I agree that he will probably not be remembered for having more than doubled revenue and almost tripled profits. He will not be remembered for transforming Microsoft into one of the most important enterprise software companies. Not for introducing .NET, C# or Kinect either. All of that will be forgotten.
He will be remembered for missing mobile. He will also be remembered for caring a lot about developers and about developers and about developers as well. The VB6 folks will still hate him ;-)
It's hard to disagree with sarcasm on the internet. But in this case you are absolutely correct.
Microsoft used to control the future of computing. Now they are yet another enterprise software company with no apparent mission except to make money.
The lay somewhere on a continuum with IBM, Oracle, SAP all the way through to companies like CA. At one end of that spectrum they do research and produce software that people use to do their job 0.5% better than they used to. At the other end they may as well be accounting companies for all the impact they have on the future.
Yes, they make money. And yes, I admit they try to compete with consumer oriented technology companies and have some interesting products. But you are 100% correct - Microsoft is now primarily an enterprise software company.
Meanwhile Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc look toward the future.
There is a tendency to believe that the companies which are doing well right now have 'won' in some sense. We need to understand that this is the state of affairs right now. There is a non-trivial possibility that Facebook/Google etc become lumbering giants just like MSFT.
>There is a non-trivial possibility that Facebook/Google etc become lumbering giants just like MSFT.
It might already be true, how do you distinguish between a lumbering giant and not without the help of hindsight? The public consensus on such things lags a few years behind reality.
What signs have you seen in 2013 that Google is not a lumbering giant?
Microsoft's approach was different: let others innovate, then we'll dominate. Others would come up with new stuff, and Microsoft would "embrace and extend" whatever got traction in the market by adding it to their near-monopoly OS/app stack at whatever price served the purpose of eliminating the inventor and taking their market.
This strategy always made Gates paranoid, because the risk was that some alternative to the MS stack would take off too quickly to be killed. Without their near monopoly power as a weapon, they would have no special competitive advantage.
What they feared happened in the mid-90's when the Web took off and the browser/Java combo threatened to be a universal VM on top of every PC. Gates fought back with every weapon he had to fragment the universality of the meta-platform. He was able to greatly slow, but not stop, the emergence of an OS-independent Web, because he controlled the majority of the OS market underneath it.
But then the second shoe dropped. Mobile came along and MS was not able to stop its explosive growth. The growth of mobile made MS just another minority OS underneath the Web, and they lost their ability to disrupt the standardization of the Web platform. They were in the position they had always feared: having to support the standards of others or be abandoned by their customers as the Web became the new monopoly platform.
If Ballmer could have created the mPhone and mPad and given away for free an mOS for phones that was a mini, modified version of .Net, maybe they could have kept the Web fragmented and continued their platform dominance, but whether that was even possible (MS did things second, not first, was only a minor hardware developer, and seldom gave things away except when tied to something they sold), I'll never know. Gates got to wield monopoly power; Ballmer didn't.
MS's monopoly-based business model has to be abandoned, but do they have any other? They'll come up with something, as IBM did, but I don't think they'll ever be leaders again, because they didn't really "lead" before, except in market share.
Google's business model (expand the Web platform for free, dominate Web advertising, and employ an army of PhDs looking for something besides advertising to do) is nothing like Microsoft's. If they ever lost advertising, they'd go down harder than MS, and they could lose it if they ever lost much search mindshare.
And Facebook? They're a website. They are completely dependent on the psychological inertia of their users, which I wouldn't bet on long term.
"(MS did things second, not first, was only a minor hardware developer, and seldom gave things away except when tied to something they sold)"
This is where Jobs learned a lesson from his first time running Apple.
Apple introduced such a polished product for an initial launch, and iterated so fast with iPhone that the market was already taken before Microsoft understood what was happening. I can imagine Gates responding to iPhone with an emergency memo like he famously did with the web, but Ballmer didn't seem to understand the significance of this new market being created until it was too late.
I remember his first reaction was to laugh at the iPhone for being too expensive. It's hard to think of any better example of missing the entire point.
But it WAS too expensive. The fact that the iPhone price dropped within two months of it being introduced is proof of that. And you have to remember, that most touch phones sucked at the time, and they ALL sucked if they didn't have a stylus, and it was a really, really, big deal to have an all touch interface that truly worked.
And, it wasn't as if Microsoft didn't have a mobile OS. Windows Mobile always worked decently, but never was just truly great. And it never focused on being just for phones. It was adaptable to any type of mobile environments, like Android is trying to do right now.
It is also more difficult to implement new technologies on top of old ones, which was Microsoft's first choice when they tried to make the phone part of Windows Mobile more modern, until they realized that that house of cards wouldn't stand. Then they did a rewrite of, which lead to Windows 7.
So, from Microsoft's point of view, it was a limited phone, that had no way of adding apps, no business functionality, no keyboard for typing, no true enterprise security, and for a whole lot of money, only available on AT&T. I too thought that the original iPhone wasn't that great, only marginally better than the ROKR E1, functionality-wise. Though, I did think that that original iPhone screen was truly awesome.
So, let's not come down to, to hard on Balmer for not recognizing the iPhone at first for the threat it came to be.
If you watch jobs unveil the iPhone, there is a moment, when speaking of three new revolutionary devices being released that day (http://youtu.be/0KfrSzyXmiw?t=1m5s), he says "the first one is wide screen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.", repeats the line, and then chuckles as everyone realizes that they're all one device... I remember streaming that live and thinking: "Holy crap, phones don't suck anymore". If Balmer watched that and laughed at it, I'm going to be hard on him. He had the chance to react and he let Jobs walk away with it. So many people, including me, we're just waiting for a cell phone that didn't suck.
But as a leader of technology, Ballmer should have realized that in the early stage, new technology is expensive, and people (particularly fans of apple) will buy. The iPod only a few years earlier was also too expensive, and had a bunch off early tech 'flaws' ( Mac only, FireWire only, etc), yet came to dominate the market, and Microsoft couldn't catch up. Ballmer, or the other senior leaders at MS should have recognized the iPhone as the evolution of the iPod.
Everything is too expensive when it first comes out. The first cars were so expensive that building a car that the men on the assembly line could afford was an innovation (so was using an assembly line). Ballmer himself probably remembers when microcomputers were fairly expensive. Maybe he laughed at his college buddies for dropping out to write microcomputer software and start a company on that premise. But if he didn't learn his lesson in his decades in the tech industry, I don't know what he thought he was doing at Microsoft.
It's entirely possible that he recognized the threat but had to denigrate it for public consumption. But even if he says exactly that in his memoirs, nobody will believe him.
> Microsoft's approach was different: let others innovate, then we'll dominate.
XBox, Surface and ergonomic keyboards would beg to differ. Not mentioning the countless other innovations that didn't become as popular as these ones.
I know the Hacker News hive mind likes to perpetuate the myth that Microsoft doesn't innovate but it innovates at least as much as, if not more than, Google and Apple.
I'm speechless. Well, almost. Apple revolutionized the music industry, how music is sold, and how it's listened to. It revolutionized phones. Its iPad changed consumer computing, media consumption, user interface expectations.... Five year olds are totally at home on an iPad and think a screen without touch "isn't working". As they get older, all screens will have to conform to the new reality. They revolutionized shopping for music, movies, and apps. They revolutionized brick and mortar retailing with the most profitable stores of all time.
And Google has changed human access to information so profoundly that I can't adequately explain to my kids what it was like growing up in a world so cut off from things other people knew. Google Earth is something from science fiction. Street View lets me get to know my way around a town before I travel there. I can take my kids for a walk past my old homes in four different countries. Astonishing. And Google's self-driving cars may make driving off-limits to humans in another few years.
Then there's Microsoft, with thousands of smart people working for decades with billions of dollars of resources to work with---the most powerful of them all until what feels like "recently" to me. And the evidence of their innovative power: we have one of several game platforms, a billion-dollar write-off tablet that they can't give away, and a kind of keyboard that accounts for less than 1% of keyboards in use today. Oh, and other stuff that "didn't become as popular as these".
I'm not saying they never came up with anything new. I'm saying that relative to their size and resources, their innovations were trivial. Their huge impact on business, on consumer use of the Internet, on the tech industry, on governments, and so on, came not from revolutionary innovation but primarily from their relentless efforts to monopolize markets.
Of course, the lifeblood of a company is profit, not innovation. Without subsidies from ad revenues, Google's innovations could dry up quickly, and cheap knock-offs could eventually take away most of the markets Apple has revolutionized. But even if their profits prove short-lived, their amazing contributions to society will live on. I doubt many in the future will feel the same about Microsoft's contributions.
Then there's Microsoft, with thousands of smart people working for decades with billions of dollars of resources to work with---the most powerful of them all until what feels like "recently" to me. And the evidence of their innovative power: we have one of several game platforms, a billion-dollar write-off tablet that they can't give away, and a kind of keyboard that accounts for less than 1% of keyboards in use today. Oh, and other stuff that "didn't become as popular as these".
This is not really fair, and I'm sure you realise that. As a random selection, and in roughly decreasing order of significance from "world defining" to "things you'd really miss if they weren't there":
We have a standardised desktop operating system that is familiar to nearly every computer user on the planet, with which an array of hardware more diverse than at any point in human history mostly just works, and on which software probably written before some people reading this were born still runs.
We have a history of programming languages that have advanced both the state of industrial practice and the state of the art in research, and both traditions continue to this day.
Until very recently, the majority of web pages were presented in one of a handful of carefully designed, screen-optimised fonts that brought digital typography far beyond its previous standard, which are available on almost all major platforms, not just Microsoft's.
We have a wealth of ideas regarding HCI, from more efficient user interface designs to accessibility techniques to support users with disabilities.
It's not difficult to think of more examples, and of course Microsoft have also participated in numerous collaborative endeavours over the years that have advanced the industry in other ways. No doubt an organisation with Microsoft's resources could have achieved much more in recent years with more visionary leadership, but the idea that their work has produced nothing more than a few hardware devices over the years is just silly.
I was referring to the examples in the comment I was replying to, not making them up myself. I like your examples much more (and upvoted you for them), but yours are what I had in mind with my original comment. Microsoft was able to create that "familiar" desktop experience after getting the court to rule that they were free to make Win95 as Mac-like as they wanted. "The look and feel of an OS should not be copyrightable" is sort of an odd position for a leading innovator to defend so vigorously in court. Getting that OS to run everywhere was more about making themselves ubiquitous--the "no matter what computer you buy, you'll have to pay us" monopoly thing--than about "innovation". Likewise for the "ancient software still runs" strategy of preserving the franchise vs. innovation.
And innovation in programming languages? I was using BASIC before Microsoft existed, and while I thought Visual Basic was a significant innovation, I knew the guy who actually invented it and know how Microsoft took it from him. ("Take our lowball offer or we 'invent it' ourselves and you get nothing.") Nothing Steve Jobs wouldn't stoop to, but not a great example of MS innovation.
And .Net was the MS response to the JVM and C# was their response to Java. Both were improvements, but it was obvious what they were improvements on. And those two (VB and C#) are the only MS languages to have any impact outside the research lab.
And fonts? Was it Bill Gates who took that famous calligraphy class and brought the world of fonts to "microcomputers", or was that Steve Jobs and the Mac? Was it Microsoft who joined with Adobe and created the desktop publishing revolution, or was that Apple, too? Well, yes, Bill and Steve did work together on font technologies later, but that was to try to break Adobe's font monopoly, wasn't it? That m-word again.
Again, I'm not questioning the idea that MS came up with many new ideas, and all innovations have predecessors. It's a question of degree: how big a change is this? MS's innovations, while real, were just not in the same league as innovations from Apple and Google, despite MS's enormous power, because MS's focus was on defending their existing monopoly from competition, while Apple and Google were more focused on attention-grabbing product innovation.
Yep. All the good once are stuck playing *craft games.
Find a modern 8-year old, who understand PC circuitry (at analog and digital level), seen manufacturing processes, can re-solder components, can write C/assembly, can develop basic useful applications (like, say MS Paint). I bet you could easily find one like that, back in 70s-90s, particularly here in the silicon valley. Now - I'm not so sure.
Is'nt it the logical transition, at least in some schools it was, and i was thought the same way, begin with BASIC, and then as our curiosity increased we moved onto c and 8051 hardware/assembly.
And Microsoft revolutionized the PC industry, which has led to the generation of billions of dollars of wealth for millions of users on the entire planet.
You don't seem to be very fair in evaluating the merits of tech industries by focusing only on the bad parts of the one you don't like and the good sides of the ones you like.
Microsoft was there as an epiphenomenon. If they didn't exist (at all) the PC industry would still be here and some would argue that without the monopolistic innovation stifling practices, it would be much more vibrant today.
What? Correct me if I'm remembering incorrectly, but before Microsoft (and Compaq's IBM PC "compatibles") caused PCs to be commoditized, every computer-maker was trying to foist their own closed, proprietary walled garden onto the market. Instead of the PC revolution that created a common platform everywhere, we'd have a hundred small, fragmented, incompatible ecosystems fighting each other for market share. That just does not sound like it would allow for mass adoption through steep hardware price drops and the insane innovation that it enabled (which includes things like Linux). You might think the resultant situation as "vibrant", but I think the more appropriate word is "fragmented".
Citing you as a source, how was MS involved in the clones? Compaq made a clone of the IBM PC. The IBM PC was cloneable in the first place because they went extremely low budget and stuck together off the shelf parts. Yes, the cheap clone army definitely spurred the small computer revolution. But I don't see how MS can viewed as an entity that shepherded it along. They certainly weren't the only ones make a CPM clone either.
> Apple revolutionized the music industry, how music is sold, and how it's listened to.
How? iPods are great, but they are just mp3 players (not the first at that) with a great user interface. iTunes is a program I used as a music player only because I had to in order to transfer songs from my iPod. At least when I was using it, I could get "illegitimate mp3s" by putting in only a slight amount more effort than by buying them from iTunes. And when I did buy mp3s from iTunes, I wasn't able to make them to play on different computers - so an inferior product compared to the illicit mp3s. I have an eBook that I bought from iTunes that I have never been allowed by iTunes to listen to.
Maybe you're (also) talking about some Apple products that I don't know of.
Yes, and how many of your family and friends had mp3 players before iPods? And you dismiss a feature of the iPods by just saying 'a great user interface'. I remember mp3 players back then. All monochrome UI's, with the actual bit rate and frequency shown along with the title, as if anyone but an audio fanatic would care about something like that.
Plus, and I cannot stress this enough, iTunes really was power pushing the iPod and Apple along. First, by truly binding hardware and software together to work together as seamlessly as possible. Second, by being able to purchase songs from iTunes store, and have it automatically appear in iTunes. And thirdly, and this is perhaps the most important bit, by forcing (and by forcing, I mean sometimes using the mob style of forcing) the record industry to play along. No longer did you have to know which artist belonged to which record company in order to buy music. No longer having to browse 4 or 5 different sites to find music. No longer did you have to convert songs, if you could even, to another to get around DRM to get all your music to play on one device.
So, yes, they did revolutionize the music industry.
> Yes, and how many of your family and friends had mp3 players before iPods?
I don't know. But mp3 players were definitely something people knew about before iPod's (at least the kids, can't speak for the adults at the time). Some even got those mp3 players with 128 MB, enough to cram two albums into. I didn't feel it was worth it before 512 MB, at the least.
Back when I was in the market for a good (gigabits of storage) mp3 player, I don't recall that iPod was the definite go-to choice in the electronics store.
> And you dismiss a feature of the iPods by just saying 'a great user interface'.
Not dismiss in general as much as dismiss when it comes to revolutionizing music listening and the industry. I think that people would still have adapted mp3 players (what were the alternatives? Discmans and those cassette-like players which you could record 320 minutes of music max on each disc?) even if Apple wouldn't have come out with a really nice UI.
> Plus, and I cannot stress this enough, iTunes really was power pushing the iPod and Apple along. First, by truly binding hardware and software together to work together as seamlessly as possible.
All mp3 players I've used (except for iPod's) are very easy to manage: plug it to the computer, open the folder of the mp3 player, and copy-paste songs. I am hardly a 'techie' when it comes to general computer usage, and I was not back then, either. But maybe this was beyond the capabilities of most people for all I know.
> Second, by being able to purchase songs from iTunes store, and have it automatically appear in iTunes.
I could torrent music and have them automatically appear in my Downloads folder. You could say that the iTunes way is more user-friendly, but most people used Windows back then and were used to shuffling around files and folders themselves, because you had to do that at some if you wanted to do more than read your mail.
> And thirdly, and this is perhaps the most important bit, by forcing (and by forcing, I mean sometimes using the mob style of forcing) the record industry to play along. No longer did you have to know which artist belonged to which record company in order to buy music. No longer having to browse 4 or 5 different sites to find music.
I guess I never was big on buying music online. I downloaded illicitlyt, bought some things in the store and the few things I didn't find I bought through iTunes. I know the last part validates your point, but having four more albums in my collection didn't exactly revolutionize my music listening.
> No longer did you have to convert songs, if you could even, to another to get around DRM to get all your music to play on one device.
When I changed computers I couldn't get my songs to play on the new machine.
> So, yes, they did revolutionize the music industry.
What revolutionized music listening for me was: 1. being able to easily download (mostly pirate) music 2. streaming services (only used Spotify myself).
> I don't know. But mp3 players were definitely something people knew about before iPod's (at least the kids, can't speak for the adults at the time). Some even got those mp3 players with 128 MB, enough to cram two albums into. I didn't feel it was worth it before 512 MB, at the least.
I can tell you right now, that unless they were very technical, most adults didn't have mp3 players and weren't interested in them. Because they didn't even have mp3 files. Don't forget, very often back then, you had to specifically install programs, like winamp, instead of Windows Media Player or Real Player to rip CDs to the mp3 format.
> Not dismiss in general as much as dismiss when it comes to revolutionizing music listening and the industry. I think that people would still have adapted mp3 players (what were the alternatives? Discmans and those cassette-like players which you could record 320 minutes of music max on each disc?) even if Apple wouldn't have come out with a really nice UI.
Well, making a ripped CD was very well known and popularly done. People use to just carry around books of CDs, and it sounded better, too. Those old mp3 sounded like ass, the big rate was so low, like 32-64 bit. Now, if it's not 160 bit or higher, I'd say most people would refuse to purchase.
> All mp3 players I've used (except for iPod's) are very easy to manage: plug it to the computer, open the folder of the mp3 player, and copy-paste songs. I am hardly a 'techie' when it comes to general computer usage, and I was not back then, either. But maybe this was beyond the capabilities of most people for all I know.
You know why Windows 98 and above has AutoPlay? Because it wasn't simple enough for most of the public to just insert a media type device (CD/DVD/Flash type device) and just have the user manually start it.
> I could torrent music and have them automatically appear in my Downloads folder. You could say that the iTunes way is more user-friendly, but most people used Windows back then and were used to shuffling around files and folders themselves, because you had to do that at some if you wanted to do more than read your mail.
Well, maybe you were dealing with more technically inclined people than I was, but to this day I still have people who save EVERYTHING to their desktop, because they don't want to lose files. I still know people who can only find files by opening up which applications they used to create or modify them. They never make backups because they don't know where any of their files are. AND, even if they could, the older mp3 players only played files located in certain folders. If you mistakenly put them in the wrong folder, the mp3 player couldn't play them. Not user friendly at all.
> When I changed computers I couldn't get my songs to play on the new machine.
That's because in iTunes, your media is associated with your iTunes account. If you don't sign with that, then none of your songs would play. Unless you did that already, and it still didn't play. That's an error, which Apple should be obligated to fix on your behalf.
> What revolutionized music listening for me was: 1. being able to easily download (mostly pirate) music 2. streaming services (only used Spotify myself).
Technically, streaming services has existed since 1995, when Real was selling their Helix servers, and started streaming media themselves sometime in 1997-1998ish. That's even before Napster came out. Spotify only works because the music industry couldn't do it themselves, and wanted other streams of revenue online other than Apple and Pandora.
> I can tell you right now, that unless they were very technical, most adults didn't have mp3 players and weren't interested in them. Because they didn't even have mp3 files. Don't forget, very often back then, you had to specifically install programs, like winamp, instead of Windows Media Player or Real Player to rip CDs to the mp3 format.
That's interesting. I guess I only dealt with kids who downloaded music for their mp3 players, and whatever CD's they had stayed in their CD players.
> You know why Windows 98 and above has AutoPlay? Because it wasn't simple enough for most of the public to just insert a media type device (CD/DVD/Flash type device) and just have the user manually start it.
Windows will also ask if you want to open an inserted mp3 device as a folder when you plug it in.
> Technically, streaming services has existed since 1995, when Real was selling their Helix servers, and started streaming media themselves sometime in 1997-1998ish.
Do you really want to emphasize who was first out with streaming? Hasn't your point all along been that Apple, while not inventing mp3 players, made it mainstream? ;P
> Spotify only works because the music industry couldn't do it themselves, and wanted other streams of revenue online other than Apple and Pandora
Spotify was a thing in my part of the world before Pandora. In fact it's only on the Internet that I've heard of people using Pandora.
> Windows will also ask if you want to open an inserted mp3 device as a folder when you plug it in.
When Windows does that, it's running a service called Autoplay. What I'm saying, is that before Windows 98SE, users had to manually open up inserted media, and enough of them had problems with it, that Microsoft included Autoplay ever since with Windows.
> Do you really want to emphasize who was first out with streaming? Hasn't your point all along been that Apple, while not inventing mp3 players, made it mainstream? ;P
Streaming has nothing to do with mp3 players. Even today, Apple doesn't do streaming. It's only going to be on the new IOS 7 where that even starts to be an option. Mp3 players is basically a dead market. The point I was trying to make was that Spotify/Streaming is only becoming a viable solution because Internet speeds and 4g networks are fast enough to stream at high rates. Unless I'm missing something, nothing Spotify is doing is truly unique, other than perhaps working in far more places globally than any other type of service before.
No, but I was saying that mp3 players and Apple are analogous to streaming and Spotify; Apple didn't invent but helped make mp3 players popular, and Spotify didn't invent music streaming but helped make it popular.
When people hear about Microsoft innovating, they think about the Kinect and the Surface, but Microsoft Research is very well respected in academia and constantly creates new technology.
An academic friend of mine frequently tells me that Google et al do not compare to MSR in either quality or volume.
Jamie Shotton and others at MSR were directly responsible for the pose detection software for Kinect. MS bought in the RGBD camera from outside, but did really good work on the software internally, using the talent at MSR. A great success story for the corporate lab model. I don't know how often things work out as well as that, as the labs must be enormously expensive!
I watched a really interesting talk about how XBox (and presumably the Xbox One) uses a technology they call TrueRank to do player matching. As far as I know this was an MSR project to create a Bayesian version of the ELO chess ranking system. Actually, now that I think of it, it was a whole week of ML talks by academics from MSR.
My point being, they produce (and ship) a lot of smaller innovations too, behind the scenes. Sometimes it's just detecting griefers.
Yep, I heard about that too. It wasn't just detecting griefers, it was a whole matching system to make sure new players didn't get frustrated while experienced players were still challenged.
My feeling of Microsoft is that they didn't understand their innovative success; XBox - or how to capitalize on it going forward. The 360 was likely the last product of theirs I will ever buy. The new console - not innovative and if they weren't paying attention to the fall out around the Sim City debacle then that's just added injury to insult. Baller is a bad CEO by today's success standards. He has always come off as arrogant and assuming. Not something an innovative company strives for.
The real dilemma here is that the general population has two unique metrics playing on them in a different manner today. One is a burgeoning idea of rights, ownership and privacy (which Microsoft Flys directly in the face of, in a very bad way) and then there is the subjective problem of attrition and interest that is eroding much faster today as consumers expect "the next big thing" every time a release comes ton market. It's one part "innovator's dilemma" with a sprinkle of fast flux perception.
Microsoft is a dead brand. I started saying this in 2004. I still believe it today. Why? Because instead of having more interest annually I have less. If Gates wanted to leave a mark on the world he'd buy back pieces and parts of the behemoth and set them free for the open market, but the reality is it will continue to fade away and generations coming into the world today will view the giant as relevant as tape decks and CDs.
The technology industry is in a period of change and maturation. It may not feel like it but my thought is 5 years out products will be more cohesive because consumers demanded platforms that were interoperable. If not, then the future may be a very stark and gloomy state of affairs dictated by a few who hold self-interest and money first.
I hope this industry doesn't follow in the footsteps of the financial industry...
> If Gates wanted to leave a mark on the world he'd buy back pieces and parts of the behemoth and set them free for the open market
I agree with most of your comment, but that line bothered me. In my opinion, the single worthwhile accomplishment of Microsoft was that it led to the formation of the Gates Foundation.
I don't even agree with many of their objectives, but simply providing funding for "unprofitable" medical research alone has already left "a mark on the world".
This is a dangerous thought, imo. Robber Barons turned philanthropists are still evil old men trying to buy social indulgences.
I argue that the weight these monopolists tied around their industries had larger negative impact on GDP and innovation than the positive value of the 'works' their charities re-invest in society.
Oh, I completely agree. The point I was trying to make was simply that increasing funding for medical research on malaria, tuberculosis, etc. was more significant than anything he did (or could do) with Microsoft.
But regardless, I agree that the world would be a much better place if addressing our solvable problems didn't require the support of a retired billionaire first.
Microsoft is a dead brand. I started saying this in 2004. I still believe it today.
Really, even after the era of huge success with Windows 7 and the Xbox 360 you were still saying this? Is that when you bought the Xbox 360 from the "dead brand". Do you always throw down hundreds of dollars for products from dead brands?
Xbox was a response to PlayStation--the only "innovation" of the original Xbox, to use commodity PC hardware, was dropped with the second generation. Surface is an also-ran. Which leaves Microsoft's true innovative legacy as the inventors of the bendy keyboard? Well, that's "as much as, if not more than, Google and Apple" if I've ever seen it.
Yes you can't ignore MS, especially when they still dominate the desktop and workstation market with their OS.
I was a sysadmin in the 90s, and other admins I knew loved the Microsoft offerings - having gui control panels to server services. Active directory and the like. It wasn't particularly innovative, but MS managed to put lipstick on a pig and managed to sell it, while cleverly locking down their ecosystem through their proprietry platform. For some the CLI and Linux is still a turnoff, and there isn't that much preventing people from putting lipstick on that particular pig - but you don't see that many offerings (arguably you could say that Apple server is kind of like that).
Sys admins who have to click on a GUI to patch a rack-full of servers with the same update? That's just sick. Yeah, we can thank Microsoft for that.
Now, as a developer who remembers the old days, I have to deal with sys admins who have no idea what the hell they are doing on a *nix box. (some of that is hiring, yeah, but that's the pool we have to draw from now)
You said "just don't stick" and quoted a product that "completely sucked".
The PC tablet from MS was a laughable joke. The iPad made a revolution because it was revolutionary. It took Android years to catch up and Microsoft is still trying to fumble something together today.
xbox is msft embracing and extending the console market, if only to further their "3 screen" initiative. that's why you see xbox devs moaning about how msft is loosing touch with gamers... it's because msft was never in touch with gamers. they wanted the consoles to get into living rooms.
I'd argue that search and Ajax did more harm and drove the first wedge. Search gave Google a business model and revenue stream. Ajax enabled Web apps, beginning with Gmail. That enabled platform independence and a split from the Office monopoly, particularly Outlook/Exchange and Active Directory.
Mobile was another keg of coffin nails, particularly in consumer space showing that ease of use and zero configuration were possible.
I agree on your assessment of Google's advertising reliance being an Achilles geek,and that the company risks marketshare loss through heavy-handed G+ promotion and privacy concerns.
Microsoft essentially invented AJAX. In the late 90s they had some HTML remote update thingy via a Java applet, I believe. Then they introduced XMLHttpRequest. Developing for IE around that timeframe wasn't bad. They had excellent documentation, and added (proprietary, sure) extensions that let you do all sorts of neat stuff.
Yes. Microsoft invented XMLHTTP so they could build a killer web client for Exchange Email. Remember when you first saw that? It was amazing. IE 5 was hands down a more capable browser than any other when it was current. It was nonstandard, but it was very productive. You could do AJAX, XML to HTML transforms in the browser with XSLT, xpath navigation of XML documents, etc. JSON wasn't popular then but support for XML was excellent.
They didn't have the vision to build consumer oriented "cloud" software like Google did, but they were positioned to do it before anyone else was.
MS ran off the hell off of Xenix internally. Mail, calendaring, etc. I remember when NT was going to be the best Unix out there... And then Win32 happened and coolaid got sloshed around. The NT Kernel could have been an amazing Unix.
Does anyone still use Facebook? Seriously, I'm medicine. It doesn't even come up anymore. The only thing that reminds me is HN. My daughter and her friends seem unimpressed.
The only reason I haven't deleted my profile is that I don't want to cede the namespace. Don't cross the street to get your ass kicked.
I'm on HN, I'm probably aware of how many people use FB. The question was more to the issue of leading minds. Are smart people, people looking to the future, using Facebook? In my slice of meatspace, the answer is no. I was hoping to tap into the tech sector youngins to shed some light on their experience.
I work for Google and I use Facebook regularly. It's still used by over 90% of my friends and acquaintances, in all (especially tech, academia, medical) spaces.
I think there is something there. My 13 year old sister does not want a Facebook. I got her to get a g+ thinking 4 way video chat would be just her thing and she posted for a bit but she and her friends prefer Skype); the AIM of today. Ten years of that sort of success and whatever is HN then will be talking about FB the way HN speaks of Yahoo now.
Notice I mentioned the "Microsoft Munchkins" and other unethical attacks against OS/2 later on was far worse than the Joint Development Agreement between MS and IBM, and the mention of DR-DOS at the end.
I think it largely is - the late follow-on and then anti-user insistence that has driven Google+ is clearly out of the playbook of a lumbering giant.
That having been said, it still has points of excitement - things like glass and driverless cars and parts of the Android world still feel exciting to consumers and that's part of what keeps lumbering giant company syndrome at bay - innovation leading to consumer excitement, repeated again and again keeps companies lively.
When you look at it, Google probably already has. 20% time is practically gone, Reader gone, iGoogle going, etc. All the various little projects that may not have had huge numbers of users, but still indicated that Google was a fast moving, innovative company are disappearing.
It may take a few years for people to realise they are a lumbering giant in decline now, but the seeds are already planted, maybe even full grown...
It is inevitable that as companies get bigger, the things they do to allow them to scale takes away from their nimbleness. I can't think of a single instance of where the largest company in an industry is the most nimble.
Coordinating people takes effort and standardization. Also, the larger you get, the harder it is to outgrow your market. This is the price you pay for winning. It's also why employees leave as companies grow. They say, "It just doesn't feel the same" because what got the firm from 100 to 1000 employees isn't what scales them to 10000.
We tend to forget that Microsoft ALREADY did what these "startups" did. MSFT already pushed the envelope and changed the way we use technology in our day to day lives.
There is (probably) only so much change one company / person can do. Even if there is additional potential, in the end companies will seek profit and stability.
> We tend to forget that Microsoft ALREADY did what these "startups" did. MSFT already pushed the envelope and changed the way we use technology in our day to day lives.
We tend to forget that IBM did that in a previous era.
Another example that "in the end companies will seek profit and stability" and be an "enterprise software company"
No sadness here - Microsoft has been a stain on the last decade of the computing industry. The only sadness is that their trajectory of circling of the toilet might change, with a new CEO. But I doubt it.
Your ridiculous claim that ridiculous claims are impossible to expand on is so ridiculous that I find it impossible to ridicule to show how ridiculous it is.
> Microsoft has been a stain on the last decade of the computing industry.
Wrong decade. Microsoft has made a lot of positive changes these past ten years.
If anything, I'm betting that we are going to uncover some pretty dirty business practices exercised by Apple this past decade (I'm predicting that the e-book price rigging is the tip of the iceberg).
Exactly. Just ask those app devs that have gotten screwed out of a large chunk of their livelihood because one day Apple decided that functionality of their app competed with Apple/iOS.
Apple's developer ecosystem is setup to give you everything for free. It's also setup to take everything away as it pleases all while controlling every aspect of it - even subjective components of it. It's not free at that point, and the control for security basis only goes so far before the argument starts to fall apart. Yes, it is a good thing to have controls for that exact reason. Is Google any better? In some regards yes (the platform has dwarfed iOS in terms of technical security controls but fragmentation plagues the ability of everyone to take advantage of updates) and in others no.
Apple is just an accelerated Microsoft at this point. Significantly slowed innovation (compared to the early OS X and iPhone days) - again because of the "innovator's dilemma". They're now locked into this massive ecosystem which will artificially continue to suffocate them over time.
You know 100 000 people are employed there right? And its blue chip stock for probably millions? Just checking to confirm you don't care at all about any of these people...
I don't get why people compare Facebook's performance to that of Microsoft's. Okay, they are both tech companies that have large interests in the internet. But one makes enterprise and consumer software (exceedingly successfully by any measure) and the other is a website for sharing photos.
Microsoft is worth roughly three times what Facebook is at one-twentieth the P/E ratio. Why do people assume they are losing? I fully accept that they are continually riding the coat tails of Windows XP for the majority of that and have missed a number of opportunities though. But let's be honest, everyone but Apple missed the smartphone revolution except Google and Samsung and Microsoft owns part of Facebook and isn't really playing in a competing market for the most part.
Why would anybody think that there aren't limits to what one company can dominate?
This absurd notion that Microsoft could have ever possibly retained "control" of the future of computing (apparently forever would be the requirement) is non-sense.
You have to understand that some of us, who were around and writing code through the 90s, are still a little PTSD about Microsoft. Back then, when Microsoft did control computing, it was easy to wonder if maybe they would control it forever.
It was a shitty period. There was a sense of futility to building software. You could build small software, but as soon as you reached a certain scale, particularly if you were a platform company, Microsoft would decide that they'd like to take your revenue, so they'd box your software out of their operating system with incompatibilities, launch their own competitor, and eat your lunch.
The only sane strategy at the time was to try to anticipate what areas of computing Microsoft would likely never enter. But even that is Russian Roulette.
So, in 2013, yes. It's "obvious" now that Microsoft couldn't have possibly retained the control they had. But many of us have deep recesses in our brain that are still shocked that we got here.
"It was a shitty period. There was a sense of futility to building software. You could build small software, but as soon as you reached a certain scale, particularly if you were a platform company, Microsoft would decide that they'd like to take your revenue, so they'd box your software out of their operating system with incompatibilities, launch their own competitor, and eat your lunch."
The thing is, since Apple releases so many new features and software with updates while Microsoft leaves unfinished, crappy software for a decade, you can find dozens of stories like this about Apple.
So many of their default features were popular third party programs that got rebuilt by Apple in-house.
At one time, IBM controlled around 70% of the whole IT business, probably more. Mainframes, minis, comms, switchboards, typewriters. IBM even ran its own bank (IBM Credit Corp).
Microsoft happened to steal a very small part of IBM's monopoly, which got bigger over time, but IBM's revenues are still bigger than Microsoft's even 32 years later. (And IBM has been spinning off or selling whole businesses along the way, eg the PC business to Lenovo; spinning off Lexmark).
I was talking to one US corporate IT manager who said IBM was still a third of his budget cf 3% for Microsoft.
Big picture: Microsoft's monopoly has always been much smaller and less powerful than the IBM monopoly used to be. However, in time, all tech monopolies tend to get largely undone by new technologies.
Excellent post that captures my feelings precisely. I worked for a MS "partner" whose product integrated with BizTalk (I know, right?) A big part of our strategy was trying to keep MS from locking us out once we became successful. Eventually we got bought out and the product was killed.
Around 2000, Linux was on the scene and like a lot of people I got the hell out of the MS ecosystem and never looked back.
All they had to do was get mobile right. To do that, all they needed was one manager who kept an eye on the state of capacitive touchscreen development and moved to lock it down before his/her counterpart at Apple did the same thing.
The iPhone could have been theirs all along, with all that that implies. But first they ignored the underlying technology, then Ballmer laughed at it (on national TV no less), then they fought it, and then they lost.
> all they needed was one manager who kept an eye on the state of capacitive touchscreen development and moved to lock it down before his/her counterpart
And they did move.
I was trying to create a startup based on PDAs at the early 00's (no luck, they were too expensive - the idea was flawed from day 1). There was Palm, and the two entrants: Windows and Linux. Palm had a once nice system that nobody wanted to program for anymore (accumulated too much cruft), Windows had a giant marketing campaign that made everybody hear about them (it was getting more known than Palm), but it was so bad that everybody soon learned to run away from it, and Linux got a steady monotonic growth from nowhere into almost-nowhere.
I loved Palm. I wondered why more people didn't buy them.
I once looked up a price of Halo 2 at 9 p.m. on a library
Internet access( open at the time), and bought 500
copies of Halo 2 for $2.99 each. I sole all of them
on ebay for at least 30 a piece. I knew nothing about
vid games, but I knew they were priced to move.
I felt like I was the only one in the world who realized
how great having Internet access was in my pants pocket.
Now Everyone is connected.
> Now the lay somewhere on a continuum with IBM, Oracle, SAP all the way through to companies like CA.
And I think that's fine. Added together, these are the bread and butter.
As a whole, we benefit more from them doing what they do well and having stable revenue than trying to make everything under the sun and creating gigantic monopolies that dictate standards and absorb any company doing something remotely interesting (like, sadly, today's Google).
Is it looking to the future, or having a consumer focus versus enterprise?
Consumers are fickle, and you have to be on top of the latest trends in GUI, service, products, business models.
Corporate customers tend to be stickier, and more resistant to change.
The A/G/A/F foursome are geared for consumers, and are suitably nimble. The others you listed aren't. The worst thing a company can do is try to be perfect for both types of customers.
I think we should compare MSFT against other companies in enterprise space.
So lets take, for example, ORCL.
From 2000 till today, ORCL become the clear leader in enterprise: they acquired PeopleSoft, Siebel, BEA, Sun, etc.
On the other hand, MSFT position in enterprise space is in much weaker position comparing to competitors such as ORCL. Enterprises will replace their Windows with tablets, but I don't see them replacing Oracle Database or Oracle Applications (and Siebel and PeopleSoft apps are not so bad).
So Balmer gets B- for his enterprise work. Larry, on the other hand, gets A+.
I see that slightly differently. Oracle is huge in government, world-wide. But while it used to be "Oracle is the answer. What was the question again?", there's a shift towards F/OSS, open standards, and commodity hardware. This hurts Oracle. And yes, the exact same thing hurts Microsoft, too.
Microsoft, however, have three products that will ensure their continued profitability[1] - Excel, Exchange and (probably most importantly), Active Directory. This is over and above their insanely cohesive ecosystem, from SCCM all the way to Dynamics.
Active Directory is so critical because of the vast amount of legacy code that depends on it. Want to guess how many fortune 500 companies rely on AD?
[1] Nothing is guaranteed so yes, unless they evolve as the environment they generate value for inevitably evolves, they'll go.
Back in late 1990s and early 2000s, enterprises were much more dependent on MSFT than today. Windows machines were in server rooms, Windows machines were on desktops, Exchange was everywhere.... Companies really depended on Microsoft: they had the entire stack.
Fast forward to 2013 ... what do you see? Did Ballmer really improve Microsoft position in enterprise comparing to Oracle and other competitors?
And how much growth potential is there in selling Active Directory, Excel, and Exchange?
Every sizable company already has these things installed. Smaller and new companies may choose to spend their dollars elsewhere and that's a change of events for Microsoft. Projects that previously would go on Sharepoint are now done less expensively with cloud services, for example.
In tech, growth is in consumer, and with consumer tech drifting in to the enterprise, even enterprise IT spending may not go to Microsoft.
You can't really blame people for abandoning sharepoint, it's really an excellent display of why you shouldn't try to interbreed all your gui applications with internetexplorer iframes.
It's literally the worst MS have ever produced.
"Enterprises will replace their Windows with tablets"
really? What can you do on your tablet in enterprises? You can have them only as an additional device. They don't even have any port where you can plugin something. And, you will have your tablets interact with whom?
At the end of the day, you need real machine running full blown OS to get shit done and not devices meant for playing with those face painting apps.
Ten years ago, were you saying the same about laptops?
Given that there are already enterprise users out there today on Android and iOS devices, this is a pretty bold claim. (And you can, in fact, plug things into tablets with both operating systems - they have USB support.)
These are not all being deployed as "secondary devices" - in many cases companies deploy them because they're cheaper to deploy and maintain than a laptop, which only makes sense if you're not also providing a laptop to the user.
Having companies run solely on laptops or tablets has nothing to do with whether or not there are enterprise tablet deployments. Your logic is flawed.
Thin clients for VDI for one, and the trend does seem to go that way. With current generation hardware, a good 1U server can support 50 - 100 desktop simultaneously.
And then Microsoft makes money by selling 50-100 Remote Desktop CALs to replace those 50-100 physical desktops. The price per CAL is about 90% of the price per license of Windows. But add in the base price of the Windows Server license, and you're back to essentially the same price.
At first. But eventually, less and less will run on the 370^H^H^H Windows box, as people get native clients (or good HTML 5+ clients) for email, memos and spreadsheets, and only "that legacy .NET app we still have to use" will be on the big-iron rack in the DP donjon.
no port needed. everything wireless. I'm waiting for NFC keyboards.
google now says you interact with the tablet by voice, and you watch the screen with your eyes. Now, tablets can even derive events from looking at your face (samsung you look away video stops).
Noticed you don't need a mouse with a tablet?
Oh, the software will have to be rewritten, no doubt, but since most of the software is interface anyway...
In last 10 years, I have visited 100s of enterprise data centers and seen the transformation from primarily UNIX (non-Linux) and Windows server to Linux. Today I rarely come across UNIX and come across shrinking base of Windows servers. Ten years ago, I saw shops exclusively being either UNIX or Windows. Today shops are either Linux or a combination of Windows and Linux. In Enterprise OS market, Linux ate UNIX for lunch and now nibbling at Windows for dinner.
Active Directory and Exchange are much more popular because of its utility with windows workstation managements and user familiarity with PC and Outlook. With the acceptance of BYOD, thanks primarily due to iPhone and iPad, the MSFT hold on workstation side has started to be impacted.
Sharepount is not that much popular except in dominantly Windows server shops.
Microsoft still has a problem. AD, Exchange, and Office (no SharePoint is not everywhere) only work on completely Windows networks. Once somebody has to use mobile computers, you are better with Samba, IMAP, and a LibreOffice compatible package.
Every mobile platform that matters hooks into Exchange - iOS, Android, Mac OS X Mail, Surface Mail, Windows Phone, Pre-Windows Nokia, all speak ActiveSync for mail, calendar and contacts. Blackberries hook in with Blackberry Enterprise Server.
And most if not all of them have some kind of Office Document viewer and basic levels of editor, either built in, shipped with, or available as an app.
And how is Samba, a clone of Windows SMB file shares, going to help anything mobile?
Although Active Directory and Exchange are pretty entrenched. And how's Sharepoint and Lync doing? Microsoft still have quite a foothold in the enterprise, even leaving aside Office.
I am missing something in what you are saying there, OR you are saying something that I find absurd, and I can't figure out which.
Are you meaning to say that an enterprise software company can't be looking toward the future, and/or that only consumer facing technology companies are innovating and creating new stuff that will affect the future?
"Microsoft used to control the future of computing. Now they are yet another enterprise software company with no apparent mission except to make money."
Heh. You really think any successful tech company has ever had a mission besides making money? Some of them talk big in their first few years, but they never follow through and they get embarrassed and try to sweep it under the rug pretty quick. Remember when the RealPlayer company was called Progressive Networks, because it was supposed to "provide a distribution channel for politically progressive content"? Remember "don't be evil"?
Yes, but he cleverly avoids the fact that a few thousand dollars put into Apple stock in late 90's could have made you a millionaire today, but same in MS would have actually lost value from inflation.
It depends what you bought when. If you held both Apple and Microsoft from the beginning, you made far more money on Microsoft stock. If you bought in the bubble then you probably lost a bundle on whatever you bought, whether it was Microsoft stock or somebody else's.
If you bought Apple at $700, you're still in a big hole.
However, if you bought Apple stock instead of Apple computers, then over the years, you probably did pretty well ;-)
I responded to the sibling comment a while ago, and I'd welcome you joining that thread.
But for a quick synopsis of my response to your statement:
1. Billions of people use computers with a variety of operating systems every day;
2. Thousands of people touch their first computer ever, every day, and very, very few run Windows;
3. Millions of people use computers every day and are still deeply confused when the start button moves.
Regardless, the point I was responding to was that Microsoft had some sort of special advantage over the run-of-the-mill enterprise soul-suckers like IBM or Oracle. They might; but they won't for long.
Ultimately, I don't see how any reasonable person could disagree with simply making note of the fact that Microsoft no longer has the ability to change the course of computing: enterprise or consumer.
My point is that operating systems are largely commodified now, and that Windows' strategic value (for both Microsoft and the corporations using it) only holds in very homogenous environments.
That is the state of most corporations today, but at best, I would consider Windows a rapidly depreciating asset (in a strategic sense -- I'm sure it will continue to be a major source of cash for a while).
The person that I originally responded to, whose statement you're apparently defending said:
"Microsoft used to control the future of computing. Now they are yet another enterprise software company with no apparent mission except to make money.
...
Meanwhile Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc look toward the future"
I disagreed with the part where they said "just another enterprise software company". I also happen to disagree that they have no apparent mission, but that's another story; please forget that I said it :)
So, would you argue my point for a second? Why is Microsoft NOT just another enterprise software company now or in the next decade? I think I can come up with more, "bigger" and more provable reasons that they are NOT than that they are, but could be wrong. And who knows the future? Right now, they're surely not just another enterprise company and the future is not static, it's based on the now.
I was arguing your point; specifically, I don't think their "major footholds" have sufficient strategic value to push Microsoft into a class of its own.
And to be clear, my "just another enterprise software company" category includes IBM and Oracle, as well. And I imagine Microsoft is still on the top of that list, but I don't think they have a radically stronger position. It is a very profitable position for now, but that wasn't what the original comment was about.
The question is whether they can again "control the future of computing" or just continue to make a lot of money on roughly the status quo (i.e. simply be "yet another enterprise software company"). I can't speak for the original commenter, but I suspect their emphasis was on "enterprise software company with no apparent mission except to make money" rather than "yet another", so that line could probably be replaced with something like "yet another boring, immensely profitable company".
On that question, I think you can make a good argument that some of their footholds are actually a handicap now. For example, Windows and Office make so much money that the company becomes conservative, unwilling to do anything that might significantly disrupt them.
They haven't released an OS without the Windows name in about 20 years now. Even with their mobile OS attempts, it always has Windows in the name. Even the original XBox promotion had a bit of "it's based on Windows" push. And on that line of thought, why hasn't there been an XBox Phone? The smartphone market is largely consumer right now, so why not try a different brand approach?
Yes, Microsoft dominates in the enterprise space right now, but they are losing badly in the consumer space (which will eventually break into the enterprise position) and the cloud space (which is the enterprise position of new companies). What do you see them doing to change the course now?
On a "consumer tech" tangent, IE 11 will finally implement WebGL. Direct3D gave them a unique hold on desktop gaming, paired with a really strong console gaming position. WebGL finally forced them to submit. I expect there are a few divisions that are wickedly pissed off now, and I totally understand why: Direct3D is now in its deathbed.
An utterly dominant, gaming tech position undermined and eliminated in the span of maybe five years.
In the enterprise market, I'd give them a longer timeline, but it's hard to imagine a moribund, hydrogen blimp of that size managing to see (much less avoid) the fireball collapse that's coming.
Failed Windows 7 launch? What the hell are you smoking?
Has a lot of failures on his plate for one man? Please hand this comment an award for middlebrow remark of the year.
Let's put Steve Ballmer's accomplishments in perspective: Have you tripled a multi-billion dollar company's revenue over ten years? Did you launch the Xbox? Did you launch Windows Phone (10% marketshare in 3 years)? Did you launch Bing (growing faster than the search market)? Did you grow .NET into the most widely adopted application development platform in the world? Did you grow the Windows Server business out of nothing compared to where it was 15 years ago? Did you turn Visual Studio into the gold standard for IDEs?
Didn't think so. Ballmer will be remembered for one great mistake, and that's denying Microsoft's culture and employees a strong technical visionary over the course of his tenure.
Ballmer is a COO, kind of like the guy running Apple these days - neither Ballmer nor Tim Cook have a strong ability to anticipate changes in the way technology is consumed compared to their predecessors. And this is largely what's responsible for Microsoft's big whiffs - they missed the mark multiple times on the consumerization of technology.
People are already starting to grumble many of the same criticisms of Tim Cook's innovation that they did about Steve Ballmer, and who can blame them? Over the past three years all Apple has shipped are the same products they had before but with different screen sizes.
However, that doesn't mean that Tim Cook won't be successful in growing Apple's business, nor does it mean that Steve Ballmer was a failure.
As an ex-Microsoftie, I could not be happier to see Steve go. The company needs a technical visionary in order to stop having to play from behind every time there's a change in the market.
But to call Steve a failure is utter nonsense and requires overlooking all of the successes that he and Microsoft had during his tenure.
"Did you grow .NET into the most widely adopted application development platform in the world?"
They already had the most widely adopted platform in Win32. The transition to .NET was horrible. No one was sure what .NET actually meant for a while, as it was used in marketing for all kinds of things. They also seemed to change their minds every few months about how which platform people should use. Finally it converged, and .NET is not bad. But they already owned the desktop app OS and dev platform since the mid 90s, when they overtook Borland and others.
I don't know if MS took out Borland, or Linux took out Borland. Maybe Borland took out Borland.
All I know is that for a sample of 1, me, I used to use (and really like) the Borland (Pascal, C, ...) compilers in the late 80s and early 90s. Then, I started doing more unix and then Linux work. GCC, perl and later Java was there. By the time Delphi was there, it was too late - Java had already provided a free equivalent. (Java is just Modula + OOP + UCSD-P-code in C++ clothing)
iOS and Android are largely for consumer devices, .Net is largely used in the enterprise for B2B products that consumers never see. .Net and Java dominate the enterprise market. Apples and oranges.
What does that have to do with anything? The iPhone is still a consumer device as well. The enterprise isn't about mobile anything, it's about internal applications and B2B systems integration and .Net and Java rule the roost here, as does SOAP still. What works on the public net and what works in the enterprise are light years apart and probably always will be.
The enterprise is desperately, rapidly re-building all of those internal applications (at least the client-side) on mobile platforms, and iOS is in the lead.
This is why these "mobility" servers like IBM WorkLight or SAP/Sybase Unwired are hot products.
Not at all, and the iPhone kicked the blackberries ass, but that has shit to do with enterprise space. All business != enterprise space. Enterprise != mobile. Mobile created a new space, apples and oranges.
He's referring to the fact that Ballmer dismissed the iPhone when it first came out as an expensive toy that only consumers would care about. As everyone has seen now, "enterprise" phones like Blackberry are dead in the water and workplaces are adapting to supporting iOS and Android devices instead.
> People are already starting to grumble many of the same criticisms of Tim Cook's innovation that they did about Steve Ballmer, and who can blame them? Over the past three years all Apple has shipped are the same products they had before but with different screen sizes.
I think the big difference is, Cook doesn't seem to be pushing innovative people out. The only big head to roll under Cook's watch was Scott Forstall's, and apparently he left because he clashed with Jonny Ive (and wanted to go to war with Google in the machine learning space - not just having a few in-house alternatives, but trying to lock Google out of the iPhone to promote Apple's stuff).
I'm no fan of Ballmer, but I think "insulting OEMs" is one of the good things he did. The OEMs carry a great deal of blame for the collapse of Windows. While Apple was shipping beautiful metal enclosures with great convenient features like MagSafe and magnetic latches, OEMs like Dell were shitting all over the Windows brand with plasticky (and still expensive!), heavy, unreliable, loud-as-shit laptops with terrible screens.
The same thing happened with WinPhone. MSFT spent a lot of time developing an honestly pretty decent OS, only to have its launch lineup filled with unimaginative, plasticky bullshit phones from Samsung and LG.
I for one think Microsoft's messy divorce from OEMs is a great thing, my only disappointment was that they didn't throw the OEMs under the bus at supersonic speed.
>but I think "insulting OEMs" is one of the good things he did.
Agree with this statement. OEMs is also the one of the reasons why Android gets a bad rep. Android doesn't suck, it just gets thrown into incompatible and low spec'd devices and when the lag starts rolling in, people blame the OS. I guess this is one of those unavoidable quirks of being an OS vendor and having no say in the hardware. Atleast in Microsofts case, if they wanted, they could get restrict their OS from being installed on an under spec'd device but would Google be able to do the same, especially in light of Android's openness?
Google can't prevent an OEM from installing Android on a crappy device, but they could refuse to pass it in the CTS, which would mean they couldn't include Google Play, Gmail, etc.
This is honestly the worst of it IMO. Apple does have better hardware, yes, but the difference in speed out of the box is stunning when bloatware is involved. Microsoft didn't have a chance to keep up with OSX.
Apple does have better hardware, yes, but the difference in speed out of the box is stunning when bloatware is involved
Aside from the odd "Apple has better hardware" bit (they use the same binned devices that other OEMs like Dell do, so not sure where that comes from), you've benchmarked this purported speed difference?
Because most of the crapware that companies like Dell, HP, and others put on, while irritating, consumes exactly 0% of processor or I/O time, and has zero impact on performance of the device, beyond the hysterical, easily-convinced responses of the placebo effect. The vast majority is nothing more than trials. It's irritating, and wastes users time if you want to clean up your desktop and app lists, but the commonly stated impact is just not at all supported.
And then there's the issue of what exactly is crapware and what isn't. Buy a pure Windows device and you'll be pestered endlessly for Skydrive, Hotmail, Bing, photo backups, Xbox coupling, active your Office trial, etc (just as if you buy an xbox 360 and then pay for the privilege of using it online, in return you get ads and sponsored placements on your dashboard).
Apple is predominately a hardware vendor that has made enormous bank on that (pivoting their MP3 player market into a smartphone market into a tablet market into a bonafide desktop market). Microsoft is predominately a software vendor.
Everyone told Microsoft that they should mirror Apple: it got them a billion dollar+ write down so far, and offended all of their prior allies to start grouping behind alternatives. This "Microsoft should be like Apple" plan isn't really paying dividends.
> Aside from the odd "Apple has better hardware" bit (they use the same binned devices that other OEMs like Dell do, so not sure where that comes from)
Apple pushed IPS screens when PC OEMs were happy with the lowest quality TFT panels available. For years Apple insisted on having a proper GPU in their machines, until Intel finally was able to offer a competitive IGP. And finally Apple also moved forward with SSDs early on.
Add on top of that, Apple's laptops look good. Asus is one of the few PC OEMs making laptops that are even within striking distance of Apple, but their distribution and advertising is abysmal. Asus's best ultrabook was exclusively available from Amazon for the longest time! And then their model numbers are so confusing I knew what I wanted to buy but I couldn't figure out exactly what magic combination of model numbers equated to the machine that I desired.
Every PC Laptop out there has "something" missing from it. Then there is the terrible buying experience, pretty much the only sane way to buy a Dell or an HP machine is to find a magic sales link that takes you to the site which will now show you the real price of the laptop, rather than the rather insane price that is shown by default.
> Buy a pure Windows device and you'll be pestered endlessly for Skydrive, Hotmail, Bing, photo backups
Really? Pestered? I signed into my MS account and my Skydrive files are synced down, but aside from that, I've had no other notifications or requests on either of my Win8 machines. Granted these are both raw Win8 installs.
Apple pushed IPS screens when PC OEMs were happy with the lowest quality TFT panels available. For years Apple insisted on having a proper GPU in their machines, until Intel finally was able to offer a competitive IGP. And finally Apple also moved forward with SSDs early on.
There have always been a diversity of options available in the PC market, and those who wanted to pay the premium for an IPS screen (you know, Apple still sells devices with TN screens...), GPU, or SSD could. Picking the lowest priced PC and pointing and jeering "see!!???" is not a useful tactic, just as someone can't point at the Macbook Pro and jeer at the price without equalizing hardware.
Apple's willingness to invest in making higher resolution panels and better screens the standard helped bring down prices for everyone else to be able to get the same level of quality.
On the phone side, for several years, the iPhone had the BEST possible screen available on any phone because they invested in the panel and locked up the supply (since they paid for it) while other phone makers were content with lower resolution screens.
"Content with lower resolution" screens, when almost all of them dramatically led Apple at the time of their retina unveiling. Add that companies like LG, Sony, and Samsung actually make the screen (and rest assured, Apple is not stopping any of those companies from doing what they want with their own lines).
This is the mythology of Apple that is so bizarre. Apple overshot competitors not because Apple has such a dedication to technology excellence (I mean, at the time their offerings were dramatically behind all competitors), but because the simplicity of the SDK meant that they had to simply double existing resolutions.
It's going to be interesting to see what Apple does with the market-lagging iPad Mini on the refresh -- double each dimension resolution, yielding a hilariously excessive pixel density purely to maintain the wrong-headed SDK?
> "Content with lower resolution" screens, when almost all of them dramatically led Apple at the time of their retina unveiling
I call bullshit, that's not how I remember it at all.
The iPhone 4 was released in June 2010 at 960x640. The Samsung Galaxy S2 wasn't available until 11 months later - May 2011, at 800x480. The Motorola Droid X was also available May 2011, at 960x540, along with the HTC Sensation, with the same resolution.
This is the mythology of anti-Apple postings that is so bizarre. They just know that Apple is always technologically inferior.
By 2012, the Android competition has gotten better than Apple in resolution... but only because Apple made resolution important.
The original Galaxy S had the same resolution as S2 - 800x480. It was available in June 2010.
But it was also not the first. The Nexus One/HTC Desire had also 800x480 resolution - 6 months before iPhone 4. Also, the original Motorola Droid - available since November 2009 - had 854x480 resolution.
Sorry corresation, I should have been more specific that I wasn't referring to the current "Retina" era of screens since yes, all of the competitors (especially Samsung who makes the panels) have the same thing or are doing better.
I'm talking about when the first iPhone came out (2007?) and you couldn't find a multi-touch capacitive touch screen in any mass market device that was able to match the precision and responsiveness of what Apple delivered in v1 of their mobile phone. It was not for a few years that competitive devices came out with a screen that had the same level of responsiveness.
> and those who wanted to pay the premium for an IPS screen (you know, Apple still sells devices with TN screens...), GPU, or SSD could.
In the laptop arena? Not so much.
When buying my last laptop (~2 years ago) I wanted a 14" laptop, 1080p IPS screen, and a quality dedicated GPU.
I was out of luck, NO ONE made a machine like that. I could get any of those two, but not all three. I ended up with a 14" 1080 TFT and a GPU.
A few laptop manufacturers have started pushing the boundaries of quality, but it is by no means universal. Even today getting a well build (e.g. not Clevo) 14" machine with a GPU and a good screen isn't easy, you have a couple of options to choose from.
Suffice to say for my laptop purchase I bought my own SSD and installed it myself, much more powerful and lower cost than anything the OEM was offering at the time.
"Because most of the crapware that companies like Dell, HP, and others put on, while irritating, consumes exactly 0% of processor or I/O time, and has zero impact on performance of the device, beyond the hysterical, easily-convinced responses of the placebo effect"
100% wrong
1 - Startup time is affected by all the bloat
2 - Trial for slow/crappy AV, affects IO and CPU usage (more than other anti-virus)
3 - OEM "tools" that make it "easier" to use the computer, consuming a non trivial amount of CPU to check for updates, show several tray icons because of course you need a special utility to switch from builtin screen to external monitor even though the builtin one works better and by the way do you want to sign up to our special partner offers?
I have used countless installs of Windows, through MSDN, retail, Technet, and through vendors like Dell. I happen to avoid being a suggestible simpleton so I don't simply adopt the sophistry that is so common. Sorry if this offends you into hilarious insults.
Just exactly how imaginative can you be designing a phone's external appearance? It's just plastic (or metal in some cases) around a screen in a somewhat rectangular shape. Hard to get that wrong. What do you mean plasticky? Is plastic a bad thing? The lower density makes the phone take less damage when dropped.
OEMs like Dell were shitting all over the Windows brand with plasticky (and still expensive!), heavy, unreliable, loud-as-shit laptops with terrible screens.
This is utter nonsense. There simply is no other way to put it.
There have always been premium Windows machines (Sony was doing the extremely-thin, fits in an envelope, made-with-unobtanium laptop thing years before Apple did), and discount machines. Focus-on-aesthetics machines, and ugly but functional machines.
That is how a diverse ecosystems work, and the consumer gets to choose what they want, and what matches their priorities (the fact that you have some sort of hipsterism dislike of "plasticy" should not restrict my purchase when I see it as simply a material that is often optimal. I don't have a fetish for materials).
Even the $3000+ laptops from Sony or other oems were littered with crapware. When consumers shifted from desktops to mobile all of the hardware innovation was moved to the oems' suppliers, which led them to drop all of their technical talent. Now the likes of dell and hp are full of mbas whose job is to make deals with companies like McAfee to squeeze an extra penny out of each sale and to annoy clueless consumers who buy that shit.
My most recent purchase was a Dell laptop with a 3rd gen i7, 16GB RAM, eMMC accelerated TB magnetic disc, IPS 1080p screen, fingerprint reader, backlit keyboard, blah blah. Weight and battery life fit my usage.
I believe it was somewhere around $800, and is a perfect device for my needs. Spent a few minutes after booting removing the various trials of junk on it.
For me, i7 2650QM, 8 GB of RAM, 500 GB hard drive, 17.3" monitor, fingerprint reader, 9 cell battery.
$550. People who buy Macs can't even conceive that you can buy 4 PC notebooks for the price they are buying 1 Mac notebook. They can't conceive that the typical person doesn't buy overpriced Ultrabooks that are different only in marketing name.
All they will say is that their computer "holds its resale value" or that it will "last longer". When it is literally 4x more expensive for equivalent speed, these things are meaningless.
Gross oversimplification of the "Mac" consumer. I use Macs and PCs every day and have worked in the computer hardware business with a specific focus on gaming (Newegg) and it's not that people who buy Macs don't realize they're paying a premium, it's that they value more than "equivalent" speed.
When I have a notebook, I don't want it to weight 10lbs because I'll be walking around with it. What's the point in having a fast notebook when you dread taking it around with you? I also appreciate the design aesthetic and the "it just works" feeling I get when I use OS X. The battery life is great, the laptop is portable, the design is beautiful, I get the job done. That's why I use my Mac notebook and that's what I'm paying for.
I know that I could have purchased 4+ Windows laptops for the price of my MacBook. I know that they would have been faster and have more ports and "features". In fact, I used to hold the same opinion as you do and went through 5 windows laptops before I switched to macs. Then I realized all of those specs are complete bullshit when you have to clear your machine of malware when you buy it, it weighs 10lbs, the hinges break after a year of use, and it's as thick as 4 windows laptops (I kid, sort of...) and the keyboard feels like shit (except my thinkpad, that keyboard was awesome), and anytime you have to reinstall Windows you have to spend time installing drivers for the webcam and fingerprint sensor and all of those awesome features.
Once I switched to mac I began to focus more on the work I do, and less on the machine I use to do it. Plus, I sold my 3 year old MacBook Air for ~70% of it's value, whereas my brother was barely able to sell his 2 year old xps 15z (which is NOT a cheap laptop) for ~40% of it's value.
Another thing I have noticed is that many Windows laptops have their own strengths, ThinkPads have great keyboards and are indestructible but are pretty thick, not very stylish, and still quite expensive. The Asus Zenbook has great build quality and looks very stylish, but is also expensive, has a finicky trackpad, not the best keyboard, and still has some bullshit software that comes preinstalled (although it is better than most Windows machines in this regard). That's what I love about my MacBook, sure it's expensive, but it has amazing build quality, it's plenty fast for 99% of my needs, has an amazing screen, no malware when you buy it, the best trackpad in the industry, keyboard is as good as the ThinkPad (in some ways better, in some worse), the warranty is unmatchable, and the resale value is also the best in the industry. These are the things that matter to me now.
Windows laptops are packed full of hardware and software crap that nobody really wants. Fingerprint readers are unsafe toys. 17 inch monitors make it impossible to use comfortably on your lap. Doesn't matter how many cells are in your battery, it won't outlast mine because Windows drinks juice like a sailor.
I don't care how much more money I'm paying for my MacBook over a comparably specced PC. There's just no comparison. Software, hardware, support. I took my laptop to the Apple Store three times last year, got a quick turnaround and paid nothing for the repairs. I did not have to go through a phone maze or argue with anybody.
People who buy PCs just don't understand quality. Only price.
> Windows laptops are packed full of hardware and software crap that nobody really wants. Fingerprint readers are unsafe toys. 17 inch monitors make it impossible to use comfortably on your lap. Doesn't matter how many cells are in your battery, it won't outlast mine because Windows drinks juice like a sailor.
You're making a logical fallacy: "I don't want this feature, therefore nobody wants this feature."
I just helped a friend pick out a new laptop. He insisted on a 17-inch screen. This was his single absolute must-have. No 17-inch screen? No purchase. Any other spec was negotiable. The screen was an absolute must-have. Even a 15.6-inch screen was too small for him.
Weight? He didn't care. Battery life? He didn't care. It had to have a 17-inch screen. He didn't want to use it on his lap. He wanted a desktop replacement that he'd keep plugged in all the time -- with the option of picking it up and moving it to another desk.
> People who buy PCs just don't understand quality. Only price.
He didn't care about price. He was willing to spend $1500, $2000, whatever it took to get a 17-inch laptop. Except, of course, that Apple cancelled the 17-inch MacBook Pro -- the one feature that might've won his purchase.
I can't believe you actually took me seriously when I stated that "nobody really wants" certain features. Obviously there are outliers with strange needs like your friend's. He should count himself lucky that he's able to find any machine that fits his requirements for any price.
That's the nature of the new economy we live in. If it's not profitable, if millions of people don't want it, it's relegated to the back-channels and specialty web dealers. Companies just can't afford to release anything anymore without excellent product-market fit.
It used to be you could get Dell to build you anything you damned well pleased. I just went to the Dell website, and you can't even look at their laptops until you identify as a member of an organization. They don't sell to consumers anymore. You have to go to Best Buy.
If you want to know who's responsible for this shitty state of affairs, walk over to a mirror and take a good long look in it. Silly, unrealistic, demanding consumers who don't understand quality, only price, are turning the entire industry into shitty versions of Apple.
So I'm sorry, I have zero patience for asshole customers who think they're always right. It's good that your friend was willing to pay whatever it took to get his 17 inch screen. Most of these idiots don't. And they ruined PCs.
I just went to the Dell website, and you can't even look at their laptops until you identify as a member of an organization. They don't sell to consumers anymore. You have to go to Best Buy.
Ridiculous claim. Visit http://www.dell.com, click on "For Home" on the menu at the top, then in the menu click "laptops & ultrabooks".
That puts you on a page showing consumer laptops you can buy, right there, two clicks from the homepage. Or you can search/filter on ten different fields (including 17" screen size which finds a choice of 34 laptops).
This argument drives me crazy! The CPU speed is probably one of the least important things to me, basically any laptop sold today is fast enough. What I care about is weight, build quality and battery life.
The macbook air weighs ~1kg, has a 12 hour battery life, and has a nice aluminium body. Last time I looked, not only is it impossible to get a PC laptop like that for a comparable price, it is impossible to buy such a laptop from any PC manufacturer for any price.
I didn't pay 4x, I payed (almost) 2x more, for the bottom end Macbook Pro
Best money I ever spend
Today, unless you're doing heavy processing stuff, CPU speed DOES NOT MATTER. Memory does. I was perfectly happy with the CPU speed of the notebook I had before, the problem of course was memory size.
(I wouldn't buy a 17' notebook, you'll pay the price on back problems)
I can't stand using Windows and the Linux distributions nowadays take much of my time with BS like Gnome 3 and other bloated crap.
Without wanting to agree or disagree with the parent discussion, one very plausible answer is simply that they had hundreds of millions and felt an obligation to invest it in support of their market ecosystem.
So has Steve Jobs missed social and search as well? No. All companies need not do the exact same thing. Missing mobile is relevant because it is eating into Microsoft's PC revenues, but social and search is a whole new business that Microsoft didn't need to get involved in at all.
In my view, Ballmer's mistake is to not go after Oracle and SAP much more than chasing Apple and Google.
Microsoft saw social and search and thought, "we must create our own!" While apple saw social and search, and said, "that's not our market, let's have google handle that for us."
Edit: Apple did acquire ping, but that was social music, which is a bit different. They also introduced siri, which simply plugged in to preexisting search services (Google in iOS 6, Bing in iOS7) so it really is agnostic on that front.
"Google are making baked beans? Why aren't we in the baked bean market? Let's make beans!"
"What? Now Facebook are making Facebook Soda? We need to make Microsoft Soda!"
Every time a tech company produces something new MS have to muscle in on the market, despite having a) no prior experience, b) no aptitude, c) existing products that could use their attention.
It does feel like MS just shows up like that. Azure did (and does) give that impression; Zune, as well. And Surface tablets are also a clear response to the iPad (whether MS ever had anything in R&D previously or not, they certainly didn't ship).
But I think Google is much more prone to jump in to a market with force, they just seem to execute "better" (I leave that open to interpretation).
FB comes out and MS buys in whereas Google makes their own social network. Apple makes the iPhone and Google makes Android. Only much later (as the ship has already left port) does Microsoft come in with Windows Phone (I'm only considering 7 & 8). Somewhat related, I feel like MS and Dell were on target with the Axim from a product idea standpoint but Apple really capitalized on combining the functionality of a phone and forward thinking hardware and software design with iOS devices.
That's because that has been Microsoft's strategy from the beginning: let someone else take the risk of proving whether a market for something exists, and then, if it does, get in there quick with their own offering. They got into the PC OS business with MS-DOS after the Apple II; into the GUI business with Windows after the Mac; into the word-processor business with Word after WordPerfect; into the browser business with IE after Netscape, etc.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I don't believe that was true for the BASIC through beginning MS-DOS era. Putting a BASIC interpreter on the Altair 8800 and other early microcomputers was an "obvious" thing to do at the time given the language's popularity in minicomputers, and MS-DOS and its wild success essentially fell into their lap, with their critically being willing to bet the company on it (DRI, the CP/M company wasn't willing to do business on IBM's terms, hardly surprising at the time) and successful execution.
After that, yeah, a lot of following, then again for the GUI introduction era everyone was following Douglas Engelbart, and Xerox PARC for the graphical part.
To be fair, Windows Mobile existed and gained market dominance long before the iPhone was around. Tablet PCs were introduced with Windows XP, long before the iPad was around.
Microsoft's failure was in hesitating to change with the market, not a failure to have products on the market.
I'd go so far as to argue that it really wasn't the same market - the one that Windows Mobile was in was not anything like the smartphone market created by Apple and Google.
Tablets, you can make a case for, as above, I guess, but again, the leap with the iPad was so great that it wasn't just an iteration but a leap, leaving it open for a fast follower to come on (as Google did there too).
The difference I was trying to point out was that Apple and Google had no legacy involvement in the market at all. Microsoft had clearly defined strategies that were playing out, and were working on developments to further those strategies.
Apple and Google didn't have Windows Mobile 6, 7, and 8 being planned and developed when iOS or Android were released. Microsoft did. It's slower to turn a ship around than it is to start one going in the right direction in the first place.
And besides faster processors and a slicker UI, what exactly puts Android in a different market than Windows Mobile? Serious question. Both allow you to develop, download, and install apps. Both are pocket computers with a cell phone built in, built on the same paradigm that Microsoft ushered in throughout the 90's (give users almost complete control, let OEMs do whatever they want on the hardware side). Windows Mobile has touchscreen support. Both can/could be gotten for very cheap or very expensive. Android seems to be, for all intents and purposes, a straight-line evolution of Windows Mobile with a Linux kernel (yet still closed-source where it really counts).
Android and iOS are effectively in a different market than the original Windows Mobile because they were designed from the ground up to be used only with fingers on capacitive multi-touch screens. Same thing with the tablets. Windows was designed to be used with mouse and keyboard, which is why it never really worked on tablets. Windows Mobile seemed more like an attempt to make a phone as much like a Windows PC as possible, rather than a genuine rethink of how people would interact with mobile devices. Windows Phone seems much better, but it looks to be too late to get a foothold in the market, even with Microsoft throwing money at it.
What puts them in a different market now? Nothing.
What supports my claim that the market was created by Apple and Google? You cannot exclude "faster processors and a slicker UI", as you put it - nor what they're a part of. It was a revolutionary change in user experience.
Your point about neither Google or Apple having involvement in the industry is a good one and it's not completely uncommon for stories of disruptive innovation - which this clearly is...
I didn't say they were executing on that strategy well these days. Surface, Zune and Bing are all examples of fast-follower products that either came too late to be relevant (Zune) or that weren't good enough relative to the competition to displace them (Surface, Bing).
Which is not to say they can't execute a fast-follower play successfully anymore -- see XBox and Azure. Just that they don't nail it as thoroughly and consistently as they used to.
Agree with G+ being FB inspired. There's more to it (Google ecosystem etc.) but I'll leave that.
Android, however, was totally unrelated to the iPhone. In fact, Android's development started before the iPhone. Android's inspirations were also totally different. It's just that the iPhone appealed to a larger number of initial users and thus gained market share quickly, because, well that's what it was designed to do.
Azure wasn't so much "Amazon has EC2? We should have our EC2 as well!", Azure was one of the few products Microsoft actually succeeded in launching. Otherwise, Ballmer greeted Microsoft with a series of failures...only when Ballmer has no control does the company actually succeed.
Azure in the private cloud has been a flop though, in fact I'm not even sure you could run a equivalent Azure cloud privately. Meanwhile OpenStack is going gangbusters.
>I find it hard to believe that someone who writes something this wrong can function in society.
Please, stay civil. :)
Anyway, I don't think the statement is wrong. Sure, Microsoft had tablet computers first, but I think it's also true that the Surface RT and Surface Pro were made in response to the iPad's success.
Well couldn't that be said about any company? If the competitor is doing something different, wouldn't you ask yourself why the heck am I not doing that, especially when there is an untapped revenue. Expecting companies not to follow/copy/learn from their competitors is a naive stand.
>Every time a tech company produces something new MS have to muscle in on the market, despite having a) no prior experience, b) no aptitude, c) existing products that could use their attention.
Similar to what Google is also trying to achieve with Google+, especially with muscling in part? Although I don't like their approach, I can't blame them for going with it. There is a huge untapped market in the social segment and they were right to put a footing on it.
Most of Google's products have been knock-offs of something that already existed. Sometimes much improved knock-offs (Search, Gmail) but sometimes not (Knol, G+ etc).
I'm sure I'm in the minority but I don't consider ping a social network (nor do I Twitter, honestly). And that's just me. Twitter is so much more communication focused in my book where things like FB anf G+ have been more frivolous.
I never thought of Siri as search. To me it was more about interfacing with your device.
yes it did. I tried Google Now the other day. It blew my mind. Google Now understands every single words I said (Asian accent); As for Siri, 50% is kinda optimistic.
Is that what determines a flop, though? Siri is definitely known, and added value to the iphone and the apple brand overall. While I use Google Now and think it is superior, I'm not sure if performance would be enough to label Siri as a flop.
Probably the differences are only noticeable for non-native English speakers like me only. It's way too good that it makes me feel Siri is such a failure.
Native speakers might not see a huge difference though.
I am a native English speaker and Siri constantly misunderstands me. Siri has become a punchline and certainly does not have the usual Apple Cool Factor.
It's probably still to early to tell. But I don't see how anyone can dispute that Google Now is basically what Siri tried to do, but significantly better. I'm yet to see Apple's response to that.
What about Bing? Microsoft didn't get into social because that is entirely outside their market. The limit of it seemed to be something like msn messenger, which had business use cases as much as social ones.
I mean, its not like MS didn't try the search thing, but search is something Google will own until they fuck it up, not from anyone entering to compete with them, because free & good enough are hard to break. Albeit, Google has been doing a good job fucking up their search in the last several years.
Nope, he screwed up even bigger than that. As recently 2005, IE's browser share was well into the 90's. Now, it's hovering roughly 40% depending on whose stats you trust. This on the desktop, to say nothing of mobile which would make the comparison between years even worse. This is after Microsoft recognized that the web was their big challenge, after the so called Tidal Wave memo.
He allowed IE6 to languish while the competition was growing.
To me, Ballmer is symbolic of Microsoft-with-ADD. They ignore things until they become urgent, and then shovel money into the furnace until victory comes. Look at Windows Phone - microsoft had a mobile offering when iOS came on the scene, but took years to move on with WP7. Desktops languished on IE6 for far, far too long.
And Vista's long death-march process and lackluster result is another point.
It's a business decision - web makes all the OS platforms equal. It is against Microsoft's interests to do that. They wanted to keep the status quo as long as possible.
I think the bad pat about windows 7 is that they put out Windows 8 way too quickly.
There are a lot of people that would be OK with being dragged into upgrading if Windows 7 was an easily available option. Bu now, MS is pushing manufacturers into pre-installing 8, which is NOT a good transition path from XP as Windows 7 was.
The problem was that it was a complete pivot on an operating system people finally saw as the true successor to Windows XP. It's what Vista should have been, a nice polished and professional OS that generally was out of your face, yet extremely useful. Then there was windows 8, not horrible, there were some under the hood improvements but the horrible hybrid metro/desktop interaction alienated the desktop market and no clear incentive to upgrade.
The bad part about every Windows since Windows 2000 is that it didn't really offer any new value. A bit more bling in the GUI, yes, and security, yes, but fundamentally Windows 2000 is just as good as Windows 7 from a productivity standpoint. So a lot of people saw that, and decided to just stay with XP until they are forced to do something different.
I hate the UI in Vista/7 and the corresponding Office versions. I managed to trim most of the eye-cruft off of the default, which trims down the edges of most programs, but that god-ahhhwful UI in office just won't go away.
OK, name his successes. How has Microsoft improved on his watch?
Failures are acceptable if there is ultimate success, what is Ballmer's success? Retiring rich? (Most of which was accomplished on Gate's stewardship.)
Perhaps his name could become a unit for excess inventory. The "Ballmer", 500 cubic metres of unsold goods.
EDIT: or perhaps the name of a new airplane seat, "The Ballmer" the only chair to fly in!
He will be remembered for missing mobile. He will also be remembered for caring a lot about developers and about developers and about developers as well. The VB6 folks will still hate him ;-)