Saberware Computer Consulting Blog

Chances are (if you work in the tech industry) that you’ve heard the acquisition story of the year thus far: Microsoft has bought voice and video chat giant Skype for $8.5 Billion.  Skype has 663 million users worldwide, more than Facebook (600 million) or Twitter (200 million).

Microsoft is certainly not new to the voice and video chat game (it added voice and video chat in 2001 with MSN Messenger 4.6), but use of those capabilities is not popular. (In fact, I’ve used it since around that time and I had to research whether it could do voice and video myself.) Skype, on the other hand, has been the standard for free peer-to-peer VOIP chat since its inception in 2003.

So, what does this mean for us as consumers? It’s hard to say, but probably nothing good. Let’s review some of Microsoft’s previous acquisitions and their outcomes. First, the bad:

1. Fox Software – Makers of FoxPro database system. Bought in 1992, maintained and integrated into Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE as Visual FoxPro, then halted development and maintenance in 2007. No plans for a new version so far.

2. Vermeer Technologies – Original developer of FrontPage, Microsoft’s first WYSIWYG HTML editor. Integrated into Microsoft Office suite from 1997-2003, then replaced by other MS products.

3. WebTV – ISP and internet browsing appliance manufacturer. Most people remember these; it allowed you to browse the web on your TV. Purchased by Microsoft in 1997, rebranded as MSN TV in 2001, no new hardware since 2006.

4. FASA Studio – Video game wing of board game manufacturer FASA, famous for games such as Battletech and Warhammer. Microsoft bought the divison in 1999, two years before the company collapsed on itself. It now only exists to collect licensing royalties from its past properties, and Microsoft’s FASA Studio shut its doors in 2007 after releasing just seven titles.

5. Rare Ltd. –  Those of us who grew up in the 90s fondly remember Rare. They created some of Nintendo’s greatest titles of that era (Battletoads, Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark). Unfortunately, after they were acquired by Microsoft, they’ve drifted along as a second-rate handheld and XBox 360 Console developer.

Now, the good:

1. Bungie Software – If you don’t know who Bungie is, I have one word for you: HALO. Bungie was acquired in 2000 during the end of the original Halo’s development cycle after close to a decade as a small but well-received Macintosh game developer. Microsoft saw Halo as the perfect flagship game for their upcoming entry in the video game console wars, the XBox. Halo has spawned a total of six games and is a billion-dollar franchise. Despite all this, Bungie retained almost complete autonomy and creative control, and in 2007 they split off into a privately held LLC with Microsoft retaining a minority stake.

2. Visio Corporation – Developed its eponymous diagramming software throughout the 90s and was bought by Microsoft in 2000. Since 2003 has become a member of the Microsoft Office family and is very popular in corporate environments.

3. Hotmail – Anyone who thought the words “free email” before Google’s GMail debuted in 2004 would likely point to Hotmail, acquired in 1997 by Microsoft. Hotmail was literally the first web-based email service and Microsoft has dedicated itself since that time to keep Hotmail’s reputation as the consumer’s first choice in free email.

Now that we see all of these purchases as they have played out over the years, what can we conclude about Microsoft’s behavior towards the management of their acquired assets? The good thing is that Microsoft does have a track record of letting products continue, at least for a time, testing their viability in the market. The bad news is that Microsoft already has a stake in what Skype does: Video and voice chat via their Live Messenger product. I’d expect very little to happen at first, but the infrastructure, features, and resources will slowly bleed into Live Messenger, leaving only superficial differences between the two products. Five to ten years from now, Skype will probably be phased out, users offered incentives over time to migrate to the new, improved Live Messenger with development intentionally slow and dogged on the Skype program. Finally, it will cease its services altogether.

Yesterday, as I considered the potential uses of the machines we have here at the office, I started looking at the specs of a particularly old machine we’ve held onto over the years. This machine is thirteen years old, has a quarter-GB of RAM, a 10GB hard disc and a 400MHz Pentium II processor. The fact that we had this machine isn’t what surprised me. What surprised me was the realization that this machine is more than capable of running Windows XP.

According to Wikipedia¹ as of February 2011, Windows XP, despite being in its tenth year, remains by far the single most-used operating system with over 41% of the market share. In second place, Windows 7 trails by fifteen points at 26%. Microsoft lists the system requirements of Windows XP as follows²:

Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended)

At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended)

At least 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available space on the hard disk

CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive

Keyboard and a Microsoft Mouse or some other compatible pointing device

Video adapter and monitor with Super VGA (800 x 600)or higher resolution

Sound card

Speakers or headphones

In terms of motherboard capability, these requirements encompass almost every computer made within the past fourteen years, since the Pentium II debuted in May 1997. Computers are not becoming obsolete at nearly the same rate as they had previously. A ten year-old computer today is a perfect candidate for an XP system on a shop floor or in a child’s bedroom; in 2000 it was an ancient, heavy pile of scrap that was barely capable of doing anything productive. (I would know. Around that time I had a 386 in my room. It had no network card or modem, Windows 3.1, and a 250MB hard drive. I couldn’t even write papers for school on it.)

Business has a vested interest in keeping Windows XP alive. Even though Microsoft stopped selling XP retail in 2008 and bundled with hardware last year, business can keep installing their volume-licensed copies to their hearts’ content, and downgrade processes are available for some new systems. What’s going to really hurt happens three years from now on April 8, 2014³…when “extended support” ends. Translation: when Microsoft stops releasing patches.

Regularly-updated patches are what keep an operating system usable on the web. Should you ever come across a computer running Windows 98 or ME, do not hook them up to the internet: Microsoft stopped releasing patches for these systems in 2006⁴ and running them exposes you to a myriad of very real threats. The same thing has the potential to happen in 2014, when businesses and institutions across the country will be faced with OS and hardware upgrades on a massive scale to keep their systems secure; which will, in turn, cause massive software migration headaches. (They’ve already begun. Anyone forced to run Outlook 2003 on a new Windows 7 machine because of an old Exchange 2000 mail server that’s too costly to replace knows exactly what I’m talking about.) All of this will be extremely costly for every party involved.

With regard to upgrading existing systems, Windows 7 and Windows Vista both require 1GB of RAM for the 32-bit versions, but anyone who has actually used these OSes knows that 2GB is a more practical minimum. In addition, though a 1GHz processor is “required,” a dual-core processor is almost a necessity. This puts many fine-working systems, sold as recently as 2007, out of practical use in 2014…or at least forces them into an environment where they are allowed no communication with the internet, severely limiting their use-value.

Enter FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), software developed and maintained by volunteers and distributed over the internet at no cost. Today, thanks to open source operating system projects like Linux and BSD, many computers considered too old for practical use have found new lives as second-tier servers and desktops, though many of these OSes are developed for enterprise-level applications (Solaris, Red Hat, et. al.). Some flavors of Linux can support hardware as old as my aforementioned 386⁵ and nearly all XP-capable systems will support a useful bundle of regularly-updated software for internet browsing, email, word processing, instant messaging, and other productive applications. Best of all, they enjoy regular patches and updates, and an end to “extended support” is nowhere to be found. FOSS has found some heavyweight supporters in recent years and many global corporations invest money and dedicate staff to furthering FOSS towards their own ends, a couple of the most notable being Sun (now acquired by Oracle) and Google.

The problem with a FOSS solution to soon-to-be-obsolete business hardware is that businesses spent years and invested thousands developing custom software for their businesses’ unique processes specifically tuned to a Windows XP environment, and then implemented operating procedures based around these custom applications. Many businesses today are even still running the horribly-outdated Internet Explorer 6 because the custom web applications they developed are not compatible with the three newer versions of the browser⁶. The way I see it, businesses have a few options with regard to their OS migration processes:

-        Bite the bullet and bring everyone over to Windows 7 at once, absorbing massive costs in new hardware and resolving software migration issues

-        Bring everyone over gradually, which will help somewhat from a financial standpoint but will stilly need investment in software migration and cause problems with applications that need to be run in a dual-OS workplace

-        Find a FOSS solution to utilize their older hardware, which may be even more problematic than using a newer version of Windows

This brings me to my question: if businesses have so much time and effort invested in Windows XP, why can’t there be a FOSS solution to the “end of extended support” debacle? With enough money and development time invested, surely the XP-based Windows Update process could be studied enough to find clean, seamless, and effective alternative paths to system patching and a solution developed to handle it in an easily-scalable, transparent manner. The open source community can watch the latest malware and virus threats, then find ways to develop patches and defeat them. Every business, big and small, could reap the benefits.

References:

1. Usage Share of Operating Systems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
2. System requirements for Windows XP operating systems. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314865
3. Windows Lifecycle Fact Sheet. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/products/lifecycle
4. End of Support for Windows 98, Windows ME, and XP SP1 http://www.microsoft.com/windows/support/endofsupport.mspx
5. Installing Debian GNU/Linux for Intel X86 http://www.debian.org/releases/2.1/i386/ch-hardware-req.en.html
6. Gartner: Microsoft Should Help With IE6 Migration http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/entdev/article.php/3912866/Gartner-Microsoft-Should-Help-With-IE6-Migration.htm