London Stock Exchange

One of the main reasons is that trading platforms are a competitive marketplace now. They now compete based on latency more than all else. Speed of execution wins. The reason this is especially relevant is due to High-Frequency Traders. They are the new market makers (what used to be the people screaming at each other on the floor of exchanges). High-Frequency Trading are computers trading with each other. This is why within the U.S., you see a war going on between electronic exchanges, and their rebates (exchanges paying HFT for trading on their markets, note this only applies to market suppliers, buyers still have to comply with NBBO).

The problem is that the LSE has been executing prices at above 25ms slower than other exchanges, sometimes to the point where it’s faster to execute in exchanges further away. If they’re that slow with execution, trading volumes will be going to other exchanges, notably Euronext. These slow speeds, probably due to the way .NET is structured, and Windows’ opaque network stack is killing them competitively (as opposed to *NIX where one can intuitively know where the buffering is — and minimize that). The real failure here isn’t Microsoft, is Accenture and LSE for throwing in people that have no idea the modern demands and throwing out the tried and true.

David Gerard said,

July 11, 2009 at 11:01 am

Hey, a minor amusing note from Wikipedia:

When Google Chrome OS was announced, the shills commented saying “uh this is just a copy of the Microsoft Gazelle browser OS ya rly.” Gazelle is of course vaporware - it exists only as a Microsoft Research paper, no product in sight. So I went to the Wikipedia article, which was a one-paragraph note with no third-party references. So I tagged it for “prospective deletion”, which means “this really needs either fixing or trashing soon thanks.” Within three hours, an IP editor came along and brought it up to just about minimum standard. So the article lives.

The IP is there in the history, it’s 192.102.82.253, which is owned by … The SCO Group, Lindon UT!

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, SCO and Microsoft are completely separate entities, and good contributions from anywhere are most welcome. Yep.

The SCO case has the potential to break Micro-Soft’s neck.

If IBM should be able to proove that SCO is a MS puppet and MS stiffles deliberately IBM’s Linux business, the damages for which IBM might sue Micro-Soft will well exceed all cash reserves of Micro-Soft.