Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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?
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.
In other words, Ballmer was the symptom, not the problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since I graduated from college in 1986, Microsoft has been a place where great minds go to die. They were the hottest employer, and it sickens me to see how little Microsoft has allowed their amazing talent to produce. They had, and continue to have, essentially a monopoly on the desktop OS market. They don't need innovation to remain on top, and could even be damaged by it, so it's no wonder that they wouldn't let their great minds produce much of consequence. If Windows Me didn't convince you that Microsoft is anti-innovation, certainly Windows Vista and Windows 8 should make it clear.
That said, I have no problem with companies being the best company in their field. Microsoft's market is shrinking, and it's not their fault. They remain the dominant PC OS, even with crappy Windows 8. Few would argue with my claim that Sun Microsystems was the best workstation vendor ever, but when cheap x86 CPUs began to have enough power for most users, Sun's market went away.
Most people think it's stupidity for companies to remain the best in their market while their market shrinks, but I don't feel that way. There's always another company ready to take over a new market, and a company without the PC OS baggage is going to do a lot better. That's the way it should be.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
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.
They're continuing to rely on old technology that's past it's time - like Office.
Please tell us what new technology replaces a spreadsheet program, a word processor, a presentation tool, and a personal/workgroup relational database.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
You think a good business strategy is to rely on making minuscule changes to spreadsheets and word processors - expecting - consumers to buy the new version?? Why would anyone want Office 2010 when Office 2007 is capable of doing more than 99% of existing users care about? All this while OpenOffice (completely free) is capable of meeting the needs of 99% of spreadsheet and word processing users. Seriously? You think there's a big $$$ future in the continued development and deployment of Office 2011, 2012....2024? Seriously? Okay, now I've told you. And that's free from me to you... ;)
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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
Stephen Elop. No doubt. Their platform is burning!
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.
Hi don't know really which part of the story you missed about his family being millionaire, his mother being influential in Washington, and IBMs president being a friend of his mother Despite everything, I take my hat to Mr. Gates as a shrewd businessman, if the not the most one of the 80s. Pity they based their entire business model into asphyxiating the competition and not really innovating. What I don't buy the tale of his "hobby success", and "visionary" approach.