
Microsoft Is Suddenly a New Company. But Is It Too Late? - calvin_c
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/microsoft-new-company
======
jburwell
Open sourcing the C# compiler represents a fair amount of effort (code
cleansing, IP review, license selection/compliance checking, etc) -- likely
more work than could be completed in Nadella's short tenure. Therefore, it is
likely that the compiler had been prepared, and his actions represent the long
standing desires of the technical staff that were ignored/denied by Ballmer.
Ditto goes for the iPad version of Office. As such, I wouldn't say these moves
represent Nadella's changing the company, as much as him ending Ballmer's
repression.

~~~
Hominem
My suspicion is that Ballmer's departure was choreographed to coincide with
seemingly "sudden" 360 to make it seem like some sort of internal revolution
instead of a carefully planned business strategy. I certainly appreciate it.
As a career c# developer it has given me some sort of new cred around the
office like I was on the inside track on something cool instead of a guy who
was hooked on some lame corporate language.

~~~
sremani
I think most of the people who find Microsoft as a sinister mega-corporation
forget the majority of work force in Microsoft are developers and share the
"culture" with developer community in general. I read Scott Hanselman blogging
that Microsoft is too damn unorganized to come with a master evil plan. I
think the Nixonian conspiracy lot of Microsoft bashers use to portray is
mostly their imagination.

~~~
Hominem
I don't think it is sinister, or a conspiracy, just the kind of coordinated
rebranding and messaging modern corporations do all the time. I don't think it
takes a PR genius to say "why don't we wait until after Ballmer leaves before
we roll out our new initiatives, while the new CEO is still in his honeymoon
stage". Microsoft 2.0, finally emerging, instead of poor old Ballmer, always
late to the party with hamfisted plans.

------
dewitt
As much as I'm genuinely excited and sincerely optimistic about the great work
from their developer group (e.g., the open source announcements this week), I
also feel that their "if you can't compete on product, slander" negative ad
campaigns (e.g., scroogled) will continue to hold Microsoft back as a company
and as a culture.

This engineer, for example, would never consider going back and working there
again as long as their executives think that negativity is a good business
policy. And ultimately, their employees can (and have) voted with their feet.

Fix that, though, and yes, Microsoft is very much capable of reinventing
itself for a new era.

Edit: To clarify, I'm sure that there are some readers who agree with the
particular points raised in these negative campaigns. Generally speaking, I
don't, but that's not my point here.

What bothers me is when, rather than promoting the values of one's own
product, companies try to (sometimes even hypocritically) find or invent flaws
in the competition instead. Be humble and respectful of your competitors and
customers alike, build the best product you can (better than the competition
if possible), and win on merit. I truly believe the talented, hard-working
engineers deserve that much.

~~~
teacup50
> _" if you can't compete on product, slander" negative ad campaigns (e.g.,
> scroogled)_

Why do you think Scroogled is slander? Some of this stuff seems pretty
accurate:

[http://www.scroogled.com/privacy](http://www.scroogled.com/privacy)

By comparison, Microsoft asks for explicit permission for _any_ information
sharing in their OS and software.

~~~
msh
No, they delete files from skydrive and block accounts if they don't like the
files you are storing privately . And, we are not talking illegal material:
[http://www.neowin.net/news/man-says-microsoft-blocked-him-
be...](http://www.neowin.net/news/man-says-microsoft-blocked-him-because-of-
private-skydrive-folder)

~~~
teacup50
"Assuming that everything went down as WingsofFury claims -- and since there's
really no way to investigate it, we can't confirm that it did ..."

Even _if_ Microsoft is hypocritical, that doesn't magically turn what they're
claiming into "slander".

It just demonstrates that their arguments against an advertising-driven
vertically integrated Google cloud can also apply to their own cloud services.

------
6cxs2hd6
"Is it too late?" For what outcome?

If you set the bar at "regain their 1990s level dominance", yeah that probably
won't ever happen. But so what? Given where they're at, an outcome such as
"don't end up another RIM et al" is perfectly reasonable. To put it in
context, their odds are better than most startups.

They have a _huge_ amount of cash on hand. The cash cows will throw off
billions before they finally dry up. Although they've had a talent drain, that
trend is likely to reverse somewhat.

~~~
yulaow
Also, they are creating new cash cows to replace the old ones. While maybe the
windows licenses is no more the big one, now azure is becoming it,
Xbox(/devices) division is finally becoming profitable, office license model
is being replaced by subscription model very easily, etc etc

Long story short: As you I think they will never become again "monopolist" in
a market (and I am happy about this), but I think they will still be one of
the main protagonists in it for very long time (and I am happy also about
this).

~~~
angrybits
Office is a major part of this. Practically every workflow on the planet is
glued together with emails and excel spreadsheets.

~~~
threeseed
Do you work in an enterprise ? Because I can't remember the last time I've
seen a Word or Excel doc and work emails are often ignored. Increasingly
business wikis and social networks are the norm. It's why I see Microsoft's
acquisition of Yammer and Skype as brilliant acquisitions and OneNote and
lighter Office 365 apps as their future.

Microsoft if they were really smart would acquire Atlassian and Evernote and
look at taking over Wave.

~~~
angrybits
Yes, and believe me the business world at large still runs on Windows/Office
from top to bottom. I work at a major financial institution on a data team and
we log into Windows 7, open up Excel, log it into our SSAS cube, make pretty
graphs and tables, put the results into Power Point, and then send through
Exchange to the execs. It will take a very long time to overcome that kind of
momentum.

~~~
UK-AL
Why you want replace Microsoft software in that area? That's exactly the type
of stuff Microsoft is good at.

~~~
angrybits
Oh I don't, it's a system that works quite well for us. I was adding a
counterpoint to this statement: "Increasingly business wikis and social
networks are the norm." I don't believe that to be the case outside of silicon
valley, unless you count the stampede of completely terrible sharepoint
implementations we have floating around. But I don't think that is what the
poster of that statement was referring to.

------
NicoJuicy
Is it too late is just a headline to attract readers.

Microsoft (in contrary to the general believe here) is doing very well. Their
profits are good, XBox is attracting and etc..

They do have some marketing issues concerning Windows Phone and Windows 8. But
don't over eggagerate... Windows is the most used platform on desktops and
servers (definatly in SMB's, because not the whole world is a fortune 500
company and has their own IT departement). People who are running MAC are
using dualboot or Parallels to use Windows and Microsoft gets a lot of money
from mobile (even though it is Android mostly).

Their profits are up in the business sector and with Azure, they have a great
platform (i use it myselve) and with Bizspark, they help startups in their
most critical period.

The only thing that is changing, is that microsoft is more open and are
improving their public image. But that's affecting the IT knowledgable persons
more then anyone else.

People who have non-it jobs don't really care about the difference and i see
even a trend where IT knowledgable persons don't want anything to do with
businesses like Apple.

In that extent, i see more and more people countering Apple then Microsoft.
(I'm speaking from a personal view in Belgium, the observations i have from
talking with my parents and my non-IT friends, i don't know for sure how it is
outside of Belgium.) For example, the hardware stores who have almost no
access to Apple devices (and if they do, a very limited profit margin and a
lot more hassle) and people who give lessons in using a tablet to other
people, who have expressed their concerns about Apple are just 2 examples i
can think of)

~~~
dijit
>People who have non-it jobs don't really care about the difference [..]

You're right, however, if I tell my mother that 'Apple is better than a PC
running windows' over the course of 10 years; then very time she talks to
someone about buying a new computer she'll remember that..

The only reason microsoft is the dominant platform is because of inertia.

if we were able to retrofit a generation of people with knowledge of other
operating systems then I very much doubt microsoft would have even half of
it's market share, since it's main merits are backwards-compatibility and very
few of the applications that run on top of windows adhere to the same
principles anyway.

~~~
teamonkey
> The only reason microsoft is the dominant platform is because of inertia.

I don't know, I think the fact that you can buy a sub-$400 family PC at
WalMart might have something to do with it too.

~~~
NicoJuicy
Okay, you crunched reason #1 or #2 here :)

------
matthewmacleod
I must admit that I'm _a little_ surprised at the number of people who have
been so keen to heap praise on Microsoft recently.

I'm very glad that they are making moves towards increasing openness and
collaborating more with other ecosystems. From my perspective, software
development has always felt like it was split into two camps: the "open
source" platform, and the "Microsoft" one, with developers working across both
being pretty rare in my experience. Being able to break down those barriers
and maybe starting to see genuine cross-platform Microsoft technologies is
really, really exciting.

However, I'm convinced it's prudent to remain cautious. Microsoft have a long
and colourful history of doing real damage to open standards, free software,
and their own business partners. Even their development community has been
harmed by repeated changes of direction in their development efforts – damage
which is made worse by that fact that the ecosystem is traditionally so
closed. Maybe we are seeing a core of developers who are actually too young to
have experienced this firsthand, or at least with limited experience of other
platforms, who are a little less skeptical.

Anyway, Microsoft's recent bout of openness is nothing but a good thing. It'll
be a while before I'm comfortable deploying a cross-platform app on .NET, but
baby steps…

------
bane
Right now Microsoft reminds me of GM. Capable of producing a good car model or
two for a few years when the boss is really focusing the entire company around
this. But utterly incapable of across-the-board Toyota-level quality. I'm
asked every once in a while why I don't buy this or that American car and I
respond (thinking about the decades of bad cars GM and Ford produced), "when
most of the lineup a company puts out is clearly reliable and of high quality,
and they can do this over two model generations, then I'll think about it."
Because this means that the entire company culture has changed, and they've
managed to sustain it. A bad care is then an anomaly.

Actually, I think Ford is pretty close to this. Hyundai is a very good example
of this culture change. It wasn't all that long ago that people were afraid of
driving their Hyundais at Highway speeds, now they build quality vehicles
across the entire lineup and have for 3 or 4 complete model generations.

Right now Microsoft has a couple open source projects, a couple multi-platform
projects, and the rest is still more or less old Microsoft. They've killed
Stack Rankings, which I think is helping lead to some of these new changes.
But the across-the-board Microsoft still looks like Microsoft from 10-15 years
ago. If they can implement this kind of "new friendlier Microsoft" across the
entire company, and do it for two major version changes across all products, I
think then and only then can we consider Microsoft a new company.

------
codeulike
Of all the big players in 2014, none are as diversified as Microsoft - they
have Windows, XBox, Enterprise, Office, Mobile, Azure - all of which would be
huge businesses even on their own. Hence you could argue they are a lot less
vulnerable than people assume them to be.

~~~
rbanffy
Their various units, with the exception of Xbox, are mutually reinforcing. If
you don't use Office, there is little reason to use SharePoint. If you don't
use Exchange, AD or SQL Server, there is little reason to use Windows servers.
If you don't use Office, there is no reason to use Windows. If you don't use a
Microsoft stack, Azure has little special appeal to you.

If one or two of their businesses fail, the rest will crumble.

~~~
r00fus
The lynchpin is Office. Microsoft realizes that Windows is no longer
ascendant. It's a post-PC world. But Office, thanks in part to Microsoft's
efforts is successfully sabotaging the ISO standards decisions (OOXML vs.
OpenDocument), is still a near-requirement - you at least need to be able to
open .doc and .xls files.

I still expect Microsoft will treat Windows as "first among equals" similar to
how Google treats Chrome for enhanced web features (not unlike how Apple did
with Safari), but it's no longer going to be Windows-only.

Microsoft is showing a lot of clue lately. I would not count them out.

------
benaston
A puff piece. All the significant announcements made since Nadella took office
will have been in the pipeline for months if not years. You don't port Office
to iPad in 8 weeks.

------
bananas
For me this is not about whether it is too late or not, but what is the
underlying motive? We can agree that these recent changes and releases are
superficially good but what is the long term impact? Is this just another ploy
to lock people into their office/cloud platform and/or tooling because they've
decided that the operating system game is over?

This gift horse deserves a good look in the mouth.

------
spo81rty
They have by far the best development tool set available and they are all in
on making Azure an amazing product. I think their future is bright.

------
asadlionpk
You should consider that Microsoft was late to console market. For me, this
shows that there is no such thing as "too late" in this market.

~~~
psawaya
The video game market basically resets every five years with a new generation
of consoles. Totally different from software platforms, where consumers stick
to an old choice because they have legacy software written for it.

------
drawkbox
Any platform can win if they win the developers and thus a thriving platform.
Microsoft has been repelling developers for the past decade but most recently
it is now attracting them with more open broad market technologies.

They built their platforms/empire on developers first originally, every
platform since has also done this. The signals out of the new Microsoft seems
to be old school developer love.

They are pushing people to their new 'OS' Azure, higher up the stack, and
their tools push you in that way. But they are no longer religious about the
language, platform, code, etc. This supports their tools, cloud and ultimately
platform. But they have to reconvince developers that they won't grow distance
again.

------
Aqueous
It's not too late as long as they're still in business. Market share changes
happen so rapidly in these industries. You can lose a huge chunk of market
share in two or three years, but you can gain it back just as quickly. For a
long time it looked like Apple was going to be dominant in the smartphone
market even though Android had already started to show up on handsets. But
very very quickly the cell phone industry in its entirety adopted Android -
because of its low price and lack of licensing restrictions - and it outgrew
the iPhone in terms of market share very rapidly. Same thing could happen with
Microsoft.

Of course, then there's BlackBerry...

I'd be a bit worried if I were Apple. They are still making money hand over
fist - and the market is big enough that you can be extremely profitable even
if you aren't dominant in market share. But having to compete with one free
operating system is hard enough. Now they will have to compete with two. It's
like a replay of the OS wars in the 80s and 90s. Things could change quickly.

~~~
jaegerpicker
Actually if anyone should worry it would be Google. Microsofts play here is
very much like Google's, offer a free OS for a variety of phone hardware
companies and make money off of the services and app sales. Microsoft can
offer a better OS and app store than google but still be on just as many
pieces of hardware. Windows 8.1 on a phone is actually a better experience in
a lot of ways than Android 4.4 already and it's just going to continue to go
that way IMO.

~~~
threeseed
100% spot on. Google is the one people need to be worried about.

Should Siri and Cordova get to the point that people stop going to the browser
to search then it could severely impact Google's mobile revenues. And what
happens if Microsoft doubles down on Bing and convinces Apple to make it the
default ? Android may have a large market share but iOS has a disproportionate
share of browser usage.

Google has a lot of enemies and zero friends. Precarious place to be in.

~~~
ISL
'Zero friends' is a strong statement, don't you think?

IMHO, Google is in its adolescence as a company. Its values of "don't be
evil", transparency, etcetera are in the right place. Google has many bright
and good-hearted people in its employ, and it's in them that I have the
greatest faith.

Cloud-hosted services and social networks, Google among them, are only
beginning to work out their strengths, weaknesses, and consequences of their
actions.

But when I see how easily-rooted Android and Chrome OS are, Google's
resistance to censorship in some countries, epidemiology outreach and more,
I'm reminded that while there is darkness implicit in any company's great
store of information, in Google's case there is a capacity and willingness to
do good at scale. For that, I remain an optimist.

------
yalogin
To make windows machines truly useable they should create a good shell. I
would even go as far as to say they should install and set up python natively.
If I am not using MS technology there is no reason to use a windows OS. Of
course I realize a huge percentage of users are not developers.

~~~
octopus
They already have a good shell, it is named PowerShell. The problem for most
old Unix beards with it is that it is not a Bash like shell.

------
jaunkst
I think the real question is - Can you challenge yourself when you already
have the "Last Mover Advantage."

“First mover isn't what’s important — it’s the last mover. Like Microsoft was
the last operating system, and Google was the last search engine.”

I personally cant find or have any analytics of this kind of situation. Its
obvious though that Microsoft hasn't quite hit the nail on the head as far as
proper reinvestment and focus on maintaining their position in the OS space.
I.E Amazon spending almost all of their net profit year after year to put
themselves so far ahead that to even enter the race the investment would have
to be unheard of.

------
Zigurd
No. Not too late.

It might be, perhaps probably is, too late for Windows Phone. This might be
the last generation of high-end game consoles. Buying Nokia was a bad idea.
But those things are not existential threats.

Microsoft has a long way to go in other areas, such as embracing the right
side of DRM, patent, and open source.

But there is no chance of Microsoft becoming RIM in the next five years.
Microsoft could suck in an ocean of money just by raising the price of
enterprise-oriented editions of Windows.

They have plenty of time, and many very good people.

------
fredgrott
Wait a minute..

I think most of this considering the work required was Ballmer's last
push..Remember BG is still on the board, and the tell he gave in indicating
disagreement with Ballmer was the lack of thanks when Ballmer left.

Let me tell you why it might be this way. Ballmer was behind the push to
settle with the DOJ and the States over BG's objections..its why BG ws asked
to leave Chairmen spot.

If it was Ballmer's push than its not anew company..just a small pivot..

~~~
mkr-hn
A small pivot for a big company is no small thing.

------
jjgreen
I'll believe that Microsoft has changed when one can install Windows on a
machine without it blowing away a pre-installed Linux partition.

------
outside1234
By this same logic, Google is too late to the enterprise and will fail.

In other words, this article has a static view of the world in that it thinks
markets "are done" and not constantly in motion.

That's a flawed view of markets as we have seen time and time again.

This is the same view people had with AOL vs. Microsoft and we know how that
turned out. There was a shift in the market to broadband and AOL died.

~~~
ForHackernews
> By this same logic, Google is too late to the enterprise and will fail.

It very well might be.

Google had been making a huge push to try and get "enterprise" companies to
use Google Docs in place of Microsoft Office. I can only imagine that effort
suffered a major setback in the wake of NSA revelations.

I can't see how any serious business would trust private data to "the cloud"
today.

~~~
rbanffy
> I can't see how any serious business would trust private data to "the cloud"
> today.

If you are a US-based company, your data is already one legal maneuver away
from having your data copied.

~~~
ForHackernews
At least if they subpoena you directly, you're aware of it, and your lawyers
can fight back. They'll probably still lose, but it's better than having your
data slurped up secretly behind your back.

~~~
rbanffy
If your data-center is on the receiving end of such legal maneuver, they'll
never tell you.

------
latch
Previous conversation:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7539873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7539873)

------
higherpurpose
Last I checked, they're still trying to go after open source projects to
squeeze patent money from them - so I'd say no, it isn't a "new" company. It
just has new PR tactics: "Look at us, we released one open source app - we're
basically now a kitten-loving company".

~~~
Revex
Can you point to any information regarding this? I have heard nothing about
this.

------
sz4kerto
I'd like to cite Betteridge's law.

~~~
jessaustin
If that law did hold at any time, could it possibly still hold now? I would
think that at least some headline writers would be somewhat genre-savvy, and
would write headlines specifically to subvert this line of thought. Example:

    
    
        Is Air Pollution Really Bad for Your Health?

~~~
axefrog
If you pick apart the intent of the law, rather than getting caught up in
literal semantics, you'll see that the law is suggesting that when a headline
asks a question intending to cast doubt or contradiction on some accepted
fact, paradigm or otherwise, that the doubt itself can be called into question
because if were based on any solid evidence, then it would not be presented as
a question but rather as a statement of fact. Hence it still applies to your
example without contradicting the intent of the law; in your case "yes" is the
correct answer.

~~~
jessaustin
I've never seen the law stated that way, which is understandable: "no" is more
succinct than "whatever conventional wisdom would say".

~~~
axefrog
Agreed, I'm just trying to say that the apparent "exception" quoted by the
parent, while seeming to contradict Betteridge's Law, actually doesn't really
contradict the law when you attempt to interpret the spirit of the law without
getting into semantics.

~~~
jessaustin
I think you're proposing a different law, one which I distrust for its
obsequious devotion to the _status quo_.

------
seivan
For me the deal breaker is that I need a unix based foundation if I ever go
back to Windows. Regardless of development platform.

