'He tells us: "Eventually somebody would come back to you with your idea – they would say, 'Hey, you know, this doesn't need Windows at all'. And you have to control your urge to fucking kill them, because you've been telling them that for two years and now they finally come up with it like it's their idea. But that's the Jedi mind trick." '
OMG. I learned this a few years ago working in a corp environment with stubborn senior people with big egos. Basically, to get one of these types on board with your idea you have to find a way to convince them the idea was originally theirs. Sounds strange I know..
The way I see it, you are just a single data point to the senior people. You mention something, they hear it from a couple of other places and they are now convinced that its a good path forward.
You can put your black hat and game this by making sure you suggest whatever you’re after to more people/sources of info that your target listens to. Bonus points for going through intermediaries that obscure the source of the idea.
At some point, your senior decision maker has his “epiphany” as what you want is “what everybody is talking about”.
Interestingly this is something we talk about with my partner as a lot of times one of us would suggest something, the other might be dismissive, but then someone else would suggest, it gets done and and I/she would get upset that “you listen to them but not to me”.
But in reality whats going on is that we are both waiting to accumulate enough data points to make a heuristic work.
Once that became apparent we’re much more understanding to each other.
As for managers, if they smart enough, they would notice that a lot of the things you’re suggesting ends up what being done, and at some point they would value your points a lot more. But hardly anyone would use only one source of input to make their decisions.
I've learned the best way to get ideas going in a corporate settings are:
- pitch the idea to as many folks as possible. Not just to the ones who are going to okay it. Even if only a small portion of each idea resonates with each person, you now have them all slightly on board, which is all you need to get a foot in the door. The more people on board, the more you can back yourself up with to get the okay
- do proof of concepts yourself. I always carve out some time to implement a MVP of my ideas, and then use that to hook people.
- make a design doc. I hate doing this personally, but a lot of people respond well to the idea of one, even if most won't read it. It's just the idea that it's well thought out, even if the design doc is mostly fluff and will change dramatically. People love procedural work.
I've had that exact same experience with my wife. I'd tell her something for weeks, months, years, without her buying into it at all--then I'd watch somebody at a party tell her the same thing and she suddenly agrees! It's been infuriating. But now that I look at it in this framework, I have a path forward: spread ideas to her family and friends first.
"I was thinking about what you said, and you were totally right, if we <insert your idea> then we can achieve <insert their goal>. I'm really glad you said that - you really gave me a new perspective on this."
> to get one of these types on board with your idea you have to find a way to convince them the idea was originally theirs
I forget where I read it, but I recall reading several times that this was how people at Apple had to present stuff to Steve Jobs to get him onboard with it. He'd initially dismiss it, then come back with the exact same idea as if it were his own.
That's what set Steve Jobs apart. Your typical executive could take months between rejecting your idea and proposing it as their own. But Jobs could compress this down to a week.
I'm amazed how absolutely every character flaw Jobs had gets turned into a positive. If I had a nickel for how many times I've seen this happen on the internet, I'd be rich.
That's because "character flaws" on a personal level are often required to achieve exceptional results.
Not sufficient. But often required.
If Jobs were a quiet, contemplative, respectful person who was careful to keep track of where he heard what idea and assign credit where credit was due - it's unlikely we'd have Apple. That's just a different personality type.
I believe this is the wrong way to think about this.
Character flaws are often associated with certain effective traits, but are not chained to them.
In your example, one can be vocal, biased-twoards-action, and low-bullshit, while also giving credit where credit is due.
I think it’s far from obvious that Jobs would have been a less effective leader if he had addressed his character shortcomings.
I similarly feel the same way about current leaders like Musk. He could do some inner work, become far less of a jerk, and be equally or more effective.
The sad thing is, they don't need that personal growth. Their luck or other character traits made/make them successful, they're rich and quite powerful, attractive to women, etc.
So they'll never do what you're saying. For an extreme example, look at Trump. In Romanian we have a saying: "the only thing that will straighten a hunchback's back is the coffin".
IMHO personal growth of the founders/leaders is correlated with long-term success. A healthy organization should be able to adapt to changes in the market. The same is true for a healthy individual. And more importantly as leader(s) of an organization - because you must lead by example. E.g. if you have a healthy way to keep your ego in check or be aware of your flaws you will be able to notice issues in organizational structures; if you're willing to change when presented with new information so will the organization; if you micromanage everything you've fixed the speed of adaptation to your own - can be good - can be bad; if you need validation you will surround yourself with people that validate you no matter what; if you twist your reality so that you're always on top those lies will seep into the culture.
It's kind of like Conway's law but more like organizations design structures (communication, hierarchies, etc.) which mirror their leaders identity/character/personality/soul...
Yeah, for some reason we as a society really dig the whole "good with the bad", "beauty and the beast" style narrative. As if people can't be that good without also being that bad.
It's an extremely old meme, and it will take a long long time to die.
No. That’s just coverage bias. The leaders who are successful but aren’t dicks don’t have a ton of stories about them in the media about being brilliant dicks.
Why putting character flaws into quotes? They are still character flaws, the same way as same behavior is if it is not coming from rich powergul person.
There is no reason to pretend it is something special. If they helped him to get more money and more credit and what not, that does not make them not flaws.
Calling them flaws would seem to me to be a subjective position. Personality traits are perceived differently depending on what the observer is sensitive to. Somebody that is considered rude in a yoga clinic might not be perceived the same way on a construction site.
I read it ironically. I mean, if there are months in between, it makes plausible deniality that you forgot you got idea from someone else. Week makes you more of asshole.
That’s the genius of Jobs. You get a woman pregnant then deny the child is yours. Afterwards you acknowledge your error and have a great relationship with the kid and name a product after them.
> I learned this a few years ago working in a corp environment with stubborn senior people with big egos.
Not disagreeing that corp envs are full of senior people with big egos, but this looks a little different from the opposite perspective.
Imagine you're a hypothetical "ideal" egoless senior corp person, and you have 20 people coming to you with their ideas. You know >51% of them are likely bad ideas (or at least it would be a bad idea to adopt most of them simultaneously). How can you tell which are worth adopting? If you trusted any of the suggesters absolutely they probably would've been promoted already, so it's difficult; you "stubbornly" reject most of them (probably some of the good ones too), or at the very least put them on the long finger for consideration later.
When you do get on board with an idea, yes there is still the problem of proper attribution and credit, and often there's non-benign human factors involved in muddying the waters there. But often ideas are Venn diagrams and defining them as atomic things from a single source isn't really practical.
If your goal is to change the world--incepting some politician to change their position or some businessperson to alter their product--that makes a lot of sense... if you are working for some company extracting value from you, why would you ever do this? I can't imagine it would help your career any... shouldn't you be spending all of that effort finding a less toxic place to work?
It's not toxicity though - it's human psychology. The classic book "How To Win Friends And Influence People" even mentions this strategy when discussing winning people over to your ideas.
People are far more willing to promote an idea they played a role in creating than one which they are just a passive party to. In large organizations, getting buy-in is critical to moving anything forward, so you need to have higher-ups going to bat for your ideas.
One way to use this approach to your career advantage is to make sure you are a few steps ahead once the idea takes hold. This makes it clear that you also had the idea, and you were smart enough to consider the consequences of it.
"This book had a profound effect on me, however, of the negative variety. It did give me pointers on how to actually break out of my shell and "win friends" but in the long term, it did way more harm than good. Not the book per se, but my choice to follow the advice given there. The book basically tells you to be agreeable to everybody, find something to honestly like about them and compliment them on it, talk about their interests only and, practically, act like a people pleaser all the time.
It might sound like a harmless, or even attractive idea in theory, but choosing to apply it in your every day life can lead to dangerous results. Case in point: after being a smiley happy person with loads of friends for about a year, the unpleasant realization began to creep in, that by being so agreeable to everybody else, I rarely ever got my way. I also sustained friendships with people who were self-centered, so talking about their interests was all we got to do together, which drained me of my energy. The worst thing still, is that by trying to find something to like about every person, I completely disregarded their glaring faults. It didn't matter that those people did have redeeming qualities - they weren't redeeming enough! I ended up with a bunch of friends I didn't really want and, because I was so preoccupied with "winning" those friendships I missed out on the chance to form relationships with good people.
I suppose, for somebody who is a better judge of character, the principles outlined in this book could be of some value. But that's really just me trying to find something positive (using the "principles") in a book that I am still trying to UN learn.
If you want to win friends, you have to do it the hard way, by being yourself and risking rejection (and daring to do some rejection of your own, as well). And if you want to influence people the only fair way to do it is through honesty. All the rest is manipulation and pretending. Do not read this book, you'll only learn how to manipulate yourself & others. Do not read it out of fear of rejection & low self-esteem, there are better ways to gain some courage in approaching people. This will harm you in the long run.
Thank you for reading this review." — Caroline [1]
I'm sharing this review because trying Carnegie's strategies had the exact same effect on me.
Advice nudges people in a direction. Carnegie's advice is good for nudging people in the direction of being less self centered. For people pleasers who don't think of themselves enough, it is bad advice. For people too wrapped up in themselves, it is good advice.
Interesting. I have tended to think the book's main flaw is in encouraging some amount of manipulation of others and a degree of artificiality in doing so. I always thought of it in tactical terms for things like business negotiations. It never occurred to me to treat it as a general guidebook to personal interaction, but I can see how that could cause problems.
You can’t just keep running from all of your difficult situations. Sometimes the best way to avoid something is figuring it out.
You sometimes see other people never face the same situations you face repeatedly. That is life telling you that you need to learn and that they’ve already figured that part out. That is why when they face the situation it doesn’t seem so intense.
I tend to think of bureaucracies as a mechanism for outsourcing the "real-life" parts of a project I care less about. The marketing, the litigation-responding, the budgeting. The cost is you sometimes have to deal with this. Sometimes it's still worth it. Whether or not it's toxic depends on whether or not you wanted them to take credit for it, or whether it was a surprise.
Not every "idea" that crosses one's mind is worth taking credit for. They are not that great to begin with.
> if you are working for some company extracting value from you, why would you ever do this?
Because there can be massive monetary rewards for it? (Sorry if that’s the obvious answer we’re all pretending isn’t there.) We’re talking about the Xbox project, where one of the leaders is so rich he pays people to help him cook ancient Egyptian bread for something to do.
Ok, so if you are incepting someone into giving you a pay raise or a dividend or options or a commission on a new project, that makes some sense to me; but if you are just working at a company and have to move mountains to convince people to do something that they will never even be able to appreciate you for it because part of the process was tricking them into thinking it was their own idea, then I guess I am saying you also need to make damned sure that you aren't going to just work for that project and have protection against being replaced on it: you need to incept the further idea that you should get a cut of the upside (which just sounds difficult in a world where you are explicitly diverting any credit for the idea to someone else).
It’s not necessarily about the environment being toxic. I’ve had the same experience with co-authors. It’s just human nature to forget things other people tell you, and then to suddenly have the idea yourself....
To me the problem was the "I won't do it if it isn't my idea (and so other people have to go out of their way to trick me into thinking their idea is my idea so I don't discard it)" aspect (which I find extremely toxic), not some kind of "I (maybe even accidentally) took credit for your idea because (but if you had corrected me I'm sure it wouldn't have been a problem)" angle.
That's basically the core of managing without authority. If you want people to do something but they don't report to you, then it has to seem like a great idea that will benefit them. All the better if they think it was originally their idea and get to claim the credit.
That was alledgedly how the Technical University of Denmark was started by Hans Christian Ørsted after he praised government officials of "their" idea of a polytechnical learning institution.
I've seen this in companies too. You keep reminding them about this thing, and then eventually they come up with this idea themselves. I have the feeling that the idea doesn't reach their mind but their subconscious, and then that one reminds their mind again. It seems they have to ponder on it for a while, maybe hear it multiple times, before it reaches their mind again as their own idea.
It makes you wonder how many of your own ideas were actually that from others.
Frustratingly high in my case, apparently. The good news is that Google often allows you to easily verify that fact. The bad news is that Google often allows you to easily verify that fact.
Go doesn’t solve scaling issues in any meaningful sense. At most it’s just some constant factor reduction in required severs compared to python/ruby/whatever interpreted thing it usually replaces.
> in a corp environment with stubborn senior people with big egos. Basically, to get one of these types on board with your idea you have to find a way to convince them the idea was originally theirs. Sounds strange I know..
Not strange at all: that is the way my mother has always operated with my father.
There is nothing strange about that, unfortunately. It's just how people work. Things like this are also why I sincerely hope that humanity eventually dies off and is replaced by literally any species, natural or artificial, that bases decisions on logic and facts.
There is no such thing as a meritocracy when humans are involved, no matter how much we delude ourselves to believe otherwise.
The problem with that is logic doesn’t provide goals, priorities or motivation to achieve them.
I was thinking about this recently while watching Raised By Wolves. The Androids express feelings and emotions, but this isn’t necessarily unrealistic. That could be a useful way to encode goals and evaluate priorities.
I'm sorry you took offense, I didn't mean to be rude. I'm just making a point about logic in general, not "your logic" whatever you mean by that. Fundamental drives and goals are necessarily axiomatic and so cannot be derived logically. Intermediate goals yes, but not base drives and objectives.
My "logic" is this: humanity continually makes decisions collectively which harm humanity collectively. We are into self-harm in a major way, and almost no one cares. Those who do care are effectively shunned by others because more money is made by ignoring them and marginalizing their views.
Humanity is a self-destructive mess and deserves to go extinct.
The Xbox operating system does base on Windows though. It's just locked down in some areas and lacks some higher level builtin programs of Windows and has a different launcher/DE. It's a half-lie at most.
Also, the parts of Windows that Xbox does ship with are the most important ones for Microsoft shareholders. Nobody would want to edit their documents from their Xbox. That would in fact be harmful because some people might not buy a proper PC then (as is observable years later with the advent of smartphones). But the Xbox uses the DirectX API as well as builds on all the Windows-isms. So if you built a game for Windows, it's not hard to port it to Xbox, and vice versa.
A lot of the code in the NT kernel running on XBox was written specifically for the console. The filesystem drivers, the TCP/IP stack, the HAL, and possibly other components were rewritten from scratch for XBox specifically. It wasn't just locked down, a significant portion of "Windows" was entirely missing, and a decent chunk was replaced with new, Windows-incompatible code.
I suppose it depends on what "based on" means, though. It is technically based on Windows, but not like most people would take that to mean. e.g, when you say "based on linux", you don't take it to mean, "based on our custom kernel based on the initial loader and memory management and debugger functions in linux with the rest scrapped and replaced with a custom stack".
Using a little hyperbole there, but yeah. It does use DirectX, and is more Windows than not. But I can definitely see why someone might see it as a "lie" that it's "based on Windows".
They took out the idea of processes for instance. A single executable runs at a time, and it's dynamically linked against the kernel and running in kernel space. There are no system calls instructions used, just normal call instructions that get fixed up on load.
USB, network, and graphics stacks all live in the executable, not the kernel provided by the box (despite everything running in kernel space).
I've been writing a Rust based devkit for the Original Xbox recently and it feels more like uCOS than Windows.
Yeah, in a lot of ways RTOSes in general are unikernels, and the concept is wayyyy older than the webdev side of the industry gives credit for.
They even derive from the same sorta lineage with the ancient SABRE (now z/TPF) being both the first major API server and the first major real time OS.
MinWin is arguably the windows kernel without most of the userspace. Though it's still massive and contains a lot of userspace: 25MB on disk, 40MB in memory.
The xbox kernel has absolutely no connection, it forked off at a completely different point and was hacked and slashed until it fits into just 256KB.
I’ve had coworkers who were on the original Xbox team and they told me that the OS was not Windows. One of the things about the Xbox OS is that the OS itself gets a fixed timeslice each frame to do whatever it needs while the game is running, in order to make it so the game can get the rest of the frame to run. This sounds to me like a decision that has far-reaching consequences.
I’m sure that it shares plenty code with Windows. You might say that the OS is based on Windows. But it’s definitely not Windows.
I too remember the "Xbox kernel is not Windows" narratives in 2000s-2010s. Clearly Microsoft then considered it "not Windows", IIRC especially on Xbox 360. It's not that a VMM that reside parallel to the Xbox kernel makes it not Windows or not. Sometimes they said it's "built with technologies from Windows" or sometimes it was "built specifically for Xbox" but they maintained it's not Windows.
“ They had thought that before: 'Oh, we should make a Windows gaming platform – Windows will offer all these values...' Which is garbage, right? It's garbage, it is not true. No gamer gives a fuck about Windows features. But for the guys in Redmond, it was true. And you're not going to convince them. I mean, have you tried convincing your grandfather of something?”
Ha. It seems like every big company is like this... blind to some obvious truths because of their massive success.
> "There was a meeting in a small conference room with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. And Steve never, I don't think, ever thought it was a good idea. There's a story I've told where I was standing in line in the cafeteria with Kevin, and Steve Ballmer snuck up behind us and yelled in my ear, making me throw my food: 'YOU'RE GOING TO LOSE ALL OUR MONEY!'”
Steve Ballmer might be the funniest dude ever to run a tech company. Every story with him is absolutely golden.
I don't think that's funny dude. The asshole with the bad ideas is in the ceo seat and he's your boss. I can't think of a less funnier employment situation. Kudos on him for having what it takes to actually bring it to life
Steve hated it. Bill hated what it turned out to be by 1999 (I left around then). Dave Cutler hated it. Eric Engstrom saw it more as a defensive strategy. Microsoft poured an incredible amount of talent and resources that would have gone towards the Web into Xbox.
Losing the web is forgivable in retrospect: the web is a very big place and MS still has a very respectable Internet business thanks to Azure. What they can't be forgiven for is their focus on winning the living room rather than investing in mobile. If PocketPC had followed the same consumer/developer-centric trajectory as XBox, I think the mobile world would look very different today.
I used to think I would do pretty much anything I didn't find immoral for a million dollars per year. An abusive boss for 80+ hours per week changed my mind.
When I quit my third job, my boss told me "Karl, I know you hate me now, but in a couple years, you'll be making a million dollars a year and love me."
My response "Even if I believed you, I wouldn't do this job for a million dollars".
Maybe I would have. We were trading interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives in 2006. 2008 / 2009 would have been very volatile. We were generally long volatility, but sometimes we had some legs on some trades that would make significant losses in extreme volatility. It's hard to say. It's possible our 4-person desk could have made 100 million and my boss would have thrown a few my way. It's also possible the desk would have folded.
I still think I made the right choice by leaving. You have to live your life, and unless you really love your job, 80+ hours per week in the office is not living your life.
Also, I left that macro quant job by calling up Google and asking if they'd re-open the job offer I turned down 4 months earlier. It certainly helped that I had good backup jobs available.
Not just the paycheck. If your boss is mean and stupid all the time, you'll learn so little from them, the net work experience you got from the job become a negative.
In my opinion, a good boss can be loud, but must also smart and willing to hear, learn and teach, which are essential if you want to increase productivity and get your team full of smart and idea generating people together.
If you work for a mean and stupid boss, not only you'll work in hell, if the business failed due to their mistake, they'll probably put failure on their employees. Which is really bad if their false words got into the ears of your next recruiter.
Life is short, if something is obviously bad, don't try it.
having been employed by an asshole in a previous life, a good enough paycheck makes it manageable.
Not saying its healthy tho; I think somepeople have simply mastered the 'embrace the suck' mentality when it comes to toxicity...they call that 'resilience'
nah. I think Balmer did wonders for Ms. It’s really easy to blame the guy but I think it’s important to look at the context (of when he took over, what he actually did)
also, he is the only CEO I routinely saw at the “corporate gym” in Redmond before the pandemic struck. No bodyguards, no nothings. Like a regular dude going to the gym, hanging out in the sauna/jacuzzi. He had a super positive attitude towards the staff and other people that would strike up a conversation. While I did not the to have the image of a naked Ballmer burned into my retinas, I do appreciate that he did not let all that wealth go to his head.
I'm sorry, but their market cap is like 10x in the past decade. Their revenue streams are different now, yes, but they recognized they'd lost the platform with the SaaSification of most things and they wisely moved into other areas. Yes, they could have tried something else that kept them as the winners of the OS game, but vertical integration wasn't really in their bloodstream. Platforming and services were.
Oh, I'm wrong then. I was under the mistaken impression that he was CEO much more recently than that. Thanks for the correction, it appears that you're completely correct about his leadership.
one could argue that Windows is the most popular consumer OS even today (keep in mind the HN is not representative for what people normally run).
Also, a decade later, Microsoft is experiencing a software renaissance, in part, due to the the work Ballmer setup. One example: Azure. In the cloud space there are 2 gorillas: AWS and Azure (everything else is vaporware and at this point I don't think it would be wise to bet the farm on GCP or ... Oracle). How did Azure get here? Do you think they decided to do cloud and it happened magically?
Another example: the XBOX. I personally will never but a PS, and I believe XBOX is awesome in this space.
The most popular consumer OS is Android. Arguing anything else goes against all known stats.
Microsoft's renaissance is mainly due to Nadella focusing on software and services instead of selling Windows. You mentioned Xbox as a way to support Ballmer. The Xbox story mentioned in the article does not support Ballmer.
Agreed re Azure but I don't know if Ballmer was still focusing on Windows for Azure, which seems likely. Keep in mind Azure is mostly Linux instances today.
Starting by not having a keyboard and mouse available, good luck typing a 2 pages report on screen keyboard, let alone something with more deep content.
Then proper copy-paste workflows across applications when placing those pictures into the word document, alongside the table created in Excel for the respective field information and bar charts with the results.
Yes, it is doable, but better have lots of patience and time available to jump through all the obstacles to make it work on Android tablets.
There is also the possibility to use a pen instead, which again is very much hit and miss across Android tablets, more miss than hit actually, when compared with the capabilities of Windows Ink and surface pens.
Well maybe you're right. But it does seem like Chromebooks and iPads are extremely popular in the education market. Both of which use the mobile versions of Office.
The market did not moved to mobile. Mobile is alongside desktop. People like diversity and mobile offered another one. And people who have only mobile in their homes are poor that can't afford desktop but I see mobile as a gateway drug to desktop. Once people will have enough money, will also buy desktop exactly because mobile hooked them in the first place.
You can't really use percentages to say that something has declined if the whole pie is growing, and web use is maybe the one thing that looks least favorable for desktops.
That's a tale of saturation. Toaster sales are probably relatively flat as well. Not because toaster use has declined but because people already have a toaster that meets their toasting needs. PC improvements have slowed to a crawl over the past decade in terms of real-world performance gains for the average consumer. Their 5 year old rig still manages to surf the web, stream videos, play games and send emails just fine so they see no reason to upgrade. Another 4 cores or the jump from 14nm+ to 14nm++++ isn't justifiable for the average user. That said I bet the combination of COVID + AMD really coming out swinging the past 2 years might make for a bit of an anomalous spike.
The original proposition was that desktop sales would rise with mobile sales (with a lag time), and that's clearly not the case to this point, and there are no indicators that will ever be true.
Have to agree with you there, smartphones are still seeing 2-3 year turn over that PCs no longer enjoy. Because they are small and visible out and about you have a second motivator for replacement besides straight improvement pressure. People using them as a status symbol/indicator feel the need to have the latest and greatest.
Phones, even the premium tier are a much less costly investment than a desktop PC. In addition to the $1500-$2500 for a decent desktop computer you also have all the supporting bits, a desk to put it on, a chair, maybe a printer, + the floorspace to house it all.
With a phone it's just the phone, and maybe a case. So while a household might be satisfied with a single desktop computer, every member of the household is going to want their own phone. More devices per household + higher turn over frequency = higher volume annual sales even at saturation.
1) Yes mobile moved the market by capturing hundreds of millions of people who would never have owned a computer otherwise, and Microsoft failed to react to this.
2) Do you have any data to back up the claim that mobile usage leads to desktop purchases? I have never heard such a claim before
Given that I see more Windows laptops and 2-1 devices than Android tablets around here, Microsoft has reacted quite well to this.
Additionally given the amount of people that run Office on their phones, in spite of total lack of usability to do such kind of work on those devices, again very good reaction.
Sure, if "computer" to you means "laptop or desktop PC".
My smartphone is a computer, which I use at home and work, and it sure as hell doesn't run Windows. Smartphones are a far more significant type of computer in the modern world than laptop or desktop PCs.
AWS instances run Windows too. And MS makes money off those instances. Also, Azure runs Linux too. Microsoft is in the post-Windows phase and it's working on things that will keep it relevant long term
He botched Microsoft pretty bad.. windows 8 was his hallmark project no? And the beginning of surface was not that good. Once Satya took over Microsoft became a powerhouse again with their cloud/office integration + focus on azure.
So what they would have been created anyways. It’s satya’s business mind in propelling Microsoft’s business that made it a huge success, something ballmer was failing to do
Computers have been going back and forth between desktop and central servers for 40 years. When people tire of the cloud and shift back to local control, microsoft will no longer have an advantage over alternatives.
I can’t tell if this is a manufactured pattern, or if it’s true and I’m missing something because I haven’t been alive long enough.
From what I can tell, once upon a time we had mainframes and server rooms and big expensive computers, and there was no personal computing.
Then, we got personal computing and had very limited consumer connection to centralized servers on them. A lot of people barely had internet.
Then, we connected personal computing to centralized servers and many products were born.
Now, we have platforms built for creating centralized services because managing your own hardware was not necessary.
Where is the pattern there? It seems like you’re extrapolating a wave pattern from what could be a single datapoint. We got this, we got that, we connected them, now we’re here. Where is the back-and-forth you implied?
After desktops came along like the Apple II and DOS based PCs, people had full control. Then we got networking to share printers, and IT started controlling things again. It's been a constant back and forth ever since. Not all the way to the extremes, and not every company at the same time. Not everyone ran Novell Netware for example.
when Ballmer took over MS was right after the anti-trust fiasco. There was a time when people were not sure if the software giant was going to survive. They did under Ballmer.
From a sales pov, the company also grew and prospered. Microsoft had phenomenal growth while under Ballmer.
It's easy to remember all the things he botched (hello iphone?) but if you look at it objectively I think Ms did survive and prospered under Ballmer.
> It's easy to remember all the things he botched (hello iphone?) but if you look at it objectively I think Ms did survive and prospered under Ballmer.
If you look at it objectively you include all the things he botched, which are "easy to remember" according to you. At best, he was meh. In my personal opinion he was horrible - I think a random employee likely would have done better.
I’m going to respectfully disagree. He did contribute to MS before he became CEO. And invested in a lot of things where the fruits are harvested to this day.
I thought we were assessing him as a CEO, not an employee. Sure, he contributed before, and during, being a CEO. And obviously everything is speculation since we can't A/B test hypothetical timelines. But the numerous anecdotes of his "unique" management (if some of the stories are true, which I cannot verify, the guy should get sued for harassment on multiple counts), the fact that he missed obvious opportunities for MS (sure it's easy in hindsight, but even then I remember thinking "what is he doing?"), and the fact that Microsoft's reputation plummeted during his reign (again, subjective, but none of my friends wanted to work there and openly mocked it as an employer and that has completely changed under Nadella) are all strong signs that he wasn't an excellent leader.
But ultimately this is just my opinion, and he's a brilliant (I think he's a horrible CEO, but a very talented mathematician) billionaire. So what do I know?
It’s okay to have your own opinion. I think it’s really easy to judge others when we are not in their shoes and to believe that somehow we could have done a better job.
As you point out, it’s hard to understand what would have happened in a different scenario.
When cycles happen on decade long time scales and planning horizons outlast a ceo’s tenure assessing credit and blame becomes exponentially harder. Your right on with Balmer’s contributions.
One wonders how the future of civilization will work if the vast majority cannot even understand the true scope of the wheels they’re standing on, or turning in the background.
Yup... there are a lot of counter-examples of what actually-bad CEO's leave behind. (HP comes to mind... but that's far from the worst case since it still exists.)
Eh, I don't post often, but I have to reply this. Please don't normalize that behavior. It's not funny. That's like a bully.
It's only acceptable for him to do that because of his position. Imagine a factory worker doing that to the CEO "just cause it's funny". That's the same with other funny-but-inappropriate behaviors we should discourage at work.
Context makes every difference here. I could very easily imagine some lower level employee doing this to a CEO and getting a laugh out of it. Context and relationship.
EDIT: not that im saying Steve was in the right, who knows what their relationship was like
"Microsoft's choice of codename for the console project – Midway – was a deliberate statement, one that may seem problematic in a more enlightened age, referring as it does to the World War II battle in which US forces defeated the Japanese. "
Hard to believe someone wrote that non-ironically...
Actually it's super-easy to believe, barely an inconvenience.
Wikipedia tells me 3,000 Japanese soldiers died in the Battle of Midway. [1]
If I gloss over the fact that they were soldiers and not civilians, and ignore the injuries, in terms of one-day death toll, it's the same as 9/11. Sure, the Japanese military was the aggressor in WWII, but it seems rude to mention 3,000 human deaths for a cheap "take that!"
I mean, the Confederates sure don't like it when we remind them that they lost the American Civil war. They were in the wrong, but they're still real sensitive about losing. In polite company I wouldn't mention it. [2]
As an optional fun fact, Midway Games was probably using the same allegory when they picked their name. [3]
> As an optional fun fact, Midway Games was probably using the same allegory when they picked their name.
Really? I always thought this was because they were founded in Chicago, near Midway airport. (The airport itself was named after the battle though). Midway games got started in video games licensing games from japanese companies Taito and Namco, so I never thought about an adversarial explaination of the name.
Midway started in the 60s. They weren't competing with Japanese companies back then. American arcades were filled with American pinball machines, Computer Space or Pong. Japanese games like Space Invaders and Pac Man wouldn't take off until the late 70s.
In addition to the airport being a source for the name, in the 40s, the Chicago Bears were nicknamed "Monsters of the Midway" and there is also a park known as "the Midway" in Chicago.
Most of the world doesn't think like that, and referring to a major battle the US won in what is probably the single most justified war in US history as "problematic" make you sound like a nazi.
Edit: specifically the line "referring as it does to the World War II battle in which US forces defeated the Japanese."
You're right that it's distasteful, but it's not _problematic_. Certainly not because 3,000 Imperial Japanese serviceman lost their lives furthering their nation's colonial ambitions.
When the words 'problematic' or 'enlightened' are used in a sentence without a trace of irony, the end result is rarely promising. It's like a litmus test for a certain kind of censorious attitude to life mixed with condescension.
It's the only software in the world I've tried to actively avoid buying and failed. At least 7 times now.
It's the shopping channel of software. Whether or not you wanted it it comes bundled.
I'm pretty sure it'd be a lot less popular if every OEM had a check box that said Ubuntu that deducted the license fee. MS frowns upon that sort of thing, though.
I found an article that says that OEMs pay around $10 for a Windows license, at least for tablets. If I was buying a new computer I’d probably keep Windows installed for $10 just in case I needed to dual boot some time in the future.
At some point they weren't paying anything for licenses on sub 9" devices. Although I swear it was 11" or 14" on Win10 at some point I can't find a reference.
> Also that comment about midway being problematic.
It compares the "battle" between Sony and Microsoft to an actual war in which a lot of people died. It also sets up the XBox as some sort of patriotic push to defeat the agressors that attacked us without warning.
I'd be offended if I was working for the PS2 division at Sony at the time, I think. I also think I'd be offended if I was working on games for the XBox - it's entertainment, not war!
I wouldn't be offended, but I would be horrified. It's an awful comparison and one that I'd never make. I'd think poorly of anyone who discounts lives that easily.
Do they? I thought people just got windows with their PC and didn’t buy it. Lots of people use office at work, but I don’t know anyone that bought it personally. Google docs works fine for 99.9% of what people need office software for.
Office was and is so popular because it's better than the competition. Microsoft originally had hoped someone else would provide decent office type software. But it was crap so they wrote their own.
Has Xbox ever been profitable for Microsoft? The rumors I have always heard indicated that it wasn't [1]. Maybe it was worthwhile for protecting their Windows business, maybe they never should have bothered. Even if it is profitable now (I can't find any information one way or another), it doesn't seem like it turned out to be a worthwhile investment. Maybe Steve Ballmer was right?
It's possible that Xbox serves as a loss-leader for introducing/keeping people in the brand.
For kids who may only have chromebooks at school, and macs at home, an Xbox may be the first time they make a Microsoft account. That account then goes on to accumulate digital assets and stays with them until much later when they're ready to make bigger financial commitments.
Anecdotally, for the past few years, gaming has been the only reason for me keep a Windows device around at all.
- The sale price of the Xbox itself pays for the per-unit cost of the machine
- The percentage Microsoft gets of the sale price of games, adds just about enough to pay for the development and marketing costs, so at that point, the business doesn't do much better than breaking even
- But when you add in the ongoing revenue from online gaming, that's where the profit comes from
After start up costs (starting from scratch with the original Xbox was certainly more expensive than iterating to the current version), in general, consoles are loss leaders and you make up for them in rights fees from games (console makers traditionally do much better than breaking even here). Online services, like Xbox live gold, is another revenue stream.
MS probably gets some value from more people getting Microsoft accounts, too.
Kinect alone was a ~$1B loss from what I remember. They bought 2-3 time-of-flight companies to develop hardware, $300mil from what I remember, and it turned out to be too early so they had to license from primesense (Apple bought them later). Then on top of that it turned out gameplay it enabled was abysmal(latency).
Tangent but I just launched the Halo Master Chief Collection from Steam on my Ubuntu Desktop using the Proton compatibility layer and it plays really well. So I can play every game in the halo series up to Halo 4 (including Reach and ODST) on my Linux machine! What a time to be alive!
> "You'd have to sit in a meeting with Bill, and he's frighteningly brilliant. People throw around the word 'genius' all the time, and the way people say 'genius' is not accurate if you've met somebody who is a genius – somebody who, when you meet them, it seems like aliens are whispering in their ear because there's no way they could know these things otherwise. This is a different kind of a thing, and Bill's like that.
This pretty much describes the guy. I was at Microsoft during the final years of BillG being very hands-on with most core products (pre-lawsuit). I really wish I had worked with him more, but here is my anecdote that speaks to the guy’s brilliance:
My boss had gotten a fairly angry email from Bill sometime in 1995 if memory serves right. Chicago had taken much of his and Microsoft’s attention since the early 90s, that we didn’t see the internet coming.
When it came, nobody was alarmed. Bill had apparently gone on a learning tour of sorts shortly afterwards, but most of the people in the industry knew nothing about what the internet made possible. We knew you could share documents, and it was growing fast, and that Bill thought it was important. Nobody “got” the internet, just like nobody “got” the power of controlling the OS before Microsoft.
At the time, we were working on IIS (internet information service server) and a little behind schedule. Bill had also somehow caught wind of some Palo Alto startup talking to set top box companies to deliver an internet-connected OS (turned out to be WebTV, which we bought later) and was furious. Comes in, yells about how we can’t get the web resource model working, all that. Four letter words. Fairly typical angry boss rant. And then he collected himself and said something we thought was absurd - something akin to this: IIS and Internet Explorer will be Microsoft’s two most important products. We were struggling to get static HTML documents serving properly, and Bill goes on a monologue about how much of commerce will shift to the web, most video will be delivered online, we’d have free live video calling on handheld computers and the web as a platform would end Wintel. Thousands of machines running IIS that we could loan to web companies (sound familiar?).
Bill understood no matter how far we got with Windows, the days of a platform tied to an OS were numbered - in the same time period that Windows 95 was selling like hotcakes. There is no other person I think who could analyze situations objectively like that. It’s like if Steve Jobs launched the iPhone 3G and a month later gives Apple a speech on how the iWatch will kill it.
It was all absurd at the time - stuff of science fiction. Even a few years later during the dot com boom, much of it seemed far fetched.
Then Android and Chrome, iPhone, M1, AWS, and Amazon all happened, and I realized Bill was right. It took a little longer than predicted, but every single laughable thing the guy said that day turned out to be true. I really do think if it wasn’t for the anti trust case, Bill would have seen a lot of this through - for better or worse. It’s easy to look back and say Microsoft lacked the vision to succeed in the internet age - and it’s almost true - but Bill had formulated all this in a few weeks of “exploration”.
In a different universe, I think Microsoft abandons consumer Windows earlier than we can imagine, and builds “AWS” and “Chrome” around the IIS/IE combination. With reason to abandon the Wintel cash cow, IE may not have been so distastefully bad. Guess we’ll never find out though.
In a different universe, I think Microsoft [..] builds “AWS” and “Chrome” around the IIS/IE combination. With reason to abandon the Wintel cash cow, IE may not have been so distastefully bad.
Instead, we would have TCP/IP replaced my Microsoft QUIC(tm), accompanied by a 40,000-page specification riddled with "just to what IIS does" explanations, thereby ensuring no other browser could ever emerge.
It’s possible. Steve Jobs said Microsoft lacked taste. But they were also able to build the Xbox, Zune, Surface etc. If they realized the internet was a consumer products, very likely they change the heading.
From what I heard, by 1999 they knew they had mispredicted their internet strategy, but everyone was too fearful of the US government to make drastic changes. One friend said they couldn’t mention competitors by name in their org. So they stuck to their guns and doubled down on enterprise servers and OSes. I don’t recall when MsSQL started, but it was another step in that direction.
I understand that we are looking at this from a position of strong bias, having the technology in front of us already. But surely smart engineers in that sector would be well aware of how easily science-fiction can turn into reality, having witnessed half a century of astounding developments? Did no one really take Bill's predictions that seriously at the time?
Lot of people understood it was going to be massive. But they understood it as “doing X on the internet”. Just like everyone was making “Uber for X” three years ago.
Yahoo was yellow pages on the web.
Viaweb was shopping. Broadcast was radio. All X on the web.
At the time, most web sites were official company sites (basically HTML ads). A few news sites (Bloomberg was an early one). Some research labs and universities.
When we started IIS, there were maybe 3 million internet-connected users worldwide, and the web server we were running couldn’t handle the traffic coming to Microsoft’s web site - that would be single digit QPS.
Bill not only comes in and says “video calling”. But also free, worldwide, and on a PDA. Making a video ad showcasing the concept back then would have cost more than building the product itself today. Everyone can predict the future, very few can predict the future with an error of +/- 5 years. Nobody will bet a company richer than god on it.
Some of my ex-Apple colleagues used to “joke” that Bill’s gift was to see a piece of technology, and hit the fast forward button, and Steve (Jobs)’s gift was to see the future and hit rewind to the present day. Both hit the button too hard at times (Apple Newton, Lisa, IIS, WebTV).
Bill saw the internet, and knew it was the platform of the future a week later. The OS didn’t matter, the chipmaker didn’t matter, the form factor didn’t matter. It was all about content and services at the edge.
Unfortunately for Microsoft - and fortunately for other companies - cannibalizing Windows wasn’t on the menu. It didn’t matter what Bill thought. There was the board, shareholders, Steve, Dave. Even rank and file employees would not be receptive - someone on every team was vesting enough stock to become a millionaire each week, why would you talk about changing course? It’s really true that after a certain size, your maneuverability is severely restricted. So they doubled down into trying to make Windows + IE the internet, and nearly succeeded.
Two things had to happen before others saw the same things Bill did. Javascript running in the browser (1997), and Google figuring out hardware didn’t matter on the server side (2000). Java was a token threat. Bill knew it would not be performant enough on clients for Applets to succeed. They had to rebuild their language to put every fixed-size object on the stack because sorting an array<int> on a typical machine took forever. That’s why Java still doesn’t have operator overloading. That Java battle would be on the server, and we didn’t have a good language to bring to the battle there. Wired and co loved to paint a picture of Microsoft v Java as Goliath v David. Not true - Java was a speedbump.
The real threat was dumb terminals (aka web browsers). Even today, the world could run on Mac OS / iOS and Safari. If Microsoft was okay with sacrificing Windows market share and instead controlled content and services, they would be much more valuable. OS wars ended in 1995 - I think we had prototype of Excel running inside IE by 1999. It wasn’t very usable, but was maybe 3 years of clock speed improvements away. Wait for 3 years and you have an incredible product. Nope - some people decided to pour more resources to tying IE to Windows. Idiotic strategy when a web browser at the time would be a two-week project since every OS kernel shipped networking primitives by now. Rendering HTML/XML was trivial.
Once the DOJ walked into Microsoft, it was all walking on eggshells from then on. More people saw the vision, but were too scared to act.
You’re very welcome. Always nice to walk down memory lane to an exciting era for the industry.
Fun office rumour from the time: MSFT offices were in Seattle, while most competitors were in California. Yet Bill and co always seemed to know what every new company - stealth mode or not - was up to.
Rumour was that Msft had bribed a lot of SV reporters to gather intel. Often in the cafes and computer clubs where people loved to talk.
When Clinton was elected, there was some government agency shakeup and lot of ex-FBI agents were available to contract. Quite a few VIPs’ security affairs (including Michael Jordan who was the biggest star in the world) were handled by these contractors. Story went that we’d hired a number of them into the competitor intel work. We’d known about Sun working on a user space VM since 1992.
Bill Gates' "brilliance' was his extreme paranoia - always looking for a disruptor to his rent-seeking monopolies that pretty much stifled most creativity in the PC space for the better part of two decades. But he's certainly no genius. Geniuses leave behind a creative, ground-breaking legacy. Gates only legacy was to strangle that sort of creativity. So he's an anti-genius.
Back then, Microsoft had a reputation for ruthless and underhanded corporate behavior. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising, were bad behavior also going on internally.
The original Xbox lost money over its entire life. It wasn't until the second generation that Microsoft moved into positive territory on that. Hardware had to get cheaper before a PC in a game console case was profitable.
Except the 2nd generation (Xbox 360) was the only Xbox that wasn't x86. It featured a 3.2 GHz PowerPC Tri-Core Xenon CPU [1].
It was also Microsoft's highest selling console ever [2]. Note that the PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 each individually outsold it though. As a result, Microsoft has never outsold Sony with an x86 PC-like console, despite trying multiple times.
Ironically, recent PlayStation consoles have been x86. Maybe Microsoft kind of won in the end? It still doesn't run Windows through, so maybe Microsoft was right from the start?
This doesn't sound like a true story. He lies to Bill Gates 'telling him the console would incorporate the Windows operating system' but also had 'been telling them that [this doesn't need Windows at all] for two years.'
Someone gave a talk at my college early after the release of the original Xbox. It was definitely "Based" off of Windows 2000. So like I would call this a white-lie. Basically just the kernel and file system if I remember correctly.
Could you elaborate? I'd say any connection iOS has with NextStep is through OS X. What connection does iOS have to NextStep that is independent of OS X parentage?
My takeaway is that this is a good example to keep in mind when considering architectural diversity, whether in software or hardware. Can your business take the hit if/when Apple/Microsoft/Amazon enter your industry, as a direct competitor, using your own platform and established userbase against you?
It's funny how brilliant people like Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were so intentionally stupid, because they were blinded by their own religion of "Everything Windows". It really makes you think how many others are blinded by this type of religious, dogmatic thought pattern. I'm sure there are many that we just don't hear about, including Zuckerberg, Pinchai, Musk, etc.
I imagine that they see the market fitness landscape using the same perspective that helped them hill climb to where they are. It's one of the reasons why disruption is a thing.
You might criticize this, but their perspective helped them punch through to where they are today. (Founders, at least. Not sure about hired CEOs like Pichai and Ballmer.)
Leaders making decisions that are wrong (alongside plenty that were right) - well, that’s part of leading. Being called “intentionally stupid” on a message board - well, collect your points as they come, but I don’t buy it.
OMG. I learned this a few years ago working in a corp environment with stubborn senior people with big egos. Basically, to get one of these types on board with your idea you have to find a way to convince them the idea was originally theirs. Sounds strange I know..