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Comment by arsalanb | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft always gives the vibe of a company that is desperate to salvage some pride from its glory days. It was once a giant, but now they're on the brink of redundancy, in terms of being viewed as "innovative".

This opinion may be controversial to many, but it is what a lot of people are thinking. They experiment, which is phenomenal. But none of those experiments have been a major hit.

Apple has flagship products like the iPhone, etc. Google has search, Android, and even Youtube at the center of its existence. A fallback option, if you please.

Mircosoft "somewhat" has Windows, but hasn't really nailed it yet. These "experiments" will not bring back the glory days.

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Ok I'll feed the troll.

I've excitedly watched what Apple has done in the last 10 years (and exclusively use Apple devices in my home, and have convinced many family members to switch).

But as a technologist who likes to see companies with great resources move fast, to me MS has been much more exciting lately as a tech company than Apple.

We are seeing the manifestation of the new Satya Nadella decree, which went from "prop up Windows at any cost" to just "build stuff people like."

We're constantly seeing these kinds of things come out of MS now, and I can't help but see that it must be a really exciting time to be an MS employee right now, judging by the sheer amount of experimentation going on.

I think this nails it. In many ways, Microsoft is playing catch-up with Apple, Google, and Facebook. But they have good momentum right now. I, for one, am happy with the Nadella era.

Firstly, I didn't intend to "troll" Microsoft.

Well, I agree with the last sentence. Satya Nadella was the much needed U-turn from the Balmer era. It's just that by the standards Microsoft has set for itself, they've under-performed over the years. I'm talking about major failed experiments like Windows Vista, Lumia (or even the entire Nokia acquisition)

And I think that's why the "Satya U-Turn" is so promising. Vista and Lumia were Ballmer-era failures. I work at Microsoft on Azure; it feels like a new era. The open source feel is real, even if we might fail at it here and there. PMs on the freaking SQL Server team were using Macs, because they want to feel the pain of SQL users on Macs. It's really good stuff.

Absolutely. Now by my estimation there is still some effort going into supporting those Ballmer-era failures, but such is the burden of being a company as large as Microsoft.

Microsoft without the dead-weight of having to support failed tech — Now that is a place I would like to work.

Edit: Do you think that Microsoft is actively taking steps in trying to do away with supporting things like Vista, etc?

Wait why is apple being held up as an example of an innovative company again? As far as i am aware apple had the ipod in 2001, the iphone in 2007 and the ipad in 2010. Pretty much every release of any of those items in the last 6 years have been incremental upgrades.

This isnt to be negative on Apple, just saying they are a great quality, style, design company. and an amazing financial success but they havent been innovative for quite some time.

The funny part is Microsoft under Satya has made a large push to distance themselves from the Ballmer-led Microsoft.

A push for (at least some form of) open-source, a Windows offering that has been more stable and feature-added at launch than several past versions.

I'd gamble on more innovation out of Microsoft than Apple in the next 10 years.

They prevented root from modifying anything in /usr/bin - that's a fairly unique innovation I'd have thought.

>It was once a giant, but now they're on the brink of redundancy

Pretty sure they're doing okay in enterprise office software

Microsoft, like every other company, has some failures and some successes, that's the nature of innovation; you stick with the ideas that work and abandon (hopefully quickly) the ones that fail.

You're correct, some of the Microsoft experiments have failed but you need to balance that with the ones that are doing well such as Office365 and Azure.

Indeed. I may have judged them from the technologies that I see being used commonly, and turned a blind eye to important ones. That being said, Office365 and Azure are fairly popular anywhere.

Let's say, for argument's sake, that everything you say is true. So what? Are you giving investment advice? Or warning us from seeking employment?

I know the popularity of bashing MS hasn't waned. Maybe it's even deserved. But how's it relevant to this post?

When have they ever been considered innovative? Virtually every successful product has been either copied from or bought outright from another company. The only real exception I can think of is OneNote (which preceded EverNote by 5 years).

Who would you actually consider to be innovative then?

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