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Comment by jemeshsu | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.).

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.

The BI stack is growing steadily.

Lots happening in Excel/PowerPivot/Data Explorer land.

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