This has been mentioned before on other web sites

Silicon Insider: R.I.P. Microsoft?

Is Microsoft toast?

No one seems to trust them and I suspect they will have to either die and re-form or get split up before they can move forward into the 21st century as a new, play-nice-with-all company.

You missed the biggest one: OpenDocument.

Well, what you describe are the typical symptoms every monopoly experiences. Like all the rest who have fallen they'll not be able to do anything about it. If you look at the history of the monopoly world, they all have had to have severe knocks to the head for extended periods of time before any real change takes effect. And it seems to me the only way that happens is when the top level management changes their way of doing business or those people leave. I don't foresee either of those two things happening anytime soon.

Unlike the authour, I percieve with glee the malaise at Microsoft. They got themselves into this position, not by winning, but by cheating. I have done my part to educate people about free open-source software and millions are using it with satisfaction. The Microsoft business model has not just matured but reached old age. The Vista life-cycle will decide its fate. People and organizations not locked in will first adopt alternatives and the rest will follow.

I'm now convinced that Microsoft cannot exist much longer as a single corporate entity -- there are too many new trends that they are not catching, and no clear competitor to crush.

Agreed. However, corporately, Microsoft will never be able to bring themselves to decide to split the OS from Office (whether desktop based or web based, it doesn't matter). Microsoft's only successful method of competing has been to tie other products to their OS and include those products for free (or for cheap) in exclusive OEM deals until their competition gives up. The ONLY way Microsoft will ever split is AFTER they have become last years news and they get very very desperate. And by then it will be too late.

"Bill and Steve did too good a job at winning ..."

Do you count anti-competitive, monopolistic behavior as "winning"?

Does a drug dealer "win" when he's riding high for a few years, only to be gunned down in the prime of his life in a gang warfare?

No sir, their "winning" always was an illusion, because it involved losing trust, and that's something that money can't get recover.

You have to be kidding. bill gates has done more to delay, crush and ruin good companies and competition. i am glad that microsoft will soon suffer the same fate as others and well deserved. i work for a non-profit and believe me, how we have suffered financially under microsoft's domination and propriatory software. we have moved to linux and are reaping the benefits!!! look at what microsponge did to ernie ball in california! tried to make an example of his company and went for the throat over licenses. earnie ball is now Linux!!
i have absolutely no sympathy for microsoft. remember what they tried to do to novell with their cereal fud!

"democratize" pc tech? Did "too good" a job. Wow, way to trivialize their illegal business practices. Pretty sad when even MS's fan's are predicting their doom.

And, of course, not so long ago to sell Linux into an account, you had to basically hide it from IT management (to paraphrase). That too seems to be on the point of changing.

M$ is no different than any other organization that has it too good for too long. They tend to think that their success was pre-ordained and God given; "what is it is what should be". In their success lurks the seeds of failure; the Greeks called it hubris.

Shall we recite the dishonor roll of other American companies over the last, say 40 years or so, who also failed to understand that the ice was melting and a new world was dawning: railroads, PanAm, Eastern Airlines, a zillion steel companies, GM, Ford, DEC, Wang, Prime, Data General. Did I miss anyone?

Browse the business aisle at any book store - or business magazine - for the latest sure fire success tips by the latest CEO hero. Then wander over to the remainder aisle to judge the fate of last year's hero. Or the fate of the "next great thing".

What do we expect in a business culture run by people who think a long term trend is TWO quarters of data, care only about share price and their own bonuses, and are taught in business school to regurgitate case studies rather than understand the world around them?

Nobody quits when they're ahead, nobody stops doing something successfull when they should and transitions to something untried. Very few people have that vision.

I own no M$ products, haven't for years. I am glad they are finally getting their comeuppance. But I am also not quite sure that a) it's time to write Bill's obit, b) Apple is completely out of the woods.

Microsoft, more than most/any other technology company has done more to democratize PC technology.

OK, I'll bite...

Would you care to back this assertion up with some evidence? I have heard it many times, and I usually try to ask what the speaker/writer means.

Microsoft's contribution was to work out how to successfully tax nearly every computer on the planet - which is somewhat like saying that the mafia democratised waste disposal. Let's agree that MS has managed to "consumerise" software in an immature market.

Now, commodity hardware may be said to have democratised technology to a some degre and yes, the development of cheap commodity hardware needed a low cost OS that wasn't tied to a single hardware vendor. The system vendors of the 80s were too happy with their lock-in, selling hw and sw that were mutually interdependent. That era had to end; MS's one stroke of evil genius was to exploit this by pulling off the trick of achieving vendor lock-in for their software while Compaq, HP, Dell and all the little guys bore the overhead of making low margin hardware. Gates et a saw the business opportunity and managed to pull off this con trick and then use the cash and market share to crush any commercial opposition.

All this means that technology is now at least 10 years behind. Free software actually is democratising technology (including hardware - Linux runs on dozens of platforms, not just Intel).

Fast though technical development has appeared, post MS, once the real free market hits, the general non-techy crowd will realise just how shoddy MS's products were and how much that monopoly has in fact held us all back.

It's an interesting twist that having the monopoly trial aborted and the prosecutors called off at the behest of a big-business-friendly administration was probably the worst possible outcome for MS in the long run.

What MS needed, and needs, is to split up. That way functional units like Office, Windows, and Xbox coud pursue their markets without having a big yellow clamp stuck to the leg in the form of consideration for the market share of the other units.

And as people are happy to point out, there is no way that the company is going to split by itself; not only would it be excruciatingly painful in the short run, it's also just not in the company genes to do something like that. They would need a push - a serious, unavoidable _must_ - to go through with it, kicking and screaming (and throwing chairs) every single step of the way.

Having an (appellate or Supreme) court order to split the company would have done it. Nothing much with less force can. And they squandered the one big chance to have this service done to them.

Coming from NY, I think the mafia analogy is a bit off -- probably a better one would be the crack dealer that gives free samples (rather than breaks your kneecaps).

I think we are in violent agreement -- what I mean by 'democratizing' PC technology is exactly the ubiquity that you mention -- the development of the common OS platform allowed the development of lower price points for both application software as well as hardware. As an avid MAC user, the lack of scale in the platform jacking up the price points is painfully apparent to me every day.

Microsoft made this happen for the PC marketplace. I remember running out and buying my $99 copy of Access 1.0 when my only other alternatives were $400+.

But you are also right in the statement that this benefit has run its course, and that other models/alternatives should have their day in the sun.

Finally, I think you over-estimate the ability of the non-techie crowd to adopt any change once they have been inculcated with a system/platform. I disagree that they will ever realize how bad it was -- try to move a standard user to OS X some day to see what I mean.

Microsoft has done an incredible amount to democratize computers. Wait, hear me out.

In the early 1980s, many companies did software development. As there were a dozen companies selling word processors, and half a dozen selling spreadsheet programs, and so forth, those companies had to listen to their customers and respond to their needs to stay afloat. Because of this, most of the customers were relatively happy, and few people really felt the need to write their own. Those that did had no issues with following the same route as the other players, and produce a proprietary product. In such an environment, only an idealist would be interested in changing to the non-proprietary software model that the UNIX community intrinically followed (not to be confused with the UNIX vendors, of course, who were as proprietary as could be.)

Microsoft changed all that, by eliminating all of the competition. After that, they no longer "had" to listen to customers, so they didn't. This created a great amount of need in the technical community.

More than any other company, the actions of Microsoft fostered the development of free software, by forcing the would-be developers to scratch their own itch. Without Microsoft dominanting the software industry, free software developers would've been a much rarer breed, and would've had more difficulties coming in contact with each other. The free software movement would've taken another thirty years to really get going. Open Source wouldn't have been a concept until 2033.

Unfortunately, in the next few years, Microsoft is going to do the one thing that I think could really spell the beginning of the end for Linux.

They're going to go under.

After all, nobody stays the top dog for very long these days.

I think it's not external forces that've done Microsoft in so much as their own successful business practices. They made their business by building a wall around their products. They tied their other software into Windows and made it so any alternatives weren't going to work quite as well or as smoothly. They kept their interfaces undocumented and changing so nobody's software but theirs could ever quite get it right. This gave them a huge boost, because people who wanted any of the Microsoft world pretty much had to buy into all of it and once in there was this high wall in the way of their getting back out.

Problem is, walls work both ways. That wall acted to keep Microsoft's customers in, but it also kept the rest of the world out. That worked well up until the point where stuff outside the wall became too compelling for people to ignore, and when there was enough available outside the wall that the extra you could get by going inside the wall wasn't worth the cost of getting over the wall. Now the wall's keeping customers out, not in.

If Microsoft could accept that the wall isn't working, that they're going to have to play with all the other kids on the playground, they could turn things around. They wouldn't even lose that much, they'd still probably be the biggest player in the game. But the executives at the top of Microsoft have a warped view of the world: either you achieve total victory, eliminating all opponents in the process, or you've failed. I don't see Microsoft's all-or-nothing attitude changing while those executives are in charge.

good riddance. Monopoly$oft will get whats coming to them. they are UnAmerican

The problem with the non-computer-literati being able to adapt to a new OS (as if every version of Windows wasn't a new OS...) is that Firefox, OpenOffice, to name two of the primary things people do with a PC, are identical on Windows and Linux. There is no retraining required.

Had Microsoft written Office for Linux in 1997 when they had a chance, they would have cornered the market for a long time to come. But they didn't, they tried to tie everything to their OS. The more you tighten your grip, Gates, the more computer systems will slip through your fingers.

Indeed the real commoditization (much more important than democratization, which is really the majority dictating to the minority and more a symptom of Microsoft's market dominance that you had to run MS to exchange data with anyone else, than "power to the people") of the OS is the distributed nature of Linux. It does run on lots of different hardware, old and new, fast and slow, runs great for one user or hundreds.

It's not democracy, it's an-archy. That is, rules without rulers.

Hi All,

I hate to say this because I like Linux as much as any of you but Microsoft is *not* going out of business any time soon. Barrons just did a front page article arguing all the reason why you should buy their stock now. If anything this article is further contrarian proof that they are right.

To Todd: Very perceptive, and exactly right. Making your stuff not work with others only helps you so long as people are willing to throw out the others in favor of yours.

To go back to the wall analogy, the wall only helps as long as you're on the right side, the winning side, of it.

Good example: I work for a hospital that was part of a chain of hospitals, all running Lotus Notes. Another chain of hospitals gets spun out of a bigger chain, all running Exchange. Flush with cash from the spin-off, they buy our chain of hospitals. They start having incompatibilities, so they decide to "standardize" on one. Naturally, the ones with more money than sense rule the day, so everybody migrates troblems with schedules not looking quite the same in both packages, and they finally decide to migrate everyone over to Exchange.

(Bad move, by the way. Not that I'm fond of Notes, but Exchange is much worse. We used to just shake our heads when the other hospitals would get hit with a virus and their email would go down. Now we'll be in the thick of it with them.)

The point is, the incompatibilities between Lotus Notes and Exchange is probably one of the biggest single reasons why Exchange is so dominant: to avoid those incompatibilities.

But the pendulum could just as easily swing the other way. As long as people think Microsoft is the "safe" choice or the "default" choice, incompatibilities help Microsoft. Let that perception ever change .....

IBM have come out very well from their "downfall", and I expect Microsoft would do the same. IBM have changed a lot, but for the better.

I too see Microsoft's success as having been in the right place at the right time with a cheap graphical shell for cheap PCs, and using every illegal business practice in the book to kill off often much better competition.

They have as much trust now as the stereotypical politician. I read in one place how they're using open standard XML to be compatibible, then in another place how they wrap it in patented proprietry encodings and compression rendering it useless as an interoperability standard. Typical political double talk.

Is PanAm today's Microsoft?

Their attitude towards the undeveloped countries seems to bear this out. Anyone with any sense would see the parallels with the seventies - an undeveloped market, largely because no-one considered it a market worth developing; a set of people eager to start something, to do something, to get things going, to start things moving; and a big company (or a set of them) with nothing better to do than to criticize and posture.

Their attitude towards license proliferation and needless bureaucracy would appear to bear this out. I've asked Matusow, the former Shared (Scared ?) Source Czar, to obliterate the four-license Shared Source shuffle that's in place around the MS WinCE Corral in favour of a two-license shuffle - one the MS Community License, the other a purely proprietary set-up reminiscent of AT&T at its worst; however, rationalizing the current proliferation of Microsoft Shared Source licenses is too much like hard work, so I expect they won't do that, and their legacy code will be so polluted by illogical and unenforceable licenses at cross-purposes such that nobody will step up to the plate and maintain what their collapse leaves behind.

No exit strategy, in other words. And we all know how well investors love that feature.

What a load of bollocks!!!

With tens of billions of dollars per annum of free cash flow and tens of billions of dollars in the coffers Micro$oft ain't going away anytime soon.

Twenty odd years of "average" software products from Microsoft hasn't bothered tens if not hundreds of millions of PC users so far, why should it bother them now?

MS isn't going away anytime soon.

I don't use MS products, haven't since late 2000. I don't like their products very much and I show all of my clients the benefits of running free software.

On the other hand, MS has money, and a huge largely ignorant user base. We'll see MS around for at least another decade in one form or another.

The 5-year time-frame isn't all that different from the decade you mention. Microsoft will be around in 10 years' time, IF they manage to "see the light." If not, they won't (and I don't see any indication that they are going to; .NET and the new Office products they are introducing are just Embrace, Extend, Extinguish with friendlier marketing noises wrapped around them. Except that this time, they won't be able to accomplish that third E.) Not only that, but if they are around, then they WILL be vastly different, not least because they will be one company among many, and if you are that, then you can't 3E anyone, as UNIX companies found to their cost. Hell, they may even decide to become the new BSDI.