Poor Steve Ballmer only got a $670,000 bonus because results were so bad and even people at Information Week realize that Microsoft might not be around in five years.

[16.2 billion in revenue] up 25% from a year ago. Operating income was $7.12 billion, up 59%; net income was $5.41 billion, up 51%; EPS was up 55%. Year ago period results included the deferral of $1.47 billion of revenue related to Windows 7 upgrades; adjusted for that factor, revenue was up 13% and operating income was up 20%, while net income was up 16% and EPS rose 19%.

Sounds great, right? Not when compared to 2009 [2], the tail end of Vista failure. In 2009, the company had income of about 7 billion. So, there is little change from where Vista left them in 2009. In fact, the company is probably worse off because they managed to channel stuff 240 million Vista 7 licenses recently. Not much should be expected beyond that spurt.

Predictably, Microsoft bills the deferral roller coaster as explosive growth. In this article, for example, claims “During Q1 FY10, before Windows 7 was released…” which is not true. Microsoft was already selling licenses for the new OS and had channel stuffed enough of them to cause a big dip when the revenue was “deferred”. A year later, we have some more channel stuffing billed as actual sales to make an apparent rise. The two year numbers tell the story more clearly but Microsoft boosters pretend to be unable to remember the numbers. Goldfish might do better.

It is better to talk about the fundamental issues of software freedom which clear the air quickly. More freedom and fewer restrictions are obviously better for everyone. “Fragmentation” does not exist where people are free to share. Most other software problems boil down to people being uncooperative and abusive towards their neighbors.

Back when Windows 9x/Me was released, an upgrade cost $90USD, and the full version (everything!) was $199 at most. WinXP increased that slightly; I think upgrades were $120-130 range, but the full version (Pro) was still only about $199. With Vista, Microsoft more than doubled the cost. All of a sudden upgrades were $199, and the full version was $399! An inflated value that they kept for Win7, only they added the Family Pack (3-5 licenses) for a little more than that $199 upgrade price. Still, not really much of a deal.

At least with Office they were smart enough not to change the price too significantly; but it’s still pricey; and Microsoft relies Office to drive sales of Windows. So as people and organizations have started moving off of Office, they now find themselves able to move off of Windows as well, or at least in a better position to do so.

So, I expect that we are at the beginning of the exponential curve downwards of ousting Microsoft from the PC business. The same wave that pushed them to market dominance is now going to crush them.

On Windows, you cannot replace the “Explorer” (shell), you cannot replace “Gena” (the login manager), but still – there are 4 major versions of Windows splitted amongst different SPs and each with its own problems/bugs. Different MSOffice versions sometimes don’t match each other making documents look funny. Different IIS versions have weird bugs, not to mention performance issues.
Some laptop OEMs build drivers only for Vista/7, making it impossible to use XP with that laptop.

If anything’s true about fragmentation is that every software has it.
MS users suffer more from it. If you have a problem with a certain version of Windows you either need to pay for an upgrade, which breaks other stuff, wait for the company to build a fixed version or don’t use the feature you wanted at all.
If that same problem occures on Linux, at worst you chroot.

Fragmentation on Linux is an advantage, it was created that way. Fragmentation on Windows is how they do business.