Marketing Ninja

Yesterday I wrote a post called Rea Maor doesn’t get it – 7 Reasons Why Microsoft is not Doomed. It was simply a debunking piece for Rea Maor’s absurd article on 7 Reasons Why Microsoft is DOOMED!

On second thought, I think Rea Maor’s piece may just be a very good example of successful link bait; I don’t know the guy but given that he’s a PayPerPost blogger I wouldn’t it past him. We all mistook his inability to back up his arguments with facts as some kind of ignorance when in reality he may be an evil genius laughing all the way as bloggers like me link to his article and boost his Technorati authority.

Some of the comments and additional blog entries on Rea’s blog have additional great debunking information that I want to summarize for you. I did a good job with my own debunking article but some of the readers of Rea’s blog had additional insights and criticisms that are worth notice.

1. Their business model is at a dead end.

Rob D said:
14 billion in PROFIT is not a dead end.

Note: that’s what I said.

2. They flunk at Web 2.0.

t-itern said:
Most of my friends are using Live Spaces. And dude, Live has great APIs and libraries to come out soon. It’s way better to deal with Live APIs than to deal with 10000000001 REST-ful different web-apps out there. Because for each web-apps out there, you have to “login” x-times. Even that, web 2.0 mostly is just hype. There’s no big money in it, and I still believe that web/http is not a good software platform. It’s good for publishing but not for software.

lix said:
“Although the term Ajax was coined in 2005, most of the technologies that enable Ajax started a decade earlier with Microsoft’s initiatives in developing Remote Scripting. Referring to the idea as Inner-Browsing, Netscape Evangelism published an article in 2003 which presented ideas for implementing models in which “all navigation occurs within a single page, as in a typical application interface.” [2] Techniques for the asynchronous loading of content on an existing Web page without requiring a full reload date back as far as the IFRAME element type (introduced in Internet Explorer 3 in 1996) and the LAYER element type (introduced in Netscape 4 in 1997, abandoned during early development of Mozilla). Both element types had a src attribute that could take any external URL, and by loading a page containing JavaScript that manipulated the parent page, Ajax-like effects could be attained. This set of client-side technologies was usually grouped together under the generic term of DHTML. Macromedia’s Flash could also, from version 4, load XML and CSV files from a remote server without requiring a browser to be refreshed.

Microsoft’s Remote Scripting (MSRS), introduced in 1998, acted as a more elegant replacement for these techniques, with data being pulled in by a Java applet with which the client side could communicate using JavaScript. This technique worked on both Internet Explorer version 4 and Netscape Navigator version 4 onwards. Microsoft then created the XMLHttpRequest object in Internet Explorer version 5 and first took advantage of these techniques using XMLHttpRequest in Outlook Web Access supplied with the Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 release.”

Note: in this portion of the comment lix is quoting from the Wikipedia article on AJAX.

3. They’re running out of friends.

t-itern said:
They’re not running out of friends so to speak. Do you know what Steve Jobs envy the most from Microsoft/Bill Gates? One word: Partnership. MS has tons of partnerships outside the tech industry. Recently, I just installed Vista on my desktop (I also own a MacBook by the way). Front-Row (or Corn Row, whatever you want to call that particular Mac App) is no match for Windows Media Center. I can listen and watch MTV music video for FREE (granted not all of them but it still beats Front-Row). I installed my new cheap TV-Tuner and voila, Windows Media Center deals with all the connection and figuring out all the channels. Now my Dev box has become an entertainment box with no performance tax. MS provides the infrastructure, content providers provide the content. They both happy with the current situation because MS knows its place.

4. They only have a couple of cash cows to work with.

Rob D said:
ONLY a COUPLE of cash cows? Better than only one cash cow like say Google.

Note: To clarify, the point that Rob D is making is that Microsoft has a much more diverse range of products and sources of income than Google, which makes the vast majority of its money off of AdWords and AdSense, a single advertising service product line.

5. People are hating on Vista.

McAkins said:
So what is wrong with Vista? I love this Vista that XP, and I am not talking of the UI at all. If your Vista install is buggy, then you may not be the geek you pretend to be afteral, because if you run compatibility check you would have known if your hardware and software are fit for Vista or not. I have been using Vista since Beta3, sir, I love this OS. What do you mean slow? I am writing this from my 5 year old P4 laptop installed with Vista with just 512K of memory. Why don’t I see all the complaints these idiots are talkings about? Why, somome mentioned blue-screen-of-death? Where? I haven’t seen one since Beta3. Vista is the first OS you can appear with online without antivirus and firewall and still can surf with confidence. Everyone complains of holes in MS software, now MS closes the holes with Vista, now they are complaining it is locked so tight it no fun using it. Hello, you can’t eat your cake and still have it. There is price to pay for every change requested.

6. Their stock isn’t rising any more.

fubar said:
omg, microsoft owns 30% of apple, what the heck was the author thinking?!

Note: While this reply does not have to do with Microsoft’s stock price itself, I couldn’t resist the temptation to republish the comment.

7. PC Makers are starting to turn their backs on Microsoft.

Steve Hodson said:
Now about this thing with OEM’s turning their backs on Microsoft – c’mon – didn’t you take economics in school or did you miss the part about the consumer being a part of market forces. All Dell and the others are doing is giving in to consumer demand for choice as Linux becomes more well known among the real world users – not just a geek’s software toy to play with. I bet you dollars to donuts that if OS X could run on the PC platform you would see even more people asking for it on OEM installs than you are seeing ask for Linux.

Given that I received a gigantic landslide of traffic from my post yesterday, I’m going to throw up two additional adsense ads today to measure the effectiveness of their positions on the page and their color schemes, since I anticipate that this post may also receive heavier traffic than usual. The purpose is not to make money off of the ads, but rather to provide some research data that I will republish later.

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