I am a shareholder of your company. The world is still waiting for your Q4 FY2010 report so that we will know how much money you made as of June 30, 2010. We are all on Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein’s schedule. Mr. Klein, you rival Red Hat posted their FY 2010 report, what is the hold up?

Since I have yet to receive a personal invitation to your shareholders meeting on July 29, 2010. I have several more questions for Microsoft which I will ask from here. I welcome any answers from leadership or the floor.

What is your mobile strategy in a post-PC world? Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may try to deny it. The fact is that PC desktop sales have been on a decline, 23% down as of last year. Bill Gates has nothing to do with the day-to-day anymore and it shows.

Your attempt to reach the youth via smart phones was an epic failure. KIN has been pulled by Verizon in a matter of weeks. Anonymous purported employees claimed that the IP you bought acquiring Danger are now wasted and call it as embarrassing as Microsoft Bob. Joe Wilcox correctly predicted Kin’s failure as you fired the leadership of the Entertainment and Devices division just before the Kin product launch. I too predicted in November 2009 that Kin, then code-named “Pink,” would not live up to Mr. Ballmer’s nor Mr. Gates’ vision. How could releasing the Kin under the circumstances be profitable? Why would anybody buy a Kin? Android and the iPhone have cameras, Facebook, Twitter, and more… how could you proceed into the market with less?!? Sure you can say I don’t get it because I am not a teenager but still how can you make a social phone without a calendar? Sorry, the Microsoft brand does not equal cool with whatever crowd you expected to buy Kin.

You bought the wrong smartphone IP. Last year bloggers advised you to buy Palm for their Linux-based WebOS, but you let that HP beat you to it. Now HP plans to ditch Microsoft for WebOS on tablets netting a double loss for you. There goes Mr. Ballmer’s iPad killer. Your excuses come from Mr. Klein who complains that tech mergers are hard to do. Is this fiscal leadership?

With all of the Kin ads you bought, did you once stop to notice that Windows Mobile lost market share to Google Android Linux? Developers are not chomping at the bit to write apps for Windows 7 Mobile but they were so eager to do so for Apple that WWDC2010 sold out. Developers favor Android over Apple’s iPhone OS which makes any platform you put together a third class even before product launch.

What is next, Microsoft, yet another round of layoffs? No wonder Business Insider is saying “Microsoft’s Business Could Collapse in 2010.” First Google ditches Windows on security concerns. Next, IBM names Firefox its web browser standard. Microsoft apologist, Ina Fried reports that Microsoft is now forced to offer no-cost Office options in order to compete with OpenOffice.Org and Google Docs. How does firing people now help you make products that actually sell?

Microsoft, I can not say I did not warn you as I have been warning you of your demise here at whatwillweuse.com. I do not stand alone as Computer World is ready to admit: Linux could become the world’s most popular operating system. Come June 30, 2011, Microsoft, you will lack majority market share. What are you going to do about it?

Sincerely,

Beth Lynn Eicher

What Did I Buy

20 shares of ARMH- the low-power microprocessor behind Apple iPhone 4 and most Google Android phones. Since they are positioning to bring netbooks and thin-clients running Ubuntu and/or Google’s ChromeOS/Android, ARM processors will kill the PC. Microsoft will regret their decision not to support ARM on Windows 7.

7 shares of RHT- the Linux distributor Red Hat already has impressive enterprise server market share. As applications shift to the “software as a service” model, Red Hat will profit as green penny pinching IT managers look to the cloud. With their entrance to the virtualization market, they will capitalize on customers who want a single finger to point. Virtualization competitors Citrix and VMware do not make a guest-level OS, putting Red Hat at the cloud market advantage.

1 share MFST- the software giant is imploding yet I bought a single share. I welcome Microsoft’s glossy pamphlets which deny the epic failure that is afoot.

What we will buy affects what we will use.

I started this blog to keep personal notes of what exactly is Microsoft’s market share. Never did I ever expect a crowd of 28,460 unique visitors to care about what will we use when Microsoft has a minority market share. Thank you all for making me the tribal user of What Will We Use where we watch Microsoft’s market share until FY 2011 close.

First I defined where Microsoft claimed to have a majority market share.Then Nick and I agreed to watch w3counter’s market share reports.

There were only 3 which held any merit as of June 2009: Desktops, Browsers, and Office Suites.

How are we doing one year into it?

1. Desktop Operating Systems

In the past twelve months Windows market share went from 88.09% to 83.11%. The Windows XP product, which continues to hold the largest market share went from 69.74% to 49.95% of the total desktop operating system market share. The trend is showing as people divest from older Microsoft technologies, they do not “upgrade” to Windows Vista or Windows 7.

The next 12 months will bring a new breed of tablets and notebooks which will run  Ubuntu on ARM. These will sell like hot cakes so that people can watch Google’s youtube and play games of Facebook. The desktop is over, even in the corporate sector.

Here’s the dirty secret behind this mind-boggling growth — and the two words that will put an end to the party

IT consulting firm IDC reports that every dollar a company spends on a Microsoft product results in an additional $8 of IT expenses.

And one IT expert admits, “Trillions of dollars that companies have invested into information technology have gone to waste.”

Yet, companies have had no choice but to run these obscenely expensive and highly inefficient networks.

But that’s all about to change…

And that’s precisely why the two words “cloud computing” scare the hell out of Bill Gates.

…

And Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, has even written an entire book on the subject, entitled The Big Switch. In it, he asserts: “The PC age is giving way to a new era: the utility age.”

He goes on to make this prediction: “Rendered obsolete, the traditional PC is replaced by a simple terminal — a ‘thin client’ that’s little more than a monitor hooked up to the Internet.”

While that may sound far-fetched, in the corporate market, sales of these “thin clients” have been growing at over 20 percent per year — far outpacing the sales of PCs.

According to market-research firm IDC, the U.S. is now home to more than 7,000 data centers just like the one constructed on the banks of the Columbia River in 2005.

And the number of servers operating within these massive data centers is expected to grow to nearly 16 million by 2010 — that’s three times as many as a decade ago.

quote courtesy of Motely Fool Newsletter called

The Two Words Bill Gates Doesn’t Want You to Hear…

Plus, the 2 companies poised to rule the post-Microsoft world

“

2. Web Browsers

In the past twelve months Internet Explorer went from 57.6% to 45.7%. As far as Nick and I are concerned, this one is won in my favor. It is still fun to watch low low can Microsoft go? Google’s decision to turn off youtube.com support for older browsers was a fatal blow for IE6. All market share browser counters show Microsoft hemorrhaging market share. In June 30, 2011. IE9 will not save Microsoft since they have decided to not support it on Windows XP. Since Microsoft’s key operating system user demographic is XP, turning their back on their legacy customers will be the last straw. Seriously, how many people are going to buy a new PC just to run a proprietary web browser when Firefox and Chrome are free?

3. Office Suites

It is very possible I have this one won too. Last month I proposed to Nick that we use Oracle’s OpenOffice.Org download figures to count as missed profit opportunity. As of the time of this post OpenOffice.Org 3.x has 159,894,085 downloads which represents $55,962,929,750 loss. That’s Almost 56 MILLION dollars that Microsoft coulda-shoulda-woulda had. Will Microsoft make that level of profits in their business software division come FY2011 market share reports?

Meanwhile, Google Apps continues to pick up market share with their Microsoft Exchange migration tool…

Over 500,000 companies — including GE [NYSE: GE] and Procter & Gamble [NYSE: PG] — have already signed up for Google Apps.

This grab bag of business applications can be purchased and run over the Web for just $50 per year and is just one of many Google products now giving Microsoft a run for its money.

Considering that Google Apps costs just one-tenth of what a traditional business software suite does, it’s no surprise that more than 2,000 businesses are signing up per day.

quote courtesy of Motely Fool Newsletter called

The Two Words Bill Gates Doesn’t Want You to Hear…

Plus, the 2 companies poised to rule the post-Microsoft world

Microsoft’s Sharepoint product which is heavily tied to Microsoft Office 2007 is not for long either. Customers seeking to use free software to manage their intra-net content can do so with Alfresco. They’ll even help you migrate.

I am as confident as ever in my assertion.

Yes indeed Bug One will be RESOLVED.

Nick will pay me $20.

GandhiCon4 is afoot.

We will win the war. We are at war with Microsoft. We have always been at war with Microsoft. Come June 30, 2011 Microsoft will lose majority market share.

wasted

Just next door to the yard sale lived a friend of mine. She is a single mom and she was desperate. Her desktop would keep hanging and she was convinced she had a virus. She was using Windows after all. My friend had called the company who made the computer and the broadband provider. The company who made the computer would not talk to her because the computer was out of warranty. The broadband provider sent a tech to her home who fuddled around with her system but did not fix it. Instead the tech advised that she keep the computer off their network since it may have a virus. A mutual friend gave her a Ubuntu CD but she feared that the computer was too far gone. Her desktop, despite not having the cash to buy another one, was about to sit right next to that television.

She was hopeless because not only will her home be suddenly desktop-less, she was about to lose her documents and pictures. These bits were far beyond sentiment to her; they were her livelihood as a freelancer. Mother and daughter were asking themselves the question, “If we junk this computer, what will we use?” I told them, do not fear, this can be fixed by Linux.

I booted the system with the Ubuntu live CD. There was about 6 GB of original work to backup. Moreover, we were up against a dying hard drive. As I traversed the hard drive looking for good bits, the computer was trying i/o errors. I had to leave her home, go to the store to pick up a USB key and new hard drive. Out of pocket cost, minus the gas, was $65.

After backing up the hard drive, I asked my friend if she would like to replace the hard drive herself. Never seeing inside a computer, she was reluctant but I told her that I would be there the entire time. Once we cracked the case, she was more bold. Now knowing this computer was all-but-a-goner like the television hours previous, she slid the new hard drive in its place. While we were in there, I put in some spare memory I bought in a lot on ebay. As a reward, I gave her a t-shirt I bought at the Zareason booth at the SouthEast LinuxFest. Indeed, friends help friends use Linux. Out of pocket cost now up to $85.

Fixed by Linux

Now my friend uses a desktop with a newer disk, double the memory, and absolutely no viruses. She could not be happier. Was she asking for “Internet Explorer” or “Microsoft Office?” Nope. She was already using Firefox and OpenOffice.Org on her desktop before the disk failures and viruses showed up. There was absolutely no panicked questions like “If I can not use Microsoft software on Ubuntu, what will we use?”

Skeptics of my story and the premise for this blog “Microsoft will lose majority market share come June 30, 2011″ may say, “Beth Lynn, you are just one idealistic geek, you can not free the world with open source software.” To the contrary, I say, the Linux community steps up against poverty, not just proprietary software.

Maddog and Me at SouthEast LinuxFest 2010

Take Maddog for example. This man was a system administrator, like me. When he worked for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), a too-big-to-fail mega corporation, he told everyone that UNIX was dying and “Linux is inevitable!” They laughed at him but since he did a lot of favors for people he had enough gift-economy credits to convince folks to gift a computer to some college kid in Finland. Who was this boy genius who promised to replace the UNIX operating system this DEC computer ran with free software he helped write himself? Linus Tourvalds.
Maddog could retired with the gift of that one desktop as the feather in his cap. Instead he has dedicated his career to spreading the word about free software since then. Indeed, Linux is International.

Today he is in Brazil, and promises to deliver 70 MILLION systems with a business plan centered around Linux Terminal Server Project consoles.

Don’t believe it because you did not see it on television? Well, nobody watches television anymore. Instead we watch Google’s youtube.

Come June 30, 2011 Microsoft will be like television.

My copy of Microsoft Disk Operating System, circa 1984

In the 1980′s IBM, convinced that there was only money in hardware, licensed the operating systems for desktop computers to Microsoft Corporation. The PC was born. Software was shipped as a  boxed set with disks and manuals. Want more software? Want newer software? You had to buy it for hundreds of dollars from a licensed distributor, either at a store or through a sales person. Buying  the software then opening the box locked you into an end-user-licensing-agreement contract. If you try the software and you find it inadequate, you do not have the source code so your IT department can not fix it. You may call the company who made the software for help but they are likely to charge you as much as a physic hotline. There are no refunds on the software itself or support bills. If you are a home customer, you are at the mercy of user or “hobbyist” clubs who may provide some help on a volunteer basis. These hobbyists might even have some free software which matches your needs even better than the boxed software you bought for a couple hundred dollars. You might be lucky enough to have a geek somewhere in your family or circle of friends but in the end it is all just a hassle.

Why can’t the software be brought to wherever the computer is? All sorts of applications should be available by type by search-able key words. It would be a store that free and for purchase software would be side by side. Large companies and small businesses should compete for your business in the true American entrepreneurial spirit. Software should be vetted publicly. Each software product would have customer reviews from early adopters (IT people, hobbyists, and geeks) so that you can choose only the best software for your computer. The software should be intuitive yet inexpensive. Payment for software should only a few dollars or less. All you should have to do is one click and the software should ready to run in a minute without any additional action on your behalf. Software by easy button.
The software store I describe is not science fiction. This is reality for Apple “App Store” for Ipad/Iphone, the “Ubuntu Software Center” for Canonical’s Linux-based desktop operating system, the Google “Android Market” for Android Linux-based phones, and Palm “PreWare” for WebOS Linux-based phones.

Ladies and Gentelmen, the platform-delivered software store is how distributed in the 21st century. Unfortunately for Microsoft, no such thing exists for Windows. 

Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer doesn’t get it.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs does: The PC is so over.

What will we use come June 30, 2011? Not boxed Microsoft software.

Sorry this video seems to require full flash. It claims Google resolved bug one: browsers, operating systems, and office suite dominance. If anyone knows of a youtube or other accessible source of this footage, please leave a comment.

Actual story with video on thestreet.com

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From ieteam's flickr stream under Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license, open the code Microsoft, or else...

March 2010 will prove to be a critical month in ending Microsoft’s chances of having majority browser market share. All of the sudden, people world wide will be asking themselves, “What will we use?”

I believe that every person should be free to choose a browser. How did I choose not to use Internet Explorer?

On my first internet computer, I used Mosaic as a web browser in 1993. In the 1990s I also tried AOL’s browser but Netscape Communicator was my favourite. By the end of the decade, I was using Mozilla on Linux causally. Through the mid-2000′s Windows 9x would be my primary desktop where I used Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox until my husband gave me an Apple.

Admittedly, I have not used Opera and Safari since 2003. I was using MacOSX on the desktop at the time and there was no definitive browser king for that platform at the time. I tried Internet Explorer and Firefox for the Mac too. As I recall, I ditched Opera because its no-cost product was Adware. Commercials would display in a panel taking up valuable screen real-estate and bandwidth. On that system, Safari was my favourite browser for a few months because it was the only one with tab support. Soon after, Firefox released tab support and I was back home with the Netscape/Mozilla based browsers. There were no features with Internet Explorer worth holding my attention. For the most part since 2005, I have faithfully using Firefox.

I do want to tip my hat to two other browsers: Safari and Opera.

Apple products, Safari is no exception, have aesthetics in mind. I’m sure some people appreciate its integration with Itunes. Due to it’s lack of Linux version, however, I have not even tried the Apple browser since 2005 when my MacOSX system died. Even so, I understand why people enjoy Safari. While the entire Safari browser is not open source, the core components known as Webkit are open source. have been re-implemented as Konquerer and Epiphany by KDE and GNOME. Quite honestly, I wonder if these browsers are mistaken for Safari in market share counters. Either way, Apple benefits from the code they do write and the code they did not directly sponsor to make the Safari product.

Are you paying attention Microsoft? Since you do not sell Internet Explorer as a product, why do you hold onto the code? Learn from your competitor Apple. This is how you can leverage open source to maintain relevance now that your browser is no longer holding the majority of market share.

Microsoft does not have a monopoly in the proprietary browser space. Opera, the browser that I have not as much as blinked at since 2003 is alive and well. Apparently, they are the fastest mobile web browser – a market where Microsoft suffers. Business at Opera is good since they have figured out how to monetize. Also paying the bills for Opera is Nintendo who have partnered web browsing product for Wii and DSi called the Internet Channel. While Microsoft makes console browsing difficult, Nintendo keeps their customers happy  Too bad for Microsoft who can not get past the vaporware stage when it comes to launching their own portable game system, let alone porting IE for it.

While Microsoft is teasing us with the idea that they MIGHT think about working with open web standards when they release IE9, Opera has been pushing for open standards for quite some time now. Recently, the Opera folks have gstreamer and promoting .ogg which is a huge win for anyone who believes in free content.

Seriously, Microsoft, people do not prefer your browser. This has been true for years. Web developers don’t want to support IE6 as of last March. They’ve banded together to bring down IE6 and now Microsoft has to listen. With end-of-life as of June 2010, Microsoft can no longer count IE6 as part of this market share. Even with NetApplications which continues to claim majority market share for IE, take out the IE6/5 and Microsoft only has 36.09% browser market share. Users will not upgrade from IE6 to another Microsoft product. Your market share tanks at the rate of 3% a quarter. Now that Europe is given a choice, Microsoft does not have a prayer of holding onto significant browser market share. Its all over this March for Microsoft web browsers, Google said so.

Whatever Microsoft ends up doing about the browser, all I can say is, “it is your funeral.”

Come June 30, 2011, Microsoft will lack Office Suite and Operating System market share.

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The French roll down the Champs-Élysées with Thunderbird in their arsenal

We have only 575 days until Microsoft’s market share crumbles. Some may call me crazy since even more favorable market share counters like w3counter list Linux market share hovering close to 2% and MacOSX close to 7.5%. Why do I maintain big and bold claim that Nick will pay me $20 when Microsoft no longer has majority market share as soon as two summers from now?

Nick is scared he will lose the $20. It’s true. He has emailed me privately to try to back-out of the bet. The game has been changed by Google’s ChromeOS.  With a fast power-on to browser promise, ChromeOS is going to completely destroy the paradigm of what a computer really is.

All sorts of software-as-a-service applications will be at your finger tips in seconds after sitting down in front of your ChromeOS system. Meanwhile, Windows 7 will make minutes feel like an eternity in comparison while installing those updates before you are even allowed to login.

But what will be the “killer application”  that makes everyone drop exactly what they are using an go ChromeOS? Everybody just wants to get to the top three internet websites we all use now.

1. Google for search, Google docs, and gmail.
2. Facebook for social networking and games.
3. Yahoo! for search, mail, games, news, and flickr.

Nick fears that the Internet itself will be the killer app to bring Microsoft to tremble.

A killer application makes everyone drop the tool that they are using because another brand’s troll brings a more attractive results. Everyone could see why 8-bit gaming was more fun than Atari’s games with Ninendo released Super Mario Brothers, the most sold game record for over 15 years. It caused people to not care if they owned a gazillion Atari cartridges already, Nintendo was where all of the serious gamers were. Then, everyone wanted Mario and Nintendo-branded games, even those who owned zero home video game consoles. Nick fears that everyone will want ChromeOS and Linux systems in order to get to the internet faster than what Microsoft can offer.

The truth of the matter is Gandhi-Con4 has already started.  Brazil, the 10th largest world economy and growing, dumped Microsoft in favor of Linux years ago in a desire for transparency and has been tickeled pink ever since. The French Army just quit Outlook in favor of the open source email client, Thunderbird. It does not stop there, remember, countries in every corner of the world have ordered One-Laptop-Per-Child netbooks that run Linux. Tax-payers of the world will see this trend and get sick and tired of seeing that Microsoft is on their corporate welfare dole.

With killer applications abound, Microsoft will not hold majority market share come June 30, 2011.

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The claim that Microsoft has majority market share within the browser market is a myth that I have been silently collecting data to debunk. In this post I will reveal some of the reasons I see this as true and discuss the Bing/Internet Explorer market share connection. When you ask people what is the best browser, people seem to vote for Firefox hands-down. Yet, month after month, browser market share reports come out and the results are all over the charts but always in favour of Internet Explorer. The Counter reports just shy of 70%. W3counter reports just a little north of 51%. Meanwhile, “Market Share” by Net Applications reports 63.63% for November yet it has been shedding 1% for many months now. The Counter, W3Counter, and Market Share by Net Applications are analytics services that tell website owners who is visiting their site.

Quick tanget and un-paid endourcement…

Only W3Counter offers this service cost-free as only as you have only one site to watch that get less than 5,000 page views a day. Since W3counter is so accessible to anybody with a website, I declared W3Counter the official market share report of this blog. I was so impressed that I opted to pay for their pro $39.95 per 6 month account even though I already pre-paid for two years of Google Analytics. I prefer the way that W3Counter parses the data for me and how it integrates well with WordPress, the open source blogging software that runs whatwillweuse.com. If you are using anything else other than W3Counter, please give them a try.

OK, back to Internet Explorer and Bing.

A common market share assertion I hear when it comes to operating system and web browser market share is “Microsoft’s market share is high because that is what came with the computer and people do not switch due to interia.”

People just use what is there. To a certain extent, I will have to agree with that point. But if most people just used what Microsoft put in front of them, I would expect far more than 8% search market share out of Bing, the default search on Internet Explorer. Yahoo! Fiance reports that Bing’s market share is shrinking. Why would people choose to not use a product that they did not have to pay for and is delivered to them from the very first time they turn on their computer?

Change is risky and fearsome, especially those new to computer. Despite the fact that Internet Explorer 6 is an eight years old browser, 12.57% of the web browsing population still uses it. That is why Internet Explorer 6 has one thing going for it though, those with Windows XP have had it installed by default. A Vista system that keeps up with patches runs Internet Explorer 8 and this is why it has a respectable market share at 21.21%. Meanwhile there are 17.36 running Internet Explorer 7. I do not know how Microsoft can deliver a competitve free as in cost product while maintaining all of these versions. Even though Microsoft is working on releasing Internet Explorer 9, they are obligated to continue to support Internet Explorer 6,  a product. Together these numbers add up to 51.14% although only 8 percent, and shrinking, are using IE browser’s default search engine.

I assert three things given the interita theory…

Go Chrome

1. Microsoft Internet Explorer users are primarily using Google and Yahoo! instead. When they visit http://www.google.com they are greeted with an invitation to download Chrome. At least 2% will take Google up on the offer and push Internet Explorer below 50% in less than three months.

2. Perhaps 8% bing usage is a reflection of how many people prefer Microsoft’s products, given the choice. Maybe these Internet Explorer users are small businesses who lack full time IT staff who have permission to install software like web browsers. They may use Internet Explorer in the office because they have to but at home they use Firefox because they want to. Web analytics services that release market share reports will give more merit to the 8 hours of the day that people have opportuntiy to use the browser at their desk instead of the 3 hours of the day they might be able to use their browser at home. This would also explain why people overwhelmingly vote for Firefox when asked about their browser of choice yet market share reports continute to favour Internet Explorer.

3. Those 8% loyal Microsoft customers saw Microsoft not deliver a service that they are pouring millions of dollars in American TV ads to support. They were left asking themselves the question, “what will we use?” and the answer, according to Internet Explorer and Bing, was Yahoo!

Come February 28, 2010, Microsoft will no longer have browser market share.

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At least in one corner of the South Hills Village Mall, Microsoft lacks majority market share on November 28, 2009.

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