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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."
Even if that was true, he understood what other geeks needed. Plain business men probably aren't going to understand that.
And if you're ever read some book by Bill Gates, you'd notice he does have quite (interesting, I might add) ideas. Not just with OS and such, but with technology general and how to combine it with everyday life.
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
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).
No kidding. He made the comment during the antitrust trial that "technological miracles cross my desk every day." Well, assuming that's true (and it ought to be, given the money the company spends on Microsoft Research) my only question was: well, then, well the hell are they?! Google, Apple and others are making those things happen: Microsoft just releases yet another version of Windows and Office every few years and calls that "innovation."
Plus which, it doesn't help that Ballmer is a flaming sociopath who should be on medication not running a multi-billion dollar corporation.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
Plus which, it doesn't help that Ballmer is a flaming sociopath who should be on medication not running a multi-billion dollar corporation.
I always thought that was required from *all* CEO's of multi-billion dollar corporations.
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
You realize in most independent benchmarks, Java is quite a bit faster than .NET and has been proven in really huge enterprise apps. .NET hasn't been proven, just ask the London Stock Exchange.
I think you need to get the facts, my friend.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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!
Also like how Wikipedia article tells on his early life,
One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.[15]
At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs in FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language.
Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students.
That gotta give some hacker and geekiness points ;)
So Bill Gates studied the source code and benefitted from having done so? I wonder if he appreciates that he'd have been unable to do this if everyone operated the way Microsoft does.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I think instead he appreciated the NDA he had to sign to gain access to the source(*), which coincidentally is how Microsoft operates. Except their recent open source offerings, but we can't mention those here, they're obviously a trap or something.
(*) Yes, this is pure speculation, much like the parent.
I wonder if he appreciates that he'd have been unable to do this if everyone operated the way Microsoft does.
I think you misread. A company essentially contracted him to come in and fix bugs. Are you telling me that MS wouldn't let you see their code if they contracted with you to come in and fix bugs?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Um... wow. That doesn't fit my recollection at all.
No (sane) person claimed Jobs invented the iPod. Jobs didn't invent the Macintosh either. He directed the final product to what it was, but he didn't start the process saying "this is exactly what we're building".
iTunes took off because of the iPod. The iTunes Music Store and DRM didn't come until years after the iPod had been out. MS screwed up with FairPlay, but they didn't have the market share to compete with the iPod at that point, so I'm sure it would have succeeded even if they hadn't scrapped it to make the Zune.
The iPhone wasn't a sales disaster. People lined up for the thing. People loved the thing. It was never going to capture 100% of the market at $500/$600, but for what it had, it wasn't a horrible price. High end smart phones often cost $300 or $400. The iPhone just didn't have the subsidy.
But it sold.
But Apple didn't keep it there, they dropped the price pretty quickly. The price probably helped keep the shortage from being worse. Either way, people were certainly willing to pay the premium, so economics says it wasn't a disaster. I don't know where you got "slow niche seller". It sold very well, and it's niche was "high end smart phone". It sold better when the 3G came out, but by then it had a year of people raving about how nice it was. If I was one of the other phone makers, I would have started shaking when Apple started selling the 3G at $99 this year. If Sprint/Verizon customers weren't locked out of getting the iPhone, do you really think they'd have sold so many of their "iPhone killer" phones in the last 2 years? I doubt it.
Is it really surprising Apple wants you to buy an Apple product to develop for the Apple platform? MS used to make you do the same thing.
Actually, at this point in your rant you seem to have switched from "Jobs got lucky over and OVER and OVER again" to "insert random Apple complaint here."
Then at the end, you go close to fanboy mode. You switch from Apple is evil and doesn't know what it's doing and is only succeeding because everyone else is screwing up to "Apple makes very good stuff, you should buy it".
Let's just pretend that Apple did get lucky over and over and over again. Lots of companies get lucky over and over and over again. Very few repeatedly capitalize on it, especially as well as Apple.
Either Apple knows what they are doing, or they know how to take advantage of everyone else not knowing what they are doing.
The first iMac could have been luck. People in the industry said it was, that it was Apple's last breath. They've managed to hold that breath for a long time now.
Apple isn't just lucky.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
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.
Seems like you're guilty of the same thing. He doesn't do anything overtly technological anymore, merely spending his days doing philanthropy with his billions of dollars, and that means he's not a geek. Never mind that you have no idea what he does in his spare, private time. Never mind his geeky, green house. Never mind his previous efforts.
If he's not publicly geeky, according to you, there's no shade of gray, and he must not be a geek.
Apple is a company that takes existing technology and integrates it into products that more people can afford. Apple did this with a graphic based OS. They did not create it, but they did figure out how to package it so that many people could afford it and see a reason to buy it. Not everyone could afford it, as it still required high end hardware like a dedicated GPU, but more people could. Importantly, like higher end computers, one was not sold a just a machine, but a system that would do something. Lower end machines cut prices by not including full functionality. The iPod and the iPhone is the same thing. Sure there better machines out there, but myu iPod mini was the price and had 10X the storage of the music player I had bought just two years before. And it could hold my addresses and dates to boot.
MS, OTOH, has been the company that has taken long existing technology and repackages it, usually in an extreme proprietary format, for commodity sales. Their products have support a wide variety of hardware because they do not sell any compelling hardware. They hold an important positions because allow a structure where people can buy the absolute cheapest pieces of hardware to meet their computing needs. This often is a benefit as people often consider their time to be worth nothing. In addition, MS supplies very good tools when you need many hundreds of people to have the same machines to do simple tasks, such as IBM did with the typewriter.
The software MS provides is very good, and there it suites many people needs, but they made two mistakes, neither of which is BillG fault. First, they did not provide a compelling reason for people to remain loyal to the Office products. The big reason to upgrade is collaboration, but collaboration is not a huge market. Mostly I see people writing memos in MS Word, and I don't think collaboration helps that much. There are other authoring tasks that people do need. For instance, I do not know why office does not include an real image editing program. This is what people want. GIMP is free, so why can't MS put a GIMP like program in there. I think it is the same reason you can't get into some MS web sites with cookies turned off. One takes what MS gives, or just go away.
The second reason is that they got too cocky. MS is very good at taking existing technologies and making them available to the masses. The only issue I have with them is they do in such a way to break everyone elses product. IMHO the problems started when MS decided MS Vista was going to the OS that took MS into the big leagues. Rather than supplying an OS to the masses, a OS that did what people needed at a cost that allowed very large deployments, MS got uppity and decided that the knock off business was not good enough. Nothing demonstrated this lack of business competence than the decision to create WinFS, which ultimately lead to the demonstration of technical incompetence. Now one had done a RDFS in a commercial product, so it had to be done from scratch, something that MS is not so good at. This distracted them from doing things they were good at, and ultimately lead to a OS that did not work with the hardware. Since MS OS is expected to work with hardware, and is not judged on it's own merits, people pretty much were dissatisfied and MS had to make a Herculean effort to get a new OS out in two years.
If anything, I would say Ballmer was a very good business person, as he has saved the company from what could have been a fatal decision made by his predecessor in 2003. If can get people to buy MS Windows 7, in spite of the mess that has been made of the company from 2004-2009, he should enjoy a good reputation.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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
You only need to read the part about how Bill Gates supposedly realized the threat of the Internet early on to answer that question. I think that most people who are familiar with that history believe the opposite—that in fact the rapid growth of the Internet caught Microsoft flat footed. When Windows 95 came out, Microsoft believed that closed online services were the future and integrated its MSN service into Win95 because of it. It was only the ability to leverage the power of its Windows monopoly which allowed MS to "strangle" Netscape. I put the word strangle in quotes because in fact Netscape did survive long enough to open-source its code, which eventually led to the birth of Firefox, and sue Microsoft.
If anything, it was the anti-trust suits in the US and Europe that really "broke" Microsoft at least in the sense that they forced it to become more bureaucratic and more sluggish in terms of its ability to adjust to sudden shifts in the market. Did this allow companies like Google and Apple to surpass MS in terms of industry influence if not in terms of profits? Maybe.
The problem with these theories is that they are always too simple. Microsoft is and was a huge, influential company. But even when they were unquestionably dominant, Bill Gates acknowledged that some young start up that no one had ever heard of back them might take their place as an industry leader and it looks like that's what happened with Google quietly assuming Microsoft's role as the 800 pound gorilla of computing simply because they were a younger, more innovative company run by younger, more innovative people. But that doesn't make for good copy; stories about the cult of the CEO and which head honcho is better do and that's why you see stories like this one.
Does this
I don't suppose you've ever heard of BASIC before, have you? You know, the language that was on the computer in your own fucking username? The most popular implementation of it even today remains Microsoft Basic, which was initally developed by...wait for it...Paul Allen and _Bill Gates_./p>
Even better, he developed the C64 basic since Commodore licensed it from MS.
Well, MS did develop Amiga Basic and I thank them for that.
Amiga Basic was so horrible that made me give up programming in Basic and switch to Pascal, then C.
"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
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 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.
Microsoft's revenues nearly tripled from $23B to $58B on Ballmer's watch.
And this was a "lost decade?"
General Motors had a lost decade. Microsoft did not.
First, since when has MS EVER promoted standards?
They didn't write the basic compiler, it was copied and badly copied at that.
And then there is the real joke that shows you have no clue whatsoever about computer history. It was Compaq that created the IBM-clone. MS had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Next time you read up on history, don't do it at microsoft.com.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Gates: Buys out your company if he perceives you as a threat. Your employees might be screwed but you're set for life.
Ballmer: Throws chairs out the window and shouts death threats "I'M GOING TO F$^@ING KILL YOU"
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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
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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