
The Microsoft Empire Reboots - aseem
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/11/satya-nadella-bill-gates-steve-ballmer-microsoft.print
======
Rapzid
The biggest shift I've noticed in Microsoft in recent years is its support and
push for open source, cross platform components and projects. It seems that
there may be a paradigm shift towards selling tools and an integrated platform
while providing more choice and making inroads into the open source
comminities.

This is exciting for me because I absolutely love .net and friends, but I'm
also a Linux engineer and lean heavily toward open source and cross platform
technologies. In recent years I have noted that with the existence of mono and
mono develop(xamarin) C#/F# is right on the verge of being an excellent choice
for open source tools and projects. I've been lamenting the fact that
Microsoft's early platform lock in approach has prevented .net from being a
serious java alternative(or the alternative it deserves to be). Its nature
stiffling the open source ecosysytem .

The outlook has been getting rosier over the past 2 years though. Now we have
OWIN, ASP.NET vNext, MVC6, entity framework 7, F#, and a strange officially
unofficial interest in mono. Projects on github! These are welcome steps in an
attempt to boost relevancy IMHO.

~~~
InclinedPlane
I don't think it's a huge shift as much as it is getting back to its roots. MS
got its start by being the company that supported the PC as an open platform.
Anyone could build a PC, any individual, any OEM, and put DOS or Windows on
it. And anyone could write an app to run on DOS or Windows. For the time it
was a remarkably free wheeling and open system, especially compared to what
other companies like Apple was doing. And let us not forget that it was the
success and growth of the open PC which made it possible for linux to come
along and put itself on the same hardware. MS has certainly been guilty of
various unfair business practices from time to time, and from trying to use
its power to gain unfair advantage in the market, but for the most part I
think that behavior tends to be the exception over Microsoft's history. Most
of the time they are trying to pull customers and developers to them by
offering a good platform and at some times even facilitating their own
competition. In that regard, embracing open source is very much in keeping
with that spirit, updated to reflect the new norms for what openness means
today.

~~~
Rapzid
Sure, you could choose your hardware as long as you were running Windows. This
is a new, different type of choice that MS is backing. ASP.NET(and MVC) vNext
is goingt to be tested against mono. And mono represents code running on non-
Windows platforms. I certainly view this as a shift; how large a shift is
rather subjective.

------
Immortalin
Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products
and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is
probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other
"beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u
are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6
was creating a simple calculator, it was amazing knowing that i could create
an application simply by dragging and dropping some elements and writing some
code. I never had to worry about things like gtk bindings and makefiles etc.
The earlier version of visual studio started up in less then a second and I
never experienced any lag. The killer feature was probably the combination of
both an just-in-time interpretator and a full-blown compiler. I could simply
click play and the app would run, if i need an exe, it would also export one.
This feature put most modern "repl-based languages" and "test-driven
development" to shame. A lot of people complain that vb 6 is not object-
orientated enough, but remember, C is not object-orientated either, and it
still tops the tiobe programming list. Windows is sorely in need of an Rapid
application development framework. Although vb6 still installs on windows 7, a
lot of its features are broken. I really miss having an IDE that doesnt get in
your way, starts up quickly, and allows you to get things done fast. The
argument that vb6 encourages bad programming practices etc. is not really that
valid when the user is not an professional programmer. After all, would you
rather teach your kids to code by teaching him about build tools and
commandlines and gui bindings or would you simply give them an environment
where they can create whatever they want in a fuss-free way? Now, lets just
hope that microsoft isnt stupid enough to nerf asp.net web forms.......

~~~
gurkendoktor
I was a huge fan of Delphi 5 at the time, and hoped it would win over VB6 (I
guess it's a Coke/Pepsi thing). Now I'm in the same boat as you, because it
seems _both_ Delphi and its competitor, VB, have lost. I'm not even sure if
there are any winners.

I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with
developer tools...

~~~
Nitramp
> I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with
> developer tools...

I think that's the web. The development that used to happen in VB6 & Delphi
simply has migrated there, desktop apps from that segment are dead.

~~~
david927
I think you're right, and it's a huge indictment. The web, as an application
platform, is worse than VB ever was.

Think about that for a moment: _We 've regressed from VB._

The usual tradeoff is: easy to write, hard to extend and maintain. But the web
is hard to write _and_ hard to extend/maintain.

We have some of the smartest people in the world in our industry, and
evidently we're all idiots.

~~~
monstermonster
This, a million times. I'm a bit further down the abstraction chain but I am
thoroughly glad I sit there all day writing C/C++ for Windows native (win32)
GUI applications.

I know once I've tested it on one machine it's going to work fine on all the
other ones. It's the most stable API and platform I've ever seen. Code we
wrote for Windows NT4 works fine on Windows 8.1 and behaves exactly the same.

Compare that to our poor web guy who spends at least 50% of his time trying to
get everything working on a selection of browsers going from IE6 to the latest
Chrome while necking red bull, using the F word a lot, smoking and going
bright purple.

~~~
eldavido
I used to work at Microsoft (SQL Server). It goes without saying, but getting
here is an intentional, conscious thing Microsoft spends billions of dollars
to achieve.

Working in SF in earlier-stage companies, I've never seen anything even close
to the rigor with which Microsoft approached testing. Definitely consider
working there if you want to learn from some of the best QA/QE/verification
engineers in the industry.

~~~
tdicola
Sadly many of the recent layoffs from MS have been in their QA and SDET/test
engineering teams. The days of a strong testing discipline might be over for
the company.

------
grokys
> The holy grail for Microsoft would be getting developers to write new
> software for Windows again, putting Windows back at the center of a new
> virtuous circle.

And yet there is no currently properly supported way to write desktop
applications for Windows! MFC = obsolete, WinForms = maintenance mode, WPF =
Dead on arrival, WinRT = Metro only.

For all the people saying "web is where it's at", there are some things that
are simply still best done on desktop. And native development in iOS and
Android is still going strong.

~~~
damian2000
AFAIK WPF isn't dead, its popular with line of business apps. But yeah,
disappointing there's been only minor improvements to it in the last 4 years,
during which they've been focusing their efforts on WinRT.

I was just reading something about the subject here [http://pragmateek.com/is-
wpf-dead-the-present-and-future-of-...](http://pragmateek.com/is-wpf-dead-the-
present-and-future-of-wpf)

~~~
grokys
Oh I mean I use it almost every day and it has many good points, but the
complete lack of interest from MS is obvious. I mean, even renaming a window
doesn't work properly in Visual Studio. Most of it hasn't even been updated to
use generics. It still uses DX9. But there's no better option.

~~~
mistermann
A massive strategic error on Microsoft's part. They're now stuck on the wrong
side of what Joes Spolsky called I think fire and motion.

They still own the desktop, yet they ignore it.

------
x0x0
(I think) it's not hard to understand where microsoft went wrong. Ballmer just
doesn't seem to get where the industry is going. As evidence, this quote from
the article:

    
    
       Indeed, Ballmer seemed to have no intention of leaving when he announced a 
       massive reorganization of the entire company in July 2013. Behind the scenes 
       he had also begun negotiating an acquisition that was meant to transform 
       Microsoft. He had become convinced that the company had to make hardware 
       too. The reason why goes back to his chart. The two companies which have 
       seen the greatest increases in the share of profits they take are Apple and 
       Samsung, particularly Apple, whose share of the technology industry’s 
       profits leapt from 7 percent in 2008 to 21 percent in 2013. To Ballmer, the 
       message was clear, and so, in December 2012, he began talking to the Finnish 
       smartphone-maker, Nokia, whose C.E.O., Stephen Elop, had worked at 
       Microsoft. There was a defensive reason for the deal as well as an offensive 
       one. Nokia was pretty much the only company left that was making Windows 
       phones. If Nokia went under, what would happen to Microsoft’s phone business?
    

Apple and Samsung's phone businesses are entirely different. Apple is selling
ios to the high and middle end market. Samsung is getting devoured from the
bottom, because there is very little difference between android oems, whereas
Apple doesn't need (or want!) the bottom. It's pretty amazing that someone
like Ballmer wouldn't see that coming, given that Xiaomi and the other chinese
competitors are running a classic competitive playbook on Samsung.

Stratechery has written about this at length, though I don't recall if it was
clearly discussed in a single article or my mental synthesis from a
collection. Either way, differentiated companies -- apple -- require
completely different strategies than nondifferentiated -- samsung.

~~~
latch
That might be one of the mistakes, but it isn't the start of the problem.
Tangibly, it's either United States v. Microsoft Corporation or Longhorn /
Vista.

Intangibly, it's the attitude that permeated the company that said "we are
right because we are Microsoft." There were few people you could talk to who'd
think you had anything to offer someone who worked at Microsoft. You still see
this today around products like Bing, IE, Xbox and Azure (I know the last 2
are popular, but the xbox has been a loss leader (and what it's leading too
isn't clear yet) and Azure, like everyone else, is being crushed by Amazon (it
really is, they spend a ton more money and get a fraction of the market
(that's Bing-style success!))

I remember a story from the only time I was on their campus. An employee (I
remember his name) was telling me how they wanted to make IIS great, so they
hired an expert Apache consultant to learn more about apache. I'm listening,
thinking "wow, this is great, they're really interested in bettering
themselves." He then proudly went on to tell me how the Apache expert had an
amusingly outdated understanding of IIS and by the end of the gig they'd
convinced him of how great IIS was. They'd literally rather pay people to tell
them how great they are, then admit they might have something to learn.

This perfectly encapsulated my time as a .NET developer. Lucky this was at the
start of an MVP conference, so I took the hint, skipped most of the conference
and visited Seattle (oh, but I did attend 1 talk where the speaker said Visual
Studio would add a color picker and people applauded him).

~~~
bambax
This rings true. I had some relations with Microsoft last year and it's
incredible how inward-looking they are. They spend most of the time telling
you how great everything Microsoft-like is or will be, and don't seem to be
well aware of the outside world.

They know there are things like iPhones and Android devices, but they appear
truly baffled that anyone would want one. They think it's some kind of
conspiratory rebellion, that the world uses those out of spite for Microsoft.

~~~
HillRat
Yeah, the coldest summer I ever spent in Seattle was hauling an iPad around
meetings at Redmond. One L69 had this very pointed way of staring at the
tablet, then at the big red clock, then back again. Keep in mind, I was part
of a team coming in as a prospective _customer_. Just very weird.

I still have hopes for Nadella -- maybe just because I'm an old Sun warhorse
-- but it's going to require a big rethink of MSFT, which right now is
basically just a cash pile in search of a market. Changing the burn rate is
just playing at the margins (layoffs are not a strategy), and if there's a big
plan underlying the Mojang acquisition it's incomprehensible to me on both
strategic and financial levels. Likewise, mass-producing Perceptive Pixel
displays, while undoubtedly cool, is both fiendishly difficult (PP was
basically a garage manufactory, so this is a software company figuring out how
to scale up a product that has never been mass-produced) and not something
that can push market dominance. Buying Nokia kept MSFT in the mobile space at
a very high price, but really only purchased time and space, not a turnkey
strategy.

Having said all that, it seems to me that there are two companies on the
auction block right now that could give Redmond the germ of a strategy. Both
Xamarin and Unity would fit very comfortably in what is arguably MSFT's
wheelhouse -- software development tools -- while giving the company a way to
seamlessly increase their mobile app ecosystem.

~~~
ScottBurson
> the coldest summer I ever spent in Seattle was hauling an iPad around
> meetings at Redmond

> [from the article] “[Ballmer's] view was that anyone in the company who used
> the iPhone was a traitor,” says this person. “His dad worked for Ford, and
> that meant you had Ford in your garage.”

This attitude drives me nuts. The best thing Ford and GM could have done in
1985 would have been to _buy Civics and Corollas for 10% of their employees_
so they could see for themselves what was so good about them. But no, instead
they had this adolescent "be true to your school" thing going on.

The same clearly applies to Microsoft. I hope Nadella gets that business is
not a repeat of high school.

~~~
throwawaymsft
Beautifully put. Used to work there and the inner navel gazing was painful.
People assumed loyalty meant blindly ignoring competing products under the
guise of "dogfooding". They would dismiss competitive products almost in
disbelief that people would use them (without ever have tried!).

------
MichaelGG
>I put the A-team resources on Longhorn, not on phones or browsers.

Hilarious. It wasn't the lack of an A-team resource on browsers, it was the
lack of any team. Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing.

Microsoft's other big sin is counting on its hardware partners. They could
have preempted the iPod, for instance, but they just hoped Creative and others
would deliver a great experience, while they sat back and wrote the software
and cashed in on licenses. Same for tablets. Tablet PCs were great in the 00s,
and I loved using them. Except, they were clunky and had little mass appeal.
Once again, MS just counted on its partners and never gave a thought to the
full experience.

Also, the fact that Windows _still_ is touch/pen unfriendly outside of Metro
just shows they Don't Get It. Instead of working on some tech to make Windows
work well across all its apps, they ditch everything and hope Metro will work.
It's hard to imagine that anyone could be so myopic.

~~~
bambax
> _Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing._

Yes, but wasn't that intentional? Once IE4, then 6, had conquered the world,
the point was to keep people from leaving Windows for the Web, and so IE dev
was stopped dead.

~~~
alex_hitchins
"Browser tabs will only confuse people". Ha!

~~~
rconti
Actually I still argue that tabs are a Bad Thing. Developers have taken a
thing that SHOULD be handled by the window manager, and written their own way
of doing it -- every application slightly differently, naturally.

It's not as big a deal on Windows where the look+feel of various applications
was always inconsistent as hell -- remember when Trillian was the most popular
IM client, it seemed like in those days virtually every application handled
windowing differently, it was terrible.

But it's a bigger issue on OS X and in Linux. Since both have functionality to
cycle through windows of a given application, tabs become less important. Of
course, we still end up with visual clutter, so even luddites like myself use
tabs now and again. But this should really be implemented as an OS feature,
not on a per-application basis.

Google, of course, vehemently disagrees, since they implement their own
terrible look-and-feel everywhere. (see: crappy windowing inside of GMail,
crappy windowing behavior of Hangouts, etc).

~~~
tdicola
If you really want the window manager to handle your browser windows then just
open new windows instead of opening tabs. All of your window manager's fancy
window switching features, etc. will work.

~~~
tatterdemalion
I think the problem isn't that tabbed browsing exists, but that window
managers are not good enough to handle user experience as well as tabbed
browsing does.

~~~
rspeer
And the fact that tabs exist isn't stopping window managers from getting
better at it. They just haven't.

It seems that putting the application in control of its window-switching
experience has just worked out better.

------
__Joker
More oft repeated history apart from the later part of the article which
discusses the present and the future direction.

"The holy grail for Microsoft would be getting developers to write new
software for Windows again ", this necessarily isn't true. The developer go
where users and money are. And users not necessarily go to devices which have
lot of apps. This might sound like a chicken and egg problem, but look at
amazon, if developers are writing software for its devices, Amazon is
bootstrapping its devices with software. I take out the other devices, the
desktop and servers, might not have as much impact as it may sound.

Second, Xbox, Bing, may sound looser, but they may be interesting in the next
round of battle. The smart phone battle is more or less is over and it is not
going to make much difference, but the future of the smart device fields will
be another story, if only MS can concentrate on the future in coherent way.

------
gvb
There is a Macintosh in the background of the picture "JUST KIDS Gates and
former C.E.O. Steve Ballmer at Microsoft’s offices in Bellevue, 1985."

Not unexpected given the date and the relationship between Apple and Microsoft
at the time, but interesting that it shares the desk (albeit off in a corner)
with the IBM-PC.

~~~
melling
Microsoft was busy copying the Macintosh in 1985. Late in the year Windows 1.0
was released.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0)

~~~
outside1234
I can tell they brainwashed you well in Cupertino. ;) They probably left out
the part where Jobs borrowed the ideas for the Mac from Xerox I suspect too.

More accurately, there is probably a Mac here because they were building
Office for it.

~~~
melling
Nah. All the cool kids in the 80's wanted the Amiga. The Mac was a toy. The
story of Jobs' visit to Xerox Parc is well documented. They paid a million
dollars for the visits.

[http://www.macstories.net/linked/parc-scientist-larry-
tesler...](http://www.macstories.net/linked/parc-scientist-larry-tesler-
recalls-jobs-famous-xerox-visits/)

[http://www.cultofmac.com/126863/in-defense-of-steve-
jobs/](http://www.cultofmac.com/126863/in-defense-of-steve-jobs/)

~~~
Keyframe
People tend to forget there were many players out there back in the day. Amoga
was so far ahead in 'multimedia' infront of Pc and Mac that it's not even
comparable until 486 era. Not to mention SGI and Sun machines. Pretending that
Mac was some kind of single origin of everything or Pc being a toure de force
is just wrong.

~~~
ido
Or the atari st! Like a mac only at 1/3 the price :)

------
mkhpalm
Realistically... the biggest reason for irrelevance is Microsoft's concept
that an operating system should be a prime source of revenue. An OS _is_ the
garden you want people to come to so you have prime real estate to sell your
wares. Charging admission works great if you're the only garden in town... and
not so much if you're not. Microsoft is putting itself into this position by
forcing the market to move into the other, more easily accessible gardens. It
has very little to do with UX/UI or anything like that. Most consumers
actually don't want to learn how to do anything new if they can ever help it.

I'm constantly amazed that all these "experts" haven't figured out what
happened to the 800 pound gorilla. Quite simply put, other gardens that people
could live with and easier to access suddenly showed up. The vendors making
and selling their wares went to the place people were at or wanted to go to.
Its simple economics and you can point directly to the people who decided that
WGA was a good idea for killing MS. Piracy _itself_ is what made windows
dominant to begin with.

------
shmerl
_> Around three-quarters of Microsoft’s profits come from the two fabulously
successful products on which the company was built: the Windows operating
system, which essentially makes personal computers run, and Office, the suite
of applications that includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint._

All of which are on quite shaky grounds with competition eating at them. MS
know they can't keep these cash cows forever.

On the other hand, parasitic income that MS gets is just crazy huge:
[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/lawsuit-
reveals-s...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/lawsuit-reveals-
samsung-paid-microsoft-1-billion-a-year-for-android-patents/)

And this attitude doesn't seem to change, despite some cosmetic shifts like
more usage of open source.

Such kind of companies better fall into irrelevance sooner than later. We need
real innovators, not humongous parasites.

------
mtdewcmu
Bethany McLean is the best in business writing. The Smartest Guys in the Room
was fantastic.

As for Microsoft: the adage goes that success has many fathers. Failure has
even more. It would have been nothing short of amazing if Microsoft was as
dominant now as it was in the early days of PCs.

------
fdezjose
Nadella likes to ask, "How would the world be different if we weren't here?"

Profound question...

------
sidcool
A long but intense article. I read just to test my attention span. The result
weren't good, but I managed to finish the article in a single sitting, albeit
with a couple of YouTube video watches in between.

One thing I hold bitterly against Microsoft is their abuse of monopoly. During
the time they were kings of technology, there was little progress in Browser
market, OS market, both PCs and phones. But I believe Microsoft has learnt
their lesson, and under Nadella, the company is going to take the community
along with it.

------
praetorian84
The most useful thing Microsoft ever made (OK, funded) was Age of Empires. Now
if only they'd make another.

------
SandB0x
Impossible to read on my phone. Single page print version is better:

[http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/11/satya-nadella-
bil...](http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/11/satya-nadella-bill-gates-
steve-ballmer-microsoft.print)

~~~
dang
Thanks; changed to that.

------
deanclatworthy
How is it in this day and age a magazine like VanityFair can have such an
awful UX on mobile:

\- I can't read the article because some as keeps jumping me back to the top
of the page a few seconds after I scroll

\- the article font is tiny and hard to read anyway

\- for some reason even though there is a large body of text, ios doesn't
allow me to use reader mode

~~~
dredmorbius
Which is why I say Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem.

I wish pretty much every damned site in existence rendered as on Readability.

~~~
Roboprog
There is something to be said for getting to HTML paragraphs and lists, and
then stopping.

None of this "Everybody has a 2048 pixel wide monitor to view my 4 huge
columns in" (I used divs instead of tables, so it's OK that it takes 2 K
pixels to render, right? Right?)

~~~
dredmorbius
I also like headings, tables of contents, and super and subscript.

LaTeX equation input is also something that's creeping up my "must have" list.

------
higherpurpose
Oh, good. Because it's a corporate _empire_ what consumers want.

~~~
CmonDev
They are pretty happy with Apple's empire. You don't need Microsoft's hardware
to build stuff for Windows though.

------
ilaksh
Microsoft has some of the most amazing products and many terrific engineers.

Unfortunately, it is also has some extremely negative associations, most of
which have been earned and even, perhaps, proven.

* unfair and sometimes illegal business practices

* sabotage of innovative technologies when they conflict with Microsoft's monopolies

* eugenics

* empire

* surveillance state (Skype/NSA)

~~~
curiousDog
Eugenics? Are you high or just incredibly stupid and listen to that nut job
Alex Jones?

~~~
cbd1984
This might be what they're talking about:
[http://skeptoid.com/blog/2013/12/16/why-would-bill-gates-
wan...](http://skeptoid.com/blog/2013/12/16/why-would-bill-gates-want-to-kill-
one-billion-people/)

Yes, it is "drunk or high or Alex Jones"-level idiocy. It is, in fact,
fractally stupid: Believing it requires you believe multiple other things,
each of which is just as dumb as the whole. For example, it requires you to
believe the following things are evil: GMOs in general, vaccines, and wanting
to reduce the world's population.

------
scientist
Microsoft seems to be a crumbling empire. They seem not even able to maintain
their websites. Here is a message I got today from Microsoft Azure: "NO ACTION
REQUIRED: We want to notify you of an upcoming maintenance operation to your
Virtual Machines in West Europe, starting at 23:00 Saturday, October 18th UTC.
Single instance virtual machine deployments that are not in availability sets
will reboot once during this maintenance operation. We expect the update to
finish within six to eight hours of the start time. Please note that Cloud
Services using Web or Worker roles aren't impacted by this maintenance
operation. This link contains additional information:
[http://aka.ms/vax58"](http://aka.ms/vax58"). The link they give leads to a
404 error.

~~~
asdfologist
Yes, they sent out one broken link, and therefore they're a crumbling empire.

~~~
scientist
It's not the first time they send broken links. I've also received some in
marketing emails from them. And it's not the only issue with Microsoft, but
it's illustrative for how they are unable to manage the complexity of their
stuff.

