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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."
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
Not only is a double post, the full article still isn't available, and this is just a short teaser.
Microsoft has a long and storied history of leadership in the tech industry, and the company has driven innovation for decades
LMFAO
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
They still have a commanding market share in many areas...
And that's the exact reason you're unlikely to see them reinvent themselves the way Apple did. Apple did it because they had no choice - they were getting their asses handed to them in every sector they were in, they were haemorrhaging money and were on the verge of bankruptcy. It was a do-or-die move.
Microsoft have no need to copy them. They may not be raising the roof on the stock indexes, but they're still making money and because of that, inertia will mean that they'll never look at the kind of radical solutions that Apple did; it's easier to play the safe game and make smaller profits for less risk.
-Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience-
In many ways Apple had it easier. The state they were in, the board was willing to try anything and Jobs had free reign to make major changes. If what Jobs did didn't work, there wasn't much loss.
MS is still profitable and making major changes that affects their profitability will face resistance. MS needs new leadership and Ballmer is not likely to lead the reinvention. Over the last several years, it seems the leaders that were willing to change how MS did things have left: Ozzie, Allard, Bach. Everything must be Windows or Office has been a major problem to their innovation.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Remember back in the days that Windows didn't have basic operating system features like memory protection and used to crash thrice daily?
Remember back in the days where using the latest version of IE would assure you that nothing but the most quirky IE only pages would render correctly?
Remember back in the days where Apple had a usable GUI for half a decade and MS users were stuck on a really shitty command line?
I do, it wasn't that long ago, pretty much it was the entire company's history before the "lost decade". But Windows doesn't crash so much any more since the later service packs of Windows 2000 and is fairly usable these days. It seems that Microsoft should have become IBM a long time ago.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
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.
Think about the analogy. You are basically saying the stuff that OS/2 aimed to bring to PCs. Those were the days when the Microsoft/Western Digital/Intel standard crushed every other consumer & small business based system based on the cost / feature set ratio. I agreed with you at the time and used QEMM as my memory manager and Desqview to multitask but still owned Windows and was moving towards Windows applications. So yes that is what they mean. A dynamic company rapidly improving their products and challenging new markets. Windows for Workgroups may very well have been the worst Lan sold, but it was WfW that owned the small business space and made Lans ubiquitous.
Now Microsoft is in a "shrink slowly but profitably" stage.
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.
They didn't make Kinect and still don't own the rights to the tech. It was created by licenced from PrimeSense.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.
I don't know about that. Where Microsoft has really been dynamic this decade is at the enterprise level. For example Microsoft Dynamics (which I understand was an acquisition) ties very tightly to office. But accountants and sales people know office. CRM, ERP, Accounting... all tied together with an office interface relatively easy to configure/setup and use. That's rather impressive. Now tie that in with the enhancements to Sharepoint and Universal Communicator and you really have a fully formed office based total communication system. So they have been innovative on a windows / office paradigm.
Their problem is in consumer / internet and to a certain extent not developing there was strategic. It bought them an entire extra decade of dominance. Now Balmer / Microsoft is fighting for consumer market share we'll see what they do. But I don't think its fair to say there has been a lack of innovation. Perhaps not innovations you are about though.
After opening with a false premise like "storied history of leadership", do you really want to read more?
the full article still isn't available, and this is just a short teaser.
Just like Microsoft product announcements.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
After opening with a false premise like "storied history of leadership", do you really want to read more?
Yeah, that was a good one. I also liked "...and the company has driven innovation for decades." That made me chuckle.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
In many ways Apple had it easier. The state they were in, the board was willing to try anything and Jobs had free reign to make major changes.
And why was the board so willing? Anybody remember their history?
No, of course not, this is IT ;-) Everybody talks about the iMac as being what Steve Jobs did to start turning Apple around, but in reality it was secondary. The single most important thing Steve Jobs did was convince the Apple board of directors to resign so that he could replace them with a board of his choosing.
Press and financial analysts at the time went nuts over this move, because clearly Jobs' ego was out of control, and now having padded the board with people who would not exercise adequate oversight, he was free to run the company into the ground...
But a fact that was not known to most at the time, was that the prior board had long been convinced that Apple could not survive on its own. Many of the seemingly strange decisions by prior CEOs had been because the board was pushing them to position Apple for sale, thus instead of building the brand, they were pursuing short term strategies to pad the bottom line at any cost--including chipping away at their reputation for superior products.
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?
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.
You are correct! John Sculley nearly destroyed Apple. I remember reading that at the time of Steve's return to Apple, he was actually using a Windows machine. It took new vision and new leadership to turn Apple around --Microsoft needs to do the same and get rid of Steve B -- Why do they keep him around? Can someone please tell me what he has done to advance Microsoft?
Anyway, the most interesting part is not the article itself, but the comments of many Microsofties.
"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...
They drove it into hiding.
Have gnu, will travel.
....is "People Magazine" for well-off literate people.
Remember back in the days that Windows didn't have basic operating system features like memory protection and used to crash thrice daily?
Remember back in the days where using the latest version of IE would assure you that nothing but the most quirky IE only pages would render correctly?
Remember back in the days where Apple had a usable GUI for half a decade and MS users were stuck on a really shitty command line?
Pepperidge Farm remembers
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the (supposed) good of its victims may be the most oppressive
Ya, really.
> Microsoft Has "Become the Thing They Despised"
And what's that? They became a studly male suave wit da ladies?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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
Meh I'll get hate for saying this but fuck it, truth is truth. Ya wanna know what is REALLY sad? All the Win 8 apologists have damned near copypasta'd their apologies word for word from the more militant members of the FOSS community. You get the classics like "You don't need that" (except if we didn't we wouldn't be asking for it ass), "Our way is better" (without any concrete reasons WHY of course), "Flash is proprietary crap, all must embrace HTML V5" (while ignoring the creation tools aren't there and it still is used by millions daily), its a hit parade of excuses.
In the end while I have no doubt some will like Win 8, after all i know a couple of old folks that actually liked WinME, I'd say that the way to spot either a batshit softie or a paid shill is anybody that defends Ballmer. I mean look at his track record folks, he has blown, what? 20 BILLION on bad deals that have gotten MSFT exactly nowhere? Hell what has he done that wasn't at least a partial failure? you can't even count the X360 because he rushed that out with a fatal flaw that cost them 2 billion bucks! When you look at the man's track record, Zune, Kin, killing playsforsure which had actually given them an inroad into the media market, the X360 flaw, Vista, blowing shitloads on companies that he knew fuck all what to do with, if you would have taken a chimp and left it to fling its own poo at the stock page and then bought major amounts of any stock whose listing was heavily covered in monkey shit I have NO doubt you would have made more money for MSFT than the man who has led the company for the last decade!
So lets make this dupe into something worthwhile, how about it? lets here from all the guys inside MSFT, are you as fucking frustrated at this lame "Me too!" half ass Apple ripping off by your employer? Is the culture there so filled with PHBs and bullshit you wanna puke? What about Ballmer? Does his direction in any way inspire you, or are you like the rest of us and just wishing he'd go away?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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();
Steve used an IBM ThinkPad running NextStep. I'd hardly call that a "Windows machine."
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
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.
I think you make a great point but I think a lot of ./ers aren't going to pick up on what you are saying.
I do all enterprise-level work. I'm talking organizations with petabytes of data and thousands of servers. And you know what? I'm seeing more and more Windows 2008R2 server. Linux got popular for a while when Solaris and big iron started to disappear, but now with VMs and the improved stability in Windows, people are more comfortable with hosting their apps on Windows instead, especially because .NET web apps are easier to write.
So yeah, maybe Apple and even Linux are taking over the tablet/smartphone/consumer market. But MS pwns in the biz world.
(this is kind of sad to me...back in the day I was a Unix/Linux admin and I remember when Unix ran the world, sendmail, bind/dns, etc. Ever since active directory came about it and Exchange seems to be replacing the lan/wan-level infrastructure. Backbones might still use unix though, I'm not really in touch with that level)
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
> if you would have taken a chimp and left it to fling its own poo at the stock page and then bought major amounts of any stock whose listing was heavily covered in monkey shit I have NO doubt you would have made more money for MSFT than the man who has led the company for the last decade!
Now, *that's* an internship I would turn down...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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/
I know some people who have installed the preview of Win 8. I'm not saying it's not a MS product, with all the crap that entails, but my understanding is that it's actually faster than Win 7, and Windows 7 isn't bad. If you can get over Metro, and there's really no reason you couldn't, it's a serviceable upgrade.
Mind you, if I was using Linux or MacOS regularly, for whatever reason, it is far from switch-worthy, but since Windows has the lion's share of the desktop app and gaming ecosystem, I'm darn glad it's not a stinker like Vista.
Of course, they still have time to shit it up, so call this a provisional review. :)
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
Pepperidge Farm remembers....
And RT will be the downfall of Microsoft. All of Microsoft's coder base that grew up on .NET will slowly migrate to other technologies... In business, if you make someone choose, they will almost always choose the competitor.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
What about Ballmer? Does his direction in any way inspire you, or are you like the rest of us and just wishing he'd go away?
Speaking as an Apple fan, I hope the great Steven Ballmer continues his spectacular reign as CEO long into the 21st Century. In fact, I hope they have his head preserved, Futurama-style, to lead Microsoft down its present path until they are inevitably DE-LISTED on the stock exchange...
But I fear that the MS stockholders will band together and demand his ouster before that happens (sigh).
"He" referred to Sculley, not Jobs.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
...clearly as a founder he's part of the old boy's club and not going anywhere soon unless Microsoft's board finally says enough z'nough.
Ballmer's position is secure because he excels at the one thing that actually counts: complete, unquestioning obedience to Bill Gates, who as the largest shareholder still controls the company.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Friend I have a Win 8 CP machine set up in the shop for everyone from tweeners to little old ladies to play with as they shop, know what I found? That this is a typical reaction only with more frustration than that sweet old lady gets. i don't care if it was the business guys or backhoe operators, insurance saleswomen or Suzy the checkout girl ALL OF THEM couldn't figure out fuck all to do with that damned OS.
More speed isn't gonna help you if all it does is lets you get nowhere fast, and that is Win 8 in a nutshell. its just not intuitive, not discoverable,, has ZERO help in the way of tooltips or tutorials that would help the lost users, its just a fricking mess.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
But even if they fail and do get knocked out that still just shrinks them to:
-- consumer work from home PCs
-- enterprise desktops
-- 45+% of server sales
I'll note one item of interest - it's 45-48% of server sales revenue. There's a whole suite of linux servers out there with 0 revenue associated with them, e.g., lots of DNS, web, and application servers as well as appliances, which might not show up as Linux sales either. Every MS Server OS should be licensed, and therefore counted. As it is, with Linux at 20% of the revenue vs MS's 48%, the numbers wind up being very close, since Windows costs at least double the equivalent Linux licensing fees, and that's not counting all the other servers out there running CentOS and the like.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
That is not only petty and sad, its really pathetic. i'll have you know that most of us Windows guys actually felt sorry for your when you were stuck with one craptastic CEO after another and even though I've never owned an Apple product I happily tuned it to watch Job's first Stevenote as the returning CEO because I was actually happy for you, happy you got to see the incompetent thrown aside for someone who actually knew the product and what you wanted.
So maybe instead of wishing bad on other people you should ask yourself why, why does the product you like ONLY make you happy if you are running someone down, hmmm? maybe its that little niggling doubt you are only buying fashion, that just won't go away how many times you try to swat it with you iPad?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.