Hacker News Reader

Comment by godzillabrennus | Hacker News Reader

If true it would explain why Microsoft keeps getting better while Google management seems to ignore the founders and keeps getting worse.

View on HN

I don't think it's so much that Google ignores the founders, so much as the founders are ignoring Google.

I was at G when L&S stepped away, and it really just felt that leading up to that, they'd become completely disinterested. S, especially, seemed completely out of touch. And L just tired.

BG is a shrewd, cutthroat businessman on top of having a tech background. I think he's far different from L&S in that respect. But yeah it helps he hasn't disengaged as well.

Google would have probably been better off if Eric Schmidt had stayed engaged.

I don't like the guy's opinions on many things, but he was pretty good at keeping the ship headed in generally the right direction.

Or any direction? I couldn't tell what the direction of Google was if I had to.

What's the direction of Microsoft, Amazon, or Apple? They're too big to have one direction.

Google does have one direction, the same direction it's had since IPO, really.

Maximize ad revenue, to maximize share value.

Just all the other window dressing is going away.

Never liked Eric, but Google had such a clear direction and vision under his leadership. Pichai, feels like the accountants are running the business. It is ONLY about the next quarters results.

I don't think Larry and Sergey is on the same level as Bill Gates. Solo founders who have raised to and led a big tech company is a different breed. I would pick Jeff Bezos, Zuck and Larry Ellison on the same level of Bill Gates. They don't manage day 2 day but big strategies don't go through without their blessing. Even though you can say Bill does not manage, the top level executives will always think "what would Bill do" or "what would Bill think about this".

Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen. If anything, Paul Allen was the instigator.

Yeah and Jobs co-founded Apple with Wozniak. Wozniak was instrumental to Apple's initial success but clearly it was Jobs who took it to the mat. Same with Gates/Allen, by their IPO in 1986 it was billg at the helm and Paul Allen doing something else.

I don't dispute Bill Gates might have been the business mind that drove Microsoft to its status today as the biggest software vendor to businesses on the planet. However, it's not because he was some sort of solo founder sigma grindset.

Allen clued Gates in on the upcoming microcomputing revolution when the Altair made the cover of Popular Electronics in 1975. And there are stories about both writing code on planes while on their way to sales meetings. So Gates arguably combined Woz’s technical chops with Jobs’ business acumen (even though I always admired the latter’s sensibility and vision more).

I think my phrasing of "solo founder" was not very good. I should have used another word.

Zuck is not a solo founder at all but what happened to the rest of the guys. Some says Google is what it is today was largely due to Eric Schimdt's involvement who is not a founder. The idea that all co-founders hold large influence in the long run of the company is not true. However, there individuals who essentially established the culture, the vision and the framework of the company.

The idea is that within the original or pivotal executive board there are people who even though left the company still holds significant influence in terms of grand strategy or vision. And those people does not include all cofounders.

Which of their products is getting better?

They’re executing better.

Microsoft has never made great products with some exceptions.

Microsoft makes “good enough” products that integrate smoothly. That’s what enterprises want and smaller vendors can’t provide by their very nature.

Some exceptions like Windows, Office and Xbox?

You're listing widely used products, not great products. Fast food is not great just because it's popular.

> Fast food is not great just because it's popular.

It's not good for you, as a consumer. As a company, it's a trillion dollar market, nurturing some of the largest companies in the world.

Even Bill Gates has admitted that a big part of their success was just sheer luck. There were many competitors that were pushing far better technology than they had but simply could not get a foot hold in the market.

Just the other day on here I mentioned BeOS/Haiku OS, the tech vision on that thing is astounding but it simply did not pan out into any sort of market success. Same with parts of Commodore, IBM, NeXT. MS did capitalize and manipulate the market to assist themselves and keep competitors out, but just becaused they won doesn't mean they had the best technology.

Microsoft intentionally and specifically suffocated BeOS. That was not luck.

Not a single person who uses Word and Excel daily would agree with you. Apple the “great product” company has been at it forever and so have many open source competitors and none come close to how good word and excel are.

This seems to be the problem with engineers: “I use eMacs on Linux so that’s the greatest product for everyone.”

Microsoft is expert at vendor lock-in. Your company got Office in the 1990s because competing office suites didn't work with Microsoft's operating system "for some reason". Now all of your accountants' macros only work in Excel and it would take thousands of hours to convert them, so no one can switch until a competitor has bug-compatibility with the highly complex and under-specified document format. But because companies can't switch, it sucks all the oxygen out of the room for competitors who are deprived of the revenue, patches and donations they would otherwise get with a larger user base. So they don't have the resources to achieve bug-compatibility and the status quo sustains, not because Excel is so great, but because Microsoft ensures that competitors don't get better.

In theory Apple has the resources to do this, but "Microsoft compatibility mode" and "backwards compatible forever" are anathema to their brand, so they don't. Google, by contrast, has actually made an effort and taken a huge bite out of Office market share. You might even say the product is better. But it's still not 100% compatible, and there are companies not willing to put their most sensitive private data on somebody else's cloud, so there are still plenty of companies stuck with Microsoft -- not because it's great, but because there is no great alternative.

But it's not just about compatibility, open source (or any other alternatives) are just simply worse in most ways (UX/feature parity/etc.) than Excel and Word etc.

Google Docs is not worse. LibreOffice is sometimes worse for the reason already mentioned -- companies can't switch to it when they're locked in, but user base is the source of resources for improvement via support contracts, donations and code contributions.

> Google Docs is not worse

It's certainly worse" than than the desktop office apps for some use cases.

> improvement via support contracts

Which might end up being effectively more expensive than paying for MS Office licenses.

> It's certainly worse" than than the desktop office apps for some use cases.

You can add "for some use cases" and make the sentence true about any product in comparison to any other product. That's not what makes something great.

> Which might end up being effectively more expensive than paying for MS Office licenses

You're now comparing two entirely different things. With a support contract you get support. It's something different than the product itself with independent additional value.

> You're now comparing two entirely different things. With a support contract you get support

I was thinking about you needing to pay someone to add new features/fix bugs or just help you to reimplement the workflows which you already have on Excel.

> any product in comparison to any other product. That's not what makes something great

I was thinking about many common workflows and general "power user" stuff that's very important for many professional users.

It's like saying that Apple Numbers is not "inferior" to Excel/Sheets because it's a different product and that it's perfectly sufficient (maybe even superior) for certain workflows, however that doesn't change the fact that it's objectively inferior from the perspective of significant proportion of people who are working with spreadsheets.

I don't know. I use the iLife suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) and prefer them over Word/Excel. Obviously I'm not a power user, but for the standard tasks you need from such tools I find them much better designed. Keynote in particular stomps all over PowerPoint for anything except collaboration, where Apple's "only the Apple ecosystem exists" mentality holds them back.

Excel is a great example.

The idea is fantastic. Programmers are too harsh on excel.

Unfortunately Microsoft haven't really updated excel in decades. They've added tweaks here and there, and made a really clumsy attempt at integrating python, but it's potential is shockingly untapped considering it's at getting on for twice as old as me.

In my brain, Microsoft is two companies at once. Old Microsoft and New Microsoft.

The split is categorized by Satya's focus and specifically MS's acquisitions after he took over.

This new Microsoft does very well (Azure, Github, Linkedin, OpenAI investment, Unix focus (WSL, C#/.net on linux)

However the old Microsoft is still around and in some ways just as bad as ever. Namely Windows.

I agree Windows is getting worse, but there are still lots stable products in old Microsoft, namely the whole productivity suites like Office, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, etc.

All of the new versions of those suck. They're absolutely awful performance and design wise. I don't know what the hell they're doing. It's this horrible mishmash of design decisions and it isn't even good looking. You can forgive a lot of usability issues if it looks fantastic, but it looks like a white screen with some random lines of text and feels like notepad via RDP over a DSL line.

In my mind everything they have acquired they are running into the ground.

Tell that to the massive increase in relevance and usage that Linkedin has seen, and the huge money maker that is now Github Copilot / Actions / Dev Environments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com