Before succumbing to schadenfreude just remember that this will eventually happen to your favorite tech company in the future, be it HP, Dell, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Fog Creek, Amazon, Y Combinator, etc. Companies have ups and down.
Hopefully MS will see this as a learning experience, become a better competitor and then we as consumers will benefit.
Yes, but most companies can't rely on the revenue from two gigantic monopolies to keep the zombie alive. It will take a lot more than the failure of the Kin (which it appears was set up to fail all along) to change the corporate and engineering culture at MS.
It saved the company in that it stopped the hemorrhaging of cash and gave them an actually profitable business model. Without this, they would've gone out of business entirely sometime in the early-mid 90s.
It killed them as a center of innovation. IBM hasn't invented anything worthwhile since the IBM PC in 1981. (No, I don't count Eclipse: IntelliJ idea came out first and better, and yet was eclipsed because IBM could afford to offer their product for free.)
Maybe that's the dilemma that Microsoft now faces. They can embrace their mediocrity, cater to their existing customer base, and continue to milk billions a year from their Winoffice monopoly. Or they can try to innovate. But most of their recent projects seem like they're trying to innovate and the coming out thoroughly mediocre, which isn't really a good combination.
Without this, they would've gone out of business entirely sometime in the early-mid 90s.
There is a problem with your timeline. My memory says that IBM only openly embraced open source in 1998, which means that it saved them later than you indicate.
Lemme look. (Searches, finds http://www.salon.com/technology/fsp/2000/09/12/chapter_7_par..., reads.) I was right. They joined the Apache Project in June. They released Jikes (a Java compiler for Linux) in July. In September it was open sourced. At the same time they ported DB2 to Linux. And, what I hadn't known, all of this happened at a skunkworks level. It was not until Dec. 14, 1998 that open source as an issue landed on Lou Gerstner's desk, and the decision was made that the whole company adopted an official policy on open source.
IBM hasn't invented anything worthwhile since the IBM PC in 1981.
Really? They introduced the AS 400 in 1987. I consider an operating system whose _average_ uptime in the field is better than 99.9% to be pretty worthwhile.
They commercialized gigantic magneto-resistance in 1997. That's in your hard drive right now, and gives it at least an order of magnitude improvement over what previous technology could do. I consider that pretty darned worthwhile as well.
IBM is a big company that does a lot of things. I'm sure they have some other cool stuff.
Other than those points, I agree with what you say.
IBM's "problem" is that they don't do consumer stuff.. So they can get slagged off as inventing nothing worthwhile since 1981 - because they don't make shiny toys like the iphone..
Your timeline is correct: the dam really started to break for open source and Linux when Mozilla got open sourced, and when Oracle announced they would release their Linux port. By the dot com boom, Linux was big business.
I'm not so sure. Thinkpad laptops are legendary. They've been spun off to Lenovo but they pretty much set the standard for quality business-grade notebooks. Steve Jobs even used them as inspiration for the updated Powerbook line upon his return to Apple.
They pioneered SOI manufacturing, BlueGene TeraFLOP super-computing, and several other major advances.
Also, their consulting business sort of set the standard for other big players in that market. IME it's not that great, but none of them are great, so kudos for getting there first and not becoming significantly worse! On second thought, lets forget about this one....
That is true (and I am very happily typing on one right now. Yeah IBM) but lets face it - they were sold to Lenevo because IBM couldn't make a profit on them.
> IBM hasn't invented anything worthwhile since the IBM PC
I have to disagree. The PC was not innovative at all - it was little more than a repackage of existing stuff. It's architecture was hugely successful in the market thanks to IBM's muscle and its poor judgement that allowed Microsoft to sell MS-DOS to clone makers.
But nobody should say the PC is innovative. The Apple ][, the Atari's (both 8-bit and the STs), the Commodores (the VIC 20, the C64, the Amiga) were all innovative, groundbreaking products.
The PC was a kludge. And mostly still is. Recently, playing with hardware detection I found out my Atom-based netbook has an ISA bus somewhere inside it. I wanted to wash my hands.
I would be willing to bet your Atom notebook has a chipset in it that would support an ISA device were it present on a non-existent ISA slot. But it does not actually have an ISA bus in the sense of something actually connected to those pins.
But most of their recent projects seem like they're trying to innovate and the coming out thoroughly mediocre, which isn't really a good combination.
Innovation and milking monopolies generally require different skills and attitudes. MS has tons of people good at the latter (starting with Balmer) and that very fact acts against them when it comes to innovation. Any innovation that happens (C# and LINQ come to mind) is limited in scope and is the work of individuals below senior management. These innovators have very little to do with steering the company.
If MS wishes to innovate they should start by firing or sidelining a lot of the entrenched senior hierarchy. Easier said than done.
Nope, IBM's open source efforts are generally 'lipstick on a pig' sex-appeal marketing efforts rather than something they are seriously invested in.
What IBM doesn't tell you in their PR is that mainframes are still very much the profit engine of the company. Although the money is more in support services and business process outsourcing rather than the actual hardware/software.
IBM makes its money from hardware sales and consulting. You need new hardware to run Linux. You need armies of consultants to post your "legacy" code. IBM is perfectly happy to save money on its software bill!
Or MS is next in line after Nokia and Sony, on the downward spiral. Seemingly-invincible companies go under all the time. It doesn't have to be one big explosion, but death by a thousand cuts.
Sure, and it's arguably happening right now to some of the companies I mentioned (Dell, Yahoo) but if/when they recover it will likely happen again. Apple will likely face bad times at some point in the future.
Don't tell anyone, but I think it's happening to Google right now. It's just early stages (like MS in 1995), and Google still has more good products than bad, so it isn't exceptionally noticeable.
But the recent, high-profile launch disasters, the clutter that's slowly creeping into the result pages, and stuff like the search page background goofiness...they sure feel like early MS-style mistakes.....
MS in 1995 still had many, many years of good work ahead of it. Remember that they won the browser wars, after everyone had written them off as being too big and clumsy to adapt to change. That was also when we got Win2k and WinXP (arguably the best versions of Windows ever) and their Office product matured into its familiar form.
I'd say Microsoft started going downhill after 2002, when they disbanded the IE team and embarked on the disaster that was Vista. But I remember that when I started college in 2001, I hated Microsoft and yet virtually all the software on my computer was by them. It's a sign of market dominance when your customers hate you and yet use your products anyway. ;-)
"MS in 1995 still had many, many years of good work ahead of it. Remember that they won the browser wars, after everyone had written them off as being too big and clumsy to adapt to change. That was also when we got Win2k and WinXP (arguably the best versions of Windows ever) and their Office product matured into its familiar form."
Eh. We also got WindowsME in 2000, which was arguably the worst version ever. And to be fair, Office has been mostly re-arranging the furniture and re-painting the walls since Office95. And...let's not forget Bob. Bob was Microsoft's Buzz, circa 1995.
That said, sure, it's not like MS got to their current state on January 1, 1996. And there's no way I'd argue that they (or Google) are going away soon. My point is only that Google is starting to show signs of lumbering corporate giant-hood, and that it has happened pretty quickly, in comparison to MS.
Google is probably past an inflection point, they've still got plenty of upward momentum and almost certainly won't peak for many, many years. However, Google seems to have empire-itis just like any other big company. Eventually they'll start believing their own BS more than they will external truths, they'll become process bound and bureaucracy bound, they'll start to saddle themselves with more and more strategy taxes until they become increasingly like any other big company.
There's still time for that not to happen, but all the signs are pointing that way.
Apple's products weren't highly regarded through most of the 90s. The survived on a niche market at the time, but weren't highly regarded during this phase either for their design or technical architecture. Pricing wasn't their problem -- their products were the problem.
It wasn't until 2000 or so when they got their mojo back.
They were highly regarded in their niches. If you needed a computer to edit photos or to assemble a print publication, a Mac would be your obvious choice. In the PowePC era, it was the fastest computer you could buy that ran off-th-shelf productivity software and many found their way into labs as instrument controllers. Considering the size of their lineup, a couple lemons (pun intended) were to be expected. Still, considering how many models were made, I saw more bad computers coming from PC makers.
And, until the arrival of NT4, PC GUIs had little to no advantage over what Apple was offering. Windows was ugly and crash-prone. In retrospect, NT4 was also very crash prone, probably because MS moved graphics drivers onto kernel space. Windows only became more acceptable (some would prefer "less offensive") visually with the NeXT-like visuals of 95.
That's not the history as I remember it. Windows 95 came before NT4, and it was the first to introduce the famous "start button" visuals. 95 however was still based on the old kernel and it crashed a lot. NT4 came later, with the same visuals, but due to the NT kernel it was remarkably stable.
Windows NT4 was much more stable than the previous Win3.11->95->98->Me line, but - primarily due to moving Graphics drives into the kernel for performance - was considerably less stable than its immediate predecessor in the NT line, Windows NT 3.51.
While 95 introduced long filenames to a mainstream audience, it was very unstable. MacOS 7.5 was not perfect (and the PPC migration brought some instability), but it was not nearly as bad as 95. NT4 had a kernel internally more advanced than MacOS classic, but most users wouldn't be able to tell.
Microsoft's GUI offerings started to really compete with Apple's with 95 and matured through NT4 and 2000.
Apple had a good product, if you compare it with what the PC market was offering. OS8 and 9 were well-rounded OSs that competed mostly against the 9x family, as XP, which made the NT kernel mainstream, wasn't launched until after OSX.
Companies have their ups and downs (thats the funny thing about the runway start ups usually talk about, there is normally another in the end that you go down on).
But Fog Creek and Y combinator aren't near big enough for them to collaps like that, so I doubt that they will fall that far.
Remember the bigger they are, they harder they fall. And lets face it - Microsoft is insanely big.
I was being a little facetious - HP split in two, with one half called Agilent taking the instruments, calculators and so on, and the other half still called HP doing PCs, printers, cameras. When people think of HP as being a great engineering firm, and a great place to work, they're thinking of the bit that became Agilent.
Despite the ignorant and inflammatory commentary that I linked to, I doubt that Accenture's failure to write a system in C# raised much of a wave inside Microsoft. Accenture could have made the same mistakes in Java or in any other language.
Hopefully MS will see this as a learning experience, become a better competitor and then we as consumers will benefit.