christopher baus dot net
This is a really interesting post covering why the author thinks microsoft is in trouble. There's a lot in it I agree with. Definately Microsoft's current attitude to parts of the developer community (VB6 in particular) seems likely to drive people to the competition...
However I see Microsofts problem, from a security standpoint one the of their major problems is having to maintain backwards compatibility, for example Windows Server 2003 has many improvements to security, which are partially neutralised if you have to run it in backwards compatibility mode (eg, using LM/NTLM for NT4 compatibility).
That said Microsoft doesn't always help themselves from a security point of view... as is mentioned in the article they deploy a MEDIA PLAYER and a POP3 Client by default on their SERVER OS!!! That's just crazy, especially when those components start having critical vulnerabilities . Can you imagine a large enterprise having to deploy a patch to thousands of servers because the media player which will probably never run on any of them needs a patch!
ok this is turning into a bit of a rant, but that is a pet hate of mine... onto one other thought I have about this, which is.. how Microsoft may intend to save themselves (not saying I have some prescient knowledge of their strategy, but this does seem to fit current facts)
It's easy, force people to run your products because all your documents songs movies etc, will only play on those products and use DRM technology so that the content is encrypted such that there's no way for competitors to, legally, access it... Simple and if Microsoft pulls it off, I'm not actually sure how you'd stop them. If the majority of the media out there gets into encrpyted DRM protected Microsoft proprietary formats, it will really stuff the competition...
