
Microsoft’s Creative Destruction  - unignorant
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html?ref=opinion
======
Goronmon
_Despite billions in investment, its Xbox line is still at best an equal
contender in the game console business._

I think he doesn't give Microsoft enough credit on this. They entered a game
console market with two entrenched players, where one was clearly dominating
the other. People gave Microsoft little to no chance of succeeding and yet, on
there second iteration were able to put themselves on equal ground to Sony and
Nintendo. And that is with producing one of the most unreliable consoles ever
made.

~~~
mckilljoy
I agree, even that is an impressive accomplishment. But after nearly 10 years,
it would be nice to see them actually profit on the endeavor.

~~~
wayne
Entertainment and Devices made $375 million last quarter:
<http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/192686.asp>

~~~
Calamitous
"made" $375 million? Is that profit or revenue? One is very good, the other...
not so much without a clear view of expenses.

~~~
Encosia
Microsoft's entertainment group's revenue was 2.9 billion.

~~~
Calamitous
Good deal, thanks for the update. The parent's article wasn't terribly clear.
:)

------
aaronbrethorst
(my background: I worked at MS from 2003-2007 until I jumped ship to join a 20
person startup.)

The answer is simple: Microsoft needs its own Steve Jobs, not a Steve Ballmer.

Without an absolute tyrant with a keen sense of where the market is, and where
it's going at the helm, Microsoft will continue to flounder. And with good
reason, there are too many internal fiefdoms, and too many internal rivalries.

To be honest, I think MS would've been very well served to have been broken up
at the end of the 90s. If the company had been divided into three separate
firms, like Office Inc., Windows Inc. and Everything Else Inc., I think things
would've turned out very differently for those firms over the past ten years:
fewer boondoggle projects that only have a prayer of making a profit in the
distant future, less of a whackjob 'better together' mentality that hamstrings
Microsoft developers into using inadequate internal solutions or forces them
to bolt useless features onto their products, and so on.

Sigh, sorry. I really think Microsoft is capable of so much more than they've
been able to do for years, and it frustrates me to see so much talent go to
waste.

~~~
timothychung
My opinion is that Steve Jobs won't survive in MS due to their culture. Their
take on innovation is to be a late market joiner.

They win because they do things better with their resources.

MS has an innovation model. It's just that it is a very non-innovative
innovation model.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
The article we're all commenting on talks about Microsoft's ill-fated Tablet
computer, which premiered almost a decade before the iPad. Microsoft does many
things which could be considered 'innovative,' except that they never achieve
widespread market acceptance.

Also, when was the last time Microsoft won with the "non-innovative innovation
model" you refer to? Sharepoint? SQL Server? I can't think of any instance
where this has worked in years.

~~~
joe_the_user
Yes, even though their successes with that model were in the OS, browser and
office wars decade _s_ ago, they made billions on those success _this year_.

------
edw519
In enterprise IT, we have 2 kinds of vendors, those we actively embrace and
those who hold us hostage.

The biggest fear in making any major IT purchase is not the price, the
conversion, or the change in culture; it's the potential loss of options in
how we run our own business.

I've seen it over and over again: competitive pressure requires us to make a
change in the way we run our business, but we can't. For all kinds of reasons.
The license agreement kills any possible ROI. We don't have the needed IT
support because so much of it is spent on keeping current. The systems don't
talk to each other. The feature we need is still 18 months away. And probably
most of all, the software is not as excellent as we need it to be (let's just
leave it at that).

Long gone are the days when you needed IBM's permission to fart. Guess who the
biggest culprit is today?

Just because you go with someone doesn't necessarily mean you like it. Almost
every enterprise IT department I know would _love_ an alternative to
Microsoft. (And make no mistake about it, the _enterprise_ is Microsoft's
strength, much more so than the consumer.)

Sure, pissing off your customers may pad today's bottom line. How do you think
those customers will feel when your landscape changes and they have more
choices?

[Entered using ie7 on xp pro. I didn't have a choice.]

~~~
DenisM
So Microsoft is preventing you from buying copy of Windows 7 and installing
Firefox? No? Your anger is misplaced then, should be angry with your IT
department that doesn't let you upgrade form a 9 year old OS.

~~~
dualogy
An MS-based "Enterprise IT" is more than that, much more. It's not about the
Windows client version and choice of browser. They'll have heavily integrated
server products (all of them, multiple instances), sometimes for good reason
and sometimes not. SQL Server, ISA, "Office Communication Server", "Team
Foundation Server", SharePoint Server, Active Directory Services, etc. pp. you
name it, ad infinitum. All with the appropriate, sometimes buggy GUI tools,
and the much-needed, sometimes buggy, 3rd-party add-ons and tools. Often this
ends up as a big mess, and while the products have certainly matured over a
decade and thousands of developers working on them, a decade and 1000s of devs
can also introduce many new flaws with each update. In the end, it's a big
pile of mediocrity and un-agility, and yes, despite that "deciders" often buy
into it because-nobody-ever-got-fired-for-etc. Of course, this will not go on
forever...

~~~
actf
> Often this ends up as a big mess

Care to give us a concrete example? Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point
here, but my experience has been somewhat the opposite. The tight integration
of the Microsoft development tools (for example Visual Studio, SQL Server) is
what makes it such an appealing and easy to use development platform for so
many enterprise developers.

> a decade and 1000s of devs can also introduce many new flaws with each
> update.

I find that silly - what are you basing that argument on other than anecdotal
evidence? Using that same logic you'd expect linux to be extremely flawed
since so many developer's hands touch it.

~~~
dualogy
Sure, the integration of dev tools is pretty slick and appealing. But I wasn't
talking about VS at all, but about all the various servers and how they are
typically deployed in the Enterprise.

You're right about the "anecdotal evidence", but I just experience that
anecdotal evidence every other day and there's a _lot_ more of that anecdotal
evidence to be found in most IT depts and MS shops.

------
kulkarnic
As someone who's worked at MSFT himself, the author certainly knows what he's
talking about. However, there's a couple of factors one must reflect on:

1\. It's a HUGE company (80k employees?). When you get to that size, it's hard
to ensure all great ideas get to market. For a very long time in its history,
the company was guided by a dominating spirit (computers on every desk) and a
similar leader (Bill Gates). With both outmoded now, it's easy for business-
groups to take local decisions, rather than follow the war-plan.

2\. BUT, they've made HUGE investments in the future. Consider Microsoft
Research. MSFT isn't going to be IBM anytime soon (huge company, but better
known for sales folks than tech enterprise). Though they'll possibly not be as
sexy as Apple, they'll definitely have the tech/IP if/when they want to
utilize it.

~~~
mrduncan
I think you hit on their biggest problem now. They have (mostly) succeeded in
their original goal to get a computer on every desk. What's next though? It
seems to me that they need a new grand plan for the company as a whole.

~~~
endtime
Their current mission statement is a bunch of crap, something like "Enabling
businesses to reach their full potential".

But the other mission statement-y phrase that gets thrown around a lot is
having an integrated experience between "three screens and the cloud". The
three screens being TV (Xbox), computer, and cell phone. That gives a little
direction, but as much as I'd like to see them be competitive in mobile, I'm
not optimistic.

~~~
mckilljoy
Based on their latest presentation at CES, they have even lost that tiny sense
of direction. Now the strategy has become "Many screens and a cloud" to
encompass netbooks, tablets, etc. that weren't easily anticipated a year or
two ago.

Maybe I'm cynical, but I feel like a long-term mission statement shouldn't be
changing every 12 months.

------
maurycy
Microsoft wouldn't be worth discussing, if not their role on the market. I
mean, they were once innovative and now they're just plain stupid. Like many
companies in the past, their success is slowly killing them.

The real problem, though, is that Microsoft slows down the innovation. Every
time I see my friends working on Windows, I see an operating system that
nearly not changed since 1995.

I know that there are nice fonts, widgets, and you have nice shadows here and
there. All the basic concepts, though, are the same since 1995. There's
basically no true innovation.

See what Apple does. Ten years ago they had ugly, and basically unusable OS.
Five ten years ago they were comparable. Now, they are the frontiers of the
touch&the mobile revolution.

Regular people still struggle with the same problems they struggled ten years
ago. They still have to cope with utterly complicated filesystem, there's
still too much voodoo, they still cannot find their programs easily, there's
still mouse&keyboard, they still get unnecessary viruses, and the cloud
integration is almost non-existing, so they have to use pendrives.

Unfortunately, 90% of the new computers is sold with Windows, and it takes
some unnecessary effort to find&learn better tools. We cannot expect regular
people to give up their jobs in search of better IT solutions. They just want
to get their job done, and it's OK.

We, as a developers, like to speak how Microsoft slows down the web. I think,
Microsoft slows down the whole society. The time wasted on their today's
deprecated software is the whole society's loss.

~~~
halo
I don't see how you can say with a straight face that's Windows has "nearly
not changed" since 1995 while saying that Mac OS X has significantly changed
since 2001.

~~~
maurycy
It depends how you understand the innovation.

I don't say that Mac OS X has significantly changed since 2001. Please read
carefully. I mean Apple as a whole. They do a lot of innovation. iPhone
literally revolutionized the way we interact with mobile phones, and iPad is
going to do the same with the standard computing model.

For me, innovation is all about the regular people. I don't care about the
buzzwords, and the top notch innovation, which is used by 0,0069% of the
population. Concepts such as cloud computing are so old, it's pathetic they
are not widely used.

The same goes with iPhone/iPad pair. I know that spec-wide, there's nothing
new about these tools. We, hackers, are so used to some concepts, we forget
about our dads, girlfriends and co-workers from different departments, which
are still in 1995.

By the way, I think OS X changed a lot. Not significantly, but a lot. This is
not a completely different paradigm but things like MobileMe (iCal,
AddressBook in the cloud), Spotlight, iTunes are big steps.

~~~
maurycy
Replying to myself, but I don't want to edit the former comment.

I think that iPod is the excellent case study for what the innovation actually
is. From the technical standpoint, iPod is a garbage. I mean, less space than
a nomand, lame. iPod wasn't very innovative in the terms of technology. MP3
players existed for years, and I was, as a nerd, relatively happy with them.

However, iPod played a significant role in bringing in the basic innovation to
the masses. Downloading music with a click, instead of ripping it from CD with
some weird tools, keeping your music library in a sync. It makes no difference
for you or me, but it makes a big difference for your friend from different
department, which is not tech savvy.

That's the actual purpose of innovation. It's about a Marry from the street.

People using the standard Microsoft environment, still use their computers as
a bit better typewriter, faster snail mail, and an interface for finding stuff
immediately, through Google. They do nearly the same stuff they were doing in
1995. Except, Internet is more popular thing.

People in the standard Apple environment, share their personal data between
many devices, use nice touch interface, download music and movies with a
click, without need to buy/rent a DVD, put their photos on the web easily
etc., etc. Soon, thanks to iPad, they're going to enjoy the touch screen on
daily basis, and forget about the standard folders-based filesystem, Desktop
and other concepts that, actually, might be unnecessary for them.

~~~
halo
So you're comparing Windows since 1995 with _everything_ Apple have made? No
wonder Microsoft appear to have badly stagnated.

Microsoft have changed a lot since 1995. They moved into the mobile space with
Windows CE and Windows Mobile. They moved onto the web starting with software
like Internet Explorer, Outlook, IIS, Windows Live Messenger and moved onto
websites such as MSN, Hotmail, Multimap, and, more recently, Bing. They moved
into hardware and released the Xbox, Zune, Zune HD, Xbox and Xbox 360. They
moved into online gaming with Xbox Live and Games for Windows Live, which have
evolved into social networks and marketplaces for both these products. That's
ignoring all the different major changes to Windows-related technologies,
whether .NET, DirectX, Exchange, Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center,
Windows Search, Windows Firewall, or Microsoft Security Essentials, which have
all changed beyond recognition or outright didn't exist back in 1995. Hell,
Microsoft have even made a standardised video codec called VC-1. There's
probably others, but that's much more than "nice fonts, widgets, and ... nice
shadows here and there".

Were these products innovative? Some definitely were (Xbox Live stands out),
some weren't especially innovative but had advantages that caused them to
compare favourably to their competitors to gain significant marketshare (Xbox,
Internet Explorer, DirectX, .NET, Windows CE, Exchange, IIS), some weren't and
have largely languished (GfwL, Windows Media Player, Bing). Besides,
Microsoft's victories have traditionally not been through direct innovation as
much as incremental product iteration which they generally do well.

Apple have grown at an unprecedented rate, and any company compared to them
doesn't compare favourably, but that hardly means Microsoft have just sat
there doing nothing. Trying to this into a "Apple environment vs. Microsoft
environment" battle which is completely artificial when neither company exists
in a vaccuum as they create platforms for other companies to build on.

------
wglb
While it is natural to attribute much of this to individual efforts within the
company, and to lack of innovation, the result you see at Microsoft might be
more of a natural consequence of a company of that size and success.

Just a little thought experiment here: in the eyes of shareholders, which is
more important at the end of each quarter -- innovation, or profit? So did the
profitability of the Office division suffer from not engaging the tablet?
(note that some think that the anticipated use of the iPad is more on the
consumer end, and less on the creation end).

And another little quiz: where does Simon Peyton Jones work and what does he
do and what has he produced?

To me, the underlying takeaway from this story, and I disagree a little with
the slant the author of TFA has, is that execution can trump innovation.

There have been articles referenced here on HN that talk about others stealing
ideas (my favorite was one told by Steve Blank) but at the end of the day, the
winner is the one who executes well.

Isn't this the bottom-line message from the Microsoft story?

~~~
gabrielroth
_Just a little thought experiment here: in the eyes of shareholders, which is
more important at the end of each quarter -- innovation, or profit? So did the
profitability of the Office division suffer from not engaging the tablet?_

And yet shareholders are not, in fact, rewarding Microsoft for its consistent
profitability:
[http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdet=126531720000...](http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdet=1265317200000&chddm=492269&cmpto=NASDAQ:AAPL;NASDAQ:MSFT&cmptdms=0;0&q=aapl)
msft&ntsp=0

~~~
ajross
That's a link to Apple's chart, not MSFT. And MSFT has been tracking the
overall market pretty closely over the past few years. It hasn't been tanking,
nor booming. I'd say that's a _validation_ of wglb's point, no? Investors
don't care about anything but revenue, and revenue of a company this size
tracks the economy, and thus it behaves pretty much the same as the market
does.

~~~
gabrielroth
Look closer. It's a link to a chart that compares the share prices of Apple
and Microsoft over the past five years. Apple, driven by innovation, has
increased by 400%. Microsoft, with its consistent profits, has remained almost
perfectly flat.

This makes the previous poster's claim that investors have responded
positively to Microsoft's approach look pretty weak.

------
Kilimanjaro
"I am going to fucking kill Google" it's been their mantra for the last ten
years (since ballmer got the CEO spot).

They don't innovate, they just embrace and derail, extend and delay, patent
and extinguish, copy and destroy.

Great company solely focused on money, at the cost of fucking up everybody
else, and killing progress for their own benefit, when the rest of the world
is focused on progress, and money.

Ballmer must go, and that destructive mentality must change.

------
mckilljoy
Microsoft's lack innovation is a result of a couple of factors I can think of:

-Leaders without vision: Gates wasn't perfect, but he at least put forward the vision of a PC in every house. Ballmer is more of a cheerleader than a visionary, and "three screens and a cloud" isn't a vision of the future so much as commentary on the present.

-Hubris: Making billions of dollars is an easy way to justify that you are "doing the right thing", even 15 years later.

-Customers focused: This is a little more subtle, but I think a culture making products (Windows, Office) for "Customers" is different than a culture making products (Gmail, Search) for "Users". For the former, you could pessimistically say that your main objective is to make a product you can convince someone to buy. Whether or not the customer uses the product is somewhat incidental. Each subsequent version must have enough features crammed into it to justify the customer paying again, even if they aren't useful. In contrast, focusing on the user provides more motivation to keep the product relevant, make the product useful, and so on. If it isn't, the users can simply stop using it.

-Middle-child syndrome: If your team isn't making $1+billion, no one cares. It is hard to have the proper resources to innovate and be creative if most of your management chain doesn't know your project exists.

~~~
joe_the_user
Another thing is that "embrace and extend" tends to lead to monolithic, dead-
end products. You can only cram so many useful features into a closed desktop
application before in becomes a nightmare. This prevents you from doing the
sane thing - producing a bunch of small modular tools. A lot of the good
coming out of the web is just a product of not having to start with context of
an application competing with other existing applications.

------
davepeck
I left MSFT a couple years ago; my experience was in line with the author's.
Microsoft was a strange, fantastic, ultimately frustrating place to work. My
blog post on it:

<http://davepeck.org/2008/12/12/meditations-on-microsoft/>

~~~
city41
My last day with Microsoft is on Tuesday. I also feel the same way. I think
working at MS in the 80s/early 90s would have been exciting, fresh and
challenging (not to mention extremely lucrative). But now? "Frustration" is
the best word to describe it :-/

~~~
davepeck
In the past two years, some of the most brilliant engineers I've ever had the
privilege of working with have decided to throw in the towel at MSFT. It is
not a good sign. I am ramping up my sales of MSFT stock, for sure.

There is still religious fervor inside the company. While at MSFT I worked
with a handful of "true believers." Unfortunately, their enthusiasm and faith
has yet to translate into interesting new products...

Anyway, if you're in the Seattle area, get in touch. The entrepreneurial
community here very much rocks.

~~~
InclinedPlane
That was my experience as well (seeing many brilliant engineers leaving after
deciding they've had enough of being let down by MS). Lack of other people on
my team that I felt I could look up to and that I enjoyed working with was a
big factor in why I left. I suspect the brain drain from MS will only
accelerate over time though there are still a lot of truly excellent engineers
working there.

Though I only worked at MS for a few years I suspect that the current working
environment, culture, bureaucracy etc. problems have been building up for a
very long time but were offset by remaining enthusiasm (read: kool aid
aftereffects) and the enormous financial incentives from stock options. Now
that the MSFT stock price has been flat for nearly a decade and it's
increasingly easy to find tech jobs with comparable salaries a lot of the
luster of working at MS has evaporated.

------
b-man
_No one in his right mind should wish Microsoft failure._

I've met quite a few people, who in my opinion had quite sane and intelligent
minds, who wished for MS failure, for a lot of well based reasons.

~~~
Groxx
It would hurt for a while, but I for one would welcome Microsoft's demise.
Linux is much nicer to program for, and wouldn't take too long to convert the
majority of programmers over to it, and thus most programs.

Plus, it's not like there aren't any other options, several of them quite
good. The market would adjust to fill the gap.

~~~
ytinas
Wait, what? I would be just as happy as the next guy to see MS go down in
flames, but "Linux is much nicer to program for"? In what way exactly? GUI?
Nope, the opposite. [1] The server? Not so much. I mean, if you were actually
writing to sockets and things then easy use of epoll, etc. might be an issue
but in business you're mostly doing REST or web services or something in which
case programming the server on _Windows_ is much easier. The environment
provides so much for you here. Scripting? Maybe, but who cares?

Right now I really find Visual Studio the best IDE. I would like to see that
change (and VS has lots of problems) but it's currently head and shoulders
above the rest.

[1] Further, the Linux GUI has to be one of the worst cases of optimizing for
the nearly nonexistent use case ever. If you look at all users of computers
today how many of them need X? A number so small as to be statistically
irrelevant.

------
pragmatic
Hackers take note.

The dominant OS for Business (on desktops) is Windows. This can't change
(soon), too many companies are locked into software that requires it (either
built in house or purchased).

That's changing, more applications are going web based. But there are always
those little niche apps that hang out in purchasing or accounting that require
windows and aren't going away soon.

Most companies can't function without Excel. Go to the accounting department.
Even if they have an "accounting system" ask the people working their what the
use (or watch them). They probably have Excel open all day. Excel is hard to
do in a browser.

Every company in the world would love to be MSFT. High profits and a locked in
customer base.

~~~
tmountain
I'd say companies are less locked into Windows the OS and more so tied to
binary compatibility with Windows products. I've been watching and using Wine
since the project began, and it has made unbelievable progress in the last
decade. Given a few more years, I wouldn't be surprised if it reached the
stage of near perfect compatibility with Windows products. That coupled with
the shift to more and more "cloud applications" spells big trouble for
Microsoft.

~~~
arethuza
Given the success of serious virtualization platforms like VMWare ESX I do
think there is a long term danger of Windows becoming a rather thin shim
between actual applications and the underlying "real" OS. Especially with the
current "Best Practise" of every application running on its own dedicated
server as everyone is terrified of the potential conflicts if you have more
than one vendor application on the same instance of Windows.

------
ShabbyDoo
Why is it that Google does not seem to suffer from the same internal
competition as this article claims present at MSFT? Perhaps Google is seen by
its employees as the Land of Plenty while MSFT employees see the company as a
zero-sum game? I'm not suggesting that either view is necessarily rational,
but such perceptions could explain the behaviors.

~~~
bad_user
Google only has one channel that produces money right now ... AdSense. All
their released products are complementary to it ... in fact, I don't know of a
single product that isn't.

So you can draw an analogy here ... Microsoft held to its cash-cows (Windows,
Office) for too long, although they are showing incremental success in other
areas ... like the XBox. Google may get to that point where AdSense will start
making them irrelevant, and then they'll be in the same situation.

All big companies face this. Even Apple ... if you'll look closer, they are
far too focused on their iTunes Store. And when a cash-cow starts to become
irrelevant, although it's still profitable, it's a tough decision to let go.

~~~
mediaman
Why is being focused on the iTunes Store bad? I understand how reliance on the
actual software is a bad idea -- although it's rumored that this is being
replaced with a web front-end (hence the acquisition of LaLa).

But I don't see how owning such a powerful distribution channel is something
they should let go of. Even now it's looking like they could become a major
player in not just music distribution but other media (books, video)
distribution as well.

~~~
bad_user
> _Even now it's looking like they could become a major player in not just
> music distribution but other media (books, video) distribution as well._

This is where I disagree ... they are doing the same mistake Microsoft did.
Right now to develop apps for your iPhone, you need a commercial SDK for which
you pay $99 and that only works on Mac OS X.

Do you know how much of a PITA this is? I am on an NDA and I can't give
details about what I'm doing right now, but believe me ... dealing with iPhone
is the ugliest of all mobile platforms.

When your distribution channel is tied to your software platform, that's when
it's starting to smell. When you also have lots of rules about what gets in,
that's a first sign it is not sustainable ... throughout the history
businesses have always been interested in eliminating the middle-men. That's
one reason web-apps are getting so popular.

And now here comes the iPad, which promises to do for books what iPod did for
music. I'm failing to see how this will work, since Amazon is already there,
and I can't picture myself watching movies on a tablet.

But maybe Jobs knows what he's doing, I really don't know ... what I do know
is that my colleagues that were ecstatic about iPhones are now switching to
Nexus Ones and Druids. And the iPhone used to be cool, now it's just popular
... the only reason we are supporting the hell of the App Store approval
process.

~~~
carbon8
_"you need a commercial SDK for which you pay $99"_

The SDK is free.

~~~
gnurant
The apple tax is not ;)

------
angelbob
It sounds like Microsoft's internal competition is exactly the same kind of
dysfunctional as its external competition.

~~~
stcredzero
From article:

 _But those of us who worked there know it differently. At worst, you can say
it’s a highly repentant, largely accidental monopolist._

If you want people to forgive your "accidental monopoly," it pays to not act
the 800 pound gorilla.

~~~
DenisM
When was the last time the acted the 800lb gorilla? When then yanked one
publisher's books from their book store? Or when they refused to approve
Google Voice for Windows?

Microsoft has been thoroughly declawed by the antitrust suite - all the
energetic and ruthlessly effective people who were driving company forward
have left Microsoft about 10 years ago when they realized they can't use their
favorite set of tools anymore. This is why Microsoft hasn't been changing the
world in the last 10 years, in a good or bad way.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Railroading a shoddy partial translation of their Office suite memory dump
format into XML through ISO, destroying that organizations credibility as it
did so. That was a dick move.

~~~
DenisM
Hm, good point. I forgot about that.

------
bensummers
So, they managed to destroy a competitor producing a tablet computer, only to
fail to produce their promised product because of infighting?

(See Jerry Kaplan's book, "Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure" for the
depressing story.)

How exactly is this defensible behaviour?

~~~
maurycy
It's defensible on the personal level.

People from other cubicles felt threatened, and they had to defend themselves.
;-)

~~~
bensummers
I meant the behaviour of saying to the market "we're making something which
will be far better than this shipping product" so loudly that no one bought
the shipping product.

The fact that their internal politics made it impossible to release something
better in the first place is just adding insult to injury.

Read the book, it's a good story.

------
rabidgnat
All of the internal issues wouldn't be a huge problem if consumers wanted to
buy their products, but they just don't know how to tell a compelling story of
improving lives. Microsoft just launches products that they think will compete
well in certain sectors, but they're not really thinking about what people
need. The XBox is really the only counterexample from the whole past _decade_!
"Hey, we have this thing that plays games, but you can also get updates and
games online using our store. When's the last time you've been able to apply a
bugfix to your console game?" Show me another Microsoft consumer product that
really improves someone's life like the XBox did

~~~
bad_user
Sorry, but many companies are using the Exchange/Office combination simply
because there isn't anything better.

Also, while many developers are preferring Unix-like OSes, customers actually
want Windows. It's what they know and it works well for them.

Another example would be their developer tools ... which are quite well
integrated with each other. I have seen many (good) devs that wouldn't dream
working without Visual Studio, and if you get a MSDN subscription, the
resources offered are top-notch. Myself I wouldn't touch any of that, since I
can't stand working with Windows servers, but if they made their tools multi-
platform, I would switch without blinking.

> _they're not really thinking about what people need_

And since when do people really need iPods / iPads or whatever else comes out
of Apple?

Actually I think Microsoft does a pretty good job about what people _need_ ...
but they aren't particularly good at anticipating what people _want_.

~~~
rabidgnat
To clarify, I was only focusing on their approach to emerging markets. How
many successful products/services have they created and launched in the last
year? The last 5 years? The last 10 years?

Also, sometimes it's a mistake to separate wants and needs! People started
carrying their music as soon as the technology let them. That's a trend that
hasn't abated in decades. It's not just some passing fad, but a symptom of
minds that need to be regularly engaged. To compare Apple with Microsoft,
Apple creates the device with the story, and Microsoft just creates the device
and the ads

------
elblanco
"Another example: When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, _the vice
president in charge of Office at the time_ decided he didn’t like the concept.
The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and
thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the
popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. "

This is easily solved with a few strategic firings.

------
grandinj
By an accident of history and a lot of skill, Microsoft wangled themselves a
virtual monopoly. Their skill at keeping that monopoly was second to none.

But now that other markets are opening and their monopoly power is fading, we
see the truth - they don't really have anything special beyond the likes of HP
and IBM.

------
csmeder
"At worst, you can say it’s a highly repentant, largely accidental
monopolist."

Incorrect, at worst it's a monopolist.

`

"It employs thousands of the smartest, most capable engineers in the world.
More than any other firm, it made using computers both ubiquitous and
affordable. Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office applications suite
still utterly rule their markets."

By monopoly...

`

"over $100 billion in the past 10 years alone and help sustain the economies
of Seattle, Washington State and the nation as a whole."

So we are supposed to support monopolies if they support Seattle? and
apparently "the nation as a whole." You don't support the economy by
monopolizing it.

`

"Its founder, Bill Gates, is not only the most generous philanthropist in
history, but has also inspired thousands of his employees to give generously
themselves. No one in his right mind should wish Microsoft failure."

This is philanthropy by force, he is a Robin Hood, steal from the rich USA and
give to the poorer countries. Out of all the statements this is the one I find
least fault with. Fine steal from me to give to the poor. But do it straight
up. Don't also hinder technological advancement while your stealing from me.
Just take my money and leave technology out of it.

------
PJNasty
Don't forget about xbox360 - most US males age 7-18 wants/has one. It's an
excellent Microsoft product that is often overlooked.

~~~
Glimjaur
"Despite billions in investment, its Xbox line is still at best an equal
contender in the game console business."

He didn't forget the Xbox, but he did give the impression that he wouldn't
consider it a success.

~~~
InclinedPlane
He probably doesn't know much about the gaming industry. The 360 is already an
unqualified success. It's unquestionably reached status as an iconic platform
in the history of console gaming, right up there with the NES and the PS1/2.
To outsiders it may seem as though Nintendo is leading this field but that's
somewhat misleading. Nintendo opened up a new market and has been able to sell
console gaming systems to a whole new group of people who wouldn't have bought
them before. This is fabulous for Nintendo, but in a very real sense it means
it's no longer operating in the same market as Microsoft and Sony (though
there is some overlap).

The 360 is the go-to console for any major game developer. Partly because 360
owners buy about 50% more games than either Wii or PS3 owners. Given that
games are responsible for the bulk of the profits related to console gaming
that's an enormously significant figure. The 360 console is raking in cash for
Microsoft and continuing to grow in popularity. It's one of Microsoft's most
successful ventures of all time.

~~~
mckilljoy
Well, define your criteria for success.

Xbox is successful in that it has a large mind-share in the hard-core gamer
community, but financially the project is still a failure. Had Microsoft
decided not to begin the Xbox project 10+ years ago, it would easily have a
few more $billion in the bank today.

Contrast that with the Wii, which, along with the DS, has added billions of
dollars in profit to Nintendo's coffers over the past few years alone.

Now that Xbox has established itself, the next decade will show whether or not
the system is net-profitable, or whether the project never should have started
to begin with.

~~~
sshumaker
No, Xbox has largest market share in the gamer community period, with > 25
million units shipped worldwide. And they will be profitable overall on their
gaming unit by the time this console generation is over (2015?).

Nintendo is operating in a different market. They are a toy company, first and
foremost. And it's better, conceptually, to think about the Wii and DS as
toys. They have a completely different audience - and completely different
revenue model. People buy toys for a short-term entertainment value, or
novelty - and then the novelty wears off.

This describes the Wii exactly - people buy one, they play a game or two, or
maybe Wii fit, and that's it. You aren't seeing serious time spent with it -
and the tie ratio demonstrates that.

BTW - I think I'd classify Guitar Hero / Rock Band as toys, too. Hence the
horrible sales numbers this season - people are sick of this particular kind
of toy.

~~~
mckilljoy
I'm not sure it is valuable to segment the market into those who buy "toys"
and those who buy "hard-core games". At the end of the day, there is just one
big market: the human population.

Yes, Microsoft sold 30 million Xboxs to "hard core gamers" and effectively
conquered that market niche.

But, in the same time, Nintendo sold 50+ million Wiis to people who like
"toys", making billions of dollars in the process.

As a hypothetical investor, I don't really care if Microsoft "wins" the hard-
core market, I care about the bottom line. Nintendo effectively created a new
market and capitalized on it, and they would get my hypothetical dollar.

------
djcapelis
"the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers"

Someone mistook the problem as a benefit.

------
raheemm
Seems to me that MS is struggling with bureaucracy, which is made worse by
product-lines that are super-complexified by a need to be backwards, sideways
and upside-down compatible with the rest of the universe. Factor in workplace
politics and the job of bringing innovation to market is harder than hell.

------
voxcogitatio
To me the really interesting question is how Microsoft ever got to be a
monopoly in the first place, with the kind of products they've been making.
What made windows and office succeed in the first place? Can you really coast
that far just on malignant business practices?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
This article lays out a big problem: internally the competition is won not on
technical or business merit but on politics, abuse of power, gameplaying and
generally dodgy shenanigans.

He brushes aside their monopolies which were created because _externally_ the
competition was defeated not on technical or business merit but on politics,
abuse of power, gameplaying and generally dodgy shenanigans.

Live by the sword, die by the irony.

------
CapitalistCartr
"The much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and
prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future . . . "

Microsoft never did that. Author has to be a press release junkie to not know
that.

~~~
kulkarnic
Not really. If you were following the company in the 90s, two quick examples
are Windows 95 and Internet Explorer 4 (Remember when IE was actually
_praised_ for better standards-compliance and developer-features?)

~~~
pohl
It might appear that way if Microsoft was the _only_ company one was following
back in the 90s. While they were freezing the market with promises of what
Chicago would be, NeXT had already brought the future - and that codebase
still feels like the future today.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Except that a NeXTCube cost $10k at the same time that a decent windows PC
cost $1.5-2k. Even though both NeXTStep and NT represented full, proper 32-bit
"modern" operating systems and were both invented in the early 90s it took
until 2001/2002 for both to come of age as consumer grade operating systems
(NeXTStep as OS X, NT as Windows XP). In the meantime MS put forth an interim
solution (Windows 9x) that was still suitable for consumer-grade PC hardware,
resulting in a continuation of Windows market dominance and billions of
dollars in profits for Microsoft. In contrast, NeXT took the intellectual high
road, stubbornly refusing to compromise its vision of the future, resulting in
massive financial losses, being forced to lay off 2/3 of its employees, and a
long, slow slide into bankruptcy and irrelevancy before being acquired by
Apple (which had stretched the decrepit Mac OS to its breaking point).

Had NeXT maintained a little more pragmatism and a little less stubborn pride
it's possible that they could have become the next Apple or the next
Microsoft, rather than merely a juicy intellectual property morsel for the
real players in the industry to pick up and take advantage of.

~~~
pohl
Sure, I couldn't afford a NeXTCube in 1990. But by 1993 I was running NeXTstep
on my generic intel hardware, a full two years prior to the release of Windows
95. (Incidentally, I also had the pleasure of running it on a SPARC laptop
made by Tadpole, and on one of the HP PA-RISC "gecko" machines, but those were
owned by employers. I could afford to run it on a PC, though.) But, you're
right, people continued to believe that NeXTstep required a $10000 machine
long after it did not.

------
aresant
Google rolls lots of stuff out in "BETA" to judge how users react which gives
them feedback and lets them measure engagement.

MSFT does not do as good of a job in letting users have-at these projects,
they've got such a huge array of interesting research projects underway (a
whole new OS Kernel for one <http://www.barrelfish.org/>) that they do not
seem to market whatsoever. . .

------
ilamont
Just curious: Wouldn't these types of details be subject to an NDA or whatever
agreement he signed when he left the company?

~~~
nostrademons
Usually NDAs cover much more specific information than what he writes about
here. They basically cover the company's intellectual property - the specific
technical information that lets them do their job better than others.

Stories, anecdotes, and cultural observations don't fall under this, unless
those stories reveal the existence of projects/technologies that the company
wants to keep secret. You can say "here's why I think my past employer was
dysfunctional", and it won't win you any friends, but they can't come after
you legally for that.

The only thing here that looks like it may've been confidential at some point
is the existence of ClearType or the tablet PC. But since both of those were
launched - albeit late - they're public information anyway, and he's not
telling you anything you couldn't read in the tech press.

------
digamber_kamat
I think Microsoft is playing its cards very well. They have a very firm foot
in ground through their office and OS business. And they have presence almost
everywhere from phones to web. They can simply acquire a small time company
like Twitter to fill up the Gaps.

------
joe_the_user
IBM embraced open source after they lost their stranglehold on corporate IT.
They seem to have benefited tremendously from this. If MS could do the same,
they might have a brighter post-monopoly future.

~~~
joe_the_user
Part of the reason MS isn't growing is that they have colonized the desktop to
such an extent that innovators look elsewhere for opportunities. If MS could
successfully open source windows, it might create an explosion of innovation
on the desktop (or probably in integrating the desktop and the web but still).
Of course, I doubt MS could handle losing the license fees at this point.

------
marcusestes
Perfect byline: Dick Brass.

