How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around
economist.com
economist.com
It wasn't a coincidence that on the day Ballmer stepped down and Satya became CEO (2014), Microsoft also announced Office for iOS, Cloud first strategy, and a whole slew of cloud/Azure product announcements.
All of which was developed under Ballmer watch and he handed off the launch and continued execution to Satya.
Sundar's role seems to really be give his lieutenants free reign which I guess makes sense seeing as how he now oversees all of Alphabet.
What's the incentive to do anything at that level? He's going to walk away after 5-10 years with OOM a billion dollars regardless of how anything he does or doesn't do pans out for Google. Why not just play the quiet card and pin anything that happens to the fiefdom lords who now have free reign and no oversight?
If good things happen, he gets credit for delegating well. If bad things happen, it's their fault. But if he loudly tries something different and it fails, the failure is more likely to get pinned on him. And again, he's already going to walk away with a billion regardless, so "financial upside" as a motivator for success is largely an illusion.
He's a "just gotta keep my nose clean and get out with a middling reputation and a shitload of money" CEO.
The way I remember it, when Microsoft fiiiinaly launched something successful other than office/windows, it's father was quickly made the new king they had been looking for since so long.
This [1] wired interview provides an insight into the structured thinking at Microsoft/Gates even back in 1996.
I'm sure this kind of thinking permeates any successful company, to have a video of this depth, and now available for public viewing, is really unique.
Trying to play catch up does not count as innovation in my book.
At the end of his regime MS lost top-tier tech place (when someone says "big tech" it's Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, not MS), he lost the main Microsoft advantage - an army of Windows programmers. MS under Ballmer lost couple of generations of programmers, to the point where MS needs to ship Linux kernel with Windows just to get cosy with programmers again.
Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook. I can't wait for him to be replaced.
This is an odd thing to blame on Ballmer — he was CEO already during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 launches! His CEO tenure was 14 years...
Why doesn’t he get credit for making Microsoft a top vendor in gaming?
Surprisingly the phone was loved. What wasnt loved was the one desktop everywhere so when they tried to push 'Metro' to the PC, tablet and phone it struggled. But the tiled phone interface was good, and a lot of people liked it.
I really think Ballmer and Cook are manifestations of the same person. Mac OS quality is the worst it's been in probably a decade+? Hardware design for the laptops have been under massive scrutiny. Cook brought the Watch to the table which is a massive success. Their services business plan is just a money grab like their approach to accessories. But Apple isn't innovating much, they have been cashing in in recent years (besides the watch imo, maybe airpods but Id personally disagree)
I'd still take WP over Android or iOS.
Sad that we are stuck with Android and iOS basically now.
The app store was definitely lacking. In my own circle of real life users I did not meet one person that did not really like the phone (software included). Granted this is just my own experience so very limited but its also a group of non-technical people just sharing with me. I never heard one complaint in fact it was usually more accolades.
Biggest flaw at the time was Google's shady nonsense involving banning Google Maps/Youtube on Windows Phone without a native app.
As far as the Macs, outside of the keyboard fiasco which has been rectified, the recent Macs are getting good reviews from people who were rightfully critical a few years ago. The ARM Macs will soon be as far ahead of equivalent PCs as the iPhones are Androids when it comes to processing power.
And I think USB-A isn't quite legacy just yet (it's OK they ditched the VGA and/or DVI ports), there are still a lot of need for one of those ports. Same with a card reader slot. I also think there is a need for a headphone jack even though bluetooth is qutie viable.
But they didn’t want to take the risk with a low margin high cost center activity like providing in person support and expanding headcount. Hence no reward.
And with their recent closing of Microsoft stores, it’s clear that they are doubling down on rent seeking from Office and Windows licenses.
On top of that, even though that was towards the end of the era of massive phone hardware subsidies from the carriers, it was still the era of massive phone hardware subsidies from the carriers if you bought directly from them.
Apple had/has "luxury brand" caché that Microsoft couldn't build into its stores if it wanted to, and first mover advantage on top of that. Many consumers didn't blink if there was a huge sticker price difference between the iPhone in the AT&T Store and the unlocked one in the Apple Store, because it was a luxury brand. Microsoft was never going to earn that. Additionally, if a lot of people showed up to an AT&T or Verizon store with an unlocked iPhone and were refused a SIM that would be a major scandal, and would get a lot of luxury good "entitlement" people out of the woodwork. People told that they couldn't buy an unlocked Microsoft phone and use it on their carrier just shrugged and moved on (to an iPhone or an Android).
> And with their recent closing of Microsoft stores, it’s clear that they are doubling down on rent seeking from Office and Windows licenses.
Windows and Office are still getting improvements, it is a bit disingenuous to consider those products "rent seeking".
Xbox and Surface are doing just fine with or without Microsoft-specific Stores.
Besides, both before and after the Microsoft Stores, Microsoft had good retail relationships with Best Buy and others. It's not like there is "zero" Microsoft retail exposure without Microsoft owning their own boutique retail stores.
I disagree. It takes time, money, and effort to earn people’s trust, but it’s possible. They obviously weren’t going to reverse a decade of shipping malware ridden computers, but they could have put out quality Microsoft products, and spent years earning back people’s trust.
And yes, maybe it wouldn’t work, and taking risks is part of business. But this is one of the most profitable companies in the history of the world, and they could have afforded it.
But if the point was to save the marketshare of Windows phone products via retail store presence, Microsoft didn't have time, they were racing a losing money clock and the shareholders were watching retail operations worried Microsoft was just "throwing good money after bad".
... in the USA.
Meanwhile the other 90% of the global market awaited.
I think it is another reason why doubling down on US retail store operations as an attempted run around the US carriers was ultimately the wrong plan.
Though I think the biggest problem there is that it didn't happen in a vacuum. It was one more event in a fairly long list of Microsoft technologies and APIs that were shipped to much fanfare, and then abandoned shortly after release. It made it hard to feel comfortable trying any Microsoft tech that wasn't at least a fewy years old. Including mobile APIs. Which, given what happened with Windows Phone 8, did not turn out to be an overabundance of caution.
The problem hurt more than Windows Phone, too. A lot of people got sick of having the rug repeatedly yanked out from under them, and started developing on non-Microsoft tech stacks. Which then removed a lot of the need to run Windows Server, and things sort of snowballed.
Despite all his infamous ranting about the importance of keeping developers happy early on, the Ballmer years turned out to be the era when Microsoft perfected the art of alienating developers.
They were also a couple years late, as for android and iphone had considerable market share.
I think the same can be said for google these days, there is no reason to risk investing time or money into one of their new technologies because it will get dropped if its not one of the big 4 (search, ads, youtube, GCP, maybe arguably android)
The big difference is, Google pulls stunts like that small things that aren't critical to the company's business. Microsoft, on the other hand, was blithely jackhammering away at the foundation of their business.
They did fine, insofar as they're still profitable and well-capitalized, but one has to wonder what things could have been like for them if they hadn't spent the aughties playing Dr Strangelove's Hand with themselves.
OTOH, one could argue that spending a decade eating humble pie was a necessary step in teaching them how to play nice with others.
For sure, I think MS was panicking tbh. They missed the mobile revolution (This was Ballmer and Gates), and then cloud was starting to take off and realized their OS and Office products were not optimized or read for that shift. I think they realized they had to change, and change fast and as a result didn't go well. But at least it started the change we see today with MS (for good or bad).
Oh, and they decided to only target the high end of the market, instead of a full range, so they lost the low end market that was selling a lot of phones in poorer nations.
/rant of a dedicated windows phone enthusiast.
At least firefox lets me put the urlbar at the bottom now! And Android picked up dark mode from WP as well.
My memory is fuzzy on the specifics but the breaks weren't done just for the fun of it. If I recall correctly, refactoring on a titanic scale on the Windows Phone OS was underway along with the same on Windows itself to both make Windows a componentized OS that would work on anything from a tiny mobile device to a huge server and to synchronize the architecture of WP to Windows. By the time of WP10, as the old joke goes, "the operation was a success but the patient died". It's kind of a pity.
iOS has not been unified with OS X, and Android has not been unified with Chrome OS. And all four OSes are quite successful despite the lack of unification. Meanwhile, the Windows RT Surface tablets never took off, and the Windows 8 unified experience was universally recognized as an unmitigated disaster on launch day, if not earlier.
It was a gamble that enough native desktop apps would remain for this strategy to pay off, but they lost to web and electron apps.
Such a shame they sold it off and yes I know the reasons but it was the best phone I've had in the modern century.
> "Windows Phone"
You can lay that at Terry Myerson's feet. The several breaks in backward compatibility was a big factor in ensuring WP had no apps.
> "Xbox One (which halved its marketshare vs the 360)"
That was crappy decision making by Don Mattrick. He also had a hand in killing Flight Simulator IIRC.
Easy to say "making good quarters" is table stakes, much harder to come up with a vision that works. What do you see as possible visions Cook could pursue given Apple's positioning?
So ummm, maybe a slight difference in performance.
A company is more than its stock price.
In fact according to the CAPM economic model, it is impossible. The assets of the company decrease by the money spent on buybacks, which matches the value of stock bought and destroyed. This should leave the price per remaining stock unchanged.
All are second order effects.
The one that hurt Microsoft was the EU decrees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Commission may remind you of that.
That said, the one thing Ballmer did right is that he took on the difficult problem of locking down Microsoft products on a security front. This was a hard and thankless task, but absolutely necessary in the long run.
Ballmer became CEO in 2000. But Bill Gates continued being involved in day to day operations until 2009.
Considering that Microsoft got religious about security in the 2000s, and this was a shift in corporate policy, I give credit to Ballmer.
But ideas are a dime a dozen. I give credit not to coming up with the idea, but to actually putting in the elbow grease. And there is no question that Ballmer put a lot of elbow grease into keeping the initiative going.
Tim Cook has done a fantastic job.
Prior to 2010: Search, Doubleclick, Maps, Mail, GSuite, AppEngine (which was first serverless platform). All of which were category makers or category killers.
Since 2010:
We're still on Facebook and Twitter and Youtube, using iPhones to play digital music. You say 2020, I say 2009.
Wireless earbuds and smart watches I guess are the only "game changing" (they're not) inventions of note for the past decade?
Web... phone... computer... they're just more refined versions of products we had in 2009.
Android was launched in 2008, although I think it really deserves to be in the post-2010 category. Today's Android is a whole different beast.
Google Home is a new product. And tied in with Home & Android is voice recognition, which is definitely post-2010. Voice recognition may not be a standalone product but it has radically changed how I interact with technology. It counts.
Google Hangouts launched in 2013. Google's whole messaging platform has become a muddled mess that they're only just now untangling, but hangouts video was a huge hit for a while.
Of course it's hard to top hits like Search, Gmail, GSuite, and Maps... but there's progress.
Does it define the category? Is Google Cloud 'the' cloud provider? "Just spin up a box on GCP" the default thing for people to do in tech?
> Today's Android is a whole different beast.
Is it? Android 4 (which was around that time) is pretty close to android as it is now.
> Google Home is a new product
And? Is it category defining like maps or Mail or GSuite, did it create something entirely new like GAE did for serverless? Is it the default home assistant? Do people outside tech even know the name 'Google Home'?
> hangouts video was a huge hit for a while
And now it's close to dead. Never reached the heights of Skype or Zoom.
None of these products are category defining.
That said, Google's voice recognition does "define the category". My iPhone-using friends barely use voice recognition.
Android - Acquisition
Doubleclick - Acquisition
GSuite - Acquisition
AppEngine?? - Is that still around?
Google is indeed rudderless, but it's been mostly just milking their search cash cow for a long time.
As much as HN poo poos the Apple Watch and the AirPods, from a technical standpoint it is much more innovative than the iPad - the last product that was introduced under Jobs. Once you have the iPhone, using the same technology in something with less constraints was easy. The Watch is just the oppposite.
From a financial standpoint. The Watch already produced more in revenue and profit than the iPod at peak. As does the AirPods.
Not to mention that Apple could have never shipped in volume without Cooks supply chain management expertise.
Then there are the upcoming ARM Macs that will probably be the fastest personal computers in the industry in a year or two. The $399 iPhone SE is already faster than any Android phone at any price.
They’ve been laying the platform groundwork for AR for years now, that’s not an accident.
I recognize Apple's A series and S series chips are different, but both the chips and watch in general seem like incrementalism to me.
The Watch being smaller, it’s technically much more impressive that it has an always on display, cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, heart rate sensors, altimeter, gyroscope, 32GB Storage, and it still gets 12-16 hours of battery life.
While the Apple’s A series is already 2 or 3 years ahead of everything else in the mobile market, nothing is even coming that close to the S series chip.
Sure, there are no home runs here, but he's effectively executing a coherent strategy and hasn't really had any big mistakes. I wouldn't put him as high up as Nadella and I certainly wouldn't put him as low as Ballmer. It's tough to be the guy who follows the founder and Cook has handled it well. I don't know who is out there who looks like a better candidate or a suitable replacement for Cook.
> Sure, there are no home runs here, ...
Huh?
AirPods + Apple Watch are bigger than either the Mac or the iPad and are growing much faster.
Companies don't crank out iPhone class "home runs" every 10 years. Microsoft had the Windows and Office, Google had Search and GMail (and made solid acquisitions in the form of YouTube and Docs). Facebook had Facebook... and bought everything else they own worth a damn.
Apple created a $25 billion/ year product line (AirPods/ Beats/ Watch) under Cook... but it's not a home run?
If you don’t live on the coasts, and you want to invest in a stack that will keep you employed indefinitely and wherever you go, you pick dotnet hands down, and I say this as someone who hasn’t written a line of dotnet code
They have sustainable business models in several segments, and even though they aren't on the cutting edge of pop culture, they're doing well.
One thing about Microsoft, their tooling just seems more polished and things tend to just work.
I'd be surprised if a lot of start ups don't start using c# since it's now open source and more platform agnostic.
They have a widely used desktop operating system, a top-3 public cloud, they make their own laptops and other hardware, they make multiple widely used programming languages, they have one of the most widely used databases, they have a well regarded research division ... the list goes on
The scope of tech that MSFT works on is as big as anyone, and is what they primarily make their money from ... so why wouldn't anyone think it's "big tech"?
Disclaimer: I do work for Microsoft on SQL, but I am not in management nor do I speak in any capacity for Microsoft.
and so it's not seen ad big tech, even if it's used by more people.
maybe it's also because MS tech talks don't really make no1 on HN.
Loud people do not always reflect reality very well :)
Comments like this make zero sense to me. Apple might be better if Jobs was still alive. But without a time machine, and potentially better medicine, that's not an option.
Under Cook Apple:
- Increased profitability and market share massively.
- Created the most successful watch brand in the world.
- Turned Beats into Beats + AirPods, the two most successful headphone brands in the world.
- Massively increased Mac, iPhone, iPad, install base.
- Avoided the sort of ridiculous cash burning acquisitions to inflate growth Ballmer was guilty of.
Apple has a bunch of mis-steps under Cook, but none of them have had long term company damaging impact. Many of the things people beat Cook up over were actually things Jobs was as bad/ worse with. For example almost all the App Store policies everyone hates were created under Jobs. Jobs was also far more protective and litigious.
Cook isn't Jobs, since Jobs is dead the comparison is pointless. Cook has done better than the vast majority of CEOs who have taken over successful brands. Apple is doing just fine.
Jobs refused conventional treatment to treat his cancer until it was too late. He placed heavy emphasis on oriental mysticism.
I think there was some initial success in attaching vitamin d to some drugs to bypass the "firewall", but it was still hard.
Pancreatic adenocarcinoma is the fast killer.
That's something Nadella hasn't even managed, let alone Ballmer.
More seriously, I shouldn't have put the comparison to Nadella in there at all. They are both great CEOs.
Cook probably wouldn't have ever been a good fit for Microsoft. His expertise is in physical products logistics.
Nadella is a great CEO.
Cook is a great CEO.
They've both done a good job running their respective companies. Which is better is endlessly debatable.
Since Satya took over, MSFT stock has been soaring... You can't deny the evidence. That's 100% clear
Everybody of us used to be a huge apple fanboy, now every one of us hates them with a passion.
They completely ignored their customers for the iPhone money grab. Their hardware and software used to be synonymous with quality, nowadays their shoddy quality has become a meme at work.
"Oops reboot." - "What did you expect, it's a mac."
We're looking for the door, and slowly started to introduce windows machines. We were shocked how fast computers got without apple catching up.
Apple used to he one of the pillars of our productivy, nowadays it's a liability.
And from a developer perspective, they murdered their own App ecosystem.
Mac software used to be really really good. But who do you expect to write great apps for 70ct per sale. That's just ridiculous. Also, why should I get an iPad pro, if I can't even write software on it.
They could've dominated the PC market if iPad Os was actually a real OS.
I doubt that apple can keep its brand relevant without opinion leaders like design professionals.
I mean, c'mon, even Ive left.
Apple is dead, it's only a matter of time for the rot to bring it down.
Neither of these extremes are healthy attitudes. It's a company, making machines. That's all there is to it.
I know a fair number of developers and most of them still use Macs. Not because they are fan boys, but because MacOS still sucks less than Windows.
For me and likely many, OS choice is a pragmatic thing and for the moment MacOS is the least bad option. It's going to be interesting seeing what happens with the new CPUs which have the potential to push the Mac ahead of the pack in terms of price/ performance as well.
> I mean, c'mon, even Ive left.
Ive is 54 years old. He's was at Apple for ~26 years when he left. I have no idea how wealthy he is at this point, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's a billionaire based on his position and likely large stock option grants in the 00s.
You are a designer, how many years would you put in cranking out designs for mass consumption consumer electronics after you were a many times over millionaire? How many black aluminium iPhones would you design? Another 40 years worth?
About your last point, it would be every designer's dream to work in a company with as powerful a brand as Apple, with as big a war chest and as global a reach for massive adoption. Yet Ive left, perhaps due to feeling that Apple has drained itself of ideas and doesn't have any concrete plans in future. FWIW, most of its recent products were envisioned when Jobs was alive.
But I have a Ryzen 3950X desktop with a real GPU (RTX 2080) running Windows and Linux, for when I am not portable.
Same dotfiles for all, any operating system these days has the terminal + browser story covered, if you then use VS Code and languages like Go or Rust, you don’t really need to care what the OS is.
Getting religious over any one platform is a waste of time IMO.
Gamers who use Windows and devs using Unix seem not to mind.
As an aside, I have almost the same setup as you(just waiting for the 5950x). Probably the most bang for buck setup for devs.
The issue with Macs for me is not the usability of the OS (apart from the lock in that Apple tried to do), but because of its irreparability. Spilt a few dropfuls water on your PC while using? Tough luck, gotta go to the Apple Care centre and wait till they fix it in a week or more. Meanwhile once I accidentally spilt water on my ThinkPad, I just disconnected everything, left it to dry for a day and voila! All of my data was preserved, no issues at all. Another time, I accidentally dropped the ThinkPad from my desk, yet it still works as good as new. Even if some issue were to happen to it, I can be assured of getting out-of-warranty support anywhere in the world - heck, I've had an old Dell repaired at the bloke's who runs a computer shop in my grandfather's village in rural India.
Another gripe I have is with Mac's updates. People complain about Windows updates, but it just takes an hour or two tops if it's a big one, and can be done on restart. Compare that to Mac - last year, Catalina took more than 10 hours on my Mac. Those are wasted hours of productivity, and it's always the same story with Mac every year.
I completely agree that it's still less bad, but look at the language you're using. It's not that MacOS is a great platform, it's just less bad than the other options. It had a great starting position from which it declines. It's a lot worse than it used to be and it continues to decline, so the trend and outcome are clear.
> How many black aluminium iPhones would you design? Another 40 years worth?
EXACTLY!
The iPhone is now 14 years old. The iPod lasted 6 years until it got replaced with the iPhone.
Apples great advantage used to be that they competed with themselves. It was the Macintosh Team vs. the Rest of Apple for example. The Macintosh was allowed to completely cannibalise all other Machines, the iPhone was allowed to completely canibalise the iPod, the iMac replaced the Cube and was allowed to completely cannibalise most tower macs.
They didn't create a huge product portfolio trying to balance features so that they all sell equally well, crippling some for the survival of others (e.g. where's the iPad Pro with XCode, or a MacBook with LTE). They tried to make the best product that would revolutionise the markets, even if it would kill their other products. Because the Products were front and center, not the profits.
If apple was still apple, we wouldn't have Macbooks anymore. We'd all use iPad Pros with proper software and keyboards that can balance them on your laps.
We probably wouldn't use iPhones either, we'd simply have Airpods, an appleWatch, and an optional larger screen that you slide into your shirt pocket or your wallet, or carry as a pocket mirror. Doing 90% of interactions through Siri (which is also 8 years old now, ancient by computer standards, still worse than what it used to be, because apple wants to save money on compute).
Why would Ive leave if he had the power to shape that future.
In addition, under Cook, Apple also made great strides in ecological manufacturing and supplier accountability. And early on, Cook had the courage to fire a highly visible but toxic executive.
Do you have evidence of that? It seems like it is quite the opposite. Apple prefer to destroy not working phones or Macs instead of repairing them. They make sure independent repair shops cannot repair any of their products and design them in a way so that they fail in short space of time, so customers can either pay for repair through the nose or buy a new Mac.
Even Greenpeace acknowledges quite a bit of progress in many respects: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/GG... — keep in mind that they used to picket Apple annual meetings. Admittedly, they still have plenty of criticisms, and several of them echo yours.
Personally, I think "designed to fail" is a downright false charge, and "repairability" is a trickier trade-off than repair advocates make it out to be — how much weight, size, and fragility does the repairability add, and how often is the device in fact repaired?
(I'm going by Apple's own claims here, would be interested to hear whether you have information contradicting these claims).
[1] https://industryeurope.com/5-tech-giants-sued-over-use-of-ch...
The complaint [1] is interesting and disturbing. But I'm not convinced it's entirely in good faith. It spends a lot of time expounding on the DRC's sordid history (Whatever you want to blame Apple for, they had nothing to do with King Leopold). It cites extensively from Amnesty's 2016 report on conditions in Cobalt mining [2], but entirely fails to mention Amnesty's 2017 followup report [3] that credits many of the defendants (especially Apple) of having taken significant steps in the right direction since 2016. And the complaint appears to dismiss any positive measures taken by the defendants merely as evidence that their prior bad conduct was knowing.
Of course, a company improving their conduct does not mean they cannot be found liable for their earlier conduct, but I would not take this complaint as an objective assessment of the defendants' current cobalt sourcing practices.
[1] http://iradvocates.org/sites/iradvocates.org/files/stamped%2...
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/AFR6231832016ENGL...
[3] https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/AFR6273952017ENGL...
Somebody should tell the UK Parliament, they need some feedback and Apple cannot spare anybody to clear up this "downright false charge" :
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/62/environmental-...
There is concern about repairability there. I seem to recall that the UK was a member of a trans-national organization that recently passed tougher repairability legislation, and quit that organization to be rid of all that burdensome regulation.
For the life of me, I can't understand why Apple wouldn't take the UK seriously…
> Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook.
is
> but Tim Cook added $1.7 Trillion to apple's market cap since taking over as chief executive.
Steve was visionary, but Tim has taken that vision farther than anyone ever gives him credit for.
We're 10 years past Jobs and Cook was running quite a bit of Apple even before Jobs passed away. Not even Jobs is prescient enough to have predicted where the market would have gone this far out. He was good at being where the puck was going, but he didn't have a crystal ball.
Apple's valuation doesn't do me any good (or ill!) as a customer. I feel like there are a lot more bugs in Mac OS than there were in the past, and I'd happily trade Apple's market cap for a return to confident OS upgrades.
After having purchased most every iPhone release since launch, with the prior model gifted to family, this year we switched to iPhone-as-a-Service subscription on the Apple Card.
Post shift, Apple moves me out of making a $1300 buying evaluation decision to simply ‘staying current’ for forty bucks a month for the flagship model.
This was available for a while, took a while to break through my sense I should “own” my device each year instead of subscribe to it, but the mental stress of buying new and reselling old, inevitably ending up with some in a drawer (iPhone 6s anyone?) ... the subscription is hassle free for me, recurring revenue for Tim, and shockingly well priced given the convenience.
Imagine what their numbers would look like to Wall Street if he could turn most of their hardware buyers into subscribers...
How are you working out "most successful"? Beats aren't rated particularly highly apart from by label-followers; while blinkeredness has always been a notable criticism of Apple product appraisal, it did in the past occasionally lead the field - that's not at all obvious with Beats etc.
Sales. How else do you measure success of a consumer electronics product?
> Beats aren't rated particularly highly apart from by label-followers
While Beats haven't been highly rated by audiophiles, they are popular and sound quality and in particular Bluetooth performance has improved significantly under Apple.
AirPods... well they are AirPods. They are might well be the most universally loved product in Apple's product line right now. Maybe the most loved consumer electronics product on the market right now.
There are clearly many measures of success. It's best if you mean best-selling maybe just to say that, as it may be important to salespeople but not so much to (say) end users.
[Airpods...]Maybe the most loved consumer electronics product on the market right now.
That sounds more like a subjective or emotional claim than one measurable, and that's part of the problem with Apple in particular (though not only Apple) as I've already mentioned; the seeming lack of ability of its champions to consider it's products in a reasonably neutral way.
To an extent, that's a compliment to the way it has built it's brand over time, but it means it's important to bear it in mind when judging rather sweeping superiority claims.
People have been spewing nonsense like this for decades. As if customers being happy with a product is a worthless concept.
The AirPods are successful because people love them. When AirPods were first launched, they were widely panned and people laughed at the design, but everyone who bought them loved them. I could go into details about why, but it's irrelevant, if they hadn't been so well liked, they wouldn't be the best selling headphones on the market.
See also, Apple Watch.
More emotion.
As if customers being happy with a product is a worthless concept.
No, customers not being able to look at things with a reasonable sense of perspective and ability to judge things reasonably impartially is to be borne in mind when considering sweeping claims. Somewhat different.
It's funny how Apple has often been exhorted by industry observers to make large acquisitions, and instead has done quite well with smaller ones. Beats has been a commercial success. PA Semi (dating back to the Jobs era) was the foundation to a hugely successful VLSI design division. The success of Siri is a bit more disputed, but it's playing an important role in many products.
I have seen that headline every year since 1984. Every single year.
Though with the size and cash reserves, it's more likely they get "doomed" the way Microsoft was in the last 10 years (still is, perhaps).
Apple's products are demonstrably supported in software far longer than other manufacturers. People rate the physical build quality of their products very high as well.
It seems that people like the benefits and features of Apple hardware enough to overlook the problems with self-repairability.
And regarding the app store, maybe because you're in the industry you think it's a generally big problem, because you're affected. But it's a 1% privilege issue to most of the world.
It seems Apple is doing enough right that its value is climbing.
Remember when TV and radio repair shops were a thing? RadioShack in the US or Tandy in Europe? Kids these days don’t...
https://fortune.com/2019/08/06/apple-airpods-business/
I don't think you can characterize that as a business failure.
People wrote off the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad as gimmicks. Even the Mac was written off as a toy.
It's the ultimate hubris to assume you know more than the millions of people who buy a given product and enjoy using it.
That being said I'm also very impressed with Satya Nadella, and have recently been using Windows more and more again, something I thought would be pretty unlikely (to put it mildly) a decade ago when Ballmer was at the helm. I'm pretty excited about future products from both companies.
That has been some of my view as well. But some of their approach have changed.
The old Apple was about making something great, charge a premium. That is about the same with current Apple. Except its whole Services Strategy reeks of money grabbing. There is nothing about Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great.
I'm not sure how you'd consider Apple Music a money grab but are ok with iTunes music purchases? Basically they were expanding their business to follow the industry trend of streaming music instead of buying it. iTunes has been a revenue stream at Apple since the iPod was born.
Also, Apple selling supplemental services and software that are... not amazing is not new either.
The big one? iTunes. For a few years it was great, but for a long long time it was just a giant mess. iHome, iMovie (Garage Band is pretty rad), iPhoto (Photos is way better), Mobile Me, Ping didn't even last 2 years I don't think. Most of those products were meh at best, they did the basic thing they needed to do and that's about it.
The big difference between Apple then and Apple now is they have the money to contract out for their own content.
> Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great.
Apple TV+ has a paltry selection because they didn't go out and buy a huge external library of content to bootstrap themselves. The content they have is—Decent and getting better. They know this and there is a reason they aren't really charging for it yet.
Apple Fitness doesn't even exist so not sure how you can criticize it.
Yeah, it's all a "Money Grab", they are growing the business, that's what companies do. Fortunately all of this stuff is optional. You can enjoy your computer/ phone/ tablet without any of it. IMO the only egregious "money grab" is their paltry 5GB free iCloud storage. Considering that's the best and for many only way of backing up their $1000 phone with their life stored on it, that's messed up.
Steve Jobs: We are still Better!
Bill Gates: Does it Matter?
Time will tell.
I think a lot of that was Ray Ozzie. I guess Balmer deserves some credit at least for hiring him?
MS under Ballmer lost couple of generations of programmers
A lot of younger programmers may not realize this, but in the 90’s, all roads led to Microsoft. If you were a programmer and you didn’t know at least some of the MS acronym soup of Win32/VB/ATL/MFC/etc/etc, you weren’t getting paid. Microsoft and Windows completely dominated commercial software development. And then what happened?
Balmer tried stupidly to kill the web. He redeployed the IE team and assumed that the web would stagnate without his attention. He’d killed Netscape and the threat had passed. In the meantime, Mozilla and Apple and Google were forming the whatwg and architecting the next generation of the web. And MS was not only not a part of it, but had lost all credibility in the eyes of web and browser devs.
And then of course he also got caught flat-footed by the iPhone. Balmer was a serial failure as a CEO. Maybe he deserves some credit, a little bit at least for Azure? But he’ll always be remembered for all of those stupid quips he made about how Apple wasn’t going to be able to make headway in the smartphone biz.
I make this point because many of us (both engineers and customers alike) pushed back hard against Microsoft. They actively fought against open standards and interoperability. We literally thought of them as the evil empire. Even as late as the mid 2000s, when I was at Yahoo and there was talk of a Microsoft acquisition, I would have quit rather than work at Microsoft.
Economics aside, changing that toxic culture is what I appreciate most about Nadella's time as CEO. He has (it appears) made Microsoft into a citizen.
But Cook isn't Ballmer, either.
As for losing out on programmers which (my words) essentially reduce the exponential behavior that tech was experiencing. I'll say this. It is sad. Rent seeking is a typical behavior of any company that gets large.
I'm actually now wondering if something is preventing these companies from growing very fast, like a national actor.
If you look at Amazon, they are in numerous industries and have a little market share of them and are trying to innovate in them. Amazon isn't slowing down either. I find it an interesting case study. Only AWS is helping programmers, many other products are actually against user's interests.
Another case study would be Tesla. They are emerging as a most likely monopoly due to their relentless innovation. But they don't harness community programmers either. I believe this will change overtime, since Musk has said this for many years but I doubt there will be a lot of freedom in their system either.
I want to see a company that is innovative and allowing others to innovate on their platform. It would be very valuable to society if we do this.
Google has only one cash cow. They don't know how to develop products and how to win customers. I feel like products at Google get developed when someone has a bright idea, and then as soon as they get promoted they go do other stuff, and the business isn't really about nurturing a new product. All they care about is their big ads cash cow, with which nothing can compare.
LOL, I agree. Ballmer at least came across as a strong leader, if wrong-headed at times. Sundar just comes across as a weakling yes-man trying to please all the sides.
I couldn't / can't get my work calendars to work on google home, but I can get my work calendars to work on Alexa - let that sink in! Been a top complaint for years - they just don't care - it's really all about the new stuff.
Apple - a lot of nice features that solve problems I had usually on new releases.
They are currently the 2nd biggest company in the world by market cap. Around double the size of Facebook.
They might not be cool or trendy in tech circles anymore, but they are without a doubt a big tech company.
Their OS runs over 70% of desktops [1] and their office suite has over 80% of the market share [2]. And that's just the sectors they completely dominate in before we even talk about other sectors that they are involved in with major competitive products. Xbox, Surface, Azure, SQL server, Power BI, Windows Server, .net, Visual Studio, BizTalk, are all huge popular widely used tech products. And I'm sure there's more that I don't know.
And then add GitHub and LinkedIn if you want to count recent acquisitions that still seem to operate mostly independently at the moment.
1 - https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
2 - https://www.ciodive.com/news/Google-Microsoft-Office-collabo...
What Satya has done is incredibly impressive and will be much studied IMHO
For what it's worth (and this is mostly seperate from your point I guess), most of the time when people say "big tech", they're talking about the negative cultural, political, and economic impacts of those companies. Maybe its not so bad to not be lumped in with Facebook?
The funny thing is everyone I spoke to who used it loved Windows phone.
Well before Windows Phone existed, they already had to deal with that for Windows CE 1.0 to 6.x and all the PDAs/phones that used them. Android has to deal with the same thing. Nothing was new about that for Windows Phone.
Aside from that, Microsoft had to deal with that already anyway because of Windows CE Embedded / Windows Automotive and all the miscellaneous gadgets people wanted to use it with.
What I remember is the most charismatic human being I've ever seen. The man could have been a cult leader. He had and maybe still has power in his ability to speak. Any question we asked (and we were interns, we asked lots of them) he had not just an answer but a good answer. He spoke of his failures well too: "They ask if we should make a video game console or a phone, and I chose the console- I should have said 'both'!".
But nobody cares about how well you can speak. People want results.[0]
The original schedule for the event actually got cancelled at the last minute- there was a huge announcement that had to be made, a big deal that was going to change the face of Microsoft, and it overlapped with our time. He was very apologetic about that, and rescheduled us for the next week, and then spoke at length about this incredible thing that was about to happen.
That big announcement? Bing was teaming up with Yahoo on Search. (We all remember the day of that earth-changing event, right?)
He drove a several-year old dark red Mercury Montego in which he almost ran me over in a parking lot behind the EBC. He was on the phone.
I never liked working there, but watching him scream "I LOVE THIS COMPANY" while in tears made me feel like I was part of something huge and important.
Balmer was very successful in doing what he was tasked with. You can’t blame him for that.
I'm not going to get started on his miserable technical leadership. Things more or less just happened under him, he didn't seem that involved in the quality of what was being produced.
Microsoft is well rid of him.
It was a few weeks later. Office for iOS was ready to go but I suspect Ballmer was holding it back (not wanting to give up precious Windows exclusives) rather than driving it.
Yes Office on iOS was a smart move, buy why was it even necessary? It was a white flag after over a decade of missed opportunities. Only under a new leader could it be re-branded as a refreshing change of direction.
I honestly don't know to what extent the problems there can be laid at Ballmer's door, but it really wasn't just him, frankly it was him and Bill. They were fantastic at executing on established products and technologies pioneered by others but dropped the ball time and again at innovating into new areas.
Satya did not invent the "platform wins" strategy. That was long before him. And that's what the company is still capitalizing on.
That's what Microsoft is still the best at. Platform. And tools.
No one comes even close to having the developer experience MS offers. And that plays directly into the platform strategy.
Ballmer was a genius. Straight fact.
They might have been developed while he was at the helm, but how do you know he wasn't the one blocking their release?
He basically won the lottery by getting assigned to the same dorm floor at Harvard as Bill Gates, and has been coasting ever since.
Agreed. Ballmer's tenure is widely misunderstood. Gates does not receive enough blame for the missteps of that era.
Great read: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-l...
In February 2011 Nadella was promoted to president of the Server and Tools Division, which oversaw products for companies’ data centers like Windows Server and the SQL Server database. This department also oversaw the Azure cloud platform. When he took over this area it was doing $16.6 billion in revenue. In two years, by 2013, Nadella raised that number to $20.3 billion.
I purchased a Macbook about 2 years ago out of curiosity, as it seems a lot of developers prefer them. I'll admit the screen is beautiful, but so much of the developer niceties are simply the Mac taking advantage of POSIX interoperability. As WSL continues to grow, I could definitely see going back to a Windows machine.
Biggest benefit for me has been how simple it has made ssh on Windows. I got a nicer spec'd Surface Laptop 3 during my last hardware refresh and haven't missed Macbook at all.
I think he's referring to the SSH integration inside VS code so you can open up a remote folder as if it was a local one in the IDE
Macs are popular dev machines because they couple the above with a very polished and stable widely compatible OS. The broad market appeal with the advantages of Unix like terminal and file system and a package manager. The screen isn't even that great, I'd take the XPS screen over the Macbook's.
I think buying NPM and GitHub, and inducing Docker to add Windows support, got them more (in the long run) in this space than those two things.
Every single thing he's credited for "turning around" was launched under Ballmer.
My reading of Ballmer from the outside (I'd left long before the recent transition years) is that he probably trusted his division heads too much. He figured they knew what they were doing and he just had to steer the giant ship gently in a general direction.
What other explanation is there for letting Sinofsky run amok with the horseshit that was Windows 8 ? Or Office refusing to ship WinRT apps, ever ?
Ballmer had Microsoft in his blood and I loved him for that. People like to make fun of his "Developers, Developers, Developers" video, but that man put his soul in his work. Nadella is bent on competing on low-price Linux VMs with AWS and he will lose that bet in the long run.
I don't feel like I need to go into the abomination that is Windows 10.
Or maybe I'm just a bitter Windows Phone user shaking my fist at the clouds (no pun intended).
Strikes me that these two things are the same failure. WinRT wasn't up to the task due to Windows 8 being poorly thought out, so Office couldn't use it.
That's nonsense. Ballmer kept Microsoft in the 90's style of doing business, but this didn't work so well in the 2000's. After Satya took over he embraced opensource. He allowed Linux into Azure, which is bold. He killed the Windows division, which is very bold. He made Windows free. He made Office free for devices with small screens. He opensourced .NET and other products such as VSCode and TypeScript. He incorporated Linux kernel into Windows. None of these things would have happened under Balmer. These are bold moves and these moves are responsible for why customers, developers and investors love the new Microsoft.
Yeah, no. article from 2012 https://www.wired.com/2012/01/meet-bill-gates/ . Adoption may have accelerated under Nadella, but this was the direction the company was headed.
>He allowed Linux into Azure, which is bold.
Azure was supporting Linux VMs in 2012.
>He killed the Windows division, which is very bold.
You say bold, I say stupid. Windows is still a big chunk of earnings and all that Nadella/Panos have managed to do is piss off long-standing customers by producing a half-assed Windows 10 version every six months.
>He made Office free for devices with small screens
Again, 2012 is when Office mobile was launched.
>He opensourced .NET and other products such as VSCode and TypeScript.
I hate to keep harping on 2012, but yeah, Typescript was announced in 2012 as well.
I'm not going to Fisk every line of your points. There seems to be some sort of blind hatred for Ballmer on HN such that it makes people think there was a magic wand waved by Nadella to suddenly spread enlightenment throughout Microsoft.
The fact of the matter is that Microsoft was already changing.
I don't know if you're joking or not. The "successes" prior to Satya were Windows 8 and Vista :)
Windows is much better now than it ever was.
Most importantly, he said and acted as if Windows wasn't the core of the company. A challenging but right decision.
It's still a 40-year-old company, so it still has some historic issues. But yes, I do feel like Satya has done a great job.
If I go to settings, or open the start menu, I have latencies measured in seconds, even though I have a fast gaming laptop.
As a comparision on my iPad most of the settings windows have about 0.2s rendering latency (some shorter, some longer), but in reality I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be the part of the continuous testing of any operating system.
Another important example is that I find it harder to find installed programs in Windows 10 than what it was in Windows 7, as Windows 7 grouped shortcuts installed by programs into folders, now I just see a big mess of shortcuts where I have to remember the name of the shortcut to be able to run it.
Also I have things like ,,Candy Crash Friends'' icon that's very bright, takes my focus away on what I want to do, and I don't know how to turn it off, as I don't find it in the settings (to tell you the truth, I haven't even played it, but I'm waiting for Cyberpunk 2077, so I don't want to try other games right now).
They are not all bad, but the Modern UI is crap, stupid animations blocking the user from doing things. If i wanted eyecandy i 'd buy a mac or use a wobbly linux WM. MS please go back to making boring things that work.
Is that something people at huge companies have to think about often?
Good money vs working on a product you believe in.
There is no way you seriously think this...
Skype is atrocious, and offensive as a product.
Let me put it this way: Since chatting with Teams, I no longer think quite as badly of Skype.
UI is old, but is the fastest.
-- State of software, 2020
I wonder if this is a way to boost bing usage.
P.S. Linux user
Create a Folder with the Name:
GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}
The Windows Master Control Panel shortcut, labeled All Tasks and also called Windows God Mode by bloggers and All Tasks folder by at least one Microsoft developer, is a shortcut to access various control settings in Windows Vista and later operating systems, including Windows 10. By creating a folder with a certain name, users have access to all of the operating system's control panels from within a single folder.
The shortcut is implemented by creating a folder with the extension .{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}. GodMode was the original folder name used when the feature was publicised, but any name can be used.
I definitely realize that by writing this comment I am both identifying myself as not a gamer and reverse-dating myself. :)
It's terrible.
At least they finally put a screen brightness slider on the notification center.
1. Bing web search results for "system"
2. System Information, a program that shows a report about hardware and software in your computer
3. Settings, the modern control panel app, which has a panel called System
4. The old "System" control panel
5. "Change Your System Sleep Settings", or some other randomly-chosen specific setting from inside the modern System control panel.
(if some distro could manage to provide a consistent UI ...)
It might work, it might fool me once. But you and me computer, we are working together all day! It gets old.
There's a tool called Everything that somehow does a search across all files instantaneously and I haven't touched start since then
Start Button > Settings Icon > Devices, which is in the top-middle, and has the subtitle "Bluetooth, printers, mouse"
But why bother? Without having any idea where it is I can still find it even faster than that.
Start Button > "bluetooth" > Enter
And with search autocomplete I only needed to get as far as "bl" before it suggests the right thing. And my desktop doesn't have wifi, but I only need to get as far as typing "wi" for the start menu to suggest the wireless settings anyway. The Control Panel always sucked, and the settings menu sucks on iOS or Android too. Typing in the start menu to search has been around since roughly Vista.
And their apps aren't great, but I haven't experienced anything like the problems you describe. They're barebones but fine.
The path is: Network & Internet -> Status -> Network&Sharing center -> <Connection name> -> Wireless properties -> Security -> show characters.
The fastest way to get to that is via a google search: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/find-your-wi-fi-...
I still don't know how you can see the password for a network without being connected to it.
But the rest, I don't have any of the problems you describe. And I run Windows 10 on a ThinkPad P50, which is 5 years old.
Also, the start menu is reasonable, although I prefer the simplicity of XP.
I upgraded my Core 2 Duo machine from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and it definitely struggled.
But my Core i7 machine has no trouble with Windows 10.
It's a beast when it comes to mathematical computations on a laptop, that's why it's so frustrating that simple things are so laggy.
Got so bad, that I now have MS Paint as default image viewer.
I kinda like the image viewer's ability to view other pictures in the same directory, but the performance and waiting time to view anything was just way too terrible.
Another example is Time Machine compared to the backup which comes with Windows. Microsoft have constantly mucked about with backup but have never managed to get it right. I can't imagine anybody relying on it. Time Machine is fantastic in comparison.
Definitely drives me nuts though - how hard is it to show a JPEG?!
I'll die on this hill.
http://blog.livedoor.jp/blackwingcat/archives/1299806.html
There's a person in Japan that is actively (edit: maybe not active) working on modernizing windows 2000
There is Azure, Office 365, Xbox, Bing, servers any many others properties that are money makers.
I created a quick ppt or xls file yesterday, not sure how I named it. I hit the Windows key, type Excel (usually you don't need to type the whole word, specially if it's a frequent search) and it immediately shows the Excel shortcut and a list of the last few files I've opened.
The other case is I wanted to modify the action when closing the laptop lid. I know that setting is somewhere in the power configuration, but can't remember exactly where. So I just hit the Windows key, type lid and voila! there's the setting
I typically don't restart my MBP for months at a time. With Windows 10, it'll tell me I need to restart after updates. I can ignore it to a point, but eventually it just reboots without asking, and whatever was opened at the time is lost.
It's absurd that Apple came up with Spotlight in 10.4 (15 years ago) and Microsoft still hasn't caught up with such a fundamental game changer.
There's an issue open here about this:
It's kind of crazy to think back to those conversations with Microsoft about their long-range plans. Some they have delivered well, like the transition to a subscription model for client applications. Some they have not, like native peer-to-peer social networking in the OS.
It was that way for years, but at some point recently they finally seem to have fixed it - I can now enter the start, end, or just part of anything I want to find, and it finds it! You know, the bare minimum you'd expect from a search function!
I'm actually a big fan of Windows 10, but it boggles the mind how long they left such a key part of the Windows experience in such a sorry state.
Gaming on Windows is almost more confusing than it's been due to all the things and settings you have to make sure are set up right.
Better explanation of problem is for example here (none of the proposed workarounds work for me): https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/4qlgqp/taskbar_i...
I didn't have this problem in Win7.
What % of the improvement in computer technology has come on this slow crawl of OS, vs all the hardware, browser apps, etc?
The search function also still basically sucks.
Use the Control Panel instead of settings, Everything for search, IrfanView for an image viewer... the list goes on. Just remove all UWP bloat and telemetry. You'll find many scripts on the internet to automate that.
I don't think it's a coincidence that he was at the helm for two of the most technologically advanced and successful product lines (NT 4.0 and azure).
- https://news.microsoft.com/features/the-engineers-engineer-c...
Windows 7 was the best version and Office before 365 was good too - now they just really milking everyone with subscription payments
I’m not sure but I assume companies also had perpetual licenses of Office, so for them to fork over a consistent stream to Microsoft for O365 just to ensure they have the latest version with all the updates is quite expensive over the long run. But most people think in terms of the sticker cost of 1 year and Office 365 and other subscription apps look cheap in that light.
https://www.skyhighnetworks.com/cloud-security-blog/7-charts...
I must disagree with you on Office 365 though. It is a marvel. Microsoft has re-engineered compatibility with document, spreadsheet, and presentation formats with a 30 year legacy from scratch, enabled multi-user editing on these formats, and crafted a web experience almost equivalent to desktop. They've really had to innovate to keep up with the advantages of Google Docs, and while they have not matched it from a speed perspective, they're no longer out of the running with consumers. Word and Excel Online are now free with a Microsoft account, and I found them just last week to have a rich selection of templates and had compatibility with Office documents I was sent. Office 365 is also very reasonably priced for it's Family license.
That said, I still find google docs much easier to use for simplicity (and I at least up to Office 2013, I knew and used every feature in Excel PowerPoint Word) - but a lot of that is UX, Windows 10 and O365 I find too “clunky” and a tad slow on some button clicks
Storage imo is a non point since it’s very easy to get free or super cheap storage with a bit of searching.
My girlfriend used Dropbox for her business, I was horrified when I saw how much she was paying each month!
Moved over to google and her needs are covered in the free plan, so that’s a quality 50$ per month saved.
I’m not as rich as I used to be, so have really started to feel the pinch with all these subs, incl office which I don’t have anymore. Before I had the same view as you as it doesn’t feel like a lot. But given we’ve been paying for Office from 1990s onwards, you can see that Microsoft is milking it a fair bit given updates (whilst important, and very important in “enterprise” companies) are not that significant to justify paying for it every year.
2. If you're a small-scale Office user who's happy not to have the latest and the greatest, and you're happy to update your copy of Office every 5-7 years, then a yearly subscription will not be a good trade-off.
A less known aspect of IITs in the past is their gaming of the GRE/US grad school application process, ranging from straight out cheating in the GRE (in the paper-pencil version, IIT students were given a single block of time for all sections rather than having time-limits for the sections, a blatant cheat made possible by their self-proctoring), to creating GRE question banks by collectively memorizing the test, to using the Australian time zone (ahead of India's) to find out the questions on the GRE. When applying to grad school in the US, IIT students would divvy up the schools among the graduating class so that no more than 1-2 would apply to top schools and claim to be in their class' top 10%, regardless of actual standing.
So, anytime I see an IIT grad at work, I'm not really impressed by that aspect. The fact that Satya isn't from an IIT is of no consequence and actually makes him more credible in my eyes.
What makes you think that?
The tech industry on aggregate has plenty of disdain for MBA's, both the degree programs and people with those degrees. Some of it is deserved, but MBA's aren't automatically BS degrees.
And if it can flip you from an marketing engineer in a fading semiconductor fabrication (Applied Materials) industry into a leading a $1-2 Trillion adtech/AI company and equip you with the skills necessary to handle being on the frontlines of a DOJ trial.
https://magazine.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/spring-summer-2020...
What I see, is that MS acted like a small-company startup for many years; ferociously competitive, fairly agile (not the Agile Manifesto kind; just flexible and responsive). That paid off for them (and it's arguable whether or not it was a good thing for the industry in general -it sank a number of companies, but also put Seattle firmly into the center of the tech world).
Then they became a blue-chip company, and all that startup-y stuff wasn't working anymore. Also, the consumer market changed a lot, with mobile overtaking desktop systems. For many, many folks, smartphones are the only computers that they will ever use.
He did have the right vision for a new corporate direction.
As a user of Windows since 3.1 (w/out networking). I do the same as MekaiGS "I honestly have no idea where all the Windows settings are anymore so I just search instead."
It was like multiple teams designed different parts of the settings but they never had any meetings or talked with each other.
There are days when I would rather use Microsoft Bob than Windows 10
Or better yet, Microsoft Joe Bob http://www.bytebrothers.org/joebob.htm "Go Microsoft -- Go Intel -- Go America," and "QuickTime is for Pinko Hippie Wimps."
Sometimes success is a matter of being at the right place at the right time. As the article mentions, many customers were afraid of AWS because they feared Amazon snooping in their retail intel. Because MS doesn't have a big e-store presence, they were not a retail threat. And Azure integrates better with existing Windows networks. Compatibility is still a key here, not raw merit. AWS is technically better.
That being said, Satya has been a steady hand and has made it fairly easy to keep running legacy software rather than pulling the carpet out, like VB-classic (desktop) did. Google, on the other hand, changes products like a teen changes fashion.
The VB-Classic fiasco under Ballmer sent panic through the industry, making customers realize they can no longer bet the farm on any MS tech, which they had been doing. Dot-Net was not backward compatible. COBOL still lives largely because co's don't or can't F with it. That's a lesson to not be ignored. (The need for a network GUI standard with similar properties is still out there.)
Businesses hate upgrading just for the sake of upgrading. Satya seems to understand this, making transitions gentler and more gradual.
What's worrying in a broader sense is that our societies have come to depend heavily on Microsoft's previous flagship offering, Windows. As the article observes, the focus has shifted elsewhere under Nadella's term. And as many people can attest, Windows 10 is far from the Windows we used to rely on, particularly for those not in enterprise world or academia. Many millions of people are now fundamentally depending on a product that is no longer the goose laying golden eggs for its maker, and the maker's economic incentives are no longer aligned with the best interests of their users.
I'm sure Windows is no longer considered the sexy department in Micrsoft's internal culture. But corporate management would have to be ridiculously incompetent to let that business line get significantly neglected.
Still, the reason the makers of expensive professional software have largely turned a blind eye to privacy forever and/or given away very cheap or free copies to students or home users is because they're well aware that it's a huge advantage for their software to be the cultural default. For example, would Adobe really have become dominant in digital content creation software if loads of enthusiastic design students hadn't been honing their skills on ripped off copies of Photoshop? Would Microsoft have come to dominate business desktops if home and school PCs hadn't all come with Windows so everyone already knew how to use it, or if they hadn't given away their development tools mostly for free to anyone who wanted them? We'll never know for sure, but it would be naive to discount the effects of familiarity.
This feels a bit like Apple's recent trend for messing up its laptops and largely ignoring the rest of desktop/server space other than producing an occasional statement piece. Sure, they make the vast majority of their money from their mobile devices and the surrounding ecosystem, but someone still has to write the apps that drive that ecosystem, and those people are primarily using Apple laptops. If you ruin your development platform, and the developers start shifting their efforts towards other platforms (presumably Android in this case) then your users will follow, and now your business model is dead, even though the part you neglected was only directly responsible for a tiny part of your revenue stream.
Obviously the danger isn't quite the same for Microsoft because strategically it's banking on cloud rather than mobile for its big revenues. But even so, cloud hosting is a pretty competitive space right now, and the Windows-friendly integrations (for developers as well as users) are a competitive advantage, one that is at risk if the very long tail of smaller developers start getting fed up of Windows and shifting to other systems. I suspect Microsoft's leadership are well aware of this danger and the often better developer experience on Linux is a big driver for introducing WSL, but still, if that's all they've got then you can just as well use a real Linux box and not pay the Microsoft tax or deal with all the unwanted games that Windows 10 keeps trying to play. If Windows 10 becomes too much of a liability for small businesses and power users, sooner or later that will inevitably have consequences for the whole business model and all those synergies you mentioned, even if it only happens over a period of years.
I can remember in the 2000's, they had spectacular paid support on their stuff.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/core-infrastructure-a...
It was just a long delayed admission that you can't make a lot of money on offline boxed software sales today.
And the cloud based features of office make absolute sense from a user perspective. Collaborative document editing on sharepoint just makes sense compared to the old 'non cloud' world, where you had to share documents around documents on emails and save twenty copies for version control (v0.5, v1, v1 final, v1 final final) on some shared drive that you have to VPN into from your home.
It's different for personal usage, of course, but all of their personal usage software I'm aware of still has an offline option.
How do you figure? If I'm a business and I want things a certain way, and you won't provide that way to me, then I have every right to complain. Complaining is how I tell you I'm not satisfied and therefore might not buy or continue with your product.
Microsoft's achievement (in relation to their "legacy" enterprise peers like Oracle and IBM) is making a much better job of the transition. For example, where are IBM cloud and Oracle cloud in terms of market share, relative to Azure...
Well, yeah. That's the turnaround. And it's worked. It's not easy to get a large company, fat off the proceeds of boxed software to actually reinvent their business model to shift to what lots of companies actually want (easy-in/easy-out licenses on their whole software stack to scale with their workforce, like with O365).
Ballmer and Nadella have pulled it off remarkably well - few legacy companies manage to stay in with their existing clientele whilst also adapting themselves to changing landscapes like that.
I'm not so sure. The biggest problem Windows has long had in this respect is that its application installation and update model is awful. Installation is haphazard and every program does its own thing. Updates even more so. Data security and application access control are barely existent, which wasn't so bad 30 years ago when the worst you were going to suffer was a virus wiping your disk and having to restore from backups, but has become a (perhaps the) critical problem for software management in today's connected world.
Microsoft could have fixed almost all of that relatively quickly at any time, by providing the kind of robust installation/update/permissions models we see on numerous other platforms today, implementing an online store for vetted software from credible sources, and then perhaps extending that idea from selling the single licences that facilities like the mobile app stores offer up to selling and managing organisation-wide licensing for serious professional software. It would have made life easier for developers at all scales, it would have made life easier for users, it would have given them an extremely lucrative store model to use as a revenue generator, and they wouldn't even have had to shut down installing software from other sources and try to lock their systems down, just provide the option to limit installation on centrally managed systems for organisational users. But instead all we've seen is variations on poor imitation app stores, which have mostly offered toy applications using half-baked runtimes instead of the full power of Windows, as Microsoft tried to dumb the big desktop OS down to mobile OS levels instead of realising that it could still dominate professional and power user desktops.
They want to sell you an Office365 subscription for each user, whose computing needs are provided by a remote desktop served on Azure compute, which you access from a Surface device, where your business information is stored and accessed through databases on their servers and software they provide. They want your enterprise identity to be managed through their offering, and your warehouse automation microservices to run on their k8s platform.
Their consumer play is looking more and more like it's Xbox focused, and some personal software interoperability with their enterprise offering. The consumer OS layer is less important now they missed mobile - they get end consumers by selling the cloud [0] to the business who sell to them, not providing the shopfront to the end user.
The model they're moving towards is that the "desktop" is largely going to go. You want some software? Here's a dumb terminal and a burst of virtual CPU from the cloud to run it for the 45 minutes you need. "Installing" things (from an end user perspective) is going to seem old hat within many of our working lives.
That being said, am sure a shopfront will emerge at some point, but for cloud based software, not for installable onto an OS software. That only really comes after this whole transition is complete though.
[0] and "cloud" in this context not being commodity access, but the vertical software integration to go with it.
The question is when that will happen, because obviously the powerful interests running Big Software are almost all heavily invested in promoting the cloud model for now since they're the ones most able to benefit from it. It wouldn't surprise me if the effective opposition eventually comes from some sort of grass roots movement towards open hardware and open software, even if it takes a decade or more, rather than from any of the established tech giants voluntarily changing strategy within that time frame. It's just a shame about all the billions we're going to waste due to lost productivity and security/privacy problems with the dumbed down software and corporate exploitation that will be the norm for IT in the meantime. :-(
Would be nice to see, however I see it coming more from one of the major players screwing up - whether a large scale hack, huge amounts of downtime or a verrrry public issue migrating a high value customer, regulatory break up, or pushing prices just too high.
For a large amount of users of Microsoft's products in enterprises, local government, even SMBs, the experience will likely be better though. "Dumbed down" software is a feature, not a bug. Usage based renting is a preference, compared to large scale IT capex.
I'm just waiting for the O365 + Surface subscriptions to start (unless I've missed it and they have already?). Hardware, software and services for one monthly payment. They're already doing something similar for Xbox and the Game Pass in some markets I believe.
> rather than from any of the established tech giants voluntarily changing strategy within that time frame
They'll go where the money takes them. If the market starts moving, they'll undoubtedly stick their toes in the water. If the current picks up, they'll look to turn the ship to go along with it.
All of the above being said, it still I think reinforces the point that Microsoft's shift from boxed software to services is superbly well done. Whether or not we want that as our future, they've handled the shift toward the current vision of the future well.
I would really like to agree with that, but no matter how much they screw up, it won't matter if there isn't a viable alternative strategy anyway. With basically all of Big Tech pushing the same way right now, I think the momentum is too much for any of those things to cause a significant change in direction in the near future.
We've already seen some pretty horrendous failures in terms of reliability, privacy and security. Some of them have come from some very big names. And yet so far I see little if any consequence, other than perhaps some regulatory slaps on the wrist. The big customers paying the big bills are still paying, because what choice do they have? It doesn't gain them much to migrate to a competitor that is still pushing in the same basic direction and vulnerable to the same basic threats, and migrations of key software at corporate scale are financially expensive and have timescales measured in years so there's a big incentive to accept the devil you know.
All of the above being said, it still I think reinforces the point that Microsoft's shift from boxed software to services is superbly well done. Whether or not we want that as our future, they've handled the shift toward the current vision of the future well.
Indeed. As I wrote in another comment, it's tough to argue with success. It's unfortunate that Microsoft's success here doesn't necessarily correlate positively with a better experience for the users of Microsoft software, and the lack of competition for the desktop market is going to leave a lot of people and businesses vulnerable to whatever Microsoft decides is best for Microsoft over the next few years.
Of the possible big events you mentioned, I suspect that means regulatory break-up in an attempt to rejuvenate effective competition in the market is the most promising. But I still wouldn't bet on that happening faster than a grass roots effort powered by the kinds of people who believe in things like rights to repair and meaningful online privacy, and who enjoy writing their own software or experimenting with things like 3D printers and Raspberry Pis. A young generation might take a different view of programming and hobbyist hardware than those 20 or 40 years older who have perhaps become too accepting of the way things are. They might be driven by not wanting to feel trapped by big businesses they think aren't acting in their best interests, or perhaps other concerns about longevity and adaptability driven by positive motivations from outside of pure tech fields, such as protecting the environment. Given the right figurehead(s) to lead a movement, I could believe that might actually happen, but probably over the next decade or two more than the next year or two.
Microsoft has a huge number of very smart people. Aligning the company behind what they are good at will enable Microsoft to thrive.
Some sort of a strict mode or a way to designate data types on table columns would solve probably 90% of the issues people have with Excel.
- Why does search not work when the spreadsheet has a few thousand rows? Sometimes, I'll do Ctrl + A, select the entire data set, move my cursor to cell A1, then type Ctrl+F to find text, finds nothing. But if I filter the column where I think it might be for what I was looking for then it finds it.
- Sometimes the opposite of the first occurs. I'll filter for something in a column, finds nothing, but Ctrl+A and then Ctrl+F finds it. Super weird. Again, I'm talking like 5000 rows and maybe 25 columns worth of data, a spreadsheet a few Megabytes big. Not the biggest dataset.
I also make sure I have no extraneous columns like some people tend to make by mistake which makes the searching take longer.
- Ever try to undo (ctrl + z), if you have many sheets open, sometimes your ctrl+ z will start going through the undo history of other files (i.e. not the ones that you're actually working on or the foreground. The ones in the background or minimized. Guess what? Now you can't tell if you altered data on the other sheets because for some reason Excel registers everything as a change to sheet. You want to expand your columns to fit your text. Good, that counts as a change. Filtering your columns? That's a change.) etc. etc. Every action is worthy of a: 'Do you want to save your changes' even if never really added or updated data. So good luck trying to sort through undos that you didn't mean to make.
That's but a few things and don't get me started on number and date formatting. And btw, these are bugs I noticed around 2003 btw. Why are they still there?
Working on Excel and making sure that it doesn't make mistakes is work on top of the actual work that needs to be done.
I've become so distrusting of Excel that I've learned Python so I can use Pandas so that I can get the truth about a spreadsheet because I can't trust Excel.
That's incredibly depressing that I have to do that.
More importantly, the people who use the above spreadsheets are the ones who give Microsoft the real money, and therefore the ones whose cries are heard the most loudly.
But then, maybe I could be wrong a killing could be made selling linux boxes to be servers on the intranets around the world.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-02/satya-nad...
Surveillance capitalism must be regulated out of existence.
Was that a wind force thing or your masterful captaincy?
Not everyone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purism_(company).
The thing is, when you're talking about an operating system with access to everything you do on your own equipment, it doesn't necessarily matter what they do with the data. The fact that any data is uploaded involuntarily is already a big problem.
I've been a Windows desktop user for most of my professional life, because in most fields, that's where you'd find the best quality and range of software and the best hardware support. But since the shift to 10, and the attempted abuse of 7 upwards via updates, I've become very cautious about Microsoft and its user-hostile actions. In my own businesses, we run many different platforms now and each computer or device we buy is configured individually according to the needs of its user. The major exception is Windows 10, which we don't use at all as a primary desktop OS. How can you ever trust a system that will update itself against your will and upload your data against your will, run by a business that is apparently building its whole strategy around continuing to do those things and overpowering any user resistance?
What amazes me is that lawyers and compliance officers working in smaller businesses aren't blowing the roof off over this stuff, which seems to all but guarantee that you can't comply with privacy regulations like the GDPR or typical corporate non-disclosure agreements. It seems that several European privacy regulators do have similar concerns and may be investigating various aspects of modern Microsoft systems. Is this just a case of everyone keeping their head down and hoping for the best because they don't see any better options than continuing to use Windows anyway?
Error reporting and usage telemetry, same as many apps and websites.
Ever notice how, for all the furor about Windows telemetry, nobody is ever able to explain how that data is being abused or point out anything specifically that's problematic? That's because the people who keep bringing it up haven't been able to find any (yet, of course) despite proclaiming loudly how terrible it is. That really tells you all you need to know about them.
https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement
"In order to provide this computing experience, we collect data about you, your device, and the way you use Windows. "
"We also share data with Microsoft-controlled affiliates and subsidiaries; with vendors working on our behalf; when required by law or to respond to legal process; to protect our customers; "
Obviously when they sell to data broker, they call them a vendor.