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Re: Microsoft is Scared

The ABC article is quite damning, and worth a lengthier quote:

<Quote>
[The Yahoo deal went bad...]

The old, swaggering Microsoft would have decided that it could win
this battle against Google on its own, through a combination of a
perpetually upgraded search engine, questionable linkages to existing
MS products (such as Vista), raiding talent from Google and Yahoo and
strong-arming everyone up and down the distribution and retail chains.

[But now MS seems rattled by bad news over Vista...]

...after a report, by the systems management appliance company KACE,
saying that 60 percent of the administrators it surveyed had no
intention of ever implementing Microsoft's year-old flagship operating
system Windows Vista -- up 10 percent from last November.

Potentially even more devastating was the fact that more than 40
percent of the respondents said they were actively looking at other
platforms, from the Apple Mac OS X to Linux -- while the remainder had
either already abandoned Vista or were sticking with Microsoft's older
Windows XP.

And that was only half of the bad news, because at about the same
time, the influential market analysis firm Forrester Research came out
with a report that announced that, more than a year after the
introduction of Vista, its acceptance by enterprise (big company)
users was "still in the single digits." More chilling, Forrester said,
was the fact that even among those few acceptances, most came from
automatic upgrades of existing software, rather than conscious
adoption by XP users.

[Ballmer acts rattled, tries to rally the troops, then the Mojave
affair...]

As blogger Christopher Null noted, "Presumably none of the focus group
members had to face peripheral incompatibility problems and missing
drivers, or watch their old XP computers suddenly slow to a crawl due
to Vista's overbearing resource requirements. Sitting down in front of
a powerful machine, configured correctly, and taking an expert-guided
tour of Vista isn't an unpleasurable experience. Vista in the real
world is a little different."

What Null didn't mention was the sheer creepiness -- and flop-sweat
desperation -- of this gambit by Microsoft. Just how scared is the
company by this apparent backlash against -- or at least glacial
adoption of -- Vista.

[MS attacks the messenger...]

...the very idea of making a bitter enemy of a person who not only
plays an important role in helping your biggest customers make their
purchasing decisions, but also, ultimately, influences your stock
price, seems an act of amazing stupidity and short-sightedness.

[Threats to Windows, Office, the real cash cows...]

But the world changed, thanks to open-source operating systems like
Linux, to a resurgent and reborn Apple, and to the unique capabilities
of the Web. Meanwhile, Microsoft did nothing to help its case: each
generation of Windows, built upon the ones before, were buggy and
increasingly unreliable.

[Delays annoyed OEMs...]

And when Vista, when it finally arrived, proved to be merely an
evolutionary advance from its klugey predecessors rather than the
revolutionary leap it was promised to be, the company quickly found
itself on the path to its current predicament.
</Quote>



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