Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO
microsoft.com
microsoft.com
Disclaimer: I work in Azure.
As for buying them, why mess up a good thing?
Is there still any value for Microsoft in Win9x?
An open source XP would get many hackers interested in Windows, something they desperately need.
They are definitely making money on closed-source operating systems and operating system tools:
http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earn...
It wasn't free--it took a couple of hours of my time!
I think Microsoft would do very well to go the IBM route, and a FOSS Windows would really shake up the market.
Anyhow, the new MS CEO seems like a good guy, hopefully it's the beginning of a less evil, nicer Microsoft.
Maybe open sourcing Windows will keep their other products at the positive for longer.
Microsoft could come up with their own license that was "open source" but not "free software" by Stallman's definitions (ignoring here the people who've attempted to make these terms synonymous), which would allow people to change code and distribute freely among license holders, but not allow people to resell or just give out copies of Windows. I'd actually be really excited about this, because I think the FSF is overboard with their demand that everyone essentially make their software unsellable.
They could go the Red Hat route, go GPL, accept that they'll no longer get money for software licenses but instead support contracts (they could even try selling these to consumers; Dell would pay MS $50/PC not for a copy of Windows, but for a subscription to Windows Update). This would shift the dynamics of the company a bit, but probably not as much as one may think, since enterprise keeps MS afloat anyway, and it may be a good solution.
The important question then would be: Could you legally port directx to *nix from this? If not, then what'd be the point?
Disclaimer: I contribute to some ASF projects.
also, what do you see MSFT to do to regain talent from Facebook and Google?
Some things only work in Silverlight, some only in WPF, and mixing both at the same time is a royal pain.
There are a LOT of bugs and regressions in WPF4 that are "wontfix", were supposed to be fixed in 4.5 or 5.0, but that's never going to happen. (Google "wpf 3.5 4.0 bug wontfix" to see a very incomplete list of regressions. I've met some of these myself, and some that are not on the first two pages).
And lastly, unlike Silverlight (Mac or Win, no Android, no iOS, no Linux), HTML5 is much more widely available (and with an easier graceful degradation path). The only place where using WPF or Silverlight makes sense today is when your target audience is using a locked down system - e.g. an enterprise with tightly controlled client machines. Otherwise, it's a no-go just from this perspective.
I didn't find the learning curve intimidating, FWIW. But the experience with using and deploying me scarred me.
The lack of support killed off the language, not the language itself, IMO.
Isn't it kind of the point of web browsers to render webpages in a common open language instead of being a host for proprietary vendor specific plugins? What's the big advantage over standalone applications in that case anyway?
e.g. Google is very far from 99% Windows - and though it is not your standard "enterprise", it is far from unique.
Convincing Google, Apple, Mozilla, the rest of the universe to adopt Microsoft's closed platform (even if it were Open Sourced) = billions of billions of man hours :)
Although Microsoft remains very strong in the corporate world, its presence in the Internet and mobile worlds are now pretty limited and leaving the two power-houses of Google and Apple to shape the industry.
Satya has done a good job with Azure, and it will be interesting to see whether he can make Microsoft more relevant to the Internet back into someone that can influence the industry.
It can complement or replace PowerShell, but what I really like about it is that it introduces a Python-style C# REPL.
C#'s a nice contender against Java, but in my hindsight, it had an overly limited vision.
MS's offerings in that arena are at least as good as any other, if not superior, and I think far superior to the latest fad of (ab)using the web browser as a One Size Fits All application platform.
Why did this matter? Innovation is much faster and a lot cheaper with open source. Other platforms benefited and grew from it, and a lot of people left the MS ecosystem because it seemed to stagnate i.e. you have to re-invent a lot of wheels when staying in MS's world while all of that is already done and freely available to you on other platforms.
I'm not saying that MS hasn't changed their stance on open source (Codeplex is a prime example). I'm just telling the story of how MS lost traction with developers.
No, I much prefer today's world of Google, Apple, Samsung and FOSS in all its myriad forms battling it out. There's more developer frameworks than ever available to us. More languages. More everything.
No. I don't want to go back.
Having used multiple languages and technologies, I'm not even slightly impressed by VS.
I've use VisualStudio every day for the past years. And honestly there are a lot ideas they could borrow from other tools like Eclipse.
Some examples that I personally feel are ways that C# in VS is lackluster compared to Java in Eclipse.
No proper automatic build. While the stuff in Eclipse is a bit too aggressive sometimes it's really one of those really cool features to have.
Errors, warnings, other tools like StyleCop don't show errors inline with the code. I mean, really? I have to scroll through the error list and click?
It also doesn't really seem to understand the code it's processing. I'd expect that when I'm working on Silverlight with C# that the premiere tool from Microsoft should be able to handle things like refactoring properties in C# where it would update automatically in XAML.
And this is not even mentioning the complete trainwreck that is MSDN. Perhaps you can understand it once you really get into it, but I find it extremely confusing the way it mixes different frameworks with similar but subtly different functionality. (Eg a lot of things in Windows Phone are similar, but not identical, to features in .Net and trying to find the "chain of classes" that are relevant to your code is not nearly easy enough.)
Some of these things are probably things you can fix with extensions like Reshaper. But in the end you'll pay hundreds of dollars to compete with something that is free in Eclipse.
Still doesn't change the fact that these techs are one of the best ever made.
MVC4 would be blocked by:
> MVC4 - Partial, no async features supported. > ASP.NET 4.5 Async Pipeline - Needs an parallel processing pipeline with async support, not done.
On arrogance - this comes with size. The larger a company gets, the more internal stakeholders they have. What was once a simple, "Of course we'll change that" turns into "Who else is impacted to this change?" to "Let's only change what we need to, and not get distracted by everything else."
My inclination is the more competitors, the better. But we don't necessarily need more standards. Creating another service provider for cloud based computing is great. Creating another browser that everyone needs to optimize their websites for separately - not so great.
Bing is actually doing surprisingly well, considering the team competes with probably the most successful department and the foundation of GOOG. IMHO it's likely one of very few successful strategic moves of MSFT in competitive markets. Without Bing, GOOG would pretty much print money and pour money on whatever futuristic projects they feel like. Oh, well, they're already doing these stunts, it would only get worse without Bing. Azure and Office-in-the-cloud alone cannot compete with freebies backed by big pockets.
Creating another browser that everyone needs to optimize their websites for separately - not so great.
I agree on the pains caused by browser fragmentation, but I do think it's still a good thing to have IE especially the new versions around. The recent move of GOOG pushing for Dart is a dangerous sign that GOOG is starting to flex its muscle and do whatever they want. Mozilla alone stands no chance in such a challenge, in a same sense they couldn't in a battle against MSFT about 2 decades ago.
You say it like Google's futuristic projects are bad things; if anything, we need more of them!
The term you're thinking of is conglomerate, because Google has at least one competitor in every one of it's markets, which isn't a monopoly.
Only when getting fined for antitrust or monopolistic behavior, which doesn't mean it is a monopoly - only that a regulating body is trying to prevent it from eventually becoming one.
Definitively, mono-poly means one entity in the market.
That also describes Bing.
> The recent move of GOOG pushing for Dart is a dangerous sign that GOOG is starting to flex its muscle and do whatever they want.
How exactly is Dart dangerous? It's open source, unlike C#.
One nit to pick here: C# is open sourced, though the .NET framework is not. Anyway, let's focus our discussion on Dart.
Somehow I had an impression that GOOG might have a plan B that would push Dart to replace JS on the web and Java on the mobile and a walled-garden that unifies current ChromeAppStore and PlayStore. JS would be totally marginalized and obsoleted. I'm not a fan of JS, but throwing away the enormous efforts done for the past decade is too much a churn and waste for me to swallow. I could hopefully be totally wrong though.
Hardly lost.
We are all better off with a Bing than without. I can comprehend literally zero harm caused by Bing. It's not like you can make a "but IE hurts developers" argument here.
Moreover, if 1/3 of desktop US traffic is of nominal value in your opinion, I think possibly you're jaded.
http://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-s...
The last thing we need is more UX failures like Windows 8 cluttering the market.
Why are they so behind in C++11 support in their tools then? I think they are falling behind in their tools advantages already. With emergence of OpenGL debugger from Valve that will only escalate (at least on the gaming scene).
It wouldn't be unfair to call me a Microsoft "hater", but I've always had respect for their development tools, and especially their compilers. I'm doing a little Windows development these days, but it's on an ancient version of Visual Studio (2003) that can't be upgraded at this time, so I'm not familiar with the latest and greatest. I'm surprised to hear they are behind the curve here, although I'm not surprised to hear that anyone is having trouble implementing the amazingly complex stuff that was introduced in C++11.
Disclosure: Microsoft employee, but not in Visual Studio group.
You're tarring more than 100,000 people with that brush, many of whom were not at Microsoft back then.
He's not saying anything about any of the natural persons involved acting outside their roles in Microsoft.
Corporate "goodwill" exists in negative forms as well, and Microsoft has acquired quite a bit over the years.
When most people get a job, they're going to be using Microsoft because that's what they will be given. I've never been somewhere where I'm told which search engine to use. Most places still don't offer an alternative to IE in the work place. That's why developers are still coding to IE7.
It really is frustrating that people don't understand this. I wouldn't mind a better Microsoft, except for the fact that people have short memories and don't really understand how powerful Microsoft currently is. Google is the the same ballpark? Seriously!?!
I personally strongly prefer modern "desktop" computing (that is, working with a computer with large displays while at a desk; I don't care what form factor the actual box takes) to computing on small devices.
Separately, I tend to like Microsoft's products more than Apple's and Google's even though I'm not a .NET developer. I'm weird, I suppose.
But all that said, Apple and Google are right that desktop is not hot—even a fan of desktop computing like myself must admit it's fallen out of favor. I've had my share of rants about why that is and what could be done to address it if firms are interested. But putting that tangent aside, I find those who bemoan Microsoft's dominance on desktop are using the wrong angle. If you like desktop computing like I do, but you don't like Microsoft, don't attack Microsoft. Instead, ask your favored firm (Apple, Google, whatever) why they don't offer you something you'd like in the desktop space.
I for one never agreed with past depictions of Microsoft as a monopolist on the desktop even through my experiments with oddball alternatives like OS/2. Their tricky business being what it is, they were not a monopoly. There were other options, but I eventually realized that I didn't like the alternatives.
Finally, I'm not sure I precisely agree with the implied shift from "desktop" and "the Internet." I figure I understand what you mean, but I can't help but envision the popular Homer Simpson quote: "Wait, they have the Internet on computers now?" Being a desktop aficionado, my desktop computing environment is all about network-enabled consumption and creation.
I see the chief battlefronts as:
* Small-screen versus large-screen (where I favor large screen and want small screen devices to be subservient views on applications running on my application server).
* Federated or self-control with sharing via documented protocols versus the plain cloud (where I favor federated or self-control because I feel the plain cloud we have today has brought us tremendous lock-in and multi-device/multi-cloud chaos).
All of these involve "the Internet," being the common communication medium.
IMHO, it's not an issue of "desktop" vs. small device, but integrated applications and presence that works smoothly across platforms vs. monolithic and siloed apps that keep you on one device.
Nobody does this well yet, but the holy grail of computing is to be able to move from desktop to tablet to laptop to phone and have your apps, data, and presence seamlessly follow you around.
Mobile has lept ahead in perceived value because it provides an illusion of that integration. Since you have the device with you always, you get a taste of what having everything everywhere would be like. However, that is fleeting and the providers have jumped at the chance to make it a walled garden that feels open (since the device is always with you), but doesn't share or play with others.
Eventually, people will become aware that mobile only is closed and bad, and integrated open multiplatform will rise, whether that is based on multi cloud or personal cloud or whatever technology best supports that seamless transition between devices.
It's at least partially on Microsoft to come up with good reasons for normal people to use their platform over all other options, and they've fallen very flat on that note in the past 15 or so years - particularly in the consumer space. It'd be interesting to see a revitalized Microsoft really attacking this space, but the promotion of Nadella makes me think that this isn't really what the MS board has in mind.
The technology sphere is a lot bigger than the desktop now. This year there will be almost twice as many Android devices shipped than Windows + iOS/OSX devices combined. The future of technology is going to decrease the importance of the desktop even further, and Google has 90s-Microsoft level market share of every other type of consumer networked device. This is what scares people about Google.
http://redmondmag.com/articles/2014/01/07/android-growth-ecl...
The "decreased importance" you cite is only relative; I for one don't see the desktop becoming unimportant any time soon.
For one thing, my aging parents need 24 inch or bigger screens to adequately see what they're doing. As a programmer and watcher of digital video I need a minimum of 24 inches of 1080p screen.
Then there's the enterprise, where biggish screens are needed for basic IT.
And I agree there will always be a need for large screen devices, but this doesn't necessarily mean desktops. Smart TVs or set-top boxes like Apple TV or streaming devices like Chromecast or consoles like the Xbox are where the growth is happening in the large format market. The Playstation 3 is the most popular Netflix streaming device.
I'm one of the dinosaurs that uses my laptop for everything these new consumer devices provide, but it doesn't mean I ignore that most people are moving away from this use case.
I think it's very interesting to see an internal MS manager with a background in Bing and Azure to become CEO, interesting times are sure ahead.
The Office formats, for all their quirks, are open and documented. There's no one forcing you to use MS Office. You probably can't switch which OS you're using at work, but Windows is fairly permissive of portable apps that evade most of the security restrictions. We're locked into using IE8 at work for compatibility reasons, but I'm able to use Chrome on my work computer just fine.
If you don't think Google is heading down the old Microsoft route, I point you to the bundling of Google+ with all of their other apps. Yes, it delivers value. But that's what Microsoft said when it started bundling IE with Windows.
A better way to put that would be businesses can't opt out of consumers using Google. Obviously you can not be listed simply by using robots.txt or not having a website.
This makes 0 sense. You can absolutely opt out, but wouldn't every business want to be at the top. I imagine if someone comes up with a better page ranking algorithm they definitely have a shot at beating google.
>bundling
I think its referred to single sign on in the enterprise world. Its much better than having to remember different logons and profiles for every google service (which youtube did)
Not a chance... about the same as Linux has at beating Windows on the desktop, in my opinion. It's too entrenched, too far ahead, barrier to entry to even get to a level playing field is too high...
I'd love to see it, to be honest. I hope beyond hope it will happen. But I think it's more likely to see something remove the need to search entirely than have a new search engine take out Google's dominance.
I can't come to the same conclusion. Just look at how much innovation has happened to areas that Microsoft dominated as opposed to those dominated by Google. Google basically sets fire to whatever it gets into. Look at how much they've enriched the developer space in those areas. Everything Microsoft is still stuck in the early 2000s.
When I think 'programming space' I think open-source - C, C++, Java, Mono, Javascript, Python, Ruby, R, Lisps, Rust, Dart, Go, Haskell, OCaml, etc...
Google doesn't immediately come to mind because they just use and give back to the OSS space, not caring too much to lock developers in.
I'm not trying to suggest that Google isn't contributing positively to the dev community, but I strongly dispute the idea that they have enriched it in any way proportionally to the way they've profited from it.
Actually, neither do I. Its funny, because when they do hit on something like Node.js (built with v8), Google ignores it. Its sort of puzzling actually.
The archive is still being prepared, but I am genuinely curious to see if it is better than the various office documents, spreadsheets, and backup formats I have had to use in years past. I am, for the moment, optimistic.
The world of Google and Apple (Samsung and FOSS aren't even a player) is a world of closed computing platforms where people can't control their own devices and can't and don't code for them. More languages? I don't think so. How many languages can you use to write apps for your iPhone or Android device? Objective C and Java respectively and that's about it. With Google not only do you not control your apps/device even your data isn't under your control any more.
Yes, Microsoft's business practices weren't so great, but I don't agree the new world is much better. As a developer it actually feels worse. The only exception is Linux and server side development which is in a sense a niche (plus that existed before Google and Apple rose to their dominance and could have co-existed with Microsoft perfectly happily).
Android allows you to freely deploy your applications to their devices, while iOS requires a little more work. In neither case do you have to go through their respective stores (I'm thinking enterprise/personal apps here). For commercial sales it's increasingly a moot point: consumers are purchasing apps through app stores regardless of platform.
As a developer, I've never felt more free, less beholden to a corporate entity and their hidden agenda, and have an awesome stable of tools and technologies from which I can use to build solutions. It's almost gotten to the point where I have too much choice!
And that's awesome!
Compared to truly open devices, and moderately open systems (even Windows or OSX), that is an absolute joke.
So I guess your answer is, Objective-C, Lua, or Microsoft technologies (implemented by Xamarin)? I guess Microsoft may have a role to play in this. ;)
I strongly disagree. FOSS is a huge force for both backend development and front end web development. One can also argue that Android is mostly open. EDIT: The large majority of servers in the world are running on FOSS. I can also predict a large number of upcoming devices like the internet of things to be running on it. Whether or not they run Android is another story.
The only reason FOSS may not be a "player" is because it's not a single monolithic organization, but instead it's a very loose coalition of thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies.
> How many languages can you use to write apps for your iPhone or Android device? Objective C and Java respectively and that's about it.
This may be the case for clients, but a lot of mobile apps also depend on server side apps.
In North America and Europe it's theoretically open but OEM's dependence on Google's services (which for many people are part and parcel of the Android experience) and the control Google exert through that means that there are real limitations on how open it is in reality. This week showed just how much freedom Samsung, the largest smartphone maker in the world, has to do what it wants with Android - almost none.
You can argue that that's not really Android, it's the services, but until there are solid FOSS alternatives to those services you can't use Android to put together a compelling smartphone without Google.
That may change over time but for now for a majority of people it's a relatively closed platform.
In China and much of Asia where Google services are either unavailable or less compelling it is far closer to open. OEMs use the OS, bundle what they want and ship it without Google knowing or controlling anything and that's maybe a third of Android shipments worldwide so not insignificant.
That said, yes Android isn't technically Android without Google services but it doesn't mean that stripped down it's still not useful. Just ask Amazon or one of the many companies in Asia that have forked it.
> until there are solid FOSS alternatives to those services you can't use Android to put together a compelling smartphone without Google.
You've made my argument in the same post.
> In China and much of Asia where Google services are either unavailable or less compelling it is far closer to open. OEMs use the OS, bundle what they want and ship it without Google knowing or controlling anything and that's maybe a third of Android shipments worldwide so not insignificant.
The interesting thing for me is how Google react to the areas where they're losing control of Android. For them Android is (or was) a means to an end - it stopped Apple getting control of the mobile space which would have made Google beholden to Apple for traffic to their services.
I personally don't believe Google have particularly strong feelings about Android as an open source property, they care about it for what it does for them in areas they do care about. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out over the next few years and what that means for Android.
I actually have an older Galaxy S and I installed CyanogenMod on it without Google's services, so no Google Play, no GMail, etc... The phone is actually usable. I have more apps on it than I have on another Win Phone 8, a Lumia that I received as a gift.
As a browser, I'm using Firefox, which I happen to believe it's the best mobile browser right now. For email I'm using K-9 Mail, a pretty good open-source email client that can also do PGP encryption btw. My contacts and my calendar are synced fairly OK, since I'm connected to my Google account through the Exchange protocol.
For maps I'm using OsmAnd - extremely awful interface, but the maps are from OSM and are awesome and because it helped me get to where I wanted, I have tolerated the UI. For music and movies I'm using Apollo and VLC.
For Facebook and Twitter and other high-profile apps, I could have gone with Amazon's Appstore, however I preferred to use the web interfaces, packaged as apps in Firefox's marketplace. Not as snappy as the native interfaces, but they work and you also get better sandboxing.
The amount of work to go from zero to open-source Android is huge. You could fork Android and release something usable today. Amazon did it ;-)
1) This is really an option for a relatively small part of Android's install base most of whom don't know F-Droid exists, let alone how to install it or why they might want to.
2) Any company wanting to produce a phone on this basis is (a) depending on a lot of other products and organisations and (b) putting out a product with - for instance - a substandard maps product next to the competition.
So yes it's open, but not in the way that I think many would like it to be (that is where a genuinely open phone that the average punter can and does use exists).
That last point is one of the reasons for why I switched away from iOS to Android. I have yet to encounter an Android phone that doesn't do Wifi tethering because the mobile career says so. And my prior mobile career also had the nerve to ask me for an extra 4 EUR per month for wifi tethering. It's my device damn it and I feel that Windows Phone is a shitty iOS replacement, without the sexy.
> How many languages can you use to write apps for your iPhone or Android device? Objective C and Java respectively and that's about it.
For targeting iOS you can actually use Ruby [1], C# [2], Java [3]. Many iOS games are using Lua for scripting. Speaking of which, Unity 3D is a platform for building games and you can use Javascript, C#, Boo or UnityScript (a sort of ActionScript). The problem with iOS is that Apple had artificial restrictions that disallowed virtual machines, so bytecode and virtual machines were out. I think they lifted those restrictions, though iOS is what I call a defective by design platform.
On Android there are no limits. People build stuff with Java, because it's the least painful path and works fairly well. Games are still being built with C++. I have used Scala and it works well. Many people are also building apps with JRuby and Clojure ... though Dalvik is not as capable as a real JVM, so dynamic stuff has performance issues.
Even if you target the browser, you can compile C++ to asm.js and for replacing Javascript there are full-featured replacements available that use Javascript as bytecode - like Dart or ClojureScript.
> server side development which is in a sense a niche
Err, what? 99.9% of all software being built today is either server-side or has indispensable business logic that's handled server-side.
> [Linux, server-side] could have co-existed with Microsoft perfectly happily
You're probably too young to remember all the shit Microsoft did to prevent Linux and the web as a platform from happening. That's OK, you'll live and learn.
[1] http://www.rubymotion.com/
http://www.embarcadero.com/products/rad-studio/ios-developme...
http://scala-ide.org/docs/tutorials/androiddevelopment/index...
I'm guessing no.
The entire experience is a sorry joke. I'm a big fan of Delphi as far as a tool to produce good/fast/native apps goes. They really dropped the ball with the ios/android tools. They ripped off GPL code, causing multiple patches to "fix" mis-appropriated open source code, it's fairly obvious there is no money, and the only customers they have are the existing ones who have a bunch of greybeards with a lot of Delphi experience and nothing else who are desperate to pump out _something_ for the mobile market, but are unprepared to learn _anything_ new.
Sorry, I'm just bitter that they took a decent product (Delphi 7), and took a shit on it, and then continued to grind it into oblivion.
Anyone owning a computing device in the days of Microsoft's reign was able to use any programming language in existence (pretty much) to do development for their device. The APIs were accessible and libraries and technologies played with each other. Mostly because they were around some common lower denominator (e.g. a C or lower level API). You could install anyone's software without needing an intermediary. It was clear that you owned your device, you owned your software and you owned your data. They didn't force other software vendors to pay them a fee. It wasn't Microsoft that broke all that. Microsoft is only playing catch up there.
I don't know Windows Phone 8 at all but if all you're saying is right then that sucks and I won't defend Microsoft there.
SaaS is just another facet of this multi-pronged attack on the user.
In today's mobile world, Apple and others could learn from the drawbacks of the desktop world and implement a "better" system, at least in some respects. It has certainly helped their revenue.
You could use any programming language you wanted - as long as you ported the headers and import libs to it. The Windows SDK and other Microsoft SDKs supported only C (Microsoft's, not Borland's or Watcom's, nor GCC) and Visual Basic. Wanted to use Delhi and Borland didn't create import units yet? Too bad, you had that to do for yourself.
Which is similar situation today. Both iOS and Android have well defined ABIs. Do you want to use something, that is not oficially supported by respective vendors? You can create the bindings for yourself. Nobody is preventing you. For some languages it was done, for some it was not. Android by its nature supports anything that compiles into Java bytecode, so even the bindings problem is a less of an importance. (Yes, there could be problem with Clojure, because of different assumptions on the part of Clojure and the constrains on Android devices. Due to that, it will run, but very slowly).
You can install any apk on Android device, without any intermediary. On the other hand, Microsoft got Apple envy and does prevent you from installing any application on WP handset.
EDIT: Something happened to my footnote. The HW specs used to be open in the PC WinTel era. We could freely exchange software. We could run multiple OSes. Lots more choice in languages etc.
iOS - ObjC, Ruby, Common Lisp, Haxe, Java, HTML5, C#, C++, probably others...
Android - Ruby, Python, Clojure, Java, Common Lisp, Haxe, C#, HTML5, Scala, C++, C, anything that runs on the JVM or translates to Java, anything that compiles to native code. Basically everything. Some are easier than others.
On my phone there are commercial apps that run on Clojure and Haxe, two fairly obscure languages.
This is hilarious, since Linux and BSDs are just killing it in the server space - take a look at stats on Amazon EC2, or DigitalOcean, or even just server market share stats. Take a look at what pretty much every web service uses as their backend (Linux).
Linux is pretty much the only game in town in the HPC (supercomputing) market.
> As a developer it actually feels worse.
I'm currently working with someone who only knows how to program with a ton of hand-holding from VS. I don't doubt it feels worse for you.
Linux makes development feel 1000x better if you are willing to learn a few basic things, which you'll retain forever.
This is why the world is better today - because Apple, Google, MS, IBM - not one of them 'controls' anything. They all push a little in various directions, but openness is winning. Linux is more relevant than ever, Mozilla is more relevant than ever, and the open web is bigger than ever.
> The world of Google and Apple (Samsung and FOSS aren't even a player) is a world of closed computing platforms
As a user of Omnirom and a donator to Replicant I don't understand how you come to this conclusion.
Agreed, the alternatives to google apps are not too good today, but that could relatively easily be changed. But if compared to windows phone. Really? How?
> where people can't control their own devices
If installing a different operating system with the tools from the official SDK is not controlling my own devices, what is?
Again, the proprietary drivers is a bad situation, but compared to windows phone, what exactly do they more openly?
> and can't and don't code for them.
All the tools required to build apks are open source. The eclipse android plugin was open source and android studio is open source. Enabling installing your own apps directly is natively built in and can literally be enabled in seconds. If you "can't and don't code for" android even if you want, then there is really nobody but yourself to blame.
> More languages? I don't think so. How many languages can you use to write apps for your iPhone or Android device?
As others have said, you may want to use android's gui toolkit, but other than that native applications can rather easily be wrapped. As it is linux, you may even run command line programs in any language you can compile for arm or compile an interpreter for directly.
> Objective C and Java respectively and that's about it.
Have you actually heard about xamarin'c c# for mobile devices? python + kivy? ...?
> With Google not only do you not control your apps/device
Well, I can compile the operating system myself and remove any apps I don't like in the process. I could also remove them from the device because I have root rights. There is literally nothing but the proprietary drivers and firmware I don't control, but again, how exactly does that get better with windows phone?
> even your data isn't under your control any more.
I use the google apps for convenience but you can use your android device without them perfectly fine. Install f-droid. Install only open source apps. Try doing this with windows phone?
> Yes, Microsoft's business practices weren't so great, but I don't agree the new world is much better.
With android being open source you can see the benefits directly: Other systems like Blackberry OS (or whatever it is called) or Sailfish OS can (rather) easily implement android's runtime and run almost all android apps natively. Compare this with what wine has to do?
> As a developer it actually feels worse.
It feels worse not to have proprietary microsoft specific tools that lock you into the microsoft ecosystem forever?
I feel like in some ways they were victims of their own success (Microsoft was). Building the core of an OS around a browser? At the time, a fairly novel idea, but really forward-looking. And I believe that's part of what brought about the massive anti-trust lawsuit.
Why? A strong anti-competitive troll/racketeer which fights open standards and etc. is not something the world really needs.
and they went in a bad direction imho:
- Apple closed down the app distribution process (we don't like what they are saying, let's censor Phone Story etc. etc. ..)
- The One of Google graps all information it can reach: the world (how boring it gets), me (nicely aggregated behind closed doors). Meanwhile spamming the world with ads.
Regarding the former, governments should enforce a non-exclusive app store policy. Regarding the second, it's more difficult, maybe the Chinese were right to 'shut them out'. Of course I like/kind of depend on some google services. Tricky.
It's extremely dangerous to think if Microsoft as weak. They have enormous profits and revenue - far, far bigger than Google, for example - that are secure far into the future. They are willing to plow this money for an almost indefinite amount of time into any product to brute force it to success (see Xbox) and they are willing stoop lower and employ underhand tactics to an extent that nobody else in the industry will match. So fear not, Microsoft is a long way from weak. We should worry a lot more about the possibility of them actually becoming completely dominant again than we should worry about the relatively benign prospect of them becoming weaker.
I long for a time when data flowed freely along pipes and tubes.
Microsoft is a big place. I predict we're going to continue to create and ship new stuff, and it will vary in all degrees of 'open'. But in my experience as a 3rd party outside developer, it's pretty rare that stronger engagement leads to things being more closed.
Am I in opposite world? People want microsoft software on their mobile devices because an open source OS is too "closed"?
I would believe what you actually want is an alternative to google apps on android...
History is littered with corporate walking corpses that owned markets at times that are are coasting or dead. Just look at how long AOL raked in billions after they long since ceased to be relevant to anything at all. I am not saying that MS is this, but they are feared to become one if they don't find a way to become much more relevant to how many people see the future going.
Worse than Google or Amazon's dominance of the marketplace? The squashing out competition that they do? I don't think so - Microsoft could be on a par perhaps, but certainly no worse.
I have a long-running joke with friends when we come up with ideas, that we'd better not do it as "Google's going there soon". Thankfully it seems to have slowed down its expansion a bit in the last few years.
Also the power they wield with search and adwords, to make businesses thrive or die - especially if they play the rules (cf RapGenius). Though I don't expect it would be any better if Bing was the dominant search engine.
tl;dr: I don't like semi-monopolies. Small, competing and thriving businesses are the best.
It would be more accurate to say Microsoft is willing to plow money into a product long enough for that product development to get past the barriers to success that are inherit in a 130k person software company.
Fantastic in what regard? Can I put my favorite linux distribution on it? Can I even write and release software for it under GPL? Without "applying" to microsoft and waiting for them to "approve" it?
Maybe it's just me but I don't really see why I should buy hardware that is 100% controlled by microsoft when it can't do anything that a general purpose computer couldn't do...
Frankly, it works very well for what it was designed to be. 4-5 years ago it provided an awfully intuitive platform to plug into your TV and stream video, tv shows and music from your home network or increasingly from the Internet. Almost no configuration necessary, rarely has issues, and fixes for those issues are pushed fast and often.
It's a home media PC for people that don't have the gumption or wherewithal to build one, and a much more pleasant interaction than many/most of the other HTPC distros out there. And really, almost no one wants to go through building a home server and HTPC, thus the continued advances in "smart" TVs and game-consoles-as-HTPCs.
They have always been 2 steps behind on virtually every product release.
Windows phone - check.
Browser that supports modern javascript - check.
An OS that looks wonky on the desktop because they're attempting to play catch-up with mobile devices - check.
You can probably throw Azure cloud services up there too.
If this guy can clean house and run a better ship that what they've been doing, more power to him, but they've got more to worry about that swapping their high paid CEO if they're going to have a future outside of Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
(Did I hear "Kin Phone"?)
It their mission for minimalism, they threw out a few good pieces. Now they have to figure out, how to catch up and not to blow up in their face.
Microsoft under Ballmer has been a study in short attention span. Changing themes, names, and directions every three to five years. When I was a Windows sysadmin back in the day, it was incredibly frustrating to build anything on the Microsoft platform because by the time you wrapped your brain around the new way of doing things, the next server OS release would change everything. From what I've seen since I moved on to a different career, that pattern hasn't changed.
Apple's success has come from a laser focus and constant improvement for the past 17 years. Microsoft used to be similarly focused. Remember the old adage that Microsoft would get it right by Version Three, and wipe out the competition? Well, they haven't stuck to any particular plan for long enough to come up with a version three of anything in 15 years.
Hell, Microsoft pioneered tablet computers, but after some promising early models and some decent push into the innovation required, they kind of just let that project wither on the vine until Apple came up with a workable model. Then MS desperately tried to pivot and turn everything, even the server OS, into a tablet-and-desktop-friendly mess.
Remember Zune? Remember Live? Remember the Kin??
I look forward to Microsoft finding their own perspective not only in hardware, but in software/search as well.
We should be very careful about criticizing others for their failed products. The side-effect of experimentation and innovation is that some of the experiments will result in failure to find market fit. Market fit failure isn't a good thing for a company, but it's much worse to not experiment at all.
For that matter, the Zune was a (late) iPod clone; sure, it had some experimental features (that didn't pan out, but, hey, they tried), but it was hardly seriously innovative.
It also was yet another example in how you'd best not trust Microsoft, as part of it they threw their PlaysForSure ecosystem under the bus.
Hmmm, getting whole sectors of the world to trust Microsoft in the future is going to be a tall order for the next CEO, assuming he doesn't just punt on many of them, which might be the wisest thing to do.
A small startup that gets squished by larger competition has an excuse as to why it shut down services and let down it's customers. Microsoft has no such excuse. They failed to compete, then the failed their customers. Innovation is wasted if it's improperly handled.
Zune could have been a good brand but rather than sticking to their guns, they abandoned it. Live was another unifying brand that they gave up on too quickly in favor of new rebrandings -- Bing, Office365, etc.
My point is that the constant jumping from idea to idea and rebranding instead of sticking with good ideas and revising until they're successful is a pattern of the Ballmer years that is a big part of Microsoft's lack of impact in the computing world over the past 5-10 years as Apple and Google and Amazon have risen to the forefront.
I always thought that was GO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GO_Corp.
Although I suspect more people know about GO from Jerry Kaplan's book Startup than from their products.
[...]
> Apple's success has come from a laser focus and constant improvement for the past 17 years.
Really? OS 9, OS X, iOS? Sure, it's not quite the same number of platforms as Microsoft have done in that time. But I don't think that they're on polar opposites of the spectrum here as you suggest (nor do I think that being at one end of this spectrum is necessarily good).
When Apple bought NeXT and Steve Jobs took over as CEO, the OSX project was born at that moment. Before that Apple had been stabbing wildly in the dark for a solution to their outdated OS, with a bunch of failed efforts at a rewrite. Yes, they updated the old MacOS a couple of times, which needed to happen, but as soon as OSX was ready for prime timee, they made the switch.
iOS is to some extent based on the same internals as OSX, but even if it were a completely different architecture, I'd say it's actually a good example of Apple's focus. Rather than forcing crossover and synergy where it doesn't make sense (ie, forcing the Metro interface onto the desktop and server, without actually providing Metro interfaces to their most popular desktop apps or server tools), Apple created separate OSes for devices that have completely different roles.
A Nokia Lumia 520 is dirt-cheap and has an FM tuner.
All you have to do is to pretend that it isn't also a phone.
You said you were looking for an MP3 player with FM radio, and couldn't find one. I just meant that you could've found what you needed by expanding your search to include phones.
Either way, thanks for the suggestion.
Although this has been rumored to happen for some time, its still a big "changing of the guard" step for Microsoft.
Good luck to Bill in his new roll on the Board as "Founder and Technology Advisor".
It looks like 80% of the money goes for "management" and the rest goes to the actual people in need. Not to mention the contracted "fundraisers" that are paid poorly. (I have nothing against the fundraisers per se, they're usually college kids trying to make some money)
Charities can spend their money on administration, marketing, etc., such that very little can end up going to their chosen task. A government is the opposite. There are millions of people clamouring to whinge about any amount of waste in government. So you end up with governments being up to 6 times more efficient at delivering aid. The classic example is the cancer cure charities that deliver almost no research funding, while government grants are an excellent source of funding.
80% is pretty good in the fundraising industry. Usually it's closer to 90%. Don't ever do one of those "text 12345 to donate to hurricane victims in the tropics" sort of thing, the returns on those are abysmal. But really, what do you expect? People doing work have to get paid. Most of the fuel in a rocket is for getting the rest of the fuel in the rocket off the ground.
One of the ways that fundraising departments try to keep the costs down is to use volunteer work (i.e., a form of donation of time) and internships to do the grunt work of calling people on the phone. Nobody expects those college kids to stay in those internships for their entire careers. Usually, they're only there for the "busy season", the end of the year where people rush to get donations in to count towards their tax writeoffs. For many of the kids, it's either that or a completely unpaid internship in advertising.
And government is actually a lot worse. In the US, only about 55% of your tax dollar goes towards social services. Then you have to take the admin percentage off the top of that. To beat an 80% number like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they'd have to keep overhead down to less than 64%. That's so absurdly low that I can't imagine it is possible.
My comment in my original post refers to the fact that every charity in the US is required to spend a certain percentage of their endowment every year. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a HUGE endowment. They have to spend so much that they can't find enough outlets for it. They have to fund projects that aren't necessarily part of their core goals because they can't fund their core goals anymore.
And the snarky comment about Al Qaeda is a commentary on the nature of Al Qaeda, they are not a single organization that operates above the board, they are themselves more of a foundation and loose conglomeration of various groups for mutual benefit. But the way our government casts it, if you help any organization that has any ties to Al Qaeda, then you are helping The Al Qaeda Man Who Is A Single Person Who 9/11 9/11 9/11.
So, when you have more money then you literally know what to do with, just tossing it around makes it very easy to hit Al Qaeda.
How are you defining social services? And do you mean all govmt spending, or only federal govmt spending?
At most established nonprofits relatively little money actually goes to management. There have been a very few cases that have gotten a lot of publicity, but it's relatively a small (and dangerously over-stated) issue.
See Charity Navigator to see the 'management' costs, which are often quite small. http://www.charitynavigator.org/
That said, 'administrative expenses' are a notoriously poor way to measure nonprofits. The group GiveWell is known for attempting to rate charities based on impact. http://givewell.org/
Basically, A) The average charity doesn't spend that much on management. B) Even if the 'average' did, there are plenty that don't. C) Even so, try using 'impact' rather than 'administrative costs' D) There are many great causes to give to, and that's really all that matters here.
That said, I would typically expect large companies to have large biases to help local causes rather than the best things for the world.
I think Bill Gates is brilliant, but if I was a major shareholder in MSFT, I would have him focus all his efforts on his foundation.
Without a cultural change Microsoft should end its here to now futile attempts to expand outside of its core (has the Xbox, at net, ever made the a lot of money?), put Windows and Office in maintenance mode after restoring the utility of the former for normal desktops, and mostly become a stodgy enterprise software company.
I assume the first generation wasn't wildly profitable due to the costs in establishing the ecosystem.
The second generation's hardware execution was infamously botched; we know they took a $900 million write-down on that debacle, and can be sure there were massive additional costs in e.g. brand equity.
How has it done since then?
What do you mean by cloud gaming? Something like the Ouya or Steam's new device?
VR will be interesting. I'm not familiar enough with the hardware requirements to comment intelligently about that. I haven't done much with VR since the late 90s. Is the PS4/XB1's hardware not powerful enough to drive the kind of things that we're seeing the beginning of with Oculus Rift?
I expect it to follow whatever path Netflix et. al. blaze. Depending; Moore's Law is very much alive, but doesn't apply to batteries. What's the attraction of a cheap tablet vs. a not quite so cheap capable tablet now, or a cheap capable tablet tomorrow, and how much will this depend on battery capacity?
Cloud gaming is when games are run on a server and streamed to your home. Combine chromecast and cloud gaming, and you suddenly got a huge platform, with much more users than xboox one/ps4. And since it's google ,it would probably run android games which there are tons. This could make the platform preferable for AAA gaming.
One more element that could be important in this is microsoft's "project spark" which let users build games with amazing creativity and amazing graphics. It's still in beta , but when it's release it could be a huge force in gaming , especially together with VR.
I chose Witcher 2 since it was featured on the OnLive home page.
As the intro video streamed, I was impressed. It was smooth and the quality was good.
After the intro video, it all fell apart. The round trip latency on the menu screen was very jarring. Gameplay significantly magnified the latency issues. I felt like my character was drunk, trying to walk around even in the tutorial phase. I can't imagine how terrible that would be during demanding phases of the game. It really was terrible.
Maybe this would be useful for less demanding games, where latency isn't so crucial, but isn't that the whole point? A low powered device probably wouldn't need to outsource rendering in the first place if the game is slow enough that latency doesn't matter. Maybe I'm missing something.
Ironically, playing a few minutes on the OnLive trial made me interested in buying and downloading the real game via Steam, and made me never want to try anything on OnLive again.
BTW: sony will be also offering it , so maybe the tech is ready ?
An open question... What's the big thing he brings to the table? Strategic thinking? Vision? Competitiveness? Respect in the Company? All of the above? What's the best way to harness this? (Ok, that's open questionS)
MS clearly need a rethink, but I'm of the view it's time for Bill to walk away to give more space to the others.
Probably more of a honorary title than anything else. I doubt he'll be as active as Microsoft makes it seem. If anything, Microsoft would be smart to let the new CEO follow his own visions, not Gates's visions.
I wish Nadella and Microsoft luck, and hope they make a real turn around.
As a side note it is also exciting to see some more diversity in the top ranks of one of our biggest technology companies. If I were a young aspiring engineer from India, or anywhere in the world really, I'd feel pretty good about the future right now.
Also amazing is that they're publishing and embedding Google YouTube videos on that page.
Because true diversity is people who look different!
I don't want to draw any conclusions, but I have a good feeling about that.
While there are reasonable third-party workarounds for the most pressing problems, the Windows console subsystem could use lots of love.
I also forgot to mention how slow text output is on cmd.exe when compared against terminals like xterm on linux. If the new CEO can improve the windows command line experience I for one would be immensely grateful.
You might have been facetious to prove a point but surprisingly few know you can change those settings there, and I like making my terminal oldschool-hacker-green :)
edit: Actually, I've no idea what I've done but now I can drag the window arbitrarily and it'll just show more characters. Maybe I set a font and now can do it? I don't know!
edit 2: I made it go to 160 characters, then set it back to 80, and now it'll let me drag it out to 160 but no more? This is so confusing Microsoft is on drugs
edit 3: Oh, ok. Screen buffer size sets the 'you can resize to this maximum' whereas screen size sets the 'you start at this size'. I'll stop making edits now.
I'd never even consider using a Windows machine without it.
http://lifehacker.com/5185647/mintty-gives-cygwin-a-native-w...
/sarcasm
If you're from a Unix background, you're probably better off running bash from Cygwin, but if you're a Windows guy, TCC is a great shell.
It's the first thing I install on a Windows machine.
Also, I'm not talking about a posix layer that is all but hidden, I'm talking about making Windows a posix system. Coreutils (or something like it), a free compiler, a terminal.
(Side note: I'm a developer, not an administrator and I use PowerShell as such – I have no clue of how to query AD or manage IIS, but I do know the language very well. I also was a technical reviewer of the PowerShell Cookbook 2nd ed.)
From my experience the language has some quirks (that are being slowly remedied in recent versions, e.g. handling of one-element arrays), but otherwise is quite well designed. The quite consistent naming of cmdlets give you enough hints to figure out what a command would be, if you only knows it exists, e.g. querying things always start with Get, projection is done with Select, etc. In a way, PowerShell is more unixy than traditional Unix utilities in that they really do one thing and only one thing. This can lead some to consider PowerShell overly verbose, because the pipeline often looks like
Get-Things | Select-Things | Format-Things
Need to fiddle around with a format string to get it right?
'{0:yyyy-MM-dd}' -f (Get-Date)
$p = New-WebServiceProxy http://localhost/FooService.svc
$p.AwesomeMethod()
Add-Type -Path key.dll
[Key.LicenseKey]::Check('...')
That said, I think OSs are irrelevant: people are happy to pay for apps, cloud hosting etc and MS are happy to provide it to them, Windows or not, for money.
Per http://www.unityisplural.com/2012/01/windows-posix-complianc... due to a procurement lawsuit in 1995 the Coast Guard was forced to accept a NT based "open system" bid. I don't know if they actually cared at the time, but the UNIX(TM) losing bidders certainly did, and it certainly made a big difference in subsequent adoption of NT/Windows.
Another lost opportunity. Microsoft could've captured the academic and web-developer market that eventually turned to OS X as a client OS.
However, it's Microsoft's tendency to squeeze and coerce compliance that drove people away. Proprietary everything means you don't play nice with everyone else.
Now the web has leveled the playing field somewhat, and they can't be coercive to be successful. It'll be interesting to see them play will on other companies' turf and platforms.
By the numbers, Microsoft is still incredibly relevant. At the same time, I can't even remember when I last used any MS product. It's not a boycott, there are simply no points where their stuff intersects with my life. I can imagine I'm not the only one, and that's not a comfortable position to be in for them. However, it's also difficult to see how they could ever break out of that. From where I'm standing they look like a partly consumer-focused IBM: rich, powerful, calcified, eternal, but computing has largely moved on and left them behind.
As a former MS user, I wish them all the success in the world turning this around.
Being one of the only Mac users in my office I constantly have to find work arounds for everything. Sadly they will be relevant for a long time we have almost 30,000 people using windows and they wont be learning anything new for a long time if ever.
I do hope the changing of the guard will help microsoft to build better products that integrate with OS's beside windows.
That's an interesting assumption.
> Microsoft has a massive foothold in enterprise
There is nothing in my comment to suggest otherwise.
On a meta note, I've been getting these "corrections" a lot here on HN lately, I'm just not sure why that's happening. Am I just too sensitive? Should I be more explicit in my comments? I'm not being touchy, I'd really like to know.
> I do hope the changing of the guard will help microsoft to build better products that integrate with OS's beside windows.
Agreed, it would be great if they aimed for integration as a more general goal too.
> Microsoft has a massive foothold in enterprise
> You must not work in the corporate world
You said you never interact with MS products, those products have a massive foothold in the corporate world, therefore you probably do not work in the corporate world.
If you are doing corporate work, not just software development (though even that too) in a corporate setting but business analysis, etc., and you do not use powerpoint/excel/visio then you are very much outside the norm.
>On a meta note, I've been getting these "corrections" a lot here on HN lately, I'm just not sure why that's happening.
The "corrections" as above, are an attempt to offer a different opinion that counteracts yours because it is seen as outside the normal expirience people are having and since you are getting them often I would think that is because there are many aspects of your comments that are outside the norm.
>Am I just too sensitive? Should I be more explicit in my comments?
I don't think so, your comment seems to add a valuable perspective from someone who does not use MS products in their daily activities, pointing that it is possible when surrounded by the right work culture.
But we still have Mac machines, because our customer data comes in in Excel, our applications are written to be compatible with IE8, etc.
If you are a web designer or creative professional I could see how this could be true for your team. My company provides people with a Dell but for those that wish you can BYOD. 98% of people use the company laptop.
In my job, each year I end up in dozens of meetings between corporate executives from different countries around the world. Nowadays, it is true that I see them bringing mostly Macs and iPads.
But this is, in my experience, a rather astonishing change from even 5 years ago, when 95% of the computers I would see these visitors bring would be Windows (and the majority of those still being Windows XP).
The Apple hegemony is still a pretty new thing.
No, it's not you, I'm seeing it a lot as well. Especially the "you actually don't know what you're talking about" threads citing Dunning–Kruger or the equivalent.
EDIT: I don’t mean it’s irrelevant, I just mean your assumption wasn’t really legitimate. There’s now many big companies that only use Microsoft in limited ways, and probably even some that don’t use the software at all.
It's not about integration, for Microsoft it's about migration. Why give customers, who are already well and truly invested, any leeway to migrate part of their infrastructure to a competing product?
Interoperability only makes business sense to allow people to migrate to your product, not when there's a risk of allowing customers to ease moving away from it. Given that they've already taken over the corporate/office world, there's not much left out there to suck in. Most of their battles are now in mobile and in the server room. Both of which they're coming from a losing position.
When these kids grow up and enter the workforce, they will want to use the tools they know, and will not understand the point of in-house Windows sysadmins, or the software licensing fees.
My 21-year old daughter grew up using Microsoft products, and has abandoned them completely. Everything she does is in the cloud, (mostly google, yahoo for email). She enters the workforce in one year.
Whatever the new CEO does, he basically cannot win back a generation that has learned to do office tasks on non-Microsoft products. It's sort of like what happened with GM. They produced absolutely shitty cars in the 80s, and many people who had early experiences with those cars started buying Japanese cars and stayed there. (No, I don't have statistics to cite, that's just my impression and personal experience.)
I give Microsoft ten years until their first quarterly loss.
When your company reaches a certain size, auditors and such will put an end to that.
"This gets backed up where?"
"Where's your antivirus?"
"Why aren't you using _STANDARD_PRODUCTS_?"
etc
Ours never did. Processes, yes, specific brands? No way.
Asking doesn't necessarily facilitate the need to do that thing necessarily.
I am inclined to agree. Already I can see the difference in the new interns and new hires at my job. Many of them are using chrome books at home so they tend to use chrome plugins to do everything at work.
Also professors and departments at universities are starting to use open source products in their curriculum as opposed to the traditional Microsoft suite. Even the school I graduated from uses google for email.
Hahah - If i had a penny for every time I've heard that. I'm an apple user myself - but MS offers all of what you are describing your daughter to be using as well - in fact I know many companies are already rolling their staff onto Office360 and so on. As for google docs etc - if you ever had to really crunch data - nothing comes close to Excel even today. I'm not saying they should keep doing what they are doing - I do think it's foolish to assume that they dont know whats going on in the world outside and aren't capable to grow with it.
I agree that google doc products are inferior to MS Office. (I find that Libre Office is good enough for me.) It's a funny argument to bring up though. Ignoring the cheaper, inferior alternative is exactly what led to Microsoft's dominance over IBM.
But Microsoft is not ignoring Google Docs. The Office web apps are also free, have more features than Google Docs, and have better compatibility with Office files. Microsoft is even bundling desktop Office for free with certain tablets, such as the Dell Venue 8 Pro.
There have always been cheaper products. Microsoft even used to sell one. Back when Office was $500, Works was $100. And yet -- even back then, companies opted to pay the extra money for Office.
The only difference now is that the lower-priced product is free. But as a percentage of the worker's salary, Microsoft Office has actually gotten cheaper over time.
Desktop versions are close irrelevant to this discussion.
Office web apps are completely irrelevant, I think. I've never met anyone who has ever used them. 100% of people I know who use web apps use Google's.
Office 365 (not 360) already generates over a billion dollars in annual revenues -- and that includes the desktop versions of Office. Even the consumer version of Office 365 Office has already sold about 2 million subscriptions.
And there are 50 million users of the Office web apps. If you don't know any of them, then perhaps you should think about whether your own experiences are skewed, and unrepresentative of what's actually happening out in the marketplace.
Most people don't, that's why it doesn't matter. I volunteer as treasurer of a cub scout pack. We switched from Excel to Google docs spreadsheet. We're using about 1/1000th the power and limitations of google docs, and google's capabilities are expanding faster than our needs are expanding. I don't care if Excel would be "better" because we'd only need 1/100000th its capabilities or it would take 20 times longer to learn how to use.
Most business tasks run into exactly the same scaling issue.
Business decisions are never made by qualified techs on the basis of pessimism, they're always by completely technologically unqualified managers in a hurry on the basis of optimism.
> there are simply no points where their stuff intersects with my life.
As to your other point: Microsoft is big. A "general trajectory" is very vague at their scale. Failure in one area (mobile, tablet) does not imply failure in another (enterprise), or indeed overall. I don't see what's wrong with trying to find a CEO who can turnaround that failure, and don't think it's really indicative of anything other than a missed opportunity.
I'm not asserting MS is failing. We basically agree though that there are areas where a turnaround would be exceedingly beneficial or even actually needed. I was trying to illustrate something about those areas, namely that I'd like MS to come back and make contributions to things I care about. It's not selfish, it was merely a wish to make our ecosystem richer again. And I wouldn't have guessed this opinion to be that controversial, but here we go.
Your argument is: because you don't see their products intersecting with your life, and - you imagine - that of many others, you imagine that's an undesirable position for them to be in, and that computing has largely moved on and left them behind.
I'm pointing out that your argument is focused on one niche -- a big one, but by all means not one that makes them "left behind" just because they have a small presence within it.
Perhaps you think Walmart [1a] is irrelevant and left behind because you never shop there? Or that Apple [1b] is irrelevant and left behind because you don't own an i*device/service?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_re...
[1a] The largest US company by revenue
[1b] The largest US company by market cap
Oh, and I use (and enjoy) Windows 8.
So, yes, people like you exist. But so do people like me.
You don't use Twitter or Facebook (their auto-translations are powered by Bing)? You don't play games? You don't use Skype?
I can believe these happen to be possible for you, but if they are, it seems like you're the outlier rather than the average.
Still a bit less buzzwordy than Ballmer.
Microsoft already produce some apps for the web, iOS and Android, and Azure can run Linux VMs.
Hopefully they just go wherever people want to pay them, eg, to access MS Office where they need it, even if it isn't via a Windows device.
Anyway good luck be with him - from what I read in his bio he was heading the only part of MS recently that managed to not alienate its customer and developer base.
In the next few weeks, the new CEO will be solidifying everything with Q&As, visiting the various campuses, and announce any new org changes. Org changes will be the big thing that impacts what individual contributors actually do in their jobs. Major changes to the 2014 strategy or goals would be announced soon, but seeing as how it's mid Q1 it's probably going to be changes for Q2 or 2H.
He introduces himself, explains about his way of thinking, tells about his family, for example
It's something MS needs. A fresh departure from Ray Ozzie, who looked like said Good Morning to his wife with a Corporate Memo, or from Ballmer, who, although energetic, didn't have a good aim for things (well, to be fair it's difficult to throw chairs with precision)
[1] Around this time, he reported to an executive named John M. Thompson, hence the use of middle initials.
It's another thing to pretend he's a robot and has no feelings on the matter, which is what you're implying. I think the original question is a valid one. Clearly he would have thoughts on the matter and they may be interesting to hear.
I know nothing about his career or his decisions WRT the OS/2 product, but, after having a closer look at the other two, a pattern of executive placement as an offensive weapon starts to form.
edit: minor clarifications
Good Lord, that is some serious speculation :)
Unfortunately, per Bill Gates, its 286 was "brain dead chip" and absolutely hopeless and slow in Protected Mode, which is where it needed to run for a modern, large address space computer. As I understand it, the OS/2 inability to abandon the 286/PC-AT for the 386 is what really drove the split.
(It wasn't even IBM that came out with the first major 386 system, but Compaq.)
What I was told by various people who tried this is that Intel had no idea how people actually coded for the x86/weren't willing to make segment sizes larger than the original 64 KiB, and the penalty for loading a new segment register was "tens of cycles" per Wikipedia, I've heard on the order of 40 earlier.
So a lot of existing code bases, including a couple I worked on for PCs (Gosling Emacs and a write once filesystem) ran, or would run, fantastically slower in Protected Mode.
Yeah, sure, you could with no small amount of pain write more efficient code for OS/2 1.x, but why bother after Windows 3.x became a big hit?
Oh, yeah, now you're reminding me that the cost to develop for it was $6K for the SDK in 2013 dollars, plus of course a PC-AT with a lot of memory (at least 1.5 MiB, which wasn't cheap back then, nor was the AT).
It's far-fetched anyway. Belluzzo is much less far-fetched and Elop is pretty obvious.
I would love to see Nadella's Microsoft get more involved in open source projects, and win back some developer love that has become lost in darker years.
Any external candidates would have had to buy-in to the restructure already started but not fully executed under Ballmer. Since he was theoretically part of the changes started with Ballmer, he will continue the same agenda.
What would our industry be like if it respects tradition? Less reinventing the wheel every decade?
PS: Azure is great technically and is lightyears ahead most other parts of MSFT but it has not found enough customers to warrant applause. AWS eats their lunch.
They're trying to segment such that their phones run one OS and their tablets and laptops run another. This is a really bad premise for a lot of reasons. The right processor architectures for laptops are not the same as the right processor architectures for tablets and phones. Windows 8's interface that tries to cater simultaneously to touch and mouse input is a confusing mess for users. They've decided to kill foundational elements of the UI for reasons that are simply boneheaded. It's obvious that an OS focused on touch input and mobile processor architectures and an OS focused on mouse/keyboard input and desktop architectures is a much better strategy.
As far as I can tell, Ballmer was a nut whose principal qualification was being Gates's college roommate. Hopefully we'll see Microsoft become more competitive in the consumer space with this change.
Microsoft is very good at long term support platforms. They have clearly articulated how long they will support each of their iteration of OS, and software packages. These work extremely well in the enterprise space. Moving a lot of their disparate services into long term support - e.g. skydrive makes good sense.
If they can now do the same for their software platforms and provide long term support for how to write long lived applications that will run well on the ARM and x86 platforms, we should start seeing some consolidation in the APIs again.
Bad start.
Instead of using proper unix machines, my early computing years were spent on DOS and Win 3.1.
I certainly would not have agreed that Microsoft ca. 1992 was at all visionary. I felt embarrassed for them and their users back then, much as I would for an adult who shows up at the office proud of the childish fingerpainting he spent the last month making. Grasping, copying, but not visionary.
I love the breadth and the diversity of all of the customers we empower, from students in the classroom to consumers to small businesses to governments to the largest enterprises.
It's interesting to see the governments standing between small businesses and large enterprises in the minds of such men.
edit: why the down votes? Honest question, parent seems to be implying that its a bad thing that he adjusted to his environment, an environment where clear communication is paramount,.
Typically, it just requires spending time around the person and interacting with them. It doesn't matter where they are from or what sort of accent they have. After a few days, you'll understand them.
And also, an accent has no bearing on intelligence.
Out of curiosity, has anyone ever articulated why your Chinese is hard to understand? Is it tone or phonemes?
Do you mean Nadella's in particular? I didn't think it was that bad. Anyway it's only racist if you think less of a person just because you can't understand them. Remember there are lots of people who can't understand you, either.
He still sounds Indian - eg 'more meaning', 'unbounded' has the emphasis on the vowels which is quite Indian. He also pronounces 'perseverance' differently from an American. I don't think he's putting anything on.
So the point is that accents can evolve naturally over a period if the person makes an attempt. Yes it gets harder as you get older. Just because someone sounds American-ish doesn't mean that they are not speaking it naturally.
A lot of people do not realize that their accent can actually be a hindrance in communication. They might have near perfect grammar but accents do cause a problem. I know this is a controversial topic and even pg got some flak for saying this but a "neutralized" (notice the American spelling) accent is important for communication. If you are a leader/CEO, even more important.
Nadella shows no sign of this. He may not sound "perfectly american" but he's understandable enough for me. In fact, he sounds vaguely European. Keep in mind I am a Hungarian, born in Brazil who learned Hungarian, Portuguese and English in that order. If I can understand him, I suppose Americans will have little trouble ;-)
It's easy to summarize: the stockholders trust the corporation's board, and the board trusts its selected candidate. There are very few written requirements, most of the process is based on the judgment and experience of the board members -- which is why they're sitting on the board.
> ... years and years of strategic positioning, favors, and relationship building with people that matter.
That's accurate. But the bottom line is that if the candidate doesn't work out, the board's credibility evaporates -- that part of the process is also ruthless and unwritten.
Also think it's a bad thing that Gates is going to take a more active role as the technology world today is very different from when he dominated. Gates is famously (if the stories are true) the one who didn't like the Courier tablet, for example.
Interesting that they chose a walk and talk kind of thing, in a completely vacant office. What where they hurrying towards that they couldn't take the time to sit down?
Am I too cynical?
I was just disappointed he didn't hop on the vespa and putter away at the end.
Or
What suggestions would you give Satya, if you were to meet him today?
Recognise that operating systems are less relevant than they were and port everything to everywhere. This means dev tools, Office, etc. People will pay for Visual Studio on the Mac and on Linux if it's the same experience as it is on Windows.
De-complexify Windows and focus on its number one use case: Office. Windows is essentially a platform for running Office and playing games.
Buy Oculus VR.
Not sure if they are good suggestions or not for the business but they would certainly help me out!
Wonder if he has read Vikram Seth's Golden Gate. Looks to be an interesting person despite the corpspeak.
Catching up to the current state of things does not sound like innovation.
I take this to mean that Microsoft is aiming to be hip and cool. That's not a bad thing, if they really mean it and can pull it off. I hate the coat & tie thing when it dictates what I can do and my level of political influence. Those things should be decided by my ability to think and reason, not where I shop for clothes.
New blood will surely bring in fresh ideas and approaches - I hope Microsoft manages to raise the bar even higher and make me an MS evangelist again.
Satya on first things to focus on:
* ruthlessly remove obstacles to innovation
* focus innovation on things that Microsoft can uniquely do
* find more meaning at work
opportunities for Microsoft:
* opportunities are unbounded; we want need to be able to pick a unique contribution that we want to bring.. (focus on productivity)
why will Microsoft be successful?
* we have the talent, the resources and perseverance like no one else has => combine it with self empowered world = best platform to change the world.
hopefully soon there will be a more tangible strategy for Microsoft, but i'm not holding my breath.
He was cheerleading here. Boosting the morale of Microsoft employees by talking about how awesome they are and how their lives will improve under his tutelage.
On the other hand, contrary to Ballmer, the new CEO will be under strong influence of Gates and the investors.
In the first scene, we see fog outside the windows.
According to the Weather Underground, it was foggy in Seattle on February 1 and 2, with rain on the 1st. There was no fog or rain on February 3 or 4.
Conclusion: the video was recorded on either Saturday or Sunday. Hence the empty building.
if you want Microsoft to innovate, simply throw out everything you have done so far and bring us a real object-oriented operating system that can work seamlessly on one machine, many machines on a lan or many machines on a wan.
Productivity could be vastly enhanced from what it is today by a true object-oriented design.
Computers are not file cabinets. Computers contain objects. The file metaphor no longer serves us.
Microsoft has always been its best as the underdog and that's where they're at now.
Scrap Ballmer's toys and go after the big enterprise boys.
That's where the money is :)
Running O365 on Azure has probably substantially improved the platform.
I can't see why Microsoft would take the slightest interest in the mobile software world of 100,000 different $1 crapware products. There's no money in it.
Rovio is one of the most successful mobile developers there is, with annual income of $150 million, across pretty much every mobile platform. They're great at it.
$150 million isn't even visible next to Microsoft's $60 billion yearly income.
This strikes me as an odd thing to say, especially so given the nature of the communication. Am I alone in this thought?
On the other hand, the last time they got busted in the U.S., they got off with a slap on the wrist. The E.U. seems to take that stuff a little more seriously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella#cite_note-16
But he is still wicked smart, i think :)
There is nothing wrong with the guy wearing suits to work if he wants, but it seems that they're trying unnecessarily hard to make him fit some sort of cool geek stereotype.
Look at his glasses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5BhQVuRcTk
Any startup that sets out to recreate Photoshop would also compete with GIMP and Pixelmator.
GIMP is poor quality.
But barely no one likes Adobe flash. Their software quality is getting lower and lower. Too much bureaucracy always shown in these companies.
I see a clear pattern here.
I'm open to other possible interpretations.
I'm afraid that we'll backtrack all the way back to the 7 days and inhibit progress. It's been shown to happen in the past, and it's not an illegitimate concern, however racist it may seem.
He was educated in the US. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella: "Nadella earned an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business."