Microsoft is interesting again
medium.com
medium.com
In other words, nerds often heap disdain on marketing but they are as susceptible to it as anyone else. The marketing to which they are susceptible is just less recognizable as such.
As much as some part of me squirms when I say it, Microsoft really is a player again.
On the enterprise side of things, a lot of sysadmins are shocked at the low quality of security updates and the massive delay in getting them out. How many were recalled in 2014? Nadella's personal mission at MS was redoing QA and as far as I can tell, he's somehow made it worse. Tabletizing interfaces in Win8 and Server 2013 was a questionable move. Office 2013 is a pig with lipstick and is known for its horror stories. Licensing has somehow gotten more bureaucratic and expensive.
I'm not fan of Ballmer, but I think the Ballmer/Gates magic was a real thing for a time, and its obvious this magic needed Gates to work. Nadella's Steve Jobs impersonation is becoming tiresome imo. The cloud/mobile first initiative ate from MS's core competencies- rock solid and featureful enterprise software. The only thing I can say about Nadella is that he's recognizing how important a classic start menu is for enterprise users and its coming back in Win10. Out of all of MS's products, Win10 is the only thing of interest. "Me toos" like its budget tablets/phones or the buying of skype or minecraft, just seem like desperate moves from a company that has lost its way. Frankly, I'd like to see enterprise broken off from loss leaders like surface (which is sold at a loss) and all the things its giving away for free as a sort of catch up to FOSS dominated and Apple dominated areas. One just seems to be eating the other, and the one being eaten is the moneymaker. MS is just too big and is chasing so many tails. Nadella fought to keep the xbox division when investors were pissed about it last year. How much political capital did it cost for him to keep that pig?
I certainly don't think MS is going to fail anytime soon, but I don't think its somehow changed its ways. Its still too many chefs chasing too many targets, many of which are probably unhittable for such a bureaucratic giant. Windows phone goes for 50 bucks nowadays and the sales are still unimpressive. Getting this late to the mobile game is a killer. There may be no way to recover lost marketshare that mobile has taken. How many billions will Nadella burn through trying? We're almost three years into the Surface line. When does it finally pay off? When do I actually see one in public?
I'll also be interested to see where their new direction in development tools goes, iOS and Android support for C++ in Visual Studio, open source .NET Core etc. The fact that this article exists is a testament to the fact that what they are doing is to some extent working, they are creating interest.
Xbox one is quite amazing. Sales are good, games are ramping up. Every week some new games are out or announced. I can't wait to see what they do to improve that.
Buying of Minecraft was a fantastic decision, it's not like they didn't have any video game division and suddenly bought it. I'm hoping to see more work on it but you saw how they were using it as a platform in their VR announcements, which means that they plan to expand it further and it ideally will continue to be a platform that devs will create new ideas in and from.
From just using it and having been kind of annoyed by MS Office since the 2003 days, 365 seems snappier and better than it ever has been. Certain things after getting used to seeing them end up making sense and are attractive.
OneDrive is a very nice service, I like it way better than Google, for free and paid you get a lot of storage with it and it's super easy to use and looks classy, not cheap.
windows 10 could be insanely good. don't forget the free upgrade offerings too, which is new and much welcomed.
Xbox BTW is a good earner for Microsoft, they lose money on the console and make a killing on each game. Lumia and Surface also showed very good profits from Q3 2014 and onwards. And Windows Azure is probably the only truly profitable cloud platform out there with 25-30 bln dollars in yearly profits (not income).
Amazon is losing billions on their cloud, and on every other product they run including their store, the only time they got out of the red was 2009 after 15 years in business and that was never repeated again.
In 2014 both MSFT and Amazon had virtually the same income Amazon even made 2-3 bln. $ more. MSFT has a net profit of 28 bln, Amazon lost 250 mil.
There is more to business than just revenue streams, but as revenue goes MSFT is in a very good shape.
OSX keeps eating market share especially amongst the more younger demographics thats true, but it has nothing to do with the OS, they could run an OS that shows a picture of a potato every 10min and freezes till you shake the laptop and it won't make a different.
Apple is cool and pretty, people buy it, they also market aggressively to students with financial assistance and student discounts. However i wonder how many students would actually use OSX if MSFT wouldn't have had Office for it. Even taking into account the fact that some uni's still require students to use TEX/LATEX for works most of them write it in word in a 2 or 3 column format and use a converter (I've done that 10 years ago).
So far from what I've seen MSFT made Windows cost almost nothing, made office very cheap for home users and almost free for students. Brought down the price of Visual Studio considerably, and releasing the new "Community Edition" which is considerably more feature rich than the Express edition of yesteryear.
And while many people found Windows 8 lackluster it still brought quite a bit of good changes, and as a free upgrade to Windows 7 for many users and at less than 50$ for all the rest.
There is very little reason for OS's to make huge jumps these days, the platforms they run don't double their RAM and CPU power every 3-4 years like they used too. For all intents and purposes the Core i5 machine you bought in 2009 would still run Windows 8 just as fine as a new one you bought today (that's not saying that the CPU's are the same or even come close to having a comparable raw processing power).
@ Main topic, i do love articles that state MSFT lost X to Y and Z to M over and over, if they would had control over search, social media and mobile you would both hate them much more, and we most likely would've been in a worse position as consumers.
Google is bad enough, i would go as far as saying that they are worse than MSFT ever was. They control how virtually every person finds and accesses data and they are expanding their reach from not only controlling how you do it over the internet but going as far as establishing them selves as an ISP, wanting to become a wireless carrier, and funding SAT based internet access.
However with all that, and the fact that their business model is heavily invested in having access to every peace of private and public information about you and everyone else no one gives them half the flak they gave MSFT when they tried to bundle internet explorer with Windows.
I wonder if in 15 years after some court cases and blunders we'll see articles about how Google is interesting again, sadly i doubt it will come to that.
Now they want to play ball, which is wise... since business is unfortunately likely to pursue social, mobile, and cloud for enterprise.
Give away everything for free
Produce it's own hardware, and at a loss (Surface may have made $1b now, but it's lost more than that over it's lifetime)
Frankly, I don't know how they are making money now a days.
In Ballmer's Microsoft, they spent cash on dividends.
In Nadel's Microsoft, they're spending cash on market share.
Office 365 is doing well already.
When I heard that announcement I thought the same thing, Microsoft's language was very ambiguous.
However they have since clarified, and Windows 10 won't require a subscription fee as far as they have said.
The year thing is similar to the $10 Windows 8 promotion (upgrade from 7 to 8 for $10 for the first year). Except this time it is completely free from 7 or 8/8.1 to 10, but if you don't do it in the first year then you'll have to buy an upgrade kit at whatever the retail price is.
The only subscription they've talked about with Windows 10 is Software Assurance, but that isn't remotely new, and has existed for enterprise customers since at least 2000. It doesn't apply to consumers.
Office 365 is subscription though, and it remains to be seen if they'll continue to do boxed software indefinitely. They already tried to alter the box software licensing terms so you could never upgrade your computer without re-buying it until there was a massive public outcry.
Businesses that want a predictable operating system that receives only security updates, will need to pay for support. In other words, if consumers want what was free with Win7, they have to use a support pricing structure designed for business.
Are you from the future when the final version is out or can you back this up with some credible source?
> There is also a variety of user data tracking
Aren't you just saying that because the preview version was built specifically to provide lots of feedback data to microsoft (and they were pretty clear about it)?
Because a "preview build" and a "final product that is not even released yet" are different things, you know...
Unless you are just being a dick on the internet talking shit about things you don't know and don't even use. I heard that some people do that.
Did "preview builds" of previous Microsoft Windows versions have a comparable terms of service stipulation on user tracking and data collection? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/07/windows_10_data_coll...
Microsoft says they are moving to "Windows as a Service". Yes, we can wait until GA to find out what that means. Some IT professionals are paid to decide what that means, before GA, so their business can make strategic purchasing decisions. Microsoft is releasing information incrementally in response to customer feedback, so anyone who cares about this topic and is paying for Software Assurance is free to add their voice to the chorus of questioners.
Jan 2015, Terry Myerson of Microsoft, http://blogs.windows.com/business/2015/01/30/windows-10-for-...
"With Windows 10, the experience will evolve and get even better over time. We’ll deliver new features when they’re ready, not waiting for the next major release. We think of Windows as a Service – in fact, one could reasonably think of Windows in the next couple of years as one of the largest Internet services on the planet.
And just like any Internet service, the idea of asking “What version are you on?” will cease to make sense – which is great news for our Windows developers... Many consumers today expect their devices to receive ongoing feature updates without having to take an action. However, we understand that businesses require more control in how updates are delivered, and at what pace.
For example, systems powering hospital emergency rooms, air traffic control towers, financial trading systems, factory floors, just to name a few, may need very strict change management policies, for prolonged periods of time. To support Windows 10 devices in these mission critical customer environments we will provide Long Term Servicing branches at the appropriate time intervals.
... we are introducing a new approach for business customers, which we are referring to as the Current branch for Business. By putting devices on the Current branch for Business, enterprises will be able to receive feature updates after their quality and application compatibility has been assessed in the consumer market, while continuing to receive security updates on a regular basis."
Feb 2015, analysis of Jim Alcove (MS) blog post, http://blogs.windows.com/business/2015/01/30/windows-10-for-... & http://www.computerworld.com/article/2877983/microsoft-talks...
"Rather than rely on its decades-old practice of rolling out a new operating system every three years, Microsoft will stick with Windows 10 for much, much longer, updating the software on a frequent schedule with not only security fixes -- offered monthly since 2003 -- but also new features, new functionality and UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) changes and improvements.
The revamp, which experts have called Microsoft's biggest-ever change to its update and upgrade process, is integral to the firm's "Windows as a service" strategy."
Posting a lot of unrelated text as answer doesn't make you more correct.
This is explicitly addressed in the quoted text. Sorry if you didn't understand it.
> "it will have "a variety of user data tracking"
Addressed in my other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9064579), based on the Win10 preview. Are you familar with the concept of a "trial balloon"?
Or maybe you're just not able to make yourself clear. You should work on that.
This is a statement by Microsoft, not by me.
What do you think it means?
But I'm 100% sure there is nothing in this sentence saying it will be mandatory, or that non-os applications are included in the updates, or that the user cannot opt out of updates.
Sincerely, I'm not sure what's your point here.
Can you provide a source? First time I've seen someone claim this. Several articles I've read up until now has suggested that the Windows 10 licence which is granted for free would be indistinguishable from the paid version.
Microsoft can't even keep XBOX live up when someone wants to DDOS it, I don't want software that I'm renting that cant run if their servers are down.
When it comes to online services, Microsoft has never been reliable in my experience. Not then, not now, not ever. When a Microsoft online service works properly, I'm surprised. When it doesn't work, I expect that and I move on. If you know anything about my comment history, I'm not anti-Microsoft in any way. But man their online services really suck when it comes to reliability.
Windows Desktop, MS Office, Visual Studio, Xbox (platform AND games), Skype.
All of these are profitable. Then you have Azure, which I'm not sure if it is profitable, but will most certainly be. Very profitable.
Geesh, how are these guys alive even? They should give Dynamics AX for free, otherwise they are toast!
(Skype as one of the examples, though?! Skype is likely never going to be profitable for MS, right?)
Funding new interesting ideas will always help them also secure a better seat in the open source community as most startups rely on open source technologies.
Android: hate the new GUI and every game prompting me to sign in to stupid G+ or whatever it's called. Anyone tried Cyanogen on Nexus 2013 tablet?
Cyanogen is fine and has some nice features if they apply to your personal usage but the thing about games wanting to log into your Google account would likely be the same. It's the equivalent of Apple's game center or whatever it's called. It's basically a universal login for games so you can keep progress/settings saved across devices. I haven't found any yet that require it but typically it's an opt-in thing if you care about that functionality. I've only ever been asked to sign in on first run of a newly installed game so it's not nearly as obnoxious as the ones that constantly pester you to connect with Facebook or some other thing that's completely unrelated. On a Google phone I can understand using Google's games framework for your game profile but it's annoying to assume I want to use an unrelated service (Facebook) or even have an account with them.