licensing software engineers? i don't like the sound of this...

[Mr. Harley]

Apple has an expensive OS since they have a proprietary system, and the business model they used, maintaining control of the entire system, hardware through software, has not served them well. I remember being a "code monkey" in the days of the Apple II+ - actually, I did both the engineering and the coding , writing a large multi-relational database using floppy drives and numbered floppies, in a matter akin to today's tape storage libraries (except the floppy changer was a hand mark 1). Apple had an excellent chance to dominate the pc industry, and history speaks for itself.

Secondly, if you are also in the IT industry, shame on you! Apple the same price as MS! Only in desktop operating systems, and only for the end user. Try purchasing a full slate of MS development tools. Plus, MS is doing the exact same thing as Apple, getting greedy and putting it's business plan at risk. Of course that's comparing Apples and Oranges , or at least Apples and PC's.

MS is making the same mistakes as Apple, they've just had a more successful business/legal plan (sue any small, innovative competitors that threaten you, and who won't sell, and put them out of business - let's discuss Dr. Dos, Stacker, et al). They also have a huge war chest, and a de facto monopoly. If you want to argue the de facto monopoly bit, look at their profits on their Windows OS/Office products - runn ing at approximately 800-900% from their own balance sheets, one was 0.2 billion in costs on 2.1 billion profits, the other one was slightly less. How can you maintain that level of profit with out a de facto monopoly?

However, they have gotten so greedy, i.e. the proposed yearly license fees, etc. that they've finally pushed the Linux market over the critical point. That's why I phrase it "de facto" monopoly. After a certain point your greed drives people into alternatives, and you lose your control. Microsoft is trying to retrench after doing just that, with the dropping in fees for some of their developer packages. They just dropped one from $249 to $49. It remains to be seen if they can react fast enough, and remain an IBM (after they blew their initial triumph with their PC - which was flawed, no argument there, but they did it mostly right) or end up on the periphery like Apple. I'm betting they will stay big, but lose their monopoly power.

(more on security later, my break is over )

[Asher]

Originally posted by shawnmmcc
Apple has an expensive OS since they have a proprietary system

The most complicated part of the OS (Darwin) is most certainly not proprietary, it's open source.

Secondly, if you are also in the IT industry, shame on you! Apple the same price as MS! Only in desktop operating systems, and only for the end user. Try purchasing a full slate of MS development tools.

Try purchasing a full slate of Apple development tools comparable to Visual Studio...you can't. Visual Studio is expensive just like all premium products with a small userbase but insane R&D costs are (3D Studio, etc).

If you want to argue the de facto monopoly bit, look at their profits on their Windows OS/Office products - runn ing at approximately 800-900% from their own balance sheets, one was 0.2 billion in costs on 2.1 billion profits, the other one was slightly less.

You're confusing profits with revenues, and you also seem to think profit margins has some impact on monopoly status. They don't. They may correleate in some cases, but correlation does not equal causation.

I really don't believe Microsoft has a "de facto" monopoly, because there's plenty of choice out there for users. What is a monopoly good for if it doesn't restrict choice? Isn't that how a monopoly is defined?

You can buy computers without buying Windows, you can remove Windows and still function. The vast majority of people use Windows because it's the common platform. That's how the industry will always work.

However, they have gotten so greedy, i.e. the proposed yearly license fees, etc. that they've finally pushed the Linux market over the critical point. That's why I phrase it "de facto" monopoly. After a certain point your greed drives people into alternatives, and you lose your control. Microsoft is trying to retrench after doing just that, with the dropping in fees for some of their developer packages. They just dropped one from $249 to $49.

They dropped the 2002s to $49 because it was replaced with 2003s for $249...

There's one main flaw with your argument: Microsoft's revenues and profits keep increasing. You paint the picture that everyone's fleeing to Linux (when this is actually not the case at all, especially in MS' bread-and-butter desktop business).

[Q Classic]

my problem is less with the companies hiring the engineers. no, i just don't see it actually doing anything to help with security. people want features--whether they use them or not. this is why those email-only terminals bombed as a home computer; this is why imacs got huge (apple shipped them with a full suite of software: image/video, music, browsing/email, and word processing). unfortunately, the more features you add on by default, the less secure the system will be; licensing engineers won't change that.

users will remain idiots. you can't really change that.

i just don't see how it'll make anything more secure, other than corporate intranets.

[Mr. Harley]

Asher, I said DE FACTO monopoly. They control the vast majority of desktops and offices. There had been no low cost, easy alternative (please note I said easy - I prefer command line interfaces, but we are talking markets here). Note also I agree that you cannot directly compare Apple and Windows products, which is why you cannot purchase the same types of development platforms. It's why I made the bad puns.

Ahser stated: You're confusing profits with revenues, and you also seem to think profit margins has some impact on monopoly status. They don't. They may correleate in some cases, but correlation does not equal causation.

First, I am not confusing profits with revenues! Are you bothering to read my post? I posted the costs, AS PUBLISHED BY MICROSOFT, with the revenues. Subtract costs from revenue. I believe that equals profit. This is using MS published numbers for that division. Corporate profits includes numerous other factors, we are looking at the OS and Office divisions only, for which I was very specific and for which MS publishes individual figures. IT'S THEIR NUMBERS.

Then there is your reversal of my reasoning. I do not think "...profit margins has some impact on monopoly status." No, I state that exceedingly high profit margins are an indicator, and a fairly solid one, of monopoly status. The monopoly can be perfectly legal, such as those granted by a patent. Or they can be de facto, granted by market position, size (which in the US usually includes abuse of the legal and political systems to help guarantee the de facto monopoly), etc.

One good indicator of this is in pharma. The profit margins on a drug, once the patent status is lost, drops to pennies on the dollar as other companies begin marketing it. Any field where the operating profits run in the HUNDREDS of per cent will naturally attract substantial investment, increasing competition, and then dropping costs.

It hasn't happened in operating systems. That is because of the de facto monopoly MS has. Part of it is due to the complacency of users, and for a long period the costs of the office and the OS were a reasonable fraction of the cost of the hardware (in Wintel PC's).

However, now that you can assemble a perfectly good business machine, hardware wise, for $200 as a home user (bargain shopping over many months) or easily $500 for a business user, the OS and office have become a susbtantial portion of the cost of a computer. MS attempted to start to impose yearly licensing fees, and has had to retreat partially on these. Again, why de facto monopoly. A true monopoly, like one granted for a drug via patent, for which there is no superior alternative, such as with so-called orphan drugs, can maintain extremely high costs, even though many of them are actually developed using government funds and previously performed research. However, just like vaccines (look at our free-market arguments there ) it's not just is the product profitable, but is it profitable enough for the Wall Street model imposed on many companies.

MS has dropped their office costs to $150 is you qualify for acedemic software. Akin to the two-tiered costs in the airline industry, for business versus pleasure travel. This is due to the fact for most home users, Office 97 is perfectly adequate, the Corel and other now free offices are priced very competitively, and the fact MS realizes, like the automobile companies, if you get students (analogy - first time buyers) to get used to MS products, they will probably continue to use them. I never said MS was stupid. Quite the contrary. They are responding to new market pressures against their DE FACTO monopoly, which is why I compared them to IBM. I do not think they will become a secondary company in the software industry like Apple, they have too many sharp executives, and one of the biggest war chests in the history of modern capitalism.

I will back up my claim of Microsoft model of charging excessively high fees for development tools. When I was writing the database mentioned before, I looked into Fortran and Cobol compilers (which I already knew). Please remember that we are talking I believe 1979. The cost was $550! That's around $2000. I ended up programming in Basic, which I had to learn, like alot of people during that time period, because the compiler cost more than the hardware. For a ported product (minimal research, any masters level student can easily port a compiler), no less. People in the IT industry have noted the same thing. The browser wars had very little to do with your desktop browser, it had everything to do with Server software and development tools, Java, etc.

security next

[Mr. Harley]

Microsoft made marketing decisions that directly affected, and continue to affect, the security of their products. You have three problems, ASPI, ActiveX, Office Macro tools, and the VB runtime engine (I'll use VB for short).

Let's take the easiest case. Active X, which is related to the browser wars. Everything said here for Active X also applies to ASPI, though to a lesser degree (go ahead, split hairs - I said more or less - I am going to attempt to keep this post shorter than my usual ).

Active X is tightly integrated into the operating system, in fact it makes system calls. That means that an Active X control can tell the operating system to directly do something, NO intermediate layers. To put something like that on a web page is insane, from a security standpoint.

However, MS had a plan. EVERYBODY would pay MS for a security certificate for their web pages, an expensive, recurring cost. The only problem is that most businesses decided not to, while deploying Active X. You can be like me, and turn Active X off unless I absolutely must have it, for example on some of my financial sites, after which I turn it back off. It's lousy security and great marketing.

Aspi differs in that the profit would be made via sale of web-authoring software, versus security certificates. It was part of the largely successful attempt to defeat java as a not-quite open source initiative. I won't argue that Sun microsystems made some bad decisions in that conflict, conversely, MS was in the position to put them in a "head I win, tales you lose" proposition. This is one of MS's strengths, they are excellent at recognizing and exploiting those situations.

Look at MSN. MS sunk BILLIONS in it, and made numerous mistakes over the first several years. However, MS has the money, and a senior management that both has vision and controls the company. They do not mind paying billions for their mistakes, while if their competitors make mistakes, sometimes even just one, they go under. MS essentially has no capitalization costs, which puts them in an enviable market position. They brilliantly and brutally use it.

Office Macro tools. The way MS, combined with highly deceptive and misleading product announcements during the initial days of windows, put it's Office Suite on the way to the top. The Macro tools let MS present the first integrated suite of word processor, spreadsheet, non-relational database, and OPERATING SYSTEM (see Active X, above). From a security standpoint, they are HORRENDOUS. I have used alternative products for those very reasons. However, giving their marketing, brilliant aquisition strategy (MS now owns parts of both Corel and Apple), strategic alliances (giving money to SCO when their new management is built on a lawsuit-based business model that includes Linux), etc. for many people in the business world they have little choice.

However, MS greed on Office products and the clever release of some free products by their competitors has again weakened their hold in the long term. They have responded by making the Student/Teacher version both affordable and easy to obtain. They are not stupid. But just as the airline industry discovered, the two tiered pricing system will put downward pressure on their profits. If MS drops it's profits on it's office division to a measely 100-200% (that represents a roughly 70%-90% drop FOR THE DIVISION) they still won't lose money. Okay, I wandered. Back to security.

The VB runtime engine. What in the name of *** did they think they were doing. Like Active X I essentially am letting someone on the outside (at the web page I am accessing) have direct access into the core of my system. VB is very powerful. The way it is implemented is, well, unspeakable in terms of security. That's why many worm writers adore it.

The only worm I ever might have gotten caught by was the one with the "I love you" message in the Phillipines, which used VB. Where the clever sod took advantage of Outlook defaults, and used a double .. file name (simple change in the Windows file system - that should, again from the SECURITY standpoint, never have been permitted). The default Outlook display truncated the .vbx portion of the name, making it look like some innocent file type, I cannot remember which. Luckily, I don't use Outlook and didn't get caught.

All of these issues are convenience, about which your comments about consumers are largely correct, and MARKETING desicions. Those rest solely at MS feet. Which is why I totally oppose the idea of licensing engineers. They will be pressured to release bad code due to marketing reasons, and then of course the company will try to blame it one the licensed engineer. After all, it's on his ticket, he should have saved us from ourselves.

I've seen it happen all the time in aviation, for an imperfect analogy. One of the more common causes of accidents in general aviation is when the businessman/owner of an aircraft puts pressure on the pilot to get to the appointment. The pilot caves in, proceeds into weather conditions that his aircraft is not suited for, they crash with fatal results, and then everybody is signing statements while the lawyers try to figure out who to blame. The difference is the businessman in these cases also pays the price for his ignorance/stupidity (ignoring the advice from the pilot/professional he hired and pushing them). Without that kind of consequence, the pressure on these licensed engineers given the current outsourcing and paradigm shifts in the software industry would be horrendous. Leave the system as it is.

[Asher]

Originally posted by shawnmmcc
Let's take the easiest case. Active X, which is related to the browser wars. Everything said here for Active X also applies to ASPI, though to a lesser degree (go ahead, split hairs - I said more or less - I am going to attempt to keep this post shorter than my usual ).

Active X is tightly integrated into the operating system, in fact it makes system calls. That means that an Active X control can tell the operating system to directly do something, NO intermediate layers. To put something like that on a web page is insane, from a security standpoint.

ActiveX itself isn't the problem, Mozilla has a similar system called XPI. In fact, XPI is more or less a direct clone of ActiveX but is limited only to the browser suite since, well, they don't run an OS. The difference is, MS uses ActiveX for things such as Windows Update and Office Update.

It's actually a feature that most users find incredibly convenient, and it's actually the little things like that which make MS popular with consumers. Most geeks don't understand that. They see ActiveX and cringe -- "why don't they make them log out and log in as a root user, run apt-get update??? This ActiveX stuff is nonsense!"

I'm confused why you discuss how evil this is, when ActiveX itself has seen very little problems with it. There was a brief period of a couple weeks where ActiveX certificates could be forged, but that was fixed and there were no widespread use of that as far as I know.

One of the "problems" with it is users click "Yes" all the time to unsigned ActiveX updates. The problem with that is user stupidity, there's a clear warning label on it.

Look at MSN. MS sunk BILLIONS in it, and made numerous mistakes over the first several years. However, MS has the money, and a senior management that both has vision and controls the company. They do not mind paying billions for their mistakes, while if their competitors make mistakes, sometimes even just one, they go under. MS essentially has no capitalization costs, which puts them in an enviable market position. They brilliantly and brutally use it.

For the life of me I can't see how this applies to security or to anything we're talking about. MSN turns a profit now, btw.

Office Macro tools. The way MS, combined with highly deceptive and misleading product announcements during the initial days of windows, put it's Office Suite on the way to the top. The Macro tools let MS present the first integrated suite of word processor, spreadsheet, non-relational database, and OPERATING SYSTEM (see Active X, above). From a security standpoint, they are HORRENDOUS.

Explain.
Because Office allows you to use macros it's horrendous for security?

Office 2003 has VERY clear warnings before it runs any Macros, so they're only run when you tell it to.

Again, this is another classic case of the geek not understanding what people want. Businesses in particular love Macros, they vastly increase productivity in many areas.

This is another situation where the vast majority of "problems" with it are people running Macros they shouldn't. Again, this is merely a social engineering problem and has nothing to do with the validity of the software.

Too many geeks are just completely clueless when it comes to how people use computers and what people want in their computers (see Urban Ranger's amusing rants about how Linux is going to displace Windows on the desktop...). The vast majority of Windows problems out there are because of an uneducated and careless userbase. It will happen to any product that sees massive adoption by non-computer geeks. Windows is a happy balance between security, usability, and stability, provided you keep up to date with the updates.

As you probably know, I've run Windows for years and years and have never had a virus, I've never had my computer hacked, I've never had any security problems with it. The same can be said for users of Linux and other alternative operating systems, but they mistakenly attribute this to how wonderful their OS is compared to Windows. It's actually because they tend to know what they're doing.

People who know what they're doing in Windows are just as secure as people who know what they're doing in Linux.

[Asher]

Originally posted by shawnmmcc
First, I am not confusing profits with revenues! Are you bothering to read my post? I posted the costs, AS PUBLISHED BY MICROSOFT, with the revenues. Subtract costs from revenue. I believe that equals profit. This is using MS published numbers for that division. Corporate profits includes numerous other factors, we are looking at the OS and Office divisions only, for which I was very specific and for which MS publishes individual figures. IT'S THEIR NUMBERS.

I guess my problem was with your lack of grasp of economics lingo -- when you say SOMETHING in (cost/revenue) on SOMETHINGELSE, SOMETHINGELSE is always revenue. You don't make something "on" profit, it's "on" revenue. Like I made $100 on revenue of $1000...

Then there is your reversal of my reasoning. I do not think "...profit margins has some impact on monopoly status." No, I state that exceedingly high profit margins are an indicator, and a fairly solid one, of monopoly status. The monopoly can be perfectly legal, such as those granted by a patent. Or they can be de facto, granted by market position, size (which in the US usually includes abuse of the legal and political systems to help guarantee the de facto monopoly), etc.

It can be an indicator, but it doesn't prove it. That was my point. Correlation does not equal causation...

One good indicator of this is in pharma. The profit margins on a drug, once the patent status is lost, drops to pennies on the dollar as other companies begin marketing it. Any field where the operating profits run in the HUNDREDS of per cent will naturally attract substantial investment, increasing competition, and then dropping costs.

It hasn't happened in operating systems. That is because of the de facto monopoly MS has. Part of it is due to the complacency of users, and for a long period the costs of the office and the OS were a reasonable fraction of the cost of the hardware (in Wintel PC's).

You can't honestly compare the pharmacuticals market with the OS market and keep a straight face...

Windows is a monopoly because it's the standard. Because it's the standard, people buy it. It's a fundamental property of mainstream operating systems. For developers to make software, they need to know the architecture. If there were multiple mainstream platforms, development costs would be extraordinary, and support headaches far more numerous. The Operating System market is what most people call a "naturally occuring monopoly", people use the standard, and the standard propagates simply because it is the standard.

Any talk about "breaking up this monopoly" comes from people who don't understand economics and don't understand how computers work. (Note I'm not saying you advocated this, this was merely a tangent).

MS has dropped their office costs to $150 is you qualify for acedemic software.

What's your point? This is standard practice for the vast majority of major software companies. Academic pricing exists with Apple, it exists with Microsoft, it exists with Corel, it exists with Borland, it exists with Sun, etc. It's a very clever way to get up-and-coming students hooked on your software and well-versed with it.

Are you saying this is somehow evil, because MS gives students (who are notoriously short on cash) a substantial price break?

I will agree Microsoft has a "monopoly" on consumer OS and office systems, but this is not a true "monopoly" because if one really wants, there are other viable choices out there. It's not like a patent monopoly, as you said, which gives someone absolute power. Nor is it a natural resource monopoly. For that reason, there's nothing wrong with it as long as prices are inline and consumers are willing to pay it.

Seeing as how Microsoft's biggest competition in the consumer market charges more for their OS ($100 to upgrade every year for Mac, $90 every 4-5 years to upgrade for Windows...), I don't see how the point can be made that MS overcharges.

[JimmyCracksCorn]

I think this point:

While he acknowledged that IT budgets vary widely even within vertical markets, a programmer at a small community credit union, for instance, should be held to the same standard as one working for Bank of America. “If that credit union is connected to the ATM backbone, what kind of damage can be caused” by software that was open to vulnerabilities, Moritz wondered.

...alone makes it worth it in my mind.

Besides, its not like its unreasonable to ask people to be trained before you hire them. And I don't mean those Microsoft A+ certification courses you can take for a grand either. I worked for one of those as a the head technicians helper, and it was a joke. Besides the guy I worked for, everyone else there, even the teachers were complete idiots, and knew next to nothing about computers. Not that I'm an expert either (got the job through my dad), but I'm not trained and I knew more than them. Not to mention 99% of the graduates didn't speak a word of English either. What a joke...

But I think this licensing is a good thing... why not?