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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.
That memo is waaaay too long. No wonder none of that stuff happened - no one read past the first page and a half.
Better known as 318230.
You can make a hundred correct predictions in a row as to where the market is heading, and then whiff on two, and an apple or a google gain a foothold.
It's not rocket science... it's way harder than that.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Rocket science needs complex math. market prediction needs a functioning crystal ball.
Look, a modern software company must do 4 things:
1) Employ hipsters.
2) Use Git and GitHub.
3) Use Ruby on Rails when creating any sort of software.
4) Use MongoDB when storing any sort of data.
Microsoft may do part of 2), but I don't think they do 1), and I don't think they do 3), and I don't think they do 4).
If a company doesn't do those 4 things, then they're old hat. They're Web 1.0. They're SQL. They aren't cool. They aren't stylish. They can't scale without bound. They're a company that's irrelevant in this modern world of wearable Internet. They just aren't chaz.
In the late nineties and into the last decade Microsoft just dumped too much time and money on their vision of a hyper-connected home. They dumped so much research money into building out test spaces and building out test devices, they failed to realize that people don't want an intelligent dryer and an intelligent toaster and an intelligent melon baller. The reality is whatever fancy device you own that has any kind of transistor in it, much less a CPU-- a phone, a tablet, a TV-- you're having to fuss with it. Constantly. And the same is/was always true for their "Microsoft At Home" vision. And yes, these things were connected-- but only to each other.
That, and the fact that Microsoft has always misread the Internet, from coming to TCP/IP late, to ignoring the vital interoperability that cloud services demand. It's always been about the toys with them. Toys that run Windows. Ugh.
Gratefully, only a few of these monstrous things ever saw the light of day beyond the lab.
While Xerox deserves full blame for missing opportunities (the mouse, GUI, ethernet, and laser printer were all invented there), Kodak does not. They were always on the forefront of digital imaging. They built the first digital camera in the 1970s, and had a line of digital SLRs in the early 1990s. They knew exactly where the industry was heading, and in fact did most of the early R&D to get us there. The only reason they managed to hang around as long as they did was because they owned most of the patents on digital imaging and were collecting massive royalties.
What led to Kodak's downfall is obvious if you look at the pictures in that wikipedia link. Those are Nikon (and later Canon) bodies with Kodak digital sensors. Kodak was a film company, not a camera company. They weren't in the business of making cameras (aside from some cheap consumer models and disposables). When the industry shifted from film to digital, the companies which ended up on top were companies skilled at making cameras/lenses (Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Zeiss, and their arch-rival Fuji which had been busy making decent point and shoots prior to the switch to digital), and companies skilled at making electronics/silicon (Sony, Panasonic, Casio, etc). Kodak thought they could carve a piece of the digital sensor pie for themselves, but rapidly found themselves unable to keep up with companies with decades of expertise manufacturing microprocessors who simply shifted that expertise into manufacturing sensors. In other words, the best business model for making camera sensors turned out not to be knowing how to make camera sensors. It turned out to be knowing how to make microchips.
Are we violating any of Intellectual Ventures' patents by reading it?
#DeleteChrome
| 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.
| 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).
Waaay back I remember someone pointing out that Microsoft was spending enormous sums to hire researchers, especially promising ones in academia. The idea, apparently, was for MS Research to be a sort of "intellectual roach motel" (love that phrase) were IQ would check in, and nothing checked out. This made a certain amount of sense. As a monopolist you don't -want- any innovation. One way to do that is hire hitmen to kill potential innovators. But the risks there are huge. A much easier way if you have the money is to hire promising minds and then keep them neutralized. That's just what Microsoft did.
All that memo will do (and it did) is to create a regressive hierarchy of backbiting political scum, who devote their energy to their next, larger, paycheck.
Any new ideas will be ruthlessly crushed, to avoid the risk their will succeed and toss those on high into the rubbish heap of history.
So they have done that with the company, and it only survive because of its natural monopolies in a few software fields.
Apple could have killed them ages ago, by allowing their OS to be licensed on any processor, and include a state machine rom with each licenced copy, said state machine being a soldered un-crackable dongle, so that Apple gets ~~$100 per copy - they would slay Microsoft.
As it is Apple clings to their walled garden = dumb, but Apple = richer than me, so what do I know?
Its semi-common in financial industries (who generally are mostly *Nix/Java based, but always have a substantial percentage of Windows development for either client or specialized server side use. They often get steep discounts because of all the exchange/office licenses they get).
The neat thing about F# is that its an ML dialect, and thus is fairly good for complex/mathy algorithms that are best written functionally. Then C# can consume the F# DLL's transparently. Don't get me wrong, there isn't hundreds of millions of lines of code written in it, but when I was in that industry, I worked at a few company (one among the "big 3") that has a substantial F# department, to write operational research algorithms to help balance portfolios and stuff.
It looks like you're trying to write a memo... let me help you with that
Apparently it actually does.
Except it doesn't, because Apple sold style, not superiority. What brought them back into fashion was the iPod, and there were competitors which were superior in every way other than style.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What led to Kodak's downfall is obvious if you look at the pictures in that wikipedia link. Those are Nikon (and later Canon) bodies with Kodak digital sensors.
There's other things as well. I owned a couple of Kodak digital cameras because they were very cheap. The first one had a bad interface even for cameras of the day (people were still using quicktakes when I bought it) but I took a chance and bought another one figuring that surely they would have figured it out by now [then] and NOPE. Kodak-branded digital cameras have literally the worst interfaces I have ever used. I started with a Casio QV-11...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"