[How] Will Microsoft Weather a Perfect Storm?

Last week's article What Is Microsoft So Afraid Of? is meant to be provocative ... but it is also real reporting.

Thinking about the situation Microsoft is in, I believe the firm has, at a high level, quite a lot to be worried about ... a sort of perfect storm of high-level business trends, many of which transcend any individual product or feature. Big trends are harder to debug and then patch on Tuesdays.

Here are the issues:

1. Declining importance of the desktop OS. As people spend more and more time in their browsers, the OS underneath it matters less. The trend is definitely toward more browser-based apps, even if they employ Flash or Silverlight or other acceleration technologies. Offline support is moving slowly but together with cloud (Mesh?) storage, will make the local filesystem less important.
2. Rise of OS X as a real competitor -- between publicity, 'time to sink in,' and the decreasing premium that Apple charges for a Mac over a similarly equipped Dell/Acer/Toshiba laptop, OS X is a real and growing threat to Windows.
3. Bill's off to save the world. For a while now, Bill has been the good cop (hey, stop laughing, I'm serious) to Steve Ballmer's bad cop. Now that Gates has retired to work on philanthropy, and Ballmer's the CEO, we're seeing more dumb-ass bad-cop stuff like the Mojave experiment, and less brilliant product strategy. Microsoft needs a good cop to pair off with Steve.
4. Vista failure. The .Net platform was one of the smartest, most successful things Microsoft has ever done, an enormous accomplishment that brought enterprise IT shops and other developers along. Following that up with Vista isn't just bad at the retail (license selling) level, it shakes enterprise confidence in MSFT, and ticks off developers. From a developer POV, most of the cool stuff in Vista was gutted, or moved somewhere else ... or never really worked very well (WPF), after years of build-up. Now MSFT desperately needs devs to buy into "the next thing," and they're hesitant.
5. Silverlight stuck in transition: Silverlight 2 is an awesome technology... but it has two problems: First, small penetration, unknown/unpublished penetration numbers, and no specific numeric commitment by MSFT to create penetration on PCs. Second, folks are sceptical that Silverlight on Mac really has a future. If that's in doubt, it seriously impacts the choice to use Silverlight because of #2 above. I can say that I've already had more than one client interested in doing serious work on Silverlight 2, but they insist on installed base projections (not download numbers) to make the business decision, and I don't blame them.
6. Rise of console gaming: PC gaming was always a key part of the "latest and greatest" PC/OS/component ecosystem, plus it helped press down Mac adoption. As consoles (including Microsoft's own Xbox 360) gain, this relative benefit of the Wintel client platform goes down... and yet MSFT still has to spend a ton on R&D if they intend to keep the PC gaming client (DirectX and hardware integration) decent. So less bang for the buck there.
7. Rise of USB. Now that practically everything runs over USB, it's easier for device makers to offer Linux, MacOS, etc. drivers (the upper layers can often be just user-space apps). So on the peripheral front there is less Windows differentiation in terms of hardware choices, and less lock-in.
8. Reluctance to innovate with server licensing model. Most startups dream of going big, and they assume they'll do so on an open-source stack -- not because Windows Server isn't a killer product ... but because the current licensing for Server makes it a non-starter for cloud services or for architectures designed around cheap, flexible horizontal scaling. An easy fix is to add auditing to the core WMI counters and create a Windows Server SKU that costs $0 per CPU and $0 per client ... but to stay in compliance you average your ASP.net transaction count, or SQL size/complexity + operation count and then cut a license renewal check. Make it free (as in beer, with online-only support) for the first few thousand page views per month for a typical app, and it'll rapidly start taking over a big piece of the startup and cloud/on-demand computing world.

All this said, big companies tend to have nine lives (even if Yahoo! seems intent on burning through all nine of them). So I'm not about to count Microsoft out, or suggest an "over-the-hill" tipping point is at hand. Just some big decisions, both strategic and tactical, that ought to be made well and soon.

Vista Performance: It Really Is That Bad

I try to stay away from the rant post, it's too easy and doesn't contribute a lot. But I feel myself succumbing, so at least I'll try and mix in a little useful material with my rant.

I just spent some significant time trying get Vista to behave on my wife's laptop. By behave, I mean not make it impossible for her to surf the web with Firefox because the CPU was pegged most of the time and the HDD never spun down.

First, some facts:

1. I'm as close to a Microsoft fanboy as you'll find in the Bay Area. They do great stuff. I'm an ecumenical kind of guy, so I also so like Ruby and Flex and Java and Linux (wait 'til my next MySQL post). I.e., I'm not married to Microsoft, but I think they have done some amazing engineering in the last 10 years and it's a pleasure to work with almost all of their late-model products.
2. This machine, while not blazing by 2008 standards is only a few years old, does have a 3 GHz HT proc, multiple gigs of RAM, nVidia graphics, plenty of hard drive space, etc. In fact, it ranks in the 4.x range on Vista's own "performance estimate" in every category except graphics. Which shouldn't matter because Aero Glass is turned off, and my wife isn't a gamer.
3. Just to cover all the bases, it's plugged in and not configured to ever step down the processor or anything like that to save power. And there's almost no software on it. It's basically Firefox and MS Office, Grisoft/AVG, whatever Windows Update considers critical, and not much else. My wife runs under a non-admin account because she neither wants nor needs to install or configure anything on it.
4. An early-ish adopter, I was forced to abandon Vista after seeing it run cripplingly slowly on a 3.5 GHz, 5+ rated desktop. As a developer, watching this machine churn while it tries to decide which UAC prompt to throw next wasn't acceptable, since I had XP on the same box (dual-boot) and could measure that XP was easily 25% faster. But the wife liked Vista's look and feel, actually preferred it to XP, so cool, didn't think perf would be a big issue for her.

Ok, so the performance was all gone to heck. I checked all the obvious background tasks that could be going nuts, virus scans, disk indexing and all that. Found a few services and tasks that had caused problems before and disabled all of them. Can't imagine why they're running by default. What ever happened to configuring services to run based on their actually being needed by something the user wants to do?

The killer this particular time was the 'network location awareness service' and the DNS caching service. First, NLA. According to MSDN (full info here), this service is 'vital for computers or devices that might move between different networks.' First, I'm not sure I believe that; so far, the computer seems to work better without it. The little icon (and service) that would take 5 minutes to realize the machine was actually on the Internet (you know the icon) is now dead, and apps connect right away. Funny how that works.

Just for the sake of argument, let's pretend that it really is 'vital for computers moving between different networks.' Here's a clue: (1) it doesn't take much monitoring for the machine to realize it's always on the same network in my house, so (2) shut this stupid service down, (3) if another network is detected or the old one is unavailable, maybe then spin this beast up and (4) monitor your own resource usage -- if the service starts using 50%+ of the CPU all the time, for whatever reason, and the network isn't ever changing, why not shut it the #$% down at that point?

I could make the same argument for DNS cache. Although it boggles the mind how a service this simple could ever be using a real percentage of a modern CPU. I turned it off. I guess Comcast will hate me now for making an extra 25 lookups a day.

I'm not going to get into the argument that there shouldn't be lots of services on the machine -- after all, most of the myriad services have little performance impact and at least in Vista are supposedly less likely to compromise security. Although I would prefer a 'configure to run after deciding it's useful and not harmful' self-management approach.

I just wonder, if a pristine machine like this one, well configured etc., scoring generally 4 in the Vista perf scale, and whose only sin is being 2005 vintage, gets mucked up this badly from such mild use, there are truly some problems with Vista, both for home users and businesses, that are more serious than I would have believed.

Ok, so I promised I'd try and offer a little useful info. Once again, for the sake of SEO

Some possible fixes for Really Bad Perf in a basic Vista machine:

• go into the task scheduler and get rid of tasks you don't want to run;
• look at the Network Location Awareness and DNSCache services (I'm not gonna say kill them unless that's what your particular machine needs ... but look at them);
• if you haven't quashed Aero already, turn it all off and see if that helps;
• and if you're running Vista Ultimate, and you don't actually ever use Media Center, go and kill all the tasks and services related to MC because Vista isn't smart enough to notice that you don't need 'em, and I've caught them hogging a ton of resources.

Last, not to get into the 'uphill to school both ways thing,' but a 700+MB working set with no user apps running??? You just want to say, "Man, have some self respect and get on a treadmill once in a while..."