Hacker News Reader

I second all of these conclusions and have a few anecdotes of my own to add.

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.

WinXP is still the dominant Enterprise Operating system (crazy I know).

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 Windows is great. I don't.

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?

> WP8 is not a dominant operating system. Azure is not a dominant cloud infrastructure. Surface is not a dominant tablet.

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?

It's a monopoly game with a power-law distribution. If you're not playing for first place, eventually Amazon's Zero margin business will subsume all of the smaller players.

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.

[0]http://blog.2600hz.com/post/55614383443/bezos-law

> 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?

Well, it offers competition in a niche; it's largely price-competitive with AWS for Windows instances, but not for other OSes.

He said Windows 7 was the dominant Enterprise Windows operating system, not 8. And this is correct, 7 is the domant enterprise windows deployment, XP having been recently retired in most Fortune 500 companies. Ask around any IT dept and you'll learn this first hand.

> 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.

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.

Source? Everything I see states that Windows 7 is the dominant Windows operating system in the Enterprise.

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?

My corporate laptop was WinXP, scheduled for upgrade to Win7 in 2015, until I made a stink and got Win7. WinXP is dominant where I work, anecdote of one plus the corp.

> Everything I see states that Windows 7 is the dominant Windows operating system in the Enterprise.

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.

Azure has $1B in revenue [0]. Are you seriously telling me that DigitalOcean is that large?

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...

You are misreading the punchline of that Article. It says $1B in Sales, not $1B in revenue. There's nothing in that article that says that's revenue, only sales. There's also nothing in that article that says it doesn't include comped hours.

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.

Excuse the ignorance, but what am I missing here? Don't all sales qualify as revenue?

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.

You know what. I read that Bloomberg article multiple times and I've never seen it anywhere else on the Internet. As I googled to make sure I wasn't making a grave error, the term "Azure $1B Revenue" has quite a few hits.

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.

I work at MSFT in the Azure division. I have no idea about the specifics of accounting terminology, but from what I hear internally I can say that we're quite pleased with both the absolute numbers and the projected growth. It's understandable that our cloud isn't as prominent in the minds of the HN crowd as some of the other well-known ones, but we actually do have the kind of customer base to make the public numbers credible.

Thanks very much for the contribution to the discussion. I appreciate the insight.

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.

You may have heard about the reorganization the other day, I think we're now called "Server and Cloud". Perhaps they may be referring to systems such as Azure Active Directory and Message Service Bus? There's a lot more going on than a simple PaaS VM and web hosting. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh967619.aspx http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/services/messaging/

Dude, sales is revenue. Maybe you're thinking of net earnings or profit?

Thanks for this comment. For a moment, I didn't understand basic economics terms.

Digital Ocean is worth 15.6 billion so ut's not exactly a small company. Edit nm wrong company.

Rackspace is worth about $6bn, so I doubt some new startup with a tiny market share is worth more than twice Rackspace.

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:RAX

Posting a new made-up number is the opposite of a citation. Just FYI.

Also, I'm going to be straight with you... There's not one bit of me that believes that number.

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/snapshot/s...

Market Cap: 15.6B

That's the wrong company and those numbers aren't in USD (On the order 10-15 million USD market cap).

That number is in Korean Won.

051160:KOSDAQ. Wake up dude.

To be fair, Windows XP use is moving to Windows 7 - just so people can have 4GB or 8GB of memory on their work PC.

Not Windows 8, but Windows 7.

This is precisely what fueled my employer (19,000 employees) to do a mass update of Windows XP to Windows 7. We'll probably skip 8 like we did Vista and go to 8.1 or more likely 9.

The 3 GB of usable memory you're limited to with 32-bit Windows XP is very restrictive.

Win8 is hated/feared more than Vista was.

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 don't believe it is revisionist thinking as the data backs it up very objectively. http://www.zdnet.com/windows-8-continues-to-fail-7000016222/

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.

Win8 is bollocks and has very low Enterprise adoption rates. I'm not a consumer guy so I can't speak there, but I don't think it's performing at all well in Business.

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.

I really don't get the windows 8 hate. Yes, metro isn't for everyone, but it can be disabled. Aside from that, boot time is incredibly fast, memory and power consumption are light, and the UI overall seems incredibly well polished. Now if they would just include a decent terminal I might consider using it.

It's a genuinely good operating system. I use 7, 8 and OSX every day. I prefer OSX(largely because I have access to a great terminal, familiar shell commands and lots of great developer tools :)), but the rabid hate displayed for 8 is completely out of line with reality. It's faster, more efficient and gives you better management tools. A lot of the hate seems to derive from some weird belief that you need to use Metro if you use Windows 8, which is simply not the case.

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.

> but it can be disabled

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.

Don't forget skydrive looking at and deleting private files.

> What tasks can you do with an iPad and not with Surface and vice-versa?

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.

My 920 lacks apps :( Even Facebook and Skype are missing from the market my phone is locked too.

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.

China. They came locked, weirdly enough, this is just the Nokias, the HTC phones can be set to any market the user wishes.

>Win8 is hated/feared more than Vista was.

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.

> >Win8 is hated/feared more than Vista was.

> 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.

> What? If anything Windows Phone and Nokia is growing exceptionally in the emerging markets specifically India and Africa.

Well, Windows Phone is. Nokia is declining in those markets; it's simply cannibalising its existing large Symbian market there with WP.

> What? If anything Windows Phone and Nokia is growing exceptionally in the emerging markets specifically India and Africa.

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.

I wouldn't bother arguing some people are in the Microsoft camp as a matter of religion. I work in a Microsoft shop and it's depressing how awful the offerings are and how helpless you become when you depend on something that's broken and have no power to correct it, fix it, or work around it. It's actually caused me to search for work outside of my day job just so that I can work with technology that's actually well-documented, workable, and supported by real, organic communities.

This!

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...

I see many mid-size and larger companies deploying O365. They do it because it's familiar to their IT, it fits in with their existing policy systems, and it works well with their existing MS Office workflows (office web apps, and sharepoint in the cloud). In some cases, I know Google tried to win their business too.

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)

> Try google search autocompletion of "google apps vs" and the first result is office 365.

"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.

> Win8 is hated/feared more than Vista was.

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.

I am a forum/news-site technology massive lurker and i can guarantee to you that win8 is much much more hated that vista was and for obvious reasons: w8 is a totally new interface proposition while vista was just an "upgrade" over the xp ui, but still looks familiar.

That's a lot of blanket statements states as if they were the truth.

>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.

Share price is diving? As compared to what?

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.

That's because AAPL had something to lose. At their peak they were worth three DELLs more than MSFT.

Interesting.

At its peak, how much bigger was MSFT than Apple?

Hint: Lots.

We're only concerned with recent history here, though, aren't we?

Everything I needed to know about Steve Ballmer -- and Microsoft's future -- I learned when he laughed at the iPhone on national TV.