No one involved in the transition from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone should be satisfied, it was a complete failure. At the time Windows Mobile pretty much owned the Smart Phone market(unless you consider BB at the time smart phones, they were close to but not just IMO. No where near the freedom as WM). But over Windows Mobiles life time it completely stagnated, but even with that had a large following.
With there transition to Windows Phone they completely deserted there current user base opting for a more iphonesk ecosystem. That of restriction instead of freedom.
Ironically Android is the true successor to Windows Mobile, and in a position Microsoft can only dream of right now.
The code base for WinMobile was a horrible, disgusting mess. The build system is one of the worst I've ever seen.
MS let WinMobile rot internally for years, building up tons of technical debt, and they paid for it in market share.
I was on a project that was repurposing pieces of the WM6 code, just cherry-picking drivers and stuff. We used to go rummaging through the source code on "Wait, you thought /that/ was bad..." sessions.
The BSPs ("Board Support Packages") that provided drivers and and other low-level code for the various platforms that WM ran on were written by third parties, largely by contractors, largely by the /same/ contractors, and the code quality was again terrible.
Don't ever let code quality and good system design take a back seat to politics, personal agendas or convenience. That kind of nonsense is at the core of why MS is not a major power in the mobile market today. Senior management at MS utterly dropped the ball; I like to think it's because the upper echelons don't really read code or look at designs any more.
The code was awful because there was no accountability. No oversight. Nothing happened to you if you checked in junk, as long as it compiled. Q/A was happy if their tests ran and every function did mindless NULL checking on parameters.
When Widows Mobile Smartphone came out in 2003, it was the most advanced, most open, most app-friendly phone OS. However, there were not substantial improvements for the next 5 years - the product was in fact stillborn. The Windows Phone team was then brought in to bury the corpse, and start afresh, which is what they did. It wasn't their fault that the predecessor has died several years earlier.
To be fair, those teams were not parallel. 6.5 died with 7, which died with 8. Danger was a subsidiary, and they made Project Pink, so they're the same. Windows on ARM, yes, was a team, but not associated with Mobility. They're a Windows 8 team, not a Windows Phone team, so they're not actually competing with WP nor are they working on mobility-specific platforms. They simply deal with Windows on ARM processors. And finally, we don't know where the Courier team fit into the whole plan, since it was an incubation project.
Therefore, we get:
- Windows Phone
- Windows on ARM
- Danger/Pink
And then some Courier Team, probably a MS Research team (so not part of an actual commercial team) which I wouldn't count as a team.
Then, Danger was folded into Windows Phone, and Courier was killed off, leaving:
PMX wasn't Danger, and PMX did Pink/Kin. Danger was folded into PMX, true, but the history is way messier than you're letting on. Some of the survivors of the PMX fiasco / power grab went on to Courier.
WoA did absorb some parts of WiMo (power management, for example).
The whole thing makes me want to cry in frustration. The day the iPhone was announced, the halls of 116-117-118-119 were filled with shell shocked, demoralized, pissed off people.
Though I agree with much of your comment, I think you're missing the timing a bit. I don't think it is the transition team specifically that is the issue, but rather the leadership did not recognize where the market was going, or didn't think the market was big enough to dedicate the right resources. Big mistake. They shouldn't have been responding to Apple and Android, they should have been leading it all.
This is probably a good example of the innovators dilemma in action.
I also disagree that Android is the 'true successor to Windows Mobile'. Sure it is somewhat more open than WP, but I don't think openness is what is a key part of Android's success.
I was working in the mobile business before the iPhone came and owned everybody (waiting then for Android) and I recall things totally differently than you.
The smartphone market was owned by Nokia and their Sxx series. That and the BlackBerries.
We were working on mostly Nokia (either native or Java), Qualcomm BREW (C++) and, granted, we had some demand for Windows Mobile but they were pretty much a nobody in that pre-iPhone world. Just as they're still nobody.
There was hardly any customer demand for Windows Mobile compared to Nokia and the others.
There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones.
It has always been an utter failure.
Now of course you may your definition of a "pre-iPhone Smartphone" which appears to be: "Certainly not a BlackBerry and certainly not anything that wasn't running Windows Mobile". So then it becomes hard to argue ; )
>There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones ...
That's not really true because there was the PDA market, which was dominated by Palm and Microsoft. So you had RIM and Nokia in one corner, and Palm and Microsoft in the other. Any one of them could have created the iPhone but none of them really got it, and they are where they are.
This is fairly illusory as a comparison. I don't believe the PDA market ever amounted to more than 12 million devices a year. Whilst by the year 2000 the entire mobile phone market was around 700 million.
Plus it didn't help that MS were trying to charge unrealistic prices for the OS, in 1999 they were asking for $80 per unit....
Pre-iPhone, there was a small PDA market, a bigger smartphone market, and a huge cell phone market. PDAs are a precursor to the iPhone, as much as (if not more than) Blackberries and Symbian phones. Both Palm and Microsoft were experimenting with PDAs with phone functionality years before the iPhone (which is why Ballmer was so dismissive of the iPhone at launch). They were so very close.
Yes, PDAs existed and you could see an evolution of phone to smartphone which included PDA like features.
However, in the early 00s the money was in dumbphones simply because the BOM cost of the RAM/ROM, AP and modem was pretty high.
The real migration path was from phones, either in terms of incorporating PDA like features in to existing platforms like Series 40, or using an OS capable of running in low memory, execute in place environments.
IMO Symbian was much more capable of achieving that need than either Palm or MS, at least because of it's low memory requirements and it's OS architecture was more advanced so it didn't have pseudo-arbitrary limits such as the 32 process limit that W/E had:
Also obviously the Symbian heritage was from PDAs (EPOC32 from PSION). I'm not saying that Symbian was a great OS, however, it really had the measure of MS technically in those times and Palm OS at that time was well known to be in the stone-age OS wise.
Microsoft existed in the PDA space to keep Palm from growing.
Lets face it, the secret sauce to smartphones from a technology POV is the web and web services. Microsoft had disbanded its IE team after the release of IE6, and thought that they had put the Internet problem to bed.
You can write a book on the number of missteps and missed opportunities Microsoft had in the last 10-15 years. They missed the boat on everything from search, to web-mail, to social networks, to digital music, to smartphones.
>Microsoft had disbanded its IE team after the release of IE6
I remember when that news hit slashdot like it was yesterday. I remember because I got really angry at Microsoft and their idiocy. I actually thought ie6 was a decent browser, but there was no fuckin chance it was going to be-all and end-all of browsers. It was also the day that I really started looking for an alternative. Soon after, I installed Firebird beta and never looked back.
The PDA market was ridiculously small (I owned one and I hardly knew anyone else who did) and was not growing at the time. PDAs were pricey, and while they could do many of the things that the iPhone did later, most people did not see its value back then. Well, it was a very fragmented market focused only on professionals. It was never aimed to consumers (a big mistake).
The iPhone did what it could do because it bundled a data plan that was reasonable at the time ($20/month unlimited, though 2G only, was a pretty damn good deal). Prior to my iPhone I used a Treo 6xx series that Verizon wanted me to pay $45/m for data (2G also).
The lack of native data connectivity made PDAs deal with the continually nasty and ever under-estimated problem of sync. With iPhoneOS v1, Apple matched what Palm had to offer - an iPod touch was almost as good as a Palm PDA, an iPhone better than a Treo. With iOS2 and ActiveSync, it blew away it's competition.
Absolutely this. I had an XDA II, then an XDA Mini S pretty much from launch (rebranded HTC phones on O2-UK), but as a student simply couldn't afford the data plans to go with them.
The iPhone (and really, the iPhone 3G for me) is when prices started to become reasonable.. nowadays, you can get decent data plans with (almost) everyone here.
>Whilst by the year 2000 the entire mobile phone market was around 700 million.
What was the size of the smartphone market? I'd guess it wasn't that big either, certainly it isn't anywhere near present-day numbers. And yes, I am differentiating between "smartphone" and "cell phone" market. The former was small, the latter was huge.
> Well, it was a very fragmented market focused only on professionals. It was never aimed to consumers (a big mistake).
You could say the same for RIM, who was never that interested in building a consumer phone. Many mistakes were made by all incumbents..
By the way, you may not be aware of this, but RIM had (and still has, somehow), a huge consumer following in certain countries like Indonesia because of the chat applications it provided ahead of the rest. Until not too long ago it was bigger than the iphone and Android phones there (I need to find a link for that, though...)
I cant really argue with to much of what you say, but in my defense as i said in my original post i dont really consider BB to be smartphones, i would also extend this to Symbian. Though this is entirely my opinion, most of which i would probably say is as much my bias to WM as anything :).
But at the same time if you look at the statistics here on market percentage [1], you see my main point to that windows has lost nearly all of its previous market share.
But WM's marketshare of the overall mobile phone market was never that large, so ya, they lost half, but half of a small share.
I don't see anything else Microsoft could have done with Windows Phone (disclosure: I'm a Microsoft employee but no inside info). I mean, the iPhone was pure disruption. Android then comes a long and destroys the market for OSes because they gave it away! So iPhone disrupts the high end, Android disrupts the low end, and Microsoft is put into an interesting non-trivial position.
Not really. Gates is still anti-web. He also doesn't absorb how culture has changed - both the culture of technology creation and the culture of technology consumption. Ballmer is not great but he probably has more daily exposure to the right arguments than Gates. Also, Ballmer's buffoon-psychopath persona seems to be a cover for a paranoia or fear. Gates seems genuinely more cocky, perhaps because he's more intelligent, while Ballmer seems more likely to listen to ideas he doesn't agree with. A contemporary Microsoft led by Gates would probably make some awesome but irrelevant products.
Microsoft simply could not dictate to the telcos like they did to the PC manufacturers in the 1990s. The telcos decide what phones get sold to consumers. Kin, for example, was killed because no telco wanted it.
Telcos like Android - its free and they can skin it.
Microsoft has been arrogant and toxic to every one of the mobile phone manufactures that partnered with it.
It is ironic that Android, with its free software Linux kernel, is crushing Microsoft worldwide in the most dominating fashion!
If smartphones are true personal computers, then Microsoft is toast.
Microsoft had been going downhill since steve ballmer took the Gate's position. They're loosing their empire that Bill built.
But I have to give it to Bill, he knows how to control and take over. Letting others pirate your software just to let your empire grow is astounishing to me.
Just one question, where is my Microsoft Linux? Give me that and a UI better than Unity (like Gnome 2) and I'll actually pay for it. Subscription. Seriously. I don't even need a "Visual Sudio for Linux", Eclipse works great but hey if you want to put C# apps on Linux I might go back to buying MSDN (for Linux) oh and this deal is only on if you don't take it all away in a year or two. You bet the farm on Linux Microsoft, and I'll bet the rest of my future on Microsoft and Linux.
It's not like Microsoft ever innovated much anyway. DOS was bought from a hobbyist and repackaged as MS-DOS in the early days, Windows was not the first OS with GUI (on the contrary, it was quite late in the game), the Xbox 1 was no more no less than a PC under the hood, DirectX was Microsoft's own library to copy OpenGL, etc... In that sense, what they are doing nowadays reflects their past history of poor innovation.
This level of dismissal could undermine any potential accomplishment.
If you're talking 'innovation' like Marie Curie, then sure. But its willfully disingenuous to say that they weren't -- or aren't -- an innovative company, relative to so many others.
Well Microsoft had "I can do it too" kind of innovation, if you like, but rarely pushed for something very new on the market by themselves. I have rather known Bill Gates and his friends for his "innovative" market practices to crush competition than actual product innovation (having OEMs install Windows by default, and threatening the ones who would not do that to get the next versions of Windows later, and so on).
I reckon that PocketPCs were probably an exception to that point, and there are here and there innovative parts in the company, but it feels more that it's "innovative DESPITE its roots" than anything else.
Windows Mobile still goes strong in the PDA market with retailers and for POS devices. My company makes custom software for WinMo PDAs, and admittedly my opinion is colored by the fact that our software is also a POS (pun intended), but I can't really believe that WinMo once held a dominant market share. Or rather, I can believe it, and can believe that the iPhone had it for lunch.
IMHO certainly bigger than Vista dont know about RRD. Vista was not THAT bad and SP1 fixed most of the issue. W8 is wrong at a fundamental level, its an OS for a tablet scotchtaped onto a desktop OS. What made my mind up is trying to help a woman in the shop the other week who had unknowlingly bought a new PC with Win8 on and was totally confused. I tried to help her and even I was lost... its a mess.
It seems pretty clear that Microsoft's problem isn't with their ability to innovate.
It's in their complete inability to get to market quickly, take risks and work together. And that is directly related to their HR policies in particular their ranking system.
Not sure why you were downvoted. Upvoted even though I don't particularly agree.
Having lived in Seattle for a couple of years, and knowing many Microsoft employees during that time, my outsider's view is that MS's consumer-side failures are largely geographical and cultural.
Redmond, or even Bellevue, is extremely isolated from Seattle, which in and of itself is not exactly deeply intertwined with the cultural centers of the US. Locals know this - Microsoft employees who move from Seattle across the lake to the east side often joke about nobody ever visiting them again (sometimes less-than-jokingly). It's also more or less a company town - Microsoft's presence is so overwhelming and absolute that a lot of the technological zeitgeist from the rest of the country never make it there. If you lived/worked there it's easy to believe Microsoft's ridiculously optimistic PR pieces - pieces that would be hilarious when read in any other environment.
This isn't even an urban/suburban argument (though it has shades of it), it's a "company town vs. diverse city" thing. Microsoft's geographical location gives its people tunnel vision and a grossly false picture of the technology sector.
The second part I've observed is a lack of internal honesty within Microsoft. Failure seems to be couched in safe corporate-speak to the point where it's greatly muted (maybe that's the intent). You cannot expect your work force to pivot and fight hard when they've been falsely told their giant failure was a minor hiccup. I saw this after the WinPhone launch - MS employees were still honestly bullish about its prospects even when the market as a whole had completely rejected it.
If MS wants to be nimble in the consumer space, it needs to set up shop in cities where their competitors play - you will not get an honest impression of how your products (or your competitors' products) are doing otherwise. They also need to have frequent, honest, no-holds-barred accountings of how they are doing. If a product was a flop, call it a flop.
Your observation in many ways can be extended to the Microsoft ecosystem as a whole. Microsoft as a company has always had this weird thing where the materials they release (marketing, documentation) are written in an alternative universe where no non-Microsoft technology exists. I haven't been part of the MS ecosystem for a number of years but I do get the sense this has been changing. But in many ways I don't think it's a deliberate framing, it's likely just as much due to the reality that inside of the Redmond/Bellevue bubble, things like Ruby on Rails, the iPhone, and non-IE browsers are weird, untrusted 3rd party technologies that nobody uses (partly because they think Microsoft products by definition are better, partly because they fear if word gets out they are toying with these things there will be negative consequences.) I remember when C# was originally released the degree to which Microsoft managed to pretend like Java did not exist was just plain bizarre.
I guess one way to look at it is Microsoft is a good counterweight to the argument you should eat your own dogfood. You should, but you should not do so exclusively.
Having worked there for 11 years I also got the impression that company management is inadvertently trying to stay culturally isolated.
For example, when the iPhone came out, the management called AT&T and asked them to exclude the iPhone from the previously negotiated Microsoft Employee Discount program. MS phone is Ok, Blackberry is Ok, iPhone not Ok. The effect was, obviously, even less awareness of the best products out there, especially among the most loyal, and thus most influencing managers. One high-ranked manager told me he can't use an iPhone because he couldn't give money to the company trying to kill MS. Assuming the unlikely that Apple indeed was out to kill MS (rather than the more plausible - to make a good product and a few bucks), that would be a very good reason to get half a dozen iPhones, so that you know well what's going to hit you over the head real soon.
Culture is the least identifiable, least amendable, and yet most influential component of any organization...
I've never worked there. I did work at IBM while MS was beating the hell out of OS/2 and Lotus though. During those years, MS did use phrases like "cut off the air supply" and "embrace, extend and extinguish." "Killing the opposition" seems like it's a very deep part of their corporate ethos, at least that's what a lot of their competition thinks and FWIW, their golder years seemed to be when they were more vocally that way. I'm not sure that's the healthiest approach to take. From there, every thing starts to look like defense, are they making a given play because they have something to contribute and a vision of how search, mobile, gaming, etc.. should be that's different than the market? Or are they making the play because they want to shore up their defenses?
I'm not sure I'll ever fully trust them, maybe if they had a complete outsider running the show.
I graduated from high school in Bothell (just north of Kirkland) and I'm a Microsoft employee, but I've never been based in Redmond before. I find your post is a bit weird, bizarre, and maybe a bit biased.
Yes, suburb Seattle is quite different from urban Seattle, but ALOT more people live in the suburbs. You also have to compare it to San Francisco and San Jose, how many of your friends from the city will visit you once you moved to San Jose? Honestly any?
Seattle is fairly international and non-isolated, its in the same category as the bay area, which is to say: we have a lot of space between us and the next mega-cities (Vancouver or Portland), but that is true of any western city.
As for Redmond, I remember when it was just a bunch of trees with a filming lot for Northern Exposure. It never had much of its own identity, like Kirkland, Bothell, or Lynwood; they are just part of the suburbs. Even Bellevue is a bit souless, they have an urban core but its mostly a shopping mall. Not much difference from any other big city in the states!
Microsoft employees are actually brutally honest. We internally criticize our own stuff all the time, there is not much of a reality distortion field in Redmond or Beijing. But we aren't going to hang our dirty laundry in public, what company would do that?
Finally, Microsoft has many offices around the world, many are deeply involved in core products; Silicon Valley for example. My own office has a 1000 people I think.
> "Yes, suburb Seattle is quite different from urban Seattle, but ALOT more people live in the suburbs."
I was careful to disclaim that this isn't a urban vs. suburban thing (though it is, to a limited extent) - this is a company town vs. business-diverse city thing.
After all, Google and Facebook were both born and headquartered deep within suburbs. The difference is that Mountain View and Palo Alto are swimming in tech companies - even if your social circles were entirely tech people, it's extremely unlikely they all work at the same place.
Compare with Seattle (stronger in Redmond/Bellevue) where practically everyone works for Microsoft (if you're on the east side) or Amazon (if you're on the west). Even for members of the community who don't directly work for MS, the relationship with MS is so overwhelming that it grossly distorts reality inside the bubble.
There's a lack of perspective because just about everyone works for the same company, subject to the same cognitive biases, with no substantial competition base (or hell, just other tech companies) to give you the necessary occasional whack upside the head.
> " but its mostly a shopping mall. Not much difference from any other big city in the states!"
I very, very heavily disagree. The US has many incredibly interesting big cities, even if some of them are deeply flawed from a financial or civic perspective. NYC and SF are no-brainers, but even the much-lampooned suburban gridlock of LA is (arguably) the cultural center of the entire country. New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago, Boston... I don't think I can seriously describe any of those as soulless mostly-shopping-malls.
This is my personal opinion, but IMO Bellevue epitomizes the worst of forced-urbanization. Its soullessness and emptiness is far from the norm in the US, and definitely not the norm for urbanization in the world.
Even if you are in Mountain View, say you have friends in San Jose; how often do you see them? Its really not that different.
I think you have a very poor understanding of the pudget sound area economy. On the west side, you are just as likely to run into someone working for a startup, Starbucks, or Boeing, or UW, than Amazon. Amazon isn't that dominating. Now, in the east side, Microsoft is bigger, but there are still a lot of other companies, eBay, Google (on both east and west sides, and even in freaking Bothell now), a bunch of startups. Its not quite the monoculture you make it out to be!
Now, when we are talking about Bellevue, you compare it to San Jose, not San Francisco, or Fort Worth, not Dallas, or some weird industrial wasteland suburb of New Orleans (of which there are plenty), not the wards or the French Quarter. All of these interesting cities have their souless mostly-shopping mall areas. Looking international, what I've seen the same nearby satallite cities of Tokyo, Paris, Bangkok, Amsterdam, Lausanne, etc...tells me suburban blight is not just an American problem.
Mega-cities on the West Coast? Portland and Vancouver are mega-cities? San Francisco and Seattle are not mega-cities either. It's really funny how things can look so differently depending on where you sit.
Based on comments like yours, and general awareness of MS, I think Microsoft has long ago moved from <choose any category you like> to generic mega corporation. In such a company, an individual's success depends on learning how to operate the corporation, and operate within it.
It's a destination for MBAs and project managers, not a place to innovate.
I'd argue against your statement that the company doesn't:
> take risks and work together
When I was there, I was _constantly_ being told (as a manager in DevDiv) that our next release had to work together with each and every new technology that might almost be ready near our ship time (Windows, SQL, Office, etc.). This added not only a huge amount of schedule risk, but dramatically slowed everything down. When your development team has to wipe their machine and install a new build of Windows every week (literally true during one ~9 month cycle of a product I was on), you lose a lot of time. Especially when those builds each pass basic smoke tests, so they're sufficient for running tests, but do not pass basic usage tests, so you can't, say, install Visual Studio successfully on some of them.
Microsoft is well-practiced at the strategy of lashing together all of the boats before they head off to a battle at sea...
And unfortunately I have little sympathy for people who complain about the ranking system. The numbers of "poor" ratings required were so low even back in more-aggressive days that they served more to prevent managers from copping out on delivering hard messages than unjustly delivering bad review scores. Though, certainly, many leads delivered the, "oh, so sorry, couldn't get you a better score" message. But, that's often part of why they're still leads and not managers.
I believe the point is that while the software HAS to work together, the people (product owners and stakeholders) often don't. The result is that features cost a lot, and innovation costs even more; overall quality is driven by the lowest common denominator, and most products stagnate naturally because of that.
I certainly agree with your point about the goal and the issue in some companies.
However, having seen Microsoft in action from the inside, any collaborations - most of which are _required_ at gunpoint from top-down - result in a horde of program managers shuttling themselves from building to building "owning" the X->Y relationship, one each per group-pair and arrow direction. It's a win-win for them, as those are a quicker path to promotion than trying to build up internal scope or working with the external market (godforbid <grin>).
Frankly, it's really, really expensive and painful for ~2000 developers on three different teams to each be adding a slew of features with one of those teams building on top of and coordinating the other two. Even with huge amounts of communication, tracking, and the best of intents, until the products at the bottom of the chain settle down, you can't make any progress at the top. And when the top is finally making progress, you actually can put developers in front of APIs (in our case) and then you find out that the stuff at the bottom is totally unusable, but it's too late, because they finally stopped churning and want to ship soon.
I don't claim there's an easy answer, but throwing more people or tools at the coordination problem doesn't (I've seen it tried).
None of what you wrote is obvious to me. Partly this is because Microsoft is big enough that I find descriptions that treat Microsoft as a monolithic entity unconvincing. After all, they got Kinect to market quickly. SharePoint seemed to come out of nowhere to dominate its market, too. Thankfully, I've never had to deal with stack ranking, but I find it unlikely that it's the explanation behind Microsoft's various failures.
Microsoft's got a weird dual personality in that regard. There are plenty of smaller units within Microsoft that manage to do really great things. At the same time, oftentimes when the Mothership decides to try and get involved, what ensues frequently looks more like meddling than coordination.
For example, look at how their mobile offering's .NET-based APIs and "WCF lite" GUI toolkit lasted for precisely one generation before someone got the bright idea of yanking it and replacing it with a whole new system based on a gussied-up version of COM. I have a really hard time believing that's an example of coordination. From the outside, it looks a lot more like someone from the Windows division becoming jealous of what folks from the other divisions were accomplishing, and deciding to horn in on that game while simultaneously reasserting the old Win32 technology base at the expense of newer technologies.
It's also a spectacular waste of effort, and left a lot of us developers feeling like we just became collateral damage in an internal power struggle.
Ditto. Azure looks nice enough, but at this point I can't in good faith recommend to my employer that we become any more exposed to opportunities for the carpet to get yanked out from under us by an executive in Redmond who's forgotten to take his Ritalin.
Kinect was acquired and SharePoint is popular but it really did so on the back of existing infrastructure i.e. it was like an upsell.
And I am not saying that stack ranking is responsible for all its failures but I fail to see how it encourages co-operation which is so critical for successful companies.
I partially agree. I think it's a combination of 2 things (the second being more or less the same as what you are saying):
1) Their brand reputation became toxic over time. Windows ME was seen as a bad product. XP prior to service pack 1 was seen as a bad product. Normal people knew what the blue screen of death with. Normal people made jokes about the quality of Windows. Correct or not, their market dominance (seen as insurmountable) contributed to it. By the early 2000s, no one liked Microsoft.
Windows Mobile was just as good as the competition (pre-iPhone). It might not have been dramatically better, but it was just as good. In the 90s that would have been enough for them to swallow up the market completed, but it didn't happen here. People were slow to adopt smartphones in this time period.
2) They are just an old company. As you said, they are slow to get to market. It's the ship you can't turn around. Google is a lot like Microsoft in their ability to form partnerships, but unlike Microsoft is very nimble and able to adapt to the market, has the courage to try something completely new (Chrome OS was laughed at just a few years ago), and has the right amount of cockiness to make it happen (usually).
There can only be one Google/Microsoft in technology. If you accept that, how can Microsoft possibly win?
This. Combined with their failure to realize this. I strongly suspect that Windows Phone would have been more successful if they hadn't given it a name that evokes innumerable products with which everyone has a love-hate relationship at best.
>There can only be one Google/Microsoft in technology.
I don't buy it. A decade ago Google and Microsoft were on different planets. It's totally possible for one company to sell operating systems to everyone and a different company to provide ad-supported services to the same people.
The mistake Microsoft made was to take Google's nominal preference for open standards and open source technologies as a declaration of war. So they started pushing Bing solely for the purpose of pissing in Google's oatmeal and started astroturfing and lobbying against them left and right, and the next thing you know Google is putting more resources behind Google Docs, they release Chrome and take a huge chunk of Internet Explorer's market share, and by the time Google realizes that Apple is poised to take over the expanding mobile device market in ~2006 the chances of them looking to Microsoft to act as a check on Apple's power would have been such a ridiculous suggestion that I doubt they even considered it, so instead we saw Google's full might behind Android which is obviously what did Microsoft in for the mobile space and what may destroy them yet.
Microsoft's mistake was to attack something they couldn't kill, and in so doing they turned what might have been a thorn in their side into a major war. And it's a war they're losing.
Gates has been selling his stock at a steady pace for over a decade. Since Sept '01 he has sold an average of about 78.4 million shares per year.
Using your link you can see that he sells 20 million shares quarterly, with each block of 20M selling within one week. So he did his usual 80 million in the past year.
Since the rate of his selling has neither increased nor decreased significantly in at least 11.5 years, are you sure you can conclude something about his satisfaction level? What about the possibility that he is diversifying and funding his philanthropic goals?
As of today he still owns about 421 million common shares of MSFT, worth $11.8 billion.
You are right. I was not looking at the whole picture. But still, if Bill is putting that money into another growth vehicle, that means that he believes Microsoft isn't going to rise to superstar status again. It's not a place where his money will even retain it's base value. He wants to get it out as soon as possible without crushing the stock. A decade long opinion that Microsoft isn't going to get better with time.
> if Bill is putting that money into another growth vehicle, that means that he believes Microsoft isn't going to rise to superstar status again.
But Gates is not putting his money into another growth vehicle, he's putting it into his philanthropic projects, which he spends most of his time managing.
He has made it clear (with both words and actions) that he wants to use the rest of his life doing the most good with his money that he can. And he has almost entirely redirected his career toward those non-Microsoft goals. If he was interested in making the most money he can, he would be doing totally different things.
Of course, he can't (sensibly) sell his entire stake in MSFT at once. Instead he is selling it slowly but steadily.
Diversifying his wealth makes a great deal of fiscal sense, considering his goals, and the fact that he is no longer running Microsoft.
So, I don't see how you reasonably conclude that his MSFT sales mean he has lost faith in Microsoft.
> It's not a place where his money will even retain it's base value.
The MSFT dividend yield has historically been over 2% and is now over 3%, so it's not like it's doing completely nothing before he can sell it.
So it seems we agree that Gates wants to sell his MSFT as quickly as is reasonably possible, we just don't agree on his motivation. I suspect he will continue doing so until he isn't risking so many eggs in one basket, because he has other goals besides wealth accumulation.
Bill, IIRC, sells to give it to his foundation and his foundation sells to donate. Eric Schmidt is also selling about 50% of his holdings, but after a while it's accepted as estate planning or whatever, not as lacking confidence in the stock.
With there transition to Windows Phone they completely deserted there current user base opting for a more iphonesk ecosystem. That of restriction instead of freedom.
Ironically Android is the true successor to Windows Mobile, and in a position Microsoft can only dream of right now.