Former Microsoft Exec: Microsoft Has "Become the Thing They Despised" 488
zacharye writes "Microsoft has a long and storied history of leadership in the tech industry, and the company has driven innovation for decades. In recent years, however, Microsoft has fallen behind the times in several key industries; the company's mobile position has deteriorated and left it with a low single-digit market share, and Microsoft won't launch Windows RT, its response to Apple's three-year-old iPad, until later this year. In a recent piece titled 'Microsoft’s Lost Decade,' Vanity Fair contributor Kurt Eichenwald analyzes the company’s 'astonishingly foolish management decisions' and picks apart moves made during the Steve Ballmer era."
Drip, Drip, Drip (Score:4, Informative)
Looks like Vanity Fair is going to drip feed us this stuff for a while... does it add anything we didn't already know?
Re:Drip, Drip, Drip (Score:5, Interesting)
It's been around for about 100 years. It's been a good magazine on and off, sort of a proto-Esquire.
I think it was originally called "Dress and Vanity Fair". I got on some list some years ago and the magazine showed up at my house for a while. There was some decent writing, a lot of fluff, George Clooney always on the cover, shiny, glossy, typical Conde Nast high-toned puke for people you don't want to know. Think Wired magazine without the tech and ads. Lots and lots of ads. You can't tell where the ads end and the articles begin. In fact, if you start from the front, you can flip pages for half an hour without getting to one bit of editorial content. Or maybe I couldn't recognize the editorial content.
And perfume samples, at least when it was coming to my house. My wife, who picks up the mail usually, used to stack them on my desk so my office smelled like my Aunt Lena's underwear drawer. She'd plop it down and say, "Your Vanity Fair is here, Evelyn" (my name is not Evelyn). Then she's snort with laughter. It was bizarre, hearing a woman with a heavy Eastern European accent try to imitate a high-end London swell.
They make a good sturdy surface to roll joints on. I imagine.
Vanity Fair (Score:3)
....is "People Magazine" for well-off literate people.
Re:Drip, Drip, Drip (Score:4, Insightful)
> my office smelled like my Aunt Lena's underwear drawer.
That's a disturbingly specific choice over the usual "smelled like a whorehouse".
Re: (Score:3)
Like most young boys, I occasionally liked to "dress pretty", so I'd find myself rummaging through Aunt Lena's underwear drawer.
She was a rather large woman so her dresses were a little too long, but her undies made for quite spectacular headwear.
Don't try to pretend that you'd didn't dress up in ladies lingerie when you were a wee lad. In my case, it was entirely my
Re:Drip, Drip, Drip (Score:5, Informative)
It's from 'Pilgrim's Progress' by John Bunyan.
The novel is a 'Western Canon' extended metaphor for the story of Christian salvation.
Specifically, Vanity Fair is a city through which the King's Highway passes. It looks like the 'true and only Heaven', but it is a worldly distraction.
I always thought it was an appropraite name for a fashion magazine.
Nothing new (Score:2)
Re:Nothing new (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember back in the days that Windows didn't have basic operating system features like memory protection and used to crash thrice daily?
Remember back in the days where using the latest version of IE would assure you that nothing but the most quirky IE only pages would render correctly?
Remember back in the days where Apple had a usable GUI for half a decade and MS users were stuck on a really shitty command line?
I do, it wasn't that long ago, pretty much it was the entire company's history before the "lost decade". But Windows doesn't crash so much any more since the later service packs of Windows 2000 and is fairly usable these days. It seems that Microsoft should have become IBM a long time ago.
Re:Nothing new (Score:4, Interesting)
Think about the analogy. You are basically saying the stuff that OS/2 aimed to bring to PCs. Those were the days when the Microsoft/Western Digital/Intel standard crushed every other consumer & small business based system based on the cost / feature set ratio. I agreed with you at the time and used QEMM as my memory manager and Desqview to multitask but still owned Windows and was moving towards Windows applications. So yes that is what they mean. A dynamic company rapidly improving their products and challenging new markets. Windows for Workgroups may very well have been the worst Lan sold, but it was WfW that owned the small business space and made Lans ubiquitous.
Now Microsoft is in a "shrink slowly but profitably" stage.
Reliability and usability count, too (Score:3, Interesting)
A couple of years ago I was quick to promote Linux over Windows due to higher reliability. Now I don't remember when was the last time that my Windows crashed but I've had numerous problems with Linux (On Ubuntu, last two times I allowed the package manager to make a major version update have broken the whole system. I then tried to install Mint, it crashed half a dozen times before I was finally able to get the whole installation through and then enabling two monitors broke X. I've had little interest to g
Re:Reliability and usability count, too (Score:4, Insightful)
why would regular users (not OS junkies) want to upgrade at all?
Few do, however that is not Microsoft's meal ticket. Microsoft's big meal ticket is now, as it always was, illegal market control of PC OEMs. Microsoft's second biggest meal ticket is illegal tying of servers to client operating system.
Re:Nothing new (Score:5, Funny)
Remember back in the days that Windows didn't have basic operating system features like memory protection and used to crash thrice daily?
Remember back in the days where using the latest version of IE would assure you that nothing but the most quirky IE only pages would render correctly?
Remember back in the days where Apple had a usable GUI for half a decade and MS users were stuck on a really shitty command line?
Pepperidge Farm remembers
Re:Nothing new (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Nothing new (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nothing new (Score:4, Informative)
Steve used an IBM ThinkPad running NextStep. I'd hardly call that a "Windows machine."
Re: (Score:3)
"He" referred to Sculley, not Jobs.
Re:Nothing new (Score:4, Insightful)
...clearly as a founder he's part of the old boy's club and not going anywhere soon unless Microsoft's board finally says enough z'nough.
Ballmer's position is secure because he excels at the one thing that actually counts: complete, unquestioning obedience to Bill Gates, who as the largest shareholder still controls the company.
Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft has a long and storied history of leadership in the tech industry, and the company has driven innovation for decades
LMFAO
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is downmodded, but where for example do we find the website for "Apple Research"?
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
This is incorrect. PARC is not an Apple Research center.
WHOOSH!!! This was supposed to be a joke. But since it was modded "insightful" instead of funny, you are apparently not the only one who didn't get the joke, so let me explain: In 1979 Steve Jobs visited Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and was shown the Xerox Alto [wikipedia.org]. It included the Smalltalk OO-programming environment, and more importantly, a GUI and mouse. This was the inspiration for the Lisa, and subsequently, the Macintosh. Basically, Xerox had invented the modern computer, and then had let it sit in a research lab until someone else came along and saw the potential.
Re: (Score:3)
It's perfectly cromulent.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Having a research center is negatively correlated with innovation
100% utter bullshit.
Where do you think unix, C and C++ came from?
Where do you think the Kinect body tracking came from?
The really, really innovative stuff, rather than fancy repackaging of existing ideas generally comes from university spinouts (i.e. research labs) and research labs.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
This is actually history being rewritten by companies. Kinect DID NOT come from Microsoft research. It came from an Israeli company that actually offered the technology first to Apple. It did not like the contract and hence did not even show it to Apple. They then went to Microsoft and the rest is history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PrimeSense [wikipedia.org]
Microsoft research and its R&D department SUCKS wind. In stock investing terms R&D is supposed to increase your revenue and cash flow. Thus if I invest 10 USD in R&D I should get at least a return of 10 USD. Anything below that means that the company is throwing money out the window. Microsoft is such a company. It's R&D generates very little that adds to the bottom line of Microsoft. It does not mean that Microsoft Research is useless. It means that something in Microsoft is causing not to make more money from its research department.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft research and its R&D department SUCKS wind. In stock investing terms R&D is supposed to increase your revenue and cash flow. Thus if I invest 10 USD in R&D I should get at least a return of 10 USD. Anything below that means that the company is throwing money out the window. Microsoft is such a company. It's R&D generates very little that adds to the bottom line of Microsoft. It does not mean that Microsoft Research is useless. It means that something in Microsoft is causing not to make more money from its research department.
MS Research is a place where MS parks people who would otherwise be doing usefull stuff for their competition.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft Research made the skeleton tracking software, something that is arguably more complex than the camera itself. I'm not saying the camera hardware and software is trivial, but the principle of using structured light (IR dot pattern) to discern distance to the target is not new nor revolutionary. The revolutionary part was the skeleton tracking software, and the PRICE of the Kinect. I worked with the PrimeSense hardware before Microsoft commoditized it. At that point it cost ~$2000 a pop.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
In stock investing terms R&D is supposed to increase your revenue and cash flow. Thus if I invest 10 USD in R&D I should get at least a return of 10 USD. Anything below that means that the company is throwing money out the window.
Uh, no. In fact, your "stock investing terms" are quite sickening.
R&D is pretty much a black hole when it comes to money, but it is still an investment. Your are actually investing in the company's long-term future. You are investing in the possibility of being the leader in a product or market that doesn't exist yet (it eludes me how you expect R&D to pay for itself if there is no product and/or market). In the R&D you are looking for the product that will be your cash-cow in 10-20 years time. It may also be that you are trying to enter a market by making a product cheaper and/or better, but it will still not pay back for itself, just because even if your R&D is 100% successful, once they hit a home-run the product will be passed on to the engineering department and the R&D will get busy with the next thing. You will never see any money coming back from the R&D. Your revenue and cash flow have nothing to do with R&D. Disclaimer: some very large companies have "engineering R&D" departments that do aim in increasing your revenue, but this is no real R&D, because they occupy themselves with the improvement of your e.g. manufacturing line and their research is not that low-level.
I am not familiar with Microsoft's R&D, but the worst thing that can happen to an R&D is when the company's leaders lack vision. Then you actually do have a bunch of people in the R&D department playing around with this and that without concentrating their efforts. And, of course, it is improbable that something big will come out of this, even in the long term.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Where do you think unix, C and C++ came from?
They came from AT&T Bell Labs. Where they sat. Meanwhile AT&T released the AT&T 6300 PC based on, not Unix, but MSDOS. But there was still lots of interest in Unix, so AT&T pulled it out of the research lab and turned it over to ... the legal department, so they could sue their potential customers. I suppose that is innovation of a sort.
Re: (Score:3)
C and Unix were released before MSDOS. Indeed, Microsot licensed a version of Unix before it released MSDOS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Xenix [wikipedia.org]
Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)
Wait; Bell Labs - the lab which INVENTED the transistor ...(ignoring the Russian guy, [newscientist.com] named Oleg Vladimirovich Losev [wikipedia.org] who Stalling starved to death during the siege of Leningrad [wikipedia.org] before he could bring it to the world)... and made it possible for you to be typing this... They didn't contribute anything? How about IBM's research, which drove their HDD business to such success that at one point IBM was predicting they would own the entire industry in 6 months (but then IBM's mfg department "lost the formula" i.e. they couldn't upscale their success to larger densities, and IBM sold their entire drive business). How about all the research which has been done by a lot of companies around fiber-optics, which wasn't immediately turned into a product, but which now run the communications backbones of the world?
When you get it it looks like a product; that doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of theoretical research done before hand.
As an aside, can you imagine how world history may have been different if Oleg Losev had lived? We may very well have not "won" the cold war, as the impact of the Russians having the transistor decades before us would have had far greater repercussions then just them being able to listen to portable radios before us. One of many of our advantages was that we were using transistors in military technology while they were still using vacuum tubes, whose only advantage was that tubes required less radiation hardening.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft Research is the most depressing part of that whole company. There have so many great researchers and computer scientists working there and you hear very little from them. People who used to publish papers every year join up with MR and are never heard from again. It's a roach motel of computer scientists.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Microsoft Research is basically a place where they can keep innovators out of the hands of their competitors, rather than research innovative new stuff that Microsoft will make - allowing Microsoft to rest on their Windows/Office laurels for longer.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
When I interned at Microsoft, I talked to some guys at MSR once for my project. They'd developed a dataset that was slightly better than current state of the art in the field. I distinctly remember saying "Oh that would be useful to have, are you going to publish the data?", to which they responded "Well you know, it's just data, takes a lot of effort to publish, who has the time?" while looking guilty.
So yeah, MSR is a gilded cage for people who might otherwise be out there starting competitors, or publishing papers thatwould lead to competitors. It's really only in the tools and programming languages divisions that MS lets MSR's freak flag fly (the next version of the .net languages are going to natively support continuation passing style, for goodness sakes, and they're essentially releasing the C# parser as a library)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft Research is the most depressing part of that whole company. There have so many great researchers and computer scientists working there and you hear very little from them. People who used to publish papers every year join up with MR and are never heard from again. It's a roach motel of computer scientists.
Obviously you do not track the academic conference and journals. Microsoft Research publishes a huge number of papers each year, dominating in many research areas. Here's a graph of their publication counts: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Organization/20355/microsoft [microsoft.com]
Re: (Score:3)
MS researchers publish papers. The problem is, nothing they do ever seems to get transitioned into actual products.
Re: (Score:3)
My comment may be somewhat hyperbolic, but it isn't generally false. Pick out your favorite MS research fellow and compare their publishing history before and after joining Microsoft. Most of the people I'm talking about come from academia and perhaps it's just the nature of the academic world -- publish or perish. Maybe they join Microsoft in part to escape that cycle?
Re: (Score:2)
I agree with the original comment. Only a fool would think otherwise.
Not that I like Microsoft, but to dismiss their work simply out of predjudice is silly.
Re: (Score:3)
I've been building a network of RHEL servers lately using, but have been using predominately MS products for about 12 years. I've come to the realization that for enterprise networks, Microsoft has been THE leader with Active Directory. Linux has a few open source loose-ends lying around but they aren't production ready integrated tools.
Red Hat has introduced some similar tools recently with the identity management software (DNS, LDAP, Kerberos, NTP, etc.) but they are late to the party still not really production ready or integrated.
AD is certainly a great feature set. But they ripped it off from Novell. It's basically the Novell tree.
Re: (Score:3)
Seat-based projectiles
Hyperhidrosis enhanced clothing
But somehow, still not as absurd as Apples slide-to-unlock "innovation"
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Not to mention that XP, Vista and 7, Office, etc all had features that were copied by competitors. Just because the final product isn't OMFGAMAZING!!! doesn't mean it didn't contain some good innovations.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)
Mac OS X has had that for a while. It's called Spotlight [wikipedia.org].
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
Mac OS X has had that for a while. It's called Spotlight [wikipedia.org].
And it actually works, unlike the search feature in Windows 7. Overall I like Win 7, but the search feature is literally useless.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, to be fair the Win7 version almost works. It comes SO close to working properly. But Spotlight on the Mac is an actual killer feature, and I won't even consider another OS as my daily system unless it has at least as good a search, preview, and document opening/application starting system as Spotlight. It's not a COOL feature, but unbelievably useful. I work with a lot of documents, Spotlight is indispensable.
Windows is trying, Linux is trying (Ubuntu's Lenses), and that is excellent. But they both have far to go.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft did show some innovation. Namely Microsoft made it possible for generic applications to utilize specific hardware without having to know about the hardware details. This abstraction was attempted by others like Desqview, and OS/2, but it was Microsoft that made it work extremely well. Go back to the original Mac days. You had to buy Apple specific crap, and that was very easy to do. Sun did that approach, so did DEC. I personally feel that little piece of historical credit is underplayed. It is not sexy as a desktop, or as exciting, but it is damm near amazing as it facilitated the desktops we have today.
Office was very innovative as well. Back in the original days you had wordperfect, and you had lotus. Both of these apps could not share any data. Microsoft created a unified vision of desktop app integration. They used OLE, and the result were a bunch of competitors who tried to copy them. OLE while initially badly designed was actually quite amazing. You could embed documents within documents and create a work. What did OLE in was the fact that they tried it, and then tried to write it off. Though I would argue they actually mastered the idea of copy and paste. Yes yes others tried it, but Windows copy and paste did work across the board unlike the others. I remember trying to get copy and paste to work on Linux or a generic Unix, royal pain in the ass. Even to this day OSX copy and paste has little issues. For example when I copy from TextWrangler to WebStorm I will have moments where things just will not transfer.
After that yeah I agree not so much innovation...
Re: (Score:3)
Apple DOS was not innovative, Mac OS 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, OS X wasn't innovative.
OK, I do not dispute that. I never claimed that Apple is an innovative company. In general, Apple grabs innovative technologies, wraps them up in a pretty package, and monetizes them.
Innovation is sometime an incremental improvement, then a big Gee-Wiz everything is brand new.
Which of these has Microsoft done? How did the DOS, Windows, Windows NT, Office, or any other Microsoft product line improve the state of the art?
Re: (Score:3)
That was Commodore.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
They ran over people in the '80s and '90s. Google "cut off Netscape's air supply". They got SQL Server from an unequal deal with Sybase (vaguely similar to the treaties the US government made with Mexico). They offered PC makers deals whereby the OEM's got Windows for less if they didn't also sell PC's with OS/2 or DR-DOS. They effectively tricked IBM with a joint development effort on OS/2, which they abandoned in favor of Windows. As for Windows, it wasn't until 1990 that they had a saleable product, some six years after Apple released the Mac (add another couple years for Lisa).
Microsoft did little innovation relative to its size throughout the '80s and '90s. Mainly, Bill Gates was about being paranoid and crushing anyone who seemed to be a threat. Jerry Kaplan's book "Startup" tells this with anecdotal detail about Gates and Jeff Raikes, his right-hand man at the time. Remember Microsoft's Pen Windows, and Apple's Newton tablet? Both companies lifted the idea from Kaplan without crediting (this was in the days when IT companies didn't patent aggressively).
I think they can reinvent themselves (Score:2, Interesting)
They still have a commanding market share in many areas - it will be interesting to see if they can pull of the reinvention that Apple did.
Re:I think they can reinvent themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
They still have a commanding market share in many areas...
And that's the exact reason you're unlikely to see them reinvent themselves the way Apple did. Apple did it because they had no choice - they were getting their asses handed to them in every sector they were in, they were haemorrhaging money and were on the verge of bankruptcy. It was a do-or-die move.
Microsoft have no need to copy them. They may not be raising the roof on the stock indexes, but they're still making money and because of that, inertia will mean that they'll never look at the kind of radical solutions that Apple did; it's easier to play the safe game and make smaller profits for less risk.
Re:I think they can reinvent themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
In many ways Apple had it easier. The state they were in, the board was willing to try anything and Jobs had free reign to make major changes. If what Jobs did didn't work, there wasn't much loss.
MS is still profitable and making major changes that affects their profitability will face resistance. MS needs new leadership and Ballmer is not likely to lead the reinvention. Over the last several years, it seems the leaders that were willing to change how MS did things have left: Ozzie, Allard, Bach. Everything must be Windows or Office has been a major problem to their innovation.
Re:I think they can reinvent themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about that. Where Microsoft has really been dynamic this decade is at the enterprise level. For example Microsoft Dynamics (which I understand was an acquisition) ties very tightly to office. But accountants and sales people know office. CRM, ERP, Accounting... all tied together with an office interface relatively easy to configure/setup and use. That's rather impressive. Now tie that in with the enhancements to Sharepoint and Universal Communicator and you really have a fully formed office based total communication system. So they have been innovative on a windows / office paradigm.
Their problem is in consumer / internet and to a certain extent not developing there was strategic. It bought them an entire extra decade of dominance. Now Balmer / Microsoft is fighting for consumer market share we'll see what they do. But I don't think its fair to say there has been a lack of innovation. Perhaps not innovations you are about though.
Re:I think they can reinvent themselves (Score:4, Interesting)
I think you make a great point but I think a lot of ./ers aren't going to pick up on what you are saying.
I do all enterprise-level work. I'm talking organizations with petabytes of data and thousands of servers. And you know what? I'm seeing more and more Windows 2008R2 server. Linux got popular for a while when Solaris and big iron started to disappear, but now with VMs and the improved stability in Windows, people are more comfortable with hosting their apps on Windows instead, especially because .NET web apps are easier to write.
So yeah, maybe Apple and even Linux are taking over the tablet/smartphone/consumer market. But MS pwns in the biz world.
(this is kind of sad to me...back in the day I was a Unix/Linux admin and I remember when Unix ran the world, sendmail, bind/dns, etc. Ever since active directory came about it and Exchange seems to be replacing the lan/wan-level infrastructure. Backbones might still use unix though, I'm not really in touch with that level)
Re:I think they can reinvent themselves (Score:5, Interesting)
In many ways Apple had it easier. The state they were in, the board was willing to try anything and Jobs had free reign to make major changes.
And why was the board so willing? Anybody remember their history?
No, of course not, this is IT ;-) Everybody talks about the iMac as being what Steve Jobs did to start turning Apple around, but in reality it was secondary. The single most important thing Steve Jobs did was convince the Apple board of directors to resign so that he could replace them with a board of his choosing.
Press and financial analysts at the time went nuts over this move, because clearly Jobs' ego was out of control, and now having padded the board with people who would not exercise adequate oversight, he was free to run the company into the ground...
But a fact that was not known to most at the time, was that the prior board had long been convinced that Apple could not survive on its own. Many of the seemingly strange decisions by prior CEOs had been because the board was pushing them to position Apple for sale, thus instead of building the brand, they were pursuing short term strategies to pad the bottom line at any cost--including chipping away at their reputation for superior products.
That's nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Elop did to Nokia in a matter of months what Ballmer took over a decade to do to Microsoft.
Re:That's nothing (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah they had problems before, but they were nothing compared to the new ones Elop made. All they had to do before was make their smartphones a little more noob-friendly to gain mass-market appeal. Even if they'd just kept on making cheapo phones for the 3rd world and high-end open phones for uber-geeks they would have been much better off.
The Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Executives, Executives, EXECUTIVES
Quarterly results and long term projects (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the problem with management with KPIs: they have to report results every 3 months. Cutting some long term projects looks great in the beginning: less overhead and fewer costs, and if you move your researchers to production, you even get a bigger income.
The damage only becomes visible 2-5 years later. And then it's too late.
Too bad the whole world is focussed on those dan
Re:Quarterly results and long term projects (Score:5, Interesting)
An increasingly common quote I've been hearing from the consultants of technology giants recently is that "product enhancements" are only considered if they can be demonstrated to be critical to closing a sale.
It's absolutely asinine.
For example, paraphrasing somewhat, I once found a missing function that made an entire API useless. It was designed for manipulating objects, and there were functions for adding, changing, and deleting objects of several types, except one that could not be deleted. It's a simple mistake that can be quickly rectified with a hotfix. Nope. Sorry. We don't have any sales that would be affected by this. Err...
Microsoft products are riddled with abandoned, half-complete, and archaic code that nobody will ever improve or fix, because either no customer wants it desperately enough, or no manager within Microsoft cares, so nobody will get any gold stars for fixing it. Code that does boring things -- no matter how important -- gets no love. This is also where all those security vulnerabilities come, from ancient code that hasn't been modernized or even just looked over in a decade.
Don't believe me? Install Windows 8 Release Preview, and create a new ODBC connection using the control panel. That dialog box hasn't changed in something like 15 years. It's like a museum piece. The "Add new performance counter" window is the same story. You still can't resize it, even though many of the counter names are longer than the available space and can't be read.
This short-sightedness leads to products that are just layers and layers of ancient cruft that no current employee understands or is willing to even touch any more. Eventually the entire product becomes unsellable and has to be scrapped. With something as enormous as Windows, this could very well lead to the end of Microsoft as we know it. Of course, none of this is relevant to sales this quarter, so it doesn't matter...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You're absolutely spot on there. This is my pet peeve because my employer is doing the same thing. My employer's product is getting outdated, the competitors are closing in. We know what needs to be done but I'm never given the go-ahead (I'm the s/w dev manager) because...it'd cost money. My employer's company is loaded (for now), so money should not be an issue.
Unless a customer is paying for a change (like you said, changes need to be paid for in an order) it doesn't get done. Some changes are very import
Re:Quarterly results and long term projects (Score:4, Interesting)
One problem which (only) partially accounts for it is that there are probably valuable customers with mission-critical in-house applications which depend on the half-completed, archaic, abandoned code.
Former exec (Score:4, Insightful)
A former exec disgruntled with his previous company? you don't say...
Re:Former exec (Score:5, Insightful)
I left an employer once because it was shit and was disgruntled with it as my previous company.
But just because I was disgruntled with it, doesn't mean it wasn't shit.
It's bankrupt now.
Sometimes ex-employees are exactly the people you should be listening to, sometimes, they're ex-employees by their own choosing and for good reason.
Re:Former exec (Score:4, Insightful)
Been there. In 1995 or 1996, I was working in my first job, as a systems administrator for a small geographics company. Our main business was in generating custom maps for large businesses that needed to visualize the geophysical data for a certain area. For example, one typical customer was a large local bank that needed us to generate custom maps to show all the residential addresses they loaned money to in the metro area over the previous year, so they could show there was no discrimination in who they loaned to.
Back to the point: we could make custom maps. One day, my supervisor and I were talking about "The Web" and all the cool things you could find there. We had the great idea to use "The Web" to advertise our business. So we pitched an idea to our vice president: Let's set up a server that lets people type in their address in a "Web Browser", then we can pass that to our mapping system and create a simple "line drawing" map of their immediate area. Just stuff our server could complete in about 5 seconds or so. We figured the "Web Page" could also tell the visitor about the other things we do. Basically, give away a few small maps in exchange for getting more customers for our big stuff.
The vice president considered, then rejected the idea, saying that free maps on the Internet wasn't our business.
Only a year later, companies like MapQuest arrived on the scene, offering free maps supported by advertising. It was the start of a new business model. I don't want to say that our little company could have become MapQuest ... but yeah, we really could have. I'll note that the first versions of these mapping "Web Sites" provided little more than a line-drawing of a location, and a route to get from point A to point B.
I believe that company went out of business a few years after I left. Surprisingly, they weren't able to adapt to this new model where people could get free maps on the Internet.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Ok, fine.. let's attack his argument.
He says the past 10 years have been 'lost'. Yet, profits and revenue have more than tripled.
http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Microsoft_(MSFT)/Data/Derived_Net_Income/2000 [wikinvest.com]
http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Microsoft_(MSFT)/Data/Revenue/2000 [wikinvest.com]
He complains that Windows RT won't launch until "later this year". Is he really complaining that an entire operating system won't be available for a few more months?! This is just stupid. An operating system is not simply a new version of not
Courier Tablet (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Courier Tablet (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
The Courier was seriously deep into "Shut up and take my money!" territory. Even if it was just a concept, the technology existed to make it happen. They could have named their own price and made Apple-style mountains of cash. Even now, there still isn't even anything on the horizon that is really comparable to what the Courier proposed to be.
No. Microsoft has always been the same. (Score:5, Insightful)
Despicable Them (Score:3)
Microsoft Has "Become the Thing They Despised"
That's funny... for me it's just more despicable now than it was way back when. I guess my despicableness threshold is lower than Eichenwald's and Ballmer's?
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That's weird, for me it's the complete opposite. I used to despise them, now I just find them an annoyance and laugh at their patheticness. Whereas Apple I used to find amusing, but they're rising quickly on my "despicableness meter". Google's starting to really get on my nerves too, though for different reasons (Gmail UI suddenly became butt-ugly, and other things like Google Maps seem like they don't work as well as they used to).
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Innovation doesn't exist anymore (Score:3, Interesting)
s/driven/killed/ (Score:5, Insightful)
and the company has driven innovation for decades
Uh... geez. Where to even start?
The first and last real MS innovation was the Microsoft BASIC interpreter which became ubiquitous in 1980s home computers. Everything else they ever did was shamelessly stolen and/or bought and/or badly copied from others. Even MS-DOS started out as a bought-out CP/M imitation.
They disparaged GUIs and the whole idea of user-friendly computing until the Mac proved them wrong. It took them a decade to come up with a usable competitor (Windows 95). Then it took them years to recognize the importance of the Internet, so they killed the competition by illegally leveraging their monopoly on Windows desktops. With the competition dead, they stalled IE development and set back web innovation by a decade until Firefox broke the market back open.
Now you can see them screw up the same way with mobile devices. It took even Bill Gates until last week to admit that the PC-centric model may be "changing". Thankfully, with Gates gone and that dancing sweatmonkey in charge, they don't seem to be capable of their past level of predation anymore.
MS has always been a follower at best. It has frequently been a predatory abuser of its monopoly. It has usually parasitized on the innovations of others. Embrace, extend, extinguish was always how they operated. It has never been an innovation leader.
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Woz must have been abusing that time machine of his, to have copied microsoft's 1980 "innovation" in 1978 with his AppleSoft BASIC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applesoft_BASIC [wikipedia.org]
Re:s/driven/killed/ (Score:4, Informative)
Woz must have been abusing that time machine of his, to have copied microsoft's 1980 "innovation" in 1978 with his AppleSoft BASIC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applesoft_BASIC [wikipedia.org]
Insofar as he was cloning Gates' 1975 introduction of Altair Basic [wikipedia.org], yes. Of course, neither was remotely original: BASIC had been around since the mid 60's, if just hadn't been ported to small machines.
Re:s/driven/killed/ (Score:5, Informative)
I was one of the lucky few (in college) who got to taste the Internet in the 1980s. Microsoft absolutely refused to add a TCP/IP stack to Windows 3.x. Gates believed the proprietary network model championed by AOL and CompuServe would win out. MSN was actually Microsoft's entry into that model. Back then, you had to pay a monthly fee to subscribe to it - it was not free like it is now. There was no way in hell he was going to help Windows users use the free Internet, so no TCP/IP stack for Windows. We had to futz around with manually installing Trumpet Winsock ourselves to hook up a Windows machine to the net. This was not for the faint of heart, and took me several hours spread across several days to get it right.
1994 was when the Internet reached critical mass. AOL and CompuServe gave their (massive at the time) userbase access to USENET [wikipedia.org] in 1993, and word spread from there among non-geeks about this great, free worldwide communications network. URLs started showing up in commercials and on billboards that year. IIRC the first Super Bowl commercial with a URL was that year. That was when Gates finally conceded that the Internet had beaten the walled garden networks, and put a TCP/IP stack into Windows. Hence why it didn't show up until Windows 95.
While the Mac did not officially support TCP/IP until later, that was because there was a great and easy-to-use third party TCP/IP installer for it. I want to say it was MacTCP but I don't remember exactly anymore. What I do remember was that we had a bunch of Macs at my college computer lab in 1988 hooked up to the Internet, no problem.
If you check the release history for IE, there's something like a 13 month period where Microsoft released no new features for IE, only security updates. That's what they did after they'd vanquished Netscape. Once the competition was gone, they stopped funding new development. So that's at least a year that browsers are behind that's directly attributable to Microsoft.
I'm not sure I'd say they put the browser back by a decade, but they were working hard the entire time to fragment the industry by introducing non-compliant and proprietary web extensions (ActiveX, which could only be implemented by Windows web servers) in an attempt to take over the WWW. I wouldn't say that's entirely a negative thing - they did force the fogeys at W3C to hurry up and implement new features in HTML that users and web developers were clamoring for. But by trying to take over the WWW instead of working with W3C to improve it, they did put the industry back by a few years at least.
That's Cool (Score:3)
Some of you might think my hatred is baseless, but that's really not the case. Had the industry decided to run with any of a number of other technologies, we'd have got to incrementally larger platforms (16 bit, 32 bit, 64 bit,) preemptive multitasking and a flat memory model and much more secure systems a decade faster than we did with Microsoft and Intel. Admittedly, the failure of those systems to dominate was as much the fault of the inept management of the owners of those technologies as it was Microsoft's abuse of the monopoly position afforded them by IBM at the time.
I also don't let my hatred of them blind me to the improvements they've made in the last 10 years, though I wonder how much of that would have happened had Linux not been nipping at their heels. We have no way of knowing if the future would have been any different had one of the workstation players of the day had come out on top instead of Microsoft. They traditionally had a habit of doing just enough and then resting on their laurels and not expecting the industry to continue advancing. History is littered with the bodies of companies and product development teams that did that. The main thing I'll credit Microsoft with is they had the vision to realize that one day nearly everyone would have a PC in their home, at a time when the UNIX guys were laughing at PC and calling them toys.
Now that this vision has been realized, I wonder if a Microsoft under Ballmer has the vision to make the next jump. They're already playing catch-up from a woefully-behind position in the mobile market, but it's not the first time they've come late to a party and done all-right for themselves. I don't think they have the foresight to set their target to whatever lies beyond that point, but I can't predict what that thing will be either. One thing I do know all too well is that history is littered with the bodies of companies that were not quick on their feet or flexible enough to adapt to changing situations fast enough, and that some of those companies (Sun) were quite big. I won't shed a tear if Microsoft becomes one of those also-rans in the next decade or two, but I won't dance on their grave, either. For better or worse they had their time and I think their impact on my profession will end up having been a wash.
Stopped reading here: (Score:3)
"Microsoft has a long and storied history of leadership in the tech industry, and the company has driven innovation for decades.
Microsoft & random reward (pigeons in Skinner (Score:5, Interesting)
Some time in the 1980s the corporations realized the efficiencies of using office computers. But it was an esoteric and complex device and it required lots of training to use, and the top managers did not fully understand how easy/difficult it would be. I have seen highly intelligent relatives of mine who were totally flummoxed by the PC. So they were desperately looking for ways to reduce training costs and to get some kind of predictability. They wanted interoperability and portable skills for their work force. They picked on Microsoft as the common thing. Once enough corporations picked Microsoft, probably because of strong recommendations by IBM and its association with IBM, Microsoft became the de-facto monopoly. Food will appear magically. Not at random but at predictable intervels in a torrent.
Microsoft managers, like the pigeons in the random reward Skinner's box, started believing it is their action that had resulted in this huge torrent of cash. This torrent cash masked the incompetence of managers, the mediocrity of the products, the lack of innovation, the corrosive work culture, abusive customer relations, etc etc.
Re: (Score:3)
You are partially right.
Microsoft became big when they could sell DOS to the clones, especially Compaq. They got in the door because of the price of a clone-PC. The magic was in "IBM compatible".
The next part is that I think most software environments tend to gravitate towards a monopoly. As soon as MS had established their first one, they then used some very aggressive moves to expand, their history in the eighties and nineties is one of lost lawsuits. What they used is that the judicial system is just muc
Frankly I Feel the Opposite (Score:4)
This opinion will be about as popular as a kick in the teeth here I know, but I don't care either way, sometimes you have to go against the group-think....
-Windows Servers are coming into it's own; WinServer 2012 is getting some rave reviews for the new virtualization stuff especially, and it's not even out yet. SQL Server is going from strength-to-strength, not to mention the bizapps servers (SharePoint, Exchange, Lync) have never sold so many ever more than now.
-Windows in general is finally becoming consumer & tablet friendly, some even say at the expense of the power-users, but it'll ultimately broaden it's appeal to grandmas & Joe Sixpack's alike. Metro, love it or hate it, is what grandma wants; simple, shiny, easy to use. This of course is not what everyone wants but there's always the classic UI too - which leads me to my next point....
-Product integration/commonality across a huge range of hardware; the same code & UI works on XBox, WinPhone, Windows tablet (RT), and Windows normal. Windows phone 8 will level out the platform field even further and expect this to be something that improves continually, meaning even more ROI on code over time.
-Office365 is a great product; small business in particular love it as they don't have to run IT anymore (and shouldn't have to) and they get access to enterprise-scale services like Exchange for a mere pitance every month.
-SkyDrive is also taking off; I never thought I'd see the day when Google released an inferior competing product that had less space than the MS offering.
-Finally, finally MS aren't leaving to OEMs to actually give Apple a run for their money. Apple have great toys they spend a lot of time engineering them to be "just right" and have sold bucket-loads of devices because of it. Yes this might wind up the OEMs but this is the kick up the ass they needed, and the Surface should be it.
-XBox is still selling loads even being years old now. It's also proof MS can enter consumer markets if the product's done right.
Not everything's perfect of course; there are plenty of risks as slashdotters like pointing out; Win8 is still an unknown to some extent, Apple are hammering MS on all fronts right now for the consumer space, but there's plenty of action & big descisions going on that I think might just work. On the cloud side Amazon are hammering MS too, but it's all to play for still.
But these are exciting times; competition is a good & needed thing, and so far at least on the consumer side, Apple is quickly becoming the dominant player in this space - let's hope they don't go unanswered. Microsoft are as far as I see willing to stake big bets on some big changes, and that's why I'm excited to see how this all plays out - I think it might just work, personally. Never before has IT been such a competitive & interesting place to be in.
OK, I've accidently said a positive thing about Microsoft. Forgive me slashdot; you may flame away.
Give the customer what they want (Score:3)
It seems so much of the article can be summed by a very simple business statement.
"Give the customer what they want"
(yes... sometimes the customer themselves doesn't know what they want until you give it to them)
Microsoft's early success was all about giving the customer what they wanted. Windows 95 gave people a GUI with DOS with pretty low requirements. I remember trying to toss on some Linux distros on older hardware... and none performed as well Windows 95. Now yes, Windows 95 made a lot of sacrifices to make it speedy... but it was what the customer wanted. Office scripting/VBS are along the same lines, but it worked.
Microsoft's lost decade I think is kind of unique... in that they forgot about this. They began focusing on things outside of providing for the customer. Some of it actually needed from a technical standpoint (gutting/rewriting legacy stuff). But much of it not.
For Vista, where was the demand for a database file system? They also focused too much on making things work with Windows or giving them a Windows feel. All things customers really don't care about. The initial windows smart phones complete with start menu... seems so silly now.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Eh? (Score:5, Funny)
the full article still isn't available, and this is just a short teaser.
Just like Microsoft product announcements.
Re: (Score:3)
Anyway, the most interesting part is not the article itself, but the comments of many Microsofties.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
> if you would have taken a chimp and left it to fling its own poo at the stock page and then bought major amounts of any stock whose listing was heavily covered in monkey shit I have NO doubt you would have made more money for MSFT than the man who has led the company for the last decade!
Now, *that's* an internship I would turn down...
Re: (Score:3)
I know some people who have installed the preview of Win 8. I'm not saying it's not a MS product, with all the crap that entails, but my understanding is that it's actually faster than Win 7, and Windows 7 isn't bad. If you can get over Metro, and there's really no reason you couldn't, it's a serviceable upgrade.
Mind you, if I was using Linux or MacOS regularly, for whatever reason, it is far from switch-worthy, but since Windows has the lion's share of the desktop app and gaming ecosystem, I'm darn glad
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
What about Ballmer? Does his direction in any way inspire you, or are you like the rest of us and just wishing he'd go away?
Speaking as an Apple fan, I hope the great Steven Ballmer continues his spectacular reign as CEO long into the 21st Century. In fact, I hope they have his head preserved, Futurama-style, to lead Microsoft down its present path until they are inevitably DE-LISTED on the stock exchange...
But I fear that the MS stockholders will band together and demand his ouster before that happens (sigh).
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Mother of All Dupes (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mother of All Dupes (Score:5, Insightful)
After opening with a false premise like "storied history of leadership", do you really want to read more?
Yeah, that was a good one. I also liked "...and the company has driven innovation for decades." That made me chuckle.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Ya, really.
> Microsoft Has "Become the Thing They Despised"
And what's that? They became a studly male suave wit da ladies?
Re: (Score:3)
... the company has driven innovation for decades...
They drove it into hiding.