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Journal tomhudson's Journal: How long before Microsoft falls to #3 26

Journal by tomhudson

How long before Apple overtakes Microsoft for the #2 spot?

Trailing 12 months revenue:

  1. IBM: $96.91 Billion
  2. Microsoft: $59.54 Billion
  3. Apple: $51.12 Billion

Growth (year over year):

  1. Apple: 48.6%.
  2. Microsoft: 6.3%

It's not hard to do the math ... if current trends continue, Microsoft falls to #3 later this year - if they haven't already.

So, how long is the Balminator going to be in a position to throw chairs? It was 2 years ago last month that he said he'd retire in 10 years - which would be 2018. The question on more and more people's minds is - will he last out the year? Or is this going to be a case of "Our corporate culture is so f$cked that we don't have a replacement, so everybody just keep on praying that this lame duck develops wings."

Newsweek predicted Ballmer will be fired this year.

Distracted by the Windows Vista fiasco, Ballmer has missed every big new tech market of the past decade. Google won the race for Internet search and keyword advertising. Apple won in MP3 players and online music sales, and now holds the high ground in mobile phones, while Windows Mobile fades away. Microsoft's Zune music player is a dud. Bing, Microsoft's search engine, will never catch Google. Ballmer is said to be a brilliant guy, but he got a black eye for the way he blundered and blustered and finally botched an attempted acquisition of Yahoo. He's a screamer and a bit of a bully--not the easiest guy to work for. If Microsoft were any other company, this guy would be in trouble.

Is it finally time for Ballmer to go at Microsoft?

Harvard Business Review's Top 100 CEOs - Steve Jobs is #1, Eric Schmidt is #9, and Steve ("I'll f$cking bury google") Ballmer is # .... oops, he didn't make the top 100.

And WP7 (Windows Phone 7) is getting slagged by Microsoft employees who are working on it - see the comments. I guess it's the Next-of-KIN.

So let's see what's happened with 10 year of Ballmer:

XBox launch which later launches a billion-dollar recall, disbanding the team after IE6 because "browsers are obsolete - everything will be DOT.NET", Zune, Vista, KIN, Windows Server loses big-time in London Stock Exchange - to linux after much boasting in the trades, live search and it's bastard spawn, the failed takeover of Yahoo ...

In reality, these are all (with the exception of Yahoo and KIN) Bill Gates fiascos. In fact, the *only* pc product that Microsoft has released in the last 20 years that worked as expected out of the bos was DOS 5.0.

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How long before Microsoft falls to #3 More

How long before Microsoft falls to #3

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  • Not in the sense that it will disappear. IBM is still there and it was the evil empire back in my youth. (Even though, back then, I was a loyal stormtrooper! Still am in some sense: IBM makes awesome hardware).

    Last weekend I have gotten proof positive again that Microsoft caters to the people who do not want to learn anything about computers. I argued, shouted, implored with my mother in law (who uses a Ubuntu Machine, because that's the only way she'll get support from me) to tell me what was on the sc

    • Those users aren't necessarily Microsoft turf - they're a case of "whoever gets them first, wins." To them, that becomes "how a computer is supposed to work." But yes, it's frustrating. Just like it's frustrating to boot my laptop into Windows every 3-4 months to do some compatibility testing and see how it just seems to CRAWL under vista, even though it's a dual-core 64-bit with 4 gigs of ram.

      Speaking of which, a friend of mine who I introduced to linux and who now uses it for everything except scanning

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Qzukk ( 229616 )

        don't understand why creating indexes with a cardinality of 2 is generally not a good idea, especially for 50-50 splits of data

        Indexes don't help much for 50-50 splits (or 95-5 splits where you want to know the 95% value), but sometimes I need an "on_fire" field, and I need to know which rows are true, and I'd like to know faster than scanning the whole table. Fortunately, postgresql does OK with bitmap indexes, and if you create a partial index "WHERE on_fire='t'", it won't waste a lot of space unless eve

      • Most certainly, I could....

        But... For your friend: VueScan [hamrick.com]. Yes, I know it's for pay, but it's friggin worth it. Works like a charm with my dads Minolta Dimage Scan Speed [konicaminoltasupport.com], which isn't exactly your run-of-the-mill scanner. Yes, on Ubuntu.

        XSane needs a really serious overhaul (and no, XSane doesn't support said film scanner)

        • Vista came with the machine, so he might as well use what he paid for - and it will remind him of how sucky Windows really is :-)

          • Which isn't all that difficult. Vista + Office 2007 + WebDAV = buggiest combo ever. (Office 2007 might be innocent here, it's just that most posts I found about it also involve Office 2007).

            I do not know who wrote the WebDAV client in Vista, but this person should be fired and banned from programming computers ever again. Funny, by the way, you know what the official fix is? Install the WebDAV subsystem from Windows XP... I am not kidding, it's what the hotfix does [microsoft.com]....

            Frankly, I'd rather drop down 80$

            • I'll send him the link ...
              • It's also a link to keep for when you encounter a person who says you can't have commercial software on Linux because open source projects will simply copy them. I've yet to see a VueScan clone.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by plover ( 150551 ) *

          Seconded.

          My Dimage Scan Dual II device drivers don't work on 64-bit Windows OSs, and they ended support during the XP era. But when I was running it on XP, however, I bought VueScan because it's totally awesome. It focused faster, and scanned batches of slides over twice as fast as the Minolta software. And it did great with color correction, because the slides I was scanning were all over the place: Kodachrome, Ektachrome, etc. ++++ would buy again!

    • why don't you have it set up to ssh into your relatives machines you need to support? Much better than phone tag stuff and trying to decipher what someone is not seeing.

      With that said, bah and humbug on consumer computers that we have now, mostly junque, What we need for 99% of the people out there (probably including me) are internet appliances that *don't suck*. General computers are just too complicated for most people, even ubuntu. Heck, my latest ubuntu is half hosed already, updates are broken on it,

      • even ubuntu. Heck, my latest ubuntu is half hosed already, updates are broken on it, keeps claiming it can't find the repositories even though they are are in the sources, andf FF is a steaming pile, so many things wrong with it now I want to chuck it out, except for noscript and adblock plus.

        Crapuntu will ALWAYS be a steaming pile. They don't have the engineers. They contribute almost no code to the kernel. Here's some older stats [lwn.net] from when everyone was going "ubuntu Ubuntu" - they were putting zip in ba

        • I honestly am befuddled how having more kernel engineers would fix problems in Firefox. I myself see problems in Ubuntu, for example there was no way to upgrade from Kubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 (both are successive long-term support versions), but I don't see how them having more kernel engineers fixes any of the desktop oriented problems.

          The strength of Ubuntu and their great contribution is their work to fix issues on the desktop.

          Rants are not useless. Well researched and argumented rants are edifying, but

          • The strength of Ubuntu and their great contribution is their work to fix issues on the desktop.

            It's still fugly. On too of that, their patent protection promise is hollow [ectnews.com] - they don't have the people to work around patents, so they have to either depend on someone who does, or pay protection money.

            As I say in the article, I'd rather switch to bsd than do that.

      • why don't you have it set up to ssh into your relatives machines you need to support? Much better than phone tag stuff and trying to decipher what someone is not seeing.

        I did not want to open a potential security hole, but after the experience, I will. I'll also have to find a way to map family members machines do DNS, or I'll have to ask them an IP address every time which is going to be a hurtful experience.

        So, I did not, because I expected my MiL to be more reasonable (what was I thinking?). This stuff

  • Your blog post is a nice summary about the decade of blunders of Microsoft.

    At the end you link to an article that talks how Windows Server was slow and LSE was to abandon it. It is a very bad article. I was interested to learn more and clicked on the link. It was written with zero technical research. The low value of the article can be summarized as: Windows running dot NET is slower than Linux. But why? I sincerely doubt the OS and language are the culprits.

    From articles concerning all the fiascos I ha

    • I get some of the freebie tech trade mags, and for over a year Microsoft was publishing this fake headline about how the London Stock Exchange was switching to Windows Server for their infrastructure because it was faster, more scalable, etc. In the end, it was a fiasco because Windows Server and .NET suck [slashdot.org]. Several banks have had the same problem. It's important to keep in mind that this was a Microsoft/Accenture partnership that built this, not some nameless 3rd party.

      First fail: Using Windows.
      Second f

  • They do make some pretty decent products.

    * Bing seems decent enough.
    * Windows 7 Ultimate 64 seems very solid. (I am obliged to run windows at work, so it's my primary environment.)
    * XBox 360 appears to be a pretty nifty gaming system.

    That said, everything above is a bit second-rate. Bing is clever but overshadowed by Google; Win7 is solid but lacks the polish of OSX; XBox360 is powerful but Nintendo Wii is skipping joyfully all the way to the bank.

    I have the impression that all of the above works as well as

  • Yes, it's fun to rag on Ballmer, but the company has actually made some pretty good strides under him. And who's the magical replacement man?

    I know you enjoy the fantasy of splitting Microsoft up into various divisions (even I think that's a good idea) but I see both Microsoft and Apple as being in roughly the same business: Making a lifestyle software and hardware stack that incorporates as much ease of use into using just their platform as is possible. It's just Microsoft's lifestyle stack also accounts f

    • I said it when the DoJ turned chicken - this was a GOOD thing because it gave linux the time to grow to critical mass. If I were to advise Microsoft, it would be to focus, focus, focus - and that means on only 2 products - Office and Desktop Windows. Sell off everything else. Fortunately, they'll never do that :-)

      they both have portable media device

      Really? Do you know anyone who bought a "Microsoft Portable Media Device" ... and is willing to admit it? :-)

      It's not that I'm anti-Microsoft ... it's that

      • I agree wholeheartedly that Apple is losing their "cool", but I think Microsoft is picking up some of what they lost. And I think that we /.'ers are too close to the fight, as it were. There are plenty of people who love their Zunes.* There are people using Kin. There are people who will never give up their WinMo and use it religiously.

        Until I hear of a viable candidate to replace Ballmer, I think he's still the right man for the job. For right now, I'm just going to agree to disagree with you (which hasn't

        • *I don't personally know anyone that uses a Zune because I prefer to put people on the simpler stack, not the more expandable one. Therefore I put people on iPods and iTunes, and if they figure out it's lacking, then I tell them I don't support Windows Media devices/app, so they can't ask me for help. We've all done it. But the ease of use of using iTunes with an iPod/iPhone+iPod makes it too easy and keeps my support headache to a minimal low. However, I do know anecdotally of several people who have Zunes and prefer them over the iPod. Just nobody I have to support.

          I've known precisely 3 people who have owned a Zune, and it's true that they did enjoy the devices. However, all 3 of them have since switched to using their shiny new Android devices for their music and have ditched the Zune.

          The problem is, enthusiasts tend to shy away from DRM, and the Zune is chock full of it. At least with the iPod, you get SOME stuff that isn't DRM'd to hell. With Android, there's no music store, but you can put whatever you want on it, and then make it a ring tone, if you'd like.

          • My only limitation on ringtones I've found so far is most devices don't seem to like (for whatever software configured reason) a ringtone over right at 30 seconds. So other than that ... I make my own ringtones. Can you really set a whole song as the ringtone on Android, or will it start over after a point?

            • I'm not sure if it will start over, but yes, you can put a whole song or trim it with built-in (as in, on the phone) tools. So far, my phone has gone to voicemail before any song as restarted.

  • http://i.imgur.com/nmQEY.jpg [imgur.com]

    "Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continues... AAY!"

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