December 21, 2004
ms death knell?
In a recent gapingvoid post, Microsoft employee/star blogger Robert Scoble asks the question about his employer:
Can we turn this aircraft carrier around? I don’t know, but I’m having fun trying!
Richard then counters with this point:
A collapsing empire or an aircraft carrier in search of a handbrake turn are both behemothic (mmm, neologism?). Open source trends (I include blogging in that — it’s open source publishing) can’t actually rescue them. Indeed, I propose a different analogy to either of you. Open source software and blogging are the small mammals to M$‘s and big publishing’s dinosaurs. Even without the meteorite, the big lizards are doomed.
I work for a small publishing company, and the big question I’m trying to answer is one posed by Hugh and others a while back: how do you cope when bundled content is dead? What do those of use whose revenue model is bundled content and intermediation do five years from now when a generation of media consumers is used to creating their own bundles? M$ has the same question to answer: when software development doesn’t rely on big gangs of coders and creators and distributors and consultants — on overhead, basically — what then?
And then I pipe in:
Richard, good point. What you have illustrated is the often corrupting influence of taking your company public.
At least in the USA, a private company can go, “The goalposts have moved. Screw it. Move on. Build a new biz model which relies on 2,000 people, not 60,000. Have it up n’ running by next Christmas”.
Because a public company is ALWAYS beholden to Wall Street, it cannot do that. It can only do stuff which is good for the next Quarter.
What is good for the business is not always good for Wall Street, and vice versa.
If MS does have a meteor, methinks it’s the same meteor that once happily gave Bill Gates billions of dollars. The one that will insist MS remain a large, cold-blooded lizard, and forbid it to change into a small, furry mammal.
If MS goes under, it will not be Open Source that puts MS out of business. MS’s owners (i.e. Wall Street) will put MS out of business.
Bill and his top management are extremely smart people. I’ll wager they already know all this, and already have a possible exit strategy well thought out. I’ll also wager Robert and people of similar rank at Microsoft have no earthly clue what it is.
But who knows. Predicting the future is a hazardous business. So is underestimating Microsoft.
[AFTERTHOUGHT:]
Like I said, “At least in the USA”. JUST TRY cutting your workforce by over 90% in say, France, even if the market justifies it ten times over.
Basically, you have to imagine a pack of well-fed, highly-trained burocrats, intoxicated with the smell of blood, descending on you for a good ol’ feeding frenzy. Not pretty.
Right, Loic?
I agree. No open source will be the death knell of MS. And the day MS “dies” the skies will be littered with golden parachutes.
Agreed. Littering the skies with golden parachutes is a perfectly valid exit strategy.
…Especially if you own one of the golden parachutes
Hmmmm
What I see is a lot of lawyer bullshit building up, like patenting business methods and software and so on. Microsoft cannot innovate, but they can stomp your innnovative fast moving little ass with big lawsuits for having copied some of “their” ideas.
If you look at Open Source, the best example of this for the moment is the on-going, and frankly bizarre claim by the SCO group to own LINUX’s code. If you want more on this go to http://www.groklaw.com
This is way of the future. Get a market, get the fundamentals, and then lawyer the shit out of anyone who tries to come into the same area. For other big patent holders, you have the “if you sue me, I’ll sue you” defence, as they all have a good portfolio. For the small guys, no chance in hell.
Gah. Anyway, on a lighter note, glad to hear that the wallet is filling up a bit. Here at Hamish mansions I’m doing all I can to empty the damn thing into the nearest branch of a toyshop in time for Xmas. (Actually, on that subject… I live in a french speaking country, and they used to have a branch of “Toys R Us” in town, only it failed, because nobody really got what “Toeusroos” was. Name only works in English, so the local outfit, King Jouet took the market completely. Think global, act local as the hackneyed phrase from the 90s has it.
This is exactly what we are experiencing.
I own a company, Publish and be damned, that allows authors to become independent publishers themselves, totally bypassing traditional as well as vanity (or subsidy) publishers.
When we first started out we thought that the majority of our customers would be authors who had previously been turned down by established publishing houses.
Not so.
More and more authors are turning to us, having actually ditched their publishers. We have been operating for six months now, in that time we have helped to publish over 70 books. Four of these were established authors who have clawed back the copyright for their work and are now going it alone.
The reasons: Control and money. Mid-list authors are very badly served by publishers, simply because they don’t make enough money to support a large support staff, corner offices and all the paraphernalia that goes with it. As a result they are used to taking care of marketing and PR themselves — the publisher won’t do it for them. For these authors independent publishing makes total sense. They still have the same amount of work, yet the financial rewards are much higher.
To give an example: One of our customer’s books sold about 70.000 copies. He made, after tax, about
PS: I offered Hugh help to publish the Hughtrain. He hasn’t been in touch since
/end shameless plug.
RAP (Rapid Assembly Posting) — the Blogging World’s Answer to Rap Music
Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void gets into one of the most interesting areas of impact the Web has on the …
They’re not dead yet.
I love reading gapingvoid; it’s always so entertaining. But sometimes Hugh goes overboard. It’s a bit early to sound a death knell for Microsoft. This is a company with revenue in 2004 of almost $40 billion, and increasing, even through…