Here's hoping they all fill their shorts!
I've never been short Microsoft, but I wish I had been over the last few weeks. You think shorts who covered on Monday are feeling bad about all the money they made as MSFT hit new 52-week lows last week?
Now look what a respected and impartial tech reporter for the Wall St. Journal has to say about .NET.
Oh yeah, I forgot. The Wall St. Journal is a communist organ that hates Microsoft, just like CNBC and the New York Times hate Microsoft, everybody who doesn't love Microsoft hates Microsoft, you guys were Napoleon in a past life, and so forth.
I'm really posting this only so there'll be some industry prose on this thread that isn't one of the Microsoft-written press releases regularly posted by Mr. Dowd followed by a misty, exclamatory "What a company!".
--QS
PS: Yes Divit, I noticed that Lee Gomes thinks Sun is doomed in the manner of DEC. You don't have to re-cite it with that sentence in bold. Save yourself the typing.
Edit: I installed (and paid the guy for) that RoboForm program discussed in this article and it "totally rules".
BOOM TOWN
By LEE GOMES
Microsoft's .Net 'Marketecture'
Is Lacking in Real Innovation
Listening to Bill Gates speak on Wednesday, I wanted badly to get him on the phone with Vadim Maslov. I think the conversation would do personal-computer users a world of good.
Mr. Gates you already know. Mr. Maslov makes a free program called RoboForm that automatically fills out forms on Web pages, like a subscription asking for your name and address.
Thoughts? Write to Lee Gomes at lee.gomes@wsj.com1
I find RoboForm (www.roboform.com2) easy to use, and without any hidden "spyware," either. But that's not the point. The point is that this type of software exists today -- something you might not have thought possible while listening to Mr. Gates.
He was appearing at a Microsoft briefing about ".NET," the company's big new technology strategy. I was struck by how speaker after speaker, from Mr. Gates on down, would identify problems in the computer industry -- such as Web sites that are hard to use -- and then talk about how .NET would one day solve them.
But .NET is behind schedule. Out in the real world, people like Mr. Maslov haven't been waiting for this Promethean gift from Redmond. They're rolling up their sleeves and getting to work, making the sort of innovative, lean, useful products one rarely sees from Microsoft. Of course, these outside products march to their own drummer, rather than conform to Microsoft's worldview. They're thus not cogs in some Microsoft master plan to increase its hegemony.
Microsoft, for example, will tell you that its answer to RoboForm involves a .NET service called Passport. But Passport is widely seen as Microsoft's way of preparing for the day when it can collect a percentage of every online sale. Give me something unmettlesome like RoboForm any day.
Just as people grow up to become their parents, companies morph into the firms they spent their formative years fighting.
Sun Microsystems, for example, now looks a lot like Digital Equipment of the early 1980s, clinging stubbornly and perilously to a strategy made out-of-date by cheaper machines.
Microsoft seems to have become like the IBM of old -- moving at a glacial pace with massive self-serving software "architectures," apparently unmindful of the PC being a lean, grass-roots machine. (There's a sly name for these sorts of .NET-style strategy announcements that are heavy on marketing but light on specifics: "marketecture.")
What exactly is .NET? Microsoft says it's a way to allow all kinds of programs and devices to communicate. How? Essentially by taking existing computer products and adding "XML" to them. XML, or extensible markup language, is a method programs use to exchange data; a Web page you visit might be using XML when it asks you for your name and address. This species of software is known as plumbing.
XML isn't a bad thing -- although some gripe it's a little bloated. But it's no panacea.
A video for .NET, though, promises it will allow companies "to get products out the door in weeks, not months." But XML is just one of numerous methods computers can use to exchange data. A company taking too long to get a product out the door has problems bigger than anything XML could solve.
Actually, XML is just this year's version of that venerable tech-industry sales pitch: "This is the last software you will ever need." That come-on may have worked in the tech-credulous '90s, but not these days. Companies are hip to the fact each piece of new software billed as final always needs some still-newer piece to work right.
XML is one of those good ideas that gets turned into a bad policy, or worse, into dogma. Some buzzword-compliant venture capitalists have been telling aspiring entrepreneurs, "Sorry, but XML has already solved that problem."
A person attending Microsoft's briefing Wednesday and hoping that the world's most important technology company would provide the excitement and vision needed to lead the industry out of its current malaise would have been distressed.
The demos, for one, were soporific. By far, the most exciting one involved a Windows program that turns your PC into a TV, complete with remote control.
Visionary? Hardly. Not only do TiVo and Replay owners have such a system now, but so do people who have PC graphics cards made by ATI Technologies.
Microsoft diehards who want a PC TV will have to wait, because like .NET, that software isn't ready yet. Could it be that Microsoft itself needs help getting products out the door?
Write to Lee Gomes at lee.gomes@wsj.com4
ABOUT LEE GOMES
Lee Gomes, who writes the Boom Town column on Monday and the Boom Town Exchange7 on Friday, has been covering various topics, technical and otherwise, for The Wall Street Journal since 1996. He is a graduate of the University of Hawaii and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and lives in San Francisco. |
