Microsoft Offers to buy Yahoo
I got an email from Brad Ferguson this week; he mentioned that MSFT was back in the news with their offer to purchase Yahoo. My reply bordered on a rant, so I decided to go all out and write down my thoughts.
MS has seriously changed the way they do business with me. Instead of helping me to grow, they have decided I am a farm for fees. They want me to pay fees for the internal classifications they assign me, and for training to get that internal classification. The only advantage I get from those fees and ratings is the opportunity to buy the trial software and sales tools that they have been selling me for 10 years already. Moreover, they have limited the trial software to the point that I am unable to make recommendations regarding some of the software they want desperately to sell. i.e. they don’t let me try out the “good stuff”.
In fact they assigned a “one on one” individual to “guide me through” the process. In fact it is not an individual, but they listed my name on a telephone solicitation list so various telemarketers could bug me to buy into these fees. In the meantime they fired their entire outside sales force that used to call on us and help us negotiate the maze of programs they have.
Last month they sent a mass email out begging consultants to recommend Vista to our customers, promising that they will fix all the problems. Here are a couple excerpts from that email:
With your help, Windows Vista has made great strides since its release in the key areas of device and application compatibility, reliability and performance - while delivering improved security from day one.
Today, 98 of the top 100 selling applications are compatible with Windows Vista*. There is support for 54,000 components and devices on Windows Update – at launch there was support for just 13,000. That means that more than 9 out of 10 PCs will have all the drivers they need in the box and on Windows Update.
Incremental SP1 benefits include improved speed on resume from sleep; faster file transfer on and between PCs; additional changes making it easier to configure, manage and deploy Windows Vista; and support for new technologies like the exFAT file system for Flash-based devices and forthcoming Direct 3D 10.1 graphics cards.
Now I just want to ask a couple of questions here.
- Why didn’t they work on reliability and compatibility BEFORE they released Vista?
- Why did the ship an OS that lacked support for 41,000 components and devices that they already knew about?
Another part of this letter annoys me, they say “Incremental SP1 benefits include…faster file transfer on and between PCs”.
Have any of you tried to transfer files from one directory to another in Windows Vista? I have a TiVo device and I use the TiVo software on my laptop to transfer files from the TiVo to my laptop, and then to my PC. My laptop (P4 3.0GB, 1GB RAM) has Windows XP, while my PC (C2D E6700, 3GB RAM) runs Windows Vista. The files are .mpg files ranging in size from 300MB to 3.6GB. Typically I right click on a file in XP, and choose cut, then I paste the file into the directory it belongs in. The menus pop up immediately, and the file takes several seconds to transfer. In fact I timed a typical 600MB file and it transferred in about 1:35.
In Windows Vista the menus take 20 to 30 seconds to pop up, it takes Windows a minute or two to “Calculate Transfer time”, then the transfer takes another minute or so. The same file I mentioned above completed the transfer in 3:15.
3 minutes 15 seconds to transfer one .mpg file from one directory to another on the same hard drive…. My Vista PC is already running their SP1 with it’s “faster file transfers”.
Now Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo, showing that they believe they own the OS and Office suite market and that they want to compete heads up with Google for the SAS (Software As a Service) market. In the meantime I sell 10 Windows XP machines to every one Vista machine, and MAC sales are growing like crazy. A new notebook has appeared on the market that runs Linux. It is aimed at kids and if this type of promotion succeeds the next generation of computer users could be Linux fans. (2nd link)
You can really see that Bill is not in charge anymore.
