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Put Steve Jobs in there, maybe he call pull them out... Holy crap, what am I saying?!

But seriously - when a company, of any kind, gets into a nose dive it can't seem to get out of, the blame is not usefully placed anywhere except right at the very top - period. In the end, every company goes where its led.

Is this Microsoft Daily News, or what?


(MDN Magic Word "west", as in, this site has gone south).

"...maybe he can pull them out..."

..and this is the guy who said Vista was going to kill Apple...

MDN: The Lamisil graphics are a great weight loss product. Makes you lose your appetite.

Every other story here seems to be about microsoft.

no apple news????

Vista is suffering from the wicked Curse of Copland

What scares me is our military will run on Vista and XP.

Blue screen of death has a whole new meaning.

Or hospitals running on winblows. Or our traffic control systems running on winblows. Our credit and identity secrets are stored on winblows servers with secret back doors.

Windows scares the crap out of me.

Who cares what happens to Microbore?
Screw them...

employees showing their increasing concerns with working for a company so apparently dysfunctional

Quit complaining and do something about it – quit.

Whiners.

The ONLY thing Vista and Copland have in common is that Apple did it first.

But seriously, Apple struggled with Copland and wasn't afraid to admit defeat, go with Plan B (or D or G) and make something work.

What was the result? cutting their losses and ending up with the World's most advanced OS.

The difference with MS is that they knew they needed to be moving in this direction more than a decade ago - when NT was supposed to unseat Unix and all that. But they skimped on the NT re-write and they did the same with XP and are doing the same now.

"...my guess the cause of the problem is one or more of the following.

• Unqualified employees and managers
• Excessive Bureaucracy
• Intelligence
• Trust"

It may be just me, but reading this I get the impression from the 'tone' of the article that Enderle is blameing the M$ employees and middle-management for Vista's problems, rather than asking why the top management are failing to see where the problems lie, and what they are doing to rectify the problems.

MDN magic word: 'dead.' Anyone want to start a MS Death-knell counter?

Don't forget the “Enderle Group" is dysfunctional too, BIG TIME! Especially Rob and his wang being so obsessed with Paris Hilton!!! The rest of the group, consists of his dog, his gold fish, his wife are fine.

[quote 'me'] But seriously, Apple struggled with Copland and wasn't afraid to admit defeat, go with Plan B (or D or G) and make something work.

Shouldn't that be "..Apple struggled with Copland and wasn't afraid to admit defeat, go with Plan (Ne)XT and make something work.

Another boring Enderle piece from MacDaily Windows News.

Microsoft will be pulled under by their own weight.

"backwards compatibility" will be the undoing of MS, please keep it up.

I know I speak for every MS customer in thanking Mr. Gates for preserving the ability to play my '95 "Flight Simulator" software. I would deeply resent being forced to buy an upgrade or new copy just because of Vista

The one of the greatest management books ever is Frederick Brooks' "The Mythical Man Month". It is based on his experience managing an IBM mainframe OS development in the 1960s, but is still completely relevant today.

One his observations: Adding more people to an already late project only makes it later.

Microsoft is in a damned if you do, damned if you don't position.

Tick - Tock Microsoft Tick - Tock



• Unqualified employees and managers
• Excessive Bureaucracy
• Intelligence
• Trust

Hmmm... sounds just like another huge corporation: The Bush Administration.

"The first step should be to accurately analyze the problem. If this isn’t done by people who are both qualified in the analysis and trustworthy the result will be garbage."

Rob Enderle saying this is so funny I may have just lost a kidney. Is he really talking about Microsoft or another "Group" entirely?

If MS was truly smart, they would have done something similar to what Apple did with OS X.

Vista should have been a whole new OS, rebuilt from the ground up. New applications written for Vista won't run on older OS's. But, make it easy for developers to upgrade their apps, and maybe an environment that ran both (a la Carbon).

Vista would include a pseudo-emulation portion that would load up an XP engine and run most software that ran on XP (like Classic).

The result is the ability to ditch all the old code and legacy support without immediately dropping the old software and giving people a way to upgrade without losing their old stuff.

I, for one, am glad they DIDN'T go this way because it will just be one more nail in the MS Coffin. I can't wait to see them die.

Flight simulator? Are you kidding me? What a boring morose game.

Top heavy management that is Marketing oriented created this. How many times over the past 10 years have I seen complaints to MS dismissed as "in our feedback, this is what we see" or "That is not a bug, but a feature."

Just look at Balmer. He was chosen, not for his technical prowess but his pushy marketing ability. Marketing can only go so far beyond what the technology actually is.

MS has gotten way ahead of itself in marketing vs actual usable technology. In my opinion, that is the root of their problem and is from the highest level of management.

"Vista should have been a whole new OS, rebuilt from the ground up. New applications written for Vista won't run on older OS's. But, make it easy for developers to upgrade their apps, and maybe an environment that ran both (a la Carbon). "

Yea, this is the way to do it and Apple pulled it off a few times in the past. But each time they did, they lost market share big time. That's what M$ is afraid of. They're not (real) dumb. They know this is the way to go, but they're really afraid of lossing that huge chunck of market share that's still running versions earlier than XP. They count these systems when they arrive at their 90% market share figure. It doesn't matter that a huge chunk of them are still running Windoze 3.1-Windoze 2000. Do you really think this group of users will stay with M$ if M$ kills backwards compatibility? Nope.

Since they'll have to buy a new system anyway, they'll certainly look at a mac. As it is, half of the pc market share will have to buy new systems to run Vista. If M$ drops the legacy os and make all the old apps useless, you can be a lot of those user will go out and simply buy macs and new mac apps.

This is where the problem is. Apple took a chance and will eventually rebuild the market share they lost everytime they made huge shifts in hardware/software. M$ doesn't have the guts to do as Apple did.

What if you don't trust the analyst who is writing about a lack of trust?

Microsoft's management trust problems pale when compared to Enderlie's creditability problems.

your all being conned!!

Microsoft delayed consumer Vista so it can sell more X-Boxes this holiday season.

PC vendors like HP who sell a lot of consumer PC's during the holidays had to snowjobbed, so thus the so called "management shakeup" and other pressures at Redmond to cover up.

Microsoft see's devices like X-Boxes as the solution for the consumer, not PC's.

Reality Check, I did enjoy reading your remark above. It must really be hurting...

You get no sympathy from me as you're getting just what you and other arrogant idiots deserve for having over the years talked down about Apple.

What is so enjoyable also is that we have been predicting this for a long time...

MS should buy Be, inc's IP and build Windows ZP from that. That'd show Apple!

Spot on Big Al. This article would have more credibility if it came from anyone other than the Fudmeister (with the possible exception of Thurrott or Dvorak).

I do think the question of trust is an interesting angle though. Would you trust Ballmer with anything? I wouldn't. I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw a chair.

Would anyone trust Bill Gates? Look at the history of MS. He has screwed partners and enemies alike. If you were working for him, would you trust him?

MDN word : one
Trust no one.

The advantage Apple had in recovering from the Copeland fiasco is that Apple was willing to bite the bullet, shift gears, and drop support for older software/systems (if not immediately, then eventually). Heck, they weren't even going to have a Classic environment initially, until they realized that they wouldn't sell as many new Macs if people couldn't run Classic apps while waiting for software updates/replacements.

Microsoft's biggest problem is that they refuse to cut off the legacy PCs. The irony is that such a change would force a lot of companies to upgrade systems, software, etc., and probably make Microsoft even more money on new versions of Outlook, Office, etc.

"Excessive Bureaucracy" should have been listed three times!

We have all already commented inteeligently on this stuff; why do we care what coçksm00ch Enderle has to say? I read his commentary above and it adds NOTHING to this story. MDN, please continue to preface your links to discussions of his pointless scribblings with Enderle: Yada, yada... so that I may know not to go there. Thank you for you support.

Intelligently

There's a little part of my brain that keeps softly saying:

Steve has a plan. He's demonstrated it twice already and few people seem to recognize the potential for it happening a third time.

1. Steve builds NeXT into a viable software platform with a state of the art OS product. Then he sells this to Apple at a time when it is sorely needed and saves Apple. Steve and NeXT take over Apple.

2. Steve build Pixar into a viable animated movie house with a state of the art movie product. Then he sells this to Disney at a time when it is sorely needed and saves Disney. Steve and Pixar take over Disney.

3. Steve rebuilds Apple into a viable hardware and software platform (again) with a state of the art OS and cutting edge hardware products. He even migrates the OS and hardware to another chipset used by the other computing companies. He then sells the computer side of Apple to Microsoft at a time when it is sorely needed and saves Microsoft. Steve and Apple Computers take over Microsoft.

Steve and the new Apple Entertainment continue to produce the iPod and other media related business products.

Seems to fit, doesn't it? Or perhaps my medication is overdue....

Back on the meds.

Stronger Meds

SirROM,

That's an interesting idea, but the biggest reason why that couldn't happen is the same reason (one of many reasons actually) that MS is having so much trouble coming out with a quality product in their next OS - Legacy.

The size of their customer base forces them to keep all that old Windows garbage intact so that the world doesn't come to a screeching halt. As much as I despise the company and their corporate culture (or lack thereof), I recognize that they must surely have some talented people there who are capable of innovation. It sounds like they have some serious management issues but even if they didn't, I don't think they'd be capable of coming up with something really great because they're tied so tightly to 20+ year old technology. To truly innovate, they need to step away from that, but their enormous customer and developer base won't let them. It would also stop them from buying Apple and building off the Mac OS.

ndelc,

That's where I think the beauty of this idea comes from. If they "bought" Mac OS X and brought Steve on board (much like Disney), they could turn this OS problem over to the "Apple department" and tell the world that within 2 years the OS would be changing. This would give developers a chance to modify their programs (made easier by the switch of Mac OS X to Intel) and they would likely be relieved to know they would be getting a stable, virus-free OS. In addition, Steve would unveil the famous "red box" virtualization layer using the new Intel chips that would be available to run current Windows XP programs unhindered while the remainder of the developers made the transtion. I think Microsoft is either too lazy (bloated from within) and doesn't feel the need to innovate with such a dominant market position, or they are just too afraid or overwhelmed by the necessary task they must eventually face. Either way, buying the Mac OS would bring everything into harmony and Microsoft wouldn't have to worry about losing market share to Apple during the transition. I honestly think that Microsoft's customers would be excited for the first time in years about such a transition if they had an idea of what they would be getting in return.

I enjoyed reading your thoughful comments and getting a chance to discuss this idea!

Trust? Naah, more likely the same old culture of trying to break or change things to "own" them, plus an incredible feature-greediness that includes backward-compatibility and more secure back doors to the company's black ops room [aka the MW: "hell"].

Dunno why that makes me laugh.