Memo to Steve Ballmer for the long flight home
The rumors about Windows Vista apparently are true. People hate it.
Hey Jerry, you think Solozzo's tough?
Even with a cast of thousands and a sky-high budget, Vista's achieved more notoriety as a punch line for Apple's searing Mac-PC television spoofs than as IT's savior. And now The Wall Street Journal's Ben Worthen has put pencil to paper to correctly note that you've got a "Vista problem."
It's hard to draw a definitive conclusion because of the deferred revenue last year. At the time, Microsoft said that the $1.67 billion came from advance sales of Vista and the new version of Office, but didn't break it down further. If we take away the $1.67 billion, revenue for the two divisions combined only grew 4 percent.
To put that in perspective, PC sales grew somewhere around 12 percent to 14 percent over the same period depending on whose numbers you use. The sales that these divisions did make came at a high price: Even if we attribute all of the $1.14 income boost Microsoft deferred last year to the Windows division, income only grew 1 percent year-on-year. Between the two divisions, profits dropped 4 percent once the deferral is accounted for, meaning that it cost Microsoft more to sell the products this year.
But before you slam another bag of peanuts into your forehead, there's a good-news scenario you can consider.
Yahoo's born-again commitment to openness becomes a lot more interesting in light of what Microsoft is doing with its Live Developer Environment as well as Live Mesh. At the Web 2.0 conference, the company's Ari Balogh said the plan is to unify all profiles throughout Yahoo to create a single social Web-service API. The goal is to offer a common interface across Yahoo's invitation, presence, social-messaging and other services. How will that mesh (pardon the pun) with Microsoft? Beats me but you're both talking about platforms and services and openness. Ray Ozzie should be able to figure out how to make that work to common advantage.
Yahoo's got until Saturday to accept your original buyout bid, but why be a putz about it? Everyone knows Jerry Yang's toast if he decides to go it alone. If Google keeps racking up $5 billion quarters, you're not in such great shape either. I can predict what will happen, courtesy of The Godfather. (Isn't everything like The Godfather?)
The Corleones (that's Microsoft) have the desktop operating system and that's still a great franchise--until now. Not only is Vista a dog but search is undeniably the future. Has mankind invented a more efficient business idea than search-based advertising? So think of Eric Schmidt as Barzini. With the kind of money Google's printing each quarter, how long before it buys whatever's still needed to come after you in a big way? And I'm talking about stuff that will pose bigger headaches than just Google Docs.
So do yourself a favor and get Brad Smith on the line when you hit the tarmac. You can extend this bid a little while extra. You're doing a good job making Yahoo sweat but there's no reason to be precipitate. Besides, it's great fodder on the cocktail party circuit.
To quote Sonny, "Well, what's your answer gonna be, Pop, er, Steve?"
Charles Cooper has covered technology and business for more than 25 years. Before joining CNET News, he worked at the Associated Press, Computer & Software News, Computer Shopper, PC Week, and ZDNet. E-mail Charlie. 
- Take a deep breath. Breathe out all that bad Vista energy. (Did I hear a gong?)
- Relieve some stress through exercise. Why not go do a little dance?
What do you get for the significant theft of processor resources with Vista?
Answer: DRM, Built in Spyware, and more malware. In other words nothing of value.
I've been using Microsoft since DOS 3 when I didn't have Windows at all, and other computers before that. OS upgrades aren't a new thing, and it isn't that I'm not technical enough either. That's not the cause of all the complaints.
It seems to me generally the more technical crowd with real work that needs done prefers sticking with XP, but that is maybe bias. However, I don?t think people are complaining because they're just too dumb for it or have never upgraded before.
Memo to Charles: Try checking with your audience before claiming that people hate Vista, because if you don't, there will be lot's of people that will be more that happy to prove you dead wrong!
Both of those companies have Enterprise agreements, so they got Vista for free (or part of the enterprise licenses) and were counted in the 100 million copies of Vista, but in reality its something like 200K copies of Vista NOT USED.
I also have a good friend that owns a small business consulting company and I do work for him on the side, on occasion. Vista is reeking havoc among SBS community. These are usually companies with 5-50 employees, that sometimes will buy a new PC without consulting their IT support and then have massive problems with printer drivers, application support, and tons of "how too" questions that is making my friends happy with all of the hours he is getting. His #1 request from the SBS base, please remove Vista and put XP on this PC. I seriously mean he gets TONS of these requests.
Vista has failed. Vista has helped Apple more than anyone. The 50+% of Mac sales over last year is due in part to Vista being so badly received. I think only Bush gets more bad press than Vista, but its close.
Changing OS, without changing computers is not likely.
When we change computers, we tend to go with what is offered at the time.
Yahoo isn't toast, they've been profitable online for more than a decade and MS never has.
The distraction of Google is killing MS' core business, which have been lapsing into caretaker role.
Yeah because CNET is the only IT news source saying Vista has problems. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Morons who whine about Vista need to actually check it out before jumping on the bandwagon.
Seriously though I'm glad you like it. However, other people don't like it. There's a difference between someone that paid for it and loved it and someone that paid for it and hated it.
The only reason all this discussion is taking place is because Microsoft won't listen to a good chunk of their customers and deny all their concerns.
tortured tenure as CEO.
Microsoft needs to let Yahoo go. Instead make other smart acquisitions in this space and save themselves a couple billion in the process. The can revisit Yahoo at a later time if it still makes sense.
You've been pushing this deal like nobody's business since day one. Maybe you don't have a financial stake (which journalistic integrity would force you to expose), but it sounds like you have some personal grudges against Yahoo. Or maybe you really like Microsoft. Or perhaps Steve Ballmer.
Whatever it is, how about trying to remain an objective journalist? No wonder C|Net is experiencing such problems when the people can find thoughtful, non-biased commentary elsewhere.
- by ralfthedog April 25, 2008 8:52 AM PDT
- Why buy Yahoo? They should spend the money purchasing a company that knows how to write an operating system. Vista uses more memory. Vista eats more clock cycles. Vista is only more secure if you are a moron, "You are about to run an application, 'Registry Shredder' authored by the Chainsaw Hackers Association". Do you wish to continue?
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (42 Comments)An application that uses more resources to accomplish the same or less is the definition of bloat. Microsoft is rapidly becoming irrelevant . Time for news.com to stop talking about them.