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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.
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.
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.
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.
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