03.25.09
Eye on Microsoft: Advertising, Vista 7, and Conficker
Summary: Some quick links to news of interest about Microsoft
Microsoft Underwhelms With Preview Of Futuristic Ad Technologies
Call us crazy, but isn’t the point of a public demo to generate excitement?
Windows 7: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
It’s as if someone took a collection of day-glow spray paint cans and just sort of splattered the thing. Ugh! Truly horrible looking.
April Fools’ Day is no joke to Windows: Conficker to Phone Home on April Fools’ Day
Symantec Corp.’s Vincent Weafer, vice president of the company’s security response group, agreed with Stewart that it’s impossible to know ahead of time what stunt Conficker’s controllers will pull next week. “Nobody has any real idea,” said Weafer. “There’s no indication of what it will do April 1.”
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Conficker, which is also called Downadup by some security companies, first appeared late last year, and originally exploited a Windows vulnerability that Microsoft Corp. patched in an October 2008 emergency update. In early 2009, the next version — Conficker.b — infected millions of PCs in just a few days.
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David Gerard said,
March 25, 2009 at 10:01 am
Here’s an interesting thing I found just today: Eric S. Raymond from 2000:
Doc: Where does it stand now?
Eric: In appliance territory. Which is why you see companies like Nokia and GTE Sylvania defecting from the Windows CE alliance. They’ve figured out they can’t make any money at that price point, given the license price of Windows CE. Over time, because the price of hardware is dropping, the functional point represented by that price point is going to rise into low-end consumer PC territory. When the price point at which you can’t make any money dealing with Microsoft passes the average price point of a consumer desktop PC, the game is over. And I think this is going to happen before the justice department gets its final verdict.”
He thought that Microsoft not being able to keep their stock price rising would doom them quickly, and it’s actually taken nine years. But it describes the present netbook woes quite well.
(Given the failure of most predictions of Microsoft’s inevitable doom, I predict they’ll decline very slowly indeed, and turn into a services company if they’re lucky.)
Roy Schestowitz Reply:
March 25th, 2009 at 10:20 am
They have attempted to sell hardware (e.g. XBox, Zune) without success. They made losses, not profits. They also betrayed their partners whom they used to license software to. The Microsoft stores will make it more of a bitter affair.
The same goes for the Web, which Google — powered by Free software for the most part — gives Microsoft a good lesson in.
Just recently: Microsoft’s business model is done
David Gerard Reply:
March 25th, 2009 at 11:04 am
I think the XBox 360 would have made a profit if they hadn’t grievously cut corners in manufacturing – a popular console with good games, but the Red Ring is on their game reputation forever.
I still think they could sell Zunes if third-party firmware was more feasible. A 30GB Zune with Rockbox that actually uses the wifi would be a really nice gadget. I realise this will never happen.
Roy Schestowitz Reply:
March 25th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Where would profit come from? it’s the licensing of software that’s a dying model. Linux, Apache, GNOME etc. are commodity