million” Ballmer and his amazing Surface that he and his cronies lied about since it was such a royal failure (another failure that we critics/armchair CEOs/alliance of tech workers with common sense predicted well before it was released.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/08/14/microsoft-faces-lawsuit-o…
Good luck with that.
I don’t think he defended anyone, and instead pointed out that your words are prefaced with “maybe” and “probably”. In other words, you’re guessing as to what happened and going from there.
You don’t know, I don’t know, and neither does anyone else outside of Microsoft’s senior leadership.
In all likelihood Ballmer was asked to leave. But if you can’t see that then I’m not surprised as I stopped questioning your judgment long ago. I would say your sense of judgement “probably” does not exist.
“in all likelihood”
You see where you’re guessing again?
It’s called making a prediction based on knowledge which is a central aspect of Western thought. Take it up with the Greeks if you don’t like it.
I realize you have tough times ahead now that the dumbass in charge is leaving. The next CEO might state the obvious which is that the Sinofsky line of products were just plain dumb and scuttle them.
Be sure to tell your Grandkids that you helped defend a failed corporate product line in your free time.
And its fine to predict, but that’s where the armchair CEO bit comes from.
You’re drawing a conclusion based off of incomplete information and using it to further your point, when in reality, there are often much more complex mechanics at work than is visible to those outside of the company.
To you your reasoning might seem sound, but that’s only because its predicated on truisms and generalizations (a majority of developers hating Windows 8 for example, something which when I pressed you to prove you reneged).
So you might enjoy your facts lite, and even dare to call the bullshit you spout off on a daily basis analysis, but I think its otherwise known as armchair CEOing.
That you thought I was in any way attempting to “defend” him speaks volumes about the inadequacy of your cognitive processes, specially as far as basic reading and comprehension capabilities are concerned.
Then why don’t you tell us exactly who you were referring to as armchair CEOs.
The term itself implies amateurish judgment by inexperienced critics outside the company. In the current situation the critics outside the company have been right from day one but more importantly I believe the average grade school child has far better judgment than Ballmer. Forget forum posters or armchair CEOs as you try to malign them, even a 7 year old kid knows it’s a really dumb idea to push a product that people have tried and rejected. Ballmer is on par with the severely mentally handicapped as he is unable to predict the most likely outcomes of situations that are clear and obvious to everyone else.
So yea I find your term a little insulting here when the armchair CEOs would have not doubled down on stupid as Ballmer did with Sinofsky’s plan. The collective opinion of critics was clear and would have saved the company both money and image if enacted. As I have said before my dog would have done a better job running the company in the last 2 years because doing nothing would have made them more money. That’s not debatable, Windows 8 and Surface have been a huge waste of money. Windows 8 only sells because that’s what new computers come with. Windows 7 OEM in fact still outsells 8 on Amazon.
Edited 2013-08-23 21:06 UTC
You really did not need 3 rambling paragraphs to let me know what I wrote hit home way too close for your own personal comfort.
Then:
Yeah, who could he possibly be referring to? It’s a mystery for the ages, if I ever saw one.
Edited 2013-08-24 09:38 UTC
i LOATHED microsoft for so many years – Gates maliciously controlled so much of the industry and I just couldn’t stand it. Conversations with my own parents started tending towards, “you want help with MICROSOFT software?! Kick yourself in the balls! there ya go, I improved the situation 10 fold for ya”!!
yup. vile, putrid hate. Couldn’t help myself, i’m only an engineer (thus hate horribly broken stuff being crammed down everyone’s throats as the ‘best’ — woops, there i go again).
Then came Ballmer and I thought, “SWEET! that screaming monkey man will DESTROY microsoft through incompetence and sheer absurdity”!
I was wrong.
Some say he crippled microsoft, but I see how the company has changed for the better since he took the helm. Maybe he doesn’t deserve the credit (what would I know?) but the company as a whole has VASTLY IMPROVED their effect on the industry.
I no longer hate the company; i still strongly dislike their software, but it has steadily improved (imho) and their interactions with the industry at large have become almost admirable.
I’ll actually miss the screaming, chair throwing, red-faced monkey man. He did SOMETHING RIGHT as far as I am concerned (though most non-industry folks I talk to feel otherwise).
Interactions with the industry? Like improving their browser? I hope you don’t mean sales or support because I really hate dealing with them compared to smaller software companies.
I wouldn’t care much about Microsoft as long as the good researchers keep doing their innovative researches and the planners keep maintaining all the good Microsoft brands. I have to say that Ballmer is a huge problem for Microsoft. He needs to go away ASAP.
There is an experienced CEO, who knows how to run a company that is having some problems with their operating system platform. Somebody with vision and balls to throw away all Microsoft’s software properties and license everything from another company, thus completing Microsoft’s transformation into devices company.
Microsoft and Oracle are already getting along, so maybe Oracle could dust off J2ME and Microsoft could put that into their phones and tablets. That would be truly visionary leadership.
A paragraph completely setup for…
1. Elop
2. Symbian
3. Microsoft
4. Nokia
But then you didn’t even go there.
Microsoft never had a visionary.
Only great advocates and salesman which manage to sell third rated “technology” (read: shit) to entire planet.
Actually, for years Microsoft had a figure the eclipsed every other on computer industry and it was Bill Gates. Perhaps or your were too young or did not exist at all when MS started to gain noticeable traction.
Sales visionary of course but tech visionary? I doubt it.
You do realize that people we all depicted as “visionary” have failed spectacularly throughout history, don’t you? Whether I like MS and its products or not, or if I keep Bill Gates at high standards or not is irrelevant, he and his company created an impression on human history that will live for centuries even if MS may sink suddenly or disappear lingeringly.
You’re trying to have it both ways, me thinks. Applying your approach basically anyone could be a visionary.
Also, you could be going off the deep end with the assumption that anyone will give any mind to MS in hundred(s) years time. Example, could you tell me off the top of your head who was the largest maker of steam engines in the XIX century?
Edited 2013-08-24 22:55 UTC
Where specifically I said visionary? That must be the most abused and hyped word of them all. Read history, you will probably find that what most people call “revolutionary” and “visionary” was actually a developing process where opportunity met competency. Lets see:
– Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by luck, but he had to have the expertise to understand what was going on;
– Keeping the due proportions, Einstein probably would not create special relativity if was not for Michelson-Morley experiment showing that the physics of that time didn’t “fit”, same with photoelectric effect. Was not for classic gravitation difficult with the aberration of Mercury movements, perhaps, GG would not have been created also;
– Ford was not the first to use “production lines” but he was the first to do it on mechanical parts and with an unknown efficiency at his time;
– The work of Maxwell was the culmination and synthesis of the 19 century experiments with electric and magnetic effects;
– Even if I think that Tesla was and extraordinary engineer the myth that he created the induction motor from nothing is just that, a myth, but he had the knowledge and brightness to see where they could be applied;
– Rockefeller had the right product at the right time and could recognize that. Same can be said about Carnegie and many other big business men that came before or after;
We could go on and on with Newton, Galileo, the discovery of DNA and so on and so forth.
See the similarities? All these men where on the right time with the right knowledge. Granted, some of them where geniuses but not them all, nevertheless, they recognized what could be done and used the advantage they had.
I did say most people will, except probably for Einstein and Newton, many will not recognize the names I listed and even less would know what they did. But for us, that had the opportunity to enjoy a good education, his names and their acts will be there and will be used as historical sources to help us comprehend why some succeed when so many failed.
May I be wrong, but I suspect that Bill Gates name will be there, at least close to Rockefeller and Carnegie. And no, I never was a follower of him, I keep my esteem to scientific and hard technical achievements.
I had many classes on thermodynamics, heat transfer and thermal machines so lets skip the last question.
some of them where geniuses to some of them were geniuses
I did say most people will to I did not say most people will
Lets pretend that it was the result of tiredness.
You really have some unhealthy obsession here…
Now maybe Microsoft will start making sane decisions that actually have its users in mind.
BALLMER IS OUT!!!!!!!!!! OUT I SAY, OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A Billion wasted on Kin should have released the guillotine already. It’s shocking how badly mixed up the company’s strategy is. Failed product after failed product. Still no tangible cohesiveness. With all Balmer’s blustering, I don’t think anybody in Microsoft even knows _what_ Microsoft is or supposed to be any more.
Window should have focused more on improving their own products then trying to sabotage others. I don’t know what is the deal is with attention about windows 8 have a backdoor its not like its something new for windows
Microsoft did not lose a billion dollars on Kin.
Microsoft also had many successes under Ballmer. Microsoft has 16 billion dollar businesses. That amount of cash flow has been very healthy for Microsoft.
Threading the needle that was transitioning Office to a subscription model is by itself a tremendous feat.
Vista was promising than windows 8 UI…WINDOWS 8 IS FAR WORST UI DESIGNS I EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE…VISTA AERO DESKTOP WAS FAR SUPERIOR THAN METRO…BUT IN RUN BEST ON WIN 7….but it need more eye candly like Linux compiz and KDE Kwin effects..i am starting to notice GNOME 3.10 is having more transitions effects that starting to like the UI more than Unity combine
Microsoft needs either a visionary or a brilliant business leader at the helm. It’s very hard to identify the former and, even after they are identified, few have the staying power of a Steve Jobs.
Microsoft owns the corporate environment with Windows and Office. Windows runs on the vast majority of computers in consumers’ homes. Their Xbox is a top gaming platform (the one anomalistically successful new product line of the Ballmer era).
They don’t need to sell phones, tablets, or MP3 players. All of the money that they wasted in their Zune line, Surface tablets, and various failed incarnations of mobile phones could have been spent improving their operating systems, Office suite, and even their Xbox product line.
Instead, both consumers and businesses are loathe to “upgrade” when a new version of Windows or Office appears, with most feeling that there’s no compelling new functionality to justify the expense — the initial expense, hardware upgrade costs, or the time involved in the installation, training, and transition. That explains why Windows XP still commands 35% of the market share compared to Windows 8 at less than 6%. And it was only recently that Windows 7 was finally on more desktops than the ancient Windows XP.
Microsoft needs to offer compelling reasons to upgrade. They have to be better than “yes, Vista totally sucks, so upgrade to Windows 7.” New features added should be clearly explained and easily understood by their target customer base. When Apple introduced its Time Machine backup feature, they explained what it did and showed it in action when the OS was introduced. Everyone who saw the intro immediately understood why it could benefit them to have it. Microsoft needs to do upgrades more often, at lower prices, and to have each be evolutionary rather than a massive change to the user interface.
They need to go to the Apple model of click a button to buy the OS upgrade and it then downloads and installs. Period. No product keys, activation, trips to the store to buy CDs/DVDs, choosing between multiple “editions,” and so forth.
In closing, Microsoft should be focused on maintaining a dominant role, not acting like a kid who missed his morning Ritalin.
By obsoleting quickly old versions of the OS and stop releasing security patches.
They could even create date limited OSes.
My company is currently transitioning from XP to Seven only because XP will stop being supported next year.
Of course, it only concern enterprises. Home PCs are never upgraded and it is an endangered specie.
Enhancing the OS ? Nobody cares. The OS does not exist, a PC is a thingy for running Office and IE.
So you’re advocating that they decrease support and degrade the OS further to force upgrades? As an Apple shareholder, I fully approve. I’m sure that most Linux fans would be equally happy about that.
That’s because the new versions of Windows did not offer features or functionality that gave your company a reason to upgrade.
Macs are upgraded. Want to know which version of OS X has the largest installed base? It’s the most recent one — Mountain Lion. That’s because Apple charges a reasonable price and makes upgrades that improve the user experience.
I switched from the PC to the Mac because the Windows OS simply changed without actually improving. Bad and outdated ideas continued to be proliferated from version to version. This is coming from someone who started using Windows back in the 2.0 days.
Want to know when an OS exists? It exists when the user’s computer becomes infected with malware. It exists when his hard drive crashes and he realizes that he can’t recover because Windows has no backup comparable to Time Machine. It exists when his Windows computer starts taking ten minutes to boot. It exists when an application that ran two months ago no longer runs now and he has no idea if it’s due to an overwritten DLL, a corrupt registry, or some OS update that. It exists when he’s in a hurry to shut off his PC and Windows decides that it’s going to spend fifteen minutes installing updates. It exists when every time he powers one, the system blue-screens and he has to pay “The Geek Squad” $200 only to have them reformat his hard drive and reinstall the OS.
Linux users upgrade. OS X users upgrade. Windows users don’t. Because Windows upgrades are too expensive, usually require hardware upgrades, and, in some cases, have even required reformatting the hard drive. And for all of that effort, they really don’t reward with actual improvements that justify the cost, time, and effort.
Edited 2013-08-25 21:37 UTC
To be clear, I am not _advocating_ anything. Both my personal PCs run Linux. I only tolerate Windows in a virtual machine.
In a way, I have the impression that some efforts that Microsoft exercised to prevent piracy have helped making upgrading the OS complex for users. Obviously, their plan is to allow upgrades through application stores in a controlled environment…
Windows architecture made restarting from scratch every 3 years something desirable for home users. They buy a Windows re-install which includes a PC. Driver support has always be terrible for users anyway, so new PCs come with new OSes and new OSes are only compatible with new PCs.
I have a couple of Linux systems as well as two Macs. And, like you, I only run Windows as a virtual system (under parallels). Well, there is my Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition that I use for my server (web, e-mail, FTP, etc.) — the e-mail server I use is Windows-only and it has some features that I’ve come to rely on.
Also agreed.
I think it’s desirable for Microsoft, Dell, Acer, HP, Toshiba, Sony, etc. MIcrosoft makes money selling the OS to the hardware vendors and they make their money selling PCs. It’s a symbiotic relationship — I just can’t figure out which party is the parasite.
I wouldn’t bet on it.
Though this is admittedly anecdotal evidence, non-geek Mac users around me tend to upgrade their OS about as often as their Windows counterpard. That is, only when their tech support begs to let them do it.
The reason being that OS upgrades tend to break some software compatibility and user habits. And even if OSX does indeed a better job at avoiding it than other OSs, in sense that breaking stuff always seems to be done on purpose, it is still not totally exempt from this problem.
Some examples of user-disturbing changes in OSX off the top of my head:
=> Dropping PPC compatibility and breaking Quicktime API compatibility in Snow Leopard
=> Strongly raising hardware requirements, spreading kitsch visuals everywhere, hiding scroll bars, and reversing scrolling direction in Lion
=> Disturbing software installation with Gatekeeper and dropping official X11.app support in Mountain Lion
Also, the App Store-only requirement put on OSX upgrades since Lion probably put even more people away from upgrading, since not everyone has a fast and reliable Internet connection or wants to open an App Store account.
Edited 2013-08-26 07:13 UTC
Just to be clear, I do not state things as facts unless they are facts:
http://www.ibtimes.com/mac-os-x-108-mountain-lion-surpasses-lion-al…
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9235230/Mountain_Lion_mauls_…
Since you composed a lengthy post detailing why you doubted the veracity of the absolutely true thing that I wrote, I’ll take the time to respond.
1. Dropping support for the the PowerPC and PowerPC applications in later versions of the OS made the upgrades more appealing to most users. The result was a faster OS with a smaller memory footprint — because it was no longer hauling around the baggage to support outdated PowerPC processors that Apple phased out seven years ago.
2. Breaking Quicktime 7 API compatibility was fine. Apple did it in order to pressure developers to update their apps to the massively upgraded Quicktime X. But they still made a Snow Leopard compatible version of Quicktime 7 available for download for those cases where the app was not being updated.
If a user wants to stick with outdated hardware, they are free to use the OS it came with or some later version that still supported it. I don’t want my UI and user experience compromised because they’ve chosen to use hardware from the Jurassic era. My Mac Pro, a machine from early 2008 is still supported in Mountain Lion and looks like it will continue to be in Mavericks. And it’s just as fast and responsive now under Mountain Lion as it was under Snow Leopard, probably more so.
You’re complaining about things that are changed back with single checkboxes? That’s “user disturbing”? Maybe to a disturbed user.
If the user is too stupid to know how to check a box labelled “Allow applications downloaded from: [*] Anywhere” then they have no business installing apps from sources other than the App Store. Period. That’s just one way that Apple improved the OS to reduce the spread of malware to computer-illiterate users. Or would you have preferred Apple followed the Windows model, where gullible users are tricked into installing malware by fake pop-up windows that appear while browsing and warn of ominous virus threats?
Why should Apple continue to develop and support something designed for graphical Unix apps that do not supply a native Mac interface? I think that they gave the developers more than enough time to move to the native Mac interface.
If you’re still on dial-up, then your Mac is too old to run Mountain Lion or Mavericks. Non-issue.
The idea is to force those people to open an App Store account, even if they don’t want to, so that they will purchase software through the App Store, driving up Apple’s profits, while allowing Apple to reduce the proliferation of badly behaved apps and apps that contain malware.
Apple chose to move forward rather than hobble OS X and drive up development and distribution costs in order to continue supporting outdated hardware, outdated software, and luddite users. That was the correct decision from both technical and marketing perspectives. The result is that OS X Mountain Lion has the fastest adoption rate of any desktop OS, surpassing 10% in the first month alone.
Edited 2013-08-26 10:17 UTC
My point was that computer geeks will be able to deal with upgrades on any OS, while non-geeks can cause just as much havoc on their system if they attempt an OSX upgrade on their own as if they try it with another OS. So I disagree with the statement that OSX is easier to upgrade than other desktop OSs.
More likely, OSX installs are upgraded faster because most Mac users are more likely to be tech-savvy than Windows users, and because the Apple ecosystem has a tendency to deprecate older OS releases much quicker than Microsoft. Contrast, as an example, how much current software will still run on Windows 2000 or XP (2001), while it has long been near impossible to find up-to-date software for OS X Tiger (2005).
As for your specific points…
Oh, I do not dispute that these changes were performed for good reasons. But I mentioned them to illustrate the fact that if you are not a tech-savvy user who takes the time to read detailed OS changelogs, attempting to upgrade OSX without this knowledge is just as unwise as attempting to upgrade another OS.
You do not have to go back to ancient hardware, just try Lion on the mid-2009 13″ Macbook Pro, which began selling exactly one year before the release of Lion. Lion performs horribly on this laptop, beachballing for seconds even when doing something as simple as selecting a user on the login screen, while Snow Leopard did just fine on the same hardware.
The reason why you do not experience these slowdonws is likely that your Mac Pro has much more ram and much better mass storage performance than any laptop sold in 2009 (or even than some laptops sold today for that matter). Unfortunately, legacy hardware support is not supposed to limit itself to previous-generation flagships.
It’s not a matter of being stupid, but rather of being uninformed, and not caring enough to do the research. As surprising as this may sound, not everyone takes the time to cycle through all the settings of a freshly installed OS in order to fine-tune its behaviour.
And, what may be even more of a surprise to you, some people still use optical discs to install professional software, since it requires no lengthy download, allows for more flexible licensing options than the App Store (think multi-user licenses and token servers), and since in most corporate structures, it’s easier to order a disk from a well-known shop than to have your accountant enter the company’s credit card number in some shady “Mac App Store” software that he’s never heard of. Gatekeeper is a direct attack on this decentralized software distribution model.
The only real answer to the social engineering problem is user education, and you know it as well as me. Otherwise, instead of fake antivirus botnets, you will simply have stolen credit card numbers and user passwords…
And why should Unix devs buy a Mac and learn completely alien development tools in order to build Mac versions of tools that will otherwise work well on any other Unix? That actually is the point of having X11 for OSX, since Mac devs never wrote software based on X11 anyway.
Please stop making assumptions. In the US and other large and sparsely populated countries, many people only have dial-up or equally crappy cellular Internet access because it’s not commercially viable to provide them with high-bandwidth Internet access in their home.
And then there are those buildings for students and other low-income persons where one single 8MB ADSL connection is shared by hundreds of people because they can’t afford buying themselves individual contracts. Though I’ll admit that such people probably shouldn’t buy Apple hardware anyway, since Apple doesn’t care about anyone who wins less than twice the median income of an industrialized country.
Fair enough, then again this “our way or the highway” approach is probably exactly why OSX has such a small share of the desktop OS market, in spite of largely outperforming its Windows competition in many key areas.
Edited 2013-08-26 18:24 UTC
Mac users go to the App Store and press “Install” and OS X downloads and installs. The percentage of OS X users that have to seek assistance is diminishingly small, largely because Apple has a well-defined, limited hardware base; just like Sun does, which is why Solaris, like OS X, normally installs with minimal problems.
Now I’m sure that you can find plenty of anecdotal evidence on the web of people reporting problems, but, statistically speaking, it’s rare. Just look in any Apple Store after an OS upgrade. If it was so problematic, the “Genius Bar” would be slammed for weeks with people seeking assistance (especially when over 10% of Mac users upgraded to the latest OS in the first month it was available). But it just doesn’t happen.
I’m running Mountain Lion, and ran Lion before it, on a white MacBook with a Core 2 Duo from 2008 and I’ve not had speed issues with it. Perhaps it’s because I tossed in some bigger SIMMS, but that’s not exactly rocket science.
I don’t think you’re going to surprise me a lot. I work as an engineer at an aerospace firm and have been an engineering professional for over three decades. And the firm where I work installs software using images over their corporate network. We don’t have IT people travelling all over seven buildings on our campus carrying optical discs.
Relying on educated users for security is hopeless. Corporate America does not rely on user education. They rely on OS permissions and controls. OS X notifies users whenever there is an attempted escalation of privilege. It notifies the user when an app is coming from an unknown or untrusted source. That’s far more reliable than trying to teach the unwashed masses.
They should not buy it if they don’t want to develop for it using its native interface. It’s like arguing that Windows should still be providing full VESA graphics support for MS-DOS command line games.
I don’t have a metric for how much Apple “cares” about people, but they are not in the business of producing competitors to the $35 Raspberry Pi. They make a premium product and they gear the policies and support accordingly. You may “win” your income, but I earn mine through my technical expertise, hard work, and intelligence.
What percentage of cars on the road have Porsche engines? How about Hyundai engines? Is that a comment on how wholly unsatisfactory Porsche engines are to the motoring public and how much more desirable Hyundai engines are?
Apple shipped more client PCs than any other firm last quarter, including Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. That, despite having higher initial prices. Since that’s the only way to get OS X (practically & legally), isn’t that an affirmation from the marketplace that OS X is very desirable? Isn’t the proliferation of “hackintosh” websites and forums devoted to running OS X on non-Apple platforms also evidence of OS X’s desirability?
Edited 2013-08-26 20:47 UTC
That’s one of more common cognitive biases – we are all mostly born into success; when looking at different factors, where and to what family you were born is the most reliable one when predicting later success in life.
About how common it is: there’s this concept of “American Dream” and “land of opportunity” …while the US is in reality at the bottom (together with the UK) of developed countries in actual measure of this stuff, social mobility (in short: how much the end result depends on your efforts and how much being born into it). At the top are popularly disparaged so called “nanny states” BTW.
I’d also argue that a subscription model is going to kill Microsoft. Just this past Sunday, I was able to convince a good non-IT friend of mine that Photoshop isn’t worth getting, because of the subscription model. I basically said, you can invest time into photoshop, but when the next version comes out, you have to pay subscription on it, or you can learn the GIMP, and each new version will always be free. This girl is exceptionally frugal and she immediately understood what I was saying about the costs.
Subscription is just a way for companies to pull money out of people in a never ending cycle. The free clones smash that business model wide open. I could easily walk upto half my business clients and sell them onto open office and gimp on cost alone. I have some really super frugal clients who don’t care about platform. They only care about cost. As an IT worker it’s actually quite hard to know what’s truly right to sell to clients. On the one hand my bosses want to promote the standard Windows model, on the other hand I think our clients should know the issues regarding these platforms and long term costs.
As much as people slam Linux and open source, most stores don’t need all the overhead that Windows provides. Many places just need PoS/ERP/e-mail. Hell it could be argued that many of these places don’t even need OS/Desktop upgrades just hardware replacement and security patching.
Edited 2013-08-26 21:12 UTC
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/msft/interactive-chart?timeframe=1m&ch…