Microsoft founder Paul Allen's money man wants Redmond to break up The man in charge of Microsoft founder Paul Allen's investment vehicle has suggested Microsoft should be broken up. Allen left Microsoft in 1982 after an illness, but retained a huge parcel of shares and still owns a couple of billion worth of Microsoft stock. That stake is managed by Vulcan Capital, whose chief investment …
IBM demonstrated that business services and back end hardware, while killing off all consumer tech can result in a thriving business.
What I suspect is really the case is that businesses who do R&D thrive. All these people circling round MS, saying they should split up, will be the first to kill off R&D and that would be the death of MS.
@AC 00:05 What have the Romans ever given us?
While the Romans probably didn't invent the aquaduct, they certainly made huge advances in making its benefits easily available to lots of people.
Sort of how MS took a bunch of Unix technologies as made them available in a ready-to-roll form as Active Directory. Before that it was their acquisitioon of MS-DOS.
"Before that it was their acquisitioon of MS-DOS."
An "acquisitioon" is not R&D!
"Sort of how MS took a bunch of Unix technologies as made them available in a ready-to-roll form as Active Directory."
Actually Active Directory was based off of Novell Directory Services. Sure it is based off of x.500 which was releases several years prior. NDS had an issue upon release and Novell offered a workaround before an actual fix was released. Microsoft releases AD and surprise surprise, it had the same flaw and Microsoft offered the same workaround. Microsoft vowed an actual fix but never did and instead waited until a later release of Windows to actually fix it.
So, both of your examples actually just proved my prior statement that copying others is not R&D. The fact is, Microsoft has done very little innovation. Vista was suppose to have a lot of features found in other OS's available at the time. The schedule for Vista kept being pushed further back until Microsoft pulled the plug on a lot of those features. Vista also saw features available in XP removed only to be added back in with Windows 7. Vista had a 5 1/2 year development process but was an incomplete OS compared to XP and Windows 7.
Microsoft has a cash cow of products and they are just riding that wave. Many companies have been in that position in the past and they all came crashing down at some point.
Thereby being Linux just a copy of Unix you mean Linux is no R&D at all?
Sometimes reinventing the wheel is not the way to go, sometimes it is. Microsoft does R&D, copies and acquisitions as any other company. Where do you believe the multitouch technology which made Apple mobile device successful? From internal R&D? Nope, it was an acquisition (Fingerworks). What is Android built on? A copy of Java, and Apache Harmony. Lots of internal R&D here too.... Research: "free java library" -> "I'm feeling lucky".
MS May have purchased the QDOS poduct, but it was barely functional and certainly needed a very large amount of bug fixes and development before it was released. It was then IIRC totally re-written from the ground up for the next major release.
You seem to imply that because a product is based around something that it somehow needs no development or research? AD didn't just magic into existence and certainly uses technologies which aren't available to Novell or x.500 users.
MS do a large amount of R&D for the sake of doing R&D, you'll see articles fairly regularly on The Reg about things such as their no-glasses 3d screens, and various other flashy stuff. Try doing a few internet searches for "Microsoft Research" and see what you find, it's pretty interesting.
> MS May have purchased the QDOS poduct, but it was barely functional and certainly needed a very large amount of bug fixes and development before it was released.
When MS bought DOS from SCP it was _already_ being distributed as SCP-DOS (or 86-DOS) and was sold with SCP's Zebra 8086 S100 boxes.
Certainly it was modified to use MS's FAT file system rather than the CP/M cloned file system.
> It was then IIRC totally re-written from the ground up for the next major release.
It was rewritten by IBM when Gary Kildall demonstrated PC-DOS 1.0 showing a DRI copyright notice that was buried deeply in the code. Both MS and SCP were CP/M OEMs. SCP with their Zebra 8 bit systems and MS with the Z80 Softcard. It has been alleged that SCP decompiled the CP/M BDOS (there were commented decompilers available at that time - see Byte magazine ads) and put the code through Intel's 8-16 bit ASM converter (also available) to arrive at the initial QDOS.
After IBM rewrote PC-DOS as 1.1 it was passed back to MS to create MS-DOS 1.25.
It was rewritten again to make 2.x and to include hard disk support (which had been available for several years on CP/M).
R&D ?
My favourite example of Windows since 3.1, was stacking Glasses on bar for "layer" of OS, about win98se I had to change to paper cups, it was unstable ...
Windows was always a single user system, adapted/Updated/Modified to work with WWW, that why its drowning in viruses, and Java ...
Bill jumped ship, now rats fight for scraps, before it goes down ....
@JamesTQuirk - Thankyou for demonstrating that you know nothing about modern Windows. The NT/2k/XP series of OSes have absolutely nothing to do with the 3.1/95/98 series. The NT OS is multi user from the ground up.
Also, Bill hardly jumped ships, what with him being the Chairman of the board of Microsoft.
@ Anonymous Coward (Windows Certified Thingy ?), r u somebody who paid microsoft a wad of cash to be shown how to actually use & organise, their easy to use software ...?
Your so right, being using using Debian since about 94, I saw writing on wall, for me, Windows gets buried under a linux install, ALWAYS .. So yes "modern" Windows has no value for me, I met it's ancestors ....
Why bother commenting on comment threads about Windows when you by your own admission have no knowledge of the OS?
I've been using Linux since about 1995, I've also been using Windows since 3.1 and DOS from way before then. I know for certain that I wouldn't compare Linux from 1995 to Linux today, so why would you think that Windows is just the same?
How do you even know that Windows has no value to you, if you don't know enough about it to know that it's not a single user system?
Yeah Windows 8 will be a problem, soon as they stop bundling laptops with them, before I buy a new one, but I will find a copy in Junk pile soon ...
I have multible copies of XP, Win7 here, I seen them, fix them & I charge Windows types heaps for it, de-virus/trojan etc regularly, for others that use windows, how people can use that enviroment bewilders me, I know old Legacy, but name says it all software Business is to tight to replace, well sorry I prodded your fragile windows ego's but it sucks, it sucked 20, 10 5, years ago & yesterday as far as I am Concerned ...
I have knowledge of Window "nt" or greater, but it tells me to avoid it .....
It was a guess, I was too busy to write it down, and there was no artifical EGO , like twitter, facebook, things that teenagers use these days, and not sure, did you look at 68K dev, as I said I first installed on Amiga 2000, but if it was 19 years ago, who cares, windows is still a limp dick ...
> The NT OS is multi user from the ground up.
That is simply not true. Originally Cutler intended the new NT to be multiuser but Gates had this removed because he wanted to sell a machine to each user and not one copy of Windows for several users.
Later, Citrix (started by Ed Iacobucci of OS/2 fame), added actual multiuser facilities to NT 3.51 by licencing the NT source code. When NT 4 was released MS refused to release the source code to this until Citrix cross licenced their multiuser code and communications protocols back to MS (for free?) so that MS could build TSE.
While NT may have serial reuse with different logins, it is not (apart from Terminal Services) actual multi user (ie multi concurrent users).
Even with Citrix or TSE there are several nasty hacks needed because there is no real separation between the users on one machine.
Erm, lots of Enterprise level software runs on Linux (and commercial Unix OSes) within businesses.
Linux is extremely well established in the Enterprise, certainly in the financial sector.
Running large volume web based systems on Windows is pretty much non existent at the high end of this industry. You sound like you would be quite surprised how much of a consumer you actually are of Linux based systems when you use the web.
To be fair, all desktop PCs within businesses use Windows for everyday user applications, but I think you're ignoring the backend systems which power the real mission critical stuff a little too much.
MSFT has a very successful business suite called Office, that is used by BOTH businesses and consumers.
If MSFT spun off the "consumer" businesses, what happens to Office?
MSFT has the opportunity to LEVERAGE the success of Office to gain market share in mobile.
The POTENTIAL gains in mobile from leveraging the ownership of Office are immense.
It is short sighted of Vulcan to call for the split up of MSFT at this time, in my opinion.
Their is a powerful synergy between consumer and business, based upon the OFFICE suite.
In the future, almost everything will be accessed from the cloud.
But, who's cloud?
MSFT has the ability to become one of the top cloud destinations, which will become the key to future profitability.
The OFFICE suite, SKYPE, and gaming content will be key attractions for choosing MSFT's cloud over the competition.
Business people are also "consumers". The trend is NOT to carry 2 phones, 2 mobile computers
Most Business people want ONE mobile device from each category, that can handle ALL of their needs.
Bottom line, there are significant synergies gained by being both a business supplier, and a consumer supplier.
Just look at Blackberry...Their business offerings are suffering, because people do not want to carry around 2 devices...
If you are multi billionaire, or the manager of $15 billion, you can have an assistant who follows you around carrying all your various different devices... could it be that these super rich people do not understand how most people operate, in the real world?
Please put down the Kool-Aid. You sound almost as bad as the Fanbois.
Open Office/Office Libre killed the Office Synergy. Sure I use Office at work, never at home. I don't want to be stuck on the upgrade treadmill for an occasional use product. In fact, were it not for the Windows Monopoly there would be no Office Monopoly for MS today. WordPerfect was a far superior product, even when Office was the only working GUI for Windows 95A. Of course back in those days a full copy of WordPerfect set me back $495. Upgrades were more affordable of course. MS cut their money supply by selling competitive upgrade copies for $99. WordPerfect tried the same thing, but without the cash flow from a monopoly OS, it didn't help. Although I did know people who owned copies of both during that time because once you had one the other was only $100 more. One enterprising co-worker even managed to bag both of them for only $200.
We're moving toward platform agnosticism not platform dependencies. Best of breed not monopoly lock-in.
I'm not sure if they are better off as one company or better off split apart. Maybe they can get synergies. Maybe forcing everything into the same mold is what is holding them back. I'm sure as hell in the camp that thinks that's how they screwed up Windows 8. But I'm willing to concede they might be able to maintain a root code base that is similar for devices. Linux certainly does even when it gets specialized for an appliance as dedicated as a car gps.
IBM is cleaning up by focusing on business and of course computer research.
The consumer end is either really gadget or games. Throw in a little search and help and you are there. Samsung came from no where, just like Apple did, just like Sony did, just like the next fad manufacturer will. That's the problem with the consumer market, your time in the sun always comes to an end. So target IBM business and research, not so much the competitor to beat, the whole of that market is that but the competitor to align with. Security is also floating around but thanks to the NSA that is going to end up a one country at a time market, nobody will trust anyone going forward (the fiscal harm the NSA has done to US business is staggering, trillions of dollars will go begging).
So MSN, XBox(gaming division), Bing(back to MSN Search),whole bunch of cash for restructuring and to keep share value up, basically creating MSN consumer products.
Everything else stays with M$. Add in clearing out deadwood, for both divisions and M$ will be able to trim right down and clean up.
While MSN will charge right at Apple and Google, two targets with big revenue to sink their teeth into (Focus is all MSN needs).
I've always liked Bing, but until recently it did not have a good option for sorting search results by date, like Google. Now, at least Bing has introduced the ability to search for the past day, week and month, so I'm finding it more useful. They need to add the ability to sort search results by year, and by custom date, like Google.
Bing's image and video search features are already quite superior to Google from my perspective, and their maps are very good, although the maps don't yet offer auto-complete like Google's maps.
Mind you, it could mean they develop a search engine of their own instead of merely throwing up a script kiddie wrapper round a real one.
@Bob - We've been through this before countless times:
What happened was a google engineer, found a way to game the Bing toolbar (which watches your visited URLs and returns them to MS) so that when he visited a page which was present only on a malformed google search. The bing toolbar picked up the url from the browser and sent it back to MS, the systems at MS basically said "we've not seen this URL before, let's include it in bing."
You repeat this claim again and again, you are corrected again and again but still do it. This is an entirely dishonest way to behave.
http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-accusations-63279
I do believe the microsoft shills round here are following a script. Why just last week when the painful reminder of Uncle Festers "Linux is a cancer" rant came up, they all piped up right on cue, with some pathetic argument about it all being in the past so it doesn't count - similar to this Bing copies Google one, in fact. Well the article on Googles official blog hasn't changed in the almost 3 years since it was written so I'd say it's as much a certainty as it is hilarious watching the apologists try to squirm out of it each time it's brought up.
Which it will be again, I'd warrant.
It's people like you that bring computers to their knees for no good reason and then insist more money must be spent.
Need to run a 30Kb DOS executable? No problem, that just means pissing away 256Mb memory and 10Gb disk space on an XP VM...
Oh, and that still doesn't work quite right because it's now on a separate VM rather than alongside everything else it needs...
Round here you'd be told where to go in no short order.
I can't speak for your desktop PC, but mine is Core i7 3770 water cooled, 32GB fast RAM, SSD boot drive and 5TB secondary storage, plus a decent GPU.
I build a PC for my business to last 5 years, 7 with luck because unlike most businesses I have dealt with, I know that 'best value' is not the same as 'least cost'. Whether you're a serious home user or you make your livelihood with your PC, it should be money well spent, not a question of 'how much'.
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/haizo_baum/sets/72157633423490011/
So, No, using the resources available is NOT pissing them away and I won't even feel such a flea-bite.
If you can't get all the resources you need into one XP VM, maybe you need someone to build you an appliance under VMware, that works fine for me too.
I've been in places where they relied on old programs because they were too tight to get a replacement written. I have warned managers of the need to migrate from DOS and 16-bit applications for safety and maintainability too - until I gave it away as a waste of time in 2004!
In my opinion, it is those managers who put their companies at such risk that should be fired, pronto.
I've been in places where they relied on old programs because they were too tight to get a replacement written. I have warned managers of the need to migrate from DOS and 16-bit applications for safety and maintainability too - until I gave it away as a waste of time in 2004!
In my opinion, it is those managers who put their companies at such risk that should be fired, pronto.
In that case it's simple: we'd never hire you.
As a slightly different but essentially identical example: I work at a university where we have a telescope mount controlled from an old XENIX app. We were able to upgrade that to Openserver 5 but even that is 15 years old now. Anything more recent via XENIX emulation simply doesn't work since it needs semi-direct hardware access via ioctls. Cost of an new and equivalent mount? £130,000. Are you offering to stump up?
That's still small fry: for example Royal Mail have hundreds of millions tied up in Integrated Mail Processors. There's a fancy front end on some of the newer machines but underneath it all they are still DOS based. Are they supposed to scrap that investment on your whim too?
Remember, you haven't qualified your statement in any way so you are either ignorant of reality or chequebook happy. There are plenty of apps out there tied to one specific platform or other for any number of reasons. Simply wishing them away doesn't work.
Well, I never understood why managers need the latest car/laptop/tablet/phone model, but don't care about upgrading software even when it's getting too old.
Your telescope mount software can't be upgraded? Fine - stay with old software, and maybe hardware, if the software can't be run on on newer one - or virtualize it (and you can still give VMs direct access to hardware if you need it). The latest Hubble upgrade required technicians to work on hardware and software from the '80s - and they did, didn't ask, "hey, we need <whatever> to support VMS and CP/M and 8" floppies!"
But you can't ask endless compatibility with old software from newer operating systems, there's a point when going forward means to cut backward compatibility.
If a company like Royal Mail is unable to plan investments to keep its software updated as technology changes, well, there's a lot to be worried about. Do they plan to deliver mail still by horse, steam trains and Morse code? Or did they plan - and invest - to deliver mail using more modern media?
As everything else, software is not something "buy once, use forever". Its obsolescence and upgrade cycle must be planned as everything else - machinery, cars, etc. If management fails it, well, it means there are the wrong people in the wrong place.
"don't care about upgrading software even when it's getting too old"
What do you mean by "too old"?
If you mean it is not doing the job that is required of it, then yes, something needs to be done. But if you have something special that does what is required efficiently and reliably, why change it?
We have an ancient DOS application and it runs for months on end without fault, only restarted when system updates need a reboot or configuration changes have to be made. To re-write that would be man-years of effort, followed by a year or more of bug-fixing, and all to get back to exactly where we currently are in terms of function.
To me that represents business resources that could be used more effectively elsewhere.
And having done so, by your book we would be then saying in 1-2 years time "oh you don't do it that way any more as the .net/HAL/silverlight/etc assumptions have changes so you need to"... and so go through a lot of said pain again, and again.
As the grammatically-challenged, but pertinent saying goes: If it ain't broke - don't fix it.
"If it ain't broke - don't fix it."
That's what lazy syadmins spending their work hours watching porn on the Internet, and managers more interested in changing their company cars with their budgets want you to believe. And that's what made the IT systema a paraphernalia of unsecure badly configured systems running old, unamanteinable software.
You have two choice: let the old software run on old systems, or you have to upgrade it because lack of support. Everything has an obsolescence cycle - why software should last forever? Are you working on a fifty year old desktop and chair, lightin it with an old incandescent lamp, and typing on a keyboard from the '80s, and using a green phosphor CRT monitor? Do you still use perfectly working 10Mb hubs? No, you have changed them even if perfectly working to get something more "modern". Face it - software needs to be upgraded too, and you have to plan and invest for that as well. A well written DOS application can become a Windows console applications with very few changes. If the code is no longer maintenable, or lost, well, the problem is not Windows not supporting DOS apps any longer....
It's funny, there are peope here who would kill for the latest mobe (while any old mobe can still place calls perfectly), but Windows has to support code thirty years old. BTW - how many 16 bit apps can Linux run? How many old PowerPC applications can the latest OSX run?
"typing on a keyboard from the '80s, and using a green phosphor CRT monitor?"
Actually I do still use a 10+ year old keyboard because it has a much better feel than your typical $5 ones that almost everyone now supplies. But I have changed my monitor to a better one. Not "modern", but better.
"A well written DOS application can become a Windows console applications with very few changes."
Excuse me while I stop laughing. Have you actually tried to port a complex bit of software that was written to use the old DOS graphics libraries and that assumed direct hardware I/O was permitted?
"BTW - how many 16 bit apps can Linux run?"
AFIK there never were any 16-bit (i.e. segment/offset memory model) programs for Linux as it started life in a flat 32-bit memory model. Same as Windows NT.
But today a 64-bit Linux can run a lot of 16-bit DOS programs using dosemu. While MS, with billions of dollars to spend, has decided that their equivalent ntvdm (which is how they supported DOS and Win3.1/95/98 stuff) will not be supported any more.
Ultimately with Linux I can do something about it if things break for me, but for Windows I am screwed if MS decided to change something, and after years of Windows usage that is something I now value a lot.
To reply to me AC self:
"assumed direct hardware I/O was permitted"
While ntvdm will not permit general I/O, it emulates serial & parallel port I/O behaviour reasonably well.
However with dosemu if needed (and desperate/bold/stupid, delete as applicable) you can give direct I/O rights to the DOS program for special hardware access.
It was Intel that removed Virtual 86 mode from x64 processor running in long mode. There was little MS could do to support DOS in Windows without it, but with emulation. But why spend time to support really outdated applications and cripple the system with folder redirection and lower security?
It was time to cut some ties with the past and look forward. Why no one complained when Apple removed PowerPC apps support from OSX?
And what graphical applications are you still running today but games??
"little MS could do to support DOS in Windows without it, but with emulation"
Well dosemu manages such emulation and they don't have MS' budget for programming staff.
"Why no one complained when Apple removed PowerPC apps support from OSX?"
I think you will find a lot of folk complained. However, not many Apple users have built business or science systems on their products, most have been in the creative/content-generation business who are happier with changing for fashion.
"And what graphical applications are you still running today but games?"
Anything that uses menus and/or a mouse. So basically that is pretty much everything interactive, other than file I/O or database-like programs (which are often easier to port, as long as they were written in C/FORTRAN/Pascal and not in something obscure or using x86 assembly in places).
And right there is the business need to re-write the code to comply with modern security standards. If you allow the 16-bit app direct access you've opened up a hole a mile wide that hackers will sail an oil tanker through.
No it's not pretty, but buck up and pay the money to secure the system. The university telescope you can probably make a case for a waiver on. It doesn't need to be networked. But it will need a decent security protocol as well given Stuxnet.
Want some qualifications, eh?
Firstly, assertions like "we'd never hire you" carry no weight at all when you're over 50 and apparently already past it.
Meanwhile, I make a living writing real-time embedded systems right down to the metal on ARM processors.
One particular device is a classic closed-loop motor control job to throw tennis balls accurately, finding and tracking a star should be child's play today if a processor from 15 years ago could do it.
http://www.tennismatic.com/main/page_products_ball_machines_t200_series.html
In the past I have done IBM 3270 screen-scraping for Australia's first Mobile Data courier system for Skypak, The original Freight Management System for Ansett Airfreight, and the Sortation Plant control program for TNT's Enfield Sortation Plant which handled 4 parcels per second at maximum load UNDER WINDOWS! as much as any Royal Mail plant. I have real-time down cold.
Saving flying Silent Trader aircraft flying overnight from Adelaide alone for Ansett saved millions.
Feel free to verify any of this with my old manager - http://www.linkedin.com/pub/john-szwec/7/493/94b
I run Cross Compiling, Simulation and PCB design mostly on my PC and for the chap who could have bought a PC each year, I say "9 women can't have a child in 1 month", you wouldn't have the same capability as this PC from year 1 and probably not by year 5 either.
This post has been deleted by its author
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
