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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."
Yes. Microsoft Research.
Executives, Executives, EXECUTIVES
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-
Apple Research
Palm trees and 8
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
They ran over people in the '80s and '90s. Google "cut off Netscape's air supply". They got SQL Server from an unequal deal with Sybase (vaguely similar to the treaties the US government made with Mexico). They offered PC makers deals whereby the OEM's got Windows for less if they didn't also sell PC's with OS/2 or DR-DOS. They effectively tricked IBM with a joint development effort on OS/2, which they abandoned in favor of Windows. As for Windows, it wasn't until 1990 that they had a saleable product, some six years after Apple released the Mac (add another couple years for Lisa).
Microsoft did little innovation relative to its size throughout the '80s and '90s. Mainly, Bill Gates was about being paranoid and crushing anyone who seemed to be a threat. Jerry Kaplan's book "Startup" tells this with anecdotal detail about Gates and Jeff Raikes, his right-hand man at the time. Remember Microsoft's Pen Windows, and Apple's Newton tablet? Both companies lifted the idea from Kaplan without crediting (this was in the days when IT companies didn't patent aggressively).
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.
After opening with a false premise like "storied history of leadership", do you really want to read more?
Microsoft Research is the most depressing part of that whole company. There have so many great researchers and computer scientists working there and you hear very little from them. People who used to publish papers every year join up with MR and are never heard from again. It's a roach motel of computer scientists.
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.
This is incorrect. PARC is not an Apple Research center.
WHOOSH!!! This was supposed to be a joke. But since it was modded "insightful" instead of funny, you are apparently not the only one who didn't get the joke, so let me explain: In 1979 Steve Jobs visited Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and was shown the Xerox Alto. It included the Smalltalk OO-programming environment, and more importantly, a GUI and mouse. This was the inspiration for the Lisa, and subsequently, the Macintosh. Basically, Xerox had invented the modern computer, and then had let it sit in a research lab until someone else came along and saw the potential.
I think Microsoft Research is basically a place where they can keep innovators out of the hands of their competitors, rather than research innovative new stuff that Microsoft will make - allowing Microsoft to rest on their Windows/Office laurels for longer.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
An increasingly common quote I've been hearing from the consultants of technology giants recently is that "product enhancements" are only considered if they can be demonstrated to be critical to closing a sale.
It's absolutely asinine.
For example, paraphrasing somewhat, I once found a missing function that made an entire API useless. It was designed for manipulating objects, and there were functions for adding, changing, and deleting objects of several types, except one that could not be deleted. It's a simple mistake that can be quickly rectified with a hotfix. Nope. Sorry. We don't have any sales that would be affected by this. Err...
Microsoft products are riddled with abandoned, half-complete, and archaic code that nobody will ever improve or fix, because either no customer wants it desperately enough, or no manager within Microsoft cares, so nobody will get any gold stars for fixing it. Code that does boring things -- no matter how important -- gets no love. This is also where all those security vulnerabilities come, from ancient code that hasn't been modernized or even just looked over in a decade.
Don't believe me? Install Windows 8 Release Preview, and create a new ODBC connection using the control panel. That dialog box hasn't changed in something like 15 years. It's like a museum piece. The "Add new performance counter" window is the same story. You still can't resize it, even though many of the counter names are longer than the available space and can't be read.
This short-sightedness leads to products that are just layers and layers of ancient cruft that no current employee understands or is willing to even touch any more. Eventually the entire product becomes unsellable and has to be scrapped. With something as enormous as Windows, this could very well lead to the end of Microsoft as we know it. Of course, none of this is relevant to sales this quarter, so it doesn't matter...
Microsoft Research is the most depressing part of that whole company. There have so many great researchers and computer scientists working there and you hear very little from them. People who used to publish papers every year join up with MR and are never heard from again. It's a roach motel of computer scientists.
Obviously you do not track the academic conference and journals. Microsoft Research publishes a huge number of papers each year, dominating in many research areas. Here's a graph of their publication counts: http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Organization/20355/microsoft
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.