Microsoft’s shares sink by more than 10%
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Here's something to ponder: When Bill Gates retired as CEO in 2000, imagine that the board of directors hadn't chosen Steve Ballmer to replace him. Instead, they chose a CEO who stuck a sign on his desk saying "Windows and Office Development - nothing else" and then went to sip cocktails on a beach in the Bahamas for the next 13 years.
How much more would Microsoft be worth now?
I think Ballmer's alpha-male personality has blinded him to the 'do nothing' option. He loves the thrill and prestige of investing billions of dollars in new projects and is therefore biased against doing nothing and letting the shareholders keep their money.
And when he does 'do something' his execution is often flawed. Here he is in 2007 talking about the new iPhone: "Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have products that appeal to everybody. Now we'll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get." [1]
[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/20...
Also: Ballmer was absolutely right when he made that comment about the iPhone. The iPhone did not sell phenomenally well at all when it was introduced. It did alright, but nowhere near what it does now. The average Joe could not afford one at $600. I know, because I had the original one (only because my employer bought it for me, of course), and and I was the envy of people everywhere. Random people on the street and at restaurants and airports would ask me wistfully how I liked it.
When it did take off was when AT&T started subsidizing iPhones to the tune of $400 per phone (and then make money off the contracts, because the average Joe is a short-sighted chump). That's when suddenly everyone I knew had a brand new iPhone (and later, Android phones). I would credit that business model for bringing about the smartphone revolution more than the revolutionary design Apple introduced.
Did Ballmer absolutely miss the alternative strategy? Of course! But so did Apple / AT&T initially. It was probably born later out of desperation when the iPhone wasn't selling as they hoped.
Note how in '08, when the subsidized iPhone 3G was introduced ("New features, new price") it sold almost more in one quarter than the previous original had sold all year. Of course, it also had a number or new features such as an app store, but the one that really made a difference was the subsidy. Also, as mentioned below, it was sold internationally so that certainly helped, but it was the US smartphone market that first saw phenomenal growth.
As you say, the original iPhone did do well, but that was compared to the rest of the smartphone market, which in ~2007, was tiny by today's standards, because it was mostly limited to business users. The subsidized iPhone suddenly created a consumer smartphone market. Even as the iPhone was gaining market share, the other players were also selling more and more devices every year, which is why they were complacent. Until they weren't. The rest as they say is history.
But, er, that's not actually what happened. The original iPhone was released in about six countries in June 2007, usually at $600 or equivalent. In September 2007, the price dropped to $200 (in the US; there were regional variations). In June 2008, the 3G was released, at $200, in 22 countries.
It had 3G (the original's lack of 3G made it a hard sell in Europe, in the few countries where it was even available; many European telcos had skipped EDGE and gone straight to UMTS/HSDPA), and the app store, and people were more used to the idea. In 2007, normal consumers simply didn't know what a smartphone was, at all. It's far more likely that a combination of that was responsible for the growth than a price drop which actually happened nine months earlier.
Edit: my memory is not to be trusted, but articles like this were the ones where I first heard of iPhones being subsidized by AT&T... In 2008: http://www.maclife.com/article/at_t_to_subsidize_iphone_2_0
http://m.cnet.com/news/at&ts-iphone-3g-subsidy-will-cost-em/...
I can't recall the original iPhone being subsidized until then.
That wasn't actually a new business model. Subsidy was already pretty much standard in the US; it's just that for whatever reason (probably risk-aversion), AT&T didn't do it for the iPhone for the first six months.
(Certainly he has made mistakes, but frankly I think he's done just fine. Windows phone 7-8 have been pretty good, just slightly late. Xbox has been pretty successful. Azure has been fine. Bing has been the only real failure/money loser, but at least it might be holding back Google to some extent. That was the whole purpose anyways.)
This does not show that Ballmer is crap. Just that Microsoft has been crap since Ballmer took over. Generously: he has been unable to arrest the disintegration of shareholder value.
UPDATE: Out of the 3 395 overlapping 20 trading day time periods between 7 January 2000 and 19 July 2013 MSFT outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) in 1 543 of those periods, or 45% of the time. Thus, if you were to flip a coin on any trading day between those dates and, were it to come up heads, buy and hold MSFT for 20 trading days you would, on average, make money on 9 out of 20 days. If you made money you made, on average, 4.9%. If you lost money you lost, on average, 4.6%. Comparable statistics for SPYs are a 59% win rate (3 out of 5 times), 3.2% up, 4.4% down.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer
[2] https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&...
I agree with a great many criticisms of Microsoft, but this one always strikes me as nonsensical. I was an intern at Microsoft and (while I never participated in stack ranking) it never seemed particularly destructive. I went on a tour of Valve and one question that was asked during the Q&A was what kind of evaluation and ranking system they used - the answer was stack ranking. Companies have to use some form of evaluation and ranking for their employees once they grow past a certain size - it's just an organizational requirement. The alternative is upper management without quantifiable information about the many people under them, which makes it harder to allocate resources and operate efficiently. Or so I imagine, I'm not in upper management at a very large company, but that certainly seems to be the case pretty much everywhere.
Making employees feel like shit for reasons outside their control is bad management.
Most of the criticism here doesn't mention the stock price, but since you bring it up...
> He took over at the height of the tech bubble. Microsoft's PE (and everything else) was a joke.
Even if you set your start date as the collapse of the tech bubble in 2002, Microsoft's stock price has remained pretty flat. You might argue that the market was still overvaluing Microsoft in 2002, but perhaps that was because it overvalued the ability of its CEO to grow profits and return cash to shareholders.
> Since he took over revenue and profits have increased by an impressive amount
How much of the increase in profits is due to the Windows/Office cash cow, which would have existed under any other CEO? For the remaining growth in profits, how much money was invested to achieve that growth? After all, any CEO can increase company profit by $1 billion per year - he just needs to put $20 billion in a bank account.
Balmer as a CEO brings plenty of money, sales are strong, figures are good, but mostly in fields that might as well disappear in the next years. Even things like Office and .NET which should have many years left are so heavily bound to windows that they might as well get silently siloed into niche markets while the current PC market gets disrupted.
That line, coupled with the fact that it was preceded by a cheesy line form a TV show about high-school football that most SDE's wouldn't get caught watching let alone bye into the sentiment when applied to a software company, really didn't make me think he was in touch with ... well anything.
He didn't even join the board until he got made CEO.
He has done a pretty good job with maintaining the lines that make Microsoft the bulk of its revenue but in new areas he is very fucking useless.
Bill Gates did some masterful work at making Windows the dominant force that it is but Balmer has done nothing but waste money on Windows Phone and Surface.
If only Balmer was smart enough to realize he needs someone else to get new shit off the ground, then Microsoft would have half a chance.
Against its rivals in the computer segment, Microsoft didn't have to act, but Apple came at them from a different angle; by leveraging its dominant position in the music player market. Nokia, which had a crushingly dominant place in the smartphone business when Apple joined, tried the "just keep doing what you do" strategy for a long while; their marketshare steadily dropped. Probably not coincidentally, it was an ex-MS exec Elop that changed that strategy, with results comparable to Microsoft's. RIM is still clinging to it, with no success.
In comparison, Google had a more measured, deliberate approach, but they did react to Apple. When Apple went into the smartphone business, Google was gearing up to fight against Nokia, RIM and Microsoft. The disruption caused by Apple forced Google to reevaluate. They figured out key places where Apple was unable or unwilling to compete on, and capitalized on those.
Apple didn't come at them in an unavoidable way at all - Apple was going for a small sector of the consumer market, where MS could have ripped the business market away from an already-floundering RIM inside a generation. It's just not Apple's way to target enterprise functionality the way MS can.
I admire Gordon Letwin as much as the next guy, but OS/2 was never going to be the commercial success that Windows became, for basically the reasons the memo lays out: Windows 3.0/3.1 absolutely dominated the exploding PC market because it was targeted at hardware that anyone could afford. OS/2 was dependent on a level of hardware that wouldn't be commonplace until another generation or two of Moore's Law cycled through.
Microsoft simply didn't have that time to waste, and neither did their customers. The choice was between abandoning a phenomenally successful OS and API for the "next generation", or slowly building a bridge from that OS into the future carrying their customers with them. They made the right call, even if it did take roughly 11 years until Windows XP for the transition to truly be complete.
Like if Apple announced an "iPhone and nothing else" strategy.
Companies with billions of dollars in the bank are in the best position to do risky R&D projects and the rest of the industry is better because of it.
But "bad CEO"? Come on! If you look beyond the HN filter bubble, he has definitively diversified MS beyond its early Windows/Office shackles, increased revenues consistently and made (most of) the new divisions very profitable.
And if you think there's no "HN bubble", ask yourself why there's this huge front-page thread about MSFT tanking 10% but little talk about GOOG tanking 14%.
A quick search turns up one article[1] claiming 3BN loss over 10 years.
As far as Azure, I'd be surprised if they've recovered all the money they've put into engineering and so on. Maybe if you consider they had to do a lot of similar work for MS online.
1: http://www.neowin.net/news/report-microsofts-xbox-division-h...
But Xbox is just their entry into the next battlefield: the living room and tv.
What does it bring that a tivo that plays netflix and hulu doesn't already? Of anyone I know, they either have no cable (younger gen), where they just hook a computer into the tv to watch online content, they have cable and a tivo or provider DVR (mid aged families) or they are >60 years old, don't want anything to change, and can't learn to use a dvr even when I guide them through it (my grandparents).
Who is your audience? Why? What value are you delivering they don't already have in their living room? How is that going to save your company? How is an xbox one, which, while not sale-subsidized by license fees like the 360 or ps3 were, isn't making you healthy margins but supposed to provide revenue generation?
Looking further down the line, you can see a future where home automation is centered around your central console, another area where I think Microsoft could make some moves. In a sense, they could own the operating system of your home. But this is probably a decently long ways out, so who knows.
Well, as long as they are "free" and subsidized by bills. People like free, and cable companies usually give out the ancient hot DRM DVRs for free with subscriptions. I don't see people lining up to replace their DVR with an xbox (which isn't an actual replacement, it has no coax in or tv tuner).
> Why have 3 pieces of hardware when you can have one
Xbox doesn't have DOCSIS either. You can't put a cable modem in it. You maybe can use it as a router, but you can use anything with a land line ethernet plug as a router, or you could get a hotspot as a router.
> you can see a future where home automation is centered around your central console
I see this, but xbox one is so locked down, expensive, and it uses gamepads, not tv remotes. I don't see people keeping the xbone on as a media sync server, when you could buy a router with attached storage for a quarter the price.
I see a full-os media server box plugged into the tv that can act as router, sync server, tv dvr, game console, and with miracast etc provide displays all over a home, but I don't think xbone is sophisticated enough to do it. Does it even support non-xbox gamepad input?
I'd be astonished if Azure is profitable; AWS isn't, and it sees vastly higher volume at similar prices. And, of course, profitability for Azure is a messy concept; is it profitable when it makes more than they spend on it, or when it makes more than what they spend on it plus what they're losing by selling fewer Windows Server licenses to Amazon et al?
An earlier comment about how better it would have been for Microsoft to just do nothing. Maybe, from a money perspective. But meanwhile they did research, tried out designs, products, services. It's not all loss.
There's more to the trip than the destination. There's a whole ride where things happen and have a value in themselves. Unless we only value the shareholders' money.
So, it's perfectly reasonable to say that any investment with dramatically worse return than a share buy-back is a financial loser. If you'd like to argue it's a strategic winner, then change the time window or otherwise make the financial analysis take those strategic gains into account (with an appropriate discount to compare NPVs).
Sure. That means they decide between investing a certain amount of capital in some projects, or returning that capital to the investors.
> So, it's perfectly reasonable to say that any investment with dramatically worse return than a share buy-back is a financial loser.
Not, it's not reasonable. Investing on a project has return for the company, but dividends or buybacks don't. They're in a different category. I think OP wanted to say "it would have been better to invest the money at the risk-free rate than investing on that project".
If the return from a project for the company (and the therefore the shareholders) is greater than that of a dividend/buyback, do the project. If the dividend/buyback is the idea with the best return, do that.
This evaluation works whether on a projected/discounted look-forward basis or a backward looking basis. In both cases, you have to model assumptions about the path not taken.
Note that most established companies have a portfolio of ideas. Few operating companies return most of their net profits to shareholders. (some companies setup as financial instruments do/must, and whether a REIT is an operating company or not is a question, but Microsoft certainly is an operating company and returning 100% of net profits, even if that were the best idea they had on first-order evaluation, would be a terrible idea.)
At any rate, the relevant thing to compare Microsoft's investments to is the opportunity cost of the money. If Ballmer spent ten billion dollars on a project that netted only a 3% ROI, then shareholders would have been better off receiving that money and putting it into other companies.
Xbox could be seen as a loss-leader to grab a place in the living room, where they've done better than most other players in the space.
Windows and Office is not the whole story today.
Azure including their Virtual Machines are a great competitor to Amazon AWS and EC2. I've used both.
Office 365 and Hosted Exchange are a great competitor to Google Apps. I've used both.
Windows Phone 8 is a great competitor to iPhone. I had iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, iPhone 4s and now a Nokia Lumia 928.
Windows Surface Pro (i.e. not RT) is a great competitor to iPad. It really is a desktop/laptop replacement unlike the iPad and again, I've owned both.
Windows 8 had several issues out of the gate. I use it every day and spent the 10 minutes necessary to learn the new interface to get used to it. Many people aren't willing to do that. Vista had even more problems, and Microsoft still came roaring back with a very successful Windows 7. Microsoft is hoping Windows 8.1 does the same thing for Windows 8.
In all of this, the customers win. Expect cheaper prices with increased competition - example being how Amazon just lowered their EC2 pricing by as much as 80%.
Win8 is hated/feared more than Vista was.
The new xbox is probably the most panned product announcement I've ever seen.
Office 365 and Hosted Exchange are not competitors to Google Apps, they're poor competitors to Office and Exchange.
Windows Phone has been a dismal failure in terms of actual customer traction - especially outside USA. Numerous product placements are making this more of a joke than anything - (everyone laughs when a hacker in Burn Notice pulls out a Windows Phone).
Surface Pro is not even in the same market segment as an iPad - Surface Pro competes with laptops and the Mac Air, not with the iPad. You can't use them for the same tasks.
Azure is in no way a competitor to AWS/EC2 - it's more a competitor to Digital Ocean in terms of scale, and Digital Ocean is outperforming it completely.
I get that you've used the Windows stuff and the competition and find the Windows stuff better for you - that's likely because of how familiar you are with the Windows environment and Windows announcements. However, most people off the street are completely confused by it. You need to try and view the situation objectively if you want to understand why the MS share price is diving and all your customers are hopping ship.
WinXP is still the dominant Enterprise Operating system (crazy I know).
Exchange email is seen as a relic of a time gone by for new companies and something that admins usually hate in large companies. Outsource it (and I'll note that the largest reseller of Exchange, Intermedia, doesn't sell Office365).
The first windows phone I had was Windows Mobile 4.0. The flipphone handsets that came out during 6.0 were good, but every one of their gigantic, flagship, Halo devices, was terrible. HTC had some of the most badass, feature-packed phones ever, and the Operating system killed them. It's just a pile of bloat, the same way WinPhone7 and WinPhone8 appear to be. Look at the work they've done with Nokia where they basically paid Nokia billions of dollars in marketing money to attempt to promote WinPho8 and ended up hemmoraging marketshare in the transition from Symbian (Elop's "Burning Platform" memo should go down as the worst corporate writing ever, and it's not lost on me that he came from $MSFT).
I won't even dignify the surface with commentary. It was an unmitigated disaster that everyone saw coming.
Azure is only large because of promo usage. It's not competitive even with Digital Ocean in terms of scale (my personal opinion, I have no facts to back this up except anecdotes I can't publish). There's a lot of empty instances in Azure land.
Microsoft is making a lot of obvious errors. They continue to be unable to remove FUD and the Cruft of age. If they go down this path, the inertia will eventually kill them; it might take 20 years, but Microsoft is already becoming a place that finds it hard to recruit. I would argue that without their ridiculous abuse of the H1B program they would not be able to remain competitive.
In short, there's a lot of stuff to fix. The bright spot for Microsoft, as always, is licensing, but that's an ugly, ugly business.
My $.02.
Source? Everything I see states that Windows 7 is the dominant Windows operating system in the Enterprise.
HTC had some of the most badass, feature-packed phones ever, and the Operating system killed them. It's just a pile of bloat, the same way WinPhone7 and WinPhone8 appear to be.
This is just silly. You bring up Windows Mobile 4.0, then 6.0. Then you lump Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 in with them. Tell me - which WP8 phone have you owned? Because you're replying to a thread I started in which I said everything before WP8 stunk. So if you haven't used WP8, there isn't much point to your comment.
I won't even dignify the surface with commentary. It was an unmitigated disaster that everyone saw coming.
Surface Pro is doing well. Surface RT is what is not doing well - as you said, it's a solution looking for a problem.
There's a lot of empty instances in Azure land.
Where do you get these stats?
and it's not lost on me that he came from $MSFT
And it's not lost on me that you use a 90s-era style anti-Microsoft inclusion of a $ when mentioning them. Do you at least realize how biased you are or do you lack introspection?
You think you can tell me my comment is worthless despite the many years I've spent deeply entrenched in Microsoft culture. The past has relevance.
Well is relative with respect to the Surface Pro, but I won't waste my keystrokes attacking its sales figures.
As I mentioned in another comment I've got a lot of folks who run big stuff on Azure and I can tell you that almost all of their instance time is comped. Take that for what it's worth, I don't run in Azure and don't plan to run in Azure, but I can appreciate your comments here.
The $MSFT comes from StockTweets. I'm not biased, I am a student of the industry. If you ask me to critique Apple, I'd have a number of things to say. Microsoft isn't all negative, they still make a ton of money, but calling the Kettle black isn't a crime. WP8 is not a dominant operating system. Azure is not a dominant cloud infrastructure. Surface is not a dominant tablet.
We can debate semantics, but we can both agree that Microsoft has a lot of work to do. I believe it's in the product, and, if I understand you correctly, you believe it's in the branding/marketing. Chances are we're both partially correct.
Does that make sense?
The closest claim that was made to any of these was that WP8, Azure, and Surface Pro are "viable offerings" in their markets. Not that they're dominant. You even give an example of "folks who run big stuff on Azure" -- how is that not proof that Azure at least provides competition in the cloud services market?
I articulated this point in a blog post for our site[0] in which I describe a phenomenon I call Bezos' Law. Essentially, the cost of cloud computing in general (currently driven by AWS) is cut in half roughly every 18 months. This is like Moore's law, except it's driven by market conditions instead of technical innovation. The endgame of Bezos' Law is 0, but everyone else will get out well before then (once it ceases being a profitable business). Since AWS will be the largest player in cloud infrastructure, it will eventually shift from being a profit center for other organizations and will become a cost center. After that it becomes a matter of time.
IMHO, this is also the plan for Amazon's Commerce business long-term and is why the market provides them with such a ridiculous P/E ratio.
So does Azure provide competition? Maybe. I think most of the people on Azure are on there because Microsoft is comping the time (pure conjecture based on the kinds of numbers they put forward). The endgame, from my perspective, is that everyone gets choked out by Amazon with time unless someone upends them, and that's why I think the position of "providing competition" isn't going to materially move the needle for a company like Microsoft. Not now and not long term. They've called Azure a billion dollar business, but only when counting comped hours.
Lots of conjecture, I definitely put myself out there for some flaming, but that's how you learn whether your positions can stand on their own merits. Let me know what your thoughts are :).
To be clear, in spite of everything I've said today, I am long-term bullish on Microsoft. I just think Ballmer isn't making smart decisions right now.
Well, it offers competition in a niche; it's largely price-competitive with AWS for Windows instances, but not for other OSes.
That has been my impression, yep. I know a few people using it, but I don't think any of them are actually paying for it.
Try looking at reports not authored by the Microsoft marketing department.
Surface Pro is doing well.
Seriously. Whatever they're paying you, is it worth your dignity?
That seems improbable. Windows 7 only passed Windows XP in global usage under a year ago, and while reliable figures are hard to come by, most polls show in the region of 60% XP usage for the enterprise sector.
I think I'm going to need a citation if you want me to believe that.
[0]. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-29/microsoft-azure-sal...
Believe me, if Azure had $1B in revenue, Microsoft would not be quiet about it. The keyword "Sales" is there for a reason.
*Edit: "Microsoft’s $1 billion sales figure includes Azure, as well as software provided to partners to create related Windows cloud services, Anderson said in an interview." from the article. This is definitely not just instance time they're talking about.
Edit: quote from the article: > “I expect them to double annually from here,” Staten said of Microsoft’s Azure revenue.
Seems to at least imply sales and revenue are interchangeable in this context.
I must gracefully admit my error here. It's possible that they're counting comped time on the system as revenue, but it's much more unlikely if they're using the term revenue in public.
Edit: The only leg I have to stand on is the comment about the cost of software being included in Azure revenue. That's smelly accounting IMHO, but maybe I'm missing a detail.
When they talk about software being counted as part of the billing do you have any idea what they might mean? I believe it was described as software to build applications in Azure.
Also, I'm going to be straight with you... There's not one bit of me that believes that number.
Market Cap: 15.6B
Not Windows 8, but Windows 7.
The 3 GB of usable memory you're limited to with 32-bit Windows XP is very restrictive.
This is revisionist thinking and shows your own bias that you accuse me of.
You have a review of every single Microsoft product. I have to ask - what is your experience with Office 365, Hosted Exchange and Azure?
What tasks can you do with an iPad and not with Surface and vice-versa?
Flagship Windows Phone 8 (i.e. Lumia 920 or Lumia 928) is better than an iPhone. I've owned 3 iPhones - how many Windows Phone 8 flagship devices have you owned?
I, like nearly everyone on the planet, have never owned a flagship windows phone. I have no reason to own one. It doesn't matter if it is better than an iPhone or not - nobody buys them because nobody wants a windows phone. It's probably just a branding issue at this point, but branding is very important.
Irrelevant to the mobile phone market itself, but I would personally never buy a locked down windows phone as I enjoy hacking my phone to do strange things / connect to strange devices - and windows phone just doesn't offer that. I was previously very involved with windows mobile which was gloriously open and far more hacker friendly than windows phone. It's a pity MS discontinued it, the HTC Universal was one nice piece of hardware.
Office 365 is a decent product, I don't have any issues with it except for the marketing strategy (I disagree with cutting off the channel).
We run hosted exchange through intermedia at my office and other than some occasional issues with syncing, we don't have problems. It's certainly a bigger headache than Google Apps, but it's what we started on and it's not enough of a pain to get us to switch.
I have not used Azure personally, but have friends who operate fairly significant infrastructures on there. They've no complaints about the DC (except for the ridiculous SSL incident) but more about things like provisioning times and support responses. This is hearsay though so take it with a grain of salt.
You can do everything you can do on an iPad on a Surface, but the surface is visually unappealing, priced too high and not user-friendly. Those things matter a lot more than they used to; Microsoft needs to understand that the facts on the ground for product development have changed.
The Lumia 920 is not better than the iPhone, I don't know what criteria you could possibly be using to come to that conclusion. That's pure fanboyism, IMHO; I mean they faked the photos for the launch of the phone!? It doesn't get much worse than that.
I have a background in wireless and have used almost every version of the Windows Handset family. I can tell you that the process manager used to be the problem, along with the user experience, but today the issues are cultural as much as they are usability. Microsoft has a culture of adding options to menus and throwing in the kitchen sink; there's no product development because everyone is operating their own Fiefdom. Very similar to the culture at AT&T.
The only thing you 'need' to use is the Start Screen, but that should be a rarity since you should have the majority of your familiar programs down on the bar. Moreover, even when you need to use it, you use it the same way you do in 7. Just hit the windows key and type away!
My one complaint would be that the settings are a bit of a mess. There was clearly a rush to make things accessible from both the Desktop and Metro side of things, and as a result the settings can be kind of odd to find/navigate.
If it could really be disabled (and the disabling was supported by Microsoft instead of in spite of them) I'd agree with you, but it actually can't. Or at least Microsoft has gone obnoxiously far out of their way to ensure you will continually invoke it by accident, even if you tried to turn it off.
For example even after installing classic shell, random videos and photos still open the metro UI - full screen in all its glory. I also often end up falsely triggering the multitasking gesture (swipe from left=>right across trackpad). And the wifi-control panel has been turned into a brain damaged metro simpleton. And in 8.1, searching my start menu is going to return Bing results even if I was only looking for a file on my computer. My documents are going up to SkyDrive by default even though that might violate my privacy, cause me to break the law in certain industries that are regulated, cost me bandwidth or just plain be against my wishes.
If I had one word for this Windows release it would be "disrespectful". Because Microsoft has put all their own needs ahead of my own. In their selfish desire to promote their own products they have essentially become the bloatware that infected all their PCs and used to be the fault of the OEMs.
Surface RT is just the worst form factor for use in bed; the iPad is 10 times easier to hold in portrait or landscape, not to mention the high res screen looks much better than the Surface for close up in-bed viewing (RT again, I don't have a Pro). The Surface seems to be useful for Office when on a table where the keyboard can be used, but that is not part of my usage habits.
I see how Surface is cool, but the iPad still provides a better experience for my personal use cases. Haven't tried the Pro, but I already carry a laptop around for coding.
> Flagship Windows Phone 8 (i.e. Lumia 920 or Lumia 928) is better than an iPhone.
My 920 lacks apps :( Even Facebook and Skype are missing from the market my phone is locked too. I keep an old iPhone 4 (bought in the same region, ironically) in my bag for apps. Otherwise, the 920 is a wonderful phone.
What market is that? My 928 has both Skype and Facebook installed on it from the Windows Store. I'm guessing you're outside the U.S. but I'm curious just where you are and why you don't have access to the standard apps in the Windows Store.
True and obvious among techies but not sure about the average joe.
>The new xbox is probably the most panned product announcement I've ever seen.
They really f#ed up on that one (not the concept but the way it was presented) and it got worse when Sony decided to throw in a few blows while they were still down.
>Office 365 and Hosted Exchange are not competitors to Google Apps, they're poor competitors to Office and Exchange.
Agree it wasn't the best Idea to go cloud. They just made it easy for their existing consumers to compare the pros and cons between them and Google's offering.
>Windows Phone has been a dismal failure in terms of actual customer traction - especially outside USA.
What? If anything Windows Phone and Nokia is growing exceptionally in the emerging markets specifically India and Africa.
>Surface Pro is not even in the same market segment as an iPad.
Yes it is. Surface Pro is a great mix of device. I already have a laptop/utrabook but wanted a tablet when travelling. The options were Ipad, Nexus 10 or Surface pro. I ended up choosing Surface pro because it offers everything I need in a tablet while letting me use my work apps on the go. Git, Visual Studio, Photoshop, you name it, if it installs on your laptop, it installs on the Surface. Can't emphasize how productive it has been ever since I got it.
> True and obvious among techies but not sure about the average joe.
I've actually noticed the opposite. Techies seem to largely think "eh, interesting but I'm not interested" while regular consumers nearly pass out ranting about it. That's my take-away from talking with coworkers/peers, and my extended family.
The sales figures probably bear this out.. it isn't techies avoiding Windows 8 that is causing those poor numbers.
Well, Windows Phone is. Nokia is declining in those markets; it's simply cannibalising its existing large Symbian market there with WP.
Do people like it though? I'm in the EU and everyone, including me, who has Windows phones really despise them. Not only techies; one of my friends threw hers into the toilet because she couldn't bear that crap anymore. Which is stupid ofcourse, but it shows how deep the hatred goes. The thing just really doesn't work on many levels. We make apps for it because clients ask us too, but I would never use that thing in it's current form for anything other than that. I have done for a few months and it was a joke. So with aggressive marketing (which I see all around me here) they manage to sell a lot of these phones, but do people actually like them? I haven't seen anyone happy with it except a few people here on HN. I don't really understand how that works, but everyone who I meet in real life really hates it.
Surface I don't know; lot of people here on HN seem to like it. I tried it in the shop and the keyboard was annoying the crap out of me after about 5 seconds. I'm used to Apple chiclet keyboards now and I type blind and fast; it seemed to really not function that well doing that. Maybe I need more than 5 seconds, but the first impression was that it was a toy. And only a tablet is worthless as I need to write code.
The amount of brick walls I hit is horrible to say the least.
Windows by day, Linux by night.
Tables are turning though. First our cache layer with memcache on CentOS, then our SMTP servers, then our dev servers and repository, now a minor subsystem...
Try google search autocompletion of "google apps vs" and the first result is office 365.
Whether O365 can "win" is another question, but it's definitely a credible competitor.
(Not to be an MS apologist -- we've tried Azure and had to hightail back to EC2, they screw up many other things, but O365 fits a purpose for many companies well)
"electric refrigerator vs." will get you autocompletes about propane refrigerators. This shouldn't be taken as evidence that propane refrigerators are taking off... propane refrigerators are merely the only sensible thing that could be compared to electric refrigerators. They are the only competitor of note, as uncommon as they are.
Or to put it more directly, what could "google apps vs" possibly autocomplete to other than Office 365 stuff? It is the only logical autocomplete.
Not from what I have seen. Vista was hated with intensity, while Win8 is simply 'not necessary yet'/'not better enough to make me upgrade from Win7'.
About the Surface Pro vs Mac Air vs iPad: I expect to be able to use a dockable 2014 Ubuntu Tablet for all the tasks I could do with any of these in 2013.
>Office 365 and Hosted Exchange are not competitors to Google Apps, they're poor competitors to Office and Exchange.
Uhh, why not?
>Azure is in no way a competitor to AWS/EC2 - it's more a competitor to Digital Ocean in terms of scale, and Digital Ocean is outperforming it completely.
Again, reference?
>You need to try and view the situation objectively if you want to understand why the MS share price is diving
Share price is diving? As compared to what? If you read the "article" you can see that the share price was ~28 just three months ago and today it closed at more than $31.
> ..and all your customers are hopping ship.
I am completely lost with the extreme hyperbole here.
Well for starters let's compare MSFT to AAPL. Here's a chart comparing them over the last 12 months:
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=MSFT+Interactive#symbol=m...
If that link works correctly, any unbiased party will clearly acknowledge that in the past year Microsoft is up 15.5% (including today's slide) while Apple is down 30.0%.
So - the question becomes - precisely whose share price is diving? The clear answer is Apple, while Microsoft has done little but gone up over the last 12 months.
At its peak, how much bigger was MSFT than Apple?
Hint: Lots.
Everything I needed to know about Steve Ballmer -- and Microsoft's future -- I learned when he laughed at the iPhone on national TV.
The market share of Windows Phone 8 is extremely small and doesn't seem to pick up.
The PC market is shrinking extremely and many analysts now point to Windows 8 as one of the reasons behind that. You can point to a 10 minute learning curve and while I agree that the new Windows interface is not hard to learn I still think it's an extremely bad user experience. The standard apps are just so incredibly bad (e.g. the mail app, the photo app, the video app, even the store itself) that I'm not using them at all. I spend 99.9% of my time on the old Windows desktop.
The market share of the Surface again is extremely small and I don't see any indications of it growing.
I totally agree that competition is good for the customer (and might potentially be bad for competitors), but so far that doesn't help Microsoft.
With many of their new products, Microsoft seems to finally have viable offerings.
Your statement of:
Well, the market and the customers don't seem to agree on all of this
Seems to miss that point. Just to be more clear - it was only in the last few weeks that Verizon had a flagship Windows Phone 8 device available (Nokia Lumia 928). Has the market really had time to absorb that Verizon now has a Windows Phone 8 device that can compete with the iPhone? I don't think it has. As a former iPhone user, I was personally responsible for at least a dozen people buying iPhones. Now as a Windows Phone 8 user for the past couple weeks, I am responsible for someone returning their iPhone 5 to get a Lumia 928 and there are three additional people in my office who are now going to get a Lumia instead of the iPhone 5 they were planning on when they are next eligible for an upgrade.
The PC market is shrinking extremely and many analysts now point to Windows 8 as one of the reasons behind that.
...and Windows ME was a failure, Windows Vista was a failure and Windows 8 is proving to be less than stellar. Let's see how it is when Windows 8.1 is released generally and people have time to react to Haswell processors having been released. There are also a lot of people that bought iPads thinking it would fully replace their PC that are now sorely disappointed.
The market share of the Surface again is extremely small and I don't see any indications of it growing.
Surface Pro is selling well. Don't judge it by Surface RT which was a desperate attempt at increasing market share to get more Windows 8-style applications developed.
You're making the case that Windows ME sucked, Vista sucked, 7 was good, and 8 sucks.
You're absolutely missing the bigger picture, which is this: nobody cares about operating systems anymore. Everyone, I think, finally gets that the function of the operating system is to get out of the way of the application that the user is running. iOS and Android are perfect examples of this. Everyone who argues about operating systems now talks about contextual menu this, flat button style that, driver update this, without realizing that the typical primary use of a computer these days-- desktop, laptop, tablet, whatever-- has nothing to do with the operating system and everything to do with HTML and JSON.
You talk about how a lot of people bought iPads thinking that it would fully replace their PC, and now they're disappointed. I would argue that, based upon the rate at which mobile web traffic is increasing, those people are anything but disappointed.
I have serious doubts that there will be a Windows 9. There will simply be no market for it. No kid today is asking their parents for a Windows Phone or a Surface. None. When those kids grow up, Microsoft will simply stop existing save for the Xbox.
This one statement about Windows 9 speaks volumes as to your viewpoint. This statement is so colossally and obviously incorrect that it actually brings into question your every opinion on this topic.
Here's the thing - Microsoft has been working on Windows 9 since November of 2012. Here's just one citation on that:
http://www.windows9update.com/2012/11/windows-9-development-...
It's been speculated for a while that Windows 9 would be released in 2014. Did you not hear that Microsoft is more rapidly releasing operating systems going forward? In fact I've seen roadmap documents for both Windows 9 and Windows 10 and know that they have R&D departments working on features for both concurrently.
And this brings me to my main point... You know nothing about Microsoft of today. In your entire resume, you list one Microsoft technology - SQL Server. Can you just admit that you're completely ignorant about what they offer today? Your arguments are a mix of 1996 to 2011 rants and product complaints based on things you've heard and not experienced. It's intellectual dishonesty to be so critical of a company and their products when you have not used modern versions of what they offer.
Windows has a 92+% operating system market share as of July of 2013. The next release of Windows is going to be released in the next 12-18 months. So let me ask you - your honest opinion is that Windows market share will go from a virtual monopoly to low enough where Microsoft will just give up on operating systems and not release the next version? I refuse to believe that someone who can log into a computer can actually believe such a ridiculous thing as that.
I think native applications still have advantages, no matter the platform. Specially for games.
The thing is, the web is most valuable to me when there are stable parseable formats that I can push into my native infrastructure(voice and UNIX commands with clear, standalone graphics output), there isn't room for "apps" in my world, even if they're "webapps".
The reason I don't use webapps, is that using them for my essential tasks would cost me hours of time per week in waiting for buffer-bloated connections to deliver my miniscule control packets to finally update the view I'm looking at; One can spend several seconds waiting, where I could spend one framedraw waiting for the same result locally.
> Let's see how it is when Windows 8.1 is released generally and people have time to react to Haswell processors having been released.
I'll be interested if the consumers even notice - is the average consumer clued up enough to understand the significant of a point release or what a new processor adds? In my (somewhat pompous) view, Apple's success is its focus on selling the consumer things they can understand the need for, not numbers. I see MS is taking this approach with the new Win8 marketing but it'll be interesting to see if they can pull it off with 8.1
Haswell is significant because of the substantially lower power it requires which translates into significantly longer battery life. Consumers will notice that.
You might be unfamiliar with Intel's Tick-Tock strategy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock) but it does mean real world benefits to consumers that they will notice.
And MS is still (a bit more quietly) trying to kill off Open Source in general, and the GPL in particular.
And MS is still trying to control your data by locking it up in non-standard (don't start saying it's a standard if even MS doesn't follow it) in proprietary products.
And MS is still running embrace, extend, extinguish on every competing technology.
The reality today is that Microsoft does not have the engineering talent that they used to have, and their design talent has been completely drained. They simply are not a 21st century software company anymore. The marketplace perception of Microsoft now is that they are a dinosaur that also makes a gaming console. Period.
They may very well have a functional competitor to EC2, but I cannot think of one serious company that is choosing Azure over AWS, or Rackspace, or even Digital Ocean or Heroku. The Azure Case Studies page is an absolute joke, a mockery of what you would expect from a behemoth as Microsoft. The simple fact is that Amazon completely owns the market that Microsoft is trying to break into. (This is especially funny given the years 1992-1996)
They may very well have a functional competitor to Google Docs/Drive/Apps/whatever it's called now, but again, Google is totally dominating that market (crappy updates to Gmail aside). Microsoft is stuck on the outside looking in, and anyone who is starting a company, given the choice between Office 365 and Google Apps, they aren't picking Office anymore.
Windows Phone is a joke and I'm not going to devote any more words to it.
Windows 8 isn't even worth any discussion.
The reality is, is that as kids in college today enter the workforce with their Android or iPhone, and Gmail/Gdrive, and knowledge of AWS, the need for Microsoft (which you have to admit, MS has been coasting on for probably 15-20 years now) is evaporating. If all Microsoft ever tries to do now is play catchup to Amazon, Google, and Apple, they're won't necessarily be squashed, but they'll just become irrelevant.
Given that i hate Apple much more than I hate Microsoft (because seriously, Apple are much more dangerous) I'm stuck on Windows (until I write some kind of Markdown/LaTeX to power point converter (unfortunately, I also have a thesis to finish, so that's a while away yet) for work, where the first thing I install is Cygwin (and the thing I miss most is easy X-forwarding) and yet I can't switch.
Additionally, Excel is a fine product for quick and dirty analysis, while being a nightmare for any kind of continued development, so I end up using that.
Please don't mention Impress and Calc, I use them but Impress just doesn't interoperate well enough with powerpoint to make it useful, and Calc is good (regex search) but not as polished as Excel.
Its so unbelievably depressing that I'm stuck with this on the desktop, but that's the power of network effects for you.
For another example, see Facebook.
They may be for running Windows servers, but they're certainly not price-competitive for running Linux servers in most cases.
> Expect cheaper prices with increased competition - example being how Amazon just lowered their EC2 pricing by as much as 80%.
I suspect that's more to do with Google's EC2 clone, which is actually price-competitive with AWS. Also, that reduction was just on dedicated instances, which pretty much nobody uses; they largely exist for things like PCI compliance.
There are so many ways to make SurfaceRT a compelling product. If it supported Win32 API, IF it had domain-joining support, if it wasn't completely locked down to the Windows Store... maybe it'd be a compelling buy. But as it is, it has all of the disadvantages of tablets (locked down, proprietary API), with few of the advantages of Windows.
Then you've got XBox One mistake. So much wasted potential there...
Windows 8 has to happen though, the computing industry is evolving towards touch controls, and as primitive as Windows8 is with touch... its a step in the right direction for Microsoft. But they need to be more sensitive to their business partners.
Screw it, I'll just get the iPad.
1. Small number of products and product lines make it easier to explain where each one fits in your "digital lifestyle."
2. Mostly numerical differences within those product lines, amount of storage and overall computing power. Memory for desktops and laptops. Retina is an obvious exception to this, but most likely transitional.
3. Mostly self descriptive naming, no Sony style model numbers, no overly cute but inconsistant naming. (Apple reserves this for features, mostly ones that only developers ever see.)
4. Visible price points, value emphasised over price. (Same reason I don't expect a plastic iPhone outside of possibly China.) Price points match up with point #1, more storage costs more in mostly even increments.
(The answer: because Surface Pro is too expensive to appeal to the consumer tablet market, and because Microsoft wants to hedge its bets in case Intel can't catch up to ARM in the mobile space. But both of those are reasons why Microsoft would want Surface RT to exist, not why a customer would.)
Win32 API is the only real reason why people use Windows. Take that away, and you've got... well... SurfaceRT.
Then Sony and made their announcements, of features that are actually normal and expected since consoles exist, as if it was something totally new and awesome, in a very obvious way to give more ammo to Microsoft keep shooting themselves.
It was very entertaining.
Specially looking at the stock market (when Xbone wss announced, SONY shares jumped 8%) too.
There's the problem - it's not actually targeted at anybody properly. It's a business tablet (office pre-installed, heavily marketed with its keyboard and flip stand, all the ads show chic business people in suits dancing around). But it can't join a domain, won't run the line-of-business apps people actually need, doesn't support VBA (so your excel sheet will load but if it is at all interesting, it won't work), and the built-in office is not actually licensed for commercial use, so businesses who care about the fine details of that sort of thing can't actually use it anyway.
Ok, so its a consumer tablet. But it's not got essential things like a good gmail app (didn't even have outlook when it shipped), youtube appp, it sucks for viewing photos you plug in on a USB drive, can't run Chrome, has (or had) few games worth running and has a confusing new UI that is hard to figure out, so playing with it in the store usually results in frustration.
It's half awesome for each of its audiences, but its got showstoppers for both of them. It's a true first generation product, and if there was time and room for the second generation it could be awesome. But Haswell is here and the OEMs have no patience for waiting around for RT to improve when they can be selling something that actually meets everyone's needs.
Just saying, not all consumers are "my mom" who just wants to play candy crush saga and check their email.
The market confusion between the two is enormous, and it's not going in the direction Microsoft wanted: I routinely run into people who are under the impression that all tablets with Windows that they see are crippled ARM devices and not usable computers. If tablets running Windows are Microsoft's future they badly poisoned the well with RT.
Perhaps Microsoft's problem is that features like "domain-joining support" make their products "compelling."
Next time you should focus on providing evidence to support rational discussion, instead of being facetious.
So for the first time in XBox's history, the XBox is launching with strictly weaker hardware than its closest competitor. (XBox 360 at least had a GPU that was 2x stronger than the PS3 GPU, and the XBox 360 also had faster RAM. PS3 won on CPU power... but lost out on everything else.)
There is terrible, terrible press across the whole internet about the XBox One-Eighty. Video Gamers overall have a negative impression on it.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/12 http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/21
And did it matter at all? From what I remember of this current generation's history, if games looked any different on the PS3 than the 360, the developers blamed it on the tools and how difficult the PS3 was to program for, not on the weaker hardware. Developers made cross-platform titles for the Xbox first and ported to the PS3 because Xbox was easier.
When I was 16 years old I argued console hardware specs. These days I don't hear many experience gamers mention it at all, because when it comes down to it, minor differences in specs doesn't really matter.
Certain memory transfers on the PS3 are just straight up broken: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1007286/ps3-hardwar...
The XBox was "easier" to program for because it was a more balanced system. Overall, the XBox360 was both simpler and more powerful.
By making XBox360 more powerful, previous soft-exclusives like Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid made their way to the XBox360. Sony lost a lot of publishers because of the boneheaded hardware they shoved into developer's faces.
It is Microsoft that has made this mistake in this generation. Not only from a policy stand point against indie gamers (ie: Oddworld moving to PS4 exclusive title. As well as SuperGiant Games making Transistor PS4 exclusive), but also by launching with weaker (yet paradoxically more expensive) hardware.
The PS4 will be easier to program for, it has a simpler more unified architecture, and Sony's policies are more friendly towards developers.
While it barely matters for the end consumer, it is easy to see which systems producers will prefer in the coming generation.
The architectures seem near identical--the only big difference would seem to be that the XBO will have dedicated framebuffer memory, probably hidden behind a system call anyways.
As for being more friendly to developers, Microsoft has always had the best tools and documentation for developers (long live SGI, poor bastards).
I don't really see where you're getting this from.
It is dead obvious which console has won the support of indie developers.
Microsoft may have superior documentation... but when you _require_ indie gamers to find a publisher before they're allowed to make an XBox one game, the number of titles on your system will suffer significantly.
A number of PS4 indie developers want to program for the XBox One, but they can't due to Microsoft's boneheaded policy. It doesn't matter how good the XBox One development kit is, if Microsoft fails to hand it off to innovative developers.
Again, XBox One _POLICY_ is bad for indie developers.
Eh? Where are you getting that? The Xbox 360 Xenos GPU was based on ATI's R520 and the PS3's RSX was based on Nvidia's G70 architecture. They were roughly equivalent to each company's flagship Radeon X1800 and GeForce 7800 lines at the time.
The real design win for the 360 was a shared memory pool instead of a split CPU/GPU memory architecture, but I've never seen anything to suggest that the 360 had a GPU anywhere near "2x stronger."
2x faster Triangle Setup rate, 4x faster Vertex Shader processing, 50% faster pixel shaders, 2x faster Anti-Aliasing...
The PS3 makes up for it as they use all of those Cell processors basically as a GPU. But in terms of pure GPU Girth, the XBox360 was just straight up easier to use and more powerful.
--------------
Basically... despite all the major press about the PS3 "supercomputer", XBox360 was a simpler, better designed gaming machine. In in this upcomming generation, PS4 out-xboxed the XBoxOne. The PS4 is a dead-simple straightforward architecture that simply throws more hardware at the problem. (while somehow being cheaper...)
Xenos has a unified shader architecture while RSX does not. That means that during microbenchmarks, it can dedicate all of its shaders to that task, and put up relatively impressive numbers. In reality, that means that those shaders can't be used for anything else, meaning your real world performance will look nothing like the microbenchmark. AA performance is almost entirely due to the on-package EDRAM. While that was a smart design decision, it's not indicative of some huge overall power advantage.
Look, Microsoft made a number of very smart design choices with the 360 that have allowed developers to squeeze a lot out of the hardware, there's no doubting that. I think it's also fair to say that Xenos is a bit faster than the RSX -- as was the case with that generation of discrete GPUs from ATI and Nvidia -- but throwing around things like twice as powerful and "crushes" is getting into hyperbole territory if you're looking at actual performance from the hardware.
I don't know it this will have much impact on the actual sale numbers, the release date is still quite some time in the future and the PS4 despite all the love it currently gets from the gaming scene also requires a Sony account you have to pay monthly to be usable.
I am pretty sure it will play out like it always does: lots of complaining and in the end it will get bought nevertheless. [1]
http://www.idigitaltimes.com/articles/18620/20130701/xbox-18...
Don Mattrick is now fired.
However saying that the Xbox One will fail like the WinRT did is very premature; the PS3 had a slow start and still made a respectable showing this generation, and the 3DS was considered a debacle until a price cut and the right games came along and it suddenly exploded in popularity.
But Earthbound on Virtual Console, and Pikmin 3 coming out make it a compelling buy already IMO.
Edit: OP does not like the XBox One ... my bad. :)
They should have just made a clean break from it. I can't understand why anyone would want to deal with that abomination in this day and age.
And given that it's ARM, you wouldn't be able to run any of your existing apps anyway, without the vendors recompiling (and quite possibly having to update their code in the process).
Every recent architecture change was used to lock down Windows: Windows on x86-64 enforces driver signing harder than Windows on x86. Windows 8 enforces Microsoft signed Modern UI apps.
Windows on ARM enforces full lock down (drivers, Win32 apps, Modern UI apps, bootloader). It also prevents those signed Modern UI apps to run their own JIT. While one could argue that this is for security (inability to mark data as executable code after the fact, and so on), it's not even possible to use the CLR JIT on your own dynamically generated byte code, which might be a crude workaround for other VMs (JS, Java, ...): add a CLR target.
If the CLR JIT is considered unsafe, Microsoft should disable it altogether (but that would slow down the platform even more), but if it's safe they should make it available to developers. This isn't about security, it's about their competition.
Open Win32 is what keeps Microsoft somewhat honest (since they can't simply lock it down that way, as long as they keep caring about compatibility). The only redeeming part of the Windows on ARM story is that it doesn't matter commercially. May it stay that way.
It is well tested, has high performance due to its heritage, and is really damn flexible. You rarely find yourself going "well that isn't possible" with Win32 given how many iterations the API has been through.
Unfortunately making a general purpose API of any sort tends to get ugly as more and more stuff is added to it, and then add in legacy requirements, and yes things are pretty icky at times.
But any other API that is capable of as much as Win32 is would end up looking almost as bad, minus a lot of the legacy cruft, except of course in the time it takes to develop such an all encompassing API, you'd end up with legacy cruft all of your own!
Proof is that ARC exists. This is the only reason compiler tools like ARC are possible. If Cocoa were too inconsistent, ARC could not be exist.
Given that Cocoa's origins are from the 80's (NeXT) and Foundation is still with us today on iOS (and UIKit is very similar/familiar to AppKit), this is an extraordinary accomplishment and it has succeeded better and longer than any of its contemporaries.
Exactly. Also, Apple has the courage to regularly deprecate and subsequently remove things from Cocoa/Core/Darwin, keeping it clean, focused and elegant.
Which bring us to the GGP comment:
> But any other API that is capable of as much as Win32 is would end up looking almost as bad, minus a lot of the legacy cruft, except of course in the time it takes to develop such an all encompassing API, you'd end up with legacy cruft all of your own!*
To which I disagree wholeheartedly (not just because of Cocoa, but every single sane API out there regularly deprecates then drops stuff). Win32 accreted features around a core of cruft like a black hole. The only solution for Microsoft is to relegate the 8/16/32bit heritage lying at its core and drop it dead as it's collapsing under its own weight. Which is what they did with the Win8 internal design, where Win32 is relegated to a gangrenous limb awaiting to be severed.
Bits get added to Win32, but it hasn't really had much substantive change to existing stuff in a very long time.
And this is their key problem. They're stuck in the past, relying on previous successes and unable to come up with anything new that's sufficiently compelling for people to adopt.
Contrast to Apple, who made the switch to a modern, object-oriented API 13 years ago which has steadily improved, and their willingness to cut old technology (after a transition period - see Carbon and PowerPC).
iOS had zero compatibility with anything that came before, with the exception of the underlying frameworks. Microsoft needs to be able to demonstrate this level of innovation in order to survive in the long term.
I mean, afterall, as much as Win32 is legacy code... Posix / SysV compatibility in Linux is an even bigger one. That doesn't make Linux a bad system, on the contrary, it makes me confident in building long-term solutions on top of those systems.
Microsoft has their new APIs: C# and .NET, which are all good and all for new programs. But their constant support of Win32 API is frankly one of their best assets. APIs with 30+ years of backwards compatibility are _good_ for the programmer.
There's definitely a niche for "write once, run forever" (for a more extreme example, see the IBM 360/70/80/90/z/Architecture; a modern z/arch mainframe can run binaries made for a 360 half a century ago, unmodified), but it generally isn't that exciting to consumers, and even the enterprise market seems to be getting a little more cautious of it for internal stuff.
Seemingly the only way a company can retain its leadership is by innovating and then leading the market. Microsoft hasn't been that good at genuine market innovation (we're talking revolutions), so unless it can use its strong stance in markets it leads currently, the future isn't looking all that rosy for microsoft..
> Microsoft hasn't been that good at genuine market innovation (we're talking revolutions)
Microsoft has never been about revolutionary innovation. MS-DOS was just a rebadged version of Tim Paterson's QDOS. MacOS was the first OS to bring GUIs to the mass market, not Windows. IE came after Netscape. Etc.
Since the beginning of the business their approach has been to be a "fast follower" -- to let other companies take the huge risks of pioneering a new market, and then, if that market proves out, swoop in with a product of their own. Generally speaking this has worked out really, really well for them. Letting someone else do the pioneering isn't particularly heroic, but then, as the saying goes, you can always tell the pioneers because they're the ones with the arrows in their back.
The facts say otherwise:
http://www.vgchartz.com/article/250111/2012-year-on-year-sal...
[1] http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2008/06/analysis_what_vgchartz_d...
Android, iOS, free to play, Facebook / web platforms, Ouya and the coming onslaught of embedded video game technology into TV's and other solo Android machines, Valve's console entry, Steam, Nintendo, Sony; publishers like Activision etc; indie producers like Mojang etc; and on and on and on and on. Microsoft is just one big player in a very large market.
Microsoft is in a position of weakness in gaming. If the Xbox One doesn't sell on par with the PlayStation 4, or if it doesn't sell in volumes at least on par with the 360, they're going to very quickly find themselves on the outside looking in just like in mobile (lackluster sales will also take down the Kinect platform).
"Credible threat to AWS"? That billion dollar figure includes all Microsoft cloud revenue, including revenue Microsoft earns from AWS: http://gigaom.com/2013/04/29/say-what-microsoft-azures-a-1-b...
Sony and Nintendo might disagree. Nintendo kicked serious butt for most of the last generation. Sony has been doing well, at least matching MS, in the last part of the last generation. The next generation still hasn't started much, though Nintendo definitely messed up on its start. It remains to be seen if there is much of a console market left; the winners of this generation just may very well be Apple and to a lesser extent, Google.
Generally though I find it interesting that there is almost no mention of it either here on HN or other places. When AWS has an outage, everyone notice because lots of high profile sites and services go down. Azure has had a few outages and we've barely heard about it.
I think the difference now in the new markets is that Microsoft has talented competitors, including Google which has copied the strategy you mention with the twist if giving their software away for free.
They flubbed their early efforts at mobile OS development also. They had a real chance to corner the market before Apple was even making iPods, I believe. But they got too focused on beating Blackberry and didn't really look past them (in my opinion--I'm no expert).
Then the tablet: Microsoft was one of the first to really push tablet computers. Unfortunately, the technology wasn't there to support the idea. So they shelved it for awhile, then Apple came along ~10 years later and did it "right". And now Microsoft is trying to play catch up to a field where they did a decent amount of the early work.
> Look at all the trouble they had when they built Windows on top of the IE engine.
They didn't build windows on top of IE. They showhorned IE in as a technical solution to a legal problem (How to abuse their monopoly without it being patently obvious to everyone). Just to be clear - At the time, IE4 was way better than Netscape4 - but it only became popular when it was available by default. And it was a successful solution, on all accounts - they killed netscape, they won the web (for a while), and they paid very little in damages eventually.
> Then the tablet: Microsoft was one of the first to really push tablet computers. Unfortunately, the technology wasn't there to support the idea.
The technology WAS there, but Microsoft's UI wasn't - they continuously tried (and failed) to make a desktop-OS touch-usable. I've never used one myself, but everyone I know who had a Newton said it was "just right". And the palm pilot worked very well too.
People underestimate what apple have done with the iphone and tablets - they've figured out the UI/UX. Hardware is an important, but lesser part of this equation. Microsoft, for 10 years, couldn't figure out that there even was a UI/UX problem.
Interestingly, a big part of the Newton's failure (along with the terrible v1 handwriting recognition, which was largely fixed later, and Apple's strained finances) was that they went for a complete break with the past; there was basically no developer familiarity. iOS was probably a sweet spot; new, purpose-designed interface bearing very little resemblance to MacOS beyond font choices, but almost the same under the hood.
What Microsoft lacked was the insight to realize that just cramming a touchscreen and stylus on Windows XP wouldn't work.
Apple, perhaps with the hindsight of the Newton, realized that creating a completely new GUI optimized for finger touch was the way to go (or rather their experiments stemming from multi-touch trackpads showed them that it was _a_ way to go).
They were so very, very insistent on "it has to be Windows!" which lead to the notoriously dreadful Windows CE/Mobile interface. This goes on to an extent, but now more as a confusing marketing thing; Windows Phone does not seem like a good name for a phone that doesn't have windows as a concept.
What's sad is how at E3 the best thing for a lot of the gamers was how they weren't going to get screwed by heavy DRM from Sony.
Not even close. And it looks like they're about to throw it away.
One thing i always remember is that you should wait untill SP2 (service pack 2) to upgrade your windows version.
Windows Vista SP2 was Windows 7 (with again, slighter improvements), while Vista in the beginning, wasn't awefull. It was superior on SP2 and it got it's respect with a "new" release, named Windows 7.
Windows 8 is a lot of change, thanks to statistics, they'll improve again and as usual, i'll wait untill SP2 to switch. Perhaps even 8.1 if i really like it :-)
Microsoft of 15-20 years back did they wonderfully - easier to use OS, better features in Office, fast adoption of new hardware standards, etc. Microsoft of today is actively trying to sell customers what they don't want. Metro. Kinect. Office Ribbon. Bing. ARM Surface. The list goes on to almost every product MS offers.
Microsoft needs to stop pushing products for the benefit of Microsoft. I'd recommend the following: put up a poll and let the general public decide on issues like Metro - and then follow those results, even if it means throwing Metro out of the desktop. Microsoft needs to listen to customers simply because other businesses are listening to Microsoft's customers, and those customers are leaving.
Business 101 - it still applies even when you're not a startup anymore.
I assume when you say Metro, you mean on Windows 8. Metro on WP and Xbox is really great, and I think 8.1 will fix a lot of problems with Metro on 8. Metro as a design language is, IMO, really good. Implementation on Windows, not so much.
Kinect? The fastest selling consumer device in history? The numbers speak for themselves.
Office Ribbon is a step forward in UI design for menu systems. Looking for a good resource on their thought process behind it, but you can see a partial explanation here. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2005/09/14/467126.as... The ribbon backlash seems more against the fact that the UI changed than that the ribbon is bad UI design.
Bing is a long term play and I think it's starting to pay off with FB, Apple, and Yahoo deals, not to mention the deep integratin of Bing services in Windows, Xbox, and Windows Phone.
Arm Surface was a disaster.
>Microsoft needs to stop pushing products for the benefit of Microsoft. I'd recommend the following: put up a poll and let the general public decide on issues like Metro - and then follow those results, even if it means throwing Metro out of the desktop. Microsoft needs to listen to customers simply because other businesses are listening to Microsoft's customers, and those customers are leaving.
Design by committee is terrible. Design by the general population is even worse.
Microsoft is an office supply company. They got their niche by being cheaper and easier for the office worker. Bill Gates became the richest man in the world by selling EVERYONE a box of paperclips.
This is not sexy growth times. It's a boring business. You know, like most businesses that just make a steady profit.
Win32 will be around forever. It'll be like COBOL and Java. There's always buckets of money doing boring work no-one else wants to. It doesn't get you sexy startup cred with dancing VCs; it does get you a long-term living.
The goal of a company is to profit from products that sell. It doesn't necessarily mean they're building for what customers currently demand, but knowing what customers will demand.
The canonical example is Apple. If you listen to tech reviewers, Apple never makes the product that people "want". Yet they continue to lead profits in almost every product category they market.
If you want an example of something that people do not want, would never queue up for, and should not have been made? Metro.
In regards to the comment above on Metro fitting well on Xbox? Not a chance - Metro is terrible and confusing to use on Xbox, and the adverts make it even worse. If the xbox had launched with Metro as standard, it would have gotten very negative launch reviews.
What Microsoft needs is someone in upper management with a vision about what products they want to make and the persistence to make them happen. That's a bit difficult to accomplish when there is a management shuffle with some top executive deciding to spend more time with their family roughly every year.
Apple came up with the idea of the iPhone and built it. When the public saw it, we thought, "Holy shit! I've gotta have that!"
The point is that the people didn't know that they wanted an iPhone until Apple showed it to them.
Full disclosure: I always take the long view with tech companies, especially the big ones. Start ups can have the wheels fall off over a 10% drop. Big companies like MS, this is virtually nothing. I mean, look at Best Buy. Their profits were down over 80% last year and they're still out there hammering away.
Here's that BBY article I was alluding to: http://www.webpronews.com/best-buy-earnings-net-income-down-...
"Hubert Joly is the CEO now, coming in as the company reports a 90% profit drop thanks to less-than-stellar sales, and restructuring expenses."
How much as the economy grown in the last year, or how much has the dollar inflated in the last 5 years. I'm sure there is some stock growth there, and it definitely isn't tanking. But for someone who bought 5 years ago, was it a good investment with respect to the market average for this sector?
Yes, and here's why. . .
http://www.kiplinger.com/article/investing/T052-C017-S001-wh...
MS tends to be in the sweet spot for investors. It's not grossly over priced, they hit their numbers on a regular basis, and no expects them to be successful. Therefore, if one of their products hits big, investors are happy, if they have a flop, no biggie, the shares are only $23.
Compare that to Apple. Their shares are in the $500 range and they are the homecoming queen in the tech sector. If they have a flop, and you have a sizable investment, you're hosed. If they hit their numbers, your large investment stays put. It's a lot more riskier.
Additionally securities like MSFT, you can comfortably get 'aggressive' through call writing, and juice returns a little more without your risk metrics being outside your targets.
The price of a single share is utterly irrelevant to the risk of an investment. Whether you own 200 shares @ $25 or 10 shares @ $500, a 10% drop in the stock price is a 10% in the stock price.
Microsoft stock is up 25% over the last 5 years. The NASDAQ is up 56%. Apple is up 160%, even after the large drop over the past year.
Microsoft currently has a P/E of 16, Apple has a P/E of 10.
Are you talking all-time? Microsoft crushes those companies. And IBM crushes it.
My point is, to say that Microsoft is doing poorer than those competitors, you have to pick a very specific time period. Over the long-run, right up until today, Microsoft has been and will continue to be a wealth generating machine, albeit in a competitive market.
The strategy in 1990's was that software was sold in stored (EggHead). People would compare the BULLETs or CHECKMARKS on two competing packages. Microsoft's goal was to always have more and better checkmarks. That sold more software in the 1990's.
Notice their newest re-org. They are making two big pushes DEVICES and SERVICES. The entire company is becoming "functional" (devs vs testers vs program managers, etc.). They all report to Balmer. Balmer is trying to be like Steve Jobs.
Balmer talked about having "efforts" selected by him and execs in his office. Those would be the major efforts of products. This is the same as picking FEATURE BULLETS for the back of packaged software.
Microsoft does NOT have a strategy. They focus on packing feature bullets, like it is a box of software. Watch them do that with XBox ONE, Windows Phone, Windows 8, etc. Until they pick a strategy, they won't find a way to use leverage to pull ahead.
I think they don't get enough credit for what they do really well (Windows Phone is phenomenal; Office is still the gold standard; Skydrive works just as well as Dropbox; SQL Server is key in many orgs; the offerings with the new Xbox to be the media centerpiece of the home will be very interesting)
Have they missed the mark for being so late with tablets and underestimating how much people would have shock at the new Windows 8 change? Sure -- but they have too many smart people to let the stock drop and for them to 'fail'...keep in mind that Apple was not far from here just a decade or so ago =)
But the selling point of it is that it's familiar. When we recently starting transitioning to google apps at my office, people damn near rioted.
It wasn't that MS Office offered something that GA didn't, it was that they were scared that they wouldn't know how to work the new interface.
So...think about that, Microsoft. People aren't holding on to your product because it is the best, people are hanging on to your product because it is the most familiar.
I think that time will erode that.
Mind you, that was moving from Lotus Notes for email and calendar. Fuck me, GApps is heaven by comparison. I wrote the Uncyclopedia article inspired by having to use the damn thing: http://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/Lotus_Notes
After the upcoming "adjustments," they should be able to survive at a somewhat healthy level, but they will have to accept lower revenue and margin as a persistent reality.
The trouble is that "Microsoft" and "Windows" sounds to the consumer like "Monday 9am at the office". For the consumer market, they're tainted brands.
I'd like to see Windows rebranded as "The Gaming OS which does much more than just games". They need to keep the value of Windows tied to the value of Steam. This means bending over backwards to the needs of game developers and cementing the expectation that you need Windows if you want games before that expectation goes away.
This may even mean marketing themselves to Mac and Linux users as the OS you should dual boot if you want to play games. What a crazy thought.
"Mobile" has little overlap with the markets that MS has built 30 years of competitive advantage in. Phones and tablets are not general substitutes for PCS.
Microsoft's venture into the "mobile" market has resulted in them slapping the Windows name on products that are almost - but not quite - entirely unlike Windows, and this has brought a good deal of frustration to many people.
The same Steam who has done more than anyone else to make MacOS and Linux viable gaming platforms?
The trouble with games is that there's really no lockin, and porting is not that difficult, so if the publishers see MacOS and/or Linux becoming larger platforms, they'll put out more stuff for them (this is already happening, especially with indies and Valve), and few will stay on Windows because they really need game X from 1995 to keep working.
Microsoft's real strength is the enterprise, where people do need terrible internal app from 1995 that no-one has modified since then to keep working. You can't do that on Linux or MacOS easily; both are pretty happy to break binary compatibility when it suits.
I don't immediately see how this would all happen in the short term, but stuff like this tends to catch a lot of folks off guard.
https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...
Innovation vs worlds worst CEO part 2:
https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...
Microsoft is still big. As a business, they remain profitable. They have plenty of time to turn the ship around.
Their business decisions may have been terrible these past years, but they're still profitable, still making money nonetheless.
Just look at the resurgence of Samsung, that's sexy.
Microsoft? Some of their dev products might be okay, but Windows 8 and the new Xbox are downright awful. Horrible campaigns behind both.
I mean, don't we deserve a little credit for being quick enough? Or we ALWAYS have to be the primary source of something. In this case, the google stock page is only a tool.
Please explain on how this works because I have previously submitted stories that I discovered and further developed.
I just need to understand how this community works to make the most of it.
thank you!
Also, the last time I saw one of your articles, a lot of people suggested running a basic spell check over your articles. I can tell that still isn't being done. More than "being first", your articles need to add meaningful insight and information. That isn't conveyed if you text hasn't been well-edited.
I will make sure to add meaningful insight and information!
Thanks!