Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Lost Decade
theodp writes "Newsweek's Daniel Lyons (that's Fake Steve to you) explains why Steve Ballmer is no Bill Gates, arguing that what most hurt Microsoft was BillG's decision to step down as CEO in January 2000: 'Gates was a software geek. He understood technology. Ballmer is a business guy.' And the problem with putting non-techies in charge of tech companies, concludes Lyons, is that they have blind spots. So while Microsoft's revenues nearly tripled from $23B to $58B on Ballmer's watch, says Lyons, the company became bureaucratic and lumbering, slowing down while the rest of the world — including Google, Apple and Amazon — sped up."
Since when? As far as I know, he never developed anything, instead relying on others to do the work and then leveraging that work towards profitability (example: DOS).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Developers, Developers, Developers.
It must really suck to be a billionaire and yet realize if you had been smart you coulda been a trillionaire.
Always blaming or crediting the CEO and never the techs, like Martha Stewart's husband.
This says a lot more about Steve Balmer's competence than Bill Gate's geekness. A far as I know Steve Jobs is no geek, but apparently Apple's relevance is affected by him being there.
It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
Like, uh, the rise of the internet, which Windows 95 was built for?
Oh, wait...
The people who own and run Microsoft know that they won't benefit from radical development in the product line. Not in their lifetimes anyway. So the engineering side goes business as usual. Marketing gets a boost. And profits go in the bank.
Its the same where I work. And its time to go.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Daniel Lyons better get ready to find some cover!
Nice piece, but he probably got the idea from James Kwak via Gruber.
"Technology firms also face a similar problem. In technology, as in most businesses, the way to make it to the top is through sales, so you end up with a situation where the CEO is a sales guy who has no understanding of technology and, for example, thinks that you can cut the development time of a project in half by adding twice as many people. I have seen this have catastrophic results. Even when you don’t have the generational issue that Trillin talks about, the problem is that the sociology of corporations leads to a certain kind of CEO, and as corporations become increasingly dependent on complex technology or complex business processes (for example, the kind of data-driven marketing that consumer packaged companies do), you end up with CEOs who don’t understand the key aspects of the companies they are managing."
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
How far back has the software industry been set back by Microsoft?
How much further along would server side be if Microsoft had truly worked with the Java community instead of going it's own way with .Net?
How much better would cellphones be if Microsoft had not bought, and slowly strangled, Danger?
How much further along would so many areas be if Microsoft had not bought up so many experts and stuffed them in an R&D group with almost no real world output, instead of having them work on practical technologies that made it to market?
Would the HD video market have been as fragmented as it was without Microsoft pushing HD-DVD long past the point it was obviously dead just so they would get licensing revenue from the menu system?
If Microsoft the company has lost a decade, it is Karma - for the world and our industry has lost so much more at their hands.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I certainly find the viewpoint of the article very appealing - essentially that just being a manager isn't enough to enable you to manage anything you want. That you need to understand what your company does at a highly intimate level to really run it well. Who wants to be pushed around by people whose only qualification is to manage others? What about the real folks at the coalface who know what the business is really like?
Question is - is it true? Certainly appeals to me. But has anyone done a study into this? It'd be interesting to see. Although really, the backgrounds of the CEOs and the records of their companies are out there for all to see. MS under Bill Gates, Apple under Steve Jobs - these certainly look like convincing individual cases. What would happen if you analysed the whole computing industry? What about other industries?
I would suggest that to a certain extent a really good manager could manage anything they choose - because a truly good manager will make sure he understands what he's getting into. But even then, everyone has different aptitudes for different things, so there's no way to guarantee that they'd be as skilled in any given job. You can probably adapt to that, as long as you're aware of it and don't assume that your previous experience will carry you. For CEOs, there's perhaps a requirement to be a good general businessman - maybe those skills do transfer well. But I think understanding the business ought to be pretty darn important if you want to run the company *well* as opposed to just keeping it ticking over. I don't think there should be any excuse for appointing a CEO who doesn't, can't or won't understand the business adequately. But hey, I'm not on any company boards nor am I a shareholder in anything *shrug*
MS's entire business model was doomed for anything beyond the first dip in the pool...BG or not. Let's not paint that horse anything but the original color....
Maybe if they rebrand the company and call it "Freedom Hero Baby Jesus Family Values Lower Taxes Soft" instead....
This also happened with eBay, and is likely to happen to Google should they ever chance the CEO.
Formula for failure:
Have the CEO drive a business into the ground by paying them in cash. Pay them the average employee's wage + bonus in stock, therefore they are only sabotaging themselves if they drive the company into the ground, or increase customer resentment. Maybe apply this to board members too.
In Microsoft's case, the Anti-opensource/anti-linux zealotry, and delivering incremental upgrades as "new operating systems" with only improvements made to the bells and whistles has made customers who even buy windows still refer to Microsoft (the company) as bad.
What could change Microsoft's standing, and stop eroding customer confidence is doing what they did with Windows 7, and open-beta each operating system for 90 days to get feedback on what people like and dislike. Had they done this back with Windows XP, we might never have seen the terrible Vista.
And Vista was not Windows ME. Vista was stable, ME was not.
eBay runs afoul of the not listening to customers, especially with the CEO change. It went from relatively listening, to completely ignoring. (As soon as John came on board, departments were getting outsourced left and right, and plenty of forced-use-of-paypal attempts were made.) The final straw on this was the giving discounts to bulk listers. In effect John in one year turned eBay into Amazon, stripping a lot of what made eBay good out.
If Google were to follow the same route, you'd see that 20% project time gone first, then innovations would stop flowing. Then ads would be stuffed into every part of the site until it resembles Yahoo. And we all know how well Yahoo is doing (not well at all.)
Bill Gates at least knew what direction to take things, Microsoft is a software company. Ballmer doesn't seem to know what direction to go, hence the "New version, now with shiny new bells and whistles." The moving of software into "Live" is a horrible mistake that is trying to encroach on what Google does well, that being "offering free usable services." Microsoft is trying to charge money and offer unusable services.
Microsoft only does Windows and Office well, and makes some slightly-better-than-average hardware for the PC. The Xbox/Xbox360 development must have hired the same people who worked on Windows ME. Pushed unfinished, poorly tested hardware out the door to meet some business agenda.
Microsoft's Windows Mobile is becoming increasingly irrelevant with the iPhone and Blackberry eating it's lunch. Again with the "move services online" aspect that is failing. If they can't do it right on the mobile platform, they sure as hell are going to fail to make paywalled office software.
What good did that do Jerry Yang?
Microsoft is a classic case of what you get when the problem is dictating the solution.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
This has happened in a lot of businesses. The pharmaceutical industry is in similar shape for the same reasons. Maybe even more so.
revenues nearly tripled from $23B to $58B on Ballmer's watch....
56 / 23 ~= 2.43
Unless we're in some strange universe, Ballmer increased revenue almost 2 and a half times...or over two times. 3 is out.
Unless he's doing some fun rounding I'm unaware of.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
To business men, numbers are everything. To them, the larger the number under the 'Income' category the better. They measure success just by looking at the large number of money they make. In geek terms, that would be the same as measuring 'lines of code' to measure how great a peace of code is.
I agree Bill G was a geek and knew what to look for.
You make working less and earning more sound like a bad thing? And for Ten Years? Man I'm lucky if I can screw off without much to show for a little less than a week. Ballmer should write a book.
The current CEO of Palm is the inventor of the ipod, not Steve Jobs. While at Apple Steve Jobs sent him out to find a hot product to make and he found the 1.8" hard drive at Toshiba that was considered a waste of resources and about to be killed. He made the ipod around it. iTunes came from a company Apple bought and they just renamed the software.
iTunes took off because Microsoft couldn't get their DRM strategy right and iTunes worked out a good deal with the record companies. the Ipod was one brand from a company everyone knew.
the iphone was a sales disaster until they cut the price and added the subsidies from AT&T. even then it was a slow niche seller until the 3G came out with the AppStore and Exchange support. the fact that you need a Mac to code for the iphone and the Vista PR disaster helped drive Mac sales. Otherwise they were flat for most of the decade since no one in their right mind would pay the premium for Apple's usually slower hardware. Now that the PC market is maturing it's becoming more vertically integrated like any maturing industry and Apple is there with a complete product while MS sticks to it's OEM model.
if you compare the specs than the iMac's are competative against Dell/HP and in some cases cheaper. the MBP will be competative once the next refresh comes. it's worth it getting a Mac since it's the only decent desktop ^nix and there is no crapware like on Dell's and HP's
While Microsoft has never been the most innovative company, since Bill Gates' departure Microsoft seems to have fallen into a "Me Too" mentality. Nintendo and Sony were making money in gaming consoles. Microsoft says "Me Too" and the X-box is born. Apple makes money with the iPod and "Me Too" here comes the Zune. And don't get me started onMicrosoft's obvious Google-envy. Microsoft has some of the best and brightest minds in the industry but they constantly seem to be playing catch-up with everyone else.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
FTFA:
advanced...goto... ...does not compute...
A company makes $1.2 BILLION a month in net profit, and it's a failure with a lost decade? And people wonder why techies usually suck as CEOs...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The bean counters who manage Microsoft won't give two hoots that the technies within and without the company are disgruntled. Why should they? The article says that Microsoft's fortunes nearly tripled, and thats all they care about.
My web domain.
Steve Ballmer is a business guy and the CEO.
Ray Ozzie is the tech guy and the chief software architect.
Bill Gates was actually replaced by the two of them working in tandem.
Do these guys even research a little before they make these retarded articles about how an already huge company that tripled its revenue in 10 years is doing poorly?
The one thing a good manager cannot manage is creativity; they've either got it or they don't. In MS's case they never had it unless you count buying up the ideas others had come up with (DOS, SQL, Excel, Word, and on and on). This problem is compounded when, at some point, HR steps in with focus on credentials instead of competence and further strangles any new ideas. Go ahead, tell your HR department to hire more creative people and watch them demand more credentials from every applicant.
Google has managed to attract the best and brightest because they've promoted a sense of excitement and stressed competence. But at some point HR at Google will get the upper hand too. Art History majors always prevail.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
It may be a matter of risk management.
The tallest tree in the forest is the one that gets struck by lightening, thus keeping most of the forest roughly the same height.
In the case of companies like Microsoft, if you get too far ahead (technically or fiscally) you become the target of anti trust laws.
Oh, there was a bit of an economic lift in the middle of the decade -- the housing boom triggered by Greenspan's one-percent interest rates. So, some software development work went into the mortgage industry. That's as useful, as exciting, and as enduring as granite countertops (which were just a waystation between Corian and compressed quartz). Then the Great Recession hit in 2007 -- back to no innovation at all (as least outside of cleared work).
What do we have to show for it on the desktop? Window bars that are blurry and hard to read. Faaaan-tastic.
Where the heck is end-user database/web development? It's like Microsoft Access and Lotus Notes are living time capsules of their 1995 versions. Where is a unified naming system that treats e-mail messages, files, web URLs, and database records homogeneously? Where are agents? Why do I have to manually save every check images from my online banking? Why aren't these automatically downloaded to my computer by a software agent?
The original article is too timid.
The problem is not just Ballmer. The problem is that Microsoft wasn't broken up. Ballmer is the symptom.
After the antitrust ruling was emasculated, Bill Gates should have said "OK, we won. Now we're going to break Microsoft up anyway. That's the only way to prevent us from turning into exactly what we despised when we founded the company: IBM."
They have many smart people working there but they are all Thralls, in service to the continued maintenance of the Windows Empire, whose first commandment is Thou Shalt Not Think Different.
I guess Gates developed at least Microsoft BOB!!! :D
And the problem with putting non-techies in charge of tech companies, concludes Lyons, is that they have blind spots
I don't think this is necessarily true. A company like Cisco has done great things with a business guy (Chambers) in charge. He probably gets it better than Ballmer, but he's proof that a business guy can be a good CEO of a technology company.
For Microsoft, it's both - Software and Company. They create software and they are a profit machine. I don't think that having Ballmer or Gates at the helm is really driving either culture.
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swvf3w6hcY4
The early Microsoft Basic was buggy and poorly documented. It ran under the CP/M operating system.
"... the problem with putting non-techies in charge of tech companies, concludes Lyons, is that they have blind spots."
The problem with managers who have little knowledge or interest in technology is that they are mostly blind to technology. The mentally blind cannot lead.
If you read the books about Bill Gates and Microsoft, there is little evidence that he was much interested in technology. Remember, he initially didn't think the internet would be important. Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire is interesting, for example. So is Barbarians Led by Bill Gates.
Read The Road Ahead by Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold. There was little in the initial edition, at least, to suggest that Gates knew much about technology. The book was full of platitudes that any buzzword collector would know.
No, he'll always be "the shill for SCO" to me and not worthy of the click-through.
Oh come on how do you write a 4k BASIC interpreter and editor in assembly and not "know technology"?
I don't care how buggy Altair BASIC was, Bill Gates knew what he was doing back then.
"Newsweek's Daniel Lyons (that's Fake Steve to you)
Or more likely to be recognized here as Forbes Magazine's massive and unrepentant SCO shill.
(Unrepentant in that his excuse for his ridiculously one-sided reporting was the flaming he got on the topic in the first place).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Bill Gates is a computer geek in exactly the same way as I'm a multi-billionaire. Specifically, the I-wish-I-were way. If Gates were actually a geek, Windows wouldn't be such a piece of shit. Also, MS wouldn't have cheated IBM, because that's just not something our kind does. Bill Gates is just a dweeb loser who happened to be lucky enough to make a lot of money off of people foolish enough to trust him.
Cable switches were placed on a road. Traf-o-Data counted closures of the switches.
I have to disagree that it's about a tech-oriented CEO. MS's problem is that they are good at leveraging dominance of one market to conquer another. They are bundlers and package-oriented wheeler-dealers. However, the internet relies on open standards to function, and MS simply hasn't found out how to work smoothly among open-standards. Their instinct is and has always been to to kill them off via manipulation, and their reputation surrounding standards has hampered them. They simply came to the end of the leveraging-of-proprietary rope. This would have happened with or without Gates.
They would have to almost completely change company personality to get out of their rut, much like IBM did when they decided that services, not hardware, were going to be their thing. But IBM had to have it's face shoved into the boiling calderon of death before it realized it had to start over. MS is still a ways from that point.
Table-ized A.I.
pffft, poser.
CF
To be honest I'd take .NET over the piece of slow shit that Java is over any day.
I'll not say anything about speed either way, since that is not the point.
If you enjoy .Net now, wouldn't you enjoy an even more advanced .Net that was as widely deployed as Java and .Net (combined) are now? That's what we would have if Microsoft would have joined the open JCP Java community process and sought to improve that platform, instead of spending years duplicating Java.
I doubt Danger has had really any effect on Mobile world.
Of course they didn't. Microsoft bought them. But that's again the point, there was tremendous potential there very early on but it was left to languish because it was not Windows Mobile.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I thought Ballmer was a song and dance man: "Developers! Developers! Developers!"
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Regardless of how it got there, having a mass market platform to develop against surely made many projects feasible that would otherwise have cost too much for niche markets.
UNIX was handling that just fine before Microsoft came along. You also forget there were other perfectly viable user platforms until that point, like Amiga or the Mac, or for that matter even OS/2. Any benefit gained was lost in the terrible issues we have resulting from a security monoculture.
Java is a tragic missed opportunity.
Given the number of jobs and active server side development going on, and the fact that Android is based atop it, and the fact that until now mobile programming such as it was was J2ME, and the fact that Java is in the Blu-Ray menuing system... I'm almost afraid to see what an un-missed opportunity looks like (apologies to Strunk & White for the numerous "fact that").
Buying up experts and stuffing them into R&D is always hit and miss. Generally you'll take a lot of misses to get the one big hit though. It takes time and even with the recession Microsoft is still spending over 9 billion on R&D this year..
The ultimate Ivory Tower, that doubles as a dungeon - despite all that money spent they have very little usable output to point to compared to Google or Apple or just about any other company that does R&D. It's more a place to try and keep smart people AWAY from other companies than it is a productive force.
I can honestly say that I don't think anyone cared much that Microsoft was backing HD-DVD.
It's not about you or I caring. It was all about Microsoft financially backing the format, and the companies that would have leapt from the sinking ship staying about because Microsoft was still there. It's a shame they didn't do further study on the fates of other Microsoft partners or many billions might have been saved (not that I shed any tears for the movie studios)...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All this furore over Jobs, Gates and Ballmer. It's as if these guys are working 6000 hours a week, making every minor decision. There are lots and lots of talented people working "behind the scenes" to advise on the right technological directions to pursue.
Furthermore, whoever wrote this has obviously never come across a geek-ran company, strangling under quite significant business blindspots. As a company gets larger, wIth the right advisers, the guy at the top should be the business man. Sure, if he's a complete technological disaster, there's a problem, but I don't think there's too big of an issue when you've nearly tripled in net worth.
Articles like these, they're just the business version of a "music critic". Another version of the gossip column.
I record my sleeptalking
Hey! Stop interfering with the revisionist history! Next you will complain about the Gates Borg Icon and the Broken Windows icon for stories.
This space for rent.
Actually Gates knew the 1960's and 1970's technology. His mother paid for time on a mainframe for him and his school mates for the first computer club in his school. Bill Gates learned FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Assembly, etc.
Microsoft BASIC for the Altair was a group project, but rumor has it they got the Dartmouth BASIC source code from dumpster diving, but nobody can prove that. Anyway Ballmer and Gates wrote traffic control programs in assembly prior to founding Microsoft.
Bill Gates learned from his father who was a lawyer that the best way to make money is to pay people to invent new technology for you, or buy out your competition if your employees cannot do it. Like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates is a manager with a little about a technical background, but more into marketing, sales, and hype (or propaganda), as well as public relations. Steve Wozniac was the real power behind the early Apple, and Paul Allen and others where the real power behind the early Microsoft (later on Tim Patternson as well).
I wouldn't say that Gates is not knowing how technology works, but his knowledge comes from the 1960's and 1970's technology, and then management of 1980's to above as he directed others to create the technology even if he didn't write the code himself. Gates gave the vision, and the design, and the ideas and other things to drive others to create Windows, and other projects. Yes Microsoft did indeed copy off competitors and bundled technology in an effort to drive competitors out of business. While Lotus had the Lotus Symphony as the first bundled software, eventually Microsoft bundled Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and even Access as Microsoft Office for Windows and eventually wiped out Lotus (IBM bought the corpse of Lotus) and weakened Wordperfect, and drove Aston Tate out of the DBase database business with Access and SQL Server.
Microsoft always has had a BASIC product, from MS BASIC to GW-BASIC, to Quick BASIC, to Visual BASIC, to Visual BASIC.Net, the BASIC keeps on going and upgraded to new operating systems and frameworks, now with the Dotnet Framework built into Windows Vista and Windows 7. The Dotnet Framework put a lot of Visual BASIC component makers out of business as Dotnet did what a lot of third party components for Visual BASIC did before it was developed.
It takes at least a basic understanding of technology to pull all of that off. Baller is the typical Pointy Haired Boss, but Bill Gates was like the Wally of Dilbert at least, and expert on ancient technology but knows how to drive his team to get results.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Or, because we run Windows 9001, they still hack our mothership.
So what's Microsoft's alternative? Compete with themselves?
.NET is way better than Java in many respects. In fact, now Java is implementing many features of the new C# version. And I thought competition led to better things and a single language led to stagnation?
Competition within the framework of a standard is better. Competition around competing resources is inherently wasteful.
To use the beloved Slashdot car analogy, would the competition among automakers be as good if everyone needed different roads or kinds of gas?
What I am saying with this is not anything about the quality of .Net or Java. What I am saying is, imagine if both camps had not wasted time working on the same parallel tracks and instead everyone had worked to define a better base Java, and then competed around the JVM's. Microsoft would have had a kick-ass JVM and probably a lot more people would be using it. Microsoft even started to do that but then decided to enhance the JVM outside of the community framework, and that was that.
Danger is that big of a deal? huh?
They were, if you were paying attention to feature phones at the time. They were on the road to becoming just as much of a success as Blackberry, they had a great mobile OS (for the time) and really well done UI. The fact you think so little of them proves my point.
R&D with no pressure to create real world output can give freedom to academics instead of always concentrating on the almighty dollar returns.
Or it can also lead to academic masturbation. Even in profitless universities, you have the pressure to publish which drives research to publishable results. Microsoft R&D doesn't have to publish. They don't have to do anything but deliver the equivalent of a $10k table computer once a decade or so.
They were pushing HDDVD how exactly?
With millions of dollars in backing? With a huge push to publish menus for HD-DVD using the Microsoft defined standard? By continually proclaiming to the press that HD-DVD had the "full backing" of Microsoft? By producing an HD-DVD player for the 360 (though actually that was a moment of weakness for if they had included it in every 360 the format may well have won, and it certainly would have meant there was even a fight at all).
How did they NOT push HD-DVD? Go back and read the news articles man, Microsoft is in every other story on HD-DVD.
If Microsoft didn't help make computers standardized and way cheap, we would still be running $3000 computers
Well before Microsoft made computers "standard and cheap" (and I am glad you used the term "cheap" instead of inexpensive as it is so much more fitting) I was paying far less than $3k for a computer. Apple? Amiga? AtarI? Even around the time of Win 3.1, you had OS/2 and computers were not much - and they could run Linux easily too... There's a reason they were actually declared a monopoly, and the fact that unhealthy monopoly was never addressed has been a huge drag on the industry.
The world has lost too much time at the hands of Microsoft to claim there was ever an overall benefit. You can see the proof of this in how healthy competition is finally occurring on the web thanks to XHTML and the rise of alternative browsers, and how much more vibrant the world of smartphones is with Web OS, iPhone OS, and Android now that Microsoft is not stifling competition in the sector out of fear of what they might do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If understanding means seeing a deep set of relationships and being able to prioritise them, more than just having a lot of information, I'd have to give the nod to Bill for this one example:
When Bill gates was building his home, with the 10 car garage, and the library that displays DaVinci's codex, and all those other neat features, Martha Stewart actually got a look at some of it, and commented that Bill was running all the home networking through seriously hardened wiring channels that made it very hard to reroute as his needs changed. She mentioned how the guy ought to have heard about wireless networking by then.
Skip forward a few years, and Martha Stewart has been busted in a case where e-mail evidence was a major factor. Bill Gates, however, has not, and there's no sign that he had corporate espionage problems with his home set up either. I'd submit that Bill thought about it a bit, and decided that at least some of his competitors, maybe the DoJ or SEC, and maybe some foreign governments would think paying literally millions to crack his communications might still be cost effective, and wireless wasn't up to that sort of pressure.
Is Gates a technology lover? Probably not much of one. His admiration for a sweet hack may be low or nil. But understanding doesn't always imply admiration or love.
Who is John Cabal?
Microsoft dominates in the office space because it understands the office worker and the office as a working environment.
Or it is because, as the Justice department and the EU courts both found, Microsoft abused a monopoly position to keep themselves in power longer than they should have been either from technical or non-technical reasons alone.
Microsoft enjoys a level of success from providing business solutions that people need. But having worked in a very large company before, I have seen better solutions passed by because Microsoft cut some other licensing to get a foot in the door in some other area - even though the eventual millions of dollars sunk into the alternative were eventually lost when the whole thing floundered anyway.
I understand succeeding on non-technical merits very well. It's just that I have seen so many cases where that is not so.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...considering that IMHO Microsoft has actually been steadily improving since early this decade, whereas the 10 years before then were all downhill. They're acutally one of the few companies that decided to narrow their focus and keep to what they did best, and the results are finally beginning to show with Windows 7.
Get your facts straight. Learn about the snubbing by JAVA which forced MSFT to develope their own languages since JAVA would not license to MDSF.
That's bullshit.
Go back and re-read your history. Microsoft tried to implement custom extensions to Java without going through the JCP, so Sun sued them saying they were not compliant with the standards (which they were not).
Microsoft COULD HAVE joined the JCP too, just like IBM and Sun and HP and Oracle etc. etc. etc. They were invited. But they didn't want to play where they could not be the driving force behind a "standard" like .Net (gee, a "standard" defined by one company! That sure must be non-proprietary!). But Microsoft did not, and so they split the whole virtual machine development community.
JCP was the official standards body, so it was up to Microsoft to join that or not - not for Sun to come crawling to the MDSF (which they cou;dn't do anyway because unlike .Net Java is a STANDARD with many companies that would have to agree).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What was the last innovative thing MS did, where you got order-of-magnitude coolness for upgrading? 3.11 to Win95? Active Directory? Other than driver support, new themes, and building more applications into OS-level stuff (hello IIS) where are they?
Where is a real volume manager? Where is virtualization? Where is workload balancing?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Bill Gates went to Harvard Business school. His technical abilities are not what you think they are. He did not invent DOS, but bought it. At best, he is a Project Manager and not a coder. Bill Gates is as much a business man as you are claiming Ballmer is. The difference between Gates and Ballmer is that Gates could almost predict the future. He had a vision and goals. Not only that, his visions and goals satisfied others. He also knew how to market them and control the markets to his advantage. Gates is definitely a very smart guy, but not in the way you imply. Ballmer is also a greedy hothead, both qualities Bill Gates does not have. While the statements made are generally true, I just wanted to make it clear that Gates' "techie" is as a consumer of tech and not as a geeky coder type.
Microsoft mission statement under Bill Gates:
"A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software".
Translation: we want world domination!
Microsoft mission statement under Steve Ballmer:
"Help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential."
Translation: none: no meaningful information conveyed; incomprehensible marketspeak.
Everything else is just following from that, really.
The fact that Gates only knew 1960's and 1970's tech doesn't change the poster's point. What languages does Ballmer code in?
It didn't matter whether Gates or Ballmer was in charge. Gates was Chairman and Chief Architect until just recently, so Vista happened on his technical watch.
Microsoft has never been an innovator, as has been well documented. MS-DOS was just a CP/M clone that they bought from Tim Paterson. Windows was a Mac copy, Excel followed from 1-2-3, COM was a descendant of the Apollo/DCE distributed computing model, Internet Explorer was the infamous Netscape killer, X-box took after Sony. Of course .NET and C# were just slightly improved copies of Java. Arguably Microsoft's biggest innovation, Visual Basic was presented to them as a near fait-accompli by Alan Cooper, an outside developer.
So after Microsoft vanquished all of its main competitors in the PC space, they had no one left to attack or copy where they had a home field advantage. Anyone who came up with a business plan for PC desktop software could expect to be shown the door by the venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, because of Microsoft and its ruthless, fast-following tendencies. Now they are going after Google (in search) and Apple (in phones), but this time they are competing on foreign turf.
And PC desktop software is a mature business. Not only that, but there are problems with the wonderful clean .NET (or Java) model in regard to protecting intellectual property of the source code, which probably explains why none of Microsoft's own flagship offerings have been ported to C#, eight years after .NET 1.0 first shipped. That's something that really needs to be discussed.
I do wonder whether BillG was showing the world the basic lesson in business (that they don't teach you at university) that firing the founder of a company isn't usually a good idea.
-- The Grand Teddy Bear has Spoken: "Windows 8 Source Code Available NOW! more disgusting than your pr..."
The author has it all wrong.
Now, to preface this, if I had my choice I'd go back to composing my documents in latex, reading my email in mutt, and doing my number crunching against a real rdbms, but at work I don't have my choice, so I use Microsoft software.
In the world of business, the combination of Microsoft Office and Exchange is unparalleled. It's the de facto standard for productivity and collaboration in small, medium, and large business. It enjoys that position not just because it has momentum, but because it really is very good at what it does, which is providing powerful publishing, collaboration, and number crunching tools to people who don't know a lot about software but do know a lot about their business. There are successful small and medium businesses whose back offices are built on this suite.The problem with would-be competitors like KOffice, OpenOffice, Evolution, and now Google Docs isn't Microsoft's monopoly; it's that they plain just aren't anywhere near as good. Microsoft may not be the model of efficiency, but these would-be competitors continue to underestimate how many man hours it takes to build a fully-featured, competitive office suite.
And in the world of games, the Direct X platform is immensely powerful, popular, and drives development of cutting edge graphics and gaming hardware for the entire industry. Apple is years behind in this regard. If Apple took a majority of the OS market tomorrow, game development shops would be hurting.
MIcrosoft makes a lot of money because they spend a lot of money. People drastically underestimate how rich Microsoft offers are in business and gaming, and just how expensive it is to compete on that level.
If you read the books .
about Bill Gates and Microsoft, there is little evidence that he was much
interested in technology. Remember, he initially didn't think the internet
would be important. Hard
Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire is interesting,
for example.
Bullshit. I pulled "Hard Drive" off the shelf and the first several chapters are about Gates' obsession with computer programming.
Admittedly the "The Road Ahead" was some worthless crap for MBA fanboys.
But his greatest innovations were in MARKETING, not in the technology itself.
Mod-up above, please. Looking for a five for him.
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
The best and brightest at MS used to shine like gods walking amongst mortals. Now the place is crawling with Program Managers trying to mold fiefdoms into dynasties. Meanwhile the level of creativity steadily goes further down the shiatter.
Microsoft was a dinosaur since the 1980s.
They only thing they were good at was getting in bed with the OEMs, and marketing.
For a technology company they've always been behind and their implementations have always been shit.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Microsoft's revenues nearly tripled from $23B to $58B on Ballmer's watch.
And this was a "lost decade?"
General Motors had a lost decade. Microsoft did not.
keyword: nearly, he didn't say he tripled it. He said, "nearly" tippled it.
They wrote their BASIC interpreter in assembler or machine language specific to one Intel chip. Although they may have gotten algorithm ideas from other implementations, they still had to hand-code every part.
Table-ized A.I.
Predicting the future and how people will react to new technologies is difficult, and often has more to do with psychology than technology.
Table-ized A.I.
Thrown chairs.
Hey its you again. The guy with the low UID that seems to have fallen asleep in '99 and just recently woken up. It has been said TIME AND TIME AGAIN, that Apple is usually not an innovator as far as the basic spec/language/GUI. What they succeed in is making poeple care passionately enough about their tweaked product to pay top dollar for it. I bought a MBP and I know it was overpriced for its config, damn right. But I also know that in 3 years when I flip it on eBay I will get 50% of my money back, whereas the Vio I was eyeing will be worth peanuts. Plus I know it will likely work for 10 years after that. Apple overcharges, but they deliver the most reliable HW on the market as study upon study have shown. For me innovation lies in usability. If my computers last longer it is certainly more usable in the long run.
Well, let's think about the development cycle...
Ballmer throws chair at programmer ...
Programmer writes source code and calls compiler
Compiler writes binary
Seems to me like Ballmer might be programming in a way more abstract than Java's silliest concepts.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Altair BASIC and Microsoft BASIC was initially implemented by Bill Gates himself. Microsoft BASIC was licensed to numerous platforms.
Now you may scoff at BASIC, but many developers got their start on home computers running some form of BASIC, many of us on a Microsoft BASIC. And my opinion is that most slashdotters lack the technical prowess to implement even a primitive BASIC interpreter in assembly language or even C.
(I refuse to use Microsoft products, especially Office, and primarily run Linux, OSX and Solaris at home. So I'm not some Windows fanboi)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I have been reading these "MSFT is dying" articles since the start of the internet age. And before MSFT, I was reading about how IBM will never see glory days again.
I just pulled up some figures on yahoo! finance and compared the net incomes of MSFT and the "hot" technology companies like amazon, apple, saleforce, and google. Their combined net income is STILL less than MSFT.
BASIC would never have caught on over LOGO if it wasn't for Bill Gates. Kemeny & Kurtz likely felt pretty inferior once they found out about LOGO, which is far more flexible and expressive than BASIC ever could be. You could actually extend LOGO with new functions and data types and natively supported lists (being a derivative of LISP). Yet LOGO programming was considered so easy and simple that young children were usually introduced to LOGO before BASIC. Too bad most people didn't know that there is more to LOGO than Turtle Graphics.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I had no idea that WE were supposed to be the aliens in Independence Day. That completely changes everything about that movie to me.
I find it a big rewrite of history to call Bill Gates a geek. If anything he is a cunning, soulless strategist who stop at nothing to bury you if it gives him the upper hand. A techie is to me someone who feel pride in delivering good products and the best solutions.
Historically i dont know about any product he has done or been involved in himself.
HTTP/1.1 400
That's some serious revisionism from Microsoft's Daniel "Fakes Steve" Lyons. Even for slashdot, that's lame posting such shit.
Ballmer's no businessman, his only claim to fame is being buddies with the 3rd generation of Gates wealth.
Gates is a geek to be sure, but no computer geek. And sure as hell is no visionary. That goes from his open letter to the home brew club in 1976 to his "the Internet is a passing fad" / "the Internet? We are not interested in it", and onward to other gaffs this year.
"Steve Jobs belonged to the Homebrew Computer Club."
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Soooo really what you're saying is Apple takes stuff other people have already released/made, makes ui tweaks, then makes it "cool"
The attitude that mere "ui tweaks" aren't innovative or important is the reason why the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will forever be a joke.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Ok flamebait first, People seem to rate geeks a little too highly! Lets face it the guys who made money are the guys who were either lucky or the guys who knew how to make money. Being geeky had nothing to do with it. It probably did with the field you were in but thats about it. Secondly before anyone actually talks shit about anyone, am pretty sure Microsoft did more for the US than GM in the past three decades. More number of jobs and technology have been actually created because Microsoft was in business. If i weren't Microsoft it would have been something else. The reason Microsoft became such a successful company is because they filled a gap which existing solutions didn't or couldn't fill. Saying Bill Gates would have done better because he was a geek is just plain stupid and basically brings to light the ignorance of the writer. He may or maynot understand technology, but he definitely dos not understand business.
same with the medias, newspaper, movie, music and broadcast industries.
I'd say the competition of .NET made Java progress.
See the comment just below with the username Orion Blastar.
Quoting: "Microsoft BASIC for the Altair was a group project, but rumor has it they got the Dartmouth BASIC source code from dumpster diving, but nobody can prove that."
That fits with what I've seen. Microsoft's history, maybe surprisingly, does not suggest that Bill Gates is seriously interested in technology. If you disagree, please name an innovation from Microsoft. Most innovations were bought from someone else, or were, like the NTFS file system, the result of Microsoft top management hiring someone well known in the computer industry.
More evidence: Count the times Microsoft has made huge mistakes in technology. For example, Clippy and Microsoft Bob.
Microsoft failed to recognize the importance of the internet long after it became important to myself and people I knew, like a friend at Tektronix. I remember downloading something from a computer at a university in Japan and being hugely impressed. Remember that there was an internet long before there was a fully public internet.
Next sentence from the comment below: "Anyway Ballmer and Gates wrote traffic control programs in assembly prior to founding Microsoft."
That program was very limited. It was, of course, NOT a "traffic control program". It only counted switch closures and recorded the data for later analysis.
Consider the history of Windows, as recounted in the books about Microsoft, such as Hard Drive. Microsoft had supplied DOS, an OS originally bought from someone else. According to that book, Microsoft stopped competition by announcing Windows long before it was ready. The first version of Windows was worthless, in my opinion. The second version was a toy. The third version was the first that was actually useful. It crashed a lot, and handled fonts badly. Windows version 3.1 was the first acceptable product.
First, since when has MS EVER promoted standards?
They didn't write the basic compiler, it was copied and badly copied at that.
And then there is the real joke that shows you have no clue whatsoever about computer history. It was Compaq that created the IBM-clone. MS had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Next time you read up on history, don't do it at microsoft.com.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Well, at least, according to his wikipedia page:
Spouse(s) Melinda Gates (1994-present) Children Jennifer Katharine Gates (b.1996) Rory John Gates (b.1999) Phoebe Adele Gates (b.2002)She's had sex at least three more times than myself or the average Anonymous Coward. So those billions must have counted for something.
There. Fixed that for you. She can find a hard dick anywhere. It's a little more difficult to find unlimited bank credit.
MS Office is hurting, not from competition but from the fact that old versions are good enough. Countless very large companies simply no longer bother to upgrade. It is even worse with governments. MS Office competes with its older versions, it is a unique thing about software because software doesn't degrade like physical products.
The newer office versions simply have no compelling features that people MUST have.
As for DirectX, that must be one of the most poorly run businesses in the world. MS constantly is shifting its focus from Windows is not for gaming, to pushing its console and back to Windows. As for doing it for the entire industry, I presume you are leaving out the PS3, Wii, DS and PSP here? Oh and the biggest PC game, WoW runs perfectly fine on the mac, where there is no DirectX.
Sorry mate, but try again.
This article is not about MS doing badly but not doing as well as they could have done. MS could have pushed the envelope, and they didn't. That products like Open Office and KDE even come close to a billion dollar company says it all.
Just how can it be that Firefox, Opera, Chrome AND Safari are ALL better, faster and more capable browsers then IE? Where is all that R&D going?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
More evidence: Count the times Microsoft has made huge mistakes in
technology. For example, Clippy and Microsoft Bob.
For the sake of all the paperclips in the world, whether they're not yet made, holding tight in sea containers to be shipped off into a new future, being used in office for good or bad, and even the rusty ones waiting to be dissolved in stinky sewers - STOP BASHING CLIPPY!
He was the first paperclip to make it into the real world, even though he was not real. For paperclips, he is like Nelson Mandela or Gandhi. He gave them a voice. He gave them a face and a very friendly one. Have mercy. I say no more.
I think you're forgetting that an interest in technology must also be married to 'vision'. Thirty years ago, I worked for a relatively bright guy (physics trained, ran his own computer shop), who was convinced that the computers of the time were as fast as they would ever need to be. He laughed at my suggestion that 3d graphics might be cool in a gaming context, He made the mistake that many geeks seem to make in assuming that because things are thus, they will always remain thus. He had no imagination whatsoever.
Gates may or may not have an interest in technology, but he doesn't appear to have unusual amounts of imagination.
come out of the woodwork. MS has a market cap of $246 billion as of Oct. 30. The biggest company in the world, Exxon Mobile, has a market cap of $344 billion.
So "the company became bureaucratic and lumbering", not because it was big and lumbering, but because Ballmer is not Bill Gates? I don't buy it.
I agree with your statement. However, it doesn't apply in this case.
The internet existed long before it became a public utility. By a different name, it was available to big companies and universities. When Bill Gates decided that the internet was important, it had already been a very popular public service among technology enthusiasts for perhaps two years.
Another issue: I asked Vint Cerf by email if it was true that Al Gore was influential in creating the internet. He said it was. He said Al Gore created the circumstances in the U.S. government by which ARPAnet became the public utility known as the Internet. (I don't mean to imply that I know Vint Cerf. I don't.)
That fits with what I've seen. Microsoft's history, maybe surprisingly, does not suggest that Bill Gates is seriously interested in technology. If you disagree, please name an innovation from Microsoft. Most innovations were bought from someone else, or were, like the NTFS file system, the result of Microsoft top management hiring someone well known in the computer industry.
Can you identify some companies that produced "innovations" _without_ employees ?
Actually, perhaps it would be better if you could first define "innovation" and offer a few examples of same.
I read the early chapters of Hard Drive very carefully. I adjusted for the fact that Jennifer Edstrom is not knowledgeable about technology, and that creates some confusion in the story. (She is the daughter of the woman who ran Microsoft's P.R. agency at the time. That agency told Bill Gates to shower and wear nice clothes.) Jennifer's co-author was a former Microsoft manager.
Many people have become enthusiastic about computers when they were young. The differences in the case of Bill Gates are that he had rich parents, and that he wanted to start a business.
The later chapters in the book give a better understanding. If I remember correctly what was in that particular book, it was quite clear that Bill Gates was not particularly knowledgeable about technology. That's something he apparently has in common with many technology company managers.
The Road Ahead is typical of the thinking of Bill Gates, it appears to me. He was one of the authors, so it should be.
Somebody step in and remind us which "inside Microsoft" tell-all book it was where the guy said Gates went through a period where he just couldn't figure out why his programmers were having such a hard time in the lab trying to make the PC a universal computer -- run PC programs _and_ Mac programs on the fly.
I'd go in the basement and look for the book but I'm too comfortable on the sofa with my laptop running Debian with wireless, temp control, etc. etc. working just fine. Not that that takes away any of the glitter of Microsoft's technological amazingness or anything.
And I love how essayists can make history with brief comments:
"[H]e led the campaign to destroy Netscape. In those days Microsoft was still nimble enough that it could pivot quickly and catch up on a rival. Since then the company has become bureaucratic and lumbering."
The good old days when the monopoly was at it's height if that's what he means by "nimble". Any web developers like to comment on how the technological excellence of Explorer has augmented their professional happiness ever since?
Easy for a bunch of authors to question a pilot of history! I love the little puppys barking like they know! This guy gave us DOS! Come on that's cool! Basic worked great at what it was used for. Running stuff in DOS was an easy thing! All you had to do that was annoying was a bit of configuring for IRQ's and PRESTO! Redneck rampage was awesome! It was the only game that insulted my computer (for being too slow) when setting it up! And Microsoft gave the internet hotmail! and that rocks hard! Oh I miss the days of a Boot OS and by title configuration! IE: No GUI, Booting different Versions of DOS per each software title! FUN! PS: I use a Mac!
If Microsoft had done its business an an 68000 platform, the computing world would be vastly different today, and we wouldn't have lost the 80s and half of the 90s with the 16 bit nonsense.
In this decade, MS improved their development tools (.NET), database tools (SQL Server) and O/Ses (WinXP, Win7). That's what MS did the previous decade as well. What should MS have done differently in order to not "have lost" this decade?
Gates: Buys out your company if he perceives you as a threat. Your employees might be screwed but you're set for life.
Ballmer: Throws chairs out the window and shouts death threats "I'M GOING TO F$^@ING KILL YOU"
-
Gates: Works with developers in a cooperative fashion, making feature suggestions and helping architect back ends
Ballmer: has for years been trying to turn Microsoft into a cult, much like multi-level-marketing companies, what with his stomping around like an orangatan while chanting "developers developers developers" although he couldn't code his way through a batch file
-
Gates: is actually somewhat friendly and down to earth even though he's cutthroat in business
Ballmer: Douchebag to the core
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
That fits with what I've seen. Microsoft's history, maybe surprisingly, does not suggest that Bill Gates is seriously interested in technology. If you disagree, please name an innovation from Microsoft. Most innovations were bought from someone else, or were, like the NTFS file system, the result of Microsoft top management hiring someone well known in the computer industry.
Can you identify some companies that produced "innovations" _without_ employees ?
Actually, perhaps it would be better if you could first define "innovation" and offer a few examples of same.
For example, Xerox PARC's innovation was the GUI. Both Apple and later Microsoft licensed/stole the innovation after Xerox failed to understand its importance - once of the biggest mistakes in computing history. Microsoft has no equivalent; they have mostly bought out other companies that did innovate and claimed they did the innovation instead; or stole an idea from someone else that did innovate. What the GP was asking for was for a specific example of just one innovation that actually came out of Microsoft - a single original idea from Microsoft. (Note: Event Clippy and MS Bob were stolen ideas that Microsoft implemented.)
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Many of the posts here seem to assume that innovation is the goal of business. In fact, the opposite is often true. Microsoft may have the goal of simply cashing in on their earlier investments for as long as possible. If they can delay innovation (and changing revenue streams) then they can make more money off of their old investments. Any new product might bring in less revenue than an existing one, so delay is perfectly acceptable. Media companies are fighting the same battle. I don't see why this should be panned; this is the natural evolution of capitalism.
Similarly, companies headed without business sense go under.
Jeff Bezos is the exception, not the rule.
'Gates was a software geek. He understood technology. Ballmer is a business guy.
Gates understood technology a bit better than Ballmer. In particular, Gates understood technology just well enough to know what to steal from whom. Gates also understood technology just well enough to know when to get out and let somebody else take the blame for the inevitable decline of Microsoft.
The last link in TFS itself shows that Gates is seriously interested in technology and was intimate with the detailed intricacies of atleast MS Excel, if not all of MS's product suite. Which non-geek would care to read 500 pages of specs if they're not interested in technology and don't have to answer to their boss? Not to mention realizing that date functions would need special handling in VBA.
MS missing the internet boat has nothing to do with this. Technologists make mistakes all the time, all the more so because they tend to be more opinionated than others. Contrast missing the boat with the internet with licensing the Windows OS to Compaq making IBM clones. That was a brilliant move that we're all reaping rewards till today. Even Apple switched to x86 hardware.
This space for rent.
Microsoft bought hotmail in 1997, and had a heck of a time moving it off of FreeBSD (still using it for some functions as late as 2001).
The original HoTMaiL was first of its kind and was quite revolutionary.
If Microsoft didn't help make computers standardized and way cheap, we would still be running $3000 computers, especially if IBM or Apple was at the helm. There might not be even Intel today.
Microsoft had nothing to do with the price fall in personal computers, IMO. If I remember correctly, that was a result of the price war that Compaq started back in 1993 or 1994. And fat lot of good it did them because look what happened to Compaq. Microsoft's OS costs MORE than it did back in 1994, and Windows 7 is more expensive, once again. In real terms, adjusted for inflation, it's probably not changed much, but I don't think that Microsoft has ever reduced prices on its software unless there was serious competition, such as with browsers, or with its terrible MSN service.
Microsoft R&D has been around more than ten years now, so where are these fabulous long term results?
I fully support real R&D, but I think Microsoft has been particularily bad about producing nothing useful from the R&D facility they have. Google, Apple and IBM are producing far more real world results from long term research than Microsoft is, and that is my complaint - not that they spend that much on R&D, but the fact that they are sucking up all these intelligent people and then not really producing much in the way of output for all the money they spend and brainpower they sequester. I just feel like in the hands of a company like IBM (who certainly does not shrink from long term R&D) you would see so much more progress come forth...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Considering that .Net basically *is* Java with all the stupid fixed, I don't think "server side" would be any "further along" without it.
You totally miss my point. Without .Net, Java would be .Net because Microsoft would have been there driving the standard, adding the same features.
If you like .Net you should be fuming right beside me, because instead of all the Java installations everywhere now you'd have .Net equivalents all over. If Java annoys you so then why are you happy that Microsoft split off and left Java to grow to a larger size?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Now that Windows Seven is out, maybe it's time for a new Borg icon....
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Man, how often have I read here that Bill Gates really IS a geek, because he wrote an early version of BASIC (hooray!)? yes, he did that, but BASIC's syntax is LL(1), so it is extremely easy to write a compiler for it (even easier to write an interpreter, which it was). Look up "recursive descent parsers". The only thing that might be a bit outside of LL(1) are arithmetic expressions, but they can be parsed easily with 3 mutually recursive functions either... at my university we learn this stuff in semester 2.
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Daniel Lyons (you must be joking) must know little about software. Gates reigned over some of the worst software development in human history. Disastrous decades of OS debacles is Gate's legacy.
Xerox understood the importance of the GUI but they invented it too early to incorporate it into a consumer product. Even the Lisa was too early and thus too expensive to be a successful product.
Nevertheless the fact that the leaders at PARC didn't perform much of the real innovation didn't mean that they were clueless about technology.
I completely disagree with this post. Dude its not about Balmer. Its about MS lacking the vision and bill was always there with them along with all the so called cool tech geeks who keep farting in Seattle. Its just they didn't think its the right model. Now that google has come up kicking everyone's ass out they realize they should have done it and infact they are doing it now. what big time fools. For some reason I feel MS shouldn't have cheated Apple way back in 70's and Xerox should have been the leader since they are the innovators of the so called PC.
MICROSOFT has always made itself a place by making others fail instead of being better.
And IIS/ASP.Net are no different:
http://trustleap.com/
G-WAN's ANSI C scripts are 5x faster than IIS ASP.Net C#:
http://trustleap.com/en_iis.html
More tricherous computing here:
http://trustleap.com/en_timeline.html#3dayold
For example, Xerox PARC's innovation was the GUI.
If that's your measure of "innovation", then it's hardly unreasonable that Microsoft hasn't "innovated" - neither has nearly everyone else, because most "innovations" in computing were over and done with 30-50 years ago, before they were in any position to.
Microsoft has no equivalent; they have mostly bought out other companies that did innovate and claimed they did the innovation instead; or stole an idea from someone else that did innovate.
Just like everyone else, then ?
What the GP was asking for was for a specific example of just one innovation that actually came out of Microsoft - a single original idea from Microsoft. (Note: Event Clippy and MS Bob were stolen ideas that Microsoft implemented.)
With the bar set so high, then no, Microsoft hasn't "innovated" - but that's hardly a stinging criticism in that context, since neither have Apple, Google or, indeed, pretty much anyone in the last few decades.
No shocker here, put an MBA-type in charge of a tech company and watch it make more money in the short term, but fail to innovate. Of course, to make more money you invest less in R&D. After all, how many stockholders truly care about investing in R&D, because if the money is going into R&D, it's _not_ going into _their_ pockets. Eventually, this strategy will fail in the long run and the company will then be too far behind to compete. It will get gobbled up by a larger and more successful competitor and will disappear...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1426425&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=29946970
See that URL, was directed to 1st MS guy, & since you are one as well? Thanks for the answers!
APK
Apple is the exception that proves the rule. And Apple's innovations are limited to providing sexy interfaces to technologies that had been established by multiple competitors 2-3 years prior to Apple's entries: MP3 player and smartphone.
Google is a CIA front operation. Google's search was nothing special in the beginning, and only years later caught up to some of the technologies used by its competitors of the era, such as Hotbot. In my post I excluded Google from consideration as a "black ops" company.
So, clearly you are insane.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Or become a hacker in your free time.
I wrote a PDP-11 assembler emulator in BASIC. Those were the days.
Of course having Roman numerals in your last name really helps, but doing some things are not as daunting as you think they are.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It was standard practice when you were studying Computing Engineering, even in places so far detached from cutting edge tech as Mexico City .....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If you achieve it in an ethical manner, it must feel great.
If you don't, you may need to look for ways to pacify your conscience.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And the problem with putting non-techies in charge of tech companies, concludes Lyons, is that they have blind spots.
Just like putting non-engineers in charge at Boeing, eh?
Of course, that was done by the same group that drove McDonnell Douglas into the ground.
... banks and other companies handling millions per transaction use mostly Java.
But what do they know.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm not even capable of being a low-level dev at Microsoft, but if you want answers, you need to edit (yes, repost...) that post for readability. Particularly, who is saying what. I could read it, but not figure out which 'source' you were referring to or if it was your own questions being asked.
That said, I'd be interested in seeing answers (rather than responses like my own) to these questions. They, if true, are baffling.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
"That said, I'd be interested in seeing answers (rather than responses like my own) to these questions." - by Hucko (998827) on Tuesday November 03, @02:16AM (#29960820)
Ok, HERE? We are in UTTER AGREEMENT - I have confronted Microsoft on their "Engineering Windows 7" blog:
----
Welcome to our blog dedicated to the engineering of Microsoft Windows 7:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/02/25/feedback-and-engineering-windows-7.aspx
----
(search "APK" there, you will see my posts on this, with FAR MORE TECHNICAL DETAIL and SOURCES from MS themselves no less, comparing the design of the new "WFP" based NDIS6 firewalls + port filtering methods, vs. those in older Windows NT-based OS such as Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003, which used a 3 part system)
AND, I did so there, with the exact points I enumerated above with even MORE DETAIL, because it was @ MS, & about engineering their new OS' no less!
(AND, the link IS in my initial post clearly boldly marked as such no less, as it is above now... & this is why I AM BAFFLED as to why you cannot figure out my sources & where I posted them etc. et al) + a user named FOREDECKER here on /., who claims to be a senior development mgr. @ Microsoft, & then these gents here who claimed to be MS employees as well...
I have REPEATEDLY confronted ALLEGED Microsoft personnel here & on other forums as well (only to get evasions or outright avoidance of my points also., if not "effete down mods" & being flamed/harassed/trolled by others about LAME things like 'writing style')
WELL - to those types, I can only say this:
PRODUCE YOUR PHD IN ENGLISH? I just *might* (might mind you) listen, but even IF they had a PHD in English, it is like resumes - 1 "expert on writing" will say it's fine, another will not (so, so much for writing critics, because beauty &/or readability IS in "the eye of the beholder" (and his brain too)).
Something's up though - because I have gotten NOTHING but evasions on both HOSTS files having 0 removed in HOSTS file as a possible blocking "IP ADDRESS" (when Microsoft in fact, DID put it into place in a Service Pack in Windows 2000, not its original shipping OEM model on CD mind you, & kept it there all the way into VISTA until MS "patch tuesday" on 12/09/2008) AS WELL AS ON ROOTKIT.COM's statements I quoted in my original post, and outline here also below...
http://www.rootkit.com/newsread.php?newsid=952 [rootkit.com]
PERTINENT EXCERPT/QUOTE:
"BTW, the firewalls based on NDIS v6, which was introduced in Windows Vista, are much easier to unhook and bypass."
====
"They, if true, are baffling." - by Hucko (998827) on Tuesday November 03, @02:16AM (#29960820)
Oh, they're TRUE alright - AND, quite easily verified as well, no less!
In fact - check for yourself (if you can code, it is EASY to do, by making a larger HOSTS file (relative term) & 1 version using 0 as a blocking "IP Address", another version using the less efficient line by line read 0.0.0.0 as a blocking address, & lastly a version using the least efficient 127.0.0.1 "loopback adapter" std. IP address for blocking out bad website or adbanners etc. et al).
E.G.->
----
Using 127.0.0.1 here, on a HOSTS file I have with 660,000 known bad servers in it?
I get a 22+mb sized HOSTS file
Using 0.0.0.0 here, on the SAME line entries in that HOSTS file I have with 660,000 known bad servers in it, albeit using 0.0.0.0 now instead of 127.0.0.1??
I get am 18+mb sized HOSTS file
Using 0.0.0.0 here, on the SAME line entries in that HOSTS file I have with 660,000 known bad servers in it, albeit using 0.0.0.0 now instead of 127.0.0.1??
I get am 18+mb sized HOSTS file
----
SMALL AMENDMENT TO MY EXAMPLE ABOVE (which anyone can test, who codes @ LEAST):
E.G.->
====
Using 127.0.0.1 here, on a HOSTS file I have with 660,000 known bad servers in it?
I get a 22+mb sized HOSTS file
----
Using 0.0.0.0 here, on the SAME line entries in that HOSTS file I have with 660,000 known bad servers in it, albeit using 0.0.0.0 now instead of 127.0.0.1??
I get am 18+mb sized HOSTS file
----
Using 0 here, on the SAME line entries in that HOSTS file I have with 660,000 known bad servers in it, albeit using 0 now instead of 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1??
I get am 14+mb sized HOSTS file
====
Amending that from my parent post, to make the point ABSOLUTELY clear on HOSTS files using the smaller, faster, & MORE EFFICIENT 0 based blocking "IP Address" vs. the larger & slower 0.0.0.0 + the worst of all 127.0.0.1 (because of size AND THE FACT IT IS A "LOOPBACK" operation as well, where 0 & 0.0.0.0 are not) cases in HOSTS files.
Ever since Windows 2000 SP#1=#4, not the original OEM model of Windows 2000 on CD distro from MS? You could use 0... it was put in place to use, probably exactly because of what I note here (faster, smaller, thus more efficient to use for the purposes of blocking bad content online in bad sites or bad adbanners). This "held true" all the way from Windows 2000 SP's, thru Windows XP, into Windows Server 2003... & yes, into VISTA (up until 12/09/2008 "patch tuesday")...
SO, WHY REMOVE IT NOW?
APK
P.S.=> "Size matters"... & for speed + efficiency here, & SMALLER IS BETTER/FASTER/MORE EFFICIENT, by far! AND AGAIN, perhaps MOST importantly, there IS this:
http://www.rootkit.com/newsread.php?newsid=952 [rootkit.com]
----
PERTINENT EXCERPT/QUOTE:,/b>
"BTW, the firewalls based on NDIS v6, which was introduced in Windows Vista, are much easier to unhook and bypass."
----
Some "food 4 thought", on BOTH accounts... apk
Obvious failure to recognize basic irony. Not insightful.
PowerPoint.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?