

2000-2009: Microsoft's Decade of Shattered Dreams - ssp
http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/20002009-Microsofts-decade-of-shattered-dreams/1262204767?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bn+(Betanews+Full+Content+Feed+-+BN)&utm_content=Bloglines

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jasonlbaptiste
If Microsoft trimmed the friction points (management/bloat) they would
actually be rocking it. Look to the XBox team for inspiration. They've
absolutely come out of nowhere, dominated, innovated (look at the tech behind
xbox live), and even beat apple so far in the living room.

Have you guys ever checked out windows home server? Probably not. They don't
promote it enough, but it's the best product they have made in ages. It's
functionality pisses on Apple's Time Capsule and I love time capsule to death.

My guess in the next decade? Their core businesses get shaken up (office,
windows, etc.) causing them to trim a LOT of this fat after the stock takes a
rocking. They finally get the gut check they need and start pulling ahead in
other areas (Bing, XBox/Entertainment, etc.)

~~~
axod
The battle over the living room was firmly won by the wii. Households that
have never had games consoles, now have a wii in the living room. I'd be
willing to bet there are far more wii's in living rooms than any other
console.

I think one reason the xbox looks like a great success is due to how badly the
ps3 sucks, and how stupid Sony got. £300 for a games console is ridiculous,
and basing it on a soon to be obsolete bluray standard is just more idiocy.
They never seem to learn - minidisc, UMD etc - they always try to lock in
these ridiculous new formats.

For me, the only innovator lately has been Nintendo. They have absolutely
turned gaming on its head, and come out with some truly imaginative games that
focus soley on fun and gameplay. They've captured amazing large new markets of
gamers who have never played before.

The xBox is a good all round console, but it's just more of the same IMHO. I
don't see much innovation going on there. I'm sure ms are pleased with xbox,
but I wonder just how much money they've lost in total doing it. Maybe they'll
break even in the next generation, or maybe Sony will realize just how stupid
they've been. Maybe they'll go back to their playstation 1 roots.

~~~
mrduncan
_I'd be willing to bet there are far more wii's in living rooms than any other
console._

And you would be correct. According to data from manufacturers [1], Nintendo
has sold nearly twice as many Wiis as Microsoft has sold Xbox 360s.

    
    
        Wii       56 million (as of Sept. 30th)
        Xbox 360  34 million (as of Oct. 23rd)
        PS3       27 million (as of Sept. 30th)
    
    

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_game_consoles_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_game_consoles_\(seventh_generation\))

~~~
rbanffy
Also note that Wii's are sold for a profit, unlike Xboxes and PS3's

~~~
mrduncan
While that might be the case, Microsoft and Sony obviously make up for selling
at a loss through game revenue and subscriptions (Xbox Live, Playstation
Network). I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft or Sony made more money per
console than Nintendo after accounting for game revenue and subscriptions.

~~~
axod
Very much doubt it.

Also note that a large number of wii games are 'in house' through Nintendo. So
Nintendo makes larger margins on games than Sony or MS.

Even if you just measured the profit from the game 'wii sports' vs profit from
xbox live subscriptions, I'd bet Nintendo trounced them.

As far as I'm aware, Sony and MS have to share a large amount of each games
sale with publishers and game developers etc. Nintendo does most of that
themselves for the big wii games, so they get far higher margins.

~~~
Tamerlin
Don't forget the large number of game studios that Microsoft has under its
umbrella, including ones that no one has heard of like, say, Bungie ;)

Interestingly, it seems as though the MBA's don't harass the game studios very
much. Too bad MS management hasn't taken a lesson from them... but I guess
that's what happens when you start bringing in "professional managers (tm)".

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ams6110
Back in 2003 or so, I was at a conference where a former Microsoft manager of
some variety told me (paraphrased) that Microsoft's product strategies always
revolved around selling more server licenses: Windows Server, Exchange Server,
SQL Server. So all their product development was bent in that direction,
causing some otherwise good ideas to miss hitting the customer need because
there always had to be a tie-in to selling more licenses. Seems to explain a
lot of the failures that are outlined in this piece.

OTOH, any company the size of Microsoft has a lot of failed ideas, or poorly
executed ones. Not every idea is a home run; foul balls are part of the game.

~~~
flipper
In the early '90s I wrote some software in Microsoft C++ that was distributed
as an executable. An IBMer MBA friend of mine was horrified that anyone could
distribute as many copies of my program as they liked without each user having
to buy a C++ compiler.

Almost 20 years on Microsoft sound like IBM did back in the day.

~~~
blasdel
My parents started a software company out of their apartment in the early 80s
that lasted about twenty years with a sole product, which was based entirely
around a PC database / development environment. When I was cleaning out their
office before they sold the apartment a couple years ago, I found a little
cubbyhole next to my Mom's old desk.

It contained a stack of shrinkwrapped end-user software licenses for the long-
dead database environment their product was based on, one for each of their
60-70 customers over the life of the company. Cost at least a half-million
dollars total, and went right into the dumpster.

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motters
This doesn't mention the elephant in the room - open source. 2000-2009 saw
open source software become completely mainstream, probably best illustrated
by the Firefox browser. Microsoft really failed to adapt to the rise of open
source and the increasing developer mindshare which it commanded. Instead of
trying to harness its potential and ride the wave their strategy was mostly
one of antagonism and FUD.

~~~
jacquesm
IE vs Firefox is Microsoft vs Open source in a nutshell.

If not for Office they'd be a lot hotter water right now. Lock in is really
nice when you've got it, even if your customers hate it.

Open Office still has a lot of rough edges, even after all those years, it's
one of the few things that buys microsoft more time. If open office were to be
ported to C, trimmed of it's bloat and made more compatible (ok, that would
add some bloat back in) Ballmer would sleep a lot less good.

~~~
artagnon
Office/ Groupware (Microsoft Exchange, Outlook) AND their development tool
chain. Visual Studio with its fantastic compiler and debugger kicks GCC + GDB
in the arse.

~~~
jacquesm
That may be but they don't support my platform of choice so I can't use them.

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gamble
Steve frickin' Ballmer... Does anyone believe that he'd still be CEO if Bill
Gates hadn't anointed him as his successor? He's the Gordon Brown to Gates'
Tony Blair. Microsoft is never going to be relevant until Ballmer and his
horde of bean counting lackeys get the boot.

~~~
jacquesm
That's a beautiful analogy, with more than just a grain of truth to it.

Especially the Gates - Blair bit.

IBM managed to 'reinvent' itself after a very rough patch, maybe microsoft
will manage to do that too but definitely not with the current leadership. To
solve these issues you first have to be able to admit (maybe even publicly)
that there are issues. Until then it's down.

I remember IBM passing out little flashlights with 'I've seen the light', and
they really had.

Microsoft is at least a decade away from a moment like that.

Give google another 10 years to figure out how to kill office and they
probably will.

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NathanKP
That is simply incredible. I didn't realize that Microsoft had come up with so
many good ideas and then abandoned them. If they had come up with good
implementations of each of those ideas and stuck with them they would have
easily had a monopoly on most of computing.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I'm not a Microsoft hater at all and contrary to some others I think they have
been an innovative company (e.g. VB, XMLHTTPRequest, Linq, ...). But Wilcox's
list of "visionary" Microsoft innovation is weird.

I mean just because they did something before Apple did it doesn't mean they
invented it, nor that they were particularly visionary. Most of the items on
that list were talking points at the time and many wanted to do them in the
.com bubble years. What Microsoft was talking about then was just part of the
general "vision hyper-inflation" of the time.

Hailstorm was a concept for an XML Web Services platform. Yes it was supposed
to support API access to things like address books among many other things,
but presenting this as the predecessor to Facebook is a stretch to say the
least. Facebook started out as a web site, not as a platform. Turning that on
its head is not visionary. It's an old blueprint for certain failure.

And the tablet PC a precursor to the iPhone? Excuse me but the iPhone is a
phone. It's primarily a communication device on which people play some games
as well, and a very small minority does one or two other things with it. Is
everything with a touch screen now a would be iPhone?

And then there's the NTFS successor. As far as I remember it was not planned
to be a distributed file system or some kind of virtualized cloud/cluster
thing. It was supposed to be a file system that had database-like features
like a rich data model, and it used SQL Server technology. Scaling out was not
the vision but that's exactly the point of "cloud" storage.

Microsoft as the largest OS vendor completely missed the boat on
virtualization, which is probably the most important OS trend in the past 10
years. Ok, they took the next boat, but the fact that it's not even mentioned
is telling.

And then there is Office collaboration. What a horrible mess. There's nothing
even remotly usable. They piled on useless features in Office but stuff like
editing a Word file in a group, something really obvious, is so horribly
broken and has been forever. That's an anti vision.

So no, they haven't just been bad at executing. Their visions were either of
me-too quality or the kind of failed platform grandstanding that IBM was known
for.

That said, they have created some solid high quality stuff in the past 10
years as well. Windows is a good solid OS. .NET is a good solid development
platform and C# hasn't stalled as Java has. They have opened up Office file
formats and invented a sane alternative to PDF. It's good engineering work and
a little bit visionary in some places.

~~~
andrewcooke
> Facebook started out as a web site, not as a platform. Turning that on its
> head is not visionary. It's an old blueprint for certain failure.

Wave? [edit for clarification: isn't that a platform first? not that we know
it's a success, of course]

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I haven't had an opportunity to try Wave yet.

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clofresh
Not sure if the .NET dynamic languages (IronPython, IronRuby, etc) came before
the JVM dynamic languages (Jython, JRuby, etc), but it also seems like
Microsoft let the .NET languages languish and missed out on a opportunity to
bring a lot of the dynamic language programmers into the .NET fold. Meanwhile
the the JVM has experienced a rebirth with the vibrant JVM language
communities.

~~~
halo
I'm not sure what makes you think Microsoft have let .NET languish.

The .NET runtime and languages have been updated regularly with significant
changes and improvements, and Microsoft themselves support C#, VB.NET and F#
as "first-class" languages, as well as developing IronPython and IronRuby and
working on the Dynamic Language Runtime project to ease dynamic language
implementation. All of these equal or better Sun's support of Java.

There are also quite a few non-Microsoft languages based on .NET including
IronScheme and Boo. .NET's CLR also supports tail-call optimisation, something
the JVM doesn't.

~~~
bad_user
The CLR may support tail-call optimization, but that's not much. You can have
support for TCO in a JVM language, it's just that interoperability with Java
suffers.

When comparing the CLR to the JVM, I'm only jealous of one feature of the CLR
... stack-allocated objects.

On the other hand, saying that .NET's support for multiple languages is "equal
or better" then that of the JVM is just flat wrong.

The CLR doesn't optimize call-sites where the called method is virtual. This
is alleviated somewhat by the semantics of C# (all methods are non-virtual by
default), but for dynamic languages it's a disaster. The JVM on the other hand
does this ever since Java 1.3 (when hotspot was added as an option).

And the DLR is a cool framework for language designers, but it's one layer
above the CLR, and it's just code extracted from the IronPython
implementation. And related to speed, if you compare Jython with IronPython,
Jython does a lot better right now, although it's not the most active
language-implementation on the JVM.

The upcoming InvokeDynamic for the JVM will really kick ass for dynamic
invocations ... the JVM will allow one to make calls without knowing the type
of the object used in single dispatch ... and those call-sites will be
optimized (like method-inlining) just as with a normal "invoke_interface".

And then there's the little things that make your life easier on the JVM ...
for example it's easier to generate .class files, or .jar files ... along with
debugging symbols. And the JVM is truly multi-platform.

You mentioned tail-calls ... well, the tail-calls in Mono have always been
broken and unusable and there's no fix on the horizon. Also speaking of Mono,
the GC is not generational and does not defragment the heap. IMHO, it's a low
quality implementation that's only optimized for C#.

~~~
halo
Interesting, I'll bow to your greater experience that Java bytecote is better
as a target than CIL..

That said, I think that my core point still stands, _even if_ the CLR isn't
_yet_ quite as good as the JVM: Microsoft are hardly letting .NET languish.

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DaniFong
Hackers often blame MBAs, management, and hierarchy for technological mishaps.

As often did I. But it turns out that managing people is hard. It is amazing
to me that an organization that is Microsoft's size can decide and execute on
anything at all, much less on the number of things that it actually does.

Cutting five layers of management, which is already few for an organization
that's Microsoft's size, is really a recipe for chaos.

~~~
tentonova
_It is amazing to me that an organization that is Microsoft's size can decide
and execute on anything at all._

 _Cutting five layers of management, which is already few for an organization
that's Microsoft's size, is really a recipe for chaos._

I'd say Microsoft's barely navigable size might have a lot to do with those 5+
layers of middle management.

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willwagner
I'm not sure passing on Youtube and Yahoo were bad decisions for Microsoft as
stated by the article.

As far as Youtube is concerned, AFAIK it still hasn't been profitable for
Google and would have likely bled more red ink with Microsoft in higher
bandwidth charges, or alternatively, MS might have tried monetizing sooner
slowing Youtube's growth. It's doubtful purchasing Yahoo in this economic
climate would have been a big winner either.

I also don't really buy the article's description of the Xbox business defying
the data and business common sense. For a long time, Microsoft has wanted to
be in the living room, purchasing WebTV in 1997. If anything, it's an example
of how Microsoft has succeeded in the past; constantly improving upon it's
past mistakes and not giving up as quickly as other companies might. The
original XBox wasn't all that successful, but they did some smart moves with
the 360, getting it out earlier than the PS3, providing good tools and support
to their development community, and realizing that good networking support at
the OS level to allow seamless multiplayer experiences was going to be a game
changer for this generation of consoles.

~~~
msg
As far as YouTube's bandwidth bill goes, it is probably low, as discussed a
couple months back:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=886109>

I wouldn't deny that the Microsoft seems to be improving the Xbox from the
customer's point of view... but I think the larger point is that the Xbox
program is in the red.

There was already a convergent device for the living room. It's a computer
with an HDMI cable and a wireless keyboard, or maybe a wireless tablet.
Packaging it as a console with funky controllers is not a game changer, no
matter how many games come out for it.

~~~
xsmasher
The thrust of that article is that YouTube's bandwidth bill _at Google_ is
zero, because of Google's dark fiber / peering. If MS had bought them the bill
might be astronomical.

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mixmax
Microsofts biggest problem is that _"they just have no taste"_ to qoute Steve
Jobs.

Taste is what the enduser sees. Endusers don't care about strategy,
proprietary technology, bottomlines, acquisitions, tie-ins, and what have you.

The big problem here is that having good taste is like being a good hacker -
you have to be one to spot one. And since Microsoft doesn't seem to have many
people with taste they don't recognize it when they see it. This is why
Microsoft isn't doing well on the web - it's easy to switch to a competitor if
a site doesn't just work right away, and many Microsoft offerings don't.
They're clunky, hard to navigate and often have a hidden agenda thought up by
a MBA. This is also the primary reason that Apple is doing so well: Their CEO
has taste.

Endusers just want shiny stuff that works.

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wglb
This article lists missed opportunities for market penetration when MS had
technology ready.

I think the article is a bit harsh, even hostile. The criteria _Most every
technology decision must be justified by some data point. No company spends on
research like Microsoft_ is not unlike the criticism leveled at Google by that
departing designer. Large companies need operate this way.

The heart of the challenge is what transformations are necessary for a
seriously successful company to stay vital. IBM went through a catastrophic
point and came out due to some very astute business leadership. MS is more
technologically focused.

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moon_of_moon
Sorry this article is borderline ridiculous. Comparing for example, Amazon S3
to NTFS is like comparing an online storage platform used for building web
services on top of, to a local file system used for storing files on desktops.
Oh wait.

Seems to me like its a hurried piece of negative PR in part of a much larger
war. Probably a response to the "Top 9 products Google killed" story somewhere
else on the internets.

~~~
bad_user
Actually that comparison is not so ridiculous.

Customers want storage, lots of it. One way to do it is to provide the
technology to make that storage cheap and easy to maintain. Another way to
have cheap/maintainable storage is by using an external provider.

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TotlolRon
The MBAs (and lawyers) will do the same to GOOG. Correction: are doing the
same to GOOG.

