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Microsoft Filing Advises of Price Cuts | |
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| Time: 14:05 EST/19:05 GMT | News Source: eWeek | Posted By: Robert Stein | ||
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Microsoft Corp.'s admission that open-source software could cut into its revenues and force the company to lower prices has fanned speculation that the Windows developer may be forced to become more open. | ||
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| #1 By 20 (24.243.41.64) at 2/11/2003 2:24:39 PM |
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Even more open? They've been pretty open lately.
Ever heard of .NET? ECMA and ISO standards, hello? |
| #2 By 2332 (216.41.45.78) at 2/11/2003 3:28:17 PM |
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#4 - "You can't be more closed and proprietary than Microsoft. How do you think they created their monopoly?"
Talk about non-sequiter. Microsoft has produced closed/proprietary software in the past, therefore .NET is closed and proprietary. How about the lottery number has been 1234 in the past, therefore it will be 1234 tomorrow. The fact is, C# is an ISO/ECMA standard. Large portions of the framework are ISO and ECMA standards. Microsoft has both written and encouraged non-Windows implementations of .NET. Microsoft based much of .NET off of the open standards of XML and SOAP. You're simply wrong. |
| #3 By 1845 (12.209.152.69) at 2/11/2003 3:30:04 PM |
| #4, Yeah you could. You could be Sun or Apple. Think they know more about being closed and propietary than Microsoft does. |
| #4 By 7557 (81.96.71.69) at 2/11/2003 5:02:41 PM |
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The size of Microsoft's bank balance does suggest that Windows and more especially Office have been too highly priced for too long.
The suggestion that MS is being more open depends upon how you define open. Yes .Net is a published "open" standard. But as MS are applying for patents to cover virtually all aspects of it - they can completely control what anyone does with it. Therefore, it is not "open". Linux is a strange world, but for something that supposedly has a very small market percentage, it is having an amazing effect. Then again, look how far Linux has progressed in the last two years. If it continues at that pace, it ***will*** be a much better system than Windows in another 18 months. Whether it can continue to be viable with no direct revenue is questionable. But then again, before Microsoft, there was no money in software - it all came from the hardware. Could we return to that? |
| #5 By 7826 (68.100.63.48) at 2/11/2003 6:41:55 PM |
| Open Source is like Communism: good idea but never worked. And anyone who believes .NET is anything close to open source is jsut too naive. |
| #6 By 3339 (65.198.47.10) at 2/11/2003 8:09:45 PM |
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kevin, you're the only fool I've ever heard call mpeg the "open source" media standard. So you are having a non sequitar argument with yourself.
Open standards are different from open source. Open source is different from free software. Microsoft technology is none of these things. Simple. |
| #7 By 135 (208.50.206.187) at 2/11/2003 8:16:46 PM |
| Realist - Uhhh... Steven123 is one of the resident Linux trolls like yourself. |
| #8 By 3653 (216.153.67.116) at 2/11/2003 8:17:54 PM |
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bagemk - "The size of Microsoft's bank balance does suggest that Windows and more especially Office have been too highly priced for too long."
The size of their bank account has nothing to do with whether they are charging too little or too much. Its a matter of what users are willing to pay. Have you ever studied the law of supply and demand? |
| #9 By 1845 (207.173.73.201) at 2/11/2003 8:19:43 PM |
| The CLI and CTS are open standards. Microsoft .NET is an implementation of the CLI and CTS. Microsoft .NET is based on open standards. |
| #10 By 7557 (81.96.71.69) at 2/12/2003 4:06:52 AM |
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#11 Once a company has a patent, they really can control it. Mono might be faced with patent royalties anyone who develops a library to work with .Net could be faced with royalty costs.
What's more, unless MS come out with a definative legal staement that says they will never charge such a royalty, they could come along and impose it a few years down the line. #15, #18: Ordinarily, supply and demand would work. However, here there is no competition - it is a monopoly. Further, that monopoly has been built up over many, many years. Business' today have no choice - they must have Word/Excel compatibility, which means they must run Office and consequently, they must run Windows. Restoring competition and reducing prices is very hard. The entry barrier to any potential competition very high. This makes it all the more amazing that in a few years, Linux has gone from a purely hobbyist endeavour to a major server platform and now a potential threat to the desktop. I find an interesting contradiction in all of this discussion: The only real use, MS has made of their cash reserves is to maintain their monopoly by to giving away some pretty good software - IE, Media Player, Movie Maker, Outlook Express etc. Yet for some reason when the Worldwide developers give away software, it is "communism" (#9). |
| #11 By 1845 (12.209.152.69) at 2/12/2003 6:09:37 PM |
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Microsoft doesn't give away Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, etc. To use the products (the Windows versions) you must have a Windows license. Those apps, then, are simply components of the OS. In like manner MDAC, the TCP stack, etc are components of the OS.
In the case of Mac OS, Microsoft was contractually bound to develop certain apps. This contract was settlement of a legal case between Apple and Microsoft. When I think of Internet Explorer, Media Player, etc, I don't think of them as apps Microsoft gives away that drive the adoption of Windows. I think of them as parts of the Windows operating system. Just as notepad, word pad, mspaint, etc are parts of the OS. This post was edited by BobSmith on Wednesday, February 12, 2003 at 18:10. |
| #12 By 1845 (12.209.152.69) at 2/12/2003 8:29:14 PM |
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JWM, your logic is faulty. Wait, you keep expressing your opinion and not using logic.
Windows Media Player has been included in Windows since at least the 3.x days. Hmm, Windows didn't have a monopoly back then. There were competitors as there are now. It is interesting to see that any operating system that ships today ships with multimedia software, web browsing software, image editting tools, etc. The component offerings in Windows are quite similar to those in other operating systems. Since this discussion isn't about whether the piece of software is removable or not, let's not go there. Just talking about availablity of software with an operating system all the components that I call components are found for other platforms as well. So, we see that Microsoft isn't giving anything away for free. Rather they are enhancing the value of the Windows operating system. I for one would be much less interested in Windows if it didn't have Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer. Perhaps it is your feelings towards these components that clouds your judgement. |
| #13 By 1845 (12.209.152.69) at 2/12/2003 9:54:05 PM |
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There is no reason whatsoever that Microsoft or any other software company should be compelled to open itself up. I'm sorry that you aren't satisfied with a Microsoft environment. IIRC Microsoft legally obtained its operating system monopoly (though if the headlines we see about Linux are true, it would seem that they don't have a monopoly any longer). So far as I am aware, there have been no cases to prove that they do have a productivity application monopoly (though you are certainly entitled to that opinion).
I'm not sure what would satisfy you in terms of Office. There are competing products, but I'd argue that the competing products don't offer the desired functionality that Microsoft Office offers. It's interesting that when Microsoft was positioning Excel as a competitor to Lotus 1-2-3 it took a fair amount of time before it gained any ground. Before Excel began to take off, it pretty much fully duplicated the functionality of Lotus 1-2-3 including the ability to both read and write Lotus spreadsheets. What Microsoft did to Lotus, any other company could do to Microsoft. Lotus had a monopoly then and Microsoft legally took it from them. I don't see why some company doesn't do that to Microsoft now. (Sun is certainly trying with its StarOffice offering, but IMO StarOffice is a very pale imitation of Microsoft Office.) But that's the Office end of things. My comments referred to including new operating system components in Windows. I don't see that my logic is faulty. Some folks seem to have lost heart in the competitive world of software. Microsoft is vulnerable. If they don't stay on their toes, they'll lose their position. If you don't like the current situation, then think of a way around it. Bill Gates did just that when he wrested IBM's monopoly from them. There is nothing to stop anyone from doing the same thing to Microsoft. If all that is done is complain and whine about how unfortunate it is that things aren't how we want them, then nothing will change. If you don't like it, it is up to you to change it. Personally, I'm quite satisfied with Microsoft's product offerings, so I'll continue to use them. Should future offerings not be as satisfactory as the competition, I'll re-evaluate my position. |
| #14 By 1845 (12.209.152.69) at 2/12/2003 11:56:36 PM |
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Perhaps I am too tainted by my personal experience to be objective. I was a die hard WordPerfect user back in the day. In fact it wasn't until after Microsoft Office 97 came out that I dropped WordPerfect. I wasn't at all affected by the operating system, or the file format. Since Word could open all of my WordPerfect documents and could write them as well, I had no problems switching entirely to Word. If another vender offered the power and functionality that I'm used to with Word and, and this is a really big and, offered the ability to read and write Word documents, then I could very easily switch.
The logical response to that is - since .doc is not an open format, nobody has implemented it. To that I'd say that there are several who have tried and are trying to implement it. I'd also say that if Microsoft can reverse engineer Lotus and WordPerefect Corps file formats, then why can't anyone reverse engineer .doc and .xls ? If the competition put as much time into attacking Microsoft as Microsoft did in attacking Lotus and WordPerfect, then we'd have much more competition in the productivity app space. I don't think open standards are fair in this case, because Microsoft deserves to have the business that it has created from Office. Nobody handed them their marketshare. They competed for it tooth and nail. If they decide on their own to open up, that is a different story. The barriers to entry that I see (the major ones) are the substantial feature set of Office and the file formats. If a competing product could do Word better than Word could, then I'd have reason to consider other options. In like manner, if an OS can do Windows better than Windows can, then I'll have a reason to consider other options. I don't mean a rough similarity between one app and another. I mean an exact feature for feature, API for API, mouse event for mouse event app. Some of the things that bother me most about not using Microsoft software are the lack of shortcuts, key combos, key mouse combos, etc. that I use heavily. (For instance, any browser that doesn't handle going forward and backward when I click the extra buttons on my IntelliMouse will never get much usage from me.) A tidbit about Office 11. If it natively supports XML, then Office docs will be writable by any application that can write plain text. As I understand it, Office will essentially have an XSD to describe its file formats (though you can use custom XSD's as well). I don't think these XSDs are the same as those Sun submitted to OASIS for productivity apps, but an schema is a schema. If you can process one, you can process another. Perhaps your dream of openness will come to fruition. |
| #15 By 1845 (12.209.152.69) at 2/13/2003 12:46:54 AM |
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Thanks, it's for the sake of the few good discussions that occur here from time to time that I keep coming back.
XML. Take this for what it's worth considering the source. My personal opinion of Paul T's technical abilities is not too great, but his is the most comprehensive review I've seen thus far. He says: "Office 11 documents that are stored in XML format can be round-tripped, which means that they can be edited outside of Office and then returned to, say, Word and edited again without losing any content. Furthermore, Office 11 XML documents are 100 percent compatible with the entire Office feature set: If you can do it with a native Office document, you can do it with XML. And finally, it's possible to use the same document in different Office applications to get new types of views on the same data. For example, you might display a list of information in a Word chart, and then view that same data as an interactive chart in Excel." (http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/office11_beta1.asp) Changing the .doc format. I don't think this is really too valid a concern, since .doc hasn't changed since the release of Office '97. I don't know whether Office 11 will change the .doc format or not, but based on the lack of change in Office 2000 and Office XP, my best guess would be no change. I would assume that the native XML support provide the exact same abilities that .doc does, otherwise it would be rather pointless to have XML support. That's my supposition, though, so I could be way off. It seems to me that .doc and .xls are pretty much feature complete. The usefulness in new versions of Office are the new object models exposed to Office developers and the new features (like SmartTags) provided to end users. I get Office via MSDN Universal, so I'm not too sure what my opinion is worth, but for the time that features like AutoCorrect and SmartTags and TaskPanes provide, the upgrade seems worth the cost. If Office 11 continues in the tradition of the previous versions, I expect I'll think it too is worth the upgrade. I'm particularly looking forward to an easier programmatic method of generating Word or Excel documents from my applications. It would be a great boon to me if I can do reporting direct from my web apps without having to use a third party product to generate Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, or PDF files. An XML base would be great - one XSL for display in the browser, another to write a Word doc that my users can download and print or save locally. |
| #16 By 1845 (12.209.152.69) at 2/13/2003 1:41:04 AM |
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lol, I used UNIX (Solaris, HP UX) and Linux (RedHat) in college and hated it. Exchange for XServe? I knew they were adding Exchange client support to latest rev of Entourage (which should have been there in the first place IMO), but I hadn't heard about a server offering. That would be a large step to validate OS X as a server platform. Seems that with Exchange 2k's Active Directory integration, there'd be problems there. Ah, but if the decoupled directory (forgot what the product name is) runs on non Windows OS's then, the lack of native AD wouldn't be a problem. Hmm.
I think perhaps one reason why Microsoft isn't too worried about someone creating a light weight and really cheaper .doc writer app is that the next version of Office will likely be substantially cheaper than the current version. We'll have to wait and see what the prices are, but SEC filings, the lack of enforcement on educational editions, and some rumors I've heard would indicate that price changes are in the future. The die hard "Microsoft can never change" person would doubtless think price changes are about as realistic as them going with XSDs for the Office file formats. I guess we'll have to wait a few months on both counts to see whether Raikes (and the other execs) have the guts to do what it takes to maintain their market position. I think the Microsoft Works product line should be eliminated and that the full Office should take its place. Further I think that Office should be priced less than the current Office price, but higher than the previous Works price. |
| #17 By 1845 (12.209.152.69) at 2/13/2003 1:51:57 AM |
| When Exchange is written in C#, it just might happen. I wouldn't expect that till at least two versions after Titanium though. |
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