Is Microsoft Being Weighed Down By the Ghosts of Its Past? (medium.com) 206
"The Microsoft of the future is being weighed down by the ghosts of its past," argues former Microsoft engineer James Whittaker, in a new essay at Medium's new tech site, OneZero:
The Microsoft of the '90s, with Bill Gates calling the shots, was a technology-forward company, fast-paced, ambitious, and unapologetically capitalistic. .. The Microsoft of the 2000s, under Steve Ballmer, was almost exactly the opposite. Bruised and battered by the consent decree handed down by the Department of Justice for the very same ambition that brought it to dominance, Ballmer's Microsoft was sales-forward and cautious. It was either gazing at its own Windows-shaped navel or nervously clutching its pearls at the approach of Google in its rearview mirror. This inattention to anything resembling the imaginative or innovative caused it to hemorrhage talent, flatline its stock, bore its customers, and miss (or at least be very late to) the next three technology megatrends -- web, cloud, and mobile -- on the trot. It was an era of hand-wringing and coming to grips with a profitable but uninspired slide into irrelevance...
Satya Nadella has embarked on a culture-forward vision, which presents some serious historical hurdles to clear. Namely: how does a company move toward a new version of itself when its ranks are replete with people who made their fame and fortune under the previous versions...? Nadella's public fight against the old Microsoft is tacit recognition of the long shadows that both Gates and Ballmer cast. Each exited the company, but their legacies linger... If Windows was the only refuge for recycled failures -- the wannabe leaders who energetically and emphatically backed Gates' and Ballmer's strategy that whiffed on the web, cloud, and mobile -- Microsoft might be ok. But the residue of the past is thick in enough places that it is suffocating the culture of tomorrow...
At its core, Microsoft is a company that makes its money the old fashioned way: by creating products of value that people willingly part with their money to use. They stand as a bulwark against the data mongering and user exploitation that Google and Facebook see as the future of humanity. The entire world has a stake in Nadella's fledgling culture-forward strategy prevailing over the 40-year momentum of the made-men standing squarely in its way.
C'mon Microsoft. The world needs you.
Satya Nadella has embarked on a culture-forward vision, which presents some serious historical hurdles to clear. Namely: how does a company move toward a new version of itself when its ranks are replete with people who made their fame and fortune under the previous versions...? Nadella's public fight against the old Microsoft is tacit recognition of the long shadows that both Gates and Ballmer cast. Each exited the company, but their legacies linger... If Windows was the only refuge for recycled failures -- the wannabe leaders who energetically and emphatically backed Gates' and Ballmer's strategy that whiffed on the web, cloud, and mobile -- Microsoft might be ok. But the residue of the past is thick in enough places that it is suffocating the culture of tomorrow...
At its core, Microsoft is a company that makes its money the old fashioned way: by creating products of value that people willingly part with their money to use. They stand as a bulwark against the data mongering and user exploitation that Google and Facebook see as the future of humanity. The entire world has a stake in Nadella's fledgling culture-forward strategy prevailing over the 40-year momentum of the made-men standing squarely in its way.
C'mon Microsoft. The world needs you.
Is this a joke? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Well...
The Microsoft of the 2000s, under Steve Ballmer, was almost exactly the opposite. Bruised and battered by the consent decree handed down by the Department of Justice
It's no coincidence this round and round is mathematically identical to corruption in other countries, where business is denied unless money flows to the corrupt official.
Even if you assume that here all is good and that political donations had no effect, much less were the goal, it still yields similar results -- business is slowed.
Wait? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft's future is limited by past abuses. (Score:5, Informative)
Should be, "Microsoft's future is limited by past Abuses."
30 Ways Your Windows 10 Computer Phones Home to Microsoft [howtogeek.com]
Microsoft's new small print -- how your personal data is (ab)used [edri.org]
Quoting: "Summing up these 45 pages, one can say that Microsoft basically grants itself very broad rights to collect everything you do, say and write with and on your devices in order to sell more targeted advertising or to sell your data to third parties. The company appears to be granting itself the right to share your data either with your consent 'or as necessary' ".
Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. [networkworld.com] "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC."
Re:Microsoft's future is limited by past abuses. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep.
Let's call the ost "LinuxWashing" so as to remove the taint of prior regimes, who did some pretty dirty business along the way. The same group full of not-invented-here incestuousness, and rally the troops to make it past quarterly-earnings pushes.
There are no new heroes there, no great champions of freedom and supporters of the truly innovative. There's lots of chest-thumping, testosterone-driven championing of self-gratifying open source initiatives, but they still battle Google, Oracle, and themselves rather than rely on actual nurtured innovation.
Token gestures merely are for PR. Their websites are buggy as their software. I'm glad they give AWS competition, but demonstrating third party-evaluated progress is difficult, as their PR control is absolute, and they live in a walled world of their own making. To make Microsoft great requires more institutional will than they have, because they, too, are slaves to Wall Street, and all must be bent in fealty for the short-term investment.
Re:Microsoft's future is limited by past abuses. (Score:4, Insightful)
Today it seems like every company in the world is starting to think they have the same rights too.
In addition to the spyware headache that Windows 10 is infected with from Microsoft is the completely sloppy UI that they have cooked up since Windows 8. That alone is one of the reasons to stick with Windows 7 as long as possible.
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How is it that large companies that have corporate secrets are not completely freaked out by this?
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Because they have teams of lawyers, and no EULA will allow MS to steal "trade secrets."
It is the medium sized companies that should be frightened, because they have a few secrets, but they don't have as much money to protect them.
Huh? (Score:3)
So the good part is that Microsoft is trying to be "culture-forward" and do new and cool things in a newer and cooler way, but the good part is that they make money the old fashioned way instead of they way it is done by newer and cooler companies who do new and cool things.
I'm so confused.
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Let me clear it up: A technology company that has a steady income stream from it's old fashioned model, but doesn't adapt to a changing future is one with a bleak long term outlook. So it's good that they make old fashioned money, and it's good that they are trying to make new market money as well.
culture-forward strategy (Score:2)
Shit. Another corporate buzzword.
Scott Adams will love it.
Mistaken (Score:4, Insightful)
That's where you are mistaken...
Re:Mistaken (Score:4, Funny)
True, but the statement can be salvaged with a few extra words: "C'mon Microsoft. The world needs you to hurry the fuck up and die.
Literally the last thing the world needs is more incompetence fuelled clusterfuckery from the shithole company that is Microsoft.
Microsoft should concentrate on what they do well (Score:3)
... which is make excellent-quality keyboards and mice. Everything else can be dropped or spun off to other companies, to reduce the amount of distraction from their core competencies.
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No. They haven't.
Microsoft has never developed an anything whether hardware or software in their entire existence. They only buy stuff from third-parties or assimilate entire third-parties so they can call other-peoples-shit their own. (Sort of like Banksters only play with other-peoples-money -- they have none of their own).
Come to think of it there are two things that Microsoft did do itself: Microsoft Bob; and, Clippy
And we know how those worked out.
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No. They haven't.
Microsoft has never developed an anything whether hardware or software in their entire existence.
Edison would be proud.
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I wonder what you think their core competence is. If you answer making keyboards, mice, and Windows 10, then you may as well just sink the company. None of those are profit centres that are currently driving their share price to all time highs.
MS is doing well largely because their went outside their core competence.
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Another way to say the same thing, "Microsoft's core competency is convincing people to buy the crap they build." Except the world has mostly been brought down to Microsoft's level, so it's not such a funny joke anymore.
The world needs... (Score:2)
Anything but these mega-tech companies that act like they do - rather like Standard Oil and the other evil monopolies of yesterday.
Willingly? huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Who values MS software to the point they'd actually willingly pay for it??
Even great free software has trouble getting people to donate to the software they love at a quarter of the price MS demands for their software.
We buy MS when we have no other alternative. Maybe a few things are ok... but they can't support their company from the few products in that group-- they mostly profit from 2 monopolistic products and xbox.
Re: Willingly? huh? (Score:2)
Re: Willingly? huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Willingly? huh? (Score:2)
Also, thanks for making me feel dirty for having to defend MS Office!
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I'm not sure if you should list that as a pro or a con though. Like we've spent all this time and effort and they finally have a rudimentary skill in MS Office, you want the to start using a new tool? The people who think the Internet is the big blue e? That want/need a retraining class every time a button changes place or a menu changes name? I've had the displeasure of being my parent's tech support, it didn't take anything more than their online bank doing a layout change before they called me because ev
Re: Willingly? huh? (Score:3)
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So has LibreOffice - probably since it was Star Office. These features were certainly in OpenOffice over 10 years ago - as is creation and management of references using a database - ANY database (although it would be a shame to use an MS database, since they don't manage (invalid) dates correctly).
Two LibreOffice users I know did not even know about styles/Gallery and Templates until they moved to LibreOffice - probably because they Googl
Re: Willingly? huh? (Score:2)
Re:Willingly? huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Who values MS software to the point they'd actually willingly pay for it??
The people who are willing to pay 8+ figures for it. i.e. the only people who matter.
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What's that sound? (Score:3)
Oh, yeah. It's the sound of the world's tiniest violin playing mournfully in the background as I read about Microsoft's woes.
No, it's the actions of their present (Score:4, Insightful)
They can take their spyware and shove it straight up their ass.
Microsoft has done nothing to earn trust. Absolutely fucking zero.
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Microsoft has done nothing to earn trust. Absolutely fucking zero.
Yup, the only reason the author of TFA remembers Microsoft through rose-colored glasses, is because most of Microsoft's most egregious endeavors failed in the marketplace.
They also haven't learned. They're still trying to push that God-awful "S mode [hrwiki.org]" on some of their overpriced*, under-powered tablets.
* I'm not trying to fanboy over Apple here (they're guilty of some crap, too), but the current gen iPad is cheaper then the Surface Go, and typically goes on sale for even less around Black Friday.
It's called Karma (Score:5, Insightful)
There are still a lot of people who remembered all the shit M$ had done and avoided doing business with them when possible.
Claiming that M$ was "bruised and battered" by that slap on the wrist, and saying Microsoft had ever created "products of value that people willingly part with their money to use" just showed you that they did not even realized what shitty things they had done.
At its core, Microsoft only knew to leverage and abuse its monopoly position to force its software down people's throat. Without that leverage, such as on the mobile platform, nobody willingly installs Microsoft software.
Karma is a bitch, M$ deserved every bit of it.
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Microsoft only knew to leverage and abuse its monopoly position to force its software down people's throat.
How are they any different whatsoever from the past? Windows 10. They're every bit as evil as they ever were, only now they have PR department.
They were more cautious after the DOJ decision (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They were more cautious after the DOJ decision (Score:4, Insightful)
Man, I love the "I used to use Linux but now I love MS" flamebait posts. Like wealthy Nigerian scam emails, they never get ols
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Just FYI, There is no such thing as "MacOS".
"Mac OS" refers to the old, pre-OS X days. The new, post-OS X operating system is called "macOS" (no space). If you want a trick to remember the syntax, just think about "iOS".
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Yup. I remember the days of windows service packs too... They were like Star Trek movies. The even numbered ones were generally okay, and could be relied on to solve more problems than they solved while generally improving things. But the odd ones... ugh... the only thing to to with those was to treat them like week-old roadkill.
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Exactly so. Bruised and battered by a huge US Government contract for their pathetically unreliable cloud offering?
Have you ever been beaten to death with a soft pillow?
WTF?
So Microsoft basically exists (Score:5, Insightful)
It's fine if elements in Microsoft want to look forward. They do that all the time. They just suck at it. They can get it right every now and then (Xbox 360) but man, when they blow it they blow it (XBone launch).
I don't think Microsoft is a company that should risk forgetting it's roots.
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because of Office at this point.
Someone hasn't seen their profit statements. Office barely registers on it, let alone actually be the profit centre which is currently keeping their profit and share price at all time highs.
Office can disappear tomorrow and MS will still be making stupid amounts of money. You should look into what it is they actually do.
The point is Office is _safe_ (Score:2)
This is actually a bit of a stickler for me in general. Folks like to talk about Entrepreneurs as risk takers, but there's actually very, very few of those. Most Entrepreneurs have something solid to fall back on. Small ones have friends and family, own a home with a nest egg and have a long career with a college degree backing them up so they can just
Monoploy (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft still makes most of it's money from having illegally created a monopoly on Desktop and Laptops, for which it was fined billions of dollars in the US and Europe. It still has 86% of that market which means that every manufacturer, other than Apple and System 76 forces consumers to buy Windows and usually Office, same old game.
The new Microsoft, under Nadella, is trying to diversify into commercial cloud services by using those profits to undercut Amazon and Google, and they are having some success. That makes them more attractive to software engineers who can't get a job at Google.
Medium is full of narcissistic rubbish and this article is typical. It is just meaningless jargon and spin that belongs only at a Microsoft staff conference.
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No, I did not punch him on the nose - but only because of the CCTV.
Bollocks (Score:2)
OLD Microsoft? (Score:3)
We don't need them as much as we need another OS company. (Linux is great and all, but there are too many versions out there for the basic user to choose from, and its power [arguably overkill for a basic single user] makes its internals too complicated for the average person to deal with.)
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Good for granny, nerds. Not for Windows experts (Score:2)
My experience has been that most people, who have never partitioned a disk into multiple partitions, like Linux just fine. Facebook and Google work exactly the same under desktop Linux as they do on Windows. Most people wouldn't know the difference been Linux and a Windows UI update, and they don't care. They click a picture, it opens.
At the other extreme, people who want to deeply understand how the OS and services work enjoy Linux - you get as deep into the guts of the system as you want, and it all mak
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"Windows experts may not want to learn something new."
"Windows Expert" generally correlates with what used to be a Novel NCSE. It general terms they do not actually know anything except which picture to poke to do something, and were it can be found in the UI-of-the-moment. I believe Microsoft calls them MCSE or MVP or something -- MVP standing for Most Valued Putz.
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Thanks for that - I often wondered.
Where in the UI of the moment indeed (Score:2)
> except which picture to poke to do something, and were it can be found in the UI-of-the-moment.
Quite. One of the questions I got on one if the Microsoft exams concerned in which Windows version the control panel applet was called "Printing" vs "Printers and other hardware", or whatever the f*ck the exact names were. The right answer, on all versions of Windows, is "click the one that says 'Print....'"; according to the Microsoft cert an expert is someone who remembers which version switched the exact
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"enjoy Linux - you get as deep into the guts of the system as you want, and it all makes sense"
This was certainly true... until systemd came along and the system is no longer your own; its internal state is not even known to the systemd developers.
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I have set up Linux systems for people
Which means you are not a "basic user" as stated by kackle. The point stands.
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Re: OLD Microsoft? (Score:2)
Bad characterization of contrasting "visions" (Score:3)
The summary contrasts Microsoft's "old fashioned" money for products approach to Google's "user exploitation" approach. Even ignoring the question of whether or not the targeted ad-based model is "exploitation", it's not accurate to say that Google believes that advertising-supported products are "the future of humanity".
Advertising is the ideal way to fund products whose value to individual users is low enough that it doesn't justify payment of fees, but high enough that users are willing to view ads in order to use it, and which have sufficiently-broad appeal.. Broadcast media, web search and webmail are all examples. Other products make more sense in the traditional produce for fee structure -- Google's GSuite is one example of that, as well as all of the physical and digital goods sold by the Play store, among others. Google does both sorts of business, and is actually growing its "old-fashioned" business faster than it's "new-fangled" business (not that advertising-supported media is remotely new).
I'm quite happy to see the many of the changes Microsoft has made, and I wish them well (and not only because I own some MSFT stock), but the author's characterization of the company as a "bulwark against data mongering and user exploitation" is just silly.
Yeah, nah. (Score:2)
At its core, Microsoft is a company that makes its money the old fashioned way: by creating products of value that people willingly part with their money to use.
Fucking lol. I can count the number of people I've met who genuinely liked and wanted Windows on a blind butcher's worst hand. For the vast majority of people it's what comes with the computer so it's what's needed to make it work, and for most of the rest it's just necessary to run the software they actually want or need to use. Some weigh up their options and decide that overall it's less troublesome than mucking around with compatibility layers on other operating systems or using different software for t
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Fucking lol. I can count the number of people I've met who genuinely liked and wanted Windows on a blind butcher's worst hand
You've never been to Seattle.
Let me fix that headline for y'all: (Score:4, Informative)
Is Microsoft Being Weighed Down By the Sins of Its Present?
Yes, yes it is. Forcing their product on people who didn't ask for it and don't understand what's happening. Spying on it's end-users and taking control of hardware they don't have a legal right to. Shoving ads in your face. And so on.
I'm glad I'm running Ubuntu, no regrets, and never going back.
Wrong date. (Score:2)
OMG! Ponies!
No, Windows is Being Stripped of Functionality (Score:5, Informative)
Ballmer was the best CEO MS has had so far (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, Ballmer had his rough spots. He was a CEO! Culture first! FUCK THAT.
Ballmer era almost perfectly coincides with the Windows 7 era. What about Vista, you ask? Well, it sucked. So MS buried it. Like a good company should.
Nadella got promoted because he built a successful Azure business for MS. Except now that everyone from the cloud has more clout, everything looks like a nail (and yes cloud is the hammer). Everything that is wrong with the modern batch of MS is in its attempts to phone back to the mothership. This is cloud mentality. Making your OS just a terminal is why everyone dreads it. Win 10 installs are multiplying because of exclusive deals and, YES (FUCK YES) because of anticompetitve practices. It's the new MS competing with the Win 7 MS and playing dirty at it. Most users would much, much, much prefer Win7 if they were given the choice.
The majority of Win 10 installs are done because AMD won't support Win 7 and because MS won't issue new Win 7 licenses. The office in the cloud is a TERRIBLE idea. It's awful and provides worse quality than MS Office provided 15 years ago. Ever seen Grammarly adds? Yeah, that's because the MS Office which did all of that 20 years ago is not installed by default on most PC purchases (like it used to be).
MS would have done better by putting its own chinese wall between the cloud and the desktop business. Run VMs in the cloud if you want to, but don't try to erase the difference between desktops and VMs. It's not needed by most users. And it's a configuration nightmare for those who do try to do some trivial thing "seamlessly."
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" Most users would much, much, much prefer Win7 if they were given the choice."
Actually, they would prefer Windows 10 2000. That is, the Windows 10 Kernel with the Windows 2000 UI.
Re: win 2000 (Score:2)
How very dare you? Win 2000 had the best ui microsoft ever made.
Is this for real? (Score:2, Troll)
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The world needs Microsoft to die (Score:3)
The microsoft tax, bloat, and spyware as an operating system need to be burned to ash. We need a new operating system that is open source, secure, and private. The only way is to start from scratch. C'mon CS nerds. Make it.
Is James Whittaker weighed down by his past? (Score:3)
Every time he leaves an employer he posts a lengthy diatribe complaining about his former employer. Last time it was Google. Now it's Microsoft. What the fuck did you expect from a 200K person behemoth? Agility? Impact? People who give a shit? That's pretty naive. 90% of MS is rest-and-vest crowd, and they're getting less and less picky by the year as Google, FB, and Amazon hire the best and brightest from under their nose.
Corporate felon (Score:3)
If corporations are to be treated as 'people' WRT speech and such, we must bring the stick along with the carrot. Corporate death penalty must be on the table.
Horseshit (Score:2)
Microsoft is more compelling than ever.... (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who loved to hate on Microsoft for decades? I've got to admit that right now, they're poised to be the most profitable and successful they've been in a LONG time.
First off? They *finally* took a page from Apple's playbook and started building their own hardware to run their software on. The whole "Surface" product line allows businesses to purchase their hardware and not have all the headaches about device drivers and BIOS/firmware updates. Everything is just auto-detected as part of the Windows 10 installation, or gets updated automatically as part of the Windows updates.
Second? Azure is going to be a huge win for them. They were just awarded that $10 billion defense department contract with the U.S., as one example -- and in the past, that would have gone to Amazon, IBM or Oracle. They're really going all-in with cloud based services and applications, and I don't think a lot of people even realize how they're poised to overtake the existing "standards" for so many of them. The flagship of selling Office is what got their foot in the door. Companies using Office products saw it just made more sense to buy Office 365 subscriptions and let the products auto-update to the latest versions continuously, vs. buying a specific Office release and being stuck on it until they paid for the next major version they wanted to use. But once you have that, you also get "OneDrive" storage at no extra cost. And they've added enough functionality to OneDrive so it parallels DropBox. When you look what it costs to buy DropBox for Teams licenses for a company -- it's easy to see why you'd dump that and go to OneDrive. Or look at Microsoft's "Teams" application they're throwing in. It does everything you could do with a Slack subscription, except integrated more tightly with your contact list in Outlook and with ability to link to content you might have on OneDrive or using Microsoft SharePoint. Oh, and they took Skype for Business and are rolling THAT into Teams too, so you'll get accustomed to using Teams just for those video chats you used to do on Skype. Or how about the new Microsoft Forms? It lets you whip up surveys and tabulate the results, meaning you might not need that SurveyMonkey subscription anymore either.
They've already killed off most of the competition for hosting corporate email. Everyone I know uses Exchange with O365 at this point. Again, why not? If you pay for that Office 365 license anyway, you don't need to pay again for some third party to host your Exchange mail services.
Not so sure.. (Score:2)
Culture (Score:2)
Handwringing (Score:3)
WTF (Score:2)
''At its core, Microsoft is a company that makes its money the old fashioned way: by creating products of value that people willingly part with their money to use. They stand as a bulwark against the data mongering and user exploitation that Google and Facebook see as the future of humanity.''
How can anyone say this with a straight face when we all know the ultimate plan for their desktop is to stop distribution of client side executables only to be replaced with local DRM so that all services and processes
I think I understand now (Score:2)
No. Still the same broken company. (Score:2)
MS is weighted down by being MS. They are an evil, greedy company, with, at best, semi-competent engineering and consistently bad leadership. Without the historic accident of the quasi-monopoly they still hold, nobody would even know their name today.
"culture forward" (Score:2)
What the hell does that even mean?
Am I supposed to buy their "culture"? I mean I get it, it's worked for IBM for at least the last 30-40 years (do they even sell anything now)? But...?
Re: What is this rhetoric... (Score:3)
It's a clear promotion for "Medium's new tech site OneZero". What else do you expect?
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It matters to investors... Microsoft has some locked up value. Their next move is unclear.
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It matters to investors... Microsoft has some locked up value. Their next move is unclear.
If we predict Microsoft's next move, as typified by their modus operandi, "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish," I'd say we've covered embrace (with locked up value). Next, they'll be extending and extinguishing that value.
You can skip the sequels, they're just modern remakes of the last series.
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The Linux subsystem in Windows may be an attempt at "Extend". We don't know yet If it will be successful.
it's for dumb readers (Score:4, Interesting)
microsoft trying to move on from it's past is what microsoft has _WASTED_ LITERALLY BILLIONS OF MONEY ON and have had other companies and consumers waste billions of money.
did 90s microsoft have "surface" ? fking no. 2000s onwards microsoft has had like 4 surfaces and you can't even google sw or support for any of them anymore.
was it worth tens of billions to buy linked in? f no. it wasn't. it's NEVER going to be. was it worth it to ruin Nokia for them? f no it wasn't everyone just lost money.
if they had just stuck to their core business they would have approximately 100 BILLION FRIGGING DOLLARS in the bank. I'm not joking. maybe even more if they had not tried to squeeze their way into getting a cut of every sw sold for windows(surface rt and windows 8 were _totally_ about fever dreams of getting a cut of photoshop, autocad etc sales - adobe freaked out and went for a subscription model as defense move in anticipation of that)
oh. one more thing. their corporate culture lead to promotion of idiots and idiots promoting ideas of idiots. pretty face being more important.
when a developer ambassadors start being 100% useless, why IN the f would you have them? they think it's good business to send developer ambassadors out to give free lunches giving presentations on totally 100% infeasible ways to make a good game on windows phone? and to tell people they don't need an api to do something they absolutely need to have in order to ship a version for windows phone? because thats what I saw. spending money on "developer relations" WITHOUT DELIVERING THE TOOLS THE DEVELOPERS NEED. thats what was crazy about the developers developers developers rant - it's not like developers didn't want to port over their apps, they just couldn't and any number of free lunches, phones and dinners you give to the developers wasn't going to change that.
if you want to see where microsoft started to fail you need to look no further than operation zune. a product that for political reasons wouldn't die inside the company and got just morphed.
Re:it's for dumb readers (Score:5, Insightful)
if they had just stuck to their core business they would have approximately 100 BILLION FRIGGING DOLLARS in the bank.
I'm curious as to what you think this core business is? Are you talking about simply not investing in alternative ideas or do you think that core business was somehow neglected, and if the latter in what way do you think it could have been improved.
Yes MS has had a history facepalmworthy investment failures, but they likewise have had a history of actual profit segments. e.g. You talk about Surface in the same kind of way you talk about LinkedIn, but the Surface line is a profit centre, one that supports their core business (OS) as well by convincing the industry they needed touchscreens and thus needed windows 10.
Xbox is another example. MS sunk billions before making a cent, and have since become a major player.
Having 100billion in the bank is not a growth model for a business, and not a Microsoft I would recommend anyone investing in. Microsoft isn't some supermarket chain. They are a technology company and if history has shown anything it's that a technology company that rests on its laurels and doesn't attempt to expand change or diversify its model is a company which fails.
Microsoft does not make most of its money from it's "core business" anymore. Azure and cloud services are a frigging huge profit centre for them, as is gaming.
There's no way MS would have been better off not attempting investments outside of their core business.
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Actually using your wording the Operating System market share, LINUX is the dominant player in the operating system market, kicks M$ arse hands, down. Android is a layer on top of a Linux Distribution, most smart TVs run Linux, countless appliances run Linux, it is every and it dominates, just not on the desktop but watch out Huawei is likely to change that.
M$'s failure was not to split the company into MSN and Xbox and Gaming all the consumer gear, under MSN and everything else to M$ as business, because c
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Well aren't you a good son. What does that have to do with anything though?
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he probably thinks that changing a hard drive somehow impedes activation. It does not.
Bullshit. I've have Windows blow up on me from changing the hard drive before. Of course, I did upgrade some other stuff over time.
So basically you did something very different from what was being discussed. Which was a simple dead hard drive replacement.
Windows activation doesn't always decide to crap out when you upgrade your hardware in minor ways, but over time, you might have enough upgrades accumulated that it tips the scales and Microsoft starts demanding you buy a new Windows license for your "new" computer.
Nope. I had a six year old motherboard die. That is a change that inherently triggers activation, an activation that will fail. I text Microsoft that my motherboard died, I have a replacement that will go into the same case and use the original CPU and hard drive. They asked for my current activation code, I texted it to them. They texted back a new activation code. I typed in this rep
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I care. I care that he's spending money on hardware that could be purchased cheaper a-la-carte, without any of the money going to Microsoft.
Obligatory Jurassic Park (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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If private companies get all the government money as contracts, that isn't socialism or communism, that's right-wing i.e. traditional fascism.
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Someone here must have said "Microsoft, we need you to die" at some point.
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They had something that sold on merit? Must have been from a company they just recently bought before that and had not yet managed to turn into the crap all of MS consists of.
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Why aren't you bitching about EVERY US company that's outsourced a job out of the country?
Seriously.