Microsoft Is Suddenly a New Company. But Is It Too Late?

Open sourcing the C# compiler represents a fair amount of effort (code cleansing, IP review, license selection/compliance checking, etc) -- likely more work than could be completed in Nadella's short tenure. Therefore, it is likely that the compiler had been prepared, and his actions represent the long standing desires of the technical staff that were ignored/denied by Ballmer. Ditto goes for the iPad version of Office. As such, I wouldn't say these moves represent Nadella's changing the company, as much as him ending Ballmer's repression.

As much as I'm genuinely excited and sincerely optimistic about the great work from their developer group (e.g., the open source announcements this week), I also feel that their "if you can't compete on product, slander" negative ad campaigns (e.g., scroogled) will continue to hold Microsoft back as a company and as a culture.

This engineer, for example, would never consider going back and working there again as long as their executives think that negativity is a good business policy. And ultimately, their employees can (and have) voted with their feet.

Fix that, though, and yes, Microsoft is very much capable of reinventing itself for a new era.

Edit: To clarify, I'm sure that there are some readers who agree with the particular points raised in these negative campaigns. Generally speaking, I don't, but that's not my point here.

What bothers me is when, rather than promoting the values of one's own product, companies try to (sometimes even hypocritically) find or invent flaws in the competition instead. Be humble and respectful of your competitors and customers alike, build the best product you can (better than the competition if possible), and win on merit. I truly believe the talented, hard-working engineers deserve that much.

"Is it too late?" For what outcome?

If you set the bar at "regain their 1990s level dominance", yeah that probably won't ever happen. But so what? Given where they're at, an outcome such as "don't end up another RIM et al" is perfectly reasonable. To put it in context, their odds are better than most startups.

They have a huge amount of cash on hand. The cash cows will throw off billions before they finally dry up. Although they've had a talent drain, that trend is likely to reverse somewhat.

Is it too late is just a headline to attract readers.

Microsoft (in contrary to the general believe here) is doing very well. Their profits are good, XBox is attracting and etc..

They do have some marketing issues concerning Windows Phone and Windows 8. But don't over eggagerate... Windows is the most used platform on desktops and servers (definatly in SMB's, because not the whole world is a fortune 500 company and has their own IT departement). People who are running MAC are using dualboot or Parallels to use Windows and Microsoft gets a lot of money from mobile (even though it is Android mostly).

Their profits are up in the business sector and with Azure, they have a great platform (i use it myselve) and with Bizspark, they help startups in their most critical period.

The only thing that is changing, is that microsoft is more open and are improving their public image. But that's affecting the IT knowledgable persons more then anyone else.

People who have non-it jobs don't really care about the difference and i see even a trend where IT knowledgable persons don't want anything to do with businesses like Apple.

In that extent, i see more and more people countering Apple then Microsoft. (I'm speaking from a personal view in Belgium, the observations i have from talking with my parents and my non-IT friends, i don't know for sure how it is outside of Belgium.) For example, the hardware stores who have almost no access to Apple devices (and if they do, a very limited profit margin and a lot more hassle) and people who give lessons in using a tablet to other people, who have expressed their concerns about Apple are just 2 examples i can think of)

I must admit that I'm a little surprised at the number of people who have been so keen to heap praise on Microsoft recently.

I'm very glad that they are making moves towards increasing openness and collaborating more with other ecosystems. From my perspective, software development has always felt like it was split into two camps: the "open source" platform, and the "Microsoft" one, with developers working across both being pretty rare in my experience. Being able to break down those barriers and maybe starting to see genuine cross-platform Microsoft technologies is really, really exciting.

However, I'm convinced it's prudent to remain cautious. Microsoft have a long and colourful history of doing real damage to open standards, free software, and their own business partners. Even their development community has been harmed by repeated changes of direction in their development efforts – damage which is made worse by that fact that the ecosystem is traditionally so closed. Maybe we are seeing a core of developers who are actually too young to have experienced this firsthand, or at least with limited experience of other platforms, who are a little less skeptical.

Anyway, Microsoft's recent bout of openness is nothing but a good thing. It'll be a while before I'm comfortable deploying a cross-platform app on .NET, but baby steps…

Right now Microsoft reminds me of GM. Capable of producing a good car model or two for a few years when the boss is really focusing the entire company around this. But utterly incapable of across-the-board Toyota-level quality. I'm asked every once in a while why I don't buy this or that American car and I respond (thinking about the decades of bad cars GM and Ford produced), "when most of the lineup a company puts out is clearly reliable and of high quality, and they can do this over two model generations, then I'll think about it." Because this means that the entire company culture has changed, and they've managed to sustain it. A bad care is then an anomaly.

Actually, I think Ford is pretty close to this. Hyundai is a very good example of this culture change. It wasn't all that long ago that people were afraid of driving their Hyundais at Highway speeds, now they build quality vehicles across the entire lineup and have for 3 or 4 complete model generations.

Right now Microsoft has a couple open source projects, a couple multi-platform projects, and the rest is still more or less old Microsoft. They've killed Stack Rankings, which I think is helping lead to some of these new changes. But the across-the-board Microsoft still looks like Microsoft from 10-15 years ago. If they can implement this kind of "new friendlier Microsoft" across the entire company, and do it for two major version changes across all products, I think then and only then can we consider Microsoft a new company.

Of all the big players in 2014, none are as diversified as Microsoft - they have Windows, XBox, Enterprise, Office, Mobile, Azure - all of which would be huge businesses even on their own. Hence you could argue they are a lot less vulnerable than people assume them to be.

A puff piece. All the significant announcements made since Nadella took office will have been in the pipeline for months if not years. You don't port Office to iPad in 8 weeks.

For me this is not about whether it is too late or not, but what is the underlying motive? We can agree that these recent changes and releases are superficially good but what is the long term impact? Is this just another ploy to lock people into their office/cloud platform and/or tooling because they've decided that the operating system game is over?

This gift horse deserves a good look in the mouth.

They have by far the best development tool set available and they are all in on making Azure an amazing product. I think their future is bright.

You should consider that Microsoft was late to console market. For me, this shows that there is no such thing as "too late" in this market.

Any platform can win if they win the developers and thus a thriving platform. Microsoft has been repelling developers for the past decade but most recently it is now attracting them with more open broad market technologies.

They built their platforms/empire on developers first originally, every platform since has also done this. The signals out of the new Microsoft seems to be old school developer love.

They are pushing people to their new 'OS' Azure, higher up the stack, and their tools push you in that way. But they are no longer religious about the language, platform, code, etc. This supports their tools, cloud and ultimately platform. But they have to reconvince developers that they won't grow distance again.

It's not too late as long as they're still in business. Market share changes happen so rapidly in these industries. You can lose a huge chunk of market share in two or three years, but you can gain it back just as quickly. For a long time it looked like Apple was going to be dominant in the smartphone market even though Android had already started to show up on handsets. But very very quickly the cell phone industry in its entirety adopted Android - because of its low price and lack of licensing restrictions - and it outgrew the iPhone in terms of market share very rapidly. Same thing could happen with Microsoft.

Of course, then there's BlackBerry...

I'd be a bit worried if I were Apple. They are still making money hand over fist - and the market is big enough that you can be extremely profitable even if you aren't dominant in market share. But having to compete with one free operating system is hard enough. Now they will have to compete with two. It's like a replay of the OS wars in the 80s and 90s. Things could change quickly.

To make windows machines truly useable they should create a good shell. I would even go as far as to say they should install and set up python natively. If I am not using MS technology there is no reason to use a windows OS. Of course I realize a huge percentage of users are not developers.

I think the real question is - Can you challenge yourself when you already have the "Last Mover Advantage."

“First mover isn't what’s important — it’s the last mover. Like Microsoft was the last operating system, and Google was the last search engine.”

I personally cant find or have any analytics of this kind of situation. Its obvious though that Microsoft hasn't quite hit the nail on the head as far as proper reinvestment and focus on maintaining their position in the OS space. I.E Amazon spending almost all of their net profit year after year to put themselves so far ahead that to even enter the race the investment would have to be unheard of.

No. Not too late.

It might be, perhaps probably is, too late for Windows Phone. This might be the last generation of high-end game consoles. Buying Nokia was a bad idea. But those things are not existential threats.

Microsoft has a long way to go in other areas, such as embracing the right side of DRM, patent, and open source.

But there is no chance of Microsoft becoming RIM in the next five years. Microsoft could suck in an ocean of money just by raising the price of enterprise-oriented editions of Windows.

They have plenty of time, and many very good people.

Wait a minute..

I think most of this considering the work required was Ballmer's last push..Remember BG is still on the board, and the tell he gave in indicating disagreement with Ballmer was the lack of thanks when Ballmer left.

Let me tell you why it might be this way. Ballmer was behind the push to settle with the DOJ and the States over BG's objections..its why BG ws asked to leave Chairmen spot.

If it was Ballmer's push than its not anew company..just a small pivot..

I'll believe that Microsoft has changed when one can install Windows on a machine without it blowing away a pre-installed Linux partition.

By this same logic, Google is too late to the enterprise and will fail.

In other words, this article has a static view of the world in that it thinks markets "are done" and not constantly in motion.

That's a flawed view of markets as we have seen time and time again.

This is the same view people had with AOL vs. Microsoft and we know how that turned out. There was a shift in the market to broadband and AOL died.

Previous conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7539873

Last I checked, they're still trying to go after open source projects to squeeze patent money from them - so I'd say no, it isn't a "new" company. It just has new PR tactics: "Look at us, we released one open source app - we're basically now a kitten-loving company".

I'd like to cite Betteridge's law.

For me the deal breaker is that I need a unix based foundation if I ever go back to Windows. Regardless of development platform.