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Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

There's something deeply symbolic about watching those enthusiastic people doing their Sorkin walks for the camera through the vast and completely empty halls of the Microsoft offices (or is it a museum, I can't tell).

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.

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You must not work in the corporate world. Microsoft has a massive foothold in enterprise: email, instant messaging (lync), excel, word, visio, project, even sharepoint and those are just the pieces you can see not to mention whats going in the backend.

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.

The decline of Microsoft will be a generational thing. At some point, those offices are going to be inhabited by kids who grew up with google docs, dropbox, a variety of IM options, and who have never seen a native email client.

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 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.

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

Your auditors are asking about specific software???

Ours never did. Processes, yes, specific brands? No way.

Yep we only install virus scanners at email gateways to make the exchange servers not die. The virus scanners are for windows, never had any auditor for sox or pci ask about software, sounds like a shit auditor.

Our PCI auditors like to see anti-virus on every machine, Windows, Linux, Mac, or Unix. That might not be a requirement, but every year they ask to see our AV solution for everything.

From our PCI implementation documentation I don't see any requirement of AV on every operating system.

Asking doesn't necessarily facilitate the need to do that thing necessarily.

Also: The success of BYOD suggests that things aren't quite so fixed. And seriously, if you're concerned about viruses, you're going to REQUIRE Microsoft products?

"I give Microsoft ten years until their first quarterly loss."

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.

"ever had to really crunch data"

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.

It doesn't matter that Office360 does blah blah blah -- the next generation of office workers aren't using it now, and that's a problem for Microsoft.

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.

> 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.

I have some kool-aid I'd like to sell you.

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.

No, thanks, I prefer to drink water. Sounds like you bought too much Kool-Aid. You must be tired of drinking it. I recommend that you return it to the store.

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.

>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.

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.

These are the kids that change their tools whenever a better one comes along. They are exactly the people who CAN be won over by the first better client they see.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, except I wanted to point out that I still greatly prefer native email clients (I'm 24, for what it's worth). Outlook is actually a very competent piece of software on OS X and I use it at work; it's easily on par with Mail.app for me. I prefer either of these to any web email interface I've used, as they are considerably more responsive (even Gmail seems laggy in comparison).

You should try Thunderbird. I switched from Outlook a few years ago and have never looked back.

Here we go, and I use Thunderbird and would switch to Outlook (if it would be available for Ubuntu..)

Thunderbird can't provide a mail link as the Mail.app does. That is the only thing I miss since I switched from Mail.app.

I am of same age as your daughter but I use MS product and Mac. Your daughter must be stupid to abandon MS. That's the problem we have truly.

Care to qualify that otherwise pointlessly insulting post?

> You must not work in the corporate world.

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.

> I can't even remember when I last used any MS product

> 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.

Well, count me outside that norm too. I work in a pretty corporate environment and nobody here uses Microsoft stuff. In fact, I've never worked anywhere where the vast majority of people weren't on a Mac.

How long have you been working?

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.

>I've never worked anywhere where the vast majority of people weren't on a Mac.

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.

How old are you? Not bashing, really curious here!

In the past 20 years I've been employed, Mac has never been a majority. First PCs with Windows, now increasingly Linux on developer machines and management with Macs.

But we still have Mac machines, because our customer data comes in in Excel, our applications are written to be compatible with IE8, etc.

The second sentence you quoted appears to be backing up the assumption, or giving you a clue as to where it came from. I don't think he was "correcting" you

> 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.

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.

I think the world has gotten a little weird. You have real life businesses today that have no Microsoft stuff in them at all. If you live in a corporate environment defined by your Windows XP desktop, it's difficult to imagine a world where grey, 9 lb laptops and horrible corporate Windows installs aren't the norm.

I work in the corporate world. Only thing I use a Microsoft product for is running games. I do have Excel installed on my Mac, but haven’t touched it in ages (though this is mostly because things I deal with polarized themselves between „I can just do it in Numbers” and „where’s my Matlab”).

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.

> I do hope the changing of the guard will help microsoft to build better products that integrate with OS's beside windows.

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.

As a counterpoint, I use Microsoft stuff more than ever now. I migrated my email from Gmail to Outlook.com, I subscribe to Office 365 Home Premium, I use Skydrive as my cloud storage provider, and I'm starting to dabble in ASP.Net for web development again.

Oh, and I use (and enjoy) Windows 8.

So, yes, people like you exist. But so do people like me.

You probably use services running on Microsoft-based platforms all the time if you e.g. have a bank account, use commercial airports, have insurance of any form, etc. Those big numbers you're waving away represent real, significant businesses.

Even if you assume I didn't know that (which is somewhat audacious of you), this sounds exactly like IBM. Which was my point, and I'm not waving anything away. I guess there's nothing wrong with being another IBM per se, on the other hand they wouldn't have had to change CEOs if they were all that satisfied with their general trajectory.

I'm not assuming anything, I'm reading what you wrote:

> 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.

That's nitpicking. But yes, technically you're correct, I didn't cover the cases where other people outside of my control are using MS software behind the scenes which has an influence on my life. However, we're getting very far away from the original point just for the sake of one-upmanship.

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.

It's not notpicking, and your constant attempts to belittle critical responses to your opinion is becoming annoying.

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

I apologize if my comments seem belittling, I assure you they're not meant that way. In fact, condescension is the main impression I got from your first reply. At the same time I feel your tone has taken on a personal and aggressive quality that is not acceptable. I was merely trying to rectify what I thought was a miscommunication or maybe a misunderstanding of my original post. Now I see that's not likely to be productive, so excuse me for bowing out of this thread.

You're writing like I did when I was ~15 and trying to sound smart. Did this whole thread accomplish anything?

At the same time, I can't even remember when I last used any MS product

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.

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