241–250 of 283 posts
I almost choked when I read Microsoft's new mission statement: "our strategy will focus on creating a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most." In other words, Ballmer wants the company to "focus" on being everything to everyone! Not a good sign for the business. -- PS. Compare Ballmer's long,…
What is one good thing that Ballmer has done for MS? He's ridden the momentum left by Gates, and since then..... what? Nothing new & good. If I'm an investor in MS, is he really the best option? Not that Microsoft isn't a good company and does some great work (Microsoft Research labs are amazing, I don't care what people say), but honestly it seems like as a company, Microsoft hasn't really done anything new & better…
Just imagine if he made a reckless but well advertized decision! The stock would rise and I would short that so hard they would name a cake after me.
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It's a mission statement, not a strategy.
That's still extremely vague. Much more than Google's.
What do failing, bloated organizations do when they have no other ideas? Reorganize!!
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Software is becoming a cheap commodity, due to open-source, due to the freemium model on the web, due to piracy, due to the $0.99 or ads-enabled apps that are so popular lately. Cheap software is becoming a cheap commodity. It's relatively easy for any competent software developer to write a diary app with a pretty UI skin, or a basic text editor and formatting engine to drive a lightweight word processor, or a simpl…
That's all true, but you also have to recognize the fact that the market for people like you is essentially saturated. To use a different example, this is why Adobe has abandoned selling boxed copies of Photoshop, and is moving to it's "Creative Cloud" rental scheme. That is the real benefit of web applications. It's not that they're easier for the user. That's a side benefit. The real benefit comes from the fact tha…
I don't accept that premise, and moving to Creative Cloud in Adobe's case is a great example of why not.
As it happens, I use Creative Suite for work myself. My company paid a lot of money to buy it. There are plenty of things Adobe could have done that would have made it more valuable to us, and we would gladly have dropped the same money again to buy an upgrade that did a few of those things. But in several years, they haven't managed to do any of them, and so we haven't bought any of the most recent pre-CC versions.
The fact that Adobe's Creative Suite revenue stream dried up in our case has nothing to do with buy vs. rent, it has to do with not adding anything of value to us in several years of development and therefore not being worth buying again. For exactly the same reason, plus the fact that we would never allow our data to effectively be held hostage, we aren't subscribing to Creative Cloud, so Adobe will probably never get any more money from us for that product line.
PC vs. web is only a proxy for buy vs. rent if the purchase really was a one-off. For almost every piece of commercial software I use, that wouldn't necessarily be the case, and in fact the developers could easily add enough value that I'd pay them more money for an upgrade. The fact that they are pushing for the subscription model instead, even while doing funny maths that assumes I would have upgraded regularly to try and justify the cost, just demonstrates to me that they aren't actually confident that they know how to add that value and keep me paying them.
And, like it or not, the "buy" option is slowly being driven from the market.
I don't really accept that premise, either. Companies like Microsoft and Adobe have held near-unassailable leads in large and lucrative software markets for years. Of course they can abuse that position for a while to price gouge those who, rightly or wrongly, feel that they absolutely must have the latest versions of things to be able to work properly. It's even worthwhile for the software companies to offer the first hit for free, but in the end, what they're doing still isn't in the best interests of their customers. Sooner or later the market is going to figure that out, and sooner or later someone with a smarter plan is going to start providing a real alternative.
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That makes them a lot more like Apple and really puts Dell and HP in a sticky place. One wonders what the world would look like if Apple embraced people making cloned hardware. I'm not sure, but it could lead to some very interesting manoeuvres if the big PC vendors decided relying on Windows was no longer safe and building one or more freely available alternatives was in their interests. People joke a lot about the…
I think this is true but "working with the community" from the giant's perspective is often different than the community's perspective. I see Oracle as an extreme example, but prior to them Sun's lip service on Java early on really didn't help the community trying to improve Java but it did keep it moving along a path.
Perhaps, but it would be a more natural alignment in the case of hardware companies that wanted the best possible software available to drive adoption of their platforms than in any previous case I can think of. Sun's business model for several of their technologies, including Java, was never entirely clear to me. On the other hand, a consortium of big hardware vendors spending a hundred million dollars to develop the best desktop software in history and then just giving it away to anyone who wants it for free has a pretty obvious business benefit if the result is changing market trends and protecting their multi-billion-dollar revenue streams.
I almost choked when I read Microsoft's new mission statement: "our strategy will focus on creating a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most." In other words, Ballmer wants the company to "focus" on being everything to everyone! Not a good sign for the business. -- PS. Compare Ballmer's long,…
Is it weird that Google's mission statement doesn't describe their primary revenue stream? I suppose they could say that they're making information universally accessible and useful to individuals as well as advertisers. But I don't know, their mission statement makes them sound like the best library ever. Not an advertising company.
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Is Windows Phone more of a walled garden than than iOS? Is the Xbox more of a walled garden than the Wii U? The argument is still complete hyperbole.
Windows Phone is more of a walled garden than Android.
I almost choked when I read Microsoft's new mission statement: "our strategy will focus on creating a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most." In other words, Ballmer wants the company to "focus" on being everything to everyone! Not a good sign for the business. -- PS. Compare Ballmer's long,…
Is it weird that Google's mission statement doesn't describe their primary revenue stream? I suppose they could say that they're making information universally accessible and useful to individuals as well as advertisers. But I don't know, their mission statement makes them sound like the best library ever. Not an advertising company.