Oh, now *that's* a great way to inspire trust...

[jducoeur]

The latest buzz is that Microsoft, having entered the consumer-security market, is planning on diving deeply into the enterprise-security one as well, selling their own security software in competition to Symantec and the like. Quoting the article from ZDNet:

"This is a rather safe play," said Charles Kolodgy, an analyst at IDC. "It is easier than building the security into products and not being able to directly capture revenue."

Uh-huh. So let's rephrase this -- Microsoft has decided that it's too expensive and difficult to ship secure products. Okay, yes -- we all knew that they felt that way. But tacitly admitting it, and then charging people extra to get the fixes to those broken products is rather breathtakingly cynical, even by Microsoft standards...

Comments

True vertical market integration

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Think of the marketing possibilities:

"Sold with every box of quadruple-edged razors, a chainmail glove."

"We gave up on filtering our cigarettes, but we do sell a lung-auger for cleaning out plaque..."

"We couldn't make your car safer, so we sell medical insurance too. You get a discount!"

[dsrtao]

This is probably a good time to dump M$ holdings.

I've never believed that Bill Gates was stupid or evil. Misguided, narrowly-focussed, occasionally ignorant -- yes, all of those. But without him at the helm, I think MS will lose all sight of the goal of making money through selling featureware, and become completely dominated by the evil/stupid contingent which has become so prominent since the launch of Windows NT.

[jducoeur]

Could be. While I don't think of Gates as evil per se, I do think he's always been both ruthless and paranoid. Those qualities have served him well: for decades, they kept Microsoft feeling like they were under threat, and had to do anything necessary to alleviate that threat. That both made the company a bit unpleasant to be around, but is heavily responsible for Gates' riches.

It does seem like the company is in real danger now, though. Stupid or not, the really interesting question is whether the remaining guys will have the *stature* to run the company. At least twice in the past 15 years, Microsoft has survived only because Gates saw a major disaster looming, and managed to pull off a truly titanic technical turnaround. (Once on the Internet, the other on the 95-to-XP switch.) But AFAICT, that worked largely because when Gates said, "This *must* happen", everyone fell into line. I don't know if even Ballmer possesses enough real authority to pull that off.

What's *really* interesting, though, is the new announcement that Warren Buffet is giving almost his entire fortune to the Gates Foundation. The unspoken implication is that Bill no longer *needs* Microsoft. He may still care about it, he may still work hard to do what he can to help it. But his new venture, which he is quite explicitly switching his focus to in a couple of years, will survive even if Microsoft tanks. I have to wonder if he and Buffet arranged the donation with that as an explicit goal...

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

"That plan is much too clever to fail. Twice."