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Microsoft is in trouble without question...but it's going to a LONG time until they die. They are sitting on a PLANET (not just a mountain) of cash. So...it's gonna be 10 years minimum before they are really fading hard...and a lot can happen in 10 years.

It's time for a $200 billion shareholder lawsuit.

Actually, this is closer than many other such stories. That they can't twist arms is significant. That people seem to prefer XP is significant, too. It isn't the end of Microsoft, but it may well be the end of their total dominance in the market.

DLMeyer - the Voice of G.L.Horton's Stage Page Pod-Cast

All the money in the this world can't save Microsoft. I'm seeing people I meet at the local computer shops finally giving Apple some respect as before they would belittle Apple. Amazing.

This failure in not unprecedented, not even close.

This guy clearly does not know history (oil tycoons, railroads anyone?), but let us just keep it at a technology-based unprecedented, now we've narrowed the scope.

IBM, the monster of monsters, fell greatly to Redmond, with a brief blip of Apple in the early desktop growth years. IBM falling like a rock may be where Redmond is headed, but that is still not clear yet.

When Leopard hits the streets, and offers WinXP and Vista apps. to run within OS X with narry a hick-up, that may be yet another blow to Redmond they did not see coming, nor know how to stop (outside a massive attack of lawyers who will not win the day).

Our troll of the month "Huh?" will soon be here that Vista is not a FLOP but a huge success because in 4 months, err, no wait 5 months or 6... maybe 7 but WHO CARES will tell our troll: "in 8 months Vista will have sold more copies than Mac OS X THENCE it is a RESOUNDING success!!!"

Too bad that "Huh?" does not work with Microsoft: it would be good for Apple.

Luckily we still have Ballmer to fill in the idiots gaps in Redmond.

The difference between Microsoft and other previous downfalls is that in other cases the leaders had market share dominance only. In this case Microsoft has such a huge amount of cash they can literally give the products away for years.
Will that save them? No...but as I mentioned above...

A lot can happen in 10 years.

What if Steve Jobs has his cancer come back and he suddenly dies?
What if Apple makes a misstep attempting to go into corporate environments and
they get hacked badly?
What if they produce a new product or two (asteroid) and they suffer mulitple market failures (how's Apple Hi-Fi selling?)
Apple is not invulnerable either...

and all this has to be placed in the context of the world economy and political machinations that operate around it. If the US heads into a severe slump will it be the higher priced computers and electronic toys that sell? Or will they suffer too.
Things change.

Let's keep hoping they change the right way for Apple.

Let's not forget what a dog OSX was when it first came out. Or the years of a lack of native apps and drivers for years. Or the resistance that a large percentage of OS 9 users put up before making the switch. Or the fact that the Finder, even in 10.4, needs a serious makeover.

It's easy to be smug now that OSX has matured.

Or the years of a lack of native apps and drivers for years.

Sorry... gotta proofread more carefully.

Microsoft is hard to kill, it most likely will die a slow death.

Opps, guess my Apple fuming got me in trouble.

Soorrrryyy.

People get upset when they find out they have been browsing with a insecure program.

Microsoft finally priced correctly Windows: $3

What they did not say is that in China one can have a mail-in rebate as well!!!

AHHUHAUHAHHEHAHOEHAUHAUHAUHAHUHAUHAEHAHUHUH

Vista, even for free it is not palatable.


FFFFFFFFFFFFLLLLLLLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

It happened already, flaws in Safari patched some days later.

BTW, I use Firefox. The bug and exploit is Safari-only.

Microsoft hasn't died at my house. It was never born.

Never bought a Windows or DOS machine, never will.

OLDgeezer - the Voice of I love Redmond in the Springtime Pod-Cast

'any more than it makes Britney Spears better than Beethoven.'

Apparently he never saw Beethoven naked......


Oh, and death to Microsoft.

The fact that the author didn't mention Macs as a great alternative is amazing. What a cretan.

This has made my weekend

I can't wait to bug some of my co-workers

Microsoft isn't dead until the shareholders start dumping stock.

Don't forget that Microsoft is working feverishly developing Vienna. Vienna is light years ahead of Vista.

What is the reference to Mell? Is it the Inquirer's inside-joke term, like MDN's beleaguered Microsoft? Does it equate Vista with Millennium?

By the way, when is Microsoft officially beleaguered?

For me, the key point is not just that Microsoft will die, but that it deserves to die. Bill Gates built an empire cramming third-rate products down everybody's throat, and now the party is over.

Don't forget that Microsoft is working feverishly developing Vienna.

Isn't Vienna a little sausage that comes in a can?

@DL Meyer
Tell me why you feel the need to post a link to your dumbass website ?
I bet your responsible for 99% of the spam in everyones inbox jerk !

Mmmmmmmmmmmmm. Sausage in a can.

Actually, Microsoft going backwards happened in hte early 90's.

The Mac old-timers will remember MS Office for Mac 6. It was such a pice of Windows-like crap that MS was forced to put the more Mac-like Office 5 back on the market. That, or face wide spread copying as the old versions were copied to more new machines.

Microsoft is a cancer.

Vista is Windows Me II but MeII is also:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/917583

When you attempt to run Microsoft eLearning Library (MELL), or Microsoft eLearning offline and online, you may receive the following error:

"Unable to initialize the viewer. If you have installed the viewer to your computer, please rerun the setup program. If you are accessing the viewer from a server, please contact your system administrator. "

The $3 version of Vista just goes to show you how far a US consumer has to bend over to take it up their @$$.... Wonder how Americans that buy it feel about subsidizing a 3rd world country? Now if he wants to go to countries like Iran or such and give away that Microcr@p I'm okay with that...

MS's near-monopoly and huge amounts of cash don't necessarily mean that it will take a long time for them to lose their top position.
History has shown that it often takes only a few short years; an example being General Motors overtaking a seemingly indomitable Ford back in the twenties and thirties, and then leaving them far behind.

Whether it's the health of a person or institution, decline is often a rapid process and MS is beginning to look like a permanent invalid.

"This guy clearly does not know history (oil tycoons, railroads anyone?)"

You don't know the history of oil tycoons and railroads. I do.

For those asserting that M$ can sit on billions of dollars for ten years or more had better think again.

I don't really have a reference, but last week, an analyst noted that in the past year, M$'s cash reserves had dropped to $29 billion, from $40B.

That is in ONE year! This huge company has tens of thousands of employees, and if you don't think that kind of payroll doesn't just BLEED cash without significant income, go back to your calculator!

I'd look for M$ to start looking for parts of itself to begin spinning off within two years... or else significant layoffs.

The question asked was:
Tell me why you feel the need to post a link to your dumbass website ?
I bet your responsible for 99% of the spam in everyones inbox jerk !
The answer ... answers? ... are: I feel the "need" to post a link to my "dumbass website" ... well, it isn't really a "website". It's a web page, for sure, listing the episodes of my pod cast. You can take a look, or not.

There are no links to phishers on my site. Not that I know of. Should you happen to discover something there that isn't well advertised, send an email to me or to PodOmatic from the site and someone will get it fixed.

I do not post unless I believe I have have something relevant to say. Except for this "answer" to your question. And I won't post a link here.

DLMeyer

Companies can disappear very quickly if the public turns their back on them. How many people here haven't heard about Pan American:

Pan American World Airways, commonly known as Pan Am, was the principal international airline of the United States from the 1930s until its collapse in 1991. Originally founded as a seaplane service out of Key West, Florida, the airline became a major company credited with many innovations that shaped the international airline industry, including the widespread use of jet aircraft, jumbo jets, and computerized reservation systems. Identified by its blue globe logo and the use of the word "Clipper" in aircraft names and call signs, the airline was a cultural icon of the 20th century, and the unofficial flag carrier of the United States.

The cash in the bank is still vulnerable to lawsuits. Remember they got the whole lot of it by extorting insanely high profit margins out of people for Windows and Office. They are bound to have infringed many more patents/litigated than have been revealed so far.

They've always depended on lawyering and like most things in life it's not always predictable. They still have antitrust issues in the EU (with daily fines) and maybe still Korea and Japan (I'm not up to speed on those). They are up to some pretty murky stuff at the moment try to get around patent/copyright issues in bulk by setting up enough of a legal gray area that they can claim just cause for using other people's patented/copyrighted works that's in open source software.

Vista is not Microsoft's biggest worry and hasn't been for a while, which is probably the reason why it is what it is.

Where can I buy me some AAPL shares???

"Only now at the end do you understand. . . Your feeble skills are no match. . . and now young Microsoft, you Will die. . . "

@wiseguy

"BTW, I use Firefox. The bug and exploit is Safari-only."

If by "the bug" you mean the flaw that allowed the exploit at CanSecWest, it is *not* in Safari but in Apple's implementation of Java, and the exploit works just as well when the user is using Firefox.

So he's not such a wise guy after all.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2007/april#sat-21-turn_off_java


People might want to turn off Java, if they've got it on, it's not as if many sites use it these days, anyway.

As Steve Jobs said, "Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It's this big heavyweight ball and chain."

Just came across this, about Microsoft's attempt to create a gray area about IP in open source, gives a glimpse of the picture:

http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2007/04/microsofts_anti.html

I think Microsoft will fall...to about half what it was.

They are here to stay. But, I am sure Apple will be a fitting competitor, and gain half the US consumer personal computer market. But frankly, there are far too many consumers who buy on the cheap. For this and other reasons, Apple, in my opinion, will not overthrow and overturn Microsoft's presense in every home in the US.

Come on folks: Microsoft has begun hardware development, and WILL put out something that answers the hardware+software of Apple at LEAST in theory. They will catch on.

Of course if they don't, you and I still have a Mac.

It's easy to be smug now that OSX has matured.

How many people demanded System 7/8/9 back after Mac OS X came out?

<crickets chirping>

Sure we had Classic and dual-booting to ease the transition. But was OS X ever an obvious failure? Didn't think so.

"What is the reference to Mell?

"Vista is Windows Me II but MeII is also:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/917583"

Thanks, No Squirt.

MeII won't fail, they have OEMs whipped and threatened into a corner, it will sell, but you can almost hear the defectors marching toward Linux. This is a watershed."

That would've been like Ford making the Edsel a "success" by forcing it onto fleet customers and dealer lots. You can strong-arm only so many sales...

with/o microsoft on the market the world IS now a better place,now that i call living the life,with apple of course.

Well, there was definitely a slow transition period from OS 9 to OS X for many. And resistance. And slow-arriving drivers, and bugs.

But remember, OS X was a completely re-written, ground-up new OS. Not a rehash, not a tweak. Vista is just an upgrade, probably the largest, most expensive, most time-consuming OS upgrade ever. It makes the transition from OS 8 to OS 9 look like a well-planned and well-executed pit stop.

But in addition to being a new build with a new core, it also truly rethought the whole OS and how it was being used. The integration of multithreading and security and language support and a few dozen other things were all fairly ground-breaking steps. Some were things that had been done before in OS 9 or earlier, but only through patching together spaghetti code and using kludges to make them work. OS X was thought out for integration of all these features from the foundation.

I'm not familiar with the innards of Vista, but everything I've read seems to indicate that none of this is the case with Vista. They've added a GUI that's supposedly "prettier", they've added in security tweaks, and they've tried to integrate some of the other "patched" features like searching. They've reorganized, tweaked, and toyed with the OS, but it doesn't seem as if they've really redefined what Windows is.

It's still Windows, it's still a PANE in the OS.

come on guys, i know this is an apple site and all, but there is nothing wrong with his hope that linux sees growth from this. i hope they do too. in a world where 40% of desktops run linux and 40% are Macs, we would all be better off. Linux has made some good progress in the last 5 years and should be the overwhelming majority of servers in a sensible world. makes a fine desktop too, especially for the type of people who want to tinker and roll there own OS. nothing wrong with that.

think of it this way: Linux, the OS for the "do it yourself" type. OS X the S for the "just works" type. Windows, the OS for the "never works correctly" type.

magic word, "speak" as in speak the truth about the need for heterogeneous systems, development and networks. OSS and linux are good for everyone, even people who don't use it. just like Macs.

I keep thinking that the computing landscape has the potential to become something entirely different altogether. Desktops and such aren't going anywhere, but personal tech-- iPod, iPhone-- is really going to change the interaction with technology. These will be our primary machines that sync with desktops.

Windows, Linux, OS X-- it almost doesn't matter anymore, except if an OS offers something special, that is...

It just seems that M$ will become less and less relevant. They can't execute beyond Office and Windows, and even that's pretty shoddy. If iPhone is as popular as iPod, and if iPod adopts the same basic OS as iPhone, suddenly, OS X is hugely dominant. It can then be leveraged in any number of ways. The critical point, though, is that while M$ may still be here, they just become less and less important.

We are in the midst of a revolution. Chances are, we won't see the full scope of it for some time-- but when the Tipping Point® is past, the landscape will certainly not be the same. And, it'll be in our favor.

The world is going to be flat out dazzled by the golden glow of these 'Golden Parachutes' when they finally open up above us all, I mean really something!

Give away one of the crown jewels, Windows, so you can sell the other crown jewel, Office.

That's basic business 101.

NOT!

My pants are too tight.

"Linux, the OS for the 'do it yourself' type. OS X the OS for the 'just works' type. Windows, the OS for the 'never works correctly' type."

Nicely put.


Microsoft Corporation. Cancel or Allow?__

"Yes they deserve to die, and I hope they burn in Hell!" from 'A Time to Kill'.

A agree with 'pr'. A lot can happen in 10 years. Apple, Inc. can misstep as well as Microsoft. I hope not but let's not forget that Apple has: been too far ahead of the curve (Newton), misjudged pricing (Cube, 20th Century Mac), had lax QA (logic board problems with iBook G3's, problems with iMac G5's, weird shutdown problems with Macbooks), and there are more. Apple, Inc. isn't perfect but it's products are (in my opinion) the best computing experience available right now.

Speaking of threats to crown jewels, let's not forget that MS is obviously frightened of Google for good reason.

The computing landscape is changing and MS is the buggy maker. Pun intended.

Their overpriced Vista effort is MS dividing by zero.

Where is Wizegay in all this...

Did someone hurt his feelings?

Shame on you Mac guys, he just did not feel the love.
Perhaps thats why he is postponing his purchase of that 10 year old
Bondy Blue 400mhz iMac for 150.00 or perhaps he is saving up his
allowance.

As who Microsoft blows but corporate America will never admit they
spent how much??? on a shitty operating system. They will continue to
patch and fill and spackle there way into Vista and then finally they will
have the Mac they been looking for, or will they.

Just a what happened to wizegay thought