Microstiff – Bits & Pieces from the Week

(Microsofties, keep an empty waste basket nearby 'cuz the room's starting to spin!)

• Update (Saturday, 3/3/2007 12:05 pm est): Early Returns on GoogleApps adoption - As I recently prefaced elsewhere, here comes Google! Check out the adoption figures half way down the page. Are those 103,000 (38,000 & 65,000) people lost to Google forever? Once they adopt, only money or extreme freebies would win them over to Microsoft, IMHO. And, at this point, there's nothing in the Softie Cloud to win them over to! Tsk! Pass the barf bag, now! (Empty wastebaskets on the ground, barf bags in the Cloud.)
  
  
• Update: More Cloud Talk - Microsoft's aversion to "lead and you lose" needn't apply to what I call "natural innovation" -- stuff that doesn't pass the USPTO "novelty test" and yet...is profit making and needs no "wait and see" attitude. Such is the category in which I'll place LIVE word processing, LIVE spreadsheets and LIVE collaboration with the documents created by these two towers of "killer app" notoriety.
  
  My point is this: Someone at the Evil Empire should and could have seen this coming. This is quite a natural progression of the art...utilizing the Internet! It's indicative of the "circle the wagons" mentality in Redmond and it perhaps bodes not so well as an indicator of future actions at the Softie. Are you reaching for that waste basket, yet?
  
  
• Vista’s got a full 1% (.093) of the market, now! At this rate, there’ll be full Vista market penetration in 10 years! And… just think, Vista is only going to be supported for 5 years! Makes me want to run out and buy it now! Great selling tool, this support promise. Looks like Vienna in 2009 with Cloud front end is Ozzie and Hairless' plan to "leapfrog-the-Vista-Dog" ...doesn't it? God...what a great buy proposition that Vista offers...right? Move over, Windows Me, make room on this scrapheap of MSFT boondoggles; hey, it's only 5 years and $6 billion later!
  
  Update: Based upon Vienna short schedule, current Vista sales and no hint of MSFT burning up that $500 million Vista marketing petty cash, IMHO, the OS Cash Cow will be without milk for two (2) more years! Adjust your MSFT stock portfolio accordingly!
  
  Update: File this under "Money Stockholders Will Never Touch" - I got to thinking, about what Vista will have cost the stockholders in those two (2) years before Vienna's release. Stay with me, here:
  
  
  $6 billion - sunk development costs--------
  $7 billion - stock market value ------------
  

  loss from Steve Ballmer Hoof & Mouth
  

  $5 billion - ball park lost revenue 2 yrs-----
  ----------------------------------------
  

  $18 billion (Same as 2006 income bef. taxes)
  
  

  I'm no financial wizard but this $18 billion loss is the same as having zero net income for 2006! I am sure there are ways to cook this but...the figures speak for themselves!
  

  
  

• Should MSFT combat piracy by lowering prices? A few think so. But, it shouldn’t be done this way, should it now, mate? I suppose the powers that be will now say, “See, I told you lowering the prices wouldn’t work!”

• Now is THIS really necessary? Click here and check out the url window. Then look at the content. Don’t know that I’d want to waste $8.95 a year on a "url redirect" to make this point. (Hey, if you see a brown Zune in the frame...doesn't it look just like someone crapped on an Ipod?) Update: Monday, 3/5/2007 - Oops! They took the "crappy" Zune down. Now it says, "The Wow Starts Now!" Didn't that start about 6 weeks ago? I guess it just keeps starting whenever the Sofite wants it to. Tsk!
  
  
• Update: Speaking of Bureaucracies! Sorry, Federal Workers but...you can't install Vista, IE7 or Office 2007. Jeeze, except for Word/Excel Power users who don't mind a lengthy learning curve with Office 2007, who the hell would want to...anyway! Did you catch the last sentence? "Any prolonged ban on new Microsoft technologies by the federal government could have a significant impact on the software maker's bottom line, as Microsoft sells millions of dollars in software to the feds annually."
  
  
• Update: Microsoft OneCare came in dead last out of a group of 17 anti-virus programs tested against hundreds of thousands of worms, viruses, Trojan horses and other malware, an Austrian anti-virus researcher reported. (Read this; it's powerful stuff!)
  
  Yeah, but can you trust those Austrians? They're in the EU, aren't they? Time to hoist those Vista prices in Austria? Won't matter. No one's buying.
  
  
• Update: You're not going to believe this! Let's say you're a startup company. You've got this hot new cloud offering that gives SMB's free domain name, website and emails at your own domain name and...free accounting software. With this offer you are able to attract an amazing 190,000 beta customers. You're in heaven. You can't wait to go live and impress them even more!
  
  But, there's a problem; you can't convert them without a little work and...if they want to use the new software instead of convert, they will lose their domains. What should you do for those 190,000 beta customers. Do the words "jump through hoops" come to mind?
  
  Now, what if you're Microsoft? Do the words, "screw it up" come to mind? See how they did it. Is it any wonder the Live initiative is in shambles?
  
  You know, I've been in computers since they were IBM 609 punched card calculating machines. I have never in my life seen such incompetence when it comes to customer care. From the software point of view, never would we let something like this even go to beta. These people are clueless! Update: And now THIS!
  
  
• Update: If you were a student here would you think this was cool? Apparently, 5,000 of them did, as well as 250 teachers. This just exemplifies how Microsoft created their own "tipping point" by creating a combined software-hardware cost bubble which forced the move (buy Vista and you have to upgrade hardware). Isn't there one person at Microsoft who saw this coming? Tsk.
  

BTW, when we spot an extra dumb or denial-inspired move by MSFT, we’ll give out a “Duh-mbo Award”. A “Duh-mbo Award” will look like this:

• Here’s one: Punishing the British for being in the EU by charging the poor blokes nearly twice as much for Vista as we American’s pay. Hey, there’s got to be some way to recoup the EU fines!

This post will be updated until the ending Sunday of each week so, keep coming back.

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