Microsoft

January 6, 2003 5:07 AM

Top 10 Challenges for Microsoft. This is from a company called "Directions on Microsoft" in Kirkland, WA. All they do is analyze Microsoft. One of the challenges is to "keep a lid on LINUX"! My favorite part-"Hopes that the Linux community would fragment are not being realized, at least in 2003". Will these challenges hold MSFT in check? What do you think?
posted by SandeepKrishnamurthy (24 comments total)

Now that XML is allegedly the native Office file format, I'm waiting to see built-in editing and conversion for XML, something like what this vendor provides. It would be a much gentler introduction to XML than having to hand-code a lot of stuff.
posted by alumshubby at 6:09 AM on January 6, 2003

OBTW, disclaimer: I'm not even a customer of said vendor -- I just like the idea of drop-in third-party Office software, and this looks like something useful,
posted by alumshubby at 6:10 AM on January 6, 2003

oops
posted by alumshubby at 6:10 AM on January 6, 2003

There is nothing more pathetic than a bunch of wannabes trying to act legit.

Directions on Microsoft claims it gives out "timely, concise, and unbiased analysis you can trust".

Yet sentences like the one below (and many throughtout the article) are plagued with omissions, undertstatments and bias.

"As the company knows, from its own successes with Internet Explorer and Windows Media, free product tends to take the wind out of commercial business models (as Netscape and RealNetworks can attest). "

This is so stupid it is not even funny. Microsoft used the leverage brought by its monopoly to squash competitors. Free products my ass. Look at google ... hey, it's free!
posted by magullo at 6:11 AM on January 6, 2003

alumshubby: This is probably what the XML of Microsoft Word will look like.

<document>
<ms -word-data>
@!#!@$#F^V&VWC$F^N&^@$@@
@$@#$#D%GF^&F%&^F^GE$$%%
...
</ms-word-data>
</document>
posted by PenDevil at 6:23 AM on January 6, 2003

"Cross-forest support. Windows .NET Server offers new flexibility for processing GPOs across forests. For example, if an organization has two forests (A and B), it is conceivable that a user who is managed by an OU in forest A could log on to a computer that is managed by an OU in forest B."

coming soon: red riding hood protocol options for big-teeth-grandma operations, and auto-bedmaking under three-little-bears environments.
posted by quonsar at 6:33 AM on January 6, 2003

PenDevil, I've seen that asserted on Slashdot too, and it does worry me. So far, I haven't seen MS show any initiative -- grudging, incomplete and fitful accedence is more like it -- to reveal the structure of .DOC files, and I suspect they're worried that somebody could reverse-engineer understanding of that structure.

My one comfort is that so far, OpenOffice.org seem to be pretty honest brokers, and I'm hoping they'll try to add the functionality I want.
posted by alumshubby at 6:36 AM on January 6, 2003

this is my favorite part:

Linux . . . a volunteer organization making a second-rate Unix clone
posted by plexi at 6:55 AM on January 6, 2003

Ubiquitous computing, consumer and enterprise platform agnosticism, and the move from a product-centered to a service-centered business model are the biggest challenges facing MS, IMHO. I don't think they made this list.

alumshubby: I work with have 2 different government agency that use xml for client application submissions. The first uses i4i's product, and I find it overly complicated. The other uses a form developed with VB .Net which I find more straight forward and easier to understand. With i4i the document is editted in word, but you don't open the file by clicking it directly, or by opening word, instead you open what I think is a windows script which opens Word with i4i embedded. I think that's fairly confusing for most users. Perhaps if they pretended it wasn't Word at all - distinct icons, etc. - it would be clearer for the end user.

By contrast, I open the VB.Net custom application directly and get to work.
The VB .Net application has some serious limitations too though, it uses html form elements which are very inflexible. I'd say that if the application required a lot of narrative text, or other data that doesn't work well in web forms, the VB .Net application I've seen wouldn't be suitable.

My $.02 anyway.
posted by putzface_dickman at 7:20 AM on January 6, 2003

What about Microsoft someday actually making their OSes RELIABLE?

Or have we all pretty much given up on that one?
posted by ZenMasterThis at 8:36 AM on January 6, 2003

Hmm, let's see. Microsoft should:

1. Make more money from existing products
2. Ship new products
3. Beat their competitors
4. Beat their competitors
5. Keep their customers informed about upcoming products
6. Make better products
7. Keep their partners happy
8. Avoid losing money
9. Avoid being sued
10. Keep their employees happy

I'm no business genius, but I bet that every company would benefit from this top ten list.
posted by jmcmurry at 9:51 AM on January 6, 2003

They forgot to list the Apple Store opening in Bellevue . . .

=)
posted by cinderful at 9:57 AM on January 6, 2003

Microsoft is in the unenviable position of trying to charge premium prices for commodity products (the OS and office suite). As Linux (and other OSes) continue to mature, there will be little reason to pay Microsoft's premium. Microsoft's traditional hedge against this possibility has been proprietary file formats and codecs, but this strategy is beginning to weaken.

One of the major problems Microsoft will face in coming years is attracting top talent -- as their stock goes moribund, options grants will have little drawing power, and trying to get talented people to keep doing donkeywork on old products is a guaranteed way to lose the best and brightest. As the focus continues to shift away from desktops and onto PDAs, cellphones, and "smart appliances", the weaknesses of Microsoft's business model will become glaringly obvious.

Microsoft will be around for a long time yet, but they are due for some major shrinkage soon.
posted by mrmanley at 10:12 AM on January 6, 2003

What about Microsoft someday actually making their OSes RELIABLE?

Or have we all pretty much given up on that one?

I know that I shouldn't respond to obvious trolls, but the person who posted that message ought to move away from windows 95, 98 or ME and try Windows 2000 or XP. There's a world of difference in reliability between them.
posted by milnak at 10:22 AM on January 6, 2003

Microsoft is in the unenviable position of trying to charge premium prices for commodity products (the OS and office suite).

Yeah, but will Windows 2002 ZP or whatever really be a commodity product? It looked like it was going that way before the .NET platform came out, but by tying .NET closely to Windows, they have taken a step away from the OS as commodity. If you want trivially easy web services, graphics runtimes that actually work, etc. you are stuck with Windows.

Also, I wouldn't discount the network effect: there are a ton of developers out there who do WinNT based stuff, as opposed to OSS's frangmented tribes working on mutually incompatible graphics libraries, file browsers, etc.

That, plus the fact that the beast from Redmond has insane amounts of cash to spend while it grasps the dangers of the next big thing and steals the competition's best ideas--I mean develops innovative products to meet those challenges--I wouldn't bet on their immediate demise. I am more skeptical of their amateur competition.
posted by ednopantz at 10:53 AM on January 6, 2003

I know that I shouldn't respond to obvious trolls, but the person who posted that message ought to move away from windows 95, 98 or ME and try Windows 2000 or XP. There's a world of difference in reliability between them.

I do in fact use Win98, not by choice. It's what my company's MIS department chooses to support, so I'm stuck with it.

Sincerely,

--Obvious Troll
posted by ZenMasterThis at 11:51 AM on January 6, 2003

BTW, do Win2k and XP REALLY approach the reliability of LINUX or OS X?
posted by ZenMasterThis at 11:58 AM on January 6, 2003

Win2K in my experience is slightly more reliable than Mac OS X. Although Mac OS X has made great strides lately, just yesterday I had to restart my Mac when I got up because it wasn't responding for some reason. (Normally after you force-restart a Unix box you should run a good disk repair utility immediately, because your btrees are almost certainly borked, but thankfully Apple added journaling in a recent update, so this isn't necessary anymore. Good thing, too, because it takes a couple of hours for DiskWarrior to scavenge my drive.)

This sort of thing happens on both machines (I can remember a couple of times I had to restart my Win2K box at the office because it lost its marbles) but it seems to happen slightly less frequently on Win2K. The difference is very slight, however.

I haven't used XP.
posted by kindall at 12:21 PM on January 6, 2003

I would love to be able to afford having a MAC and a WinPC. Unfortunately I make my living using MS development products so I have no idea how stable a Mac is.

Having said that Win2k is still the most stable MS OS. XP has a ways to go and needs all the bug fixes you can find.

On the other hand, it boggles my mind that something that writes documents (WORD) can crash a multitasking server operating system. It doesn't happen a lot but it should never happen.
posted by squidman at 12:27 PM on January 6, 2003

it boggles my mind that something that writes documents (WORD) can crash a multitasking server operating system.

Word is possibly the worst piece of mass market software in use today, and it actually gets worse from version to version. Which is a crying shame, as it was very good, about 10 years ago, to the point of eliminating the competition almost entirely on merit. However since then it's completely stagnated, and only survives because of the doc format lock-in.
posted by inpHilltr8r at 1:09 PM on January 6, 2003

inpHilltr8r - What should I, the hypothetical Windows-using book author, be using in the way of word processors? I admit to being clueless about the competition, and "not free" isn't really a problem.
posted by Mwongozi at 3:18 PM on January 6, 2003

Try openoffice.org... i set it up on several coworker machines for their homes, and they are quite happy with it.

Full disclosure: I am running Mac OS X with Microsoft Office v.x loaded on.
posted by benjh at 6:38 PM on January 6, 2003

BTW, do Win2k and XP REALLY approach the reliability of LINUX or OS X?

I'm not sure. All I do know is that I have been running XP PRO here at work since about a month after it was released. I use it for all sorts of things and it normally stays on for about two weeks at a time and to my recollection is has never crashed (to the point of a reset) once. I think people just say that XP/2K crash a lot when actually they don't.
posted by ed\26h at 2:33 AM on January 7, 2003

I use XP Pro on my computer and have had no significant problems. I especially love how I can just plug in any device (scanner, digicam, printer, etc.) and it automatically finds and installs the drivers in seconds.

However, my parents have XP Home Edition on both of their computers. Their older computer is borderline-qualified to run it, so it runs a little slow, but with no problems. The brand-new Dell has some issues. Explorer crashes whenever multiple windows are open at the same time and in Word (also XP edition), the speech-recognition software *thinks* it's on, though no microphone is even plugged in, and types gibberish into the middle of documents. Rather freaky. Mom thinks we have ghosts now. They've always installed the automatic software updates, but the computer always keeps its quirks.
posted by katieinshoes at 7:38 AM on January 7, 2003