Microsoft Mania

Published on March 17th, 2008

Posted by John C Dvorak in General

Microsoft licenses Flash for Mobile.
What about Silverlight?
YouTube killed in China!
Microsoft still getting sued by Novell. Huh?
My commentary on the problems with the news media. I have no respect for their strategies.
Linden Labs CEO steps down. Why?
ValueClick fined for spamming.
Microsoft still on track to buy Yahoo.
Microsoft to take on Salesforce.
Vista SP1 tomorrow!
User generated video shunned by Madison Avenue.
Craigslist not liable for illegal ads.

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8 users responded in " Microsoft Mania "

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# 1 Bob said, on March 17th, 2008 at 2:41 pm

Hey, wheres the old player? I just blew out my speakers looking for the volume controls! =(

# 2 Bob said, on March 17th, 2008 at 4:37 pm

Yay it’s back! Never mind then! =)

# 3 Jägermeister said, on March 17th, 2008 at 6:29 pm

And the Brits get to enjoy targeted ads… You can just hear the envious cries from the Google nest…

# 4 Lou Minatti said, on March 17th, 2008 at 7:22 pm

I still don’t get Silverlight. I had never heard of it until a few months ago when Jackass 2.5 came out and there were ads promoting a free version you could watch online. So I installed Silverlight, watched the movie, and never used it again. Microsoft keeps coming up with these time wasters that no one will ever use. Passport is an example. Vista is an example of one of their products that no one wants but people are compelled to use.

Microsoft is Ford/GM/Chrysler/AMC circa 1977, flailing away as the world around them changes.

# 5 pjakobs said, on March 18th, 2008 at 1:58 am

So you say that the media are acting stupid when they fire people as earnings go down?

This may come as a surprise, but that’s just what any other publicly traded or investor run company does. I call it corporate short-sightedness. When you’re under pressure to deliver quarterly successes, you can’t afford to wait till your product gets better and more people buy it. You have to make do with what you can save on the bottom line and the easiest thing there is to cut down on workforce. You just have to make sure that you cut deeper than your customers so overall, the net effect will be more money in your corporate pockets.

# 6 John C Dvorak said, on March 18th, 2008 at 11:12 am

There are alternatives. The CEO can take a pay cut or fire useless middle managers. Too oftent hey fire the key people and give themselves a raise.

The logic of cutting a staff at a newspaper when taken to an extreme says get rid of the entire staff. The numbers will look great.

# 7 J said, on March 18th, 2008 at 11:32 am

John

You have been in the media business how long? When have you ever seen logic in the way they run the business?

# 8 pjakobs said, on March 18th, 2008 at 3:41 pm

But John, what you described is the logic that is behind every “restructuring” that I’ve ever seen anywhere.

Fire the “individual contributors” and make those who you spare work harder. After all, we all know that everyone but the CEO is probably lazy most of the time.

If you fire them all, the overall lazyness level in the company will drop to close to zero.

Also, for a newspaper (or a subscription based software manufacturer) the model of firing every productive staff will actually work quite nicely. The company gets rid of a huge chunk of cost while the customers have a subscription that they can probably not cancel right away. So revenue will not immediately decline.
Well worry about next quarter once it really comes around.

One company I was with has perfected this process by making sure that code they still needed was open sourced before the developers were fired.

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