Microsoft Full Circle
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
"Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware, because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. Right now the abstraction of hardware has to start by abstracting all of the hardware in your life, so the notion that this is one device is interesting and important, it doesn’t mean the kernel that boots your device just goes away, it still exists, but the point of real relevance I think in our lives is “hey, what’s that abstraction of all the hardware in my life that I use?” – some of it is shared, some of it is personal. And then, what’s the app model for it? How do I write an experience that transcends all of that hardware? And that’s really what our pursuit of Microsoft 365 is all about."
The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life". I use a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an iPhone interchangeably in my life. When I switch between them pretty much nothing changes - I have access to the same core apps: Office, Obsidian, 1Password, web browser. If there were a new device, say some kind of headset, I suspect that would plug right into my existing ecosystem of hardware and software. There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft. That could change of course, but there are so many interesting problems to solve along the way.
Disclosure: I work at Microsoft.
> When I switch between them pretty much nothing changes - I have access to the same core apps: Office, Obsidian, 1Password, web browser.
> There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft.
In your example MS is the app, not the OS. The 'abstractions' that let apps run everywhere that matter nowadays are Unix (MacOS/Linux/Android/iOS), the JVM and the browser. And if we want to talk about an actual OS that runs everywhere, it's only Linux that's running truly everywhere: on servers, consumer devices and IoT devices. Or on the level above that, the browser.
You guys lost out on mobile years ago, now it's just Office, Azure and XBox; admittedly some big businesses there, but far from the layer of abstraction that "everything" runs on...
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...
And ends up paying its major competitor $18 billion+ a year, I’m not sure it was a bad thing that Microsoft loss and instead makes money by selling apps that run across all platforms.
Yes I realize tte citation is old. But Android was already just as dominant as it is now by 2016. I doubt the fundamentals have changed.
And no phone maker is making any real money except for Apple and Samsung and Samsung only makes money because it builds its own components.
How much more would they be paying if Android didn't exist? How tempting would it be for Apple - as an intermediary - to make its own search service that would immediately hit Google's top line? How much revenue would Google lose in that scenario? Sometimes it pays to take the smaller loss to avoid larger losses.
If you have ever tried to find anything in the App Store, you know that the last thing that the world wants is an Apple powered search engine. Most people would just go to Google anyway.
Search at Google’s scale requires massive infrastructure investments, the top ML/AI experts and the constant feedback loop of users. Apple has demonstrated it sucks at everything that Google is good at. It’s an institutional problem.
Having its own mapping infrastructure was a core business need and really there are only two or three companies in the world that are good at it.
Winning looks like a race to the bottom because the abstraction layer matters less to consumers than apps.
Apple: https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/profit_margin
I couldn’t find numbers for the other two
I just don't see that. How exactly is Microsoft better placed than Apple or Google?
With Microsoft 365 they took the Idea of Google Suit and integrated it in their OS.
Google tried it the other way and failed. But ultimately they are talking about the Chrome Book.
Well even beyond that. It shouldn't matter which hardware you use and this is brilliant; it's just not Microsofts Idea.
The Web is only one form of exposing those RPC endpoints.
So no MS is not the best situated to be that 'OS'. 1. It is unclear if such an OS (with the benefits and trade-offs) will be preferred to a world where cross-OS applications can abstract away the OS. 2. Someone like Google (minus their execution woes that seem to get worse in recent years) is better positioned to abstract away the complexities for a regular consumer.
Google Workspace is the main competitor, but they're not the front runner, they're second place.
Things like Apple Pages and Keynote are only used by a small fraction of consumers. They're not taken seriously as an enterprise productivity solution by anyone.
Because anyone who can create a great presentation would never think of things as "enterprise productivity solutions". They'd just make an awesome presentation.
If you're using Keynote to make an awesome presentation as a solo project, it's fantastic. If you're using it for enterprise productivity, it's a non-starter.
Getting signoff from a standardised process aside of course; any tool can participate in that.
Amazon is an interesting underdog here...
Google is moving in that direction (including hiring a former Office exec to run Workspace), in providing an integrated bundle. They're just behind, and have been fucking around with their chat, which is one of the cornerstones of the cloud platform.
As Thompson notes, Teams was built to be the "web OS" from the get go, not a Slack clone even though most thought it was one. In Thompson's view, the best players to try to be the web OS are chat providers (due to chat network effects) and cloud storage providers. You can already see Salesforce and Dropbox making moves in that direction.
To quote:
> This is what Slack — and Silicon Valley, generally — failed to understand about Microsoft’s competitive advantage: the company doesn’t win just because it bundles, or because it has a superior ground game. By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, particularly for the non-tech workers that are in fact most of the market. Slack may have infused its chat client with love, but chatting is a means to an end, and Microsoft often seems like the only enterprise company that understands that.
...
> Here’s the thing, though: Dropbox absolutely is better than OneDrive. Google Apps are better at collaboration than Microsoft’s Office apps. Asana is better than Planner. And, to be very clear, Slack is massively better than Teams at chat. Using all of them together, though, well, it sucks: the user experience that matters for me is not any one app but all of them at once, and for the way I want to work, having everything organized in one single place is simply better (and that’s even with the normal spate of maddening Microsoft UI oddities!). In this Teams is less a chat app than it is a file explorer for the cloud generally, and Stratechery LLC specifically.
(me again)
Google, in theory, has the pieces to do it. But they're just behind in many ways - compliance, Microsoft's MSP network and sales staff on the ground, management tools, stuff like that. And there's the other question of "do they have enough at least mediocre things integrated together well enough" to make the play. They might, but not yet.
I had to abandon Apple hardware because of their hostility to interoperability. Hard for me to not feel resentful over this.
obviously that's not normal use case for a normal person and not being able to do that wouldn't even be in anyone's wildest radar.
I dont use Apple Music or iTunes anymore, it has caused too many headaches.
But i DO use PlexAmp. And it works great, works with FLAC, will transcode, and allows you to selectively cache things.
Its not perfect. There are hiccups with transitioning to Carplay for example. But in general, if not for PlexAmp, i likely would have ditched iPhones after having them since roughly the 3gs (with a few google/Android phones smattered in between, namely the Nexus One and Galazy Nexus).
How is Windows easier in this regard? Managing Windows clients requires a whole cluster of Microsoft services, no?
For basics you only need a one machine with Active Directory role installed. Everything else depends on the needs.
Is there something specific you found unacceptable?
That was really cool.
I can use various SaaS to do everything and it doesn't matter if I'm running a device from Microsoft, Apple, Google or third-party Android device builders.
The OS doesn't matter at all for the majority of users.
In enterprise use cases where the company pays for the service, you really want to integrate these SaaS services into a common shell and this is the role that Teams plays. You get single sign-on with enterprise credentials, a way to share data with those 3rd party services, and a way for multiple users in your organization to collaborate together with those 3rd party services.
This is the place where Microsoft is currently in a leadership position. Teams is increasingly viewed as being the "cloud OS shell" for enterprise users. Ben has written about this for quite some time - see this earlier piece from 2020: https://stratechery.com/2020/the-slack-social-network/
...so that it's no longer in your control, nor perhaps even your property anymore at some point.
The 3rd E isn't "extinguish" anymore; it's "enslave".
Sadly I'm guessing the seamless interchange (we've seen the ads where people writing something in MS Word on their desktop continues on the sofa on a tablet) requires you to sign in to a cloud service. I'm still a cloud-skeptic (e.g. with Google randomly blocking access to files because of presumed hash-collisions), I guess if I really cared about the seamless integration I'd have to look into OwnCloud.
What you are creating is then clearly not an OS, but an abstraction layer over operating systems. In other words: claiming that are creating an operating system this way is in all likelihood a blatant lie.
This is precisely where I think MS failed miserably with Windows Phone. They had an incredible opportunity: Make a smart phone that is a full, natural, joined-at-the-hip extension of your desktop.
They did not. Instead, they made a separate device. This was, from the perspective of desktop integration, 100% indistinguishable from any of the other offerings out there. They were playing "We too" when they should have been playing "Check this out!".
Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications, including browsers, would have been a huge step forward and a massive selling point for Windows Phone. Add to that an open API for developers to be able to integrate desktop Windows Phone services into their applications and MS would have had the makings of an ecosystem that would have just exploded into the business community in a massive way.
Instead they wasted time and money with an offering that did exactly the same things as any other offering while trying to invent a new UI. The strategy was doomed to fail before the first phone was introduced. They tried to build an iPhone with a different UI when the business world would have energetically adopted a deeply integrated extension to desktops in the form of a smart phone.
To this day, I still think I would drop iPhone in a second if MS came out with a well thought out system along the lines I described above. The paradigm shift (or the twist in thinking) is that the phone is given life as an extension to the desktop experience rather than as an afterthought that behaves as a peripheral. It would be like a sci-fi movie where the person grabs an application from the screen, it materializes as a physical device in their hand and they walk away. When they get to the office they push it into their display and it melds into that system instantly. Sci-fi aside, that feeling and utility would be incredibly useful.
I feel like the hardware limitations of ~2005-2012 would have made this nigh impossible. I know a few ultra-portable devices were trying to do something like this around that time, but even then they were still well above the size of smartphones. Cellular data and bandwidth was also extremely limited at that time as well, so cloud style/thin client file access would also be impractical.
I can understand wanting to make a new OS/UI because the pocket PC experience was quite clunky and those devices did not have widespread adoption. There was also the novelty factor of using touch and gestures instead of a stylus. Anything resembling the windows/desktop paradigm would have been seen as antiquated. I'm sure Steve Jobs would have exploited that as strongly as he possibly could.
All in all, I like the concept you have presented. I just don't think that it would have been viable at the time and I can forgive Microsoft for making the choices they made back then.
What would be amazing about this? I have one subscription to Office365 and I can start working on a document on my Mac and then work on the sabe document on my iPhone, iPad or on the web. I can take calls from my Mac from my iPhone, copy and paste between them, bookmarks are shared, I can send a text message from my Mac, my AirPods seamlessly switch, my iPad works as a second display or I can use my keyboard and mouse to control both.
What would one docked device do for me?
I'll cut-and-paste the relevant portion of another comment:
"I think the bit you missed before your reaction is that this comment was about the decisions MS made back then. Not now. Not today. In fact quite a few of the replies to my comment are from a current frame of reference."
That, in the context of that time, would have been amazing.
I paired my AirPods to my phone and they were automatically paired to my Watch, iPad, Mac, and two AppleTVs.
When I put the AirPods in my ear, whether I am on my Mac, iPad or iPhone, sound is automatically redirected.
If I am on my iPad watching a video, and I take a call or start watching something on my phone, the AirPods automatically switch to my phone and the video pauses on my iPad.
When I walk out the house for a run with just my cellular Apple Watch, I start listening to music on my Watch and it switches.
Switching isn’t automatic for an AppleTV since that would be irritating for a shared device. But it will display a pop up and ask do you want to switch.
I was responding to the idea that being able to dock a mobile device has no advantages.
I've always been a huge fan of how integrated Apple products are. I don't own a mac and only a single phone at a time, but even the integration between itunes on windows and that phone is surprisingly good.
I have 1st gen airpods. I've read bad things about the newer gens (malfunctions and the like). any experience with them?
They made a device which was worse than all of the existing devices. The initial version didn't have TCP /IP support, only HTTP. The app store was full of scams, etc.
It feels like the last two points you make contradict each other: there's a huge difference between "extension to desktop" and "pick up desktop stuff and go".
Obviously, for a myriad of hardware and UI reasons, we're not doing the latter typically. The people demented enough to want desktop software in their pocket buy a GPD Win or the like.
The real issue is behaviour patterns, though. Give me the performance of my desktop in a six-inch pocketable device with two day battery life, and I'm still going to use it very differently.
Where do many of us spend most of our workdays? In an IDE or office suite. No matter what you do, you're not going to be able to shrink those down and be usable for anything but the most trivial tweaks on a six inch screen with a glass keyboard. We sort of saw this attempted in the early days of Windows CE/Pocket PC with its silly little Portable Office apps. A docking station might make it usable when I get BACK to a desk, but at that point, I may as well just be using the phone as an expensive flash drive for sneakernet.
Okay, maybe gaming? Potentially, if done right. Genshin Impact making 82 bazillion dollars out of a game that scales from phones to desktops is the poster child. But as anyone with a Steam Deck can demonstrate, you have to pick stuff that was designed to work well with the form factor. That undermines the dream of "the entire universe of cool stuff your desktop has to offer".
Media consumption? Even that's different. People may prefer local storage to streaming due to unreliable/slow/expensive mobile data, and the media they consume is often different too. I don't want to binge 90-minute episodes of anything on a phone.
So we've basically tossed out most of the obvious answers for "seamless desktop extension". This means one of two things: 1) We're drilling in the wrong place. The desktop extensions we need are such paradigm shifts nobody has even given us a good demo 2) The things that define the mobile ecosystem currently-- for example, apps that lean heavily on "it has GPS and cameras", lightweight games, low-commitment consumption of media-- shape the market because they're the best use cases we've found for the form factor.
I liked Windows Phone. I still have three of them in my box of bad mobile device decisions (somewhere I think there's a Palm Pre too) What I liked about it was that it seemed to have a clear and cohesive design language, and it was reliably snappy on cheap hardware. We've basically given up on the former, but Android has managed to close the gap somewhat on the latter, probably mostly through surfing on Moore's Law.
Microsoft could have had one other chance, but I think they've already blew it: as privacy is becoming a selling point (see Apple and DuckDuckGo marketing), positioning themselves as "we have a business model that's not 96% ad-dependent, so we're not going to sell out your personal life for a quick nickel" could have made them the trustworthy choice, but they've burnt through any credibility they had on that front in the last few years.
What the hell are you talking about? What does this actually mean in real terms?
Right now Windows already desperately tries to do exactly what you're saying.[1] Do you want a PalmPilot-style sync app? iPad/Mac-style "Universal Control"?
1: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sync-across-your-dev...
If you'd please edit swipes like that out of your posts to HN, we'd appreciate it. Your comment would be just fine without that bit.
Care to try again? This time, pretend you know how to have a conversation.
I am perfectly satisfied with @Firmwarrior's response, which led to posting an explanation of my position. In other words, we had a conversation. Had things derailed into name calling you'd have a point. I did not appreciate you scolding me, but we are all big boys. I'll live.
Please just follow the rules in the future. You obviously broke them there.
Anyway, didn't mean to start a flame war, I was just hoping to make sense of what you were trying to say
MS, back then, missed a golden opportunity to create a truly useful differentiated product that, in my opinion, would have had a very high probability of success. The bar wasn’t as high as it is today. Slick, seamless integration between phone and desktop would have been an amazing feature. No, that did not mean running CAD on your phone. Again, the context is 2010, not today. I think that was iPhone 3 era. Something as simple as being able to seamlessly make and receive calls, send and receive SMS and do the same with email with either device, desktop or phone, would have been magical back then. Take a call in the car while you arrive at the office, once you get to your desk you put on your headset and the call continues through your computer. You can send text or links from your PC via SMS to the other person. Record the conversation if needed (with legal provisions in place). Etc. Again, don’t think 2022, think 2010.
Everything is conceptually simple. It is easy to talk about ideas, quite another matter to actually implement them and do it well. Concepts are usually simple; reality is difficult.
It isn’t that MS was full of unintelligent people who don’t know what they are doing. Not at all. The history of business is full of stories of intelligent and very capable people completely missing the mark or failing to recognize a shift in their industry. There’s a great book about this very subject: The Innovators Dilemma. In fact, the author makes the argument that some of these bad decisions are the result of good management.
BTW, I used “seamless” to describe something that is intimately integrated to the system. No installation. Think of good USB peripherals that just work.
Apple has also started designing its own processors by then for the iPad and the iPhone 4.
Even the idea of taking a call from your phone and transferring to your computer using the same headset took a specialized processor and micro operating system on the headset to work on AirPods. Microsoft didn’t have tte hardware expertise then and still doesn’t.
Even today in 2022, the ARM processors that MS uses in their laptops are so bad that you can run x86 Windows programs running Windows ARM in a VM on a Mac faster than a Microsoft laptop.
As far as the Innovators Dilemma, the author was completely wrong about the iPhone.
> As far as the Innovators Dilemma, the author was completely wrong about the iPhone.
Have you actually read the book? His iPhone predictions had nothing whatsoever to do with the core ideas, excellent historical perspective and analysis provided in Innovators Dilemma.
Quoting from the very link you provided (emphasis mine):
"It is Christensen’s second theory of disruption – low-end disruption – that I believe is flawed. Christensen first described this theory in Disruption, Disintegration and the dissipation of differentiability, and expanded on it in The Innovator’s Solution. It is this theory that is at the basis of Christensen’s critique of Apple quoted above."
Microsoft could have designed a processor like what was in the AirPods in 2010? Five years before Apple?
Besides, by 2010, Apple was already the best in the business at supply chain management and was manufacturing more high end devices than anyone in the world.
What high performance hardware was Microsoft shipping in 2010? The state of the art mobile hardware in 2010 was Apple’s ARM A4 - a 32 bit single core processor that ran from 800Mhz - 1Ghz. It could barely run Safari by 2011 let alone a full office suite.
> Have you actually read the book? His iPhone predictions had nothing whatsoever to do with the core ideas, excellent historical perspective and analysis provided in Innovators Dilemma.
He tried to apply his “low end disruption theory” from the 60s and he was completely wrong about Apple.
The features that would have been ground-breaking at the time did not require the kinds of advanced processors we have today. Not even close. This stuff isn't all that complex. Yes, it would have taken time and effort to implement, yet none of it was anywhere close to impossible for 2010.
Perhaps you are not a hardware engineer? Like I said, none of what I mentioned was impossible or challenging in 2010. Hard work? Yes, of course.
> by 2010, Apple was already the best in the business at supply chain management
No, not really. Excellent, without a doubt, of course.
> It could barely run Safari by 2011 let alone a full office suite.
Again, context is important here. What would have been disruptive in 2010 had nothing to do with running a full office suite or CAD on your phone in 2010. I had both an iPhone and Windows Phone back then. MS could have provided what I would call next-generation integration with the desktop using the hardware of the day. More than capable.
It wasn't an issue of 2010 technology not being adequate for the implementation of such integration. It was a matter of vision, direction or both. Someone, for whatever reason, simply did not make that decision. The decision MS seemed to make at the time was to try to go head-to-head with the iPhone with a product that, in my opinion, did not offer an attractive-enough value proposition. As a result, it was doomed to go nowhere almost from inception.
> He tried to apply his “low end disruption theory” from the 60s and he was completely wrong about Apple.
I think you missed my point. This is not part of "Innovators Dilema". The erroneous prediction you correctly noted was part of different work by the same author.
By 2010, Apple was shipping 50 million iPhones a year and had just started shipping iPads. Under Tim Cook, Apple had been buying up the majority of flash storage for years between the iPods and the iPhone.
Also, while you “appeal to authority”. It’s not like you can’t find information on the web about how far ahead Apple was already starting to become by 2010. In 2013, they shipped a 64 bit mobile CPU years before every one else.
It’s hard to manufacture hardware at scale especially when you can’t just be a piece assembly like Dell and you have to design everything yourself and get third party hardware manufacturers to cooperate.
> I think you missed my point. This is not part of "Innovators Dilema". The erroneous prediction you correctly noted was part of different work by the same author.
How is it the top comment? I thought comments were mainly sorted by vote-based ranking?
It's hard for it to be a "full circle" when for the most part it looks like a straight line. The surprise shift here isn't in Microsoft but in Meta finally asking for help and partners after seeming to believe they could do it all on their own.
I also think it's obvious, but then salient things are. Consumers today don't decide between PC vendors and operating systems, but between entire company-branded computing ecosystems. Are you on the Google or Apple or Amazon train?
Things Stratechery doesn't discuss enough and this article is poor about:
- Unlike in the Windows days, in the new competing-ecosystems world, geopolitics plays a much grander role. Everyone used to be on Windows, not everyone is on Google. China, Korea, Russia all have their own ecosystem juggernauts. In our globally interconnected world, computing has become somehow less globalized recently.
- Microsoft doing VR stuff on Facebook's platform is totally in line with their observations on Microsoft's strategy going forward, but Microsoft and Facebook also compete on the ecosystem front, and the implications of this are just brushed over here as that's not the article, but it would be a more interesting one.
- The really interesting thing that sets these different companies apart is their revenue sources. Apple sells hardware (and content and lifestyle), Microsoft sells enterprise software subscriptions and cloud, Google sells ad space and cloud.
This feels like a Citation Needed assumption both in this comment and in the article. Again, there's too much of a straight line here: Microsoft has always been one of (if not the) largest software development companies for the Macintosh. That has never changed.
We all know Ballmer was a huge Windows cheerleader and "home team supporter" and wanted to make sure that the best experiences were always on Windows. But he never killed Macintosh support. He championed the iPad versions of Office that Nadella is credited for (which the article even points out!). The closest Microsoft ever came to being "Windows only" was maybe the brief glimmer of optimism under Nadella where the Windows 10 team briefly imagined that every device could run Windows (and then felt the crushing disappointment to realize that most wouldn't).
Again, it doesn't look like a full circle to me but a mostly straight line with a few zigs and zags if you zoom in micro-enough. I understand where some of this is coming from that Microsoft did have years, especially under Ballmer, where they seemed to care too much about Windows, but Microsoft was never "just" The Windows Company in any era.
Not true. IBM was one of the top 10 most profitable companies in the world as recently as 2015.
After adjusting for real inflations rates, inclusive of asset inflation, they actually made greater profits some years then either Google or Meta or Amazon do today.
Now it doesn't matter all that much anymore if you're on a Mac or a Windows or a Linux computer. You can largely use the same apps and services across them (with the exception of gaming, which, as an interesting aside, is now much better on Linux than on Mac). Anyone expending the effort to make a new app will usually build them that way, while in the past, you had a lot of platform exclusives.
But what is new and interesting is that a Google account doesn't deliver you as much value in South Korea because a lot of its services are unavailable or bad there, while it's nigh on impossible to live without a Kakao account, which in turn is entirely optional in, well, most everywhere else.
I find it fascinating that the global reach of user-centric/service-oriented computing is less than the reach of the previous device-oriented computing. It's certainly also not true that geopolitics have never mattered before in computing and reaching users, but I'd say they matter more than ever before.
When things were device-oriented whoever had the better devices naturally got easy footholds in every country. Since any country that tries to outcompete the world leading products would have needed to invest vast sums of money. And even then 90% of the supply chain would still be in the typical locations.
It simply made sense for everyone to leave the multi-billion dollar investments to a few multinationals, at least for consumer products.
The only real exception being Japan pre-iPhone, when they had the manufacturing diversity to make nearly everything domestically and enough wealthy consumers who also didn't care much for international interoperability. And even then the major Japanese firms were making very slim profits.
Whereas since the entry bar for creating competitive software is so much lower, many countries can afford to nurture genuinely homegrown products, and have a reasonable expectation that they will be competitive.
I don't think it's that. It's that eg. Kakao has KakaoTalk, a chat app. And chat apps tend towards monopolies and oligopolies because of network effects. The value of the app is less in how good it is, and more in who else uses it.
If you're just buying a music player or an office suite for a common file format, what you use doesn't really matter to anyone else, and their choices to you.
Chat apps, collaboration platforms? Suddenly, who else uses them matters a lot, since it's about the people, not the physical function. And once you get big enough, the network effects turns from a hurdle into a gigantic moat.
The question of how many people use any given physical product, such as music players, certainly matters to supply chain executives and factory managers at the very least.
Because the same network effects applies to manufactured products, notably in economics of scale.
More generally, it's true that KakaoTalk benefits from network effects, but Facebook Korea could have benefited from the same.
It's just that a homegrown Korean chat app is viable against Facebook Korea because the entry bar is lower, whereas a homegrown Korean iPod would have been laughable against Apple, even in Korea.
There's very few people that would have paid 5x more for an all Korean iPod, but most are fine with being slightly inconvenient by Kakao's smaller international userbase.
This isn’t a surprise given the sales numbers of hardware and DAU of meta online properties. While they are the clear leader in VR, given how great the Quest 2 and its original pricing were it should have had much higher sales numbers and usage. That result also wasn’t a surprise given that the Facebook brand was so toxic to the masses, that even changing names to meta hasn’t mitigated it yet in the short term. The name change will pay off eventually for younger generations who aren’t very familiar with Facebook, but that day is about a decade away
To me it does seem a low target to aim for. VSCode shows they can execute, but for some reason when the stakes are higher they don't do as well Windows Phone, Edge browser, etc. I suppose I could call that corporate self-awareness.
The other possible takeaway is that after Windows Phone, Microsoft really has been truly risk adverse when it comes to consumer products, even in areas where they had a lead and could have delivered something no one else could.
> VSCode shows they can execute, but for some reason when the stakes are higher they don't do as well Windows Phone
Windows Phone was arguably very well executed at the software level. Microsoft's troubles with Windows Phone were at the hardware levels and (worse) the economic levels where the phone carriers had already decided they prefer a duopoly and selling three things is one too many things to sell.
(I had more inconvenience moving apps back and forth between WPF and Silverlight in some of the years prior, and even those moves were never from-scratch rewrites. Admittedly that may have left me with more skills to handle XAML changes and write to lowest common denominator XAML, so I am aware of my biases.)
I realize you aren't ever going to agree with me on this, and I don't expect you to. I do think it is still useful for other people to see that there are counter-opinions here.
That's the only "hard fork" between the versions. I know a lot of people (including respondents in neighboring comments) saw the changes between WP8 and WP10 as a big deal "soft fork", but very little actually changed other than a UI library upgrade from 1.x to 2.x. (In .NET; JS was dropped in 2.x and C/C++ developers saw some other shenanigans. But JS and C/C++ didn't exist in WP7 either so none of those developers saw all three "migrations" either.)
I hear a lot from developers that it seemed very fragmented, but working in it at the time, it seemed very "incremental" at best, mostly just upgrading library major versions and dealing with semver major breaking breaks. Sure, that's frustrating when that's not your primary development environment and also you aren't getting paid enough for it because adoption is low, but that is a very far cry from "Microsoft didn't have a good plan". They were iterating hard on it. They made some semver breaks that other library authors in other ecosystems could get away with no problem, even with equally low adoption (looking at random JS libraries here). It's easy to blame low adoption for making those semver major breaks seem more painful and "fragmented" than they actually were in practice, but sometimes it just also looks like that was an excuse to ignore the platform more than a problem for development experience reality. (As you seem to state that you skipped the platform entirely, possibly because you were looking for an excuse to skip it and latched onto the first one you saw.)
[1] Obviously not clear enough for some.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/porting/porting-to-the...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2014...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/wpsl-t...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/w8x-to...
It's one thing to develop versions for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. It's another if the UX source elements can't be shared within the MS ecosystem Phone, RT, x86 metro apps.
Not going to bother to list everything that changed, it is public available for anyone to judge.
We see this with Windows and with MacOS. MacOS's downfall is the more visible one.
The OS is no longer prioritized except where it needs to be somewhat presentable in screenshots. The OS becomes a vehicle to sell company goods. The OS rots to the point that there's no one left at the company with even the most basic competence to create first-party apps for it.
Because the money is elsewhere.
I wonder at which point this neglect makes the OS so unusable that it actively hurts the development of the money-making machines.
Though strangely enough MS would survive this better than Apple.
After the mismanagement of WinRT, finally fixed with UWP on Windows 10, instead of improving the .NET Native and C++/CX experience, they created Project Reunion, deprecated .NET Native and C++/CX, replacing them with lesser tooling, pivoted Project Reunion into Windows SDK, and are years away of reaching feature parity with UWP, let alone Forms, WPF, MFC.
The current team seems composed by interns without experience on previous Microsoft frameworks, while the more experienced folks seem to have moved into Azure, Google or Amazon, from their twitter feeds.
Just have some fun going through the WinUI, CsWinRT, C++/WinRT, WinAppSDK, Win2D, and see the endless amount of bug tickets, measured in thousands.
Blazour seems to be the new kid in town, to the point of even trying to push it inside MAUI as pseudo-Electron replacement.
Meanwhile the other business units are focused on Web or Android.
It looks like "Azure OS" is the new Windows.
At this point, I'd prefer an Azure OS that I could install locally and have the Windows team slowly transition to supporting Wine, improving Linux DEs/Wayland (or even create their own DE), since I believe that they're using some Wayland compositor (mutter?) for gWSL anyways, and contributing to the Linux kernel, which they're already doing to some degree. I genuinely don't know how feasible that is and I'm aware it's wishful thinking, but a person can dream.
Then again, it would probably be to the Linux community's detriment and they'd just do the same scummy Bing/telemetry/dark pattern crap to foster ad revenue.
That just runs completely counter to all the Dev Experience marketing you get from them. It feels like Widgets were slapped together by the kernel team at the last minute.
WinRT is basically the evolution of this, going back to the design board as if .NET never happened, hence .NET Native and C++/CX abstracting what is basically COM + IInspectable + .NET metadata instead of TLB + App Identity.
WinRT eventually became UWP, as they improved the developer experience, only to kill .NET Native, replace C++/CX with C++/WinRT (similar dev experience as using ATL), and move that infrastructure on top of standard COM on Win32 side.
So now you have classical COM, and Windows Runtime components are the modern COM.
Meanwhile DevDiv seems to have had enough of this and decided to focus on .NET with cross platform experience, and Web technologies, hence why even Visual Studio is quite lacking on WinUI tooling.
[0] - If they really cared they would have doubled down on it like Android and ChromeOS did, and all those C# 7 - 11 performance improvements would have been done at the time.
That’s my suspicion too. And I believe they did the same thing with Teams and hired some interns who are learning Agile to rapidly deliver “feature”.
People don’t care about that. They want the computer to go away and actually stop bugging them.
I respect people who prefer Macs to PCs, but stop speaking about it like it is some universal truth.
If your gaming doesn't work correctly on an OS other than windows, it is probably the manufacturer fault.
Look, I don't know about you, but I don't have unlimited time to go fiddle with whatever emulation layer is there to make some game from 2017 work well on a modern Mac. Not only that, but Apple has proven, time and time again, that they completely do not care about backwards compatibility, which is crucial for games, so let's not pretend that the "manufacturer" (assuming you're talking about the game developers here) is at fault - nobody has unlimited time to adjust their product on the whims of the folks in Cupertino.
Here's the reality - on Windows, I can still play DOS games. On macOS, with the latest OS release, 90% of my Steam library cannot be used (that were all perfectly fine before the update) because Apple decided to remove support for 32-bit apps. So sticking to Windows for gaming is the logical choice if you want access to the latest and greatest titles and not a selection of a few that are "hacked around".
There's awesome Linux experiences out there and the Steam deck is starting to show what's possible giving varying levels of control.
We live in exciting times. The more choice, the better.
Again - not necessarily saying that the Windows experience is ideal, but it's the absolute best out of the available options.
But the mouse, if it doesn't work and it says it does on the box then that is the vendor issue.
Guess how much malware suddenly can't execute.
On a client machine where the bulk of the software I bought is 32-bit and it stops working overnight, that's less acceptable.
Other workflows than mine would probably have different results.
But that doesn't mean it works. It's literally only there because it is entrenched. A lot of the time it doesn't work and has an extremely large support cost.
It would become on life support at that case.
Any Apple engineers reading this - an update like Snow Leopard would go a long way!
What is the truth is that they had all the opportunities and staff and squandered both on mismanagement and quality issues and continue to do so to this day. What we have left is pissed off customers, pissed off developers and a declining market position other than where they could lock businesses in. The only market keeping them alive is entrenchment and naive MSPs and retail pushing their crap.
I look forward to their VR strategy going down the toilet with Meta, where it belongs.
Fire the board. Kill off the marketing situation which is basically lies at this point, remove telemetry from your products, invest in QA again rather than getting “insiders” to do it, remove decades of bloat and build quality not quantity and perhaps people will have confidence again.
Their wins are massive. Really enterprise and XBOX lately (no doubt more, but just off the top of my head), but I've considered Windows only marginally usable for years, and that's more based on legacy, but it still has a place bloated as it is. It's an essential OS and platform, but with no focus -- they're just shuffling the same deck chairs UX wise, though no doubt improving the scaffolding bits.
https://twitter.com/Nick_Marseil/status/1582348100424720384
They have more budget, more studios, more services, and yet both Nintendo and Sony do better with much less budget and much less studios
They recently catch up WRT to console sales, but that was due to Sony's supply chain issues, since that one resolved, they are failing behind yet again, despite selling the Xbox at a loss! Sony doesn't
About Azure, their growth is not organic, specially when you consider they have been fined multiple times WRT corruption
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-settlement-idUS...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/22/microso...
https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/25/microsoft_accused_of_...
http://techrights.org/2014/05/28/microsoft-brazil/
About Github, it was already a thing and very popular before the acquisition, let's not forget that, otherwise it wouldn't have sold for that much, and outages are now lot more common than before ;)
Do you have a source for the statement that xbox hardware is sold at a loss?
Finally, the clear and obvious win for MS in the console space is their Xbox Game Pass subscription.
Despite being much older than Xbox S/X and PS5, it kept and IT STILL sells more than both combined TODAY
> Do you have a source for the statement that xbox hardware is sold at a loss?
https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-says-xbox-consoles-have...
> Finally, the clear and obvious win for MS in the console space is their Xbox Game Pass subscription.
Xbox game pass cost them money, it's not a sustainable business model, it's the bastardization of gaming, we'll see how it performs in the future when they'll stop pumping money into it to attract studios/users
Cloud gaming is the future, so that strategy could be a win for them, BUT, it's a very distant future, the current infrastructure doesn't permit it, it's very niche
And GitHub is popular but seriously so so so not right in many ways.
What they have succeeded in doing is merely centralising leverage and forcing entrenchment.
The problem is that they're all fighting really hard, and they all have their own moats. That will never produce the "everything app".
is a good thing. A monocultural WeChat future sounds utterly dystopian (in the Huxley sense)
The fact that a trillion dollar company failed is insane to me, this plus the poor reception of the Hololens by the army.. there is something that's not working at the HW/R&D microsoft divisions
Just insane, whoever is managing these teams should step down, laying off 1k people every once in a while won't change anything if that's to repeat the same mistakes with the same execs
No. I'm saying that it kills the messaging app market to have the de facto monopoly company for office software release a basically-free messaging app for offices.
There is also no “monopoly” in the office software space. Apple and Google have alternatives
Should Google not release a free messaging app either?
Would have been okay if Microsoft had sold Teams as an add on like it does Visio?
We're talking in the domain of anticompetitiveness, where a market-dominant company can release below-average products, and because of their market position it's impossible to compete.
> This is where Teams thrives: if you fully commit to the Microsoft ecosystem, one app combines your contacts, conversations, phone calls, access to files, 3rd-party applications, in a way that “just works”; I explained my personal experience with Teams in a December 2018 Daily Update:
> > Here’s the thing, though: Dropbox absolutely is better than OneDrive. Google Apps are better at collaboration than Microsoft’s Office apps. Asana is better than Planner. And, to be very clear, Slack is massively better than Teams at chat. Using all of them together, though, well, it sucks: the user experience that matters for me is not any one app but all of them at once, and for the way I want to work, having everything organized in one single place is simply better (and that’s even with the normal spate of maddening Microsoft UI oddities!). In this Teams is less a chat app than it is a file explorer for the cloud generally, and Stratechery LLC specifically.
> This is what Slack — and Silicon Valley, generally — failed to understand about Microsoft’s competitive advantage: the company doesn’t win just because it bundles, or because it has a superior ground game. By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, particularly for the non-tech workers that are in fact most of the market. Slack may have infused its chat client with love, but chatting is a means to an end, and Microsoft often seems like the only enterprise company that understands that.
Though at first I misread it as stratrechery which has other connotations!
My brain misinterpreted it at first and now it's too late to fix it.
This part doesn't make sense. Windows was no more tied to PC/Intel hardware than macOS was. Windows was ported to phones. The problems that are hurting Windows are organizational, not some inherent attribute of the OS itself.