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Comment by HillRat | Hacker News Reader

What I find interesting is that he still doesn’t realize that because Microsoft was dominant in specific plays (desktop OSes, productivity software, e-mail clients) it was precluded by internal culture from innovating on mobile.

Their success blinded them to the fact that mobile and tablets comprised a completely different functional and experiential environment, and so they kept pushing a “Windows everywhere, Outlook everywhere” strategy that failed to create a smartphone market they initially owned, failed to take advantage of the business mobile market Blackberry created, failed to take advantage of the premium consumer mobile market Apple created, and failed to take advantage of the mass consumer mobile market Android created (despite their last bite at the mobile OS apple — so to speak — being quite good).

Nothing breeds failure quite like success even, evidently, in hindsight.

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Exactly right. Microsoft was profoundly ahead of the curve! They were pushing their tablet/slate stuff 5+ years before the iPhone and iPad. Their key mistake was attempting to leverage Windows, which forced an awkward stylus mode driving a shoehorned desktop OS.

Apple blindsided them with a better cellphone instead of a worse computer, and so it slotted in naturally

Microsoft could only conceive of Windows devices. Apple's big idea was to not make the iPhone a Mac. If anything, they overcorrected, dragged kicking and screaming into allowing apps at all.

> If anything, they overcorrected, dragged kicking and screaming into allowing apps at all.

A lot of people forget this, but it's true: Apple didn't want _anyone_ to be able to make native apps on iOS except themselves. That they changed their minds and helped devs make a ton of money tends to erase this fact of history.

Yup, it was going to be an embedded, first-party personal organizer.

How do we know this was their actual strategic internal decision vs a practical one because an SDK for third party applications wasn’t ready yet or not important at launch?

Because of the WWDC events in which they touted their web-based API at the time as being all one needed to compete with Apple's own native apps. That turned out to be completely untrue and they backtracked.

I'm not convinced they believed that at the time.

That would have still been the right thing for them to say publicly if they did intend to release an SDK later though. Since it’s been a long time now, I’ve wondered if anyone’s spoken to their internal positioning.

Steve Jobs was very careful about the “Osborne effect”. Even if they had plans for an App SDK as part of the future iPhone roadmap, he would have never divulged it, to prevent customers from deffering purchases

Imagine if they had announced apps were coming for the iPhone, and potential customers waited for apps to come out and app developers waited for people to buy the phone.

Apple basically needed a take it or leave it strategy for the first release.

Still props to them that they saw it would be a benefit to the platform to allow it, and did so pretty quickly.

I have this conspiracy theory that I half believe: it was all a ruse.

Apple knew that there would be huge pushback against a walled garden appstore with Apple in absolute control, and huge pushback on them taking a 30% cut. So they started with "just write web apps". But of course, they also inexplicably made the first iPhone 2G only! Flagship phones that shipped many months before the iPhone had 3G. Why cut that particular corner, and not any others in their otherwise $$$-is-no-object new wonderphone?

You can do a much better job hiding low bandwidth and high latency in a native app, especially since app assets get downloaded once (probably over wifi) at app install time. So by essentially making app developers beg for access to their native platform, they radically reduced the anger at their wildly locked-down appstore and their 30% cut.

And it seemed a little suspicious how quickly they were able to deliver a 3rd-party SDK and developer documentation.

they also inexplicably made the first iPhone 2G only!

This has been one of the go-to plays in Apple's playbook since the very beginning. Steve Jobs was always opposed to Macs having any form of user-upgradable parts [1]; he wanted people to buy a brand new computer every time theirs became obsolete. As it happens, this occurred almost immediately after the Mac 128k's launch (almost no 3rd party apps supported it). The first generation iPhone was an exact repeat!

[1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Diagnostic_Port....

Yes, like Microsoft, once they had established themselves as an engineering company with consumers of not-fully-developed product, they were then able to exploit the anti-reuse/recycling angle more lucratively than their engineering.

It was a very thin ruse, but there's no real conspiracy theory required. The original iPhone was a beta product rushed to market to make everyone else look "last gen". The final APIs, SDK, store infrastructure, and so on was simply not ready. And yes from day 1, rumors were a SDK was coming.

Wasn't Palm taking a 80% cut in their glory days? (My google skills fail me) I heard developers saying that 30% was a great deal at the time.

No. Virtually all PalmOS software sales were either direct via dev’s web site, or via palmgear.com, which was a sort of app store for its time. They were not affiliated with Palm the company or its entities. Absolutely no platform DRM whatsoever, and all apps were basically “side loaded” onto devices, regardless of origin.

I think it was Handango that set the 30% expectation. They were the first with such a high cut I think, and was among the first app sites for most of the PDAs of the time.

30% was pretty offensive after years of shareware.

But then apps cost pennies compared to the software we were used to. Office cost many hundreds of dollars and I regularly paid £400+ for PC programs that did just one thing. £350 for Photoshop was a steal.

But then apps came along costing a small handful of dollars. They also did things you could not do on your PC due to the connectivity, the camera and the sensors. Everything changed when it came to price expectations.

> And it seemed a little suspicious how quickly they were able to deliver a 3rd-party SDK and developer documentation.

How much of this is explained by needing an SDK and developer documentation for internal apps? (That is, had Apple not built an App Store, it would have been all the more important to make sure Mail, Maps, Safari, the built-in YouTube app, etc. were high-quality.)

In part I'm curious if the engineering culture was that reasonable-quality docs were expected for internal developers.

Never worked at Apple specifically, but every place I've worked had little to no docs on internal tools. The expectation was that you'd go ask the person who wrote it, or absorb the tribal knowledge as part of on-boarding. There was even low-level resistance to folks who tried to document the ambient knowledge to help out new employees.

Also, keep in mind, in the timeframe that is relevant here, the only apps were Mail and Safari. Apple making Mail a native app from the start was another tell that "you should just build web apps" was disingenuous.

Weren't YouTube and Maps also part of iPhone OS 1.0?

Wasn’t the original idea that apps weren’t required, as html5 would be sufficient? Jobs initialy believed in webapps.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything about no kinds of third party applications on ios at all

Almost every platform seems to have believed in web apps at some point. Nokia did an attempt with Symbian, Palm had WebOS, Samsung tried that with Tizen, Apple with iPhones, Microsoft for Windows 8, Mozilla's Firefox OS...

I'm sure I forgot a few. All attempts failed quite completely.

>I'm sure I forgot a few. All attempts failed quite completely.

You forgot BlackBerry, who failed themselves spectacularly by becoming a patent troll.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190228/17170141697/black...

It also took MS forever to have an ARM version of Windows...

Depends on your definition of "Windows": Windows CE ran on ARM in the 1990s.

WinCE was really their most accurately named OS to date.

Ive seen this remark before. What does it mean?

"wince"

Nowadays "Windows" usually refers to "Windows NT"; not Windows 9x or Windows CE.

Windows NT was highly portable. It ran on PowerPC, Alpha, Itanium, and a whole lot of other architectures. The same is true for iOS.

True

Then they dragged their feet and kept Windows 2000 x86 only (I think - maybe they had an Itanium version) they had a half-ready x64 version of Windows XP

>In fact, Gates is still kicking himself for taking his eyes off the ball and allowing Google to develop Android, the “standard non-Apple phone form platform,” as he describes it. “That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win.”

Not without Satya Nadella's Microsoft, who knows how to exploit open-source ecosystem. Even if Steve Ballmer had bought Android instead of Google, Microsoft would have sold it to manufacturers at premium without letting them to innovate upon it(Like they did with Windows Mobile/Phone OS). So android under Pre-Nadella would have failed anyways.

So Bill Gates, take it easy; android under Microsoft wouldn't have become a reality due to the seeds you sowed in the Microsoft's Philosophy. But things are changing thanks to extraordinary overhaul of Satya Nadella.

Further Microsoft killed Nokia's MeeGo OS in favor of Windows Phone OS, MeeGo was far capable than Android was at that time. Now telling that 'We should have done Android' sounds like convenient amnesia to put it lightly.

Yes, that was a real shame - I have wanted something like MeeGo ever since.

But MeeGo wasn't a mainstream OS.

I would like to think, MeeGo survived in an alternate universe with Microsoft forming the 'Open handset alliance' instead of Google; but then that could mean intel taking a monopoly in smartphone chipset considering it was co-developer of MeeGo instead of ARM.

I like to have ARM where it is now, just for the sake of democratising computation. Full fledged linux on smartphones is taking shape in the form of SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch (UBPorts), postmarketOS etc. They could scale up with manufacturers like Pine releasing devices such as PinePhone.

Meanwhile, Google is moving away from Linux for their mobile devices with Fuchsia.

Ironic: "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose." —Gates, 1995

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#The_Road_Ahead_(199...

Even more ironic is that he had to revise that book just after its publication because in the 1st edition he totally missed what phenomenon the Internet was going to become.

Did he? I thought this is the book about the "information highway"?

Yes he missed it. To be fair I am not sure Steve got that either. Network and internet is very hard to grasp as a business platform at those time.

He completely failed to understand, or even mention, the internet as it was then developing. Before we got shanghaied by adtech, and "social".

His small vision of the information highway was a world full of Encarta CDs and Micrsoft Windows services that you'd subscribe to.

The main memory of the book though is "oh boy, what a boring read". Some achievement at a time when computing was firmly in its most exciting period, before it became a commodity.

Thank you. I was too young to read and experience it at the time so I don't really know.

On slightly thinner ice, Microsoft was at the height of "embracing, extending and extinguishing" the browser and internet at the time of the book. They failed in good part from completely misunderstanding, presumably at management level, their target. I'm sure many individual MS engineers understood well enough.

The era when you could put an activeX component on the desktop, or embed it into a screen saver, and some network services like ftp wouldn't be distinguished from just opening an explorer window. A world of (mostly teased but not delivered) Windows services you'd subscribe to like a series of cable channels, and when sites still backed either Netscape or IE with little "made for..." icons. Which stopped because MS thought they were "finished" with IE 6.

[Edit: IE 6 was rather later and understood, but balkanised the internet. IE 1 and 2 were interesting. Sort-of compatible but available via an MS view of the world - as an extra cost option in the Windows Plus! pack for Win 95. It was only Win 95 after some service pack that included IE in base. I'm not sure when downloads started, but initially I don't think you could]

We need chaos engineering for life. Keep tasting a bit of failure so as to be sure you know where you stand.

I don’t know how successful you are, but I definitely have failed more than enough times to not need to taste it anymore for the rest of my life.

hahah, fair point, but I did fail hard and deep too, massively.

I don't advocate for catastrophic failure, just a little dose of stress and surprise.

They almost made the same mistake with XBox, but Allard, Fries & company managed to convince Gates not to brand things as Windows.

Windows Everywhere was a bad slogan, bred tunnel vision.

It's just incredible that MS has never understood how toxic the Windows brand is -- or, if not 'toxic', at least worthless. The only time the term Windows ever enters an ordinary user's vocabulary is when they call tech support to complain about something going wrong with their computer. (Or when a scammer calls them.)

It would be one thing if it were a branding mistake made by one CEO or one management team at one isolated point in time. But they have tried to turn Windows into a viable, positive consumer brand for longer than many of their customers have been alive. Time to run up the white flag on this one, guys. It's not going to happen.

So your saying that to a layman Windows is ubiquitous to a computer, and that somehow makes the brand worthless?

When you are talking about a Hoover, sure. Anyone can make a hoover, and the name looses all meaning and becomes a victim of its own success. That’s happening to Docker right now.

But Windows is different. Not anyone can make “a Windows”, because the difference between a computer and Windows is a lot more noticeable than the difference between one type of vacuum cleaner and another.

The link between Windows and a computer does make it harder to turn into some form of platform, sure, but it’s far, far, far from worthless.

You got the association off: It's not brand -> generic, it's "user has a problem" -> brand.

For non-techie people (most users), it was always "my computer" or "my PC" until they had a problem with it and had to think about "Windows". So yeah, as GP said, "Windows" did already have a negative reputation and was viewed as a necessary evil.

Particularly when the iPhone was released, Windows Vista had just come out a few months before.

>Windows Vista had just come out a few months before.

Yes, I know, Vista == awful. But I can never think too badly of it because I live through Windows ME, And when I think "worst Windows OS" everything else just kind of fades into the background.

It's overall an improving pattern though, with every other version being a step backwards, but not as big a step as the one before. Vista wasn't as bad as ME, Windows 8 wasn't as bad as Vista. At the same time, Windows 7 wasn't as much of an improvement on Vista as XP was over ME, and 10 not nearly as much of an improvement on 8 as 7 was on Vista.

Windows ME and Windows Vista were both terrible (it doesn't matter which one was worst), but that was because Windows XP and Windows 7 were also so good. So you start to notice the difference between the predecessor or successor which articulates the strong and weak points further.

Windows ME was bad because it would crash A LOT. Every 20 minutes sometimes (and computers didn't start up so quickly back then).

Vista qas comparatively wonderful.

>> how toxic the Windows brand is -- or, if not 'toxic', at least worthless

How about the "Microsoft" brand? Looking at the "most valuable brands", Microsoft is always near the top. Example:

https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/#tab:rank

I think it's because the association is "Microsoft == successful/wealthy company" while on the other hand "Windows == bluescreen/ransomware"

I'm not sure the majority of consumers make that second association. I think you're projecting your opinion onto the public.

Blue screen/ransomware is too strong, but the point is, Windows is like a carburator: if you’re thinking about it, you’re probably not having a good time. You want Windows to get out of your way so you can do the stuff. Windows is the loading screen.

Windows is like a carburator: if you’re thinking about it, you’re probably not having a good time

That's awesome, is that line original?

Yep

Can't that second sentiment be said about almost all products? I want MacOS to get out of my way so I can do stuff, I want my Google TV to get out of the way so I can watch stuff, I want Samsung to get out of the way so I can use my tablet. I don't actively think "Wow I'm using an X product" until it breaks or fails, and that's the same with any brand not just windows. How can the Blue screen/ransomware be "too strong" if Microsoft is consistently in the top 5 most trusted brands?

Yes, it applies to a wide range. My usual go-to analogy it plumbing. You never see it, never think about it, until something goes wrong. From the user perspective, most technology is "plumbing".

I think where Apple excels is both in "getting out of the way" but also making the limited contact with plumbing that's necessary be a generally aesthetically pleasing experience. I still prefer Android and windows though.

For sure. That’s why Apple didn’t sell “iPhone: with MacOS”.

I don't think Microsoft shares what their marketing team learns about their brands, but I'm not cold to this idea, and it would explain why all those scammers are introducing themselves as "Windows Support" instead of "Microsoft".

I'm projecting my experience with other users onto the broader population. The views and experiences of other people I know might not be representative, but it's not just my projection.

We are in the comment section of a niche tech forum though. Our views and those of the people we associate with will be far more critical of technology than the public, so I wouldn't make such grand statements as Windows == bluescreens and ransomware. Sure it has them, but it's far more associated with computers in general, which people need to do their work and daily activities.

Wbox doesn’t sound as good either.

> Nothing breeds failure quite like success even, evidently, in hindsight.

Great empires are never brought down by their failings, it is their successes which do them in.

Microsoft's previous success didn't just cripple their smartphone OS development - it also damaged their sales.

Handset manufacturers like Samsung could see the exorbitant 'Windows tax' that ate into the profit margin of every desktop PC, so they would have preferred open-source Android to closed-source Windows Mobile even if both were free.

It turned out that Android could lock in the manufacturers with Google Play services built on top of an open-source platform - but this was not something that Microsoft executives considered at the time.

There is no Windows Tax for all practical purposes. The crapware that OEMs put on Windows PCs more than made up for the Windows license fee. Windows OEMs actually lose money selling consumer Linux computers since they don’t get the kickbacks from bundled software.

Besides that, if every company is paying the same amount for a Windows license, they all add it into the price of selling a PC.

Crapware is orthogonal to the Windows licence - if Linux had become popular with the general public then OEMs would have been just as happy to bundle crapware with their Linux boxes.

You're right that all OEMs pass the Windows licencing fee onto consumers, but consumers then respond by buying fewer computers, so it's still a hit to OEM profit.

The estimated $30 per computer that OEMs pay has nothing to do with consumers buying fewer PCs. Consumers are buying fewer PCs because of mobile and better single use devices like streaming boxes, smart TVs, and consoles.

Who was going to pay for crapware on Linux? Few PC consumers want computers without Windows just like few consumers want Android without Google Services.

Besides that, computers have been “good enough” for home use for awhile where they don’t need to be upgraded. Considering that most non gamers only use their home computers for Web+Office these days.

I just brought home an old Dell Inspiron Dual Core Pentium circa 2009 running Windows 7 (cleaned it up) with 4Gb of RAM and installed the latest version of Chrome and Office using one of my 6 available users. The only thing slow about is the spinning hard drive for what she needed.

In fact, Dell still sells low end laptops with lower resolution than my 10 year old Dell (1600x900), the same 4GB RAM, the same speed hard drive, and the same wireless technology - 802.11n 5Ghz.

While neither the built in Ethernet or WiFi can take advantage of my gig-e up/down. It’s still not a bottleneck for their crappy cable internet.

It's been barely any time at all since they gave up pushing that "We're calling our x86-64 OS and our ARM laptop/tablet OS and our ARM phone OS the same thing because they're the same system" horseshit. It may look like Windows 10 but none of the drivers work, half the x86 programs don't run, and the ones that do run make you feel like you're using a Transmeta CPU from 2002.

Great point. Also let's not forget Microsoft messed up the browser game too. Internet explorer was a colossal catch up game to Netscape... And they were off by a few years here and never able to catch up.

I'm also surprised Gates is so hard on himself about Android.

I think most companies do this, even ones that aren't that successful. If you've got a product that has any modicum of success at any point, the natural inclination is to push and mold that product into every corner of every space you're in. Any employee that spends time on anything else is not pulling their weight in the company.

> What I find interesting is that he still doesn’t realize that because Microsoft was dominant in specific plays

I think he knows that since he said in one interview back in the 90s that he is worried about 2 guys working in a garage coming up with a product that would disrupt MS.

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