Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

To add more context, about a month later after Kevin Scott's email...

July 12, 2019 OpenAI announces Microsoft's $1 billion investment

- https://openai.com/index/microsoft-invests-in-and-partners-w...

- https://news.microsoft.com/2019/07/22/openai-forms-exclusive...

It was interesting how K Scott was objective and candid about Microsoft's internal ai efforts falling behind but also phrasing the email diplomatically to not criticize anyone. It's interesting to see some of the behind-the-scenes thinking.

View on HN

It’s fair to say that the CTO’s job is to make sure Microsoft never misses a trend. Their number one existential threat is a new tech trend that makes their existing model fail. Whether that thing is the rise of smart phones or generative AI, Kevin Scott’s job is to give early warning.

“Do you care to know why I’m in this chair… why I earn the big bucks? I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now, that’s it, nothing more.” John Tuld, Margin Call

I think about this movie all the time now that I’ve been in the corporate world for a while and I have realized one consistent outcome: the leaders who “guess” right a lot survive a hell of a lot longer than those who get it wrong.

I could perfectly hear in my head Jeremy Irons delivering those lines. What a fantastic scene.

"And please, speak as you might, to a young child; or, a Golden Retriever" -- I, when I'm reading academic papers. Also I, when I'm trying to review a pull request.

That is one of the best movies I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of movies. But I am a little biased since I like that kind of stuff.

I agree, it is as near perfect as a film can be. It does exactly what it sets out to do, the acting and casting are entirely on point, and there is no violence.

Spoiler: A phone did get destroyed, though. Arguably a (large) part of the economy as well.

You don't need to guess correctly, a large company with enough capital can just buy a huge amount of new developments.

Wait how was the story again with Ballmer and the Iphone?

Isn't that exactly what an LLM does? Predicting the next token?

Exactly.

That's what struck me as well. It's extremely important for such positions to be clear and open about their position and not masking their reality. You'll often find marketing speak internally between levels which masks truth and then hinders actual strategic moves. In this context CTO would've said they're not that far off, if only this and that.. but no, he fessed up and CEO also understood; raw awareness.

I don’t think they want a repeat of missing out on web and then mobile again.

Was gonna say, the email reads similarly to this famous thread about Java (with the old CTO of MS!): https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-im-literally-losing-...

Really makes you think about the structure of mega corps and how powerful the “defender’s advantage” is. These giants knowingly sleep on disruption and wait to time their entry, and are generally rewarded. I dont know if its good or bad, it probably depends, but I think the capitalism game devs need some balance tweaks.

Are they generally rewarded? Wondering is there are statistics on that because the narrative is usually that defenders end up unable to compete even with technologies they themselves invented and die out, with maybe apple and Microsoft recently breaking that trend.

I think in the long term Google could still win the AI wars. They're behind right now but they have the talent, money, and infrastructure to win. That said, I would absolutely not bet on it. I sold almost all of my GOOG.

The defender's advantage only counts if the corporation is run by people smart enough to do something about it.

History is littered with out-innovated companies that are gone or clinging to relevance. Xerox, IBM, cable companies, telephone companies, every train company ever. All had a huge opportunity to disrupt their own business model and make even more money, almost none of them managed it.

It's funny that people only seem to remember the successes. Seemingly dominant giants fall all the time. Kodak, Nortel, Blockbuster, Blackberry, ...

A current model in danger: flight travel in the US.

It's becoming too expensive and too much of a hassle. On top of plane tickets, the airport rental car system is also absurdly expensive. Flying, while fast, is full of inconveniences that make it less worthwhile.

The first airline that rebrand itself as (1) from your door to (2) your real destination, and starts including effective ways to get to/from airport while having faster security lines will become dominant.

E.g. if Delta started connecting ATL to the local region by rail or fast buses

Microsoft didn’t miss out on the web. They won it so thoroughly that they assumed it was theirs to keep and stopped competing.

Seems we collectively forgot about IE era.

Nightmares are best forgotten.

You still live on them but now it is called Safari

The IE era, a shoddy browser by a sleepy dormant pseudo-monopoly, is what allowed for Chrome to be so good.

Lots of low hanging fruit in optimizing browser rendering and JavaScript. Google engineers plucked these fruit. Pichai took all the credit.

In an alternate universe, some IE PM focused on making a great, fast browser, Chrome would’ve been killed by Google after not taking sufficient market share to deem worthwhile, and Pichai would be working at Oracle as an L5 TPM.

It was Firefox, and to a lesser extent Safari, that initially calved into IE. While Chrome did indeed strike the fatal blow, it came a little later into fight.

You also missed the GPs point, the reason Microsoft could be “sleepy dormant” on the web was because they had already won the browser wars and because the dominant platform for a decade. And that wasn’t by accident, it was very much a strategic move to conquer the browser market.

You're spot pn on both accounts. Firefox was the one that chipped at IE initially.. remember Firefox 3 campaign and how everyone put banners for/of it on their sites? good times

They did fall behind initially, before "The Internet Tidal Wave" memo was written and Microsoft fully mobilized to fight Netscape. Bill Gates was convinced that proprietary networks like the original MSN were the future, but he changed his mind fairly quickly.

That sort of was the future, with Facebook reviving the proprietary network.

Huh. Exactly right.

We ended up with Xanadu's vision of walled gardens. Without all that pesky Xanadu technological innovation. Two-way links, OIDs & tumblers (zippers? Now I forget.), transclusion, micropayements, etc.

Another example of worst is better.

Parent is referring to the decade before that.

Berners-Lee created the WWW in 1991. Netscape 1.0 launched in December 1994. Bill Gates’s big Internet turnaround came in 1995. By 1999, IE was the dominant browser and Netscape was going broke.

Things moved so fast at the time, it left the impression that Microsoft was slow to react. But actually everything happened within just a few years.

There are multiple eras here.

MS missed the tpc/ip train completely and ended up just copy pasting the stack from one of the BSDs in Windows 95 I think, or it wasn't a default install, I forget which.

They were late to the http train and had to give away explorer for free. You can tell how desperate they were since they didn't do the same thing with office.

Then between 1999 and 2012 they completely dominated.

Then they missed the mobile train completely and lost the browser wars. And here we are.

I blame IE being free for the state of the internet we have today. If people were trained to pay for it then we wouldn't have spyvertisment as the only model for it.

The death knell of MS's mobile ambitions came when the iPhone was released mid 2007. Windows Phone 7 launched end of 2010 as an unholy abomination based on Windows CE and a Zune-based interface, which created a whole generation of phones that would be unsupported by the NT-based Windows Phone 8 (released 2 years later), which is what they should've released in the first place.

I remember installing the TCP/IP stack from a treasured special floppy onto win 3.11 machines (giving them RIPE addresses and using NT4 as a router to expose the entire network onto the public internet - not a great idea in retrospect, but it was 1994 and everyone seemed so polite).

They didn't miss out on mobile. They had a strong mobile system with more than 10% market share in Europe but they only focused on the US market where it was not successful. Then they killed the platform with the god awful Windows 10 Mobile. The biggest enemy of Windows Phone was Microsoft themselves.

I actually really liked Windows Phone, but it's obvious why it didn't take off - iPhone captured all of the "sheep" consumers (the ones that just want what everyone else has) successfully (and still owns them somehow), and Android captured all the rest (which tend to be smaller target groups). The largest target was probably price point, but cheap androids sucked so much, it just created more Apple users.

By the time WP came around, this was already been done. Phones were costing near a $1000 and a 2 year contract, and opinions have been made. No real amount of people was going to risk a windows phone when you'd have to fork over that much money and that much of a contract term.

>The largest target was probably price point, but cheap androids sucked so much, it just created more Apple users

Doesn't this statement contradicts itself? Nobody buys an iPhone because cheap Android phones suck(ed) - you would have to shell over ~10 times the money. Android still dominates the European market (~65 % market share).

Good Windows Phone were 120 to 250 € and WP8 was optimized for low-end hardware so that was no problem. You got a cheap phone without an annoying expensive locked-in contract. I saw a lot of people using a Windows Phone exactly ten years ago. I had a brand new Lumia 535 myself and only paid 130 €.

No, it doesn't. Android on cheaper devices sucked so hard, that people decided forking the money for an iPhone that just works was now worth it if they could afford it. Paying $100 for a POS isn't helpful to budget conscious customers. If they couldn't afford it, they maybe still found a way to via various forms of financing.

Windows Phone came too late to dispel this problem. I still run into people who remember their first and only Android and switched to Apple and never looked back. WP never had a chance to wins those customers.

> iPhone captured all of the "sheep" consumers (the ones that just want what everyone else has) successfully (and still owns them somehow),

This is not a good take. Android was a highly fractured ecosystem that didn't really have good unified product experience until Nexus and Galaxy S3 rolled around. You don't go to a $1000 phone because a $100 phone sucks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com