Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations
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With there transition to Windows Phone they completely deserted there current user base opting for a more iphonesk ecosystem. That of restriction instead of freedom.
Ironically Android is the true successor to Windows Mobile, and in a position Microsoft can only dream of right now.
This is probably a good example of the innovators dilemma in action.
I also disagree that Android is the 'true successor to Windows Mobile'. Sure it is somewhat more open than WP, but I don't think openness is what is a key part of Android's success.
The smartphone market was owned by Nokia and their Sxx series. That and the BlackBerries.
We were working on mostly Nokia (either native or Java), Qualcomm BREW (C++) and, granted, we had some demand for Windows Mobile but they were pretty much a nobody in that pre-iPhone world. Just as they're still nobody.
There was hardly any customer demand for Windows Mobile compared to Nokia and the others.
There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones.
It has always been an utter failure.
Now of course you may your definition of a "pre-iPhone Smartphone" which appears to be: "Certainly not a BlackBerry and certainly not anything that wasn't running Windows Mobile". So then it becomes hard to argue ; )
But at the same time if you look at the statistics here on market percentage [1], you see my main point to that windows has lost nearly all of its previous market share.
[1]
I don't see anything else Microsoft could have done with Windows Phone (disclosure: I'm a Microsoft employee but no inside info). I mean, the iPhone was pure disruption. Android then comes a long and destroys the market for OSes because they gave it away! So iPhone disrupts the high end, Android disrupts the low end, and Microsoft is put into an interesting non-trivial position.
That's not really true because there was the PDA market, which was dominated by Palm and Microsoft. So you had RIM and Nokia in one corner, and Palm and Microsoft in the other. Any one of them could have created the iPhone but none of them really got it, and they are where they are.
Plus it didn't help that MS were trying to charge unrealistic prices for the OS, in 1999 they were asking for $80 per unit....
However, in the early 00s the money was in dumbphones simply because the BOM cost of the RAM/ROM, AP and modem was pretty high.
The real migration path was from phones, either in terms of incorporating PDA like features in to existing platforms like Series 40, or using an OS capable of running in low memory, execute in place environments.
IMO Symbian was much more capable of achieving that need than either Palm or MS, at least because of it's low memory requirements and it's OS architecture was more advanced so it didn't have pseudo-arbitrary limits such as the 32 process limit that W/E had:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Embedded_CE_6.0
Also obviously the Symbian heritage was from PDAs (EPOC32 from PSION). I'm not saying that Symbian was a great OS, however, it really had the measure of MS technically in those times and Palm OS at that time was well known to be in the stone-age OS wise.
What was the size of the smartphone market? I'd guess it wasn't that big either, certainly it isn't anywhere near present-day numbers. And yes, I am differentiating between "smartphone" and "cell phone" market. The former was small, the latter was huge.
> Well, it was a very fragmented market focused only on professionals. It was never aimed to consumers (a big mistake).
You could say the same for RIM, who was never that interested in building a consumer phone. Many mistakes were made by all incumbents..
The lack of native data connectivity made PDAs deal with the continually nasty and ever under-estimated problem of sync. With iPhoneOS v1, Apple matched what Palm had to offer - an iPod touch was almost as good as a Palm PDA, an iPhone better than a Treo. With iOS2 and ActiveSync, it blew away it's competition.
The iPhone (and really, the iPhone 3G for me) is when prices started to become reasonable.. nowadays, you can get decent data plans with (almost) everyone here.
Lets face it, the secret sauce to smartphones from a technology POV is the web and web services. Microsoft had disbanded its IE team after the release of IE6, and thought that they had put the Internet problem to bed.
>Microsoft had disbanded its IE team after the release of IE6
I remember when that news hit slashdot like it was yesterday. I remember because I got really angry at Microsoft and their idiocy. I actually thought ie6 was a decent browser, but there was no fuckin chance it was going to be-all and end-all of browsers. It was also the day that I really started looking for an alternative. Soon after, I installed Firebird beta and never looked back.
When Widows Mobile Smartphone came out in 2003, it was the most advanced, most open, most app-friendly phone OS. However, there were not substantial improvements for the next 5 years - the product was in fact stillborn. The Windows Phone team was then brought in to bury the corpse, and start afresh, which is what they did. It wasn't their fault that the predecessor has died several years earlier.
a) Windows phone 6.5
b) Windows phone 7.x
c) Windows phone 8.x
d) Project Pink / Kin
e) Danger
f) Windows 8 RT
g) Courier
Therefore, we get:
- Windows Phone
- Windows on ARM
- Danger/Pink
And then some Courier Team, probably a MS Research team (so not part of an actual commercial team) which I wouldn't count as a team.
Then, Danger was folded into Windows Phone, and Courier was killed off, leaving:
- Windows Phone
- Windows on ARM
WoA did absorb some parts of WiMo (power management, for example).
The whole thing makes me want to cry in frustration. The day the iPhone was announced, the halls of 116-117-118-119 were filled with shell shocked, demoralized, pissed off people.
MS let WinMobile rot internally for years, building up tons of technical debt, and they paid for it in market share.
I was on a project that was repurposing pieces of the WM6 code, just cherry-picking drivers and stuff. We used to go rummaging through the source code on "Wait, you thought /that/ was bad..." sessions.
The BSPs ("Board Support Packages") that provided drivers and and other low-level code for the various platforms that WM ran on were written by third parties, largely by contractors, largely by the /same/ contractors, and the code quality was again terrible.
Don't ever let code quality and good system design take a back seat to politics, personal agendas or convenience. That kind of nonsense is at the core of why MS is not a major power in the mobile market today. Senior management at MS utterly dropped the ball; I like to think it's because the upper echelons don't really read code or look at designs any more.
The code ended up being that awful to maintain because of deadlines pressures or Microsoft inherited the code base from a buyout of another company?
1. Announce that Bill Gates is coming back.
2. Announce that Ballmer is leaving.
That would be the _real_ "Ballmer peak."
Telcos like Android - its free and they can skin it.
Microsoft has been arrogant and toxic to every one of the mobile phone manufactures that partnered with it.
It is ironic that Android, with its free software Linux kernel, is crushing Microsoft worldwide in the most dominating fashion!
If smartphones are true personal computers, then Microsoft is toast.
But I have to give it to Bill, he knows how to control and take over. Letting others pirate your software just to let your empire grow is astounishing to me.
If you don't I bet IBM or HP will.
Technically it's true, but I think it gives the impression that Bill Gates is not happy with Microsoft's decisions.
Really it's that Gates doesn't think Microsoft has reached the end of its innovations, and that he wants to improve smartphones.
If you're talking 'innovation' like Marie Curie, then sure. But its willfully disingenuous to say that they weren't -- or aren't -- an innovative company, relative to so many others.
I reckon that PocketPCs were probably an exception to that point, and there are here and there innovative parts in the company, but it feels more that it's "innovative DESPITE its roots" than anything else.
It's in their complete inability to get to market quickly, take risks and work together. And that is directly related to their HR policies in particular their ranking system.
For example, look at how their mobile offering's .NET-based APIs and "WCF lite" GUI toolkit lasted for precisely one generation before someone got the bright idea of yanking it and replacing it with a whole new system based on a gussied-up version of COM. I have a really hard time believing that's an example of coordination. From the outside, it looks a lot more like someone from the Windows division becoming jealous of what folks from the other divisions were accomplishing, and deciding to horn in on that game while simultaneously reasserting the old Win32 technology base at the expense of newer technologies.
It's also a spectacular waste of effort, and left a lot of us developers feeling like we just became collateral damage in an internal power struggle.
Why I'm leery of Windows Azure, even though it seems to be doing mostly the right thng.
And I am not saying that stack ranking is responsible for all its failures but I fail to see how it encourages co-operation which is so critical for successful companies.
Having lived in Seattle for a couple of years, and knowing many Microsoft employees during that time, my outsider's view is that MS's consumer-side failures are largely geographical and cultural.
Redmond, or even Bellevue, is extremely isolated from Seattle, which in and of itself is not exactly deeply intertwined with the cultural centers of the US. Locals know this - Microsoft employees who move from Seattle across the lake to the east side often joke about nobody ever visiting them again (sometimes less-than-jokingly). It's also more or less a company town - Microsoft's presence is so overwhelming and absolute that a lot of the technological zeitgeist from the rest of the country never make it there. If you lived/worked there it's easy to believe Microsoft's ridiculously optimistic PR pieces - pieces that would be hilarious when read in any other environment.
This isn't even an urban/suburban argument (though it has shades of it), it's a "company town vs. diverse city" thing. Microsoft's geographical location gives its people tunnel vision and a grossly false picture of the technology sector.
The second part I've observed is a lack of internal honesty within Microsoft. Failure seems to be couched in safe corporate-speak to the point where it's greatly muted (maybe that's the intent). You cannot expect your work force to pivot and fight hard when they've been falsely told their giant failure was a minor hiccup. I saw this after the WinPhone launch - MS employees were still honestly bullish about its prospects even when the market as a whole had completely rejected it.
If MS wants to be nimble in the consumer space, it needs to set up shop in cities where their competitors play - you will not get an honest impression of how your products (or your competitors' products) are doing otherwise. They also need to have frequent, honest, no-holds-barred accountings of how they are doing. If a product was a flop, call it a flop.
I guess one way to look at it is Microsoft is a good counterweight to the argument you should eat your own dogfood. You should, but you should not do so exclusively.
For example, when the iPhone came out, the management called AT&T and asked them to exclude the iPhone from the previously negotiated Microsoft Employee Discount program. MS phone is Ok, Blackberry is Ok, iPhone not Ok. The effect was, obviously, even less awareness of the best products out there, especially among the most loyal, and thus most influencing managers. One high-ranked manager told me he can't use an iPhone because he couldn't give money to the company trying to kill MS. Assuming the unlikely that Apple indeed was out to kill MS (rather than the more plausible - to make a good product and a few bucks), that would be a very good reason to get half a dozen iPhones, so that you know well what's going to hit you over the head real soon.
Culture is the least identifiable, least amendable, and yet most influential component of any organization...
I've never worked there. I did work at IBM while MS was beating the hell out of OS/2 and Lotus though. During those years, MS did use phrases like "cut off the air supply" and "embrace, extend and extinguish." "Killing the opposition" seems like it's a very deep part of their corporate ethos, at least that's what a lot of their competition thinks and FWIW, their golder years seemed to be when they were more vocally that way. I'm not sure that's the healthiest approach to take. From there, every thing starts to look like defense, are they making a given play because they have something to contribute and a vision of how search, mobile, gaming, etc.. should be that's different than the market? Or are they making the play because they want to shore up their defenses?
I'm not sure I'll ever fully trust them, maybe if they had a complete outsider running the show.
It's a destination for MBAs and project managers, not a place to innovate.
Yes, suburb Seattle is quite different from urban Seattle, but ALOT more people live in the suburbs. You also have to compare it to San Francisco and San Jose, how many of your friends from the city will visit you once you moved to San Jose? Honestly any?
Seattle is fairly international and non-isolated, its in the same category as the bay area, which is to say: we have a lot of space between us and the next mega-cities (Vancouver or Portland), but that is true of any western city.
As for Redmond, I remember when it was just a bunch of trees with a filming lot for Northern Exposure. It never had much of its own identity, like Kirkland, Bothell, or Lynwood; they are just part of the suburbs. Even Bellevue is a bit souless, they have an urban core but its mostly a shopping mall. Not much difference from any other big city in the states!
Microsoft employees are actually brutally honest. We internally criticize our own stuff all the time, there is not much of a reality distortion field in Redmond or Beijing. But we aren't going to hang our dirty laundry in public, what company would do that?
Finally, Microsoft has many offices around the world, many are deeply involved in core products; Silicon Valley for example. My own office has a 1000 people I think.
I was careful to disclaim that this isn't a urban vs. suburban thing (though it is, to a limited extent) - this is a company town vs. business-diverse city thing.
After all, Google and Facebook were both born and headquartered deep within suburbs. The difference is that Mountain View and Palo Alto are swimming in tech companies - even if your social circles were entirely tech people, it's extremely unlikely they all work at the same place.
Compare with Seattle (stronger in Redmond/Bellevue) where practically everyone works for Microsoft (if you're on the east side) or Amazon (if you're on the west). Even for members of the community who don't directly work for MS, the relationship with MS is so overwhelming that it grossly distorts reality inside the bubble.
There's a lack of perspective because just about everyone works for the same company, subject to the same cognitive biases, with no substantial competition base (or hell, just other tech companies) to give you the necessary occasional whack upside the head.
> " but its mostly a shopping mall. Not much difference from any other big city in the states!"
I very, very heavily disagree. The US has many incredibly interesting big cities, even if some of them are deeply flawed from a financial or civic perspective. NYC and SF are no-brainers, but even the much-lampooned suburban gridlock of LA is (arguably) the cultural center of the entire country. New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago, Boston... I don't think I can seriously describe any of those as soulless mostly-shopping-malls.
This is my personal opinion, but IMO Bellevue epitomizes the worst of forced-urbanization. Its soullessness and emptiness is far from the norm in the US, and definitely not the norm for urbanization in the world.
The US has far more boring big cities, though. You've already mentioned the interesting ones.
I'm not sure about the suburban blight around it, I never lived there to experience any of it. But inner tubing down the Guadalupe....
I think you have a very poor understanding of the pudget sound area economy. On the west side, you are just as likely to run into someone working for a startup, Starbucks, or Boeing, or UW, than Amazon. Amazon isn't that dominating. Now, in the east side, Microsoft is bigger, but there are still a lot of other companies, eBay, Google (on both east and west sides, and even in freaking Bothell now), a bunch of startups. Its not quite the monoculture you make it out to be!
Now, when we are talking about Bellevue, you compare it to San Jose, not San Francisco, or Fort Worth, not Dallas, or some weird industrial wasteland suburb of New Orleans (of which there are plenty), not the wards or the French Quarter. All of these interesting cities have their souless mostly-shopping mall areas. Looking international, what I've seen the same nearby satallite cities of Tokyo, Paris, Bangkok, Amsterdam, Lausanne, etc...tells me suburban blight is not just an American problem.
1) Their brand reputation became toxic over time. Windows ME was seen as a bad product. XP prior to service pack 1 was seen as a bad product. Normal people knew what the blue screen of death with. Normal people made jokes about the quality of Windows. Correct or not, their market dominance (seen as insurmountable) contributed to it. By the early 2000s, no one liked Microsoft.
Windows Mobile was just as good as the competition (pre-iPhone). It might not have been dramatically better, but it was just as good. In the 90s that would have been enough for them to swallow up the market completed, but it didn't happen here. People were slow to adopt smartphones in this time period.
2) They are just an old company. As you said, they are slow to get to market. It's the ship you can't turn around. Google is a lot like Microsoft in their ability to form partnerships, but unlike Microsoft is very nimble and able to adapt to the market, has the courage to try something completely new (Chrome OS was laughed at just a few years ago), and has the right amount of cockiness to make it happen (usually).
There can only be one Google/Microsoft in technology. If you accept that, how can Microsoft possibly win?
This. Combined with their failure to realize this. I strongly suspect that Windows Phone would have been more successful if they hadn't given it a name that evokes innumerable products with which everyone has a love-hate relationship at best.
> They are just an old company.
They're 362 days older than Apple.
This Apple is really NeXT.
Something potatolicious explained so wonderfully.
I don't buy it. A decade ago Google and Microsoft were on different planets. It's totally possible for one company to sell operating systems to everyone and a different company to provide ad-supported services to the same people.
The mistake Microsoft made was to take Google's nominal preference for open standards and open source technologies as a declaration of war. So they started pushing Bing solely for the purpose of pissing in Google's oatmeal and started astroturfing and lobbying against them left and right, and the next thing you know Google is putting more resources behind Google Docs, they release Chrome and take a huge chunk of Internet Explorer's market share, and by the time Google realizes that Apple is poised to take over the expanding mobile device market in ~2006 the chances of them looking to Microsoft to act as a check on Apple's power would have been such a ridiculous suggestion that I doubt they even considered it, so instead we saw Google's full might behind Android which is obviously what did Microsoft in for the mobile space and what may destroy them yet.
Microsoft's mistake was to attack something they couldn't kill, and in so doing they turned what might have been a thorn in their side into a major war. And it's a war they're losing.
> take risks and work together
When I was there, I was _constantly_ being told (as a manager in DevDiv) that our next release had to work together with each and every new technology that might almost be ready near our ship time (Windows, SQL, Office, etc.). This added not only a huge amount of schedule risk, but dramatically slowed everything down. When your development team has to wipe their machine and install a new build of Windows every week (literally true during one ~9 month cycle of a product I was on), you lose a lot of time. Especially when those builds each pass basic smoke tests, so they're sufficient for running tests, but do not pass basic usage tests, so you can't, say, install Visual Studio successfully on some of them.
Microsoft is well-practiced at the strategy of lashing together all of the boats before they head off to a battle at sea...
And unfortunately I have little sympathy for people who complain about the ranking system. The numbers of "poor" ratings required were so low even back in more-aggressive days that they served more to prevent managers from copping out on delivering hard messages than unjustly delivering bad review scores. Though, certainly, many leads delivered the, "oh, so sorry, couldn't get you a better score" message. But, that's often part of why they're still leads and not managers.
However, having seen Microsoft in action from the inside, any collaborations - most of which are _required_ at gunpoint from top-down - result in a horde of program managers shuttling themselves from building to building "owning" the X->Y relationship, one each per group-pair and arrow direction. It's a win-win for them, as those are a quicker path to promotion than trying to build up internal scope or working with the external market (godforbid <grin>).
Frankly, it's really, really expensive and painful for ~2000 developers on three different teams to each be adding a slew of features with one of those teams building on top of and coordinating the other two. Even with huge amounts of communication, tracking, and the best of intents, until the products at the bottom of the chain settle down, you can't make any progress at the top. And when the top is finally making progress, you actually can put developers in front of APIs (in our case) and then you find out that the stuff at the bottom is totally unusable, but it's too late, because they finally stopped churning and want to ship soon.
I don't claim there's an easy answer, but throwing more people or tools at the coordination problem doesn't (I've seen it tried).
Citation needed. Seriously.
http://biz.yahoo.com/t/38/567.html
6-Feb-13 3,189,267 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.44 per share. (Proceeds of $87,513,486)
5-Feb-13 3,810,733 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.56 per share. (Proceeds of $105,023,801)
4-Feb-13 3,000,000 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.64 per share. (Proceeds of $82,920,000)
1-Feb-13 5,500,000 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.87 per share. (Proceeds of $153,285,000)
31-Jan-13 4,500,000 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.50 per share. (Proceeds of $123,750,000)
We are in a world drowning in words, follow the money, it does not lie.
http://biz.yahoo.com/t/38/567.html
Bill, IIRC, sells to give it to his foundation and his foundation sells to donate. Eric Schmidt is also selling about 50% of his holdings, but after a while it's accepted as estate planning or whatever, not as lacking confidence in the stock.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7106589/ljbox/doc/MSFT-shares.png
Gates has been selling his stock at a steady pace for over a decade. Since Sept '01 he has sold an average of about 78.4 million shares per year.
Using your link you can see that he sells 20 million shares quarterly, with each block of 20M selling within one week. So he did his usual 80 million in the past year.
Since the rate of his selling has neither increased nor decreased significantly in at least 11.5 years, are you sure you can conclude something about his satisfaction level? What about the possibility that he is diversifying and funding his philanthropic goals?
As of today he still owns about 421 million common shares of MSFT, worth $11.8 billion.
But Gates is not putting his money into another growth vehicle, he's putting it into his philanthropic projects, which he spends most of his time managing.
He has made it clear (with both words and actions) that he wants to use the rest of his life doing the most good with his money that he can. And he has almost entirely redirected his career toward those non-Microsoft goals. If he was interested in making the most money he can, he would be doing totally different things.
Of course, he can't (sensibly) sell his entire stake in MSFT at once. Instead he is selling it slowly but steadily.
Also of course, he can't (sensibly) spend all his money at once. It is being invested in a diversified manner: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_Investment
Diversifying his wealth makes a great deal of fiscal sense, considering his goals, and the fact that he is no longer running Microsoft.
So, I don't see how you reasonably conclude that his MSFT sales mean he has lost faith in Microsoft.
> It's not a place where his money will even retain it's base value.
The MSFT dividend yield has historically been over 2% and is now over 3%, so it's not like it's doing completely nothing before he can sell it.
So it seems we agree that Gates wants to sell his MSFT as quickly as is reasonably possible, we just don't agree on his motivation. I suspect he will continue doing so until he isn't risking so many eggs in one basket, because he has other goals besides wealth accumulation.