R.I.P Microsoft?

ABCnews ^ | 2.10.05 | MICHAEL S. MALONE

[Peelod]

... The health of established firms, especially great ones, is more difficult to diagnose. The balance sheet can give some clues, but, because it captures the recent past rather than the near future, it can fool you. Most veteran reporters look at more subtle clues, like the comings and goings of key employees, slippage in the release dates of new products (or missing features), and subtle shifts in the tone of company news releases, advertisements and executive speeches.

But most of all, at least for me, there is the smell test: the faintest whiff of decay that comes from dying companies. ...

[Right Wing Assault]

I thought he was talking about CBS!! Especially the 'smell' part.

[Calvin Locke]

Eons ago (okay, a quarter of a century...), I showed up at my first job out of school, and was given the task
of porting the latest version MS Basic Interpreter to the company's OS. It was pretty inefficient at the places that were
near the driver and other system calls that I had to change.

Not that I looked that hard because it wasn't my job. But I fixed the glaring stuff. I'm talking 8085 assembly,
with 64K, max. The time-sliced OS was only a couple of K. And, the OS author used software interrupts for the
most frequent calls to save a byte per call.

So, I'm thinking MS rarely re-engineers their OLE'd code to keep up with processors and algorithms....

I just switched from Symantec on the home machines after I read the review that Symantec hasn't updated
their Norton products, efficiency-wise. My machines run faster without Norton AV slowing things down.

[BenLurkin]

Current Assets Microsoft
Cash And Cash Equivalents $15,982,000,000


I should be so sick!

[Conservatrix]

Somehow when I hear the name "Longhorn" I think of a certain Bugs Bunny Character...

[Conservatrix]

[Paleo Conservative]

I have had oppoutunies to play with some of the beta stuff for longhorn and it is pretty cool, but more bells and whistles than actual O/S upgrades.

What do you think of the indexing file system in Longhorn?

[Paleo Conservative]

Corporate America is another issue, as it isn't going to change hordes of Win apps to OSX.

But they might port Unix apps to OSX.

[NoCmpromiz]

I'll bet it will be bug-free! no patches needed!

And perchance, were you maybe smoking some medicinal herbs before posting this??

Don't buy anything from Redmond until SP1 is released.

;-)

[LibFreeOrDie]

I envision everyone at Microsoft making the University of Texas Longhorns "Hook 'em, horns" salute, just like Dubya!

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1325728/posts

[dennisw]

good one.... I read the link

[Psycho_Bunny]

Corporate America will move to X-nux long before considering a move to Apple in the workplace.  Apples don't play nice on large networks.  Every build of X-nux I've networked flys.....Apples, on the other hand are more quirky than Win2k and XP have proven themselves to be.

 

 

[iThinkBig]

My take: Best days behind them but the smell of a dying company? This guy should get a clue... It's called diversification and Bill Gates has done a good job at it.

[Major_Risktaker]

My take: Best days behind them but the smell of a dying company? This guy should get a clue...

It's called diversification and Bill Gates has done a good job at it.

__________________

I'm not reading this article. I just read MSFT's balance sheet.

Bottom Line:

$15 Billion in CASH!
$92 Billion in Total ASSETS!
$17 Billion in Total Liabilities.

MSFT Hoovers

64 Bit OS and applications around the corner.

Remember 16 bit to 32 bit upgrades? Well, how about a old type CRAY super computer for home use.

This is just the beginning.

[Peelod]

“$15 Billion in CASH!
$92 Billion in Total ASSETS!
$17 Billion in Total Liabilities.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Add $x.xB to total liabilities for burst.com’s shareholders.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030828.html

Stupid Microsoft Tricks:
Why the Richest Company on Earth Feels it Needs to Cheat

[jammer]

Calvin, to what did you switch? We support a lot of machines around the country, all versions of Windows, and every version of pcAnywhere gets worse and worse (have to use dial-up in many cases). So, it seems, does Norton--we refuse support on machines with SystemWorks or whatever it is. Symantec seems to have gone to hell, also.

[eno_]

So, I'm thinking MS rarely re-engineers their OLE'd code to keep up with processors and algorithms....

MS's QA methodology discourages touching old code. Hence they get a real stew of old crap in any product that has been around a while. This is a very '70s mentality.

[eno_]

HP has $14B is cash, too. Ask anyone running a publicly traded company about, say, sinking that cash into a moon-shot effort to develop new products. After they stop rolling on the floor laughing, they will tell you just what you can and can't do with a cash pile. Little wonder MS decided a dividend was the way to go.

[eno_]

My take: Best days behind them but the smell of a dying company? This guy should get a clue... It's called diversification and Bill Gates has done a good job at it.

It's called fixation on a Bad Idea. Billg still wants to jam DRM into your PC: Code you can't control, storage you can't see - Big Brother Inside(tm). What rational person would want that?

[KeyWest]

I just switched from Symantec on the home machines after I read the review that Symantec hasn't updated their Norton products, efficiency-wise. My machines run faster without Norton AV slowing things do

Also, they have shifted their products to spyware. I have been buying Norton for years but no longer. They do not trust me, I do not trust them. There is a load of freeware around that does what Norton Utilities does. And AVG is free. I just liked it all in one place.

[chronic_loser]

Yeah, whatever did happen to Longhorn? >>

I have a beta copy of that POS