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Microsoft's Lost Decade
Kurt Eichenwald has written a lengthy article about Microsoft's slow decline over the past 10 years, cataloging their missteps and showing how consistent, poor decision-making from management crippled the tech titan in several important industries.
"By the dawn of the millennium, the hallways at Microsoft were no longer home to barefoot programmers in Hawaiian shirts working through nights and weekends toward a common goal of excellence; instead, life behind the thick corporate walls had become staid and brutish. Fiefdoms had taken root, and a mastery of internal politics emerged as key to career success. In those years Microsoft had stepped up its efforts to cripple competitors, but—because of a series of astonishingly foolish management decisions—the competitors being crippled were often co-workers at Microsoft, instead of other companies. Staffers were rewarded not just for doing well but for making sure that their colleagues failed. As a result, the company was consumed by an endless series of internal knife fights. Potential market-busting businesses—such as e-book and smartphone technology—were killed, derailed, or delayed amid bickering and power plays. That is the portrait of Microsoft depicted in interviews with dozens of current and former executives, as well as in thousands of pages of internal documents and legal records."
We discussed a teaser for this piece earlier in the month — the full article has all the unpleasant details.
This story is so stupid it's not worth reading.
The problem is Ballmer. Always has been.
It'a a rotten company http://web.archive.org/web/20110519051938/http://msversus.org/
Seems like XP and 7 did quite well.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
MBAs can't run businesses. It's that simple. When Bill ran it, everything was great. When Steve took over, everything went downhill. The same happened in Apple: When Steve was in charge, Apple grew. When Steve was fired, downhill. When Steve was brought back, more growth. The same with HP. Moral: don't let MBAs run your company, it'll tank.
Don't stop where the ink does.
So doubling your revenues and net income is now considered a "lost decade"?
In any organization I've ever seen or worked for.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
You know right away the article is BS.
Because during the last 10 years many MS products have finally become as usable as they should have been 10 years ago.
Microsoft failed to conquer a number of new markets over that past decade. Social networking, tablets/smart phones, etc. -- Microsoft is just not winning, and their old strategies of monopoly abuse are not going to help them.
Palm trees and 8
This article is a microcosm for what's happening in the entire United States.
Among others a reply from Frank Shaw (MSFT):
http://www.neowin.net/news/what-the-hell-is-microsofts-lost-decade
Microsoft have always been about coming late to a party someone else started and then trying to steal the limelight. That's not always a bad thing (eg. cheap and nasty workstations and servers that were just good enough made a lot of things possible) and it has worked for them on many occasions, however recently they don't seem to have been able to dominate a niche that they've come into late.
Note that Apple have been doing that as well, mp3 players, smartphones and tablets were mature before they got involved but they managed to get up to speed quickly enough to dominate those markets
To sum up, I don't see the last decade as anything different with Microsoft in that area, and I recall articles about toxic office politics at Microsoft (and moreso Apple) well over a decade ago anyway.
Well the article points out that the iPhone sells more than all of Microsoft sales combined. But I feel sorry from Nokia. From number 1 to number none, all because they hired a failed Microsoft executive as their CEO.
Group think has set in such that slowly politics has created an environment where the top management do not hear dissenting voices, so somehow they can do no wrong.
It is natures great recycler.
I was waiting for my daily "Microsoft-is-failing" article. That's always a sign of a quality tech site.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
On Apple's OS:
'E-mails flew around Microsoft, expressing dismay about the quality of Tiger. To executives’ disbelief, it contained functional equivalents of Avalon and WinFS. “It was fucking amazing,” wrote Lenn Pryor, part of the Longhorn team. “It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.”'
"“It was a bloated mishmash of folks,” said Johann Garcia, a former Microsoft product manager who worked on the Bing project. “They had two or three times the number of people they needed. There were just so many layers of people.”"
etc etc.
You may not see it, but MS exces can see it, I can see it, WallStreet can see it. Yet you can't see it. Are you Ballmer?
>"Fiefdoms had taken root, and a mastery of internal politics emerged as key to career success. In those years Microsoft had stepped up its efforts to cripple competitors"
Welcome to life at a huge, fat monopoly. At least it seems like they hit an ace with UEFI, further stifling competition and removing consumer freedom and choice.
Looks like Apple is falling into the same trap in their niche markets where they were also a near monopoly (tablets/phones).... instead of opening up, offering product choices, lowering prices, they are spending all their effort trying to sue everyone into submission.
They made a loss last quarter, in what sense did he double the net income?
It's only terrible to Microsoft astroturfer shills and those who have plenty of MSFT shares.
The article is as comprehensive and as factual as it can be.
Steve Ballmer is nothing but a boisterous used car salesman and bean counter. I'm quite surprised he's still in charge at Microsoft.
The demise of Microsoft will come. Windows 8 will hasten that demise.
Microsoft has hired brilliant people, but buried them with red tape and bullshit politicking.
Even now, Microsoft is split into two major factions: the pro-Sinofsky camp and the anti-Sinofsky camp.
A house divided unto itself cannot stand.
IBM, Microsoft, Apple. The HNIC loses something sitting at the top looking down that the up & climbers still have. Why yes, the en does stand for nerd.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Queue the Micro$oft fanboys
Not the coach, veterans, a philosophy, or a legacy breeds "chemistry" as fast as winning. Sometimes it'll even shut your wide receiver up.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
This is the same phenomenon that destroys all large corporations slowly from the inside.
There may be one product, but different departments responsible for different parts of that product are given competing and incompatible goals by upper management, the theory being that this will create the cheapest, highest quality solution - when the exact opposite is true.
Frank Shaws comments that they've returned 194 billion in dividends and stock buybacks to shareholders. This is not true, if the buy backs haven't increased the share-price, then none of that is returned. What they've done is waste all that buy-back money for no effect!
Also he posted it on Facebook, not Microsoft Live which is very telling.
I RTFA the whole article... but IMO, it has forgot one or two things....
M$ vs DOJ: If you have read daily technology news back in 90s, you might remember how narrowly M$ escaped from a major anti-trust case. Since then, M$ had to play nice with DOJ to avoid getting the worm can re-opened. So it is somewhat obvious M$ didn't work aggressively in taking over other markets in last decade. All the new players, they do not have to answer DOJ for any anti-trust violations. So... new players are very lucky when it comes to approaching new markets.. be it search, consumer media, social networking etc.
At the very heart of the DOJ case...M$ was accused of "locking-in" customers for their products. And now, fast forward to 2012... Apple is literally locking in consumers behind their gardened walls with a plethora of their own hardware and software, Google & FB literally collecting private details from its consumers. Playing the devil's advocate here, I wonder how come they are not scrutinised intensely ?
M$ massive hiring spree: Though I can't exactly remember the figures and fact, I believe M$'s staff count has gone up by few folds since the turn of the century. Though I am not sure what's the reason behind this; but I am pretty sure this is the real reason why wheels started getting off. More staff means more HR to handle them. My best guess for this 'staff head count inflation' is, having lot of cash in bank.
But my overall conclusion is... markets are wide open only for a brief period of time. One can concur that market only during that brief moment. Late comers will always have to play "do or die" battle before totally convert the market to their camp, or die an early shameful death. M$'s biggest issue it seems, not discovering wide open markets to concur like the rest.
Having said all that, during last decade, M$ consumer products have become more stable and secure than in 90s. That's something worth noting.
Also, I would like to see Steven Sinofsky to head the Redmond camp after Ballmer... looking at his track record, I believe he can stop this plunging boat from drowning.
p.s
I have to agree that 'management style' in M$ is somewhat deleterious. My software house has this ghastly 6-month review cycle despite being a SMB. In the most recent review, I was accused of not having any initiatives during work by the reviewing HR boss. My sad situation is, my technical boss disagrees with my initiatives. To avoid annoying him too much, and get the team working on one direction; I have learnt to suspend my ideas and just to be a "yes-boss" guy. But would the HR boss understand my situation fully? Personally, I put lot of hours in writing well-polished reliable code. In return, both my bosses are nit-picking on me. IMO, these reviews are good for "failing" employees.. but the rest, why bother.. just throw them free candy or coffee.
In times past Microsoft would find a nice add-in product for their software and then bundle a cloned version of it for free. Remember Stac Electronics? The disk compression Microsoft put in the next version of MSDOS was not better than Stac's, but it was free. Stac only won some money in a lawsuit, but was essentially destroyed. I think to this day developers are still mindful of this predilection. Now this same thing is happening to the cash cows of Microsoft: Windows and Office. Linux and LibreOffice are the nemesis of Microsoft's flagship products. Another product for the server world is Exchange. Exchange virtually forces the use of Outlook. No other Windows or Linux client can properly work with it. This is a strategy MS uses to delay the inevitable. Don't you think /. is read by MS employees? They can read the signs of the times. They just can't show their strategy to carry them through this. This lost decade is the decade of dealing with free alternatives. Microsoft is reaping what they have sown. You can't perpetuate the monopoly on Windows and Office alone anymore. I'll say it again:
It's hard to argue with free.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
if that's a lost decade I'm alright with that.
Ballmer sucks. Bad.
That is because Corporations are the Modern Version of Fiefdoms (http://bit.ly/MSfvml) with a fatal obsession for "Metrics and Productivity" (http://bit.ly/tB6o8I) both which can be easily gamed. Furthermore their supposed focus on shareholder value makes them susceptible to short-termism (http://bit.ly/McEkgs) as the reward system is rather dystopic (http://bit.ly/LYEke4).
From the perspective of Microsoft's core markets, last decade wasn't really "lost". You could more accurately say there was a lost half-decade from 2004 to 2009. But Microsoft's bread and butter is the business/power-user desktop, and Windows 7 is the best desktop OS ever produced. As for Office, I know this will be controversial to say, but the Ribbon actually was a welcome change – once you get used to it (which doesn't really take that long), it's a lot more user-friendly than the old nested menus.
Microsoft is losing its way now, chasing the chimera of Apple-sized smartphone and tablet profits, while forgetting the core customers who count on them to provide the tools to do serious work (or, in some cases, serious gaming). Windows 8 is shaping up to be another Vista-sized flop, and we can only hope it will end with Ballmer out on the street and Microsoft returning to its senses.
The article's author seems to think that Microsoft should have conquered those new markets. But what about the opposite approach: don't even try to enter those markets. Why should a company always try to become bigger even in areas that are not its strength?
In particular, why should Microsoft be in the smart phone business? It's not like smart phones will replace PCs. They are behind Apple and Google in terms of features, mind share and available 3rd party applications; to succeed they must either do the same thing much better (like Apple with the iPod) or do something different to make their platform stand out. If they don't have the ideas for that, it's better in my opinion to stay out of the market altogether rather than make a "me too" product.
While much of your MS history is accurate, the conspiracy theories are not reasonable. Microsoft is not the Illuminati. This kind of speculation is not helpful.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
So, MS has become what it said it would never do....it has become a "suit & tie" corporation. It's a BUSINESS, not a frat house.
As usual, MM blogs about disappointing product campaigns, while his (mostly insider) anonymous talk about stack ranking and the broken employee review system:
It could be just 10 years in human life, but in dog years it is 70 and in cyber dog year it is (2^10 - 1) that is 1023 years.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles), Nintendo Wii sold more units than both Xbox and Xbox 360. While Xbox 360 outsold Sony Playstation 3 by a few million units, combined sales of all Playstation models are several times higher than sales of both Xbox models. So what makes you say that Microsoft is the number one console manufacturer?
Moreover, unlike sales of smartphones and tablets, sales of game consoles are stagnating already. So it's pointless to argue whether Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony is the No. 1 or coolest console manufacturer.
Well, CEO is just the CEO. What do we know about Windows project team leaders, key developers, etc? Decisions on that level must have also had a meaningful impact to awesomeness of Windows 7, suckiness of Windows 8, and other things.
I picked up a paper copy of it yesterday by chance and quit reading after the first page or so. The article was effusive about the great creative years of Microsoft. I think they became rich by exploiting a monopoly that they inherited from IBM and imitating existing products in ways that precluded interoperation. I quit reading the article because I thought the author understood neither the history nor the technology.
Just look for the court docs regarding Microsoft's Java dealings to see where developers would get kicked in the mouth for trying to be the best software. These were the days where Bill Gates was in command and the desktop OS was king and they owned the King's throne.
IMHO, they have been stagnating because they used the desktop OS market position to kill off the competition by bloating that OS time and time again. Look at how they were willing to spread the IE code throughout the OS DLLs just to show in court it was part of the OS. So they really have not been able to take a bloated mess of an OS with a monopoly position and take that to other sectors like PDAs, media players, phones, and tablets. Without a mains power connection that kind of software can't compete with those who are willing, and have the know how, to build efficient software for the sake of competition. Using the word "competition" in the sense of an open market where faster, better, cheaper is what customers get and become long term customers. I've been seeing many desktop Windows users purchasing Mac hardware after experiencing the iPod, iPhone, etc hardware and getting sick of the issues common to Microsoft software.
They've rode their monopoly for a long time but their inability to really create something which can compete in an open market is showing how long a ride that's been. Too long a ride without anything to fund the beast into the future. Their management has been pointing them as an anti-competition company for decades instead of a super tech innovator through the 1990s so it's really not just the past decade. IMO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Market cap is to company's real worth as photoshopped magazine covers are to original models' beauty: a somewhat good reference but not really that reliable.
That is very true, Apple's market cap remains substantially depressed compared to other companies.
In the decade that Microsoft simply continued to sell the same thing they always had, Apple herded the music market unwillingly to digital sales, totally took over portable music players, forced a massive shift in the smartphone market, and then to top it off proceeded to be the company that led the inevitable shift in the computing market to tablets despite Microsoft trying and failing to do sofor almost ten years.
I'd say the "lost decade" description for Microsoft is utterly apt, for all sorts of reasons... the way that Microsoft killed off better technologies as they rose against Microsoft for many years was a loss of around a decade of computer advancements for real people as Microsoft kept the status quo.
But just like keeping the lid shut on a pressure cooker, eventually something much blow - and Apple was the company that forced the issue.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Atlantic has an interesting story, focused on AOL in the last year that has two very interesting plots of the % change in stock prices, including Aapl.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/07/the-best-tech-stock-of-the-year-is-aol/260438/
The dang of it is that I bought into Aapl in 2000 and sold out in mid-2005; bad move.
Over the decade Aapl has a better than 8000 % increase and Msft an anemic 30 % increase (which if we factor in deprecation of currency gives Msft a loss).
LoL
If you go by share price, sure, Microsoft has been stagnant the last decade. Share price has little or nothing to do with the day to day operations of the business, though. The actual business is consistently posting record revenues and profits throughout most of this past decade. That is what matters.
However, as soon as you account for the fact that there was an incredible tech bubble that popped around.. a decade ago.. they have actually done pretty well growing into that massive valuation again. Furthermore they pay dividends now! Microsoft is a huge and mature company - not a high growth speculation at this point.
Secondly, they may have floundered around with Vista but I think everyone has to admit that Windows 7 was a nice recovery.
Microsoft continues to invest heavily in R&D and we can quibble about the results but I'll just say it is nice that a company is actually doing this at all!
In the past decade they have massively increased their server applications business, the Dynamics/NAV business, Sharepoint is a billion + a year business with nice lock in for Microsoft.. Xbox is a huge success --- sure there is a sunk cost in getting going that they may still be recovering from but Xbox Live is a solid revenue stream for Microsoft every month and the Xbox has become more and more a centerpiece for more than games.
Microsoft is not just a Windows / Office company any longer. Windows & Office is still the engine of Microsoft at the moment but the company has diversified and continues to do so..
That all being said, Microsoft is entering into a crucial time. They are bringing out all their major products new revisions in a 6 month span and they need them to all be solid. All these releases and the integration between them is crucial to get right or they will really run the risk of fading away.
Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, Surface, Server 2012 etc. all need to be strong and that is a big bite to chew with them all coming up shortly.. ambitious but risky.
> This story is so stupid it's not worth reading.
Either I'm hallucinating or you can't read.
The article is basically correct, does a pretty good job in describing the time line -- I was living that period, albeit watching from a safe distance (that means nothing happened next to me).
But I'd like to point out something that seems out of tune to me: M$ has a long tradition (perceived by me at least from 1980) of making less-than-excellent products. If the company ever hired great professionals, I'm pretty sure most of its products carried their trademark of being good enough (and sometimes, not enough!).
My point is: it was not a lost decade for M$; rather, they did business as usual. But they could not compete (as they were never able before, in fact) with the excellence of Google, the maniacally perfection-seeking Apple or the Zen-minded Japanese gamers. These latter are great and M$ can be blamed of a lot of things -- but being great will never be one of them IMHO.
Also, we reached the age of inexpensive: inexpensive songs, inexpensive internet access, inexpensive OSes and their inexpensive applications. There's not much M$ can achieve by being cheap, which is their traditional strategy.
At this moment, going for hardware (like in the Surface gizmo) might be M$' best card. They must have a niche to retreat to, as IBM also did in the past. If there's a single thing I could recognize a minimal amount of competence in M$, making fairly good working is it.
The article ends in great style with Jobs' precise evaluation of why M$ is to be blamed for lack of good products -- it's not Ballmer the problem, however other faults he might have, M$ itself is a business-orientated company. You can die before getting excited with any of their products.
For techies, me included, that's a most deadly sin.
The infighting and competition between teams is the worst and Silverlight & XNA are the two most recent victims. C# and Silverlight are the two main reasons I chose to be a Windows developer. Without those I'm free to head to other pastures.
An MBA degree program is not what you think. An MBA is not like other Master's Degrees where you become more of an expert in a particular field. An MBA makes you generally knowledgeable of all the parts of an organization, not just the one you are currently experienced in. An MBA is an add-on to whatever degree you already have. An MBA does not make you an accountant, it does not make you a manager, it does not make you an executive. It helps one become a better manager or executive because you now have an understanding of other fields beyond your own, you can understand other people's perspectives a little more.
... but that is not what they were trained to do. It is much like computer science where a person is trained to write well designed, reliable and maintainable code in school and then when they get a job they just slap together crap as fast as they can to generate the illusion of performance rather than create good products.
30% of my MBA class were engineers, they left with the same technical perspective they came in with. However they could now more effectively communicate their perspective with people from other fields and they could more effectively persuade these people because they had some understanding of the perspectives of their respective fields. These are good skills.
That said. In an MBA program you really are taught to do the "right" thing. Manage for the long term, have some flexibility with people (there is no one way of doing things, different people may be more efficient/productive taking different approaches), marketing and new product development is based on careful study of consumer wants and needs and projections are based on careful modeling of the market (I was shocked by the amount of advanced math we used, pleasantly surprised by the scientific and mathematical approach), etc. However an individual person may be taught these things but not put them into practice in the real world. MBAs may manage for the quarterly results, have one size fits all approaches, pull numbers out of the air
"By the dawn of the millennium, the hallways at Microsoft were no longer home to barefoot programmers in Hawaiian shirts working through nights and weekends toward a common goal of excellence"
...
Ha, you have just got to be kidding. Microsoft was derived from a contractual relationship with IBM, it was never a home for 'barefoot programmers in Hawaiian shirts`
I'll buy that familiarity with the technology is a factor, but it's also about the thrill of technology as a motivator. Business types don't have it. Everybody knows what their SOLE motivation in life is ... How can we rake in the bucks and rip off the people?
Few engineers know the reality of business and MBAs - been there, done that, I am guilty - just as few business types understand the reality of engineering and other technical disciplines. When I eventually attended business school I thoroughly enjoyed it for two reasons. (1) Learning new and different things. (2) Laughing at myself, laughing at how ignorant and misinformed I had been about business, marketing, etc. Here's a clue: the professors in business school love Dilbert as much as any geek.
To avoid redundancy here is the reality of MBA degrees: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3010671&cid=40801865
The short story: Its just an add-on to your current degree and experience, it gives you an overview of all the pieces of a business/organization. They actually do teach you to do the "right thing", whether you do as you were taught is something else.
It isn't the MBA that makes the boss a bad manager. It's the forgetting of where money comes from. An MBA is content to run the company quarter to quarter, taking action solely based on the profits generated, and forgetting that a company does not just print money like a factory. A company makes money by making something valuable that people want to trade their money for. In a small company, this is obvious, because you are making those valuable things yourself and observing the process firsthand. Once you have MBAs on board, you no longer do. You stop thinking about the company and what it makes. You start thinking of it as a money printing press. Good products can keep this going for a while, but the MBAs who care about profits rather than the value that generates them will destroy it as surely as they will sell the ship's engine to bolster this quarter's bottom line only to go bankrupt in the next one.
it makes it sound like microsoft was ever a company that made great innovate products.
in the 1990s it flourished becuase of a demand for computers and NO competition. They were probably more hated then than now. Their software was far less reliable then, than now.
They were far more overreaching in their rhetoric and legal prowess to cover up their inability to make good products then, than now. They were far more evil then than now.
They have competition now, and if they tried what they did then, now, they would be sink.
Agree - but this can be simplified. There's a rule.
Managers are of two types.
There are managers who believe that management itself is a profession that stands outside of any other profession or industry; that is, that a manager only manages people. It doesn't matter what those people do. Nor does it matter what the manager knows about the business he/she manages. A good manager will deliver goodness, regardless.
Then there are managers who believe that they'd best excel at the specifics of the industry they find themselves in. Because one should understand the 'why' of making decisions, outside of the people involved.
The first type are MBAs. The second type are filthy rich.
Funny, but wrong. I'm a somewhat recent MBA grad and we were definitely taught that understanding your product, your market, your industry, the economic forces that effect your industry, etc was critical. About 1/3 of my class were engineers and scientist.
To avoid redundancy see: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3010671&cid=40801865
MBAs are taught finance.
Wrong. An MBA program is not about accounting and finance. An MBA program actually is an overview of all the pieces of a company/organization. Accounting and finance is just one piece. To avoid redundancy see: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3010671&cid=40801865
"Evil turns upon itself" Good for Google :D
We'll have us a little Microsoft Windows CD barbecue in the yard. They'll see the flames for miles. We'll dance around it like wild Injuns! You understand me? Catching my drift?... Or am I being obtuse?
Oh, and BTW, how much did MS pay you (/.) to remove the borg icon?
Nokia is the latest company going to shit because of the MS 'taint'. Remember Corel Linux? They made a deal, too and where is it now?
I know there is a habit here at Slashdot to only read and comment on the summary. Trust me, this article (though long) is worth the read. Very insightful. I did not know about the stack ranking system at Microsoft. What an amazingly stupid and suicidal system. Again, if you only read the summary, go read the article. It's worth your time.
Last financial period of 2012 Microsoft grossed in a netto loss of approx. 450million vs. an approx. 5 billion netto profit during the same financial period last year.
This is the first time since they went to the stock market that they managed a netto loss.
"Doubling net income" ?
"Microsoft is not the Illuminati"
A piece of a whole puzzle, like a drop in the ocean, does not negate the reality of the whole, nor remove the piece or drop from scrutiny.
Microsoft has not done badly for itself. I think the expectations put on many tech companies are unrealistic. Some tech companies have come from nowhere to mega enterprises. There are those that will think a company has not done well if they no longer sustain their early growth rate. Of course these expectations are arithmetically absurd. A small company can become a global force. Then where do they go? Take over the galaxy? This is also happening to Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and others. To be sure, Microsoft does have some challenges ahead of them. The sudden turn Microsoft made when they suddenly discovered the Internet is almost happening again with the rise of mobile computing. Whether they succeed this time again will have to be seen.
I don't think they are stupid, evil, or lost people. I like Windows 7 just fine. I don't like Windows 8. I wouldn't even bother with MS Office 2010 if I did not have to run Outlook because of Exchange.
We're seeing some huge paradigm shifts in the tech world as well as company consolidations. I still say Microsoft is moving towards becoming just like Apple. But I think people's expectations on them are always high. They can hardly win a a good press analysis lately.
I also still prefer Linux as a desktop, mobile and server platform. I don't feel as controlled or constrained by it. There are also lofty expectations imposed on Linux and there will be more. Sometimes I think that Microsoft by their aggressive behavior has invited these expectations on themselves too. That for sure will probably continue.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
Everyone's got problems, even corporate bodies. How about you? I do, to save you that question. See subject. In any event, the day I see spreadsheets and databases of mission critical enterprise class nature run and worked on in corporate Amerika on smartphones (as the overwhelming majority) is the day I retire from this field of computing. I think Mr. Ballmer is a problem. He may be a nice guy, and I've actually heard that from people who met him in airports, but what MS needs is another Bill Gates - a combined businessman and computer geek at the helm. Then again, for example? Linux has problems! It's a decent OS, but apparently, there's not enough "marketing saavy" to get it to the "top spot" in combined Server + PC Desktop marketshare/mindshare.
You're right about the revisionist history. Bill made their bed and now they are lying in it. But he didn't have to leave. Despite his negative charisma and the brutality of his methods, his leadership was better than what followed. I don't even think he was personally hated so much as the fruits of his reign were hated. I personally don't hate Bill. Hitchens describes some dictatorship (Romania?) where it was said that the fear was so thick you could not just cut it, but actually eat it. My contempt for what His Billness stands for is so thick I could eat it, but I don't actually hate the man.
Slow decline? That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard since Windows Me, a brisk decline by any rational standard. In a Warner Brothers cartoon, Windows Me would be represented as a piano in free fall attached to a coil of rope rapidly unwinding. The rope is attached to a cotter pin in the trellis work supporting a Saturn V rocket ship, which threatens to tip over and launch sideways into a colossal machine works with a 50,000 tonne Alcoa press hard at work stamping out giant Fabrige ostrich eggs.
I've got Amis's The War Against Cliche on hold at my local library. If I had written Harry Potter, anyone describing the arc of Microsoft as "slow decline" would be at risk of having the owls arrive to carry off their beards and toupees, or any other device of attire designed to conceal the bare chin wattles or shiny pate of thoughtless word selection. Instead of Muggles, there would be Paters: universal objects of titters and ridicule. Instead of Defence Against the Dark Arts, cautious use of hair-stealing adjectives would prevail among the cognoscenti.
In the Lost Decade narrative, there has been much said about Microsoft's unprofitable investments and purchases. But in the last decade there have also risen to prominence competitors that were previously non-existent or irrelevant. I can name Google, Apple for a couple. But there are many more. Microsoft is playing a game with them all to win. Now back to those unprofitable purchases. I liked playing the board game of Monopoly with my family for years. Often times I would buy something I knew I couldn't make money on just to deny it to another player. This made it harder for them to win. It also occasionally made my wife or kids made at me. I think to a great degree this is what Microsoft has been doing with some of those purchases. Even if I did win it all, I survived.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
mod this as funny better yet sarcasm
How is this different than any other big bureaucratic organization where Dilbertian Culture rules? Is there a magic formula for getting rid of Dilbertian Culture? My org needs it BADLY!
Table-ized A.I.
While much of your MS history is accurate, the conspiracy theories are not reasonable. Microsoft is not the Illuminati. This kind of speculation is not helpful.
IMO, and I'm sure a lot of people would agree, Microsoft IS a conspiracy.
The Crappy Surface Pad, Horrible Windows Phone and Windows 8... Welcome to the next lost Decade
I worked at MS for a good chunk of my early career thanks to friends a few years older who spoke glowingly of the atmosphere. They were correct. When I arrived @ 93 I dropped into a fantastic job living relatively close to where I grew up and working with some very interesting people. I worked there long enough to see the transition in progress and knew I had to join the bulk of my friends who had moved on. I didn't have enough to retire by any means but I did have enough to be free to make choices and do things I wanted to do mostly when I wanted to do them. I will probably work another few years and retire at 50, very fortunate in my timing hitting the right industry at the right location.
The first time I really accepted the culture was shifting was at a monthlyish meeting of various leads and a mix of other team/group members. I had attended them regularly for a couple of years as I moved up the food chain, but the first time someone new arrived and in his introduction the first credential he mentioned was from business rather than tech or basic academia. He was there to "learn" or some such BS. There were many rumours about where exactly he fit it, but he seemed to be a link between HR & accounting or finance: it wasn't the fact that he existed that caused clamor but how he had been inserted into the process without any prior mention. The walls were already up but now the doors were getting locked and folks were undermining others initiative and ideas rather than supporting the advance of the company or even technology in general. Back stabbing increased, dress became more conditional upon what that fiefdom's "boss" did rather than the taste of the employee.
Ever seen "Brain Candy?" The scene of the CEO's arrival at work reminds me of the last few weeks I was at MS. He was you typical eccentric long service guy who would regale the people he was desperate to poach or recruit about his "face time with Bill." He went through a period of not wearing socks except to formal meetings where he wasn't the "boss" and most nauseating of all was how many of the proles aped their master. I was already on my way out, having arranged some holiday time before starting with a new company and i bailed from there just before the first tech crash. MS changed into a bureaucracy and that is never a good thing.
Heck, I was in a small company of around 50 employees, and there were 3 departments. Each of them actively fucked each other over in order to look good and get better bonuses than the other departments. Large corporations just magnify the problem, as the other departments you're fighting might be on the other side of the country or even in another country. As long as the top 3 or 4 guys had good profits, they didn't care about all of the mess going on beneath them.
After more than 12 years one would think the Board at M$ would have the intellectual capacity to recognize that Steve Balmer is the problem #1.
Yet, the M$ Board will yet for many more years pass on the obvious person who should leave the M$ campus.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!
This makes MSFT a contra stock buy!
Bet against the MSFT price, you always win.
LoL XD
...but hoping for the best.
.NET is becoming fragmented. Nevermind Metro.
I work for a midsize software company and for practical reasons, the client-side/presentation portion of our software is desktop based and will be for the long-term. Naturally, "desktop" support means "Windows" support and thus we're one of the companies that add value to Windows beyond the basic Office suite.
Yet Windows has become a huge question mark in the past couple of years. Their native/unmanaged desktop development has become stagnant and their development API on
This makes me uneasy and I'm certain our top engineers/architects are looking into hedging our technology bets, as Microsoft has the smell of a unfocused captain slowly steering its ship towards an iceberg. Meanwhile our Unix/Linux developers are chugging along just fine.
It is not wrong.
You could replace "Microsoft" with "Nokia" on that article. Both have great basic understanding of their field. They have lots of fundamental technology under their grasp - even patent, like it or not.
But both are failing for simple reasons:
- Too many meetings, not enough innovation and basic research done without interruptions. Everyone wanting to be "manager of something".
- Red tape all over the place, teams competing with each other inside the company.
- Management has lack of perspective.
Yes, I'm oversimplifying things and Microsoft is not as of yet failing, but they might be if they do not get other cash-cows than Windows and Office, and so far they have not been very successful at that.
Sorry but it is wrong regarding MBAs, which is all I commented upon. MBAs are not taught "that a manager only manages people. It doesn't matter what those people do. Nor does it matter what the manager knows about the business he/she manages." They are taught quite the opposite. Whether they follow what they are taught is a different matter. Much like computer science majors are taught to write well designed, reliable and maintainable code but often do something else on the job.
The problem is that Steve Ballmer is Dick Fuld. Incompetent beyond any metric but aggressive and intimidating within a corporate structure.
IT is EXACTLY the same case and the same things said of the decline of Kodak! Kodak was ahead in technology and ideas and products... nothing. Then came the Japanese and now we have all this paraphernalia. Kodak finally moved now and I ended up just purchasing my first handheld video from Kodak because it looked superior (despite being actually very first version...). And something similar happened to IBM, right? No one can think of SABOTAGE, NATIONALLY SPONSORED SPIES, COVERT WAR...? And other such techniques... Should be very evident that SOMEONES have a lot to win if THE WHOLE INDUSTRY just went away into oblivion... Or as I ve said before: you mean this people can put togther thousands and millions of working symbols but they cannot handle a managerial case (or whatever it is they cannot handle)? We already got instantaneous obsolesence and inefficiency in ALL our systems by forcing UNICODE... So if their plan goes ahead, we ll say good bye to Windows and end up using... something in Japanese? djb
Wow, everybody's piling on. Poor MSFT, crying all the way to the bank. They're blue-chip now. They're a utility, like the phone company, and they'll continue to pull in phone-company revenues for the next few decades and stymie innovation as the phone company did. When MSFT is a memory in the rear-view mirror (yes, mixing my metaphors, sue me) and we're all running a different OS on the machines in our cubicles (which will NOT be our smartphones or our XBoxes), then we can cry for Microsoft. Or gloat, as the case may be.
"Lost decade," my ass. Microsoft is doing just fine, thank you very much, and will continue to milk their cash cow.
This article has the warm feeling of the Cognitive Consonance. The writer put down many things already in my mind. Hey, he must be very clever.
However, the first thing that came to mind is exactly why do I use a particular product by Microsoft. (One of) my computer's OS.
Straight to the point. What does Microsoft provides to me now:
- POSIX subsystem, included since Windows NT 3.5 in 1994. Does it change too often?
- DirectShow subsystem, first version in 1996. Using ffdshow, as far as I know is not Microsoft.
- Direct3D subsystem, first version in 1995, heavily updated, specially in parallel with XBOX.
Most of the rest are simply gone, not used any more, obsoleted by ERPs, web interfaces, mobile clients...
And I am not talking about those all important enterprise requirements, I am talking about the comp on my table. Of those 11.523 improvements that every other Windows OS has brought on the table I have yet to use them. I can't think of any other part in this operating system is working for me. Remember, that even WINSOCK was provided by the manufacturer of the modem, not by Microsoft.
Of these elements the only one that holds a little value, either by itself or by lock in, is Direct3D. And now, most of the game developers for PC understand that they must support OpenGL. Valve new gaming imitative is killing the only element that is attaching power users to Microsoft.
In my mind Microsoft is like a sinking old WWII warship. Still heavy and with a massive hulk, using full fire-power against all targets, she is mortally wounded. How many companies will it buy and wither? How many 'environments' will it create that will trap partners and users? What kind of near-death 'experiences' will it provide? What kind of 'rebates' will provide to avoid interoperable solutions?
The only question is how much damage it will do to the industry before it sinks.