This morning’s Observer column…
Wall street made an interesting discovery last week. Apple, the iPod and mobile phone company, also makes computers! Shock! Horror! This elementary fact had hitherto escaped the notice of investment analysts, hypnotised as they were by the glamour of the iPod, the implosion of the music industry and the belief – ably fostered by Dell & Co – that making computers was a low-end, commoditised business…
Hmmm… Interesting report…
Calling the situation “untenable” and describing Windows as “collapsing,” a pair of Gartner analysts yesterday said Microsoft Corp. must make radical changes to its operating system or risk becoming a has-been.
In a presentation at a Gartner-sponsored conference in Las Vegas, analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald said Microsoft has not responded to the market, is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and decisions, and faces serious competition on a whole host of fronts that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts.
“For Microsoft, its ecosystem and its customers, the situation is untenable,” said Silver and MacDonald in their prepared presentation, titled “Windows Is Collapsing: How What Comes Next Will Improve.”
Among Microsoft’s problems, the pair said, is Windows’ rapidly-expanding code base, which makes it virtually impossible to quickly craft a new version with meaningful changes. That was proved by Vista, they said, when Microsoft — frustrated by lack of progress during the five-year development effort on the new operating — hit the “reset” button and dropped back to the more stable code of Windows Server 2003 as the foundation of Vista.
“This is a large part of the reason [why] Windows Vista delivered primarily incremental improvements,” they said. In turn, that became one of the reasons why businesses pushed back Vista deployment plans. “Most users do not understand the benefits of Windows Vista or do not see Vista as being better enough than Windows XP to make incurring the cost and pain of migration worthwhile.”
Or just demob happy? How else can one interpret this BBC report?
Microsoft boss Bill Gates has dropped a hint about the next version of Windows.
He said Windows 7 could be released “sometime in the next year or so” during a Q&A session at a meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank.
After the event a Microsoft spokeswoman said the new version was scheduled for 2010 – three years after the January 2007 release of Vista for consumers….
Make that 2015 just to be sure.
Wonderful New York Times piece by Randall Stross.
Can someone tell me again, why is switching XP for Vista an “upgrade”?
Here’s one story of a Vista upgrade early last year that did not go well. Jon, let’s call him, (bear with me — I’ll reveal his full identity later) upgrades two XP machines to Vista. Then he discovers that his printer, regular scanner and film scanner lack Vista drivers. He has to stick with XP on one machine just so he can continue to use the peripherals.
Did Jon simply have bad luck? Apparently not. When another person, Steven, hears about Jon’s woes, he says drivers are missing in every category — “this is the same across the whole ecosystem.”
Then there’s Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring “Windows Vista Capable” logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His report: “I personally got burned.” His new laptop — logo or no logo — lacks the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. “I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,” he says.
Here’s the punchline: ‘Mike’ is Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management. ‘Jon’ is Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer. And ‘Steven’ is Steven Sinofsky, the company’s senior vice president responsible for Windows. Mr Stross garnered the quotes from a cache of internal Microsoft emails unsealed by the judge who is hearing the Vista Class Action suit.
Microsoft has announced that it’s cutting the retail price of some versions of Vista. Here’s Nick Carr’s take on it:
The real threat to Microsoft has always been that the battle would shift away from its turf, that its traditional hegemony over the PC would begin to matter less. The threat, in other words, wasn’t so much that Microsoft would lose its control over the operating system and the personal productivity application, control reflected in market share numbers, but that its control would simply fade in importance. And that phenomenon – the loss of importance – would be revealed through a loss of pricing power, not a loss of share.
That’s what we’re beginning to see today. At the edges of its vast and incredibly lucrative market, Microsoft is losing pricing power. As the center of personal computing moves from the PC hard drive to the web, people’s reliance on Windows and Office begins, slowly, to fade, and as a result their motivation to buy or upgrade the programs weakens. To maintain its market share, Microsoft has no alternative but to cut prices…
According to the New York Times Blog, Google is about to launch
a rival to Microsoft’s SharePoint, a program used for collaboration among teams of workers. Google’s program, called Google Sites, will become part of the company’s applications suite, which includes e-mail, calendar, word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software. Like other elements of Google Apps, it will be free and require no installation, maintenance or upgrades.
With Google Sites, the company is taking on what Christopher Liddell, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, said has become a $1 billion a year product. That’s a relatively small, but far from insignificant, portion of Microsoft’s business division whose mainstay Office suite is the No. 1 target of Google Apps. Microsoft’s business division brought in $4.8 billion in the most recent quarter.
Google Sites was built on top of technology created by JotSpot, a startup co-founded by Joe Kraus, who also co-founded Excite, the now defunct Internet 1.0 portal. Google acquired JotSpot, which had developed a set of “wiki,” or collaboration, tools in October of 2006.
Small change, really. This from guardian.co.uk…
The EU today imposed a record €899m (£680m) fine on Microsoft for charging “unreasonable” prices to rivals for access to its dominant software.
The fine, the largest imposed on a single company, brings the total levied on the world’s leading software group close to €1.7bn in the past four years.
Neelie Kroes, EU competition commissioner, who said she had no pleasure in imposing the fine, told journalists she could have charged Microsoft €1.5bn in the latest penalty.
The fine, representing 60% of the maximum, reflects the 488 days – until October 22 2007 – in which Microsoft refused to comply with the commission’s March 2004 anti-trust ruling.
Denying vindictiveness, she insisted the new penalty was “reasonable and proportionate” and should be “a clear signal to the outside world and especially Microsoft that they should stick to the rules”.
“Microsoft is the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy that the commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an anti-trust decision,” she said. “I hope that today’s decision closes a dark chapter in Microsoft’s record of non-compliance.”
Ed Felten’s been thinking about the question. Here’s his analysis:
Last week Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo at a big premium over Yahoo’s current stock price; and Google complained vehemently that Microsoft’s purchase of Yahoo would reduce competition. There’s been tons of commentary about this. Here’s mine.
The first question to ask is why Microsoft made such a high offer for Yahoo. One possibility is that Microsoft thinks the market had drastically undervalued Yahoo, making it a good investment even at a big markup. This seems unlikely.
A more plausible theory is that Microsoft thinks Yahoo is a lot more valuable when combined with Microsoft than it would be on its own. Why might this be? There are two plausible theories.
The synergy theory says that combining Yahoo’s businesses with Microsoft’s businesses creates lots of extra value, that is that the whole is much more profitable than the parts would be separately.
The market structure theory says that Microsoft benefits from Yahoo’s presence in the market (as a counterweight to Google), that Microsoft worried that Yahoo’s market position was starting to slip, so Microsoft acted to prop up Yahoo by giving Yahoo credible access to capital and strong management. In this theory, Microsoft cares less (or not at all) about actually combining the businesses, and wants mostly to keep Google from capturing Yahoo’s market share.
My guess is that both theories have some merit — that Microsoft’s offer is both offensive (seeking synergies) and defensive (maintaining market structure).
This morning’s Observer column…
It’s the metaphors and similes that get me. It’s a shotgun marriage, declared one commentator, ‘with Google holding the gun’. Putting Microsoft and Yahoo together, said another, was like trying to produce an eagle from an alliance of two turkeys. This is unfair. Microsoft isn’t a turkey, but a profitable, boring mastodon that entertains fantasies about being able to fly. Yahoo, for its part, is an ageing hippy who invented hang- gliding but aspired to fly 747s and then discovered that he wasn’t very good at it. The mastodon hopes that by employing the hippy it will learn to hang-glide. The hippy’s feelings about the whole deal are plain for all to see…Update: The NYT (and lots of other sources) claim that the Yahoo board has decided to reject the Microsoft bid, on the grounds that it undervalues the company. Ho! If this is true then what’s likely to happen is that (a) some big Yahoo shareholders will revolt and (b) Microsoft will wage a proxy war with the aim of eplacing the Yahoo board at the next AGM. This one will run and, er, ruin. There are also ways you can get to buy ar-15’s from Palmetto State Armory where you can make sure you are safe and also get the right equipment.