15 ms·

Microsoft’s Creative Destruction

342 points by unignorant 17y ago

bensummers 17y ago
So, they managed to destroy a competitor producing a tablet computer, only to fail to produce their promised product because of infighting? (See Jerry Kaplan's book, "Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure" for the depressing story.) How exactly is this defensible behaviour?
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Apparently, a lot of unethical behaviors feel defensible when one works at Microsoft. I think it may have something with the height where they place the bar.
- maurycy 17y ago
  It's defensible on the personal level. People from other cubicles felt threatened, and they had to defend themselves. ;-)
  - bensummers 17y ago
    I meant the behaviour of saying to the market "we're making something which will be far better than this shipping product" so loudly that no one bought the shipping product. The fact that their internal politics made it impossible to release something better in the first place is just adding insult to injury. Read the book, it's a good story.
pragmatic 17y ago
Hackers take note. The dominant OS for Business (on desktops) is Windows. This can't change (soon), too many companies are locked into software that requires it (either built in house or purchased). That's changing, more applications are going web based. But there are always those little niche apps that hang out in purchasing or accounting that require windows and aren't going away soon. Most companies can't function without Excel. Go to the accounting department. Even if they have an "accounting system" ask the people working their what the use (or watch them). They probably have Excel open all day. Excel is hard to do in a browser. Every company in the world would love to be MSFT. High profits and a locked in customer base.
- pragmatic 17y ago
  OR: "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."
  - qjz 17y ago
    Note that the guy who said that is dead.
    - shrikant 17y ago
      He wasn't when he said it.
      - ericd 17y ago
        Neither is MSFT.
- simon_ 17y ago
  Even complete lock-in might not work for them forever. The entire US financial industry uses Windows desktops and will for the foreseeable future, but adoption of Vista, Windows 7, and Office 2007 has been (anecdotally) pretty negligible. I imagine that their future profits are in trouble if they can't innovate enough for users to even upgrade their products.
  - bad_user 17y ago
    > adoption of Vista, Windows 7, and Office 2007 has been (anecdotally) pretty negligible. That's because Win XP and Office 2003 are good enough. That also spells trouble for their would-be competitors. If someone doesn't upgrade his XP box to Windows 7, do you think it's more likely he'll buy a Mac instead? I don't think so. And while web-apps are all the rage these days ... it sounds to me a lot like Sun's marketing campaign for Java or for the NC. I don't see a web-app replacing Office, even if it's powered by Google. Funny thing happened yesterday ... went to my local library to get some books, and the bookkeeper couldn't give me those books to me because their Internet connection went down, and their accounting was done with a web-app ... cursing and screaming in the process.
CapitalistCartr 17y ago
"The much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future . . . " Microsoft never did that. Author has to be a press release junkie to not know that.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Microsoft produces its very own reality distortion field. The author just spent too much time inside it and thinks it's true. I fail to remember any genuine innovation from them since, well, the Z-80 SoftCard for the Apple II.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    Then you don't read CS papers. He's not exaggerating research.microsoft.com.
    - angstrom 17y ago
      So true, few companies spend as much on R&D.
      - gtufano 17y ago
        Sun Microsystems was spending more than 10% of its revenues on R&D... that's not a recipe for sure success, I would say, if you're not able to produce something sellable from time to time. Ah, SUNW used also to have a "CTOs council"...
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      I read a lot of CS papers, but, again, we are talking about products, not proof-of-concept-level research. Microsoft's product line is not very impressive. Maybe it's because I am harder to impress.
      - tptacek 17y ago
        Stupid scientists with all their proofs of concepts. I want a better window manager RIGHT NOW.
maurycy 17y ago
Microsoft wouldn't be worth discussing, if not their role on the market. I mean, they were once innovative and now they're just plain stupid. Like many companies in the past, their success is slowly killing them. The real problem, though, is that Microsoft slows down the innovation. Every time I see my friends working on Windows, I see an operating system that nearly not changed since 1995. I know that there are nice fonts, widgets, and you have nice shadows here and there. All the basic concepts, though, are the same since 1995. There's basically no true innovation. See what Apple does. Ten years ago they had ugly, and basically unusable OS. Five ten years ago they were comparable. Now, they are the frontiers of the touch&the mobile revolution. Regular people still struggle with the same problems they struggled ten years ago. They still have to cope with utterly complicated filesystem, there's still too much voodoo, they still cannot find their programs easily, there's still mouse&keyboard, they still get unnecessary viruses, and the cloud integration is almost non-existing, so they have to use pendrives. Unfortunately, 90% of the new computers is sold with Windows, and it takes some unnecessary effort to find&learn better tools. We cannot expect regular people to give up their jobs in search of better IT solutions. They just want to get their job done, and it's OK. We, as a developers, like to speak how Microsoft slows down the web. I think, Microsoft slows down the whole society. The time wasted on their today's deprecated software is the whole society's loss.
- halo 17y ago
  I don't see how you can say with a straight face that's Windows has "nearly not changed" since 1995 while saying that Mac OS X has significantly changed since 2001.
  - maurycy 17y ago
    It depends how you understand the innovation. I don't say that Mac OS X has significantly changed since 2001. Please read carefully. I mean Apple as a whole. They do a lot of innovation. iPhone literally revolutionized the way we interact with mobile phones, and iPad is going to do the same with the standard computing model. For me, innovation is all about the regular people. I don't care about the buzzwords, and the top notch innovation, which is used by 0,0069% of the population. Concepts such as cloud computing are so old, it's pathetic they are not widely used. The same goes with iPhone/iPad pair. I know that spec-wide, there's nothing new about these tools. We, hackers, are so used to some concepts, we forget about our dads, girlfriends and co-workers from different departments, which are still in 1995. By the way, I think OS X changed a lot. Not significantly, but a lot. This is not a completely different paradigm but things like MobileMe (iCal, AddressBook in the cloud), Spotlight, iTunes are big steps.
PJNasty 17y ago
Don't forget about xbox360 - most US males age 7-18 wants/has one. It's an excellent Microsoft product that is often overlooked.
- Glimjaur 17y ago
  "Despite billions in investment, its Xbox line is still at best an equal contender in the game console business." He didn't forget the Xbox, but he did give the impression that he wouldn't consider it a success.
  - moron4hire 17y ago
    I think it's a very unfair impression. The Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii are not competitor products: the people who only have a Wii would have never bought an Xbox 360 in the first place. The Wii is to console games what Flash games are to PC games. Flash games didn't cut into the strategy, shooter, simulation, or role playing genre sales on the PC at all, because the people buying/playing them are not the same people who buy RTS/FPS/sim/RPG games. The Xbox line has been singlehandedly responsible for redefining the console gaming experience. Sony has been playing catchup ever since the 360's release.
    - grhino 17y ago
      There are lots of casual games for the Xbox 360, and they are making a clear push against Nintendo Wii with Project Natal. Also, Microsoft envisions Xbox as an entertainment center where families not only play games together, but watch TV and movies as well. Nintendo and Xbox have claimed different market segments but that's not because they weren't competing.
    - TheBranca18 17y ago
      Sony may have copied some of the more successful features of the Xbox 360, but I'm going to disagree that the Xbox line has redefined the console gaming experience. It's redefined each generation. This generation is about motion controls as the top seller of all time, the Nintendo DS, has motion controls alongside its console brother the Wii which also does. Sure the 360 has stream lined the online experience, however it has also introduced gamers to the closed era of consoles. You want a bigger HD? Sure just pay an absolute premium on it. Not to mention the 360's hardware problems which have been conveniently forgotten. The fact that you're comparing the Wii to flash games is absurd. It's fine not to like the Wii, I know I don't like it besides some drunken debauchery, but its impact on the industry is clear. Clear enough that Microsoft and Sony are both coming out with motion control products in the next year.
kulkarnic 17y ago
As someone who's worked at MSFT himself, the author certainly knows what he's talking about. However, there's a couple of factors one must reflect on: 1. It's a HUGE company (80k employees?). When you get to that size, it's hard to ensure all great ideas get to market. For a very long time in its history, the company was guided by a dominating spirit (computers on every desk) and a similar leader (Bill Gates). With both outmoded now, it's easy for business-groups to take local decisions, rather than follow the war-plan. 2. BUT, they've made HUGE investments in the future. Consider Microsoft Research. MSFT isn't going to be IBM anytime soon (huge company, but better known for sales folks than tech enterprise). Though they'll possibly not be as sexy as Apple, they'll definitely have the tech/IP if/when they want to utilize it.
- mrduncan 17y ago
  I think you hit on their biggest problem now. They have (mostly) succeeded in their original goal to get a computer on every desk. What's next though? It seems to me that they need a new grand plan for the company as a whole.
  - drats 17y ago
    Exactly right, and now a company like Google which makes almost all of its money off advertising can have a driving mantra like "to organize all the world's information" and utilize that network. Furthermore, Google can pump money into open source and new devices to bring people online - things that make the web more important to people's lives - and it will benefit their core business. Most of the world's population isn't even online, Google could even make a case to buy out ARM and licence it for free to other companies (inter-licencing with other processor companies might be difficult) just to expand the market to nearer to its full potential (6 billion and rising). Whereas Microsoft faces having to sell software products to different markets, like games and movies do, which basically means price-fixing and changing the product (be that through crippled "lite" versions of Windows for the developing world, or the price-fixing that is involved in region-encoded DVDs and regional sales of games).
  - endtime 17y ago
    Their current mission statement is a bunch of crap, something like "Enabling businesses to reach their full potential". But the other mission statement-y phrase that gets thrown around a lot is having an integrated experience between "three screens and the cloud". The three screens being TV (Xbox), computer, and cell phone. That gives a little direction, but as much as I'd like to see them be competitive in mobile, I'm not optimistic.
edw519 17y ago
In enterprise IT, we have 2 kinds of vendors, those we actively embrace and those who hold us hostage. The biggest fear in making any major IT purchase is not the price, the conversion, or the change in culture; it's the potential loss of options in how we run our own business. I've seen it over and over again: competitive pressure requires us to make a change in the way we run our business, but we can't. For all kinds of reasons. The license agreement kills any possible ROI. We don't have the needed IT support because so much of it is spent on keeping current. The systems don't talk to each other. The feature we need is still 18 months away. And probably most of all, the software is not as excellent as we need it to be (let's just leave it at that). Long gone are the days when you needed IBM's permission to fart. Guess who the biggest culprit is today? Just because you go with someone doesn't necessarily mean you like it. Almost every enterprise IT department I know would love an alternative to Microsoft. (And make no mistake about it, the enterprise is Microsoft's strength, much more so than the consumer.) Sure, pissing off your customers may pad today's bottom line. How do you think those customers will feel when your landscape changes and they have more choices? [Entered using ie7 on xp pro. I didn't have a choice.]
- lispm 17y ago
  I'm with you on that. I think it hurts the companies a lot. I did consulting for a company which was hostage of Windows NT for many years, old Internet Explorer's and so on. On TV and in print the company advertised themselves as young, innovative, communicative - if you actually worked there, much of that was really the opposite. If the employee gets greeted by a gray office, a gray desk, a gray PC and a gray user interface, then it will be clear that the company does not live the values it communicates to the outside. So the plain gray PC with the interface that is either gray or childish has found its home in the enterprise. The computer is like it is, because the reality in many enterprise is not 'human' at all and Microsoft contributed to it and made its profit from it (because the companies choose their equipment, not only the computer, based on price mostly).
- DenisM 17y ago
  So Microsoft is preventing you from buying copy of Windows 7 and installing Firefox? No? Your anger is misplaced then, should be angry with your IT department that doesn't let you upgrade form a 9 year old OS.
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rabidgnat 17y ago
All of the internal issues wouldn't be a huge problem if consumers wanted to buy their products, but they just don't know how to tell a compelling story of improving lives. Microsoft just launches products that they think will compete well in certain sectors, but they're not really thinking about what people need. The XBox is really the only counterexample from the whole past decade! "Hey, we have this thing that plays games, but you can also get updates and games online using our store. When's the last time you've been able to apply a bugfix to your console game?" Show me another Microsoft consumer product that really improves someone's life like the XBox did
- altano 17y ago
  Live Mesh (access my files anywhere), Exchange Online (affordable hosted exchange, my personal email, calendar, and contacts actually in sync, everywhere), Windows Home Server (my music and movies, available on any device in my house, trivial backup, etc). That's just what I've started using in the past year. These may not be as awesome individually as an Xbox or an iPhone (which I adore), but they've changed my day to day life.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    Do you have to endure Outlook to use Exchange Online? Willingly?
    - altano 17y ago
      Mail.app and the iPhone natively support Exchange if you're into that. iPhone support is great in my experience. I love Outlook 2010, which I'm beta testing. Mail.app was just too buggy for me and I like being able to have a shortcut key to file email and the rule support is just so much better in Outlook. I also prefer OWA to gmail, but don't use either.
      - rbanffy 17y ago
        > I also prefer OWA to gmail, but don't use either. Have you ever had to do a search?
grandinj 17y ago
By an accident of history and a lot of skill, Microsoft wangled themselves a virtual monopoly. Their skill at keeping that monopoly was second to none. But now that other markets are opening and their monopoly power is fading, we see the truth - they don't really have anything special beyond the likes of HP and IBM.
wglb 17y ago
While it is natural to attribute much of this to individual efforts within the company, and to lack of innovation, the result you see at Microsoft might be more of a natural consequence of a company of that size and success. Just a little thought experiment here: in the eyes of shareholders, which is more important at the end of each quarter -- innovation, or profit? So did the profitability of the Office division suffer from not engaging the tablet? (note that some think that the anticipated use of the iPad is more on the consumer end, and less on the creation end). And another little quiz: where does Simon Peyton Jones work and what does he do and what has he produced? To me, the underlying takeaway from this story, and I disagree a little with the slant the author of TFA has, is that execution can trump innovation. There have been articles referenced here on HN that talk about others stealing ideas (my favorite was one told by Steve Blank) but at the end of the day, the winner is the one who executes well. Isn't this the bottom-line message from the Microsoft story?
- gabrielroth 17y ago
  Just a little thought experiment here: in the eyes of shareholders, which is more important at the end of each quarter -- innovation, or profit? So did the profitability of the Office division suffer from not engaging the tablet? And yet shareholders are not, in fact, rewarding Microsoft for its consistent profitability: http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdet=1265317200000&chddm=492269&cmpto=NASDAQ:AAPL;NASDAQ:MSFT&cmptdms=0;0&q=aapl http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdet=126531720000... msft&ntsp=0
  - ajross 17y ago
    That's a link to Apple's chart, not MSFT. And MSFT has been tracking the overall market pretty closely over the past few years. It hasn't been tanking, nor booming. I'd say that's a validation of wglb's point, no? Investors don't care about anything but revenue, and revenue of a company this size tracks the economy, and thus it behaves pretty much the same as the market does.
    - gabrielroth 17y ago
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ShabbyDoo 17y ago
Why is it that Google does not seem to suffer from the same internal competition as this article claims present at MSFT? Perhaps Google is seen by its employees as the Land of Plenty while MSFT employees see the company as a zero-sum game? I'm not suggesting that either view is necessarily rational, but such perceptions could explain the behaviors.
- Groxx 17y ago
  My bet? Their 20% non-primary-project policy. It keeps their employees learning, testing, & innovating when other companies just drain them 100% of the time.
- JulianMorrison 17y ago
  Google are smart enough to let the new-and-chancy cannibalize the old-and-profitable, rather than vice versa.
  - silvestrov 17y ago
    And Apple allowed a new iPod nano to supersede the very successful iPod mini while the mini was the top of the game. To have sustained competitive advantage, you need to be able to say goodbye to the current stars.
  - paraschopra 17y ago
    Any examples on this? Or is is your hypothesis?
    - JulianMorrison 17y ago
      Wave versus gmail and docs. Chrome OS versus Android.
- bad_user 17y ago
  Google only has one channel that produces money right now ... AdSense. All their released products are complementary to it ... in fact, I don't know of a single product that isn't. So you can draw an analogy here ... Microsoft held to its cash-cows (Windows, Office) for too long, although they are showing incremental success in other areas ... like the XBox. Google may get to that point where AdSense will start making them irrelevant, and then they'll be in the same situation. All big companies face this. Even Apple ... if you'll look closer, they are far too focused on their iTunes Store. And when a cash-cow starts to become irrelevant, although it's still profitable, it's a tough decision to let go.
angelbob 17y ago
It sounds like Microsoft's internal competition is exactly the same kind of dysfunctional as its external competition.
- Groxx 17y ago
  Except they can't simply buy out their internal competition. If your business is consistently shooting itself where it most needs to grow, you're doing something so fundamentally wrong you deserve to die. This isn't anti-Microsoft fanboyism, this is natural selection at its core. I take this stance with any business that behaves like this to a large enough degree.
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    Except they can't simply buy out their internal competition. To put it in free-market terms, the boundaries of Microsoft got so large that they encompassed many antagonists, but insulated them from the mediating forces of the market. Reminds me of a situation at a previous company, where we were paying something like 1/4 mil yearly for a transatlantic E3 data line no one ever got to use. If one VP came up with a use for it, the other VPs would sabotage the project, so they could use it someday.
    - DLWormwood 17y ago
      > If one VP came up with a use for it, the other VPs would sabotage the project, so they could use it someday. Disgusting, and telling of how un-savvy those VPs were. Within an organization, it's not very difficult to put a traffic or QoS cap on one department if the other departments were afraid of being shut out. A company that has VPs that think their one department in deserving of exclusive control of a corporate resource deserves to fail just like MS is.
      - stcredzero 17y ago
        Disgusting, and telling of how un-savvy those VPs were. Yeah, and in the middle of layoffs too! We could've kept 2 more engineers employed with that money. (One department voted that everyone take a 10% pay cut instead of laying people off. And yes, this is while those resource shenanigans were going on!)
ilamont 17y ago
Just curious: Wouldn't these types of details be subject to an NDA or whatever agreement he signed when he left the company?
- nostrademons 17y ago
  Usually NDAs cover much more specific information than what he writes about here. They basically cover the company's intellectual property - the specific technical information that lets them do their job better than others. Stories, anecdotes, and cultural observations don't fall under this, unless those stories reveal the existence of projects/technologies that the company wants to keep secret. You can say "here's why I think my past employer was dysfunctional", and it won't win you any friends, but they can't come after you legally for that. The only thing here that looks like it may've been confidential at some point is the existence of ClearType or the tablet PC. But since both of those were launched - albeit late - they're public information anyway, and he's not telling you anything you couldn't read in the tech press.
- ytinas 17y ago
  Companies tend to make NDAs that are much more restrictive than what they could actually enforce.
b-man 17y ago
No one in his right mind should wish Microsoft failure. I've met quite a few people, who in my opinion had quite sane and intelligent minds, who wished for MS failure, for a lot of well based reasons.
- Groxx 17y ago
  It would hurt for a while, but I for one would welcome Microsoft's demise. Linux is much nicer to program for, and wouldn't take too long to convert the majority of programmers over to it, and thus most programs. Plus, it's not like there aren't any other options, several of them quite good. The market would adjust to fill the gap.
  - ytinas 17y ago
    Wait, what? I would be just as happy as the next guy to see MS go down in flames, but "Linux is much nicer to program for"? In what way exactly? GUI? Nope, the opposite. [1] The server? Not so much. I mean, if you were actually writing to sockets and things then easy use of epoll, etc. might be an issue but in business you're mostly doing REST or web services or something in which case programming the server on Windows is much easier. The environment provides so much for you here. Scripting? Maybe, but who cares? Right now I really find Visual Studio the best IDE. I would like to see that change (and VS has lots of problems) but it's currently head and shoulders above the rest. [1] Further, the Linux GUI has to be one of the worst cases of optimizing for the nearly nonexistent use case ever. If you look at all users of computers today how many of them need X? A number so small as to be statistically irrelevant.
  - blub 17y ago
    >Linux is much nicer to program for In my experience, this is largely a myth promoted by Linux hackers. > and wouldn't take too long to convert the majority of programmers over to it This on the other hand... is just wishful thinking.
Goronmon 17y ago
Despite billions in investment, its Xbox line is still at best an equal contender in the game console business. I think he doesn't give Microsoft enough credit on this. They entered a game console market with two entrenched players, where one was clearly dominating the other. People gave Microsoft little to no chance of succeeding and yet, on there second iteration were able to put themselves on equal ground to Sony and Nintendo. And that is with producing one of the most unreliable consoles ever made.
- mckilljoy 17y ago
  I agree, even that is an impressive accomplishment. But after nearly 10 years, it would be nice to see them actually profit on the endeavor.
  - wayne 17y ago
    Entertainment and Devices made $375 million last quarter: http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/192686.asp http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/192686.asp
    - mckilljoy 17y ago
      Consider the life-time revenue and cost of the Xbox project starting before 2001. And don't forget that $1 billion written off for RRoD warranty repairs. Over this last decade, Xbox is still in a pretty deep hole, and even optimistic earnings mean it will take awhile before breaking even.
    - Calamitous 17y ago
      "made" $375 million? Is that profit or revenue? One is very good, the other... not so much without a clear view of expenses.
      - Encosia 17y ago
        Microsoft's entertainment group's revenue was 2.9 billion.
davepeck 17y ago
I left MSFT a couple years ago; my experience was in line with the author's. Microsoft was a strange, fantastic, ultimately frustrating place to work. My blog post on it: http://davepeck.org/2008/12/12/meditations-on-microsoft/ http://davepeck.org/2008/12/12/meditations-on-microsoft/
- city41 17y ago
  My last day with Microsoft is on Tuesday. I also feel the same way. I think working at MS in the 80s/early 90s would have been exciting, fresh and challenging (not to mention extremely lucrative). But now? "Frustration" is the best word to describe it :-/
  - davepeck 17y ago
    In the past two years, some of the most brilliant engineers I've ever had the privilege of working with have decided to throw in the towel at MSFT. It is not a good sign. I am ramping up my sales of MSFT stock, for sure. There is still religious fervor inside the company. While at MSFT I worked with a handful of "true believers." Unfortunately, their enthusiasm and faith has yet to translate into interesting new products... Anyway, if you're in the Seattle area, get in touch. The entrepreneurial community here very much rocks.
    - InclinedPlane 17y ago
      That was my experience as well (seeing many brilliant engineers leaving after deciding they've had enough of being let down by MS). Lack of other people on my team that I felt I could look up to and that I enjoyed working with was a big factor in why I left. I suspect the brain drain from MS will only accelerate over time though there are still a lot of truly excellent engineers working there. Though I only worked at MS for a few years I suspect that the current working environment, culture, bureaucracy etc. problems have been building up for a very long time but were offset by remaining enthusiasm (read: kool aid aftereffects) and the enormous financial incentives from stock options. Now that the MSFT stock price has been flat for nearly a decade and it's increasingly easy to find tech jobs with comparable salaries a lot of the luster of working at MS has evaporated.
Kilimanjaro 17y ago
"I am going to fucking kill Google" it's been their mantra for the last ten years (since ballmer got the CEO spot). They don't innovate, they just embrace and derail, extend and delay, patent and extinguish, copy and destroy. Great company solely focused on money, at the cost of fucking up everybody else, and killing progress for their own benefit, when the rest of the world is focused on progress, and money. Ballmer must go, and that destructive mentality must change.
aresant 17y ago
Google rolls lots of stuff out in "BETA" to judge how users react which gives them feedback and lets them measure engagement. MSFT does not do as good of a job in letting users have-at these projects, they've got such a huge array of interesting research projects underway (a whole new OS Kernel for one http://www.barrelfish.org/ http://www.barrelfish.org/) that they do not seem to market whatsoever. . .
marcusestes 17y ago
Perfect byline: Dick Brass.
aaronbrethorst 17y ago
(my background: I worked at MS from 2003-2007 until I jumped ship to join a 20 person startup.) The answer is simple: Microsoft needs its own Steve Jobs, not a Steve Ballmer. Without an absolute tyrant with a keen sense of where the market is, and where it's going at the helm, Microsoft will continue to flounder. And with good reason, there are too many internal fiefdoms, and too many internal rivalries. To be honest, I think MS would've been very well served to have been broken up at the end of the 90s. If the company had been divided into three separate firms, like Office Inc., Windows Inc. and Everything Else Inc., I think things would've turned out very differently for those firms over the past ten years: fewer boondoggle projects that only have a prayer of making a profit in the distant future, less of a whackjob 'better together' mentality that hamstrings Microsoft developers into using inadequate internal solutions or forces them to bolt useless features onto their products, and so on. Sigh, sorry. I really think Microsoft is capable of so much more than they've been able to do for years, and it frustrates me to see so much talent go to waste.
- timothychung 17y ago
  My opinion is that Steve Jobs won't survive in MS due to their culture. Their take on innovation is to be a late market joiner. They win because they do things better with their resources. MS has an innovation model. It's just that it is a very non-innovative innovation model.
  - aaronbrethorst 17y ago
    The article we're all commenting on talks about Microsoft's ill-fated Tablet computer, which premiered almost a decade before the iPad. Microsoft does many things which could be considered 'innovative,' except that they never achieve widespread market acceptance. Also, when was the last time Microsoft won with the "non-innovative innovation model" you refer to? Sharepoint? SQL Server? I can't think of any instance where this has worked in years.
    - joe_the_user 17y ago
      Yes, even though their successes with that model were in the OS, browser and office wars decades ago, they made billions on those success this year.
csmeder 17y ago
"At worst, you can say it’s a highly repentant, largely accidental monopolist." Incorrect, at worst it's a monopolist. ` "It employs thousands of the smartest, most capable engineers in the world. More than any other firm, it made using computers both ubiquitous and affordable. Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office applications suite still utterly rule their markets." By monopoly... ` "over $100 billion in the past 10 years alone and help sustain the economies of Seattle, Washington State and the nation as a whole." So we are supposed to support monopolies if they support Seattle? and apparently "the nation as a whole." You don't support the economy by monopolizing it. ` "Its founder, Bill Gates, is not only the most generous philanthropist in history, but has also inspired thousands of his employees to give generously themselves. No one in his right mind should wish Microsoft failure." This is philanthropy by force, he is a Robin Hood, steal from the rich USA and give to the poorer countries. Out of all the statements this is the one I find least fault with. Fine steal from me to give to the poor. But do it straight up. Don't also hinder technological advancement while your stealing from me. Just take my money and leave technology out of it.
voxcogitatio 17y ago
To me the really interesting question is how Microsoft ever got to be a monopoly in the first place, with the kind of products they've been making. What made windows and office succeed in the first place? Can you really coast that far just on malignant business practices?
- protomyth 17y ago
  yep, you can coast this far. corporate inertia is an amazing thing, and revolutions don't come along that often. I think the coming revolution in mobile devices in companies will be a break the current PC inertia and might get some new players in the door.
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  This article lays out a big problem: internally the competition is won not on technical or business merit but on politics, abuse of power, gameplaying and generally dodgy shenanigans. He brushes aside their monopolies which were created because externally the competition was defeated not on technical or business merit but on politics, abuse of power, gameplaying and generally dodgy shenanigans. Live by the sword, die by the irony.
mckilljoy 17y ago
Microsoft's lack innovation is a result of a couple of factors I can think of: -Leaders without vision: Gates wasn't perfect, but he at least put forward the vision of a PC in every house. Ballmer is more of a cheerleader than a visionary, and "three screens and a cloud" isn't a vision of the future so much as commentary on the present. -Hubris: Making billions of dollars is an easy way to justify that you are "doing the right thing", even 15 years later. -Customers focused: This is a little more subtle, but I think a culture making products (Windows, Office) for "Customers" is different than a culture making products (Gmail, Search) for "Users". For the former, you could pessimistically say that your main objective is to make a product you can convince someone to buy. Whether or not the customer uses the product is somewhat incidental. Each subsequent version must have enough features crammed into it to justify the customer paying again, even if they aren't useful. In contrast, focusing on the user provides more motivation to keep the product relevant, make the product useful, and so on. If it isn't, the users can simply stop using it. -Middle-child syndrome: If your team isn't making $1+billion, no one cares. It is hard to have the proper resources to innovate and be creative if most of your management chain doesn't know your project exists.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  Another thing is that "embrace and extend" tends to lead to monolithic, dead-end products. You can only cram so many useful features into a closed desktop application before in becomes a nightmare. This prevents you from doing the sane thing - producing a bunch of small modular tools. A lot of the good coming out of the web is just a product of not having to start with context of an application competing with other existing applications.
- cubicle67 17y ago
  thanks... Your description of Ballmer as a cheerleader has now given me a mental image I'd rather not have :/
joe_the_user 17y ago
IBM embraced open source after they lost their stranglehold on corporate IT. They seem to have benefited tremendously from this. If MS could do the same, they might have a brighter post-monopoly future.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  Part of the reason MS isn't growing is that they have colonized the desktop to such an extent that innovators look elsewhere for opportunities. If MS could successfully open source windows, it might create an explosion of innovation on the desktop (or probably in integrating the desktop and the web but still). Of course, I doubt MS could handle losing the license fees at this point.
- actf 17y ago
  Based on what? It sure didn't work out for Sun, what makes you think it'll work for Microsoft? It's no secret that part of the reason Microsoft makes so much money is because of vendor lockin. Embracing open source would make it easier for users to switch vendors - and I really don't see that as beneficial to Microsoft.
elblanco 17y ago
"Another example: When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. " This is easily solved with a few strategic firings.
djcapelis 17y ago
"the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers" Someone mistook the problem as a benefit.
raheemm 17y ago
Seems to me that MS is struggling with bureaucracy, which is made worse by product-lines that are super-complexified by a need to be backwards, sideways and upside-down compatible with the rest of the universe. Factor in workplace politics and the job of bringing innovation to market is harder than hell.
digamber_kamat 17y ago
I think Microsoft is playing its cards very well. They have a very firm foot in ground through their office and OS business. And they have presence almost everywhere from phones to web. They can simply acquire a small time company like Twitter to fill up the Gaps.

342 points by unignorant 17y ago

So, they managed to destroy a competitor producing a tablet computer, only to fail to produce their promised product because of infighting? (See Jerry Kaplan's book, "Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure" for the depressing story.) How exactly is this defensible behaviour?

rbanffy 17y ago
Apparently, a lot of unethical behaviors feel defensible when one works at Microsoft. I think it may have something with the height where they place the bar.
maurycy 17y ago
It's defensible on the personal level. People from other cubicles felt threatened, and they had to defend themselves. ;-)
- bensummers 17y ago
  I meant the behaviour of saying to the market "we're making something which will be far better than this shipping product" so loudly that no one bought the shipping product. The fact that their internal politics made it impossible to release something better in the first place is just adding insult to injury. Read the book, it's a good story.

pragmatic 17y ago

Hackers take note. The dominant OS for Business (on desktops) is Windows. This can't change (soon), too many companies are locked into software that requires it (either built in house or purchased). That's changing, more applications are going web based. But there are always those little niche apps that hang out in purchasing or accounting that require windows and aren't going away soon. Most companies can't function without Excel. Go to the accounting department. Even if they have an "accounting system" ask the people working their what the use (or watch them). They probably have Excel open all day. Excel is hard to do in a browser. Every company in the world would love to be MSFT. High profits and a locked in customer base.

pragmatic 17y ago
OR: "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."
- qjz 17y ago
  Note that the guy who said that is dead.
  - shrikant 17y ago
    He wasn't when he said it.
    - ericd 17y ago
      Neither is MSFT.
simon_ 17y ago
Even complete lock-in might not work for them forever. The entire US financial industry uses Windows desktops and will for the foreseeable future, but adoption of Vista, Windows 7, and Office 2007 has been (anecdotally) pretty negligible. I imagine that their future profits are in trouble if they can't innovate enough for users to even upgrade their products.
- bad_user 17y ago
  > adoption of Vista, Windows 7, and Office 2007 has been (anecdotally) pretty negligible. That's because Win XP and Office 2003 are good enough. That also spells trouble for their would-be competitors. If someone doesn't upgrade his XP box to Windows 7, do you think it's more likely he'll buy a Mac instead? I don't think so. And while web-apps are all the rage these days ... it sounds to me a lot like Sun's marketing campaign for Java or for the NC. I don't see a web-app replacing Office, even if it's powered by Google. Funny thing happened yesterday ... went to my local library to get some books, and the bookkeeper couldn't give me those books to me because their Internet connection went down, and their accounting was done with a web-app ... cursing and screaming in the process.

CapitalistCartr 17y ago

"The much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future . . . " Microsoft never did that. Author has to be a press release junkie to not know that.

rbanffy 17y ago
Microsoft produces its very own reality distortion field. The author just spent too much time inside it and thinks it's true. I fail to remember any genuine innovation from them since, well, the Z-80 SoftCard for the Apple II.
- tptacek 17y ago
  Then you don't read CS papers. He's not exaggerating research.microsoft.com.
  - angstrom 17y ago
    So true, few companies spend as much on R&D.
    - gtufano 17y ago
      Sun Microsystems was spending more than 10% of its revenues on R&D... that's not a recipe for sure success, I would say, if you're not able to produce something sellable from time to time. Ah, SUNW used also to have a "CTOs council"...
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    I read a lot of CS papers, but, again, we are talking about products, not proof-of-concept-level research. Microsoft's product line is not very impressive. Maybe it's because I am harder to impress.
    - tptacek 17y ago
      Stupid scientists with all their proofs of concepts. I want a better window manager RIGHT NOW.

maurycy 17y ago

Microsoft wouldn't be worth discussing, if not their role on the market. I mean, they were once innovative and now they're just plain stupid. Like many companies in the past, their success is slowly killing them. The real problem, though, is that Microsoft slows down the innovation. Every time I see my friends working on Windows, I see an operating system that nearly not changed since 1995. I know that there are nice fonts, widgets, and you have nice shadows here and there. All the basic concepts, though, are the same since 1995. There's basically no true innovation. See what Apple does. Ten years ago they had ugly, and basically unusable OS. Five ten years ago they were comparable. Now, they are the frontiers of the touch&the mobile revolution. Regular people still struggle with the same problems they struggled ten years ago. They still have to cope with utterly complicated filesystem, there's still too much voodoo, they still cannot find their programs easily, there's still mouse&keyboard, they still get unnecessary viruses, and the cloud integration is almost non-existing, so they have to use pendrives. Unfortunately, 90% of the new computers is sold with Windows, and it takes some unnecessary effort to find&learn better tools. We cannot expect regular people to give up their jobs in search of better IT solutions. They just want to get their job done, and it's OK. We, as a developers, like to speak how Microsoft slows down the web. I think, Microsoft slows down the whole society. The time wasted on their today's deprecated software is the whole society's loss.

halo 17y ago
I don't see how you can say with a straight face that's Windows has "nearly not changed" since 1995 while saying that Mac OS X has significantly changed since 2001.
- maurycy 17y ago
  It depends how you understand the innovation. I don't say that Mac OS X has significantly changed since 2001. Please read carefully. I mean Apple as a whole. They do a lot of innovation. iPhone literally revolutionized the way we interact with mobile phones, and iPad is going to do the same with the standard computing model. For me, innovation is all about the regular people. I don't care about the buzzwords, and the top notch innovation, which is used by 0,0069% of the population. Concepts such as cloud computing are so old, it's pathetic they are not widely used. The same goes with iPhone/iPad pair. I know that spec-wide, there's nothing new about these tools. We, hackers, are so used to some concepts, we forget about our dads, girlfriends and co-workers from different departments, which are still in 1995. By the way, I think OS X changed a lot. Not significantly, but a lot. This is not a completely different paradigm but things like MobileMe (iCal, AddressBook in the cloud), Spotlight, iTunes are big steps.

PJNasty 17y ago

Don't forget about xbox360 - most US males age 7-18 wants/has one. It's an excellent Microsoft product that is often overlooked.

Glimjaur 17y ago
"Despite billions in investment, its Xbox line is still at best an equal contender in the game console business." He didn't forget the Xbox, but he did give the impression that he wouldn't consider it a success.
- moron4hire 17y ago
  I think it's a very unfair impression. The Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii are not competitor products: the people who only have a Wii would have never bought an Xbox 360 in the first place. The Wii is to console games what Flash games are to PC games. Flash games didn't cut into the strategy, shooter, simulation, or role playing genre sales on the PC at all, because the people buying/playing them are not the same people who buy RTS/FPS/sim/RPG games. The Xbox line has been singlehandedly responsible for redefining the console gaming experience. Sony has been playing catchup ever since the 360's release.
  - grhino 17y ago
    There are lots of casual games for the Xbox 360, and they are making a clear push against Nintendo Wii with Project Natal. Also, Microsoft envisions Xbox as an entertainment center where families not only play games together, but watch TV and movies as well. Nintendo and Xbox have claimed different market segments but that's not because they weren't competing.
  - TheBranca18 17y ago
    Sony may have copied some of the more successful features of the Xbox 360, but I'm going to disagree that the Xbox line has redefined the console gaming experience. It's redefined each generation. This generation is about motion controls as the top seller of all time, the Nintendo DS, has motion controls alongside its console brother the Wii which also does. Sure the 360 has stream lined the online experience, however it has also introduced gamers to the closed era of consoles. You want a bigger HD? Sure just pay an absolute premium on it. Not to mention the 360's hardware problems which have been conveniently forgotten. The fact that you're comparing the Wii to flash games is absurd. It's fine not to like the Wii, I know I don't like it besides some drunken debauchery, but its impact on the industry is clear. Clear enough that Microsoft and Sony are both coming out with motion control products in the next year.

kulkarnic 17y ago

As someone who's worked at MSFT himself, the author certainly knows what he's talking about. However, there's a couple of factors one must reflect on: 1. It's a HUGE company (80k employees?). When you get to that size, it's hard to ensure all great ideas get to market. For a very long time in its history, the company was guided by a dominating spirit (computers on every desk) and a similar leader (Bill Gates). With both outmoded now, it's easy for business-groups to take local decisions, rather than follow the war-plan. 2. BUT, they've made HUGE investments in the future. Consider Microsoft Research. MSFT isn't going to be IBM anytime soon (huge company, but better known for sales folks than tech enterprise). Though they'll possibly not be as sexy as Apple, they'll definitely have the tech/IP if/when they want to utilize it.

mrduncan 17y ago
I think you hit on their biggest problem now. They have (mostly) succeeded in their original goal to get a computer on every desk. What's next though? It seems to me that they need a new grand plan for the company as a whole.
- drats 17y ago
  Exactly right, and now a company like Google which makes almost all of its money off advertising can have a driving mantra like "to organize all the world's information" and utilize that network. Furthermore, Google can pump money into open source and new devices to bring people online - things that make the web more important to people's lives - and it will benefit their core business. Most of the world's population isn't even online, Google could even make a case to buy out ARM and licence it for free to other companies (inter-licencing with other processor companies might be difficult) just to expand the market to nearer to its full potential (6 billion and rising). Whereas Microsoft faces having to sell software products to different markets, like games and movies do, which basically means price-fixing and changing the product (be that through crippled "lite" versions of Windows for the developing world, or the price-fixing that is involved in region-encoded DVDs and regional sales of games).
- endtime 17y ago
  Their current mission statement is a bunch of crap, something like "Enabling businesses to reach their full potential". But the other mission statement-y phrase that gets thrown around a lot is having an integrated experience between "three screens and the cloud". The three screens being TV (Xbox), computer, and cell phone. That gives a little direction, but as much as I'd like to see them be competitive in mobile, I'm not optimistic.

edw519 17y ago

In enterprise IT, we have 2 kinds of vendors, those we actively embrace and those who hold us hostage. The biggest fear in making any major IT purchase is not the price, the conversion, or the change in culture; it's the potential loss of options in how we run our own business. I've seen it over and over again: competitive pressure requires us to make a change in the way we run our business, but we can't. For all kinds of reasons. The license agreement kills any possible ROI. We don't have the needed IT support because so much of it is spent on keeping current. The systems don't talk to each other. The feature we need is still 18 months away. And probably most of all, the software is not as excellent as we need it to be (let's just leave it at that). Long gone are the days when you needed IBM's permission to fart. Guess who the biggest culprit is today? Just because you go with someone doesn't necessarily mean you like it. Almost every enterprise IT department I know would love an alternative to Microsoft. (And make no mistake about it, the enterprise is Microsoft's strength, much more so than the consumer.) Sure, pissing off your customers may pad today's bottom line. How do you think those customers will feel when your landscape changes and they have more choices? [Entered using ie7 on xp pro. I didn't have a choice.]

lispm 17y ago
I'm with you on that. I think it hurts the companies a lot. I did consulting for a company which was hostage of Windows NT for many years, old Internet Explorer's and so on. On TV and in print the company advertised themselves as young, innovative, communicative - if you actually worked there, much of that was really the opposite. If the employee gets greeted by a gray office, a gray desk, a gray PC and a gray user interface, then it will be clear that the company does not live the values it communicates to the outside. So the plain gray PC with the interface that is either gray or childish has found its home in the enterprise. The computer is like it is, because the reality in many enterprise is not 'human' at all and Microsoft contributed to it and made its profit from it (because the companies choose their equipment, not only the computer, based on price mostly).
DenisM 17y ago
So Microsoft is preventing you from buying copy of Windows 7 and installing Firefox? No? Your anger is misplaced then, should be angry with your IT department that doesn't let you upgrade form a 9 year old OS.

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rabidgnat 17y ago

All of the internal issues wouldn't be a huge problem if consumers wanted to buy their products, but they just don't know how to tell a compelling story of improving lives. Microsoft just launches products that they think will compete well in certain sectors, but they're not really thinking about what people need. The XBox is really the only counterexample from the whole past decade! "Hey, we have this thing that plays games, but you can also get updates and games online using our store. When's the last time you've been able to apply a bugfix to your console game?" Show me another Microsoft consumer product that really improves someone's life like the XBox did

altano 17y ago
Live Mesh (access my files anywhere), Exchange Online (affordable hosted exchange, my personal email, calendar, and contacts actually in sync, everywhere), Windows Home Server (my music and movies, available on any device in my house, trivial backup, etc). That's just what I've started using in the past year. These may not be as awesome individually as an Xbox or an iPhone (which I adore), but they've changed my day to day life.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  Do you have to endure Outlook to use Exchange Online? Willingly?
  - altano 17y ago
    Mail.app and the iPhone natively support Exchange if you're into that. iPhone support is great in my experience. I love Outlook 2010, which I'm beta testing. Mail.app was just too buggy for me and I like being able to have a shortcut key to file email and the rule support is just so much better in Outlook. I also prefer OWA to gmail, but don't use either.
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      > I also prefer OWA to gmail, but don't use either. Have you ever had to do a search?

grandinj 17y ago

By an accident of history and a lot of skill, Microsoft wangled themselves a virtual monopoly. Their skill at keeping that monopoly was second to none. But now that other markets are opening and their monopoly power is fading, we see the truth - they don't really have anything special beyond the likes of HP and IBM.

wglb 17y ago

While it is natural to attribute much of this to individual efforts within the company, and to lack of innovation, the result you see at Microsoft might be more of a natural consequence of a company of that size and success. Just a little thought experiment here: in the eyes of shareholders, which is more important at the end of each quarter -- innovation, or profit? So did the profitability of the Office division suffer from not engaging the tablet? (note that some think that the anticipated use of the iPad is more on the consumer end, and less on the creation end). And another little quiz: where does Simon Peyton Jones work and what does he do and what has he produced? To me, the underlying takeaway from this story, and I disagree a little with the slant the author of TFA has, is that execution can trump innovation. There have been articles referenced here on HN that talk about others stealing ideas (my favorite was one told by Steve Blank) but at the end of the day, the winner is the one who executes well. Isn't this the bottom-line message from the Microsoft story?

gabrielroth 17y ago
Just a little thought experiment here: in the eyes of shareholders, which is more important at the end of each quarter -- innovation, or profit? So did the profitability of the Office division suffer from not engaging the tablet? And yet shareholders are not, in fact, rewarding Microsoft for its consistent profitability: http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdet=1265317200000&chddm=492269&cmpto=NASDAQ:AAPL;NASDAQ:MSFT&cmptdms=0;0&q=aapl http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdet=126531720000... msft&ntsp=0
- ajross 17y ago
  That's a link to Apple's chart, not MSFT. And MSFT has been tracking the overall market pretty closely over the past few years. It hasn't been tanking, nor booming. I'd say that's a validation of wglb's point, no? Investors don't care about anything but revenue, and revenue of a company this size tracks the economy, and thus it behaves pretty much the same as the market does.
  - gabrielroth 17y ago

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ShabbyDoo 17y ago

Why is it that Google does not seem to suffer from the same internal competition as this article claims present at MSFT? Perhaps Google is seen by its employees as the Land of Plenty while MSFT employees see the company as a zero-sum game? I'm not suggesting that either view is necessarily rational, but such perceptions could explain the behaviors.

Groxx 17y ago
My bet? Their 20% non-primary-project policy. It keeps their employees learning, testing, & innovating when other companies just drain them 100% of the time.
JulianMorrison 17y ago
Google are smart enough to let the new-and-chancy cannibalize the old-and-profitable, rather than vice versa.
- silvestrov 17y ago
  And Apple allowed a new iPod nano to supersede the very successful iPod mini while the mini was the top of the game. To have sustained competitive advantage, you need to be able to say goodbye to the current stars.
- paraschopra 17y ago
  Any examples on this? Or is is your hypothesis?
  - JulianMorrison 17y ago
    Wave versus gmail and docs. Chrome OS versus Android.
bad_user 17y ago
Google only has one channel that produces money right now ... AdSense. All their released products are complementary to it ... in fact, I don't know of a single product that isn't. So you can draw an analogy here ... Microsoft held to its cash-cows (Windows, Office) for too long, although they are showing incremental success in other areas ... like the XBox. Google may get to that point where AdSense will start making them irrelevant, and then they'll be in the same situation. All big companies face this. Even Apple ... if you'll look closer, they are far too focused on their iTunes Store. And when a cash-cow starts to become irrelevant, although it's still profitable, it's a tough decision to let go.

angelbob 17y ago

It sounds like Microsoft's internal competition is exactly the same kind of dysfunctional as its external competition.

Groxx 17y ago
Except they can't simply buy out their internal competition. If your business is consistently shooting itself where it most needs to grow, you're doing something so fundamentally wrong you deserve to die. This isn't anti-Microsoft fanboyism, this is natural selection at its core. I take this stance with any business that behaves like this to a large enough degree.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Except they can't simply buy out their internal competition. To put it in free-market terms, the boundaries of Microsoft got so large that they encompassed many antagonists, but insulated them from the mediating forces of the market. Reminds me of a situation at a previous company, where we were paying something like 1/4 mil yearly for a transatlantic E3 data line no one ever got to use. If one VP came up with a use for it, the other VPs would sabotage the project, so they could use it someday.
  - DLWormwood 17y ago
    > If one VP came up with a use for it, the other VPs would sabotage the project, so they could use it someday. Disgusting, and telling of how un-savvy those VPs were. Within an organization, it's not very difficult to put a traffic or QoS cap on one department if the other departments were afraid of being shut out. A company that has VPs that think their one department in deserving of exclusive control of a corporate resource deserves to fail just like MS is.
    - stcredzero 17y ago
      Disgusting, and telling of how un-savvy those VPs were. Yeah, and in the middle of layoffs too! We could've kept 2 more engineers employed with that money. (One department voted that everyone take a 10% pay cut instead of laying people off. And yes, this is while those resource shenanigans were going on!)

ilamont 17y ago

Just curious: Wouldn't these types of details be subject to an NDA or whatever agreement he signed when he left the company?

nostrademons 17y ago
Usually NDAs cover much more specific information than what he writes about here. They basically cover the company's intellectual property - the specific technical information that lets them do their job better than others. Stories, anecdotes, and cultural observations don't fall under this, unless those stories reveal the existence of projects/technologies that the company wants to keep secret. You can say "here's why I think my past employer was dysfunctional", and it won't win you any friends, but they can't come after you legally for that. The only thing here that looks like it may've been confidential at some point is the existence of ClearType or the tablet PC. But since both of those were launched - albeit late - they're public information anyway, and he's not telling you anything you couldn't read in the tech press.
ytinas 17y ago
Companies tend to make NDAs that are much more restrictive than what they could actually enforce.

b-man 17y ago

No one in his right mind should wish Microsoft failure. I've met quite a few people, who in my opinion had quite sane and intelligent minds, who wished for MS failure, for a lot of well based reasons.

Groxx 17y ago
It would hurt for a while, but I for one would welcome Microsoft's demise. Linux is much nicer to program for, and wouldn't take too long to convert the majority of programmers over to it, and thus most programs. Plus, it's not like there aren't any other options, several of them quite good. The market would adjust to fill the gap.
- ytinas 17y ago
  Wait, what? I would be just as happy as the next guy to see MS go down in flames, but "Linux is much nicer to program for"? In what way exactly? GUI? Nope, the opposite. [1] The server? Not so much. I mean, if you were actually writing to sockets and things then easy use of epoll, etc. might be an issue but in business you're mostly doing REST or web services or something in which case programming the server on Windows is much easier. The environment provides so much for you here. Scripting? Maybe, but who cares? Right now I really find Visual Studio the best IDE. I would like to see that change (and VS has lots of problems) but it's currently head and shoulders above the rest. [1] Further, the Linux GUI has to be one of the worst cases of optimizing for the nearly nonexistent use case ever. If you look at all users of computers today how many of them need X? A number so small as to be statistically irrelevant.
- blub 17y ago
  >Linux is much nicer to program for In my experience, this is largely a myth promoted by Linux hackers. > and wouldn't take too long to convert the majority of programmers over to it This on the other hand... is just wishful thinking.

Goronmon 17y ago

Despite billions in investment, its Xbox line is still at best an equal contender in the game console business. I think he doesn't give Microsoft enough credit on this. They entered a game console market with two entrenched players, where one was clearly dominating the other. People gave Microsoft little to no chance of succeeding and yet, on there second iteration were able to put themselves on equal ground to Sony and Nintendo. And that is with producing one of the most unreliable consoles ever made.

mckilljoy 17y ago
I agree, even that is an impressive accomplishment. But after nearly 10 years, it would be nice to see them actually profit on the endeavor.
- wayne 17y ago
  Entertainment and Devices made $375 million last quarter: http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/192686.asp http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/192686.asp
  - mckilljoy 17y ago
    Consider the life-time revenue and cost of the Xbox project starting before 2001. And don't forget that $1 billion written off for RRoD warranty repairs. Over this last decade, Xbox is still in a pretty deep hole, and even optimistic earnings mean it will take awhile before breaking even.
  - Calamitous 17y ago
    "made" $375 million? Is that profit or revenue? One is very good, the other... not so much without a clear view of expenses.
    - Encosia 17y ago
      Microsoft's entertainment group's revenue was 2.9 billion.

davepeck 17y ago

I left MSFT a couple years ago; my experience was in line with the author's. Microsoft was a strange, fantastic, ultimately frustrating place to work. My blog post on it: http://davepeck.org/2008/12/12/meditations-on-microsoft/ http://davepeck.org/2008/12/12/meditations-on-microsoft/

city41 17y ago
My last day with Microsoft is on Tuesday. I also feel the same way. I think working at MS in the 80s/early 90s would have been exciting, fresh and challenging (not to mention extremely lucrative). But now? "Frustration" is the best word to describe it :-/
- davepeck 17y ago
  In the past two years, some of the most brilliant engineers I've ever had the privilege of working with have decided to throw in the towel at MSFT. It is not a good sign. I am ramping up my sales of MSFT stock, for sure. There is still religious fervor inside the company. While at MSFT I worked with a handful of "true believers." Unfortunately, their enthusiasm and faith has yet to translate into interesting new products... Anyway, if you're in the Seattle area, get in touch. The entrepreneurial community here very much rocks.
  - InclinedPlane 17y ago
    That was my experience as well (seeing many brilliant engineers leaving after deciding they've had enough of being let down by MS). Lack of other people on my team that I felt I could look up to and that I enjoyed working with was a big factor in why I left. I suspect the brain drain from MS will only accelerate over time though there are still a lot of truly excellent engineers working there. Though I only worked at MS for a few years I suspect that the current working environment, culture, bureaucracy etc. problems have been building up for a very long time but were offset by remaining enthusiasm (read: kool aid aftereffects) and the enormous financial incentives from stock options. Now that the MSFT stock price has been flat for nearly a decade and it's increasingly easy to find tech jobs with comparable salaries a lot of the luster of working at MS has evaporated.

Kilimanjaro 17y ago

"I am going to fucking kill Google" it's been their mantra for the last ten years (since ballmer got the CEO spot). They don't innovate, they just embrace and derail, extend and delay, patent and extinguish, copy and destroy. Great company solely focused on money, at the cost of fucking up everybody else, and killing progress for their own benefit, when the rest of the world is focused on progress, and money. Ballmer must go, and that destructive mentality must change.

aresant 17y ago

Google rolls lots of stuff out in "BETA" to judge how users react which gives them feedback and lets them measure engagement. MSFT does not do as good of a job in letting users have-at these projects, they've got such a huge array of interesting research projects underway (a whole new OS Kernel for one http://www.barrelfish.org/ http://www.barrelfish.org/) that they do not seem to market whatsoever. . .

marcusestes 17y ago

Perfect byline: Dick Brass.

aaronbrethorst 17y ago

(my background: I worked at MS from 2003-2007 until I jumped ship to join a 20 person startup.) The answer is simple: Microsoft needs its own Steve Jobs, not a Steve Ballmer. Without an absolute tyrant with a keen sense of where the market is, and where it's going at the helm, Microsoft will continue to flounder. And with good reason, there are too many internal fiefdoms, and too many internal rivalries. To be honest, I think MS would've been very well served to have been broken up at the end of the 90s. If the company had been divided into three separate firms, like Office Inc., Windows Inc. and Everything Else Inc., I think things would've turned out very differently for those firms over the past ten years: fewer boondoggle projects that only have a prayer of making a profit in the distant future, less of a whackjob 'better together' mentality that hamstrings Microsoft developers into using inadequate internal solutions or forces them to bolt useless features onto their products, and so on. Sigh, sorry. I really think Microsoft is capable of so much more than they've been able to do for years, and it frustrates me to see so much talent go to waste.

timothychung 17y ago
My opinion is that Steve Jobs won't survive in MS due to their culture. Their take on innovation is to be a late market joiner. They win because they do things better with their resources. MS has an innovation model. It's just that it is a very non-innovative innovation model.
- aaronbrethorst 17y ago
  The article we're all commenting on talks about Microsoft's ill-fated Tablet computer, which premiered almost a decade before the iPad. Microsoft does many things which could be considered 'innovative,' except that they never achieve widespread market acceptance. Also, when was the last time Microsoft won with the "non-innovative innovation model" you refer to? Sharepoint? SQL Server? I can't think of any instance where this has worked in years.
  - joe_the_user 17y ago
    Yes, even though their successes with that model were in the OS, browser and office wars decades ago, they made billions on those success this year.

csmeder 17y ago

"At worst, you can say it’s a highly repentant, largely accidental monopolist." Incorrect, at worst it's a monopolist. ` "It employs thousands of the smartest, most capable engineers in the world. More than any other firm, it made using computers both ubiquitous and affordable. Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office applications suite still utterly rule their markets." By monopoly... ` "over $100 billion in the past 10 years alone and help sustain the economies of Seattle, Washington State and the nation as a whole." So we are supposed to support monopolies if they support Seattle? and apparently "the nation as a whole." You don't support the economy by monopolizing it. ` "Its founder, Bill Gates, is not only the most generous philanthropist in history, but has also inspired thousands of his employees to give generously themselves. No one in his right mind should wish Microsoft failure." This is philanthropy by force, he is a Robin Hood, steal from the rich USA and give to the poorer countries. Out of all the statements this is the one I find least fault with. Fine steal from me to give to the poor. But do it straight up. Don't also hinder technological advancement while your stealing from me. Just take my money and leave technology out of it.

voxcogitatio 17y ago

To me the really interesting question is how Microsoft ever got to be a monopoly in the first place, with the kind of products they've been making. What made windows and office succeed in the first place? Can you really coast that far just on malignant business practices?

protomyth 17y ago
yep, you can coast this far. corporate inertia is an amazing thing, and revolutions don't come along that often. I think the coming revolution in mobile devices in companies will be a break the current PC inertia and might get some new players in the door.
ZeroGravitas 17y ago
This article lays out a big problem: internally the competition is won not on technical or business merit but on politics, abuse of power, gameplaying and generally dodgy shenanigans. He brushes aside their monopolies which were created because externally the competition was defeated not on technical or business merit but on politics, abuse of power, gameplaying and generally dodgy shenanigans. Live by the sword, die by the irony.

mckilljoy 17y ago

Microsoft's lack innovation is a result of a couple of factors I can think of: -Leaders without vision: Gates wasn't perfect, but he at least put forward the vision of a PC in every house. Ballmer is more of a cheerleader than a visionary, and "three screens and a cloud" isn't a vision of the future so much as commentary on the present. -Hubris: Making billions of dollars is an easy way to justify that you are "doing the right thing", even 15 years later. -Customers focused: This is a little more subtle, but I think a culture making products (Windows, Office) for "Customers" is different than a culture making products (Gmail, Search) for "Users". For the former, you could pessimistically say that your main objective is to make a product you can convince someone to buy. Whether or not the customer uses the product is somewhat incidental. Each subsequent version must have enough features crammed into it to justify the customer paying again, even if they aren't useful. In contrast, focusing on the user provides more motivation to keep the product relevant, make the product useful, and so on. If it isn't, the users can simply stop using it. -Middle-child syndrome: If your team isn't making $1+billion, no one cares. It is hard to have the proper resources to innovate and be creative if most of your management chain doesn't know your project exists.

joe_the_user 17y ago
Another thing is that "embrace and extend" tends to lead to monolithic, dead-end products. You can only cram so many useful features into a closed desktop application before in becomes a nightmare. This prevents you from doing the sane thing - producing a bunch of small modular tools. A lot of the good coming out of the web is just a product of not having to start with context of an application competing with other existing applications.
cubicle67 17y ago
thanks... Your description of Ballmer as a cheerleader has now given me a mental image I'd rather not have :/

joe_the_user 17y ago

IBM embraced open source after they lost their stranglehold on corporate IT. They seem to have benefited tremendously from this. If MS could do the same, they might have a brighter post-monopoly future.

joe_the_user 17y ago
Part of the reason MS isn't growing is that they have colonized the desktop to such an extent that innovators look elsewhere for opportunities. If MS could successfully open source windows, it might create an explosion of innovation on the desktop (or probably in integrating the desktop and the web but still). Of course, I doubt MS could handle losing the license fees at this point.
actf 17y ago
Based on what? It sure didn't work out for Sun, what makes you think it'll work for Microsoft? It's no secret that part of the reason Microsoft makes so much money is because of vendor lockin. Embracing open source would make it easier for users to switch vendors - and I really don't see that as beneficial to Microsoft.

elblanco 17y ago

"Another example: When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. " This is easily solved with a few strategic firings.

djcapelis 17y ago

"the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers" Someone mistook the problem as a benefit.

raheemm 17y ago

Seems to me that MS is struggling with bureaucracy, which is made worse by product-lines that are super-complexified by a need to be backwards, sideways and upside-down compatible with the rest of the universe. Factor in workplace politics and the job of bringing innovation to market is harder than hell.

digamber_kamat 17y ago

I think Microsoft is playing its cards very well. They have a very firm foot in ground through their office and OS business. And they have presence almost everywhere from phones to web. They can simply acquire a small time company like Twitter to fill up the Gaps.