"if microsoft wishes to change the world, then changing themselves is also, most defi …

ista is causing me a general headache in terms of supporting customer networks. I upgraded my laptop to Vista and had more service packs, hot fixes and work arounds to do just to get it to talk to Small Business Server.
The reality is at Vista was designed for Windows Server 2008, which, is obviously not out yet. Consequently, it is a general nightmare to accessnetwork resources.
On a seperate issue, I resell Live Meeting and use Live Meeting for all desktop support issues to immediately gain access to a desktop for support. The Vista security pop ups make desktop sharing in Live Meeting impossible. I have to get the end user to make the steps as Live Meeting keeps getting locked out by Vista security. Hugely hoping this issue has been addressed by Live Meeting 2007 or I’ll be going back to VNC for support.

Perhaps the monster’s slogan should be:
“The World of Microsoft. Change it or go home.”
After all, isn’t MSFT’s claim that it already has changed the world? And of course it has…
(So, people who aren’t MSFT fans are clueless, naive and too young to remember what this business used to be like? Funny, I could swear I remember what the computing business was in 1995. And in 1985. And in 1975. And a few years before that. What a gratuitous ad hominem.)
@: MSFT is vigorously hostile to remote desktop access, screen sharing and virtualization schemes, I suspect because they wreak havok on a per-seat pricing business model, and Software-as-a-Service is not getting a warm reception among the customer base. The only reason there *is* Remote Desktop and NetMeeting/LiveMeeting is that VNC and webinar use was spreading so rapidly.

Vista is a highly polished turd. My next upgrade will be Ubuntu.

Re: “People who hate Microsoft are either clueless or naive about what running a business was actually like, before they were around.”
That’s just plain silly. Yes, I am sufficiently a fogey to remember life before Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft AT THE TIME was a fine upstanding upstart. Certainly MS-DOS and Windows were improvements over TRS-DOS, AppleDOS, and the like.
But your comment suggests that once upstanding, always upstanding. That’s preposterous, as divorce rates on both sides of the pond would illustrate. Just because we applaud what Microsoft did in its early years doesn’t mean we must applaud what Microsoft has done afterwards.

Hugh, I thought he was talking about the business of computing…of handing information. What kind of “running a business” was he talking about that did not involve handling information “before Microsoft was around”? A newsstand?
One of my first paying jobs was running an 64k IBM mainframe and operating punched card equipment for a small savings bank (remeber “savings banks”?) It sure looked like a business to me. After that I worked for a pharamceutical house on managing their raw materials and finished product inventory. This bore an astounding resemblence to a business too.
Perhaps your friend is thinking about front-office business operations like bookeeping and document preparation, (which in the “Dan Rather Bush Memo” days was done on typewriters — the memos forged on MS Word were easy to spot; they were too good).
But MSFT didn’t invent document processing software or spreadsheets. They didn’t invent low-cost small computers, or business applications for them. They didn’t invent small, fast, high-quality printers. They didn’t invent inexpensive data storage media, or data management sofware to utilize it. They didn’t invent low-cost data communications. They didn’t invent computer networking. They weren’t innovators in making all these things work together.
They simply became ruthlessly efficient at establishing and maintaining market share by controlling technology and its users…a crown formerly held by IBM, but taken away from them by a company that was listening better.
We’ve seen these cycles before: IBM itself grew up by taking the business away from NCR in the 1920’s…at the hand of an ex-NCR executive who’d just gotten out of jail on antitrust charges.
“This has all happened before…this will all happen again.” -BSG

People who “hate” anything need therapy!
It is a well known truth that when you change the inside you manifest intentions externally. This is true of individuals and of any organized entity. Law of attraction, etc;

People who hate Microsoft are either clueless or naive about what running a business was actually like, before they were around.”
Not so.
http://www.stephenfry.com/blog/?p=3

I don’t hate Microsoft, but I’ll waste no love on them either. In short, they do not polarise people. They follow the curve, they do not jump it. (Yes, I read Guy’s blog too).
As for business before Microsoft – irrelevant, and misdirecting. The real question is what was business like before the internet? And as well documented in “Barbarians Led by Bill Gates” they totally missed the boat (unless you subscribe to revisionist history).
If I was running Microsoft I’d develop Ozzie’s Groove into next generation F&P so that businesses could concentrate on doing business and not supporting Microsoft tosh.

My company (not a MegaCorp, but definately a BigCorp) released a corporate edict that no-one will be upgrading to Vista for the foreseeable future. I doubt there’ll be a Linux revolution (I’m not that lucky), but considering that we’ll still buying PCs (just with XP), I’m not surprised by the recent announcement that XP will be available another six months.

You – and your friend – don’t get it.
We’re not talking about whether they made the 1990s and 1980s more productive (which they did) we’re talking about how clueless they are in the current software industry.
You can talk about the “Blue Monster” until you yourself are blue in the face, it won’t change the underlying problems.
For a developer right now, choosing a job is a bit like being a college grad and having a choice between becoming an entrepreneur or working in a merchant bank.
Both routes have their advantages, their perks, their interesting bits and their horrible bits.
All the interesting stuff right now is happening in the “entrepreneur” channel in software. Going and working for Microsoft (or increasingly, Google) is like working for the merchant bank: dull, large, faceless.
Developers WANT to change the World. Software runs civilisation, and we KNOW we can change the way it works, how it communicates, how people spend their lives. We are literally the masters of the fricking Universe.
We *really* don’t need to be told that for the millionth time. We studied this stuff because we wanted to change the World, not because we wanted to automate trivial crap.
But you only get to do that World-changing work if you are edgy, risky, doing things nobody else would ever allow you to do. You don’t get to do that in the merchant banks of the software industry.
Microsoft can talk about changing their attitude but they will never, ever, ever do it. It is a black hole attracting suits and mediocrity like nothing else on Earth. They can’t talk about innovation, but as far as they’ll get is changing a few UI components and hoping “that’ll do” whilst waiting for their options to vest.
They can’t do edgy. They can’t do risky. They’re not *allowed*. Not by their shareholders, not even by themselves.
They talk about innovation and entrepreneurship and then they try it and they tank: look at Zune, look at Vista, in fact look at anything they’ve produced in the last few years.
They don’t understand 2007. They don’t understand the World they’re in *at all*. They don’t know how to move around in it with the agility of a smaller company. In terms of one of your cartoons, they are the dinosaur you shouldn’t discuss meteorites with.
They can’t innovate any more. The reasons are deep, complex and to do with the size of the business and the security of their revenue stream.
They can’t be fixed by a cartoon.
This isn’t “Microsoft sux0rz!” stuff, this is real spiky industry stuff, and I’m afraid you and your friend just don’t understand where the industry is well enough to grok what we’re all talking about.

I agree with Lee. I attended the Expression launch, and going after Ad agencies is not going to re-invent anything, so thats a non-starter. At the core, I see the issue MS dealing with is product quality in three areas:
1) the base systems, Windows, Office, Sharepoint have been over-engineered to the point of annoying people now, rather than address the relatively simple needs of users, whether corporate or personal.
2) The proprietary nature of the products that was previously a corporate advantage has reached such complexity, that it is now a disadvantage, particularly backward compatibility.
3) Browsers. Ask an Microsoft developer their opinion about MS Internet Explorer. General view is that it is lacking and has fallen behind, and is restricting development of other products
The reason people move to Linux is not ease of use, because it has its quirks. The reason, is because it is an operating system. It allows me to turn my computer on, runs for days/ weeks, and doesn’t crash or slow down and grind the way Windows does.
Change the world by getting back to basics, and product quality.

I am very supportive of the executive decision made by the president of the company by a recent poster that they will consider downgrading to Linux instead of upgrading their existing Microsoft based hardware/software. No telling what they will use to communicate without Word, Excel and so on.
We need businesses to cut off their relationship with Microsoft software, go out to the edge of survival, and die off in an agonizing way because they cannot interact with the rest of the business world. Darwin was right. This helps to underscore the point that Microsoft Rules. Goodbye Fools. Get with the program or get off the bus.
Of course I mean this in a very light hearted spirited way.
Not.
Best Wishes Sucker…
Dave

@ O’Neill:
Well, one might very well think every file in Vista is DRMed…because they are. In Vista, DRM doesn’t just apply to music and movies, it applies to the operating system itself, and to applications like Office, too.
You can imagine how customers must have clamored to have this feature to “enhance their computing experience”. And how thrilled they were in August and October when the “Windows Genuine Advantage” servers broke, and copies of Vista started erroneously declaring themselves stolen.

@ Dave Armstrong:
If you really think business communicate with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, you’re clearly not a very good communicator.
They communicate with phone calls, meetings and e-mail. None of these need Microsoft. You might feel they could be enhanced by Microsoft, but they’re now late to the party as hundreds of start-ups are innovating better and gaining market share.
I agree they could probably do it better. So far their answer is to produce a pinnacle of mediocrity and “hope it’ll do” in the form of Exchange Server (proprietary technology overlying the most open standard on the planet) or SharePoint (don’t even get me started).
Even if you want a standard for spreadsheets or documents, open source tools now handle most Office documents just fine, and increasingly Microsoft is having to allow others inside their proprietary document formats: do you really want all of your local Government’s documents to be unreadable 100 years from now? The citzens of Munich don’t.
But the *real* issue is not about market dominance the way you see it.
The fact that Microsoft is the World’s largest software company is not helping them. It’s exactly their size which is killing them.
Large organisations struggle to adapt, change and understand. MS is skilled at understanding the shift in technologies around them (cf. their adoption of the Internet in the late 1990s), but they are absolutely *awful* at understanding innovation in licensing, software economics or shifts in the underlying industry business models.
They do not understand the modern software business. They’re not alone – Oracle, SAP and many others don’t either. IBM are starting to get it and Google aren’t too bad (but have other problems related to their size), but bizarrely the real pioneers right now are – get this! – Amazon. Yeah, the bookshop! Who could have predicted *that*?
Just because a gazillion offices around the World use MS products, it doesn’t mean they’re being innovative, shaking the industry up or “changing the World”. It means they are the large white whale, and they haven’t realised there are tens of thousands of Captain Ahabs out there hunting them down.
It’s not about DRM, or open source, or document formats, or market dominance or installed desktops – it’s about it being almost 2008 and not 1978.
And no cartoon is ever going to fix that for them, nor is any comment on this blog.

Hugh, I have another business that recycled used computers. I’ve been following the XP vs Vista arguement for some time. One of my clients bought three identicle laptops, two with Windoes XP and one with Vista. The Vista machine runs 30 to 50 percent slower. As it stands, we have a lot of folks rushing to buy used laptops and desktops from because they don’t like Vista. The big blue monster better listen up and fast because people vote with their dollars and their feet, and their Linux competition is only a download away with no major out of pocket expense to load up and go. Anyone need a few latops and desktops preloaded with Ubantu? Call me.

And as if to make my point for me, Microsoft basically admits they don’t “do” innovation:
http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2007/10/07/bungie-jumps-but-the-halo-doesnt-slip/

@ O’Neill:
There’s no important difference between DRM and “anti-piracy”. DRM stands for “Digital Rights Management”, a weasel-worded euphemism that tries to make what we used to call “copy protection” sound desirable. If it hadn’t gotten such a (deservedly) bad reputation, it wouldn’t have been necessary to rename it.
All DRM schemes attempt to sell you a copy of some data while restricting your ability to use it, preserving the ability to get paid again for its use in a different way, at a different time, or by a different person.
Remember that the deep insight of the Von Neumann architecture used by almost all modern computers is that programs are data too. Your distinction is beyond pedantic; it’s just wrong.

Heh. Michael Neel, the HARDCORE anti-MS crowd don’t phase me too much. If they were better at answering the question, “What would you do differently” or “What would you have done differently” [Maggie Leber’s last comment about DRM was a fine example of this; criticism is easy etc.], maybe that would change.
But if someone has issues with MSFT, that’s perfectly valid. I myself use a Mac. Why?
1. Rebooting took forever on my last PC.
2. PC viruses.
3. Wireless seems to work a lot better on a Mac than my last PC.
4. I’m a sucker for good industrial design.
5. My needs for a computer are pretty limited, so Mac’s relatively closed shop isn’t a problem for me.
That being said, I’d be utterly lost careerwise without my Tablet PC, which I occasionally use for drawing.

Good response, Maggie, thanks for that.
What’s interesting to me is, even if you qualify the question I asked with “If money, time and intellectual capital were no object, what would you do/what would you have done/what are you going to do differently”, I still never receive a clear answer. I get plenty of idealism and untested theory, though.
That’s not because my detractors are bad people, or clueless people, any more than MSFT is “evil”. It goes deeper than that, as my next paragraph will explain.
DRM exists for one reason only: Because different people have different ideas about what should be paid for, and what should be free. And yeah, we live in a world where the lines that separate the two will become increasingly blurred, with advocates on both sides becoming increasing polarized [and even increasingly hostile]. For all the debate I’ve seen on both sides in the last decade or so, I don’t think we’re any closer to an answer.

Hugh–
I *have* answered “what I’m doing/going to do differently”. (Bear in mind you get clearer answers if you ask clearer questions…and preferably one at a time. 🙂 )
But here it is again: I’m going to minimize my dependence on and exposure to technology from sources that insist on too much control over what I do with it. Especially when that control appears to be designed to operate against my interests.
This would include things like “copy protection” in all it’s guises. Packaging designed to impede reverse engineering. (We’re already past the point where “funny fasteners” like Torx wrenches have any real effect.) Stuff that “phones home” in ways the user does not control, especially if when the “phoning home” fails, the stuff stops working. Things deliberately built from proprietary parts that are single-sourced. X-Box and Zune and Vista may be pinnacles of this sort of thing in the MSFT world.
On the Apple side, iPod and iTunes have some similar problems albeit not in such severe forms. If you want to form an extreme contrast, compare an iPhone to a Palm Treo sometime. They do the same kinds of things, but from very different points of view designwise.
I’m half convinced this kind of “phone-home” engineering is a result of too much marketing influence over engineering.
This used to be justified by claiming that “engineers don’t care enough about the user”, and posing marketing folks as a kind of ombudsman to protect the poor user from the nasty geek people. There once was a lot of truth to that. But over time I think some marketers have lost track of “what the user wants” and replaced it with “what we we force the user to buy”…and dictated product requirements to that end.
That approach may appear to work over a short term, producing a nice pulse in quarterly sales, but longer-term, people begin to realize that the company they’ve been buying from–despite piles of soothing “we care about you” words from its public mouth–actually holds them in contempt. The attitude is reflected in the carnival workers slang term for a customer: “a mark”. It shares some of the feel of “trick” when used by a hooker or a pimp.
It causes products like “Bob” and “Clippy”. And schemes like “Windows Activation” and DVD region coding.
But I disagree with your thought that “we’re no closer to an answer”. In fact we *are* closer to answers; we’re beginning to invent new ways of dealing with near-zero-unit-cost information goods that actually make sense.
But unless you’re tapped into the right information streams today, you may not be aware of what those new answers are and how they operate. One set of them is found in the various open source software movements. Another is efforts around the Creative Commons forms of IP licensing.
For some examples, look at the writing of Cory Doctorow (I frequently find his politics distasteful in the extreme, but he’s a bright and talented writer nonetheless). Look at the music of Jonathan Coulton. Look at the piles of useful open-source-licensed Java software (do try to overlook the somewhat bigger pile of not-so-useful abandonware; the real cost of using Open Source code is not plopping down for a licence fee and ongoing maintenance charges, it’s figuring out what’s worthwhile to you and what’s dreck…or having somebody you trust to do that for you. Linux distros are an example of this; you are trusting the builder of the distro to figure out what is worthwhile having in the core of the distro, and what’s worth having easily available in a package repository.)
We are evolving reputation based schemes to assist us with this winnowing in other areas; for example: you don’t have to look through millions of crappy videos on YouTube; your chances of finding something really funny or interesting are greatly enhanced when someone you trust to not waste your time refers you to it.
So I can’t tell you chapter-and-verse what the final solutions will be; I suspect they will continue to evolve and be invented at accelerating speed long after I’m dead and gone.
And if MSFT comes to understand and internalize these ideas, they won’t have to figure out how “tell a different story”. Their story will *be* different, no matter who’s telling it.
I can’t write a prescription for how to do that, that’s their job to do, or to fail at. They have some very addictive, nasty habits ingrained in their culture that are undoubtedly extremely difficult to break. But they could do worse than starting by admitting that it needs to be done, and look at how IBM reinvented itself for some valuable lessons.

Um…all the “untested theory” examples I cited are real-world things that are functioning today.
And try telling Google or IBM or Sun or Red Hat how lucky they are to not have to please shareholders. Yet every one of those four enterprises has a better grip on how to survive in the world of future tech than MSFT’s current behavior suggests it does.
I think maybe you’ve been listening to your marketing friends just a little too much…and I think I’ve heard that kind of patronising “you kids are just playing and don’t understand the Real Business World” attitude before. It was coming from an IBM SE guy in the mid-1980’s who was telling me how the Micro Channel Architecture were going to regain control of the PC hardware market for Big Blue.
Remember MCA? If you don’t, you’re not alone…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2#Micro_Channel_Architecture

In the early days Microsoft was the cute upstart overthrowing the establishment (PCs for the masses). Now it in turn has become a monopolist and the establishment. For a techie working for a technology monopolist is a huge embarrassment, it’s not what you are meant to do – your peers will laugh at you. Nowadays no company thinks Microsoft is going to out-innovate them (Microsoft was always better at marketing than technology) but they do think that Microsoft will use it’s financial muscle to crush them and the Blue Monster image reinforces that.
Ultimately the best thing that could have happened to Microsoft would have been to be split up into baby-softs. It would have stripped them of their monopoly power, got rid of the dead wood, and forced them to start to compete again. Now though they will fade to the point down the line where, like IBM were, they are forced to reinvent themselves. However that revolution is a long way.

Hugh,
I notice your “Blue Monster” drawing doesn’t include a note advising that the “Microsoft” name is a trademark. Aren’t you afraid Gates & Co will sue you for trademark infringement? Wouldn’t you like someone to put a program on your computer to keep you from ever typing the word “Microsoft” just to make sure you never violate Microsoft’s trademark?

If MSFT can’t/won’t fairly compete in the marketplace, the marketplace owes them nothing – much less nostalgia about what business was like before MSFT. Look at MSFT’s gross revenue, they get enough worldly tribute whether they deserve it or not.

Paul,
You need a new business plan, a new wife (if she can take the abuse and anger) and a new outlook. Or …
Best Wishes,
Dave