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Comment by smakz | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of a discussion I read a while back about a power struggle in Microsoft between the 'backwards compatible' group mentality and the 'reinvent the wheel to be better at whatever cost' group mentality.

It seems to me the 'reinvent the wheel to be better at whatever cost' is winning (and indeed during that discussion they were in the early stages of winning), but that Microsoft's reputation as a whole keeps going down since that time.

People used to like windows because it just worked, and ran all their favorite software. The more they make it harder for people to do that, the more Apple and Linux will continue to eat their lunch.

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Well, I think until fairly recently the backwards compatible group had it right. Windows had way too much going on in the corporate world to even consider it. But now in the era of (relatively) good virtualization and lots of cool web apps running on a nearly ubiquitous internet, the other group's argument has gotten a lot stronger. That's sort of the catch-22 for Microsoft though, because the exact same arguments make OSX an option for more users.

I think MS is a little behind on this, but only a little. Still I hope they don't ditch the Windows brand name, it's clearly one of the most successful of all time. Isn't midori a watermelon liqueur?

who needs virtualization anyway? salesforce is doing just fine...most of msft's bread and butter apps are moving to the web

That remains to be seen. Web-based Office competitors have been underwhelming, both in terms of quality and uptake, and nobody's sure what if anything MSFT is doing there. It's a fallacy (though a very common one among the tech-savvy) to act as if web-based Offices pose any threat at all. They may, of course, but there's no sign of that yet.

Also virtualization isn't about Microsoft's products, they'll just write new ones for any new OSes. It's about the legacy code businesses everywhere run on.

Web-based Office competitors have been underwhelming

time and the trends are on their side. google docs shows the possibility. once web systems evolve to better handle these type of apps, the advantage will play to them more and more

Yeah, that's what everyone's been saying for about 3 years now. It's what a lot of people say about every technology, including the 99% that don't catch on. It's so cliche as to be meaningless.

I'm not sure what you mean by "web systems", but if you mean browsers/standards they're moving at far too slow pace to assume any impact at all on anything ever. And even if they advance, there's a lag until people adopt them. A large percentage of people still use IE6, so any business model built on "web systems" unavailable until IE9 is so far off as to be not worth discussing.

Yeah, that's what everyone's been saying for about 3 years now. It's what a lot of people say about every technology, including the 99% that don't catch on. It's so cliche as to be meaningless.

its not a cliche. people are making real money. microsoft should be concerned

The only people making real money off of web-based Office products are the founders who sold their startups to Google or Adobe.

Not true. Zoho is cleaning up.

Source?

$40m/yr revenue, $1m/month profit, and 100% bootstrapped as of 5 1/2 months ago when this article was written:

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/02/22/mitra-zoho-india...

It's probably doing even better today.

It means "green" in Japanese. But I don't know what the implications of that are supposed to be with regard to an operating system project.

> "...the more Apple and Linux will continue to eat their lunch."

Apple & Linux have merely started to nibble at their bread crumbs ... maybe if Win7 screws up, then they'll start to eat Microsoft's lunch.

let me know when people stand in line for three hours to get a windows mobile phone. tell me the next time a wall street trading house does a re-architect and move to windows

I think that is more of a cult of personality issue. The iPhone is a great product, but waiting in line for hours for it is more of a super-fan thing to do. I saw the papers and the articles so I know it happened, but I sure don't know anyone who waited in line. A lot of people also wait in lines for video games and movie tickets but they are not the masses, they are the hardcore fringe fans.

I had to wait in line because I'd just gotten back from Asia and wasn't about to sign a 3-year BlackBerry contract when I could wait a couple weeks for the iPhone -- so by the time it arrived, I needed a phone badly.

In front of me were a couple of teenyboppers with no idea what the iPhone even cost (and didn't much care, their parents picked up the tab). Behind me was a DJ who knew every tidbit of iPhone gossip imaginable, definitely a hard-core Apple fan.

That the teenyboppers showed up tells me that it is something more than just a "cult of personality" that attracts Apple fans. It hits consumer culture in just the right spot to be a mass market hit.

Microsoft is coasting on past momentum at this point.

And between them, Apple and the swarm of open source operating systems have nibbled away a couple of extremely key markets. Name me a field where intense concentrated utilisation of computing resources happens in a mostly Windows environment. Most of the industrial computing environments run on some form of free unix-like OS for some very good reasons. And industrial computing (whether Google, Amazon, rackspace or what have you) is the growth segment of the technology industry at this time.

Windows may own the desktop still, but the desktop is a relatively saturated segment of the market. And most of the sales are replacements, not new seats.

And please don't just dismiss me as a Microsoft hater, I know some very smart people who work there and I do not underestimate the capability or creativity that can come out of the company when it comes down to the wire. But as one of the people I know there said to me a couple of years back "Inside microsoft there are about a hundred world class software companies, most of which are working against each other."

Was that discussion Spolsky's "How Microsoft Lost The API War" (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html)?

Nice find, that's exactly right.

Joel continued on a similar topic a few months ago: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

In particular it goes into "IE8 and web standards"

There's a middle ground: build a new OS and provide backwards compatibility using virtualization (closer to Solaris Zones). It could work like the Coherence feature in Parallels VM for the Mac, but be embedded in the OS. If you double-click an app that requires WinXP, it launches it within a Zone containing an XP compatible environment and displays the GUI natively on your desktop.

build a new OS and provide backwards compatibility using virtualization (closer to Solaris Zones)

opensolaris - they can't even give it away

honestly, who has dropped linux or freebsd for opensolaris?

this is a cautionary tale for MS - no one will care about your new os

OpenSolaris is failing for reasons other than technology. They do not actually want it to be open source, they just want to snow people who don't know better that it is open source. If it was open source, why not make it gplv2 and make it compatible with Linux? OpenSolaris needs hardware drivers, Linux would beneifit from ZFS. In the end Sun would gain a LOT more than they would give up. But instead it is gplv3, there is nothing to share with other projects, and they don't receive many patches. So it is DOA.

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