Re: Apple's poor positioning for the age *after* x86
- From: Daniel Johnson <danieljohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 21:19:06 -0400
On 2005-09-14 23:57:43 -0400, ZnU <znu@xxxxxxxxxxxx> said:
In article <2005091417440543658%danieljohnson@vzavenuenet>, Daniel Johnson <danieljohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:This is quit wrong. Vista is the next phase of the rollout of the new managed runtimes. The Win32-dependent bits are to be replaced will all-singing, all-dancing managed equivalents. The 2.0 runtime will be delivered on every new computer.
.NET will no longer be a big download you need to run certain things.
It will just be Windows.
Yeah, they're also bundling .NET, which is already available for XP.
Right back to Win95, actually. They did something like this with Win32 also. Remember Win32s?
"It will just be Windows" is a bit misleading, because Win32 is still there, and much of the rewriting that was supposed to happen didn't happen, so most of Windows is still written on top of Win32.
It was only "supposed to happen" by people who did not understand the technology. Win32 was always going to be there; it would be suicidal to remove it and very silly to rewrite it in terms of .NET. Nor is the ..NET technology suitable for use in the kernel; a new kernel was never in the cards.
What MS is doing is putting *another* API in there. There will no doubt be some apps to show it off, also. But the important thing is the API itself.
[snip]
I Very Much Doubt This.
It isn't the file format that produces the lock-in. It is the feature set. You can't render every Word document with 100% fidelity unless you have 100% of Word's feature set.
99% of Word documents could be represented just as well as RTF.
I do not think this is quite so; it may be that they *ought to be* like that, and that Word is used when something simpler would be better. I tend to think so myself.
[snip]
Their desire to diversify isn't new. They've always been branching off into other areas; that is how they got such a huge software portfolio, and why they make mice and keyboards.
But they've largely failed.
Well, that's not the usual assessment of Microsoft. They do sometimes fail, of course.
Oh, they keep at it, because they can afford to, but they lose money on almost everything except Office and Windows. If you lose sight of that, it makes Microsoft look a lot more scary than it actually is.
Microsoft's greatest virtue as a company is this persistence. They keep plugging until they get it right. This is what makes them scary.
*All* software is like that, though. Even perfectionists like Apple can't get a large product right the first time; consider Mac OS X 10.0 for one very obvious example.
[snip]
They've promoted product activation and insane DRM schemes that would, for instance, degrade the quality of video output for consumers who didn't buy new monitors.
Microsoft is offering their *real* customers what they want- really good copy protection.
You see, MS's real customers are the people who *produce* the media and applications you consume. *Those* are the people they must win over. All else follows.
It's not nearly that simple. The truth is, most of these crazy copy protection schemes, don't really work.
Microsoft is trying to make them work. They may fail, but if they succeed, software vendors everywhere will beat *yet another* path to their door.
So in reality, Microsoft is angering the people who give it money, in order to *pretend* to do something for developers and content creators.
Microsoft isn't really angering the OEMs who give it money. :D
I don't see how this arrangement will make *anyone* happy.
It will make the MPAA very happy. :D
I do not really think these organizations are being wise- a little copy protection is prudent but once you come to see *your* customers as the enemy, you can no longer win even in principle.
But anyway, clearly a lot of people *do* want improved copy protection. It's just that those people are not the consumers or media or software, but its producers.
Moreover, with Microsoft's market share, Windows is too big to ignore; are developers going to only write for other platforms if Microsoft doesn't implement this stuff? Of course not.
MS had a bad scare in the late nineties because developers did start writing for another platform- Java. Who is to say this can't happen again?
[snip]
But it is not the biggest advantage. That is that Windows is a universal OS- you can use to do almost anything. It runs on a huge range of diverse computers from PDAs to big servers.
Other systems run on even more hardware.
Merely being able to boot is not enough, you need to provide the appropriate OS services at the same time. Windows also does this, for nearly any OS service you can think of.
Moreover, there's no particularly good reason that someone picking an OS for a desktop computer should care whether some variant of that OS runs on set-top boxes or PDAs.
You are thinking of consumers again.
Developers benefit from this. They can reuse their skills, their knowledge, and even their code in a far wider field if the platform they have learned is universal.
Even if you are just thinking of one narrow app, there are far fewer compatibility headaches if every computer that app interacts with runs the same OS. Is is not convenient, for instance, that your user account's security tokens are carried over when you access a server? Only works if you are using Active Directory (or its predecessors).
[snip]
What Apple did was making the iPod the only "platform" (if you will) for big-name commercial music (which you get off the ITunes Music Store).
That is the kind of entrenchement that MS has in the OS market, actually. :D
I don't think that's such a huge part of the iPod's success; the average iPod user has only purchased a few songs from the iTMS.
Certainly the iPod was 'cool' before the iTMS was out there, but that does not account for the entrenchment: 'cool' is an ephemeral thing. Lock-in is more durable. :D
[snip]
Come on, I expect more than Edwin-like games from you. My argument here is very clear; in markets where Microsoft isn't already completely entrenched, other competitors, often using models very different from Microsoft's, tend to beat Microsoft. If Microsoft's iron grip on the OS market ever slips, the same thing could start happening there.
This is not a tautology like the last one, but it is a truism. Where Microsoft succeeds, they become entrenched. Where they fail, not. Should their entrenchment in the OS market be overcome, they could fail there also.
The thing that is *not* trivial is the thing you left out: how could it happen that Microsoft's iron grip should slip?
That, I think, is the interest question.
I do not know myself, but I strongly suspect that Apache does well because it is a good product and has a very attractive price.
Yes, and that works in the web server market. It doesn't work in the OS market, because of the Windows monopoly.
Dunno about that; the "OS market" is a very broad term. Linux is not as successful as Apache but it is doing reasonably well in the server space were it is adequate for the task.
There are some bits of the OS market that MS owns with an iron grip; they are the bits where nobody has anything close to a competitive offering.
[snip]
This strikes me as unlikely. Microsoft may fall but surely not very fast- many, many companies are tied to windows by their custom apps. That is a link that will take time to break.
Obviously Windows would take years to die off. But look at IBM's downfall.
While there are *still* companies with legacy systems running on IBM mainframes, all these years later, IBM went from industry monopolist to struggling-for-survival fairly fast.
Struggling for survival? Surely it was never *that* bad. They had to adapt to world which they didn't dominate, because the mainframes they dominated had become irrelevant. But they weren't teetering on the edge of bankruptcy at any point... were they?
It is true that now that Apple and Sun have started putting up a fight, Microsoft's life is not quite so easy. But they are no pushover. I think you may be underestimating them.
I don't think so. Microsoft's near total inability to *profitably* expand out of its two monopoly markets shows the company for what it really is; a third-rate software developer that lucked into a good starting position at the dawn of the PC era.
This is wishful thinking. Your favorite product (whatever it is :D ) is not that good, and Microsoft's are not that bad. They are clearly the best in several important categories and are highly competitive in a number of others. They didn't do that by being a "third-rate software developer".
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