Steve Ballmer: We Won't Be Out-Innovated By Apple Anymore 610
An anonymous reader tips an article about comments from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer regarding Microsoft's attitude toward Apple. It seems Microsoft is tired of being behind the curve in most areas of the tech market, and will be trying very hard to prevent Apple and other companies from beating them to the punch in the future. From the article:
"In a recent interview, Ballmer explained that the company had ceded innovations in hardware and software to Apple, but that the-times-they-are-a-'changin. 'We are trying to make absolutely clear we are not going to leave any space uncovered to Apple,' Ballmer explained. 'Not the consumer cloud. Not hardware software innovation. We are not leaving any of that to Apple by itself. Not going to happen. Not on our watch.' ... An admirable goal, but it's fair to argue that attempting to innovate everywhere results in innovation nowhere. A big part of the reason Apple has been so successful is that they devote the bulk of their attention to only a few select market areas. By trying to innovate everywhere, so to speak, Microsoft runs the continued risk of spreading itself too thin and not really having a fundamental impact in any one market."
Sorry (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sorry (Score:5, Insightful)
To me the humor is this: why are they going after apple? Let them, surely - but why do they think it is apple who is out innovating them as opposed to the entire technology industry at large?
"first they ignore you" (Score:5, Insightful)
"then they laugh at you"
"then they fight you"
"and then you win."
It looks like Ballmer has decided to proceed from stage 2 to stage 3. This is really the first time I recall him doing anything to admit there's a problem. Usually the MS stage puppets just keep up the brainwashing with how MS is doing so well and owns the market and is the leader in everything and how the new blablabla is going to be such a smashing success. You know the gloves have come off when Ballmer admits they're behind.
Re:"first they ignore you" (Score:5, Insightful)
I was thinking more about the five stages of grief (Kübler-Ross model [wikipedia.org]), the first of which is denial:
1) Denial
2) Anger
3) Bargaining
4) Depression
5) Acceptance
I'd put old Steve Balls somewhere between #1 and #2.
Re:"first they ignore you" (Score:4, Funny)
I was thinking more about the five stages of grief (Kübler-Ross model [wikipedia.org]), the first of which is denial:
1) Denial
2) Anger
3) Bargaining
4) Depression
5) Acceptance
I'd put old Steve Balls somewhere between #1 and #2.
Does this mean he's past the chair throwing stage? Tough times ahead for Herman Miller.
Re:"first they ignore you" (Score:5, Insightful)
With regard to Apple, Microsoft will ALWAYS fail at this contest.
Microsoft is built around and "Enterprise Sales Division". The existence of such a monstrosity is the death-knell for any company of tech-innovators.
Apple has no such - and they are overturning MS in the "home turf" of corporate business customers. They do so without creating a separate business line of devices, "Enterprise" software or the RFQ-response configuration choices, beloved by hardware vendors selling to corporations.
Microsoft sold out to ideas about business and capital very early - and were always based out of a Harvard Business School background - without the real hacker DNA. Ballmer never sold Billy's blue boxes, to start their enterprise... :-)
Since 2001 MS spent a couple dozen BILLION on R&D. Yet they capitalized on nothing - despite ensconcing the best and brightest in world-class labs and facilities. Every "innovation" from MS has been an acquisition (TellMe, Kinect) or a "Me too" (.net, Windows imaging model, Silverlight, HyperV...)
Ballmer's bruised ego is not enough of a motivating force to make any difference here. I look forward with relish to Microsoft's continued, punishing humiliation. There is really no other company so deserving of becoming the next RIM.
Re:"first they ignore you" (Score:4, Informative)
you could say that the "me too" stuff was acquisition too - .NET was created by the same guy who did Delphi at Borland which prompter Microsoft to "buy" him and get him to work on J++. So its not surprising that he then went on to make J++++.
Silverlight is pretty much the same stable, and dead too BTW. If you mean the XMl-based programming model of WPF, then I think they'd do well not to admit they created that mess.
HyperV was a purchased product from Connectix in 2003/.
Re:"first they ignore you" (Score:5, Informative)
Apple hasn't ploughed 24 Billion of shareholder money into dead-end R&D with no discernible return over the past 11 years.
One could argue that the competitive advantage of Microsoft labs comes from keeping good researchers funded, away from useful work elsewhere - the advancement of which would only make Micosoft look even worse in comparison!
Re: (Score:3)
Kinect comes from some little outfit in Israel - who OEM'd the technology under license to MS.
Re:"first they ignore you" (Score:5, Interesting)
I am currently doing an internship at Microsoft Research. There are a huge number of very innovative things on the horizon (which, sadly, I can't talk about), and Microsoft has gathered one of the most talented groups of people I have ever had the pleasure to work with. Note that I have never been a fan of Microsoft-- I conscientiously avoided their software for a long time. I've been a BSD/Linux person for more than a decade and a Mac person since the late 1980's, and I prefer to write code in more traditionally UNIX languages: Ruby, C, Scala, etc. But I've had the pleasure of working with F# (basically ML, also developed by MSR) on top of the
I don't think Ballmer is blowing smoke, because from my standpoint, there's a lot going on here. While it's true that many of the things developed don't become products, the technology is very often integrated into existing products, without fanfare. The Windows fault-tolerant heap, for example, was developed at MSR for Linux, rejected by the Linux community (because it was not "incremental"), and then eventually ported to Windows. Many improvements that make Visual Studio a pleasure to use come from MSR. And, whether you think this is worthwhile or not-- MSR generates a huge number of very good research papers. Apple produces zero, although it does share some code (e.g., WebKit and LLVM). Google produces a handful and shares very little code (e.g., MapReduce and FlumeJava were never released, although they were reverse-engineered by people at Yahoo).
Re:"first they ignore you" (Score:5, Insightful)
I am currently doing an internship at Microsoft Research. There are a huge number of very innovative things on the horizon
There always are at MSR.
(which, sadly, I can't talk about),
You probably can. Most of the stuff they do gets published in conferences, journals, and so on. The problem Microsoft has always had (at least, from the early '90s onwards) is that they spend a vast amount on MSR and then only take a tiny fraction of the output and produce products. Apple, in contrast, spends nothing at all on pure research, but is very good at identifying interesting research from elsewhere and turning it into shipping products.
Don't be deceived into thinking that the shiny stuff you see at MSR is somehow new. Pick a random issue of a random computing journal from the last 20 years and you'll probably see at least one interesting paper by someone at MSR, or someone in collaboration with MSR, but you almost certainly won't see any MS products based on it. Given that MS invests about $5bn/year in MSR, I'd be shocked if they didn't produce interesting research, but that's only the first stage in creating a compelling product. The next stages are at least as important.
Oh, and I couldn't let this one pass:
(basically ML, also developed by MSR)
ML comes from Edinburgh in 1973, long before MSR existed. Ocaml, the most commonly used dialect comes from INRIA, in 1996. MSR does a lot more work on Haskell (Simon Peyton-Jones and friends) than ML-family languages.
Re: (Score:3)
What really astounds me, is how much you sound like a DEC or System 360 advocate, at the opening of the PC era, 20-25 years ago.
"Those mammals will never make it! Ridiculous metabolic rate... no armour.. hell, their young aren't even born with protective egg-casings! Wait til they face up a T-Rex. Then we'll see who's laughing..."
Re:"first they ignore you" (Score:4, Insightful)
Right but IBM is apt. IBM has always innovated (The PC itself, for instance) but the creativity of its techs was stifled by a general old-world business model that left it vunerable to getting its throat torn out by the new-world practices of microsoft in the 80s. But microsoft is now in that same boat. The apple it crushed in the 90s bears no resemblance to the apple of today, and apple has learned and studied its mistakes. And apple has studied microsoft learning its successes too. Apple now has the raw capital to beat microsoft in an endurance game and it has the smarts to beat microsoft at being desirable and attractive to non techie punters.
Microsoft will always have a market for its PC stuff, as long as it doesnt completely blow it with this metro guff, but apple is redefining the market, and I'm not convinced that whatever innovations Win8 brings to the tablet space have arived in time to make a difference.
Frankly I suspect the only thing that will make MS's tablets work is if it fogets the home market and makes an aggressive pitch at the enterprise. It might succeed in that.
Re:"first they ignore you" (Score:4, Interesting)
And that is why this will never, ever, ever happen. Internal fiefdoms are jealously guarded at Microsoft.
"It's why we suck!"(tm)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:"first they ignore you" (Score:5, Funny)
1) Developers
2) Developers
3) Developers
4) Developers
Re:"first they ignore you" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"first they ignore you" (Score:4, Insightful)
standard car analogy, look at the stagnant small cars in the 80s, the imports came in and swooped up. Due to that, the domestics hard to reinvent themselves, and slowly but surely we have way better small cars now than we did then.
Re:"first they ignore you" (Score:4, Funny)
Let's all pile into this thread so it takes longer to scroll past, everyone!
Re:"first they ignore you" (Score:5, Informative)
"then they laugh at you"
"then they fight you"
"and then you win."
And of course the "then they laugh at you" is very well documented [youtube.com].
I love the part where he says (of the Motorola Q), "it'll do music, it'll do... uh, internet...". Ah, Steve, you slay me.
Re:"first they ignore you" (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft version:
"first they laugh at you"
"then you fail"
"then they laugh at you again."
Re:Sorry (Score:4)
It's Microsoft's long established development culture [google.com] – watch what Apple does... then implement whatever that is in Windows.
Ballmer's previous failed plan for beyond the OS was " last to cool, first to profit." [marketplace.org] That didn't go over so well.
Microsoft is not entirely unlike the relentless Joshua from WarGames, but unlike Joshua, Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to learn. [youtube.com]
Re:Sorry (Score:5, Insightful)
And the one time they try to predict where Apple is going and beat them there, we end up with Windows 8 + Metro. I'm convinced that back in 2008 or 2009, Microsoft predicted that iOS and OSX would be merged. I really can't understand any other reason for their current strategy.
Re:Sorry (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sorry (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, Apple has a patent on innovation.
Why stop at Apple? Everyone is out-innovating MSFT. They got lazy, back in the 90's and have to root out the rot in their company before they will be nimble enough to do anything. Best bet would be to spin off a tightly focused innovation group and pull in resources as needed from where ever they come from.
cool story bro (Score:5, Insightful)
"we are not going to leave any space uncovered to Apple"
all that really says is they will be following Apple into any market even ones that aren't right for Microsoft. it actually sounds to me like they are doubling down on copying Apple.
Re:cool story bro (Score:5, Insightful)
Phones yielded to Apple and Android.
Desktop operating systems yielded to MacOSX (and maybe Ubuntu)
Tablets tossed with the Hail Mary of RT.
Servers yielded to several versions of Linux (and here, Apple croaked).
Cloud to dozens of IaaS and PaaS providers.
Virtual machines handed on a platter to VMware, Citrix, RedHat, and varying others.
OH! But Games! Microsoft has XBOX and Zune^H^H^H^H
Steve: remember, it was you that mixed the kool aid.
Re: (Score:3)
Sorry, you're wrong-- and you're a propagandizer. Microsoft has lots of stuff and it's lost mindshare. Statistically, I'm sure Microsoft has majority share in desktop operating systems, and Nothing.Else.
Your lack of knowledge about Citrix XenServer pegs you. Look it up. Find out where it plays.
Re:cool story bro (Score:4, Insightful)
Its Office suite is still pretty much mandatory in a lot of offices, and any place else where you have to exchange editable documents.
This is due in part to the abysmal nature of those formats: nobody from outside can get them working with 100% fidelity. If you hand me a Word doc, and I edit it or fill it out with anything other than Genuine Microsoft(tm)-brand Word, there's a good chance it's going to look like crap when you get it back. Job security through incompetence.
That's diminishing as people find other ways of sharing stuff, but there's still a large place for the Big File Full Of Carefully Formatted Words And Pictures that needs to be edited on both ends.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But that's FUD. Microsoft Office works well on Macs. No one complains EVER when I send them one from LibreOffice. They can't be told form the original-- and NEVER has a document not opened or looked funny.
So you can share with about anything; Microsoft Office doesn't have document dominion anymore.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
On desktops...MS still rules.
But, from my anecdotal experience...with BIG systems, many of them even on the Federal level...in the server rooms, these days it is largely RHEL.
The general consensus I get from any existing or new project is..."Windows does not belong in the server room". Most of what I'm seeing lately is VMWare and RHEL and Oracle in the server rooms.
Re:cool story bro (Score:5, Interesting)
Walk inside a public place these days. What do you see? Lots of Apples. Lots of coders (and not civilians in the US, anyway) run Linux on their desktops. I know, heresy.
Civilians usually don't run non-Windows stuff. Go onto a HS or university campus. What do you see? A sea of Apples. Microsoft has improved their stuff, don't get me wrong. But while Apple was paying deep attention to detail, Microsoft was pandering to Standard and Poor. I'm not a fanboi; I do not use Apple stuff. But I have a deep respect for Apple engineering and their ability to hypnotize their customers.
Microsoft has statistically ceded share in almost all categories. I got modded as troll. The truth is painful, especially during lovefests like the Microsoft Partner Conference, being held this week in Toronto. Microsoft typically finds ways to pound down criticism as their lovefest pounds fists on podiums. Ballmer has let his organization and his customers down, IMHO. He's allowed a variety of holes to be broken with the concrete hammers of success and innovation, sparse sometimes, as it is. Kool aid. With sugar.
Re:cool story bro (Score:5, Informative)
Walk into any office. Count the number of Apple and Linux desktops. Blush and admit you're an idiot.
Re:cool story bro (Score:5, Interesting)
Just did. No blushing.
Then I went to the corner coffee shop. Nineteen Macs, two Dell notebooks, one huge whomping HP running Vista. The Point of Sale system they use is Linux running something on KDE.
Really, you need to get out.
Re: (Score:3)
Nice way to characterize people.
Tell me, how many non-iPad tablets do you see out there? I see a bunch of Kindles, but mostly iPads and a few rare Androids.
Microsoft knows how to sell to businesses. Apple completely sucks at not selling directly to consumers. But the licenses trend is still bad for Microsoft. Can they do better? Ballmer claims so, but he's now an apologist, not a thought leader.
Re: (Score:3)
I see a bunch of Kindles, but mostly iPads and a few rare Androids.
Not as rare as last week.
Re:cool story bro (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Until recently you'd have been correct. I work for a large company which has always exclusively used Windows desktops (apart from some 'creative' people who had Macs for design or video). It was extremely rare to see a Mac anywhere. But in the last year or so, I'm starting to see them in large numbers, and on the desks of business people and software developers. In fact, there are now whole offices full of Macs, where once would have been Windows PCs.
A few weeks ago, I was at a software development conf
Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Ballmer to MS board: "Please let stay as the CEO"
Re:Translation (Score:5, Funny)
MS board to Ballmer: "No we not."
Re:Translation (Score:5, Funny)
Ballmer in a month: "They fled. The Apple louts fled. Indeed, concerning the fighting waged by the heroes of Microsoft yesterday, one amazing thing really is the cowardice of the Apple employees. We had not anticipated this... Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Redmond. Be assured, Redmond is safe, protected."
Re: (Score:3)
Ballmer in a month: "They fled. The Apple louts fled. Indeed, concerning the fighting waged by the heroes of Microsoft yesterday, one amazing thing really is the cowardice of the Apple employees. We had not anticipated this... Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Redmond. Be assured, Redmond is safe, protected."
Microsoft's new product "Microsoft Baghdad Bob"
Re:Translation (Score:4, Funny)
After Jobs, Ballmer is the second best person for Apple. They should be paying his salary to keep working at Microsoft.
Re:Translation (Score:4, Funny)
Their last conversation probably went something like:
BillyG: "Ah, don't worry Steve, I'm pretty sure even you can't bankrupt Microsoft within Melinda's and my lifetime."
SteveB: "What? What are you saying? Hey! CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!"
Hmmm ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why am I reminded of this [dilbert.com] Dilbert cartoon from last week?
A decree from the CEO to be more innovative largely means nothing if they can't actually make the change in a meaningful way and bring out products.
If Microsoft has been innovating and not creating products, they're idiots. If they haven't been innovating, well, that's the fundamental problem, isn't it?
Microsoft has been so mired in the "copy someone else's product badly" mentality for so long, I question if Balmer understand what needs to be done to fix this. Certainly not just a speech.
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:5, Informative)
They've been innovating and not creating products. Microsoft has been very conservative. Go to http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/ [microsoft.com] and you'll be shocked how many cool ideas aren't seeing the light of day because they've been strategically focused and conservative. If Microsoft is willing to start taking risks again, and Windows 8 so far surely qualifies, I think it might get fun in tech again.
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's already fun in tech as long as you're not a microsoft-centric person.
Quite frankly the farther I get from Microsoft-groupthink-land the better I feel. Since I'm a gamer there is nothing I can't do on my Ubuntu laptop that I can't do on any other O.S., plus I don't waste gbs on a huge Office install.
Re: (Score:3)
since I'm *not a gamer. God I need to learn to proofreed.
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
A year late.
Kinect was hacked to run on darn near anything in a few WEEKS after it shipped. It took Microsoft a year to admit it was useful for other things.
Re: (Score:3)
Well, that's quite sad then. I know they spend metric butt-loads of cash on R&D, but if they can't figure out which of those could lead to a marketable product ... they might as well not be doing the research.
The reality is, to me (and likely loads of others), Microsoft has "innovated" very few actually cool things which have turned into products, and they sure as hell haven't been able to come up with any "disrupti
Re:Hmmm ... (Score:4, Informative)
X# has nothing to do with F#. F# originated from the attempt to port OCaml to .NET, which itself was preceded by an attempt to port Haskell to .NET (Google for "Mondrian programming language").
X# was rather an attempt to take C# and combine it with XML, and specifically XDM (which was all the rage in enterprise circles back in 2002-2004, when the project ran) - sorta like imperative XQuery with more C#-like syntax. So you had XDM complex types as first class entities, the ability to reference XML Schema as a type library etc. The only part of X# is survived in some way were query comprehensions, which shed their XML origin and became LINQ.
Also, F# is not an implementation of Objective Caml: it supports none of the "objective" part - i.e. none of the original awesome structurally-typed object model with multiple inheritance and pervasive type inference; instead, it uses its own object model that maps closely to .NET. It also doesn't support functors, which is another particularly strong point of OCaml. In "legacy syntax" mode, F# implements the only base Caml language (more or less the same as Caml Light). In regular mode, it is a wholly separate dialect of ML with some minor OCaml heritage, but unique syntax and idioms.
As for why F# was sat on for so long... I dare say it doesn't have much to do with Scala, but more with FP itself becoming more mainstream in general, and in MS developer ecosystem in particular. C# and VB programmers were essentially forcibly exposed to some important parts of FP when LINQ was introduced - and LINQ, if you set the AST-preserving portion of it aside, is just lazy sequence comprehensions, the usual map/filter/fold that is the staple of idiomatic FP code. So by now even many C# developers are not unfamiliar with the programming style that you showcase.
Fight the wrong battles? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ballmer seems to be citing the ongoing (prior?) battles as areas where MS intends to fight... That's great and all, assuming MS delivers, but they should instead be focussing on the next battles.
Re:Fight the wrong battles? (Score:5, Insightful)
A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.
-- Wayne Gretzky
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Balmer just doesn't give a puck.
Re: (Score:3)
Balmer just doesn't give a puck.
Ballmer heard that goalies win games, so he put 6 goalies on the ice. He's now substituting them with 6 wingers.
Re: (Score:3)
A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.
-- Wayne Gretzky
Yet everything I've ever heard about Ballmer indicates that he's the type to hold a management meeting to agree where the puck was and to work out what their strategic approach to dealing with the whole puck-goal situation needs to be in the first place. Time and again MS come up with good things internally with great potential, and time and again they kill them for obscure reasons. They'll even try to throw competing teams at the same problem, if I've remembered right.
It's no wonder that so many other comp
Re:Fight the wrong battles? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, he is using the same strategy as the TSA. Focus on yesterday's problem, not tomorrow's.
Re:Fight the wrong battles? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's an oft-quoted line of Wayne Gretsky about skating to where the puck is going, rather than skating to where it is now. Steve Jobs quoted it a number of years ago regarding their strategy of looking towards whatever was coming next, rather than what consumers were using and wanting now.
Microsoft has been a "skate to where the puck is" company for quite a few years now, which is why everything they've been putting out feels just a bit off and a bit behind. They've made indications in the last few months that they want to get away from that and actually start to be pushing boundaries, rather than filling in behind the people that push the boundaries. And I sincerely hope they do, since more innovation (and competition!) in the tech space is always a good thing. They certainly have an awesome R&D department that routinely puts out awesome stuff, but it's unfortunately very rarely realized in its full potential. I'd love to see them using the stuff they develop internally in big ways.
So... (Score:4, Insightful)
they're going to do something that is completely against/opposite any and all products or direction they have ever made or gone? I'll believe it when I see it!
They don't have the best track record on original products :)
Obligatory Dilbert reference... (Score:3)
Work smarter, not harder: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1997-07-06/ [dilbert.com] .
Because innovation is the same way - Ballmer doesn't want to be out-innovated in any of the established "hot" areas but he doesn't know what he doesn't know.
Won't be out-innovated by Apple anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
You keep using that word... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Innovation." You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
You want to out-innovate Apple? Don't make a goal of going head-to-head with them everywhere - that's copying, the exact opposite of innovating. Compete where you actually have a newer, better product than they have. Compete where they have no product. Let them win where you cannot create a better or more innovative product. I'm sure Sun Tzu had something I could quote here, but I can't remember anything offhand.
Re:You keep using that word... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You keep using that word... (Score:5, Interesting)
But there are only so many customers of that stuff. Microsoft has failed to build any of that into CONSUMER devices. Microsoft wants $100+ checks per user for each of those...
If no CONSUMERS have the tools, there are no kids out there doing great stuff... That aren't tied to some company payroll. Even if kids were out there, consumer devices would compete with the enterprise devices where the big checks get written.
Microsoft made the CHOICE to be an INSTITUTIONAL sales organization, not a consumer one a decade ago. They wanted the fat steady checks from 1000 PCs at a time, or from selling tools to developers, websites, etc... Those tools are now SO EXPENSIVE that there is little GROWTH for $100,000 solutions.
Apple lost the business and school market a decade ago. They had to make due selling to EACH PERSON, not just winning one boss with 1000 workers over.
This is the same Microsoft that rewards only 10%. (Score:3, Insightful)
So if a team of 20 build a new widget, which rockets into fame (yes this is a work of fiction), then the 2 people will get all the credit, 16 will get credit for being there, and the other 2 will be blow standards. I don't think we have to worry about Microsoft changing.
Their structure almost defies innovation (Score:3, Interesting)
I know why they have this system in place, but it's so completely misguided them up to now that I don't know if they could recover from
One more thing (Score:3)
Make your product the coolest there is and make no compromise to compatibility with previous products.
Then support that product for it's entire lifecycle, including real updates. If you drop support for phones sold less than a year ago that run your current latest telephone OS, you will never get anyone to believe your product is worth spending 150% of the competitors price on. You can't have your cake and eat it too, if you drop support for older hardware, make sure the older hardware has served it's purp
Well, that's it then. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Well, that's it then. (Score:4, Funny)
worked for Nokia. Turned that company right around.
Microsoft's table is too large (Score:5, Interesting)
"Well, we are the most focused company that I know of, or have read of, or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number, so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose, so that we can deliver the best products in the world. In fact, the table that each of you are sitting at today, you could probably put every product on it that Apple makes, and yet Apple’s revenue last year was over $40 billion. I think the only other company that could say that is an oil company."
Microsoft is too large and unfocused to sustain innovation. They will continue to be fast followers, and still make plenty of money doing it.
Re:Microsoft's table is too large (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft's table is too large (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, I find their pricing and licensing models - often chancing on a yearly basis - to be very innovative... :)
He doesn't get it. To hell with innovation. (Score:5, Insightful)
We're at a stage in the computer industry where innovation is the LAST thing we need.
What we need is bug fixes and "refinement". Microsoft didn't need to force Metro on us...they just needed to perfect Windows 7. Apple isn't redesigning OS X every 2 years. They're tweaking it an making it better.
The endless push for NEW products is what screws up the computer industry. Nothing is ever actually *finished*.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:He doesn't get it. To hell with innovation. (Score:5, Insightful)
RIM isn't dying because they couldn't innovate, they are dying because BlackberryOS sucks, and they refused to fix it in a reasonable amount of time.
Like I said, it's not innovation that most companies need, it's quality products.
Ooh, this is going to hurt... (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple doesn't really do innovation as much as they do polished, decisive, takes on things that were previously relegated to niche status or mediocrity. They've also shown a historical willingness to murder even their popular products in order to introduce something that they like better(ipod mini being the most notable recent example: killed at the height of its popularity in favor of more expensive and lower-capacity flash-based products, because rotating media were deemed sufficiently inelegant.
If 'innovation' were the problem, Microsoft could trivially bury Apple in wacky stuff coming out of MS research. As it is, though, they can't even refrain from eating any of their own young that don't play nicely enough with Windows/Office, and they have a veritable talent for squandering even the technical superiority areas that they do have by making them too expensive or too complex for individual users(eg. MS had volume shadow copy in full working order since server 2003, and has substantial clout in terms of getting OEMs to build things, plus an embedded OS to license to them for the purpose. So why is it that they let Apple beat them to releasing a usable-by-morons home backup system(based on a rather more primitive and hacky architecture) 4 years later?)
Positive decisiveness. (Score:5, Insightful)
Your use of "decisive" is probably the best word I've heard to describe Apple. What set them apart as far back as the gumdrop iMac wasn't their ability to say "no" to things or to innovate so much as their ability to say YES to things without qualification.
That's Apple's unique strength. While everyone else is hedging their bets and keeping pokers in the fire, Apple bets the farm over and over again. They never doubt. They never second-guess themselves. A decision is made and that's that. They put every . last . resource . into the things that they run with, and as a result, those things carry the weight (the embodied human knowledge, labor, energy, research, refinement, etc.) of the entire organization within them.
So often in the tech industry you get the feeling that every other company is watching the stats about every product in their lineup, just waiting to kill them at the first hint of weakness and loathe to invest in them further once they're out the door. They keep thirty or fifty or a hundred product lines just barely alive but perpetually on the chopping block, none of them ever named "do or die" for the company, which makes consumers hesitate to use them in "do or die" situations in real life.
The only other product line that ever seemed even close to as "committed" as the iDevices was IBM's ThinkPad series back in the day, but even then it wasn't at the same level.
Every time Apple launches a new family of anything (OS, computing device, consumer device, service) there is a vast geography of scoffing from all of the other industry players, and a lot of critics saying they've got it wrong.
But Apple doesn't care whether they've got it "right" or "wrong," they care that they execute and perfect whatever it happens to be that they've got. In the end, that focus on execution and perfection tends to make it "right" within a product cycle or two.
It's an easy thing to say (Score:5, Insightful)
It is. It's an easy thing to say. And very soothing to stockholders I'm sure. But how are you going to do it? It's sort of like saying "I'm going to have an innovative idea by 3pm tomorrow!" Ok, that's great. How exactly do you do that?
Innovation isn't something you simply decide you're going to have, and then you have it.
What you can do is to change your culture, foster ideas, hire people and don't abuse them. Make your environment a place where innovation can happen. I'm looking at you forced curve. [glassdoor.com] People who think "outside the box" do not like being put in one. If you set up your environment to where only drones do well, then drones are what you'll have. Any real rogue thinkers in the Microsoft structure would get crushed like ants. Need I remind you Einstein did some of his best work while he was getting poor reviews as a patent clerk?
And innovation isn't something you can really buy, either. Although MS tries. The current MS policy of borg-like assimilation of any outside company that might have a good idea isn't really working, is it? It's a wonderful tribute to the amount of money you have, but it hasn't produced any sort of good results I can think of in a decade. Hell, you guys couldn't even keep Hotmail working. They were the #1 gold standard, and Google waltzed right into that space with Gmail and it's a done deal now.
In short, if you want to lead you better change. Your culture is all wrong for innovation.
Talk is cheap... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is always talking about what they're gonna do. They need to just shut up and actually DO something. Their last innovative product was when they created the GUI version of the spreadsheet and called it 'Excel.' Since then, the innovation has been a little slow. The problem starts with Ballmer. He is not thinking about cool stuff that can be done with tech. No, he's thinking about how he can make money doing cool stuff that others are doing. As they say in Texas, Microsoft is all hat and no cattle.
Re: (Score:3)
As they say in Texas, Microsoft is all hat and no cattle.
Or quoth Paul Keating, former Australian Prime Minister, talking about one of his opponents: "He's all tip and no iceberg."
Innovation != Buyout (Score:3)
Innovation does not mean buying out new startups with promising technology.
It means investing in people, technology, and software, building towards a hoped-for future.
Neither Apple nor MicroSoft have done much innovating in the past 25 years. All they've done is fine tune, repackage, and buy startups that were promising or a threat.
Until the bottom line is the corporate future instead of the shareholder payout, it won't change, either.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Genius! (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps he also should have mentioned that he intends for Microsoft to sell more, higher value products and to earn more money!
How do they think of these things? They just must be thinking all the time over there at Microsoft!
Innovation from MS? No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, I don't even want Microsoft to be "innovative." At this point, they're pretty much like a public utility – I prefer when they're doing their work in the background, and I mostly only notice if they screw something up.
The fundamental problem is that Microsoft should be transitioning from a high-growth company to a stable, mature company – from a financial perspective, less emphasis on stock appreciation and more on dividends. People – and more importantly, businesses – rely on Microsoft for un-sexy features like backwards compatibility, familiarity, installed base, and stability (some of the older Slashdotters may laugh, but Windows 7 really is a rock-stable OS, and even a fully patched XP isn't bad.) The fact is that Windows became "good enough" for most users years ago, and everything since then has been either incremental improvements or actual degradation. There hasn't been any major positive "paradigm shift" on the desktop and there won't be. Some users will find that they don't need a full-fledged PC and will transition to tablets, but many, perhaps a majority, still need the power and/or flexibility that only a complete desktop OS can offer. This is Microsoft's niche. They need to focus on it and stop chasing phantoms.
Re: (Score:3)
Smartphones and tablets are media consumption devices. They aren't suitable for anyone who does any actual work
[citation needed]
If you can hook them up to external input and output devices, they can do all the same shit a real computer does. It wasn't all that long ago NONE of us had a computer as powerful as one of the higher-end ARM tablets.
Re: (Score:3)
The logical conclusion to all of this is a cell phone that connects wirelessly to touch-screens, keyboards and monitors and all of your computing is done in a single small device.
Re: (Score:3)
The logical conclusion to all of this is a cell phone that connects wirelessly to touch-screens, keyboards and monitors and all of your computing is done in a single small device.
And once you've done all that, you have successfully built a laptop, or, if you want a nice, big screen or three, a desktop.
Re: (Score:3)
If you can hook them up to external input and output devices, they can do all the same shit a real computer does.
But that configuration is effectively identical to a desktop, except that your case has a touchscreen.
Also, with iOS at least, it's still mostly theoretical. Sure you can hook up a keyboard, but it still lacks a convenient pointing device to go with it (which touchscreen is not - using it alongside the keyboard triggers the "gorilla arm" syndrome pretty quick). It also lacks the way to save the results of your work to an external storage device to pass to someone else. And before someone cries about "cloud"
i would like to see that (Score:4, Funny)
Not On Our Watch (Score:3)
"Not going to happen. Not on our watch."
LOL. This piece of history (Ballmer's "watch") has already been written.
Steve Ballmer: We Won't Be Out-Innovated By Apple (Score:4, Funny)
because Steve Jobs is dead
Fat Steve, much to learn still you do. (Score:3)
Apple doesn't have to lose for Microsoft to win.
Slight difference (Score:3)
Courier? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the thinking that lead to the cancellation of the Courier (google it, it was awesome).
By chasing trends, you will never be leading. I think this quote is quite apt:
"There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them."
- Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin
These next paragraphs for freee, Mr Ballmer. (Score:3)
It's last thing at night, my wife is immersed in some fictive on her Slate, and i've been watching TV, a rebuild of American Pie on mine. For a few years it was lame - it really didn't age well - but the rebuild is funny, because an AI has been spicing it up, and it's got Marilyn Monroe in it now, and she's still hot. And the soundtrack with New Beatles is kinda good too; John Lennon II - the AI clone - is really getting it right, and the music is going places it didn't when the Beatles were alive.
Boris, our AI housekeeper, has realised that I have to be up by 6am tomorrow, and I take it as a subtle hint that we should be turning in when he starts dimming the walls. "Hey, Boris", I mutter, "hang on for ten minutes." The walls brighten a little, he's bumped up the lightness of the wallpaper pattern. I say he, but I guess he's not really he. "Also, I've just remembered, I'm going to need the Mercury file on the plane tomorrow." No need to worry about that now; Boris will talk to my desk and get that moved to the slate I'm going to take with me tomorrow. I watch the last few minutes of the movie, and then get ready for bed. Liz is still engrossed in some historical fictive. Her and a bunch of friends have been writing a community set in the 18th century. It's not my cup of tea, but it's been getting great reviews from all the people following them. It's better soap than soap to be honest, and some of them are getting really famous now. A real bonus is that it's desperately hard to sneak product placement into historical drama. Lol. But they were offered trips to Vegas if they'd name a character in reference to the new Audi Scoot. I decide that it would be nice to have a glass of juice before bed, so I help myself to one, and then climb into bed next to Liz. At least I don't have to brush my teeth anymore. Not since I had that DentaZ treatment; all my enamel has been renewed, I've been vaccinated against caries, and my oral bacteria have been repopulated with a healthier batch. I give Liz a kiss and drift off to sleep to the sound of Liz subvocalising the plot for the next day for her character, Charlotte.
I wake hugely refreshed. Boris has organised the room lighting so that it's timed to my sleep cycle. The interesting bits of the news are cycling up the wall, and there's a note that I wrote to myself to take a phone. That's not something I normally carry, but I'm going to need some privacy. After showering, it's straight into the car. It will arrange to pick up breakfast on the way. I work while it's driving. It's pretty quick once we join the cartrain. I forgot my work Slate at home. I guess I was still dozy, but I get the car to pull the Mercury file up onto the windscreen, and the dash screen. I start by reading the summary that the office AI has provided. It's also given a tree of the most important bits, so I have a look through the tree. About half way through I realise that I don't understand how the deal is structured, so I call the office AI, and ask. She explains that she has spoken to Mercury's AIs, and they've come up with 3 scenario deals, and that this one is the primary. I ask her about how we'll be handling things going forward if we can agree the deal, and she flashes some graphs to my car screen. We agree to chat later in the day.
By the time I get to the airport, it's only 15 minutes before my flight. I've been precleared for everything. It's a bit weird actually getting on a plane. It's been at least two years since I had any face-to-face meetings but this one is too important to leave to tele. I walk straight to the gate. I've been scanned thoroughly ever since we reached the road to the airport. I've been profiled, the car vouched for me, Boris has, my movements over the last 4 years have been analysed. The airport know I am me.
After I've boarded the plane I get my phone out, and flick it at my seat screen, so it knows that I want to use that. It's not as smart as a Slate, but it can talk to the seat adequately, and it was keeping an eye on what was going on with the car
Re: (Score:3)
Don't forget Microsoft got where is today via. winning the small business market and then sneaking into to enterprise desktop to overturn the Mainframes and Minis. Microsoft understands fully well if they are knocked out mostly from consumer by 2020, by 2030 things could look very different in enterprise.
Re:"spreading itself too thin"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't believe it. (Score:4, Informative)
When you go back a while, when die Microsoft ever really "Invent" something?
DOS bought from Seattle Computer Products, idea for Windows in general nicked from Xerox, Browser taken over from NCSA Mosaic, PSTools acquired from Sysinternals, etc....
The only difference now seems to be that Apple isn't willing to be bought up and/or hoodwinked into giving up their innovation to MS.
Re:I don't believe it. (Score:4, Interesting)
MS brought us the optical mouse, the original tablet PC, smartphones that were document-compatible with the desktop, MS Bob, and thousands of other innovations; some of which caught on, some of which vanished into the mists of time.
The problem is not that MS doesn't innovate with technologies, it's that they don't innovate in sales, marketing or production. They seem unwilling to be the pig in any enterprise, and would rather be the chicken.
Remember, when a CEO talks innovation, they're usually not talking technical innovation. Where does Apple innovate? In design and marketing.
This is actually a problem, because all those things you mentioned, from SCP, Xerox, NCSA and Winternals/Sysinternals are cases where MS took a risk on producing and marketing someone else's innovation. With stuff coming out of their own labs, that rarely happens (the MS optical mouse being one of the few exceptions) because there's no push (someone can say "see that great product X over there? We could buy that and make money off of it!" but the MS culture wouldn't get people behind "Lab Y has come up with this really neat tech -- if we give it to this design team, they might be able to produce a wonderful product we can make money off of!").