
Microsoft is interesting again - yblu
https://medium.com/@jason/microsoft-is-interesting-again-very-f9c5bef7116
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serve_yay
Not to downplay the change taking place, but what portion of the work that MS
as a company does is represented by the flashy stuff that has everyone calling
it a "new Microsoft"? Did all that middle-management and infighting and
bureaucratic stasis just... disappear?

In other words, nerds often heap disdain on marketing but they are as
susceptible to it as anyone else. The marketing to which they are susceptible
is just less recognizable as such.

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33mhz
They fired tens of thousands of employees, including shifting upper management
thoroughly. So yes, they killed a lot of bureaucracy.

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Grazester
and how many of those people were from Nokia that was acquired by them?

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Gurkenmaster
They acquired Nokia with 30,000 employees then fired about one third of those.

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crystaln
It's true, Microsoft is suddenly a palatable company without the greedy,
vengeful, angry attitude of Steve Ballmer. With the anachronistic culture of
the founders now entirely purged, I see no reason why they would not become a
credible competitor in many markets. They are hungry to prove they are
relevant again, giving them the incentive of a startup, while they have
essentially unlimited cash.

As much as some part of me squirms when I say it, Microsoft really is a player
again.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Player in what? The Surface looks interesting but its very, very expensive
compared to either a laptop or a tablet. Their phones are underwhelming
regardless of their massive 'mobile/cloud' first initiatives and are now the
bottom-basement phone for the ultra cheap buyer. Office365 is interesting but
predates Nadella's leadership. Azure never panned out to be the Windows EC2.
OSX keeps eating up laptop marketshare (go to any college campus, no one has
windows). Surface RT was a complete disaster. Win8 was underwhelming at best.

On the enterprise side of things, a lot of sysadmins are shocked at the low
quality of security updates and the massive delay in getting them out. How
many were recalled in 2014? Nadella's personal mission at MS was redoing QA
and as far as I can tell, he's somehow made it worse. Tabletizing interfaces
in Win8 and Server 2013 was a questionable move. Office 2013 is a pig with
lipstick and is known for its horror stories. Licensing has somehow gotten
more bureaucratic and expensive.

I'm not fan of Ballmer, but I think the Ballmer/Gates magic was a real thing
for a time, and its obvious this magic needed Gates to work. Nadella's Steve
Jobs impersonation is becoming tiresome imo. The cloud/mobile first initiative
ate from MS's core competencies- rock solid and featureful enterprise
software. The only thing I can say about Nadella is that he's recognizing how
important a classic start menu is for enterprise users and its coming back in
Win10. Out of all of MS's products, Win10 is the only thing of interest. "Me
toos" like its budget tablets/phones or the buying of skype or minecraft, just
seem like desperate moves from a company that has lost its way. Frankly, I'd
like to see enterprise broken off from loss leaders like surface (which is
sold at a loss) and all the things its giving away for free as a sort of catch
up to FOSS dominated and Apple dominated areas. One just seems to be eating
the other, and the one being eaten is the moneymaker. MS is just too big and
is chasing so many tails. Nadella fought to keep the xbox division when
investors were pissed about it last year. How much political capital did it
cost for him to keep that pig?

I certainly don't think MS is going to fail anytime soon, but I don't think
its somehow changed its ways. Its still too many chefs chasing too many
targets, many of which are probably unhittable for such a bureaucratic giant.
Windows phone goes for 50 bucks nowadays and the sales are still unimpressive.
Getting this late to the mobile game is a killer. There may be no way to
recover lost marketshare that mobile has taken. How many billions will Nadella
burn through trying? We're almost three years into the Surface line. When does
it finally pay off? When do I actually see one in public?

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michaelbuddy
some good details in your assessment but entirely missing a lot of great
positives especially on the products you've hit out. Azure is growing, Surface
is growing and is not only a solid product but one of those products that is
what a lot of people have been dreaming about that other companies just aren't
ballsy enough to do. Each iteration in a short time has improved quite a bit
either in performance or device spec. That's a lot of fast good work.

Xbox one is quite amazing. Sales are good, games are ramping up. Every week
some new games are out or announced. I can't wait to see what they do to
improve that.

Buying of Minecraft was a fantastic decision, it's not like they didn't have
any video game division and suddenly bought it. I'm hoping to see more work on
it but you saw how they were using it as a platform in their VR announcements,
which means that they plan to expand it further and it ideally will continue
to be a platform that devs will create new ideas in and from.

From just using it and having been kind of annoyed by MS Office since the 2003
days, 365 seems snappier and better than it ever has been. Certain things
after getting used to seeing them end up making sense and are attractive.

OneDrive is a very nice service, I like it way better than Google, for free
and paid you get a lot of storage with it and it's super easy to use and looks
classy, not cheap.

windows 10 could be insanely good. don't forget the free upgrade offerings
too, which is new and much welcomed.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
A lot of the things you listed are losing money for MS. Yes, they're neat and
from an end user perspective, nice toys, but the reality is that cashflow only
come from a handful of sources and MS really is screwing up. I think maybe it
just needs to find its footing, but at the end of the day, someone needs to
pay the bills. Meanwhile Apple and Google are making money hand over fist in
those spaces.

~~~
dogma1138
Amazon has never made a profit, they are a case study example of a company
that never has gotten out of the red, losing money on every product and still
growing to become a monster.

Xbox BTW is a good earner for Microsoft, they lose money on the console and
make a killing on each game. Lumia and Surface also showed very good profits
from Q3 2014 and onwards. And Windows Azure is probably the only truly
profitable cloud platform out there with 25-30 bln dollars in yearly profits
(not income).

Amazon is losing billions on their cloud, and on every other product they run
including their store, the only time they got out of the red was 2009 after 15
years in business and that was never repeated again.

In 2014 both MSFT and Amazon had virtually the same income Amazon even made
2-3 bln. $ more. MSFT has a net profit of 28 bln, Amazon lost 250 mil.

There is more to business than just revenue streams, but as revenue goes MSFT
is in a very good shape.

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dbg31415
I didn't think this was horribly written until I saw the "move to SF" line
about 8 times. Sorry, SF location isn't going to do anything for MSFT. So sick
of all the fanboy shit about life in SF.

~~~
hacknat
I know, what the hell is moving Bing or Xbox to SF going to do? I don't think
he realizes how big these teams are, but even if that wasn't issue this sounds
a lot like underpants gnomes to me.

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33mhz
Microsoft did miss the boats on open source, search, mobile, social, and
cloud, but they continued to #win what they previously cared about:
enterprise. No one has meaningfully entered their arena.

Now they want to play ball, which is wise... since business is unfortunately
likely to pursue social, mobile, and cloud for enterprise.

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johng
If you read that article, what I see is that Microsoft has been forced to do
the following:

Give away everything for free

Produce it's own hardware, and at a loss (Surface may have made $1b now, but
it's lost more than that over it's lifetime)

Frankly, I don't know how they are making money now a days.

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IanDrake
They are transitioning to SAAS. Windows 10 upgrade will be "free for a year",
but I take that to mean after a year you'll be paying $10 per month for
Windows 10.

Office 365 is doing well already.

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johng
I may be old school but I am not keen on paying monthly fees for software that
I use. That is part of the reason I refuse to upgrade to Adobe's Creative
Cloud.

Microsoft can't even keep XBOX live up when someone wants to DDOS it, I don't
want software that I'm renting that cant run if their servers are down.

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wlesieutre
To clarify the Windows 10 situation, they used some unfortunately vague
language when they announced it, but it's not a subscription. The 1-year thing
is a limited giveaway period to push Windows 7 users into upgrading quickly
rather than waiting.

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sparaker
Microsoft has always failed when they have tried to enforce their own
standards in the industry. Moving away from this mistake and recognizing that
promoting something that is relevant and makes sense is the only way to go
forward is a huge step.

Funding new interesting ideas will always help them also secure a better seat
in the open source community as most startups rely on open source
technologies.

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CmonDev
_" If Android & Cyanogen both run Android Apps perfectly, and Cyanogen doesn’t
have to come bundled with Google’s suite of services….well….hmmmm…do the
math."_

Android: hate the new GUI and every game prompting me to sign in to stupid G+
or whatever it's called. Anyone tried Cyanogen on Nexus 2013 tablet?

~~~
soylentcola
Depending on what you dislike about the UI, you can probably make it more to
your liking by using a different launcher (Nova is the one I use). It lets me
make one or two minor changes to bring things more in line with my preferences
but otherwise is just as fluid as the stock Google launcher.

Cyanogen is fine and has some nice features if they apply to your personal
usage but the thing about games wanting to log into your Google account would
likely be the same. It's the equivalent of Apple's game center or whatever
it's called. It's basically a universal login for games so you can keep
progress/settings saved across devices. I haven't found any yet that require
it but typically it's an opt-in thing if you care about that functionality.
I've only ever been asked to sign in on first run of a newly installed game so
it's not nearly as obnoxious as the ones that constantly pester you to connect
with Facebook or some other thing that's completely unrelated. On a Google
phone I can understand using Google's games framework for your game profile
but it's annoying to assume I want to use an unrelated service (Facebook) or
even have an account with them.

