The Onion’s 9 best bits about Microsoft

Poking fun at the software giant and founder Bill Gates since 1996

Going on two decades of ridicule
The Onion, self-branded "America's Finest News Source," has been making fun of Microsoft -- and, in particular, Bill Gates -- since at least 1996, according to its online archive. Here are nine of what we've judged to be the best efforts.

Bill Gates To Get Half
Publication date: July 23, 1996

Sample: "Don't touch anything until you're sure it's not part of my half," Gates instructed the world's citizenry yesterday via the several million 40-foot-high projection screens he has scattered throughout the globe. "I don’t want anyone messing up stuff in my half."

Bill Gates Spends $56 Million On Amazon In One Night
Published: Sept. 22, 2011

Sample: "The kids were in bed, and I was thinking about how it had been a long time since I'd heard any Yes, so I bought the MP3 for 'Leave It,'" Gates said as he opened one of the 13,846 boxes that had arrived at his house.

Microsoft patents ones and zeros
Published: March 25, 1998

Sample: "Microsoft has been using the binary system of ones and zeroes ever since its inception in 1975," Gates told reporters. "For years, in the interest of the overall health of the computer industry, we permitted the free and unfettered use of our proprietary numeric systems. However, changing marketplace conditions and the increasingly predatory practices of certain competitors now leave us with no choice but to seek compensation for the use of our numerals."

Thousands Wait Overnight At Microsoft Stores For Second Generation Zune
Published: Dec. 17, 2007

Sample: The sleek new Zune, whose record-breaking sales have made the Zune name synonymous with "mp3 player," was so sought-after that thousands formed long lines outside hip, minimalist Microsoft Stores across the country days before the device went on sale. In Midtown Manhattan, the hysteria reached such a fever pitch that some were willing to pay as much as $200 for a spot in line.

Microsoft Signs Justice Dept. Attorney To $350 Million Endorsement Deal
Published: Jan. 21, 1998

Sample: Klein, who will appear in Microsoft TV and print ads, joins a growing list of high-profile government personalities who have signed endorsement deals with the software giant, including solicitor general Seth Waxman, FTC chair Robert Pitofsky, and federal judge Thomas Penfield Jackson.

Microsoft Ad Campaign Crashing Nation's Televisions
Published: Oct. 27, 2008

Sample: The Microsoft ads, which began airing earlier this week, are being blamed for generating critical system errors in more than 70 million televisions. In addition, thousands of frustrated Americans said that the ads have caused their TVs to become unresponsive, their screens to turn blue, and a small box with the message "terminal application error" to suddenly appear.

Bill Gates Finally Getting Into Radiohead's Kid A
Published: Sept. 12, 2001

Sample: "I listened to it a few times when I first got it, but it just wasn't grabbing me," Gates told The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Xbox capable of controlling users
Sample from video: "TechBuzz is raving. 'This is the future of gaming. With the Xbox One we are closer than ever to being completely piloted by a console. It's the immersive obedience experience we've been waiting for.' "

Modern-Day John Henry Dies Trying To Out-Spreadsheet Excel 11.0
Published: Feb. 27, 2006

Sample: Peters challenged the computer after an interoffice memo announced that Excel's powerful upgraded accounting software would render jobs in the accounts receivable division obsolete and result in sweeping layoffs. Although warned repeatedly by his colleagues in billing, Peters insisted that he could beat the software "to the bottom of a large balance sheet of bedrock-hard figures."

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Why there’s no open-source standard-bearer for the network

Why there’s no open-source standard-bearer for the network

Open-source creeps into the network from below, but no Red Hat analogues in sight

Open-source software plays an increasingly prominent role in many areas of modern business IT – it’s in servers, databases and even the cloud. Vendors like Red Hat, Canonical and others have managed to graft open-source principles onto a profitable business model. The former company became the first open-source-centered business with $1 billion in annual revenue in 2012.

So what about the network? Why isn’t there an open-source alternative there?

Plenty of reasons, according to experts, including the difficulty of challenging established incumbents, the dangers of getting eaten alive by a large customer and the sheer scale and complexity of managing a heterodox network in an orthodox way.

THE HEAVYWEIGHTS
Obviously, the incumbents in most fields of enterprise technology are formidable enough, but networking hopefuls have to contend with a bona-fide giant of the realm in the form of Cisco – which sells between 65% and 70% of the world’s enterprise switches, 80% of the enterprise routers, and 18% of the security appliances – still good for tops in its category, according to IDC.

More than that, however, they’re actually pleasing their customers, according to 451 Research analyst Peter Christy.

“If you talk to Cisco customers, rather than viewing them as a predatory, monopolistic company they would like to get away from, they view them as the best tech vendor they deal with in terms of helping the customer succeed,” he said.

Companies have to compete with Cisco to do a better job providing a working network, which isn’t easy to do. (Not that it’s stopped some companies from trying – Brocade bought open-source networking software maker Vyatta in 2012 with that end in mind.) And that’s not to say that companies that, like Cisco, depend on branded hardware are going to have it all their own way in perpetuity.

"[Network management] is a freaking hard problem. It’s just a lot of things to try to cover, and the market moves."

John Michelsen, CTO for CA Technologies
Neela Jacques is the executive director of the Open Daylight project, which is a collaborative group that works to create open-source networking software. He argues that some pricey proprietary hardware isn’t worth it.

“In some areas, there’s been tremendous innovation and differentiation, where you’re paying $100,000 for a box and it really is solving a problem you couldn’t solve otherwise,” he said. “But especially at the lower end of the market, there’s been very, very high margins for a long time, and the boxes haven’t really changed as much.”

All too often, Jacques said, networking hardware is made by a no-name ODM in China, programmed with a specific vendor’s network operating system, and marked up by a factor of five to 10.

“People have been looking at that and saying ‘wait a second – if we could just create an open-source version of that network operating system, then someone could get the exact same SKU that they’re putting into their environment,’” he added.

Christy noted that three of the four biggest clouds out there – Amazon, Facebook, and Google, with Microsoft the odd company out – build their own networking boxes. Even hardware makers like Riverbed say that commodity hardware is the wave of the future.

“Why should they buy the same thing from Cisco if they can build what they want, somewhat tweaked, by themselves, with the same outside manufacturers?” he asked.

A FREAKING HARD PROBLEM
Even so, CA Technologies CTO John Michelsen said, attempts to create a broad-based performance management framework in an open-source manner, like OpenNMS, haven’t been terribly successful because the issues faced are simply very difficult.

“It’s a freaking hard problem. It’s just a lot of things to try to cover, and the market moves," he said.

The well-known aphorism of UNIX philosophy says to “write programs that do one thing and do it well” – a problematic stance for broad-based network management and performance optimization systems, which are, almost by definition, heavily multi-functional.

Michelsen said that his company’s application performance management product is designed to monitor eight separate aspects of the network.

“It’s very hard to bring an integrated set of very deep-science things in several different areas. Each of these different types of monitoring are their own science project,” he said.

SWALLOWED UP
Despite the philosophical and logistical problems, open-source technology is still a major part of the network – it’s just in there at a very low level, according to 451’s Christy.

Big companies that buy a service from smaller ones impose tough contractual terms around code escrow – meaning that the vendor will have to provide a copy of their offering’s source code for legal safe-keeping, so that the bigger firm will be able to continue to function if the smaller one goes out of business.

Open source obviates a lot of those headaches, in principle. It also offers companies in the same industry a way to collaborate on development without fear of being accused of collusion.

But it also means that open source tends to get swallowed up by big companies in the network space, one way or another. Key early adopters of open-source networking technology have had so much in-house technological expertise that it becomes difficult to offer them a paid service offering – they can simply do that themselves.

“The biggest users always self-support – it’s not a commercial opportunity,” said Christy.

That same open-source code, freely viewed and tinkered with by companies full of top programming talent, helps fuel the aforementioned shift in the direction of commodity hardware.

BIG KIDS ONLY
But, obviously, not every company has Facebook or Google’s battalions of elite developers. It’s because of this that the hands-off, managed service option remains popular.

“In the case of networking, for most customers, there’s a greater motivation to let the vendor sit in the middle and integrate patches and be responsible for the operation of the network as a whole, than it is for, say, the typical use of Linux,” Christy said.

Jacques argues that open-source’s low-level presence on the network is strong, and could eventually diversify to the point at which smaller customers are more attracted to it.

“Open-source is a key underpinning of network management technology, but absent a “core platform,” there’s little chance of open-source making it to the app layer.

“[L]ook at what happened with Linux, for example. It took Linux being credible for running servers … for people to look and turn it into something to run cars and phones and home security systems and all that,” he said. “I think you’ll see the exact same thing in networking, because you can’t have an open-source app that sits on a proprietary platform.”

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Groupware hug: Lotus Notes turning 25

In an interview first published Dec. 2, 2004, Ray Ozzie walks us through the history

This coming Sunday marks the passing of 25 years since the initial release of Lotus Notes, known today as IBM Notes. In marking the 15th anniversary 10 years ago, I spoke with Ray Ozzie about the earliest days of Notes and the subsequent acquisition of Lotus by IBM. Here is a slightly shortened version of that interview.

Do you ever get tired of talking about Notes?
That's funny … I don't get tired of talking about it depending on the conversation and which way it's spinning. … I get a chance to surf off of it into my current passions and what I'm talking about now and I hope it doesn't sound like the song that nobody wants to hear. I'm passionate about computer-supported cooperative work, writ large. I hope when people are asking about Lotus Notes that that is really what they're talking about.

Take us back to the day when you trotted out Notes 1.0.
At the time Notes was launched, Dec. 7, 1989, we had one customer -- Sheldon Laube from PriceWaterhouse -- who shared our vision. He understood enough about it and he's a great communicator, much better than we were about the value of Notes at the time.

It was a very fortuitous time for Notes to be coming out because people were just using LANs for printer sharing and they could now leverage that simple technology for lightweight processes within the enterprise. By '95 or so the leading-edge companies started to try to use it outside the company, not just inside. We take this for granted now, but it was fairly interesting and it turned out to be difficult because Notes, in particular, was designed for centralized management. It was fairly burdensome from an administrative perspective for good reason: It was the way that you managed the directory, the way that you managed the security was all designed for the data center and for IT, and it was difficult to extend that to an environment of multiple IT organizations.

When did you know you had something big with Notes?
I'll say something that let's you see a little bit about my personality: I knew we had something before we started the company. The two guys who started Iris (Associates) with me -- Tim Halvorsen and Len Kawell -- the three of us had been at the University of Illinois in the mid-'70s and had been exposed to a system called Plato, where we first lived the online community experience. We knew what it was like to work with other people at a distance online because we lived it for years.

We lost that when we went into industry. When we graduated from school, they went to DEC and I went to Data General and suddenly we were thrown into this way-back machine of working the old-fashioned way. We had an innate desire to bring back that method of virtual online work that we had experienced before.

In 1989, because of (Lotus founder) Mitch Kapor and a number of other people who believed in us, we finally had the opportunity to start a company and build that vision.

When we came out with the product in '89, we knew what you could do with it and we couldn't understand why we couldn't communicate to others the difference that they could make.

What piece was missing at that point?
People think always in terms of their business problem, their business process, their business pain. You always have to surf off of what you know, and if you are an accountant, you're wrapped up in the accounting procedures that you've dealt with for many years. You might be able to take on incremental things, like a fax machine or a spreadsheet that emulates what you were doing and takes it one notch further, but the concept of going from physical work to virtual work, the concept of processes that cross-cut group boundaries, it required too many things to change.

What really ended up doing it for Notes was nothing that Lotus did, it was the fact that there's a VAR community, a reseller community, which understood their own customers. They understood the context within which collaborative processes would occur. They built solutions on the platform that we built, and then the customers could understand it.

Looking back, were there any aspects of Notes that you had spot-on from the beginning -- or missed?
Absolutely. I'll start with what we missed. We missed -- but I missed clearly -- the immense value in simple publishing. Notes was and is an amazing interactive system around messages and forms and documents and things like that, and in order to use it you have to authenticate yourself to the system so that there's some security and you build these apps and it works really well.

We had a number of people at the time -- early customers like Reuters, who were just trying to get their information out to their customers. They were trying to just publish it to lots of users in an organization.

When I first saw the Web -- Mosaic -- I am ashamed to admit that I said to myself, this is so trivial, it's got no security, you can't authenticate, the server doesn't know who the user is -- so all you can do with this is simple publishing. I should have foreseen earlier on in Notes the value of a simpler, anonymous client/reader that could have been used for a much broader set of applications than it was initially.

One of the things we got right… is the respect for off-line use and mobility. You have to know from day one when you're building a system that you want to treat mobility as a first-class problem. Early on in Notes (we embraced) the concept of putting all of the code that would be on the server on the client so that you could do this replication. Obviously we did that again in Groove Networks, in a different, much more sophisticated way, but it's the same basic idea that you want to empower the user to work whenever, wherever they need to work. I think we got that so right and it amazes me to this day that more people haven't gotten it right.

Why do you think that is?
It's hard. It's hard and you can't add it on, particularly the integration between the storage, communications and security. They all have to be wrapped together from day one in order to get that seamless use between what you do on the client and what you do when you're connected.

Are there milestones through the early years of Notes that you thought particularly important to the development path?
The first big milestone -- and this is not specific to Notes but rather any major commercial end-user software product -- version 3.0 tends to be the first version that hits its mark because it's got a certain level of maturity, a certain level of user feedback plowed back into the product.

The next major milestone -- and this is not widely written about but I think customers understand it -- is there was a thing called "The Nifty 50." It was a set of application templates that were starter apps, so to speak, that were built on top of Notes 3. It bridged a lot of people into understanding and they just started to build more things.

In release 4.5 email and calendaring became world-class. It was concurrent with the release of (Microsoft) Exchange and it suddenly set in motion thousands of companies putting out RFPs for email systems and then picking one, either Exchange or Notes.

The last major event is in '95 when IBM bought Lotus. People don't realize this, but we had shipped about 2.2 million seats of Notes before IBM, and IBM rapidly jacked that up to 100 million-plus. They did so many things right at the start. There was a lot of turmoil because of the Lotus management structure, but they said, 'Do you know what you're doing? If so, we will put resources into it.' They put resources into it and stepped back and let us enable their organization by putting Notes throughout IBM.

What was your reaction when it was first made clear to you that IBM was going to buy Lotus?
(IBM CEO Louis) Gerstner looked me in the eye one-one-one and said, 'Ray, we're not going to spend $3 billion on Notes, $3.5 billion on Lotus, to screw it up, so stick around and we'll let you make it what you wanted it to be.' I was willing to give them a chance because it was extremely genuine. No, I didn't like the fact that Lotus was losing its independence, but so many people had put so much love into that product for so long that we wanted to give it a chance. And they did what they said they were going to do.

So you were relatively happy with how things went in the subsequent two years before you left?

Sure, absolutely. In any environment, particularly in a big-company environment, there are frustrations, but it's surely in the noise, it's nothing to dwell on. The bottom line is that they invested in Notes and brought it to a much broader base than ever could have been exposed to it, and they used it as the basis for building a big services organization within their own company.

I read the "history of Notes" on the IBM site and couldn't help but notice that you were not quoted in it. Is there anything to be read into that?
I don't think so. The history of Notes that is up there is largely accurate, and it's in any company's best interests to focus on the more recent stuff, and I didn't have any involvement in the more recent stuff. We've had a great relationship and I left on very good terms.

What's your sense as to whether Notes will continue on as an independent product?
IBM has a history of never forcing its customers through tremendous changes; there are S/360s out there that are still cranking along, and I'm sure you'd find a few PROFS systems that are still out there. So I don't see that they would do something so reckless as to stop something. I just don't think that's in the cards.

What's very clear is that Notes has transitioned into a cash cow; it's not at the leading edge of their initiatives. Workplace is at the leading edge, and they would like to, for very pragmatic business reasons, sell more DB2 and sell more Websphere and the things that they regard as more contemporary technologies than Notes. So I think you'll see a lot of marketecture that unifies two architectures, and you'll see active selling efforts on the newer stuff. The older stuff will gracefully stabilize.

You've been doing this kind of work a long time. It still gets you excited?
Yes, sir. I thrive on two things: interesting technology challenges and interesting business challenges.

I'll just pick one thing (to illustrate): Look what's going on in the government post-9/11. The 9/11 Commission, the president's directives, have all said 'you must learn to do joint operations more effectively; you must learn to share information more effectively for some very important reasons.' That gives me a lot of opportunities to help customers understand what they can use technologies for to solve some really important problems, and that's fascinating to me.

From a technology perspective, I couldn't get more excited by what's gone on in the Internet. Groove is a product that lives at the edge of a network; it's a PC-based network, it's based on peer technologies and if you look at all of the exciting trends that are happening in technology, it's all happening at the edge. There are a lot of things that can be done that are intriguing from a technology perspective involving mobile devices, involving wireless, that haven't been done before … and it frankly turns me on.

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