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| That's true of most microsoft technologies now.
|
| The 1998 antitrust trial had a significant morale impact within the company
| and cost them something like three dozen senior executives (both Myrvolds,
| Silverberg, etc). Then msft responded to the permatemps lawsuit by firing
| _all_ temporary workers (many of which had been there for a decade), which
| turned out to hose their build system so badly they stopped being able to
| compile Windows 2000 shortly after its release. (XP was literally the result
| of the Windows Millenium development team being tasked with taking the NT4
| source, backporting as much of Windows 2000 as they could get to compile, and
| making it pretty.) Then msft stock tanked in 2000 (because they copied
| Cisco's pooling method of acquisitions and triggered an SEC rule that
| prevented their stock buyback program from disguising the dilution inherent
| in their stock option income tax benefit) and has been flat ever since
| (really, the stock's peak was back at the start of 2000) so everybody who was
| there for the money left. Then Google started seriously raiding them and
| hiring away everybody with a brain around 2003. Then Gates saw 4 gig memory
| wall and corresponding switch to 64 bit hardware coming (with a corresponding
| 8 bit cp/m -> 16 bit dos -> 32 bit windows operating system transition) and
| decided to retire rather than fight it.
|
| The Vista death march (taking 7 years to ship crap) was a side effect of all
| this, but of course it made it worse by burning out most of their remaining
| competent engineers. Then the Yahoo acquisition caused everybody to lose
| faith in Ballmer, so a big "employees vs management" vibe cropped up (blaming
| him for everything from the stock price to the loss of towels in the company
| gym). Then the economy cratered and MS started missing its numbers for the
| first time in over 20 years.
|
| Earlier this year, even mini-msft announced he was considering leaving the
| company. From a human resources perspective, they are _deeply_screwed_, and
| it's not a new thing. it's been festering for about ten years now.
|
| Of course none of those affect their real source of power, which is their
| lock on the distribution channels. Nobody wants Vista, but you can't buy a
| machine from Frys that hasn't got it preinstalled. (You can't even upgrade
| most of 'em to XP, you MUST buy Vista if you buy that hardware.) That's the
| heart of the microsoft monopoly; preinstalls. Always has been.
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http://valhenson.livejournal.com/35953.html?thread=216177#t216177
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