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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 $58B on Ballmer's watch, says Lyons, the company became bureaucratic and lumbering, slowing down while the rest of the world — including Google, Apple and Amazon — sped up."
He developed an early version of BASIC.
He may have not put a whole lot of development into windows in the later years, but he at least had more focus on the tech side than Ballmer plus, he did program alot in his early years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Early_life
Someday we'll hit the human carrying capacity. And the band will just play on.
I don't suppose you've ever heard of BASIC before, have you? You know, the language that was on the computer in your own fucking username? The most popular implementation of it even today remains Microsoft Basic, which was initally developed by...wait for it...Paul Allen and _Bill Gates_. Did you know that? No, of course you didn't. If you were literate you'd be able to do a simple search and find out just how wrong you were.
Try doing a bit of reading, it might help. Or hey, go ahead and keep spewing out ignorance for all I care, it -is- Slashdot after all. You'll probably get more mod points for being completely wrong, as long as you're insulting good old M$.
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 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.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
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*
This has happened in a lot of businesses. The pharmaceutical industry is in similar shape for the same reasons. Maybe even more so.
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
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 dunno, after reading this interview from 1986 I don't think he used to be a horrible guy. The interview seems pretty insightful, and Microsoft does look like a nice company back then, at least according to Gates. And some of his statements look geeky to me, especially in light of bloatware that's bearing the name .Net Framework.
Not like Apple innovates. There were other MP3 players on the market when the ipod came along. and it was a niche Mac fanboy product until Apple released a Windows version of ITunes. Blackberries had music capability before the iphone. in fact Apple worked with Motorola on the disaster known as the ROKR before the iphone came out.
Apple has a good marketing department that has a plan before they enter a new business and changes it if things go badly like they did with the iphone at first. Microsoft still relies on OEM's who sell on tiny margins and go cheap in every way they can. except for the x-box Microsoft doesn't seem to have any plan for their products except prayer. why would anyone enter the PMP market when cell phones are taking over that category. WInMo seems to be in limbo and behind the new blood of Palm, Apple and Google.
Apple sells slightly different versions of OS X in each product. Mac's, Time Capsule, Apple TV, iPhone. they all run slightly modified versions of OS X with big limitations.
A far as I know Steve Jobs is no geek
But it's so cute when he tries.
I remember back in 2003 when Xcode 1.0 came out and Steve was on stage showing "Fix and Run" (where you could have the program running, change some code, recompile and dynamically link that code into the running binary). All he had to do was change a few lines of code in the demo and hit the "Fix & Run" button, but you could see his cheat sheets and he, very carefully, was typing in exactly what was on the sheet and no idea what he was doing.
Of course, he was joking that he had no idea what he was doing--he wasn't trying to pretend that he was some superprogrammer or anything. There've also been a few times when he's talked about processors and instruction paths and geeky hardware stuff and followed it up with, "I have no idea what that means."
Steve is pretty good about surrounding himself with people who know this stuff (ie, Woz, Avie Tevanian) and turning pure technology into products that people want to buy.
Yes, Bill Gates did write code. As a matter of fact, Andy Hertzfeld (who was part of a little startup called Apple Computer) has a story about some code Bill Gates wrote.
#DeleteChrome
So he's not a geek, he just wrote a compiler in machine code on an 8080 interpreter Allen had written for the PDP-10 targetting the kit-form hobbyist computer credited for starting the personal computer revolution.
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.
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?
I read that quite clearly, thanks. I also read that prior to that arrangement, he and three other Lakeside students were banned for exploiting bugs in the OS. Presumably, his skill at doing so is what caused them to contract him. While he could have done this without source code, it certainly would have made that task easier. Furthermore, another Wikipedia article states that the users of the PDP-10 both shared and reused source code, so it's not unreasonable to think that Gates had access to it:
Over time, some PDP-10 operators began running operating systems assembled from major components developed outside DEC. For example, the main Scheduler might come from one university, the Disk Service from another, and so on. The commercial timesharing services such as CompuServe, On-Line Systems (OLS), and Rapidata maintained sophisticated inhouse systems programming groups so that they could modify the operating system as needed for their own businesses without being dependent on DEC or others. There were also strong user communities such as DECUS through which users could share software that they had developed. In some ways, this was one of the first open source environments, although the commercial operators tended to only take code from open sources, keeping their own proprietary enhancements to themselves.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I think "miracle" is a bit strong, but I certainly felt that my first iPod was the coolest electronic thing that I'd ever owned... at the time everything else had either too little storage or was too bulky, and the firewire meant that you didn't have to wait for hours while it loaded up. Even later once Toshiba managed to release one about the same size, they f'd up the DRM so badly that the USB2 connection behaved like a USB1.1 connection on the hardware of the day.
I don't have one myself, but the iPhone really changed the game in that you now had a credible web browser in pocket-able form factor, and it even had a mediocre phone capability. Considering that I remember when a StarTac was really amazing, I'd say the iPhone was close to miraculous.
The Macs are mostly just computers. But even there they manage to do things like Time Machine, which is really, even now, the only backup solution worth a shit for the unwashed masses. And one of their laptops paired with one of their Time Capsules is pretty close to laptop Nirvana between the 801.11n and the automatic backup... all setup with a big "On" switch and virtually nothing else.
But miracles is still some pretty big hyperbole...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
That's what makes a good manager/boss: Someone who listens to the experts that he hired because they are better at something than he is.
One could say: A perfect boss is someone, who can perfectly combine and channel all the competence of his employees into one point. Like a network switch. Allowing them do work with each other at top efficiency. A switch is only a relatively simple device. But essential for any network to function.
One could say, bad bosses are not only just network hubs. They also corrupt the packets on the way, and lead them everywhere but where they belong. Making the results useless for all clients of the company.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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.
Reading the disassembly and critique of Commodore BASIC by gurus like Jim Butterfield and Rae West reveals Gates to be quite a hacker. A hacker's hacker if you will.
POKE 36879,8
The problem isn't the techs at MS. I've talked to many employees of Microsoft, they aren't idiots, they aren't the "bottom barrel" code monkeys, heck some of them even read /. and know more Linux and UNIX than the average Linux sysadmin. The problem is management. Its gotten so bad that in general the people working on Office don't even talk to the guys developing the OS, the OS guys don't talk to the guys making the UI, etc. Microsoft has gotten so big and vast that the people who should be in close contact with one another aren't. Things are developed independently and I believe that they even have multiple projects going on for the same thing and one gets picked and the others get scrapped. Its little wonder nothing gets done.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
the internet relies on open standards to function
Oh I'm so tired of this tired old mantra. If everyone relied so much on standards, why do all the major browsers support .innerHTML, which is not part of W3C ?
Because Microsoft did it first (right or wrong, it works, and is a lot cleaner than all that messing with DOM nodes), and the competition had to make a choice between :-
1) Aceepting that standards are out-of-date before they are ever finalised (because anything decided by a committee of 1000's is doomed to failure)
or
2) Risk having the world saying "Firefox / Safari / Opera sucks because the DHTML don't work like is does in IE".
So what it really boils down to is a case of the other browsers playing a game of "you should follow standards like we do, unless MS or someone else do something better, in which we'll ignore the principles we were founded on and simply follow the leader instead".
Or perhaps would you have all browser development forbidden until the HTML5 spec is finalized when ? 2025 ?
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.
Apple purchased NeXT on December 20, 1996 for $429 million,[2] and much of the current Mac OS X system is built on the OPENSTEP foundation. [3] WebObjects is now bundled with Mac OS X Server and Xcode.
...so there you have it. I'm not an Apple fanboy, and own none from their line of computers. I do enjoy hunting trolls, however.
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
I think that Daniel Lyons just doesn't remember Bill Gates or what Microsoft did. I mean, sure, in the 90's Microsoft controlled the OS market. Windows 95 ruled. And then came 98, 98SE, ME. Yes, that was really visionary. And it was Bill Gates who ignored the internet, and let other browsers control the entire market. On the other hand, it was on Ballmer's watch that the Xbox appeared, and grew into a real success.
And now to contradict what I said above, because Daniel Lyons made an even bigger mistake. Gates continue to lead Microsoft's product strategy until 2006, which makes it silly to blame Ballmer for most of the 2000's.
On a final note, I heard Bill Gates talk over the years and read what he was saying. He had technical vision, but it was often at odds with the market. IMO he was bad at understanding where technology was going. Microsoft has always been a follower, rarely an innovator. It just won because it knew how to get into a market and continue to improve its products to the point where they were good enough.
He developed an early version of BASIC.
No he didn't. Like everything else he's been involved with, he "persuaded" someone else to develop it for him, and then he claimed the credit! Paul Allen did some of the work, but it was based on the work of a couple of grad students.
Just like all other "Microsoft technology", the developers weren't paid (their work was stolen), it didn' t work properly (because an incomplete version was released), and it was outrageously expensive (so anyone who wanted it, copied it).
Later, Bill G went to a lot of meetings inside Microsoft, but the actual work was done by others. Almost all technical design discussions were way over his head. This goes some way to explaining the fundamental insecurity of Windows - Bill didn't understand the problem, and just kept insisting that it had to be "easy to use".
Gates has never really understood computing, but made his money by lying, stealing and cheating - he would have made a great politician!
Remember - it'll all be fixed in the next release!
Well said. Jobs is a guy who appreciates quality and excellence, and he absolutely demands it from his subordinates.
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.
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)
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 don't think that's fair. If anything Microsoft is probably doing more basic research than Apple or Google, who are far more secretive, walled in and commercially oriented. I'll cut Google some slack though, since even if they're not publishing as much at conferences, they do churn out a lot of useful open source projects. I can't say the same about Microsoft.
Wikipedia has the following [wikipedia.org] to say on NeXT's impact : "Despite NeXT's limited commercial success, the company had a profound impact on the computer industry. Object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces became more common after the 1988 release of the NeXTcube and NeXTSTEP, when other companies started to emulate NeXT's object-oriented system."
And somehow, you manage to miss the biggest point: OSX *is* NeXTstep revisited. It's what NeXTSTEP was trying to be, and it's obvious where the influences are...
By making OSX a successor to MacOS, it had a fighting chance, with an inherited customer base, even if the transition was a bit painful...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.