11 ms·

How Microsoft Plans to Beat Google and Facebook to the Next Tech Breakthrough

94 points by Qworg 11y ago

orionblastar 11y ago
Good luck because great minds think alike. Getting a product idea finished and out to market takes time, and competitors might be able to do it faster. Skype Translate reminds me of the Star Trek universal translator but it can only do several languages. I remember when Babelfish came out and some translations didn't take too well. There has always been a need for a computer to translate foreign languages and to translate accurately as well. I think Apple is trying to do the same things as Microsoft for their iPhone and Macintosh series. So Microsoft has to compete with Apple too to get new ideas to market. It is a shame that Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple can't work together to share ideas and see which ones does them best.
- harigov 11y ago
  They are sharing ideas. A lot of these technologies have research roots that are published in open journals. Although the companies are competitors, people behind those companies are scientific minded individuals interested in furthering the technological possibilities.
- jeffjose 11y ago
  If anything, the race to attract top minds has actually forced these companies to open source their proprietary libraries. (TensorFlow, CNTK etc). While they might not be working together, there's definitely a greater good that has happened as a side-effect. I'd argue that the open sourcing of libraries is better than 2 big companies working secretly.
- Joof 11y ago
  All Microsoft research (or at least a huge chunk of it) is published in open journals. I can't say the same for acadamia.
shrewduser 11y ago
I really don't think that the problem with microsoft was their research division being too seperate. although interfacing better with the rest of the company makes sense they've always fallen on their face when it comes to execution, they were a real player in the smartphone sector at one point for example. figure out how to execute on your ideas, the generation of ideas themselves aren't the issue.
hackaflocka 11y ago
Headlines like this are good for a mid-day laugh. Operative phrase: "Plans to." Two words Microsoft needs to learn before it tries anything: "Strategy tax."
- meagain20000 11y ago
  Since I'm not familiar with the term could you explain it like I'm five?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - BarkMore 11y ago
    Strategy tax is where an individual product is constrained in some way to further the overall goals of the company. For example, Microsoft killed a project to port SQL Server to Linux because the product would help to strengthen Linux as a competitor to Windows. The term has been used inside Microsoft since the 1990s (and maybe before that time).
    - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
      It's an interesting but misleading phrase, because it doesn't allow for the fact that a bad strategy does nothing to further the overall goals of the company - where a relaxation of a bad strategy does. If your strategy is "Protect the crown jewels at all costs" while your competitors have discovered a diamond mine, no one needs to care what cutlery you're supposed to use. Of course that sounds ludicrous, but the impression I get is that that kind of strategic confusion has been endemic at MS since Gates moved on. Clever innovations like Skype Translate or even Hololens are not a strategy. Selling lots of good individual solutions still isn't a strategy. You can't play defence on strategy (Office 2026? Windows Infinity?) You need a kick-ass plan for the 5-10 year future, and I see no evidence that anyone at MS is capable of designing a product plan for consumer markets that don't exist yet, and then wondering how to market them - while Google, FB, Apple and even Amazon are at least thinking about it.
petke 11y ago
As a developer I noticed lately there is an impressive number of libraries coming from ms. They probably have a hundred libraries just on github and many older ones on codeplex. I hope this new practical money making focus doesn't mean those libraries will get neglected. Part of the charm with ms is that they are not as calculating and ruthlessly capitalist as apple and google. They are more focused on the developer and researcher than the user. I hope they don't end up becoming the same.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  Part of the charm with ms is that they are not as calculating and ruthlessly capitalist as apple and google. They are more focused on the developer and researcher than the user. I hope they don't end up becoming the same. I take it you weren't in the industry when the Halloween documents leaked, or the antitrust case was prosecuted. MS was (and probably still is) every bit as ruthlessly capitalistic as the new 800lb gorillas in town.
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    While petke's post seems a bit... overly optimistic?... It's basically completely nonsensical to focus on news from a decade ago or further when discussing technology. Ten years in tech is like a different century in any other topic. Halloween documents was 1998, Microsoft's antitrust case was 2001. If you want to neg a company, find examples in the last decade. (They exist. Windows 10 privacy issues are a great example of them still getting some things wrong.)
  - petke 11y ago
    The ms is evil thing is very 90s. It doesn't look so bad compared to say facebook and google who's core business is advertisement. Those will sell your personal information to 3rd parties any chance they get. Ms core business is still about selling software and services to users. In my book thats a more honest way to make a living. I hope it stays that way. Apple is another story ..
- eva1984 11y ago
  Part of the charm with ms is that they are not as calculating and ruthlessly capitalist as apple and google What????MS sues everyone that dare to use pirate copy of Windows just like 10 years ago and keep hostile to OSS until only recently. It is much more hated before, now since they retreat more from consumer market, it looks like it tries and probably will become the new IBM, while Google is more like the new MS.
melted 11y ago
Microsoft has suffered a heck of a brain drain in the past decade. I don't believe they can recover from it in the long term. I also don't believe in innovation by executive edict. Google and FB models work because executive edicts are not necessary there: top researchers and engineers run the whole show.
- jmspring 11y ago
  Sources? I'm an apple household in general, but have multiple devices. Cortana is superior to Siri, Google is still better. But you make a post with no actual facts.
  - jmspring 11y ago
    If you mention the consolidation of MSR labs including the closure of that in Mountain View, that was a bad move (in my opinion). But, trying to understand here. My experience over a number of years is that experienced individuals are transitory...People move around. Depending on the group in MSFT and Satya's mandate, churn may make sense. A decade is multiple tech lifetimes...Someone stellar 10 years ago may be on it now or may not... This level of general MS bs on HN gets a little tiring when there are no facts.
- argonaut 11y ago
  This is not true of Microsoft Research. MSR has for many many years been one of the top industry research labs. Only recently have Google Research and Facebook joined its ranks (and Facebook only in AI research).
  - Ant5do 11y ago
    I'd argue that Google Research (Jeff Dean) is still not what MSR is by reputation.
  - josephpmay 11y ago
    Facebook has been building a ridiculously strong VR/AR research team in Seattle
frik 11y ago
Pretty good analysis of MSFT, Google and Facebook. In the 1990s Bill Gates shared his visions in 1990 and 1994 at COMDEX (information at your fingertips and "Cairo"). In the 2000s Longhorn, WinFS (failed because dotNet was too slow) and the great work of Microsoft Labs like Photosynth. MSFT was on its peak with Office 2010 and Win7. Though then they closed their Labs department. And Satya Nadella only tries to milks the custumer with SaaS versions of their former on-premises software, expensive license model changes and hostile privacy intrusive spying stuff on end consumer. MSFT is such a mean company.
- melted 11y ago
  WinFS failed not because .NET was too slow, but because no one, not even the people in charge of WinFS, could explain why the fuck anyone would want something like this. I also don't get what's so great about Photosynth. Last I checked it completely failed to take off anywhere.
  - Peaker 11y ago
    For the same reason we want "locate". Except it would be nice to be able to query on many more attributes. And without having the machine be unresponsive for a while every day, only to find that "updatedb" decided to churn the machine.
    - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
      Have you tried mlocate? It has a much more sane updatedb, reading only the changes to the filesystem. https://fedorahosted.org/mlocate/ https://fedorahosted.org/mlocate/
  - aluskuiuc 11y ago
    I was an intern in the WinFS team in 2004 - seriously nobody knew what it actually was even inside the team. The best I could say was that it was a way for lots of applications writing their own complex datastores (like outlook) to share an OS-level platform so that it could be exposed to other applications with a unified API. It was way more a developer tool than a user-facing feature, but that's not how it was marketed.
AndrewKemendo 11y ago
I have to say that our team has been really impressed with Microsoft from a developer perspective. They were very accommodating with bringing us in to see/try the Hololens and we have been really happy with Azure since switching from AWS.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  They seem to have had that strategy for a very long time -- entice developers to lock in end users. It worked quite well obviously, but I myself still find a good REPL, solid CLI tools, and fully open source code all the way down to the BIOS even more enticing. I'm looking forward to seeing what Microsoft's "next" is; they've tried a lot of "nexts" that didn't always pan out.
  - AndrewKemendo 11y ago
    Yea except 100% of our end users are on iOS. We have no intentions on building for Windows Phone or Windows OS and they know that.
    - kozukumi 11y ago
      > We have no intentions on building for Windows Phone or Windows OS and they know that That is the biggest change in Microsoft IMHO. Talking from personal experience - in the past whenever we worked with MS they always put in stupid requirements such as we had to support X or Y (with X and Y being some new Microsoft technology/platform/product). It was abuse of their position so I am glad to see this is changing.
      - dev360 11y ago
        Yeah I was in total shock yesterday when I found out they are phasing out app fabric caching in favor of REDIS. Glad times are finally catching up to them, but it feels so much like Sun.. Too little, too late.
meesterdude 11y ago
Microsoft could build a robot that did chores around the house for me, and I still would have no interest in it. Because it's microsoft, and there is a lot of baggage that goes along with that. This holds true for other large tech companies as well - there is always baggage. It might be poor updates, crappy support, no production quality, poor execution, poor security, or required integration with their larger platform. Yahoo is faced with a similar problem; they can't shake who they are, no matter how cool or different they try to rebrand themselves. They're still Yahoo. And nobody is interested. I say this because MS seems to think that if they get a slamdunk on technology, everything else will fall into place. And maybe there is some truth to that. But you can't escape who you are and what you've done, especially when it's become your M.O. Facebook has an advantage in this space: they're still a new name in tech. They're "hipper" although still have their own baggage; but it remains to be seen how that permeates throughout what they do. So far it hasn't looked good though. Really, I think there is too much talent locked up in this major companies. I think the world would be better off if more engineers and creatives were forging their own paths, chasing their own dreams and coming to market themselves. We need less whales and more/bigger fish.
- jmspring 11y ago
  Facebook is a new name? The review of the the pixel book got me thinking... What do FB and GOOG have to prop up their valuation beyond advertising? In both cases the user is the product, advertisers the customer. Amazon, MSFT, and Apple have other avenues. It's always interesting how a past reputation glosses of a legacy name is used to gloss over the behaviors of "a new name".
  - bitmapbrother 11y ago
    What does Microsoft have besides Office/Windows? And what does Apple have besides the iPhone?
    - jongalloway2 11y ago
      Here's a list circa 2013: http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-16-billion-dollar-businesses-an-updated-list/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-16-billion-dollar-bu...
pavs 11y ago
What does Tech breakthrough in this context means? And what tech breakthrough came from Facebook? Is something like HHVM considered a tech breakthrough? Automated self driving cars considered a tech breakthrough? (most probably)
- yid 11y ago
  > Is something like HHVM considered a tech breakthrough? A largely backwards source-compatible, JIT'ed interpreter for one of the world's shittiest designed but most widely deployed languages? That runs the frontend fleet for the #2 site on the Web? While supporting new core language features and extensions? Yes, I would say that's a breakthrough in interpreter implementation, and thus tech.
gottam 11y ago
Microsoft's independent innovations of the last decade are the kind the average person doesn't really want or need. They're making a skype translator... fantastic... but the market for that is still pretty niche. When Google released maps/street view, or apple announced the iphone, those were the kinds of things that built excitement because they were big ideas, and it was the kind of future we wanted to live in. Microsoft doesn't really do that, and from this article they still don't get it.
- Udik 11y ago
  And at the beginning of the multi-touch revolution, while Apple was releasing the iPhone, Microsoft was still busy developing Surface (now PixelSense) - an 80kg, 50x50cm coffee table cum multitouch screen. Really. So I agree with you, it seems that impressive products of Microsoft research look like proofs of concept rather then viable mass products.
  - krylon 11y ago
    > it seems that impressive products of Microsoft research look like proofs of concept rather then viable mass products. Isn't that kind of the point of having a research division? Let the research people go crazy with new ideas, then sift through them and figure out what to make of that, product-wise? It's not like MS Research hasn't delivered some cool stuff, but Microsoft was either not capable or not interested in turning that stuff into products. At least that is the impression I get.
    - gottam 11y ago
      The biggest thing I can think of that MS research delivered in the last few years is the kinect. They hinged a lot upon that being the next thing in gaming, but what is it now really? Their competitors aren't exactly in a rush to copy it... because once again, its a gimmick for a niche market. Now just look at VR on the other hand... there's many big companies investing in that and there's a lot of hype around it. Heck even Facebook is on board and Microsoft is nowhere to be seen. There's yet another technological revolution that they're missing out on.
sixQuarks 11y ago
Question from non-technical person: What script is used to do the headline scramble? What process do you use to find out what script it is? thanks
- lucideer 11y ago
  It's entirely custom but it leverages the d3 library so it's quite short/relatively simple in its execution as it leaves most of it up to d3. Process for finding out is not fixed. Generally a simple "View Source", look at <script> tags, read script files and look for obvious clues is the best first port of call (and worked easily here). If there's a lot of indirection and pre-compilation being done it gets harder.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - sixQuarks 11y ago
    thanks, appreciate the response. I had a hunch it was with d3, but wasn't sure.
- ricardobeat 11y ago
  Unfortunately that animation runs at a choppy snail's pace on an iPad. One would hope cross-browser/device testing was a part of developing fancy stuff for the web.
dekhn 11y ago
Any time a CEO of a company this size has to make a last-minute forced integration between groups in their company to catch up with a competitor, it means the CEO failed at their real job: anticipating their competitor, and being prepared with a response. If CEOs are micro-managing tactics like this, it means they are failing to hire and delegate.
- josephpmay 11y ago
  Granted, it was a very different CEO that failed to anticipate their competition
josep2 11y ago
Sincerely hope this is the case.

94 points by Qworg 11y ago

Good luck because great minds think alike. Getting a product idea finished and out to market takes time, and competitors might be able to do it faster. Skype Translate reminds me of the Star Trek universal translator but it can only do several languages. I remember when Babelfish came out and some translations didn't take too well. There has always been a need for a computer to translate foreign languages and to translate accurately as well. I think Apple is trying to do the same things as Microsoft for their iPhone and Macintosh series. So Microsoft has to compete with Apple too to get new ideas to market. It is a shame that Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple can't work together to share ideas and see which ones does them best.

harigov 11y ago
They are sharing ideas. A lot of these technologies have research roots that are published in open journals. Although the companies are competitors, people behind those companies are scientific minded individuals interested in furthering the technological possibilities.
jeffjose 11y ago
If anything, the race to attract top minds has actually forced these companies to open source their proprietary libraries. (TensorFlow, CNTK etc). While they might not be working together, there's definitely a greater good that has happened as a side-effect. I'd argue that the open sourcing of libraries is better than 2 big companies working secretly.
Joof 11y ago
All Microsoft research (or at least a huge chunk of it) is published in open journals. I can't say the same for acadamia.

shrewduser 11y ago

I really don't think that the problem with microsoft was their research division being too seperate. although interfacing better with the rest of the company makes sense they've always fallen on their face when it comes to execution, they were a real player in the smartphone sector at one point for example. figure out how to execute on your ideas, the generation of ideas themselves aren't the issue.

hackaflocka 11y ago

Headlines like this are good for a mid-day laugh. Operative phrase: "Plans to." Two words Microsoft needs to learn before it tries anything: "Strategy tax."

meagain20000 11y ago
Since I'm not familiar with the term could you explain it like I'm five?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- BarkMore 11y ago
  Strategy tax is where an individual product is constrained in some way to further the overall goals of the company. For example, Microsoft killed a project to port SQL Server to Linux because the product would help to strengthen Linux as a competitor to Windows. The term has been used inside Microsoft since the 1990s (and maybe before that time).
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    It's an interesting but misleading phrase, because it doesn't allow for the fact that a bad strategy does nothing to further the overall goals of the company - where a relaxation of a bad strategy does. If your strategy is "Protect the crown jewels at all costs" while your competitors have discovered a diamond mine, no one needs to care what cutlery you're supposed to use. Of course that sounds ludicrous, but the impression I get is that that kind of strategic confusion has been endemic at MS since Gates moved on. Clever innovations like Skype Translate or even Hololens are not a strategy. Selling lots of good individual solutions still isn't a strategy. You can't play defence on strategy (Office 2026? Windows Infinity?) You need a kick-ass plan for the 5-10 year future, and I see no evidence that anyone at MS is capable of designing a product plan for consumer markets that don't exist yet, and then wondering how to market them - while Google, FB, Apple and even Amazon are at least thinking about it.

petke 11y ago

As a developer I noticed lately there is an impressive number of libraries coming from ms. They probably have a hundred libraries just on github and many older ones on codeplex. I hope this new practical money making focus doesn't mean those libraries will get neglected. Part of the charm with ms is that they are not as calculating and ruthlessly capitalist as apple and google. They are more focused on the developer and researcher than the user. I hope they don't end up becoming the same.

nitrogen 11y ago
Part of the charm with ms is that they are not as calculating and ruthlessly capitalist as apple and google. They are more focused on the developer and researcher than the user. I hope they don't end up becoming the same. I take it you weren't in the industry when the Halloween documents leaked, or the antitrust case was prosecuted. MS was (and probably still is) every bit as ruthlessly capitalistic as the new 800lb gorillas in town.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  While petke's post seems a bit... overly optimistic?... It's basically completely nonsensical to focus on news from a decade ago or further when discussing technology. Ten years in tech is like a different century in any other topic. Halloween documents was 1998, Microsoft's antitrust case was 2001. If you want to neg a company, find examples in the last decade. (They exist. Windows 10 privacy issues are a great example of them still getting some things wrong.)
- petke 11y ago
  The ms is evil thing is very 90s. It doesn't look so bad compared to say facebook and google who's core business is advertisement. Those will sell your personal information to 3rd parties any chance they get. Ms core business is still about selling software and services to users. In my book thats a more honest way to make a living. I hope it stays that way. Apple is another story ..
eva1984 11y ago
Part of the charm with ms is that they are not as calculating and ruthlessly capitalist as apple and google What????MS sues everyone that dare to use pirate copy of Windows just like 10 years ago and keep hostile to OSS until only recently. It is much more hated before, now since they retreat more from consumer market, it looks like it tries and probably will become the new IBM, while Google is more like the new MS.

melted 11y ago

Microsoft has suffered a heck of a brain drain in the past decade. I don't believe they can recover from it in the long term. I also don't believe in innovation by executive edict. Google and FB models work because executive edicts are not necessary there: top researchers and engineers run the whole show.

jmspring 11y ago
Sources? I'm an apple household in general, but have multiple devices. Cortana is superior to Siri, Google is still better. But you make a post with no actual facts.
- jmspring 11y ago
  If you mention the consolidation of MSR labs including the closure of that in Mountain View, that was a bad move (in my opinion). But, trying to understand here. My experience over a number of years is that experienced individuals are transitory...People move around. Depending on the group in MSFT and Satya's mandate, churn may make sense. A decade is multiple tech lifetimes...Someone stellar 10 years ago may be on it now or may not... This level of general MS bs on HN gets a little tiring when there are no facts.
argonaut 11y ago
This is not true of Microsoft Research. MSR has for many many years been one of the top industry research labs. Only recently have Google Research and Facebook joined its ranks (and Facebook only in AI research).
- Ant5do 11y ago
  I'd argue that Google Research (Jeff Dean) is still not what MSR is by reputation.
- josephpmay 11y ago
  Facebook has been building a ridiculously strong VR/AR research team in Seattle

frik 11y ago

Pretty good analysis of MSFT, Google and Facebook. In the 1990s Bill Gates shared his visions in 1990 and 1994 at COMDEX (information at your fingertips and "Cairo"). In the 2000s Longhorn, WinFS (failed because dotNet was too slow) and the great work of Microsoft Labs like Photosynth. MSFT was on its peak with Office 2010 and Win7. Though then they closed their Labs department. And Satya Nadella only tries to milks the custumer with SaaS versions of their former on-premises software, expensive license model changes and hostile privacy intrusive spying stuff on end consumer. MSFT is such a mean company.

melted 11y ago
WinFS failed not because .NET was too slow, but because no one, not even the people in charge of WinFS, could explain why the fuck anyone would want something like this. I also don't get what's so great about Photosynth. Last I checked it completely failed to take off anywhere.
- Peaker 11y ago
  For the same reason we want "locate". Except it would be nice to be able to query on many more attributes. And without having the machine be unresponsive for a while every day, only to find that "updatedb" decided to churn the machine.
  - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
    Have you tried mlocate? It has a much more sane updatedb, reading only the changes to the filesystem. https://fedorahosted.org/mlocate/ https://fedorahosted.org/mlocate/
- aluskuiuc 11y ago
  I was an intern in the WinFS team in 2004 - seriously nobody knew what it actually was even inside the team. The best I could say was that it was a way for lots of applications writing their own complex datastores (like outlook) to share an OS-level platform so that it could be exposed to other applications with a unified API. It was way more a developer tool than a user-facing feature, but that's not how it was marketed.

AndrewKemendo 11y ago

I have to say that our team has been really impressed with Microsoft from a developer perspective. They were very accommodating with bringing us in to see/try the Hololens and we have been really happy with Azure since switching from AWS.

nitrogen 11y ago
They seem to have had that strategy for a very long time -- entice developers to lock in end users. It worked quite well obviously, but I myself still find a good REPL, solid CLI tools, and fully open source code all the way down to the BIOS even more enticing. I'm looking forward to seeing what Microsoft's "next" is; they've tried a lot of "nexts" that didn't always pan out.
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  Yea except 100% of our end users are on iOS. We have no intentions on building for Windows Phone or Windows OS and they know that.
  - kozukumi 11y ago
    > We have no intentions on building for Windows Phone or Windows OS and they know that That is the biggest change in Microsoft IMHO. Talking from personal experience - in the past whenever we worked with MS they always put in stupid requirements such as we had to support X or Y (with X and Y being some new Microsoft technology/platform/product). It was abuse of their position so I am glad to see this is changing.
    - dev360 11y ago
      Yeah I was in total shock yesterday when I found out they are phasing out app fabric caching in favor of REDIS. Glad times are finally catching up to them, but it feels so much like Sun.. Too little, too late.

meesterdude 11y ago

Microsoft could build a robot that did chores around the house for me, and I still would have no interest in it. Because it's microsoft, and there is a lot of baggage that goes along with that. This holds true for other large tech companies as well - there is always baggage. It might be poor updates, crappy support, no production quality, poor execution, poor security, or required integration with their larger platform. Yahoo is faced with a similar problem; they can't shake who they are, no matter how cool or different they try to rebrand themselves. They're still Yahoo. And nobody is interested. I say this because MS seems to think that if they get a slamdunk on technology, everything else will fall into place. And maybe there is some truth to that. But you can't escape who you are and what you've done, especially when it's become your M.O. Facebook has an advantage in this space: they're still a new name in tech. They're "hipper" although still have their own baggage; but it remains to be seen how that permeates throughout what they do. So far it hasn't looked good though. Really, I think there is too much talent locked up in this major companies. I think the world would be better off if more engineers and creatives were forging their own paths, chasing their own dreams and coming to market themselves. We need less whales and more/bigger fish.

jmspring 11y ago
Facebook is a new name? The review of the the pixel book got me thinking... What do FB and GOOG have to prop up their valuation beyond advertising? In both cases the user is the product, advertisers the customer. Amazon, MSFT, and Apple have other avenues. It's always interesting how a past reputation glosses of a legacy name is used to gloss over the behaviors of "a new name".
- bitmapbrother 11y ago
  What does Microsoft have besides Office/Windows? And what does Apple have besides the iPhone?
  - jongalloway2 11y ago
    Here's a list circa 2013: http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-16-billion-dollar-businesses-an-updated-list/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-16-billion-dollar-bu...

pavs 11y ago

What does Tech breakthrough in this context means? And what tech breakthrough came from Facebook? Is something like HHVM considered a tech breakthrough? Automated self driving cars considered a tech breakthrough? (most probably)

yid 11y ago
> Is something like HHVM considered a tech breakthrough? A largely backwards source-compatible, JIT'ed interpreter for one of the world's shittiest designed but most widely deployed languages? That runs the frontend fleet for the #2 site on the Web? While supporting new core language features and extensions? Yes, I would say that's a breakthrough in interpreter implementation, and thus tech.

gottam 11y ago

Microsoft's independent innovations of the last decade are the kind the average person doesn't really want or need. They're making a skype translator... fantastic... but the market for that is still pretty niche. When Google released maps/street view, or apple announced the iphone, those were the kinds of things that built excitement because they were big ideas, and it was the kind of future we wanted to live in. Microsoft doesn't really do that, and from this article they still don't get it.

Udik 11y ago
And at the beginning of the multi-touch revolution, while Apple was releasing the iPhone, Microsoft was still busy developing Surface (now PixelSense) - an 80kg, 50x50cm coffee table cum multitouch screen. Really. So I agree with you, it seems that impressive products of Microsoft research look like proofs of concept rather then viable mass products.
- krylon 11y ago
  > it seems that impressive products of Microsoft research look like proofs of concept rather then viable mass products. Isn't that kind of the point of having a research division? Let the research people go crazy with new ideas, then sift through them and figure out what to make of that, product-wise? It's not like MS Research hasn't delivered some cool stuff, but Microsoft was either not capable or not interested in turning that stuff into products. At least that is the impression I get.
  - gottam 11y ago
    The biggest thing I can think of that MS research delivered in the last few years is the kinect. They hinged a lot upon that being the next thing in gaming, but what is it now really? Their competitors aren't exactly in a rush to copy it... because once again, its a gimmick for a niche market. Now just look at VR on the other hand... there's many big companies investing in that and there's a lot of hype around it. Heck even Facebook is on board and Microsoft is nowhere to be seen. There's yet another technological revolution that they're missing out on.

sixQuarks 11y ago

Question from non-technical person: What script is used to do the headline scramble? What process do you use to find out what script it is? thanks

lucideer 11y ago
It's entirely custom but it leverages the d3 library so it's quite short/relatively simple in its execution as it leaves most of it up to d3. Process for finding out is not fixed. Generally a simple "View Source", look at <script> tags, read script files and look for obvious clues is the best first port of call (and worked easily here). If there's a lot of indirection and pre-compilation being done it gets harder.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- sixQuarks 11y ago
  thanks, appreciate the response. I had a hunch it was with d3, but wasn't sure.
ricardobeat 11y ago
Unfortunately that animation runs at a choppy snail's pace on an iPad. One would hope cross-browser/device testing was a part of developing fancy stuff for the web.

dekhn 11y ago

Any time a CEO of a company this size has to make a last-minute forced integration between groups in their company to catch up with a competitor, it means the CEO failed at their real job: anticipating their competitor, and being prepared with a response. If CEOs are micro-managing tactics like this, it means they are failing to hire and delegate.

josephpmay 11y ago
Granted, it was a very different CEO that failed to anticipate their competition

josep2 11y ago

Sincerely hope this is the case.