Few days back, I got an intimation from MS that they will conduct a SAM (Software Assessment Management) where as they will asses and check the compliance of MS products at out company. I was amused and more funny was that some where it was mentioned, that this exercise shall have no direct cost implication on us. This is crap. The while idea is to find out pirated licenses and ask for buying these licenses!!!
Bill Gates was a technical Genius combined with a strong business acumen. But I would not hold the same respect for recent MS decisions. I started working on MS in 1990, when they created PC-DOS for IBM PCs. PC-DOS was built by MS for IBM for the first real desktop computer. MS had the copyright and they started to sell PC-DOS as MS-DOS to every possible vendor. The rest is history. MS-DOS was everywhere as small businesses could afford cheap desktops with a small operating system. Computers moved from large offices to small business and homes.
The story of MS goes on of business acumen rather then innovation. MS-DOS and later MS-Windows thrived as it was easily pirated, cheap licenses and simplicity (compared to Unix) and soon it found its way in every house and small business. MS then built windows hinging on X-Windows, Excel was copied from Lotus-123, Word from Wordstar and so on. Though windows kept crashing, it's price and piracy and simplicity... let many third party application being developed to make it really rule the world. I was personally devastated when giants like Digital VAX VMS was devoured by a PC maker called Compaq. This is not goliath vs david story! This was a real pittance. Digital was a legend on which Unix was invented and which now people have forgotten. What followed was worse. I remember working on Silicon Graphics Terminal (SGI), Sun, HP, IBM servers. Some of them survived but some of them collapsed. Legends like SGI, Siemens and Sun collapsed.
MS came with its own servers to compete with Unix servers and actually people started to use them for high end applications. MS has in late 1990's become so big that they wanted to control everything. Explorer was made part of the OS. EU and US at that time considered braking MS into smaller companies. That was the heights of MS. Around this time, Bill decides to leave the top decision making in MS and pursue his philanthropic interests. Things start to change.
Java came around this time which offered interoprablity and platform independence. More and more application became web based thus needing to do away with a client side of platform. Only a browser was needed which was HTML standards complaint. Around this time a revolution started to happen in open source technologies. More and more companies started to offer hosted, cloud based and pay per use products. Ubuntu and more Linux clones came into existence which were GUI based and offered full range of applications which were mostly open source and free.
What is going to happen to MS? Who needs MS? Only if you use legacy windows based application like India's popular Tally software, you would need MS. Else shifting to Ubuntu is fun. It has much more variety, themes and customization then Windows would ever have. Google, Facebook and others generate their revenues from pay per use whereas MS still drives it revenues from perpetual licenses. Windows 10 is their last release... Office... there are enough options on Linux... their servers... like IIS, LDAP.... why would people pay for these unstable proprietary technologies... Who uses IIS when WAMP or LAMP is open-source and wonderful... Once we had a great product in VB, VC about 20 years back and I loved VS. Now they brought in .NET to rival Java/SOAP. .NET is cumbersome and again very platform dependent. So eventually, Visual Studio lost its charm. MS bought Nokia, killed Symbain with their OS. This is not a bad move although MS itself has written off this investment. I think, one product which is still popular from MS is skype. Things like Bing will not survive as Google moves at a very fast pace.
The stock of Google doubled this year whereas MS stocks fell by 50%. These markets are smart and can sense the wind much more then we technical folks.
MS is now hiring external companies like Deloitte for audit of small (actually very small companies with 2-3 users). I think it will be double whammy for MS. First they will pay throguth their nose to companies like Deliote, secondly they will only loose users who in first place made Windows popular. More and more apps will be Web based and than who will need MS?
About Myself : Ajay Garg, spend over 25 years working for companies like Siemens, Erricsson, BMC, Syntel, Globallogic, AVL leading very large enterprise delivery teams in US, Germany, Switzerland, Greece and across all continents.
Bill Gates was a technical Genius combined with a strong business acumen. But I would not hold the same respect for recent MS decisions. I started working on MS in 1990, when they created PC-DOS for IBM PCs. PC-DOS was built by MS for IBM for the first real desktop computer. MS had the copyright and they started to sell PC-DOS as MS-DOS to every possible vendor. The rest is history. MS-DOS was everywhere as small businesses could afford cheap desktops with a small operating system. Computers moved from large offices to small business and homes.
The story of MS goes on of business acumen rather then innovation. MS-DOS and later MS-Windows thrived as it was easily pirated, cheap licenses and simplicity (compared to Unix) and soon it found its way in every house and small business. MS then built windows hinging on X-Windows, Excel was copied from Lotus-123, Word from Wordstar and so on. Though windows kept crashing, it's price and piracy and simplicity... let many third party application being developed to make it really rule the world. I was personally devastated when giants like Digital VAX VMS was devoured by a PC maker called Compaq. This is not goliath vs david story! This was a real pittance. Digital was a legend on which Unix was invented and which now people have forgotten. What followed was worse. I remember working on Silicon Graphics Terminal (SGI), Sun, HP, IBM servers. Some of them survived but some of them collapsed. Legends like SGI, Siemens and Sun collapsed.
MS came with its own servers to compete with Unix servers and actually people started to use them for high end applications. MS has in late 1990's become so big that they wanted to control everything. Explorer was made part of the OS. EU and US at that time considered braking MS into smaller companies. That was the heights of MS. Around this time, Bill decides to leave the top decision making in MS and pursue his philanthropic interests. Things start to change.
Java came around this time which offered interoprablity and platform independence. More and more application became web based thus needing to do away with a client side of platform. Only a browser was needed which was HTML standards complaint. Around this time a revolution started to happen in open source technologies. More and more companies started to offer hosted, cloud based and pay per use products. Ubuntu and more Linux clones came into existence which were GUI based and offered full range of applications which were mostly open source and free.
What is going to happen to MS? Who needs MS? Only if you use legacy windows based application like India's popular Tally software, you would need MS. Else shifting to Ubuntu is fun. It has much more variety, themes and customization then Windows would ever have. Google, Facebook and others generate their revenues from pay per use whereas MS still drives it revenues from perpetual licenses. Windows 10 is their last release... Office... there are enough options on Linux... their servers... like IIS, LDAP.... why would people pay for these unstable proprietary technologies... Who uses IIS when WAMP or LAMP is open-source and wonderful... Once we had a great product in VB, VC about 20 years back and I loved VS. Now they brought in .NET to rival Java/SOAP. .NET is cumbersome and again very platform dependent. So eventually, Visual Studio lost its charm. MS bought Nokia, killed Symbain with their OS. This is not a bad move although MS itself has written off this investment. I think, one product which is still popular from MS is skype. Things like Bing will not survive as Google moves at a very fast pace.
The stock of Google doubled this year whereas MS stocks fell by 50%. These markets are smart and can sense the wind much more then we technical folks.
MS is now hiring external companies like Deloitte for audit of small (actually very small companies with 2-3 users). I think it will be double whammy for MS. First they will pay throguth their nose to companies like Deliote, secondly they will only loose users who in first place made Windows popular. More and more apps will be Web based and than who will need MS?
About Myself : Ajay Garg, spend over 25 years working for companies like Siemens, Erricsson, BMC, Syntel, Globallogic, AVL leading very large enterprise delivery teams in US, Germany, Switzerland, Greece and across all continents.
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