Is M$ Finally Over? The M$ Death Watch.

Journal twitter's Journal: Is M$ Finally Over? The M$ Death Watch. 6

Journal by twitter on Sunday October 05, 2008 @10:05PM

Update 05/02/2011 - In 2008, I asked, "Has the end finally come for M$ and non free software?" The answer is now obviously, "yes". Hopefully, the company will implode before it can do more harm. Recent victories through entriesm and other dirty tricks have ruined once great companies but have been hollow. They corrupted ISO but no one switched to OOXML, and Office profits continue to decline. They took over Yahoo but Bing was caught scraping Google results off user's PCs and remained a huge loss. Mobile computing efforts were a bigger flop than Zune. Microsoft managed to coopt Nokia but carriers remained skeptical. Novell was finally slaughtered but this brought nothing to Microsoft other than government limited patents. The courts wasted much time, money and effort but ultimately rejected Microsoft's patent extortion as companies finally fought back. Microsoft customers are stuck between an ancient OS that works but is painful to use and modern versions that are not much better but come with unacceptable privacy loses and user restrictions. No businesses that count have moved to Vista/Windows 7 and hapless users are spread equally between XP, Vista and Windows 7 so that none of these very different and diverging platforms has more than 30% of the shrinking "PC" market. The monopoly is over, here's my write up of the major signposts that got us here as they happened:

2009 was declared the year of Desktop Linux because Windows 7 failed and netbooks drove sales. Vista was rejected, even when rebranded, and there were lots of stories about how the company was past it's prime. Opinion of their new Office is about as low. Partners like CompUSA and Circuit City failed with Vista, Adobe is under full frontal attack for the remaining "profit centers," and outsource partners are imploding [2]. There's been a regular executive exodus. After three straight quarters of missing Wall Street expectation came news of massive losses, a now confirmed plan to go into debt buying their own stock and a hiring freeze. The fourth straight quarter of misses was worse than the others and M$ fired around 10,000 workers. In 2010 Microsoft bullied gnu/linux out of netbooks only to watch the market drop 40% as people rushed to Linux and OSX powered phones and tablets. Even Forbes has declared Microsoft over.

For fun, listen to this while you read, or take a tour of M$'s own Software Graveyard.

The Death Watch:

1998-2008, a decade of failure capped by Vista and destruction of their Patent Portfolio.

M$FT Stock Price, this never recovered from it's high of $58 right before the dot com crash of 2000. While other companies like IBM, Apple and Google matched or exceed their 2000 value, M$ has remained at half its bomb price and capped out at $35 in 2007. Watch it tumble despite $40 billion in planned buy backs. 52Wk Low: $14.87 (price last seen in 1998) - 2011 update, the stock stays under $30, often under $25 and competitors like Apple out grew them in revenue, cash on hand and value
1998 - M$ recognizes GNU/Linux as a competitive threat.
2001 - 2003 - the XP roll out failure. A new OS was supposed to lift them out of the dolldrums but did not. Retailers and manufacturers alike soon craved a new version.
2002 - Jim Alchin and other insiders at M$ panic about GNU/Linux, "I'm scared ... we are not on a path to win against Linux." Plans are laid to attack patent indemnification and cover the world in FUD. The SCO attack happens six months later and the infamous "Get the facts campaign" kicks off. They play the same games with Novell still and prepare "studdies" such as this recent example. A steady trickle of success stories slowly negates the FUD.
2005 - XP SP2 lockin and bugs gives people Nightmares
2006, Steve Ballmer tells us M$ is all about advertisers. There can be no happy ending to that story.
2006 - 2008 - Vista Cratered.
06/29/2007 - GPL3 negates the Novell Patent Deal.
10/2007 - Vista Failure starts to destroy the M$ Retail Chain. DSG sinks, CompUSA and Circuit City soon follow.
02/21/2008 - Roughly Drafted and Boycott Novell detail massive losses and potential fraud as M$'s cash on hand shrinks from $60 to $20 billion.
08/06/2008 - Announces they will go $20 billion into debt buying back $40 billion of their own stock.
10/30/2008 - Bilski Decision eliminates business method patents and makes worthless much of M$'s patent portfolio

2008, the end is apparent. Obituaries are written, employees, investors and customers bail out of the monopoly.

05/19 - Time Magazine, M$, "an empire in rapid decline"
05/28 - CNet "Microsoft still doesn't understand the Internet, the ultimate child of the open-source movement. It is the Internet that simultaneously makes Google and open source so brilliantly destructive and disruptive to Microsoft's future."
09/30 - Steve Ballmer personally begs the US Congress to pass the $700E9 bailout so big companies and OEMs can keep buying Windows. Congress does, but companies and households tighten up anyway.
10/03 - Salon.com "Microsoft does not matter any more"
10/05 - Techradar "Has Microsoft lost it? Rejected by Yahoo!, outgunned by Google and humiliated by Apple, it's fighting for its survival"
10/05 - Open contempt from the Guardian, "This is not a company that knows what it's doing."
10/08 - Famous investment banker bails on M$, blames "Google envy" for poor performance.
10/17 - Steve Ballmer admits Google Apps bite into M$ Office market share in the influential US college market.
10/20 - M$ threatens Red Hat with bogus patent suits, bringing M$ that much closer to the litigation failure phase of tech senility.
10/21 - Sweaty B says M$ won't be more successful than Vista
10/22 - China is not bullied by WGA black screen, so much for developing nations as a growth market.
10/23 - Russia moves all schools to GNU/Linux. This is what they said they would do when M$ sued and threatened school teacher with jail for "Piracy".
10/24 - Traditional software sales tumble in Q1, a bad start for what is going to be a very bad year. They have less cash than Apple, a hiring freeze and a $500 million cost cutting plan that will can scale up or down.
10/27 - The first reviews of Windows 7 are negative. It sucks like Vista and is getting worse.
10/28 - How low can you go? M$ puts a $70 million squeeze on old folks and charity with a bait and switch license plan. Way to go! Six months later, initial outrage had turned into a full scale backlash
10/29 - Fortune Magazine, "PC makers move closer to a post-Windows world" with free software they can customize themselves.
10/30 - Information Week, "Is The Cloud The End Of Microsoft?"
10/30 - The Bilski Decision (US Supreme Court), business method patents axed. This may eliminate patent trolls, like M$. A full range of views on this now uncertain business plan is here.
11/03 - The financial melt down shaves billions of dollars spending from M$'s biggest partners banks (22% of revenues) and government. Boycott Novell documents some outrageous behavior by large banks, a kind of "support" that would be good to lose. No wonder they are falling over.
11/07 - ComputerWorld, Netbooks show the end of M$ dominance. "Windows is a slow dinosaur competing with the fast-moving Linux mammals. It's not a race I expect Windows to win. Linux is already more stable, more secure, vastly faster boot times, and it's far less expensive than Windows."
11/08 - Analysts conclude that Netbooks take a bite out of M$ Profits
11/19 - Another large investor details M$ failures and mismanagement but his plan of action falls short of what's really required to fix things.
11/20 - Inquirerer notices that Windows 7 will be stillborn in the recession.
11/20 - Bonds issued to fund buybacks. The amount, like everything else concerning M$, is unclear but even the $20 billion dollar amount will put them in debt.
11/30 - M$ insanely announces plans to spend $20 billion on data centers
12/04 - M$ PR firm Waggener Edstrom tries to "correct" a story. The reporter responds by telling the drone just what a pile of insecure suck M$ software really is.
12/05 - Analysts note M$'s many competitors and say the company will miss already reduced market expectations
12/01 - Former M$ executive, Keith Curtis, writes a book about how free software is the future and how non free software drags down research and the entire economy.
12/19 - Channel Web, " due to a recent spate of mishaps, it sure looks like that when it comes to the desktop and end-user side of things, Microsoft's days may be numbered"

2009, the melt down turns into a death spiral. Even M$ Word fans see the end of an era and Windows 7 turns out to be an even bigger disaster than Vista.

01/05 - Analysts recommend 10% layoffs at M$, that's about 9,000 people.
01/12 - Vista's failure was so bad that PC Makers expect sales to fall another 2 to 8% despite the release of Vista rebranded as Windows 7
01/13 - Intel and other embedded device makers bypass M$ and GNU's market domination becomes obvious.
01/14 - As M$'s money runs out, three major M$ outsourcing and GNU/Linux attack partners, Infosys, Satyam and Wipro, come under investigation for fraud and plenty is soon found. Failure is working it's way up the M$ "pawn" chain. First vendors and OEMs suffered, now software partners.
01/22 - M$ fires 5,000 employees. 8% decline in client revenue and other losses combine to an 11% drop in net income. Cuts are across the board and includes programmers and a 15% cut back on contractors. The contractor count is about 5,000, so original estimates of 10.000 cuts were correct. Some analysts point out that operating expenses will actually increase to $14 billion from $13 and say that more needs to be cut. Product in the dolldrums, programmers fired, this is a classic tech death spiral.
01/22 - Settling the "Vista Capable lawsuit may cost $8.5 billion dollars, money they don't have.
01/23 - A US Senator looks into M$'s H1-B foreign worker hiring. He rightly connects M$'s recently gained H1B hiring permissions to the wave of firing. It is against the law to hire H1B workers when there are qualified US applicants. The program should be terminated because it is unfair to foreign workers, people should be treated as immigrants not as company slaves.
01/27 - M$ Database expansions grind to a halt, threatening the new version of Windows and internet service lock-in plans.
02/02 - M$ surrenders the lucrative Netbook market to GNU/Linux by only offering them with crippled "starter" editions of Windows 7
02/09 - Over the last six months, insiders have been dumping not buying M$FT. Bill Gates himself shed 22 million shares, 2 million of them at $18.84. So much for the "buying shares now is smart" lie.
02/11 - Stating the obvious, "Stay away from MSFT, which for years has not been investor-friendly." Author points to Vista Failure and thinks Windows 7 is more of the same.
02/13 - M$ betrays it's ailing and revolting retail partners with retail store plans. Most see it as a poor copy of Apple, doomed to fail. [Slashdot discussion]
02/15 - There will be no extra toys for the Ultimate Upsell Version because M$ can no longer afford "out of cycle" development.
02/20 - Resentment of H1B abuse grows as M$ fires more expensive, citizen workers.
03/06 - Cuts to contractors may have been up to 20% and are now being applied to outside vendors. As usual, M$ lied about their bad news. The cuts were worse than expected and the company will be that much less able to compete.
03/06 - M$'s contractual arrangements were designed to shield M$ against isolated cases of business failure by placing obligations on MVPs, Microsoft Partners, who acted as brokers for long term licensing. Multiple business failures, however, can have a cascading effect - MVPs go under and they are unable to deliver revenue from surviving license holders. This is true in Iceland now and surviving MVPs are turning to free software as revenue generators to save them from M$. As the economy continues to fail, we should see more of the same elsewhere.
03/12 - Analysts doubt Windows 7 will fix M$'s revenue erosion. It's Vista all over again.
03/13 - Carl Shapiro, who favors the breakup of M$, is added to US Department of Justice.
03/15 - M$ continues to lose web search and email customers.
03/30 - Mini M$FT basically gives up hope. His "reality check has been cashed."
03/31 - M$ pulls Encarta, their non free encyclopedia that has largely been replaced by Wikipedia. The traditional media, terrified for it's own existence, completely misses the parallel story of M$ and free software, even though Wikipedia runs on free software and uses a model common to the free software world.
04/02 - Matt Assay blogs the continuing OEM revolt against Vista and M$. OEMs don't like M$ and know Windows 7 won't work on netbooks so they flock to GNU/Linux and Android.
04/23 - Unable to buy new revenue, M$ reports it's first revenue decline ever.
05/05 - Another 5,000 M$ employees get the axe. M$FT sinks back under $20. Those left might not feel like spending their money in the company's new private mall and the public might conclude, the bridge built for employees to get there was a waste of money.
05/12 - As BBC did before them, The New York Times and Major League Baseball both dump Silverlight because it did not work. This puts M$'s media revenues in question, as well as their plans to patent extort GNU/Linux with formats. So much for those future revenue plans. People who care about quality and freedom are moving to ogg anyway. Adobe and Windows Media will only be used by people who don't want to share, newspapers and broadcasters that just don't get the web anyway.
05/15 - M$ takes on $3.75 billion worth of debt while Bill Gates sells off 3 million M$FT shares at less than $20. I don't think the company has the money that they say they do. It is claimed this money is used for their $40 billion stock buy back, a rotten thing to do when you are firing employees.
05/22 - Michael Hickens says Intel's renewed interest in GNU/Linux (Moblin) and cloud computing is fatal for M$. He is far too optimistic about Windows 7, so his analysis is likewise optimistic about M$'s chances of survival.
05/29 - M$ shocks partners by tightening finace terms, a move predicted to cost sales. A company that really has a lot of money in the band would not fire employees, take on debt or cost themselves sales by tightening finance. They must be running out of cash.
06/16 - M$ partner Best Buy sees a 15% profit drop on slow consumer electronic sales. New CEO sounds like someone who's listening to M$, expect bigger failure on Vista 7 channel stuffing.
06/28 - Geek.com bloogs OEM revolt against M$ and non free software in general. OEM dissatisfaction with Vista was clear and apply twice to netbooks as geek.com notes. Geek.com gives too much credit to device makers for the "maturity" of current desktops.
06/29 - M$ blogger, Todd Bishop, takes a tour of M$'s software graveyard, which is filled with now defunct "products".
06/30 - M$ sheds another 2,000 employees by selling their Razorfish advertising agency
07/07 - Google launches a desktop OS.
07/15 - More angry shareholders.
07/23 - Declines for the quarter announced, Operating Income Down 30%, Income Down 29%, and Earnings Down 26%. MSFT looses 8% in a single day, months worth of gains they made along with general market. Other tech firms continue their climb out of the recession.
08/02 - Ars Technica states the obvious, M$ Word and PC file storage is "the new typewriter" soon to be universally replaced by Wikis. That will eliminate M$ Office as a cash cow and the primary reason people use M$'s other cash cow, Windows.
08/05 - M$ Officially blames free software for their declining fortunes.
08/07 - A botnet attack takes down Facebook and Twitter and causes a revulsion against Windows. Perhaps this outrage will do what power outages and hospital network infections did not.
08/27 - M$ partner Dell suffers another terrible quarter. Dell's profits fell 23% and sales declined 22% for its fiscal second quarter ended July 31. Sales of desktop PCs and laptopsDell's mainstay businessesfell 33% and 21%, ... server computers and disk storage machines increased 7%. The prices of consumer and business PCs are falling rapidly, vexing computer makers that have relied on the machines for hefty chunks of their sales. This is the price of sticking with M$.
09/06 - Another lawsuit is launched against M$ for the spyware called, "Windows Genuine Advantage".
09/24 - Windows 7 is again predicted to be a slow seller like Vista.
10/23 - The first quarter of 2010 is horrible for Microsoft as Windows 7 fails to drive sales. Windows income is down 52%, online losses widen by 50%. "For fiscal 2010 first quarter, Microsoft reported revenue of $12.92 billion, for a 14 percent year-over-year decline. Operating income: $4.48 billion, down 25 percent. Net income: $3.57 billion, or 40 cents a share. Net income fell by 18 percent and earnings per share by 17 percent year over year."

2010 - Windows 7 Fails.

01/18 - It's official, Windows 7 fails to drive sales, and netbooks were a winner. 2009 is declared "Year of Desktop Linux." I predict majority GNU/Linux if not liberation by 2011 as cheap mobile platforms take over most computing needs.
08/25 - Another day, another stock downgrade.
10/04 - Goldman Sachs downgrades Microsoft to "neutral". Many other firms follow the lead and also downgrade Microsoft.
10/27 - CNN Calls Microsoft "A Dying Consumer Brand", Laura Didio is quoted and they work hard to lessen the bad new.
12/23 - ARM Vaporware announcements show that the company's business model is over.

2011 - Microsoft Collapses into Patent Bully. Executive cut and run while jobs are outsourced.

01/12 - Android/Linux overtakes iPhone sales, Microsoft Phoney 7 fails.
01/17 - The Harvard Business review claims, "this year's CES marks the beginning of the end for Microsoft and Intel" as OEMs abandon Microsoft exclusivity and ARM dominated the floor with computing that won't support software licensing costs. Yes, even the business types have noticed.
01/29 - Microsoft has another quarter of declining profits and Apple made more money than they did. There are allegations of bookeeping fraud against Microsoft because their numbers don't add up or match previous publication
01/31 - Netgear CEO Lo states the obvious as a footnote to a conversation about iOS and Android, "[Windows Phone 7's chance against iOS and Android] Microsoft is over â" game over."
02/15 - Microsoft's valuation now $100 million less than Apple, Google and IBM are each close to surpassing Microsoft as well. Microsoft has been a bad investment for a decade and it's not about to get better.
03/05 - Forbes claims Microsoft share of market is down to 75%. We can be sure that reality is worse than that for the company, especially when smart phones, tablets and other form factors are taken into account.
05/02 - Forbes advises people to sell MSFT as quickly as they can because the company, "is well on its way to failure, even if on the surface it looks reasonably healthy. It's a sucker's bet to buy these stocks."
05/16 - Another Microsoft shareholder rants about a decade of poor performance. They compare Goolge and Apple stock performance to M$FT and recount expensive failures, Zune, Danger, Kin, Windows Phoney 7 and many others capped off with an obviously anti-competitive $8.5 billion Skype purchase which is only contested because they think it costs too much. The author is too complementary of Microsoft's past and present ability to do anything right, calling the hated Office ribbon interface, "innovative".
Microsoft's Q1 revenue declines 2.6% over 2010.
05/20 - IBM is now worth more than Microsoft.

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