The Giant Sucking Sound

Every year the business magazine “Fortune” ranks the top 500 corporations in the US by revenue (and in a later issue the top 500 non-U.S. corporations). You might think that looking at a bunch of numbers would only be of interest to accountants, but I find it interesting too. It reminds you of a few things.

On top of the list this year again...is the retail giant Walmart.

Walmart is of course famous for busting unions, treating workers like crap, charges of predatory pricing, squeezing suppliers, and extracting all kinds of planning and tax concessions from municipal governments so they can build big box stores on the outskirts of town while putting everyone on "Main Street" out of business.

On revenues of $378 billion, they earned $12.7 billion in profits.

Exxon Mobile (they named an oil spill after them!) came in second with just under $373 billion in revenue, but a whopping $40.6 billion in profits.

Number three spot went to another oil company...Chevron (the company that briefly named an oil tanker named after the current U.S. Secretary of State). They had revenues of over $210 billion and made $18.7 billion in profits.

Poor old fourth place General Motors lost $38.7 billion on revenues of $182 billion.

Way down the list at number 44 is a once little known company based in Redmond, Washington. They had revenues of "only" $51.1 billion. But, they made nearly $14.1 billion in profits! I'm talking about the company that Bill Gates built..Microsoft.

Aside from Exxon Mobile and Chevron, only General Electric ($22.2 billion), JP Morgan-Chase ($15.4 billion) and the Bank of America ($15 billion) made more dough than the boys from Redmond last year.

I'm not a mathematician and thankfully not an economist either. But I do know how to use a calculator. So I had a little fun with figures.

For every single dollar you spent on a Microsoft product, they cleared 28 cents in pure gravy!

On the other hand, "Union Buster's 'R Us" Walmart made a little over three cents on every dollar you spent there. (They didn't make it on me. I NEVER shop there).

Oil spillin' catastophe lovin' Exxon Mobile, made about eleven cents on every dollar you spent "putting a tiger in your tank". (Okay...I'm dating myself).

Chevron made about nine cents on the dollar and Conoco-Phillips made about seven cents profit on the dollar. Even that "into everything" company...General Electric made only thirteen cents on the dollar.

What's the secret recipe for being a global vaccuum cleaner that sucks up masses of cash instead of dust bunnies?

Go down to your nearest big box store and try to buy a PC without Microsoft's resource hogging Windows Vista operating system on it. Go ahead and try!

The license to use Microsoft's Windows operating system adds anywhere from $50-100 to the cost of your PC. It's a defacto "private tax" whenever you buy a PC.

If you poke around on line, you might be able to find some large computer manufacturers still selling machines with Microsoft's older Windows XP operating system on them. If you really really look hard, you'll find a few brave manufacturers selling machines with a free software GNU/Linux operating system pre-installed. But you'll need to be a real web sleuth to find them. (Here and here).

Recently, GNU/Linux operating systems have gained a bit of a toehold in a new class of portable computers. The micro notebook "UMPC" or "ULPC" class machines...like the One Laptop Per Child Project's "XO" computer.

Some of the "Intel Classmate" machines also run a GNU/Linux operating system.

The "Asus EeePC" (see my previous blogpost) has taken the world by storm. HP and others will soon be offering GNU/Linux based UMPC/ULPC class machines.

Even though this is only a tiny toehold for the community built operating system, Microsoft has decided to crush this movement before it gets out of hand.

Just this past week they've announced that they'll be making their almost obsolete "Windows XP Home" operating system available to manufacturers of UMPC/ULPC machines for about $30 a pop. The plan was to shelve this operating system next month, but for this class of machines they've put it back on life support.

They're even trying to dictate to hardware manufacturers what kind of machines they are "allowed" to put this discounted Windows XP Home on.

The OLPC project used to be really cool. The plan was to sell tens of thousands of these neat little GNU/Linux powered "XO" machines to education ministries in the developing world. The aim was to try to get the price down to around $100 per unit. So far they've managed to get it down to about $180.

But this week, Microsoft announced that it's officially got its paws into the XO project.

So the XO project will no longer be introducing techno-savvy kids in the developing world to software that they have the freedom to change and adapt to their needs. Instead they'll be stuck with an operating system that is "licensed and not sold"...that they are not free to change.

And so these bright geeky kids will never have the chance to develop software that's appropriate to local conditions. They'll grow up addicted to the Microsoft drug. It's electronic colonialism.

A few months back, Mandrivasoft, a small French company that distributes its own GNU/Linux operating system made a deal with the Nigerian education ministry to supply some Intel Classmate machines with Mandriva Linux pre-installed. Mandriva was going to supply the tech support for the machines.

But Microsoft went in through the back door and tried to derail the deal.

Microsoft will stop at nothing to preserve it's tax on computing.

Then there's Microsoft's second cash cow..."Microsoft Office". Microsoft has convinced hundreds of millions of computer users that they "need" this software.

They've even gone so far as to bully the International Standards Organization (ISO) into accepting it's broken file formats as "a standard" for the exchange of electronic documents. Two years previously the ISO had accepted without controversy the totally open and vendor neutral "Open Document Format" (ODF) as "the" standard for electronic documents.

Rather than deal with the technical merits of Microsoft's file formats (what they're supposed to do), they simply caved in to heavy-handed lobbying.

I feel totally confident in saying that 90% of computer users do not need Microsoft Office. If you say you "need it", you'll need to have a very good argument to convince me.

Instead you should be using the free as in freedom, free as in free beer "Openoffice.org" office suite. It's available for the Windows, MacOSX, GNU/Linux and Solaris operating systems.

Download it today and start using it. Kiss Microsoft Office goodbye forever and get off the treadmill of spending money on upgrades every time Microsoft introduces a new file format.

And if anyone sends you a ".docx" file, send it back!

If we can't turn off this cash sucking vaccuum cleaner, maybe we can at least put it on a lower setting.