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Comment by venomsnake | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft had all the cards to win the device war. But they forgot what made them win the PC war.

They tried to emulate apple while forgetting that people that bought into apple ideology already had apple.

If the W8 arm was unlocked it would have been a big winner. WP7 just needed fast moving instead of stagnation and they almost got everything right with the original xbox and X360 in the beginning.

But I am moving away from microsoft right now even as a desktop. Arch with KDE is almost as good. There is surprising gaming support and the only real show stopper is the terrible fonts in JetBrains products.

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What made them win the PC war was what landed them in federal court.

By controlling the Windows ecosystem they could "disrupt" any competitors trying to produce applications, pushing Office while alternatives struggled, and they could use Office to push Windows.

Charging OEMs a flat "per-CPU" fee for licensing meant that Microsoft was getting paid regardless of the OS being shipped on the system. They eventually had to stop doing this, but came up with other ways of achieving the same effect.

There's no Office for game consoles. No matter how popular your title is, another platform will have an exclusive of their own that's just as compelling. They can't strong-arm OEMs because they are the one making and selling the hardware.

Linux has all the technology needed to overcome Windows, lacking only fit and finish.

What landed them in Federal Court was bundling a browser (the most advanced at the time) with their OS for free. Over a decade later, we all know that a consumer OS that ships without a browser is an incomplete product (as BillG testified in the case).

What Apple is doing now with dictatorial actions in its app stores is just as, if not more, overreaching IMHO. Does that make it OK? No.

But keep in mind why people were actually interested in what MS had to offer back then. Just as we still buy Apple products despite their anti-competitive behavior, people bought MSFT products in the largely because the product addressed their needs better than others and the price was right.

They did more than bundle a browser, they gave OEMs financial incentives NOT to bundle Netscape.

The reason why Apple's dictatorial actions don't bother me is they're only a small part of the market. If I want to develop a mobile web browser, I can still use Android and have a market.

With Windows, Microsoft WAS the market.

With the tablets there was a time (roughly a year) when Apple was the market.

Not just the browser.

They also had pricing schemes with OEMs that made it impossible for the box builders to release any products with alternative OSes preinstalled (as it would raise the price of their Windows license). And a box builder that couldn't sell a competitive Windows machine was effectively useless.

Hitachi backing out of pre-installing (the technically amazing) BeOS is what eventually killed the company. Years later the shareholders won in court but by then Be was dead.

> What landed them in Federal Court was bundling a browser (the most advanced at the time) with their OS for free. Over a decade later, we all know that a consumer OS that ships without a browser is an incomplete product (as BillG testified in the case)

no. it was never a problem that Microsoft bundled IE or any other product in with their own software. The problem was leaning on other companies, that Microsoft was in a business relationship with, to encourage those companies to exclude software offered by Microsoft's competitors.

My personal favorite is the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-...

> They tried to emulate apple while forgetting that people that bought into apple ideology already had apple.

Agreed. Their enterprise offering is strong. And one day they will realize it is IBM that is their destiny, and drop out of consumer market.

"IBM that is their destiny"

Which means becoming a company built around professional services which will mean a lot of unhappy Microsoft partners.

I have always thought that being a Microsoft partner is already a corporate suicide note. They are ruthless when trying to earn more money from existing business lines.

Here we were customers of some company who sold Exchange hosting, now we login into outlook.com.

And all this without having into account the discontinued products because of internal politics. Think XNA Game Studio.

Their setup works well with companies that are willing and able to pay tons for a setup that works well top to bottom.

Last job used MS for everything, but they got a setup which worked well and anyone they hired could use. Plus it's well supported (although they were stuck on XP still, that's going to be lots of money).

Microsoft has no hope of becoming an IBM.

IBM manufactures lots of hardware, produces new technology it licenses, and has an enormous software consulting division. Microsoft does none of these things.

If anything, Microsoft will become like Computer Associates (CA Technologies), a company that milks products enterprise is hooked on and can't quit, squeezing money out of these things for decades to come.

Consulting, not so much, but they have an integrated, whole-enterprise stack that includes:

Office (especially Word / Excel / Outlook trifecta which practically everyone uses at work for documents, scheduling, e-mail)

Lync (text, voice, video chat that is integrated w/ Outlook contacts)

Sharepoint for intranet portals, content management, collaborative documents with version control

Dynamics ERP & CRM for accounting and sales

SQL Server, which has a sophisticated BI stack for reporting & analytics

Visual Studio for developing custom applications that can interface with the APIs of all above products

Now they have or are working on cloud versions of basically all of these products so you don't even need any hardware if you want to go that route.

Personally I am not a huge fan of Microsoft for a lot of reasons, but no other company, including IBM, comes even close to offering such a comprehensive enterprise stack. They're the only company that has a product for everything (except hardware).

The biggest (of many) problems with these offerings is that they only work in and of themselves and only on Windows. I cannot run any of them on my Linux desktop, an Android device, an iPad, etc. Microsoft will not port any of these things to alternate platforms because Windows is their religion.

So the less people use Windows the less appeal there will be for these products. They are all anchored to the same sinking ship.

Also, SharePoint sucks. I had to say it. It's a worst-in-class product in a sea of vastly superior web application and document sharing platforms. I can't believe you included it in your list. I severely dislike many of those other products (Outlook, Exchange, and SQL Server, specifically) but even I'll admit that those products actually do what they're supposed to. SharePoint is nothing but a black hole where documents, time, and energy go in but nothing useful ever comes back out.

And why specifically do you dislike, say, SQL Server? (except for price; obviously Microsoft wants to make money off of it).

I have several reasons but here's the top:

* It runs on Windows and carries with it all that baggage... An unnecessary GUI is always running. Endless security issues. You'll need to reboot regularly to apply patches. You'll also need to deal with things that are unnecessary on other platforms like antivirus packages and--because it comes with that aforementioned GUI--probably a zillion little background daemons (usually with systray icons) that only keep one particular piece of software up-to-date. If your database server asks you to install the Ask Toolbar you've got a problem (haha, Java how I despise thee).

* Lack of built-in pagination or LIMIT-like mechanism. Grabbing a limited subset of any given query in SQL server is like pulling teeth! Just look at this StackOverflow question/answer on how to do pagination with SQL server: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/109232/what-is-the-best-w... If you didn't find that answer by googling you'd be in hell trying to figure it out!

* If your software isn't built on top of Microsoft tools/frameworks working with MS SQL Server is a huge pain in the ass. You'll quickly get into dependency hell just trying to get the necessary modules/libraries working and you'll never get anywhere near as good performance as Microsoft's frameworks. Whenever I'm in this situation I feel like SQL server is a nail and if you're on Windows they give you a hammer but on any other platform they give you a screwdriver and say, "just hit it with the handle really hard. Oh, and use soft wood or plastic."

* Growing SQL server is expensive. Not usually my problem but it is always a concern. It's never as simple as "just adding more servers" because you not only have to pay for the SQL Server licensing you also have to pay for the Windows licensing and all the other licenses that are intrinsic to any Windows install in any given enterprise environment.

Yep. Using any of these locks you into Windows.

Sharepoint kind of sucks, but it sucks less than most proprietary corporate intranets. It's an out-of-the-box intranet server app and it's pretty good for small-medium enterprises. Beats Lotus Notes anyway.

MS lockin starts with Active Directory and Exchange. There are basically no competitors for AD, and few credible competitors for Exchange.

From there they jump to the products you mention. Sharepoint is terrible for building websites, but recognizes and uses AD permissions out of the box. So does Office. So does Lync. Etc.

"IBM manufactures lots of hardware"

I bet MS makes and sells more hardware. XBox alone must outnumber all IBM hardware sales. (ThinkPad hasn't been IBM for several years now).

I didn't have time to dig for really accurate numbers, but Microsoft's Xbox sales, which might include revenue from game developers as well as hardware, was about $9.6B for FY 2012. (http://www.microsoft.com/Investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earn...)

IBM's system hardware revenue for FY 2012 was $17.6B. (http://www.ibm.com/annualreport/2012/bin/assets/2012_ibm_ann... page 30). IBM also manufactures components and licenses hardware designs, such as the CPUs used in the PS3 and Xbox 360.

Microsoft is still not as big a hardware player even compared to an IBM that has sold off a good chunk of their hardware manufacturing.

I stand corrected, thanks. I often underestimate the crazy money still being made in IT infrastructure. This will teach me.

I see Microsoft in a position similar to RIM 5 - 8 years back. They have tons of revenue from big business that are kinda locked in to their stack. There is no need for large innovation in those very mature markets and they innovate by pushing more of the same. I may not be an office power use, but I see very little significant changes in Office since 2003, only small features tweaked.

It's even worse than that. If you are a power user and turn off the toolbars etc, excel 97 isn't that much different to excel 2013.

If you can say this then you are not a power user. If only by one MASSIVE measure and that is the row limit increase between these two versions, but there are plenty others.

Office has changed dramatically since then. The ribbon, while a superficial change, apparently has a huge impact on discoverability of Office features and usage. There's now an online version of the applications, and integration with Skydrive/SharePoint. There are tons of smaller additions that are very useful, too (e.g. Flash Fill in Excel, multi-monitor support in PowerPoint, etc.).

The BI stack is growing steadily.

Lots happening in Excel/PowerPivot/Data Explorer land.

The reasons why Microsoft fail seem so petty. They are technologically probably the most advanced company, but ruin it by dubious politics.

> They are technologically probably the most advanced company

I disagree. Their technology is mostly OK, and, surely, they seem managed by idiots, but I wouldn't dare to call them "the most advanced company" when compared to even most software companies.

> They are technologically probably the most advanced company

What?!? How could you possibly believe that when you know they're all using Windows in Redmond. It has absolutely zero technical superiority over everything else out right now (e.g. Linux, Mac OS X, iOS, etc).

I don't want to say which company is the most technically superior right now but I'd probably start my investigation at Google because of things like Google Glass, Google Now, self-driving cars, Maps & Street View, and a search engine that still bests everything else out there by huge margins.

>It has absolutely zero technical superiority over everything else out right now.

Not necessarily in the enterprise market. Based off my experience, their enterprise softwares are vastly superior other alternatives.

May I also mention the advancements of Kinect? The ability to scan and display with a great deal of accuracy: your body skeleton, your heart rate, muscle maps, etc is pretty awesome. I find whatever comes out of Microsoft Research to be very exciting. However the truth is most are killed even before they make it to the market (remember Microsoft Courier?), thanks to their internal politics.

Yeah, so vastly superior that they can't even convince their enterprise customers to adopt their latest platforms (phones, tabets) and operating system (Windows 8).

Also, do you realize that the Kinect technology was developed outside of Microsoft? It was invented by an Israeli company: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PrimeSense

Microsoft just licensed their technology for use in the Kinect. So if you consider licensing someone else's inventions as, "the most technologically advanced" then yeah; Kinect is pretty good as far as game-playing technology goes.

>Yeah, so vastly superior that they can't even convince their enterprise customers to adopt their latest platforms (phones, tabets) and operating system (Windows 8).

If you have ever worked in a corporate world, you will realize the main motto is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Windows 8 doesn't add anymore to their value that what XP and Windows 7 does. Also, Windows 8 was built with consumer centric point of view.

>do you realize that the Kinect technology was developed outside of Microsoft?

The chip was but not most of the software. There has been a lot of work that went into it. As someone who is interested in Imaging Algorithms, what is the next best alternative? OpenCV? It hasn't moved a square peg in almost a decade and I am glad this stagnation is ending or changing because of Kinect.

Did you know Youtube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Driverless Car, heck even android was all built on top of already bought technologies? However, there was a lot of work put into them just like the Kinect and I am not going to belittle that.

Microsoft had all the cards back in 2008, maybe. The missteps started with Vista and Zune, and continued with Windows Phone 7, and were magnified with Windows 8, Windows 8 RT, and now XBox One. There's also the big non-step of trying to starve the iPad by not porting Office to it -- which has made it glaringly obvious how little we need Office to get stuff done.

I'd say Microsoft's problem now is pretty intractable. I think it's quite possible there will be no victor in XBox One vs. PS4 just as there was no victor in Bluray vs. HD-DVD (Bluray just lost more slowly).

Why did Bluray loose? I love Bluray. And I buy them too...

He means disc growth is stagnant with all future growth apparently going to streaming.

i think he's referring to the fact that disc-based delivery of content is quickly becoming obsolete.

From my experience, Arch with KDE and XP/Win7 are extremely similar with regards to user experience quality, so that I myself wouldn't be willing to call one or the other better. At this point, a person more used to Windows might get annoyed by having to edit config files on Arch/KDE every so often, and a person more into Linux might be frustrated that in Windows, some things can't be easily fixed. But these are more differences in preference than in quality.

Quality really hits you when you have to set up postfix, dovecot-lda, dovecot imap, ldap auth and an NFS share to store mail on.

I'd genuinely rather use exchange and active directory!

Slightly offtopic but can you point me to a description of said font issues? My Android Studio (IDEA) fonts seem fine (on latest Kubuntu and Fedora w/ KDE).

IDEA-57233 Editor font antialising/appearance problems on Linux http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-57233

I had huge issues with swing fonts. Bad enough that I bought a couple jetbrains products that I wasn't using at all. Then when the Android Studio came out I installed it just to look at it and noticed it looked good. I fired up my other swing stuff and saw noticeable improvement. This is on Fedora 18 (64 bit if it matters, KDE is my desktop) with the Oracle JVM.

I don't know what changed - if it was something in Fedora, Java or what - but I'm pretty happy with how things look now, whereas before I couldn't stand it. I tried all the java switches and what not to no avail - but now it just works.

All that said, KDevelop has made such great strides I can see it becoming my primary environment for all my development.

Hi, have you tried the AAHack plugin? It made a difference for me when running IDEA on Arch/Gnome.

Arch's fonts can be prettified a lot with Ubuntu patches from AUR: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_Configuration#Ubun...

(I'm another Arch + KDE user - both at home and at work)

I used infiniality and the result is beautiful. From what I was able to deduce it was a mix of phpstorm bolding everything way too much, JDK refusing to use rendering and some dpi issues (a letter in storm is almost twice smaller than in kwrite)

But my experiences with arch are very positive so far.

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