The most common form of Microsoft-hate usually centers around how a company of such gargantuan size makes such gargantuan fuck-ups. But this is to be expected of companies of gargantuan size, and is certainly not limited to Microsoft alone (although recently they've had more than their fair share).
My qualm with Microsoft is all the little things that they let slip through. Little things like having a control panel with 100 different links with nondescript names. Is it really possible that not a single person at Microsoft tried changing a setting on their Windows machine and realized how difficult it was to even find the setting? Were they so entrenched in the Microsoft way of doing things that they were accustomed to a shitty user experience? Or did the aesthetically minded engineer have his voice drowned out by the bureaucracy?
If the higher-ups were yelling down the food chain, "build an Apple-killing UI!", I can see how they would settle on what became the app-centric look of Windows 8. But blatantly idiotic decisions around the little things like control panels, choosing wireless connections, and the sheer difficulty of navigation, make me realize that somewhere at Microsoft something is really fucked up.
All of those things that Microsof were hated for in the 90s are just mainstream tech business practice in 2014. For better or worse, they were trailblazers that big tech companies since have copied, not just a one-off bad guy. Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook are all doing exactly the same stuff, where they can and where they calculate they can get away with it.
Microsoft didn't even invent the practices. The tactics--like bundling--are only illegal when you have an monopoly and you exploit the monopoly to win over different markets.
That said, I don't believe Microsoft is a monopoly any longer, at least for consumer PCs.
People born when the antitrust lawsuit was prosecuted would now be in college. So I would expect that if what you said is true, going forward, MS hate explained by those reasons would decrease. It would be like people in their 30s today holding a grudge against IBM for their role in the PCs v. clones battle.
Edit:
I suspect the problem for MS is not lingering hate from the early-mid 90s, but more one of fading into irrelevance among people who are today 18-25 y/o
It's simply astonishing that the "Vista shut down menu" meme continues to come up after all this time, and that the wrong lessons continue to be drawn.
Between Windows Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft changed exactly one thing. They replaced the two icons with a single text label that said "Shut down."
Nothing else changed. There was still a fly-out menu. There were still half-a-dozen options that users vaguely understood. They still had strange labels like "Hibernate" and "Sleep." There was still a "Log out" option. There was still a "Lock" option.
Turns out, none of that was the problem. The problem was that people didn't understand what the power icon did. Replace the icon with text that said "Shut down", and suddenly they knew what it did, and started clicking on it. They stopped opening the fly-out menu, and the "Paradox of Choice" went away.
The lesson is not that you should stop offering choices to your users! You can offer simplicity and choice at the same time. Just stop replacing text labels with confusing icons.
Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000 had a "Shut down" text label. Windows XP had both an icon and text. Windows Vista had an icon but no text. Windows 7 went back to just text. The only design that caused confusion was Windows Vista.
I agree that the main problem wasn't the options, but I do think that some of options are were unnecessary (the distinction between hibernate and sleep, for instance).
The real lesson is that design by comittee over years trying to reach a compromise will often result in terrible design decisions. It wouldn't even have been a problem if they had kept the icon, if it just did what people expected it to! (shutdown, not sleep as was the default). And now we have Windows 8, where they've hidden the shutdown menu inside Settings.
I agree that the default was wrong in Windows Vista. I disagree that an icon would've been OK -- as Joel Spolsky pointed out, he had no idea what the icon would do. That's why he opened the fly-out menu, and that's why a lot of users opened the fly-out menu. Where they got confused.
I just found it frustrating that the tech press echo chamber ganged up on the fly-out menu, when that wasn't even the problem. The fact that Microsoft eliminated the complaints with just one button in Windows 7 shows exactly where the actual problem was.
On every Microsoft topic a lot of old stories come up. I think many people at Microsoft know that things have been going wrong during the Vista development, and a lot has changed since then.
"This highlights a style of software design shared by Microsoft and the open source movement, in both cases driven by a desire for consensus and for "Making Everybody Happy," but it's based on the misconceived notion that lots of choices make people happy, which we really need to rethink."
Unfortunately we are down this road and I'm unhappy with software taking away features I use. I can't wait for chrome to be one white screen with no buttons.
Wasn't control panel decently organized even in Windows XP SP2? Honestly, I don't see much difference between Mac's System Preferences now and Control Panel of Windows XP era.
Searching these settings sucked in XP but Windows 7 resolved that.
Windows 8 is one thing I can agree with you. It made using the PC unnecessarily hard for mouse and keyboard users.
For my windows partition, I actually quite enjoy the move from win 7 to win 8. Here's a few things that I've taken a liking to:
1) Boot into desktop mode. This was introduced in 8.1 and definitely better for my uses than having to open a desktop from the metro UI in 8.0.
2) Win-f, I used to use win-r quite a bit to run programs quickly. However, with the changes MS has made with caching, win-f is just as fast and saves me from having to remember the commands for system preferences and the like.
3) Powershell. Win 8 ships with powershell and it's actually decent.
4) I have personally found it to run faster than win 7 as it shifts more UI load to the graphics card.
Did anyone found it usable? I struggled to automate some recursive copy/filter of files. I don't remember that task taking that long to automate on Linux.
I will admit I was paid to drive hyperv from ruby remotely. What happened is that WinRM wasn't usable and that PowerShell was the lowest barrier mechanism to drive the functionality. It was nasty but thanks to WMI and some 3rd party PowerShell REPL that job was over. I wouldn't willingly give up Ruby much less Perl or Bash for PS. It seems like another "thumb their nose" CLR, C#, closed-source NIH proprietary lock-in tactic.
Years ago I wrote tons of jscript to silently deploy lots of software remotely, and it wasn't as slow to become "productive" at as PS.
Honestly I loved Windows XP, although I really only used it as a teenager because it was the only OS that could run Civilization III. I remember that blue control panel that neatly organized all the settings - it is astounding that it was considered more user-friendly to just make a big three-column list of every subcategory of settings.
One thing to note is that for someone who knows what they're doing, the structure of settings don't make much of a difference, because you'll find things eventually. It makes a big difference when technology-inept people like my mom have to fix problems like "how do I make the computer screen not hurt my eyes?". They just don't connect the phrase "display settings" to the concept of brightness, so navigating settings becomes a nightmare for them.
I can never find the programs one. I swear every time I open it Windows checks a rnd to see if it should be called All Programs or Programs & Features.
One can classify sw development companies into dev centric or UI centric. Microsoft is the former. Tivo, Apple ( more to apple than this though) and some others are User centric.
It refers to where the seat of power is in the company which defines strategy and envelops products. A dev centric company like Microsoft does not become User centric by hiring a UI designer..
Hence, Windows UI will always be sub par. USer centric design is very deep, not superficially changeable, and can't be simply bolted on.
> Is it really possible that not a single person at Microsoft tried changing a setting on their Windows machine and realized how difficult it was to even find the setting?
Oh god, a million times yes. I really like the old windows way and prefer the osx pref panes. It seemed like MSFT confusing churn to say we changed something (and therefore "fixed" something) without knowing what made sense or what/if there was a customer problem. Instead it created a bigger problem of customer confusion (relearning). All companies including Apple have done this, but the takeaway is that not caring about customer impact is inevitably a recipe for strategic failure as others that do take marketshare (Zappos). It's also a dick move antithetical to providing quality product|service.
System Configuration (msconfig) for me was a huge, huge disappointment product after product by Microsoft. Sure it's for "power" users, but I think a lot of people want to make certain applications not start up at boot, and not all software makes it easy to do in application. For more than a decade I have waited for them to allow resizing the damn window so I can read something more than the first few letters of an application name, path, etc. Nothing!!!
Things like you are describing are not always designed from the ground up the way you see them in the end. It's quite probable it built up over time starting with just a few controls ending in many. It's easy in retrospect to see this error but it's been built and shipped and probably lower priority for a company of that size. This is a pretty common issue for large companies or projects with many people aka design by committee.
In XP, when connecting to a wireless network, you are required to type the network's password twice. How the UI team came to that decision I'll never know.
> Is it really possible that not a single person at Microsoft tried changing a setting on their Windows machine and realized how difficult it was to even find the setting?
When I was at MS, we usually used the command line to change settings. It was horrible. It used GUIDs. Literally GUIDs. But it was a stable target. You didn't have to relearn it every nightly build. And you could script it.
We sort of assumed that if the control panel would sit still we could learn it easily enough, but that assumption couldn't be tested until it was too late.
It seems like you're referring to the visual style, but I think the comment you were replying to was about the structure and behavior more than mere skinning, and about differences that far predate iOS 7. There's a reason the term is "look and feel", not just "look"; that second half is where Apple so often distinguishes itself.
No. I'm not referring to the visual style alone. Microsoft didn't just do flat UI to be cool. There was a purpose behind it to focus on content first, the same thing literally is being preached by Apple. Apple just executed better when it came down to it but they definitely borrowed many ideas from both Android and MS in terms of interaction alone.
It's really interesting how in 2007, I believed (as did pg, seemingly) that the web would eventually overtake desktop software.
Fast forward seven years, and some of the biggest names in software (Instagram, Lyft) have completely abandoned the web for "desktop" (really, native) software.
That so much code ships directly to mobile devices says a lot about the power of centralized app stores and truly sandboxed installations where one app can't trash the entire system. We've come a long way.
The critical characteristic of the desktop here isn't its use of native code. It's more the local filesystem. Many mobile apps use network data. From this perspective they have more in common with web apps than with desktop software.
Despite this, I'm inclined to agree that the web is threatened. The desktop may be defined by local files but the web wasn't defined by remote ones. It was more about the culture. More about anyone-can-publish. To me, that's the baby at risk in the mobile bathwater.
That, and any aspect of personal computing that can't be performed on a phone. Which is most of them. I'll stick with the hemorrhoids and circadian disruption, thanks.
My wife and I were talking about this the other night: It's not that people who learned to compute on the desktop are abandoning it for mobile. It's that most people couldn't handle desktop computing in the first place. It's too abstract (dare I say difficult?). So the mobile revolution is really about the unwashed masses computing for the first time. Perhaps that's why mobile apps and operating systems eerily remind me of soap operas and reality TV.
> It's not that people who learned to compute on the desktop are abandoning it for mobile. It's that most people couldn't handle desktop computing in the first place.
Totally agree. For most everyday scenarios, using Windows is like flying a Boeing 737 for your daily commute: it's a huge overkill, requiring way too much setting up and maintenance and when you incidentally touches one switch the whole thing stops working.
Windows 8 didn't take off because what MSFT did was in addition to all the panels of the 737, they put an iPad in the cabin. For those familiar with Windows that's no big deal: this is why we see people shrug off all the Win 8 hate, saying "it's just Windows 7 plus touching interface". But for those had trouble coping with Windows in the first place, it's now doubly confusing.
It is not surprising at all. "The Cloud" is really "the mainframe" and "native software" is really "client-server".
The cycle takes 10 years or so but once you've seen a few you'll realize that the same things come round again and again. The only progress is through better hardware. Software guys, with their (our) fascination for the new and shiny and disdain for "legacy code" means we just reinvent the wheel over and over again.
I was only thinking this yesterday. It is very very true. All of it is client-server, just with different transport protocols. In the end, it is just interfaces to databases basically!
Yep, there are "forms" (interfaces for entering data) and "reports" (interfaces for extracting data) and that's really it as far as 99% of apps go. Even massively complicated things like Amazon are really just a form for you to say what you want, and a report they run in the warehouse to tell them what to pack. There's nothing to it that would be unfamiliar to a programmer from the '70s.
Even better, Amazon don't need to get a physical report but use hand-held devices.
So, clearly the plan is:
1. Write a good database (as Oracle say "the database is the application")
2. Put a dummy interface on it (RESTful HTTP anyone?)
3. Write a native client for each platform (or maybe a web based one if you want endless testing and pain)
4. Profit? (Or perhaps running costs... and no profit)
Weirdly, they recycle this concept again and again as something ground-breaking and wonderfully new but this is 99% of apps, as you say.
Feels like you've taken the red pill, right? It's the major reason I find web development, particularly front-end stuff, so dull and the hyperbole so grating. I heard and saw all the same stuff from VB developers in 1996.
As you implied, the nitty-gritty is in the db for most applications. And I've come to accept that much of the most interesting and innovative stuff happens in game programming.
It's not. But clearly there is a momentum towards native apps again. Surprising is that this momentum is happening even in desktops. You just have to see how many popular services one used to do from browsers are being done from mobile/tablet apps now. Email, chat, social, weather etc.
And I'm not even including non-web apps like Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, Uber, Lyft etc. here.
Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, Uber, Lyft are mobile apps because they suit the context of mobile or rely on their features (camera/video). I think they are obviously mobile first because without mobile they wouldn't exist.
We shouldn't fool ourselves. Even with technologies like AngularJS, webGL, or D3.js ; desktop applications will always be there. You will always have software that need the maximum of power and will be native. Even if you think that because in 5 years computers will be much more faster, it won't change the fact that some applications will need to have every ressources available.
The only place where I can see we would avoid to do native apps is for mobile apps. Because in the future mobiles will be faster but they stay limited by their small screen. So you will use higher level tools to do your "simple" app that doesn't require thousands buttons and stay more productive.
Fast forward seven years, and some of the biggest names in software (Instagram, Lyft) have completely abandoned the web for "desktop" (really, native) software.
But don't those software only work by connecting to their cloud servers? Could you use Instagram if Instagram Ltd turned off their servers? That means it's inherently web software.
Will there be a move towards decentralization of apps again or are we locked in? The inertia that app store and play store have is formidable. If Windows Phone fails, some part of the blame will be on the availibility of apps.
Web software basically runs anywhere and doesn't have to be updated; it has minimal platform dependencies.
Native code, on the other hand, is a 25-year-long story of install/uninstall, sophisticated package/dependency management, chroot jails, and viruses.
I fear that, if web software continues its crawl out of the browser sandbox, we'll get all the disadvantages of native code (security exploits, dependency problems) without any of the advantages (speed, high-performance graphics)
That's because the web disrupted native desktop, and native mobile is disrupting both web and native desktop. Native mobile is certainly not the same as native desktop. It's a completely new paradigm. The web might disrupt native mobile yet again in the future. And then perhaps native-glassware or whatever will disrupt web on mobile, and so on.
It is an insightful piece but nothing annoys me more than sensationalism. Its click bait and I am annoyed I got sucked into reading it and annoyed that I feel compelled to waste time commenting.
Anyway, if it isn't obvious, the article's credibility is killed by the use of the word dead. Microsoft clearly isn't dead it just isn't the biggest player on the internet, and isn't really a player in the start up space.
Yeah, he was right, people that design software no longer had to worry about Microsoft.
Except that it's 2014 and Microsoft is still relevant. The techy bubble on the west coast may all be using Mac's but microsoft products can still be found throughout the rest of the world.
I like PG, and love his essays, but this one was just bad. I'm not even talking about his prediction, just the way he puts it out there. It's just a very pathetic read.
For ~20 years Microsoft was a bully and received much criticism for it. Now they're just another tech company that's successful at the end of the day and has a lot of products out there being used by a lot of people. Now they're dead?
Give me a break. The whole Microsoft-hate bandwagon is absolutely pathetic to watch. It's just like the Apple-hate bandwagon.
How are they still relevant exactly? They're doing some interesting things, but I know dozens of people that rarely if ever touch an MS operating system every day, unthinkable a decade ago, and they're missing out on nothing. I can't think of a must use piece of software that launched on an MS platform (outside Xbox) in the last 5 years. That puts them pretty low on the relevance totem pole.
> They're doing some interesting things, but I know dozens of people that rarely if ever touch an MS operating system every day, unthinkable a decade ago, and they're missing out on nothing.
I knew plenty of Mac users in 2004. They didn't feel like they were missing out on anything back then.
The recent past does not represent the normal state of affairs. Microsoft was not going to retain a monopoly forever, any more than IBM could've retained a monopoly. Yet IBM is larger today than it ever was as a monopoly.
Markets grow, and new markets open up. Microsoft doesn't need a monopoly in every market. What it needs is something that it doesn't yet have in the various consumer markets -- 20-30% share. Large enough to matter.
Your comment is the exact same as PG's - because you don't see it with your own two eyes it must not exist.
There are millions of people that are working off of microsoft exchange servers, using websites hosted by microsoft IIS, involved in environments managed using active directory, work collaboratively with others using sharepoint (there's lots of job opportunities as a shairpoint dev, by the way), .NET developers, people working with Azure and Office 365, use SQL server databases, using microsoft office products, having their traffic pass through UAG systems, and so and so on. In addition they're one of the leading tech companies when it comes to helping fight spam and cyber crime activity (when I say one of the leading tech companies I mean one of the leading tech companies that's mission statement isn't to mainly fight spam and cyber crime.)
Hyper-v, file shares, remote desktop gateway and services, the list of services microsoft has its hands in is very, very long. Microsoft does a whole hell of a lot more than just produce an office suite and an operating system.
Just because you're personally surrounded by linux and mac users doesn't mean microsoft is irrelevant. It just means your scope on the world is narrow enough that it's out of your personal bubble.
There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you recognize it for what it is - your own little world that is not a perfect representation of the real world.
If the premise is that Microsoft no longer has a death grip on the technology sector, with the ability to throw its weight in whatever direction it pleases whenever it pleases, then I would agree with that.
Dead? Not even close.
(But they may be dead in the not too distant future. i do not have a crystal ball. but right now they're hardly dead, 7 years after PG's essay.)
> the article's credibility is killed by the use of the word dead
How? The author clearly doesn't mean "out of business" when he says "dead". He means that what Microsoft once was, or what it represented, is dead. The idea once conveyed by the word "Microsoft" is dead. It's not sensationalist clickbait, it's a metaphor.
Well he may mean that, but that's not what comes to mind when most people think of the word "dead." And picking that particular word to use as liberally as he does comes across as overly dramatic.
If they were really dead he wouldn't need to say it, it wouldn't be of interest to say it, and he wouldn't have bothered saying it. Microsoft only needs to be concerned when people stop banging on about them.
It would have been better if had said he wished they were dead because he doesn't like them, or because he thinks they are bullies or he thinks they are ruining the web or something of that nature. I would respect that.
Not really. They're still immense players in desktop and corporate IT. That alone accounts for an immense amount of revenue, a sizeable chunk in the whole world of computing.
On top of that, Azure is competitive and is gaining more and more traction, and the person who headed the Azure department is now the new CEO. Their gaming division (Xbox) is profitable, which is mostly a hardware field, and they're slowly getting a foothold in mobile and have purchased a big mobile hardware manufacturer.
Their development tools (Visual Studio and .NET) are immensely popular and they've managed to capitalize on the whole JavaScript thing by making it easy to develop with VS.
They're anything but dead.
Of course things like Bing aren't a success yet but if MSFT figures out what do with that they'll have something other than people just Google stuff on.
I don't see why. Microsoft had $77bn in revenue last year, with net income of ~$22bn. Revenue has grown every year for the last five years and last year's was their highest ever.
Not being large players in the areas mentioned doesn't imply that they are somehow "dead".
No one means 'dead' like RIM, they mean 'dead' like IBM. IBM is doing great - they're making lots of money in the service industry, they have a good research division, etc. They also haven't made an impact in the consumer space for years, and they probably never will again. They're just a different animal now.
When PG wrote this, that's what Microsoft was. They were irrelevant in all the areas where interesting things were happening. Are they more relevant now? They seem like they might be, but it's hard to say. The essay is not about profit, it's about mindshare.
The fact that a large number of comments here are clarifying what he means by 'dead' is indicative of this baity nature of it. He specifically chose to say "Microsoft is dead" not "Microsoft has lost mindshare", and now its conveniently providing him protection by interpretation.
Reduced to not fearing is dead. Computer Associates eeks out a living on obsolete enterprise apps that some people. And the city of San Francisco contains a direct current power utility. Edge cases are the opposite of dominance.
APPL may soon be the next MSFT if they don't have another full-sized iPad up their sleeves to wow us with very soon. A solar powered flying watch that reads your mind and predictively orders groceries. :)
I tend to think the exact opposite to the "Microsoft is Dead". I'm nobody important (well not a PG anyway), just a consumer and a developer. And if anybody cares, I'm quite excited by Microsoft at the moment.
As both a developer and a consumer, I have a complaint against Google. It's going in every direction. Google has no stable, coherent, ecosystem on which you can build your products. You don't know where they are going between Android and Chrome OS. Or between DART and javascript. Or Java and Go. Microsoft is trying to attack exactly that by trying to create, brick by brick, a coherent software ecosystem. Coherent from a development, design and user experience point of view. This direction makes sense to me. I'm just not buying at the moment as the quality and experience is just not there yet. But I could buy.
Also I just watched Nadella speaking, and he says he wants to address the separation between consumer and business software. I think that's pretty cool. If you couple that with the fact more and more people work from home, or remotely, and the fact we have more and more devices around for both work and private usage, that begins to make sense.
You could argue that we are tired of Microsoft trying. But they are moving all their products together, and it takes more time, obviously. And some skills in the execution. Hence Nadella's new role. Well that's my interpretation anyway.
Now imagine he succeeds to make all these products marginally better. Microsoft doesn't need much, it's almost there. This could become an Apple-like come-back before even being gone.
Pretty terrible title considering Xbox 360 had taken off in 2006. Not one mention of Xbox in the whole post, indicating how much PG is out of touch. Xbox took gaming to next level, especially online gaming and managed to build a great ecosystem for games.
The younger ones, in the last line, are all actually playing on Xbox. Microsoft has greater identification among younger people as brand than say, Apple given their decade long presence in console and PC gaming.
>To put it in another way. Gaming (put together): not much of an industry, compared to IT/mobile sales.
Why are you comparing gaming to IT/mobile? It should be compared to other entertainment industries. It has already surpassed Hollywood in terms of revenue in the US ($17bil vs $9bil in 2011). Having a dominant product in the gaming industry begets a lot of influence.
Worldwide, The VG industry generates around $70 billion in revenue (excluding mobile gaming). In comparison the movie industry - (all countries combined, not just hollywood releases) generates around 120 billion.
>Every gamer could as well only use an Xbox, and it still wouldn't matter much for the kind of discussion we're having about Microsoft.
>Why are you comparing gaming to IT/mobile? It should be compared to other entertainment industries.
Because we're discussing a company, Microsoft, that has most of its business and revenues in the IT/mobile space and a small part of it in gaming. And I want to see if the gaming market is as large and important as the main market the company is involved in.
>Please explain what you mean..
I mean that even if Microsoft was the most succesful and relevant gaming company in the world, it would still not mean its relevant in the IT space.
And MS's relevance in the IT space (compared to the nineties) is what Paul Graham's post we're discussing is all about.
> In Microsoft's bottom lime, the Xbox is marginal at best.
In other comments people argue that Microsoft is dead despite their bottom line, because bottom line is not what matters. (pg essentially says the same)
Now you say Xbox does not matter because it produces marginal income only?
First, that was said "in other comments" by people other than me. I, for one, think bottom line is part of what matters (just not the most important metric).
Second, no I say Xbox does not matter because not only it produces only marginal income, it belongs to a marginal industry itself.
Pulling out all of your infrastructure and software systems and logical processes and replacing it is hard. Swapping your console and signing up to another service is not.
Paul Graham isn't saying that MSFT isn't a viable, powerful business, just that it no longer has the potential to use technology to change the world.
As a dominant monopolist, MSFT had little incentive to change the world, and as a large, mature company, it is much more likely to be reactive to change than to be the source of change.
There more interesting question to me now is, "Is Apple 'dead'?" Apple has similarly been reacting to change, rather than driving it since the iPad (yes, others may view this differently). Will they be able to create something new and revolutionary? Or will that be left to new, scrappy "startups"?
I think you mean "Google is much more scary than MS". The gerund doesn't make a lot of sense in this context.
For bonus fluency points, it reads better if you say "I fear Google much more than MS".
I apologize if feedback on your English was unwanted.
---
On another note, I generally agree. Google has a lot more scope for evil than Microsoft does. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish applies to what appeared to some Google properties too (eg Reader).
"As far as evil goes, to me, Google is much more scaring than MS."
You've said more about your knowledge of the history of computing than you have about Google or Microsoft.
Edit: I think it would be interesting and amusing to know the ages of people downvoting this. Microsoft has such an incredible history of anti-competitive behavior that I'm surprised anyone believes Google is even in the same league of evil as Microsoft.
I don't think you are downvoted because your answer is wrong but because it looks like a bit condescending.
But let me explain why I fear Google more than I would fear Microsoft if it was still "alive".
When they were at the top (let's say 1995 to 2005) Microsoft was always about controlling people's software (everybody should use Windows and Office ...).
However Google is about controlling people's information : the information you give them knowingly (in your Google Docs, Youtube videos etc) and the informations they gather in your profile / "dossier" (what searches are you doing, what videos are you watching, how long are you connected ...) whatever they call it.
And to me, my data is much more important than the computing platform I'm using. I can't delete what Google know about me but I can still wipe my hard-drive and install any BSD or Linux I want.
People were saying that about BlackBerry right up until a few years ago. Where are the true mobile versions of Office or Outlook? When will Windows 8+ become anything other than a painful mess for ordinary users? Will anyone ever ship a Metro app anyone cares about?
The old Microsoft isn't part of the computing platform of the future, mobile and services, but the server division is. For the division Nadella is from, their competition aren't Apple or Yahoo or even Google, it's Rackspace and AWS. For them Apple etc are customers and allies. The old Microsoft is dead in the water, but can a new Microsoft fully emerge from its shadow to take a valuable place in the future of the computing industry?
Do they need a mobile version, really? I wouldn't use it at work, and we all seem to get along with the native versions just fine. It's the corporate clientele that pays the big bucks for these products, and I'm not aware of them clamoring for a mobile version.
(PS, I've only actually worked at startups which have grown into larger companies. At no time did I or anyone else I was aware of feel the need for mobile Excel.)
That's true. Although the parent is right that everyone hates Windows 8+ and nobody cares about Metro apps in truth, the big money is made in the enterprise space. Windows Server, SQL Server and Exchange are huge. People think that everyone could install a Linux box and migrate but it isn't that easy. Give a Windows admin a Linux box and see how dumbfounded he will be.
The iPad made a splash in the consumer world and perhaps in the BYOD world a bit but you don't really see people doing real work on them or ditching their desktops to use them. Great for consuming, not for creating (unless you enjoy struggling). I think as long as Microsoft caters to the enterprise market and move away from attempting to force a mobile UI on a desktop, things will go swimmingly for them.
Having said that, Windows 8 on a Surface is a joy to use! Just not on a desktop without having to fling your mouse all over the place to get things to appear.
Their revenue numbers were impressive but how much of that change was from new products and customers and how much was from increasing licensing costs to existing customers?
"One of the reasons "Web 2.0" has such an air of euphoria about it is the feeling, conscious or not, that this era of monopoly may finally be over."
While it seems that there is no longer the complete monopoly that Microsoft had, the new monopoly that Google has is functionally similar. While not fully there yet, they are heading towards near-complete lock-in to Google services. Web 2.0 may have raised the bar for monopoly (or lowered the bar for competition), it definitely didn't do away with it altogether.
I predicted Apple's death some months after Steve Jobs died. Why? Two things (both of them decisions of the CEO): Plastic iPhones and the iPad mini (both products Jobs had resisted) and the more damning fact that for the first time a dividend of a serious size was paid (http://investor.apple.com/dividends.cfm). Jobs was adamant about growing the warchest. His assumption was that if a stockholder thought his/her investment was better placed elsewhere, stock could be sold and reinvested. The act of paying a dividend states that the board thinks the investor can do better elsewhere with that money.
>I predicted Apple's death some months after Steve Jobs died. Why? Two things (both of them decisions of the CEO): Plastic iPhones*
You mean like the plastic Cube, G3, G4, Macbook and iPod's that preceded them during Jobs tenure? Only with even better and novel quality plastics used?
>and the iPad mini (both products Jobs had resisted)
Jobs probably knew about the mini all along, it takes more than a year to prototype and ship such a device. Besides, what jobs "resisted" or not is mere speculation, unless there are actual sources of him rejecting them. But even then, Jobs, according to witness accounts, changed ideas about lots of things he once rejected (e.g the iBooks).
>and the more damning fact that for the first time a dividend of a serious size was paid. Jobs was adamant about growing the warchest.
At a time when the warchest was still small. When Jobs died it rivalled the US economy. After some point it's silly to ammass even more money.
>His assumption was that if a stockholder thought his/her investment was better placed elsewhere, stock could be sold and reinvested. The act of paying a dividend states that the board thinks the investor can do better elsewhere with that money.
Only, whatever the board thinks, the invester CAN go elsewhere with that money, and that would have an effect on stock, morale etc. Better throw a bone and keep investors happy too.
The first iPad mini was introduced on 2012-10-23. Steve Jobs died on 2011-10-05. It's certain that Steve both knew about the iPad mini and supported its development. Apple's hardware development takes time and does not shift on a dime.
"Apple is no longer hungry, nor foolish" is such a facile statement that means absolutely nothing.
I was actually rephrasing my point, using the quote. Sheding money as dividends means Apple is not hungry. Having no visionary guide to quell the aversion of risk, Apple is no longer foolish. I'm a bit embarrassed having to explain it.
Their war chest will remain strategically as big as it needs to be. The amount of cash they have is ridiculous.
And while an Icahn sized stock buy back is probably too much, their current buy back makes all the sense in the world. The stock is tremendously undervalued.
You can't say it more eloquently than Warren Buffet: "If you could buy dollar bills for 80 cents, it's a very good thing to do." [1]
Not to mention most of that cash is overseas, and it would be extremely costly to pull in onshore. They actually took a loan to pay out the dividends as it would be cheaper than paying the tax required to onshore their overseas monies.
I expect if all that money was in the US they would be spending it on something else. There are only so many fancy stores with expensive glass you can build overseas.
If you've read Steve Jobs bio and know enough about him, you could surmise that he is "full of shit". He changes his mind, absorbs other people's ideas as his own and doesn't give them credit.
The iPad Mini actually sells really well, and Steve was around to ship the hundred iterations of iPod (nano, shuffle, etc.)
A hardware designer I used to work with noted that Jobs was against putting a radio in the iPod, and sure enough it appeared during a spell when he was off sick.
This may indicate a corporate shift from a visionary outlook to a managing perspective. Someone on the inside would have better insight, but as an outsider I have to wonder.
Microsoft as the concept of an all powerful dominating IT company is dead, and nothing has or will replace it. The company itself is still doing fine- they still make roughly twice the profit google did last financial year.
Is that just net profit, or does it account for growth? Net profit is not always a good metric for a large company's performance, as there are a lot of incentives to keep that number down and invest money back into the business (such as taxes). Amazon, for example, almost always operates near or at a loss from a quarterly or yearly perspective, but makes huge growth as business.
True, I haven't looked deeply into the financials so I don't know what they are doing with their money. Microsoft's profit margin looks a lot better than google's so maybe google is reinvesting a lot.
I remember that they even saved Apple from going bankrupt back then. Its true that they dominated Apple, but i wouldn't say that they wanted to destroy them.
You're right of course, but the tactics they used (especially against oss/linux and the web) pissed off a lot of people.
If destroying meant: making yet a better product and marginalizing the competition (with the product or through marketing) it would be business as usual, but it seems microsoft didn't understand that their embrace-extend-extinguish method would backfire in the internet age.
You made the point. Although it was not that explicit, from IE destroyed Netscape, I can see the other intentions. Fortunately, Linux, Apple, Android survives. MS tried to play monopoly which hampered the competition. The same for Google now. Maybe once you are no.1, you will be like that, but it's near eye sighted.
Why can't people just acknowledge these things are cyclical?
You love something, then everyone loves it, then it's not as cool and special, then people start to hate it, then they tear it down and find something else to love. Microsoft has completed that cycle and is now potentially going to be loved again, whereas Apple is nearing the end of their cycle and is started to be hated.
IMO Microsoft is still one of the scariest companies when it comes to the gaming industry. I'm overjoyed to see tricklets of sanity rise up (the PC market)through Valves efforts, but MS is still a very big, very scary beast in AAA gaming.
My guess is that Valve is being watched by every other game maker. I wonder what is being said behind closed doors in meetings with a lot of suits. If Valve is successful, I don't think they will be alone for long.
The most amazing thing about this essay is that even the smartest people amongst us (Paul Graham) can be bigoted and see things as black and white when they are grey.
Microsoft has done some well documented evil things but imagine if IBM had won the OS wars? Talk about locked down and monopolistic! And has the ascendance of Apple and Google been uniformly good? I think not - we are in less control over our software and our data than when Microsoft was in charge.
It kinda seems crazy stupid to not invite a company that makes $24B in income a year to your demo day. But then again, Microsoft has never been a company that is bamboozled by Nest Labs-style startup overvaluation bullshit, and maybe you knew that.
Microsoft is lumbering and beurocratic but they do actually ship a lot of code and support the developer community. Xbox is also very successful obviously. Windows 8 was a huge flop in most people's opinion due to terrible user interface, despite the welcome creation of a Windows app store.
They still have a lot of momentum behind them because of all the PC applications that only work with Windows.
It's an interesting reality that Apple has their OS locked "officially" with their own hardware. In that respect, Microsoft seems more open to hardware competition. (IMO)
The strange thing is that with Windows XP, you could go online and search for software from within it. You could "get software" from within XP (somewhere in the Control Panel I think?)
Perhaps it didn't take off due to the lack of wide-ranging Internet connectivity at the time. But they did at least attempt an online shop/store at the time. But everyone forgets this.
Ah, I think I know what you're talking about. Was this where their games like "Motocross Madness" were available for trial or purchase? I see the convenience of a nice searchable, organized app store but the decision to bifurcate Windows 8 into two completely separate desktop environments and then hide all the useful controls off of the screen (in corners) seems completely asinine. There's probably keyboard shortcuts that make navigation easier but there needs to be a good GUI for those users who are used to using their PC that way.
Precisely. Windows-C for the charm etc. isn't obvious. It isn't even obvious what this charm thing is either, or why I need to move the cursor over to the edge of the screen.
This will completely confuse most Windows users who are used to clicking on things that they see, not magically waving the cursor around to make things appear and then clicking on non-obvious vague silhouette-style icons.
Sometimes I wonder if people who write this stuff actually understand how businesses operate.
Microsoft is dead because of competition? How does that even make sense? Like I've said many times before, competition actually makes a company and their products better, not make them die. MS has had to turn their huge ship around and its a slow process.
Sure, they're making baby steps and getting there, but the hatred for them is beyond what I've seen for other companies. It's not just that they dominated and killed a bunch of competition in the 80's and 90's. Even now with the new products they're bringing to market, people are still hazing them and won't let them get off the mat.
It's almost fashionable these days to hate MS. They can't do mobile like Android and Apple, they can't do cloud stuff like Amazon and Salesforce. .Net is dead, everybody loves Ruby. MS can't do anything right, blah, blah, blah.
Nobody wants to see the small victories, they just want to pile on enough dirt and hope they go away.
> Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway.
Well, Apple's laptops, like their whole hardware range, look really nice and well made. My Toshiba Satellite is dusty, covered in bagel crumbs and stinks of roll-ups. I would be really embarrassed turning up in a public arena with a pig ugly piece of kit that looks like it has been used in a sewer.
Windows is still used by many businesses in the UK. That is the main reason I still have it on my laptop, most CV's are only accepted as .doc/.docx/.txt files.
The desktop no longer matters? Hell, the CLI is still alive and kicking. I find Vim works better in tty than in xterm.
So are these the same thoughts the hacker community will have with Apple's iOS in the future (there'll inevitably be some missteps)? Or even OSX for that matter? I fail to see why in-principle the community that is so vocal about FOSS gives them a pass.
"The Eart is flat. I already know what the reaction to this eassay will be. Half the readers will say that the Earth is round".
Might not exactly be the case here (since he's talking for relevanece vs profits) but one can argue that continued and even increased profits must also show some kind of relevance.
But, most importantly, I wanted to show that foretelling what your critics might say doesn't make what you said any more correct.
I guess they don't see themselves as the community sees an all round and productive IT company. They had and do still have an abundance of market penetration (considering the business world in Europe and Asia and so on). They couldn't (maybe didn't) kill the desktop by replacing it with surface. They really could have, and the whole business world may be on tablets today, but they didn't do it. (and please don't tell me that the business world are on tablets today, tablets are still accessories to laptop and desktop computers)
I understand if anybody says "hey! MS is not a company as you or others would prescribe to be and you don't get what surface is and what it is for!" Maybe that's true. But they had lots of chances of coming back as a competitive, innovative actor and they keep grounding their chances with products like Windows 8. Last month, may father, who is an author and do not get along well with any computer called me and said: "I just could not work with this Windows 8." To note, he barely learned to cope with the old fashioned windows interface. Loading a considerable amount of cognitive load to consumers upon whom your market penetration depends does not seem like good idea. It at least is not "innovation".
We will see what the concept will be like in 5 to 10 years or so, when the planned obsolescence time of the currently available MS running hardware (and software for that matter) comes. But to replace things like Word, Excel? Quite possible, but difficult. When those can be replaced, I think we will see whether the company stands over a house of cards or not.
"no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway."
That was a false statement in 2007 and is still today. I'm the evidence, if no one else. And I don't think I'm alone, although it does puzzle me when I see Microsoft evangelists at conferences holding speeches from Apple computers.
I do think Windows will become pretty irrelevant over the next 5 years, as Android and iOS get owned by billions of people. However, I agree that right now and for the past few years, there's a very strong bias towards Apple computers in Silicon Valley and in media offices, and they might think "Apple is everywhere", even though it's not.
If Apple keeps curling up in their luxury niche it will be iOS that's going to be irrelevant in 5 years.
And Microsoft will start to decline if they don't go after SAP's and Oracle's enterprise applications business before their server-side stuff becomes a low cost cloud based commodity.
I think both Apple and Microsoft are going down. Linux will rule the server side and the client side in the shape of Android/Chrome OS.
I don't think they are dead. Just look at design. WP7 brought forward the flat style. First everybody laughed at it. Now it's the new hip. iOS got converted into flat. Lots of websites are being redesigned for flat. How many examples of flat design would there be if MS didn't have any mindshare?
A lot of start ups are making OSs, browsers, web servers, email clients or servers, productivity suites, game consoles,document servers. Nope. Sorry, still avoiding Microsoft's territory. And if Google or Apple gets kicked in the balls from the justice department they would become low key as well.
Its a natural tendency of the system for proprietary efforts to grow in power and centralize. We need a more evolved paradigm because there is a fundamental antagonism between business (in its current form) and technology.
One of the things that is starting to force this evolution is the growing realization that we must move from a server-based internet to a distributed data-based internet.
We need to popularize new or better ways of achieving cohesion while maintaining decoupling, diversity, and freedom to evolve different solutions.
I think there are a lot of ideas but the newest and best ideas for fundamental structural changes are not well known or tested. We need to test some radical changes to societal structures.
It would not be optimal for Microsoft to die. And it is kinda sad that DEC and Sun are no more. I liked that http://altavista.digital.com. It was good.
That is not the definition of death that the article uses. He argues that Microsoft died as a monopolist, as the bully of the schoolyard. DEC and Sun never had that position to lose. IBM did, but now I keep paraphrasing the article. Read it :)
Funny how the links to the footnotes in the article are intercepted by the numbered list near the bottom. You'd think somebody would have caught that bug by now.
The first time through, I thought they were the footnotes, and, oddly enough, they sort-of made sense. Especially the 2nd one, which came off as a strange joke (as in "We better make sure Microsoft doesn't catch the Apple bug").
Wow, reading an article saying that MSFT is dead, with this line, "And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and phones on the way."
ON THE WAY. This article is before the iPhone came to dominate. Wow, did Microsoft miss that boat.
And, what do you imagine will solve the problem of entrenched bureaucracy? Given that bureaucracy tends to expand itself as a primary feature...saying a company is "just plagued" with it, is a pretty damning statement.
well the op deleted their post to stop the downvote flood, but the real issue is that it was pg stating that he knows they "seemed" dangerous. That "seemed" means, "my opinion of them."
You could read it as pg saying "I know that my opinion of microsoft in 2001 was they were dangerous because I wrote an essay about it back then."
> but the real issue is that it was pg stating that he knows they "seemed" dangerous. That "seemed" means, "my opinion of them."
That makes no sense at all, since PGs argument wasn't that they seemed dangerous to him, it was that it was his opinion that they were less dangerous that they seemed to other people.
His more recent claim is saying that he was aware of the general perception of Microsoft's danger in 2001, and that this awareness is evident in the post he wrote at the time, which acknowledged that perception and argued that it was exaggerated.
C# and .net killed MS. The same virus killed Sun and will kill oracle. Technologies that try to isolate the coder from the machine by creating a funnelled dumbed-down common interface are inherently flawed because the HW evolves faster than the software.
You are seriously saying somehow that languages which abstract away hardware details are bad?
"Assembly? Bad! you should know the instructions op codes."
"C? Bad! you should know assembly! What are you trying to do? Write an operating system that is portable beyond the PDP architecture?"
"Java? Bad! You should manage your own memory! And the STL should be good enough for anyone."
Abstraction, by reducing complexity or making assumptions, allows developers to work faster or do more. Does this have negative side effects? Sure (see Joel's leaky abstractions article), but the benefits out weight the costs by several orders of magnitude. My evidence? The entire computer industry for the last 74 years.
Sorry I did not formulate my though properly. Let's try this:
Companies that try to use a language/platform combination to isolate the coder from the machine by creating a funnelled dumbed-down common interface and executing environment are pursuing a loose-loose path.
1. the HW evolves faster than the software
2. the coder wants to hack the most out of the hardware
3. the OpenSource community is a paradigm shift for software companies, you can't put the cat back in the bag.
> Technologies that try to isolate the coder from the machine by creating a funnelled dumbed-down common interface are inherently flawed because the HW evolves faster than the software.
My qualm with Microsoft is all the little things that they let slip through. Little things like having a control panel with 100 different links with nondescript names. Is it really possible that not a single person at Microsoft tried changing a setting on their Windows machine and realized how difficult it was to even find the setting? Were they so entrenched in the Microsoft way of doing things that they were accustomed to a shitty user experience? Or did the aesthetically minded engineer have his voice drowned out by the bureaucracy?
If the higher-ups were yelling down the food chain, "build an Apple-killing UI!", I can see how they would settle on what became the app-centric look of Windows 8. But blatantly idiotic decisions around the little things like control panels, choosing wireless connections, and the sheer difficulty of navigation, make me realize that somewhere at Microsoft something is really fucked up.