Microsoft: A profitable failure

[danrok]

Are Steve Ballmer's days at Microsoft numbered?

See front page:
http://www.aoaforums.com/frontpage/content/view/4165/2/

What do you think?

[cloasters]

I don't know. Is there any other old timer that's as much "family" as Mr Ballmer is?

[cloasters]

Interesting, MS's stock value went up after they announced we ain't buying Yahoo!. And Yahoo!'s went down. Looks like more than one person didn't see why Microsoft should purchase Yahoo!. Do you Yahoo!? Hardly ever, thank you very much.

[danrok]

I'm sure a whole bunch of people must have bought shares in Yahoo prior to this, in the hope of making a quick profit in the event of MS buying them at a higher price.

A fool and his money are easily parted, as the saying goes!

Microsoft has value thanks to its off-line business, i.e. all those new PCs sold with Windows installed.

They haven't really gained or lost anything from the lack of any deal with Yahoo. Microsoft can simply wait it out, and try again, let them sweat.

[Favu]

I think MS are now so engrained in what people consider to be a "PC" that they can make a whole range of mistakes, and people will still go with them - vista is just an example, in a competative market, I don't think it would fair well in competition with OSX or Linux variants.

However people buy it because it is what their new pcs come with, because it is what they are used to and essentially just because it is WINDOWS. And this is just your normal average person, whois no computer enthusiast.

The Microsoft fanboys (and yes, they do exist, everyone knows one, as they say) make things ten times worse, singing the praises of the latest and greatest, without actually considering if it is anything other than what MS PR wing wants them to believe. Convincing people perhaps less computer savvy that might have considered "one of those apple computers" or "that Dell with the other software on it" that they do, in fact, want windows.

It doesn't matter that the majority of their arguments hold no water (vista is not easier to use than OSX, does not work as well as good Linux install, you can work with people on other operating systems...), it is the sheer viral, infecting properties of the fanboy and the blank unquestioning approach of the average user (remember when people thought a 2.66Ghz Celeron was faster than a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4?) that make them the driving force behind windows.

I think the only way to really combat MS would be to start a counter attack on the same level, pick OSX or compromise on a Linux distro that works well (sorry, but BSD and the like are better left in the server room for now) and give it your full backing, convince your friends to try it, your neighbours, sing it's praises in meetings, use it on your laptop, never say it isn't working or you don't know how to do something. I think that with this approach within a few years MS could be shaken from it's pedestal.

There is just one major problem with this plan however - the sheer number of Linux distributions, and people's opinions towards them - I personally don't like Ubuntu, openSuSE is too slow, fedora was not appealing to me, Gentoo is like Lego with text-based instructions... you can see where this is going. In the end I settled on Debian, for now. It is very stable, works well, and is easy to use. However, I don't think Debian is the distribution to lead the crusade, purely because out of the box, it isn't pretty enough out of the box (Compiz is still in unstable), and the your average computer user is very much impressed by pretty graphics.

So, I ask you, which Linux distribution do you think should lead the Charge? Are you willing to compromise on what may not be your favourite distro, but back it anyway, for the greater good?

Favu out!

[Áedán]

Gentoo all the way, built from stage 1...

Or not. You should probably start a separate thread for this...

[Favu]

Heh, that's not a bad idea, I think it might turn out to be a major hijack otherwise

EDIT : Started one HERE

in case anyone is interested?