Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> __/ [ Gordon ] on Thursday 21 September 2006 17:52 \__
>
> > have just done a clean re-install of the retail copy of XP Pro that I have
> > owned for 4 years, on the same un-changed laptop that it has resided on for
> > that four years.
Yes. The problem is that Microsoft really can't tell anymore, whether
you are installing it directly on the laptop, or if you are installing
into a VMWare Image. My guess is that Microsoft has been seeing a
sudden SURGE in activations of existing licenses, especially OEM
licenses. Installing Windows into a VM isn't expressly prohibited by
the license, and provides Windows users with rapid recovery
capabilities, especially when running as a Linux client.
Still, Microsoft is starting to realize that it needs to do a bit of
market research. If Vista is VM-Host Hostile, and they could lose
20-30% of their market, especially the "early adopters", it could be
disasterous for Microsoft.
> > The last installation was well over a YEAR ago.
Yes. But what made you reinstall? Microsoft wants to know.
Were you plagued by a "killer virus"? Were you replacing the hard
drive?
Or were you installing Linux and then reinstalling Windows XP?
Microsoft wants to know - Why are millions of people reactivating
licenses once a year, or more?
My **guess** is that Microsoft will be watching your machine very
carefully. They will want to probe, check the configuration, see how
the machine identifies itself, see if you have drives known to be
VMWare drives. Are you being firewalled by Linux?
At this point, I don't think Microsoft has been telling VMers that they
couldn't be reactivated - because they are still in "information
gathering" mode.
Microsoft got caught with it's pants down in 1994. They didn't see
TCP/IP and HTTP exploding into the marketplace. They were spending
billions of dollars to make Exchange more like Notes, and didn't even
see Web Browsers, Web Servers, and Search engines, until it was
**almost** too late.
This time, Microsoft is seeing a pattern, at a time when they are
really vulnerable, which could be totally critical to their continued
success as a company.
If Linux is providing "Foundation" services for a large portion of the
early adopters most likely to be the first Vista users, and Microsoft
rolls out a first GA version of Vista that is so hostile that early
adopters end up reccomending AGAINST using Vista, it could delay sales
of hundreds of millions of machines by as much as 3-4 years. Microsoft
could be in the same situation it was in 1994, when they had released
NT, but developes were reccomending AGAINST upgrades to NT.
In 1994, the critical "death blow" to NT was a bunch of critical 3rd
party applications that wouldn't run on NT. Microsoft had assumed that
if Office ran on NT, that it didn't matter that Quicken, Lotus Notes,
PowerBuilder, Borland, SAP, or other critical applications, many of
which used shared memory as interprocesss communications, and simply
died on NT.
It wasn't that these "early adopters" were saying "don't use NT, use
Linux - or anything else", it was just that they were saying "wait, NT
won't be stable for 3-4 years".
It had a horrible impact on Microsoft. Their stock was flat for 3
years, their revenues were threatened, the OEMs were on the verge of
defecting to alternatives and were investigating Solaris, UnixWare,
Warp, and Linux.
Windows 95 put Microsoft back in the game, but only at the cost of
customer good will. Many of Microsoft's legal problems were a direct
result of their hostility toward boot manager, OS/2, Netscape, Lotus
Notes, and competitors on almost every market level.
Microsoft felt that they really needed to aggressively drive
competitors out of the market, to recover from the market vulnerability
of Missing the Web and the Internet.
> > It failed the internet activation and I ended up having to speak to a customer
> > services representative.
What better way to find out if you're a "Microsoft hater" than to have
you call in to Microsoft's toll number, at a critical moment, when your
machine is disabled, and you are probably a bit upset because the
activation failed. If you are openly hostile toward the operator and
start making disparaging remarks, then you are a problem. If 80% of
the people making those phone calls are acting this way, then Microsoft
has a really BIG problem.
In 1990, Microsoft got really "touchy-feely" with customers, providing
them with a toll-free number which they could use any time they were
having any kind of a problem with Windows 3.0. The collected this
information and quickly found ways to resolve nearly 80% of these user
problems using pop-ups, bubbles, and dancing paper-clips.
But Microsoft has really lost touch with the end-user. And the
end-users are expressing their dissatisfaction with Microsoft to the
OEMs. The number of times that workers lose time and money because
something went really wrong with their computers, has become almost a
joke in it's own right. There were even commercial that made fun of
Microsoft's unreliability (advertising for help services). There are
companies who specialize in taking care of the end-users that Microsoft
long-ago abandoned.
Now, Microsoft is getting an ear-ful.
> > I asked him why it did not activate over the
> > internet. He told me that a new policy just issued is that even with retail
> > copies, internet activation is now restricted to ONE instance - any more,
> > then that has to be over the phone.
Maybe Microsoft has done a bit of their own number crunching and has
figured out that Linux is a bit bigger of a problem than statmarket
seems to think it is. Microsoft can publish all the propaganda it
wants in their "fast facts" sites. Those are intended to try and get
the attention of CEOs, CIO, CTO, and IT Architects who are "sitting on
the fence" and try to push them back into the Windows camp.
But Microsoft has found that their market opportunities are rapidly
shifting. Big companies used to buy new servers for Windows to get the
most bang for the buck out of very expensive "Data Center" edition
licenses for Windows 2000+ and SQL Server 2000+. Unfortunately for
Microsoft, there aren't as many NEW projects being implemented in
Windows, and most of the NT 4.0 projects were phased over to Linux, not
Windows, when Microsoft tried to cut off support for NT 4.0.
Keep in mind that in 1991, IBM was convinced that they were going to
"clean up" with MVS 4.0 and OS/2 2.0. MVS 4.0 was released in late
1991, and OS/2 was supposed to be out in March of 1991. IBM had just
won a lawsuit, giving them complete ownership of OS/2, they were
expecting license fees from OEMs for MicroChannel, and they were
pushing APPC over SNA as "the solution to all integration problems".
But in November, IBM got a horrible shock. When sales reps went to big
multibillion dollar companies and said "we need $5 million to update
each of your 5 $4 million dollar mainframes", the customers weren't
buying.
A little company called Sun was offering their own solution, along with
another little company called Oracle. You could move your DB2 data
over to Oracle, running on a 6 processor Sun/6 machine, strap about 5
of these puppies together using RPC and pipes, and do many of your
mainframe chores using "The Network is the Mainframe". The Sun
Machines were only $50,000 each, including OS licenses, and the Oracle
licenses were also very reasonable.
Suddenly instead of ordering upgrades for 5 mainframes, they were only
ordering upgrades for 2 mainframes. Shock of shocks. Horror of
Horrors. In a month, IBM stock dropped almost 60%. IBM had to lay off
thousands of workers. They closed down their mainframe facilities in
Kingston NY, and eventually closed entire facilities, leaving the the
workers either unemployed, or owning houses they couldn't sell for as
much as they owed. Many had to take pay cuts, transferrs, and had to
sell stock, cash savings, and liquidate other holdings, just to cover
the gap between the Mortgage and the sale price. Some just walked away
from the house, even leaving the furniture behind, and let the bank
foreclose.
Microsoft is suddenly getting a really ugly wake-up call. For the last
7 years, Microsoft's primary sources of revenue have been the OEMs, and
the "support contracts" funded a substantial portion of their business.
Their "top-of-the-line" service could be as much as $50/month/employee
(not PC user), and was probably worth it back when Windows NT 4.0
machine were crashing weekly, systems needed to be reimaged bimonthly,
and support patches had to be applied manually or manually distributed,
usually after careful testing for dependencies and side-effects.
But Microsoft may have been a victim of it's own success. When XP
featured automatic updates, and all that was required was the OEM
license, many of the big companies who had been paying premium price
weren't particularly happy about it, especially since Microsoft had
TRIPLED the price of their "top shelf" services.
The problem is that Microsoft pissed of not only a lot of hackers,
developers, power-users, IT executives, and even CEOs, but these people
had 3 years to "stew in the juices. Microsoft didn't exactly try to
calm them down either. Add to that horrible PR from the poor handling
of the antitrust cases, failure to cooperate, and "green stamp"
settlements in which only the class initiating lawyers actually made
any "real" money, and you have a lot of people who were saying
"enough".
Many of the companies who are renewing are renewing at a much lower
level. Those who weren't getting much support anyway have opted to
just ride on their OEM licenses. Others have simply not responded to
offers and bids.
Many of the "platinum" services also included support for applications
like MS-Office, Visio, and Project. But those are also expiring, and
the customers aren't renewing, even then free upgrades are offered
(free - after you pay $1,800 per employee for the "service contract" -
$50/month for 3 years).
To make matters worse, Microsofts Xbox/360 cut deeply into the PC as
Game Machine market, leaving millions of machines sitting on the
shelves for weeks or even months. Many of these OEMs had to sell these
machines at "fire sale" prices. This didn't win Microsoft many friends
in the boardrooms of HP, IBM, Dell, Sony, and Toshiba. HP covertly
defected, making most of their machines "Linux Ready" even though they
were still ordering OEM licenses for each machine (about 1.2 licenses
per machine actually).
IBM just bailed out of the OEM desktop and laptop altogether. It was
easier to license the brands to Lennovo, let Lennovo get the OEM
licenses, then purchase the machines as VARs, End-Users, and
Consultants, who could do ANYTHING to these machines, and still have a
valid license.
Dell even dabbled with "white boxes" offering machines with "FreeDos"
preinstalled. Even though the machines were rarely sold this way, it
told Linux users exactly which machines were "Linux Ready".
Sony decided to retaliate against the X-Box, by selling it's PS3 as a
Linux machine. When it's released, probably very soon now, we will see
millions of little Linux machines, complete with KDE desktops, and
maybe even OpenOffice, being sold at K-mart, WalMart, Sears, BestBuy,
and any other place that sold the PS/2. Suddenly Microsoft will not
even have a seat at the table while kids and parents take real-live
tours of Linux, OpenOffice, and possibly even XGL desktops. Even
though Sony is still selling the VIAO line with Windows, it wouldn't
take much more than a little nudge to see them shipping with Linux
instead.
Toshiba hasn't completely defected, but they are being pressured by new
"white box" makers who are offering "NASCAR" PCs - which are sold with
Windows and are designed to be converted to Linux, with Windows as a VM
Client. In most cases, the conversion takes less than 30 minutes.
AK-47s, M-16s, and Mac-10s are always sold as "semi-automatic weapons"
to the public. Selling them as automatic weapons would be a federal
felony punishable by years in prison and no discression for the judge
and no early parole. But at the same gun show, you can purchase a $2
kit that shows you exactly how to turn that semi-automatic into a fully
automatic weapon in less than an hour.
So here is Microsoft, suddenly looking at a market where the demand
seems to be for Linux ready machines. The OEMs are getting hostile.
The CIOs are not renewing or are renewing at lower levels of service.
The Market is shifting. Suddenly what looked like a long streight path
along solid ground, is beginning to look like a maze of quicksand,
ready to pull executives under if they make one wrong step.
> > That's going to push a lot more people to Linux, isn't it?
Yes. It probably will. Which is why it is even more relevant that
Microsoft is so willing to take that risk to get this 'personal' level
of feedback from end-users.
> > If this is true, WHAT THE HELL DO MS THINK THEY ARE DOING?
I think that's the question that many top level executives are asking
themselves.
Some have already jumped ship. Others are more focused on "damage
control", and Vista itself is being redesigned almost daily.
If Microsoft really is in the same boat as IBM was in 1991, then trying
to Force-feed a Linux-hostile Vista into corporate markets could push
many of these companies over the edge. They could renew at the lowest
possible level, convert as many machines as possible to Linux, and stop
buying machines that can't be converted to Linux with Windows. If
Microsoft shuts of Windows, this could drive some CIOs to opt for
OpenOffice, FireFox, Thunderbird, and Linux. Anyone wanting Windows
would be given one of the older machines, and those who wanted newer,
faster, machines, would be given machines pre-imaged with Linux.
Suddenly, Microsoft's revenue stream would slow to a trickle. Even
with their huge cash reserves, diversification, and secondary holdings,
it would be hard for them to make up for the loss of $5 billion in
quarterly revenue from corporate customers. It would be even harder to
make up for the loss of an OEM like Lennovo if they decided they were
"no longer in the Windows/Vista business".
If IBM and other BIG VARs start offering to mass-configure laptops for
Linux using corporate images similar to their Linux "Client for
E-Business" or "C4EB", Microsoft might be the one laying off a third of
their workforce, terminating their consultants, and shutting down
research projects like Singularity.
IBM had to completely reinvent itself to survive. The went from being
"Unix Hostile" doing everything they could to "bait and switch" people
looking at Unix into MVS, VM/CMS, OS/400, and OS/2, to a company that
became "platform agnostic". Each organization began supporting what
the customers wanted. DB2 ran better on Solaris than on AIX. AIX ran
Oracle faster than DB2. WebSphere had better TCO on Linux than on AIX.
And so on.
> To be honest with you, I think that Microsoft is trying to crack down on
> piracy (yes, honest!) as means of squeezing out revenue that is left to be
> made from overpriced properietary software.
When you pump water from the well, there is eventually that day, when
you pump the handle, and nothing come out. For a farmer on the
prairie, it's a moment of terror. Without water, the cattle die, the
crops whither, and eventually thirst and hunger result in one of the
most horrible forms of death.
> Within a couple of years, not
> only will such software become cheap, but it will also become less
> prevalent, or its importance lowered/obviated by (LAMP/OSS-based) Web
> services.
Even the 'thick client" applications are going OSS. Eclipse, KDE,
GNOME, and AJAX are blending and blurring the lines between "thin
clients" and "thick applications".
Many eclipse applications now cache user information, and replicate it,
to CVS, to Databases, to other trusted repositories. The user can
"refresh" that view, and work on it on an airplane, and then "merge"
his changes and updates back into the shared environment.
One of the biggest issues plaguing corporate users right now is the
"garbage heap" of office documents sucking up disk drive space and yet
nearly worthless. The unstructured word documents can't even be
indexed. The free-form spreadsheets with shady business rules can be
completely meaningless in hours. The project plans are completely
fluid. Deltas are difficult to track, often lost, and in some cases,
not even readable by auditors and regulators.
Regulatory procedures such as Sarbanes-Oxley have meant that this "lost
information" is a liability. A spreadsheet with a false assumption,
used to predict future revenues or costs, can mean jail-time for CEOs,
CFOs, and CIOs.
Microsoft has slit their own throats.
Now they just want to find out how badly they are bleeding.
Rex Ballard
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