Why Microsoft is not DoomedMicrosoft evangelists like myself have had to put up with our fair share of criticism and obnoxiousness from open-source users and smug Apple owners. Today I’m going to debunk Rea Maor’s 7 Reasons Why Microsoft is DOOMED; the article is so absurd that I’m half-convinced that it’s a satire piece written by a Microsoft employee with a sense of humor.
I do not love every single Microsoft product out there; I just recently wrote an article explaining my favorite Firefox web browser extensions and I have been comparing my current open-source PHP-based blog platform, Wordpress, to the new open-source ASP.NET BlogEngine.NET.
I even wrote a post explaining why I’m moving away from the Microsoft-endorsed Facebook Developer’s Toolkit to the open-source Facebook.NET alternative.
Even if I don’t like all of Microsoft’s products, I still think they’re a visionary company and I think ASP.NET is the best thing to happen to web development. Without further adieu, my debunking of Rea Maor’s 7 Reasons Why Microsoft is DOOMED:
Any company that makes $14 billion in net income in a fiscal year (F2007) does not have a “dead-end†business model - Rea Maor claims that since Microsoft’s model is based on commodity software (COTS - Commercial Off-the-Shelf Software) and not service and maintenance, that it’s going to be doomed. I guess that explains why Microsoft’s net income increased by 10.4% between F2006 and F2007. In addition modern software maintenance has been a facet of software engineering since the mid 1970s. Between 1976-1981 over 67% of the cost of software projects run by Hewlett-Packard projects was “post-delivery†maintenance. Between 1992 and 1998 this figure rose to 75%. If Microsoft’s maintenance was poor, then we wouldn’t see too many of their products in the marketplace; products that are too expensive to maintain are destroyed, because as I pointed out, the majority of the cost is in the maintenance itself. Good products are maintained and kept for years because it’s more economical to do so than create a new product from scratch. An example of a crappy modern software product that got thrown onto the trash heap of history is Apple’s OS 9. Microsoft’s NT platform has gone off and died in the same spectacular fashion that Apple’s did.
Web 2.0 is not going to make or break the high tech economy - Rea knocks Microsoft for “flunking†at Web 2.0. I’m not entirely sure what he’s talking about; I know some of the most popular Web 2.0 services on the planet are powered by ASP.NET frameworks, but maybe he missed that. One thing he notes is that Web 2.0 browser-based operating systems are going to be the wave of the future. Unfortunately until web-based operating systems can provide benefits that are greater than their drawbacks, then they’re nothing more than CSS/JS/PHP gimmicks.
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