There is a really key quote towards the end of this piece that really captures the spirit of this post, and that's from Satya Nadella. I'm including it in its entirety because I think it does a really good job at summarizing what Ben is writing about here:
"Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware, because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. Right now the abstraction of hardware has to start by abstracting all of the hardware in your life, so the notion that this is one device is interesting and important, it doesn’t mean the kernel that boots your device just goes away, it still exists, but the point of real relevance I think in our lives is “hey, what’s that abstraction of all the hardware in my life that I use?” – some of it is shared, some of it is personal. And then, what’s the app model for it? How do I write an experience that transcends all of that hardware? And that’s really what our pursuit of Microsoft 365 is all about."
The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life". I use a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an iPhone interchangeably in my life. When I switch between them pretty much nothing changes - I have access to the same core apps: Office, Obsidian, 1Password, web browser. If there were a new device, say some kind of headset, I suspect that would plug right into my existing ecosystem of hardware and software. There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft. That could change of course, but there are so many interesting problems to solve along the way.
> The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life".
> When I switch between them pretty much nothing changes - I have access to the same core apps: Office, Obsidian, 1Password, web browser.
> There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft.
In your example MS is the app, not the OS. The 'abstractions' that let apps run everywhere that matter nowadays are Unix (MacOS/Linux/Android/iOS), the JVM and the browser. And if we want to talk about an actual OS that runs everywhere, it's only Linux that's running truly everywhere: on servers, consumer devices and IoT devices. Or on the level above that, the browser.
You guys lost out on mobile years ago, now it's just Office, Azure and XBox; admittedly some big businesses there, but far from the layer of abstraction that "everything" runs on...
And ends up paying its major competitor $18 billion+ a year, I’m not sure it was a bad thing that Microsoft loss and instead makes money by selling apps that run across all platforms.
Yes I realize tte citation is old. But Android was already just as dominant as it is now by 2016. I doubt the fundamentals have changed.
And no phone maker is making any real money except for Apple and Samsung and Samsung only makes money because it builds its own components.
> And ends up paying its major competitor $18 billion+ a year
How much more would they be paying if Android didn't exist? How tempting would it be for Apple - as an intermediary - to make its own search service that would immediately hit Google's top line? How much revenue would Google lose in that scenario? Sometimes it pays to take the smaller loss to avoid larger losses.
I can’t find it now. But someone actually did make a web interface for Apple’s search engine powered by “AppleBot”. It’s used in different parts of iOS. It’s horrible.
If you have ever tried to find anything in the App Store, you know that the last thing that the world wants is an Apple powered search engine. Most people would just go to Google anyway.
Apple maps was horrible...at first (and still is in parts of the world). A full-throttled attempt at Apple search would likely go the same way: not great in the long tail, but acceptable or even good for a decent proportion of users.
The only thing it took to improve maps was more data, acquiring companies and hiring experts. Directions are a hard problem. But at the end of the day it’s just programming.
Search at Google’s scale requires massive infrastructure investments, the top ML/AI experts and the constant feedback loop of users. Apple has demonstrated it sucks at everything that Google is good at. It’s an institutional problem.
Having its own mapping infrastructure was a core business need and really there are only two or three companies in the world that are good at it.
I didn't say Android or Linux make as much money for companies as MS does off, say, Office, only that it is the OS that runs the most devices and websites we interact with.
Winning looks like a race to the bottom because the abstraction layer matters less to consumers than apps.
Not only the Web, we are now doing at large scale what Xerox, Sun, Apple, IBM and Microsoft envisioned during the last century, distributed computing with RPCs.
The Web is only one form of exposing those RPC endpoints.
This ^ is spot on. While the general 'abstraction' argument is spot on, MS is in fact poorly placed to be the 'OS' that becomes that abstraction. In fact, arguably it doesn't even need to be an 'OS' level concept. An example is google docs or WhatsApp. I can work on documents seamlessly across different actual 'OS' because the application abstracts that away - and it is sufficient. If an OS were to abstract all of this, it would also involve numerous compromises, notably on the tightly integrated end-end experience (hardware to UX), which is Apple's entire strategy against the likes of Microsoft.
So no MS is not the best situated to be that 'OS'.
1. It is unclear if such an OS (with the benefits and trade-offs) will be preferred to a world where cross-OS applications can abstract away the OS.
2. Someone like Google (minus their execution woes that seem to get worse in recent years) is better positioned to abstract away the complexities for a regular consumer.
Paraphrasing Sun, the network is the computer, so it is a matter of who has more valuable distributed computing APIs and how they are exposed to the world.
Microsoft is simply making more money from more customers on it.
Google Workspace is the main competitor, but they're not the front runner, they're second place.
Things like Apple Pages and Keynote are only used by a small fraction of consumers. They're not taken seriously as an enterprise productivity solution by anyone.
> They're not taken seriously as an enterprise productivity solution by anyone.
Because anyone who can create a great presentation would never think of things as "enterprise productivity solutions". They'd just make an awesome presentation.
Right, that's exactly it. You can create a great presentation... but you can't collaborate on it online integrated with your office's directory of contacts, create todo items from within it that show up on people's calendars, embed live figures from your colleague's modeling spreadsheet, get signoff on it from colleagues as part of a standardized process, and so on.
If you're using Keynote to make an awesome presentation as a solo project, it's fantastic. If you're using it for enterprise productivity, it's a non-starter.
You're using the phrase "enterprise productivity" to describe what I think are some of the optional features of Office, and at least some of which are probably a bad idea.
Getting signoff from a standardised process aside of course; any tool can participate in that.
Apple Pages, Notes and Keynote on iPhone could do with more user-ability testing at the back of an Uber, Didi, train, taxi or bus. Make it easy to bullet point and page separate. Sometimes you feel the iPhone apps don't get dogfooded by the Apple developers and those apps are only there to fill in a tickbox for someone souless.
For sake of argument, not Apple because they are too close to the HW (specifically their own), and not Google because they are too far away from the HW (completely fractured).
MS is somewhat unusual in that they are, in some sense, "about" providing a platform but not really capable of consistently knocking it out of the park hardware-wise.
Apple is Apple only, and is an upmarket status signal. Not a good fit as a cross-device services layer, which is what Thompson is talking about there.
Google is moving in that direction (including hiring a former Office exec to run Workspace), in providing an integrated bundle. They're just behind, and have been fucking around with their chat, which is one of the cornerstones of the cloud platform.
As Thompson notes, Teams was built to be the "web OS" from the get go, not a Slack clone even though most thought it was one. In Thompson's view, the best players to try to be the web OS are chat providers (due to chat network effects) and cloud storage providers. You can already see Salesforce and Dropbox making moves in that direction.
To quote:
> This is what Slack — and Silicon Valley, generally — failed to understand about Microsoft’s competitive advantage: the company doesn’t win just because it bundles, or because it has a superior ground game. By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, particularly for the non-tech workers that are in fact most of the market. Slack may have infused its chat client with love, but chatting is a means to an end, and Microsoft often seems like the only enterprise company that understands that.
...
> Here’s the thing, though: Dropbox absolutely is better than OneDrive. Google Apps are better at collaboration than Microsoft’s Office apps. Asana is better than Planner. And, to be very clear, Slack is massively better than Teams at chat. Using all of them together, though, well, it sucks: the user experience that matters for me is not any one app but all of them at once, and for the way I want to work, having everything organized in one single place is simply better (and that’s even with the normal spate of maddening Microsoft UI oddities!). In this Teams is less a chat app than it is a file explorer for the cloud generally, and Stratechery LLC specifically.
(me again)
Google, in theory, has the pieces to do it. But they're just behind in many ways - compliance, Microsoft's MSP network and sales staff on the ground, management tools, stuff like that. And there's the other question of "do they have enough at least mediocre things integrated together well enough" to make the play. They might, but not yet.
You're not alone - I more or less bailed around the iPhone/iTunes start, once amazon gave me a way to 'own' my music outside of an OS/hardware dependent ecosystem, I left. Apple makes everything wonderful if you never leave their walled garden, but I operate linux servers, I support mac engineers, and I provide service to windows clients. The only OS that makes supporting all three harder is macOS.
Interestingly. Thats the main reason im still on an iPhone.
I dont use Apple Music or iTunes anymore, it has caused too many headaches.
But i DO use PlexAmp. And it works great, works with FLAC, will transcode, and allows you to selectively cache things.
Its not perfect. There are hiccups with transitioning to Carplay for example. But in general, if not for PlexAmp, i likely would have ditched iPhones after having them since roughly the 3gs (with a few google/Android phones smattered in between, namely the Nexus One and Galazy Nexus).
You can download all your itunes music onto your local HD for archiving, and in fact itunes will detect they have better versions of your current music (if you add it to the library) and download the better version.
Is there something specific you found unacceptable?
What were your issues? I prefer it because its unix based. It makes it a lot easier to work with open source software that assumes you are using a unix based system, and its easy to write a bash script to save you a lot of gui work.
Just wanna add that WSL(2) is one the best things Microsoft has ever done, and has opened up Windows as a true developer's OS. The universality is amazing, and now I feel like I can truly use almost any piece of software OR hardware I can dream of (short of MacOS exclusive software, which is mostly creative media stuff anyway).
I was recently blown away when I was using WSL and accidentally launched the GUI component of an ubuntu program. A native ubuntu UI popped open, fully maneuverable over my Windows desktop environment.
I'd counter that with the advent of apps and services (SaaS) is essentially the operating system now. The notion of "there's an app for that" and most mainstream apps are cross platform, so they are the thing that binds to our daily lives more than some HW abstraction OS.
I can use various SaaS to do everything and it doesn't matter if I'm running a device from Microsoft, Apple, Google or third-party Android device builders.
The OS doesn't matter at all for the majority of users.
For personal use, I'd mostly agree, but without a common identity over those SaaS services the user experience isn't as ideal as it could be. As a simple example, consider how you would share a file between two different identity systems - you can't - you effectively have to use the security by obscurity trick of "whoever has this link can {read|write} this file".
In enterprise use cases where the company pays for the service, you really want to integrate these SaaS services into a common shell and this is the role that Teams plays. You get single sign-on with enterprise credentials, a way to share data with those 3rd party services, and a way for multiple users in your organization to collaborate together with those 3rd party services.
This is the place where Microsoft is currently in a leadership position. Teams is increasingly viewed as being the "cloud OS shell" for enterprise users. Ben has written about this for quite some time - see this earlier piece from 2020: https://stratechery.com/2020/the-slack-social-network/
Agree. I think the so called "cloud" is _the_ abstraction layer for apps and even across apps. Anecdotal example that just happened to me, I'm reading a PDF on my iPad with an app called PDF Expert. When I highlight text in PDF Expert, I'm able to see the highlight in the native PDF Reader on iPad OS, and also when I open the file in the Kindle app, I get prompted to pick up from my last read location (from PDF Expert). All of that is possible because I store and read the same file from an iCloud drive.
The ability to share state between apps and in a format that they can consume and mutate is they key here, so the user does not think about what software OS is actually running underneath, or even which application. The latter still needs more work to allow interoperability based on standards, the missing ingredient there is motivation not technology.
I use a Linux laptop with my favourite applications (vim, vim-wiki, Firefox, pass). I don't try to integrate across devices, I just take it around with me.
I've found that so much of what I used to have centered around Google has moved over to Micrsoft for me. I don't pay for anything (or very little) Google wise but pay for Office monthly. If Microsoft had a GOOD Google voice competitor, well ...
I think, we used to called that cross-platform applications not Operating System. Honestly, it sounds trying to too hard to sound like sell a vision that already exits for a while. That's not a new idea IMO. Java wanted that, Adobe has been trying to do that with their CC stuff, Google has been on it for a while, Apple does that within its own ecosystem for all devices you would want to use (iCloud, handoff for applications, AirPods ...). I don't know why Microsoft is frontrunner with this. Microsoft probably can work with more platforms, but I'm not sure it goes deep enough with each other those compared to say Apple or maybe Google.
> The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life". I use a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an iPhone interchangeably in my life. When I switch between them pretty much nothing changes
Sadly I'm guessing the seamless interchange (we've seen the ads where people writing something in MS Word on their desktop continues on the sofa on a tablet) requires you to sign in to a cloud service. I'm still a cloud-skeptic (e.g. with Google randomly blocking access to files because of presumed hash-collisions), I guess if I really cared about the seamless integration I'd have to look into OwnCloud.
>
"Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware, because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. Right now the abstraction of hardware has to start by abstracting all of the hardware in your life
What you are creating is then clearly not an OS, but an abstraction layer over operating systems. In other words: claiming that are creating an operating system this way is in all likelihood a blatant lie.
"An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one." – Dan Ingalls, in an article in Byte Magazine, 1981
+1 What really matters are powerful experiences that allow people to get things done, easily. Eliminating workflows. Sorry that's overly simplistic but that's what it is.
This is precisely where I think MS failed miserably with Windows Phone. They had an incredible opportunity: Make a smart phone that is a full, natural, joined-at-the-hip extension of your desktop.
They did not. Instead, they made a separate device. This was, from the perspective of desktop integration, 100% indistinguishable from any of the other offerings out there. They were playing "We too" when they should have been playing "Check this out!".
Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications, including browsers, would have been a huge step forward and a massive selling point for Windows Phone. Add to that an open API for developers to be able to integrate desktop Windows Phone services into their applications and MS would have had the makings of an ecosystem that would have just exploded into the business community in a massive way.
Instead they wasted time and money with an offering that did exactly the same things as any other offering while trying to invent a new UI. The strategy was doomed to fail before the first phone was introduced. They tried to build an iPhone with a different UI when the business world would have energetically adopted a deeply integrated extension to desktops in the form of a smart phone.
To this day, I still think I would drop iPhone in a second if MS came out with a well thought out system along the lines I described above. The paradigm shift (or the twist in thinking) is that the phone is given life as an extension to the desktop experience rather than as an afterthought that behaves as a peripheral. It would be like a sci-fi movie where the person grabs an application from the screen, it materializes as a physical device in their hand and they walk away. When they get to the office they push it into their display and it melds into that system instantly. Sci-fi aside, that feeling and utility would be incredibly useful.
>"Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications, including browsers, would have been a huge step forward and a massive selling point for Windows Phone."
I feel like the hardware limitations of ~2005-2012 would have made this nigh impossible. I know a few ultra-portable devices were trying to do something like this around that time, but even then they were still well above the size of smartphones. Cellular data and bandwidth was also extremely limited at that time as well, so cloud style/thin client file access would also be impractical.
I can understand wanting to make a new OS/UI because the pocket PC experience was quite clunky and those devices did not have widespread adoption. There was also the novelty factor of using touch and gestures instead of a stylus. Anything resembling the windows/desktop paradigm would have been seen as antiquated. I'm sure Steve Jobs would have exploited that as strongly as he possibly could.
All in all, I like the concept you have presented. I just don't think that it would have been viable at the time and I can forgive Microsoft for making the choices they made back then.
> Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications, including browsers, would have been a huge step forward and a massive selling point for Windows Phone
What would be amazing about this? I have one subscription to Office365 and I can start working on a document on my Mac and then work on the sabe document on my iPhone, iPad or on the web. I can take calls from my Mac from my iPhone, copy and paste between them, bookmarks are shared, I can send a text message from my Mac, my AirPods seamlessly switch, my iPad works as a second display or I can use my keyboard and mouse to control both.
I'll cut-and-paste the relevant portion of another comment:
"I think the bit you missed before your reaction is that this comment was about the decisions MS made back then. Not now. Not today. In fact quite a few of the replies to my comment are from a current frame of reference."
That, in the context of that time, would have been amazing.
I paired my AirPods to my phone and they were automatically paired to my Watch, iPad, Mac, and two AppleTVs.
When I put the AirPods in my ear, whether I am on my Mac, iPad or iPhone, sound is automatically redirected.
If I am on my iPad watching a video, and I take a call or start watching something on my phone, the AirPods automatically switch to my phone and the video pauses on my iPad.
When I walk out the house for a run with just my cellular Apple Watch, I start listening to music on my Watch and it switches.
Switching isn’t automatic for an AppleTV since that would be irritating for a shared device. But it will display a pop up and ask do you want to switch.
I've always been a huge fan of how integrated Apple products are. I don't own a mac and only a single phone at a time, but even the integration between itunes on windows and that phone is surprisingly good.
I have 1st gen airpods. I've read bad things about the newer gens (malfunctions and the like). any experience with them?
My AirPod Pros 1st gen did get the buzzing problem after they were out of warranty. I just went into the local Apple Store and they replaced them for free.
> "Instead, they made a separate device. This was, from the perspective of desktop integration, 100% indistinguishable from any of the other offerings out there. "
They made a device which was worse than all of the existing devices. The initial version didn't have TCP /IP support, only HTTP. The app store was full of scams, etc.
There's a valid question about how much usage patterns differ on different form factors.
It feels like the last two points you make contradict each other: there's a huge difference between "extension to desktop" and "pick up desktop stuff and go".
Obviously, for a myriad of hardware and UI reasons, we're not doing the latter typically. The people demented enough to want desktop software in their pocket buy a GPD Win or the like.
The real issue is behaviour patterns, though. Give me the performance of my desktop in a six-inch pocketable device with two day battery life, and I'm still going to use it very differently.
Where do many of us spend most of our workdays? In an IDE or office suite. No matter what you do, you're not going to be able to shrink those down and be usable for anything but the most trivial tweaks on a six inch screen with a glass keyboard. We sort of saw this attempted in the early days of Windows CE/Pocket PC with its silly little Portable Office apps. A docking station might make it usable when I get BACK to a desk, but at that point, I may as well just be using the phone as an expensive flash drive for sneakernet.
Okay, maybe gaming? Potentially, if done right. Genshin Impact making 82 bazillion dollars out of a game that scales from phones to desktops is the poster child. But as anyone with a Steam Deck can demonstrate, you have to pick stuff that was designed to work well with the form factor. That undermines the dream of "the entire universe of cool stuff your desktop has to offer".
Media consumption? Even that's different. People may prefer local storage to streaming due to unreliable/slow/expensive mobile data, and the media they consume is often different too. I don't want to binge 90-minute episodes of anything on a phone.
So we've basically tossed out most of the obvious answers for "seamless desktop extension". This means one of two things:
1) We're drilling in the wrong place. The desktop extensions we need are such paradigm shifts nobody has even given us a good demo
2) The things that define the mobile ecosystem currently-- for example, apps that lean heavily on "it has GPS and cameras", lightweight games, low-commitment consumption of media-- shape the market because they're the best use cases we've found for the form factor.
I liked Windows Phone. I still have three of them in my box of bad mobile device decisions (somewhere I think there's a Palm Pre too) What I liked about it was that it seemed to have a clear and cohesive design language, and it was reliably snappy on cheap hardware. We've basically given up on the former, but Android has managed to close the gap somewhat on the latter, probably mostly through surfing on Moore's Law.
Microsoft could have had one other chance, but I think they've already blew it: as privacy is becoming a selling point (see Apple and DuckDuckGo marketing), positioning themselves as "we have a business model that's not 96% ad-dependent, so we're not going to sell out your personal life for a quick nickel" could have made them the trustworthy choice, but they've burnt through any credibility they had on that front in the last few years.
> Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications
What the hell are you talking about? What does this actually mean in real terms?
Right now Windows already desperately tries to do exactly what you're saying.[1] Do you want a PalmPilot-style sync app? iPad/Mac-style "Universal Control"?
Well, as you can clearly see, it did not. Sometimes --not always-- the right thing to do is to highlight such things.
I am perfectly satisfied with @Firmwarrior's response, which led to posting an explanation of my position. In other words, we had a conversation. Had things derailed into name calling you'd have a point. I did not appreciate you scolding me, but we are all big boys. I'll live.
Ah, sorry man. In my defense, you went on this long exposition that assumed implicitly that everyone at Microsoft has no idea what they're doing. I can appreciate that sentiment, but I got really frustrated trying to parse your "conceptually simple" idea.
Anyway, didn't mean to start a flame war, I was just hoping to make sense of what you were trying to say
I think the bit you missed before your reaction is that this comment was about the decisions MS made back then. Not now. Not today. In fact quite a few of the replies to my comment are from a current frame of reference. Even the link to the current Samsung/Windows integration misses the point (all you have to do is read the ridiculously complex installation and setup instructions to understand).
MS, back then, missed a golden opportunity to create a truly useful differentiated product that, in my opinion, would have had a very high probability of success. The bar wasn’t as high as it is today. Slick, seamless integration between phone and desktop would have been an amazing feature. No, that did not mean running CAD on your phone. Again, the context is 2010, not today. I think that was iPhone 3 era. Something as simple as being able to seamlessly make and receive calls, send and receive SMS and do the same with email with either device, desktop or phone, would have been magical back then. Take a call in the car while you arrive at the office, once you get to your desk you put on your headset and the call continues through your computer. You can send text or links from your PC via SMS to the other person. Record the conversation if needed (with legal provisions in place). Etc. Again, don’t think 2022, think 2010.
Everything is conceptually simple. It is easy to talk about ideas, quite another matter to actually implement them and do it well. Concepts are usually simple; reality is difficult.
It isn’t that MS was full of unintelligent people who don’t know what they are doing. Not at all. The history of business is full of stories of intelligent and very capable people completely missing the mark or failing to recognize a shift in their industry. There’s a great book about this very subject: The Innovators Dilemma. In fact, the author makes the argument that some of these bad decisions are the result of good management.
BTW, I used “seamless” to describe something that is intimately integrated to the system. No installation. Think of good USB peripherals that just work.
Everything you listed requires integration between the hardware and the software running in lockstep. By 2010, Apple had 4 years worth of experience releasing operating systems that shared features between the phone, computer and the iPad.
Apple has also started designing its own processors by then for the iPad and the iPhone 4.
Even the idea of taking a call from your phone and transferring to your computer using the same headset took a specialized processor and micro operating system on the headset to work on AirPods. Microsoft didn’t have tte hardware expertise then and still doesn’t.
Even today in 2022, the ARM processors that MS uses in their laptops are so bad that you can run x86 Windows programs running Windows ARM in a VM on a Mac faster than a Microsoft laptop.
As far as the Innovators Dilemma, the author was completely wrong about the iPhone.
Everything I listed was more than possible in 2010. I have been developing hardware/software products for 40 years. I have absolutely no doubt about that at all. The company that controlled the OS and hardware (MS) had all the freedom, smarts and capability to make that happen. All they lacked --conjecture on my part-- was the vision.
> As far as the Innovators Dilemma, the author was completely wrong about the iPhone.
Have you actually read the book? His iPhone predictions had nothing whatsoever to do with the core ideas, excellent historical perspective and analysis provided in Innovators Dilemma.
Quoting from the very link you provided (emphasis mine):
"It is Christensen’s second theory of disruption – low-end disruption – that I believe is flawed. Christensen first described this theory in Disruption, Disintegration and the dissipation of differentiability, and expanded on it in The Innovator’s Solution. It is this theory that is at the basis of Christensen’s critique of Apple quoted above."
> Everything I listed was more than possible in 2010
Microsoft could have designed a processor like what was in the AirPods in 2010? Five years before Apple?
Besides, by 2010, Apple was already the best in the business at supply chain management and was manufacturing more high end devices than anyone in the world.
What high performance hardware was Microsoft shipping in 2010? The state of the art mobile hardware in 2010 was Apple’s ARM A4 - a 32 bit single core processor that ran from 800Mhz - 1Ghz. It could barely run Safari by 2011 let alone a full office suite.
> Have you actually read the book? His iPhone predictions had nothing whatsoever to do with the core ideas, excellent historical perspective and analysis provided in Innovators Dilemma.
He tried to apply his “low end disruption theory” from the 60s and he was completely wrong about Apple.
> Microsoft could have designed a processor like what was in the AirPods in 2010? Five years before Apple?
The features that would have been ground-breaking at the time did not require the kinds of advanced processors we have today. Not even close. This stuff isn't all that complex. Yes, it would have taken time and effort to implement, yet none of it was anywhere close to impossible for 2010.
Perhaps you are not a hardware engineer? Like I said, none of what I mentioned was impossible or challenging in 2010. Hard work? Yes, of course.
> by 2010, Apple was already the best in the business at supply chain management
No, not really. Excellent, without a doubt, of course.
> It could barely run Safari by 2011 let alone a full office suite.
Again, context is important here. What would have been disruptive in 2010 had nothing to do with running a full office suite or CAD on your phone in 2010. I had both an iPhone and Windows Phone back then. MS could have provided what I would call next-generation integration with the desktop using the hardware of the day. More than capable.
It wasn't an issue of 2010 technology not being adequate for the implementation of such integration. It was a matter of vision, direction or both. Someone, for whatever reason, simply did not make that decision. The decision MS seemed to make at the time was to try to go head-to-head with the iPhone with a product that, in my opinion, did not offer an attractive-enough value proposition. As a result, it was doomed to go nowhere almost from inception.
> He tried to apply his “low end disruption theory” from the 60s and he was completely wrong about Apple.
I think you missed my point. This is not part of "Innovators Dilema". The erroneous prediction you correctly noted was part of different work by the same author.
> No, not really. Excellent, without a doubt, of course.
By 2010, Apple was shipping 50 million iPhones a year and had just started shipping iPads. Under Tim Cook, Apple had been buying up the majority of flash storage for years between the iPods and the iPhone.
Also, while you “appeal to authority”. It’s not like you can’t find information on the web about how far ahead Apple was already starting to become by 2010. In 2013, they shipped a 64 bit mobile CPU years before every one else.
It’s hard to manufacture hardware at scale especially when you can’t just be a piece assembly like Dell and you have to design everything yourself and get third party hardware manufacturers to cooperate.
> I think you missed my point. This is not part of "Innovators Dilema". The erroneous prediction you correctly noted was part of different work by the same author.
How do automated birthing pods and human biomass recyclers affect user identity verification compliance and lifecycle testing requirements? I don't think your plan is well thought out.
Microsoft is "early" to VR because it was already a player in VR and has very long been "early". Microsoft has been investing in AR/MR/VR research since before the original Surface, not the tablet one but the giant table that got rebranded and then sold off, and since before the original Kinect. Microsoft is still making plenty of HoloLens devices (some on huge contracts) despite them not being "sexy". Windows 10 has had AR/MR/VR apps bundled for a long time despite most users never using them.
It's hard for it to be a "full circle" when for the most part it looks like a straight line. The surprise shift here isn't in Microsoft but in Meta finally asking for help and partners after seeming to believe they could do it all on their own.
That's not the point of the title. The point of the article (and their coverage of MS for years) is that Microsoft used to be all about Windows: An operating system that abstracts hardware and enables first- and third-party apps. And now they making themselves about a system that abstracts hardware and runs apps again, but across a spectrum of devices and front-to-back. The common element is now the user and their account, not the single PC it runs on.
I also think it's obvious, but then salient things are. Consumers today don't decide between PC vendors and operating systems, but between entire company-branded computing ecosystems. Are you on the Google or Apple or Amazon train?
Things Stratechery doesn't discuss enough and this article is poor about:
- Unlike in the Windows days, in the new competing-ecosystems world, geopolitics plays a much grander role. Everyone used to be on Windows, not everyone is on Google. China, Korea, Russia all have their own ecosystem juggernauts. In our globally interconnected world, computing has become somehow less globalized recently.
- Microsoft doing VR stuff on Facebook's platform is totally in line with their observations on Microsoft's strategy going forward, but Microsoft and Facebook also compete on the ecosystem front, and the implications of this are just brushed over here as that's not the article, but it would be a more interesting one.
- The really interesting thing that sets these different companies apart is their revenue sources. Apple sells hardware (and content and lifestyle), Microsoft sells enterprise software subscriptions and cloud, Google sells ad space and cloud.
This feels like a Citation Needed assumption both in this comment and in the article. Again, there's too much of a straight line here: Microsoft has always been one of (if not the) largest software development companies for the Macintosh. That has never changed.
We all know Ballmer was a huge Windows cheerleader and "home team supporter" and wanted to make sure that the best experiences were always on Windows. But he never killed Macintosh support. He championed the iPad versions of Office that Nadella is credited for (which the article even points out!). The closest Microsoft ever came to being "Windows only" was maybe the brief glimmer of optimism under Nadella where the Windows 10 team briefly imagined that every device could run Windows (and then felt the crushing disappointment to realize that most wouldn't).
Again, it doesn't look like a full circle to me but a mostly straight line with a few zigs and zags if you zoom in micro-enough. I understand where some of this is coming from that Microsoft did have years, especially under Ballmer, where they seemed to care too much about Windows, but Microsoft was never "just" The Windows Company in any era.
Not true. IBM was one of the top 10 most profitable companies in the world as recently as 2015.
After adjusting for real inflations rates, inclusive of asset inflation, they actually made greater profits some years then either Google or Meta or Amazon do today.
You're of course right, I was exaggerating for effect. What I mean is that the PC stole a lot of other people's lunches, and PCs across the world had an almost equal likelihood across the world to be running Windows, and that mattered when the PC and what you could run on it (i.e. the app format) mattered.
Now it doesn't matter all that much anymore if you're on a Mac or a Windows or a Linux computer. You can largely use the same apps and services across them (with the exception of gaming, which, as an interesting aside, is now much better on Linux than on Mac). Anyone expending the effort to make a new app will usually build them that way, while in the past, you had a lot of platform exclusives.
But what is new and interesting is that a Google account doesn't deliver you as much value in South Korea because a lot of its services are unavailable or bad there, while it's nigh on impossible to live without a Kakao account, which in turn is entirely optional in, well, most everywhere else.
I find it fascinating that the global reach of user-centric/service-oriented computing is less than the reach of the previous device-oriented computing. It's certainly also not true that geopolitics have never mattered before in computing and reaching users, but I'd say they matter more than ever before.
When things were device-oriented whoever had the better devices naturally got easy footholds in every country. Since any country that tries to outcompete the world leading products would have needed to invest vast sums of money. And even then 90% of the supply chain would still be in the typical locations.
It simply made sense for everyone to leave the multi-billion dollar investments to a few multinationals, at least for consumer products.
The only real exception being Japan pre-iPhone, when they had the manufacturing diversity to make nearly everything domestically and enough wealthy consumers who also didn't care much for international interoperability. And even then the major Japanese firms were making very slim profits.
Whereas since the entry bar for creating competitive software is so much lower, many countries can afford to nurture genuinely homegrown products, and have a reasonable expectation that they will be competitive.
> Whereas since the entry bar for creating competitive software is so much lower, many countries can afford to nurture genuinely homegrown products, and have a reasonable expectation that they will be competitive.
I don't think it's that. It's that eg. Kakao has KakaoTalk, a chat app. And chat apps tend towards monopolies and oligopolies because of network effects. The value of the app is less in how good it is, and more in who else uses it.
If you're just buying a music player or an office suite for a common file format, what you use doesn't really matter to anyone else, and their choices to you.
Chat apps, collaboration platforms? Suddenly, who else uses them matters a lot, since it's about the people, not the physical function. And once you get big enough, the network effects turns from a hurdle into a gigantic moat.
> If you're just buying a music player or an office suite for a common file format, what you use doesn't really matter to anyone else, and their choices to you.
The question of how many people use any given physical product, such as music players, certainly matters to supply chain executives and factory managers at the very least.
Because the same network effects applies to manufactured products, notably in economics of scale.
More generally, it's true that KakaoTalk benefits from network effects, but Facebook Korea could have benefited from the same.
It's just that a homegrown Korean chat app is viable against Facebook Korea because the entry bar is lower, whereas a homegrown Korean iPod would have been laughable against Apple, even in Korea.
There's very few people that would have paid 5x more for an all Korean iPod, but most are fine with being slightly inconvenient by Kakao's smaller international userbase.
> The surprise shift here isn't in Microsoft but in Meta finally asking for help and partners after seeming to believe they could do it all on their own
This isn’t a surprise given the sales numbers of hardware and DAU of meta online properties. While they are the clear leader in VR, given how great the Quest 2 and its original pricing were it should have had much higher sales numbers and usage. That result also wasn’t a surprise given that the Facebook brand was so toxic to the masses, that even changing names to meta hasn’t mitigated it yet in the short term. The name change will pay off eventually for younger generations who aren’t very familiar with Facebook, but that day is about a decade away
Initially I thought MS might have learned from missing out on mobile to get ahead in AR/MR/VR and be a device and platform leader. It seems what they learned is to give up before entering and focus on partnering instead. That is something they've always succeeded at PC+DOS, IBM+WindowsNT, Apple+Office, JavaVM.
To me it does seem a low target to aim for. VSCode shows they can execute, but for some reason when the stakes are higher they don't do as well Windows Phone, Edge browser, etc. I suppose I could call that corporate self-awareness.
Here specifically too: Microsoft has such a weird lead in AR/MR/VR and have mostly just been sitting on it. For example, because of early Kinect work, they own the patents that would have made Meta's weird journey between "no legs" to "everyone gets legs if they want them! excitement!" irrelevant or much faster had the partnership happened sooner. They built the first "metaverse cloud" on Azure and they've used it and they've made something as exciting in theory as the HoloLens boring Enterprise products.
The other possible takeaway is that after Windows Phone, Microsoft really has been truly risk adverse when it comes to consumer products, even in areas where they had a lead and could have delivered something no one else could.
> VSCode shows they can execute, but for some reason when the stakes are higher they don't do as well Windows Phone
Windows Phone was arguably very well executed at the software level. Microsoft's troubles with Windows Phone were at the hardware levels and (worse) the economic levels where the phone carriers had already decided they prefer a duopoly and selling three things is one too many things to sell.
We've had this argument more than once and I still disagree with that take. I took a .NET application through those transitions and there was never a "from scratch rewrite" step at any point. A lot of cheese moved and there was sometimes quite a bit of XAML shifts to meet new UI expectations, but most of the business logic code stayed the same or barely changed. On the other side, I've seen Apple enforce equal or worse "enforced" rewrites between major iOS versions with not even a fraction of the complaints Microsoft got across those product versions.
(I had more inconvenience moving apps back and forth between WPF and Silverlight in some of the years prior, and even those moves were never from-scratch rewrites. Admittedly that may have left me with more skills to handle XAML changes and write to lowest common denominator XAML, so I am aware of my biases.)
I realize you aren't ever going to agree with me on this, and I don't expect you to. I do think it is still useful for other people to see that there are counter-opinions here.
The difference of course is that iOS already has enough adoption to get away with this. Windows Phone and Windows UI development forked for no good reason while keeping very similar names and structures while trying to get initial adoption. It was clearly a mistake at that stage. I personally looked into the tech and as soon as I saw how fragmented it was realized MS didn't have a good plan and didn't venture developing for it.
Windows Phone 7 was pretty clear [1] it was a temporary platform (bootstrapped on Silverlight) while they waited for the engineering projects that were to become Windows Phone 8 finished. Microsoft helped pay to migrate some projects across that hump and there was a migration story.
That's the only "hard fork" between the versions. I know a lot of people (including respondents in neighboring comments) saw the changes between WP8 and WP10 as a big deal "soft fork", but very little actually changed other than a UI library upgrade from 1.x to 2.x. (In .NET; JS was dropped in 2.x and C/C++ developers saw some other shenanigans. But JS and C/C++ didn't exist in WP7 either so none of those developers saw all three "migrations" either.)
I hear a lot from developers that it seemed very fragmented, but working in it at the time, it seemed very "incremental" at best, mostly just upgrading library major versions and dealing with semver major breaking breaks. Sure, that's frustrating when that's not your primary development environment and also you aren't getting paid enough for it because adoption is low, but that is a very far cry from "Microsoft didn't have a good plan". They were iterating hard on it. They made some semver breaks that other library authors in other ecosystems could get away with no problem, even with equally low adoption (looking at random JS libraries here). It's easy to blame low adoption for making those semver major breaks seem more painful and "fragmented" than they actually were in practice, but sometimes it just also looks like that was an excuse to ignore the platform more than a problem for development experience reality. (As you seem to state that you skipped the platform entirely, possibly because you were looking for an excuse to skip it and latched onto the first one you saw.)
IIRC, there was also dev kits for Windows RT around the same time with the same or similar names which added to incompatibilities and confusion. The only sharable source was non-UI core code, or perhaps hand-altered variations of UI file type contents.
It's one thing to develop versions for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. It's another if the UX source elements can't be shared within the MS ecosystem Phone, RT, x86 metro apps.
Apple can get away with a lot more given its dominant market position (esp. when it comes to delivering paying customers to app authors). But when you're the new scrappy contender with minimal market share, so you need the devs to make apps for your store rather than the other way around, it better be smooth sailing all around.
> Windows was demoted to one section of the company’s Surface announcements held as a precursor to the main event.
We see this with Windows and with MacOS. MacOS's downfall is the more visible one.
The OS is no longer prioritized except where it needs to be somewhat presentable in screenshots. The OS becomes a vehicle to sell company goods. The OS rots to the point that there's no one left at the company with even the most basic competence to create first-party apps for it.
Because the money is elsewhere.
I wonder at which point this neglect makes the OS so unusable that it actively hurts the development of the money-making machines.
Though strangely enough MS would survive this better than Apple.
Anyone doing Windows desktop development can definitly feel this.
After the mismanagement of WinRT, finally fixed with UWP on Windows 10, instead of improving the .NET Native and C++/CX experience, they created Project Reunion, deprecated .NET Native and C++/CX, replacing them with lesser tooling, pivoted Project Reunion into Windows SDK, and are years away of reaching feature parity with UWP, let alone Forms, WPF, MFC.
The current team seems composed by interns without experience on previous Microsoft frameworks, while the more experienced folks seem to have moved into Azure, Google or Amazon, from their twitter feeds.
Just have some fun going through the WinUI, CsWinRT, C++/WinRT, WinAppSDK, Win2D, and see the endless amount of bug tickets, measured in thousands.
Blazour seems to be the new kid in town, to the point of even trying to push it inside MAUI as pseudo-Electron replacement.
Meanwhile the other business units are focused on Web or Android.
Windows really is a clusterf*k right now. In addition to the mess of frameworks that you talk about, Windows 11 has been a mess. From the random Bing-related crap getting increasingly prevalent and pervasive around the OS to the TPM fiasco (they originally let you install it on non-supported hardware but are now withholding updates). From the feature regression (e.g., taskbar is now immovable) to the yet-another-redesign that they teased/leaked during Build this year.
At this point, I'd prefer an Azure OS that I could install locally and have the Windows team slowly transition to supporting Wine, improving Linux DEs/Wayland (or even create their own DE), since I believe that they're using some Wayland compositor (mutter?) for gWSL anyways, and contributing to the Linux kernel, which they're already doing to some degree. I genuinely don't know how feasible that is and I'm aware it's wishful thinking, but a person can dream.
Then again, it would probably be to the Linux community's detriment and they'd just do the same scummy Bing/telemetry/dark pattern crap to foster ad revenue.
Only the taskbar's icons can be aligned to the center or the bottom left of the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. The taskbar cannot be moved to the left, right or top of the screen in Windows 11, a huge regression.
I didn’t even realize that widgets were so under-developed? I legit thought I’d look into writing one today as I suddenly had a use case. Apparently at the moment the only way to write one is Win32 flavored C++ and a bunch of COM Black Magic. One would assume from their marketing that they’d have at least started at .NET. But instead it’s C++ and Someday(TM) PWAs (via Edge I assume) can provide widgets.
That just runs completely counter to all the Dev Experience marketing you get from them. It feels like Widgets were slapped together by the kernel team at the last minute.
When Longhorn failed, mostly due to WinDev sabotage[0], they doubled down on using COM, hence why since Vista all major Windows APIs are COM based, and if we are lucky there are some .NET bindings as well.
WinRT is basically the evolution of this, going back to the design board as if .NET never happened, hence .NET Native and C++/CX abstracting what is basically COM + IInspectable + .NET metadata instead of TLB + App Identity.
WinRT eventually became UWP, as they improved the developer experience, only to kill .NET Native, replace C++/CX with C++/WinRT (similar dev experience as using ATL), and move that infrastructure on top of standard COM on Win32 side.
So now you have classical COM, and Windows Runtime components are the modern COM.
Meanwhile DevDiv seems to have had enough of this and decided to focus on .NET with cross platform experience, and Web technologies, hence why even Visual Studio is quite lacking on WinUI tooling.
[0] - If they really cared they would have doubled down on it like Android and ChromeOS did, and all those C# 7 - 11 performance improvements would have been done at the time.
I noticed the same, I can’t believe the inexperience of the developers Microsoft has picked to work on these important frameworks. It appears like a form of self sabotage.
Do you actually use macOS? It actually works. Unlike most of windows these days. There is near parity across all platforms on all apple apps and functions. I can transition from any device to another one smoothly.
People don’t care about that. They want the computer to go away and actually stop bugging them.
No it doesn't, not for me. I don't work at MSFT and I own both a Windows machine and a Mac M1 for work. Simple things like my gaming mouse and wanting larger fonts on my 1440p monitor don't work without cumbersome hacks through buggy hobby software. My windows computer works flawlessly among other advantages such as a large software library right out of the box.
I respect people who prefer Macs to PCs, but stop speaking about it like it is some universal truth.
Ah yes, the good ol' Linux "You're holding it wrong" mantra.
Look, I don't know about you, but I don't have unlimited time to go fiddle with whatever emulation layer is there to make some game from 2017 work well on a modern Mac. Not only that, but Apple has proven, time and time again, that they completely do not care about backwards compatibility, which is crucial for games, so let's not pretend that the "manufacturer" (assuming you're talking about the game developers here) is at fault - nobody has unlimited time to adjust their product on the whims of the folks in Cupertino.
Here's the reality - on Windows, I can still play DOS games. On macOS, with the latest OS release, 90% of my Steam library cannot be used (that were all perfectly fine before the update) because Apple decided to remove support for 32-bit apps. So sticking to Windows for gaming is the logical choice if you want access to the latest and greatest titles and not a selection of a few that are "hacked around".
You're being unfair to Linux if you think Windows doesn't do the same "you're not supposed to do that" every time you step out of a nice path. Or even with the nice path it'll suddenly decide it's time to worsen your experience to improve their marketing or data mining.
There's awesome Linux experiences out there and the Steam deck is starting to show what's possible giving varying levels of control.
We live in exciting times. The more choice, the better.
On Mac, your apps reliably break. On Windows, they never break. It's not whether there's a right way and a wrong way, it's whether the right way stands at complete odds to how anyone actually wants to use the computer. Sure, Linux has a reasonable experience most of the time - that has nothing to do with Mac, and in fact has very little to do with Linux or its community either; Steam has nearly single-handedly made it work. The same way Windows tries to make it work, and the way Mac notably tries not to.
Steam Deck is nice, but let's not kid ourselves that it's anywhere close to what Windows has to offer. Most games in my Steam library still are not Steam Deck compatible, and chances are they never will either because they are too old or because they require new OS components that embed themselves around kernel APIs (separate conversation on whether that is good or bad).
Again - not necessarily saying that the Windows experience is ideal, but it's the absolute best out of the available options.
Eh, I use macOS, Windows, and Ubuntu pretty regularly, and they're all pretty much fine. macOS gets in my way the most, but it's not significant trouble.
Other workflows than mine would probably have different results.
One of the other complaints you here on HN is that software is changing for sake of change rather than remaining relatively stable once the core feature-set has been built out. Well, MacOS strikes a pretty good balance on that score. They introduce new features, but haven't radically changed anything in a long time ... and that enables people to get work done.
I've been on MacOS for 15 years now. The iOSification and changes for changes' sake in the past years is evident to everyone. As for incompetence, it's enough to look at the new settings app that they shipped basically unchanged since the clusterfuck during betas and fixing only the most superficial of bugs.
In your own way, you are correct, but so are people who have the completely opposite experience. In our industry (biotech manufacturing) we rely Windows for everything. All the apps we use are Windows only. For us, there is no "parity across all platforms".
Yeah it's the same in my industry for some parts of it as well.
But that doesn't mean it works. It's literally only there because it is entrenched. A lot of the time it doesn't work and has an extremely large support cost.
It's not really just my view. You might be a lucky outlier. I get to sit on a lot of calls with tens of large and small organisations who have serious troubles on a daily basis. I've seen some real horrors out there. Independently everyone just thinks this is the status quo.
Microsoft is only early to VR because it universally screwed everything else up. Wrapping all this text around it and marketing bullshit is disingenuous.
What is the truth is that they had all the opportunities and staff and squandered both on mismanagement and quality issues and continue to do so to this day. What we have left is pissed off customers, pissed off developers and a declining market position other than where they could lock businesses in. The only market keeping them alive is entrenchment and naive MSPs and retail pushing their crap.
I look forward to their VR strategy going down the toilet with Meta, where it belongs.
Fire the board. Kill off the marketing situation which is basically lies at this point, remove telemetry from your products, invest in QA again rather than getting “insiders” to do it, remove decades of bloat and build quality not quantity and perhaps people will have confidence again.
They didn't quite screw everything up. Cloud is making a killing. Office monthly subs is a goldmine, and Windows online subs will be too. That's why they constantly talk cloud, it's their new bread and butter. And, in a highly related way, Xbox is also killing it. They have half the hardware sales, but their Xbox live ultimate sub is awesome. Lots of games, pretty cheap, and pretty, pretty recurring revenue. Oh, recurring revenue that feeds their cloud a gigantic customer, too. They went so far as to force most games to be compatible with both the new and old generation of Xbox's, so they could keep getting Xbox sub money. This has been successful enough that Sony has both been forced to do likewise, and Sony has resorted to the courts to stop it.
It isn't dissimilar to other missteps they made in the past as well. Early tablets powered by Windows XP. Windows CE and embedded. Phones.
Their wins are massive. Really enterprise and XBOX lately (no doubt more, but just off the top of my head), but I've considered Windows only marginally usable for years, and that's more based on legacy, but it still has a place bloated as it is. It's an essential OS and platform, but with no focus -- they're just shuffling the same deck chairs UX wise, though no doubt improving the scaffolding bits.
Once bitten twice shy. It actually looks the other way: after the mobile and browser debacles, I think they got multiple things right: Cloud, XBox, Github, LinkedIn...one thing though is you don't see much cohesion between these services which Google and others seem to be much better.
They recently catch up WRT to console sales, but that was due to
Sony's supply chain issues, since that one resolved, they are failing behind yet again, despite selling the Xbox at a loss! Sony doesn't
About Azure, their growth is not organic, specially when you consider they have been fined multiple times WRT corruption
About Github, it was already a thing and very popular before the acquisition, let's not forget that, otherwise it wouldn't have sold for that much, and outages are now lot more common than before ;)
> Finally, the clear and obvious win for MS in the console space is their Xbox Game Pass subscription.
Xbox game pass cost them money, it's not a sustainable business model, it's the bastardization of gaming, we'll see how it performs in the future when they'll stop pumping money into it to attract studios/users
Cloud gaming is the future, so that strategy could be a win for them, BUT, it's a very distant future, the current infrastructure doesn't permit it, it's very niche
I can't say they got cloud or github right. Both are major friction points for a lot of companies I know. Particularly O365, OneDrive and Intune are complete administrative nightmares riddled with bugs. Even Office on the desktop is a shit show now thanks to all the cloud integration.
And GitHub is popular but seriously so so so not right in many ways.
What they have succeeded in doing is merely centralising leverage and forcing entrenchment.
Sony managed to do VR at scale properly many years ago for their PlayStation
The fact that a trillion dollar company failed is insane to me, this plus the poor reception of the Hololens by the army.. there is something that's not working at the HW/R&D microsoft divisions
Just insane, whoever is managing these teams should step down, laying off 1k people every once in a while won't change anything if that's to repeat the same mistakes with the same execs
If Facebook had built Gliphy from the ground up, there wouldn’t be a problem. Besides MS is not a monopoly with messaging. Are you saying that bo company should be allowed to include a free messaging app?
> Are you saying that bo company should be allowed to include a free messaging app?
No. I'm saying that it kills the messaging app market to have the de facto monopoly company for office software release a basically-free messaging app for offices.
If you haven’t checked, tte messaging app market is far from dead. It’s not like Slack is some tiny startup. It’s owned by Salesforce. Not to mention Google has like five messaging apps by itself.
There is also no “monopoly” in the office software space. Apple and Google have alternatives
I have checked; this move is likely the main reason why Slack was for sale. Slack even tried to make an anticompetition claim against Microsoft for this reason [0].
> So in that case should all software companies not be allowed to bundle anything?
We're talking in the domain of anticompetitiveness, where a market-dominant company can release below-average products, and because of their market position it's impossible to compete.
> This is where Teams thrives: if you fully commit to the Microsoft ecosystem, one app combines your contacts, conversations, phone calls, access to files, 3rd-party applications, in a way that “just works”; I explained my personal experience with Teams in a December 2018 Daily Update:
> > Here’s the thing, though: Dropbox absolutely is better than OneDrive. Google Apps are better at collaboration than Microsoft’s Office apps. Asana is better than Planner. And, to be very clear, Slack is massively better than Teams at chat. Using all of them together, though, well, it sucks: the user experience that matters for me is not any one app but all of them at once, and for the way I want to work, having everything organized in one single place is simply better (and that’s even with the normal spate of maddening Microsoft UI oddities!). In this Teams is less a chat app than it is a file explorer for the cloud generally, and Stratechery LLC specifically.
> This is what Slack — and Silicon Valley, generally — failed to understand about Microsoft’s competitive advantage: the company doesn’t win just because it bundles, or because it has a superior ground game. By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, particularly for the non-tech workers that are in fact most of the market. Slack may have infused its chat client with love, but chatting is a means to an end, and Microsoft often seems like the only enterprise company that understands that.
I don't disagree, although I think the biggest advantage they have is that Microsoft sells to its customers (IT and finance departments) and not its users. One bill and one vendor is better than 8 of each.
Right, a reasonable person would understand that in order to map the pronunciation of "strategery" to "stratechery", you would substitute "TEK" for "TEEJ".
> the entire reason why Windows faltered as a strategic linchpin is that it was tied to a device — the PC — that was disrupted by a paradigm shift in hardware. Microsoft 365, on the other hand, is attached to the customer
This part doesn't make sense. Windows was no more tied to PC/Intel hardware than macOS was. Windows was ported to phones. The problems that are hurting Windows are organizational, not some inherent attribute of the OS itself.
"Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware, because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. Right now the abstraction of hardware has to start by abstracting all of the hardware in your life, so the notion that this is one device is interesting and important, it doesn’t mean the kernel that boots your device just goes away, it still exists, but the point of real relevance I think in our lives is “hey, what’s that abstraction of all the hardware in my life that I use?” – some of it is shared, some of it is personal. And then, what’s the app model for it? How do I write an experience that transcends all of that hardware? And that’s really what our pursuit of Microsoft 365 is all about."
The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life". I use a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an iPhone interchangeably in my life. When I switch between them pretty much nothing changes - I have access to the same core apps: Office, Obsidian, 1Password, web browser. If there were a new device, say some kind of headset, I suspect that would plug right into my existing ecosystem of hardware and software. There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft. That could change of course, but there are so many interesting problems to solve along the way.
Disclosure: I work at Microsoft.