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Microsoft Needs a Catch-Up Artist
The New York Times says that what Microsoft needs now isn't just a CEO, but a catch-up artist, to regain the footing that it had a few years ago as the biggest name in software. There's a lot of catching up, too: An anonymous reader reminds us that a year ago, Vanity Fair gave a scathing review of Steve Ballmer's performance:"Once upon a time, Microsoft dominated the tech industry; indeed, it was the wealthiest corporation in the world. But since 2000, as Apple, Google, and Facebook whizzed by, it has fallen flat in every arena it entered: e-books, music, search, social networking, etc., etc. Talking to former and current Microsoft executives, Kurt Eichenwald finds the fingers pointing at C.E.O. Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates's successor, as the man who led them astray."
(Ketchup?!)
No, microsoft doesn't need to catch up because it isn't behind. They have everything, what it doesn't have is something that is different, innovativ and without spyware.
Microsoft needs to learn to lead and stay ahead of the trends. They're continuing to rely on old technology that's past it's time - like Office.
They are no longer embracing and extending. They were never really leaders. They only took other ideas and muscled their way into market dominance.
A few key points MS needs to digest:
1) They completely neutered their Small Business Server selection, and now to get anything remotely comparable you're looking at a cost-per-core set up. I recently ran into this setting up a medical practice. In the past I had used SBS with the premium add-on to get access to SQL Server Standard for certain software packages. Of course, I can still get licenses for it, but if their business model is moving in that direction, I'm moving away from using their product. I'm finding that certain flavors of Ubuntu are much more suited to what my clients need, and at a price you can't beat. (Zentyal for those that are curious).
2) Get rid of the MS/Windows Tax. Force OEMs to hand out CoAs so that their customers can re-install the OS if need be, rather than using restore media. It's complete BS that customers of big PC manufacturers can't re-install the same (albeit blank) OS that came on a PC they just bought, rather we're forced to go through an uninstall bloat/crap-ware from PC's individually. I don't care what agreements are in place already, shoving this crap down our throat won't help business.
3) Stop screwing IT businesses all over. This is more of a general comment, but killing Technet is a good example of things you really shouldn't do.
Microsoft never produced anything for the user. If there were any benefits, it was a by product. Microsoft tried to please the producers.
Apple did it the other way round. Apple made things for the end users. True, they had very specific ideas of what the end users can and cannot do, but ultimately, the UI, the way to do things, the way things are done, are all planned and implemented with the end user in mind.
6 weeks before the original iphone launched, Jobs said - no plastic screen, use gorilla glass - why? Because your keys in your pocket would scratch the screen. How many other executives would stop production to do that?
dump bing and the rest of the money losing businesses that have no hope of turning a profit in the next decade
get the research people to concentrate on stuff that improves current products or present some kind of business plan for any project that is in research
wait for the next tech change cycle. these come every 10 years or so. we had the mainframe to PC cycle in the 80's. the rise of servers in the 90's. the internet in the 90's. and the last one was the rise of mobile. MS lost the current cycle but there is another one coming soon. smart watches and other similar tech is out there and people are buying it. what is missing is the one product that will take the most popular wished for features and put them together in a simple and easy to use device
the small business model is to push them to azure, not to have on premise servers. big money expense and big operational maintenance expense
Yes, perhaps MS have "fallen flat" in search, social networks, etc. What's really unforgivable, however, are the Vista and Win8 debacles; those are cases where MS screwed up on home turf. The perception that they're having trouble getting their OS right must be tainting their efforts in other spheres. I reckon the XBox is relatively isolated from the Windows aura, as it's almost a brand in its own right (you never hear the term "Microsoft XBox"). Other things, such as search and phones, are harder to dissociate from Windows. Microsoft's real problem right now is that they're not "cool." It's that intangible quality that they need to foster in order to hit the upswing with consumers.
soylentnews.org
Looks like a cut-and-paste from Microsoft's PR department to me.
Somebody probably wants to unload a few shares on the volatility.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
There seems to be a lot of looking at Bill Gates with rose coloured glasses.
As far as I've been able to tell, Microsoft is still trying to do the same thing as it's always done since it's inception. Wait for others to define a market, then try to buy or muscle your way into it with a "good enough" product.
Just now with Microsoft's OS monopoly not being an effective control mechanism, and the barrier of entry for other companies not being too high, "good enough" doesn't convince anybody anymore.
From reading the article the main difference between Bill and Steve on recent issues was that Bill resigned to the fact that they were already too late on things like music players and phones and he wouldn't have even tried getting in.
Microsoft couldn't be turned around easily, it's too much of a change to its ethos. Could a better CEO really have got them into other markets propely, or would a better CEO just doubled down on OS/Office/Business Services and saved a bit of money but had no other impact? Maybe Balmer-Microsoft needed to try and flail around in every market as a first step in a (long) transition period where Microsoft comes out the other side as a company with a bit more humility, creativity and modern vision.
Interested to hear opinions.
It's turtles all the way down.
MS should hire Elon Musk as CEO?
Sorry.... I have problems with any tech writer that either doesn't know what linux is or ignores it on purpose.
But somewhere left the developers behind. They started to treat them as people who supported Microsoft, instead of the other way around.
Which boils down to...they need a product focused person. Someone like Marissa Mayer. A seriously good read no matter how you feel about her turnaround methodology at Yahoo:
http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-biography-2013-8
It's hard to imagine they'll find a single person to undo the last 13 years of stagnation at MSFT but it could happen. I suspect Yahoo will be the turnaround case study in B-school five years from now. Not Microsoft.
I agree that it's going to be dead boring for a while until the writers get Balmer's retirement out of their systems.
But there is one little point I'd like someone to try to explain --- how come that he was never kicked out? The tea lady would have done a better job for the company. And yet, he wasn't thrown out on his ass for complete and total inability to stop the downward spiral, despite it being obvious within 18 months.
How the hell did he manage to avoid the fate so richly deserved?
Microsoft spent millions every year researching things like user interfaces.
They threw it all away in a short-sighted quest to shove their way into the revenue stream of walled markets.
I think a return to basics - provide value to their best customers (Corporate IT) - through improving productivity and offering stable development environments to encourage those customers to invest in a Microsoft ecosystem.
At this very moment, the only thing tying corporations to the "Microsoft Ecosystem" are Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and pretty much everything pre-2012. Admins don't need "Modern UI" interfaces on their server boxes. Developers don't need monochrome toolbar buttons and screaming menus. Desktop users don't need to gestures to do their daily work. All of those mis-steps has IT departments across the country realizing that while they do not WANT to put the effort into leaving that ecosystem, Microsoft has left them with no choice - So now the decision is to move to something slightly less familiar (Linux and OSX), or move to something WILDLY unfamiliar (Windows 8, Server 2012, etc...) - which makes more sense? so It departments are no longer beholden to Microsoft, thanks to Microsoft's own stupid decisions.
Get back to what worked. Mobile and Desktop are separate markets, which is why Apple didn't paste the iOS UI onto OSX, and why Android isn't a desktop operating system. Stop trying so hard for convergence in the UI when we aren't even close, technologically, to making that happen. Stop forcing your customers to face painful training budgets and re-writing legacy apps just to fit into your executive's superfluous decisions to bully them into the Metro UI with the idea that it would somehow magically sell millions of mobile devices with "Windows 8" (more like "Tiles 1"). That effort failed spectacularly, by any measure, so step back, lick your wounds, and give the customers what they want, instead of shoving what YOU want down their throats.
(Ketchup?!)
No, microsoft doesn't need to catch up because it isn't behind. They have everything, what it doesn't have is something that is different, innovativ and without spyware.
Microsoft in the suddenly relevant, consumer, mobile, socially linked, always connected, future now...behind in market share, mindshare, technology both hardware and software with a poisonous brand, a stench of repeated failure, leaving its OEM Slaves and hostages as expendable casualties...even though they suddenly have to compete.
Unfortunately I can't recommend cloud based products to my clients. Having a hard dependency on network connectivity to the internet is a non-starter for most people.
That's where that business model fails. For the most part though, the "Servers" I see in use throughout most businesses could be whittled down to an i5 or an i7 with some fakeraid. Anyone trying to sell anything more than an extremely low range xeon server to someone with 4-5 employees, with the only hard requirements being a database which will never be over taxed along with network storage is doing a disservice to their customers.
Microsoft needs to learn to lead and stay ahead of the trends..
That is already well and good...you should put a one in from of it and a Profit??? somewhere. The point is the future is already here consumer portable electronics , tablets smartphones Smart TV and watches, and Internet Giants in Retail; Search and Social...and Microsoft has failed or doesn't have a product in those market places.
and let them do a reverse takeover of MS (this happens from time to time in American business). So the next MS CEO would be a woman most recently photographed stylishly dressed upside down on a couch.
We know the price, it's $45 billion.
Microsoft tried to please the producers.Apple did it the other way round. Apple made things for the end users
Ironically Apple recently found guilty of forming a cartel with publishing companies forcing up the price of books to its customers...and everyone else.
dump bing and the rest of the money losing businesses that have no hope of turning a profit
I think one of the problems Microsoft had was its focus on profits. The reality is its current products revolve around its increasingly unimportant Monopoly...much as you personally might benefit from focussing on them, and that is not healthy.
is a person who can tell everyone else to get lost; and release all MS software on a truly FOSS license model. Not the shared source license model, nor the Microsoft Permissive License model.
If RedHat can make a billion dollars on Free Sotware that is used less than Windows; Microsoft can exponentially increase the use of their software with a FOSS compliant license that puts the onus of innovation on the developers and producers; rather than on itself. The community is thousands of times more powerful than a corporation.
Intel miserably failed by not licensing its technology to others; unlike ARM which has been a roaring success. So much so, IBM is now licensing the Power architecture to others. And Intel is taking down Microsoft and Apple along with them down the death spiral.
Lesser control leads to greater adoption, greater innovation and greater profits in the medium and long term. Microsoft's future CEO has to decide which one is more important - ideology or profits - he can't choose both.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
How are any of them 'successes'?
Xbox has still lost money over its lifetime.
Office? People would happily be using whatever version of Office Microsoft churned out, there was no demand to switch to a new version.
Windows 7? If Microsoft were still pumping out upgraded versions of Windows XP, they'd be selling more than they are of Windows 8.
Microsoft should have called Windows and Office done years ago, and moved most of the developers off to new products. Then they might still be relevant.
" The New York Times says that what Microsoft needs now isn't just a CEO, but a catch-up artist, "
No, they've been doing that for the entire history of the company, coming in late to every successful idea long after the competition does. They used to be able to "cut off the oxygen" of their competitors, but they can't do that anymore. Not since they tried to do it to Google and failed utterly.
--
BMO - Unfortunately, Ballmer is leaving before he's finishing the job of killing the company.
What bothers me is that Microsoft has really good engineers but lacks a clear strategic direction. Their massive amount of legacy code plus some seriously bad "assumptions" about what the users want have sustained their decline in the last 10 years. It's a sad state of affairs, having used their products since Windows 1.0 when they were "the rebels".
I know it's just my opinion, but given their deep pockets, they should create an incubator unit or a completely separate start-up with huge funding for a re-acquisition later on (similar to what Cisco is doing with Insieme). The purpose of this group should be to go back to their roots, and re-think the way people and companies are expected to interact with computers in the next 10-20 years timeframe, and create a brand new OS with no legacy code, and anticipating the challenges and threats that will evolve overtime as much as possible.
I've always wondered why airplanes and MRI machines can have "mission critical" OSs and software while we all have to deal with crashes and uncertainty. They have the capability to create and bring to market a practical, usable EAL-7 OS. We know it has been done before, but Microsoft has the capability to make it commercially viable for everyone. And this is only ONE of the things they could do.
Design the next version of Windows independently from whatever they're putting on mobile/Xbox, build it around making people more productive in virtual reality. That would be forward thinking, imo.
Now you slave your knowledge lacking clients to something only you can support - I don't that relationship lasting long. You because your just as bad as MS, just on a infinitely smaller scale...and them - they will go out of business because they are clearly bad decision makers allowing you to do it to them.
"The New York Times says that what Microsoft needs now isn't just a CEO, but a catch-up artist, to regain the footing that it had a few years ago as the biggest name in software."
..
Without the WinTEL monopoly and the onerous lock-in contracts with the OEMs, Microsoft is just another tech company
AccountKiller
Too late, but imagine it wasn't, and these are the changes:
1) app stores for ALL software that can run on Microsoft platforms.
2) a COMPLETE depreciation of Metro/RT/New-UI on desktop class versions of the Windows OS
3) FULL windows on ARM, and a massive push for ARM based desktop/laptop systems with the same focus as the previous x86 based PCs
4) free Metro/RT/New-UI OS for tablets/phones, with money made exclusively from the app-stores and ads.
5) active encouragement for 'RT' based tables being as cheap as the Android-based ones.
6) Extreme depreciation of the NSA Kinect sensor system, allowing the vastly inferior Xbox One to be priced LOWER that the vastly more powerful PS4
7) Immediate project to design the Xbox Two- compatible with the Xbox One, but with GPU hardware at least at PS4 levels- for release Xmas 2014.
8) an END to all propaganda and coercion that attempts to force users to upgrade from ANY version of Windows from XP onwards.
9) official support of ALL API systems from ALL versions of Windows 8 (including new 'versions' of DirectX) on Windows 7 as well. Windows 7 64-bit is the 'new' XP- the MS OS of choice for people with brains, and the OS that such people are willing to stick with for the foreseeable future.
10) an OFFICIAL recognition that policies under Ballmer had made all intelligent MS customers desperately wish for a Linux-based alternative to the Windows ecosystem that was actually worth using.
Even as Tablets become dominant, Desktop/Work-horse PCs are going nowhere. So many of us need a place to do REAL computer work, and Windows has provided that place for so long now. But serious Windows users need a strong vanilla environment that "just works", not "flavour of the month" shit like RT. If MS wishes to work the high gimmick markets, it should NOT be at the expense of the traditional work-horse PC.
How can Microsoft be so MORONIC that it charges for RT. Only a vicious cretin like Ballmer could fail to see the advantage of having ultra-cheapo RT tablets from China all pointing their users at MS app-stores and MS ad servers. With Android, you can pay tens of dollars, or hundreds of dollars for your Tablet. The choice is in the hands of the consumers. With Microsoft, every RT tablet is insanely over-priced shit, with lousy quality control, praised only by tech journalists with a large MS cheque in their back pockets.
And if Ballmer hadn't agreed to the massive pay-off from Intel, Windows 8 would be currently running on ARM based desktops/laptops, building a customer market in readiness for the release of true mains powered ARM parts that will rival Intel in CPU performance, and thrash Intel in GPU performance and memory bandwidth.
But as I said, it's too late by maybe a couple of years now. Microsoft will be in panic response mode as the Xbox One flops, Windows 8 continues to flop, and the rise of Android continues unabated. Microsoft's corporate desktop business is mostly lost once Google releases the desktop version of Android. Microsoft needed to begin the transition to much cheaper computing based on ARM, and cut the umbilical cord that has joined it to Intel since the beginning of the age of the Windows-based PC. Intel CANNOT survive against ARM. Microsoft did have a much better chance surviving against Android (and Linux).
In my opinion Ballmer is an operational that was promoted in the wrong time. The problems of Microsoft are symptomatic of a larger disease, and Ballmer is just a scapegoat. Truth to be said, the only product I can remember of being their truly innovation, is Microsoft Basic. The rest was a matter of having the right influence, a matter at time on their side, the right partners, sheer luck, buying what they needed at the right time. It is a known fact after all this years, that DOS was bought to seal a business Gates mom got with his influence, power and political cloud. The fact that consumers preferred a cheaper machine 20 years behind its time just because it had a IBM sticker, and the misguided monopoly that ensued for 3 decades, was a pure stroke of luck. that movement is losing momentum IMO. They had also terrible problems of judgment. The worst of all, was basing their business model in the dominance of the Wintel platform. I don't know for how long their Office platform will hold waters - for instance in a couple of years iWork from Apple will be a real competitor (it already is, minus the Pages utility). They failed to see the Internet coming, and had to buy Internet Explorer. The Zune (music player) was a commercial failure. Windows CE based hardware is/was a terrible flop. Windows 8 and Surface, a customer PR disaster. Their phone platform, despite how many billions they throw at it - 2 billions to Nokia alone, product placement in holywood series, is a product nobody want to touch. They killed their excellent TechNet offering which was the staple of many Microsoft houses. Androids are iPhones are the trojans that are showing whole generations they are not depending anymore on WIntel compatibles to handle their data - either work, emails, documents, spreadsheets. Mac is also making inroads in several faculties. Linux has gained corporate acceptance. VMWare is the king of virtualisation platforms, and XEN a close second The cat is out of the bag it is not mandatory to use IBM compatible/Microsoft products, specially in corporate environments, and the terrible news for MS is this a very different world from the 80s, and customer loyalty isnt up what it used to be.
3) Stop screwing IT businesses all over.
Right, that's gonna happen...
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Microsoft did not get into a position of market dominance by having better products, they got there by underhanded methods. They are now where they should be.
A former user of Lotus 1-2-3, DR-DOS, OS/2, and WordPerfect
MS had some great ideas, but absolutely screwed it up in terms of execution. I occasionally still use a PocketPC from the turn of the millenium and it is genuinely well designed. One example is the design spec for the PPC put a scroll wheel on one side, which means you can hold it in one hand, clicking through pages on Microsoft Reader with the wheel.
If the PocketPC PDAs had used a finger touch screen while at the same time been marketed as a gaming and media player, rather than as purely a business tool I imagine they would have sold like crazy. Instead, it had a calander application and Office.
As sacrilege as it sounds...just give up on Windows. It's over. Nobody cares. The base OS is a commodity at this point, and most good programmers prefer a Unix style environment. Lots of command-line tools, powerful shell scripts, and a world of open source tools.
In my opinion, where Microsoft is still heads-and-shoulders above the competition is in their middle-ware layers. Office is good. Office is really really good. When you really need to use a solid word processor or spreadsheet, the various, splintered openLibreWhateverOffices are just shit. When the files become complex, they can barely open up their own output without corruption.
SQL Server: Good. IIS, C# and .NET development? Good.
In my opinion, they need to focus on all of the good software they have written, and abandon Windows.
Perhaps Windows and these products are too coupled? OK, fine. Open Source Windows. Do it. Systems are too large and complex to steal these days. Who has forked Darwin and cut out Apple's profits? Maybe something exists, but who cares.
TLDR;
Make Windows Open Source
You might actually want to read up on the facts of the case. Or, actually reading the lawsuit, and Apple's response to it.
Lol I did, July 10, 2013, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York decision found that Apple conspired to fix the prices of e-books in the United States. They were so obviously guilty. It was even published in Jobs book. ebook prices went up...Apple was found guilty.
And that it doesn't work anymore.
Their creed was "embrace - extend - extinguish". It worked like a charm with open source technologies and technologies developed by small companies. They noticed something caught on, they hopped on the train, claimed it, blew a shitload of money into it, "added" to it so it was no longer compatible with the original stuff, turned their broken design into the de-facto standard by virtue of their market position and finally everyone was "inferior" because they were "incompatible".
And that doesn't work with companies like Apple and Google who themselves play that game, and they really excel at it. AND on top of that, they needn't wait for someone to come up with a new technology people actually want: They can create it themselves, because they also know something about design.
And marketing, of course, but marketing has never been the weak spot of MS. But here's the other reason why they are falling behind more and more: Design. And their lack of it. When "the masses" started to join the IT world, design suddenly became important. While we might not care about rounded corners and whether our boxes blend nicely into our living room, the average Joe out there does. Yes, their crap doesn't have any better specs than MS' stuff does, but it LOOKS better and it WORKS easier.
And MS may be much, but designers, they are not. Neither designers of nifty looking gadgets nor designers of intuitive interfaces.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Microsoft should have called Windows and Office done years ago
Which would have made life much easier for the WINE and OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice developers.
Since 2000? They didn't fall flat in everything. They did pretty well the XBox, not to mention their success with Windows XP.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
I disagree. The Windows Desktop Environment and OS X are the only two good Desktop Environments out there. ONLY Windows will work well on the many different chipsets, sound cards, wifi adapters, cellular modems, Printers, Scanners, Cameras, bluetooth headsets, and others out there. Microsoft has thousands of programmers, working on all those dull subsystems that few care about. GNU/FOSS still has trouble with sound cards, and changing monitor resolution. Good luck finding power saving settings. OS X requires Apple, and Apple compatible hardware. That $100 bucks for a Desktop Windows license saves a lot of heartache on weird peripherals, and can run all sorts of programs. Only Microsoft can do that.
Maybe you should try a Linux distribution that's less than twenty years old.
As for 'Windows Desktop Environment' being good, any chance of that went away with Windows 8.
Exactly, there were some great ideas, but the execution was terrible. The scroll wheel was one of my favourites too, I keep waiting for an Android phone to put a wheel like that instead of their volume keys, a volume rocker isn't the same.
Unfortunately either the hardware side or the software side was lacking.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Unfortunately I can't recommend cloud based products to my clients. Having a hard dependency on network connectivity to the internet is a non-starter for most people.
I agree with this. While it's nice, and I recommend cloud servers for a lot of use cases, office infrastructure is currently not one of them. My major issue is not that the ISPs are not reliable, cost effective, or secure.
My major issue is one of network connectivity. "Business class" broadband ISP offerings in the US are pretty awful, which is why I put business class in quotes. Either service or speed (and often both) are incompatible with business requirements. Talking to first (and often second) level support is pointless once you explain to them that you're trying to run an office of 4-5 developers utilizing a cloud-based configuration management, issue tracking, and continuous build environment.
Individual connections actually seem much better. If you're going to move to a cloud-based infrastructure for the above use case, it's probably better to have everyone work from home, access protected resources via VPN, and use a distributed configuration management model to minimize connectivity down time.
The push by Microsoft towards SkyDrive and Microsoft Live accounts is also a really bad decision for consumers given the state of broadband in the US. Who's to say that Microsoft won't shut down these services in the future when/if it's no longer profitable.
I don't think I'd use Yahoo's "turn around" as a positive model for anyone.
I use it more of a things to avoid doing model.
MS doesn't need a "catch-up artist"; they need a rollback artist. They just need to roll back the dumb mistakes of the last couple of years. Announcing that Win9 will be based on Win7 (and thus that Win8 was a mistake which won't be repeated) would win them back quite a bit of the goodwill they lost. Adding back the option to use menus instead of the Ribbon in MS Office might help, as well. (I actually like the MS Office Ribbon now that I've gotten used to it, but many long-time users with experience with the old menu system hate it, and their preferences should be respected, too.)
MS's sales pitch should be something along these lines: "Apple products are nice toys for home users, but when you need to get real work done, you come to us." Their competitive advantage is in the business world, where they get to sell lots of different products because they interoperate well and maintain backward compatibility. Focus on that and stop chasing consumer fads.
I think what Microsoft needs is consistency... They have everything but nothing is well integrated.
They have three popular platforms with millions of users : Windows, Xbox and Skype.
It's nice to have a stand-alone app like Skype to make calls but this should be an integrated feature of a bigger service like a social network, just like hangout is integrated in Google+. Where is the Microsoft social network offering ?
Well, they have the Xbox platform, with Xbox Music, Xbox Video and Xbox Games, it's starting to look like Google's Play stores. But what about Windows Store, in which you can find apps but also games and movies ?
I have a Skype profil, a Messenger profil and an Xbox profil. 3 profiles but still no real social network service ?
Microsoft have the Windows Phone and the Surface tablet, why not the Windows tablet or the Surface phone ? On them, you will find Xbox apps. So why not naming every devices the Xbox device ?
I just hope Microsoft will open their eyes and fix the fragmentations and inconsistencies I see across all Microsoft services.
http://www.stardock.com/products/modernmix/
http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/
can save windows 8
"Steve Ballmer
CEO
MicroSoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-6399
Dear Mr. Ballmer;
Recently read your remarks on MS's response to Apple's iPad. It appears you're still on the downward road.
You're busy, so am I. So in few words, if you want a real chance of success in the iPad space, do this:
1. Buy an iPad for every single MS employee;
2. Send them out with a brief mission statement : "Do something better than this. Start over. Throw away whatever in MS' past doesn't serve. Get me your ideas asap. We're starting in 90 days with the best you can think of. Get going.";
3. Screen the ideas using people not more than 30 years old, and finish the screen 7 days after the 90 day brainstorm period;
4. Support what your screening team chooses;
5. Write checks, stay out of the way.
You can't make the future without breaking from the past. Good luck.
Regards,"
Got a response from a MS functionary that, to my regret, I didn't save. Nonresponsive, of course.
Purely as an exercise in alternate reality, it is interesting to wonder how the computing landscape would have been different, most certainly superior to state of affairs now, if Ballmer and Gates had not been such conniving, backstabbing dicks.
The company would almost certainly be an order of magnitude wealthier, more respected and better positioned in the marketplace, if those two guys hadn't felt it necessary to throw the company's weight around by executing the many well known monopolistic and consumer-unfriendly practices that they are so well known for.
If anything, the strategic failure of Microsoft as a company to set itself against so many others in the industry, is missing from the debate about the good and bad aspects of Steve Ballmer's legacy.
Microsoft was consumed with a truly psychotic fantasy of Netscape (a fucking web browser company) rising and dominating the computing landscape. That is just one example where the mendacity-wrought Ballmer and Gates, helped in no way the financial bottom line of MS by just being dicks, almost just because they couldn't help it.
It is fairly easy to posit that a good amount of the effort behind the rise of Linux was simply due to a common reaction against the back alley tactics deployed by Microsoft. And if Linux is not as developed as it was in 2008, does Google have something upon which to build Android? Something which can be released and developed under the GNU license? And that is just one potential hypothetical.
Back in that late 80's I was installing a vertical market application, networking among about 8 machines. The application was Unix native, but had recently been ported to MS Windows. Though Unix was our first choice, the cost was multiples of the MS Windows installation, maybe 5-10X as much when all costs were factored in, so the Unix option was a non starter.
I imagine for many small businesses that were started, or restarting, like we were, the MS option is now the expensive route. You have the costs of managing licenses, the cost of acquiring development tools(I know that some are free, but other provide real professional tools for free), and the constant threat that MS can come in a close down a business for an audit. This is why while I spent the 90's using MS tools, by the end of that decade their constant harassment made me think it was not worth the complications unless backed by major corporation. Don't get me wrong, the MS tools are good and the products useful, but the cost and restrictions are out of place in the current IT environment.
So here is what MS needs to do. If they insist on selling the OS, make it $100 and only sell one version. Give away some services with the OS, such as online storage. Up sell not by offering different levels of the OS, but by offering levels of services.
MS insistence that Visual Studio is worth $500 is going to be death of them. Give away the tools. If they want to put a non-commercial restriction on it and have a $100 charge per product to distribute, or $500 for unlimited, that might be a good compromise. MS is not going to capture a generation who can develop for free on Android and Mac OS by charging for the tools.
The fall of Unix is really the analogy here. I worked on an ATT Unix PC for a year, and it was beautiful. I would have loved for such a machine to have become the standard. I also worked on Irix, which was a wonderful interface. But like current MS products, they were just, on balance, too expensive.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Ballmer knew all of that was going to happen, but he doesn't have the ability or desire to get personally involved. So he does what a lot of consultants do when out of their element: milk it for as long as possible, then bail out for some cash.
Apple OSX only down fall is the hardware lock in and lack of choice mainly the lack of a good mid range desktop.
What they have is mini laptop in a desktop case with on board video, laptop cpu's and high prices next to other desktop systems.
The mac pro is about $1000+ over priced and has been that way for some time with old video cards.
The imac have gotten harder to work on and are the only AIO that make it hard to get to the HDD.
This really started to happen 15-20 years ago. Microsoft totally missed the internet and only manage to reassert dominance by "cutting off Netscapes air supply" and subverting Java. Had MS not done so the present situation would have been the situation back then.
They did it blatantly enough to attract the attention of DoJ. Given the DoJs action as tepid as they were and the EUs action, Microsoft was limited in how forcefully they could respond this time.
The techniques that in the past were most effective for Microsoft were no longer available. The smartest thing that Bill Gates ever did was: he saw the end was coming and got out before the downturn and left Ballmer holding the bag. Had Gates not left we would still be seeing the same thing happening, probably even worse because Ballmer has probably cleaned things up a bit on the business side.
What Microsoft needs is someone to come and clean house.
They have certain advantages, lots of cash, a well established code base. Market dominance in certain areas. What they need to do is restructure their development infrastructure, and not rely on being able to leverage their dominance in one area into another.
In my view, historically, Microsoft were never great innovators. But they used to be great at running a software business - looking at Lotus, Ashton-Tate, and so on, and then doing what those companies had already done but better. They need to go back to doing that. Swallow all pride and make software for iPhone/iPad and Android, iMac, Linux, whatever platforms exist. Windows too, of course. If they want to thrive they need to champion integration at all levels across as many platforms as possible. Nobody is going to buy something over anything else just because it came from Microsoft - it needs to be substantially better in some way.
Microsoft's great strength (after MS-DOS), was buying cool stuff and leveraging that cool stuff with its operating system predominance.
It's moronic to think that Microsoft should ever deviate from that basic strategy because it remains so profitable.
But on the other hand, our Wall Street Overlords demand constant stock performance growth, while spurning even the idea of dividends (the middlemen needs their $$$!).
Kind of a screwy world.
Plus the total lack of any decent server products. Yeah, there's a "server" version of OSX, but what hardware are you supposed to run it on? I need a rack-mount, server-grade product with environmental monitoring, redundancy, lights-out management, etc. Mac minis and even Mac Pros don't cut it there.
Sounds more like M$ needs to break into two parts. The old core windows and office and tighten up on costs whilst screwing as much income as possible for as long as possible as Linus continues to chew away at it's market.
MSN and gaming (and all the cash) needs to get out on it's own well away from the disastrous rank and yank which eats away at creativity like a cancer instead promoting the plotters and schemers (it's mental focus idiots, either they are focused on creative output or on career advancement). That's where the real failure is MSN was way way ahead of Google at one stage and was progressively screwed over by incompetence. It's brand devalued by Live and of all things bloody Bing (B for Ballmer how stupidly egoistic can people become).
From a rebuilt MSN comes the new direction and the new products, it's all about the 'N', networking, connecting the pieces and the pieces that get connected.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I'm not sure why people here want M$ to change their act and get back in the game. I for one am quite happy with M$ being irrelevant and staying that way. Do any of you really want M$ to catch up and become dominant again?
They need a miracle. A farking huge one, at that.
-- Fuck Beta
Can you IMAGINE how horrible the Windows source base must be?
Sorry, if I'm going to commit to an open source OS project, it'll never be Windows. I'd work with Linux or one of the BSDs.
MS can release Windows as FOSS all they want, I'll never adopt it.
--PM
It was Bills company, when he went Microsoft went.
Everyone has seen Steve Ballmer in action
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk
what did we expect???
It's natural attrition, who cares, lets see what tomorrow brings.
Maybe a real, caring company will come to the fore.
Go well
I'd argue that just maybe Marketing is a weak spot.
Here's a couple of angles:
1. Check out the Windows names: 3, 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, Me, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 and/or Blue.
2. They insist on putting Microsoft & Windows _____ jammed into all their marketing stuff. And they like "cluttered" ad copy. Here's one spoof:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
3. Only they know what they think they are doing with Metro/New-UI. The Windows 7 codebase was fair enough, aka the cleaned up Vista. So the Metro UI decision is in many ways "Marketing", because they are trying to convince people to do ... something.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I think Apple quite rightly decided that nobody is going to buy a luxury server. When you want a server you buy some functional hardware and install Linux on it. Macs work quite nicely with Linux servers.
The mac pro is about $1000+ over priced and has been that way for some time with old video cards.
Since the Mac Pro doesn't have a price yet, this is a rather bold statement. As for old video cards, it's a workstation. It uses dual workstation class FirePro GPUs. It doesn't use Radeons or GeForce cards, those cards are wimpy consumer ones.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Your method has an extreme emphasis on ideas. Ideas aren't actually all that difficult. http://www.forbes.com/2004/11/04/cx_gk_1104artofthestart.html
The Mac Mini server exists because Apple sells a crap load of them. Colocation services use them because they use little space and don't require massive cooling. Small Businesses use them for the same reason. They don't need to install a server room with racks for a file and print server. For $1000, stick one on Bill's desk and you're done.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's only the first or second inning. We do not yet know the outcome.
They wouldn't just down their Azure services (which Skydrive etc lives on) even if it were not profitable because they've made it an integral part of their platform. Also, Azure is one of their billion+ dollar business so that's another reason not to worry.
This cloud stuff really is more than a fad.
As for old video cards, it's a workstation. It uses dual workstation class FirePro GPUs. It doesn't use Radeons or GeForce cards, those cards are wimpy consumer ones.
You do realise that those 'workstation class' cards are probably just 'wimpy consumer ones' with a different BIOS, right?
That's how we used to distinguish between our consumer and mid-range pro cards back when I was working for a GPU company. While the mid-range pro cards were binned to run at a higher clock speed to the consumer boards, only the high-end pro cards actually had different chips on them.
Mayer’s lateness [, as much as 45 minutes,] was a pain, sure. But by the early fall of 2012, Mayer’s staff had grown used to it. In fact, they were actually glad when she’d show up late to a meeting, because that meant at least she hadn’t blown it off entirely.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Developing for Apple is generally not free.
Apple had their MacOS, and they abandoned it for a complete rethink. Microsoft should do the same. Microsoft should create a new OS based on Linux. With their own Graphics system, but use Linux as a base.
You do realise that those 'workstation class' cards are probably just 'wimpy consumer ones' with a different BIOS, right?
Really they must do some amazing in BIOS. Like put in ECC memory where none existed. What BIOS command does that?
That's how we used to distinguish between our consumer and mid-range pro cards back when I was working for a GPU company. While the mid-range pro cards were binned to run at a higher clock speed to the consumer boards, only the high-end pro cards actually had different chips on them.
So for a workstation, everyone should just use Core i5s or Core i7s right? No need to use Xeons at all.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You can develop and distribute for OS X for free.
Microsoft's big problem is simply that Windows 7 is quite good. Business desktops use it, they work fine, they crash rarely, and they get the job done. Microsoft conquered the driver quality problem by forcing drivers to pass the Static Driver Verifier, a proof of correctness system which looks at source code to see if it can buffer-overflow, make improper calls, or otherwise crash the kernel. That took care of about half of crashes. The other half, from Microsoft's own code, were handled by a system which classifies core dumps by commonality, so they can collect core dumps with the same cause, then find and fix the problem. So Microsoft conquered the big problem that business cares about - Making It Work.
Businesses see no need to "upgrade". Certainly not to Windows 8. Or Office N+1. It won't help the business.
Microsoft struggles with being "cool". Apple does well with "cool", but nobody else does. It's not clear it will help in the post-Jobs era. (Olivetti once made beautiful office machines. It didn't help them. Most major museums of modern art have some Olivetti products, but few offices did.)
What really made the iPod work was deals with the music industry. Something that many people miss is why Jobs was able to pull that off. Jobs was also CEO of Pixar, and thus, as a major film studio head, at the top of the Hollywood hierarchy. So he was able to deal with the music industry from a position of superiority. That's what made iTunes. (The hierarchy in Hollywood is very real, and very rigid. Ask anybody in the industry.) That's what re-launched Apple. The Mac was below 10% market share, and was stuck there for years, even after Jobs took over again.
There's room for a breakthrough in user interfaces. The rectangular grid of single-purpose icons is lame. We can be sure that breakthrough will not come from the open source community.
I read that article yesterday. It's an extremely well done article. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually say what the summary claims.
When the millionaire mint ran dry, the problems began:
Empowered by a dysfunctional incentive culture instigated by His Billness, though some defend it.
The Case for Stack Ranking of Employees
What a complete idiot. He presumes that such a metric must exist, and completely misses the boat on absolute rather than relative performance norms. As soon as the norms become relative, you're tying your sneakers to outrun your team mate. If that's not political, I don't know what is. There are people who might not be star performers by any specific metric, but who enhance the productivity of any team they join. Guess what other company adopted stack ranking? Enron.
I believe I once read an essay by Drucker where he said if the person who was worth hiring in the first place is underperforming, most likely that person's boss has failed to put that person into the right context.
And software is the worst of all industries to institute such metrics. Any crank an employee can turn at 1000 rpm is better off scripted. The surest route to efficiency is repetition (the athletic model from he cherry picks his favourite aspects). Human repetition is bad repetition, yet metrics never catch up to non-repetitive cultures.
The reason for pushing customers to Azure, is to provide a steady and recurring income for Microsoft. Customers will still need some kind of on-premise server, and what they save in 'expense' and 'operational maintenance', will be spent in networking and internet (troughput, capacity, reliability, ...).
IT businesses will have to change from a break-fix model to a services model.
In essence, they are cutting out the middle man...
Good call. Nobody ever says Android is cool (in the way that Apple products are), but they're still at 70% of their market. So 'coolness' isn't it.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Nice try, Marissa Mayer.
I expect Yahoo to go down even further. She doesn't understand the most basic things. For example, if you force developers to work from their cubicles, yes you solved the problems of slackers. And yes, you also alienated great developers. It's a typical extrovert failure, she fails basic knowledge about dopamine vs adrenaline driven persons. So Yahoo will still not be able to attract top developers, only mediocre, because Mayer is basically stupid and thinks everybody operates like she does. She is a simpleton who will waste many billions of Yahoo value.
Revenue has tanked at Yahoo since 2010, she has fired a few workers to compensate and? Big buzz, nothing big has changed really, they are the portal they used to be, the frontpage is a bit more sluggish to load, the strange plain looking logo, the iconic old company seams to be gone, don't know, but my bet is, it will sink further..
Damn right there is no need for Xeons. Real men use Sparc64.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
"Microsoft was consumed with a truly psychotic fantasy of Netscape (a fucking web browser company) rising and dominating the computing landscape. That is just one example where the mendacity-wrought Ballmer and Gates, helped in no way the financial bottom line of MS by just being dicks, almost just because they couldn't help it."
The great irony is that although netscape is dead, IE isn't the monopoly MS wanted. Everyone is moving to using safari or chrome on tablet devices for casual browsing, and even on the PC it's chrome or firefox as the web browser of choice.
IE is old old news, and the old lock ins that kept it in place are rapidly dwindling. The browser was the wrong battle, the real battle was for what people browsed for. Hence the rise of google, facebook etc. And those services are designed to be browser agnostic.
M$ got a free ride on the way up to consumerism but now has to tighten the belt a little and be satisfied more with businesses than consumers.
The Web changed everything for M$, and Apple for that matter. Apple would be dead by now if the Web hadn't turned up when it did.
Stephen Elop. No doubt. Their platform is burning!
nsa and mpaa are up ther ebutts so far its over for them ....anyone doing business with them does it cause they want to help the mpaa and nsa
zombie jobs running microsoft
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Maybe, but most desktop users doesn't really need workstation GPUs. It's a bit silly to say it's a bold statement to say the Mac Pro is overpriced just because *this* generation Mac Pro isn't priced yet. There have been several models, and for most desktop work, they are grossly overpriced. I think the bigger issue for Apple in the enterprise is the lack of a proper server.
Most people see that since the older Mac Pros had upgradeable part, it must be a desktop. A Mac Pro is not a desktop. It's a workstation. If you actually price it with other workstations, it's competitive. Apple doesn't want the enterprise server market. I think they simply didn't sell enough XServes to keep them going. A Mac Mini with server software has selling.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
In a similar way Jobs did when he returned to save Apple from going under, Bill Gates should turn over his "Husband & Wife" philanthropy company solely over to his wife. And return to Microsoft as it's savior.
I know in 90's Bill always got hate, even the icon for Microsoft on Slashdot was of Bill dressed like a Borg, but he totally kept the billions coming in. And watching a couple hours of the entire 12 hour deposition he was involved in that is posted to YouTube in it's entirety shows his unique genius. But that Bill is what Microsoft needs now.
Yes, people would draw comparisons to Steve Jobs' return to Apple which he saved his company from complete failure. But my opinion of course I would totally love to see Bill Gates return and take it back over and put Microsoft back on track.
But that's just my opinion, I've always been a Gates "fanboi"
I don't know open source seems to produce at least one new interface every year each of which seem to be completely new and mostly unusable, but one of these days someone might accidental stumble onto something that works just by the shear number of interfaces they are creating... I don't know if that's the strategy behind 20 window managers and 10 desktops or if the whole OSS community has ADD but it's fun to watch.
If Microsoft were divided into 4-5 separate companies, it wouldn't be difficult to find a CEO who could handle those individual pieces. The stockholders should be happy with the stock split, and the divisions that are used to competing against each other (http://www.wired.com/business/2013/08/steve-ballmer-steps-down/) would be free to work as hard as they want to develop their own products without being distracted by office politics.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
and the old workstation design of the old Mac Pro still is one of the best PC designs EVER. 4 internal drive bays where the drives just slide into the SATA connectors - GENIUS. ram daughter cards are a dumb idea, but how many pc's have 8 slots for RAM? not nearly enough.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
or, Gates & Ballmer understood that web apps could destroy the need for a Windows operating system. which, in many cases, it finally has. GMail vs. Outlook, Google Docs vs. MS Office, Spotify vs. iTunes, Salesforce vs. a zillion proprietary non-web-based products... the examples are too many to mention.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Apple does some things really well. Everyone finds their interface easy, right down to text selection behavior. Do that to the extent the law allows.
People like iPhones and their features. Copy to the extent the law allows.
After you've got these *basics* down, concentrate on innovating something that's really cool, not just different. Focus on better AI. Focus on a better google glass (Microsoft contact lenses?). Focus on neural and speech I/O. Focus on autonomous mobile servant gadgets that work. Focus on better 3d printers.
And remember, even Microsoft can use Linux to build things. Pick a flavor of Linux and brand it as Microsoft's. The Zorin distro isn't bad and the work's already done for you. Start there.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
You don't get it, do you? Linux and free alternatives were born due to their shady policies. Their policies of going out of their way to create incompatibilities with competing products or already established standards haven't gone unnoticed, and for most professionals, the burden of the problem is on their side. Plus, had they diverted all this energy to actually produce new offerings, it could be they weren't between a rock and a hard place now.
MS does not need a god damn catchup artist. What they need is a CEO that can Lead the Company w/o wasting resources as Balmer has trying to kill Google and treating the end-users as thiefs as the Win7 installer does.
IMO the Win7 installer reached the needed balance between Paranoia and usefulness as you can use any Win7 install media and not have to worry about activiation until after critical updates are downloaded so long as you have a key that passes activation - as all OEM systems should.
In the case of Win8, what I feel MS needs to do is force the OEM's to provide a link on the desktop to grab a legal download of the Win8 installer from MS that can be kept up to date by simply grabing a new image. They're already offering a Digital Download that needs the Activiation key before it will download/install so why not force the OEM's (or do it themselves in the Windows Activation Screen) to provide a link to the installer that can be updated as needed? Ensures that people have an installer that's as current as the last time it was updated by MS (critical updates and service packs) since this reduces how many non-updated systems are out there. Yes there are idiots who wont update due many reasons (lack of a connection being a big issue) so an updated installer would be a god send for them.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
why would anybody think a M$ renaissance could be a good thing for anyone but their executives & shareholders?
I generally avoid the word "evil" as I don't like appealing to emotion & frankly it's kind of lazy but in the case of companies like M$, Goldman, Monsanto, etc whose "rap sheets" need to be gzipped just to fit on a blueray (oh, yeah - forgot about Sony) it almost becomes necessary to keep a post short enough to be read. I avoid M$ products & services not out of some sense of moral obligation but out of a pragmatic reality that every $ I give them fuels countless net negatives against consumers, innovative would-be competitors & the overall industry.
simply stated: they are EVIL! again, not necessarily in the "moral" sense but in the practical "every $ I put in their pockets will be used to kill products/services I might want" sense (*cough!* SCO!!! *cough*). it's in their DNA! sorry to say for their employees/shareholders (of which I'm almost certainly one via funds) consumers, the industry & society in general would be better off without them...
Web apps have not destroyed the need for a Windows operating system. Smart phones and tablets are not winning/selling because they have web apps. They are winning because they have a innovative touch interface designed for the hardware, and a huge amount of non-web app software. The browser is just another application which is installed on the phone/tablet, an application which usually takes back seat to a custom app.
Gmail and Yahoo Mail were going to succeed if accessed via Internet Explorer or via Netscape.
In the battle to place the box under the desk, Microsoft still reigns supreme. And web apps have nothing to do with that market. The battle to place the phone in the pocket isn't being decided by which web browser is on the phone.
This speculation about a possible successor will be repeated billions of times over the next 12 months. The news media couldn't ask for better filler.
Microsoft is legend for its lawsuits, why not sue for "Catch Up?"
Another idea, how about hiring Meg Whitman, she's done wonders for HP.
Linux and free alternatives were born due to their shady policies.
No, Linus didn't like Windows, but it wasn't the politics.
Plus, had they diverted all this energy to actually produce new offerings, it could be they weren't between a rock and a hard place now.
and what would these new offerings be?
Force OEMs to hand out CoAs so that their customers can re-install the OS if need be, rather than using restore media.
You seem to be under the impression that the "restore media" garbage was the idea of the OEMs. It was not. It was Microsoft who forced the OEMs to stop providing real OS install disks.
He is the guy who can turn things around for Microsoft. After all, he's probably the only one outside the company who believes in Microsoft strategy. Nokia shareholders will not mind at all.
Flavors of Linux now come in flavors? Are you sure you got the right flavor of Zentyal?
Sheesh.
A bankruptcy attorney. simply as that.
Are you sure about it wasnt the politics? Speaking from my personal experience, I didn't pursue Windows development and was actually searching for some decent alternatives for almost a decade due to technical shortcomings AND politics. I had the luck to understand early on I could not count on Microsoft to provide me with a solid and stable, familiar platform over time. Mind you, over time. By the time I finished my faculty project (hey, I worked at a software house before), I understood Microsoft had no interest in keeping their development API and their associated graphic libraries stable, but change them frequently enough, to disable the capability of people creating emulations or linking simulations libraries for other platforms (and sell a lot of training in the process) By luck, I could almost say my private and work life was on a route of collision with a solution. But it took me a decade and half to find a capable solution to the desktop, and almost another decade to find the hardware matching with it that feels it is fairly fast enough for my liking. What those offerings could be? A stable, decent enough platform, a better browser, some more quality software, and software that does not break with other platforms ( something they devote a lot of energy to make sure it happens ).
Maybe you don't understand Microsoft's core business. Their ancient product strategy is selling an operating system for multipurpose computer devices.
Maybe you are an x-box user or something?? Their device case isn't any better or worse than what Nintendo built and Microsoft sold a ton of those.
Your obsession with "design" has very little to do with market success. Good enough sells well. Lots of pretty devices created that were never successful.
There would have been two other dicks taking their place.
Maybe Apple would have collapsed at the end of OS 9 like they nearly did and we would all still be using IBM hardware?
10 minutes after plugging in a new keyboard and mouse, the system finally recognized is, and then proceeds to bring a splash screen in front of everything I'm using and holds it there for more than a minute.
I don't want that shit, I just want to type and use the mouse I plugged in!
Linus was never a Windows® developer; he simply didn't like the stuff on his 386.
What those offerings could be? A stable, decent enough platform
And once they have that platform? XP and 7 were stable and decent enough, but how does Microsoft continue to make money from them?
a better browser
Better, in what way? More standards compliant? Faster? Smaller footprint? Ties people even more to Microsoft?
some more quality software
Software that does what?
next on /., a disgruntled M$ employee shamefully masturbates with a hand puppet while tending his resignation, carefully observing as the semen leaps through the air and inside the puppet's mouth, causing the puppet to dance.
another day, another week, another month and year, another M$ story. another "don't use M$ it sucks" comment, another reply about the reply to the M$ post, a thread unravels once, twice, three times and more.
If M$ can't rub out *nix from computers through any method of hardware enforcement, they'll likely buy up OEMs.
Shuttleworth made a mistake in closing bug #1. How many B&M stores pushing new systems are selling something other than Apple and Windows? Go ask the employees about *nix at your local generic computer store and most of them will look like you just fucked them in the ass.
The Windows monopoly remains, and once [or before] the OEMs start rolling out *nix, the OEMs will fall one by one, either bought by M$, another company owned by M$, and extinguished or eroded by M$ drones to keep the OEMs selling M$ c0ca1ne.
Speaking of insecure dictators...China is no one's answer. It is one big problem. China's leaders understand this...population, pollution, growth, carrying capacity, etc
I know China was big in the popular literature (Friedman in his NYtimes Editorials loved talking about it) as the 'next big thing' but really conquering China is done via making a good product.
Sure you need region-specific marketing but "China" is not a strategy...unless you are Goldman Sachs.
This isn't market manipulation, this is technology. China is just a factor in the production/distribution/sales equation.
From a business point of view, making the best product and rewarding your stakeholders is where the 'growth potential' is for Microsoft.
basically M$ would have to change most of the things they have chosen to define themselves with...they'd have to basically eat Linux and become some Microsoft/Linux hybrid that is interoperable and respects user privacy.
they'd have to fully reimagine their entire business model and definition of 'success' from a statistical and social standpoint, and be willing to get rid of virtually any personnel or project or business mode of operation...
In my mind that's not actually asking alot...it's the same stuff anyone would have to do in order for Microsoft to "Catch Up"
You can call it 'catching up' or 'Bayesian business model' or 'just common sense business' or 'making money' or 'making products people want' but in the end the solution is the same.
Microsoft just has to be willing to do it.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Parent makes a great point, and your Xbox exception is interesting but I must disagree with the notion that Microsoft has 'innovated' with Xbox.
Profitable, yes. Fun to play, yes. 'Innovation'....no.
Overall, M$ made Xbox the same way they got Windows and DOS...they copied something successful and Wal-Mart-ized it, using their market share as leverage.
Xbox came along at a time when the speed wars of the 80s and 90s were plateauing, product differentiation decreased, the demand for games to be easier to develop across platforms was getting hard to ignore.
People like EA didn't want to have a different Dev team for each box for each yearly version of Madden. The differences between consoles were dwindling.
Also: gamers were aging.
In this context, any functional competitive box could enter the market. If it sold, EA and the like would eventually be **begging** to make a game for it. It's more units for EA and other game publishers to sell. No real major R&D was necessary, as the processing power needed for a 'next gen' game platform was on par with what you were seeing advertised at Best Buy in a desktop PC. Gamers were familiar with M$, aging out of Nintendo (always the lovable outlier!), and bored with Playstation.
Credit M$ for seeing an opportunity to expand into a new market and jumping on it...but still, not 'innovation' just following the pack.
So all in all I have to say GP's point stands about M$...they of course have 'innovated' but it's at a smaller level.
IMHO, say what you want, but the .wma format was a great next step in music compression...of course M$ ruined it by trying to make it proprietary and lock it down, but .wma sounded great and the files were small.
Also, the High Capacity Color Barcode is cooler than QR Codes...but again...of course...it didn't catch on b/c M$ locks it down.
So I'm a M$ hater as much as the next, but they did have some good people working on a few good projects. That's where the 'innovation' happened. Deep down in the woodwork.
Profit != Innovation
Both are good, but you won't get either if you don't know the difference!!!
Thank you Dave Raggett
MS needs to take advantage of "The Matthew Effect" by beginning research and development in an area that noone significant is working on. For example, Biological Computing. Research into engineering living systems for computation and interface...
Only Microsoft can do that.
well if you meant to say that they will certify a hardware device and then when you upgrade to the next os version, they will tell you the very same device is not certified or compatible. well, then I would agree. how many printers were bought because of windows XP, then because of Vista? then most people just use a tablet and not windows at all.
yes, only Microsoft can do that
Buy Yahoo!. Promote Marissa to CEO of the whole shebang.
Catchup my ass, who wants a second rate product. You've tried and failed, now go back to the creative types in your heard and make something amazing.
Ballmer didn't start the fire (apologies to Billy Joel), he inherited it. For decades there has been no other choice and users sat by and watched MS either buy out or pound the competition to dust. They banked up a LOT of "un-goodwill", they've been in the red as far as goodwill is concerned for ages.
Now that there are valid alternatives, they are reaping what they sowed. Fair enough.
Anybody read Dune and God Emperor of Dune? Put a strangle hold on a population long enough and as soon as the grip starts to slip, BAM! They're gone.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
M$ doesn't get credit for innovation done **in spite of** it's corporate policy and behavior!!!
Of course they do. It is what it is, and opinions (however justified) about their (mis)management shouldn't change that.
Ok...ok...ok then...
What can a tech company do that makes profit that is **not** innovation in your definition?
It appears that, by your definition, a business could say copy an innovative OS from a competitor, slap a new name on it and it is, by your definition, "innovation"...if it sells.
So define this in the negative for me: What can a tech company do that is **not** innovation if a new product makes a profit?
Thank you Dave Raggett
The market has spoken and your ideas are worthless. Sorry.