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Steve Ballmer: We Won't Be Out-Innovated By Apple Anymore
An anonymous reader tips an article about comments from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer regarding Microsoft's attitude toward Apple. It seems Microsoft is tired of being behind the curve in most areas of the tech market, and will be trying very hard to prevent Apple and other companies from beating them to the punch in the future. From the article:
"In a recent interview, Ballmer explained that the company had ceded innovations in hardware and software to Apple, but that the-times-they-are-a-'changin. 'We are trying to make absolutely clear we are not going to leave any space uncovered to Apple,' Ballmer explained. 'Not the consumer cloud. Not hardware software innovation. We are not leaving any of that to Apple by itself. Not going to happen. Not on our watch.' ... An admirable goal, but it's fair to argue that attempting to innovate everywhere results in innovation nowhere. A big part of the reason Apple has been so successful is that they devote the bulk of their attention to only a few select market areas. By trying to innovate everywhere, so to speak, Microsoft runs the continued risk of spreading itself too thin and not really having a fundamental impact in any one market."
If Ballmer thinks that his problem is being 'out-innovated' by Apple, his attempt to respond is going to be about as effectual as a fish out of water.
Apple doesn't really do innovation as much as they do polished, decisive, takes on things that were previously relegated to niche status or mediocrity. They've also shown a historical willingness to murder even their popular products in order to introduce something that they like better(ipod mini being the most notable recent example: killed at the height of its popularity in favor of more expensive and lower-capacity flash-based products, because rotating media were deemed sufficiently inelegant.
If 'innovation' were the problem, Microsoft could trivially bury Apple in wacky stuff coming out of MS research. As it is, though, they can't even refrain from eating any of their own young that don't play nicely enough with Windows/Office, and they have a veritable talent for squandering even the technical superiority areas that they do have by making them too expensive or too complex for individual users(eg. MS had volume shadow copy in full working order since server 2003, and has substantial clout in terms of getting OEMs to build things, plus an embedded OS to license to them for the purpose. So why is it that they let Apple beat them to releasing a usable-by-morons home backup system(based on a rather more primitive and hacky architecture) 4 years later?)
Walk inside a public place these days. What do you see? Lots of Apples. Lots of coders (and not civilians in the US, anyway) run Linux on their desktops. I know, heresy.
Civilians usually don't run non-Windows stuff. Go onto a HS or university campus. What do you see? A sea of Apples. Microsoft has improved their stuff, don't get me wrong. But while Apple was paying deep attention to detail, Microsoft was pandering to Standard and Poor. I'm not a fanboi; I do not use Apple stuff. But I have a deep respect for Apple engineering and their ability to hypnotize their customers.
Microsoft has statistically ceded share in almost all categories. I got modded as troll. The truth is painful, especially during lovefests like the Microsoft Partner Conference, being held this week in Toronto. Microsoft typically finds ways to pound down criticism as their lovefest pounds fists on podiums. Ballmer has let his organization and his customers down, IMHO. He's allowed a variety of holes to be broken with the concrete hammers of success and innovation, sparse sometimes, as it is. Kool aid. With sugar.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Just did. No blushing.
Then I went to the corner coffee shop. Nineteen Macs, two Dell notebooks, one huge whomping HP running Vista. The Point of Sale system they use is Linux running something on KDE.
Really, you need to get out.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
That's not true. The Kinect camera hardware was developed by someone else, but the software (the real brains) was developed by Microsoft Research and then moved into a product group. Kinect-like technology is a big research focus for MSR.
.NET CLR while I've been at MSR, and I am quite impressed. It's a shame that Microsoft doesn't develop this stuff for UNIX.
I am currently doing an internship at Microsoft Research. There are a huge number of very innovative things on the horizon (which, sadly, I can't talk about), and Microsoft has gathered one of the most talented groups of people I have ever had the pleasure to work with. Note that I have never been a fan of Microsoft-- I conscientiously avoided their software for a long time. I've been a BSD/Linux person for more than a decade and a Mac person since the late 1980's, and I prefer to write code in more traditionally UNIX languages: Ruby, C, Scala, etc. But I've had the pleasure of working with F# (basically ML, also developed by MSR) on top of the
I don't think Ballmer is blowing smoke, because from my standpoint, there's a lot going on here. While it's true that many of the things developed don't become products, the technology is very often integrated into existing products, without fanfare. The Windows fault-tolerant heap, for example, was developed at MSR for Linux, rejected by the Linux community (because it was not "incremental"), and then eventually ported to Windows. Many improvements that make Visual Studio a pleasure to use come from MSR. And, whether you think this is worthwhile or not-- MSR generates a huge number of very good research papers. Apple produces zero, although it does share some code (e.g., WebKit and LLVM). Google produces a handful and shares very little code (e.g., MapReduce and FlumeJava were never released, although they were reverse-engineered by people at Yahoo).