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Microsoft

Why is Microsoft Making its Own Life Difficult? 105

Posted by Cliff from the mind-boggles dept.
sebFlyte asks: "Asking Slashdot readers what they think of Microsoft's methodology and ethos might seem like a silly thing to do, but a ZD-Net article raises some interesting points. The main one is that: 'Microsoft's behaviour is technically, morally and practically indefensible. It could publish its CIFS specification tomorrow if it so chose, an act that would correspond closely to the spirit and letter of the European decision. The company would then be free to compete through the simple process of making better products, something it claims to favour, while also encouraging precisely the sort of interoperability it says is missing.' The question I'm curious to canvas opinion on is why Microsoft is taking an attitude that is believed by so many to be damaging to their market position."
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Why is Microsoft Making its Own Life Difficult? More

Why is Microsoft Making its Own Life Difficult?

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  • It's not about marketing... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TheWanderingHermit ( 513872 ) on Monday February 07, 2005 @03:54PM (#11599785)
    It's about power and domination, period.

    Look at their attitudes from the beginning. They can never accept simple success. They only consider themselves successful when they have destroyed the competition. They have never competed on the quality of their product, or on a level playing field. They compete by force, like buying out their opposition, or giving away products until the opposition goes broke.

    While they like the money, it's about a small group of men at the top who want nothing more than to rule the world.
    • And you think any other major company is in it to provide a better product or service? If you believe that then you're more naive than the entire OSS community put together. The world revolves around money, power, and influence. You either have it, want it, or criticize it as unholy. A business is in business to make money and win market share, employing whatever means along the process it deems necessary and walking the fine line of legality and growth. I suggest you wise up or the world will run you over.
      • And you think any other major company is in it to provide a better product or service?

        Did I say I thought that? Where did I say I thought that? Where did I imply I thought that?

        Microsoft is the company under discussion, so my comments were about Microsoft.

        So how, exactly, did you infer that I felt no other company behaves the same way.

        The world revolves around money, power, and influence.

        Yeah, I thought that way at one point. I'm glad I dropped out of the rat race and found I can live without ta
      • And you think any other major company is in it to provide a better product or service?

        I can't say their motivation isn't money and power, but I've found IBM an absolute joy to work with. This was really highlighted to me when they sold their drives operation, the part of the company I've had the most dealings with, to Hitachi. The difference was, shall we say, marked.

        I agree that most companies operate as you say, but there are some out there that recognize that the best way to build, and more importantl
      • True but here's the thing. The privilege of being a corporation is granted by the people. If a corporation is useless (i.e. not providing a better product or service but instead gaining business by bully tactics and monopoly/market share abuse) then the people should refuse to continue to grant them the privilege of acting as a corporation.

        I am sure you have a realistic view of how business really works. But there is no reason the people should have to put up with abusive entities.

        Business actually has
    • While they like the money, it's about a small group of men at the top who want nothing more than to rule the world.

      True... In that book Gates published in 1994, he wrote that his goal is to collect a fee for EVERY financial transaction that takes place anywhere on the planet.

      Any man with goals like that is EXTREMELY dangerous.


    • They have never competed on the quality of their product

      Not quite.

      Only when MS has to compete on quality do they. Much of the time they're not constrainted to do so. Otherwise, there are other agendas to pursue, such as market domination and extending the customer in "Solutions" that are entirely MS.

      [Likewise, only when they have to provide open interoperability, do they. Marketing programs saying nice-sounding buzzwords are usually more their style.]

      I rail against MS all the time for their many fault

  • They don't believe they can be hurt (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    At least on the desktop. They're seriously not worried about alternatives because A. they're harder to use for people already used to using Windows, or B. they're more expensive.
    • I was going to mod you as a troll, but then I had a better Idea.

      A) OS X took me all of 1 hour to fully understand, including the command line.

      b) I can download mandrake or Suse for the costs of bandwidth and a couple of blank cd's.

      c) Linux has never crashed and took out the system on me.(I have had programs crash, but recovery is easier than windows )

      d) OS X has crashed only once during a login. (my font files got trashed)

      e) I reboot windows machines every couple of days, losing work. Very frequentl
      • You have just proved his point...

        A) OS X took me all of 1 hour to fully understand, including the command line.

        More expensive. If you already have a PC, you cannot install OS X on it. It requires a new computer. And a high-end Mac is more expensive than a high-end PC. The new Mini has eroded some of the price complaints, but the mini is not perfect for everybody.

        b) I can download mandrake or Suse for the costs of bandwidth and a couple of blank cd's.

        This one wins in price, but NOT in ease of u

        • I sad I run windows not XP. I don't consider XP useful enough to actually run software on. This is because in the 5 times I have used it, It had to be completely reinstalled each time.

          If you believe the myth that Mac's are more expensive than the cheap shit PC then you are an idiot. Take a high end PC, and match it feature for feature/ card for card to a Mac. You will have to custom build it to achieve this. Price either ties or favors Mac's this way. You can't compare an Intel S3 shared-memory vide
    • On the contrary, their behavior is best understood in terms of paranoia that they will be swept away by the next New Thing. That's why they went after Netscape so hard. With Linux, they can't undercut the price so they maintain incompatabilities, they fund FUD (and SCO, but I repeat myself), and they drop prices where it works.

  • Corporate Culture (Score:5, Insightful)

    by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Monday February 07, 2005 @03:58PM (#11599835)
    Microsoft's corporate culture, from day one, has been to "game" the system, treat the source as the family jewels and play fast and loose with truth and rules. I honestly believe that they don't know how to behave any differently. Just as Gates used university time on the mainframe to develop his first product then condemned the hobbyists that distributed a few copies, the corporation was built on taking as much out of the community and giving as little back as possible.

    BTW, I am aware of Gates' philanthropic endeavors and that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how he treats his customers and the computing industry in general.
    • MS's behavior is no different than IBM's was at its peak. Look at the history of IBM's antitrust problems with the US government, and the lock-in that IBM achieved with its customers.
      • MS's behavior is no different than IBM's was at its peak. Look at the history of IBM's antitrust problems with the US government, and the lock-in that IBM achieved with its customers.

        Reaches over, grabs his "father" hat and puts it on.

        "That doesn't make it right!", he shouts.
      • "MS's behavior is no different than IBM's was at its peak. Look at the history of IBM's antitrust problems with the US government, and the lock-in that IBM achieved with its customers. "

        How very true. in IBM's case, it continued on and off for years,like a bear hounded by a pack of dogs, until market realities, and Microsoft, reached them.
        Think about this: the original IBM pc used Ms DOS. Do you all see MS saying: "we see Office as our core product"?

        Sadly, I don't. Their core asset is the operating

        • Do you all see MS saying: "we see Office as our core product"?

          I do. They held a conference recently on MS-Office technologies and said outright that their aim was to get as many developers as possible trapped into basing stuff on MS-Office so that it would become effectively impossible for them to change out.

          If that's not monopolism, leveraging an existing dominance to entrap more customers, I don't know what is.

          If I was supervising them, they would immediately lose every patent and trademark that they

          • "They held a conference recently on MS-Office technologies and said outright that their aim was to get as many developers as possible trapped into basing stuff on MS-Office so that it would become effectively impossible for them to change out."

            Neat. But the problem for them is, only developers and a narrow subset of power users can be in a way "forced" to use Their office.

            I am not an IT pro, so for me "power user" means "anybody that is able to use VLOOKUP()", especially if the lookup table is not o
            • Excellent post! However...

              Provided you accept that the low end user is not a factor here, let us move upscale. People who want to send files from within the application, do mail merge in word. They record and modify macros in Excel. These are the people you are talking about, the common clay of Microsoft Land.

              ...these are the guys (and gals) who will innocently base their entire core stratum of MS-Office macros around one obscure .NET feature and one obscure OLE2 feature and one obscure MicrosoftFeatureOf

              • "...these are the guys (and gals) who will innocently base their entire core stratum of MS-Office macros around one obscure .NET feature and one obscure OLE2 feature and one obscure MicrosoftFeatureOfTheSeason that makes their stuff difficult to impossible to port off."

                My point exactly. "Feature bloat" is a common enemy.
                BUT, let me relate my personal experience.

                This is a sort of a coming out for me because, I have to confess, i have been a Microsoft fan once. I was a User of Lotus 1-2-3, and when, with
        • my personal opinion is that the US lost a major opportunity when it did not order MS breakup into operating system and everything else.

          So who gets to define what an "operating system" is ? Because the only remotely objective definition is the academic one, which hardly gives a saleable (to the end user) product.

      • MS's behavior is no different than IBM's was at its peak. Look at the history of IBM's antitrust problems with the US government, and the lock-in that IBM achieved with its customers.

        And, as you should also recall, IBM was penalized harshly for their behavior.

        Since his father was a CORPORATE LAWYER AT IBG, you can't tell me that Gates doesn't know that what he's doing is not only wrong but also has PRECEDENCE in federal court RULING years ago already that these business tactics and behavior are wrong.

        • If I recall correctly the antitrust settlements against IBM didn't necessarily hurt their overall market dominance in the mainframe area that much. I think it was the rise of mini and micro computers along with complacency that drove IBM down so that it was near death until Gerstner was hired.
          I think the same thing is happening with MS. The rise of Linux and other open source software will eventually reduce MS from its monopolistic perch in the consumer OS area.
          I think that it's important to recognize tha
          • The antitrust actions didn't end IBM's dominance in mainframes (they still are dominant outside of Japan)...but they DID establish that the behavior they used to strengthen that dominance is absolutely illegal.

            Since Gates' father was a career corporate lawyer for IBM, and apparently they were close enought that his father referred the PC team to Bill, it's hard to argue that Bill was kept in-the-dark about the ramifications of the government suits against IBM for behavior which M$ is now brazenly and sham

        • Hell, I'd say that *because* of his pa being a Corporate Lawyer, he probably knows that sometimes it's better to pay the fines; costs of doing business.

    • I'm talking about how he treats his customers and the computing industry in general.

      i have no love for their products. i use linux, os x, develop php/mysql apps, etc. my wife uses her computer for her photo business and runs xp, but uses, moz mail, firefox, etc., and needs it primarily for photoshop. now, as for gates and businesses, again, i'm no fan, but look, microsoft has done more for the computing industry and computing than we really want to admit. because of him, there is a computer on every d

  • Assumption (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DaveJay ( 133437 ) on Monday February 07, 2005 @04:00PM (#11599855)
    You're making the assumption that Microsoft truly believes what they say about interoperability and whatnot. Also that they believe they're still capable of making better products. If either (or both) of those assumptions is incorrect, then it might be safe to say they're blowing smoke while going right on doing what they've always done, and knowingly so.
    • Excellent point.

      I've come to the conclusion that companies advertise to their weaknesses. By that I mean that, when they recognize that they have a weakness, they treat it as a PR problem to be glossed over with advertising, rather than something that should actually be fixed.

      Examples include Dell advertising their great customer service, or Hyundai advertising their reliability.

      • >or Hyundai advertising their reliability.

        I don't disagree with your point, but I thought it worth noting that Hyundai (who is a client of the company I work for) actually has some really unique and effective new methods of improving their quality. Obviously I can't say what they are, so you'll have to take my word for it, but one approach in particular is really novel and has resulted in a huge short-term measurable quality increase (as reflected in the latest JD Power survey).

        Dunno if this will carry
        • They had to do something eventually. Everyone (yeas, I mean every one) I've known who owned a Hyundai has had serious problems with them, even in the first year or two. Granted, it's been a few years. I'll have to keep an eye out, I guess.

  • Because they have to - it's the strategy they have been following and it's a strategy too difficult to change quickly. Too many people are entrenched in their decison and those people don't want to admit that their way leads to a dead end. From their perspective it's just business, which is really just a complex game to them, and so it's better to crash and burn than admit that someone else has a better method.

  • Prudent and Non-religious MS (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Monday February 07, 2005 @04:20PM (#11600054) Homepage Journal

    As much as I or others on /. rail against MS for various practices that end up costing users money, causing vendor lock-in and upgrade treadmills, the company did not get where it is today by acting foolishly.

    All of their recent actions and behavior is consistent with maximizing shareholder return.

    If conditions change, either regulatory (EU, DOJ monitoring, broadcast flags), technical (TCPA) or marketplace (Linux, Oracle, IBM) I would count on them adjusting their strategy to continue to maximize long-term revenue, pure and simple.

    • Re:Prudent and Non-religious MS (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If conditions change, either regulatory (EU, DOJ monitoring, broadcast flags), technical (TCPA) or marketplace (Linux, Oracle, IBM) I would count on them adjusting their strategy to continue to maximize long-term revenue, pure and simple.

      Microsoft has become big and inbred. I'm not as sure as you that they can change. The people I know who work for Microsoft sound like they've been brain washed. That's bad for a company in the long run. As the article says, it looks like the strategy they've followed

    • They want to maximize return. (Not shareholder return -- except for Gates & friends, I doubt they give a damn about shareholders.)

      In order to do that, they will adapt as best they can to the current situation. With Bush in office in the US and the EU slow to react, they see the best course of action to be what they have always done: play the game.

      Buy the competition, sue the competition, undercut the competition with vaporware or bundling, lie about the competition, steal ideas from the competition
  • ...are moths drawn to the flame? ...do lemmings jump off of cliffs? ...do I answer the support line at work? ...did I get married? ...do I sit here and refresh slashdot all day?

    I suspect, many questions can all be answered the same. >:P

  • Because it works. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Johnny Mnemonic ( 176043 ) <mdinsmore&gmail,com> on Monday February 07, 2005 @04:33PM (#11600179) Homepage Journal

    The question I'm curious to canvas opinion on is why Microsoft is taking an attitude that is believed by so many to be damaging to their market position.

    Because their actions have not been damaging to their market position; they have succeeded wildly with those tactics. Why should they change? What could they possibly gain from a change in strategy that they don't already have? "Good feeling"? "Competitive instincts"? You can't take either of those to the bank.

    The only interesting question is: if, and this is a big if, if they they ever find themselves to be losing marketshare in a substantial way, will they be able to move fast enough to change and adapt? or will they maintain their mantra to the end?

    And by substantial, I don't mean FireFox and it's 3%--I mean, for a serious threat to emerge, it would have to be somewhere above 20% of the market Microsoft wants to own. Otherwise it's just an outlier.
    • Because their actions have not been damaging to their market position; they have succeeded wildly with those tactics.

      Exactly. It's not foolish to continue using a strategy that continues to work. I would actually break your interesting question into two:

      1. Will Microsoft's anticompetitive business tactics hurt their market position, as so many keep predicting it eventually will?
      2. If that happens, will Microsoft adapt and change tactics or will they blindly continue as they have?

      Although we have seen some

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • IP is where it's at (Score:4, Insightful)

    by St. Arbirix ( 218306 ) <matthew...townsend@@@gmail...com> on Monday February 07, 2005 @04:40PM (#11600236) Homepage Journal
    Keep in mind that Bill Gates didn't start the company by writing an OS, he did it by buying one. He changed the way everything thinks about software and making IP the most important part of doing business. It's not about better software, it's about better technology. It's about using the tools you and only you are privy to to edge out other people.

    I've never heard of any program that was actually written by Gates. Whatever he knows about programming is marginal compared to what he knows about protecting the implementation. If releasing any information about how MS processes data or how its IP works is required in order to publish a truly open standard then there's no way they would ever do it without fighting tooth and nail.

    New technologies may be exciting and the ideas behind them may be easily understood, but they're considered property by many people and any action that abridges that property right will be frowned upon. Bill Gates seems to think he's John Galt, but none of Ayn Rand's supermen were as prone to error as Microsoft has been. He lost his chance at immortality when his company started using clout instead of new ideas to beat out the competition.
    • Keep in mind that Bill Gates didn't start the company by writing an OS, he did it by buying one.

      Wrong. He started the company by writing a BASIC interpreter. And he developed it on a university mainframe on university time.

      A small nit perhaps.
    • Gates wrote a Basic interpreter for the Altair (first hobbyist microcomputer) way back at the dawn of time. According to a bio, he did some programming on minicomputers back in High School. However, your point is valid - he's far better known for his business practices (his dad was a lawyer) than his programming skills.

    • I've never heard of any program that was actually written by Gates

      Here's one. [folklore.org]

      Plus you shouldn't forget the original 8080 Altair BASIC that led to the infamous "open letter to hobbyists." [blinkenlights.com]

    • "Programmers at Work," Susan Lammers, Microsoft Press, 1986, ISBN 0-914845-71-3, happens to be a darn good book even if it does have a chapter about Gates. It has a number of pages of printout (pp. 70, 348-352) of a listing by GATES/ALLEN/DAVIDOFF of the original 8080 BASIC interpreter, and a page in Gates' handwriting, p. 353, "Storage layout for BASIC."

      It all looks perfectly workmanlike to me. I haven't gone over it with a fine-toothed comb judging how good it is compared to, uh, the code I was writing i

    • I read somewhere a story about a guy at Microsoft who fixed the buggy flood-fill code in the graphics for Microsoft Basic. He showed his fix to Bill Gates and wondered aloud about who had written the original code, it was such a piece of garbage. Gates nodded, said nothing, and left. An old hand who had witnessed this then told him that the author of the original code was Bill Gates.

      It seems clear from the history we have that Gates was once a real programmer. He knew assembly language and knew enough t

    • I'm actually taking a class [harvard.edu] right now at that University [harvard.edu] with a lecturer [harvard.edu] who was a senior during Gates sojourn.

      Leitner mentioned a number of weeks ago that Gates had written an altair emulator that ran in 3k of ram and left 1k for the users environment. He wrote this on a PDP-10 with only the Altair specs for a reference. The true programming feat is that his subsequently developed code ran flawlessly on an actual altair machine.

  • Because... (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by Gob Blesh It ( 847837 )
    ...they're not a bunch of smelly, disgusting communists. Tee hee!

    • Re:Because... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      bwahahaha. That could easily be the summary of MS's press reports from the last half year or more.

  • It IS about Marketing. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JoeD ( 12073 ) on Monday February 07, 2005 @05:01PM (#11600437) Homepage
    It doesn't matter whether Microsoft is really interoperable or not. Nor does it matter how secure the OS is, or how stable it is, or anything like that.

    How can this be? Because 99% of the population either doesn't know or doesn't care. All they hear is Bill Gates saying "We are focusing on security" or "We are focusing on interoperability", and that's what sticks.

    Whether or not the security or interoperability are actually addressed is irrelevant - the terms have been associated with Microsoft in peoples' minds. All it takes is some repetition and maybe an ad campaign or two to drive it home. Then in six months, some poll will come out saying that people associate Microsoft with interoperable products.

    And that's what it's all about, boys and girls.
  • Only a small minority of customers cares about open source and interoperatability- the grand majority couldn't give a damn. Therefore the greater profit is in closed source and cheap labor- so that's what the behemouths will do.

  • Exactly. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by millia ( 35740 ) on Monday February 07, 2005 @06:13PM (#11601292) Homepage
    This is my first /. posting in gosh knows when- I get fired up, see all the posts, and say, screw it.
    But this subject is one of my premier hot button issues.

    I don't understand it. If you're confident in your product, trust in that confidence- don't use obfuscated file formats to cause interoperability problems.

    The only thing I can think of that keeps this anti-customer attitude going is corporate culture. Off the top of my head, Lotus and Autodesk seem comparable, in their persistence with a worldview. Lotus, at the beginning and for quite a while, used copy protection methods. They'd not use them for a while, but pretty soon, they'd come back again. Autodesk has gone back and forth on using dongles (or at least, until 10 years ago they had- my cad days are behind me.)

    Corporate cultures seem to have memes associated with them, and Microsoft's appears to be one of paranoia- regardless of the quality of their products.

    I'm Microsoft certified. I even can say I like Word, minus clippit, and I even think XP has its merits. I even think, with Server 2003's installation and granularity, they might even be getting a clue.

    But they make it damned hard to stick up for them, and until they open up items such as file formats to all takers, it will be useless to measure the quality of their products.

  • My take (Score:3, Insightful)

    by j-turkey ( 187775 ) on Monday February 07, 2005 @06:17PM (#11601325) Homepage
    It could publish its CIFS specification tomorrow if it so chose, an act that would correspond closely to the spirit and letter of the European decision.

    Opening up CIFS, or the file specifications for their Office suite, or their ABI spec would really cut into much of their FUD. This is a good part of any dominant player's business model (I won't limit this stritctly to monopolistic behavior). A perfect example is the IBM/Wang situation, where IBM flung FUD about lack of the Wang's compatibility (which was simply untrue). In the end, IBM's sales stayed strong, and Wang went the way of...well...Wang. Microsoft does the same thing with their proporitary formats. "Sure, you can use a Samba server, but are sure you want to entrust your network to a hack of our 'real' stuff?". Same deal with OpenOffice.org (Microsoft actually published some FUD about this, which I can't seem to find) -- Microsoft basically said "Yeah, it'll probably work, but wouldn't you rather have a guarantee than a reverse-engineered hack of our stuff? Besides, you don't get Access with Oo.o, and you need that. You'll also have to shell out to pay to retrain your employees. Lost productivity!"

    Actually opening this stuff up would likely cause a major shift in their FUD activities. A good thing, perhaps...but asking why they don't do it is asking why someone hasn't opened up another hole in their head yet. Because it'll hurt!

    • Opening up CIFS

      Good post. Trouble is CIFS a joint collaboration between MS/IBM/3COM. They don't own it. They just modified it a bit. IBM/Samba/Everyone else needs to stick to he spec. If windows isn't compatible, so be it.

      Wang is now own by Unisys, which for the longest time only sold 8/16/32 Windows cluster systems. Now their selling Linux as well. Go figure.

      Enjoy,
  • It's the lawyers. Laywers aren't in the business of selling a product, all they know how to do is create problems. Really. Find your own problems before the other guys does to keep him from suing you, and find his before he does so you can sue him. It isn't about productivity, it's about extortion. Some lawyers will still consider the productivity benefits of serving their clients, corporate lawyers have lost even that small incentive to be business smart.

    A lawyer doesn't think in terms of right or wrong,
  • "The question I'm curious to canvas opinion on is why Microsoft is taking an attitude that is believed by so many to be damaging to their market position."

    Let's see: Windows is sold on nearly every x86 computer sold in a store. Office is the de facto standard for the business & academic world. Internet Explorer (like it or not) has a market dominance of over 90%. My guess is that they can take pretty much any attitude they want, cuz they're not going anywhere now or any time soon. As long as they

    • Want to bet? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by SanityInAnarchy ( 655584 )
      The alternatives just haven't hit on a really good strategy yet.

      Let's suppose that most computers are bought by either gamers or people who use Word/email/web/IM. We have damn good alternatives to Word/Outlook/IE/MSNIM, and reasonably good alternatives to things like ACT and various niche business-oriented things.

      That leaves gaming. When you buy a new box, what game do you want to play? How well do you want to play it? Gamers probably won't settle for wine/cedega, due to slowness/bugginess (teh fps!).
      • You're making some big assumptions here. The biggest is that a bunch of software and hardware makers actually want multiple operating systems on the market. Why would they spend millions of dollars to complicate their lives? Before any major software makers support any new operating system, it would have to gain a large base of users that do not also use Windows. Also, no one is going to switch to a new operating system simply because it offers "almost as good" remakes of popular made-for-Windows softwa
  • I recall Jeremy Allison, author of Samba, saying that he and the other Samba developers knew the workings of the CIFS protocol much better than the MS programmers they've spoken with.

    My point is, maybe the only useful spec is the code, which MS is unlikely to share.

    (Anyone able to find the quote?)

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