


I. Free at Last?

Windows Phone license

Microsoft's Terry Myerson

II. Why "Free" is Good for Microsoft's Bottom Line

Windows RT
III. Will OEMs Quit Android to Save Money?

Provisional patent




Source: The Verge

Comments     Threshold


RE: Inflection point?
By Argon18 on 12/12/2013 5:05:35 PM , Rating: 2
"In order for those cash cows in enterprise to disappear, there has to be a competitor with a replacement and there is none. There are a few with a few tiny pieces but no true competitor. There isnt even a close 2nd. There are zero other players at all that do what MS does."

That's incorrect.

SQL Server has plenty of competition in Oracle, MySQL, and Postgres. The only reason to choose Microsoft SQL is if you're stuck using the Windows OS. Linux and Unix offer much more robust database alternatives.

Visual Studio, the only compelling reason to use it, again, is if you're stuck using the Windows OS. Nobody uses Visual Studio to develop for other operating systems. Ditch Windows, and you no longer need Visual Studio.

Windows OS is a crufty poor excuse for a general purpose server. It sucks at file and printer sharing, it's incredibly maintenance intensive with the constant patching and rebooting, and nobody uses it for general internet services. Apache on Linux owns the majority of the internet for Web servers. IIS has nothing on Apache. So once again, the only reason to use the Microsoft product is if you're stuck in a Microsoft ecosystem.

Office is Microsoft's only prize at this point. And the only reason there are no serious competitors, is the proprietary file formats. LibreOffice is pretty damn excellent now with the current 4.1 version. But nobody is going to invest seriously in developing a competitor so long as the business world is stuck on using these proprietary Microsoft document formats. Microsoft knows this, and is using it to maintain their monopoly. As soon as the business world decides to use the Open Document formats instead, MS Office is a gonner.

RE: Inflection point?
By retrospooty on 12/12/2013 5:25:12 PM , Rating: 2
LOL. Good luck with that wish. It's not happening. Yes, it could happen , but no-one is picking up the burden. Just small one offs.

RE: Inflection point?
By 91TTZ on 12/12/2013 5:46:03 PM , Rating: 2

Even if you are stuck using Windows, you can still use MySQL and Oracle.

RE: Inflection point?
By Mitch101 on 12/12/2013 8:10:16 PM , Rating: 3
MySQL is good for startups to mid size but no way shape or form competes on the big stage. I love MySQL I use it all the time but its not a major player. If your doing a startup by all means MySQL is the way to go. We use MySQL on Windows Servers and Linux. The administrative overhead costs of using it on Linux aren't always worth it over the cost of a Windows Server License. Sorry but Linux Admins are more costly because its more of a specialty than Windows Admins.

Why would anyone want to ditch Microsoft Visual Studio? The product is phenomenal even the free versions of development tools from Microsoft are excellent. Why would you want it to develop for other platforms? BTW it does work for PHP coding.

There is no comparison on education Microsoft gives away tons of free development tools. Good luck even finding 30 day evals of competitor products where Microsoft gives away 90, 180, 365, and even full licensed products they never expire. I once tried to re-learn Lotus Notes and damn if I could get a trial product much less any training without spending thousands of dollars but anyone can learn a Microsoft product for pretty much free. Microsoft bar none has the best documentation and free training material out there nothing comes close. This is brilliance you want people to be able to use your product offer free documentation, eval copies, training, and seminars.

Currently SAP and Oracle have a leg up on Microsoft SQL but that will change in 2014/2015 when Microsoft releases Heckaton along with PDW, Polybase, PowerPivot, Power View and X-Velocity, which will blow away SAP's Hana and Oracle's Exadata. For the first time Microsoft will really leap ahead of them and be wearing the big boy pants.

Office is not just Office its an ecosystem its way beyond creating a document or spreadsheet and you left out Project Server and SharePoint. SharePoint being one of the fastest growing Products ever for Microsoft. Active Directory is also a major item. While Office is a big money maker for Microsoft they make a lot more products than the ones we mentioned that are profitable.

Apache has dropped 10% in the last year while IIS has grown 6% in the last year. Azure is starting to take hold and built into the next Windows Service pack is a few more surprises for web security cough UAG cough. But because its Apache doesn't mean its on Linux I know of a lot of Apache web boxes that are Windows servers now.

Most Windows Eco systems are plagued with Bad admins or doing dumb things like using IBM to patch Windows systems and forcing in patches that are not necessary.

Oracle has tried to compete with Microsoft on e-mail and failed miserably.

With Clustered environments and Load balanced systems patching is not an issue as there is no down time unless you do something stupid. Patching is not an argument its an excuse and if you have downtime then your doing it wrong.

I think Adobe formats were open. I also wish Yahoo and AOL followed Rich Text Formatting standards instead of making their own.

RE: Inflection point?
By Labotomizer on 12/12/2013 9:39:41 PM , Rating: 4
But his company has 122 Linux servers!

I think you really nailed this one and ultimately it's what retrospooky has been trying to say all along. It's not Office, Windows Server, Windows Client, Visual Studio, Exchange, SQL, etc. It's the fact that you can get ALL of that from one vender that is all built to work together.

You can piece together solutions from other vendors. I'd even argue that, given enough money and technical expertise, you could piece together better solutions in most cases. The problem is that you will spend far more in technical development, administration and troubleshooting then you would spend on Microsoft licensing. And THAT is why MS is so strong in the enterprise.

It's easy to think "Wow, this software is expensive, why don't we use free?" until you actually put a cost on free.

As for the major content providers of the world using Linux, yes, that makes sense. Linux is customizable. That gives it a huge advantage when building out very large scale, very custom applications where you have a lot of resources to support and build it. Same for super computers where they're tailoring the OS to the application each and every time.

Microsoft's total package isn't all best in breed. But I would argue some of their products are and those advantages combined with the integration with all the other pieces make it a very, very compelling solution.

