People at Microsoft said the wind of change was blowing long before Nadella took the job. They timed the announcement of Nadella to coincide with deliveries of new products / open platforms. The whole thing was to change the image of Microsoft: New products + new face = new Microsoft.
It's not like Nadella fired every one and started afresh.
What I kept hearing from people inside Microsoft was that the most helpful single change was getting rid of Sinofsky, and that was when the shift really began. Apparently he (much more than Ballmer) was responsible for the "Windows first" mentality that kept hobbling the rest of the company, though of course Ballmer deserves some blame for not doing his job and pushing back on that.
If i recall correctly (from what I read at the time) he hid either the existence of Surface RT or the SOC it was running from the team that was porting Office to ARM. So they had to ship an unfinished version of Office (that required multiple steps and different interfaces to update to final. Which no reviewer or early user bothered with) with it.
The team working on office for ios wasn't allowed to ship because they didn't want ios to gain share against windows phone.
Satya came from cloud and enterprise (c+e). His big bet was on the fact that everyone will have a computer in a pocket augmented by the cloud. Capitalizing on that was very important.
Windows growth had been stagnant and ballmer lost the mobile opportunity.
Satya encouraged open source at Microsoft and putting customers need first.
I was part of this transition and the change was definitely felt. He deeply understands where the puck will be rather than where it is.
> It's not like Nadella fired every one and started afresh.
He announced huge layoffs (18,000 people) almost as soon as he took over. A lot of Nokia people, but also 5,500 people not related to mobile and 1,400 of them at HQ. A year later he made another huge cut of 7,800 people.
More evidence for d--b's point. Firing 18k people at Microsoft's scale isn't even close to burning it down and starting from scratch. It's also not something a newly minted CEO would be able to get past the board on such short notice. It must have been planned in advance. Whatever you say about Balmer, someone at MSFT knew how to flawlessly execute a masterful transition plan. I though Apple did a good job, but MSFT nailed it.
"It's not like Nadella fired every one and started afresh." is a colloquialism. d--b was basically saying "it's not like Nadella did a major overhaul.
With which jonknee disagrees, citing a layoff of 18,000. To which simonh claims is not a major overhaul since Microsoft is nebulously enormous. To which piaste disagrees, as 18k was actually 15.7% of the company.
You can all continue to debate whether or not 15.7% is a major overhaul, whether the actual people they fired were significant, etc...
But you quoting a colloquialism and asking us all to take it literally is not helpful to the discussion, or the culture of HN.
I don't disagree, but the parent was being just as pedantic as I was. Perhaps my snark was an attempt to end the petty discussion (apparently, improperly so). Read these two statements in the context of the discussion:
> burning it down and starting from scratch.
> started afresh
15.7% is a major overhaul, but IMO in no way insinuates "burning something down" or "starting afresh". Do you think either of those statements is consistent with a 15% cut in workforce?
PS - 12,500 of those 18,000 came from Nokia[0].
> with 12,500 of those coming out of the streamlining of Microsoft’s acquired Nokia assets.
Don't get me wrong, Microsoft did change course. It was a tanking bloated juggernaut, and the change from pre-Nadella days has been drastic. But what I am saying is that the change had started at least 3 or 4 years before Nadella became CEO.
The article is all about how the guy changed everything so quickly while in fact this was already happening.
What's possible though is that the big guys at Microsoft planned to give the job to Nadella a while ago, and that Nadella, under Ballmer, did actually take all the decisions that took Microsoft in the right direction.
wind of change was blowing long before Nadella took the job
Well, just look at that stock prices graph, seems in line with this: sure there's a flat line during Ballmer's first 10 years, but then it suddenly started going up and the trend just continued in the same trend when Nadella got assigned. Not saying he's not doing a good job: from what I see I'd say he's doing well, though of course there's a whole lot of information I don't see so I really cannot tell.
Although I think Nadella has made some good changes to company culture, there's a lot more variables that influence a company's performance than the CEO, just as there's a lot more variables that influence a country's Economic performance than a ruling party.
The piece does that all-too-common simplification of providing a single cause to explain the fluctuation is MSFT's fortunes, a form of cognitive bias I believe. We like simple stories for complex phenomena.
Agree, 100%... One more variable I think it's also a combination of timing too. For example: Tim Cook is busy destroying Apple's product lineup forcing a lot of people to reconsider Microsoft.
They might be doing "fine" right now by some metrics like sales numbers, but that doesn't imply they will continue to be successful. Many companies have posted increasing sales figures right up until they crash.
I've been increasingly unhappy (as a user and developer) with Apple's Mac systems for some time. I'm by far from the only one. They have lost several potential sales from me, and my team at work, simply because they aren't offering systems which we wish to purchase. Until they do, we will end up purchasing systems which provide the features we need, and move to platforms which are maintained competently. These are lost sales both in the present and the future. We'll see how things play out over the next few years, but I would not be at all surprised if there isn't a dramatic reversal of their fortunes at some point.
I'd be really interested to know what features you think are most needed and are going to "crash" them. What I most commonly see is "neglecting pros by not offering 32 gigs of ram" which targets a pretty specific demographic. Honest question, not trying to be flippant in anyway.
I switched recently because whether it be sony, hcp, or lenovo every laptop me and my girlfriend went through broke down in someway and we had to deal with the horrible process of going through those companies support system. Apple laptops may get defects or break down, but at least they the best product support, and in general their quality is superior to others in terms of failure rates[1].
It's not just due to the recent MacBook Pro controversy; that's just the latest event in at least five years of decline.
At work, we target MacOS as a supported platform and have systems for continuous integration and deployment on this platform. There is no Mac system suitable for this task. Previously Xserve would have been used. Mac Pro is unsuitable and too expensive for the role. Right now we have a few mac minis on shelves in a machine room. They are crap. They are not suited for remote management, they have slow discs and bad performance all around, and the recent models are much worse than older ones. MacOS doesn't allow virtualisation on non-mac hardware so we can't use our beefy VMware infrastructure for the task. Bottom line: supporting MacOS for development and deployment in a serious capacity is not possible without suitable hardware or virtualisation. If Apple allowed MacOS X licensing on VMware ESX on non-Mac hardware, brought out a new Xserve, or even a more capable Mini or proper desktop Pro, we'd buy several tomorrow, because right now it's painful to maintain, and we just about cope with the poor minis which are creaking along while loaded to the max.
Decent graphics support is a problem. My group works on scientific and medical image storage, processing and visualisation, and the state of Mac graphics is sad indeed. Both on the hardware side and the software side. No OpenGL updates for years, and anaemic hardware. I get better graphics support on FreeBSD today... If I need a decent GPU with a decent amount of memory and current OpenGL support, I can buy one for a small fraction of the cost of any Mac, and use it with FreeBSD, Linux or Windows. The Mac is a barren wasteland.
And the software side is also a problem. It's been in continual decline since 10.6. Much of the base system hasn't seen maintenance in a decade at this point. Inter-operability and compatibility with other platforms is becoming increasingly problematic, since it's fallen a decade behind for much of the core tools. If you want a UNIX desktop, it's no longer ticking that box. You can get by with homebrew, but the hassle and poor usability makes it easier to just use Linux or FreeBSD. Right now, I use FreeBSD to debug clang++ C++ code because it's easier to do debugging there than on MacOS...
I'm still using a 2011 Macbook Pro with a matt display, Radeon GPU and lots of ports. It's been due for replacement for some time, but when my boss offered me a new one I said I'd be better sticking with the cheap Dell desktop I dual boot with Windows and Linux. Because other than the superficial aesthetics of the laptop, the desktop is better on all counts, and vastly more productive and more ergonomic--with a good quality monitor and keyboard.
Over a decade ago, at the university I worked at, you saw people dropping serious money on fully loaded Apple G5, then Intel towers for serious computation, and people had them under their desks and also in central compute facilities. Because that was the best you could get at the time, and people pushed them to the limit doing bioinformatics and simulation work. Today, they have nothing in this space. I also saw entire departments shift from 100% Windows to 100% Mac as their benefits and cost were realised. Today, people are moving back, because today's Mac hardware and software no longer has any meaningful advantage; it still has some advantages, but the cost/benefit has declined. If you need decent hardware specs, you can get better from Dell for a faction of the cost, and that's pretty sad to say.
They have increased sales by targeting causal users who want to spend a bit more on a laptop, but they have at the same time seemingly abandoned the high end, and the needs of technical, scientific and professional users entirely. I'd like to be able to purchase a decent mini for home use, and a new laptop for work, and hardware for the datacentre at work. But they aren't producing anything suitable in any of these categories, and haven't for a good while, and if they don't have anything I want to spend money on, I won't be giving them any business. Macs used to be machines I desired greatly but couldn't afford; today they are machines I could afford but don't desire. They've messed up badly.
For the software our group writes, we previously supported Linux, MacOS X and Windows as client and server platforms. We dropped MacOS X as a server platform a while back. For more recent work, we've found MacOS relegated as a client platform as well. Those CI support costs and compatibility problems due to the lack of real MacOS X maintenance resulted in it being deprioritised; Linux and Windows are the two main ones we support now, with MacOS being supported as a lower tier platform. That's a problem entirely of their own making.
We'll see what happens, but I can't help but feel that their current growth from phones and MacBooks is going to plateau and decline; their growth is certainly not from technical users who have been ignored for some time, it's from selling mediocre hardware at high prices as fashion accessories. I'd like to see them turn that around, but I can't see it being tenable to continue to purchase Mac hardware and support MacOS X in the medium to long term with the current trends.
All the wonderful presentation done by Jobs then is nowhere to be seen these days. I used to stay awake to watch it live from 2AM but I only read the reports later these days.
Cook keeps cutting everything but the most profitable departments just to make the numbers look good when Apple was about this unified experience on various aspects of what makes up as a digital life.
Your assumption is like praising a movie doing really well because the prior installment did excellent and people expect the same until they realize it isn't what it was.
I think the space to innovate might not be smaller now, but it's less ripe for big dsiruptions until VR or something else can start grabbing marketshare. Phones and laptops are pretty stable.
Apple is trying to get into at least one exciting field, self driving cars. Supposedly AR/VR too. Maybe others. They've also released some pretty solid wireless earbuds last year. Sure, it's not the next iPhone, but honestly no one else has yet either in the past five years.
I fear that is like the Diablo, Sim City, or Civilization game brands. Even if they have a very bad release, they could still easily have a release that beats the previous one. But it erodes the brand. In other words, as long as Tim Cook didn't screw up, a simple Mac lineup iteration would've had fantastic sales.
Sure but Microsoft was 'doing fine' well into the Ballmer period everyone now acknowledges was a decline. So was Blackberry for a few years after the iPhone was released.
But they're stuck with two distinct platforms: iOS (touch) and macOS (non-touch) while the hardware the world wants is not so binary. Basically, that we can't touch the screens of the high cost workstations and laptops where we do our creative work, kind of brings down the whole ecosystem.
I consider this to be one of their better decisions. With workstation and laptops, you already have higher-precision input devices available that also are less prone to causing fatigue.
For some specialty application I can see the usefulness of digitizer pen input like some Thinkpad X series models (e.g. X220T). But fat-finger touch? What for?
For big movements (getting a window out of the way, viewing media, etc.), anything collaborative, and for anytime the machine is being used in an awkward position (so when not seated comfortably focused on inputting).
Who is advocating for this besides you? Current Apple displays are some of the worst computer displays ever when it comes to fingerprints and grime - they would have to get rid of glass. I have been using an X60 for about five years and have literally used the stylus twice, just to see that it works. My wife is a commercial artist and uses Wacom tablets. If she had wanted a drawable display she would have found some way to trick me into paying for a Cintiq by now. The collaborative thing is a non-market - the last time I used a digital whiteboard was in 2006.
I can see a giant tablet with a desktop stand and keyboard becoming the new PC as a more plausible scenario than the iMac/OS X getting a touch UI.
My opinion doesn't represent everyone's of course, but I don't like touching my desktop/laptop screen and getting smudges everywhere. I'm quite happy with a keyboard and a (good) trackpad.
Apple said the touchbar is their first foray into a new system of inputs, perhaps a larger touchbar and some sort of haptic feedback is a new interface their going down, I think that could actually be pretty cool and innovative.
As for putting a touch screen on everything and desktops, eh... I mean, that Surface Studio looks amazing and likely appeals to creative professionals, but probably doesn't effect many people besides that. Kudos to them for the innovation, but I don't think it represents a better ecosystem.
I pointed this out on HN before with the same opinion and someone pointed out that they might just throw away MacOS. iOS is a smaller codebase, has superior multitasking (ever needed Activity Monitor on iOS?) and generally more future proof than MacOS is. An iOS laptop or desktop (like the Surface) wouldn't be out of the question.
Apple's financials are fine, for the time being. The pace of their product innovation has noticeably slowed down though, and many products seem to have gone backwards in terms of quality and desirability.
I disagree. Microsoft in terms of products under Nadella has been largely a continuation of Microsoft under Ballmer. Inside the company things will be different, but in terms of actual output the company has become much more risk-averse.
The latter is not very controversial. The question is can a tech giant be saved? The track record generally isn't great for companies that pass their day in the sun. Having a great CEO is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a rebound.
I agree there is no single cause but you are also under estimating the power of a CEO who is responsible for resource allocation and investments. Where he chooses to invest is what becomes of a company. Culture also flows from top down and CEO plays a big role.
Oh I don't dispute that his impact has been significant and positive. I just think there's other factors at play here. For example, Google was extremely slow to market with a competitive cloud strategy, and Apple has been a less competitive player the last 3 years with its own product innovation.
It's almost like a corporation is a mini fiefdom. Like there is a petty dictator at the helm , no matter how benevolent. Weird how capitalist companies are structured that way
I see it quite differently, the leader is the single biggest influencer on the performance of the group. There are many examples in sports where just changing the coach has changed the team from an underperforming team to a leading team. Similarly with companies, a leadership change has often lead to a significant change in performance.
To understand that you have to understand that pack behavior tends to mimic the leader, so if the leader does X, then their reports do X, and the people who report to the reports do X. In large organizations you may find pockets where someone in the change decided not to do X and then everyone below them is free of that expectation (for better or worse).
I really like the direction Microsoft is going in, especially Surface devices, the very nice Office 355 service, and Azure. The one area where I think they have failed horribly is in the phone market.
The lack of having a solid phone that interacts with their other devices, and has a rich app/developer ecosystem cost them my business recently:
I am in my 60s, and comfortably semi-retired. After decades of being a Linux-as-much-as-possible enthusiast, I now want my interaction with my devices to be as easy and workable as possible. The time I still spend writing and software development should be as efficient as possible, in the deep work sense I want to spend just a few hours a day producing things hopefully useful to society, as effectively as possible.
Recently I spent a month evaluation of staying with Apple or getting a Surface Pro. I stuck with getting a new MacBook and with my iPad Pro because of the availability of the iPhone (I am still on Android, but will switch soon), with nothing comproble from Microsoft.
Whatever it takes, I think Microsoft should get back in the phone business with a winning product.
They're pretty aware of this. But breaking a duopoly like this requires more than just a "great phone". Microsoft has had and does have "great phones", but without the app ecosystem to back them, it doesn't matter that the phones are great.
The Windows Phone might run faster, have a longer battery life, and just work better than the comparable Android flagship, but since you can get freaking Pokémon GO on the Android, people will buy the latter.
Microsoft is basically waiting for a chance at a paradigm shift in what it means to have a smartphone, so that they can release something you can get nowhere else. In the meantime, they're kinda just treading water and keeping their mobile OS workable and modern.
>Microsoft is basically waiting for a chance at a paradigm shift in what it means to have a smartphone, so that they can release something you can get nowhere else. In the meantime, they're kinda just treading water and keeping their mobile OS workable and modern.
I think that's likely both a good summary and a smart strategy. We can imagine, at least in broad terms, an evolution toward a much more unified set of connected devices. Microsoft has arguably already done the best job of reconverging the tablet and laptop with the Surface Pro but it's not enough to make most people really care.
Of course, the best way to predict the future is to invent it (Alan Kay) so, at some level, it's an opportunity that's up to them to create.
Personally, I'm carrying a Lumia 929, which is one of the last Windows Phones that works on Verizon. I got it for $99 on Groupon.
It runs the latest version of Windows 10 Mobile. When Microsoft releases a cumulative update next Tuesday for all Windows PCs, my phone will get the update likely within about an hour or so.
They'll still sell the Lumia 735. A select few retail stores even carry them in stock. But the phone is from 2014, and they don't officially support Windows 10 Mobile at all.
Verizon takes a "do so at your own risk" approach to Windows 10, because Microsoft doesn't permit carriers to hold back updates for Windows 10, and Verizon wants carrier approval for all software. So they don't have any Windows 10 phones, and the Lumia 735 is officially only supported as a Windows Phone 8.1 device. But the 929 and 735 both run great once upgraded to 10.
It's been a big sticking point for me that Microsoft's current strategy is to target enterprise, like with the HP Elite x3, but they don't have Verizon, the primary business carrier, on board.
A leak in Slack seemed to indicate a while back that there's a Verizon "team" at Apple. My guess is they are incredibly closely integrated on the update process so Verizon can simply rubber stamp the final releases.
> without the app ecosystem to back them, it doesn't matter that the phones are great
Is this true? It sounds true but I wonder if it actually is.
(I for one don't care about apps -- at all. I want a "smartphone" because I want the ability to browse the web, and that's it. I can't be the only guy like this.)
And even if it were actually true that apps are important, if you're MS, can't you jump start the app ecosystem? Android being opensource, how hard would it be for MS to make a phone capable of running Android apps (and yet be a different phone with a different OS of course)? (Also, they have Xamarin).
> Microsoft is basically waiting...
Well, yes, they don't seem to be trying very hard. This is quite strange.
The thing is... they've tried a lot of this. They've paid developers to port to Windows Phone before. It wasn't enough. They'll practically give you free hardware if you tell them you're developing an app. Realize that Google and Apple do not give a crud about you if you develop an app for their platform. Microsoft will fall over itself trying to help you if you develop for their platform, even if you are a little guy making a little app.
Microsoft already HAS developed the ability for Windows Phones to run Android apps. (They actually sent me a free phone just to test the feature!) Sadly, they decided not to release it, and we don't really know why. It could have been that they were worried about developers settling for Android apps instead of making UWP apps. Or Google could've threatened them, which seems plausible too. (Android is kinda "open" source, where yes, it's open source, but Google will do underhanded things if you dare to use it in any way they consider a risk to their dominance.) I can tell you the Android Bridge for Windows Phone worked amazingly, and my demo unit phone still has that version of Windows on it.
The other name it went by is Project Astoria, you can find a lot of the Internet about it. There's pretty much no chance of it being released at this point, unfortunately.
Microsoft and Google each have subtle and not-subtle ways of attacking each other. Google doesn't really feel threatened by Bing, everyone thinks Bing is a joke (even if it is pretty decent), plus Google steals all their best ideas from Bing. But things like the popups Google has on their sites to tell Edge users Chrome is better, Microsoft's retaliatory popups in Windows that tell Chrome users to try Edge, etc. Google has aggressively broken compatibility of their various services with Windows Mobile devices before. They definitely have options if they want to harass the others' customers.
I think it's more that the port of Windows to phones was so broken that they saw that there is no way they will get the platform into a stable state in the next year. It..just..so..broken.
I had a lumia 950 and with the crashes, lack of apps and UX horror I bought a OnePlus after 2 months amd never regreted it.
I heard that Windows Phone 7 was nice and everything went downhill with WP8 but I wouldnt know personally
WP10 is great these days. Switched from Android a few months back, to a Lumia 650, and will never go back to the bloated, resource heavy battery eater which is Android.
Fewer apps, turns out to be a pro, I've found. I'm realizing how much less distracted I am without every app and its dog installed. Also I'm realizing how well most things work via the web anyway (such as youtube), without requiring me to be logged in and sending rich tracking data to Google all the time.
Windows 10 Mobile is more stable than any version of Android I've ever used, and I carried Android from 2009 to 2016. Sure, it lacks apps, but it's just inherently a better written OS.
Refreshing to see somebody who is not an asshole succeed. Too many people seem to have concluded that success can only be achieved by being some variation of asshole whether it is Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Balmer or Larry Ellison.
Mind you I am a huge fan of Steve Jobs, despite the fact that I think he also was kind of an asshole. People are complicated I don't think Steve succeeded because he was an asshole but due to the other qualities he had not related to being an asshole.
And people of course change. Bill Gates seems like a much nicer man today than he was when he ran Microsoft. I guess much the same happened with Steve Jobs. He was a better person in his older years than in his younger.
Stephen Jay Gould often talked about how some evolved features happen not because they're beneficial to a species' success, and despite them being outright detrimental, but simply because they are linked to some other feature that is beneficial; they're necessary side effects.
Arseholery seems to fall into exactly that category. It's not helpful per se, but associated with many traits that obviously contribute to success, including clarity of vision and confidence in one's opinion against others' advice, and the ability to persist against all odds.
Nadella seems to be of another fabric entirely; he's not afraid of having a plurality of voices sing at the same time, he's more a conductor than a general.
What he's pulled off so far is amazing; lets hope it lasts.
A coworker once described to me how he thought people misinterpreted Jobs' success.
Jobs didn't succeed because he was an asshole, he succeeded despite being an asshole.
You sometimes see people trying to emulate Jobs and thinking they need to be an asshole. His take was that they completely missed the reasons for Jobs' success.
He was definitely an asshole though, especially early on.
You need to read the "fuck counter" story. I woldn't work for someone like this:
>"Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared."
> I noticed that there were comments in the margins of my spec. He had read the first page!
> He had read the first page of my spec and written little notes in the margin!
> Considering that we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier, he must have read it the night before.
> He was asking questions. I couldn’t stop noticing that he was flipping through the spec and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.
> He Read The Whole Thing! [OMG SQUEEE!]
I've talked to people who met Bill in person and by all accounts be was smart, driven, pretty nerdy, and reasonable.
Somehow, they managed to give Satya the credit for things that, by their own admission, started under his predecessor, such as Office for iPad, the One Microsoft initiative, and the rebound in Microsoft's stock price. They didn't let the facts get in the way of their heartwarming story.
I can't speak to the product side because up until a year ago I hardly used any MSFT products but I can say that the culture that has been brought by Satya, and likely his reports, is one of the reasons I joined MSFT after being a longtime hater.
When I was approached to come work for MSFT I said "no" right away. The person recruiting me said "just listen to our pitch and then you can say 'no' if you want". After hearing Satya talk about where he wants the company to go and what it'll take to get there I had a 180 degree switch on how I felt about MSFT. I talked with some other old-timers who were there to see if things really had changed and they all told me that it was a slow progression but things were certainly changing for the better.
Now it's totally possible that they all are just good at selling to people but it was enough to get me to join and 95% of the time I'm glad I did.
You aren't at a subsidiary, obviously. As the tide shifts to pushing Azure, the sales people are going ballistic and circle customers like sharks, with insane targets.
I joined a short while ago and deeply regret it, since all we do is sales. Even OSS is treated as a pure sales play.
I actually think we are in the same roles (CSA) :).
I have seen the same thing you are talking about and it is certainly one of the shitty parts of the job. Luckily I've done enough with the sales group around me that they are starting to understand that you don't sell Azure like you would O365 or whatever. There are still days where I walk away thinking that I must be on a different planet but the time I get to spend working with customers and building cool shit makes up for all of the bs.
>Nadella, meanwhile, is keen to stress that the goodwill and positive headlines the company is receiving is only of temporary importance. The main responsibility is ensuring Microsoft remains on the right path in the long-term.
Key point. I'm very happy with Microsoft, and have been since they first announced the surface line and the various other moves they've made to make a single OS.
But They've crossed the threshold of the "holy crap? MSFT did that?" And they are in the "well, this needs to work a whole lot better for me to stick around."
The fact that the CEO is aware of this already is a good sign. Looking forward to the surface event this year.
Having spent my youth childishly ranting against the evils of M$, and now coming to terms with the fact that I sincerely use VS Code because it's great, I can't shake the frequent uncanny feeling that I'm stuck in an episode of Sliders.
Dos + win 3.11 was an absolute crap. Had a mac at the time and i couldn't understand how people could cope with that horror. Anything, from atari to amiga to mac was obviously better.
Windows started to be usable starting windows 95. Before that, it was mainly a hack.
Windows 3.x was wonderful if you had DOS, which was almost everyone did. DOS, WordStar (or Word Perfect) and Lotus 1-2-3.
It was really cheap [1], and it ran on top of DOS, so you didn't lose anything you already had. The big advantage was access to a GUI and new graphical applications. If you didn't like it, you didn't have to run it, but it was always more useful than the old-style character-based DOS front-ends.
The alternatives to Windows 3.x involved paying up to 20x more for a different operating system, installing it, and possibly losing what you already had, OR dumping your whole expensive system and buying another expensive system, buying expensive new apps, and relearning everything.
Worse, you'd be buying another expensive system while losing access to Lotus 1-2-3 (on which your commercial life probably depended).
The real alternatives weren't the 68000-based Amiga/Atari/Mac etc, they were DesQview and DR GEM.
Not sure why DesQview failed. However, Apple did Microsoft a huge favor by suing Digital Research and effectively killing GEM (except on the Atari ST).
[1] From my faulty memory, it was something like $40 when business applications cost $200 to $600. OS/2 cost around $500 and Sun was charging $950 for Unix.
They credit Nadella with increasing the stock price... but MSFT performance is basically the same as the overall NASDAQ composite (of course I'm sure MSFT itself is a large portion of that index) as well as the larger S&P 500 index.
I think Microsoft has done a great job of transforming to being very brand-conscious and these stories are both a recognition of that from the press, and a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy (they talk about how different they are, the press does, then they point to the press and dress up their UX, it's very self-feeding in a way). That said -- I can't say I've experienced great technical changes in the products from microsoft that I do use, at least yet. Windows 10 is still windows underneath, and I've run into some real rough patches on windows 10 on my tower setup. Xbox controllers are still breaking down after several months. Their Cloud offering just blows my mind in a bad way in almost every interaction I've had the displeasure of experiencing.
So I read articles like this and look at the rebranding and really have a hard time deciding whether I want to point to these things as at least having a good direction, and showing that they understand that they need to care about these things. But then I'm dismayed at the execution. Does anyone else have the same thing going on?
1. They've completely dropped the Phone market under him. As in gave up.
2. They are not in the personal assistant game at all. Alexa & Google have that market all to themselves.
3. The educational market is steadily switching to Chromebooks. The new generation of kids will likely not even know how to use MS Office.
4. On the back end, they've made .NET work on Mac and Linux. This is great for me, since I don't have to worry about Windows Server licenses, but doesn't this eat into their large cash cow?
5. SQL Server - the other cash cow, is great, but free alternatives will start affecting the bottom line.
6. Windows 10 rollout stalled very much short of their stated goal of being on 1 billion devices.
2. This is being worked on, there is cortana for cars, pc's and phones, so it would make sense for it to expand to even more devices in the future.
3. This is the point of windows 10 cloud, which recently leaked.
4. Windows is really not the cash cow of Microsoft, getting more people into the ecosystem is better for buisiness.
5. Free alternatives have existed forever, alternatives that you could argue are the same or better, recently SQL Server was ported to linux which actually should shore up its market share, and even possibly increase it.
You are kind of proving my point that Microsoft, in fact, was not "revived" by Nadella.
2. Maybe it is being worked on and maybe it'll even be great. The problem is that people don't replace personal assistants every 2 years. They lost the first mover advantage.
4. Windows for enterprises, specifically server versions are cash cows. I fail to see the value (to Microsoft) of a developer getting into the .NET ecosystem if they intend to run your code on Linux.
5. It's true that free alternatives have always been around. But now, they are reasonably good. And more importantly, good enough.
6. Yes, it does. It's actually one of the few places where they could monetize people getting into their ecosystem.
1. That was good. At some point you need to cut your losses.
2. Yet. Microsoft has a tremendous research department. They could still come out with something game-changing.
3. This is also good. We don't need a bunch of kids who are brought up on software designed in the 1980s and hasn't advanced since.
4. I think MS has decided that they need to open up to certain degree despite the loss of revenue that it can cost because of the other less tangible benefits.
5. It's a good thing that MariaDB has been forked from MySQL because Oracle has had a tendency to kill every open source project they've acquired, or let them die.
6. The problem with Windows 8 was that aside from the improvements under the hood, every single thing that changed was for Microsoft's benefit, and not for the benefit of the users. Windows 10 backed off on this arrogance, but only a little. Microsoft has clearly made the commitment that when it comes to PC operating systems, that the user, and not the software is now the product, and that from now on, in order to get the marginal improvements in their products, you will have to sacrifice a lot in terms of privacy, usability and convenience. And that's assuming that their QA is up to snuff, which it clearly isn't.
You aren't really refuting the parent comment's point that Microsoft has not been revived. You're just arguing that Microsoft's descent is good for society overall. While I agree, the parent just argued that Microsoft hadn't been revived.
Ehh. All the credit being given to Nadella are initiatives that Ballmer not only started, but has to push against the will of the board to pursue.
I had major hope for Microsoft in the last few years, and I'm starting to see Nadella's MS slowly unravelling all of the good progress. I just can not believe that Windows Phone adoption got as high as 15% in Europe and then under Nadella they immediately dropped it like it was dirt. The hardware and software was superior in every way to every alternative, and this deprecation has made many of their other successful manoeuvres pointless.
It's mindboggling to me that they're crediting Nadella with Surface and Hololens, in particular.
Leaders generally get an outsized share of blame and an outsized share of credit for results that become apparent on their watch. I agree that Microsoft didn't suddenly turn 180 degrees the day Nadella took charge.
As for the phone though? Microsoft lost that one a long time ago. They can/should continue to milk other client cash cows and continue with other businesses like Xbox that are peripheral but they're well-established in. But phone would require an all-in push and it's hard to see how that would make sense for Microsoft as a distant #3.
Focusing on Azure doesn't preclude them doing something like that of course; Microsoft's a big company. But I can't fault them from deciding that they largely missed mobile and moving on. (I'm unconvinced Surface and Hololens will amount to anything significant either but I don't really see those as a focus.)
Oh Phones are gone. Finito. But they weren't a few years ago. They were taking a sharp incline with the 9xx range of Lumias in Europe, and they only declined when Microsoft whipped all Lumias from stores and released nothing for a year, the 950 range, which they stopped supporting before they'd even stopped selling it. W10M is effectively still in beta and there are no phones to use it now.
But in the meantime they'd been pushing Continuum, W10/Phone integration, UWP, Xbox/Phone integration and so on. So removing phones tarnished a large chunk of their product line imo. Same for the Band. There's no competitor to it, still, and it's also gone. Same for Kinect. Same for Onedrive subscriptions, etc etc.
This is what worries me about Nadella's MS and it's the same thing that worries me about Cook's Apple...treating the product line like commodities without acknowledging the importance of the ecosystem.
Having said that, as you say, they're a big company. My perspective is solely from that of a devices user.
>Oh Phones are gone. Finito. But they weren't a few years ago.
I doubt he had much choice. WP can't exist just for the sake of it. Yes they were increasing market share, but at what cost? If you're losing money on each phone sold and if the amount you're losing is linear with each sale because you're effectively buying the sales, selling more is a road to catastrophe. Gaining WP market share would only be worthwhile if there is a path to profitability. I don't know this was the situation for a fact, but it seems likely.
>...treating the product line like commodities without acknowledging the importance of the ecosystem.
Right, so the argument is WP was worth subsidizing because it supports the rest of the ecosystem. But suppose supporting the rest of the ecosystem was better served by integrating it with competitor's products? Hence Office for iOS, etc. At which point WP just becomes a boat anchor round their necks. I don't think there was any possible future in which it was worth the costs.
In your analysis dropping the product was irrational. I don't think it was, but must admit I'm only speculating as to the reasons. I'd love to know the reality.
Well to be more precise, I suppose my position is that if MS want to increase their product userbase, they need a vanguard of advocates who promote their products far and wide. In the early days of Apple's resurgence, this would've been the graphic designers, musicians, developers, and so on. I think that the advocates that have pushed new MS products are, again, developers and graphic designers and so on, who have transitioned to MS over the last 4 or so years due to their new products suiting their needs (digitizer etc).
My own perception is that their haphazard treatment of their product line has tarnished the sentiment in these communities. It's one thing to phase out phones, but to suddenly drop them in the same year as an amazing keynote in which they promoted the Band and Phones as being central to the platform, at the same time that you're pushing OS updates...it's not pleasant when you've bought into that vision.
Phones might not have been worth the cost in an accounting sense, but if they've lost platform advocates then it could affect their good progress.
Like you though, I'm just speculating and would love to know the politics behind it.
They are doing ok with hybrid tablets though. Here in Germany it started to be more common to see hybrid tablets with W10 than Android on the retail stores.
So I still have some (tiny) hope of them succeeding with phablets with SIM card on them.
In any case, I am more willing to just adopt one of my Lumias when my S3 dies, than sponsoring OEMs that never update their devices.
Here in Europe I see Surfaces at every retail store, while Chromebooks tend to only be available online, sometimes I do spot one on the stores.
However I don't like them, personally I think they could have been a better proposal if Google had decided to leverage Dart, and offer a Smalltalk environment on them. Even if that required some kind of developer mode.
As it is, my trusty Eee PC 1215B is what I use for travelling.
I suspect a lot more marketing/co-marketing dollars go into the Surface from Microsoft than go into Chromebooks from Google and the device manufacturers.
My sense is that education is the only market where Chromebooks have been pushed at all aggressively. Like many things Google does, it's not clear that they have a really fleshed out strategy for the Chromebook.
They're also not really targeted for doing local development though people do use them in various somewhat unnatural ways.
Although they can't do everything I can do on my MacBook, they're often suitable for my needs when traveling and I appreciate the small size of the Asus Flip.
The Chromebook is pretty much failing outside the US education market, where there were non-technical reasons behind its success. Also, schools don't buy them retail.
The OEM trend is to design for Windows 10 and then offer a version of the same hardware as a Chromebook. This is a tough sale as people expect Chromebooks to be cheaper but they are not.
[They are not cheaper for two reasons. (1) OEMs pay very little for Windows 10 and they get a lot of that back by bundling crapware. (2) The Chromebook adds costs in hardware qualification and drivers etc, plus stockkeeping, distribution and advertising costs. The advertising cost is significant because Microsoft provides 'advertising support' for ads that promote Windows, but not Chromebooks.]
EDIT
Chromebooks were cheaper, back in the days when Windows laptops had 4GB of RAM and hard drives. Today, cheap Windows laptops have 2GB of RAM and 32GB or 64GB eMMC cards, so the Chromebook's price advantage has gone or even been reversed.
In any case, schools can easily set up Windows machines so that kids can ONLY run a browser and nothing else. See Windows 10 Education AppLocker.
By following Microsoft blogs, articles, BUILD presentations among other sources, I get the idea that this whole mess, going back to WP 7, was once again the result of their political wars between DevTools and Windows division.
> The hardware and software was superior in every way to every alternative,
No, the hardware was Qualcomm reference platform, which you could find in some Androids too. On Android it just wasn't subsidized the same way as it was on WP side.
Why blame Nadella? Terry Myerson headed up the Windows Phone division during its long slide into oblivion before being promoted to head up the entire Windows division when Nadella became CEO. He's specifically responsible for dropping the ball, if anyone is.
Yeah, I'm a bit confused - it seems like MS has just continued to do what they had already started doing before Nadella took over. For example, their cloud computing offering was released in 2010.
But bear in mind that anyone can have a cloud-computing initiative. Hewlett Packard Enterprises has one. Executing well and building momentum in the face of AWS is the hard part. If Microsoft is making headway, that's interesting.
I have a great theory here. If you agree entirely mostly with the article, there is nothing to comment. Or you have to write something boring. But if you want to comment and get karma, you have to write something spicy. And thus the comments are all cynical and contrarian.
Shocked to see Windows 10 being depicted as an advancement in some of the comments along with that office 365 service. Yeah the Halcyon days of PC ate definitely gone by looking at these cringrworthy points.
M$ clearly have made their point with continuous eternal Beta program and sheeple insider ring, UWP and WDDM2.0, Gimmicky stuff cough DX12gamemode cough.
Destroyed the PC, Mr Nadella should be praised for all this...
It's not like Nadella fired every one and started afresh.