Microsoft, Past and Future
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
Microsoft's surface tablets are signs of big things to come. They're currently too expensive for what they are, but they could find a huge niche. They're portable tablets meant for content creation, not mere consumption. If you want a tablet that will let you draw, take notes, etc. as easily as on paper, iPads aren't even close to the current Surface. The surface pro would have been exactly what I wanted in undergrad physics for a lecture-hall machine. Many artists probably feel the same way now.
Tablets have long been too underpowered to tackle real creative tasks. The surface proves that the hardware has changed, although the cost is still high. I expect the next few generations of surfaces to get cheaper and more refined rapidly. People who love tablets are soon going to want something more than a glorified phone, and the Surface is going to be the go-to option.
Yeah, so MS might dominate the content-creation/student/artist tablet niche. Big whoop. Well, success in any consumer hardware niche might do for MS what it did for Apple. Namely, make them a huge pile of cash and jump-start their supply-chain so they can move into other areas. It might not play out this way. Apple has been looking for ways to make the iPad more content-creation friendly beyond just marketing them as such. Still, iOS on an iPad is a huge step behind Win8 on a Surface pro for creative tasks right now. All MS has to do is keep iterating the Surface and avoid another Vista-style PR blunder with Win9.
When was the last time they have actually managed to pull this off? Maybe the Xbox? It was never dominant or an area of profit. .NET? Never dominant or a direct source of profit.
The days you are referring to are long gone. It's not the same company anymore and it's not the same world anymore.
Considering the early advantage Java had over C#, who seems to be laughing now? Business apps (you know, the boring 90% of software) seems overwhelmingly in favor of those two languages, with C# doing a bit better.
I think you're rather wrong.
But your point still stands: MS went from a standing start to a credible competitor, overcoming their early embrace-and-extinguish failures like Visual J++.
Azure is picking up speed fairly well too.
References: http://www.microsoft.com/Investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earn...
(Of course, check out "gross margin" and not "revenue.")
Balmer explained it in his exit interview:
Q: I'm curious why you guys are so taken with being a player in consumer. Why not 'just' be IBM? You're already so successful in enterprise, why not just focus there?
Ballmer: I would say -- and I'm going to actually even let John (Thompson) echo, because this is one where I think the board and I are on the same page together, but it takes some thinking to get there.
The key isn't are you in consumer or are you in enterprise. If you're going to be in e-mail, you're going to be in e-mail. You can't say, okay, I only want to be in enterprise e-mail. If you're in real time communications, what, you only want to let enterprise people talk to enterprise people but never talk to consumers? These experiences span.
Similarly, if you're in devices -- and we are in devices. With Windows, the Windows operating system means we are in device definition. And nobody has ever managed to figure out how to build a device for a user that was just enterprise or just consumer. These core experiences do span, 'consumer and enterprise.' These core devices span consumer and enterprise.
So I know there's a lot of press, blah, blah, blah about this, but the truth of the matter is I don't even know how you could opt, what it would mean to just opt to be all enterprise, unless you want to look like Oracle and not participate in certain high value activities, or you want to choose to look like Apple and not participate in certain enterprise activities. But that's not where we grew up. We grew up with a horizontal experience called Windows and Office that's equally applicable to people in their personal lives and their professional lives.
Unless we're going to say that the XBox is helping them sell SQL Server and Office licenses over in the other divisions.
The NES came out in 1983-85, Playstation came out late 1994 and Xbox in late 2001. Microsoft came in with a fairly cold gaming brand and new image.
Windows is on a whole different level, you cannot compare anything to it because nothing comes close. 90% market share is practically impossible.
Furthermore, even if such a swing does begin, you are assuming two things: Firstly that Apple will not respond effectively to MS establishing such a niche. Secondly that Android will also fail to compete for that niche.
The problem is that all the innovative new mobile creativity apps are currently coming out on iOS, digitizer tech or no. Apple has never subscribed to the creation/consumption world view, or even used the term 'consumption' to my knowledge. It sounds like something people died from in the Middle Ages. Their flagship day one launch apps for the iPad were all creative apps - Garageband, Pages, etc.
They may well add the digitizer, but I don't think Apple will bother with better keyboard support than they already have. I think they view laptops and tablets as being complementary devices. A digitizer might make a tablet a better tablet, but a keyboard just turns it into an inferior laptop.
As tablets do evolve Apple's advantages in market share, app ecosystem dominance, software development and their 64-bit processor technology head start all place them on the strategic high ground in all the ways that matter.
Well, but that's mostly redrawing the existing widgets, it looks different, but works like how it used to work. (They added some stuff like the control center on the bottom, but they haven't really _changed_ how things work.) Also, I don't consider it to be a successful restyling (it's less straigthforward to figure out whether an icon is a button or not, and so on), but that might also be a matter of taste. What I'm trying to say is adding a digitizer to iOS does not mean that you only need to write drivers and design the hardware -- you need to change some UI paradigms. And that's hard. Windows classic desktop is now touch and digitizer-enabled in the case of Surface Pro, but the whole thing is not too useful.
Apple is in a difficult position exactly because iPad Mini is so successful at the moment. Eventually large phones will devour that market as one mobile device (large phone) is usually better than two mobile devices (phone+tablet), or at least that's my prediction. They must target the same use case what Surface is trying to target: a super-lightweight laptop replacement what can sometimes be used as a tablet but renders your old, clunky laptop mostly irrelevant.
The entire market for tablets may shrink if consumers opt for just one larger device, but iPad mini will likely still be a steady device for a long time to come. Now that I've said it, apple will drop them next quarter! ;)
I think MS took the right approach with the Surface/Metro, they really needed to reconsolidate their consumer software/hardware stack to provide a good user experience.
"When you care enough about software, you'll make your own hardware" -- Alan Kay.
Sure, but why it has to be a low margin, overcrowded smartphone market? It's better to focus on new category of devices such as thermostats;-). Microsoft's situation is different here because they have no choice - Nokia pretty much the only vendor for WP.
One can argue if the iPad is a glorified phone or not, but I think Apple isn't moving any slower than Microsoft, and it is reasonable to expect a more capable iPad in the years to come. Although it's third party hardware, stylus support has come a long way, even if it might not be as good as the Surface digitizer, it might as well be good enough for average users.
The race is on, and I wouldn't bet my shirt on Microsoft taking the lead anytime soon (in 5 or 10 years, I don't know)
They released the music kit for the Surface, but where are the vast amount of great music production / performance apps from various well established companies such as Korg, Moog, Cubase, all of which are available on iOS?
I doubt it. A keyboard alone isn't enough to win that market, great software is. Look at the content creation apps available on iOS - iMovie, Garageband, iWork, Paper, Brushes, DM1, Amplitube, Notion. It's going to be hard to catch up with that. They are built for touch. The people using them don't need a keyboard. A keyboard isn't really the ideal input device for someone creating content unless it is written content. For everything else touch seems to work better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3gG8TlUVyU
many designers look at the surface pro and find that it has very appealing features, and it's only going to get better.
Moving from OSX to Windows I have noticed a large lack of ease of use and good UX flows in a lot of third party apps.
I would say that is because you were really used to OSX. I was the other way around and really dislike the whole OSX UI experience.
I think it is just a bias based on our previous experience. Right now after moving freely between OSX, Ubuntu and Windows at different jobs for the last 5 years, I still prefer the UI experience of Windows (I only wish Windows would have a command line similar to Linux's one and it would be perfect)
I wish Microsoft would could out with a desktop OS (like windows 7) with pixel scaling and a nice flat UI (so I don't have to install some sketchy theme that screws up my font sizes and close/minimize/maximize buttons)
It seemed possible that it was due to my getting used to Windows and not being familiar with os x.
A part of me though thinks that Windows UI is in fact superior to OSX ui, and that OSX has a somewhat amateurish feel to it. If I ran a design-centric company and my OS looked like that for a decade, it would bother me strongly.
I actually want Microsoft to succeed; I want them to do much better than they have been. Microsoft does certain things really well that their competitors don't, and I would especially love to see more competition in the mobile and tablet space. Their own processes and business strategies seem to have calcified around 2003, which have since dragged down a lot of things that could have been great products.
Totally tangential, but this is ignoring the fact that they actually have been doing really well in the one area that you would think would be the only thing people care about: profit. But no one seems to care about that, even though I personally don't think that that profit is going to dry up anytime soon. They could keep going like this forever, and people would still talk about how they're dead or dying. I understand why this is, it's just unfortunate that simply being a successful business isn't enough to avoid being branded a failure.
I think a lot of Apple's success (one possible example of many) is due to the fact that they consciously don't try to please everyone. In fact, they make many decisions about such things knowing full well that those decisions will turn off many potential customers and put a ceiling on their potential market share. Their goal is to make what they think will be very desirable products for some target audience, as opposed to making something that they think will appeal to every customer in every segment of the market. IMO, Microsoft is constantly forcing itself to strive for an ambitious but impossible goal that tends to water down whatever the original product vision was.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
which was made by a MS team as an illustration of their frustration.
Because for most people, for most setups, for most use cases, it just works. Expensive? It's rolled into the price of the PC they bought. Proprietary? They don't care. Bug ridden? I rarely see a Windows machine crash these days. Even the years old XP machines I deal with sometimes, for all they need a good fix to be running at acceptable speeds, still run.
With Chrome there's certainly an argument that it can be more convenient than Windows. However, the argument for Linux needs to be stronger than being a free version of Windows or Mac OS with relatively poor hardware support and access to the underlying code that most people won't understand anyway.
Are updates included for free? If not, it could be more expensive in the long run.
>I rarely see a Windows machine crash these days
I wasn't just talking about Windows and besides, not all bugs are visible -- they might manifest themselves as security holes. Companies (should) care a lot about security, if they did, I'm sure they'd be more interested in OSS.
I think I'm trying to reason with HN and not the average Windows dependent company. How many of us have relatives using Linux or Chrome OS? Very few? That could change down the line.
Sure MS leveraged their dominance in the OS world with brutal effectiveness, but Netscape was far from the ideal browser. In fact, Opera was our "Firefox" of the time as it could fit on a floppy disk (I'm dating myself here) and seemed lightweight in comparison to even IE.
Speaking of FF, Firefox was born out of Netscape's overall crappiness/bloated nature. IE didn't start sucking until after the US gov came down hard and MS essentially threw their hands up and abandoned innovation as a result of being pounded in the courts. Firefox re-lit the fire of web innovation (along with the whole web 2.0 movement and post dot com bubble rebuild) and then Google simply out Firefoxed Firefox with Chrome.
Apparently, You never participated in the IE4/Nashville beta. Shortly before Windows 98 took the world by storm, Microsoft unleashed a new Beta of Internet Explorer for all the people who drank the kool-aid of Dynamic HTML that was being marketed at the time. One of the "features" of the Nashville beta was the HTML-ifying of the desktop and file manager. Now, everyone that's used Windows since knows that you can right-click on the desktop, and hide desktop icons. This was considered a feature in the Nashville beta, because it gave more screen real estate to .htm files you could create for every folder, including Desktop. Before uninstalling the (crashy) beta, I spent a good 2 days with all sorts of spinning .GIF files on my desktop thinking I was the coolest person ever. Eventually, I realized my PC was performing at approximately half it's normal speed, exhibiting symtoms such as Explorer taking 45 seconds (I benchmarked) to render C:\WINDOWS\system32 with HTML, and did a full Win95 reinstall in order to remove the tendrils Nashville inserted.
I'd say IE4 was when it "started sucking", myself.
No? Well that's my point.
And IE sucked from the very beginning, each and every time Microsoft could get away with it sucking due to lack of competition. Where was the spell checker? Clearly veto'd by the Office team, till IE10.
The "most innovative" browser took till 2012 to figure out that people wanted to spell check what they typed into a browser, or they intentionally hobbled their industry-crushing browser to benefit their older cash-cows. Either way it's bad. It had to be just good enough to starve the competition (and often it was easier to do that with "innovations" in bundling, lock-in and other dirty tricks than it was with features, speed or security) and then they left it to rot, when we had no other options to turn to and it took a concerted community effort to make many websites even bother to support any browser other than IE.
Also, MS didn't make IE "just good enough" they integrated the browser into the entire OS! Good or bad, they made a huge bet on the web as the future but when the DOJ essentially slapped them down they said "fuck it" and starved the market for half a decade until FF came around and the government/public had moved on from the whole Netscape fiasco enough for them to start giving a shit again. Why would you innovate on a product with the potential that any "feature" you added would put you back in court against the US Government. No thanks.
Though, I have used Firefox since the days of Phoenix, back when some of the most important bugs where for evangelists to convince important websites to support anything other than IE (often just IE on Windows, since the Mac version was different, technically better, yet worse because lots of things didn't work on it). Presumably this is why everyone else thought IE was "better" since most of the web was written for it, and it alone.
But there were other browsers, remnants of a once thriving, competitive market, e.g. Omniweb for Mac OSX had inline spell checking in about 2000 (might even have had it back on NeXT). Safari launched with it in 2003 I think. There were plugins for IE and Firefox from around the same time. Firefox was held back because the Netscape spell-checking code (for the email component) was licenced so that was something that got ripped out when Mozilla was launched. Even so, they beat Microsoft (which had more money than God and had already written the most used spell checker on the planet) by 6 whole years!
Otherwise, Microsoft rewrote the browser so that the components could be used by other programs and by outside developers, so it wasn't a bundled product, it was integrated into the operating system. This might have been a mistake (or not), but it was required because Microsoft had already signed a consent decree with Janet Reno that stated that Microsoft was allowed to add to the OS but not to tie separate products.
Life is hard when politicians interfere with software design.
Componentizing IE resulted in it being a better browser than Netscape, and made it much easier for third parties like AOL to adapt it using the SDK Microsoft provided. Netscape couldn't offer that, though it probably wouldn't have: Netscape prevented third parties from changing Navigator, and it could only be downloaded from Netscape.
Netscape finally lost for a lot of reasons. One was because it decided to rewrite its crap code just as Microsoft had done. That meant it stopped shipping new browser versions with new features. Its market share plunged and AOL, which had bought it, decided to make it open source, which is where Mozilla came in....
Incidentally, Microsoft didn't run into the same problem because it had two browser development teams working in parallel, one on the old version and one on the componentized version.
It would have been possible to keep the core HTML components without shipping a functional browser frontend.
It would have also been possible to make these core HTML components versionable, so that a given Windows version could offer multiple versions of IE at the same time.
The fact that they failed to do both of those things wasn't the fault of the courts. Some of their design decisions were explicitly made to make the browser itself appear more integral than it really was.
Who else had an OS that mattered? Apple had single digit share, maybe < 5%. What other OS do you have in mind?
BeOS? Sun? NeXT?
This was mostly back in the 28.8 and 56.6k modem days, and Netscape's caching of content was a joke:
Resize Netscape's window and what does it do? It would block (single thread) and re-download the content (HTML, images) instead of using the stuff in its cache. You could wait 30 secs before you were reading your page again. IE would instantly (well, disk cache and then re-render) redraw the page - on most non-heavy pages, you could interactively resize the window with no issues.
Netscape also inconsistently progressively downloaded content - something IE could do very well, making for a much smoother browsing experience.
From a UI perspective on limited connections, the difference was like night and day.
MS mentality barely changed. Lock-in remains their primary strategy in many areas (it's well described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_...).
In today's world though it's only backfiring at them, because they have no domination as in the past.
It is been a dream for many companies to own the full stack - client onwards all the way till the server. MS tried with Active-X controls in their browsers which only worked well with IIS servers. Apple is pretty much doing the same with their offerings.
Full-spectrum dominance.
The Xbox is quite successful, but it's a lot of work to make not a lot of money. Why? The razors and blades concept doesn't work so well as making a 30% margin on a product people really, really want to buy.
The questions in that regard seem as follows: Why would artists opt for a, relatively small, imprecise pen over something from Waccom?
Why would programmers opt for working on a small laptop analogue compared to a computer with multiple monitors?
Why would writers opt for this over a computer or a laptop?
I can see people writing a blog post on one, or sitting in a lecture hall with one - but even there, the advantage over an apple laptop; which is pretty light already; seems negligible.
Unless you have to travel a significant distance on foot. There it has the advantages that tablets always had: Light device, relatively good battery life.
But by and large, the competition for Surface in the tablet space seems likely not to be other tablets. It seems more likely to be the tools - some of which are, when you get down to it, fairly specialised - that people are already using.
They tried to do so because you can argue that in the enterprise, iPad can deliver a better Windows experience via VDI than the garbage PCs that dominate the market.
Once I'm delivering a quality Windows experience to my users by turning the client device into a TV, the next step is to further simplify. That expense app? I can use VDI to deliver some awful Enterprise Software via IE9.... or buy a solution with an iOS app! Something like 40% of enterprise users are using a defined set of < 7 PC applications to do specific things. That's easy pickings for a mobile application, and a great way to reduce Microsoft spend -- which is a big black hole in every enterprise org.
The other issue is the channel. If they get real about hardware, they are screwing Dell, HP, Lenovo. That's a symbiotic relationship that generates alot of MSFT business.
For example, iPhone completely changed my life overnight, mostly due to its navigation features and ability to look up phone numbers.
I think Surface will only be dominant if it solves a problem for people. So, which problem does it solve, and why is it useful for people?
I figure that in a few years I'll be able to do all of that on a smaller 8" form factor - even better.
At some point you start hitting some physical limits of the human body. At 7" or 8" you can't have a full-size physical keyboard and there are only so many lines of code you can fit onto the screen, and so forth.
Personally (and I do mean this is personal preference and not the One Right Solution For Everybody) carrying around a 3-5lb notebook isn't a big deal because I'm already going to be carrying pen, paper, a few medications, and a charger or two. Even if my main computing device weighed zero pounds I'd still be carrying a small bag.
Surface is a tablet which can also run Photoshop, AutoCAD, MATLAB, Visual Studio, Flash, and whatever other weird legacy apps are kicking around. It can multitask. It has a proper digitizer. It has a kickstand and a very innovative cover. Yes it's not a laptop. No it doesn't have the Android store. That doesn't mean it's useless.
(P.S. just noticed my hacker news account is 1337 days old today. wheee.)
Adobe and Autodesk all have multiple apps on iOS. How many Metro apps have they released? That's the metric that counts when we're talking about tablets.
All the software you're talking about only really works in desktop/laptop mode with a mouse. As long as that is true, MS will be an also-ran in the tablet space.
They don't really compare well, iOS versions lack a lot of important features in comparison with the windows ones.
>" How many Metro apps have they released? "
I believe the point is they don't need to, they desktop software runs just fine.
>"All the software you're talking about only really works in desktop/laptop mode with a mouse"
Not really, all those apps actually benefits from the use of a stylus (actually artist prefer that more than using a mouse) and that's something that you can't really do with an iPad (I own an Ipad2 and I had really tried hard to do anything productive on it without luck)
Art problems, apparently. Gabe of Penny Arcade seemed pretty positive about the Surface Pro:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2014/01/22/so-many-games1
"I made the switch back to an iphone recently after having a Windows phone for about a year. I really liked the OS but I had nothing but trouble with the hardware. I went through three different handsets and all of them ended up failing on me. Eventually I gave up and just bought an iPhone 5c. I have to say that after a year on the Windows phone I had forgotten what the Apple app store looks like. I think I had managed to convince myself that the Windows app store was pretty solid. Jesus Christ was I wrong."
This tells us what, exactly, about the Surface Pro?
That even someone directly targeted by Surface "professional-stylus-user" demographic, and who was willing to try Windows Phone, now has one foot in another ecosystem that also offers a quite popular tablet? Surface (and PC Gaming) wasn't enough to keep him on Windows Phone, but maybe iPhone will be enough to pull him to iPad (even if it's not as good for some tasks, but better for others e.g. gaming) if the two competing attempts at lock-in clash (and they will, because lock-in is lock-out if you're on the wrong side of it).
True, but keep in mind only refers to games in that article, which is hands down the stronger point of the app store. I don't play games any more and I hardly miss anything from iOS that doesn't exist in the Windows Phone Store.
I'm not disputing that the iPhone changed smartphones forever, but looking up numbers was something existing smartphones had apps for, long before the iPhone.
That's the thing for me: That doesn't work anymore. Privacy-Guarding destroys that. Normally, I would fully agree that this is a good vision for Microsoft, continuing to be on the Desktop (especially corporate), trying to be on other markets and failing mostly, but becoming a big cloud player. But for me, the cloud is dead, and the NSA killed it - I try not to use it if it is not really helpful and without obvious privacy issues (like http://rsspusher.eu01.aws.af.cm/, appfrog was fine for that, I still think that even if it predates that thought). And I know I'm not alone with that attitude.
Maybe that doesn't mean that the cloud is dead, rather that there is a minority for which it is. I'm not sure how to predict the influence of the surveillance on the techological future. But what it means for sure is that for me and a few other guys, a Microsoft being a big cloud player would be as dead as it was before. We will see whether that matters.
Microsoft has amazing expertise into taking any computer a 3rd party provides and making it work with their software. What about providing "cloud services" that can be guaranteed to never exit your own corporate firewall? I imagine this is going to be a huge need in the near future. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it were a standard EU regular within 5 years.
This seems like an amazingly huge opportunity they could capitalize on. Become the standard software cloud solution of all software the way they they own email in the enterprise with exchange. Plenty of companies are large enough to own their own racks of virtualized servers and would pay good money to run well integrated Microsoft software on them.
"Plenty of companies are large enough to own their own racks of virtualized servers and would pay good money to run well integrated Microsoft software on them."
They already do - that's where a significant proportion of Microsoft's revenue comes from.
What I'm saying is that CIOs of pretty much every medium to largish company needs to justify their salary to the other C*s.
If he can justify it in terms of cost savings he justifies his salary. Right now, big companies either buy appliances (at huge cost and medium support cost) or build their own networks at small (or maybe huge) cost and huge support cost.
And what I really mean by "cloud" is the fact that pretty much any CIO will call a rack of servers with any virtualization vendors' software running on the bunch of them as the cloud. And honestly it's not wrong. If your company's culture is built right whether your "cloud" is "private" or otherwise shouldn't matter.
If Microsoft can turn the enterprise into the desktop, every enterprise on our software as a new goal. Which mean abandoning huge margins, they could make huge dents into SAP, CGI, IBM, Accenture and all these huge terrible enterprise software vendors. All of them combined are a huge opportunity for Microsoft to steal all market share from and honestly I think Microsoft could definitely pull their 90s tactics and be successful.
Not if they are responsible for the CapEx, administration, upgrades, data center space etc.
I would state that the defining characteristic of "cloud computing" as far as senior managers go is that these things are all someone else's problem and all you are left with is a predictable monthly/yearly fee, application support and making sure your users have a decent internet connection.
Anyway, but experience with Azure was deep rather than broad, but it was enough to give me a strong belief that if this represents the great hope for Microsoft's future, things aren't looking so bright.
> The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device.
I don't see how Gruber can come to this conclusion unless he has suddenly changed position and thinks the open web will eventually win out over native apps.
The problem, of course, is that for a company that wants to be Microsofts size, they _need_ to own the platform, because the platform owners have an incentive to limit their dependence on you and make sure that their cloud services work better on their platform. iMessage and Hangouts? Integrated. Skype? Not so.
The only way to "own" the platform owners is to have an essential, popular product that customers demand. As much as Microsoft would want to, they don't have such a product (perhaps Office in the business market, but that's about it).
Edit: Wanted to add "How Microsoft Lost the API war" which is another interesting take on the platform thing and how Microsoft lost it: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
How does his statement have anything to do with 'open web' vs. native apps? How many native apps do you use that have no 'cloud' component whatsoever?
Gruber isn't talking about Microsoft making a bunch of web applications, he's talking about them becoming a key player in the data services arena, i.e. offering a platform for providing data to both web applications and native applications alike.
Both Apple and Google want to control their own cloud platform, and they can make sure that their cloud solution is better integrated than Microsofts offerings on their own platforms. And at least Google knows how to do this kind of thing really, really well.
So my point is, unless one expects platforms / operating systems to overall become irrelevant (which some web proponents believe), I can't see how he can draw this conclusion in earnest. It's exactly the same argument he's criticized others for making time and time again with Apple, the only difference being that "Apple should give up their operating system, bundle Windows and only focus on hardware". Of course it's obvious today why that would have been a terrible idea.
And it shows. A year ago I wouldn't even consider Azure as a platform. Now I'm starting to wonder if AWS is worth it.
They've been iterating like crazy.
The illusion part is mostly obvious. Microsoft makes oceans of money. Heck of a malaise, right?
The real part of the malaise stems from Microsoft not being objective about itself. For example, Microsoft could easily make vastly more money if they looked at Windows as a legacy product and raised prices on the people who really need Windows.
Looking at Windows as a Product of the Future means they won't actually ship any Products of the Future, because that might contradict the dogma. That's a real malaise. That's what keeps the great ideas of the very smart people at Microsoft funneled through Windows product management. The new products that get through are mostly reactive, like IE, MSN, Bing Search, Bing Maps, etc.
The malaise is even more basic than "Should Microsoft be a consumer and enterprise business?" Dividing Microsoft that way would probably help, but fail to see the underlying cause, and that would leave the consumer part vulnerable to a continuation of what ails it now.
I think Google is pretty close, really. They obviously don't have an operating system for laptops or desktops that everyone uses, but using a computer without Google products is something that people just don't really do anymore. iOS, Android, OSX, Windows, Ubuntu, etc. no matter what you're probably using something Google wrote on it.
Which is really a very old-school Microsoft strategy brought up to date to the early 21st century. Google recognized that the OS doesn't matter anymore and Microsoft continued to believe it was everything.
I think they recognize all too well that it matters, which is seen by the massive effort in developing and supporting Android, Chrome OS etc. This is just Googles version of Microsoft giving away IE.
This isn't really controversial, it was one of the major factors of the antitrust case against MS, and MS didn't argue they didn't do it, only that it wasn't illegal afaik.
[0] http://www.businessweek.com/1998/42/b3600109.htm [1] http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f2600/2613toc_htm.htm
Really, the situation Google needs to keep pressure on, to prevent a modern equivalent to what happened to Netscape, was almost acted out with Maps on iOS.
As for whether the case had any merit.. ok? What I said doesn't rely on the case having merit. Like I said, MS admitted to doing this.
This is rather naive. In certain circles yes but by far the majority of people use just their search.
That's why Google is still paying Mozilla money to make it the default in Firefox and it's why Google made Android and Chrome to be able to control what web-services people use by default, also on their mobile devices.
If the defaults switch from Google, most people wont notice. If you have any doubts about that, observe all people which has their search hijacked by malware.
Their search page has been diverted to a scummy non-Google page and nobody notices that anything is wrong.
Google definitely has a strong hold on the web, but they're a lot more fragile than you think.
I'm not really sure on what you're judging my thoughts on their fragility. I made a pretty simple claim, that the vast majority of people use something Google made regardless of who made their OS. Could someone topple them out of that? Of course. Just like someone toppled Microsoft and IBM before them. It will cost a boatload of money, but someone will eventually do it.
I just don't see how an arbitrary exclusion refutes the claim, or what relevance it has to the price of rice in china. It'd be like saying "Not everyone uses a Microsoft product every day because Windows doesn't count" in 1999. Well... ok then.
Times change. Google's core business doesn't.
I used Altavista to the last to be honest. I used to have an email account with Altavista, then had to go to Hotmail after they closed, then GMail when it was brand new (fortunate enough to have an invitation from someone). I only used Lycos for their FTP search.
So you are saying a vast majority of people don't use gmail, google maps, or youtube. I'd venture to guess a vast majority of people use at least one of those things on a regular basis.
Apart from the 5% of search that I find I need Google for, the rest is very easy to switch out. Compare that to the world of computing in the 90s. Your computer needed to be able to read FAT32. Your web site needed to work well for IE. There was only one valid office suite out there. Most peripherals only came with Windows drivers, shutting everyone else out of the fun. Indeed one part of the rebirth of the Mac was the recognition that peripheral driver support would have to be done in-house, rather than relying on 3rd parties to provide Mac drivers for their products.
The Microsoft dominance of the 90s made computing on competing platforms difficult. Google does not have anything like that level of domination / lock-in.
The question is whether that will matter the way Windows mattered to computing. I would have expected, for example, a lot more people who write software for the enterprise to start making tablet apps. They're not. I don't know if this is a wave that is late coming in, or if vendors think touch Web apps will be good enough (which they are not, for anything that is popular in an app store), or if that kind of dominance just doesn't matter as much anymore.
Android is a pretty sweet tablet OS, and I could see there being a lot more of it where PCs are serving as office productivity nodes. Tablets have the potential to to change the workplace for the better: Users not tied to heavy PCs or laptops in cubicle workspaces, etc. But it's slow to take off.
Steve Fucking Jobs said that (the desktop PC was dead and
innovation had virtually ceased). He was exactly right.
And who knows where we’d be today if Jobs and Next had not
been reunified with Apple the next year.
However, Microsoft under Ballmer thrashed around trying to copy other things from Apple, things that did not belong on a desktop PC, and made life more annoying for a great many Windows users as a result. Like another poster above suggested, another five years of that approach would have brought Microsoft down to the lowest level Apple ever reached.
I'll present one of the other perspectives.
I was all-Microsoft, from MS DOS up through Windows Server 2003. Late 90s MCSE, nothing but MS. Most of my time was spent building and maintaining NT4.0 installations and then migrating to 2000.
I got tired of keeping pace with the amount of changes in all of the services somewhere between Server 2003 and Server 2008 and have since jumped ship.
Now I use entirely open source software and a mix of AWS instances and dedicated servers in various parts of the country for heavy lifting. (I work with multiple small companies rather than one large company that would benefit from the perfect AWS deployment.) This is after having spent time and personally maintained dozens of machines in half a dozen different data centers stretching back to 1998.
It's going to take a hell of a lot.
Whilst I rather like FreeBSD, when I have to throw an architecture together that will survive over a decade, Microsoft wins every time. They're the only company which provides certainty. RedHat are close but their support sucks.
What was that that you got better supported from Microsoft than from Red Hat? Specifics please.
With respect to support you get a very narrow configuration of supported software and hardware with RH. Keeping it rolling isn't as easy as it looks. The developer support is awful as well. Documentation is shitty,you're tied to C++/JDK versions that are ancient etc. Also no MSDN, no partner support (which is pretty awesome). My few dealings with RedHat support have left us without a solution.
For ref - platforms: Exchange, Windows Server, IIS, SQL Server (the latter I've got an installation that has been cleanly upgraded since 1996 though TWO versions)
Well done Microsoft.
Hardware isn't upgraded. It's replaced when it fails. It's easier to get hardware off the shelf that is certified for Windows Server (any version!). This is particularly true on the tail end of a product lifecycle.
The OS upgrades in Linux are usually utterly painful (Debian included). If you go with CentOS/RH, you have to do this every 5 years at average due to the API churn in Linux distributions[1]. You need to get your developers on there ASAP. With Service Packs and Java updates, a simple test cycle will suffice as they don't break the API contracts. They promise this and deliver.
[1] The kernel syscall interface is fine but major versions of Apache, glibc and compilers and anything even vaguely related to client-side stuff is a PITA.
It was impossible to get that Perl web system running on anything modern without massive pain.
For the wonderful bliss of Linux-land, at least with Windows you know that something written 20 years ago will probably still work. (Yes, I know - they shouldn't have written it in Perl)
NB. The biggest issues I've seen in upgrading are modules that use C libraries (unfortunately things do change over time!).
As an example I'm still running a Perl web system & data munging backend that I wrote back in 2001 with only minor tweaks over the years for new/modern systems.
If I had known what I was doing with Perl, it might have been better. I was a bit harsh on Perl, apologies. But it still stands that migration on Linux boxes isn't massively easy or fun (not that Windows is either)
And the reason why you consider RH's version "bastardized" is, I assume, that it's not "the newest and latest." Which is the main argument with which we started: that RH intentionally doesn't push "newest" all the time in order to have long support cycles.
Your argument for Microsoft was that their technology changes slower, and then complain that RH technology doesn't change fast enough?
If you look at the CLR there are only two major current versions: 2.0 and 4.0 and perfect legacy compat and wide support across all windows server versions.
There already are servers sending data everywhere. For example the servers of Google, Facebook and Wikipedia. How would Microsoft convince those guys or new companies to get rid of their solid, free and open stack and pay for Microsofts closed stuff?
This is much different from "A computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software". Back then, there where no computers on desks and homes to begin with.
Google/Facebook mean social and crudely document shaped data. Wikipedia means data that looks like encylopedia pages.
Microsoft mean ANY data you want to shift with the same languages and tools across all platform form factors which is why people buy into the ecosystem. Even going back to 2004, I could knock out an app (in C++/C#) that worked on the desktop, on the web and on mobile devices. In fact I did and it's still in use today managing private couriers with minimal code changes.
They don't have to. They can keep on using their free and open stack, but moving to Azure instead of using Google compute engine or AWS.
Conversely to Gruber, I see Microsofts future in client software and hardware. Apple and Google have put computers in every pocket. But only the consumption part of it. The race for the production tablet has just started. And with the Surface Pro, Microsoft has the first product out there.
This can be storage, authentication, federation, messaging, queueing, etc.
And like Amazon they are building their own services (like AD in the cloud, Xbox Live, hosted exchange, Office 365, etc) on top of this infrastructure, so like for Amazon, the infrastructure they are selling literally comes for free.
Well it's good he said that, otherwise Gruber would twist himself into a knot trying to argue otherwise.
Though this is interesting
"If we include all iOS and Android devices the “computing” market in Q3 2008 was 92 million units of which Windows was 90%, whereas in Q3 2013 it was 269 million units of which Windows was 32%."
Actually doing the math, Q3 2008, Microsoft was about 83 million units. Q3 2013 Microsoft had just over 86 million units. So I guess it's still a growth? I'm sorry, revealing the actual numbers punctures Gruber's thesis. Rude of me.
I mean, nobody really conflated these categories when it was just Blackberries and video game consoles. Do I get to add Xbox units to this too?
Of course Microsoft missed the mobile boat and it's largely Ballmer's fault. That's well known and this kind of weird conflated analysis isn't insightful or interesting.
"Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world.
The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device."
Ugh, please no. Data transmission has been hopelessly commoditized and I really don't want an Apple or a Microsoft inserting themselves into a low margin game and trying to figure out how to make it a high margin one.
Did Xbox or Blackberry serve as direct substitutes for traditional PCs? No. Have Android and iOS phones and tablets serve as direct substitutes for traditional PCs? Yes.
Yes. If you don't think a Blackberry served as an entire mobile office, almost replacing PCs for most use-cases, for millions of road warriors, then you never had one or lived through that time.
The Xbox line has replaced PCs as both a gaming platform for millions as well as a media center and emulation platform for many many others. XBMC after all means "Xbox Media Center".
That sounds more like Google to me!
Microsoft has always been a software-first company. Their strategy has always been to create the OS and license it to hardware manufacturers and capture the largest share of the market. Apple began as a hardware company that chose to pursue a strategy of building its own software so it could control the entire stack, bottom to top.
One wanted to cast a wide net with limited quality control, the other wanted to produce products of the highest quality.
But here's the thing- neither is necessarily "wrong" and you can't possibly simultaneously employ both strategies.
As of today, Microsoft has a $297 billion market cap. Enterprise software sales (read the large multibillion-dollar entities that quietly purchase billions of dollars of Microsoft products without blog entries or TechCrunch critiques) aren't going anywhere for a long time. Anybody who works in one can tell you that.
What's more is that Microsoft actually has a large and growing number of evangelists for their mobile products. The claim that Prices come down, chips get faster. Software evolves. cuts both ways and should apply as much to Microsoft as to Apple, especially now that the mobile device market is "mature."
No, no, no, that is exactly what I do _not_ want! I want all my computing devices to work completely offline in all circumstances. I want to install programs to my local computer so Incan be shure that I still can use them if the company goes bankrupt. I want to be able to install old versions of programs in case I don't like a newer version...
In my opinion it is wrong to put applications to the cloud because then I become dependent on the provider of this service. For me the cloud should only be used for one thing: to synchronize data between my computing devices!
Yikes. If anyone can find Microsoft-sized margins and volume in that business, it will be more destructive than an OS monoculture ever was.
"Cloud" is a low-margin high-volume business, perfect for players like Amazon and Google, with little boutiquey heroku bits thrown in to vacuum up the value-add-at-any-price edge case customers.
That’s why today we are also announcing a commitment to match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as compute, storage and bandwidth
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/04/16/the-...
I liken this to Gruber's Microsoft strategy as being "Own the pipe". Not in the literal sense of becoming an ISP or backbone, but in the networking sense of being the middleman to all communications a la Cisco. They need to figure out something with the ARM architecture and servers to really advance the next decade.
Funny, that seems to be what dropbox is going for with their new datastore API
Microsoft is still great -- even outside of raw financial might, they continue to make great software and tools (as one aside, it is quite remarkable how enormous of an impact Bill Gate's trustworthy computing manifesto had) -- but from an influence perspective they have had little for quite a few years.