What happened to Microsoft? | Hacker News Reader

What happened to Microsoft?

marco.org

37 pointsKevinBongart42 comments

Some stats about Microsoft's current market position:

* Microsoft holds almost 90% of the operating system market share http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-shar...

* MSN Messnger is the most popular IM client in the world, 60% market share http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2006/04/3557.ars

* Internet Explorer is still the most used browser, 65%+ market share http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qp...

* Microsoft Office is still the most used Office suite (95%+ market share?)

* XBox is selling great and they are taking a market leader position http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jan09/01-05XBo...

* Hotmail is the most used web-email with 250 million users+ (GMail does not have 100 million yet) http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/metrics/email-statist...

* Microsoft are a big player in web-backend market. IIS and ASP are catching up with Apache http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/04/06/april_2009_web_...

* .Net has the largest market share amongst developers http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=.net%2C+java%2C+c%23%2C+ru...

* Even in one of the biggest financial crisis, Microsoft still makes shit loads of money (almost $15 billion in revenue for Q1 2009) http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/23/microsoft-rev...

Taken from http://amix.dk/blog/viewEntry/19446

more does not mean better. it takes quality to make quality.

The article is about the decline of MS. Statistical points that aren't rates or aren't compared to past statistical points are meaningless.

It points out that Microsoft is still a market leader in a lot of markets (including web-markets such as IM and email), they are earning lots of money in a bad economy and they are known to be excellent business people (some of the best in the market)... I think it's very naive to label one of the biggest companies in the IT industry as dead in any foreseeable future.

Btw. I also point out statical rates: Microsoft shares in IM, web-email, console market, developer tools market, web-server market etc. are all growing and aren't declining.

web-email? Growing in share? wow.. Any links for that?

And does dev-tools consist of the paid market - or does it compete with free/oss/notepad?

I still like PG's clarification of "Dead" - basically that they're no longer growing / pushing the boundary.

"I also point out statical rates: Microsoft shares in IM, web-email, console market, developer tools market, web-server market etc. are all growing and aren't declining."

Depends on how you measure it. For instance, apparently in terms of monthly uniques hotmail is declining and will be overtaken by gmail this year:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArti...

Astroturfers woke up early this sunday.

Go hug your mother and stop brownnosing M$

My inference from the article is that Microsoft is at the top of the software industry like GM used to be the top of the automotive industry. ;)

This article is filthy with mis-information. Just to give a few...

* Microsoft did make mistakes in it's early days. To make that point I need only cite all the Microsoft Execs who were quoted saying "OS/2 is the way of the future and We'll be phasing Windows out"

* Vista isn't popular with "die hard Windows fans". In fact, a big part of the reason Vista is failing is because there are a lot of things you can do in XP that you can't do in Vista (try right clicking on a network drive and looking for "Search" if you don't believe me)

* I don't see how you can have this sentence "Today’s Microsoft is impulsive and sloppy." and then follow it immediately with this "It has become massive and complex with too many layers of management, committees, and bureaucracy to produce anything great " You're either bureaucratic or impulsive but you can't really be both

* Microsoft did not "rest on their laurels" after IE6. What did happen is that Jim Allchin decided Windows = IE and disolved the IE team by integrating them into the Windows team. So when Vista's development timeline went to hell so too did IE. But there were always people working on it.

* Microsoft did not "get lazy" and miss the Internet boat in the mid-90s. What they did do was "get proprietary" and back MSN as a competitor to the Internet (remember that back then AOL was the competitor to beat and they didn't even have Internet access integrated yet).

I could go on but the point is made I think. You should know a little something about Microsoft before you write a post on how the company went wrong.

It's largely irrelevant to most startups wether Microsoft went wrong because of X, or because of Y. Point is, they don't matter any more. Interesting from a historical point of view, but not much more.

MS still shows at every single opportunity that they do not understand the internet, and they'd actually rather it didn't exist. That's unlikely to change.

I would tend to disagree since nearly 30% of web servers run IIS, and ASP.NET is one of the most popular web frameworks on the market today. Considering that it is largely competing with free servers and frameworks, that's fairly impressive.

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/04/06/april_2009_web_...

I don't think it's useful to just go for raw numbers - it'll be skewed in ms favor with tons of big irrelevant corporations using it by default. How many big consumer sites use IIS/ASP.NET? How many startups? How many high traffic sites use it?

A web startup using IIS/ASP.NET is quite a rarity. I'd expect maybe 2% of startups? If that.

The fact the xBox doesn't even have a web browser should be reason enough for alarm.

I could say the same thing about any Linux stack. Do you have any stats for that 2%, because my gut tells me 98%?

I don't think irrelevant means what you think it means. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but they are certainly relevant. And those "big corporations" are certainly relevant too - they spend billions of dollars on hardware and software.

OK to clarify, Irrelevant if you're doing a consumer based web startup.

If you're doing B2B or corporate stuff, then sure, you have to deal with that rubbish along with everything else.

You're so wrong. And even if you weren't wrong,writing off the huge B2B market is pretty silly.

In any event, MySpace and PlentyOfFish both run off of .NET

So the largest dating site in the world, and the second largest social network. I'd say that's pretty relevant.

> So the largest dating site in the world

Ahem, largest FREE dating website :-)

Microsoft might own a 30% of the web server market share, but that makes them just a glorified tool vendor. A far cry from Microsoft's earlier potential as humanity's gateway to the "digital age". So they created a popular web framework, wooptidoo, and so has every 2cent PHP developer.

Maybe you can't be bureaucratic and impulsive, but you can be bureaucratic and sloppy.

Thanks. I was hoping someone would point out my same thoughts after reading Marco's post. Also +1 to the individual who posted relevant stats about MSFT to paint a more holistic and objective picture.

These days more and more I realize that none of the people who comment on Microsoft are generally biased against microsoft and have no clue about Microsoft's business strategy. First the greatest fact of Microsoft is not innovation it is perseverance.

Generally they don't come up with any innovative products but they try to simulate other existing popular products but make them better over lots of versions by eating into competitors market share. (You can look into the history of microsoft products which will be easily proven)

The reason Microsoft can do is because they have lots of cash and they can take losses on the products for couple of versions. The greatest example is SQL Server with 1% market share in late 90's and close to 38 to 40% market share in 2009.

The revenues are generated for Microsof is because of volume of licenses. Every body knows that microsoft is microsoft because of Bill Gates who will be there for another 20 years to guide Microsoft just in case if it is needed. This is not true for Apple (Pancreatic cancer for Steve jobs) and also true for other companies.

--R

I would not dismiss Microsoft that easily, they are still a dominant force in software world and probably will be for a long time to come. Maybe they just lack focus here and there, which comes along having battles on so many fronts as they do have. Microsoft is a gigantic battleship with lots of bad and good stuff, for example Microsoft is a way to go if you want to be at the bleeding edge of 3D research these days, and that is just one very small segment of what they do - and lead in.

And don't forget Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. That's where Simon Peyton-Jones works on the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.

"The report of my death has been grossly exaggerated." - Mark Twain

Much like the endless stories of the death of Apple in the 90's, this article exudes an arrogance unsupported by the facts. Certainly, Microsoft has made many mistakes and are not at the top of their game right now. But to suggest that "Internet Explorer’s marketshare will probably dip below 50% within three years." is a sign of their decline is comical. Below 50%.. within three years.. the horror.

Microsoft continues to be a dominant force in the business world and will for the foreseeable future. Thankfully, they now have competition again on many fronts that will only serve to push them to refocus and improve the products that have declined in recent years.

You know, not too long ago Internet Explorer was regarded as dominant force on the web (98% after all), now (at least where I am) it is already on the edge of falling below 50% (last week's numbers are 51.5% of all IE versions combined). And yes Firefox pushed MS to refocus, which gave us IE7 and IE8–so what? Being the dominant force at the moment does not mean you will stay here for long. Unless you have a clear vision ahead. I fail to see any signs of that vision on MS side.

When IE was at 98% they had almost no competition in the marketplace and the Internet was still just catching on. Netscape, through a combination of MS's actions and their own incompetence had become irrelevant. That was never a situation that could endure for long.

I don't disagree with your larger point. In my opinion as a web developer, IE7 and 8 are horrible browsers. My point is that Microsoft is more likely to rebound from this situation than to go out of business or become irrelevant.

I'm inclined to agree with this assertion, if only for the fact that MS has cycled in and out of browser dominance, historically.

What's interesting to me is that IE4 won for all the wrong reasons, and it looks like IE6 failed for all the right ones. It's real easy to see how MS could massively fail or succeed through their acceptance of standards, but I agree that tho they are teetering now, that doesn't necessarily indicate any future position.

And what did MS do? They disbanded the IE team and sat on their asses.

I have a point of view, I hope you don't down vote it and understand it first.

Most of HN users are web developers. In web developement, MS was a stupid company, they try to make "their standards" and not respect the other standards; which leads them to a big failure, now they are changing (with Microsoft Expression), but their visitmix.com is still missing a lot to compete even products like wordpress.com, also the tools provided their (I tried them) are buggy... So MS needs lot of monetization to get in the right track.

This happen with me also, I didn't learn ASP.net although I'm a dot net developer. I learnt PHP, PHP servers are cheap, fast, simple and do what I need. So why go with the very costing ASP.net and SQL Server??

In Windows Developement, I beg to differ and I consider MS had succeeded. why? Because Dot Net (whether it has good shares or not (and it has)) it a GREAT product. I use Vista and I'm very satisfied with the results.

WPF and Dot net are little buggy, but that's normal for anything that goes big to have problems here and there. The Dot Net FrameWork is an important evolution in the domain of programming, is there any other competent framework? If you didn't tried it and want to develop OS applications then you should. Yes, Dot Net is for any OS, Windows, Linux, MAC. With the mono project (although I didn't tried it) I think only few tweaks are needed and your application is cross-platforms.

That's for the developers. MS didn't succeded online but did Offline.

Now when I come to the office, Office 2007 is much more advanced than 2003 and worth buying, there's a lot of whole new features to create nice documents (on word) the best feature I liked, is that i can convert my document to PDF and then it can be viewed by my clients whatever their OS!

MS is not good on all things, just few and what's wrong with that?

Is google good on all things? Was google good in his "knol"?? did google succeed with "orkut"?

Every company fail and succeed that's normal and every company is an "EVIL" and try to show us that they are "GOOD" people.

The future:

I think in the future MS will stay a power, but no longer a dominance, Market will be divided between MS, MAC and Google, but as the internet, computers and technology are getting wide spread, there will be a big market for each and no matter each one to work with, just the one you like most

There is no company called MAC, there is a company call Apple which has a line of computers commonly referred to as "Macs".

thx i had confusion on their OS, company name and computer name

> Yes, Dot Net is for any OS, Windows, Linux, MAC.

No, .NET is not available on Linux (nor on the BSDs, for that matter--a far cry from "any OS"). Linux has the Mono project, but as it is not an official product in the .NET family, it lags behind the .NET framework in features language compatibility.

Also, Windows Forms is a proprietary extension to .NET, so GUI .NET applications built on Windows are not cross-platform. This is in contrast to JVM languages with Swing or SWT, for instance, or Python in combination with any number of cross-platform windowing systems.

It's telling that the article has no mention of Windows 7 which, unlike Vista, has been widely praised for it's polish and performance. The rollout through to RC has also been handled in a slick but low key manner.

Seems a little premature to write off Microsoft at this point.

I've been using Win7 for months, and I'm as happy as a school girl in a new Christamas dress.

It does look pretty good: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLU34h8SCF4

If they restore search that they damaged with vista it could be a winner.

Xbox 360 is doing well against its similar competitor, the Playstation 3. The problem is that the Wii is doing even better - not be being better, but by changing the basis of competition.

That is the one of the few ways that successful wll-run companies can die.

Does google really have the much higher a success rate with moving into new markets? How often do you really use Knol, Lively, Google Base, Checkout, Sketchup, etc.?

These days, I could care less about Microsoft. When I hear that they're about to announce a new product or enter a new market, I don't consider it important because innovation and quality just isn't in their genes. IMHO, they're living off past successes while companies like Google and Apple continue to innovate and make Microsoft a marginal player.

Innovation is term thrown awfully loosely.

Apple did not invent the MP3 player, smart phone, GUI. Google did not invent Web search, web mail, online maps. Microsoft did not invent the OS, IDE, Office suite.

Innovation is not a core-strength of these companies. As most large companies they focus on quality (creating a really good user experience) and marketing.

Companies like IBM, Philips, Amazon.com, Toyota run on innovation. AT&T and Apple (pre-90s) used to.

What happened to Microsoft last quarter was about thirteen billion dollars in revenue.

Wishful thinking.

"Microsoft’s entry into a market previously meant imminent death of any other players, but now it’s usually a source of comedy for the tech press."

As always, a sad end for the bully.

Geeks have never and will never tolerate bullies, ever.

Progress can not be caged and tamed, no matter how much money is spent on locks and chains.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com