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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."
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
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
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."
I left an employer once because it was shit and was disgruntled with it as my previous company.
But just because I was disgruntled with it, doesn't mean it wasn't shit.
It's bankrupt now.
Sometimes ex-employees are exactly the people you should be listening to, sometimes, they're ex-employees by their own choosing and for good reason.
It's been around for about 100 years. It's been a good magazine on and off, sort of a proto-Esquire.
I think it was originally called "Dress and Vanity Fair". I got on some list some years ago and the magazine showed up at my house for a while. There was some decent writing, a lot of fluff, George Clooney always on the cover, shiny, glossy, typical Conde Nast high-toned puke for people you don't want to know. Think Wired magazine without the tech and ads. Lots and lots of ads. You can't tell where the ads end and the articles begin. In fact, if you start from the front, you can flip pages for half an hour without getting to one bit of editorial content. Or maybe I couldn't recognize the editorial content.
And perfume samples, at least when it was coming to my house. My wife, who picks up the mail usually, used to stack them on my desk so my office smelled like my Aunt Lena's underwear drawer. She'd plop it down and say, "Your Vanity Fair is here, Evelyn" (my name is not Evelyn). Then she's snort with laughter. It was bizarre, hearing a woman with a heavy Eastern European accent try to imitate a high-end London swell.
They make a good sturdy surface to roll joints on. I imagine.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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?
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
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.
It's from 'Pilgrim's Progress' by John Bunyan.
The novel is a 'Western Canon' extended metaphor for the story of Christian salvation.
Specifically, Vanity Fair is a city through which the King's Highway passes. It looks like the 'true and only Heaven', but it is a worldly distraction.
I always thought it was an appropraite name for a fashion magazine.
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.