Is the end near for Microsoft?

[Calum]

quote:Originally posted by mc0282:
i am going to cry, is my dream coming true ? is microsoft could be out of business ?  if these judge fine microsoft i am going to send him  lovely letter to him for his good ass work...

it's not going to happen. Last year when Ansett went bust (in Australia) everybody said "Oh no, now Qantas is a monopoly and can charge what they like as their only competition no longer exists". In response the Australian government spent a shitload of taxpayers' money on subsidising Ansett so there would be some competition in the business. is that fair? no. I was dead set against it, although i think quite a lot of Australians (a majority? who knows?) were in favour of it.

This is not the same situation however if Microsoft goes bust overnight (like if they were fined and had to file for bankruptcy as a result) everybody would be going "Oh no!" our critical systems require microsoft's support, our economy and national security is at stake" and what with all this high fear terrorism shit that the USA's government is churning out right now, those security fears will be acute, and the government would simply pour money into microsoft in the "public interest" or some such bullshit, and the public would support that.

To get rid of microsoft properly they need to be publicly shown to be incompetent and overpriced. there will be no quick death for microsoft for this very reason.

 

quote:Question thou make me wonder if these virus being poping out , couldn't microsoft had something to do with it ? they lunch virus and blame on hackers so the way make easy for them to unleashed the Trust Computing whatever they call it shit ?

possible, but highly unlikely in my opinion - with all these viruses around a lot of people are making a big noise about "windows is not secure" but most of them are not saying "palladium is the answer" - they are usually saying "solaris/BSD/linux is the answer", so microsoft would be doing themselves out of business by helping viruses to circulate (in fact by having such an insecure OS, this is exactly what they are doing, although in an indirect way). Also, think of the stink if it were to be made public that microsoft were doing this? no i think they would steer well clear of it.

[Faust]

quote:it's not going to happen. Last year when Ansett went bust (in Australia) everybody said "Oh no, now Qantas is a monopoly and can charge what they like as their only competition no longer exists". In response the Australian government spent a shitload of taxpayers' money on subsidising Ansett so there would be some competition in the business. is that fair? no. I was dead set against it, although i think quite a lot of Australians (a majority? who knows?) were in favour of it.

Which did absolutely nothing anyway.  Lew and Fox decided to buy Ansett but pulled out at the last minute.  Now we have wasted thousands (millions?) of  tax payer dollars for nothing.  It would have been better to spend the money on workers entitlements and then to let Ansett die.

Anyway for domestic flights we have REx in competition with Qantas - they have bought up a lot of the old Ansett planes including all of Kendell.     Those New Zealanders will never be competition to our mighty Qantas!  Muah ha ha ha!  

And I think the money MS would need to keep running even a quarter of their business would be too much for even Bush to explain away.  A huge fine may not kill them but it would at least cripple them... err... cripple them more that is.    

edit:spelling

[ May 14, 2003: Message edited by: Faust ]

[lazygamer]

quote:Originally posted by Zombie9920:
This is completely false. The Register has a habit of reporting stuff like a tabloid would. They took the $11,000 per incident fine and took the number of accounts(200 million) and multiplied the numbers together. There is no basis to this story other than some fool making assumptions and stories up.

This is strange, I am a big Register fan. Ever since I started seeing some of the Reg articles, I made the register my broswer homepage. Does this have anything to do with the fact that The Register is blatantly anti-microsoft, and you happen not to like that? How about you show me some anti-register sites eh?


Calum:Sigh, your probably right, No quick death fix. What's really scary though, is the idea that the US government would bail out Microsoft!

[SAJChurchey]

Awesome, even this will put a small dent in Billy G's wallet.

As a friend of mine once said,

 

quote:
M$'s days are numbered...it may be a big number, but they're numbered nonetheless.

[ShawnD1]

quote:The flaw was discovered close to four minutes after security researcher Muhammad Faisal Rauf Danka set to work on Passport. He was able to access Passport accounts at will by typing "emailpwdreset" into a URL that has the e-mail address of a user account and the address where a reset message can be sent.

oh my god.... 4 minutes? maybe microsoft should hire some 15 year olds to check for security flaws.

[Faust]

This is probably why Microsoft would pay security consultants by the hour and not for each bug found.  

[Calum]

here's another reason why microsoft might not be about to be put out of business by the government any time soon:
opensecrets.org (sadly a fucking ASP page!)

[Faust]

Man the "campaign contribution" thing sucks.

[new2linux55]

Someone should have told them never put all youre eggs in the one basket.