Microsoft's Missed Opportunities: Memo From 1997

New submitter gthuang88 (3752041) writes In the 1990s, Microsoft was in position to own the software and devices market. Here is Nathan Myhrvold's previously unpublished 1997 memo on expanding Microsoft Research to tackle problems in software testing, operating systems, artificial intelligence, and applications. Those fields would become crucial in the company's competition with Google, Apple, Amazon, and Oracle. But research didn't do enough to make the company broaden its businesses. While Microsoft Research was originally founded to ensure the company's future, the organization only mapped out some possible futures. And now Microsoft is undergoing the biggest restructuring in its history. At least F# and LINQ saw the light of day.

Comments

Too long

[Dan East]

That memo is waaaay too long. No wonder none of that stuff happened - no one read past the first page and a half.

Re: Too long

[alen]

Microsoft was an isp, had an internet portal and owned expedia before google existed

Re:Too long

[ozmanjusri]

No wonder none of that stuff happened - no one read past the first page and a half.

No. Just no. That's pure and slick as goose fat spin control. Businesses simply don't work that way.

That stuff didn't happen because Microsoft decided to spend the next decade and a half focused on embracing, extending and extinguishing or just f***ing killing and just f***ing burying their competitors instead of making good products.

With toxic corporate citizenship at their heart, they stacked standards committees instead of making a better Office product. When online security and malware became a problem, instead of improving and securing their colander-like OS they funded a feral and failing software company to attack a community-built competitor. When that failed, they wielded 235 patents as a FUD-bludgeon, and sold more to a 3rd party patent troll. When it became clear they couldn't compete in the mobile space, they used some questionable patents to extort money from manufacturers using a competing OS. Their customers suffered high costs and poor products because, whenever possible, they chose to litigate instead of innovate.

That's why they now have 14% market share and are laying off thousands of workers. As soon as there were viable alternatives, ex-Microsoft customers fled to them in droves.

Hindsight's twenty-twenty

[Anonymous Coward]

Rocket science needs complex math. market prediction needs a functioning crystal ball.

Re:Maybe MSFT was trying to learn from Xerox

[mbkennel]

| Kodak was a film company, not a camera company.

What Kodak didn't realize, and its competitor, Fuji did realize, was that Kodak was actually a materials, coatings & chemical processing company, but it thought it was a photography company. As you recognize, the expertise wasn't in how film works, it's how film factories work, and the people who knew semiconductor factories made better sensors.

If they did realize this, they'd be around today making graphene or medical instruments.

And for a number of decades Kodak, along with Perkin-Elmer (also in upstate New York) made the most impressive photography system in the world, i.e. the film-based NRO surveillance satellites, and could never talk about it. That big stream of revenue also died.

Re:Meh, why should we spend money on that?

[mbkennel]

| I have every expectation that the guys who invented the transistor met with business people who told them: "That's real nice, but I already have a triode or a pentode for that. Give me something I don't already have.

No. That's what happens now. That didn't happen in the 1950's at Bell Labs or in any successful organization in the era of significant American technical/industrial competence (1920-1980).

Re:Hindsight's twenty-twenty

[netsavior]

that's just not true. You don't have to do new things to be brilliant. You can do old things, better.
Google search was not new, but it was better
When iPhone came out, there was nothing it did that my Palm Treo didn't do, but it was better
The Printing press, which revolutionized the world, was just a big screw press combined with some thousand year old block printing techniques... it was nothing new.
Every best picture Oscar ever was an old story, retold.
Shakespeare's Hamlet was a re-telling of a common folktale.