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Former Microsoft Exec: Microsoft Has "Become the Thing They Despised"
zacharye writes "Microsoft has a long and storied history of leadership in the tech industry, and the company has driven innovation for decades. In recent years, however, Microsoft has fallen behind the times in several key industries; the company's mobile position has deteriorated and left it with a low single-digit market share, and Microsoft won't launch Windows RT, its response to Apple's three-year-old iPad, until later this year. In a recent piece titled 'Microsoft’s Lost Decade,' Vanity Fair contributor Kurt Eichenwald analyzes the company’s 'astonishingly foolish management decisions' and picks apart moves made during the Steve Ballmer era."
Double post?
Looks like Vanity Fair is going to drip feed us this stuff for a while... does it add anything we didn't already know?
Art is the mathematics of emotion
Didn't Bill Gates once say. "When did we become IBM"?
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Microsoft has a long and storied history of leadership in the tech industry, and the company has driven innovation for decades
LMFAO
Yes, we've seen this before. No new content yet.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
They still have a commanding market share in many areas - it will be interesting to see if they can pull of the reinvention that Apple did.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Elop did to Nokia in a matter of months what Ballmer took over a decade to do to Microsoft.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Executives, Executives, EXECUTIVES
That's the problem with management with KPIs: they have to report results every 3 months. Cutting some long term projects looks great in the beginning: less overhead and fewer costs, and if you move your researchers to production, you even get a bigger income.
The damage only becomes visible 2-5 years later. And then it's too late.
Too bad the whole world is focussed on those dan
A former exec disgruntled with his previous company? you don't say...
did you forget to take your meds?
That thing was way ahead of its time. But Gates and Balmer killed it. and now Allard is off doing something else...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
What have they "innovated"? Microsoft Bob? The only useful thing I've seen that they've innovated on their own is the kinnect. If innovate means copied or stole technology or ideas, then yes they're a great innovator.
To most of us younger folks, this has been the truth all along.
I think I'll see this happen to Google as it grows larger and larger.
The article is way off base. The most fundamental reason for their success is not anything they have done or not done. It is the whole corporate sector conflating "Microsoft compatibility" with "interoperability". Otherwise they have always been the same. Lackluster products and copying/buying innovation done elsewhere has been its mainstay. The low quality of its products was masked by the ever increasing speed and decreasing cost of hardware. Their monopoly masked the incompetence of their managers. All that is happening now is people inside and outside Microsoft, waking up and smelling the coffee.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Microsoft Has "Become the Thing They Despised"
That's funny... for me it's just more despicable now than it was way back when. I guess my despicableness threshold is lower than Eichenwald's and Ballmer's?
Why are we even having this discussion about what Microsoft innovated and which company is the best innovator, because frankly none off them innovate anymore. The easiest and most effective way to become the biggest player is to bully everyone else with patent lawsuits. Microsoft, Apple and Google are all exactly the same when it comes to employing dodgy business tactics.
and the company has driven innovation for decades
Uh... geez. Where to even start?
The first and last real MS innovation was the Microsoft BASIC interpreter which became ubiquitous in 1980s home computers. Everything else they ever did was shamelessly stolen and/or bought and/or badly copied from others. Even MS-DOS started out as a bought-out CP/M imitation.
They disparaged GUIs and the whole idea of user-friendly computing until the Mac proved them wrong. It took them a decade to come up with a usable competitor (Windows 95). Then it took them years to recognize the importance of the Internet, so they killed the competition by illegally leveraging their monopoly on Windows desktops. With the competition dead, they stalled IE development and set back web innovation by a decade until Firefox broke the market back open.
Now you can see them screw up the same way with mobile devices. It took even Bill Gates until last week to admit that the PC-centric model may be "changing". Thankfully, with Gates gone and that dancing sweatmonkey in charge, they don't seem to be capable of their past level of predation anymore.
MS has always been a follower at best. It has frequently been a predatory abuser of its monopoly. It has usually parasitized on the innovations of others. Embrace, extend, extinguish was always how they operated. It has never been an innovation leader.
Otherwise, why would any company bother with PR or advertising?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Except that now it's in danger of no longer being a monopoly.
Hey Microsoft changing the way the menus works IS NOT an upgrade. And can I please have a simple way to not show my emails in groups? Hell to do anything simple anymore you have to search on a forum for the magic voodoo steps to accomplish basic tasks in office anymore.
Lets get this over with... Fuck Off
“In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, Sears had it nailed. It was top-notch, but now it’s just a barren wasteland. And that’s Microsoft. The company just isn’t cool anymore.”
Adds to Libraries of Congress, car analogies, and the other multifarious analogies for quantifiers the layman cannot comprehend. Plus it makes one think of breasts.
Microsoft became the dominant PC OS (groan all you want, you know it's true) so it didn't HAVE to do anything.
They were windows, and most programs were created for windows and windows alone.
All they had to do was keep making more of the same, but that's not going to cut it for much longer.
Things are being ported with greater and greater ease to both the Mac and various Linux Operating Systems.
For years, the main thing holding me back from a Linux OS has been video games and my not wanting to screw with emulators (such as Wine)
However, with things like the Humble Bundle releasing several good quailty games for linux, and services like steam coming to Linux , I honestly think in the next few years I'll probably dump Windows.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Some of you might think my hatred is baseless, but that's really not the case. Had the industry decided to run with any of a number of other technologies, we'd have got to incrementally larger platforms (16 bit, 32 bit, 64 bit,) preemptive multitasking and a flat memory model and much more secure systems a decade faster than we did with Microsoft and Intel. Admittedly, the failure of those systems to dominate was as much the fault of the inept management of the owners of those technologies as it was Microsoft's abuse of the monopoly position afforded them by IBM at the time.
I also don't let my hatred of them blind me to the improvements they've made in the last 10 years, though I wonder how much of that would have happened had Linux not been nipping at their heels. We have no way of knowing if the future would have been any different had one of the workstation players of the day had come out on top instead of Microsoft. They traditionally had a habit of doing just enough and then resting on their laurels and not expecting the industry to continue advancing. History is littered with the bodies of companies and product development teams that did that. The main thing I'll credit Microsoft with is they had the vision to realize that one day nearly everyone would have a PC in their home, at a time when the UNIX guys were laughing at PC and calling them toys.
Now that this vision has been realized, I wonder if a Microsoft under Ballmer has the vision to make the next jump. They're already playing catch-up from a woefully-behind position in the mobile market, but it's not the first time they've come late to a party and done all-right for themselves. I don't think they have the foresight to set their target to whatever lies beyond that point, but I can't predict what that thing will be either. One thing I do know all too well is that history is littered with the bodies of companies that were not quick on their feet or flexible enough to adapt to changing situations fast enough, and that some of those companies (Sun) were quite big. I won't shed a tear if Microsoft becomes one of those also-rans in the next decade or two, but I won't dance on their grave, either. For better or worse they had their time and I think their impact on my profession will end up having been a wash.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That's no excuse. If the judge tells you you can't "innovate" by tying new products to legacy monopoly products then you "innovate" elsewhere.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
A couple of years ago I was quick to promote Linux over Windows due to higher reliability. Now I don't remember when was the last time that my Windows crashed but I've had numerous problems with Linux (On Ubuntu, last two times I allowed the package manager to make a major version update have broken the whole system. I then tried to install Mint, it crashed half a dozen times before I was finally able to get the whole installation through and then enabling two monitors broke X. I've had little interest to go back and find out what's the problem). I used to run Linux and just use Wine and VM when I had to use some windows app, now I run Linux inside a VM on Windows when I need to do programming.
Meanwhile, ever since Windows 7 came out, I've felt that Windows has better usability than the Linux desktops I've tried and massively better usability than the Mac I have to use at work.
I know that I've only given some anecdotes and opinions but while I understand that they aren't statistically significant, I use Linux, Mac and Windows nearly daily (iOS development, web-development and entertainment use) and I'm pretty sure that my recent lack-of-hate towards Windows is indicating that something has changed for the better.
Meanwhile MS is still in charge of the second most popular game console (Wii is the most popular but for somewhat different target audience), have gained some increase in market share on smartphones, are launching tablets and I don't think that the current year of Linux on Desktop is going to threaten MS any more than the previous ones.
So.. yeah. I'm not usually this "pro-MS", I hate Metro as much as the next geek, I have had to develop for WP7 and don't have much nice things to say about it, don't remember when was the last time I had any interest to try out Internet explorer and so on... but I still think that everything after the flop that was Vista, MS has been improving its act.
If you read the Jargon file or read up on hacker lore from the '80s and '90s, IBM was the big, evil giant hackers despised for its unfair strong-arm tactics and lousy products. Microsoft stole that crown in the early '90s.
My perception of MS is actually improving.
So what I see is a company that is, too slowly, trying to learn from its mistakes.
As Microsoft loses primacy, it loses power. I wonder if it is also losing its capacity to do harm, and if a decade from now the MS-bashing will seem as quaint and misplaced as IBM-bashing does today.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
"Microsoft has a long and storied history of leadership in the tech industry, and the company has driven innovation for decades.
... the company has driven innovation for decades...
When was this?
If you are going to replace a polished Borg-Gates with a politically correct MS logo, all in line with your wonderful BI crap and attempting to shift the demographics to ad influenced "IT professionals" (removing Billy Borg to appeal to drones, how ironic), at least make a logo that does not look like the crap /. used to have when it first started.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
What alternate universe did this story come from?
> Microsoft has a long and storied history of leadership in the tech industry, and the company has driven innovation for decades
No, Microsoft has a long and storied history of waiting for someone else to invent something, then copying it and out-marketing it.
> the company's mobile position has deteriorated and left it with a low single-digit market share
Wa-wa-what? When did Microsoft have a dominant mobile position? Or even a noticeable market position?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
....is "People Magazine" for well-off literate people.
Microsoft has a long and storied history of leadership in the tech industry, and the company has driven innovation for decades.
What in the God damned mother-fucking goddamned fucking fuck are you fucking lunatics smoking? They have a storied history of crushing competition in the tech industry through FUD, double-dealing and backstabbing, unfair and often downright illegal business practices, they should have been shut the fuck down by the US government under the RICO Act, but the US government is too corrupt and no longer has the balls to do what it did to Standard Oil and Ma' Bell. Dreadful shame.
As for driving innovation, I laughed for a good 5 minutes after I read this line, and had to wait to catch my breath to write this. Jesus Holy Motherfucking Tapdancing Christ, does Microsoft PAY YOU to write this shit, or are you really that goddamned stupid?
I tried to read the article but after encountering the phrases "astonishingly foolish management decisions," and "Paul Allen on First Meeting Steve Ballmer: He Looked Like a Stalinist Police Officer" I quit. Sorry but if you want to write about the downfall of a company you can at least do it in style, and not throw these extreme phrases around in the first paragraph.
-- Cheers!
Some time in the 1980s the corporations realized the efficiencies of using office computers. But it was an esoteric and complex device and it required lots of training to use, and the top managers did not fully understand how easy/difficult it would be. I have seen highly intelligent relatives of mine who were totally flummoxed by the PC. So they were desperately looking for ways to reduce training costs and to get some kind of predictability. They wanted interoperability and portable skills for their work force. They picked on Microsoft as the common thing. Once enough corporations picked Microsoft, probably because of strong recommendations by IBM and its association with IBM, Microsoft became the de-facto monopoly. Food will appear magically. Not at random but at predictable intervels in a torrent.
Microsoft managers, like the pigeons in the random reward Skinner's box, started believing it is their action that had resulted in this huge torrent of cash. This torrent cash masked the incompetence of managers, the mediocrity of the products, the lack of innovation, the corrosive work culture, abusive customer relations, etc etc.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This opinion will be about as popular as a kick in the teeth here I know, but I don't care either way, sometimes you have to go against the group-think....
-Windows Servers are coming into it's own; WinServer 2012 is getting some rave reviews for the new virtualization stuff especially, and it's not even out yet. SQL Server is going from strength-to-strength, not to mention the bizapps servers (SharePoint, Exchange, Lync) have never sold so many ever more than now.
-Windows in general is finally becoming consumer & tablet friendly, some even say at the expense of the power-users, but it'll ultimately broaden it's appeal to grandmas & Joe Sixpack's alike. Metro, love it or hate it, is what grandma wants; simple, shiny, easy to use. This of course is not what everyone wants but there's always the classic UI too - which leads me to my next point....
-Product integration/commonality across a huge range of hardware; the same code & UI works on XBox, WinPhone, Windows tablet (RT), and Windows normal. Windows phone 8 will level out the platform field even further and expect this to be something that improves continually, meaning even more ROI on code over time.
-Office365 is a great product; small business in particular love it as they don't have to run IT anymore (and shouldn't have to) and they get access to enterprise-scale services like Exchange for a mere pitance every month.
-SkyDrive is also taking off; I never thought I'd see the day when Google released an inferior competing product that had less space than the MS offering.
-Finally, finally MS aren't leaving to OEMs to actually give Apple a run for their money. Apple have great toys they spend a lot of time engineering them to be "just right" and have sold bucket-loads of devices because of it. Yes this might wind up the OEMs but this is the kick up the ass they needed, and the Surface should be it.
-XBox is still selling loads even being years old now. It's also proof MS can enter consumer markets if the product's done right.
Not everything's perfect of course; there are plenty of risks as slashdotters like pointing out; Win8 is still an unknown to some extent, Apple are hammering MS on all fronts right now for the consumer space, but there's plenty of action & big descisions going on that I think might just work. On the cloud side Amazon are hammering MS too, but it's all to play for still.
But these are exciting times; competition is a good & needed thing, and so far at least on the consumer side, Apple is quickly becoming the dominant player in this space - let's hope they don't go unanswered. Microsoft are as far as I see willing to stake big bets on some big changes, and that's why I'm excited to see how this all plays out - I think it might just work, personally. Never before has IT been such a competitive & interesting place to be in.
OK, I've accidently said a positive thing about Microsoft. Forgive me slashdot; you may flame away.
throw new NoSignatureException();
It seems so much of the article can be summed by a very simple business statement.
"Give the customer what they want"
(yes... sometimes the customer themselves doesn't know what they want until you give it to them)
Microsoft's early success was all about giving the customer what they wanted. Windows 95 gave people a GUI with DOS with pretty low requirements. I remember trying to toss on some Linux distros on older hardware... and none performed as well Windows 95. Now yes, Windows 95 made a lot of sacrifices to make it speedy... but it was what the customer wanted. Office scripting/VBS are along the same lines, but it worked.
Microsoft's lost decade I think is kind of unique... in that they forgot about this. They began focusing on things outside of providing for the customer. Some of it actually needed from a technical standpoint (gutting/rewriting legacy stuff). But much of it not.
For Vista, where was the demand for a database file system? They also focused too much on making things work with Windows or giving them a Windows feel. All things customers really don't care about. The initial windows smart phones complete with start menu... seems so silly now.
'the company has driven innovation for decades.'
Which document preparation system had a graphical editor for style sheets before Word? I don't think LyX was around then.
They've reversed there previous policies on linux. They no longer run FUD campaigns against linux. They've taken some of the features from linux and various X window managers and incorperated them into windows. They've started more widespread use of linux themselves in their infrastructure.
http://interserver.net/
Microsoft has never been a leader in innovation; all they ever did was drive innovated ideas and companies into the ground
Absolutely ridiculous. Just because the legal side of the building is doing their thing doesn't mean that the engineering side isn't doing their thing. Google too, we've seen a lot of innovation from them in the last several years.
Christ, you can't even GET to the actual freakin' article. /. has a lede to BGR's lede of Vanity Fair's OWN FREAKIN' LEDE. WHERE"S THE DAMN CONTENT, MAN?
Getting rid of Ballmer could be nothing but an improvement to MS.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
You are partially right.
Microsoft became big when they could sell DOS to the clones, especially Compaq. They got in the door because of the price of a clone-PC. The magic was in "IBM compatible".
The next part is that I think most software environments tend to gravitate towards a monopoly. As soon as MS had established their first one, they then used some very aggressive moves to expand, their history in the eighties and nineties is one of lost lawsuits. What they used is that the judicial system is just much slower than the speed of software development, so by the time they would lose the lawsuit, it would be irrelevant because MS would have won whatever they were after.
You are right that in business there are wide superstitions like "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft.". It perpetuates the monopolies.
I'm not sure why so many software fields tend to gravitate towards near monopolies, in some cases duopolies, but I see it everywhere (Windows, iOS/Android, Autocad, Photoshop, 3DMax/Maya, there are many more). There are economic theories about why the largest economic power tends to grow fastest, things like agglomeration effects, but I'm not sure what applies here.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
How about this - assuming you're a programmer, you're no longer allowed to innovate anything related to software or code or instructions that can be executed by a machine of any sort. Now, go forth and innovate and be a market leader.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Yeah, because that's exactly what the judge told MS at the anti-trust settlement. Actually, no it isn't. Not even remotely close.
And thatâ(TM)s Microsoft. The company just isnâ(TM)t cool anymore.
The most important change is that the mainstream media's position on MS has shifted. It used to be that Bill Gates was the hero of a generation to all but the geeks, and MS the greatest company on earth to all but the geeks, and Windows had no alternative except for the geeks.
These days, iOS and Android get more headlines on a new release than Windows does. Even new OS X releases get mainstream media coverage. And Bill is gone, he did well to step down at the high point, and Balmer has never been liked by anyone in the media. MS isn't a great company anymore, that is the latest shift, there are now quite a few serious, critical and in-depth articles, and they will keep coming.
MS has lost the PR war. This is going to be its end. Not that it's going to go away, the company is way too huge to simply pack up and leave. But the dominance is over, and their markets are ready to be taken over by other people, because "nobody ever got fired for buying ..." has stopped to be true.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
To: John Sculley, Jean Louis Gassée
From: Bill Gates, Jeff Raikes
Date: June 25, 1985
Re: Apple Licensing of Mac Technology
cc: Jon Shirley
Background
Apple's stated position in personal computers is innovative technology leader. This position implies that Apple must create a standard on new, advanced technology. They must establish a "revolutionary" architecture, which necessarily implies new development incompatible with existing architectures.
Apple must make Macintosh a standard. But no personal computer company, not even IBM, can create a standard without independent support. Even though Apple realized this, they have not been able to gain the independent support required to be perceived as a standard.
The significant investment (especially independent support) in a "standard personal computer" results in an incredible momentum for its architecture. Specifically, the IBM PC architecture continues to receive huge investment and gains additional momentum. (Though clearly the independent investment in the Apple II, and the resulting momentum, is another great example.) The investment in the IBM architecture includes development of differentiated compatibles, software and peripherals; user and sales channel education; and most importantly, attitudes and perceptions that are not easily changed.
Any deficiencies in the IBM architecture are quickly eliminated by independent support. Hardware deficiencies are remedied in two ways:
expansion cards made possible because of access to the bus (e.g. the high resolution Hercules graphics card for monochrome monitors)
manufacture of differentiated compatibles (e.g. the Compaq portable, or the faster DeskPro).
The closed architecture prevents similar independent investment in the Macintosh. The IBM architecture, when compared to the Macintosh, probably has more than 100 times the engineering resources applied to it when investment of compatible manufacturers is included. The ratio becomes even greater when the manufacturers of expansion cards are included.
Conclusion
As the independent investment in a "standard" architecture grows, so does the momentum for that architecture. The industry has reached the point where it is now impossible for Apple to create a standard out of their innovative technology without support from, and the resulting credibility of other personal computer manufacturers. Thus, Apple must open the Macintosh architecture to have the independent support required to gain momentum and establish a standard.
The Mac has not become a standard
The Macintosh has failed to attain the critical mass necessary for the technology to be considered a long term contender:
Since there is no "competition" to Apple from "Mac-compatible" manufacturers, corporations consider it risky to be locked into the Mac, for reasons of price AND choice.
Apple has reinforced the risky perception of the machine by being slow to come out with software and hardware improvements (e.g. hard disk, file server, bigger screen, better keyboard, larger memory, new ROM, operating software with improved performance). Furthermore, killing the Macintosh X/L (Lisa) eliminated the alternative model that many businesses considered necessary.
Recent negative publicity about Apple hinders the credibility of the Macintosh as a lon
I was formerly a part of the Windows team. I think you just nailed it in your last paragraph.
The whole "Microsoft got the IBM DOS contract, The End." narrative is a pretty gross over-simplification. Its practically forgotten that Microsoft was much smaller than companies such as Lotus or WordPerfect, and were minuscule compared to say IBM or Apple.
However, when you look at the history, there's one big common pattern which jumps out. Most of these larger companies ran into serious issues producing quality software. Lotus, WordPerfect, Borland, Apple, IBM, and Netscape all shot themselves in the foot with buggy or cancelled products, giving Microsoft an opportunity to take-over their markets. While Microsoft's code wasn't necessarily "good", they did know how to produce it at an industrial scale (at least until the Vista period). It came out at regular intervals and generally ran OK on people's low end computers.
Like a lot of successful people/organizations, it's very difficult for someone to determine much of it is due to luck versus skill. A model that worked because it assumed the competitors would fuck-up starts to fail when Google and Apple can churn out superior products even faster. Everyone goes into 'pigeon mode' (eg. Windows Phone will sell because it says Windows on it), because that's all they know how to do.
The other factor is that almost none of the people who e.g. made Excel into a great product are still there aside from Ballmer. They've been replaced with 'pigeons'.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Java came out of Sun's research areas too.
the company has driven innovation for decades
Examples or GTFO.
Microsoft has become an ethical company?
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
It's true that you need to download and install them yourself... But they are offered by Microsoft for free in their poweruser tools, are very lightweight and work well. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545027
and to the point. good job. i can't mention micro$oft without adding expletives
is Office. Everything else is a distraction they can afford to lose.
It's also the title of a novel by Thackeray, one of the minor works of the English canon. There is ruthless social climbing. Charming immoral people prey on each other. Also good for costume-drama movies.
I suppose someone had to say it. The question is, does the board have the balls to throw his ass out finally? Thanks for the beer Steve, here's the door. Parking pass - check, Office key - check, building pass - check. See ya! Maybe they can hire Leo Apotheker, the same guy that ran HP off a cliff.
The next guy has his work cut out for him, clearly. They need to ditch that turd of an OS and really move us to a new microprocessor architecture. Ditch the sucky X386 stuff. Iron is hot right now to do it.
let me put on my not caring hat
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?