Despite billions in investment, its Xbox line is still at best an equal contender in the game console business.
I think he doesn't give Microsoft enough credit on this. They entered a game console market with two entrenched players, where one was clearly dominating the other. People gave Microsoft little to no chance of succeeding and yet, on there second iteration were able to put themselves on equal ground to Sony and Nintendo. And that is with producing one of the most unreliable consoles ever made.
Consider the life-time revenue and cost of the Xbox project starting before 2001. And don't forget that $1 billion written off for RRoD warranty repairs. Over this last decade, Xbox is still in a pretty deep hole, and even optimistic earnings mean it will take awhile before breaking even.
Also, to be far, they don't actually separate Xbox earnings from, say, WinMo earnings. Xbox probably dominates, but it is hard to infer exactly how profitable they were.
More impressive is that the Xbox 360 is the most successful of its generation. The Wii may have sold more units, but game sales on the Xbox crush it. They also somehow charge decent rates for the Xbox Live service which their competitors give away for free, and they get more use out of it while doing so. It's truly amazing.
The video game console market has historically done to consumer electronics corporations what Russia in winter has done to mighty European militaries. For MS to have succeeded, and by many metrics come out on top, in 2 generations is an incredible feat.
Microsoft is ahead of Sony in the console race right now, but I think that Sony will end up leading the current generation. The Wii novelty will fade, and the PS3 will ultimately dominate thanks to a deeper line up of exclusive titles. I have always felt that exclusives were the Xbox's Achilles' heel - even going back to the original Xbox. Most of the best XBox games are not exclusives. For example Gamespot's best 360 game award went to Assassin's Creed 2 this year, and to GTA 4 in 2008. Both games were also released on the PS3. In contrast, the best PS3 games of 2008 and 2009 were MGS4 and Demon's Souls, respectively. I was really hoping that the Rare acquisition would pay off this generation but it doesn't look like it will anytime soon, if ever. I own a 360, but I am planning to buy a PS3 by the time God of War 3 ships, as I feel that it will be home to a lot of fantastic gaming experiences that will not be available anywhere else.
To make an analogy with movies, there will be no shortage of 'Spiderman' or 'Batman Begins' on the 360, but only the PS3 will have 'Return of the King'.
I'd love to see some data on how many people buy a console due to exclusive titles. I've done it, but it's always been Nintendo. (My dog's name is Link so you can guess why.)
The top 3 Xbox 360 games are exclusive (Halo 3, Gears of War 2, Gears of War) and 6 of the top 10. Xbox has the 'Return of the King' exclusive franchise with Halo.
The only company with a massive list of successful exclusives is Nintendo.
You are right about Halo, but it is Microsoft's only RoK exclusive franchise so far IMO. I.e. if both Microsoft and Sony were to launch a new system with a new iteration of one of their best franchises, Halo is the only weapon in Microsoft's arsenal that would enable them to sell more systems than Sony. Gears of War and Mass Effect are great, but they won't individually beat MGS, God of War, Uncharted or Gran Turismo.
During the previous generation of consoles, exclusives were a huge reason why the PS2 ended up on top I think. Its line-up in 2001 alone was incredible: Gran Turismo 3, GTA 3 , MGS2, Twisted Metal: Black, Devil May Cry, Onimusha Warlords, etc.
(1) The Xbox did not conflict with any of MSFT's existing businesses.
(2) It was an established product that MSFT did not add much to. It was a console, which was operated the same way that other consoles were operated. It does not require much business leadership to do that. Ironically that's kind of like Linux's development model. For a band of scattered, (formerly) unfunded hackers, that's ok. For a company in an evolving area like tech, it's not really acceptable.
That second part is not true at all. The Xbox has been an innovator in pushing online connectivity. It's de rigueur now, but they really pioneered it almost a decade ago. It's the biggest shift in console gaming since the NES.
(my background: I worked at MS from 2003-2007 until I jumped ship to join a 20 person startup.)
The answer is simple: Microsoft needs its own Steve Jobs, not a Steve Ballmer.
Without an absolute tyrant with a keen sense of where the market is, and where it's going at the helm, Microsoft will continue to flounder. And with good reason, there are too many internal fiefdoms, and too many internal rivalries.
To be honest, I think MS would've been very well served to have been broken up at the end of the 90s. If the company had been divided into three separate firms, like Office Inc., Windows Inc. and Everything Else Inc., I think things would've turned out very differently for those firms over the past ten years: fewer boondoggle projects that only have a prayer of making a profit in the distant future, less of a whackjob 'better together' mentality that hamstrings Microsoft developers into using inadequate internal solutions or forces them to bolt useless features onto their products, and so on.
Sigh, sorry. I really think Microsoft is capable of so much more than they've been able to do for years, and it frustrates me to see so much talent go to waste.
My impression of the man is he's just a sales guy - interested in making money, but lacking any vision or genuine enthusiasm for technology. Consequently Microsoft has mostly become a cash cow.
As the saying goes - a fish rots from the head down. When there's no passion for changing the world, it happens elsewhere.
The article we're all commenting on talks about Microsoft's ill-fated Tablet computer, which premiered almost a decade before the iPad. Microsoft does many things which could be considered 'innovative,' except that they never achieve widespread market acceptance.
Also, when was the last time Microsoft won with the "non-innovative innovation model" you refer to? Sharepoint? SQL Server? I can't think of any instance where this has worked in years.
In enterprise IT, we have 2 kinds of vendors, those we actively embrace and those who hold us hostage.
The biggest fear in making any major IT purchase is not the price, the conversion, or the change in culture; it's the potential loss of options in how we run our own business.
I've seen it over and over again: competitive pressure requires us to make a change in the way we run our business, but we can't. For all kinds of reasons. The license agreement kills any possible ROI. We don't have the needed IT support because so much of it is spent on keeping current. The systems don't talk to each other. The feature we need is still 18 months away. And probably most of all, the software is not as excellent as we need it to be (let's just leave it at that).
Long gone are the days when you needed IBM's permission to fart. Guess who the biggest culprit is today?
Just because you go with someone doesn't necessarily mean you like it. Almost every enterprise IT department I know would love an alternative to Microsoft. (And make no mistake about it, the enterprise is Microsoft's strength, much more so than the consumer.)
Sure, pissing off your customers may pad today's bottom line. How do you think those customers will feel when your landscape changes and they have more choices?
[Entered using ie7 on xp pro. I didn't have a choice.]
I'm with you on that. I think it hurts the companies a lot. I did consulting for a company which was hostage of Windows NT for many years, old Internet Explorer's and so on. On TV and in print the company advertised themselves as young, innovative, communicative - if you actually worked there, much of that was really the opposite. If the employee gets greeted by a gray office, a gray desk, a gray PC and a gray user interface, then it will be clear that the company does not live the values it communicates to the outside.
So the plain gray PC with the interface that is either gray or childish has found its home in the enterprise. The computer is like it is, because the reality in many enterprise is not 'human' at all and Microsoft contributed to it and made its profit from it (because the companies choose their equipment, not only the computer, based on price mostly).
So Microsoft is preventing you from buying copy of Windows 7 and installing Firefox? No? Your anger is misplaced then, should be angry with your IT department that doesn't let you upgrade form a 9 year old OS.
An MS-based "Enterprise IT" is more than that, much more. It's not about the Windows client version and choice of browser. They'll have heavily integrated server products (all of them, multiple instances), sometimes for good reason and sometimes not. SQL Server, ISA, "Office Communication Server", "Team Foundation Server", SharePoint Server, Active Directory Services, etc. pp. you name it, ad infinitum. All with the appropriate, sometimes buggy GUI tools, and the much-needed, sometimes buggy, 3rd-party add-ons and tools. Often this ends up as a big mess, and while the products have certainly matured over a decade and thousands of developers working on them, a decade and 1000s of devs can also introduce many new flaws with each update. In the end, it's a big pile of mediocrity and un-agility, and yes, despite that "deciders" often buy into it because-nobody-ever-got-fired-for-etc. Of course, this will not go on forever...
Care to give us a concrete example? Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point here, but my experience has been somewhat the opposite. The tight integration of the Microsoft development tools (for example Visual Studio, SQL Server) is what makes it such an appealing and easy to use development platform for so many enterprise developers.
> a decade and 1000s of devs can also introduce many new flaws with each update.
I find that silly - what are you basing that argument on other than anecdotal evidence? Using that same logic you'd expect linux to be extremely flawed since so many developer's hands touch it.
Sure, the integration of dev tools is pretty slick and appealing. But I wasn't talking about VS at all, but about all the various servers and how they are typically deployed in the Enterprise.
You're right about the "anecdotal evidence", but I just experience that anecdotal evidence every other day and there's a lot more of that anecdotal evidence to be found in most IT depts and MS shops.
As someone who's worked at MSFT himself, the author certainly knows what he's talking about. However, there's a couple of factors one must reflect on:
1. It's a HUGE company (80k employees?). When you get to that size, it's hard to ensure all great ideas get to market. For a very long time in its history, the company was guided by a dominating spirit (computers on every desk) and a similar leader (Bill Gates). With both outmoded now, it's easy for business-groups to take local decisions, rather than follow the war-plan.
2. BUT, they've made HUGE investments in the future. Consider Microsoft Research. MSFT isn't going to be IBM anytime soon (huge company, but better known for sales folks than tech enterprise). Though they'll possibly not be as sexy as Apple, they'll definitely have the tech/IP if/when they want to utilize it.
I think you hit on their biggest problem now. They have (mostly) succeeded in their original goal to get a computer on every desk. What's next though? It seems to me that they need a new grand plan for the company as a whole.
Exactly right, and now a company like Google which makes almost all of its money off advertising can have a driving mantra like "to organize all the world's information" and utilize that network. Furthermore, Google can pump money into open source and new devices to bring people online - things that make the web more important to people's lives - and it will benefit their core business. Most of the world's population isn't even online, Google could even make a case to buy out ARM and licence it for free to other companies (inter-licencing with other processor companies might be difficult) just to expand the market to nearer to its full potential (6 billion and rising). Whereas Microsoft faces having to sell software products to different markets, like games and movies do, which basically means price-fixing and changing the product (be that through crippled "lite" versions of Windows for the developing world, or the price-fixing that is involved in region-encoded DVDs and regional sales of games).
Their current mission statement is a bunch of crap, something like "Enabling businesses to reach their full potential".
But the other mission statement-y phrase that gets thrown around a lot is having an integrated experience between "three screens and the cloud". The three screens being TV (Xbox), computer, and cell phone. That gives a little direction, but as much as I'd like to see them be competitive in mobile, I'm not optimistic.
Based on their latest presentation at CES, they have even lost that tiny sense of direction. Now the strategy has become "Many screens and a cloud" to encompass netbooks, tablets, etc. that weren't easily anticipated a year or two ago.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I feel like a long-term mission statement shouldn't be changing every 12 months.
I fully agree with you. For past few years they are all over the place. From digital homes, car entertainment they are pursuing everything. And now retail stores. They are forgetting the fect that they still have not delivered an OS that will replace XP in corporations.
I don’t think your example in (2) is particularly effective. At least through 2000 or so, IBM spent more on R&D than just about anyone, Microsoft included. Others now spend comparable amounts, but IBM still got the most patents of any company last year: and they have for 17 years straight.
Big R&D budgets, with lots of interesting advanced research, DARPA grants, etc. etc. can certainly be helpful, but they don’t save a company that lacks a broader product strategy.
I'm somewhat familiar with the research models afforded by both companies, and have a slightly different view.
Research at IBM is mostly product-group driven. Microsoft affords more flexibility- allowing more academic research, for example. This puts them farther into the future, IMO, than solving immediate product research needs. What I meant by investment above is more than monetary- it takes a lot to get a good research team going.
I agree that nothing can save a company with shut eyes. A strong research group is a way to keep them open.
That may be true of IBM today, but I’m not so sure it’s true of IBM 15 or 20 years ago, which is, I think, what you were trying to make your point about, above. For decades, IBM made more than half of all the CPUs in the world, and really had by a considerable margin the most R&D of any tech company, including all kinds of extremely forward-looking “basic research” type stuff. More recently, they’ve switched to a much more services/consulting “solve particular companies’ problems one at a time” type approach, and correspondingly sold off their PC business, among other consumer-oriented parts of the company, and ditched a lot of the most pure academic research. But that’s only been after they stopped being the dominant computer maker.
Anyway, I think you could possibly be right; I just think you need a better example than IBM. :-)
They still make the CPUs for the XBox 360, PS3, and Wii, and they do a fair amount of collaboration with AMD, so they're still making an impressive number of CPUs.
* Agile practice indicates that experience with users is the best way to keep project on a useful path. Research groups necessarily act without such input, which leaves them prone to going off into the weeds, including producing interesting technologies without a total appreciation for the practicalities, or a clear path to delivering it to users.
* One of Jobs' first acts on returning to Apple was to disband the research group (http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-203996.html). Why? I would guess because he wanted research to happen in the course of and for the purpose of innovative product development. There you can get the benefit of a user-focused development process, with a defined end result.
* As with any institution (e.g. NASA http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1092972), without accountability from strong leadership or users they're prone to unproductive efforts. After all, how do you judge the quality of their efforts? How can you motivate them to strive - day to day at all levels - to make an impact, when they have these cushy unaccountable ivory tower positions?
Or, more practically, what has MSR produced that's active in changing the world, compared to a handful of startups acquired by Apple?
Or, more practically, what has MSR produced that's active in changing the world, compared to a handful of startups acquired by Apple?
the premise of funding basic research (as opposed applied product-driven research) is that only by giving researchers freedom from short-term demands can it be possible for them to do something truly innovative and 'out of the mold'. a 'classic' example is all the work done by brilliant researchers at Xerox PARC in the '70's that was way ahead of its time; of course, Xerox execs have been kicking themselves in the rear for not capitalizing on those technologies (Apple and Microsoft did), but the hope is that Microsoft will be smarter than Xerox was and actually capitalize on basic research created in MSR. Giving researchers freedom will breed lots of supposedly-useless work (that's only useful or interesting to academics), but it provides a greater possibility of doing something totally game-changing.
You raise some great points there- the best is qualifying what kind of research is actually a good thing.
It may (I'm skeptical though) that an agile business can thrive without investing in research.
But then, who invents the future (say the Fusion kind of 30-year-future pointed at above)?Our fallback is an underfunded university system, but it lacks market insight.
At this point, I don't really know if product-embedded research is the way to go. Apple seems to be pretty good at this-behold multitouch everything-but I'm curious how they work- How do they hire researchers for instance? If someone knows, please share.
You raise some great points there- the best is qualifying what kind of research is actually a good thing.
It may (I'm skeptical though) that an agile business can thrive without investing in research.
But then, who invents the future (say the Fusion kind of 30-year-future pointed at above)?Our fallback is an underfunded university system, but it lacks market insight.
At this point, I don't really know if product-embedded research is the way to go. Apple seems to be pretty good at this-behold multitouch everything-but I'm curious how they work- How do they hire researchers for instance? If someone knows, please share.
You raise some great points there- the best is qualifying what kind of research is actually a good thing.
It may (I'm skeptical though) that an agile business can thrive without investing in research.
But then, who invents the future (say the Fusion kind of 30-year-future pointed at above)?Our fallback is an underfunded university system, but it lacks market insight.
At this point, I don't really know if product-embedded research is the way to go. Apple seems to be pretty good at this-behold multitouch everything-but I'm curious how they work- How do they hire researchers for instance? If someone knows, please share.
> Or, more practically, what has MSR produced that's active in changing the world, compared to a handful of startups acquired by Apple?
I see a lot of great stuff coming out of MSR; their Simons are almost single-handedly responsible for GHC's internals and over the last 2 decades making Haskell a usable, nay, fast, language. But what OSs is Haskell principally developed & used on? Linux or OSX.
for me it looks like Microsoft is doing a lot of research into the equivalent of 'Fusion' (always fifty years away) - which is not of much benefit for their current customers...
I agree with both points. In addition, from the sound of the article, it seems like the biggest problem with having 80k employees is the jealousy and feudalism at the management level when it comes to actually implementing the great ideas across multiple teams—the ClearType and Tablet PC incidents being examples of this.
Is the problem “jealousy and feudalism” in general, or is the problem efforts by the leaders of the Windows and Office units to preserve their turf in particular?
I got an offer from MSR a while back. I remember asking, "so... how do you guys ship?" and they actually thought this was funny, laughing and laughing. "That's so cute!"
It's also a non-goal. I used to work there. It was hard to see stuff ship since researchers seemed incentivized on some value of 'prominence' (research community and MS-internal).
Even in the cases where they productize it - the Program Manager on the product team is not going to get a bonus by taking on some new project in MSR in addition to the commitments filed last year.
So researchers get on just fine without slaying dragons to ship. More cool papers to publish anyway.
A true story: a CS professor promotes Java widely and even writes undergraduate textbooks on Java.
Goes off on sabatical with Microsoft Research, and becomes a .NET evangelist. Stops writing Java books and starts writing .NET books.
Is there a quid quo pro? Probably not. But it does illustrate another purpose for Microsoft having a research organisation: winning over academics, and, by proxy, their students.
Microsoft wouldn't be worth discussing, if not their role on the market. I mean, they were once innovative and now they're just plain stupid. Like many companies in the past, their success is slowly killing them.
The real problem, though, is that Microsoft slows down the innovation. Every time I see my friends working on Windows, I see an operating system that nearly not changed since 1995.
I know that there are nice fonts, widgets, and you have nice shadows here and there. All the basic concepts, though, are the same since 1995. There's basically no true innovation.
See what Apple does. Ten years ago they had ugly, and basically unusable OS. Five ten years ago they were comparable. Now, they are the frontiers of the touch&the mobile revolution.
Regular people still struggle with the same problems they struggled ten years ago. They still have to cope with utterly complicated filesystem, there's still too much voodoo, they still cannot find their programs easily, there's still mouse&keyboard, they still get unnecessary viruses, and the cloud integration is almost non-existing, so they have to use pendrives.
Unfortunately, 90% of the new computers is sold with Windows, and it takes some unnecessary effort to find&learn better tools. We cannot expect regular people to give up their jobs in search of better IT solutions. They just want to get their job done, and it's OK.
We, as a developers, like to speak how Microsoft slows down the web. I think, Microsoft slows down the whole society. The time wasted on their today's deprecated software is the whole society's loss.
I don't see how you can say with a straight face that's Windows has "nearly not changed" since 1995 while saying that Mac OS X has significantly changed since 2001.
I don't say that Mac OS X has significantly changed since 2001. Please read carefully. I mean Apple as a whole. They do a lot of innovation. iPhone literally revolutionized the way we interact with mobile phones, and iPad is going to do the same with the standard computing model.
For me, innovation is all about the regular people. I don't care about the buzzwords, and the top notch innovation, which is used by 0,0069% of the population. Concepts such as cloud computing are so old, it's pathetic they are not widely used.
The same goes with iPhone/iPad pair. I know that spec-wide, there's nothing new about these tools. We, hackers, are so used to some concepts, we forget about our dads, girlfriends and co-workers from different departments, which are still in 1995.
By the way, I think OS X changed a lot. Not significantly, but a lot. This is not a completely different paradigm but things like MobileMe (iCal, AddressBook in the cloud), Spotlight, iTunes are big steps.
Replying to myself, but I don't want to edit the former comment.
I think that iPod is the excellent case study for what the innovation actually is. From the technical standpoint, iPod is a garbage. I mean, less space than a nomand, lame. iPod wasn't very innovative in the terms of technology. MP3 players existed for years, and I was, as a nerd, relatively happy with them.
However, iPod played a significant role in bringing in the basic innovation to the masses. Downloading music with a click, instead of ripping it from CD with some weird tools, keeping your music library in a sync. It makes no difference for you or me, but it makes a big difference for your friend from different department, which is not tech savvy.
That's the actual purpose of innovation. It's about a Marry from the street.
People using the standard Microsoft environment, still use their computers as a bit better typewriter, faster snail mail, and an interface for finding stuff immediately, through Google. They do nearly the same stuff they were doing in 1995. Except, Internet is more popular thing.
People in the standard Apple environment, share their personal data between many devices, use nice touch interface, download music and movies with a click, without need to buy/rent a DVD, put their photos on the web easily etc., etc. Soon, thanks to iPad, they're going to enjoy the touch screen on daily basis, and forget about the standard folders-based filesystem, Desktop and other concepts that, actually, might be unnecessary for them.
So you're comparing Windows since 1995 with everything Apple have made? No wonder Microsoft appear to have badly stagnated.
Microsoft have changed a lot since 1995. They moved into the mobile space with Windows CE and Windows Mobile. They moved onto the web starting with software like Internet Explorer, Outlook, IIS, Windows Live Messenger and moved onto websites such as MSN, Hotmail, Multimap, and, more recently, Bing. They moved into hardware and released the Xbox, Zune, Zune HD, Xbox and Xbox 360. They moved into online gaming with Xbox Live and Games for Windows Live, which have evolved into social networks and marketplaces for both these products. That's ignoring all the different major changes to Windows-related technologies, whether .NET, DirectX, Exchange, Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, Windows Search, Windows Firewall, or Microsoft Security Essentials, which have all changed beyond recognition or outright didn't exist back in 1995. Hell, Microsoft have even made a standardised video codec called VC-1. There's probably others, but that's much more than "nice fonts, widgets, and ... nice shadows here and there".
Were these products innovative? Some definitely were (Xbox Live stands out), some weren't especially innovative but had advantages that caused them to compare favourably to their competitors to gain significant marketshare (Xbox, Internet Explorer, DirectX, .NET, Windows CE, Exchange, IIS), some weren't and have largely languished (GfwL, Windows Media Player, Bing). Besides, Microsoft's victories have traditionally not been through direct innovation as much as incremental product iteration which they generally do well.
Apple have grown at an unprecedented rate, and any company compared to them doesn't compare favourably, but that hardly means Microsoft have just sat there doing nothing. Trying to this into a "Apple environment vs. Microsoft environment" battle which is completely artificial when neither company exists in a vaccuum as they create platforms for other companies to build on.
Concepts such as cloud computing are so old, it's pathetic they are not widely used.
You should dig into Alan Kay's "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet."
The biggest barriers aren't technological, they're cultural and conceptual. When Gutenburg invented the printing press, did you instantly have serialized novels, political pamphlets, abstruse philosophical treatises that depended on exact wording, magazines, and public libraries? Nope. That took time. Gutenburg just wanted to produce Bibles better and faster. We're still figuring out what to do with computers and networks.
Apple was at a point in the late 1990s where they HAD to innovate, or die. Their series of fiascos with clueless CEOs and never-materializing products (Copeland) had pushed them to the brink of collapse. Microsoft has not yet had to face such a challenge, perhaps they will and emerge a reinvented, reinvigorated company like Apple, or they will continue to stagnate and eventually be another Wang in the history books.
This is why I think we shouldn't count MSFT out. They've had it so easy for 10 - 15 years that they have turned to competing among themselves for something to do. Once a real sense of fear and external competition sets in we may see a very different beast.
That's an aliasing bug in the data, though. The 2001 date was cherry picked to show the release of OS X, but not the switch from the Win9x codebase to XP. You could play a similar game with the summer of 1995, where windows was "innovating" rapidly with the sudden switch to a 32 bit operating system while Apple was mired in tiny feature additions to system 8/9.
The truth is that neither the XP/Vista/7 codebase nor OS X have changed much over the last decade. Desktop computing is pretty much a solved problem. Incremental improvement is all we're going to see from here on.
> Desktop computing is pretty much a solved problem. Incremental improvement is all we're going to see from here on.
I agree that we're just going to see incremental improvement with the current UI paradigms. Maybe this is just a sci-fi reverie, but I'd hope that at a certain point, we see a new generation of desktop UIs. (Centered around what, I don't know. Maybe 3D layout + 3D gesture recognition. Pan, tilt, zoom.)
> I don't think Windows has made any such leaps since 1995. Mild improvements, but also a lot of backsliding (Vista).
You'd be 100% wrong then. There have been two huge leaps, from the 9x codebase to the vastly more stable and secure NT codebase, and a further one from XP to Vista. Vista isn't "backsliding" by any stretch of the imagination -- its focus on security is the reason Windows today is so much more secure than OS X.
Of course, there have been plenty of other improvements along the road, from global search to a compositing UI.
That's a pretty bold statement. The security model might be theoretically better but since most applications force you to run as administrator anyway I don't think it's currently buying you that much.
> The security model might be theoretically better but since most applications force you to run as administrator anyway I don't think it's currently buying you that much.
1. The security model isn't just theoretically better -- OS X still doesn't randomize heap and stack addresses properly, for example. As Dion Blazakis points out in http://www.semantiscope.com/research/BHDC2010/BHDC-2010-Slid... slide 30, NX + ASLR makes "[h]ackers everywhere shed a tear."
2. Most Windows applications do not force you to run as administrator. Vista provided the push necessary for most applications to not require admin privs (source: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/10/08/user-account-con... -- the "Impact on Software Ecosystem" section).
3. Frankly, an ordinary consumer should be a lot more concerned about his data than about the computer itself -- whether a program runs with admin privileges or not is mostly irrelevant in this case.
Nonsense. Perhaps the codebase is more stable. But why would a friend of mine still run windovs 98? He has no compulsion to change. You have to think end user.
> But why would a friend of mine still run windovs 98?
How would I know? How is one anecdote relevant in the face of facts and hard data?
> You have to think end user.
I am thinking of the end user. The end user today buys a computer with Windows 7, and enjoys a stable, secure, and hassle-free operating system. This was really not true of previous Windows versions, especially XP, and especially Windows 98.
What I meant was that my friends pc still does everything he needs and has no compulsion to upgrade to windows 7.
Stability aside (which I think is a good thing) all that I can see that is different in windows is a bit of eye candy. Big wow.
OSX and iPhoneOS is infinitely more intuitive than windows. And there lies it's strength. Linux sadly just imitates where it should be innovating on the desktop.
I can understand though the desire not to confuse the users by radically making a design change. And quite frankly the security model on windows has been a joke.
> OSX and iPhoneOS is infinitely more intuitive than windows.
I haven't used the iPhone OS, but I think OS X is significantly less intuitive than Windows. Enter renames a file?!
> And quite frankly the security model on windows has been a joke.
The security model of Windows NT has never been a joke -- it's always been more flexible than the standard Unix model (e.g. full ACLs instead of nine bits for permissions). The security of Windows XP, prior to Service Pack 2, was indeed a joke because MS wasn't too serious about security vulnerabilities then. Vista is a different story though.
Agree ACLs great idea; in practice - buggy as hell; but I left windows, so they might have changed things.
What I was getting at was, that despite the added features to each incarnation; the average Joe might not notice that much has changed. They just want to do what they want to do easily.
My Dad happily got the job done in word perfect and i comfortably used a browser (until the os crashed) on Windows 3.1.
I agree with you on Finder's irritations. Gnome's nautilous puts finder and explorer to shame in my opinion. But it has little irritations of it's own. I did notice recently that in Windows7 explorer would carry on copying files rather than terminating on error; about time!
It's been said; that Windows omitted the security model in earlier pc's as they didn't forsee home pcs connecting the web. Hardware and cost also must have also been a limitation for earlier os's.
I used to do sys admin, and I was forever trying to lock down windows, i.e limited accounts, but it would break the apps or make them error or buggy. That's not really Microsoft's problem; unless they didn't provide adequate documentation. It's poor implementation. Likewise I've seen printers not working under limited accounts; I even saw a hilarious fix: make the whole system dir totally read/writable! To cut a long story short it riled me so much; I left windows.
People went from no security to a locked down system; that they found plain irritating. Whereas in OSX there is one simple system preferences panel, that asks for your password if you do anything that requires root privileges. Windows config is nasty until you learn it. Then they change it in each incarnation with the eventual itteration resembling a turd. Don't start me on Linux desktop implementations.
Also the security model on Windows feels the wrong way around. It should be locked down and slowly opened to trusted apps. But as you say perhaps that's finally been overhauled.
My mate uses win98 as he can get his job done easily. He can reset his os in seconds as it is so small. I wouldn't use it, but it's fine for him. About the only reason he might shift is for firefox, but he recently said he's found some compatibility layer that let's him run some modern apps. Hilarious. I don't know how he copes without a command line, but he does.
Don't get me wrong, there have been some leaps and bounds, but from my perspective, I'd rather a simple system; that works; that I can tweak if i want, that is portable, interoperable, that is fast and intuitive to use rather than a machine with oodles of power just to watch a high def movie or provide a transparent window, with drop shadows.
Aware that I have just started to moan. An OS in so intrinsic to using a computer, I wish they'd get the basics sorted. A bit of competition is good, but the Microsoft stranglehold on the OS hasn't been healthy.
I fear the whole thirst for profit and protecting intellectual property is just dangerous here.
Innovation and ease of use should be rolled into an uberOS.
Open protocols and filesystems should be at there.
Technologically, a lot has been done under the hood since 1995 just to allow modern hardware to work. USB devices, wireless NICs, and multicore CPUs didn't even exist when Windows95 was released. Much of the "innovation" is unseen.
While I also wish they had innovated the UI more over the past decade, we are probably in the (admittedly growing) minority. You shouldn't switch the gas and break pedals in a car just to be "innovative", and I think for Microsoft the risk of alienating old users outweighs the risk of losing new users.
Apple of course has been more free to make sweeping changes to their OS over the past decade because, frankly, they haven't had much to lose. It will be interesting to see how dramatically they change OSX now that they have found something that sells.
"It will be interesting to see how dramatically they change OSX now that they have found something that sells."
You don't have to wait; they've already done it with the iPhone/iPad OS. Apple is clearly still willing to make hard and dramatic decisions when it comes to its operating systems.
Don't get be wrong, I completely agree with you that Apple has made some bold decisions, and I respect them for that. However, I'm not sure it is fair to contrast Apple's innovation in new products to Microsoft's (lack of) innovation in established products.
To use your example of the iPhone: As innovative as the iPhone was when it was released, Apple really hasn't messed with it in almost three years. Doing so would risk alienating the 50+ million people using iPhone OS devices every day.
When the time comes in the next few years, will Apple make the hard decision to redesign their iPhone OS, possibly driving away some of their current users in the process? I would say they are more likely to than Microsoft. However, until they have passed that test, we shouldn't be so quick to judge.
Microsoft makes productivity software, games, embedded OSes, hardware, business software, commercial suites.....etc etc etc. They can't focus with so many irons in the fire.
Apple makes well designed prosumer products....and thats it. They are focused on shiny, evolved high end consumer goods.
Apple will refine and refine and refine, while MS will dump things unless it's a huge money maker or they have an axe to grind.
Not an Apple fanboy BTW, I personally don't like anything Apple, and would be 100% Linux if not for legacy software that I need Windows for.
I am personally quite happy with the Windows 95 look and feel and set up all my machines, Linux or Windows, with plain vanilla UIs and remove anything extraneous.
As far as the tablet thing goes, most Windows tablets were well over 2000 dollars, so I really blame the hardware manufacturers for that one.
While it is natural to attribute much of this to individual efforts within the company, and to lack of innovation, the result you see at Microsoft might be more of a natural consequence of a company of that size and success.
Just a little thought experiment here: in the eyes of shareholders, which is more important at the end of each quarter -- innovation, or profit? So did the profitability of the Office division suffer from not engaging the tablet? (note that some think that the anticipated use of the iPad is more on the consumer end, and less on the creation end).
And another little quiz: where does Simon Peyton Jones work and what does he do and what has he produced?
To me, the underlying takeaway from this story, and I disagree a little with the slant the author of TFA has, is that execution can trump innovation.
There have been articles referenced here on HN that talk about others stealing ideas (my favorite was one told by Steve Blank) but at the end of the day, the winner is the one who executes well.
Isn't this the bottom-line message from the Microsoft story?
From Wikipedia: Simon Peyton Jones is a British computer scientist who researches [...]functional programming languages, particularly lazy functional languages. [...] Since 1998 he has worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge [...].
He is a major contributor to the design of the Haskell programming language, and a principal designer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He is also co-creator of the C-- programming language.
Just a little thought experiment here: in the eyes of shareholders, which is more important at the end of each quarter -- innovation, or profit? So did the profitability of the Office division suffer from not engaging the tablet?
That's a link to Apple's chart, not MSFT. And MSFT has been tracking the overall market pretty closely over the past few years. It hasn't been tanking, nor booming. I'd say that's a validation of wglb's point, no? Investors don't care about anything but revenue, and revenue of a company this size tracks the economy, and thus it behaves pretty much the same as the market does.
Look closer. It's a link to a chart that compares the share prices of Apple and Microsoft over the past five years. Apple, driven by innovation, has increased by 400%. Microsoft, with its consistent profits, has remained almost perfectly flat.
This makes the previous poster's claim that investors have responded positively to Microsoft's approach look pretty weak.
Dividends don't actually change the picture much. In the past five years (02/03/2005 through 02/03/2010), total shareholder return (including dividends) for AAPL was 412% whereas MSFT only returned 19%.
Well AAPL and MSFT are two different ball games. AAPL hit the jackpot with iPhone, post iPhone Apple has been a second coming of Apple, its no longer the same company for investors.
For investors, due to consistent profitability and revenues, MSFT is a safer bet than Apple which reflects in the returns.
"AAPL hit the jackpot with iPhone, post iPhone Apple has been a second coming of Apple"
And before the iPhone, AAPL hit the jackpot with the iPod, post iPod Apple has been a second coming of Apple. And before the iPod, AAPL hit the jackpot with the iMac, post iMac Apple has been a second coming of Apple.
"I am going to fucking kill Google" it's been their mantra for the last ten years (since ballmer got the CEO spot).
They don't innovate, they just embrace and derail, extend and delay, patent and extinguish, copy and destroy.
Great company solely focused on money, at the cost of fucking up everybody else, and killing progress for their own benefit, when the rest of the world is focused on progress, and money.
Ballmer must go, and that destructive mentality must change.
Microsoft's lack innovation is a result of a couple of factors I can think of:
-Leaders without vision: Gates wasn't perfect, but he at least put forward the vision of a PC in every house. Ballmer is more of a cheerleader than a visionary, and "three screens and a cloud" isn't a vision of the future so much as commentary on the present.
-Hubris: Making billions of dollars is an easy way to justify that you are "doing the right thing", even 15 years later.
-Customers focused: This is a little more subtle, but I think a culture making products (Windows, Office) for "Customers" is different than a culture making products (Gmail, Search) for "Users".
For the former, you could pessimistically say that your main objective is to make a product you can convince someone to buy. Whether or not the customer uses the product is somewhat incidental. Each subsequent version must have enough features crammed into it to justify the customer paying again, even if they aren't useful.
In contrast, focusing on the user provides more motivation to keep the product relevant, make the product useful, and so on. If it isn't, the users can simply stop using it.
-Middle-child syndrome: If your team isn't making $1+billion, no one cares. It is hard to have the proper resources to innovate and be creative if most of your management chain doesn't know your project exists.
Another thing is that "embrace and extend" tends to lead to monolithic, dead-end products. You can only cram so many useful features into a closed desktop application before in becomes a nightmare. This prevents you from doing the sane thing - producing a bunch of small modular tools. A lot of the good coming out of the web is just a product of not having to start with context of an application competing with other existing applications.
I left MSFT a couple years ago; my experience was in line with the author's. Microsoft was a strange, fantastic, ultimately frustrating place to work. My blog post on it:
My last day with Microsoft is on Tuesday. I also feel the same way. I think working at MS in the 80s/early 90s would have been exciting, fresh and challenging (not to mention extremely lucrative). But now? "Frustration" is the best word to describe it :-/
In the past two years, some of the most brilliant engineers I've ever had the privilege of working with have decided to throw in the towel at MSFT. It is not a good sign. I am ramping up my sales of MSFT stock, for sure.
There is still religious fervor inside the company. While at MSFT I worked with a handful of "true believers." Unfortunately, their enthusiasm and faith has yet to translate into interesting new products...
Anyway, if you're in the Seattle area, get in touch. The entrepreneurial community here very much rocks.
That was my experience as well (seeing many brilliant engineers leaving after deciding they've had enough of being let down by MS). Lack of other people on my team that I felt I could look up to and that I enjoyed working with was a big factor in why I left. I suspect the brain drain from MS will only accelerate over time though there are still a lot of truly excellent engineers working there.
Though I only worked at MS for a few years I suspect that the current working environment, culture, bureaucracy etc. problems have been building up for a very long time but were offset by remaining enthusiasm (read: kool aid aftereffects) and the enormous financial incentives from stock options. Now that the MSFT stock price has been flat for nearly a decade and it's increasingly easy to find tech jobs with comparable salaries a lot of the luster of working at MS has evaporated.
He-he. I see we have a nice group of recovering 'softies here, yours truly included (I left in October 2009). We should create a support group or something. :-)
It would hurt for a while, but I for one would welcome Microsoft's demise. Linux is much nicer to program for, and wouldn't take too long to convert the majority of programmers over to it, and thus most programs.
Plus, it's not like there aren't any other options, several of them quite good. The market would adjust to fill the gap.
Wait, what? I would be just as happy as the next guy to see MS go down in flames, but "Linux is much nicer to program for"? In what way exactly? GUI? Nope, the opposite. [1] The server? Not so much. I mean, if you were actually writing to sockets and things then easy use of epoll, etc. might be an issue but in business you're mostly doing REST or web services or something in which case programming the server on Windows is much easier. The environment provides so much for you here. Scripting? Maybe, but who cares?
Right now I really find Visual Studio the best IDE. I would like to see that change (and VS has lots of problems) but it's currently head and shoulders above the rest.
[1] Further, the Linux GUI has to be one of the worst cases of optimizing for the nearly nonexistent use case ever. If you look at all users of computers today how many of them need X? A number so small as to be statistically irrelevant.
The dominant OS for Business (on desktops) is Windows. This can't change (soon), too many companies are locked into software that requires it (either built in house or purchased).
That's changing, more applications are going web based. But there are always those little niche apps that hang out in purchasing or accounting that require windows and aren't going away soon.
Most companies can't function without Excel. Go to the accounting department. Even if they have an "accounting system" ask the people working their what the use (or watch them). They probably have Excel open all day. Excel is hard to do in a browser.
Every company in the world would love to be MSFT. High profits and a locked in customer base.
I'd say companies are less locked into Windows the OS and more so tied to binary compatibility with Windows products. I've been watching and using Wine since the project began, and it has made unbelievable progress in the last decade. Given a few more years, I wouldn't be surprised if it reached the stage of near perfect compatibility with Windows products. That coupled with the shift to more and more "cloud applications" spells big trouble for Microsoft.
Given the success of serious virtualization platforms like VMWare ESX I do think there is a long term danger of Windows becoming a rather thin shim between actual applications and the underlying "real" OS. Especially with the current "Best Practise" of every application running on its own dedicated server as everyone is terrified of the potential conflicts if you have more than one vendor application on the same instance of Windows.
If WINE actually does reach a point where it poses a serious competitive threat to Microsoft, I'd be very surprised if MS didn't file a massive lawsuit against WINE's developers + various distros to "protect their IP".
Microsoft is not just going to idly allow WINE to steal its userbase, even if WINE becomes 100% perfect and everything runs and works exactly as it would on Windows. MS has a lot of money and they will use all of it to keep Windows alive, whether that means pounding everyone involved in open-source with streams of litigation, buying off distributors (see EeePC), propaganda and FUD campaigns and whatever else.
MS already sees Linux as a threat, which is what the deal with Novell is about -- it was a proclamation to all Linux users that Microsoft isn't just going to let you stop giving them money. You either go through their approved vendor (through whom MS makes money) or you risk big SCO-esque (targeting users, not makers) lawsuits for patent infringement, etc.
To sum up, WINE is good and nice, but as soon as Microsoft perceives it as a real threat they are going to mobilize billions of dollars to put it down.
MS doesn't care about virtualization because you still have to buy Windows to use it.
Even complete lock-in might not work for them forever.
The entire US financial industry uses Windows desktops and will for the foreseeable future, but adoption of Vista, Windows 7, and Office 2007 has been (anecdotally) pretty negligible.
I imagine that their future profits are in trouble if they can't innovate enough for users to even upgrade their products.
> adoption of Vista, Windows 7, and Office 2007 has been (anecdotally) pretty negligible.
That's because Win XP and Office 2003 are good enough. That also spells trouble for their would-be competitors. If someone doesn't upgrade his XP box to Windows 7, do you think it's more likely he'll buy a Mac instead?
I don't think so.
And while web-apps are all the rage these days ... it sounds to me a lot like Sun's marketing campaign for Java or for the NC. I don't see a web-app replacing Office, even if it's powered by Google.
Funny thing happened yesterday ... went to my local library to get some books, and the bookkeeper couldn't give me those books to me because their Internet connection went down, and their accounting was done with a web-app ... cursing and screaming in the process.
Well, it's not quite right. Think it this way: Compatibility broken from XP to 7, not enough features to change (so I agree with you here), ... But, a I've been told that Mac ...
A friend who works at a financial institution, and they switched from earlier (2003 server, XP) versions of Windows, to Mac.
Compatibility isn't broken between XP to 7 ... only certain apps that used unofficial APIs. And for those you can use its "XP mode" (built on top of Virtual PC).
Personally I've had few problems with Win 7, granted I only use it on my home computer.
Apple breaks compatibility a lot more often, like every two years.
Not so much anymore. Google Apps and/or Open Office are more than sufficient for most small businesses. 10 years ago Windows and Office didn't have any viable competition. Times have changed.
Why is it that Google does not seem to suffer from the same internal competition as this article claims present at MSFT? Perhaps Google is seen by its employees as the Land of Plenty while MSFT employees see the company as a zero-sum game? I'm not suggesting that either view is necessarily rational, but such perceptions could explain the behaviors.
Google only has one channel that produces money right now ... AdSense. All their released products are complementary to it ... in fact, I don't know of a single product that isn't.
So you can draw an analogy here ... Microsoft held to its cash-cows (Windows, Office) for too long, although they are showing incremental success in other areas ... like the XBox. Google may get to that point where AdSense will start making them irrelevant, and then they'll be in the same situation.
All big companies face this. Even Apple ... if you'll look closer, they are far too focused on their iTunes Store. And when a cash-cow starts to become irrelevant, although it's still profitable, it's a tough decision to let go.
Why is being focused on the iTunes Store bad? I understand how reliance on the actual software is a bad idea -- although it's rumored that this is being replaced with a web front-end (hence the acquisition of LaLa).
But I don't see how owning such a powerful distribution channel is something they should let go of. Even now it's looking like they could become a major player in not just music distribution but other media (books, video) distribution as well.
> Even now it's looking like they could become a major player in not just music distribution but other media (books, video) distribution as well.
This is where I disagree ... they are doing the same mistake Microsoft did. Right now to develop apps for your iPhone, you need a commercial SDK for which you pay $99 and that only works on Mac OS X.
Do you know how much of a PITA this is? I am on an NDA and I can't give details about what I'm doing right now, but believe me ... dealing with iPhone is the ugliest of all mobile platforms.
When your distribution channel is tied to your software platform, that's when it's starting to smell. When you also have lots of rules about what gets in, that's a first sign it is not sustainable ... throughout the history businesses have always been interested in eliminating the middle-men. That's one reason web-apps are getting so popular.
And now here comes the iPad, which promises to do for books what iPod did for music. I'm failing to see how this will work, since Amazon is already there, and I can't picture myself watching movies on a tablet.
But maybe Jobs knows what he's doing, I really don't know ... what I do know is that my colleagues that were ecstatic about iPhones are now switching to Nexus Ones and Druids. And the iPhone used to be cool, now it's just popular ... the only reason we are supporting the hell of the App Store approval process.
There're a bunch of cultural features that tend to prevent internal competition at Google:
Everybody has access to (nearly) all source code. The single repository means that you can dig in to find & fix problems in any Google product, regardless of your position in the org chart. And if someone invents a feature that you want to use, you can just grab it, like the appearance of Wonder Wheel on YouTube.
Google has a strong ethos of "If it's broke, fix it", regardless of the org chart or assigned responsibilities. It's usually mentioned to you as a Noogler, but what really reinforces it is the reaction you get when you actually fix something broken. In a lot of companies, there'd be a bunch of "Who is this guy and why is he mucking with our code?" recriminations (if you can even get access to the code). In Google there's a "thanks for doing this" and sometimes a peer bonus.
Code reviews help a lot, somewhat paradoxically. When all code is reviewed, you lose the fear that you'll break somebody else's code with your fix. You make your fix, send it off, and if there're problems they'll have you fix them in the review. If it conflicts with the overall goals of the project, they'll just deny your patch.
In a system without code reviews, chances are that you'll break something by contributing to a project that you don't really know about. And once enough people have broken things, the company institutes code ownership policies that mean you can't fix things in other products.
There's also 20% time, as someone else mentioned. And the combination of free meals and pretty fluid inter-project mobility. It's likely that your teammates have worked on other projects before, with people who are now in wildly different areas of the company.
Finally, there's just the difference in growth rates between the two companies. Everybody at Google has more work than they can reasonably do. If somebody else does the work, it just means you can go home early this week, and there'll be plenty of other things to accomplish next week. If you spend 3 months writing a dialog box in Windows, though, and somebody makes that feature obsolete...well, that rather sucks.
True, but to the outside Google looks like a heard of cats. The biggest example is Chrome OS and Android. This split is going to be an issue in the future. The thing about Google is watching for their second source of real income (if it ever happens / if they need it).
My bet? Their 20% non-primary-project policy. It keeps their employees learning, testing, & innovating when other companies just drain them 100% of the time.
They haven't had time to fossilize. Give them a few years. All corporations expand to the point where they require cover sheets on TPS reports. That's inevitable.
Except they can't simply buy out their internal competition.
If your business is consistently shooting itself where it most needs to grow, you're doing something so fundamentally wrong you deserve to die. This isn't anti-Microsoft fanboyism, this is natural selection at its core. I take this stance with any business that behaves like this to a large enough degree.
Except they can't simply buy out their internal competition.
To put it in free-market terms, the boundaries of Microsoft got so large that they encompassed many antagonists, but insulated them from the mediating forces of the market.
Reminds me of a situation at a previous company, where we were paying something like 1/4 mil yearly for a transatlantic E3 data line no one ever got to use. If one VP came up with a use for it, the other VPs would sabotage the project, so they could use it someday.
> If one VP came up with a use for it, the other VPs would sabotage the project, so they could use it someday.
Disgusting, and telling of how un-savvy those VPs were. Within an organization, it's not very difficult to put a traffic or QoS cap on one department if the other departments were afraid of being shut out. A company that has VPs that think their one department in deserving of exclusive control of a corporate resource deserves to fail just like MS is.
Disgusting, and telling of how un-savvy those VPs were.
Yeah, and in the middle of layoffs too! We could've kept 2 more engineers employed with that money. (One department voted that everyone take a 10% pay cut instead of laying people off. And yes, this is while those resource shenanigans were going on!)
When was the last time the acted the 800lb gorilla? When then yanked one publisher's books from their book store? Or when they refused to approve Google Voice for Windows?
Microsoft has been thoroughly declawed by the antitrust suite - all the energetic and ruthlessly effective people who were driving company forward have left Microsoft about 10 years ago when they realized they can't use their favorite set of tools anymore. This is why Microsoft hasn't been changing the world in the last 10 years, in a good or bad way.
Railroading a shoddy partial translation of their Office suite memory dump format into XML through ISO, destroying that organizations credibility as it did so. That was a dick move.
Lest we forget, one of the major consequences of the anti-trust decision against Microsoft was that it made MS afraid to innovate in the web browser area (that was where it got pounded so heavily in the courts). Since it had a 90+% market share in browsers at the time MS decided there wasn't much reason to continue developing IE and they effectively stopped development. It wasn't until Firefox started to gain popularity that MS began to pour serious effort into updating IE.
In short: the anti-trust lawsuits against MS are at least partially responsible for IE6 retaining significant market share for such a long period of time.
So you claim that wasn't motivated by slowing the development of browsers, which in turn slowed the moving of applications to the Web?
(Which was the reason that Microsoft used its monopoly to kill Netscape and got into hot water from the beginning.)
Edit: Consider how "well" Microsoft followed directives from the EU. It is a bit hilarious to claim that MS stopped developing something without even court orders and threats of being fined billions...
The customer sat for Linux netbooks was horrible and return rates were sky-high. Geeks like linux, but normal people prefer convenience which often times means nothing more than familiarity.
In defense of Linux, the vendor linuxes on those netbooks were generally a terribly broken custom user interface on top of a broken and badly hacked up distribution.
They could have done much better by asking Canonical or Novell to write the last drivers they needed and using Ubuntu or SuSe.
I meant the behaviour of saying to the market "we're making something which will be far better than this shipping product" so loudly that no one bought the shipping product.
The fact that their internal politics made it impossible to release something better in the first place is just adding insult to injury.
All of the internal issues wouldn't be a huge problem if consumers wanted to buy their products, but they just don't know how to tell a compelling story of improving lives. Microsoft just launches products that they think will compete well in certain sectors, but they're not really thinking about what people need. The XBox is really the only counterexample from the whole past decade! "Hey, we have this thing that plays games, but you can also get updates and games online using our store. When's the last time you've been able to apply a bugfix to your console game?" Show me another Microsoft consumer product that really improves someone's life like the XBox did
Sorry, but many companies are using the Exchange/Office combination simply because there isn't anything better.
Also, while many developers are preferring Unix-like OSes, customers actually want Windows. It's what they know and it works well for them.
Another example would be their developer tools ... which are quite well integrated with each other. I have seen many (good) devs that wouldn't dream working without Visual Studio, and if you get a MSDN subscription, the resources offered are top-notch. Myself I wouldn't touch any of that, since I can't stand working with Windows servers, but if they made their tools multi-platform, I would switch without blinking.
> they're not really thinking about what people need
And since when do people really need iPods / iPads or whatever else comes out of Apple?
Actually I think Microsoft does a pretty good job about what people need ... but they aren't particularly good at anticipating what people want.
To clarify, I was only focusing on their approach to emerging markets. How many successful products/services have they created and launched in the last year? The last 5 years? The last 10 years?
Also, sometimes it's a mistake to separate wants and needs! People started carrying their music as soon as the technology let them. That's a trend that hasn't abated in decades. It's not just some passing fad, but a symptom of minds that need to be regularly engaged. To compare Apple with Microsoft, Apple creates the device with the story, and Microsoft just creates the device and the ads
Live Mesh (access my files anywhere), Exchange Online (affordable hosted exchange, my personal email, calendar, and contacts actually in sync, everywhere), Windows Home Server (my music and movies, available on any device in my house, trivial backup, etc).
That's just what I've started using in the past year.
These may not be as awesome individually as an Xbox or an iPhone (which I adore), but they've changed my day to day life.
Mail.app and the iPhone natively support Exchange if you're into that.
iPhone support is great in my experience.
I love Outlook 2010, which I'm beta testing. Mail.app was just too buggy for me and I like being able to have a shortcut key to file email and the rule support is just so much better in Outlook.
"Another example: When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. "
This is easily solved with a few strategic firings.
By an accident of history and a lot of skill, Microsoft wangled themselves a virtual monopoly. Their skill at keeping that monopoly was second to none.
But now that other markets are opening and their monopoly power is fading, we see the truth - they don't really have anything special beyond the likes of HP and IBM.
"At worst, you can say it’s a highly repentant, largely accidental monopolist."
Incorrect, at worst it's a monopolist.
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"It employs thousands of the smartest, most capable engineers in the world. More than any other firm, it made using computers both ubiquitous and affordable. Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office applications suite still utterly rule their markets."
By monopoly...
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"over $100 billion in the past 10 years alone and help sustain the economies of Seattle, Washington State and the nation as a whole."
So we are supposed to support monopolies if they support Seattle? and apparently "the nation as a whole." You don't support the economy by monopolizing it.
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"Its founder, Bill Gates, is not only the most generous philanthropist in history, but has also inspired thousands of his employees to give generously themselves. No one in his right mind should wish Microsoft failure."
This is philanthropy by force, he is a Robin Hood, steal from the rich USA and give to the poorer countries. Out of all the statements this is the one I find least fault with. Fine steal from me to give to the poor. But do it straight up. Don't also hinder technological advancement while your stealing from me. Just take my money and leave technology out of it.
He probably doesn't know much about the gaming industry. The 360 is already an unqualified success. It's unquestionably reached status as an iconic platform in the history of console gaming, right up there with the NES and the PS1/2. To outsiders it may seem as though Nintendo is leading this field but that's somewhat misleading. Nintendo opened up a new market and has been able to sell console gaming systems to a whole new group of people who wouldn't have bought them before. This is fabulous for Nintendo, but in a very real sense it means it's no longer operating in the same market as Microsoft and Sony (though there is some overlap).
The 360 is the go-to console for any major game developer. Partly because 360 owners buy about 50% more games than either Wii or PS3 owners. Given that games are responsible for the bulk of the profits related to console gaming that's an enormously significant figure. The 360 console is raking in cash for Microsoft and continuing to grow in popularity. It's one of Microsoft's most successful ventures of all time.
Xbox is successful in that it has a large mind-share in the hard-core gamer community, but financially the project is still a failure. Had Microsoft decided not to begin the Xbox project 10+ years ago, it would easily have a few more $billion in the bank today.
Contrast that with the Wii, which, along with the DS, has added billions of dollars in profit to Nintendo's coffers over the past few years alone.
Now that Xbox has established itself, the next decade will show whether or not the system is net-profitable, or whether the project never should have started to begin with.
No, Xbox has largest market share in the gamer community period, with > 25 million units shipped worldwide. And they will be profitable overall on their gaming unit by the time this console generation is over (2015?).
Nintendo is operating in a different market. They are a toy company, first and foremost. And it's better, conceptually, to think about the Wii and DS as toys. They have a completely different audience - and completely different revenue model. People buy toys for a short-term entertainment value, or novelty - and then the novelty wears off.
This describes the Wii exactly - people buy one, they play a game or two, or maybe Wii fit, and that's it. You aren't seeing serious time spent with it - and the tie ratio demonstrates that.
BTW - I think I'd classify Guitar Hero / Rock Band as toys, too. Hence the horrible sales numbers this season - people are sick of this particular kind of toy.
I'm not sure it is valuable to segment the market into those who buy "toys" and those who buy "hard-core games". At the end of the day, there is just one big market: the human population.
Yes, Microsoft sold 30 million Xboxs to "hard core gamers" and effectively conquered that market niche.
But, in the same time, Nintendo sold 50+ million Wiis to people who like "toys", making billions of dollars in the process.
As a hypothetical investor, I don't really care if Microsoft "wins" the hard-core market, I care about the bottom line. Nintendo effectively created a new market and capitalized on it, and they would get my hypothetical dollar.
Not every venture can completely pay back its initial costs in a short time period. It took Amazon.com an entire decade to finally start making an annual profit. The XBOX division is now on a very solid track of success, with significant annual profits and a substantial growth trend. This is hardly a failure any more than a family 10 years into paying off a 30 year mortgage is a "failure". The XBOX division has become a substantial profit center for Microsoft and will almost certainly turn a lifetime profit sometime in the next few years.
This is the nature of the game in the tech industry, significant returns are rarely achieved without significant risks and investments.
How much is that to Microsoft's credit, though? Nintendo deliberately targeted a different market and Sony promptly flew themselves into the side of a mountain by fucking up the PS3, so the 360 won almost by default, despite its very real flaws.
In gaming consoles, Microsoft had Sony to compete with. It's easier to beat Sony than to beat Apple or Google.
It's difficult to discount it on the grounds of innovation. It's the first gaming console to fully integrate online gaming successfully and it's earned status rather than ridden on the back of brand loyalty like Sony or gone for the casual gaming market like Nintendo.
I think it's a very unfair impression. The Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii are not competitor products: the people who only have a Wii would have never bought an Xbox 360 in the first place. The Wii is to console games what Flash games are to PC games. Flash games didn't cut into the strategy, shooter, simulation, or role playing genre sales on the PC at all, because the people buying/playing them are not the same people who buy RTS/FPS/sim/RPG games. The Xbox line has been singlehandedly responsible for redefining the console gaming experience. Sony has been playing catchup ever since the 360's release.
Sony may have copied some of the more successful features of the Xbox 360, but I'm going to disagree that the Xbox line has redefined the console gaming experience.
It's redefined each generation. This generation is about motion controls as the top seller of all time, the Nintendo DS, has motion controls alongside its console brother the Wii which also does. Sure the 360 has stream lined the online experience, however it has also introduced gamers to the closed era of consoles. You want a bigger HD? Sure just pay an absolute premium on it. Not to mention the 360's hardware problems which have been conveniently forgotten.
The fact that you're comparing the Wii to flash games is absurd. It's fine not to like the Wii, I know I don't like it besides some drunken debauchery, but its impact on the industry is clear. Clear enough that Microsoft and Sony are both coming out with motion control products in the next year.
The Xbox / Xbox 360 has absolutely changed the nature of online gaming. They've done more to make it accessible than ever before: The ease and transparency of playing games with your friends (voice chat, the party system), the introduction of matchmaking in Halo 2 (a huge leap from the 'choose a server' system in the past), achievements, etc, all presented with a unified interface across games.
Both the PS3 and Steam have adopted their innovations - they've become the defacto standard for online gaming.
Microsoft and Sony coming out with motion controls doesn't mean that's where they think the future of their market is, they're just trying to tap into part of the Wii's market - to introduce the casual and first time gamers to a console with a rich library of more serious games. It's kind of like a drug dealer offering a sampler of a harder drug for free to get a new customer.
And for the hardcore gamers I know, XBox Live is a redefinition of consoles. Before Live, PCs were the only serious online game in town, now the XBox actually offers a better (less painful) online experience. Sony's online system is a joke in comparison.
(I own none of these systems, but I'm an ex-gamer and know a lot of gamers.)
XBox Live might be a huge business coup, though. If you go to the trouble of paying for Xbox Live, you're gonna want to "make the most of it", and that entails doing things that make Microsoft more money (buying more monopoly money from them for downloadable content, buying more games, etc.)
I used to play quite a bit on PCs. Multi is generally free, but the experience is far from seamless in a lot of cases. My impression of Live is that It Just Works. I've heard very varied things about PS3 in comparison, many of them not kind. That's what I was drawing on.
Funny thing about the xbox 360's hardware problems, when people's 360s break the response is not "ugh, this piece of junk sucks, I want my money back, I'm buying a wii" instead it's "ugh, how long is it going to take to get repaired? I really want to play right now!" or "ugh, it's out of warranty? Damnit, now I have to buy a new one!"
These are, as they say, generally the better variety of problems to have, warranty extension costs notwithstanding.
Which is surprising to me. I guess to be a success in his mind is to completely dominate a market space. I guess when you use the market share of Windows as your barometer for success, nothing else quite compares.
Seems to me that MS is struggling with bureaucracy, which is made worse by product-lines that are super-complexified by a need to be backwards, sideways and upside-down compatible with the rest of the universe. Factor in workplace politics and the job of bringing innovation to market is harder than hell.
To me the really interesting question is how Microsoft ever got to be a monopoly in the first place, with the kind of products they've been making.
What made windows and office succeed in the first place? Can you really coast that far just on malignant business practices?
This article lays out a big problem: internally the competition is won not on technical or business merit but on politics, abuse of power, gameplaying and generally dodgy shenanigans.
He brushes aside their monopolies which were created because externally the competition was defeated not on technical or business merit but on politics, abuse of power, gameplaying and generally dodgy shenanigans.
yep, you can coast this far. corporate inertia is an amazing thing, and revolutions don't come along that often. I think the coming revolution in mobile devices in companies will be a break the current PC inertia and might get some new players in the door.
Not really. If you were following the company in the 90s, two quick examples are Windows 95 and Internet Explorer 4 (Remember when IE was actually _praised_ for better standards-compliance and developer-features?)
I think Windows NT is an even better example of a case where Microsoft was genuinely leading the way. NT was a workstation-class operating system for the average PC -- or to put it another way, it was "desktop VMS" eight years before Apple shipped the first real "desktop Unix".
Without the 98->XP growth path afforded by NT, Windows would have stalled ten years ago.
It might appear that way if Microsoft was the only company one was following back in the 90s. While they were freezing the market with promises of what Chicago would be, NeXT had already brought the future - and that codebase still feels like the future today.
Except that a NeXTCube cost $10k at the same time that a decent windows PC cost $1.5-2k. Even though both NeXTStep and NT represented full, proper 32-bit "modern" operating systems and were both invented in the early 90s it took until 2001/2002 for both to come of age as consumer grade operating systems (NeXTStep as OS X, NT as Windows XP). In the meantime MS put forth an interim solution (Windows 9x) that was still suitable for consumer-grade PC hardware, resulting in a continuation of Windows market dominance and billions of dollars in profits for Microsoft. In contrast, NeXT took the intellectual high road, stubbornly refusing to compromise its vision of the future, resulting in massive financial losses, being forced to lay off 2/3 of its employees, and a long, slow slide into bankruptcy and irrelevancy before being acquired by Apple (which had stretched the decrepit Mac OS to its breaking point).
Had NeXT maintained a little more pragmatism and a little less stubborn pride it's possible that they could have become the next Apple or the next Microsoft, rather than merely a juicy intellectual property morsel for the real players in the industry to pick up and take advantage of.
Sure, I couldn't afford a NeXTCube in 1990. But by 1993 I was running NeXTstep on my generic intel hardware, a full two years prior to the release of Windows 95. (Incidentally, I also had the pleasure of running it on a SPARC laptop made by Tadpole, and on one of the HP PA-RISC "gecko" machines, but those were owned by employers. I could afford to run it on a PC, though.) But, you're right, people continued to believe that NeXTstep required a $10000 machine long after it did not.
Reading the article, I don't think the author meant what you think - "Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation." He says they always sucked in a moderately polite fashion.
MSR is a very powerful research org, agreed. In, say, machine learning and computer vision, this has been so for over 15 years.
But the point, and it is a valid one, is that this research does not seem to be turned in to actual products.
What is the systemic problem? Why has Google, which historically has had nowhere near the research depth, been able to innovate demonstrably, but not MSR?
One hypothesis is that research innovation starts with a small idea. It's easier to deploy a small idea on the web than as part of shrink-wrap software. Google can field the small idea, and iterate it on the web.
But to be included in the kind of software MS ships, you have to do things like (a) convince a project like Office to take it on, or (b) pitch it as part of a "big concept future system". Avenue (a) is very hard. And avenue (b) tends to produce vaporware. Sound familiar?
Maybe the scientists there are less ambitious than scientists elsewhere. I have read some good papers from MSR - I am interested in concurrency and how to express it more clearly in code - but MSR doesn't particularly stand out. They have a couple good scientists there doing fine research, but thinking of MSR as an organization that somewhat leads the way is somewhat of an exaggeration.
Sun Microsystems was spending more than 10% of its revenues on R&D... that's not a recipe for sure success, I would say, if you're not able to produce something sellable from time to time. Ah, SUNW used also to have a "CTOs council"...
Many friends of mine have tried to explain me what's so great about LINQ, but it never seemed that much impressive. The same with F#. Transactional NTFS flew completely under my radar, but it, too, doesn't look impressive the way, say, ZFS does.
I may sound harsh, but there is so much more going on that their contributions really feel underwhelming.
From what I can see, the transactions in ZFS and Transactional NTFS are completely different kind of things. The Transactional NTFS kind are distributed transactions of the kind you normally associate with database server and messaging systems like MQ - so your file IO can enlist in a transaction that touches a lot of different things.
Not saying it is a good idea - abuse of distributed transactions is a terrible thing, but I do think it is fairly innovative.
Being a bad idea kind of reduces the value of whatever innovation led to it. When you find something obvious nobody tried before, you should get suspicious.
Don't get me wrong. I am an engineer and I frequently answer a "why?" with "because it's cool" or "because it could be done", but with years of experience come a strong sense of what's a good idea and what's not and what you describe looks like a very bad one. And not even a lot of fun to implement.
Google rolls lots of stuff out in "BETA" to judge how users react which gives them feedback and lets them measure engagement.
MSFT does not do as good of a job in letting users have-at these projects, they've got such a huge array of interesting research projects underway (a whole new OS Kernel for one http://www.barrelfish.org/) that they do not seem to market whatsoever. . .
Usually NDAs cover much more specific information than what he writes about here. They basically cover the company's intellectual property - the specific technical information that lets them do their job better than others.
Stories, anecdotes, and cultural observations don't fall under this, unless those stories reveal the existence of projects/technologies that the company wants to keep secret. You can say "here's why I think my past employer was dysfunctional", and it won't win you any friends, but they can't come after you legally for that.
The only thing here that looks like it may've been confidential at some point is the existence of ClearType or the tablet PC. But since both of those were launched - albeit late - they're public information anyway, and he's not telling you anything you couldn't read in the tech press.
I think Microsoft is playing its cards very well. They have a very firm foot in ground through their office and OS business. And they have presence almost everywhere from phones to web. They can simply acquire a small time company like Twitter to fill up the Gaps.
IBM embraced open source after they lost their stranglehold on corporate IT. They seem to have benefited tremendously from this. If MS could do the same, they might have a brighter post-monopoly future.
Part of the reason MS isn't growing is that they have colonized the desktop to such an extent that innovators look elsewhere for opportunities. If MS could successfully open source windows, it might create an explosion of innovation on the desktop (or probably in integrating the desktop and the web but still). Of course, I doubt MS could handle losing the license fees at this point.
Based on what? It sure didn't work out for Sun, what makes you think it'll work for Microsoft?
It's no secret that part of the reason Microsoft makes so much money is because of vendor lockin. Embracing open source would make it easier for users to switch vendors - and I really don't see that as beneficial to Microsoft.
I think he doesn't give Microsoft enough credit on this. They entered a game console market with two entrenched players, where one was clearly dominating the other. People gave Microsoft little to no chance of succeeding and yet, on there second iteration were able to put themselves on equal ground to Sony and Nintendo. And that is with producing one of the most unreliable consoles ever made.