Posted on 04/26/2002 6:14:19 PM PDT by Uni-Poster
It's the browser you'd write if you could write browsers.
You get a MacGyver award for that one.
Nice canned arguments, but so what? Everybody has a few flops. I don't see that 'Bob' flopping has ended Microsoft's existence. And let's be honest about Windows: the first useable version of Windows was 3.0, and that was at least five years after announcement.
It's stuff like this that gets you labeled a Munchkin. Their user base is up, their sales are up, the advertising business is coming out of its slump (and everybody knows it). Your statement that their stock is in the tank is patently false. See, it's the damned lies that make you Munchkins so disagreeable.
I came across this nifty chart the other day. It compares percentage changes in the stock prices of AOL and MSFT over the last five years (adjusted for splits as necessary). I don't think anybody from Microsoft has room to talk about AOL's stock price.
More gratuitous slurs with no evidence backing them up. Yep, you're a Munchkin all right. I figured I shouldn't talk about this anymore without actually getting the darn thing, so I did. I'm typing this in Mozilla RC1 right now. Yeah, AOL will "get it running." It installs just fine. It runs just fine. I went over to abc.com and it renders that just fine. You're just making up slurs and throwing them out there. No one should believe a word of it. It's really a shame that a company the size of Microsoft has to send people around to Internet forums to bad-mouth its competitors with totally made-up lies and slurs. How do you sleep at night?
No, portable software alone doesn't make it intriguing, of course, but what DOES make it intriguing is the fact that one day Browsers will replace operating systems, or put another way, Browsers will become full-fledged operating systems.
Add some additional OS functionality to Mozilla and you've got an environment that can run applets on Linux/Unix, Mac, and Windows systems from the same codebase with no recompiling. Add a little more functionality and Mozilla (or something like it from someone a little more clever) obviates the need for Linux/Unix, Mac, or Windows in the first place.
Even today, if my guys are writing VBscript or Javascript, they don't care about the client OS so much as they care that the Browser supports their scripting. This trend of Browsers becoming more important than OS's shows no sign of slowing down, either.
The killer mistake that Microsoft made in Dot Net was in not being backwards compatible.
Less than 40% of legacy VB6 code runs in Dot Net. Entire corporate libraries of working, tested VB routines are now excluded from Dot Net, only to have to be re-written and re-tested.
Re-inventing that many wheels is NOT what corporations want to be spending their money and time on.
Companies want to be able to re-use code, not re-write and re-test code with each new release.
AOL is a shitty ISP but they rode the .com/Clinton bubble up much more the then MS. At near the top they traded their bubble stock for Time Warner stock. A company which is (and was) worth much more then them. AOL made their money the old fashoned way, by screwing Time Warner stockholders (Ted Turner hahahaha). It's the stockholders own fault. Hats off to the AOL execs that pulled it off, nice job redistributing the wealth.
The Clinton bubble pops. AOL/Time Warner is back to being worth more or less what Time Warner is (plus a tiny amount for AOL). LOL
You mention their flop, I mention your flop, and you say your flop doesn't count. Only their flop counts as a flop. Yeah, sure. What a Munchkin you are.
You don't speak for Wall Street. You're just saying that because that's what Muchkins do... they say stuff. Most of it is crap, but they keep saying it anyway, in the hopes there might be somebody who buys it. That AOL's sales are up and their user base is up are matters of public record; your saying that "Wall Street disagrees" just marks you as one of those Munchkins who will say any old thing, so long as it's derogatory. Whether it's true or not never matters to Munchkins.
Yeah, I left out the last month. I'm not a day trader. I don't pay much attention to what happens to billion-dollar companies over 30-day periods. MSFT took a dive in the last 30 days, too. Does this mean MSFT will never come back up again? I doubt it. Same thing with AOL.
I know. You were just throwing a name out there of a site that Mozilla supposedly couldn't render, to put the idea in people's heads that Mozilla is somehow deficient. You had no basis for saying it, you were just pumping the usual Microsoft bilge, casting aspersions on Microsoft's competitors without any facts. It appalls me that a company as large as Microsoft has as one of its core business practices sending people around to Internet forums to bad-mouth its competitors. That is one sick corporate culture you have there.
Yep, I sure do. Both were projects with lots of people that spent lots of money, and they both fell on their butt. Everybody has these. If a company does not have any flops, it means they aren't trying enough new things. To come in here, like you did, and say, "Oh look, these guys had a flop... they must be incompetent" is just silly advocacy. It's no more than a taunt. That's all the more apparent as you sit there and claim that your own flop doesn't count.
Oh good, you have a Fortune magazine article. At least you looked something up, I'll give you credit for that.
Fortune is one of those magazines that likes to talk out of both sides of its mouth. In their 'think pieces,' they complain that U.S. companies are too focused on quarterly earnings, and they need to take a longer view. So some guy takes their advice... instead of tweaking his quarterly income statement to keep the day traders happy, he makes a bold, long-term move. He buys a huge company with real assets -- cables in the ground, movie libraries, a television network, successful magazines -- and he buys all this with stock, not a dime of cash. What's more, he does it right at the peak of the Internet bubble, so his stock is at its all-time high when he does the deal. He has to know when he does this that somewhere down the road, this is going to punch a hole in a couple of quarterly earnings statements. But so what?
Somebody who was not focused on quarterly earnings statements would call this the Deal of the Century. In fact I think Rupert Murdoch did call it a 'stroke of financial genius' or something like that. AOL acquired billions in revenue-producing assets for zero cash.
People with brains understand -- and understood when it happened -- that this is not a quarterly earnings play. This is true Long Term Guts Ball. The resulting thing is going to eat all sorts of nasty accounting charges when the stock market bubble bursts and the "price" (no cash, remember) paid for Time-Warner looks overvalued on the balance sheet. But they are not the kind of losses that make the company spend cash; it's just the accountants adjusting the book value of an asset to reflect new information about the post-bubble AOL stock price.
So comes now Fortune magazine to bitch that the quarterly earnings statement looks like Hell. This after AOL has just pulled off a spectacularly brilliant financial maneuver that puts them in an order-of-magnitude better position to face the future.
I'm not impressed. Once the Street mavens get done trashing Steve Case for his accounting loss, they'll go back to bitching that managements are too focused on quarterly earnings.
In fact AOL may already be falling into that trap. They have a COO, one of the guys who came over from Time-Warner, who thinks that AOL should pull in its horns on converting to broadband and concentrate instead on maintaining the dial-up base. Now that is Mister Quarterly Earnings talking. If Steve Case doesn't fire that guy in the next 90 days just for thinking like that, then I'll start to believe the theory that AOL is another Boeing, where the acquiree is taken over from the inside by the ex-acquired, who promptly turn it into the loser they came from.
The existence of Microsoft Munchkins is well known. Here's John Dvorak in PC Week:
Microsoft Munchkins Are Back at It Again Dept.: Will Microsoft ever learn? Some years back Microsoft employees were notorious for anonymously joining online communities, representing themselves as everyday Joes who had good things to say about Microsoft and trash to say about OS/2. Now, according to a New York Times article, at least one employee has been caught posing as a civilian and posting an anti- AOL message with a Yahoo! mail account. The deep headers indicated he was actually inside the Microsoft corporate firewall when he sent the note. These Microsoft folks apparently don't realize it's harder to hide on the Net than they think.
I was jousting with Microsoft Munchkins on Compuserve ten years ago. It's the same act now as it was then. Lies, innuendo, and cutesy one-liners, all offered up by guys who claim they're just little ol' me. Except that they are following a script, which becomes more obvious when multiples of them show up on a thread. Sometimes you can even see the same turns of phrase posted by different Munchkins in different forums and newsgroups.
I Can't WAIT~!! And it is OPEN SOURCE TOO!!! (For all those times my gramma wants to tweak the source code...)
< sarcasm off >
Ick.
You call that trick "backwards compatibility"??
Ouch.
No matter. It is my firm that is working on a product that will permit VB Dot Net to access legacy VB 6 forms and code without conversion steps.
It's a good thing that I didn't swallow that MS Kool-aid, otherwise there would have apparently been no company working on this project...
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