Microsoft Needs a Catch-Up Artist 406
The New York Times says that what Microsoft needs now isn't just a CEO, but a catch-up artist, to regain the footing that it had a few years ago as the biggest name in software. There's a lot of catching up, too: An anonymous reader reminds us that a year ago, Vanity Fair gave a scathing review of Steve Ballmer's performance:"Once upon a time, Microsoft dominated the tech industry; indeed, it was the wealthiest corporation in the world. But since 2000, as Apple, Google, and Facebook whizzed by, it has fallen flat in every arena it entered: e-books, music, search, social networking, etc., etc. Talking to former and current Microsoft executives, Kurt Eichenwald finds the fingers pointing at C.E.O. Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates's successor, as the man who led them astray."
Why catch-up? (Score:2, Insightful)
(Ketchup?!)
No, microsoft doesn't need to catch up because it isn't behind. They have everything, what it doesn't have is something that is different, innovativ and without spyware.
Catch-up because (Score:4, Insightful)
(Ketchup?!)
No, microsoft doesn't need to catch up because it isn't behind. They have everything, what it doesn't have is something that is different, innovativ and without spyware.
Microsoft in the suddenly relevant, consumer, mobile, socially linked, always connected, future now...behind in market share, mindshare, technology both hardware and software with a poisonous brand, a stench of repeated failure, leaving its OEM Slaves and hostages as expendable casualties...even though they suddenly have to compete.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Catch-up because (Score:5, Insightful)
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Mycroft
Re:Catch-up because (Score:5, Interesting)
Boom headshot.
Yes, there's plenty people with plenty great ideas, and then they get tangled in politics and realize it's impossible.
We have a saying around here (roughly translated): On your way to god, the saints will eat you alive.
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Oh come now. Ballmer is so bad even a monkey or a vacant chair would do a better job as CEO.
What's wrong with MS, and what to do about it isn't that hard to see, and hairyfeet touches on a good bit of it. Change the corporate culture, starting with elimination of stack ranking. Don't dictate to the users by taking away the start button "for their own good". Ditto with the arrogant insult to our intelligence they try to call Windows Genuine "Advantage". And then there was that whole OOXML fiasco. It
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what makes you think Andy Rubin wants to work for MS?
fallacy.
Re:Catch-up because (Score:5, Insightful)
what makes you think Andy Rubin wants to work for MS?
Money.
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what makes you think Andy Rubin wants to work for MS?
Money.
Funny that this concise and most likely accurate post got down voted.
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For OS/2 applications.
Licensing, Lack of Options, Screwing business also (Score:5, Interesting)
A few key points MS needs to digest:
1) They completely neutered their Small Business Server selection, and now to get anything remotely comparable you're looking at a cost-per-core set up. I recently ran into this setting up a medical practice. In the past I had used SBS with the premium add-on to get access to SQL Server Standard for certain software packages. Of course, I can still get licenses for it, but if their business model is moving in that direction, I'm moving away from using their product. I'm finding that certain flavors of Ubuntu are much more suited to what my clients need, and at a price you can't beat. (Zentyal for those that are curious).
2) Get rid of the MS/Windows Tax. Force OEMs to hand out CoAs so that their customers can re-install the OS if need be, rather than using restore media. It's complete BS that customers of big PC manufacturers can't re-install the same (albeit blank) OS that came on a PC they just bought, rather we're forced to go through an uninstall bloat/crap-ware from PC's individually. I don't care what agreements are in place already, shoving this crap down our throat won't help business.
3) Stop screwing IT businesses all over. This is more of a general comment, but killing Technet is a good example of things you really shouldn't do.
Re:Licensing, Lack of Options, Screwing business a (Score:5, Informative)
the small business model is to push them to azure, not to have on premise servers. big money expense and big operational maintenance expense
Re:Licensing, Lack of Options, Screwing business a (Score:5, Interesting)
Which boils down to...they need a product focused person. Someone like Marissa Mayer. A seriously good read no matter how you feel about her turnaround methodology at Yahoo:
http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-biography-2013-8 [businessinsider.com]
It's hard to imagine they'll find a single person to undo the last 13 years of stagnation at MSFT but it could happen. I suspect Yahoo will be the turnaround case study in B-school five years from now. Not Microsoft.
Re:Licensing, Lack of Options, Screwing business a (Score:4, Funny)
Mayer’s lateness [, as much as 45 minutes,] was a pain, sure. But by the early fall of 2012, Mayer’s staff had grown used to it. In fact, they were actually glad when she’d show up late to a meeting, because that meant at least she hadn’t blown it off entirely.
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3) Stop screwing IT businesses all over.
Right, that's gonna happen...
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Back in that late 80's I was installing a vertical market application, networking among about 8 machines. The application was Unix native, but had recently been ported to MS Windows. Though Unix was our first choice, the cost was multiples of the MS Windows installation, maybe 5-10X as much when all costs were factored in, so the Uni
The article missed one main thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft never produced anything for the user. If there were any benefits, it was a by product. Microsoft tried to please the producers.
Apple did it the other way round. Apple made things for the end users. True, they had very specific ideas of what the end users can and cannot do, but ultimately, the UI, the way to do things, the way things are done, are all planned and implemented with the end user in mind.
6 weeks before the original iphone launched, Jobs said - no plastic screen, use gorilla glass - why? Because your keys in your pocket would scratch the screen. How many other executives would stop production to do that?
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It's a strategy that works really well when companies know what they want. It works less well when companies aren't sure. That's where Apple excels, they were able to see that people would use a tablet, where business people couldn't give you a cost/profit breakdown on their likelihood of
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Microsoft is a B2B company, not a B2C company. They have a huge team that goes out to businesses and researches what they want and need.
So how did they end up with a tablet interface on desktop PCs? Which businesses 'wanted and needed' that?
Apple kisses babies (Score:2)
Microsoft tried to please the producers.Apple did it the other way round. Apple made things for the end users
Ironically Apple recently found guilty of forming a cartel with publishing companies forcing up the price of books to its customers...and everyone else.
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You might actually want to read up on the facts of the case. Or, actually reading the lawsuit, and Apple's response to it.
Apple lost :) (Score:2)
You might actually want to read up on the facts of the case. Or, actually reading the lawsuit, and Apple's response to it.
Lol I did, July 10, 2013, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York decision found that Apple conspired to fix the prices of e-books in the United States. They were so obviously guilty. It was even published in Jobs book. ebook prices went up...Apple was found guilty.
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Re:The article missed one main thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, no, not even close. Turns out that not being able to change absolutely every little setting to their personal preference is not a deal-breaker for the vast majority of people.
The reason why Android does so well because it comes on cheap phones that the vast majority of the world (the bits not contained in North America/Europe) can afford to buy. If Apple sold a $99-$199 phone with cheap plastic screens, cheap plastic cases, and cheap components, the rest of the world and poorer parts of North America and Europe would actually have a choice on their hands about what to buy.
Android's NA/EU sales primarily come from high-end devices that compete directly with Apple's devices while not being Apple. The reason MS wasn't able to copy that success with the same strategy is that they had an unproven device that, by the numbers, wasn't as good as the high-end offerings that were already in their later iterations, with an OS that was still suffering from first-gen problems.
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Microsoft has been developing Windows CE since 1996. Windows Phone is hardly a first-gen product. I've seen Windows CE-powered smart phones around for a LONG time (and everybody hated them). Microsoft has ZERO excuse for being run over by iPhone and Android.
Re:The article missed one main thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Show me a three year old PC that holds the same percent value that a three year old Mac does, or a three year old smartphone versus an iPhone.
Re:The article missed one main thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks like someone never tried an iOS upgrade on an older iDevice...
Older than what? Apple has industry leading backwards compatibility on their mobile devices. Hell, plenty of android devices are effectively end-of-life six months after they come out. The latest iOS build is backwards compatible back to the 3GS, which launched just over 4 years ago. Try to find ANY 4 year old android that supports Jelly Bean.
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I believe the point was that old iPhone users regularly complain that they upgraded to the latest and greatest operating system and now their phone feels like a 386 running XP.
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Interesting point of view taking into account all the planned obsolescence in apple products.
Planned obsolescence? Apple products last for ever. I still get productive work done on a Powermac built in 2001.
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The thing about Jobs which made him an anti-Ballmer was Jobs was involved with each product. And his word was final. Ballmer seemed to defer many of the decisions to someone else and not step in when MS was about to make a mistake. For example, Vista was originally not supposed to run on certain Intel chipsets (the 915 I think) because the video chip couldn't handle Aero. That meant millions of Intel boards that were not Vista compatible. Someone underling (and no one will fess up) reversed course and
dump the money losers (Score:4, Interesting)
dump bing and the rest of the money losing businesses that have no hope of turning a profit in the next decade
get the research people to concentrate on stuff that improves current products or present some kind of business plan for any project that is in research
wait for the next tech change cycle. these come every 10 years or so. we had the mainframe to PC cycle in the 80's. the rise of servers in the 90's. the internet in the 90's. and the last one was the rise of mobile. MS lost the current cycle but there is another one coming soon. smart watches and other similar tech is out there and people are buying it. what is missing is the one product that will take the most popular wished for features and put them together in a simple and easy to use device
Throw money at the problem. (Score:2)
dump bing and the rest of the money losing businesses that have no hope of turning a profit
I think one of the problems Microsoft had was its focus on profits. The reality is its current products revolve around its increasingly unimportant Monopoly...much as you personally might benefit from focussing on them, and that is not healthy.
Re: dump the money losers (Score:3)
They need to get Windows right first (Score:5, Insightful)
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I reckon the XBox is relatively isolated from the Windows aura, as it's almost a brand in its own right (you never hear the term "Microsoft XBox").
Don't worry, Microsoft is working hard to give the Xbox a bad reputation, too.
Unreliable hardware; forced advertisements; you can't use IE or Netflix on Xbox without paying the Xbox Gold Live tax; not to mention all their missteps with Xbone (despite their frantic backpedaling).
The reputation of the Xbox is slowly but surely moving in the same direction that Vista and Windows 8 took.
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Didn't he just keep up the status quo? (Score:5, Insightful)
There seems to be a lot of looking at Bill Gates with rose coloured glasses.
As far as I've been able to tell, Microsoft is still trying to do the same thing as it's always done since it's inception. Wait for others to define a market, then try to buy or muscle your way into it with a "good enough" product.
Just now with Microsoft's OS monopoly not being an effective control mechanism, and the barrier of entry for other companies not being too high, "good enough" doesn't convince anybody anymore.
From reading the article the main difference between Bill and Steve on recent issues was that Bill resigned to the fact that they were already too late on things like music players and phones and he wouldn't have even tried getting in.
Microsoft couldn't be turned around easily, it's too much of a change to its ethos. Could a better CEO really have got them into other markets propely, or would a better CEO just doubled down on OS/Office/Business Services and saved a bit of money but had no other impact? Maybe Balmer-Microsoft needed to try and flail around in every market as a first step in a (long) transition period where Microsoft comes out the other side as a company with a bit more humility, creativity and modern vision.
Interested to hear opinions.
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There seems to be a lot of looking at Bill Gates with rose coloured glasses.
As far as I've been able to tell, Microsoft is still trying to do the same thing as it's always done since it's inception. Wait for others to define a market, then try to buy or muscle your way into it with a "good enough" product.
Then perhaps they should poach somebody from Samsung?
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Bill Gates was paranoid as fuck. The whole reason they had Windows CE and Windows Mobile was "to prevent someone doing to us what we did to IBM."
If Gates was running the company, they would have started cloning the iPhone the day after Apple announced it. Instead Fat Ballmer dismissed the whole idea and sat around doing nothing for 2 years. He also did the exact same thing with Google and internet advertising, costing MSFT multi-billions.
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Re:Didn't he just keep up the status quo? (Score:5, Interesting)
By creating boat loads of dumb software writers that churned out code for XP that depended upon insecure networking interfaces they have done little more than create a huge resentment in the industry. It is still the case today that most large firms have to run large amounts of legacy activeX code on their intranet in "XP" mode that requires routines that would hose them if they were exposed to the internet.
XP was a great system for locking in customers and the huge problem it created was the fact that getting out of the trap of relying upon insecure software it created is too expensive for a large number of companies. Banks and many institutions still run XP terminals for this very reason, their internal software routines are all based upon core code that is not at all suited for a secure OS like Windows 7 that actually has sensible limited user privilege settings.
Microsoft screwed up their big hit operating system XP's UAC so badly that a culture of writing core routines without consideration of UAC became the norm. Then when things screwed up the IT guys and gals had to run out and sell the bosses on add on security controls from someone other than Microsoft. This is why the snake oil sales of security software exploded in the first place.
Vista tried to fix this problem but focused on Palladium [wikipedia.org]. Windows 7 got multi-user privilege going properly to a certain extent but still relies upon .net code that can and does leave holes in because those who code for it are largely ignorant of how to secure things. Secure Computing or Palladium does not at all address these problems and the move to so called "trusted computing" has backfired on Microsoft. Most savvy IT managers know this and tell their bosses that moving past XP will not actually gain any real security benefits because of legacy activeX and .net code. The lack of sensible security methods in the first place within the windows networking code base has created a whale floundering on the beach.
Microsoft's core business is ripe for the picking and I would not at all be surprised if we do not see some company or group of companies gang up and beat them up. A joint venture between hardware and software companies could do it. Who knows just maybe IBM will get it's revenge by releasing a killer db, office suite, server combo that can run old XP code sand boxed faster than a windows server. LOL
Just maybe Ballmer's legacy will be the complete ruin of the once stellar bunch of corporate software raiders that Microsoft was. Problem is they have run out of ideas and truly innovative companies to usurp. We are currently at a technology bubble interface. The only advances will be things like HP's low power Moonshot servers. Unless something really shocking like Microsoft merging with Intel and actually starting to produce real physical product they are really in trouble this time around.
There will be huge mergers soon in the tech industry, one that might shock everybody might be IBM an HP. Or the complete purchase of Dell by Microsoft, or as stated a merger between Microsoft and Intel. INTERESTING TIMES AHEAD and there will be blood on the floor of the stock exchange to be certain.
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Microsoft was one of the earliest forces in PDAs, smartphones, and tablets. They had very early projects to develop the technology, they knew it was coming, but no amount of a lead could get their foot in the door. Their offerings were just such committee-designed crap that nobody wanted it. Micros
Artist my ass (Score:3)
So what they're saying is (Score:5, Interesting)
MS should hire Elon Musk as CEO?
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Microsoft has always focused on development tools (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting out of this mess (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft spent millions every year researching things like user interfaces.
They threw it all away in a short-sighted quest to shove their way into the revenue stream of walled markets.
I think a return to basics - provide value to their best customers (Corporate IT) - through improving productivity and offering stable development environments to encourage those customers to invest in a Microsoft ecosystem.
At this very moment, the only thing tying corporations to the "Microsoft Ecosystem" are Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and pretty much everything pre-2012. Admins don't need "Modern UI" interfaces on their server boxes. Developers don't need monochrome toolbar buttons and screaming menus. Desktop users don't need to gestures to do their daily work. All of those mis-steps has IT departments across the country realizing that while they do not WANT to put the effort into leaving that ecosystem, Microsoft has left them with no choice - So now the decision is to move to something slightly less familiar (Linux and OSX), or move to something WILDLY unfamiliar (Windows 8, Server 2012, etc...) - which makes more sense? so It departments are no longer beholden to Microsoft, thanks to Microsoft's own stupid decisions.
Get back to what worked. Mobile and Desktop are separate markets, which is why Apple didn't paste the iOS UI onto OSX, and why Android isn't a desktop operating system. Stop trying so hard for convergence in the UI when we aren't even close, technologically, to making that happen. Stop forcing your customers to face painful training budgets and re-writing legacy apps just to fit into your executive's superfluous decisions to bully them into the Metro UI with the idea that it would somehow magically sell millions of mobile devices with "Windows 8" (more like "Tiles 1"). That effort failed spectacularly, by any measure, so step back, lick your wounds, and give the customers what they want, instead of shoving what YOU want down their throats.
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The mac pro is about $1000+ over priced and has been that way for some time with old video cards.
Since the Mac Pro doesn't have a price yet, this is a rather bold statement. As for old video cards, it's a workstation. It uses dual workstation class FirePro GPUs. It doesn't use Radeons or GeForce cards, those cards are wimpy consumer ones.
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What Microsoft really needs... (Score:2, Interesting)
is a person who can tell everyone else to get lost; and release all MS software on a truly FOSS license model. Not the shared source license model, nor the Microsoft Permissive License model.
If RedHat can make a billion dollars on Free Sotware that is used less than Windows; Microsoft can exponentially increase the use of their software with a FOSS compliant license that puts the onus of innovation on the developers and producers; rather than on itself. The community is thousands of times more powerful than
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Catch up artist? (Score:5, Interesting)
" The New York Times says that what Microsoft needs now isn't just a CEO, but a catch-up artist, "
No, they've been doing that for the entire history of the company, coming in late to every successful idea long after the competition does. They used to be able to "cut off the oxygen" of their competitors, but they can't do that anymore. Not since they tried to do it to Google and failed utterly.
--
BMO - Unfortunately, Ballmer is leaving before he's finishing the job of killing the company.
Fresh thinking (Score:4, Insightful)
I know it's just my opinion, but given their deep pockets, they should create an incubator unit or a completely separate start-up with huge funding for a re-acquisition later on (similar to what Cisco is doing with Insieme). The purpose of this group should be to go back to their roots, and re-think the way people and companies are expected to interact with computers in the next 10-20 years timeframe, and create a brand new OS with no legacy code, and anticipating the challenges and threats that will evolve overtime as much as possible.
I've always wondered why airplanes and MRI machines can have "mission critical" OSs and software while we all have to deal with crashes and uncertainty. They have the capability to create and bring to market a practical, usable EAL-7 [wikipedia.org] OS. We know it has been done before [nicta.com.au], but Microsoft has the capability to make it commercially viable for everyone. And this is only ONE of the things they could do.
Microsoft and the catch-up artist .. (Score:2)
Without the WinTEL monopoly and the onerous lock-in contracts with the OEMs, Microsoft is just another tech company
Ballmer is just a scapegoat (Score:5, Insightful)
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Customer loyalty is something you earn.
Care to tell us any one action of MS that should make me consider that they might probably have a chance of coming close to deserving it?
The worst thing is, they had some half good ideas. (Score:2)
MS had some great ideas, but absolutely screwed it up in terms of execution. I occasionally still use a PocketPC from the turn of the millenium and it is genuinely well designed. One example is the design spec for the PPC put a scroll wheel on one side, which means you can hold it in one hand, clicking through pages on Microsoft Reader with the wheel.
If the PocketPC PDAs had used a finger touch screen while at the same time been marketed as a gaming and media player, rather than as purely a business tool I
.02 from someone who hasn't been a C, E, or O (Score:2)
As sacrilege as it sounds...just give up on Windows. It's over. Nobody cares. The base OS is a commodity at this point, and most good programmers prefer a Unix style environment. Lots of command-line tools, powerful shell scripts, and a world of open source tools.
In my opinion, where Microsoft is still heads-and-shoulders above the competition is in their middle-ware layers. Office is good. Office is really really good. When you really need to use a solid word processor or spreadsheet, the various, s
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The problem is in their business strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
And that it doesn't work anymore.
Their creed was "embrace - extend - extinguish". It worked like a charm with open source technologies and technologies developed by small companies. They noticed something caught on, they hopped on the train, claimed it, blew a shitload of money into it, "added" to it so it was no longer compatible with the original stuff, turned their broken design into the de-facto standard by virtue of their market position and finally everyone was "inferior" because they were "incompatible".
And that doesn't work with companies like Apple and Google who themselves play that game, and they really excel at it. AND on top of that, they needn't wait for someone to come up with a new technology people actually want: They can create it themselves, because they also know something about design.
And marketing, of course, but marketing has never been the weak spot of MS. But here's the other reason why they are falling behind more and more: Design. And their lack of it. When "the masses" started to join the IT world, design suddenly became important. While we might not care about rounded corners and whether our boxes blend nicely into our living room, the average Joe out there does. Yes, their crap doesn't have any better specs than MS' stuff does, but it LOOKS better and it WORKS easier.
And MS may be much, but designers, they are not. Neither designers of nifty looking gadgets nor designers of intuitive interfaces.
Not Fallen Flat with Everthing (Score:2)
buy up some 3rd party software and add it to 8 (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.stardock.com/products/modernmix/ [stardock.com]
http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/ [stardock.com]
can save windows 8
What if Ballmer and Gates had not been such dicks? (Score:4, Interesting)
Purely as an exercise in alternate reality, it is interesting to wonder how the computing landscape would have been different, most certainly superior to state of affairs now, if Ballmer and Gates had not been such conniving, backstabbing dicks.
The company would almost certainly be an order of magnitude wealthier, more respected and better positioned in the marketplace, if those two guys hadn't felt it necessary to throw the company's weight around by executing the many well known monopolistic and consumer-unfriendly practices that they are so well known for.
If anything, the strategic failure of Microsoft as a company to set itself against so many others in the industry, is missing from the debate about the good and bad aspects of Steve Ballmer's legacy.
Microsoft was consumed with a truly psychotic fantasy of Netscape (a fucking web browser company) rising and dominating the computing landscape. That is just one example where the mendacity-wrought Ballmer and Gates, helped in no way the financial bottom line of MS by just being dicks, almost just because they couldn't help it.
It is fairly easy to posit that a good amount of the effort behind the rise of Linux was simply due to a common reaction against the back alley tactics deployed by Microsoft. And if Linux is not as developed as it was in 2008, does Google have something upon which to build Android? Something which can be released and developed under the GNU license? And that is just one potential hypothetical.
Re:What if Ballmer and Gates had not been such dic (Score:4, Insightful)
or, Gates & Ballmer understood that web apps could destroy the need for a Windows operating system. which, in many cases, it finally has. GMail vs. Outlook, Google Docs vs. MS Office, Spotify vs. iTunes, Salesforce vs. a zillion proprietary non-web-based products... the examples are too many to mention.
No, Let Them Die (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows 7 is quite good, and that's the problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft's big problem is simply that Windows 7 is quite good. Business desktops use it, they work fine, they crash rarely, and they get the job done. Microsoft conquered the driver quality problem by forcing drivers to pass the Static Driver Verifier, a proof of correctness system which looks at source code to see if it can buffer-overflow, make improper calls, or otherwise crash the kernel. That took care of about half of crashes. The other half, from Microsoft's own code, were handled by a system which classifies core dumps by commonality, so they can collect core dumps with the same cause, then find and fix the problem. So Microsoft conquered the big problem that business cares about - Making It Work.
Businesses see no need to "upgrade". Certainly not to Windows 8. Or Office N+1. It won't help the business.
Microsoft struggles with being "cool". Apple does well with "cool", but nobody else does. It's not clear it will help in the post-Jobs era. (Olivetti once made beautiful office machines. It didn't help them. Most major museums of modern art have some Olivetti products, but few offices did.)
What really made the iPod work was deals with the music industry. Something that many people miss is why Jobs was able to pull that off. Jobs was also CEO of Pixar, and thus, as a major film studio head, at the top of the Hollywood hierarchy. So he was able to deal with the music industry from a position of superiority. That's what made iTunes. (The hierarchy in Hollywood is very real, and very rigid. Ask anybody in the industry.) That's what re-launched Apple. The Mac was below 10% market share, and was stuck there for years, even after Jobs took over again.
There's room for a breakthrough in user interfaces. The rectangular grid of single-purpose icons is lame. We can be sure that breakthrough will not come from the open source community.
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Good call. Nobody ever says Android is cool (in the way that Apple products are), but they're still at 70% of their market. So 'coolness' isn't it.
kudos to Vanity Fair (Score:3)
I read that article yesterday. It's an extremely well done article. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually say what the summary claims.
When the millionaire mint ran dry, the problems began:
Empowered by a dysfunctional incentive culture instigated by His Billness, though some defend it.
The Case for Stack Ranking of Employees [forbes.com]
What a complete idiot. He presumes that such a metric must exist, and completely misses the boat on absolute rather than relative performance norms. As soon as the norms become relative, you're tying your sneakers to outrun your team mate. If that's not political, I don't know what is. There are people who might not be star performers by any specific metric, but who enhance the productivity of any team they join. Guess what other company adopted stack ranking? Enron.
I believe I once read an essay by Drucker where he said if the person who was worth hiring in the first place is underperforming, most likely that person's boss has failed to put that person into the right context.
And software is the worst of all industries to institute such metrics. Any crank an employee can turn at 1000 rpm is better off scripted. The surest route to efficiency is repetition (the athletic model from he cherry picks his favourite aspects). Human repetition is bad repetition, yet metrics never catch up to non-repetitive cultures.
The obvious choice is (Score:3, Funny)
Stephen Elop. No doubt. Their platform is burning!
But how did he manage to survive? (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree that it's going to be dead boring for a while until the writers get Balmer's retirement out of their systems.
But there is one little point I'd like someone to try to explain --- how come that he was never kicked out? The tea lady would have done a better job for the company. And yet, he wasn't thrown out on his ass for complete and total inability to stop the downward spiral, despite it being obvious within 18 months.
How the hell did he manage to avoid the fate so richly deserved?
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Gates left because he won. He dropped out of college and turned his hobby into the largest pile of privately acquired wealth on Earth. He was the Alpha Geek. Game over.
He could sit there atop his treasure like Smaug and wait for a hero to come, or he could parley it into a new game - and that is what he is on about now. His "Giving Pledge [wikipedia.org]" had rounded up commitments of well over $125 Billion for charity by August 2010, making him also the most successful philanthropist in all of human history - the Alp
Re:But how did he manage to survive? (Score:4)
Re:Hugging and Stretching (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, Ballmer was the symptom, not the problem.
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yes. exactly. microsoft has always been shit. nothing they ever did was ever the most secure, the most cost effective,
the more usable, the highest performance, the most attractive.
they never excelled at anything, but somehow managed to become the defacto standard for computing, and
distorted generations of young minds.
so now that the market has finally lurched forward and no one wants to buy that useless crap anymore
we are supposed to cry?
they could take all that money and do a thousand interesting things, b
Re:Hugging and Stretching (Score:5, Interesting)
Bullshit. They excelled in maintaining backwards compatibility with BINARY legacy applications coded with all kinds of brutal behaviours under the hood. Often almost beyond the bounds of reason. This was one of the big reasons Apple had so much trouble clawing itself back into the game. MS worked very hard never to give visionary CIOs a good pretext to clean house of horror show legacy applications.
Embrace, extend, and eternalise.
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The Future is Now (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft needs to learn to lead and stay ahead of the trends..
That is already well and good...you should put a one in from of it and a Profit??? somewhere. The point is the future is already here consumer portable electronics , tablets smartphones Smart TV and watches, and Internet Giants in Retail; Search and Social...and Microsoft has failed or doesn't have a product in those market places.
Re:The Future is Now (Score:5, Interesting)
From a business point of view, Microsoft's hope is Asia. The OECD is fully saturated with Microsoft product, but there's huge growth potential in Asia. (Growth potential, mind. MS will have to work very hard to realise that potential.)
Microsoft needs a CEO who understands China, and a 2IC who knows the rest of East and South Asia. Someone(s) less important can mind the shop in the OECD. Who in Microsoft could take on the big roles?
*crickets chirping...*
Ballmer's biggest failure, one that has gotten very few pixels, is succession planning. It's the core, number one duty of a CEO: to grow his staff to the point where they can run the business. Ballmer sucked at it.
Re:The Future is Now (Score:5, Insightful)
Insecure dictators have a history of making sure there's no-one available to replace them, as part of their strategy to avoid being replaced.
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He drove away half a dozen of his obvious replacements.
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> From a business point of view, Microsoft's hope is Asia. The OECD is fully saturated with Microsoft product, but there's huge growth potential in Asia. (Growth potential, mind. MS will have to work very hard to realise that potential.)
The problem is Asia doesn't fit Microsoft's business model. They're already used to relatively cheap devices running free (as in beer) software. Microsoft would be going head-to-head with free OS and free office suites and other applications. What price do you think Mi
Re:Lead, don't follow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Since I graduated from college in 1986, Microsoft has been a place where great minds go to die. They were the hottest employer, and it sickens me to see how little Microsoft has allowed their amazing talent to produce. They had, and continue to have, essentially a monopoly on the desktop OS market. They don't need innovation to remain on top, and could even be damaged by it, so it's no wonder that they wouldn't let their great minds produce much of consequence. If Windows Me didn't convince you that Microsoft is anti-innovation, certainly Windows Vista and Windows 8 should make it clear.
That said, I have no problem with companies being the best company in their field. Microsoft's market is shrinking, and it's not their fault. They remain the dominant PC OS, even with crappy Windows 8. Few would argue with my claim that Sun Microsystems was the best workstation vendor ever, but when cheap x86 CPUs began to have enough power for most users, Sun's market went away.
Most people think it's stupidity for companies to remain the best in their market while their market shrinks, but I don't feel that way. There's always another company ready to take over a new market, and a company without the PC OS baggage is going to do a lot better. That's the way it should be.
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Since I graduated from college in 1986, Microsoft has been a place where great minds go to die. They were the hottest employer, and it sickens me to see how little Microsoft has allowed their amazing talent to produce.
That's so true... except in one business: Xbox. It seems that's the only area of the company right now where they are really letting people innovate. Of course, we'll see how that works out for the XBOne - not all innovations turn out to be *good* ideas... but at least they have in fact listened to their customers and reversed their decisions on several unpopular features, as embarrassing as that was for them...
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Has Xbox turned net positive yet? I know it's finally making money, but has it reached ROI point yet?
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Has Xbox turned net positive yet? I know it's finally making money, but has it reached ROI point yet?
Not as far as I'm aware.
And the 'innovation' would mostly appear to be locking in users and spying on them.
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Many people here forget that Innovations aren't always successful. MS has put quite a few innovations on the market:
MS Bob
The stupid paper clip
That table on which you can move windows around with your hands
MS Outlook
Kinect
WP 7
Windows 8
I would say only two of them were successful: Outlook and the Kinect.
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Microsoft research was always an exercise is keeping the best new people out of the hands of the competition. Other than that it didn't really do anything.
Re:Lead, don't follow. (Score:5, Insightful)
They're continuing to rely on old technology that's past it's time - like Office.
Please tell us what new technology replaces a spreadsheet program, a word processor, a presentation tool, and a personal/workgroup relational database.
Re: Lead, don't follow. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Overlooked successes of MS in last 13 years (Score:4, Interesting)
How are any of them 'successes'?
Xbox has still lost money over its lifetime.
Office? People would happily be using whatever version of Office Microsoft churned out, there was no demand to switch to a new version.
Windows 7? If Microsoft were still pumping out upgraded versions of Windows XP, they'd be selling more than they are of Windows 8.
Microsoft should have called Windows and Office done years ago, and moved most of the developers off to new products. Then they might still be relevant.
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Microsoft should have called Windows and Office done years ago
Which would have made life much easier for the WINE and OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice developers.
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