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The Empire In Decline?
An anonymous reader writes "Pundits continue to weigh in on Steve Sinofsky's sudden exit from Microsoft (as executive head of Windows Division, he oversaw the development and release of Windows 7 and 8). SemiAccurate's Charlie Demerjian sees Microsoft headed for a steep decline, with their habit of creating walled gardens deliberately incompatible with competitors' platforms finally catching up to them. Few PC users are upgrading to Windows 8 with its unwanted Touch UI, sales of the Surface tablet are disappointing, and few are buying Windows Phones. On the Sinofsky front, Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley is willing to take the Redmond insiders' word that the departure was more about Sinofsky's communication style and deficiencies as a team player than on unfavorable market prospects for Windows 8 and Surface. Meanwhile, anonymous blogger Mini-Microsoft had suspiciously little to say."
I'm not fan of Microsoft. It's a huge bureaucracy that stifles the innovation of a lot of very bright people who work there. I would not be surprised at all to learn that their late-to-the-party tablet isn't selling well.
However, I've not seen any concrete evidence that Surface tablet sales are "disappointing." There were some vaguely-worded comments by Ballmer in a French magazine or something, and something about a few people returning the table after discovering that they couldn't run their existing apps, but that's about it. From what I've read, Surface seems to be selling. Does anyone have any concrete numbers?
Disclaimer: I am a nobody. A simple techie. I left Microsft last year because I felt they were in turmoil internally. Managment where I worked was heinous and ineffective.
MS has long seemed like it's playing catch up with the IT world. They don't seem to grok what people want. People WANT to move to the "cloud" -- as amorphous as that term is. When I met with customers I was expected to use Bing to look things up in the MS universe and say that I was "binging" this or that. I was asked to also bring up Office 365 at every opportunity.
What keeps MS alive is the corporate sector. What with Google and Apple eating MS's lunch at every turn in the consumer space, it doesn't matter why Sinofsky left. MS is an also ran in the Internet/device/OS world. They are becoming like RIM... irrelevant. Nobody cares anymore.
People want devices and software that are "now" and hip, that are scalable and easy to use. Win 8 is a point and click nightmare. I "lived" with the RP for a few months and was constantly going back to Linux to get real work done. No thanks, MS. I'm done with you. I've embraced better solutions for me and mine.
I wouldn't count them out due to one word: Inertia.
Enterprises still use the stuff, and will use it for quite a good amount of time. This gives Microsoft something that few others have: time to correct its screwups.
The debacle of Vista would have killed most other tech companies, but thanks to inertia and near-total monopoly, Microsoft had room to breathe while it fixed its messes. I think the same story will hold true here. This is similar to Intel having a chance to clean up all that NetBurst/RAMBUS bullcrap when the Pentium 4 first came out, as an example.
Now how long and how much breathing room? Hard to say, especially now that the competition has stepped up its game by quite a bit more than they had in 2006, and with mobile consumer devices forming a huge wildcard.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
He was asked to leave due to politics. Metro was the brain-child of the bitch succeeding him. He wanted to ditch it after the feedback came in and the suits told him "No" in no uncertain terms. He tried to spell it out for them what a disaster it would be and was asked to leave because they have already pulled the trigger on the project, and put too many dollars into it.
At a company like M$ once a decision is made to go with something you back it until it's well and truly failed.
I think uptake of windows 8 is going to be so fucking horrid that they're going to issue a patch to remove metro, add the windows store as a regular program, and quietly fire their new Melinda. Unfortuantely for the new bitch her lover(Ballmer presumably) isn't as rich as the last Melindas and could lose nearly everything if he pisses the board off too much.
I agree with everything you've said here.
My problem is, what's the foundation of any desktop operating system? The UI.
Windows 8, on a desktop, stinks. Metro is horrible on a desktop. The fullscreen "start menu" is horrible and useless as a standard launcher. Things like the network menu give me hives. The difficulty in getting out of the metro interface? Why can't I turn that shit off? Why is the default music player a metro app? Did no one suggest to them that maybe it'd be a good idea to have "metro mode" instead of kludging the two together? Separate file associations for when I'm in desktop mode & metro mode. Now that would work well.
I know, if you're not using the keyboard to find&launch apps you're an idiot, but my dad doesn't use the keyboard, and likely never will as he's prone to forgetting what the app he wants is called, it's just not relevant to him. I would recommend someone learn the OSX interface than learn the Windows 8 interface (although I wouldn't want to support either).
All the technical brilliance of Windows 8 doesn't matter, I didn't wonder where those features were in Windows 7 and I'm not going out of my way to expose them in Windows 8. It's the UI that matters.
Really what is the point in reading about Microsoft on slashdot. You only ever get the most negative side of the story and all there accomplishments never make it to the site. How many people know that Microsoft just demonstrated real time voice to voice translation using the original speakers own voice and the translated speech is in the correct order for the new language? (that is news for nerds as far as i'm concerned) But instead we have had six stories about how Microsoft is evil and forcing everyone to use a new version of windows that's completely broken and no one any where will ever be able to use it. Reddit is kicking your ass in journalism /.
Rocket Surgeon.
Apple had a decline in Gross Margin from 40.3% to 40.0%, in the context of a 33% increase in profits compared to the year-ago quarter, is selling more iPhones than it ever has and has $121 Billion in cash reserves: Apple is currently very successful. (Based on its 2012 Q4 earnings release)
If you want to claim that in the future they will decline you can, but to credibly claim any current decline requires more evidence than a tiny variation in gross margin.
Apple does not sell Easter eggs or Christmas trees it sells electronics. Apples market share has dropped from 23% to 14.9% [IDC figures others are worse]. I'm not really sure why being cash rich is good. I'm glad that you brought up the Q4 earnings which contained the bombshell that Apple only managed to sell 14million ipads [a drop of 70%] guess we are going to see a further drop in Market share from its current 50.4%. Oh and Gross Margin has dropped from 47% to 40% :) Its expected to drop to 36%
The bottom line is Apple is sacrificing market share for the sake of profits, and that will end badly.