Microsoft's Concept Videos From 2000: Why Didn't Ballmer Build Any of It?
bloomberg.com
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FTA: "Ballmer's Microsoft wasn't lacking for ideas; it was lacking execution."
Whatever the reason for Microsoft's inability to execute, the history shows that Gates (a programmer) could get stuff done, and Ballmer (a salesman) can't.
IMHO it's probably stack ranking that killed their execution (http://slate.me/19Jf74r). Salespeople (like Ballmer) use external fear to motivate people (Make the sale or my boss will fire me!). Programmers (like Gates) use internal fear to motivate themselves (Make this code work or my colleagues will think I'm stupid!). How can any programmer execute properly in an environment of both internal and external fear?
Ultimately the answer doesn't matter to me. The company has always been a bully, both in the marketplace and internally towards their staff. No one wants to see a bully succeed.
Edit: Wikipedia says "Since the 2000s, Microsoft used a stack ranking similar to the vitality curve." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Criticisms_of_ra...) Ballmer became CEO of Microsoft January 2000.
[1] http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/08/30/microsoft-review-tim...
Besides, I gave up rooting against Microsoft years ago. I just don't care about any of their products anymore.
Execution is everything. Microsoft tried to execute on some of these ideas, but the result was always too cumbersome/confusing.
MS needs to have a haircut like Marissa Mayer gave Yahoo. Hardware and SAAS are not the way for MS; they need to get back into large(r) system OS dev in a big way, to run house and building automation. The game console should only be part of it. If they want to do hardware, it better be to run the code they write, otherwise they will be stomped.
http://readwrite.com/2013/09/11/yahoo-marissa-mayer#awesm=~o...
They had some really shitty code. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795
My fav:
private\ntos\w32\ntuser\client\nt6\user.h:
* The magnitude of this hack compares favorably with that of the national debt.> Despite the above, the quality of the code is generally > excellent...
> In short, there is nothing really surprising in this leak. Microsoft does not steal open-source code. Their older code is flaky, their modern code excellent. Their programmers are skilled and enthusiastic. Problems are generally due to a trade-off of current quality against vast hardware, software and backward compatibility.
"Their programmers are skilled and enthusiastic." How would you get that from a code reading? Comments? No developer I know puts enthusiastic comments in unless they are being sarcastic. So, I think the summary tries to whitewash it.
The comments show some problems that never got fixed or addressed properly. They are signs that code at the time was being developed quickly and haphazardly. That is what I mean by crappy. And I'm talking about it being historically crappy, not the way it is today. I can't speak for the state of their code in every project they currently manage.
What would that same conversation with an HCI expert yield today ? Even though it all seems obvious in retrospect, it mustn't have been that easy to forecast at the time
While it is seen here regularly -- and is always strangely given a pass -- this remains the most profoundly meaningless, if not outright stupid, thing that anyone in this industry can mutter.
Not terribly applicable here... but at the same time not terribly irrelevant here either.
do you really not understand what this means?
here's an awesome idea. A sensor and software that can read your brain waves so you don't need mouse or keyboard. Awesome idea, right? Worthless without the implementation.
Worthless without a money-making proposition, which is, in many cases, the idea.
if you've got money (and thus, talent), the idea is the most valuable part.
good ideas might be valueless (though you could make a case to say this is also untrue), but they're definitely not worthless.
Sure.
Fertilizer is worthless. Without water nothing can grow.
Gasoline is worthless. Without a spark it can't provide energy.
A 50" LED 120Hz display is worthless. Without a signal to display it can't provide value.
Are those meaningful or honest statements? Is it of any value for people to constantly parrot the nonsensical "parts of a whole are worthless" prattle?
I fully understand what people think they mean when they trot it out, and that is why I think it is garbage. It is refuse being vomited online.
Many of us are excellent software developers. Most of us bide our time developing projects for other people because we have no idea what to build ourselves. Many of the profoundly valuable changes in our industry have come because someone had an idea that was different and ended up changing the world.
Yes, of course the execution mattered. But without the idea the execution would be worthless. So where does that leave us? Some sort of nihilist everything is worthless depression?
Yes, most of the time that is exactly what it is saying. Though when engaged on it invariably the definition will start oozing around amorphously to the point of complete and utter meaninglessness.
Firstly, we aren't talking about laymen and outsiders. In this case we're talking about the company that was far and away the largest technology company. Secondly, ideas may be plentiful, but so is absolutely banal, no-value-added execution. If the quantity of poor examples qualifies the statement, saying that execution is worthless is just as viable, as the overwhleming majority of execution in virtually any domain is terrible.
I have to chuckle at bit at the notion that ideas are so bountiful, though. It's a bit like how everyone is going to write the great American novel...they just need to think of the plot...but anyone can think of a plot so...
It's saying that seemingly novel ideas of solving a "pain point" in first-world life are usually fairly obvious if you'd spent an hour brainstorming with other intelligent people.
This is what people without ideas say. Seriously. As someone who regularly struggles to find ideas that are worth executing on, I seriously wonder what imaginary world so many on here live in.
But writing a great novel is all about execution...
I could just do something, literally anything, and me, having done a thing, would be worth way more than me, having an idea.
Many people have great ideas, few people have the balls or resources to actually execute them and make them worth something.
Just a thought.
The overall claim has some limited merits, but don't overstate the case.
You generating an idea in your seat about a site that, say, scrapes some public resource and presents in a useful way, are more valuable than the you who uses that same time to make yourself a sandwich.
And the ideas you can have -- ideas which you can only execute after having the ideas themselves -- are of a higher quality than someone who doesn't have your cultural and intellectual resources. Your ideas are more valuable because they are informed by a more nuanced knowledge of how things actually get done.
Or to put another way, if you were approached at a party about an opportunity to work on someone's seed of a project, would you rather that person be an engineer or a fast food employee? No offense to fast food workers, but the engineer has more, and more salient, skills when it comes to this question.
The idea can't be cashed in until it's executed, and an executed idea is superior to an unexecuted one, but in choosing which idea to act on there are clearly better and worse ones.
> someone who doesn't have your cultural and intellectual resources
Unless you are a scholar at the very top of your field, there are thousands other people with the same background and resources as you, or better. A good chunk of them will have had the exact same ideas, plus a thousand variations. A handful will actually do something.
> choosing which idea to act on there are clearly better and worse ones
The act of choosing is the beginning of execution, and is way harder and more valuable than generating ideas.
How would anyone know this?
A handful will actually do something.
What you're saying is 'execution > idea', which is not in contention. It doesn't follow that the idea is worthless.
The act of choosing is the beginning of execution
This seems like semantics to me now.
And if the point is granted, you seem to be arguing against the proposition that 'ideas >= execution' which nobody is proposing.
Ideas are cheap and contagious, execution is expensive and risky.
When I think about the concept of an "idea" vs "execution," I think about the youtube, vimeo, blip, etc sprint. Each company had relatively the same idea--video on the internet--but no number of analysts could've predicted that youtube would be the outright success of the lot. All of them had excellent execution, but it's always risky, and for youtube, it paid off.
It's not like it's impossible to sell an idea, and the world is full of self-styled idea men who are happy to do so, but buyers are thin on the ground.
Let's all agree ideas alone are not industrial products.
All of those things seem simple in hind sight, but there were very real hurdles preventing them from being realized at that time (for example, the Internet infrastructure for real-time video chat).
Concept videos like this are just the tech world's version of concept-cars by the auto industry. They make the company seem innovative and research oriented without the significant resources required to make a practical product. True, they sometimes yield useful research, but most of the time they're just meant to be good P.R.
I think, at least for me, the true failure of MS Surface was the crappy display it came with.
Are you maybe referring to the lower-res display on the Surface RT? (I haven't played with that one much.)
(The iPad Retina actually looks quite blurry to me for reading text after spending time with a Nexus 10.)
As for Windows 8. I've been using it on a laptop and have been pretty happy with it. I just upgraded to Windows 8.1 RTM and they've made tons of small refinements everywhere.
However, they failed at most things:
- they were too early and the market and technology was not ready for it (Pocket PC)
- they were too late (Zune, Windows Phone)
- plans were blocked by companies who's support they needed but who were scared of them (music/movies/mobile phone industry)
- execution sucked and products were not good enough (Windows Mobile, home server, media center, everything speech)
- their reputation with consumers was tainted and the press wrote very negatively without really understanding much (hailstorm, drm)
- they made it cost money and other offered it for free, ad supported (MapPoint)
- negotiation power and influence in the market diminished after the monopoly abuse trials
- it took a long time before they understood their problems
To be completely fair, Kinect Audio recognition is awesome.
Another thing Microsoft has severely lost in the last decade is catering to the needs of customers outside the US. Case in point: Bing
I don't see how "catering to the needs of customers outside the US" is related to "audio recognition" other than that one of them is a thing. If you didn't realize, Microsoft products are available in a dozen languages, and localization tests take a long amount of time as it is. As a company, it supports an incredibly large number of countries, more than almost all companies posted here on HN, and definitely just as much if not more than most in the world. Just because one or two products is hard to localize does not mean that Microsoft has "severely lost in the last decade to catering to the needs of customers outside the US".
Some examples of this:
I want podcast support in my Windows Phone. Because I live outside the US, I don't have it. I simply cannot understand why.
I want support for DVB-C Media in Windows, because that is the standard in my country. Because the US have other standards, my only option is using some half-baked korean crap receiver. I want to bet that the upcoming XBox One will not really work with TV in my country.
XBox Music is the new Music service from Microsoft. Guess how good the local music selection is in my country. How does Microsoft want to compete with Spotify here? Is this product even serious?
Bing is just no good outside the US. Yet it will be an important part of Windows 8.1, so I really wonder how this is gonna play out in my country when people start using it.
Didn't they buy Skype?
Document sharing - bad execution, horrible UI. Something that should take 2 clicks takes about 8 clicks on Sharepoint.
Sharepoint as a Website - don't even get me started with that. Unless you want to spend 3 months hiring a 3rd party sharepoint company to implement 3rd party tools to make it half usable, you are out of luck.
What the IPad had was style, a lot of style. The UI was beautiful. In terms of functionality didn't carry redundant desktop features like menus with it. But it was the style, the cool factor, that made it consumer in a way that nerdy Pocket PCs never were.
I feel, (like ValueAct), that Microsoft is losing consumer outside of games, and would do better to concentrate on enterprise.
They must execute better if they want to survive.
But most of these? They exist now. Not quite as nice as the video shows, but they exist.
Kinect actually enabled a lot of the voice control experiences, Skydrive and Sharepoint do some of the other sharing scenarios, just not as nice as they all should be. I saw some awesome mapping stuff working on Windows Mobile well before the iPhone came out, including actual building maps and linking into ones "social network" (however limited that was at that time) to show where one's friends sat.
It is actually sort of sad that none of the experiences have been polished nearly as well as they should have been, by any of the players in the market really. Google Hangouts comes close with some of their collaborative tools, but then something falls apart in the experience, for example in the case of Hangouts, it can be a pain to start one depending on which UI path ones chooses to take, and various bugs pop up and just break the immersion of the experience.
MSN Messenger had a lot of good stuff, video and voice conferencing both worked long ago, but then that market fell apart.
Collaborative Document Editing was done right by Microsoft with One Note 2007, and then completely ignored from then on by the rest of the Office line. Amazing technology, not sure why it wasn't more widely adopted (I'm guessing due to file format needs, presumably the One Note team had the advantage of building up from scratch).
Perhaps most amusing in this video is what people thought LCD screens would look like! I am thankful the ID on LCDs did not go that way!
But then they stopped. They knew that they had the best sailing ships and knew that changing the technology will only disrupt seas in a way threatening their supremacy.
And so the torpedo was invented by the Austrians, the steam and iron ships were pioneered by the French and Americans. This continued even in the 19th century - the century was of Pax Britanica was a century of catchup.
In the end economics was important - Britain remained the worlds leader in industry and trade.
We must all keep in mind these concepts were showcased 13 years before in the famous Knowledge Navigator video or in Sun's less known 1994 Starfire video.
And, probably, on many others that remained unseen by the masses.
http://www.quora.com/Tablet-Devices-and-Tablet-Market/Why-do...
Would love to see Apple get into Pen computing, and this is one area where I think Surface could have really distinguished itself (including a digitizer on a low-end Surface RT, for example).
Steve understood with the first iPhone WAY BACK that Touch was the way to go and people needed to be "reprogrammed" how to use it. Remember iPhone was only "Steve's way" for the first 18 months before only a few developers were invited to play too in a proto-App store. The whole path from iPhone to iPad was carefully mapped out with the next piece coming only when enough people agreed with "Steve's way". People still want iPad to be "just a pen based Mac" shows a large number of very important people don't get the subtle chane in HUMAN BEHAVIOR required to take the next step.
Right, it's not quite the same.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html?pagew...
early in my tenure, our group of very clever graphics experts invented a way to display text on screen called ClearType...
Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed it made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The vice president for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control. As a result, even though it received much public praise, internal promotion and patents, a decade passed before a fully operational version of ClearType finally made it into Windows.
When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.
So once again, even though our tablet had the enthusiastic support of top management and had cost hundreds of millions to develop, it was essentially allowed to be sabotaged. To this day, you still can’t use Office directly on a Tablet PC. And despite the certainty that an Apple tablet was coming this year, the tablet group at Microsoft was eliminated.
And thereby, being unwilling to disrupt themselves, made themselves ripe for it.
>> "Shut. Up."
Strange how the promised land looks like hell on earth.
Microsoft had a great vision for the future they just failed in execution.
These superficial concept videos have about as much relevance to the world of actual usable technology as porn has to the complexity and compromises of married life. The encyclopaedia we have today is Wikipedia, not Encarta, and no-one cares that it doesn't have embedded videos of antelopes bounding or the galaxy turning.
I care. I think Wikipedia would be greatly improved with relevant embedded video content. Unfortunately, getting high quality relevant public domain video is virtually impossible. It is nice to think about though.
I was more trying to illustrate that multimedia alone does not make a high quality resource, as proved the downfall of the "Multimedia CD-ROM" era of content production, which I feel these concept videos are rooted in.