Only Bill Gates Can Change Microsoft: MSFT needs to give up its Windows-era strategic obsessions

Wall Street Journal ^ | 08/28/2013 | By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR

[SeekAndFind]

Retirement was not the fate many customers likely would have chosen for Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. Something unpleasant involving wolverines would have been more like it

[DIRTYSECRET]

Gee, I thought his background was philanthropy. Must not be too many results.

[Paladin2]

Long live XP Pro.

[VanDeKoik]

Should also ask Apple to give up their iPhone, or Google their search since the writer got some of the good stuff to puff on apparently.

[Wonder Warthog]

The long-term core problem is that manufacturers of PC-controlled/run hardware cease to write drivers for new operating systems (cf legacy hardware and programs). If you keep running XP, eventually the machine you run it on will die, and you are "SOL".

To use examples from my profession. If you have in your lab, a half-million dollar NMR or mass spectrometer controlled by PC (which virtually every lab does), you simply cannot afford to idle/discard that hardware when the PC controlling it dies.

IMO, the solution to that problem is for Microsoft to perfect their virtualization software, and make available for free download any and all "no longer supported" operating systems. That way, they can continue to use their legacy hardware and programs under the new supported OS.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: IMO, the solution to that problem is for Microsoft to perfect their virtualization software, and make available for free download any and all “no longer supported” operating systems.

Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V vs. VMWare, which is better?

[Wonder Warthog]

"Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V vs. VMWare, which is better?"

Y'got me pal. I'm just and end user, not an IT sort. My guess would be VMWare, just because it is NOT a Microsoft product, but that's just speculation on my part.

[CA Conservative]

Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V vs. VMWare, which is better?

Don't forget Virtual Box and KVM... I think Virtual Box is one of the easiest to use, but VMWare has better support. I am not a fan of Hyper-V.

[Notary Sojac]

A half-dozen new PCs capable of running XP at high performance can be bought or built for well under $3,000, imaged from the production line machine, and kept under wraps as backups.

So the fear that the controlling PC will "die" is groundless.

Likewise, unless the techs who operate this PC and its connected machine are browsing the web with it and downloading files and email attachments, the "security" concerns for future XP use are also groundless.

[Notary Sojac]

I spent two weeks trying to get VMware to run bridged networking in XP guest machines. Nothing but frustration and the unfriendly documentation did nothing to help.

I didn't need to worry about poor support or documentation from VirtualBox because it just worked, out of the box, in less than 45 minutes. And has been running perfectly for almost a year now.

[Wonder Warthog]

"A half-dozen new PCs capable of running XP at high performance can be bought or built for well under $3,000, imaged from the production line machine, and kept under wraps as backups."

True (and that was a solution my wife was forced to use when the desktops controlling the GC's in her lab started dying). But she certainly paid a good bit more than $500 each for her replacement machines. And I think the solution should be in the operating system, not buying a dedicated nich vendor system. What happens when the nich vendor goes out of business and those machines are no longer supported?

"So the fear that the controlling PC will "die" is groundless."

Wrong. There is still the issue of wasted time and money chasing around for a solution. It took her (and more knowledgable types..i.e. real IT techs) more than a month to find this solution and a vendor.

[OneWingedShark]

That headline is incorrect.
In fact, I could change the direction of MS — I believe in a good way.

If I were the “big boss” (or even the boss of a big project like Visual Studio) I’d have the next goal be [formal] verification of the codebase: such _might_ require rewrite, and if so I’d suggest they use computer languages that are amenable to proof software (C and its derivatives are NOT) like Ada and LISP.

Why? Because with formal verification comes some excellent properties: like no program crashes and security-confidence (i.e. the software cannot be exploited to gain control of the system).

[CedarDave]

For the Tech Ping list.

[SgtHooper]

Funny how MS takes so much heat for aging out OS’s and other products, when it is the same model used by so many other companies and industries, such as Cisco, HP, phone software, router software, printer manufactures, scanners, etc.

[Notary Sojac]

more than a month to find this solution and a vendor

I think I may have pinpointed the problem. If your IT tech needs to "find a vendor" - that's no tech.

I maintain a small network and its hardware for a family run business, strictly self taught. And I'm convinced that with $3,000 and a Newegg login I could buy or build, and image from a given XP system, five reasonably fast-performing desktops inside of a week, since I doubt that current gaming-grade CPU and GPU are called for.

Now, if your wife's big dollar lab gear requires a custom hardware interface - a specialized card or dongle - then indeed, that ratchets up the complexity bigtime and she has every right to raise hell with the hardware supplier.

But absent that I see no reason why this process should be excessively costly or time consuming.

[Boogieman]

The reason MS takes heat for it, when others don't, is because other companies make sure their newer products work, and even work better, before they phase out the old products. MS just rolls out some buggy crap nobody wants, then expects people to abandon the old version of their product that worked better.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

I honestly think Windows/MS would be in far deeper doo-doo then they are now were it not for virtualization. Within two feet of where I type I have two linux machines that have windows VM’s on them. Then on my corporate laptop I’m connected to a couple of other remote windows VM’s and there’s yet a third that I typically access a few times a week.

It turns out MS knows this and they spend a lot of time and $$$ making sure that virtualization works well and also extracting all the license $$$ they can from said virtualization.

[VideoDoctor]

Long live XP Pro.

Just bought a HIGH POWERED new Desktop with a blank hard drive. Installed Windows XP and I love it.

[tacticalogic]

I think their abandoning reliance on GUI-based management will also prove to be a good long-term strategic decision. Anybody with a clue saw this coming when they made Jeffrey Snover the lead architect of the server division.

[Wonder Warthog]

"But absent that I see no reason why this process should be excessively costly or time consuming."

How many man-hours did it take you to get to your current level of expertise (which, I assure you, most small businesses do NOT have)?? That time comes directly out of billable hours.

It takes time and effort away from the money-making parts of the operation. Multiply it by the (probably) tens or hundreds of thousands of times a year it happens, and it adds up to big money, and is not acceptable.

And it "used" to be the main advantage that Microsoft had over Apple. Microsoft at least made an effort to "try" to assure some level of legacy support. With Apple, it was "legacy??....tough cookies, baby". With Windows 8 Microsoft tried to be Apple, and the customers are simply telling them to go to hell.

I think the solution I propose will reduce the pain and uncertainty of the end user by a few orders of magnitude, and give Microsoft a huge leg up with its customer base.