“The European Commission’s report on Microsoft sheds new light on a corporate culture and business practices that led regulators to sanction the company last month for anticompetitive practices,’ Michael Parsons reports for CNET News. “The 300-page document delves in part into internal e-mails that executives of the software maker have written in recent years, often with a strikingly blunt perspective on the weaknesses of Microsoft’s software.”
“In a section describing the way that Microsoft’s Windows operating system has become a ‘must-carry’ product for PC vendors, the Commission quotes from an internal memo drafted for Chairman Bill Gates by C++ general manager Aaron Contorer in 1997,” Parsons reports. “In the e-mail, Contorer outlines why he thinks customers have stuck with Windows despite Microsoft’s shortcomings. He attributes their loyalty to the high costs of switching away from their existing heavy investment in the Windows application programming interfaces (APIs).”
“‘The Windows API is so broad, so deep, and so functional that most ISVs would be crazy not to use it. And it is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system instead,’ the e-mail reads. In the EU report, Contorer’s e-mail says that the API investment is what has kept customers using Microsoft’s software when alternatives were available,” Parsons reports “‘It is this switching cost that has given the customers the patience to stick with Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high TCO (total cost of ownership), our lack of a sexy vision at times, and many other difficulties,’ the e-mail said. ‘Customers constantly evaluate other desktop platforms, (but) it would be so much work to move over that they hope we just improve Windows rather than force them to move.'”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Perhaps never before have so many been so abusively manipulated while actually paying for the pleasure.
Related MacDailyNews article:
Defending Windows over Mac a sign of mental illness – December 20, 2003
Joe,
it’s time to get a Mac. The eMac is a whopping deal right now, get one for the heck of it, and you will find yourself wanting to use it so much more than your PC’s that you will end up getting the software you need for it peice by peice, and in six months you will be a happy camper!
I don’t think this is out of date. Since 1997, things have only gotten much worse, and you would think that in 7 years, Micro$in could have rewritten out all those problems, but they didn’t, and that is why I hate Win$in, because they were screwing us at the beginning, had the power to improve the quality of their entire system,(coulda even done it on the side), but didn’t. Now that the entire universe has been milked to death, some vaporware called Longhorn is gonna fix everything and start the whole process again.
Admitting they had problems was the step towards fixing those problems, but they didn’t, even though they could have. The consumer lost because of this, and now we are getting leapfrogged technologywise by the rest of the world and we wonder why.
On TCO, how much time is spent patching windows? How much downtime is spent in DLLhell? How much productivity is lost to reduced system performance due to spyware and ad ware? How long is an office down because of the latest virus? How many employees are sitting idle waiting for the IT dept to come and fix their computers?
Even if the difference in price across the board from high end to low end between PCs and Macs was $1500, (which it isn’t, low end emachines = $400 eMac = $600) AND the average system replacement time for PCs and Macs were equal at 2 year between new systems, How many hours of idle employee time (paying the worker to do nothing) would it take to equal $1500? A month, maybe 6 weeks?
Minus from that any incoming revenue a working employee might generate if he/she were actually working rather than waiting on a computer fix.
Even a $1500 price difference would vanish in no time. Individual employees could get work done, and the company would generate more revenue.
In the case of a home user, how much is your limited free time worth? Do you really want to spend the time patching, updating, and upgrading? Or would you just like to get something done and have time to do other things?
Time saved, less stress, it would be worth the difference at $2000 Although I am so glad that the real difference is only a (very) few hundred.
Sounds like an abusive relationship to me. Ever try to help a friend who won’t leave an abusive relationship? Believe me, it’s almost an exercise in futility.
Businesses, then as now, are so fixated on not being trapped into their hardware choices, that they sold the souls of their hardware to M$.
Adding Macs to networks is the only way to go for a large-sized corporation to see the advantages of Mac OS X. But that will take some time.
Abusive relationships are complex issues. I know from experience what it took to get out of one myself. The first step is seeing the abusive relationship for exactly what it is. Then you’ve got to deal with the pros and cons of leaving vs. staying, which gets more complicated the more children are involved. Do you take the kids and leave the house and the income you depend on from the abusive mate/partner? Or do you try to get the abuser out of the house while you stay and deal with the aftermath, trying to keep the house and the kids without the income. It’s not an easy choice, and sometimes there has to be a point of “critical mass” before the final decision and action is taken, one way or the other. Sometimes it can take years for that to happen, if it happens at all
Now, imagine a large corporation is in an abusive relationship with M$. And every employee with a desktop is a child. The servers and the databases are the house and the income you depend on. It’s even more complicated than the family analogy.
So no matter how old that email is, it’s still relevant. It still reveals the general attitude at Microsoft about it’s “customers”, because most corporations have been running M$ systems since the early 90’s. And considering the huge initial cost of switching to any other OS, hardware included, M$ knows that corporate businesses deal with the viruses, the worms, the security breaches, all while hoping Longhorn will “fix” the problems. M$ knows they will wait for Lornhorn, no matter how long it takes.
“Been there, done that.”
Go ahead Joe Mac, add a Mac! See, your name even lends itself to the OS X platform. Don’t worry, keep your PCs around if you want, your Mac will coexist peacefully. The eMac will only cost you about 10 Benjamins, so what are you waiting for? Or get a new iBook, what the heck!
Software will cost you next to nothing as a home user. The shareware and freeware market is vibrant. If you must, get Office 2004 student edition for $150. Endless anti-virus subscriptions and disk defraggers? Nah, don’t need em.
C’mon Joe, do it today, add a Mac!
Ah, lunch.
cheap PC prices in 1997, includes monitor, 2 grand: http://www.gcn.com/archives/gcn/1997/march17/rev1.htm
The g3 mac, introduced 1997 for 2 grand:
http://www.lowendmac.com/ppc/g3.shtml
So the difference is the monitor, maybe $200 back then? Notice how the g3 knocks the socks off the pc’s feature and speedwise. (How times have changed).
But get this, AVERAGE price of a pc in 2003, just over $700:
http://news.com.com/2100-1042-999721.html
That’s right, AVERAGE price lower than the LEAST expensive mac. Add to that the fact that the least expensive macs suffered a 25% decline in sales in 2003, while total mac sales showed a 5% increase, and you have to expect a LARGE disparity between pc and mac prices.
All that presumptive time spent patching etc. etc. and the psychological relationship I have with my vanilla box might be right………HOWEVER on the original point, the relationship between relative price then vs. now, and the silliness of referencing old documents as if their age has no bearing on their relativity, I………..WIN.
Oh yeah, someone mentioned “buggy”, referring to the “buggy drivers” mentioned in the article. That is also a dated issue. Wintel driver problems, since windows 2000 came out, are a shadow of their former self.
let the anecdotes begin.
second martini here, gotta find some pretzels. ciao
Damn forgot to note that the 2003 wintel laptop prices are VERY close to Mac laptop prices, a fact I have acknowledged MANY times and to which I attribute the fact that Apple sells the HELL out of them while desktop sales snorkel.
Something for you all to feel good about, since it is in black and white AND current.
Weigh the value of iLife also on a purchase of a new Mac. It may not be up everyone’s alley, but it sure has changed my life. It took awhile, but my wife now uses iPhoto almost every day to send(through Mail) pictures of our baby to her family in another country. She also was tickled after I burned her a CD for her car of many of her favorite songs that she wouldn’t go out and buy a CD in order to get. She also likes the fast user switching so she can write bad things about me to her family in another language and on her own desktop. The little things do make a difference. I’ve spent thousands over the years on hardware amps, preamps, and effects units trying to get a good guitar sound that I can get now in Garageband by just plugging straight in using a Monster cable adaptor. My point is… try to purchase all this stuff on a PC with the same effort, ease of figuring out, and effectiveness. This tips the scale every time for me. Most people don’t consider all this.
Joe, I mentioned that you can’t convince, not because we’re as hard-headed as you like to claim (well, at least most of us), but because we do the very things we’re talking about. I’ve spent extra hours after work waiting for an outside IT person to finish fixing something. My company’s email is blacklisted to certain ISP’s because the outside expert who set up our network didn’t hit a check box, turning our server into a spam machine. One of the patches last week was, according to the patch description, to fix a previous patch. Total cost of ownership is far more than purchase price. It’s all of this other stuff. I realize that you know that, Joe, but we won’t let you ignore it or blow it off. Contrary to some folks around here, I appreciate the fact that you comment and keep coming back, I just strongly disagree with you on this one. And, if I remember correctly, don’t you already have a Mac? Maybe a family member with a Mac?
Newmanstein,
Good point. That’s what I always say to people who are buying a new computer. When you’ve got your new computer home, unpacked it and got the desktop up, what do you do?
Well on a Mac you can launch iTunes and start importing your albums or listening to the radio. You can launch iPhoto and import and organise your digital photo album. Or launch iMovie and create your own masterpiece film, then author it using iDVD (if you’ve got a SuperDrive). Or you could even launch GarageBand and make your own songs, then export it to iTunes. If all this isn’t enough, launch AppleWorks and start working on your novel or spreadsheet. Tony Hawks 4 anyone?
Right, what can you do with a new Windows PC – Solitaire, anyone? 3D Pinball? Wow, I can hardly contain myself.
Windows sucks. Macs rule.
to joe:
it seems odd though that in 1997, I well remember the argument that macs were a *lot* more expensive than PCs. at the time you could buy a cheap PC, with monitor for about $1200-1500. that G3 was $2000, and that was the bottom of the line. of course, by the time you got the PC’s feature set up to what you got with the mac, they were about the same.
much the same as now, when you can buy a bottom of the line PC for about $300-400, and a bottom of the line mac for about $700.
(an average is made up of highs and lows. an average of $700 just tells you more people are buying the $500 WalMart PC than the high end $3000 Sony Vaio).
a 17″ monitor at that time was about $500. I bought my 21″ monitor in 1999. it was about $1500. in 97, the one I had at work tipped the scale at $2500.
Macs have always been a similar value to PCs when you measure feature for feature. even today. your average $700 PC doesn’t have things like firewire (and USB 2.0 is not a substitute for IEEE 1394 no matter what Intel would like you to believe).
PCs are a greater value in choice. in a mac, you get what you get. in a PC, you can pay less and get less.
all in all, the differences are about the same now as it was in 1997. if anything, the mac is closer in price. the time is different.. the argument the same.
The one that’s changed was the 1985 argument that the Mac was just a toy on which to play games, whereas the PC was a serious computing machine for business. now the complaint is that there are no good games for the Mac.
So Joe. What do you do on your PC ?
BTW, buggy drivers are by no means exclusive to PCs. Both my printers have terrible drivers and people have endless problems with USB modems because little effort was made on the Mac drivers.
But the original story talks about being locked into the API. They’ve made it difficult to re-write for a different machine. That’s not reall considerably different on a mac. to rewrite a Carbon app to work on windows would not be an easy task.
On the upside, if Longhorn really is a re-write, then it means new APIs, so the problems exist there too. And if they decide to shoehorn the existing APIs into Longhorn, maybe it’ll be a shower of shit as well. And then maybe people really will have had enough and switch to Linux or OS-X. Linux will by then be ahead in usability for ordinary (non geek) users and OS-X will be even further ahead.
Do you remember yellowbox?
Apple is sometimes (often, actually) their own worst enemy.
Originally, Cocoa was Yellowbox, and since that’s even more originally the OpenStep API, which ran on X86 machines, the idea was that you could write your program in Yellowbox, and then with a recompile, have a fat binary that would install the Yellowbox API on WinNT. That way you could write once, and it would be cross-platform. With OpenStep’s ease of coding, you could code an application from scratch for both windows and Mac in half the time that it took to code for either platform by itself. There was much speculation at the time about Redbox, which would have been a license of the Win32 API, allowing windows programs to run on OS X.
Bluebox did become the Trublu environment, or Classic as we know it today.
Joe,
As with most other PC users you missed the point of the issue.
The issue is not cost of HARDWARE. The issue is general cost of infrastructure, software and investment in time spent on IT issues.
To switch to another system even if you discount the software and hardware, the IT cost would have to be considered a throw-away.
Even if PCs are ultra cheap (and I do mean that in every sense of the word), the other costs are still ridiculous.
I have an ever growing pile of useless PC hardware while I also have a number of Macs that just keep on going.
Joe,
your link for “cheap” pcs was not for cheap pcs. it was for “However, all the machines we received were “thick” clients, which empower the desktop user and let the server provide file service and gateways for e-mail and the Internet”
Try: http://www.techweb.com/wire/news/1997/09/0911price1.html
or �http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/tec112397.html –“And what’s that cost? You’ll see new PCs advertised at less than $1,000. Take a seat in PC Economics 101 for your first lesson in how computers are sold. The prices you see at the low end of the scale are nearly always fake prices, because they don’t include the cost of the display screen, called a monitor. Add $200 to $300”
so around $1200 to $1400.
BTW, is anyone else finding it hard to believe how long ago 1997 was?
Not to be picky, but Cocoa is not Yellow Box. It is a combination of Yellow Box and some Mac APIs. Also, Classic is a transparent environment as opposed to Blue Box which is an emulation in a window.
Somebody correct me if I am wrong. It was such a long time ago that I don’t remember the exact differences.
Interesting train and abusive relationship analogies, kenh and MacSmiley. Always nice to read thoughtful posts from people who don’t trivialize “switcher” issues. All I have to do is think of my brother’s business to realize how complicated things can be even for someone who’d *like* to escape the deadly embrace with Windows and related software. Just yesterday he reluctantly mentioned he needs M$ Publisher. Haven’t heard the details, but my guess is it’s for compatibility with other folks he works with. Under the circumstances he hasn’t time or energy to investigate alternatives so it’s easier just to “conform”. And he knows damn well the M$ train he’s riding just increased its speed. While the probability of him jumping off is slim I’m hoping he’ll seriously consider my suggestion to get a Mac for his *kids* when they’re old enough to use computers.
Ah,Yes……. Microsoft Publisher….
my real estate partners think that is all there is in the graphics world.
They get it bundled on their Dells, and never investigate any software that is not bundled, or required by our industry needs, (which conveniently seem to be supplied only by Microsoft)
And because I use software not normally seen by my 62 colleagues, I am considered to be a “computer genius”, and therefore have to spend an inordinate amount of free time diagnosing XP problems, if you can imagine that. Have learned a lot about it, unfortunately.
Thanks for your comment. So many do trivialize the “switcher” issue because they look at the world through their own narrow filter.
And I wonder if Steve Jobs does, too. Maybe not, I really do wonder if a set of ads declaring war on Windows would kill Microsoft Office, which would not be good for the Mac, at least at this point.
I would also guess that if Apple did a hard sell ad campaign on how easy Microsoft Office makes it for Windows users to make the “switch”to Macs, then that would bring down the wrath of Bill G. on the Mac Office developement team. Just speculating.
Heh. My brother has connections with real estate as a mortgage consultant. He recently leased a Dell notebook (w/ Win2K Pro) but maybe it didn’t include Publisher. Is there some comparable software he could use?
It’s sad that software as “boring” as M$ Office is so obsessively important. What a glorious day it’ll be when people and computers sail free from *that* anchor.
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If he wants do do graphics and publishing there are applications he can buy for his Dell, and to be honest, I know nothing about them since I use all Adobe, and Apple apps on my I-book.
The real estate software I was referring to was extremely industry specific, just as there is a lot of mortgage broker software very specific to that industry that I know little about. That is what my mortgage people do for me
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Office, unfortunately, is self perpertuating. Refer back to my train into the mountain analogy.
From what my brother’s told me that industry is a prime example of one heavily entrenched in Windows software. Some of it originates back with DOS from companies with substantial legacy influence and market share who have no incentive to produce/support anything but Windows products, nor would any “outside” developers dare to challenge them. Companies like that, more than M$ directly, are responsible for creating and sustaining PC/Windows dependences and lock-ins that seems insurmountable. That’s an extreme generalization, but my experience knows there’s some truth to it.
everyoen just get a life and stop arguing about different OS’s. OS9 and OSx crash too. To each its own.
123456: I have experience in Mac all the way back to System 5, and Windows back to Windows 95, and all the way up to current on both.
9 crashes, OSX hangs occasionally, XP is better than 95-98, but still MUCH more maintenance time than even MAC OS9. Time is money.
Based upon that, there is nothing to argue about. My life is better the less I have to do with Windows of any variation.