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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."
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
MS should hire Elon Musk as CEO?
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 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.
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.
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BMO - Unfortunately, Ballmer is leaving before he's finishing the job of killing the company.
By creating boat loads of dumb software writers that churned out code for XP that depended upon insecure networking interfaces they have done little more than create a huge resentment in the industry. It is still the case today that most large firms have to run large amounts of legacy activeX code on their intranet in "XP" mode that requires routines that would hose them if they were exposed to the internet.
XP was a great system for locking in customers and the huge problem it created was the fact that getting out of the trap of relying upon insecure software it created is too expensive for a large number of companies. Banks and many institutions still run XP terminals for this very reason, their internal software routines are all based upon core code that is not at all suited for a secure OS like Windows 7 that actually has sensible limited user privilege settings.
Microsoft screwed up their big hit operating system XP's UAC so badly that a culture of writing core routines without consideration of UAC became the norm. Then when things screwed up the IT guys and gals had to run out and sell the bosses on add on security controls from someone other than Microsoft. This is why the snake oil sales of security software exploded in the first place.
Vista tried to fix this problem but focused on Palladium. Windows 7 got multi-user privilege going properly to a certain extent but still relies upon .net code that can and does leave holes in because those who code for it are largely ignorant of how to secure things. Secure Computing or Palladium does not at all address these problems and the move to so called "trusted computing" has backfired on Microsoft. Most savvy IT managers know this and tell their bosses that moving past XP will not actually gain any real security benefits because of legacy activeX and .net code. The lack of sensible security methods in the first place within the windows networking code base has created a whale floundering on the beach.
Microsoft's core business is ripe for the picking and I would not at all be surprised if we do not see some company or group of companies gang up and beat them up. A joint venture between hardware and software companies could do it. Who knows just maybe IBM will get it's revenge by releasing a killer db, office suite, server combo that can run old XP code sand boxed faster than a windows server. LOL
Just maybe Ballmer's legacy will be the complete ruin of the once stellar bunch of corporate software raiders that Microsoft was. Problem is they have run out of ideas and truly innovative companies to usurp. We are currently at a technology bubble interface. The only advances will be things like HP's low power Moonshot servers. Unless something really shocking like Microsoft merging with Intel and actually starting to produce real physical product they are really in trouble this time around.
There will be huge mergers soon in the tech industry, one that might shock everybody might be IBM an HP. Or the complete purchase of Dell by Microsoft, or as stated a merger between Microsoft and Intel. INTERESTING TIMES AHEAD and there will be blood on the floor of the stock exchange to be certain.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
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.
"So we just buy your network, or at least a large enough interest in it to replace whomever we need to to make things happen. Our Way"
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Boom headshot.
Yes, there's plenty people with plenty great ideas, and then they get tangled in politics and realize it's impossible.
We have a saying around here (roughly translated): On your way to god, the saints will eat you alive.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Bullshit. They excelled in maintaining backwards compatibility with BINARY legacy applications coded with all kinds of brutal behaviours under the hood. Often almost beyond the bounds of reason. This was one of the big reasons Apple had so much trouble clawing itself back into the game. MS worked very hard never to give visionary CIOs a good pretext to clean house of horror show legacy applications.
Embrace, extend, and eternalise.