There's an odd bubble on HN where people are so deep into their Linux or Mac universes that they think Microsoft has faded into obscurity, when in fact they're the strongest tech company around.
Now...the company has its corner, but that's it. They provide a lot of valuable products that obviously make them a tonne of money, and they've been executing fantastically, but if you're a Linux or Mac developer who never touches a single Microsoft product, and pays no heed to whatever Microsoft is talking about or doing, you're probably perfectly fine doing that.
IBM created the PC, and was influential in a lot of critical areas. Now they are just...there. They make revenue pushing up towards Microsoft levels, but you can safely completely ignore them.
Microsoft is the most diversified tech company of the top tech companies. They have cloud, software, hardware, game consoles, search engine, development tools.
> if you're a Linux or Mac developer who never touches a single Microsoft product, and pays no heed to whatever Microsoft is talking about or doing, you're probably perfectly fine doing that.
The interesting thing now is that you can be a Linux or Mac developer and actually be able to use many Microsoft products. VS code is my favorite editor or any platform (actually I use it more on Linux than on Windows). I'm working on a project right now in .NET that will run as well on a Raspberry Pi as it does on Windows.
I think that the market grown so significantly that no company is ever going to have the tech leadership that Microsoft had in the 90's and early 2000's. But I think Microsoft is positioning themselves to great things after fumbling though the last 5-10 years.
And none of those make significant amounts of profit besides cloud, Office, and Windows
Bing and gaming alone makes almost as much as Windows. Devices and LinkedIn makes half as much as Windows and a 1/3 the revenue of Office. These aren't peanuts.
Anyone can sell $1.00 for $0.95 as long as they have a means of getting money from other sources.
i see what you did there
"They have cloud, software, hardware, game consoles, search engine, development tools."
IBM did exactly the same thing.
And FWIW, the overwhelming bulk of Microsoft's revenue comes from enterprise sales of Office and Windows. They make money on exactly the same things they made money on 20 years ago, but the pie is so much bigger they make a lot more of it.
Depends. In corporate environments, which is still a massive market, they are the central vendor. At it seems they're actually making even more headway there. Microsoft hasn't really lost influence, it's just the market is so much bigger now that influence isn't total. And they're making in-roads in those other markets.
Microsoft missed out on mobile but that's a new market rather than a loss of their existing market. And now that's a growth opportunity for them.
> IBM did exactly the same thing.
I think you're point is to say that Microsoft is the new IBM but I don't think that follows. IBM has always been IBM even when they owned much more of the market. Even Microsoft hated working with them.
> And FWIW, the overwhelming bulk of Microsoft's revenue comes from enterprise sales of Office and Windows.
Less than 50% now (see my other comment).
Most of their dysfunction seems to be driven by monetizing legacy products, but there was a time when they didn't have any legacy products.
And about the overwhelming bulk of their revenue veing from the same sources as 20 years ago, it seems their operating revenue is 60% cloud services, admittedly a lot of that is office 365 but let's not forget azure revenue which although lumped together in statements must be huge.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/18/azure-revenue-continues-to...
Must be nice having 64% growth be a worrying number.
Microsoft went all in marketing Azure, this isn't too surprising to me. They don't mess around when they launch products/services. Their marketing to corporate CTO/CIOs is a well tuned machine.
They even tried to hit up startup devs which didn't go over as well.
I think Amazon is probably far more diversified than Microsoft. Unless they are so diversified that they aren't even considered a "tech" company anymore.
I think that "technology" especially languages and toolkits and such are super overrated. They're just a means to an end. The functionality contained in the executable in what matters to the actual end-user, not the technology or the platform. And all this is ofcourse super obvious and many companies get this. And yet I don't think any company comes close to providing the level of backwards compatibility and platform stability of Windows. Just a couple of months ago, one of our older WinXP PCs shit the bed, and we replaced it with a W10 box. I was kinda half-expecting the software compatibility for 20 year old software to be a complete shitshow, but we ran the setup and everything just worked out of the box. Thats just once anecdote of course, and there is nothing technical that prevents other platforms from doing the same, except that people don't want to work on boring tasks like keeping stuff working and ticking along, because it doesn't challenge them. But I think that is the secret sauce that makes them the big bucks.
I think your description of them on the development front is accurate. But I think that’s on purpose. With Azure they don’t really care if we use .Net anymore because that’s not what they need us to do to sell us cloud. Node very quickly became a first class citizen in Azure for instance, integrating well with stuff like application insights and other Azure DevOps features. Sure we could take our Node apps to AWS, but that doesn’t really make sense when we’re already buying into the Microsoft cloud with Office365.
I’m sure tech-heavy companies can afford to ignore Microsoft, but the public sector of Europe is a billion dollar industry for tech companies and Microsoft owns it.
As to Azure cloud, they are okay and probably worth it in some circles. I think AD and O365 in Azure are absolutely worth it. I'm, however, unsure if Azure as a whole is as worth it. It looks like k8s is winning the core infrastructure war and allows you to do things wherever you want. And while I think Azure Storage services are absolutely great to work with compared to competing cloud offerings, they are all a bit of a lock in.
Best to stay as close to open and portable as possible, or go all in on a single cloud. Everyone's use case is different.
Microsoft is a clear number two in marketshare, you really cant discount how much of enterprise america would rather do business with Microsoft than other vendors. https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/CIS_Q119.j...
You can? I assume you don't work in Global2000 Enterprise IT?
- Google and Facebook are ad companies.
- NetFlix is a media content producer.
- Apple is a luxury computing hardware provider.
- Amazon is a little bit of everything from retail to cloud infrastructure.
Microsoft builds a computing platform, dev, and business tools.
So… their business is tech?
I feel like you could make an even bigger argument in favor of Apple here. Not only do they build an entire competing software stack, but they manufacture their own hardware as well.
A better word to use is tools. Microsoft and Apple both sell tools but Apple tools are a fashionable consumer tool sold at retail, and Microsoft are business tools sold to enterprise.
Google and Facebook give away free tools in exchange for attention.
Netflix more correctly fits your example, they dont create public tools used to accomplish something else, their tools are built internally. Same with Uber.
Netflix? Tool for easier to content delivery. Uber? Transportation tool.
Everything is a tool if you reduce it far enough.
With Netflix I cant buy their tool and use it to host video for my friends. I cant buy or lease Uber tech to start my own taxi network.
I mean, Apple is at the point where they're designing multiple custom chips: a general-purpose CPU (A12X), a SiP (S4) an ARM SoC (T2), a wireless-focused SoC (W3), and an audio-focused SoC (H1).
Is Intel not a "mega tech company"? They have 75% the market cap of Microsoft, and virtually all of their revenue is from producing silicon.
Ironically this is exactly the point you miss - Intel's business it to produce and sells silicone. Intel's cohorts are AMD, ARM and NVIDIA, and they are all technology companies who's business is the development and sell of technology.
Apple produces consumer electronics, and though in many cases it also designs and produces some internal technology components, their business is not in any way dependent on selling that tech in itself. In fact it's arguable that the main influence on whether an apple component is developed in house or outsourced is economical/logistical and not tech based at all. Apple's cohorts are Sony, Samsung, LG etc, all consumer electronics providers.
Given that you can't install it on anything but one brand of hardware and you can't even change the color of the mouse pointer/cursor from black to any other color that you desire (as you can on just about every other major desktop OS)... I think some of these people are just victims of marketing and a small but loud minority.
Is... is this really true? (disclaimer: I've never used a mac in my life)
Also, you can't change any of the UI colours. The major feature of the last release was that you could change the UI from grey to black.
So, now 2 colours to choose from. One day we'll get 3 or more!
None of this is true.
How is the current state of GUI customization in Windows? Last time I checked, you couldn't even set a custom wallpaper without paying money.
Microsoft is saying 'Hey, we know you pirated this copy. Instead of locking it down, we're just going to put this un-dismissable nag message here.'
Most corporate offices today are deeply locked into MS Office. They could theoretically switch to a different office suite, but nothing else is fully compatible with MS's proprietary formats. More to the point, no other company is putting serious resources into developing a more appealing product. Google's effort seems half-hearted and Adobe never seems to have bothered.
In some ways the current situation feels like a regression to the 90's and early 2000's.
I simply DON'T work for companies that don't let me use a proper *nix based OS on my work computer.
I'm being a MUCH happier human being since I started to use this policy on the early 2000's! =)
When Microsoft's money gets posted they get applauded as if they're the underdog, but whenever Apple's profits are posted many people try to point out how it must because they're doing this and that wrong.
That's why Apple gets the hate.
I generally judge a company on what they have done recently not what they did 4 years ago.
No, those were the ones with the first-generation butterfly mechanism, and they have gotten better since then.
No one I know has had to return a MacBook. Even the one from 2011 that I sold to a friend around 5 years ago, which is still being happily used by his children.
i can't tell if this is sarcasm, recency bias, or something more nefarious. have you heard of embrace, extend and extinguish?
but, i'll bite - what incredible things for communities have they done?
> but, i'll bite - what incredible things for communities have they done?
Visual studio code. .NET core. Making visual studio free. WSL, joining the linux foundation, typescript. I could go on...
It's fun seeing them like Disney with all those different brands and universes where they could squeeze out a ton of interesting things and immediately have a big market waiting. They have access to developers, to job seekers, can push certifications for their own cloud, to enterprise, to classrooms, to great hardware engineers and to minecraft to introduce upcoming AR/VR hardware with. One of the perhaps best brands for this (after pokemon?)
Or things like "Everyone I know is switching to Whole Foods from Walmart, this means Whole Foods will take over in a year's time and Walmart will die off".
If you don't want products and services from Microsoft, Walmart and McDonald's, all 3 companies who don't seem to advertise much- do you find yourself buying products from big advertisers?
I don't find these companies low quality, so I'm wondering what would make you avoid them.
In any case, nobody should have to patronize a company if they don't want to, whatever their motivation. The problem with the big tech companies is that one so frequently doesn't have a choice. I may not want to buy from MS, but some bit of hardware I'd like to use only supports Windows drivers and some bit of paperwork I need to fill out is distributed as a Word doc whose formatting doesn't render correctly outside of MS Office.
In all fairness, one can avoid Walmart and McDonalds if one wants to, but Google and Facebook are as hard to avoid as Microsoft.
It's worked out well enough. Eliminating Google sounds too painful to me, so I'm glad my family agreed to share their photos on Google's platform for me.
It just depends on my given needs for a given thing. As to Windows, I'd rather be on linux or mac, but there are a couple things I work on that are core to the business absolutely tethered to windows.
I don’t shop there and a lot of HN probably doesn’t. A LOT of other people do.
MS's newer efforts like VS Code are certainly encouraging. This doesn't change the fundamental issue that much of the world relies on desktop software that only runs on Windows and an office suite that's only compatible with MS Office. These may not seem like much to the HN crowd, but we aren't representative of the economy at large.
I have started inversing company sentiments that I find at HN :-). There is a lot of negativity here about Apple. It's almost like the company is doomed. But then, Apple reports great earnings and stock goes up :-).
Having said that, it still a goto place for me to learn about startups, tech eco system, and scaling your stack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20472640
I get a strange "OpenOffice/LibreOffice knock off trapped in some alternate 90s" vibe from Google Docs and I've never quite used Google Docs enough to detest it, but every time I am asked to use it I find it's off-putting feeling for a web app.
I've used the web PowerPoint to present from in a pinch, and I've used the web Word to write from in a similar pinch, and other than obvious native control distinctions I think in most circumstances I'd be hard pressed to tell you the difference between the iOS/Android versions of Office applications and their web counterparts shrunk to that form factor. Sometimes the same can be said between web and desktop, though ironically right now the "Simplified Ribbon" gives web away immediately right now for the Big 3 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). Microsoft has been doing a good job converging the experiences and all the platforms still feel like "Office" to me, at least.
I think I still prefer to use the desktop versions day-to-day over web, but I don't know how much of that is just inertia that I always have them installed anyway. But I do wonder sometimes if I were to experiment with another run at a Linux only system in my life if I'd feel the web Office was sufficient for most of my needs. (Hence my curiosity if you'd tried it.)
As for using Linux day to day, go for it! When I started, it wasn't easy. Mainly because you had a lot of SWF out there still, and everything say, like video calling, was an EXE. These days, with the rise of the web based everything, it's a cinch. As much as I despise Electron on principle, it's been amazing for the Linux community. Now we have VSCode, Slack, etc. Nothing requires an EXE anymore, even gotomeeting believe it or not. My biggest pain point was email. Evolution is OK, but not great. I just started using OWA and it gets me by.
Microsoft 2019 is not Microsoft 2009, and .NET core is a part of it.
NET includes the common language runtime which can take code from any of the NET languages (C#, F# and VB or any language which compiles to IL) and run it in a managed environment like the JVM.
In addition it has a huge (and I'm my opinion brilliant) standard library.
Since Microsoft started NET Core (which is fully open source) it has been possible to build and run NET on multiple platforms. As of the latest version (3) they also ported WPF and Winforms to NET Core but crucially these parts will not run outside of Windows. Full Windows only Framework as opposed to Core has continued to exist on its own release schedule in order to support all the legacy Windows only stuff. The latest plan seems to be to unite Core and Framework in the next version with cross platform for non desktop parts preserved. However for Web apps and command line tools current Core's all cross platform and surprisingly performant. Open source has really helped Core in performance terms, I've seen some tests put Kestrel (Core Web server) in the top 5 servers.
When was the last time someone worried about getting crushed by Microsoft?
Sure they still make a lot of money but they are not by any means an industry leader.
I’ve been mostly an MS developer for 20 years but even I saw the writing on the wall and started running away from Windows only development a couple of years ago.