-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Closing Microsoft - -By John C. Dvorak July 12th 2004 www.pcmag.com Bill Gates is reported to have told more than a few people, when asked how long he intends to run Microsoft, "Until it stops being fun." This remark has always baffled me, since it's never been clear what fun is for Bill Gatesor for Steve Ballmer, for that matter. Is it fun to be publicly scrutinized, ridiculed, have pies thrown in your face, and be sued left and right? Maybe not, but it's probably fun to have private jets, red-carpet treatment, and billions of dollars in your personal bank account. But once you have the latter, why bother with the former? How about simply shuttering the company? ADVERTISEMENT You have to wonder exactly where Microsoft can go from here. Is it fun to run what is now a stodgy old company? I wouldn't think so. The concept of Microsoft possibly shutting down can be associated with the recent announcement that the company is cutting costs to save a billion dollars. With upwards of $70 billion in the corporate coffers and many billions in the personal bank accounts of the CEO and founders, you have to wonder what people at Microsoft are thinking. Do they know something we do not know? The reason behind the announcement has to be one of three things: Someone sees a rocky road ahead, they are even greedier than ever, or they are planning a shutdown. The company is already saving a tremendous amount of money by offshoring jobs and using cheap H1-B visa holders for U.S. jobs. This is well documented. So what does Microsoft do with the profits besides bank them? It talks a big game about R&D but its most mundane product, the Internet Explorer browser, is full of holes and is essentially a bunch of cobbled-together old code. Here's an interesting exercise for you: Open Internet Explorer. Go to Help, then About, and you'll see that Microsoft still acknowledges that Internet Explorer is the old Spyglass browser based on Mosaic. This was thrown together years ago. Then look at the copyright notice. It ends in 2001. Unless I'm mistaken, that means that there has been no real update since then, just patches. To get a bigger laugh, click on Acknowledgements and see how long you can endure the laundry list of people who worked on the code. It's as if the entire state of Washington did some coding. Why? The fact is this software, which has been mostly stagnant since the marginalization of Netscape, is just coasting. So where is all the R&D? I don't see it. In fact, I see the entire company coasting along making more and more money with possibly one concept ahead: to close down. Yeah, I know that sounds ridiculous, but it wouldn't be unprecedented for a high-tech software company to just end its life cycle by closing. I recall the early days of microcomputing when Processor Technology closed. Everyone thought they went broke, but it turned out that the founders were just bored with the business and closed. It has been done. As this is written, the asset or book value of Microsoft per share, including the $70-plus billion in the bank, is a fraction of the stock price. But if Microsoft can knock down the stock price with one or two dubious reports and collect another $50 billion or so while moving everything offshore, it might be possible to pay out the money to the shareholders and close the company. Just walk. If everything is offshore, the shuttering would have no local impact, since all the locals would have been laid off long before. Thus the number of lawsuits filed against the company for shutting down would be minimal. There is also the possibility of spinning off the Office, MSN, Xbox, and Server folks into new companies for a pot-load of cash. Make those divisions take on new names and close down everything else while passing out the cash to everyone. Of course, I realize that this whole notion is crazy on the surface, but, in this scenario, all the principals would have their money, houses, and cars, and would never have to worry about Microsoft going into a pathetic decline, as most companies eventually do. The closure would be one of the most interesting episodes in the history of business. And who would complain? Gates could get a few cheap shots in at the Justice Department while he was at it. I think this is exactly what Microsoft should do. And this scenario falls in line with the company's announcements on cost-cutting. With Microsoft shuttered, where would it leave the users? Most users could coast on XP for three years if they had to. Perhaps Microsoft could shut its doors after Longhorn comes out. Perhaps the stable Win2K would emerge as the pass-around operating system of choice, assuming that Microsoft would send all its OS offerings into the public domain as one last slap at Linux. Is this so very far-fetched? You tell me. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFA9v0BLHLbx9ffmf8RAsO6AKCvKM/nqafrXHwDzt0OMVohubX6jgCfYsWE ditA/gLqOJ9rRMPbOBqK+IY= =omCC -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----