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Microsoft's Forgotten Mistakes
seattlenerd writes "In light of all of the hype about how much cash Microsoft is sitting on, it's good to be reminded that they do fail. A lot. This piece in Seattle Weekly points out some of the many failures -- from ActiMates Barney to Microsoft at Work to pending disasters in smartphones and interactive TV (despite recent PR-worthy announcements). But like most litter, the failures are swept under the rug in the hopes people don't remember that many 'new' Microsoft ideas are recycled from its own history." Of course, like any big company, Microsoft is not a monolith.
Don't forget Microsoft Bob!
If you are afraid to fail, you will never succeed.
...failed at just about everything before becoming president.
You can't innovate without failure (opens door for innovation comment trolls). The article discusses technologies that they DID help pioneer, not just the ones they usurped.
But seriously, everybody knows experimentation and failure cannot be avoided. Most businesses just don't have the luxury of failing with no penalty.
er .. so, like any other company, some of their ventures fail, while some others work. What's the news here? And what's it got to do with the cash balance - apart from showing that they are smart enough not to blow the whole wad on some silly idea?
and 3 of them ask "What about Microsoft Bob?"
The article says:
"More than 100 products were launched in rapid succession over 18 months, from childhood creativity (Fine Artist) to a cartoony "social interface" to make Windows appear friendlier to the pathologically computer phobic (1995's Microsoft Bob, a much-maligned happy face with geek glasses)."
I know this can be misconstrued as karma whoring, but I think it's more of a Geraldo-style expose on why RTFAing is necessary.
That was one heck of a (multi-billion dollar) failure; and in their favor!
My failures have never amounted to much...
"This would be +99 Flamebait."
He's got a point. Microsoft has gone and done a lot of things, not everything was a success.
I guess this story does sever an overlooked purpose, though. It proves that MS can't just go an take over aything it wants. The market has to decide it wants the product. I remember all the jabber here about the XBOX before it was released and how MS was going to take over the game market next. My favorite was somebody seriously thinking MS was going to port Office to the XBOX and all'd be over, heh.
I agree with parent poster, though, I think most are going to see this as an opportunity to make fun of MS instead of illuminating themselves to the idea that MS can't take over anything it damn well pleases.
"Derp de derp."
Now, why would failures "be swept under the rug"? Failures are abandoned projects, never-finished products, non-sellers, etc... They are simply left behind, not hidden.
There's a famous cliche that says "If you never fail, you are not taking enough risks." As a business person and someone who has failed several times before getting it right, I can tell you the saying is true. If you dislike failure, then go into business.
In other words, what the hell is your point?
Like all business they made mistakes when tyring something new. However on their core business they have provided a wide spread, realtivly easy to use concurrent platform with Office + Windows. If you look at all OSS office sweets etc they all at least try to read/write M$ Office as it is a standard. Not saying its a good one but its a standard
Bob in Marketing can send Maggie in Accounts a spreadsheet and be able to read it. Thats gotta count for something
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
selling hardware at a loss to make money on software. a couple of years from now, will this be "a great strategy allowing MS to break into the highly competitive console market", or "a flawed business model MS arrogantly thought it could throw money at as with other markets" ???
in being massive, immovable, or solidly uniform
MS isnt, and never was a one-trick pony. They've had DOS, Windows, Office applications, games, toys, peripherals, etc, etc..
Unlike, say Netscape who've had, say, Netscape.
Jeez! If you keep trying to innovate, you're gonna fail quite a few times. We can learn SO MUCH from our mistakes.
> get tea
No Tea: dropped.
What's the point of the original poster? Do ./ readers find Microsoft such a despicable entity that they need to post such articles to remind people that they also fail? May be it was meant as a joke, but still, very poor taste.
For those who hate them so much (they're a business, they are supposed to make money), don't you think one minute any other company in their shoes would have acted differently, including the envious Sun and over zealous Oracle.
The Gates foundation is today the biggest charitable contributer, funded by the founder himself. Sure, it's a tax relief for him, but he didn't have to do it to help researchers in financial terms in finding vaccin to the most common diseases affecting the 3rd world in the first place. Thats $10 bill available for worthy causes.
Instead, it's hotter nerdy news to point out the failures of Microsoft as a company. Since when did we become so negative about the good things that's happening in this world?
I wish I had some failures of the epoch-making magnitude of Windows...
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
I know no-one who doesn't find "It looks like you're typing a letter..." annoying. But that's not all of what the assistants do. They provide hints, and they provide an on-screen place to click and ask for help, in more-or-less plain language. Pressing F1 wouldn't occur to the people I'm talking about, nor are they likely to hunt in the menus.
Now, these people aren't daft. All intelligent people, all done well in their own field. It's just that that field isn't computing, and they also don't have the interest to make it into a hobby.
Summary: don't knock Clippy too much. The excesses are annoying, but I don't rate the basic idea as a failure.
Cheers,
Ian
And I mean that literally. When Windows first came out it was a piece of crap. But they have so much money that they can afford for a technology to do terribly for years until a market is built up, the technology gets better (like to version 3), and all the competitors burn through cash and fall by the wayside.
We laugh at stuff like Tablet PC, Microsoft Reader, XBox or WebTV, but look at some of the "sucesses" of Microsoft and you can realize they had several years of an early period where they sucked, too. Namely, Windows, Pocket PC, Internet Explorer. Just a few years ago, it was thought a foregone conclusion Netscape and Palm owned the market and Microsoft lost.
Seriously, what the fuck. Xerox is the grandparent of the windows UI. Look at Apple's UI. Apple menu is in the top left by default. On OS X it is much less important, but in OS 9 (and more importantly, previous versions since we're talking about history) it was very obviously the parallel of the Windows task bar. Applications, any folder, favorites etc were accessible through this menu item in the top left. Now where do most languages start? top left of the page. even asian languages start there, though some do not progress to the right.
Enter Windows. Let's put it in the lower left, where NO language or culture deems a good "starting" place. Windows is so backward. when i want to minimize something i have to look to the "end" of the title bar to click it. it's inefficient. I'd like to think that no one directly copies this shitty ass layout.
This didn't start out as a troll but it ended up as one...dammit.
Microsoft it not afraid to lose millions on random attempts at gaining market share. They can keep trying and trying until they succeed, and drive other companies out of business. If they fail, oh well. Lessons learned and try again.
Yeah, it was a huge blunder for MS to do all the R&D for KDE and Gnome to copy and give away free.
Just like it was a huge bluder for UC to do tons of research on networking and implement a TCP stack for MS to take it and charge everyone for it?
I'm betting the XBox and the various side projects associated with it (XBox Live! and the whole home entertainment center strategy) will be Microsoft's highest profile failure in a year or two.
When Sony publishes their next generation video game console and starts putting some serious effort into their home entertainment center strategy, it's going to be game over for M$. I have absolutely no doubts about that.
XBox sales, both hw and sw, are lagging way behind projections, as are XBox Live! subscriptions. M$ is losing an arm and a leg on XBox and the losses are growing, not going down quarter to quarter. Some analysts are estimating losses on XBox to reach $1.7B by the end of 2003.
They can not sustain this for that much longer, even if they are swimming on money.
And I'm speaking as an owner of an XBox system (I know, I should be ashamed for buying M$).
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Actually, Netscape deserves the blame for HTML email.
a lot of other companies start projects that fail, but probbably MS's get a lot more media coverage and publicity, since they are so huge. Also MS has a tendency to boast about new products and projects like there's no tomorrow. I guess they coined the term vaporware for a long time.
The phaomnneil pweor of the hmuan mnid. Fcuknig amzanig eh!
If "units shipped" is the only measure of success, then the CueCat was also an unqualified success.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Abe wrote his own speeches.
Abe started out poor and had to work for everything he got.
Abe worked hard to educate himself.
Abe was never saved again and again and again from repeated business failures by friends/supplicants to his family.
Abe was forced by circumstances into military action, designed to save the country.
Abe was elected President.
Microsoft completely missed the boat on the low-cost Intel server bandwagon. After 10 years of Windows NT technology (yeah, it's built into W2K and XP too), Microsoft has failed to gain even an appreciable share in the Intel server market.
Microsoft has been saying for years that Windows NT/2000/XP is an alternative to UNIX, and later Linux, but their attempt to penetrate the UNIX market has been an abject failure. I think Microsoft is slowly starting to realize that catchy phrases like "Enterprise Class Computing" and "Mission Critical" don't fool the UNIX crowd.
Granted, I'm not trying to troll, but it seems to me that UNIX and mainframe folks have a much different expectation of reliability and uptime than Microsoft, and Microsoft has been slow in realizing this. At this point, the reliability of WinXP is inconsequential; Microsoft has been so successful on the desktop that they will be forever known as a desktop vendor. When people think of Microsoft, they think of butterflies and games and multimedia - not exactly the images one wants to associate with their "mission critical server" vendor. This, combined with their hostile attitude toward UNIX and the open source philosophy practically gaurantees that Microsoft will never be accepted as anything more than a toy by the UNIX crowd.
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Whoever that wrote this probably don't know much about managing a business. In any business, you have to take risks. The difference between a sucessful business and one that is not, is being able to calculate your risks by recognizing its cost and profit. MS's "failure" maybe more apparent because the dollar amount they invest on pushing out a product is more than a small company's entire budget. But that's just scaling. Any company will find some of its investment a hit, and some are miss. You can list all the battles MS has lost in, but I think in the end MS has won the war (ie. it is successful in overall).
The fact that MS has the infrastructure to invest in so many areas of the market and the backing to take some losts is a sign of a successful company.
I disaprove of MSFT business practices as much as anybody. But I am in awe of msft's financial success.
Can anybody name as very successful company that has never made any big mistakes?
Yes this IS a troll. UI design isnt about putting important stuff in order, it's about making important stuff easily accessible and putting unimportant stuff out of the way. Why put the minimze button on the left next to the menus when it will just lead to accedental minimizing. Also people dont think of it as looking at the end of the title bar, its just the top right. It takes just as much effort to click on something thats at the top left as it does to click something on the top right. Do you move your mouse to the top left and along the title bar and finally to the right to click minimize?
And ending slavery is about as good an example I can think of.
And which "one leader" are you talking about? Jefferson Davis? Or the leader of the SC troops who fired on Ft Sumter?
bollocks. xbox live has smashed projections and MS has the highest game-attach rate of any modern console.
Xbox is not a failure. KOTOR has been selling like hot cakes since its release last week. MS has come into an industry dominated by sony and already displaced nintendo in the US for the #2 spot. MS has the #1 online system for consoles after less than a year.
Sony is slowly recalling their previous PS3 hype and backpedalling on all their statements about PS3. Thats the penalty for cranking out hype way ahead of itme ot try and buy time to make something real. It worked to kill the dreamcast, but it wont work with xbox.
(see also: PS3 WONT have the Cell chip in it)
Xbox will probably not beat PS2 for this generation, but i do expect it to reach parity. PS3 vs XBox2 is a level playing field, IMO.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Lots of people have said this already, but failure is a part of life. Being able to pick up the pieces and persist is what seperates the great and/or successful from the mediocre. Read up sometime about Milton Hershey Prior to founding Hershey, the candy company, he went bankrupt at least once, and started several other failed companies. The part that made him successful was his persistence and drive to succeed. After his many failures, he eventually had success and established one of the largest corporations the world has seen.
That would be a fair comparison if you could cite an article written by Microsoft pointing out (one could say "gloating about") the various failures that came from UC.
So where's the link?
Cheers
-b
"Enter Windows. Let's put it in the lower left, where NO language or culture deems a good "starting" place."
UI Designs are not sentences to be read. Microsoft didn't make a particularly good or bad choice with the placement of the Min/Max buttons.
It may be 'backwards' from what others have done, that doesn't mean it's particularly bad.
Now, if you want to discuss bad things about the MS UI, then I'd point you at the scrollbars instead. MS scrollbars are missing the 'up' scroll button directly above the down scrollbutton. So if you want to scroll down just to read line by line, then go back up, you have to fly your cursor back up to the top of the screen.
In any case, I don't see what this has to do with NG's original comment. The Open Source Commmunity has done a good deal of copying off of MS. Attempts to replace Office come to mind.
Good article up to the last paragraph. Microsoft should strive to be much more like IBM, but it has waited far to long to start. IBM has a huge patent portfolio which they have been a lot more judicious in enforcing than SCO for example. They are also better diversified into the "service" sector. Microsoft has a consulting division, but they are only geared toward helping to sell Microsoft solutions, they quickly show themselves to be nothing more than technical sales reps.
Microsoft has put it's name on mice and keyboards. Very clever, but they don't make anything. Behind IBM's outsourced hardware is a still viable manufacturing and fabrication operation (again, more fundamental research going on here). You might think of IBM as Microsoft, Dell, and Intel all rolled into one. Each of these companies can succeed or fail based on one or two key product lines. IBM became a true corporation a long time ago. Dell and Microsoft are still the product of individuals, with all the strengths and weaknesses of that approach.
There was a Nike commercial that ran a little while ago with Michael Jordan saying:
"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
I have no more love for MS and what they do and how they do it than anyone else here, but no one ever accomplishes very much without repeated failures along the way.
They'd have no monopoly if they weren't big to begin with -- they certainly weren't a government granted monopoly like AT&T once was.
No, they were an IBM-granted monopoly.
The "chicken-and-egg" problem isn't a problem, because they got to be a monopoly by exploiting the hobbyist nature of the beginning of the personal computer revolution. Microsoft was there from the beginning; and from the beginning, they used other people's code (BASIC for the Altair, for example, which was ported from available sources; the only thing neat and original about that is the way in which it was ported, and Paul Allen was the one doing the heavy lifting).
Before the IBM PC (and their Charley Chaplin ads), the Apple ][ was making inroads into corporate culture, though mostly through the back door. Apple did not have much legitimacy in the corporate culture of the time. So, IBM decided (on a lark, essentially) to create a hobbyist computer of their own, only geared toward corporate culture.
Mr. Gates' mother was on the (Red Cross?) board of directors with one of the top execs of IBM. This connection was Microsoft's major break. As IBM did not take this project too seriously, they met with Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who sold them a CP/M-like operating system they had "developed" for the 8086. (In fact, they had done no such thing.)
Once they sold IBM on the idea, they scampered back to Seattle and purchased outright the proto-DOS from a small Seattle company. Selling price: $10k. The Seattle company knew nothing about the IBM deal. Mr. Gates screwed this company, instead of dealing fairly with them (which would have involved giving him or his company a small stake in all sales of DOS).
(At this point, a bunch of you are screaming, "But they made the deal! It was all fair!" To which I reply, no fucking way was it fair. It was exploitation, and preyed on ignorance, which is about as moral as taking sexual advantage of a mentally handicapped person. Businesses can make money without fucking over people at every possible opportunity.)
So, with IBM's legitimacy, and Microsoft's ownership of of MS-DOS and a deal to ship this DOS with every PC, Microsoft began its PC life with the monopoly on desktop operating systems.
When the first clones came out, Compaq should have also cloned the OS; ironically, though they weren't willing to pay royalties on the IBM BIOS, they were willing to pay for the OS.
Those in control of Microsoft have made very cunning deals. But, yes, they *did* start off in a monopoly position of a very small market, and grew as the market grew.
But, *completely* off-topic, let me pose this question: if Microsoft has proven it will not play fairly with other businesses (that Seattle company wasn't even a competitor at the time, but a potential partner), why should we expect them to play fairly with their customers if they don't have to?
Microsoft's try-try-again philosophy and focused determination are why it is at the top of the heap of software companies and why they are sitting on the 45 billion in cash now.
Hardly. Their willingness to fuck over anyone and everyone in pursuit of market dominance is the reason they are at the top of the software heap.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
even asian languages start there, though some do not progress to the right.
Bzzt. Japanese traditionally starts in the upper-righthand corner, moving downward, with progressive vertical lines to the *left*.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
From a pure UI point of view:
Gnome is apple like. The way the application bars work is more logical, and flows better (or woudl if it wasn't so slow)
KDE is windows like. It definately wants to be like windows.
Of course, KDE is a lot faster and smoother overall.. soy ou be the judge.
Apple isn't that pissy about aqua knock offs. They were concerned about brand recognition for their new OS.. that's all. The usability and UI design of the Mac goes far beyond the color and shape of some buttons.
There is a huge difference in ease of use for a new user between the UI in windows and the mac.. they are not just two different variations of the same thing.. the apple interface is very well researched, they understand how people naturally try to use things, how your attention flows.....
Microsoft does not. Their interface is not BAD, there are certainly far worse.. but they really don't get it as far as real UI design.
Most of these botched Microsoft projects were efforts to extend the PC as an entertainment device.
Well, the PC isn't an entertainment device, and trying to make it one is as sensible as trying to turn your TV into a computer just because there are chips inside.
If Microsoft wants to make toys, they should buy a toy company. Otherwise, they should stick to real software.
And, so should Linux.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Let's say this together now.... The buttons are all in the same corner so the user doesn't have to go hunting all over the place for them. Whether he wants to minimize, maximize/restore, or close he knows where to find them.
Even though the buttons are slightly separated, the design still sucks. It is no better or worse now than in Windows, IMNSHO. I really prefered them separated since I didn't have to stop and think about which button did what based on it's color.
I am not a resource! I am a free man!
The reason why Microsoft is still around is that the company is still taking risks. So what if there are a bunch of failed products in the Microsoft catalog? It's evidence of something that many people don't like to admit: Microsoft is innovative. Some of the innovations don't work, but many its efforts succeed and, at least to date, more than make up for its failures.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
Yep. The great Ted Williams referred to it as 'pursuing an acceptable rate of failure'.
When I, or my company tries to innovate, we'll take a small research team, and develop a technology. We'll build up a prototype, and show it to people. We'll see how people react to it. Then we'll refine it a bit and show another version. The eventual idea being that through a bit of small scale experimentation and testing, we'll decide whether the product is a viable and a decent technology.
When Microsoft tries to innovate, they spend 4 billion dollars making wild predictions about the state of computing in five years and telling the entire world how they're developing some great new technology that's going to change everyone's lives. They then seem to throw the entire company behind it, and spend further billions developing something which they ultimately don't know how the market place will react to.
What I don't understand about Microsoft is why they feel they have to bet the entire farm every time try to innovate, and then spend years and billions catching up when their predictions fail. Wouldn't it make far more sense for them to calmly and quitely develop several technologies in tandem to cover various future possibilities, and then find out over time which ones are the ones worth throwing more money into?
It's not the simple fact of MS's failures that makes people want to laugh at them and rub their failures in their faces, it's their own handling of those failures that does that.
Failure is inevitable. How you deal with it is not. When something fails, one way to handle it is to say 'Well, that didn't really work out, did it?' and move on, possibly with another attempt at the same goal if you feel you've learned enough from the failure to try again.
On the other hand, MS stridently proclaims their failure to be the greatest thing since fire right up to the second they drop all mention of them. They could quietly withdraw the failure but instead they try to market it into a success. They're all about 'I MEANT to do that' and 'that's not a bug, that's a feature' and 'we never fail'. That's the sort of arrogance that practically DEMANDS ridicule.
Had MS been working on the light bulb, they would have vigorously marketed the first thing that gave off visible light for more than half a second (but less than a whole second) before burning out and would have made wild claims about how sustained artificial light might be harmful and any sane person wants to use only a fresh bulb. Of course they would have also spent a great deal of time designing a base and socket that was difficult to adapt to Edison's bulbs. Most likely the socket would be inherantly hazardous but they would blame the several cities burning down on cows. Mysteriously, everyone would believe them.
Fifty years later, they'd reverse engineer an Edison bulb and claim that they innovated a way to provide safe sustained artificial light and claim credit for single handedly driving the industrial revolution forward.
That's why people laugh at MS's failures.