Microsoft’s Creative Destruction
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I think he doesn't give Microsoft enough credit on this. They entered a game console market with two entrenched players, where one was clearly dominating the other. People gave Microsoft little to no chance of succeeding and yet, on there second iteration were able to put themselves on equal ground to Sony and Nintendo. And that is with producing one of the most unreliable consoles ever made.
(1) The Xbox did not conflict with any of MSFT's existing businesses.
(2) It was an established product that MSFT did not add much to. It was a console, which was operated the same way that other consoles were operated. It does not require much business leadership to do that. Ironically that's kind of like Linux's development model. For a band of scattered, (formerly) unfunded hackers, that's ok. For a company in an evolving area like tech, it's not really acceptable.
The video game console market has historically done to consumer electronics corporations what Russia in winter has done to mighty European militaries. For MS to have succeeded, and by many metrics come out on top, in 2 generations is an incredible feat.
To make an analogy with movies, there will be no shortage of 'Spiderman' or 'Batman Begins' on the 360, but only the PS3 will have 'Return of the King'.
The top 3 Xbox 360 games are exclusive (Halo 3, Gears of War 2, Gears of War) and 6 of the top 10. Xbox has the 'Return of the King' exclusive franchise with Halo.
The only company with a massive list of successful exclusives is Nintendo.
During the previous generation of consoles, exclusives were a huge reason why the PS2 ended up on top I think. Its line-up in 2001 alone was incredible: Gran Turismo 3, GTA 3 , MGS2, Twisted Metal: Black, Devil May Cry, Onimusha Warlords, etc.
The answer is simple: Microsoft needs its own Steve Jobs, not a Steve Ballmer.
Without an absolute tyrant with a keen sense of where the market is, and where it's going at the helm, Microsoft will continue to flounder. And with good reason, there are too many internal fiefdoms, and too many internal rivalries.
To be honest, I think MS would've been very well served to have been broken up at the end of the 90s. If the company had been divided into three separate firms, like Office Inc., Windows Inc. and Everything Else Inc., I think things would've turned out very differently for those firms over the past ten years: fewer boondoggle projects that only have a prayer of making a profit in the distant future, less of a whackjob 'better together' mentality that hamstrings Microsoft developers into using inadequate internal solutions or forces them to bolt useless features onto their products, and so on.
Sigh, sorry. I really think Microsoft is capable of so much more than they've been able to do for years, and it frustrates me to see so much talent go to waste.
They win because they do things better with their resources.
MS has an innovation model. It's just that it is a very non-innovative innovation model.
Also, when was the last time Microsoft won with the "non-innovative innovation model" you refer to? Sharepoint? SQL Server? I can't think of any instance where this has worked in years.
My impression of the man is he's just a sales guy - interested in making money, but lacking any vision or genuine enthusiasm for technology. Consequently Microsoft has mostly become a cash cow.
As the saying goes - a fish rots from the head down. When there's no passion for changing the world, it happens elsewhere.
The biggest fear in making any major IT purchase is not the price, the conversion, or the change in culture; it's the potential loss of options in how we run our own business.
I've seen it over and over again: competitive pressure requires us to make a change in the way we run our business, but we can't. For all kinds of reasons. The license agreement kills any possible ROI. We don't have the needed IT support because so much of it is spent on keeping current. The systems don't talk to each other. The feature we need is still 18 months away. And probably most of all, the software is not as excellent as we need it to be (let's just leave it at that).
Long gone are the days when you needed IBM's permission to fart. Guess who the biggest culprit is today?
Just because you go with someone doesn't necessarily mean you like it. Almost every enterprise IT department I know would love an alternative to Microsoft. (And make no mistake about it, the enterprise is Microsoft's strength, much more so than the consumer.)
Sure, pissing off your customers may pad today's bottom line. How do you think those customers will feel when your landscape changes and they have more choices?
[Entered using ie7 on xp pro. I didn't have a choice.]
So the plain gray PC with the interface that is either gray or childish has found its home in the enterprise. The computer is like it is, because the reality in many enterprise is not 'human' at all and Microsoft contributed to it and made its profit from it (because the companies choose their equipment, not only the computer, based on price mostly).
Care to give us a concrete example? Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point here, but my experience has been somewhat the opposite. The tight integration of the Microsoft development tools (for example Visual Studio, SQL Server) is what makes it such an appealing and easy to use development platform for so many enterprise developers.
> a decade and 1000s of devs can also introduce many new flaws with each update.
I find that silly - what are you basing that argument on other than anecdotal evidence? Using that same logic you'd expect linux to be extremely flawed since so many developer's hands touch it.
You're right about the "anecdotal evidence", but I just experience that anecdotal evidence every other day and there's a lot more of that anecdotal evidence to be found in most IT depts and MS shops.
1. It's a HUGE company (80k employees?). When you get to that size, it's hard to ensure all great ideas get to market. For a very long time in its history, the company was guided by a dominating spirit (computers on every desk) and a similar leader (Bill Gates). With both outmoded now, it's easy for business-groups to take local decisions, rather than follow the war-plan.
2. BUT, they've made HUGE investments in the future. Consider Microsoft Research. MSFT isn't going to be IBM anytime soon (huge company, but better known for sales folks than tech enterprise). Though they'll possibly not be as sexy as Apple, they'll definitely have the tech/IP if/when they want to utilize it.
But the other mission statement-y phrase that gets thrown around a lot is having an integrated experience between "three screens and the cloud". The three screens being TV (Xbox), computer, and cell phone. That gives a little direction, but as much as I'd like to see them be competitive in mobile, I'm not optimistic.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I feel like a long-term mission statement shouldn't be changing every 12 months.
New machines, granted. But that, unfortunately, is de rigueur in this industry.
Big R&D budgets, with lots of interesting advanced research, DARPA grants, etc. etc. can certainly be helpful, but they don’t save a company that lacks a broader product strategy.
Research at IBM is mostly product-group driven. Microsoft affords more flexibility- allowing more academic research, for example. This puts them farther into the future, IMO, than solving immediate product research needs. What I meant by investment above is more than monetary- it takes a lot to get a good research team going.
I agree that nothing can save a company with shut eyes. A strong research group is a way to keep them open.
Anyway, I think you could possibly be right; I just think you need a better example than IBM. :-)
* Agile practice indicates that experience with users is the best way to keep project on a useful path. Research groups necessarily act without such input, which leaves them prone to going off into the weeds, including producing interesting technologies without a total appreciation for the practicalities, or a clear path to delivering it to users.
* One of Jobs' first acts on returning to Apple was to disband the research group (http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-203996.html). Why? I would guess because he wanted research to happen in the course of and for the purpose of innovative product development. There you can get the benefit of a user-focused development process, with a defined end result.
* As with any institution (e.g. NASA http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1092972), without accountability from strong leadership or users they're prone to unproductive efforts. After all, how do you judge the quality of their efforts? How can you motivate them to strive - day to day at all levels - to make an impact, when they have these cushy unaccountable ivory tower positions?
Or, more practically, what has MSR produced that's active in changing the world, compared to a handful of startups acquired by Apple?
I see a lot of great stuff coming out of MSR; their Simons are almost single-handedly responsible for GHC's internals and over the last 2 decades making Haskell a usable, nay, fast, language. But what OSs is Haskell principally developed & used on? Linux or OSX.
It may (I'm skeptical though) that an agile business can thrive without investing in research.
But then, who invents the future (say the Fusion kind of 30-year-future pointed at above)?Our fallback is an underfunded university system, but it lacks market insight.
At this point, I don't really know if product-embedded research is the way to go. Apple seems to be pretty good at this-behold multitouch everything-but I'm curious how they work- How do they hire researchers for instance? If someone knows, please share.
It may (I'm skeptical though) that an agile business can thrive without investing in research.
But then, who invents the future (say the Fusion kind of 30-year-future pointed at above)?Our fallback is an underfunded university system, but it lacks market insight.
At this point, I don't really know if product-embedded research is the way to go. Apple seems to be pretty good at this-behold multitouch everything-but I'm curious how they work- How do they hire researchers for instance? If someone knows, please share.
It may (I'm skeptical though) that an agile business can thrive without investing in research.
But then, who invents the future (say the Fusion kind of 30-year-future pointed at above)?Our fallback is an underfunded university system, but it lacks market insight.
At this point, I don't really know if product-embedded research is the way to go. Apple seems to be pretty good at this-behold multitouch everything-but I'm curious how they work- How do they hire researchers for instance? If someone knows, please share.
the premise of funding basic research (as opposed applied product-driven research) is that only by giving researchers freedom from short-term demands can it be possible for them to do something truly innovative and 'out of the mold'. a 'classic' example is all the work done by brilliant researchers at Xerox PARC in the '70's that was way ahead of its time; of course, Xerox execs have been kicking themselves in the rear for not capitalizing on those technologies (Apple and Microsoft did), but the hope is that Microsoft will be smarter than Xerox was and actually capitalize on basic research created in MSR. Giving researchers freedom will breed lots of supposedly-useless work (that's only useful or interesting to academics), but it provides a greater possibility of doing something totally game-changing.
Because for them, it was an impossibility.
Even in the cases where they productize it - the Program Manager on the product team is not going to get a bonus by taking on some new project in MSR in addition to the commitments filed last year.
So researchers get on just fine without slaying dragons to ship. More cool papers to publish anyway.
Goes off on sabatical with Microsoft Research, and becomes a .NET evangelist. Stops writing Java books and starts writing .NET books.
Is there a quid quo pro? Probably not. But it does illustrate another purpose for Microsoft having a research organisation: winning over academics, and, by proxy, their students.
The real problem, though, is that Microsoft slows down the innovation. Every time I see my friends working on Windows, I see an operating system that nearly not changed since 1995.
I know that there are nice fonts, widgets, and you have nice shadows here and there. All the basic concepts, though, are the same since 1995. There's basically no true innovation.
See what Apple does. Ten years ago they had ugly, and basically unusable OS. Five ten years ago they were comparable. Now, they are the frontiers of the touch&the mobile revolution.
Regular people still struggle with the same problems they struggled ten years ago. They still have to cope with utterly complicated filesystem, there's still too much voodoo, they still cannot find their programs easily, there's still mouse&keyboard, they still get unnecessary viruses, and the cloud integration is almost non-existing, so they have to use pendrives.
Unfortunately, 90% of the new computers is sold with Windows, and it takes some unnecessary effort to find&learn better tools. We cannot expect regular people to give up their jobs in search of better IT solutions. They just want to get their job done, and it's OK.
We, as a developers, like to speak how Microsoft slows down the web. I think, Microsoft slows down the whole society. The time wasted on their today's deprecated software is the whole society's loss.
I don't say that Mac OS X has significantly changed since 2001. Please read carefully. I mean Apple as a whole. They do a lot of innovation. iPhone literally revolutionized the way we interact with mobile phones, and iPad is going to do the same with the standard computing model.
For me, innovation is all about the regular people. I don't care about the buzzwords, and the top notch innovation, which is used by 0,0069% of the population. Concepts such as cloud computing are so old, it's pathetic they are not widely used.
The same goes with iPhone/iPad pair. I know that spec-wide, there's nothing new about these tools. We, hackers, are so used to some concepts, we forget about our dads, girlfriends and co-workers from different departments, which are still in 1995.
By the way, I think OS X changed a lot. Not significantly, but a lot. This is not a completely different paradigm but things like MobileMe (iCal, AddressBook in the cloud), Spotlight, iTunes are big steps.
I think that iPod is the excellent case study for what the innovation actually is. From the technical standpoint, iPod is a garbage. I mean, less space than a nomand, lame. iPod wasn't very innovative in the terms of technology. MP3 players existed for years, and I was, as a nerd, relatively happy with them.
However, iPod played a significant role in bringing in the basic innovation to the masses. Downloading music with a click, instead of ripping it from CD with some weird tools, keeping your music library in a sync. It makes no difference for you or me, but it makes a big difference for your friend from different department, which is not tech savvy.
That's the actual purpose of innovation. It's about a Marry from the street.
People using the standard Microsoft environment, still use their computers as a bit better typewriter, faster snail mail, and an interface for finding stuff immediately, through Google. They do nearly the same stuff they were doing in 1995. Except, Internet is more popular thing.
People in the standard Apple environment, share their personal data between many devices, use nice touch interface, download music and movies with a click, without need to buy/rent a DVD, put their photos on the web easily etc., etc. Soon, thanks to iPad, they're going to enjoy the touch screen on daily basis, and forget about the standard folders-based filesystem, Desktop and other concepts that, actually, might be unnecessary for them.
Microsoft have changed a lot since 1995. They moved into the mobile space with Windows CE and Windows Mobile. They moved onto the web starting with software like Internet Explorer, Outlook, IIS, Windows Live Messenger and moved onto websites such as MSN, Hotmail, Multimap, and, more recently, Bing. They moved into hardware and released the Xbox, Zune, Zune HD, Xbox and Xbox 360. They moved into online gaming with Xbox Live and Games for Windows Live, which have evolved into social networks and marketplaces for both these products. That's ignoring all the different major changes to Windows-related technologies, whether .NET, DirectX, Exchange, Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, Windows Search, Windows Firewall, or Microsoft Security Essentials, which have all changed beyond recognition or outright didn't exist back in 1995. Hell, Microsoft have even made a standardised video codec called VC-1. There's probably others, but that's much more than "nice fonts, widgets, and ... nice shadows here and there".
Were these products innovative? Some definitely were (Xbox Live stands out), some weren't especially innovative but had advantages that caused them to compare favourably to their competitors to gain significant marketshare (Xbox, Internet Explorer, DirectX, .NET, Windows CE, Exchange, IIS), some weren't and have largely languished (GfwL, Windows Media Player, Bing). Besides, Microsoft's victories have traditionally not been through direct innovation as much as incremental product iteration which they generally do well.
Apple have grown at an unprecedented rate, and any company compared to them doesn't compare favourably, but that hardly means Microsoft have just sat there doing nothing. Trying to this into a "Apple environment vs. Microsoft environment" battle which is completely artificial when neither company exists in a vaccuum as they create platforms for other companies to build on.
Couldn't agree with this more!
EDIT: typos
You should dig into Alan Kay's "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet."
The biggest barriers aren't technological, they're cultural and conceptual. When Gutenburg invented the printing press, did you instantly have serialized novels, political pamphlets, abstruse philosophical treatises that depended on exact wording, magazines, and public libraries? Nope. That took time. Gutenburg just wanted to produce Bibles better and faster. We're still figuring out what to do with computers and networks.
I don't think Windows has made any such leaps since 1995. Mild improvements, but also a lot of backsliding (Vista).
The truth is that neither the XP/Vista/7 codebase nor OS X have changed much over the last decade. Desktop computing is pretty much a solved problem. Incremental improvement is all we're going to see from here on.
I agree that we're just going to see incremental improvement with the current UI paradigms. Maybe this is just a sci-fi reverie, but I'd hope that at a certain point, we see a new generation of desktop UIs. (Centered around what, I don't know. Maybe 3D layout + 3D gesture recognition. Pan, tilt, zoom.)
You'd be 100% wrong then. There have been two huge leaps, from the 9x codebase to the vastly more stable and secure NT codebase, and a further one from XP to Vista. Vista isn't "backsliding" by any stretch of the imagination -- its focus on security is the reason Windows today is so much more secure than OS X.
Of course, there have been plenty of other improvements along the road, from global search to a compositing UI.
That's a pretty bold statement. The security model might be theoretically better but since most applications force you to run as administrator anyway I don't think it's currently buying you that much.
1. The security model isn't just theoretically better -- OS X still doesn't randomize heap and stack addresses properly, for example. As Dion Blazakis points out in http://www.semantiscope.com/research/BHDC2010/BHDC-2010-Slid... slide 30, NX + ASLR makes "[h]ackers everywhere shed a tear."
2. Most Windows applications do not force you to run as administrator. Vista provided the push necessary for most applications to not require admin privs (source: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/10/08/user-account-con... -- the "Impact on Software Ecosystem" section).
3. Frankly, an ordinary consumer should be a lot more concerned about his data than about the computer itself -- whether a program runs with admin privileges or not is mostly irrelevant in this case.
Which part is nonsense?
> But why would a friend of mine still run windovs 98?
How would I know? How is one anecdote relevant in the face of facts and hard data?
> You have to think end user.
I am thinking of the end user. The end user today buys a computer with Windows 7, and enjoys a stable, secure, and hassle-free operating system. This was really not true of previous Windows versions, especially XP, and especially Windows 98.
Stability aside (which I think is a good thing) all that I can see that is different in windows is a bit of eye candy. Big wow.
OSX and iPhoneOS is infinitely more intuitive than windows. And there lies it's strength. Linux sadly just imitates where it should be innovating on the desktop.
I can understand though the desire not to confuse the users by radically making a design change. And quite frankly the security model on windows has been a joke.
But that's wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista alone is huge.
> OSX and iPhoneOS is infinitely more intuitive than windows.
I haven't used the iPhone OS, but I think OS X is significantly less intuitive than Windows. Enter renames a file?!
> And quite frankly the security model on windows has been a joke.
The security model of Windows NT has never been a joke -- it's always been more flexible than the standard Unix model (e.g. full ACLs instead of nine bits for permissions). The security of Windows XP, prior to Service Pack 2, was indeed a joke because MS wasn't too serious about security vulnerabilities then. Vista is a different story though.
What I was getting at was, that despite the added features to each incarnation; the average Joe might not notice that much has changed. They just want to do what they want to do easily.
My Dad happily got the job done in word perfect and i comfortably used a browser (until the os crashed) on Windows 3.1.
I agree with you on Finder's irritations. Gnome's nautilous puts finder and explorer to shame in my opinion. But it has little irritations of it's own. I did notice recently that in Windows7 explorer would carry on copying files rather than terminating on error; about time!
It's been said; that Windows omitted the security model in earlier pc's as they didn't forsee home pcs connecting the web. Hardware and cost also must have also been a limitation for earlier os's.
I used to do sys admin, and I was forever trying to lock down windows, i.e limited accounts, but it would break the apps or make them error or buggy. That's not really Microsoft's problem; unless they didn't provide adequate documentation. It's poor implementation. Likewise I've seen printers not working under limited accounts; I even saw a hilarious fix: make the whole system dir totally read/writable! To cut a long story short it riled me so much; I left windows.
People went from no security to a locked down system; that they found plain irritating. Whereas in OSX there is one simple system preferences panel, that asks for your password if you do anything that requires root privileges. Windows config is nasty until you learn it. Then they change it in each incarnation with the eventual itteration resembling a turd. Don't start me on Linux desktop implementations.
Also the security model on Windows feels the wrong way around. It should be locked down and slowly opened to trusted apps. But as you say perhaps that's finally been overhauled.
My mate uses win98 as he can get his job done easily. He can reset his os in seconds as it is so small. I wouldn't use it, but it's fine for him. About the only reason he might shift is for firefox, but he recently said he's found some compatibility layer that let's him run some modern apps. Hilarious. I don't know how he copes without a command line, but he does.
Don't get me wrong, there have been some leaps and bounds, but from my perspective, I'd rather a simple system; that works; that I can tweak if i want, that is portable, interoperable, that is fast and intuitive to use rather than a machine with oodles of power just to watch a high def movie or provide a transparent window, with drop shadows.
I fear the whole thirst for profit and protecting intellectual property is just dangerous here.
Innovation and ease of use should be rolled into an uberOS.
Open protocols and filesystems should be at there.
But yes. NeXTSTEP was very impressive since day 1 and OSX has come a long way since it was first introduced.
While I also wish they had innovated the UI more over the past decade, we are probably in the (admittedly growing) minority. You shouldn't switch the gas and break pedals in a car just to be "innovative", and I think for Microsoft the risk of alienating old users outweighs the risk of losing new users.
Apple of course has been more free to make sweeping changes to their OS over the past decade because, frankly, they haven't had much to lose. It will be interesting to see how dramatically they change OSX now that they have found something that sells.
You don't have to wait; they've already done it with the iPhone/iPad OS. Apple is clearly still willing to make hard and dramatic decisions when it comes to its operating systems.
To use your example of the iPhone: As innovative as the iPhone was when it was released, Apple really hasn't messed with it in almost three years. Doing so would risk alienating the 50+ million people using iPhone OS devices every day.
When the time comes in the next few years, will Apple make the hard decision to redesign their iPhone OS, possibly driving away some of their current users in the process? I would say they are more likely to than Microsoft. However, until they have passed that test, we shouldn't be so quick to judge.
Apple makes well designed prosumer products....and thats it. They are focused on shiny, evolved high end consumer goods.
Apple will refine and refine and refine, while MS will dump things unless it's a huge money maker or they have an axe to grind.
Not an Apple fanboy BTW, I personally don't like anything Apple, and would be 100% Linux if not for legacy software that I need Windows for.
I am personally quite happy with the Windows 95 look and feel and set up all my machines, Linux or Windows, with plain vanilla UIs and remove anything extraneous.
As far as the tablet thing goes, most Windows tablets were well over 2000 dollars, so I really blame the hardware manufacturers for that one.
Just a little thought experiment here: in the eyes of shareholders, which is more important at the end of each quarter -- innovation, or profit? So did the profitability of the Office division suffer from not engaging the tablet? (note that some think that the anticipated use of the iPad is more on the consumer end, and less on the creation end).
And another little quiz: where does Simon Peyton Jones work and what does he do and what has he produced?
To me, the underlying takeaway from this story, and I disagree a little with the slant the author of TFA has, is that execution can trump innovation.
There have been articles referenced here on HN that talk about others stealing ideas (my favorite was one told by Steve Blank) but at the end of the day, the winner is the one who executes well.
Isn't this the bottom-line message from the Microsoft story?
And yet shareholders are not, in fact, rewarding Microsoft for its consistent profitability: http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdet=126531720000... msft&ntsp=0
This makes the previous poster's claim that investors have responded positively to Microsoft's approach look pretty weak.
And before the iPhone, AAPL hit the jackpot with the iPod, post iPod Apple has been a second coming of Apple. And before the iPod, AAPL hit the jackpot with the iMac, post iMac Apple has been a second coming of Apple.
He is a major contributor to the design of the Haskell programming language, and a principal designer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He is also co-creator of the C-- programming language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Peyton_Jones
EDIT: Perhaps this article applies only to Microsoft Research, not MSFT as a whole.
They don't innovate, they just embrace and derail, extend and delay, patent and extinguish, copy and destroy.
Great company solely focused on money, at the cost of fucking up everybody else, and killing progress for their own benefit, when the rest of the world is focused on progress, and money.
Ballmer must go, and that destructive mentality must change.
-Leaders without vision: Gates wasn't perfect, but he at least put forward the vision of a PC in every house. Ballmer is more of a cheerleader than a visionary, and "three screens and a cloud" isn't a vision of the future so much as commentary on the present.
-Hubris: Making billions of dollars is an easy way to justify that you are "doing the right thing", even 15 years later.
-Customers focused: This is a little more subtle, but I think a culture making products (Windows, Office) for "Customers" is different than a culture making products (Gmail, Search) for "Users". For the former, you could pessimistically say that your main objective is to make a product you can convince someone to buy. Whether or not the customer uses the product is somewhat incidental. Each subsequent version must have enough features crammed into it to justify the customer paying again, even if they aren't useful. In contrast, focusing on the user provides more motivation to keep the product relevant, make the product useful, and so on. If it isn't, the users can simply stop using it.
-Middle-child syndrome: If your team isn't making $1+billion, no one cares. It is hard to have the proper resources to innovate and be creative if most of your management chain doesn't know your project exists.
There is still religious fervor inside the company. While at MSFT I worked with a handful of "true believers." Unfortunately, their enthusiasm and faith has yet to translate into interesting new products...
Anyway, if you're in the Seattle area, get in touch. The entrepreneurial community here very much rocks.
Though I only worked at MS for a few years I suspect that the current working environment, culture, bureaucracy etc. problems have been building up for a very long time but were offset by remaining enthusiasm (read: kool aid aftereffects) and the enormous financial incentives from stock options. Now that the MSFT stock price has been flat for nearly a decade and it's increasingly easy to find tech jobs with comparable salaries a lot of the luster of working at MS has evaporated.
I've met quite a few people, who in my opinion had quite sane and intelligent minds, who wished for MS failure, for a lot of well based reasons.
Plus, it's not like there aren't any other options, several of them quite good. The market would adjust to fill the gap.
Right now I really find Visual Studio the best IDE. I would like to see that change (and VS has lots of problems) but it's currently head and shoulders above the rest.
[1] Further, the Linux GUI has to be one of the worst cases of optimizing for the nearly nonexistent use case ever. If you look at all users of computers today how many of them need X? A number so small as to be statistically irrelevant.
In my experience, this is largely a myth promoted by Linux hackers.
> and wouldn't take too long to convert the majority of programmers over to it
This on the other hand... is just wishful thinking.
The dominant OS for Business (on desktops) is Windows. This can't change (soon), too many companies are locked into software that requires it (either built in house or purchased).
That's changing, more applications are going web based. But there are always those little niche apps that hang out in purchasing or accounting that require windows and aren't going away soon.
Most companies can't function without Excel. Go to the accounting department. Even if they have an "accounting system" ask the people working their what the use (or watch them). They probably have Excel open all day. Excel is hard to do in a browser.
Every company in the world would love to be MSFT. High profits and a locked in customer base.
The entire US financial industry uses Windows desktops and will for the foreseeable future, but adoption of Vista, Windows 7, and Office 2007 has been (anecdotally) pretty negligible.
I imagine that their future profits are in trouble if they can't innovate enough for users to even upgrade their products.
That's because Win XP and Office 2003 are good enough. That also spells trouble for their would-be competitors. If someone doesn't upgrade his XP box to Windows 7, do you think it's more likely he'll buy a Mac instead?
I don't think so.
And while web-apps are all the rage these days ... it sounds to me a lot like Sun's marketing campaign for Java or for the NC. I don't see a web-app replacing Office, even if it's powered by Google.
Funny thing happened yesterday ... went to my local library to get some books, and the bookkeeper couldn't give me those books to me because their Internet connection went down, and their accounting was done with a web-app ... cursing and screaming in the process.
Well, it's not quite right. Think it this way: Compatibility broken from XP to 7, not enough features to change (so I agree with you here), ... But, a I've been told that Mac ...
A friend who works at a financial institution, and they switched from earlier (2003 server, XP) versions of Windows, to Mac.
Personally I've had few problems with Win 7, granted I only use it on my home computer.
Apple breaks compatibility a lot more often, like every two years.
MS already sees Linux as a threat, which is what the deal with Novell is about -- it was a proclamation to all Linux users that Microsoft isn't just going to let you stop giving them money. You either go through their approved vendor (through whom MS makes money) or you risk big SCO-esque (targeting users, not makers) lawsuits for patent infringement, etc.
To sum up, WINE is good and nice, but as soon as Microsoft perceives it as a real threat they are going to mobilize billions of dollars to put it down.
MS doesn't care about virtualization because you still have to buy Windows to use it.
To have sustained competitive advantage, you need to be able to say goodbye to the current stars.
So you can draw an analogy here ... Microsoft held to its cash-cows (Windows, Office) for too long, although they are showing incremental success in other areas ... like the XBox. Google may get to that point where AdSense will start making them irrelevant, and then they'll be in the same situation.
All big companies face this. Even Apple ... if you'll look closer, they are far too focused on their iTunes Store. And when a cash-cow starts to become irrelevant, although it's still profitable, it's a tough decision to let go.
But I don't see how owning such a powerful distribution channel is something they should let go of. Even now it's looking like they could become a major player in not just music distribution but other media (books, video) distribution as well.
This is where I disagree ... they are doing the same mistake Microsoft did. Right now to develop apps for your iPhone, you need a commercial SDK for which you pay $99 and that only works on Mac OS X.
Do you know how much of a PITA this is? I am on an NDA and I can't give details about what I'm doing right now, but believe me ... dealing with iPhone is the ugliest of all mobile platforms.
When your distribution channel is tied to your software platform, that's when it's starting to smell. When you also have lots of rules about what gets in, that's a first sign it is not sustainable ... throughout the history businesses have always been interested in eliminating the middle-men. That's one reason web-apps are getting so popular.
And now here comes the iPad, which promises to do for books what iPod did for music. I'm failing to see how this will work, since Amazon is already there, and I can't picture myself watching movies on a tablet.
But maybe Jobs knows what he's doing, I really don't know ... what I do know is that my colleagues that were ecstatic about iPhones are now switching to Nexus Ones and Druids. And the iPhone used to be cool, now it's just popular ... the only reason we are supporting the hell of the App Store approval process.
The SDK is free.
I don't know, but I'll ask it at the next Android/Chrome OS meeting.
Everybody has access to (nearly) all source code. The single repository means that you can dig in to find & fix problems in any Google product, regardless of your position in the org chart. And if someone invents a feature that you want to use, you can just grab it, like the appearance of Wonder Wheel on YouTube.
Google has a strong ethos of "If it's broke, fix it", regardless of the org chart or assigned responsibilities. It's usually mentioned to you as a Noogler, but what really reinforces it is the reaction you get when you actually fix something broken. In a lot of companies, there'd be a bunch of "Who is this guy and why is he mucking with our code?" recriminations (if you can even get access to the code). In Google there's a "thanks for doing this" and sometimes a peer bonus.
Code reviews help a lot, somewhat paradoxically. When all code is reviewed, you lose the fear that you'll break somebody else's code with your fix. You make your fix, send it off, and if there're problems they'll have you fix them in the review. If it conflicts with the overall goals of the project, they'll just deny your patch.
In a system without code reviews, chances are that you'll break something by contributing to a project that you don't really know about. And once enough people have broken things, the company institutes code ownership policies that mean you can't fix things in other products.
There's also 20% time, as someone else mentioned. And the combination of free meals and pretty fluid inter-project mobility. It's likely that your teammates have worked on other projects before, with people who are now in wildly different areas of the company.
Finally, there's just the difference in growth rates between the two companies. Everybody at Google has more work than they can reasonably do. If somebody else does the work, it just means you can go home early this week, and there'll be plenty of other things to accomplish next week. If you spend 3 months writing a dialog box in Windows, though, and somebody makes that feature obsolete...well, that rather sucks.
If your business is consistently shooting itself where it most needs to grow, you're doing something so fundamentally wrong you deserve to die. This isn't anti-Microsoft fanboyism, this is natural selection at its core. I take this stance with any business that behaves like this to a large enough degree.
To put it in free-market terms, the boundaries of Microsoft got so large that they encompassed many antagonists, but insulated them from the mediating forces of the market.
Reminds me of a situation at a previous company, where we were paying something like 1/4 mil yearly for a transatlantic E3 data line no one ever got to use. If one VP came up with a use for it, the other VPs would sabotage the project, so they could use it someday.
Disgusting, and telling of how un-savvy those VPs were. Within an organization, it's not very difficult to put a traffic or QoS cap on one department if the other departments were afraid of being shut out. A company that has VPs that think their one department in deserving of exclusive control of a corporate resource deserves to fail just like MS is.
Yeah, and in the middle of layoffs too! We could've kept 2 more engineers employed with that money. (One department voted that everyone take a 10% pay cut instead of laying people off. And yes, this is while those resource shenanigans were going on!)
But those of us who worked there know it differently. At worst, you can say it’s a highly repentant, largely accidental monopolist.
If you want people to forgive your "accidental monopoly," it pays to not act the 800 pound gorilla.
Microsoft has been thoroughly declawed by the antitrust suite - all the energetic and ruthlessly effective people who were driving company forward have left Microsoft about 10 years ago when they realized they can't use their favorite set of tools anymore. This is why Microsoft hasn't been changing the world in the last 10 years, in a good or bad way.
Most of the netbook market was Linux a year or two earlier.
I really doesn't doubt the articles I've read about Microsoft leaning on ASUS et al.
They could have done much better by asking Canonical or Novell to write the last drivers they needed and using Ubuntu or SuSe.
In short: the anti-trust lawsuits against MS are at least partially responsible for IE6 retaining significant market share for such a long period of time.
(Which was the reason that Microsoft used its monopoly to kill Netscape and got into hot water from the beginning.)
Edit: Consider how "well" Microsoft followed directives from the EU. It is a bit hilarious to claim that MS stopped developing something without even court orders and threats of being fined billions...
(See Jerry Kaplan's book, "Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure" for the depressing story.)
How exactly is this defensible behaviour?
People from other cubicles felt threatened, and they had to defend themselves. ;-)
The fact that their internal politics made it impossible to release something better in the first place is just adding insult to injury.
Read the book, it's a good story.
I think it may have something with the height where they place the bar.
That's just what I've started using in the past year.
These may not be as awesome individually as an Xbox or an iPhone (which I adore), but they've changed my day to day life.
iPhone support is great in my experience.
I love Outlook 2010, which I'm beta testing. Mail.app was just too buggy for me and I like being able to have a shortcut key to file email and the rule support is just so much better in Outlook.
I also prefer OWA to gmail, but don't use either.
Have you ever had to do a search?
Also, while many developers are preferring Unix-like OSes, customers actually want Windows. It's what they know and it works well for them.
Another example would be their developer tools ... which are quite well integrated with each other. I have seen many (good) devs that wouldn't dream working without Visual Studio, and if you get a MSDN subscription, the resources offered are top-notch. Myself I wouldn't touch any of that, since I can't stand working with Windows servers, but if they made their tools multi-platform, I would switch without blinking.
> they're not really thinking about what people need
And since when do people really need iPods / iPads or whatever else comes out of Apple?
Actually I think Microsoft does a pretty good job about what people need ... but they aren't particularly good at anticipating what people want.
Also, sometimes it's a mistake to separate wants and needs! People started carrying their music as soon as the technology let them. That's a trend that hasn't abated in decades. It's not just some passing fad, but a symptom of minds that need to be regularly engaged. To compare Apple with Microsoft, Apple creates the device with the story, and Microsoft just creates the device and the ads
This is easily solved with a few strategic firings.
But now that other markets are opening and their monopoly power is fading, we see the truth - they don't really have anything special beyond the likes of HP and IBM.
Incorrect, at worst it's a monopolist.
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"It employs thousands of the smartest, most capable engineers in the world. More than any other firm, it made using computers both ubiquitous and affordable. Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office applications suite still utterly rule their markets."
By monopoly...
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"over $100 billion in the past 10 years alone and help sustain the economies of Seattle, Washington State and the nation as a whole."
So we are supposed to support monopolies if they support Seattle? and apparently "the nation as a whole." You don't support the economy by monopolizing it.
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"Its founder, Bill Gates, is not only the most generous philanthropist in history, but has also inspired thousands of his employees to give generously themselves. No one in his right mind should wish Microsoft failure."
This is philanthropy by force, he is a Robin Hood, steal from the rich USA and give to the poorer countries. Out of all the statements this is the one I find least fault with. Fine steal from me to give to the poor. But do it straight up. Don't also hinder technological advancement while your stealing from me. Just take my money and leave technology out of it.
He didn't forget the Xbox, but he did give the impression that he wouldn't consider it a success.
Also, Microsoft envisions Xbox as an entertainment center where families not only play games together, but watch TV and movies as well.
Nintendo and Xbox have claimed different market segments but that's not because they weren't competing.
It's redefined each generation. This generation is about motion controls as the top seller of all time, the Nintendo DS, has motion controls alongside its console brother the Wii which also does. Sure the 360 has stream lined the online experience, however it has also introduced gamers to the closed era of consoles. You want a bigger HD? Sure just pay an absolute premium on it. Not to mention the 360's hardware problems which have been conveniently forgotten.
The fact that you're comparing the Wii to flash games is absurd. It's fine not to like the Wii, I know I don't like it besides some drunken debauchery, but its impact on the industry is clear. Clear enough that Microsoft and Sony are both coming out with motion control products in the next year.
And for the hardcore gamers I know, XBox Live is a redefinition of consoles. Before Live, PCs were the only serious online game in town, now the XBox actually offers a better (less painful) online experience. Sony's online system is a joke in comparison.
(I own none of these systems, but I'm an ex-gamer and know a lot of gamers.)
And note, most non-MMORPGs games on PC have free online.
Both the PS3 and Steam have adopted their innovations - they've become the defacto standard for online gaming.
These are, as they say, generally the better variety of problems to have, warranty extension costs notwithstanding.
The 360 is the go-to console for any major game developer. Partly because 360 owners buy about 50% more games than either Wii or PS3 owners. Given that games are responsible for the bulk of the profits related to console gaming that's an enormously significant figure. The 360 console is raking in cash for Microsoft and continuing to grow in popularity. It's one of Microsoft's most successful ventures of all time.
Xbox is successful in that it has a large mind-share in the hard-core gamer community, but financially the project is still a failure. Had Microsoft decided not to begin the Xbox project 10+ years ago, it would easily have a few more $billion in the bank today.
Contrast that with the Wii, which, along with the DS, has added billions of dollars in profit to Nintendo's coffers over the past few years alone.
Now that Xbox has established itself, the next decade will show whether or not the system is net-profitable, or whether the project never should have started to begin with.
Nintendo is operating in a different market. They are a toy company, first and foremost. And it's better, conceptually, to think about the Wii and DS as toys. They have a completely different audience - and completely different revenue model. People buy toys for a short-term entertainment value, or novelty - and then the novelty wears off.
This describes the Wii exactly - people buy one, they play a game or two, or maybe Wii fit, and that's it. You aren't seeing serious time spent with it - and the tie ratio demonstrates that.
BTW - I think I'd classify Guitar Hero / Rock Band as toys, too. Hence the horrible sales numbers this season - people are sick of this particular kind of toy.
Yes, Microsoft sold 30 million Xboxs to "hard core gamers" and effectively conquered that market niche.
But, in the same time, Nintendo sold 50+ million Wiis to people who like "toys", making billions of dollars in the process.
As a hypothetical investor, I don't really care if Microsoft "wins" the hard-core market, I care about the bottom line. Nintendo effectively created a new market and capitalized on it, and they would get my hypothetical dollar.
This is the nature of the game in the tech industry, significant returns are rarely achieved without significant risks and investments.
In gaming consoles, Microsoft had Sony to compete with. It's easier to beat Sony than to beat Apple or Google.
But to be fair, i have never worked there and i am assessing only from the outside.
http://krmmalik.posterous.com/why-i-dont-think-microsoft-has...
Someone mistook the problem as a benefit.
He brushes aside their monopolies which were created because externally the competition was defeated not on technical or business merit but on politics, abuse of power, gameplaying and generally dodgy shenanigans.
Live by the sword, die by the irony.
Microsoft never did that. Author has to be a press release junkie to not know that.
I fail to remember any genuine innovation from them since, well, the Z-80 SoftCard for the Apple II.
Microsoft's product line is not very impressive. Maybe it's because I am harder to impress.
But the point, and it is a valid one, is that this research does not seem to be turned in to actual products.
What is the systemic problem? Why has Google, which historically has had nowhere near the research depth, been able to innovate demonstrably, but not MSR?
One hypothesis is that research innovation starts with a small idea. It's easier to deploy a small idea on the web than as part of shrink-wrap software. Google can field the small idea, and iterate it on the web.
But to be included in the kind of software MS ships, you have to do things like (a) convince a project like Office to take it on, or (b) pitch it as part of a "big concept future system". Avenue (a) is very hard. And avenue (b) tends to produce vaporware. Sound familiar?
I'm no Micrsoft fanboy, but to say that they haven't done anything innovative at all is a bit harsh.
I may sound harsh, but there is so much more going on that their contributions really feel underwhelming.
Not saying it is a good idea - abuse of distributed transactions is a terrible thing, but I do think it is fairly innovative.
Don't get me wrong. I am an engineer and I frequently answer a "why?" with "because it's cool" or "because it could be done", but with years of experience come a strong sense of what's a good idea and what's not and what you describe looks like a very bad one. And not even a lot of fun to implement.
Without the 98->XP growth path afforded by NT, Windows would have stalled ten years ago.
Had NeXT maintained a little more pragmatism and a little less stubborn pride it's possible that they could have become the next Apple or the next Microsoft, rather than merely a juicy intellectual property morsel for the real players in the industry to pick up and take advantage of.
MSFT does not do as good of a job in letting users have-at these projects, they've got such a huge array of interesting research projects underway (a whole new OS Kernel for one http://www.barrelfish.org/) that they do not seem to market whatsoever. . .
Stories, anecdotes, and cultural observations don't fall under this, unless those stories reveal the existence of projects/technologies that the company wants to keep secret. You can say "here's why I think my past employer was dysfunctional", and it won't win you any friends, but they can't come after you legally for that.
The only thing here that looks like it may've been confidential at some point is the existence of ClearType or the tablet PC. But since both of those were launched - albeit late - they're public information anyway, and he's not telling you anything you couldn't read in the tech press.
It's no secret that part of the reason Microsoft makes so much money is because of vendor lockin. Embracing open source would make it easier for users to switch vendors - and I really don't see that as beneficial to Microsoft.