

The Coming Microsoft Cultural Revolution - rfreytag
http://www.cringely.com/2014/07/15/coming-microsoft-cultural-revolution/

======
gtaylor
This article is so bitter and dismissive of Microsoft that I have a hard time
even taking it seriously.

 _" Nadella begins at the altar of innovation, a word that at Microsoft has
traditionally meant stealing technology. Of course he is the company
cheerleader to some extent but Microsoft’s tradition of innovation is hard to
even detect, much less celebrate or revive. This is revisionist history. Can
he really believe it’s true?"_

Seriously? We're going to poopoo them stealing tech and completely dismiss
everything they've _ever_ done? I guess Apple/Google/IBM/HP get a pass...

I'm a Linux fanboy first and foremost, so I don't exactly view MS with rose
colored glasses. With that said, regardless of how they did it, MS has left a
mark on the world. Show me a huge tech company that doesn't "steal tech" or
engage in anti-competitive practices. That doesn't make it OK, but completely
dismissing MS's history seems silly.

If the author missed the mark this bad on what Microsoft is and has done, I
have a hard time taking him seriously when talking about the future.

~~~
icantthinkofone
What Microsoft has done:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp)

~~~
gtaylor
Nobody here is denying that they've done bad things, but name a public tech
giant that hasn't done stupid/bad things. They all suck. They answer to
profit, first and foremost. They're going to bend rules and push the limits in
the name of making a few pennies for their shareholders.

Apple does it, Google does it, IBM does it, Amazon does it, they all do skeezy
things in the name of profit. MS isn't special in this regard.

~~~
icantthinkofone
None of the companies you mention were almost broken up by the Justice
Department, fined billions of dollars for this one event, or put under Federal
oversight for almost 12 years.

~~~
smackfu
Well, IBM certainly had problem with antitrust back in the 60's and 70's.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM#1969:_Antitrust....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM#1969:_Antitrust.2C_the_Unbundling_of_software_and_services)

~~~
icantthinkofone
"...the Justice Department finally concluded that the case was “without merit”
and dropped it"

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keithwarren
I almost gave up when he said "I don’t mean to be a pedant but which is it —
mobile first or cloud first? Only one thing can be first."

If you don't recognize that those are two different areas then you are either
dense, or being intentionally contrarian. Given the earlier statements he made
it is clear the latter is certainly true and quite possibly the former as
well.

~~~
rimantas
It has nothing to do with the areas being different or similar. The point is
that _only one thing_ can be _the first_.

~~~
jbigelow76
They are two sides of the same coin. What use (aside from the incredibly
useful feature of making actual phone calls) is a smartphone if there aren't
services in the cloud that account for the "smart" part?

~~~
rayiner
Lots of use, unless we're lumping the internet and e-mail into "the cloud."
I'm quite happy to have my photos stored locally, my e-mails and documents
handled by my company's exchange server, etc.

~~~
jbigelow76
I think unless you or your company is managing their own email servers then
yes, email is now "cloud".

~~~
rayiner
Don't most large companies still manage their own e-mail servers?

~~~
jbigelow76
Sure, but what about everyone else? What's the worldwide install base for
smartphones these days, several hundred million if not a billion or more? For
all those people that don't work for large companies and their email is
synonymous with the cloud.

------
chiph
> Mobile-First, Cloud-First

I dunno. I see this as "devices and services" rephrased.

~~~
sz4kerto
I don't think so, especially because Nadella specifically mentioned that D&S
is not the governing principle (well, he didn't say that exactly, but almost).
What Mobile-First means to me is that mobile is _the_ platform, and being
present on portable devices is the key to survival for Microsoft (and don't
forget, almost every end-user device is portable, including dockable mobile
workstations). That means that MS cannot afford risking not being present on
dominant mobile operating systems, for example -- it would be stupid to risk
the survival of the company and only push stuff on Windows Phone, for example.

Other than that, I disagree with the article on a many points.

> Microsoft’s tradition of innovation is hard to even detect, much less
> celebrate or revive.

The tradition of innovation is there -- see Microsoft Research, one of the
best funded institutes. The tradition of polish is not there. Microsoft has
produced tablet PCs, smartphones, voice and handwriting recognition, mapping,
and so on. It has a bad record of taking stuff out from R&D departments and
delivering them to end users in a neat and easy-to-use way.

> I don’t mean to be a pedant but which is it — mobile first or cloud first?
> Only one thing can be first.

I think the opposite: the two goes together hand in hand, and cannot really
live without each other. That's the big problem of Apple: they are not that
good in cloud services, and a phone (or a tablet) increasingly relies on cloud
services. Google is mostly winning the mobile war because it's cloud services.
It's the cloud services why Google can release Android for free, it's them why
many iOS users slowly gravitate towards Android ('because Google stuff works
better'), it's them why many people don't want Windows Phone ('I don't use too
many apps but I need Google Maps and GMail').

~~~
revscat
> The tradition of innovation is there -- see Microsoft Research, one of the
> best funded institutes... Microsoft has produced tablet PCs, smartphones,
> voice and handwriting recognition, mapping, and so on.

I don't see how you can claim Microsoft has been innovative, ever. Windows was
a reaction to the Macintosh, the Zune was a reaction to the iPod, C# was a
reaction to Java, IIS to Apache, Surface to iPad, MSN to AOL, MS Money to
Quicken, XBox to PlayStation, Bing to Google, Internet Explorer to Netscape
Navigator, Excel to Lotus 1-2-3, DOS to CP/M, Windows Phone to iPhone, Azure
to AWS, etc., etc.

Microsoft's history is a long list of occasionally successful (but mostly not)
efforts at me-too-ing the competition. In the 90s this worked -- occasionally
-- because they were able to enter those markets and dominate from their sheer
size. Now, however, it does not. In any case, I cannot think of a market that
Microsoft created or a product that they introduced that has seen success
since the 1990's.

> Google is mostly winning the mobile war because it's cloud services.

I don't understand this at all. Apple is making the lion's share of profit in
mobile. Last time I checked, Google wasn't making much money form Android at
all.

~~~
kvb
By this standard, who is innovative? Wasn't the Macintosh a reaction to the
work at Xerox PARC? Wasn't the iPod a reaction to the existing MP3 players on
the market? Wasn't Google a reaction to AltaVista et al.? Everyone takes
inspiration from the products that have come before.

~~~
revscat
In some ways, yes. But, in the case of the Macintosh, Apple took what was
available and made it successful in the consumer space. They helped to usher
in a new market. The same can be said of the iPod, although not to as dramatic
an extent as with the 512K Mac. For Google, their innovation was AdSense. You
could say that this "innovation" was just a natural evolution of the banner
ads of the era, but only in hindsight.

Contrast both Google and Apple with Microsoft and you will be hard pressed to
find a time when Microsoft had the foresight to see where the market is going,
or what the potential is. They react to established players, embrace & extend,
and (occasionally) profit. They have never been able to successfully create
new markets.

------
kvb
Given the content, I can't tell if the allusion to the disastrous Chinese
Cultural Revolution is intended or not. It seems more like Cringely's actually
talking about changing Microsoft's culture, which makes the title quite poor.

~~~
pessimizer
That was the intention of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, too. It failed in
the long term, but from the perspective of its architects, most of what we
call its disasters were actually its successes.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Mass starvation? Technological stagnation? Which success are you referring to?

~~~
cstross
Presumably breaking forever the grip of the Confucian design pattern (left
behind by the former imperial bureaucracy) on the imaginations of the low-
level functionaries, without who no top-down empire can operate.

An example uppermost in Mao's mind must have been that, despite Lenin's putsch
of 1917, by 1927 the USSR ran along lines that would have been instantly
recognizable to a Tsarist-era bureaucrat from 1907. The structure of
governance of the vast Russian empire re-asserted itself under the guise of
Actually Existing Socialism, once the Vanguard Party had replaced the top and
middle tiers of the Imperial nobility and bureaucracy with nominally-loyal
functionaries. The same sorts of person are attracted to power whatever the
ideology of the regime, and aside from joining a party and paying lip service
to the party's ideology, they make the same set of assumptions about how power
is to be exercised. True revolutionaries are discredited, expelled, or purged:
see the fates of Trotsky and Zinoviev, for example.

Mao and his inner cadre saw the Chinese people, a generation after the
revolution (itself largely pushed through by force of Russian arms, in the
shape of the Manchurian campaign of 1945 that kicked the Japanese army off the
Asian mainland), reverting to the social and political patterns of the
Confucian bureaucracy that had run the empire they supplanted. True, the new
bureaucrats paid lip service to communism as a guiding eschatology. But they
weren't _communists_ , much less revolutionaries. This was repugnant to Mao,
so he fired up the whole social revolution that cost so many lives precisely
to break that design pattern.

It sort of worked. In the short term, it caused chaos and starvation and
massive deaths: but in the long term, it laid the foundations for a
technocracy. Today's Chinese party politburo are primarily engineers and
scientists who grew up during the cultural revolution, not the spiritual heirs
to the earlier system. Although I think the direction they've taken China in
probably has Mao spinning in his grave so fast they could hook him up to a
dynamo and power their national grid ...

~~~
jbooth
Great comment, and I'm not Chinese, but did they really break away from
Confucianism?

It looks like a civil service with an emphasis on standardized testing at the
entry level and tending towards organizational politics at the medium->high
levels.. where's the ideological sea change? The biggest difference from the
dynasties seems to be the handover between premiers every decade.

~~~
cstross
_Great comment, and I 'm not Chinese, but did they really break away from
Confucianism?_

As Zho Enlai allegedly said when asked about the significance of the French
Revolution, "it's too early to say".

(Spoiler: he may have misunderstood the question, but it's still a great
anecdote: [http://www.historytoday.com/blog/news-blog/dean-
nicholas/zho...](http://www.historytoday.com/blog/news-blog/dean-
nicholas/zhou-enlais-famous-saying-debunked) )

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craigching
In the comments there is a link to a critique that I think hits the nail on
the head:

[http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/07/13/microsofts-new-ceo-
need...](http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/07/13/microsofts-new-ceo-needs-an-
editor/)

------
leo_mck
I just read the comments on posts with "Microsoft" on the title so I can laugh
at the people who says "I do not care about microsoft" (but I am here
commenting on a topic about it anyway).

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venomsnake
Decent windows on unlocked devices with root and sideloading to the users.
Still a winning idea.

~~~
ape4
It would nice if they don't follow Android and iOS by having everything
totally locked down. (Unless you root or jail break). They can see Microsoft
give you flexibility, freedom.

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vfclists
The only thing that will keep Microsoft and Apple going in the consumer
markets over the next few years are patents and binary blobs. Once chips
become fast enough and non-free drivers become irrelevant their days will be
over.

Already a $150 smartphone contains as much CPU power as a desktop of 5 years
ago. Add a keyboard and attach it to big screen, presto you have a desktop.
Their days are over and they are living on sales hype and clever apps.

Once developer lock in ends, thats it for them.

~~~
CmonDev
_Already a $150 smartphone contains as much CPU power as a desktop of 5 years
ago. Add a keyboard and attach it to big screen, presto you have a desktop._

Microsoft is working on unifying their OS versions. Please catch up.

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motters
I don't really care what Microsoft is doing. I don't use any of their
products. I don't intend to in future either. It took me years to fully
extricate myself from the disaster zone which was Microsoft Windows, and
having done that I have no desire to return.

~~~
CmonDev
Typical *nix closed-box thinking.

