SteveB’s Retirement Announcement
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Look, that company violated antitrust laws left and right and Steve Balmer was instrumental in this sordid affair.
I'm neither a Microsoft hater (I actually think their OS offerings since XP are pretty solid) but that's just so much revisionist bullshit I couldn't even finish the article.
Microsoft was not punished for being big and successful. They where punished (and rightfully so) for repeatedly and purposefully violating the law in a multitude of jusrisdictions.
Microsoft has serious problems with let the competitors a chance to compete.
edit to add data: http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/6/4069126/eu-fines-microsoft-...
Thats certainly wrong. They at some point just stopped shipping the browser choice utility they had been forced by the EU to ship, and it took a year for anyone to notice:
The Windows 7 SP1 retail release was initially missing BrowserChoice.eu functionality, affecting 28 million computers. The error remained unpatched for 14 months, and as a result in March 2013 the European Commission fined Microsoft €561 million.
Concerning that Microsoft is a test-obsessed company, failing to test properly for an error that could cost you multiple millions is also a huge blunder. This was failing to live up to a legal oblication, not a mere bug.
Do you really thing they forgot to bundle the browser selection tool?
And yes, I can imagine such a failure with a build matrix as big as the one of windows. A very simple explanation would be:
* QA department sits outside of europe
* Department is improperly briefed (not that unlikely to happen)
* Automatic tests fail (happens to the best of us)
However, if you're convicted of a crime you should tread very delicately and carefully in order to avoid being busted again.
Maybe it's arrogance, maybe it's carelesness, maybe it's even an honest mistake. But they sure as hell violated their "probation" and that comes with a price.
Still, it's rather telling.
When you come down to it, there's a lot of circumstance involved.
For instance, take iOS -- it doesn't allow any other browser engine WebKit/UIWebView. And no one is suing Apple over it.
Microsoft windows is in a strong dominating position, ios not
[1] http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/screen-s...
[2] http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....
Get back to me when 90+% of smartphones from all major manufacturers are sold with iOS. It's not just being anti-competitive - it's being an anti-competitive monopoly.
It's as if computer users were intelligent enough to find alternate browsers without the EU-mandated browser selection screen Microsoft was supposed to club them over the head with.
Their monopoly let IE6, a total PoS, maintain a lead in the browser market for years and years and years despite the complete inferiority of the offering. The web would have been a different place if Microsoft actually developed IE6. It could have been the gold standard, the Microsoft Office, to our Google LibreOffices and Mozilla AbiWords.
Was there correlation? I don't know for certain--I wasn't there. But it seems likely that work stopped on IE in large part because of the settlement. For this reason, I would remind any web developer who complains about IE 6 to reserve a bit of their vitriol for the United States government for meddling in this marketplace.
After a while, Microsoft started testing the browser water again, slowly at first. I now think IE 10 is as good a browser as Firefox or Chrome, perhaps in some different ways. I remain a Firefox fan, but I am glad that Microsoft is back in the browser game because I was already starting to feel nervous about Webkit domination in the past 1-2 years.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp...
As commenter have suggested the market has since validated that Microsoft was probably on the right track, doing what was in the best interest of consumers. No one would buy an OS today that cannot browse the web out of the box. Furthermore, MS was lambasted for "forcing" OEMs to not bundle bloatware. Once they were prevented from doing this, PCs were packaged with all kinds of crap and you pretty much had to format them to get a decent experience.
I left the company 5 years ago, partly out of frustration with the EU regulation. Our team was forced to spend hours documenting internal DB stored procedures so that some competitor could reverse engineer our product. Every year Microsoft donates thousands of man years of effort doing this crap that serves no purpose for Microsoft's customers.
Every OS today ships with a browser--yes. But are the browsers tightly integrated, crucial components for the OS itself? I don't believe so. The trend I see is that browsers are separate apps that are carefully segregated from the rest of the OS.
Wasn't the tight IE integration one of the things MS ended up having to rip apart to meet the desired level of security for Vista and onwards?
A lot of Microsoft's success in that era was due to its competitors simply dropping the ball while it executed at least minimally well. Now it's frequently executing poorly and in new markets its got some much more competent competitors ... and ones you can trust more.
Yes, MS does have a very big problem here, I just don't see OS/2 as being a good example of it.
Warp was really a nice system for its time. Switching to Win95 later was a huge step back for me.
I just ran the installer and approved Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox's prompt to associate with HTML files.
On the other hand, I can't seem to easily configure my Android phone to use an alternate app store.
Fast forward to a more recent time and it is revealed that Microsoft might have indeed been corrupt all this time ("is being investigated" is the politically correct term), but, like any big company, it probably bought its way out of the scandal: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/19/u-s-investigates-micro...
So yes, for me as a Romanian citizen Microsoft is still an evil company.
Oddly, that's exactly wrong when you're talking about antitrust law. They were punished for being big and successful. The tactics and legal limitations on tactics involved are only relevant to a company large enough to affect the entire market.
True, but it is not enough by themselves.
Does that really exist?
That's really poignant to me. It isn't just like they messed up once, in one place with tricky laws, it was both the EU and the US that felt they were out of line.
Microsoft when Balmer took over had one direction to go: down. It's reversion to the mean. Eventually a company is going to roll 7 on the craps table.
Unless Cook is extremely lucky and skilled, in 5 or 10 years people will say the same thing about Apple. Days of stagnation and decline will also visit Google and Facebook eventually.
I understand our fixation on leadership. It is super important. But as a thought experiment, I wonder if Steve Jobs was running Microsoft 2000-2010 instead of Steve Balmer, would Microsoft be in great condition today? Or were there already internal and external forces at play at that point that were trouble for Microsoft?
I guess the ultimate lesson is one you can learn from Bill Gates: quit while you're ahead.
Not at all. As mentioned here in the Vanity Fair [1] article, the iPhone could have been a Micosoft product and now brings in more revenue than the entirety of Microsoft. Ballmer said "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance." If you cut through everything else said, I think this is pretty damning.
[1] http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mo...
[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1183763?start=0&tstart=...
Take for example Surface (the table not the tablet). They go and produce a sci-fi table with a touch surface which looks amazing but costs an outrageous $10.000 and has no freaking applications. And that coming from a software company which has spend the better part of the last 30 years building APIs. Where’s the vision in that?
I use .NET daily as a platform for building web apps. I love it. I consider it a pretty solid platform and the IDE is like the golden standard in the industry. But in the long term I don’t think that they have a clue as to where they’d like to take things. Right now MS seems like the company that waits others to innovate and then follow on their steps. They spend $7B yearly on R&D and you get to wonder what’s the end result.
well... in the .NET echo chamber ecosystem, sure. I haven't done serious .NET stuff in a decade, but it was 6-7 years behind the (free) java/jvm IDE's then. I understand it has gotten much, much better but people I know that are current with it and actually use other ecosystems too generally prefer the choices and prices of those over VS. (eclipse, intellij, sublime text, textmate, webstorm, and so forth)
It is one of those situations that gets repeated at companies of every size. It was a fun place to work then someone did something and the fun stopped. The weird part is when it happens at places that are profitable.
It being "cruelly random" isn't really that uncommon either.
Nobody cares too much about the review system when the options you got three years ago are making you a millionaire.
Surely if they are irrelevant, we can call off the government attack dogs and allow Microsoft to bundle a browser and media player with their desktop operating system already, yes?
So thank you, OP, for bringing attention to the regulatory position Microsoft is in versus its competition. I've ranted elsewhere [1] about the market-holistic detriment I believe the anti-trust judgments caused. At the time, I had been of mixed feelings, being an avid Netscape fan. Since then, I've come to regard the anti-trust cases as a tragedy.
Ultimately, I think it was not just Microsoft who suffered but also the consumer. I presently find the world of mobile computing far from the ideal that I want, and I feel it arrived in this form thanks in large part to an unnaturally narrow competitive landscape (the irony!) When I retrace the steps of the past 15 years, I see there were fits of movement in a direction of unified computing, but those were lost. Only recently with the NSA leaks and a gradual pendulum swing back to self-control are we seeing some blips of unified computing.
Yet now Microsoft concedes that tablets and mobile phones should be first-class computing devices (argh!) and simply follows the proven money-making model of the other titans. I still hold out some hope that they will come around to a unified computing model, among other things [2].
[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft-awakens and [2] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft
The question is irrelevant. While PCs are rapidly losing importance in the general computing and communications market, Microsoft's monopoly extends over most of the desktop computer market. It is, therefore, a monopoly. It may not be as important as it once was, but the PC market is still huge by all measurements (and is mostly less relevant these days because the mobile device segment exploded).
Yet, the EU has--in laughably minor ways--gone after Google for its monopoly on search.
It seems there is some correlation between the size (real or imagined) of the market with whether the government attack dogs are loosed.
The point may not really be relevant to the matter at hand, I'll agree. But it's nevertheless amusing to me how often I see the same people who decry desktop computing to be over still harping on about the need for the government to bust Microsoft for its desktop computing monopoly.
I feel Google abuses its search monopoly to shove Chrome down my throat. I feel Youtube abuses its web video monopoly to force me into using Google+. I feel just about every company is shoving their cloud services and making management and control of local resources frustratingly limited by comparison.
But do I want any government to step in and assist me? No, thank you very much.
I feel I'd be happier with technology today--perhaps only slightly, mind you, but happier--had Microsoft been left alone in the late 90s/early 2000s.
The above examples may be abusive, but are they harming you?
When Vista launched, the personal computing market was basically Microsoft's to lose. Mac OS existed but iOS and Android didn't. Now with those two powering tablets, the personal computing (PC+tablet+phone) is much more competitive:
http://www.asymco.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Screen-Shot...
When it became clear that half the things promised (dbr filesystem, etc.) weren't delivered or were sub-par to promises Vista was then hailed as "foundation for the future... when you build a house you first dig foundations then put walls and a roof". Except when I buy a house, I want a house and not some hole in the ground.
IIRC there were four pillars: WinFS, Aero, Avalon and sthg else (audio or DX stack) ?
"(It included) several main pillars: Avalon (Presentation), Aero (User experience), WinFS (Storage), Indigo (Communications and collaboration), and Palladium (Privacy and security). Of these, one pillar (WinFS) would be dropped completely while another (Palladium) would be so stripped down that it's no longer considered a pillar at all."
http://winsupersite.com/product-review/road-gold-long-road-w...
> I would say probably the thing I regret most is the, what shall I call it, the loopedy-loo that we did that was sort of Longhorn to Vista.
Which I interpret to be in reference to issues with Longhorn development rather than issues with the final product (Vista).
e.g. the failure of WinFS which Gates also mentioned in a Reddit AmA awhile back as something he wished had made it to market.
Windows 8.1 puts the button back, so the adoption rates should climb back up and rather quickly.
So instead of activating the hot corner, there's now a prominent button where the Start button was, but it still takes you to a disjointed (touch-friendly) desktop that many wish could be disabled entirely.
Not saying it's a good (or bad) think in either case (as I don't know) but it's certainly not a unique-to-microsoft thing.
It's still very early in W8's life cycle to call the game. XP was not very popular until SP2.
Some times some statements within an article show such negative attitude that it becomes difficult to take the rest of the article seriously. I don't know why the author has such resentment towards 'that other company head named Steve' and why he feels to need to mention it at all.
Also in one paragraph it is mentioned that Steve is a hero. The paragraph immediately following that states that he couldn't get things put together at the same time or execute his plans. How does a CEO become a hero when he is not able to deliver the most important things expected of him?
A very confusing article this one.