Microsoft's Lost Decade 603
theodp writes "Newsweek's Daniel Lyons (that's Fake Steve to you) explains why Steve Ballmer is no Bill Gates, arguing that what most hurt Microsoft was BillG's decision to step down as CEO in January 2000: 'Gates was a software geek. He understood technology. Ballmer is a business guy.' And the problem with putting non-techies in charge of tech companies, concludes Lyons, is that they have blind spots. So while Microsoft's revenues nearly tripled from $23B to $58B on Ballmer's watch, says Lyons, the company became bureaucratic and lumbering, slowing down while the rest of the world — including Google, Apple and Amazon — sped up."
Yeah but (Score:5, Insightful)
It must really suck to be a billionaire and yet realize if you had been smart you coulda been a trillionaire.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Well, at least, according to his wikipedia page:
Spouse(s)
Melinda Gates (1994–present)
Children
Jennifer Katharine Gates (b.1996)
Rory John Gates (b.1999)
Phoebe Adele Gates (b.2002)
He's had sex at least three more times than myself or the average Anonymous Coward. So those billions must have counted for something.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yeah but (Score:4, Funny)
So the conclusion is that because Bill doesn't have guts to do anything even after that, he really is a true geek!
Re:Yeah but (Score:4, Funny)
Always blaming or crediting the CEO (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Always blaming or crediting the CEO (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft has the money to buy the best techs. So it becomes a failure of management if they fail to do so.
So in the case of Microsoft I would say that blaming the management for failure is reasonable.
Re:Always blaming or crediting the CEO (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Always blaming or crediting the CEO (Score:5, Insightful)
As a long time MS employee I can say that what the article says is only partially true. Because Ballmer is no businessman either.
He would rather save a dollar than earn 10. He is so focused on reducing costs that he leaves billions in the table to save millions.
His management style could make sense in a company whose main problem is low margins, but when you have >50% operating margins and your only threats come from your competitors being able to outinnovate you (in many cases, simply through investing more, such as in mobile), then focusing on cost is not only absurd, it is irresponsible. If it wasn't his money as well I would claim he's a crook. Since it is, he's just a jerk.
Doesn't really matter beeing a geek (Score:5, Insightful)
This says a lot more about Steve Balmer's competence than Bill Gate's geekness. A far as I know Steve Jobs is no geek, but apparently Apple's relevance is affected by him being there.
Re:Doesn't really matter beeing a geek (Score:5, Insightful)
This says a lot more about Steve Balmer's competence than Bill Gate's geekness. A far as I know Steve Jobs is no geek, but apparently Apple's relevance is affected by him being there.
Jobs is not a geek per se but he talks our language, that's how he got involved with Woz. That and he has an uncanny insight into technology and how it can be used and popularized even when he lacks the technical skill to develop it himself. He's not a salesman (bullshit artist) like Balmer, but someone who can genuinely see how cool a technology is and then transfer that enthusiasm to other people.
Re:Doesn't really matter beeing a geek (Score:5, Insightful)
Jobs is basically that guy who may not be very artistically inclined himself, but has absolutely uncanny taste and runs a gallery in SOHO that turns unknowns full of potential into superstars of the art world.
Only instead of starving artists, it's technologies.
Re:Doesn't really matter beeing a geek (Score:5, Insightful)
By "artistically inclined" you mean he's a slick talking con artist right?
No, I believe they mean that Jobs has taste and considerable insight; even if he is not technically inclined himself, he recognises talent and good work. Perhaps you don't understand what that means, but equating artistic taste with 'slick talking con artist' as a joke simply demonstrates your ignorance.
Marketing or tricks are not at the heart of Apple's success - they sell because the products are of good quality, holistically designed, and have a good UI. They have other faults, and are not a good choice for everyone, but to dismiss Jobs as a con-man is to completely misunderstand the reasons people buy Apple products.
Re:Doesn't really matter beeing a geek (Score:5, Insightful)
Uncanny insight? Lisa? NeXT? Let's not try to rewrite history here...
The Lisa was the competitor (internally at Apple) to Jobs' baby, the Macintosh. I think we all know which one won that battle.
Wikipedia has the following [wikipedia.org] to say on NeXT's impact : "Despite NeXT's limited commercial success, the company had a profound impact on the computer industry. Object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces became more common after the 1988 release of the NeXTcube and NeXTSTEP, when other companies started to emulate NeXT's object-oriented system."
There's a reason why the first browser was written on a NeXT cube you know. Berners-Lee says [w3.org] : "I wrote the program using a NeXT computer. This had the advantage that there were some great tools available -it was a great computing environment in general. In fact, I could do in a couple of months what would take more like a year on other platforms, because on the NeXT, a lot of it was done for me already. There was an application builder to make all the menus as quickly as you could dream them up. there were all the software parts to make a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get - in other words direct manipulation of text on screen as on the printed - or browsed page) word processor. I just had to add hypertext, (by subclassing the Text object)"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Jobs is not a geek per se but he talks our language, that's how he got involved with Woz.
And by "got involved" you mean befriended, used and stabbed in the back?
I didn't get that impression when I read iWoz (Woz' autobiography.) He says Jobs was his best friend and was hurt when he later found out Jobs (allegedly) didn't fairly split their first earnings but there didn't seem to be bad blood between them. In fact it sounded rather Peter Pan-esque, as if Woz was an idealistic big kid and he stayed true to his hippy ideals while Jobs went off into the grown up world and they grew apart. On his website he does say he cried tears of joy [woz.org] when Jobs returned to Apple :
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
A far as I know Steve Jobs is no geek
But it's so cute when he tries.
I remember back in 2003 when Xcode 1.0 came out and Steve was on stage showing "Fix and Run" (where you could have the program running, change some code, recompile and dynamically link that code into the running binary). All he had to do was change a few lines of code in the demo and hit the "Fix & Run" button, but you could see his cheat sheets and he, very carefully, was typing in exactly what was on the sheet and no idea what he was doing.
Of course, he was joking that
Re:Doesn't really matter beeing a geek (Score:5, Interesting)
That's what makes a good manager/boss: Someone who listens to the experts that he hired because they are better at something than he is.
One could say: A perfect boss is someone, who can perfectly combine and channel all the competence of his employees into one point. Like a network switch. Allowing them do work with each other at top efficiency. A switch is only a relatively simple device. But essential for any network to function.
One could say, bad bosses are not only just network hubs. They also corrupt the packets on the way, and lead them everywhere but where they belong. Making the results useless for all clients of the company.
Re:Doesn't really matter beeing a geek (Score:4, Insightful)
A good boss knows that he doesn't know it better than people he hired exactly because they know better. Else he would not have hired them.
A bad boss doesn't know that.
Re:Doesn't really matter beeing a geek (Score:4, Funny)
One could say, bad bosses are not only just network hubs. They also corrupt the packets on the way, and lead them everywhere but where they belong. Making the results useless for all clients of the company.
They don't just corrupt packets, they overload the circuits and blow up the network gear.
Fake Steve Start Your Copier (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice piece, but he probably got the idea from James Kwak [slashdot.org] via Gruber [daringfireball.net].
"Technology firms also face a similar problem. In technology, as in most businesses, the way to make it to the top is through sales, so you end up with a situation where the CEO is a sales guy who has no understanding of technology and, for example, thinks that you can cut the development time of a project in half by adding twice as many people. I have seen this have catastrophic results. Even when you don’t have the generational issue that Trillin talks about, the problem is that the sociology of corporations leads to a certain kind of CEO, and as corporations become increasingly dependent on complex technology or complex business processes (for example, the kind of data-driven marketing that consumer packaged companies do), you end up with CEOs who don’t understand the key aspects of the companies they are managing."
The Worlds Lost Decade (Score:5, Interesting)
How far back has the software industry been set back by Microsoft?
How much further along would server side be if Microsoft had truly worked with the Java community instead of going it's own way with .Net?
How much better would cellphones be if Microsoft had not bought, and slowly strangled, Danger?
How much further along would so many areas be if Microsoft had not bought up so many experts and stuffed them in an R&D group with almost no real world output, instead of having them work on practical technologies that made it to market?
Would the HD video market have been as fragmented as it was without Microsoft pushing HD-DVD long past the point it was obviously dead just so they would get licensing revenue from the menu system?
If Microsoft the company has lost a decade, it is Karma - for the world and our industry has lost so much more at their hands.
Re:The Worlds Lost Decade (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you really think that Microsoft is responsible for those viruses? Virus makers target Microsoft products because they have the widest user base and the greatest number of users who aren't computer savy (and are therefore more likely to fall for the tricks).
To be sure - a lot of the current issues are squarely on the shoulders of end users; the dancing pigs problem. But that doesn't completely absolve the platform. There are times when people do dangerous things that simply shouldn't be dangerous. Often these come down to poor decisions on Microsoft's part. Couple that with a history of ignoring security issues and Microsoft's history is full of issues that, yes, I would put squarely on Microsoft's shoulders.
It's difficult to see that now. If your perspec
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
``How far back has the software industry been set back by Microsoft?''
Funny, I was just thinking about these things the other day. I had this idea that, for all the anger directed at Microsoft, they don't seem to actually have made things worse than they were; at worst, they have prevented things from being as good as they could have been. I mean, what is there that we could do before Microsoft, and can't do now?
Now that you have brought up some points, you have made me thing about it again, and I realize t
Wow, how deluded can you get? (Score:5, Insightful)
First, since when has MS EVER promoted standards?
They didn't write the basic compiler, it was copied and badly copied at that.
And then there is the real joke that shows you have no clue whatsoever about computer history. It was Compaq that created the IBM-clone. MS had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Next time you read up on history, don't do it at microsoft.com.
Re:The Worlds Lost Decade (Score:5, Insightful)
You realize in most independent benchmarks, Java is quite a bit faster than .NET and has been proven in really huge enterprise apps. .NET hasn't been proven, just ask the London Stock Exchange.
I think you need to get the facts, my friend.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
To say .NET is unproven is an outright lie, and we both know trying to pin the LSE's failed IT upgrade on .NET is bullshit as well.
Re:The Worlds Lost Decade (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
.Net is just a language and some tools. Where the problem lies is that many .Net developers have no history or grounding in designing or working on high availability systems. Afterall, they are used to having their workstaions reboot for patches and updates, 8)
Re:The Worlds Lost Decade (Score:4, Interesting)
I personally run/have run many huge enterprise apps on .NET. It's actually a pretty good platform if you know what you're doing.
Don't take my word for it, though.
When I googled for what you asked to google, I found this list of sites running ASP.NET.
Costco - http://www.costco.com/ [costco.com]
Crate & Barrel - http://www.crateandbarrel.com/ [crateandbarrel.com]
Home Shopping Network - http://www.hsn.com/ [hsn.com]
Buy.com - http://www.buy.com/ [buy.com]
Dell - http://www.dell.com/ [dell.com]
Nasdaq - http://www.nasdaq.com/ [nasdaq.com]
Virgin - http://www.virgin.com/ [virgin.com]
7-Eleven - http://www.7-eleven.com/ [7-eleven.com]
Carnival Cruise Lines - http://www.carnival.com/ [carnival.com]
L'Oreal - http://www.loreal.com/ [loreal.com]
The White House - http://www.whitehouse.gov/ [whitehouse.gov]
Remax - http://www.remax.com/ [remax.com]
Monster Jobs - http://www.monster.com/ [monster.com]
USA Today - http://www.usatoday.com/ [usatoday.com]
ComputerJobs.com - http://computerjobs.com/ [computerjobs.com]
Match.com - http://www.match.com/ [match.com]
National Health Services (UK) - http://www.nhs.uk/ [www.nhs.uk]
CarrerBuilder.com - http://www.careerbuilder.com/ [careerbuilder.com]
Newegg http://newegg.com/ [newegg.com]
Geico http://geico.com/ [geico.com]
Capital One http://capitalone.com/ [capitalone.com]
Zecco http://zecco.com/ [zecco.com]
Maybe you should tell those sites that .NET is a unproven technology? Or will you try to argue that these are not huge enterprise apps? Just because you want something to be true(or maybe you were just karma whoring) doesn't make it true. C# is a better language than Java, though each one has it's strengths. And even conceding your point(I don't) that Java is faster, speed is not everything. Or we would all be coding in assembly or machine code.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The White House - http://www.whitehouse.gov/ [whitehouse.gov]
Oh, did you perhaps mean http://www.whitehouse.gov/index.php [whitehouse.gov]?
http://www.whitehouse.gov/index.asp [whitehouse.gov] and http://www.whitehouse.gov/index.aspx [whitehouse.gov] both return '404 Page Not Found'.
Interesting .Net app, that one. :)
Tip: There's this tech news aggregator site called "Slashdot". Makes it really easy to keep up with stuff like this [slashdot.org]. You should try reading it sometime.
Revised history (Score:5, Insightful)
Regardless of how it got there, having a mass market platform to develop against surely made many projects feasible that would otherwise have cost too much for niche markets.
UNIX was handling that just fine before Microsoft came along. You also forget there were other perfectly viable user platforms until that point, like Amiga or the Mac, or for that matter even OS/2. Any benefit gained was lost in the terrible issues we have resulting from a security monoculture.
Java is a tragic missed opportunity.
Given the number of jobs and active server side development going on, and the fact that Android is based atop it, and the fact that until now mobile programming such as it was was J2ME, and the fact that Java is in the Blu-Ray menuing system... I'm almost afraid to see what an un-missed opportunity looks like (apologies to Strunk & White for the numerous "fact that").
Buying up experts and stuffing them into R&D is always hit and miss. Generally you'll take a lot of misses to get the one big hit though. It takes time and even with the recession Microsoft is still spending over 9 billion on R&D this year..
The ultimate Ivory Tower, that doubles as a dungeon - despite all that money spent they have very little usable output to point to compared to Google or Apple or just about any other company that does R&D. It's more a place to try and keep smart people AWAY from other companies than it is a productive force.
I can honestly say that I don't think anyone cared much that Microsoft was backing HD-DVD.
It's not about you or I caring. It was all about Microsoft financially backing the format, and the companies that would have leapt from the sinking ship staying about because Microsoft was still there. It's a shame they didn't do further study on the fates of other Microsoft partners or many billions might have been saved (not that I shed any tears for the movie studios)...
The Best of Both is better (Score:3, Insightful)
Competition within the framework of a standard is better. Competition around competing resources is inherently wasteful.
To use the beloved Slashdot car analogy, would the competition among automakers be as good if everyone needed different roads or kinds of gas?
What I am saying with this is not anything a
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They tried that. It's called getting sued by Sun for trying to actually exploit features on your operating system.
If by "tried" you mean "implement features not in the standard and claim to be implementing the standard" then yes, they tried.
In reality they should have gone through the JCP, which was and is the Java standards body. Many companies besides Sun were definining extensions to the Java language and VM using that process just fine, which results in the Java you see today. Microsoft had a standing
Can a good manager manage anything? (Score:5, Interesting)
I certainly find the viewpoint of the article very appealing - essentially that just being a manager isn't enough to enable you to manage anything you want. That you need to understand what your company does at a highly intimate level to really run it well. Who wants to be pushed around by people whose only qualification is to manage others? What about the real folks at the coalface who know what the business is really like?
Question is - is it true? Certainly appeals to me. But has anyone done a study into this? It'd be interesting to see. Although really, the backgrounds of the CEOs and the records of their companies are out there for all to see. MS under Bill Gates, Apple under Steve Jobs - these certainly look like convincing individual cases. What would happen if you analysed the whole computing industry? What about other industries?
I would suggest that to a certain extent a really good manager could manage anything they choose - because a truly good manager will make sure he understands what he's getting into. But even then, everyone has different aptitudes for different things, so there's no way to guarantee that they'd be as skilled in any given job. You can probably adapt to that, as long as you're aware of it and don't assume that your previous experience will carry you. For CEOs, there's perhaps a requirement to be a good general businessman - maybe those skills do transfer well. But I think understanding the business ought to be pretty darn important if you want to run the company *well* as opposed to just keeping it ticking over. I don't think there should be any excuse for appointing a CEO who doesn't, can't or won't understand the business adequately. But hey, I'm not on any company boards nor am I a shareholder in anything *shrug*
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well, I'd bet a really good manager probably *could*, because part of being a good manager is knowing your limitations. And the skills needed to get the most out of people working for you are valuable and transferrable.
The thing is, there are lots of *lucky* managers out there who think they're skilled.
Think of the science museum display with the thousands of balls and pegs that gradually builds a normal distribution as the balls drop. That ball in the far right bin isn't really any smarter than the ones i
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Pure" managers are good - if they understand that they know zilch about what the company actually does and leave that to the people who do. Unfortunately, most CEO types don't have the character for that (hard to fight your way to the top when you're conscious of your shortcomings). Balmer certainly isn't one of the guys who knows what not to do himself. If nothing else convinces you of that, consider that he could've hired an actor/dancer for the monkey dance.
In the end, if you can delegate and trust peop
Classic case (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft is a classic case of what you get when the problem is dictating the solution.
Not just Microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
Tripled (Score:3, Insightful)
What a good manager can never manage.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The one thing a good manager cannot manage is creativity; they've either got it or they don't. In MS's case they never had it unless you count buying up the ideas others had come up with (DOS, SQL, Excel, Word, and on and on). This problem is compounded when, at some point, HR steps in with focus on credentials instead of competence and further strangles any new ideas. Go ahead, tell your HR department to hire more creative people and watch them demand more credentials from every applicant.
Google has managed to attract the best and brightest because they've promoted a sense of excitement and stressed competence. But at some point HR at Google will get the upper hand too. Art History majors always prevail.
Not just Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, there was a bit of an economic lift in the middle of the decade -- the housing boom triggered by Greenspan's one-percent interest rates. So, some software development work went into the mortgage industry. That's as useful, as exciting, and as enduring as granite countertops (which were just a waystation between Corian and compressed quartz). Then the Great Recession hit in 2007 -- back to no innovation at all (as least outside of cleared work).
What do we have to show for it on the desktop? Window bars that are blurry and hard to read. Faaaan-tastic.
Where the heck is end-user database/web development? It's like Microsoft Access and Lotus Notes are living time capsules of their 1995 versions. Where is a unified naming system that treats e-mail messages, files, web URLs, and database records homogeneously? Where are agents? Why do I have to manually save every check images from my online banking? Why aren't these automatically downloaded to my computer by a software agent?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not true; the dot-com stock crash around April 2000 triggered it, and it came before 9/11/2001. Maybe 9/11 worsened it, it's hard to say, but it clearly started before that.
And many companies grew relatively quickly despite economic interruptions, including Google and Apple.
The problem is not just Ballmer (Score:5, Interesting)
The original article is too timid.
The problem is not just Ballmer. The problem is that Microsoft wasn't broken up. Ballmer is the symptom.
After the antitrust ruling was emasculated, Bill Gates should have said "OK, we won. Now we're going to break Microsoft up anyway. That's the only way to prevent us from turning into exactly what we despised when we founded the company: IBM."
They have many smart people working there but they are all Thralls, in service to the continued maintenance of the Windows Empire, whose first commandment is Thou Shalt Not Think Different.
Re:The problem is not just Ballmer (Score:4, Interesting)
Having worked at Microsoft for several years up until very recently I have to say I agree with this.
Microsoft is getting too big and is starting to develop the endemic characteristics of all corporations that grow too large. Bureaucracy is growing. Innovation and individual initiative are dying. Honesty is dying. Agility is dying.
Microsoft is not, yet, populated by Thralls, there are still some amazing, even truly innovative things coming out of Microsoft and they are, to this day, still making good, positive changes toward improving the health of the company (embracing open source, for example). But all of these good things are the byproducts of the sorts of individuals, groups, and processes that will eventually be choked off by Microsoft's increasingly stultifying business culture.
Microsoft would be much better off if it were split into multiple smaller companies. Many parts of Microsoft would be stand-alone profitable (operating systems, office, xbox, developer tools, etc.) For many parts of Microsoft that are unprofitable the cost of having to pay the Microsoft strategy tax is far worse than would being forced to sink or swim in the wild. Indeed, many parts of Microsoft would be far better off if they were forced to prove their viability of their product in the market sooner rather than later.
In the end the only good raison d'etre of the continued existence of a monolithic Microsoft is the vanity of top executives to retain a giant empire.
And if you think only Microsoft has this problem, just wait. Google is headed in the same direction (at an incredibly fast pace), and Apple is arguably already an evil company (though with excellent leadership).
"that's Fake Steve to you" (Score:5, Informative)
Not Just Fake Steve (Score:5, Informative)
"Newsweek's Daniel Lyons (that's Fake Steve to you)
Or more likely to be recognized here as Forbes Magazine's massive and unrepentant SCO shill.
(Unrepentant in that his excuse for his ridiculously one-sided reporting was the flaming he got on the topic in the first place).
I disagree, it's about open standards (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to disagree that it's about a tech-oriented CEO. MS's problem is that they are good at leveraging dominance of one market to conquer another. They are bundlers and package-oriented wheeler-dealers. However, the internet relies on open standards to function, and MS simply hasn't found out how to work smoothly among open-standards. Their instinct is and has always been to to kill them off via manipulation, and their reputation surrounding standards has hampered them. They simply came to the end of the leveraging-of-proprietary rope. This would have happened with or without Gates.
They would have to almost completely change company personality to get out of their rut, much like IBM did when they decided that services, not hardware, were going to be their thing. But IBM had to have it's face shoved into the boiling calderon of death before it realized it had to start over. MS is still a ways from that point.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
the internet relies on open standards to function
Oh I'm so tired of this tired old mantra. If everyone relied so much on standards, why do all the major browsers support .innerHTML, which is not part of W3C ?
Because Microsoft did it first (right or wrong, it works, and is a lot cleaner than all that messing with DOM nodes), and the competition had to make a choice between :-
1) Aceepting that standards are out-of-date before they are ever finalised (because anything decided by a committee of 1000's is doomed
Re:I disagree, it's about open standards (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok...name one fully proprietary standard or protocol that is absolutely critical to, in the broad sense, the functioning of the internet at large... I'm waiting.
Hmm, let's see ... how's Flash for one ? For sure in terms of video streaming, it's been adopted worldwide and will never change even when HTML5 is widely supported ... too many corporates have invested too much time and money in Flash to convert everything to an open source format just for some OSS ethic that gives them zero added benefit. There, no waiting required.
Ajax is DOM based, lots of sites use Ajax. Including /. That tells me DOM isn't the widely spurned standard you portray
Not the *entire* DOM model, I didn't say that now did I ? I was referring to the insertNode, appendNode, deleteNode methods that allow manipulation of a node within the tree and can all be avoide by use of .innerHTML. And while we're on the subject of AJAX ...
In 1996, Internet Explorer introduced the IFrame element to HTML, which also enables this (asynchronous loading of content) to be achieved.
In 1999, Microsoft created the XMLHTTP ActiveX control in Internet Explorer 5, which is now supported by Mozilla, Safari and other browsers as the native XMLHttpRequest object.
On April 5, 2006 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first draft specification for the object in an attempt to create an official web standard.
Maybe you get my point about "standards", trying to quantify (first draft only) some technique that has already been available and working fine FOR 7 BLOODY YEARS ! (10 if you count iframe as an older mtheod of achieving the same thing).
As to the rest of your post, having obviously run out of coherent things to say, you resort to a spelling Nazi attack on "Aceepting" ?
It's called a typo, ffs. As there seems to be nothing in the W3C spec (yet) regarding the mandatory use of an inbuilt spell-checker before posting a comment to Slashdot, I'll carry on posting my thoughts as is, typos be damned.
Really, if that is the best you can do, then there's nothing more to say.
All you need to know (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft mission statement under Bill Gates:
"A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software".
Translation: we want world domination!
Microsoft mission statement under Steve Ballmer:
"Help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential."
Translation: none: no meaningful information conveyed; incomprehensible marketspeak.
Everything else is just following from that, really.
WTF? MS has been a dinosaur since the 80s (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft was a dinosaur since the 1980s.
They only thing they were good at was getting in bed with the OEMs, and marketing.
For a technology company they've always been behind and their implementations have always been shit.
"Lost Decade" - Not (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's revenues nearly tripled from $23B to $58B on Ballmer's watch.
And this was a "lost decade?"
General Motors had a lost decade. Microsoft did not.
It's obvioius (Score:5, Insightful)
Gates: Buys out your company if he perceives you as a threat. Your employees might be screwed but you're set for life.
Ballmer: Throws chairs out the window and shouts death threats "I'M GOING TO F$^@ING KILL YOU"
-
Gates: Works with developers in a cooperative fashion, making feature suggestions and helping architect back ends
Ballmer: has for years been trying to turn Microsoft into a cult, much like multi-level-marketing companies, what with his stomping around like an orangatan while chanting "developers developers developers" although he couldn't code his way through a batch file
-
Gates: is actually somewhat friendly and down to earth even though he's cutthroat in business
Ballmer: Douchebag to the core
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
He developed an early version of BASIC.
There is little to suggest Gates knows technology. (Score:5, Interesting)
"... the problem with putting non-techies in charge of tech companies, concludes Lyons, is that they have blind spots."
The problem with managers who have little knowledge or interest in technology is that they are mostly blind to technology. The mentally blind cannot lead.
If you read the books about Bill Gates [about.com] and Microsoft, there is little evidence that he was much interested in technology. Remember, he initially didn't think the internet would be important. Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire [amazon.com] is interesting, for example. So is Barbarians Led by Bill Gates [amazon.com].
Read The Road Ahead [wikipedia.org] by Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold. There was little in the initial edition, at least, to suggest that Gates knew much about technology. The book was full of platitudes that any buzzword collector would know.
Re:There is little to suggest Gates knows technolo (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh come on how do you write a 4k BASIC interpreter and editor in assembly and not "know technology"?
I don't care how buggy Altair BASIC was, Bill Gates knew what he was doing back then.
Re:There is little to suggest Gates knows technolo (Score:5, Funny)
Hey! Stop interfering with the revisionist history! Next you will complain about the Gates Borg Icon and the Broken Windows icon for stories.
Re:There is little to suggest Gates knows technolo (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually Gates knew the 1960's and 1970's technology. His mother paid for time on a mainframe for him and his school mates for the first computer club in his school. Bill Gates learned FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Assembly, etc.
Microsoft BASIC for the Altair was a group project, but rumor has it they got the Dartmouth BASIC source code from dumpster diving, but nobody can prove that. Anyway Ballmer and Gates wrote traffic control programs in assembly prior to founding Microsoft.
Bill Gates learned from his father who was a lawyer that the best way to make money is to pay people to invent new technology for you, or buy out your competition if your employees cannot do it. Like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates is a manager with a little about a technical background, but more into marketing, sales, and hype (or propaganda), as well as public relations. Steve Wozniac was the real power behind the early Apple, and Paul Allen and others where the real power behind the early Microsoft (later on Tim Patternson as well).
I wouldn't say that Gates is not knowing how technology works, but his knowledge comes from the 1960's and 1970's technology, and then management of 1980's to above as he directed others to create the technology even if he didn't write the code himself. Gates gave the vision, and the design, and the ideas and other things to drive others to create Windows, and other projects. Yes Microsoft did indeed copy off competitors and bundled technology in an effort to drive competitors out of business. While Lotus had the Lotus Symphony as the first bundled software, eventually Microsoft bundled Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and even Access as Microsoft Office for Windows and eventually wiped out Lotus (IBM bought the corpse of Lotus) and weakened Wordperfect, and drove Aston Tate out of the DBase database business with Access and SQL Server.
Microsoft always has had a BASIC product, from MS BASIC to GW-BASIC, to Quick BASIC, to Visual BASIC, to Visual BASIC.Net, the BASIC keeps on going and upgraded to new operating systems and frameworks, now with the Dotnet Framework built into Windows Vista and Windows 7. The Dotnet Framework put a lot of Visual BASIC component makers out of business as Dotnet did what a lot of third party components for Visual BASIC did before it was developed.
It takes at least a basic understanding of technology to pull all of that off. Baller is the typical Pointy Haired Boss, but Bill Gates was like the Wally of Dilbert at least, and expert on ancient technology but knows how to drive his team to get results.
Re:There is little to suggest Gates knows technolo (Score:5, Insightful)
If understanding means seeing a deep set of relationships and being able to prioritise them, more than just having a lot of information, I'd have to give the nod to Bill for this one example:
When Bill gates was building his home, with the 10 car garage, and the library that displays DaVinci's codex, and all those other neat features, Martha Stewart actually got a look at some of it, and commented that Bill was running all the home networking through seriously hardened wiring channels that made it very hard to reroute as his needs changed. She mentioned how the guy ought to have heard about wireless networking by then.
Skip forward a few years, and Martha Stewart has been busted in a case where e-mail evidence was a major factor. Bill Gates, however, has not, and there's no sign that he had corporate espionage problems with his home set up either. I'd submit that Bill thought about it a bit, and decided that at least some of his competitors, maybe the DoJ or SEC, and maybe some foreign governments would think paying literally millions to crack his communications might still be cost effective, and wireless wasn't up to that sort of pressure.
Is Gates a technology lover? Probably not much of one. His admiration for a sweet hack may be low or nil. But understanding doesn't always imply admiration or love.
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The fact that Gates only knew 1960's and 1970's tech doesn't change the poster's point. What languages does Ballmer code in?
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if that was true, he understood what other geeks needed. Plain business men probably aren't going to understand that.
And if you're ever read some book by Bill Gates, you'd notice he does have quite (interesting, I might add) ideas. Not just with OS and such, but with technology general and how to combine it with everyday life.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Informative)
Also like how Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] tells on his early life,
One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.[15]
At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs in FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language.
Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students.
That gotta give some hacker and geekiness points ;)
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also like how Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] tells on his early life,
One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.[15]
At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs in FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language.
Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students.
That gotta give some hacker and geekiness points ;)
So Bill Gates studied the source code and benefitted from having done so? I wonder if he appreciates that he'd have been unable to do this if everyone operated the way Microsoft does.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think instead he appreciated the NDA he had to sign to gain access to the source(*), which coincidentally is how Microsoft operates. Except their recent open source offerings, but we can't mention those here, they're obviously a trap or something.
(*) Yes, this is pure speculation, much like the parent.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder if he appreciates that he'd have been unable to do this if everyone operated the way Microsoft does.
I think you misread. A company essentially contracted him to come in and fix bugs. Are you telling me that MS wouldn't let you see their code if they contracted with you to come in and fix bugs?
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I wonder if he appreciates that he'd have been unable to do this if everyone operated the way Microsoft does.
I think you misread. A company essentially contracted him to come in and fix bugs. Are you telling me that MS wouldn't let you see their code if they contracted with you to come in and fix bugs?
I read that quite clearly, thanks. I also read that prior to that arrangement, he and three other Lakeside students were banned for exploiting bugs in the OS. Presumably, his skill at doing so is what caused them to contract him. While he could have done this without source code, it certainly would have made that task easier. Furthermore, another Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] states that the users of the PDP-10 both shared and reused source code, so it's not unreasonable to think that Gates had access to it:
Over
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Windows also has open-source components. The one that pops to mind is the BSD IP stack used up through XP.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:4, Informative)
He is also the one who gave us the "freetard" expression to describe users of open source software.
Keep such things in mind when you read his stuff. It appears that his motive is not to inform but instead to influence.
IMHO he's lying scum as likely to be correct by fluke as a stopped clock.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I don't suppose you've ever heard of BASIC before, have you? You know, the language that was on the computer in your own fucking username? The most popular implementation of it even today remains Microsoft Basic, which was initally developed by...wait for it...Paul Allen and _Bill Gates_. Did you know that? No, of course you didn't. If you were literate you'd be able to do a simple search and find out just how wrong you were.
Try doing a bit of reading, it might help. Or hey, go ahead and keep spewing out ig
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't suppose you've ever heard of BASIC before, have you? You know, the language that was on the computer in your own fucking username? The most popular implementation of it even today remains Microsoft Basic, which was initally developed by...wait for it...Paul Allen and _Bill Gates_./p>
Even better, he developed the C64 basic since Commodore licensed it from MS [wikipedia.org].
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't suppose you've ever heard of BASIC before, have you? You know, the language that was on the computer in your own fucking username? The most popular implementation of it even today remains Microsoft Basic, which was initally developed by...wait for it...Paul Allen and _Bill Gates_./p>
Even better, he developed the C64 basic since Commodore licensed it from MS [wikipedia.org].
Well, MS did develop Amiga Basic and I thank them for that.
Amiga Basic was so horrible that made me give up programming in Basic and switch to Pascal, then C.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:4, Interesting)
Reading the disassembly and critique of Commodore BASIC by gurus like Jim Butterfield and Rae West reveals Gates to be quite a hacker. A hacker's hacker if you will.
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Gates was a pretty good hacker back in the day. Even though I'm sure he hasn't flexed those particular geek muscles in a long time I don't much doubt that he knows technology about as well as anybody in the business.
What worries me is the direction he has always pushed software in. If those old ALTAIRs had the guts to do DRM you can bet his BASIC would have been locked down tighter than the iPhone.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists [wikipedia.org]
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Gates was a big fish in a small pond back in the day. Try reading the code of that BASIC interpreter. BG can't hold a candle to Woz or Chuck Moore or Dennis Ritchie.
How many people of that era CAN hold a candle to them?
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Interesting)
So he's not a geek, he just wrote a compiler in machine code on an 8080 interpreter Allen had written for the PDP-10 targetting the kit-form hobbyist computer credited for starting the personal computer revolution.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:4, Funny)
Now that he has resigned from Microsoft, there is no need to fight. He should get a /. account too, then we can all bash M$ together.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like you're guilty of the same thing. He doesn't do anything overtly technological anymore, merely spending his days doing philanthropy with his billions of dollars, and that means he's not a geek. Never mind that you have no idea what he does in his spare, private time. Never mind his geeky, green house. Never mind his previous efforts.
If he's not publicly geeky, according to you, there's no shade of gray, and he must not be a geek.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when? As far as I know, he never developed anything, instead relying on others to do the work and then leveraging that work towards profitability (example: DOS).
No kidding. He made the comment during the antitrust trial that "technological miracles cross my desk every day." Well, assuming that's true (and it ought to be, given the money the company spends on Microsoft Research) my only question was: well, then, well the hell are they?! Google, Apple and others are making those things happen: Microsoft just releases yet another version of Windows and Office every few years and calls that "innovation."
Plus which, it doesn't help that Ballmer is a flaming sociopath who should be on medication not running a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus which, it doesn't help that Ballmer is a flaming sociopath who should be on medication not running a multi-billion dollar corporation.
I always thought that was required from *all* CEO's of multi-billion dollar corporations.
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I think "miracle" is a bit strong, but I certainly felt that my first iPod was the coolest electronic thing that I'd ever owned... at the time everything else had either too little storage or was too bulky, and the firewire meant that you didn't have to wait for hours while it loaded up. Even later once Toshiba managed to release one about the same size, they f'd up the DRM so badly that the USB2 connection behaved like a USB1.1 connection on the hardware of the day.
I don't have one myself, but the iPhone r
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Oh, just "ui tweaks," huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Soooo really what you're saying is Apple takes stuff other people have already released/made, makes ui tweaks, then makes it "cool"
The attitude that mere "ui tweaks" aren't innovative or important is the reason why the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will forever be a joke.
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Re:Bill Gates is a geek? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, Bill Gates did write code. As a matter of fact, Andy Hertzfeld (who was part of a little startup called Apple Computer) has a story about some code Bill Gates wrote [folklore.org].
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Not like Apple innovates. There were other MP3 players on the market when the ipod came along. and it was a niche Mac fanboy product until Apple released a Windows version of ITunes. Blackberries had music capability before the iphone. in fact Apple worked with Motorola on the disaster known as the ROKR before the iphone came out.
Apple has a good marketing department that has a plan before they enter a new business and changes it if things go badly like they did with the iphone at first. Microsoft still rel
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A company makes $1.2 BILLION a month in net profit, and it's a failure with a lost decade?
Putting short-term profit over long term has been a standard policy for failing companies driven by short-sighted management.
Sure, Microsoft make a lot of money now, but over the last decade they've gone from being one of the most important companies in IT to 'so what?'. How many people really care about anything Microsoft does anymore? Does anyone get excited about a new version of Windows? Or a new version of anything that Microsoft produce?
So Microsoft may be making plenty of money today, but what will t
Re:Apple got lucky (Score:5, Informative)
The current CEO of Palm is the inventor of the ipod, not Steve Jobs. While at Apple Steve Jobs sent him out to find a hot product to make and he found the 1.8" hard drive at Toshiba that was considered a waste of resources and about to be killed. He made the ipod around it. iTunes came from a company Apple bought and they just renamed the software.
I'm confused. Are they lucky because they hired good people or because they made smart acquisitions ? They completely redid the GUI for iTunes by the way, Soundjam looked entirely different and they develop it in a a novel way by making it into an interface for their store.
iTunes took off because Microsoft couldn't get their DRM strategy right and iTunes worked out a good deal with the record companies. the Ipod was one brand from a company everyone knew.
True, but again that they were able to get right what MS couldn't just proves they were smart not lucky.
the iphone was a sales disaster until they cut the price and added the subsidies from AT&T. even then it was a slow niche seller until the 3G came out with the AppStore and Exchange support.
This one is just blatantly false. The iPhone hit all Apple's announced targets, 1 million sold in the first 80 days, 10 million sold by 2008 [macworld.com] ("Apple hits 10 million iPhone target two months early".)
Re:Apple got lucky (Score:5, Insightful)
Um... wow. That doesn't fit my recollection at all.
No (sane) person claimed Jobs invented the iPod. Jobs didn't invent the Macintosh either. He directed the final product to what it was, but he didn't start the process saying "this is exactly what we're building".
iTunes took off because of the iPod. The iTunes Music Store and DRM didn't come until years after the iPod had been out. MS screwed up with FairPlay, but they didn't have the market share to compete with the iPod at that point, so I'm sure it would have succeeded even if they hadn't scrapped it to make the Zune.
The iPhone wasn't a sales disaster. People lined up for the thing. People loved the thing. It was never going to capture 100% of the market at $500/$600, but for what it had, it wasn't a horrible price. High end smart phones often cost $300 or $400. The iPhone just didn't have the subsidy.
But it sold.
But Apple didn't keep it there, they dropped the price pretty quickly. The price probably helped keep the shortage from being worse. Either way, people were certainly willing to pay the premium, so economics says it wasn't a disaster. I don't know where you got "slow niche seller". It sold very well, and it's niche was "high end smart phone". It sold better when the 3G came out, but by then it had a year of people raving about how nice it was. If I was one of the other phone makers, I would have started shaking when Apple started selling the 3G at $99 this year. If Sprint/Verizon customers weren't locked out of getting the iPhone, do you really think they'd have sold so many of their "iPhone killer" phones in the last 2 years? I doubt it.
Is it really surprising Apple wants you to buy an Apple product to develop for the Apple platform? MS used to make you do the same thing.
Actually, at this point in your rant you seem to have switched from "Jobs got lucky over and OVER and OVER again" to "insert random Apple complaint here."
Then at the end, you go close to fanboy mode. You switch from Apple is evil and doesn't know what it's doing and is only succeeding because everyone else is screwing up to "Apple makes very good stuff, you should buy it".
Let's just pretend that Apple did get lucky over and over and over again. Lots of companies get lucky over and over and over again. Very few repeatedly capitalize on it, especially as well as Apple.
Either Apple knows what they are doing, or they know how to take advantage of everyone else not knowing what they are doing.
The first iMac could have been luck. People in the industry said it was, that it was Apple's last breath. They've managed to hold that breath for a long time now.
Apple isn't just lucky.
Re:Apple got lucky (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is a company that takes existing technology and integrates it into products that more people can afford. Apple did this with a graphic based OS. They did not create it, but they did figure out how to package it so that many people could afford it and see a reason to buy it. Not everyone could afford it, as it still required high end hardware like a dedicated GPU, but more people could. Importantly, like higher end computers, one was not sold a just a machine, but a system that would do something. Lower end machines cut prices by not including full functionality. The iPod and the iPhone is the same thing. Sure there better machines out there, but myu iPod mini was the price and had 10X the storage of the music player I had bought just two years before. And it could hold my addresses and dates to boot.
MS, OTOH, has been the company that has taken long existing technology and repackages it, usually in an extreme proprietary format, for commodity sales. Their products have support a wide variety of hardware because they do not sell any compelling hardware. They hold an important positions because allow a structure where people can buy the absolute cheapest pieces of hardware to meet their computing needs. This often is a benefit as people often consider their time to be worth nothing. In addition, MS supplies very good tools when you need many hundreds of people to have the same machines to do simple tasks, such as IBM did with the typewriter.
The software MS provides is very good, and there it suites many people needs, but they made two mistakes, neither of which is BillG fault. First, they did not provide a compelling reason for people to remain loyal to the Office products. The big reason to upgrade is collaboration, but collaboration is not a huge market. Mostly I see people writing memos in MS Word, and I don't think collaboration helps that much. There are other authoring tasks that people do need. For instance, I do not know why office does not include an real image editing program. This is what people want. GIMP is free, so why can't MS put a GIMP like program in there. I think it is the same reason you can't get into some MS web sites with cookies turned off. One takes what MS gives, or just go away.
The second reason is that they got too cocky. MS is very good at taking existing technologies and making them available to the masses. The only issue I have with them is they do in such a way to break everyone elses product. IMHO the problems started when MS decided MS Vista was going to the OS that took MS into the big leagues. Rather than supplying an OS to the masses, a OS that did what people needed at a cost that allowed very large deployments, MS got uppity and decided that the knock off business was not good enough. Nothing demonstrated this lack of business competence than the decision to create WinFS, which ultimately lead to the demonstration of technical incompetence. Now one had done a RDFS in a commercial product, so it had to be done from scratch, something that MS is not so good at. This distracted them from doing things they were good at, and ultimately lead to a OS that did not work with the hardware. Since MS OS is expected to work with hardware, and is not judged on it's own merits, people pretty much were dissatisfied and MS had to make a Herculean effort to get a new OS out in two years.
If anything, I would say Ballmer was a very good business person, as he has saved the company from what could have been a fatal decision made by his predecessor in 2003. If can get people to buy MS Windows 7, in spite of the mess that has been made of the company from 2004-2009, he should enjoy a good reputation.
Re:Bill Gates was not replaced only by Ballmer (Score:5, Insightful)
You only need to read the part about how Bill Gates supposedly realized the threat of the Internet early on to answer that question. I think that most people who are familiar with that history believe the opposite—that in fact the rapid growth of the Internet caught Microsoft flat footed. When Windows 95 came out, Microsoft believed that closed online services were the future and integrated its MSN service into Win95 because of it. It was only the ability to leverage the power of its Windows monopoly which allowed MS to "strangle" Netscape. I put the word strangle in quotes because in fact Netscape did survive long enough to open-source its code, which eventually led to the birth of Firefox, and sue Microsoft.
If anything, it was the anti-trust suits in the US and Europe that really "broke" Microsoft at least in the sense that they forced it to become more bureaucratic and more sluggish in terms of its ability to adjust to sudden shifts in the market. Did this allow companies like Google and Apple to surpass MS in terms of industry influence if not in terms of profits? Maybe.
The problem with these theories is that they are always too simple. Microsoft is and was a huge, influential company. But even when they were unquestionably dominant, Bill Gates acknowledged that some young start up that no one had ever heard of back them might take their place as an industry leader and it looks like that's what happened with Google quietly assuming Microsoft's role as the 800 pound gorilla of computing simply because they were a younger, more innovative company run by younger, more innovative people. But that doesn't make for good copy; stories about the cult of the CEO and which head honcho is better do and that's why you see stories like this one.
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Plus the fact that Netscape fucked up and turned their browser into that bloated, bug-ridden net suite called Communicator.
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