ESCAPE VELOCITY

1 - Could there have been some scenario wherby Microsoft would have a little less cash, Bill Gates would have a little less wealth, there would be no Zunes and the software would be a whole lot better?

2 - The thing that blows my mind is the XBox. $10 billion in losses on that thing. What would Windows & Office look like now with $10 billion worth of investment?

If they spent $1 billion on Exchange, *I* might even wanna use it!

$6 billion to buy a web ad company? $650 million in penalties in the EU? $160 million for Iowa anti-trust settlement? And yet MS customers can't even get a spreadsheet program that can multiply.

It's pathetic.

And yet Ballmer plays his fiddle.

3 - Halo 3 ??
Oh, and those two X-box 360's I had replaced.

4 - Nathan, I'd be happy if they'd make MSIE comply with standards. Web developers waste so much time "fixing" their mistakes.

5 - Oh, but I disagree -- when I spend money, I don't do it as an investment. I do it to gain a service or product. If I feel that the value gained from that service or product was worth the money spent (ROI), then I really don't care what they actually do with it.

Now, if you are disappointed in the service or products from MS, then by all means, stop purchasing them.

Shareholders care what is done with the money -- not customers.

6 - That's way more retarted than my post on Ed's blog (which you described as most retarted post on Ed's blog) :P
Especially because you made it up, Microsoft would never write that for real. My words were all about truth and facts.

7 - Great post Nathan, so funny and oh so true...

Well worth a Digg I thought... { Link }

8 - @5 - Dave, when you buy an isolated good or service, that's true, and I would agree wholeheartedly. Software Assurance is a timed investment. It's like buying a house, not a meal. It's a futures contract.

9 - Mika's starting to worry me now

Re the Excel thing, indeed, nuts! Although according to some, "That isn't a bug, but well-known floating point representation inaccuracy. FPUs don't work in decimal.

Hmm. Tell that to the Revenue.

10 - @6 - Well, I have to give to you. This comment was even more retarded than the one you did on Ed's blog. You're getting good at it or are you just trying to keep us amused?

11 - @9 & 10: I could say so many things, but I think we should all keep silent for a moment and think about things.

12 - I am now meditating quietly

13 - Time to Short Microsoft.....again

14 - What other industry besides software where your customers pay you to fix product defects?

Software Assurance makes sense to finance- if I can spread the payments of licenses overtime and get a few perks. Then why not? I'm not defending but you can see why it may be attractive to some. However it's not catching on as MS would like so they are sweetening the SA pot almost everyday.

Regarding the "spending money with a vendor", I generally agree with Nathan's statement, *but* it sounds more like something a shareholder would say than a customer. Technically you could purchase an alternate product or service if you really don't like they way they are conducting business.

15 - @14 - That's exactly my point. Why are you still a Microsoft customer, when what you're paying for isn't better Windows & Office versions -- it's video games, advertisers, MP3 players, legal fees and bribes. None of those things serve Microsoft's business customers. So why remain a business customer?

16 - Nathan is right, and really, it's quite sad. Shareholder/Customer...whatever. I've said it before: Why isn't Microsoft *better* than they are? Vista was years late, and a shadow of what it was supposed to be. XBox has succeeded somewhat with huge subsidies (and Sony's seeming intent on their own self-destruction). Windows Mobile is finally gaining some traction, but will never kill off the Blackberry/Symbian/MobileLinux crowd. Firefox came from obscurity and took 50%+ of the market while MS was ignoring IE innovation. Zune is a joke.

The only market they've ever completely dominated is the Windows/Office frachises, and now even those are facing the most credible competition they have ever had.

A company (any company!) with their revenue stream and $30B in cash should have more successes.

17 - I thought about this a bit more. Why are some (self including) using MS products given glaring issues with support, feeling gouged, etc. I come back to the same answer it's "good enough". I've attempted a few times to go a week without using a MS product and couldn't. Particularly I just tried switching to OpenOffice, while I like it a lot, I am stuck with a lot of Excel VBA code that I can't easily port to the OpenOffice equivalent (which isn't that easy to begin with).

That's always been MS sweet spot- DOS and Windows was "good enough" in spot of stability issues.

*But* it is changing- we are almost exclusively Linux on the backend servers, and most of us use Linux desktops exclusively (accept for me where I use both b/c I tied a bunch of stuff to VB a long time ago).

18 - But Mike, the situation that you describe isn't that Excel is "good enough." It's that the pain (cost) of switching is too great. If you find the MS spreadsheet adequate to your needs, and you find the OpenOffice spreadsheet adequate to your needs, but you don't switch because the "free" version would actually cost you (the price of redeveloping your VBA stuff in UNO) then it's not the product comparison that matters for you, right?

It's the lock-in on the VBA platform.

Even writing that custom code in the first place constituted an investment. And you expected ROI because -- well, OF COURSE Microsoft would keep Excel up-to-date and bug-free.

Except they haven't. They spent that revenue on subsidizing video games, and trying to push their own ISO standard through.

So now what? What happens if, say, a major customer of yours says "we will only transaction business in ISO standard document formats?" You have to switch to ODF, and Office isn't going to support you in that move.

Now have to pay whatever you paid to license Excel, PLUS whatever you need from a 3rd party to do conversions. Your cost went up. Perhaps enough to justify rewriting your VBA stuff.

But remember, Microsoft's tactic all along has been to hold back other development work. They make it harder for OpenOffice to be compatible with VBA (undocumented formats, anyone?) and therefore increase your cost to switch. That benefits them, but it doesn't do a damn thing to make you better off.

Let me remind any readers I might have left that I'm not some sort of open source zealot. I'm all for commercial software. I love shareholder returns. I love companies that make fat profits.

And I also love customers who are aware of their relationships. My AIM ID is caveatemptor27! { Link }

So if you're a Microsoft customer today, you need to ask yourself: how am I being treated as a customer? Not in terms of whether someone cuts me a "special deal," or takes me for a ride on a yacht -- but in terms of whether Microsoft is making sure that *I* have better solutions tomorrow.

19 - Well those are good points. I should mention we *are* converting all the vba automation stuff because execution speed has been a problem for a long time. Actually we can write Excel as XML so we can use "whatever" to do that, and potentially can be opened by any other ODF compliant package.

I do see your point, it's like taking money and being told it's being allocated for one thing and spent elsewhere (sorta of like the US govt :) )

20 - Excel sucks. I say that, and everyone I have met says that too. So it's not only my personal too much demanding opinion.

I could give hundreds of examples why Excel sucks, but that won't change anything, since everyone knows it. The root of the problem is that people are not informed that they could use OpenOffice Calc at once, without any re-training, and they could even do the installation themselves in no time. It's just a 118.8MB file which installs in much less than 2 minutes (I just installed it on my new PC while writing this) on about any workstation (Windows, Linux, Solaris SPARC, Solaris x86, Mac OS X, Linux PPC, FreeBSD).

I meet daily issues like:
1) Why does Excel make the number I pasted as Dates?
There's no way to disable it, and the user has to learn how to format columns as text and do a complicated paste as values into another sheet and then somehow paste them back. I don't even remember the whole chain what was needed to do a simple paste in Excel.

2) Why does Excel delete my clipboard after each paste?
I don't know, it makes absolutely no sense, and OpenOffice Calc does it correctly, as well as about any other application than Excel. If Excel deletes your clipboard, it could as well delete all files on your computer, I don't see any difference in the fatality of that (you might have some important stuff on the clipboard, like cutted notes documents).

3) My VBA macro in Excel worked fine, and now it doesn't anymore. Nothing has changed.
I think the reason is that Excel sucks. I will rewrite the agent using LotuScript in about 5 minutes. Besides that your VBA script took 2 hours to lookup the prices from a Domino database, the LotuScript version takes only 3 seconds to do the same job, as you can run it directly with 1 line in your browser.

n) and hundreds more... and about 98% of them works fine in OpenOffice Calc, and the rest can be done with LotuScript Notes/Web agents.

21 - By the way....on the issue of MSFT reinvesting its money in those games & such...

In a conversation on Power Lunch today with one analyst, the CNBC folks asked the analyst that exact question.

The answer was something to the tune of no they don't see it as a problem, they're reinvesting the "cash cow" revenues into other areas and if they weren't then she would see them as easily replaced.

I would argue if they aren't investing in those cash cow products a bit more to make them better, and addressing customer price issues, they're equally easy to replace.

22 - @21 - Kevin, are you suggesting that CNBC is reading my blog?

Actually, I could see them reading Ed's. That would be pretty funny.

Incidentally, if that PowerLunch is downloadable some where, I'd love to see it.

Thanks.