How Microsoft Has Changed Without Bill Gates

mightysquirrel writes "It's been a year since Bill Gates left Microsoft in his official capacity. At the time many speculated his departure would spark a significant shift in Redmond. But how much has really changed during Microsoft's first year without Gates?"

Comments

How soon we forget

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, yeah, I know, I'll be lynched for saying that Bill "I am Satan" Gates should be on par with RMS, ESR and Linus, but think about this for a second.

Bill founded what is now the largest software company in the world, and wether or not you agree with him, he has made a important contribution to the computing industry: Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user.

Now, be honest. How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1? Do you think that if computers still consisted on thin-client-server models based on huge VAX mainframes, that Joe and Jane Smith would be able to dial-in to AOL and connect to thousands of people around the world? Would the Internet have blossomed into the vast information network it is today without the aid of easy-to-use software from Microsoft? How about Grandma who wants to set up a webcam so she can chat with her grandchildren? She doesn't want to have to sit and hack kernels for hours. She wants Plug-and-Play, baby.

Look, disagree all you like, but thanks to things like Windows, Office, and MSN, modern computing has been made easy and affordable to everyone, thanks to pioneers like Bill Gates.

Re:How soon we forget

[Darkness404]

Sure, back before the mid '90s Microsoft was an ok company. Sure, most of their software was unstable, but it kinda got the job done. But you are forgetting the browser wars, you forgot the end product of them which was IE6, the browser that made the web effectively unchanged for many years. The browser that opened the world up to every sort of malware out there. Or what about the pain of Windows 9X that bluescreened for no reason? MS in its early days did a lot to help out the computer industry in some ways, however, they also hurt a lot of computer industries. Today, they are very little helpful and a whole lot more harmful.

Re:How soon we forget

[ubersoldat2k7]

All this things you mention are a simple evolutionary step of all the technologies, Personal Computers offered. Don't think that if Bill died at his birth we wouldn't have computers as we have them today. Different of course, but many technologies Microsoft have used were created by someone else. No great invention have come out from Redmond in long time.

Re:How soon we forget

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user."

Yet another "M$ is an innovator" myth. Before MS-DOS,there was the Commodore VIC-20, C-64, and Amiga. Before MS-DOS there was the Apple I, II, IIc,IIe, and III. Also there was the Kaypro luggables, etc. Microsoft has yet to innovate anything, ever. I challenge anyone to cite an innovation from M$, but be 100% prepared to discover that someone was doing it first and you just didn'tknow about it. Every single "Microsoft Innovation" involved M$ acquiring innovative companies and technologies who got there first, simply stealing the idea outright, or perpetuating non-truths (you'd be surprised howmany people think Gates/M$ invented the Internet. M$ probably didn't start the rumour, but they sure in the hell aren't going out of their way to stop it.)

"Would the Internet have blossomed into the vast information network it is today without the aid of easy-to-use software from Microsoft?"

It not only has, it did. (It is a retromyth that Windows is/was easy to use) If a car crashed constantly you wouldn't say it is easy to use would you?

Re:How soon we forget

[gbjbaanb]

I can see where you're coming from - that the 'standard' of Windows was required in order to move the business world of desktop computing forward to the point where it is today. Fair enough on that, I won't argue.

I will argue that Microsoft has been a force for good in the world past the point where Windows seemed to have a monopoly. The browser wars, bad. Office, bad (yes, there was Wordperfect and Lotus 123 well before Word and Excel came along and was 'aggressively' marketed and enforced on us by using Windows as leverage to gain customers), and all the others - I'd be here all day typing if I had to list every dodgy practice Microsoft has done.

In short then, MS was good for us in the beginning, once it started to get big I think it should have come to the attention of the authorities (oh it did!) and be broken up into NanoSofts (well, they had the chance) which would have continued the benefits of ubiquitous desktop computing without most of the predatory and abusive business practices the big MS engaged in.

(as for Grandma, if she just wants her webcam to 'just work', she will be disappointed when she installs Vista and finds that drivers are no longer available for that model - unless she wants to spend $$$ on a brand new one. Or install modern Linux which does just work with more hardware than Windows nowadays!)

PS. I started computing with an Acorn Atom, moved to an Amstrad than an Amiga while I used the mainframe and Sun Unix workstations at university. PCs running Windows in those days were considered toys. It was NT4 that made the big difference, before that, Windows was a joke.

Re:How soon we forget

[crontabminusell]

I had a TI-99/4A, then moved to a Commodore 128, then an Amiga 500. It wasn't until I was probably 12 years old before I got my hands on my first IBM-compatible PC (a 4.77MHz machine with a turbo button that cranked it up to 10MHz), and it was a huge step back. HUGE step back. I went from (with the Amiga) a nice GUI interface, great sound and (for the time) great graphics, and moved to a machine that beeped and booped and gave me a text prompt in up to 4 colors. Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure why I did that...

Re:How soon we forget

[Insanity Defense]

Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user.

I have to disagree there. Apple brought desktop computing to the home user. IBM brought it to the business user and took Microsoft along for the ride.

Apple lost the home with the Mac which was a totally closed system where the Apple II was an open system. IBM on the other hand brought an OPEN system to businesses along with the IBM name, people introduced to the computer at work then bought the same for home use. Microsoft just rode into the home on the back of IBM when IBM replaced Apple in the home.

My first access to a microcomputer was to a Heathkit H11 that I helped build.

Re:How soon we forget

[bledri]

The web was where the productivity turned out to be.

Yup, that's were all my productivity went.

Re:How soon we forget

[swillden]

MS in its early days did a lot to help out the computer industry in some ways

I disagree.

I remember in 1991, I purchased a NeXTstation. It had a beautiful, usable GUI layered over a powerful multitasking Unix operating system, with development tools that were not rivaled on any platform until at least a decade later. Meanwhile, at work I used Windows for Workgroups 3.11, an ugly, unstable DOS shell. My employer considered NeXTs (and did buy a few), but based on Microsoft's promises for the upcoming OS/2 decided to stick with Windows.

Then there was the OS/2 debacle. IBM and MS were jointly building a great (for the time) OS, but MS bailed and then killed OS/2 with its promises of "Cairo". What they actually delivered was Windows 95, which was hugely better than WfW, but still fell far, far short of what OS/2 delivered, much less what Cairo promised. None of which held a candle to NeXTstep, of course.

Along the way, MS stomped lots of innovative products from other companies. Consider DR-DOS, Quarterdesk, Stacker, etc.. There were dozens of small companies doing interesting things that MS squashed or bought, and then shelved their work.

While at it, Microsoft produced essentially ZERO innovation of their own. Their modus operandi was to wait for others to do interesting things and then buy or copy them. That's fine, but they earned a reputation for playing hardball and forcing unfair, one-sided deals that left the actual innovators out in the cold. I know personally of several potential startups with innovative ideas who decided not to create their products because the potential founders were sure MS would just squash them before they could make a profit. I'm sure that story was repeated hundreds or thousands of times, and the net effect seriously retarded the progress of the software industry.

Contrast that with Google, or IBM, or any of the other large players. Heck, a common Silicon Valley *business plan* is to create a web startup, develop it to prove out the ideas, then sell out to Google and walk away millionaires (or billionaires). That encourages innovation, because Google makes fair offers for the companies it buys.

Above all, Microsoft has for years trained users to accept buggy, insecure, crash-prone software as the norm, and acceptable. They have gotten much better of late, and Microsoft's R&D department has produced some great stuff in the last few years, but it will take a long time before they can do enough good to compensate for all of the damage they did in the past. If ever.

Re:How soon we forget

[Anubis IV]

Saying that IBM wasn't very "worldly" seems a bit naive. They had been around for decades at that point and moving into PCs was the natural place for them to go right then, just as it was natural for them to vacate that market when they did. IBM has always been about serving enterprise customer needs. At that time, PCs were an enterprise need. Once PCs became commoditised , PCs were no longer considered primarily an enterprise need. Instead, they were consumer needs. At that point, IBM sold off its remaining PC line (ThinkPad) to Lenovo and refocused on its core business: enterprise needs.

And to say that IBM is out of the hardware business is rather ill-informed as well. Just look at things like Blue Gene/L or Blue Gene/P, Cell, Roadrunner, Blade, or their other hardware technologies and products that they have to offer to high-end enterprise needs. Just because the average person may no longer be aware of IBM's products does not make them irrelevant or dead to the hardware business. It just means that they're out of your price range by a few hundred thousand or million of your favorite local currency.

As for Jobs, ever heard of VisiCalc? Even Microsoft Excel ran on Macs first, as did plenty of other software back then. Apple was doing fine in the early 80s, and then he was kicked out, as you'll recall. So, to pin Apple's lack of success on him is a bit iffy. Jobs is definitely a dreamer, but he's always been about shaking things up and changing the world (look up his famous quote when he was trying to recruit John Sculley, who worked at Pepsi at the time), not just appealing to people's aesthetics (though that does play a role, obviously). And if you want to see how Jobs is as a person, just look at what he did after he got kicked out of Apple: he started NeXT and made innovative computers that were aimed at businesses. He may not have been a huge success with NeXT, but to suggest that he doesn't care about business at all is just ignoring the facts of his history.

Re:How soon we forget

[phoenix321]

Maybe that's the real point where Microsoft is to blame: setting a world-wide standard for low quality software, damaging expectations well beyond the OS market up to the point where no customer is allowed to expect software that works flawlessly. It's in every software-for-hire contract, in every EULA, everywhere: software cannot be expected to work without occasionally but serious bugs. The problem is not that the software industry states that, but that all customers accept that without a second thought, because they never experienced software that did not crash sometimes. Because of this, we have grown accustomed to paying for software at a quality level we would sue the pants and cry havoc, pitchfork and torches for every other manufacturer in every other trade. But for software, even catastrophic blunders, we simply breathe deeply, reboot and curse silently. There were games that on a vanilla standard Windows installation did nothing but crash until a month and well over five emergency patches. Sure, people were clamoring in every forum for a fix, but almost no one returned the product as utterly defective, reclaiming money and compensation for efforts. There are games that NEVER worked but people still tried for months to fix them, producing unofficial patches or similar. No one would ever bother for any other stuff defective from-the-factory and I think that's party the fault of Microsoft.

No not really

[Darkness404]

No, I don't think MS has changed, but the world has. The iPhone has changed the smartphone market to where even with the best hardware Windows Mobile just isn't wanted much anymore. The 360 is still falling behind the Wii despite MS's attempts to beat it with the "New Xbox Experience" and with the development of the Natal controller. MS though has finally realized that unless Windows 7 is a hit, Linux/OS X/Now ChromeOS is going to kill them in the OS market. Office has stagnated and has had a popular revolt going on because of the "ribbon" UI that a lot of people hate, and I don't see a new version remedying that in the future. MS as a whole has remained the same, however the world is changing and they don't seem to realize that.

Re:No not really

[Opportunist]

What would you like to change? Windows XP was essentially what most of their users wanted. A nice looking interface (ok, with a teletubby standard background, but that's the least worry), good stability, good support for pretty much any hardware they had. Nothing they could be missing or hoping for in the next gen OS. And that's why Vista failed, basically. It's not the "must have" all the other MS OSs before were. Win95 was a must have, if anything ever was. It was the next best thing. Win98 was Win95 on crack, it was so much more stable, with far better support for internet and all the other new "must have" things.

(we'll politely ignore ME here now. Instead, we present some fluffy kitties to distract you)

Then, 2k. Stability of NT meets usability and compatibility of 98. IMO still one of their diamonds, and maybe the biggest leap they took in their stride. It was THE "must have" system, even "more must have" than 95 maybe was.

XP already had a harder time getting a "must have" badge. What does XP have that 2k doesn't? Out of the box WiFi support. Ok. You could install a driver for that. It's not really much more stable than 2k. It's also not really any more user friendly than 2k. There isn't really anything that I could put my finger on that the average user would want out of XP compared to 2k. But at least it was a bit more pleasing to the eye than the rather sterile 2k (a look that I loved, but I'm weird).

Vista was the first system that caused more of a "why the fuck should I?" rather than a "must have". While XP was eventually more than just "nice to have", Vista still doesn't convince. There's no compelling reason to switch (other than artificially introduced incompatibilities like the refusal to offer DirectX 10 on a system before Vista, which in turn led developers to cling to DX9 so they don't lose the XP user market). The system sells with new machines, ok, but mainly because of a lack of alternatives (since XP is no longer offered, and if, at higher price). If XP was offered at the same or lower price of Vista, the sales would look even more grim than they do.

And people using XP do not storm the stores and buy the upgrade, something that hasn't happened before. All the other upgrades were a hot seller, Vista upgrades sit like lead on the shelves.

So where should they develop to? Windows is "as good as it gets". What should they include in the system to have another "must have" seller? I can't see anything the average user could want.

More mature?

[Cryophallion]

Well, let's see, the OpenXML was definitely in the pipeline before Bill left, and the take no prisoners tactics that he loves is what got it pushed through the standards committee.

Next is ODF translators... which don't work, and in fact delete formulas. Not to mention there Smear Campaign. So we are saying maturity is going back to their ruthless kill-them-subversively methods that got them in trouble in the EU?

Oh, wait, maturity is killing declining products... which Bill did often

Sorry, I don't see a real change listed in at least that section

I really hate to join this...

[WED Fan]

I really hate to join this, but my first computer was a kit. 1976. No display, except for LED's. My first programming class had timeshare on computer across town. I programmed on a teletype with acoustic couplers, and saved my program to paper tape.

From there it was wiring my own serial S100 card from a magazine article. Yes, I used BASIC once it became available. Moved to a TRS80 model I and had a friend take me to task for wasting the money on 16k because I should be able to do everything in 4k. Moved to an Apple II, Sharp MZ80K with Pascal, Kaypro II, and eventually my first "IBM Compatible".

Microsoft was a common thread through most of that. Love 'em or hate 'em, they shaped the time.

As for their competitors, what most forget is that in the heat of battle, what allowed MS to win was usually serious mistakes by their competitors.

Word was inferior to WordPerfect, and possibly WordStar, but both companies shot themselves in the head, and allowed Word to take the lead.

Lotus 123 was THE spreadsheet for business, Lotus screwed themselves and Excel took the lead.

Netscape was the end-all-be-all for browsers, but they decided to shift focus and took on stuff that wasn't their core. Where are they now?

Yes, MS acquires a lot, sometimes by ruthlessly. But, most of the time, their competitors simply screw up and give the advantage to MS.