Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I found this assessment to be adequate when looking at Microsoft as a marketing company that makes the operating system. But what about Bing and Natal? These have been two very important developments to different worlds following the departure of Gates. I read an article from ITPro UK that I think did a better job describing change (or lack thereof) and there's certainly others with their own 1-year-on take.
Personally, it's the small things that Microsoft has done differently that I see as real change. The recent ECMA standardization and community promise surrounding CLI and C# for one. While not perfect, it's an important step. Supporting more community standards (albeit questionable) in IE8 has also been a tremendous step in my mind. I'm not embracing IE8 yet out of sheer caution but these are certainly progressive moves however small. Has Ballmer toned down his wild intensity now that he heads Microsoft and is the unquestionable leader? I don't think so in the operating system world but maybe in smaller subsections of software development. The pricing and marketing strategies they've used for their OS have been just as questionable and (in the case of the OLPC) as ridiculous as ever.
I hate to say it as I thought it was the end of the world when Ballmer took over Microsoft and that everything was going to grind to a halt around them but things don't look so bad. Honestly, I'm more concerned with other companies buying up everyone and everything around them in their quest to own a full stack of software or dominate one cash cow field--Google included. Two or three years ago, had I rubbed--to have everything in the world that was made by them blink out of existence. Now, I'd probably have better things to spend that wish on. I hate to sound like an apologist because I still despise a lot of their marketing tactics and things they do. But I'm glad they're starting to show some improvement and at least a little bit of innovation. I think things had really stagnated under Gates and though Ballmer looked like the big bad wolf, he's obviously taking more risks now that he's in charge.
My work here is dung.
Has anyone else realized that since about the beginning of this decade, Microsoft has slowly begun a transition to competing on quality, rather than simply leveraging their monopoly and sitting on their laurels? Take a look at some improvements in Microsoft products over the past few years:
* Windows XP. There is simply no comparing XP to previous "home" versions of Windows in terms of quality. Yes, I know it's largely Windows 2000 with a new skin, but the important thing here is that they discontinued their crufty, broken, DOS-based line that didn't even have true multitasking and replaced it with something stable and mature (in comparison).
* Visual Studio: As for the IDE itself, I never used versions prior to 2003, but I loved 2003 and have seen it getting nicer and nicer since. As for programming languages, their current implementation of C++ is actually quite close to standards-compliant, on the level of G++. They've got a ways to go with C, but it's less of a priority for them. The biggest change is in their flagship RAD offerings. C# and VB.NET are now mature object-oriented languages in the tradition of Java. No comparison with VB6.
* Internet Explorer: 6 was simply a joke, the laughingstock of the web. No tabs, an extremely buggy rendering engine, not extensible, unpredictable for web developers, and largely at odds with every published standard ever. IE7 was a big step in the right direction, and IE8 has entered the playing field as a serious competitor.
* Search: MSN search was useless abandonware; now they are really trying with Bing.
* User interface: Vista brought in a modern, powerful shell complete with modern, powerful command-line utilities. No comparison to the shell (with bundled terminal emulator) that has been outdated since it was released as part of DOS 1.0. Windows 7 has made several improvements on the GUI side.
Yes they're still behind, but they've covered a huge amount of ground. Yes I'd much prefer coding in Emacs using GNU Screen and XMonad for window management than in Visual Studio on Windows 7. Yes I'd much rather use Firefox, Opera, or Chrome than IE8, when given the choice. Yes, Apple has hands down the best GUI of all. But in, say, 2000, who'd have thought Microsoft would have come so far? I'm excited to see where their products will go and whether someday they will be as good as what comes from Apple, Google, and open-source hackers. I don't know whether they will, but it'll certainly be interesting.
Le français vous intéresse?
Gate's & Allen's "innovation" was to (practically) steal an operating system (DOS) from a not very worldly programmer named Tim Patterson, which happened to be appropriate to run on IBM's new (at that time) PC computer. IBM, not being very worldly either, looked toward a bright future selling tons of hardware not realizing that Asia would soon undercut ANYONE making hardware and that the platform was the OS.
The killer app soon followed, Lotus 1-2-3. One showing of this app to anyone in business made DOS so valuable that pc's became as ubiquitous as water. Everyone started making PC's that could run DOS & Lotus 1-2-3. The price of hardware then drops like a rock as everyone started making it and ultimately farming that work out to Asia driving prices down further. Apple never appealed to business, the needs of which really drive innovation. You can appreciate a personal computer as you would a Stradivarius, but that's not a need. Business had a real need for an electronic spreadsheet.
TODAY: IBM is for all intents and purposes out of the hardware business, which has moved to Singapore and S. Korea, and Paul Allen and Bill Gates are two of the richest people in the world. If Microsoft has done anything (aside from swindle people and stomped on innovation as much as possible), its made a platform that Business trusts enough to continue to invest in and employ millions of people that only do work on PC's. Jobs, always a dreamer, never really did care about the needs of Business, and instead appealed to people's vanity, which is why Apple never really took off like it might have.
Redmond's real strength lies in showing people how to be a ruthless company. Innovation is great, but people respect power and those who wield it.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
I'll consider through the eye of a SF reader : before the 80s computers worked. "Every computer glitch as a human origin" HAL taught us. (spoiler) it took a politician to make its perfect logic go amok. To say it in a nutshell, computers were deterministic.
Now fast-forward a few years. Cyberpunk. Computers fail, a skillful hacker can enter any system. Bugs cause catastrophes, virus take epic proportions. Microsoft changed the IT landscape and I think it made it lose at least 10 years (I would say 20). Now IT specialists waste their times reinventing the wheel for every version of Windows, correct the same problems over and over, put hacked patches on security holes that should not exist. Microsoft did not bring the desktop into the home. Apple did. Internet blossomed despite Microsoft attempts at controlling it (The first plans for MSN, "Microsoft Network" was to concurrence Internet itself, to be a separate network). Plug and play's most common nickname was "plug and pray" because when it didn't work (50% of the time) you had no way to make it work, even if you were an IT engineer. The long sessions of kernel hacking that were necessary a few years ago (try Ubuntu if you think this is still the case) to make a webcam work was mostly due to the culture of proprietary drivers that Microsoft helped foster. Linux drivers were written from reverse-engineered information. The fact that it could work was by itself a miracle that happened despite Microsoft efforts.
Honestly, we don't call Microsoft evil out of spite for its wealth, we have technical reasons for this. And Google did not choose "Don't be evil" as a motto without thinking of a certain Redmond company and the damages they did to the IT world.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I think IE6 is more evil for this reason: it pulled a significant part of the web away from being software/OS agnostic and made Windows a requirement. Like Windows or not this has made the web *significantly* less universal and has slowed it down. The web is still a powerful force, but if web pages (and web aps) would actually run anywhere, it would be *even more* significant to our day to day computing than it is now.
IE8 proves the point... Microsoft really tries to comply with standards and everything breaks. IE6 and non-compliance with standards is going to be a significant negative chapter in Microsoft history and we'll still be feeling the effects a decade from now at least.