

Suddenly Microsoft is the Hippest Tech Company Around - psychotik
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/03/suddenly-microsoft-hippest-tech-company-around/50402/

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nullflux
Around where? Seattle? Certainly not within a 200 mile radius of, well, just
about anywhere else.

When I see Microsoft's new ads, I _still_ cringe. It's just a veiled
"developers, developers, developers" thing. It still feels like the rich nerd
trying to act like the cool kid. It just doesn't work, and Microsoft should
realize that.

Why are the marketing-heads so interested in "rebranding" anyway? I personally
don't understand image campaigns.

Actions, not words, Microsoft. Give us more things like Xbox 360 and Kinect
(or half of the stuff Research comes up with), less lame attempts to make me
"aware" of your cool work on Internet Explorer. If you want me to use your
product, make it kick the ass of its competitors in my head. You won't
convince me based upon your silly marketing anymore. I've been hurt by that a
couple of times before.

I am glad IE has finally started to come around to be a browser worth using,
but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that I think these "hip" commercials
are targeted toward people that are mostly off of the whole Windows game by
now anyway. The problem here is that Microsoft is too late. The Lumia looks
beautiful, IE doesn't look bad, but Apple already ate their mobile market and
IE had its chance in 2005 when Microsoft didn't seem to take Mozilla
seriously.

~~~
sliverstorm
It may not work on you, but perhaps it does work on others.

------
rjknight
Two points.

First, Microsoft's status as a "cool" or, at least, "not eyeball-gougingly
awful" company is inversely proportional to the power they wield over
customers. MS was universally loathed when they were _forcing_ people to use
their browser and when it wasn't possible to do any meaningful consumer
computing without paying the Windows tax. Now that we don't _have_ to use MS
software, MS are having to make software that people might actually use by
choice. It's very hard for a dominant company to avoid becoming evil (cf.
Google), but the flip-side is that once the dominance fades away the company
has to start competing on merit again.

Second, MS in 1997 were competing with Netscape (cool startup), Sun (hippies)
and IBM (erm...). Now they're competing, and often successfully, with Facebook
(evil), Apple (enormous) and Google (evil and enormous). Today's 20-year-old
college student was _six years old_ during the "browser wars" anti-trust trial
and isn't going to hold grudges for it. Today's Microsoft is sort of like late
90s IBM - dull, slightly confused and often irrelevant, but it's not exactly
_evil_ ; XBox/Kinect is a genuinely good product, and Windows Phone is
actually _innovative_ rather than an iPhone clone; Bill Gates has morphed from
a dystopian monopolist plutocrat into your genial wealthy uncle who spends his
time trying to cure malaria and tackle poverty, more famous for giving his
money away than for the means by which he amassed it.

None of this means that Microsoft is now the hippest tech company around, but
it does explain how they might become so and why that wouldn't be a bad thing.

------
prodigal_erik
If the general public doesn't even bother resetting their browser's homepage,
I have trouble believing they will switch browsers because of an ad.

As for "used to be the evil one", I note they managed to keep the money they
extorted out of our industry, with almost no reparations to the innovators
they excluded from the market via threats and kickbacks. And they're starting
to clone Apple's dystopian walled garden.

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calibwam
I kind of followed the post up until they started talking about Windows 8.
"Windows 8 surprised and excited the tech blogger world, something a Windows
browser hasn't done since Windows 95."

Do we live on the same planet? The feeling I got right after the consumer beta
was that it was generally hated. And wasn't Win7 quite acclaimed?

~~~
arien
There is something clearly wrong in that sentence. Windows 8 and Windows 95
aren't exactly "browsers". Which makes you wonder if the one who wrote the
article did an innocent mistake or really doesn't know what she's talking
about.

~~~
calibwam
It might seem like it. I haven't got the time checking out the web site, but
it seems as a "tech blog" as that site that commented on the Raspberry Pi
being an ugly computer a little while ago.

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pagekalisedown
I think it'll take more than a few smirk-inducing commercials.

~~~
daeken
Like what? Genuine question. What could MS do to win here?

~~~
Lewisham
Microsoft needs to do three things:

1\. Come out with better, more insightful products. This is something it
actually is doing: 360, Windows Phone and Windows 8 all look awesome. I would
be very happy for Balmer to leave and for him to be replaced by J Allard
(Entertainment and Devices head that left/was forced out). From the outside
looking in, it looked like Allard had vision, he knew how to execute, and he
knew the culture the company needed to cultivate to achieve it. Xbox and
Windows Phone was out of E&D, as well as the canned-but-great-looking Courier.

2\. Have better ad campaigns. Across all divisions, the ad campaigns have been
uniformly awful.

3\. Keep executing cleanly. No company is past redemption, but Microsoft's
history is not good. They need to keep being good citizens. Trust takes time,
but it's very easy to lose it (see Yahoo!).

~~~
r00fus
> Come out with better, more insightful products. This is something it
> actually is doing: 360, Windows Phone and Windows 8 all look awesome.

A corollary of this point is that their Windows 8 "everything is metro" broad-
brush attitude is going to bite them in the ass. Case in point: Windows 8
Server - the interface in the beta is horrendous.

Someone wise once said: "God is in the details". They need to realize that
they can't just take an idea like the Metro inteface and slap it onto their
server product... the result will be tragic.

Instead, they should take the "Metro" vision, and fabricate a server version.
A good example of this would be the work that Apple has done "iOS-ifying" OSX.
You can argue whether this is a worthwhile path to take, but all of the
features were whitelisted after a) making sure they were true to where they
wanted to take the OS, and b) ensuring it looked and worked decent (even if
there was lost functionality from a previous version).

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moonchrome
Well they did just opensource their ASP.NET stack under Apache License (which,
AFAIK, grants patents on the derived works), so now all those Microsoft hating
trolls can shut up about Mono being patent encumbered (doubt that they will
tough). And they added Git to Codeplex. I actually like what Microsoft has
been doing for the past few years for developers, it's giving away free
development tools for everyone, it's open-sourcing stuff, working with
standard bodies (CLI/.NET). Shit I wish Clojure was on .NET, I jumped off .NET
two years ago since I went in to web development and I'm strongly invested in
Clojure now, but JVM is inferior in a lot of ways and I don't even want to
touch Java. ClojureCLR might be worth checking out.

~~~
manojlds
JAVA maybe inferior to C# now-a-days, but claiming the JVM to be inferior
makes me doubt your credibility.

~~~
moonchrome
No value types, no generics, this forces all sort of hacks with arrays to pack
memory layouts when you don't want to use reference types (think small vector
structures, tuples) and inefficient code generated for Java templates
(essentially everything gets boxed to Object). Value types don't touch GC.
Also on the low level Mono has SIMD vector support which is also useful, you
can even turn off dynamic bound checking when you need extra performance and
presumably already did the testing. Also native interop is better with
PInvoke. This might not be relevant for web development (although jgit and
twitter teams both mentioned they had problems with this), but I did game
development before switching and this sort of thing really matters. .NET was
bad on the JIT/inlining/optimization side but Mono fixes that with AOT
compilation/using LLVM for code generation.

And .NET has better libraries to deal with asynchronous programming, Task uses
continuation passing and each thread has it's own "event loop" with
SynchronizationContext, it's really simple to switch between them, Java has
all sort of mixes, some API's use pooling, some use continuations, and you
have to mess around with Executors since there is no equivalent to
SynchronizationContext. Also RX is a wonderful abstraction on event streams.
Java can't even consider this sort of API's because it has no
lambdas/extension methods, and this reflects in JVM libraries.

~~~
justncase80
Also, the CLR has had the ability to dynamic invoke delegates for years. Also
dynamic compilation and assembly unloading.

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gemlogger
This story is only to do with editorialized perception and opinion and nothing
to do with tech. Why is it here?

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gitarr
No, it is not.

What prevents them from being anywhere near "hip" is their past/present
actions and our memory.

~~~
r00fus
> What prevents them from being anywhere near "hip" is their past/present
> actions and our memory.

No, what prevents them is their "Microsoft is a windows company" mantra that
Ballmer reiterated recently. Windows is not hop, it's not the 90s.

Furthermore - Microsoft is and has always been an "enterprise" company.
Windows = decent enterprise product line(s), and Office (esp. Excel) is a
powerful, possibly indispensable business tool. But consumer-oriented it is
not. Absent a huge change in management focus, they will never be... they have
billions of reasons each year not to.

~~~
justncase80
Don't forget the PC games market and Xbox. It's a significant enough market to
disprove the second part of your hypothesis, I believe.

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leon_
Yeah! Can't wait to use their hip and cool .NET technology ... and using
windows is a delight. cmd32.exe > zsh ;)

~~~
JBiserkov
Come on, Windows PowerShell was released 5 years ago!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Power_Shell>

One could even argue it's better in some ways, for example: "PowerShell
differs from Unix/Linux in that .NET objects are passed between stages in the
pipeline instead of text. This eliminates the need to explicitly parse text
output.

See also: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_command_shells>

