I’m reading this on a iPhone lol but I don’t think Microsoft is even thinking about goin out of buisness

Most folks are still brainwashed. There is a war on, for your mind! just encase you didn’t know…

Here is the deal, open source will eventually win out this struggle. No questions.

I can tell you this, I manage a HUGE back-end. ALL of it open source. The front-end user will see a desktop change within the next 5 years. I’m talking 1000′s of computers everywhere! Why pay for something that comes for free? See what people don’t understand is EVERYTHING that you can do within winblows(any version) you can do ten times better with open source. including propitiatory code.
lamen

Ok for the laymen, simply put… 2 power lines come into your house.(need not worry about power sources origination, ok) BOTH of these power lines provide the same volts,amps,watts,joules, blah blah ect, ect…. (2) OF THE EXACT SAME POWER LINES… ***Get that part folks*** See now, the only difference between the 2 is….
One you pay for, and the other one is simply free. Alll you have to do for the FREE one is pay someone to set the free line up for you if you’re incompetent yourself. Or afraid of change…

So I really don’t care what most folks say, because I know what is happening behind the scene… and that is COMPLETE and total change…. Microsoft will be taught in History class. If you ask me, sooner the better.

ta ta until later.

After waiting five paragraphs for any hint whatosever of the substance of your argument, it seemed way too run-of-the-mill to justify that expenditure.

So I gather, shorn of the implied insult, that you have no information with which to counter my ideas.

Peace,
Gene

After waiting five paragraphs for any hint whatosever of the substance of your argument, it seemed way too run-of-the-mill to justify that expenditure.

Microsoft is just taking tried and true financial advice from Michael Dell. They are selling the company (to themselves) and giving the money back to the (former) shareholders.

@John,
You are correct. MSFT in the OS, Office and server space is huge, and profitable. But those are products that exist now and for the most part will not grow the business. MSFT’s server software has to continually fight free solutions like Linux/Apache/MySQL, while bloated, buggy Office is getting battered by free office suites and Apple is taking the most profitable computer hardware sales, dragging down the profits of MSFT’s hardware vendors, and expanding Apple’s market share, at least here in the U.S. MSFT has strongholds but they are slowly being eroded.

What Gene and I are asking is: what’s the next big thing for MSFT? The answer appears to be, they don’t know either.

Apple’s failures were mostly the result of releasing too many products at one time. They’ve moved beyond that now, pretty much. MobileMe seems mostly functional, for example, the iPhone activation setup is being made more efficient, and iPhone 3G performance has improved noticeably for most users.

Next.

Peace,
Gene

Gene,
Excellent questions. I am not a financial guru, but one has to wonder why MSFT is buying back ANOTHER $40B in stock. It appears they have nothing left, no ideas for new technologies that will expand the business, no “killer apps” in the works. MSFT has been left behind, I feel. Apple took the digital media market; Google took search. What’s left? I am sure time will tell, but MSFT doesn’t seem to know right now. It seems plausible that they might start laying off workers. Their cash horde is probably below Apple’s now. After this next round of stock purchases it may be gone.

Nobody is arguing they aren’t making lot’s of money with Windows and Office, but the Next Big Thing seems to allude them.

Microsoft’s core competencies – the server products – are so extremely competent and profitable. Exchange server rules the business market. SQL Server is wonderfully good, and extremely profitable. Windows Server 2003 and 2008 scale to almost any level and are extremely secure, but still pretty easy to use and administer. Microsoft takes support and security far more seriously than Apple does; and they did spend over $8 billion on R&D last fiscal year.

Apple’s had a lot of very public failures in the last few months, and some of them are clearly due to Apple’s lack of staff and lack of attention to testing.