
Microsoft's Concept Videos From 2000: Why Didn't Ballmer Build Any of It? - larsbot
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-11/microsoft-s-concept-videos-from-2000-were-spot-on-so-why-didn-t-ballmer-build-any-of-it-.html
======
milesf

      FTA: "Ballmer's Microsoft wasn't lacking for ideas; it was lacking execution."
    

Derek Sivers said it best "To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed.
They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions." (see
[https://sivers.org/multiply](https://sivers.org/multiply))

Whatever the reason for Microsoft's inability to execute, the history shows
that Gates (a programmer) could get stuff done, and Ballmer (a salesman)
can't.

IMHO it's probably stack ranking that killed their execution
([http://slate.me/19Jf74r](http://slate.me/19Jf74r)). Salespeople (like
Ballmer) use external fear to motivate people (Make the sale or my boss will
fire me!). Programmers (like Gates) use internal fear to motivate themselves
(Make this code work or my colleagues will think I'm stupid!). How can any
programmer execute properly in an environment of both internal and external
fear?

~~~
kvb
Wasn't stack ranking in use during Gates's tenure as well?

~~~
milesf
I know Gates was/is in favour of stack ranking, but I don't think it was in
use during his term as CEO.

Ultimately the answer doesn't matter to me. The company has always been a
bully, both in the marketplace and internally towards their staff. No one
wants to see a bully succeed.

 _Edit:_ Wikipedia says "Since the 2000s, Microsoft used a stack ranking
similar to the vitality curve."
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Criticisms_of_ra...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Criticisms_of_rank-
and-yank)) Ballmer became CEO of Microsoft January 2000.

~~~
kvb
Root against Microsoft all you want - I just think that stack ranking is too
convenient a scapegoat. Valve and Google stack rank, too, but that doesn't
mean they're not great companies. Also, Wikipedia's not necessarily an
infallible source; see [1] for evidence that stack ranking dates back to '96
or so (at the latest).

[1] [http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/08/30/microsoft-review-
tim...](http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/08/30/microsoft-review-time-
capsule-1997-bill-gates-ceo/)

~~~
milesf
You may be right. As I said at the top it was just my humble opinion. I still
stand by the statement that execution is vastly more important than ideas.

Besides, I gave up rooting against Microsoft years ago. I just don't care
about any of their products anymore.

------
acchow
Ideas are worth nothing. A 15 minute conversation with any expert in HCI 15
years ago would cover 95% of these ideas.

Execution is everything. Microsoft tried to execute on some of these ideas,
but the result was always too cumbersome/confusing.

~~~
corresation
"Ideas are worth nothing."

While it is seen here regularly -- and is always strangely given a pass --
this remains the most profoundly meaningless, if not outright stupid, thing
that anyone in this industry can mutter.

~~~
debt
Ideas _are_ worth nothing. Ideas have a mental effect, but execution still has
tangible results.

I could just do something, literally anything, and me, having done a thing,
would be worth way more than me, having an idea.

Many people have great ideas, few people have the balls or resources to
actually execute them and make them _worth something_.

Just a thought.

~~~
jessedhillon
_I could just do something, literally anything, and me, having done a thing,
would be worth way more than me, having an idea._

The overall claim has _some_ limited merits, but don't overstate the case.

You generating an idea in your seat about a site that, say, scrapes some
public resource and presents in a useful way, are more valuable than the you
who uses that same time to make yourself a sandwich.

And the ideas you can have -- ideas which you can only execute _after_ having
the ideas themselves -- are of a higher quality than someone who doesn't have
your cultural and intellectual resources. Your ideas are more valuable because
they are informed by a more nuanced knowledge of how things actually get done.

Or to put another way, if you were approached at a party about an opportunity
to work on someone's seed of a project, would you rather that person be an
engineer or a fast food employee? No offense to fast food workers, but the
engineer has more, and more salient, skills when it comes to this question.

The idea can't be cashed in until it's executed, and an executed idea is
superior to an unexecuted one, but in choosing which idea to act on there are
clearly better and worse ones.

~~~
ricardobeat
You're missing the point. People usually have that brilliant idea about an
useful service _while_ making a sandwich. If you don't act on it, it's worth
nothing regardless.

> someone who doesn't have your cultural and intellectual resources

Unless you are a scholar at the very top of your field, there are thousands
other people with the same background and resources as you, or better. A good
chunk of them will have had the exact same ideas, plus a thousand variations.
A handful will actually do something.

> choosing which idea to act on there are clearly better and worse ones

The act of choosing is the beginning of execution, and is way harder and more
valuable than generating ideas.

~~~
jessedhillon
_People usually have that brilliant idea about an useful service while making
a sandwich_

How would anyone know this?

 _A handful will actually do something._

What you're saying is 'execution > idea', which is not in contention. It
doesn't follow that the idea is worthless.

 _The act of choosing is the beginning of execution_

This seems like semantics to me now.

And if the point is granted, you seem to be arguing against the proposition
that 'ideas >= execution' which nobody is proposing.

------
feniv
Ballmer building any of that would be equivalent to Microsoft actually
building some of the technology from their latest "Vision" clip:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0)

All of those things seem simple in hind sight, but there were very real
hurdles preventing them from being realized at that time (for example, the
Internet infrastructure for real-time video chat).

Concept videos like this are just the tech world's version of concept-cars by
the auto industry. They make the company seem innovative and research oriented
without the significant resources required to make a practical product. True,
they sometimes yield useful research, but most of the time they're just meant
to be good P.R.

~~~
x0054
You know what's really sad about that Video, even in the future Microsoft
imagines them selves using low resolution displays. I mean, for god sakes,
every time they would zoom in on that frameless phone thing you would clearly
see pixels. Since it's all CGI, they actually went out of their way to give it
low res screen look my painting in the pixel lines.

I think, at least for me, the true failure of MS Surface was the crappy
display it came with.

~~~
sahaskatta
I played with the Surface Pro for a week or two. I felt the display was
actually one of the best ones I've seen. Especially considering the quality of
the pen digitizer inside.

Are you maybe referring to the lower-res display on the Surface RT? (I haven't
played with that one much.)

~~~
x0054
Yep, the RT. Have not played with the Pro yet, I should stop by the local
Windows store and take a look.

~~~
x0054
I wish the RT screen was as good as the pro. Played with it yesterday and it
was great. Not as good as iPad, but so good that I think most people,
including me, would not care. And I think the Windows 8 os is just marvelous,
I just wish they would finish it. Right now it feels like beat still.

~~~
sahaskatta
In terms of PPI: \-- Surface Pro is 207.82 \-- iPad Retina is 264 \-- Nexus 10
is 300

(The iPad Retina actually looks quite blurry to me for reading text after
spending time with a Nexus 10.)

As for Windows 8. I've been using it on a laptop and have been pretty happy
with it. I just upgraded to Windows 8.1 RTM and they've made tons of small
refinements everywhere.

------
Maarten88
But they did build a lot of that video. A few things even succesfully, like
Lync/Skype (video conferencing) and SharePoint (document sharing)

However, they failed at most things:

\- they were too early and the market and technology was not ready for it
(Pocket PC)

\- they were too late (Zune, Windows Phone)

\- plans were blocked by companies who's support they needed but who were
scared of them (music/movies/mobile phone industry)

\- execution sucked and products were not good enough (Windows Mobile, home
server, media center, everything speech)

\- their reputation with consumers was tainted and the press wrote very
negatively without really understanding much (hailstorm, drm)

\- they made it cost money and other offered it for free, ad supported
(MapPoint)

\- negotiation power and influence in the market diminished after the monopoly
abuse trials

\- it took a long time before they understood their problems

~~~
shubb
I loved my pocket PC. The stylus and palm style glyth input gave data entry a
practicality Android tablets can't match today.

What the IPad had was style, a lot of style. The UI was beautiful. In terms of
functionality didn't carry redundant desktop features like menus with it. But
it was the style, the cool factor, that made it _consumer_ in a way that nerdy
Pocket PCs never were.

I feel, (like ValueAct), that Microsoft is losing consumer outside of games,
and would do better to concentrate on enterprise.

~~~
Maarten88
I feel, like Ballmer, that enterprise just lags consumers by 10 years. Giving
up consumers means loosing enterprise somewhere in the future.

They must execute better if they want to survive.

------
com2kid
Some of these were built, other ideas just don't scale.

But most of these? They exist now. Not quite as nice as the video shows, but
they exist.

Kinect actually enabled a lot of the voice control experiences, Skydrive and
Sharepoint do some of the other sharing scenarios, just not as nice as they
all should be. I saw some awesome mapping stuff working on Windows Mobile well
before the iPhone came out, including actual building maps and linking into
ones "social network" (however limited that was at that time) to show where
one's friends sat.

It is actually sort of sad that none of the experiences have been polished
nearly as well as they should have been, by any of the players in the market
really. Google Hangouts comes close with some of their collaborative tools,
but then something falls apart in the experience, for example in the case of
Hangouts, it can be a pain to start one depending on which UI path ones
chooses to take, and various bugs pop up and just break the immersion of the
experience.

MSN Messenger had a lot of good stuff, video and voice conferencing both
worked long ago, but then that market fell apart.

Collaborative Document Editing was done right by Microsoft with One Note 2007,
and then completely ignored from then on by the rest of the Office line.
Amazing technology, not sure why it wasn't more widely adopted (I'm guessing
due to file format needs, presumably the One Note team had the advantage of
building up from scratch).

Perhaps most amusing in this video is what people thought LCD screens would
look like! I am thankful the ID on LCDs did not go that way!

~~~
RachelF
Don't forget Microsoft TerraServer which was a 1998 version of Google Maps.

------
dimitar
I was reading about the worlds navies around the turn of the 19th century. The
British dominated the seas and were very innovative during the wars with the
French and Dutch.

But then they stopped. They knew that they had the best sailing ships and knew
that changing the technology will only disrupt seas in a way threatening their
supremacy.

And so the torpedo was invented by the Austrians, the steam and iron ships
were pioneered by the French and Americans. This continued even in the 19th
century - the century was of Pax Britanica was a century of catchup.

In the end economics was important - Britain remained the worlds leader in
industry and trade.

~~~
shubb
As an aside, it scares me a little that Windows for Warships is a thing.
[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/windows_for_w...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/windows_for_war_1.html)

~~~
r00fus
Not me - sounds like your average defense contractor boondoggle.

------
rbanffy
Most of these devices were built, some of them with Microsoft technology, but
the technology wasn't ready, the implementation was bad (the interfaces are
horrendous, for instance), the licensing was prohibitive and Microsoft didn't
see themselves as a device company. They saw themselves as building the
technologies that supported those devices, not the devices themselves.

We must all keep in mind these concepts were showcased 13 years before in the
famous Knowledge Navigator video or in Sun's less known 1994 Starfire video.

And, probably, on many others that remained unseen by the masses.

------
Oculus
Kind of reminds me of the Windows tablet being way before the iPad, yet the
iPad blowing it out of the water. Microsoft had all these great ideas, but
failed to execute. It really reinforces the 'ideas without good execution are
worthless' motto.

~~~
saurik
FWIW, Windows Journal was _epic_ , and nothing on the iPad even comes close
(nor really can it, due to the inaccuracy of the input compared to an active
pen digitizer). I provided some more details on this a long time ago on Quora
(which kind of sucks, but it at least saves having to go into a long
description ;P).

[http://www.quora.com/Tablet-Devices-and-Tablet-Market/Why-
do...](http://www.quora.com/Tablet-Devices-and-Tablet-Market/Why-doesnt-
Microsoft-understand-tablets/answer/Jay-Freeman-1)

~~~
dreamfactory
OneNote is incredible, couldn't find anything close on iPad - but feels like
zero effective marketing there. If Apple made anything like that it would be
all over their keynotes and ads as a USP.

~~~
xal
OneNote exists on the iPad: [https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/microsoft-
onenote-for-iphone...](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/microsoft-onenote-for-
iphone/id410395246?mt=8)

Right, it's not quite the same.

~~~
dreamfactory
It really doesn't compare, don't think it even has OCR so notes aren't
searchable.

~~~
Pent
Is evernote not a good replacement? OCR searching in notes etc

~~~
dreamfactory
Yes it looks like the nearest thing but doesn't seem to compare with OneNote
usability from what I saw (had a co-worker who used it for everything).

------
Steko
What's become more and more clear is that while Ballmer is resigning now, he
actually largely abdicated the powers of CEO to the heads of the
office/windows/mobile fiefdoms over a decade ago.

~~~
Steko
Here's the article I was reminded of, and I've read variations on the same
theme many times:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html?pagew...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0)

 _early in my tenure, our group of very clever graphics experts invented a way
to display text on screen called ClearType...

Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed it made the display go haywire
when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy
and gave him headaches. The vice president for pocket devices was blunter:
he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and
the programmers to his control. As a result, even though it received much
public praise, internal promotion and patents, a decade passed before a fully
operational version of ClearType finally made it into Windows._

 _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. So if you wanted to enter a
number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to
write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to
Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.

So once again, even though our tablet had the enthusiastic support of top
management and had cost hundreds of millions to develop, it was essentially
allowed to be sabotaged. To this day, you still can’t use Office directly on a
Tablet PC. And despite the certainty that an Apple tablet was coming this
year, the tablet group at Microsoft was eliminated._

------
devx
Because they saw everything through Windows lenses - and in the end that's how
they built those tablets anyway. They still see things that way. They killed
Courier for the same reason - it wasn't Windows.

------
wsc981
Apple's 1987 vision on computing is nice for comparison:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIE8xk6Rl1w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIE8xk6Rl1w)

------
jgreen10
Because they did. Windows-powered touch-screen Pocket PCs and Tablet PCs
existed years before the iPod. Microsoft just didn't find mobile devices
important enough and wasn't willing to re-invent Windows for it. Windows
Mobile was pretty terrible to use.

~~~
pohl
_...and wasn 't willing to re-invent Windows for it._

And thereby, being unwilling to disrupt themselves, made themselves ripe for
it.

------
aswanson
For the same reason they wont execute anything on that Microsoft 2019 video in
6 years. They'll ride Office to their deathbed, which is coming into clear
view. Nice run.

~~~
edvinbesic
This is how I feel as well. For a while I thought that Windows RT might be
their stepping stone into these waters as a sort of clean break from the
burden of backwards compatibility of x86 windows, but alas, it seems as though
enterprise rules now until 6 feet under.

------
evanm
<< "Kristy, guess what? I got tickets to the fatboy slim concert!"

>> "Shut. Up."

------
jere
>Business users did get some of the promised technology. SharePoint and Lync
provide project sharing

Strange how the promised land looks like hell on earth.

------
TimJRobinson
I've recently came across "The Road Ahead" written by Bill Gates in 1995, and
in it he details many of the technologies we have today with surprising
accuracy (We'll all have digital wallets that contain all our info, take
movies and photos, allows us to converse with anyone anywhere wirelessly etc).

Microsoft had a great vision for the future they just failed in execution.

------
Paul12345534
I think they may have been a little gun shy in some of their later actions due
to fear of monopoly claims after they had been smacked down.-

------
lumberjack
Their version of the web seems to be mostly A/V which is not really realistic
as most people can't afford the time nor have the skills to contribute content
in that fashion. Does that mean that they were underestimating how valuable
user generated content would be?

------
venus
Like all MS concept videos, it's all very pretty but useless except for the
most shallow kinds of collaboration - it's not so much promising any specific
technology so much as a future in which you don't actually have to do any
work. How many people do companies really need whose role in its entirety
consists of quickly slapping together pretty-looking "reports" full of 3D
graphs?

These superficial concept videos have about as much relevance to the world of
actual usable technology as porn has to the complexity and compromises of
married life. The encyclopaedia we have today is Wikipedia, not Encarta, and
no-one cares that it doesn't have embedded videos of antelopes bounding or the
galaxy turning.

~~~
maratd
> and no-one cares that it doesn't have embedded videos of antelopes bounding
> or the galaxy turning.

I care. I think Wikipedia would be greatly improved with relevant embedded
video content. Unfortunately, getting high quality relevant public domain
video is virtually impossible. It is nice to think about though.

~~~
venus
Hm. Well, I agree actually, and in fact it does have some media at least
associated with articles, via the "wikimedia commons".

I was more trying to illustrate that multimedia alone does not make a high
quality resource, as proved the downfall of the "Multimedia CD-ROM" era of
content production, which I feel these concept videos are rooted in.

------
csel
Ballmer and his stooges were too busy making fun of Apple and Google (aka.
Microsoft's version of marketing). Gosh, when Ballmer leaves, I hope all his
VP's would be taken out as well.

~~~
general_failure
Did you forget who is the prime candidate to replace Ballmer? Elop...

------
alrs
This video won't play in Firefox on Debian or in Chrome on Android. Anyone
know where else this video can be found?

~~~
ethana
Get a real OS and browser dude! Just kidding. It's in flash man, no plugin no
play.

~~~
yulaow
Well it doesn't run neither in chrome with w8... I think it just has problems
now, probably handling the requests we are pushing on the server

------
joeblau
So in that video, I saw: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google Docs,
iPad...

