Mozek:
>>Frederick, you have no idea who your talking to on these boards.>>
Why should I care? These forums are for the free exchange of IDEAS...... You seem to be impressed by other things - position, power, politics.
>>Toy's a self proclaimed, big time IT consultant who only invests in penny stocks. He obviously has some narrowly focused technical understanding of the landscape, but seems bent on convincing others of his worth. Rudedog clearly demonstrates enough insight that I'd bet his profile is honest and maybe understated. Bearded One probably has more of a life than he talks about on these boards.>>
As I said, I don't care what these people do. If you want to comment on what I do for a living then by all means check my background and do so.
>> You may understand more than I do about some things, but not anything I've seen you post here.>>
My what a deep statement mozek. You floored me on this one. Can you come again. My hands are tied behind my back. Try again.....
>>As for myself, I'm a guy who works at Microsoft. Unfortunately, I'm not always at liberty to discuss what I do know, so sometimes I try to listen more than talk.>>
"As for myself.....I'm the guy...." Well congratulations mozek. What's you've shared on this thread leaves nothing to change my mind about the long slow decline ahead for Microsoft. Where's your fire, man!! We have a revolution on our hands.
Oh, I forgot, you guys are playing defense......
>>Don't worry, I wouldn't take your word for anything.>>
The last thing I'd expect was for a Microsoft employee to come out of woodwork on this thread and take my word for anything. This leaves me encouraged.
>>When people make amazing statements that are as off base as yours, I feel it's reasonable for me to add some truth to the thread for those able to see it. If you choose to respond with insults, it doesn't make much difference. You haven't learned anything, but maybe someone else isn't drawn into your confusion.>>
You sound like some English politician in the 1770's. Ok, let's really start to confuse everyone.....
Let's take a walk through an example of just one recent communication I have had concerning Microsoft's future. Note, that there is a BIG BANG benefit - see below - potential coming from breaking it up. If Gates does this then he truly would redeem himself to the forces of history......
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Fred:
It's a revolution, just like the one Paine helped spark with similar
principles of rebellion, escaping from a tyrrany that was bloated and
extracting from rather than nurturing its own...
I have been working on developing several ideas on the economics we are participating in right now and witnessing groundswell shifts in different industries. Basically and fundamentally you and I share the same view of what is happening and will continue to accelerate. However, I confess that alot of my thinking is pretty half-baked right now, but to give you some glimpse of what I'm working on (and when I finish with our email project I would love to sit down and formalize the work in a treatise with you Fred!):
-- take the time to make a trip to visit Microsoft; walk through their
campus, talk to some of the workers, note the ages, whether the parking lot remains full after 6pm, look at the weather in redmond, get a feel for what the life of the worker is like...then go down to Sun and do the same. Next, visit a small start-up in the bay area or check out our group in XXX. Let me know what you think of the different cultures and climes.
-- read Joseph Schumpeter's 1942 treatise "Capitalism, Socialism and
Democracy." I am again drawing heavily from Schumpeter's work as I look at the economics of building software -- which CANNOT be abstracted out of the context of politics and culture.
-- I am convinced that large software cannot be built today for commercial use. There are technical and *cultural* barriers to building what Gates want to deliver with NT 5.0, which is truly a slow train wreck. The spirit of cooperation (which is why the book "Coopetition" by Brandenburger and Nalebuff never leaves my side), openess, and intellectual competition is represented on the internet in the linux community. The best software for the most monolithic tasks (i.e. building, maintaining, and extending an o/s)is happening on the internet. This is why Schumpeter's work is so fascinating -- in software development, the best products emerge from open
environments characterized by sharing across companies. In classical economic analysis, this starts to look alot like socialism (it is not coincidental that some of the best, most stable software comes out of Scandanavia), but it's not -- it is a different, mutated form of capitalism that is changing faster than it can actually be analyzed by the inadequate frameworks economists currently use. This is where I am going with my thinking and the slide of Microsoft is the demonstration that today large software cannot be built for the commercial world. Once this technical fact is recognized, you have to look at the best way to do what classical economics mandates: division of labor to create something large and stable.
The best way to divide up a problem and solve it, is to portion it to the
entities that do that one thing better than anyone else. Instead, Microsoft wants to produce commercial quality software including:
mission critical operating systems (something big)
embedded o/s (something small)
databases (big and small)
word processors
spreadsheets
directory services
proxy servers
firewalls
transaction middleware
clustering
disk management
.
.
.
No matter your market cap and cash on hand, you could never create all of this stuff AND weave it together in a way that the commercial world wants to run its business. You simply could not assemble (culturally, pragmatically) the best in each of these domains to execute this in the grand manner Gates is trying to design for. IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN, IT HAS NEVER HAPPENED in the
history of economics.
IMHO, Gates true brilliance would be at this very moment to break Microsoft up into an o/s company, applications company, embedded company, etc.
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mozek.....come on, show some fire and rebellion, not just smoke and mirrors.
Again, maybe the break up is coming. The energy this would release would be mindboggling.
Put up or shup up time for everyone........
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