6 ms·

Oddly enough Microsoft is the only company I can see bucking this trend right now. The other big guys youve mentioned have essentially slumped down into their r

Oddly enough Microsoft is the only company I can see bucking this trend right now. The other big guys youve mentioned have essentially slumped down into their respective markets and drawn up battle lines, whereas MS really seems to be pushing into new territory. I wouldnt be surprised to see them come back into mobile with a Surface phone that gives Apple a run for their money.

slackingoff2017 9y ago
I think people don't give leadership the value it deserves. Baller made MS what it was, and Satya is largely responsible for turning the ship around. I've concluded that the leadership of IBM is what blows, and the C level offices should be gutted and replaced with whatever good engineers remain. I've seen leadership make or break every organization I've been a part of
- gchokov 9y ago
  Satya is largely responsible indeed, but he is just executing on the foundations laid out before him. The foundations were shaky, but they were still the right ones. I think too much credit is given to Satya. Maybe people just wanted to see someone better than the previous CEO.
pwthornton 9y ago
Windows Phone, once they got over to the Metro UI, was quite good. I would say from a design, UI and system perspective, it was significantly superior to Android and within striking distance of Apple and iOS. The issue with MS isn't whether or not they can build a quality mobile OS (they can), but rather it's whether or not MS can build an ecosystem with enough buy-in from companies to build apps and services. I'm sad to see MS do so poorly with their mobile OS, considering how good it is.
- wvenable 9y ago
  The way I see it, MS had a great product for the corporate/business market and could have put a nail in the coffin of Blackberry a few years sooner. But instead they wanted a piece of the consumer app market so badly that they rebooted their platform 3-4 times chasing an impossible dream.
  - pwthornton 9y ago
    The thing is there really isn't a corporate/business market anymore. The company I worked for stopped buying corporate phones and plans and just gives us money every month to put to a BYOD solution. We just need to use a phone with certain security requirements. We also have started procuring software and services to fit into this world.
    - wvenable 9y ago
      We still have people buying Blackberries on their own. There are plenty of people who want a phone that's good for work. A phone that works great with corporate networks, allows for editing Word and Excel documents, could have gone very far a few years ago. Even getting corporate app developers to port their apps to Windows phone would have been easier than chasing Zynga down.
      - chucksmash 9y ago
        > We still have people buying Blackberries on their own. There are plenty of people who want a phone that's good for work. This article[1] seems to run counter to your intuition: > In the fourth quarter of 2016, more than 432 million smartphones were sold, according to a report published on Wednesday by the research firm Gartner. Of those, just 207,900 were BlackBerry devices running its own operating system. > That gives the Canadian smartphone company a share of the overall phone market of less than a single percentage point. To be precise, it's 0.0481%. > Even when you include BlackBerry's devices running Android, its numbers are still incredibly low. Last year, CEO John Chen said the company sold only about 400,000 devices in the second quarter. Blackberry's market share is much nearer my own (i.e. 0 phones manufactured or sold) than it is Apple's or Google's. [1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/blackberry-smartphone-marketshare-zero-percent-gartner-q4-2016-2017-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/blackberry-smartphone-markets...
- yourapostasy 9y ago
  > ...it's whether or not MS can build an ecosystem with enough buy-in from companies to build apps and services. I think there might be a titanic fight shaping up in the economy to build out and secure ecosystems in a more Net-centric future. The WalMart diktats to truckers to not drive Amazon loads are just opening salvos in this war, for example. I see healthy, vibrant ecosystems with a bidirectional value exchange as a way for very large companies to mitigate much of the damage inflicted by their own size. Unfortunately, most large companies are trying their damnedest to build out ecosystems as command and control bot networks, and see it only as a profit source to unidirectionally squeeze. That's tempting because it's so easy, but it means your command and control decisions must be better and more timely than the ecosystem's wisdom of crowds, or you'll suffer the consequences.
WalterBright 9y ago
I used to have a piece of paper with the top 10 US companies by market cap, decade by decade. You didn't have to go very far back in time to find companies you don't recognize :-)
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Tenancy on that list has dropped tremendously. The list of Dow components is a particularly compelling study. It firms up in the 1920s and 1930s, and is relatively stable through the 1950s, then starts turning over at an accelerating pace. See also Deloitte's "Shift Index". A Forbes writer has covered this for years. A long-term secular decline dating to the mid-1960s. Measuring return on invested capital.
gaius 9y ago
Oddly enough Microsoft is the only company I can see bucking this trend right now. I'll second that - both Azure and Surface are best-in-class.
- tomrod 9y ago
  Eh, Azure is not that great. It's okay.
  - MandieD 9y ago
    Azure is an absolute joy to use and administer compared to IBM Bluemix.
    - antod 9y ago
      >> Eh, Azure is not that great. It's okay. > Azure is an absolute joy to use and administer compared to IBM Bluemix. Note to other readers: although slightly tangential, these two comments do not actually disagree or contradict each other.
    - jtmcmc 9y ago
      very low bar there...
    - tomrod 9y ago
      I have no doubt. I spent some time recently diving into Azure ML Studio. It's a rough product still, with a lot of opportunity for optimizations/better UX. I reckon the administration is much nicer, and probably closer to the designers/architects' UX understanding.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Angostura 9y ago
  Surface has just been turned into a meaningless marketing term, like Watson. See the Surface laptop as an example.

slackingoff2017 9y ago

I think people don't give leadership the value it deserves. Baller made MS what it was, and Satya is largely responsible for turning the ship around. I've concluded that the leadership of IBM is what blows, and the C level offices should be gutted and replaced with whatever good engineers remain. I've seen leadership make or break every organization I've been a part of

gchokov 9y ago
Satya is largely responsible indeed, but he is just executing on the foundations laid out before him. The foundations were shaky, but they were still the right ones. I think too much credit is given to Satya. Maybe people just wanted to see someone better than the previous CEO.

pwthornton 9y ago

Windows Phone, once they got over to the Metro UI, was quite good. I would say from a design, UI and system perspective, it was significantly superior to Android and within striking distance of Apple and iOS. The issue with MS isn't whether or not they can build a quality mobile OS (they can), but rather it's whether or not MS can build an ecosystem with enough buy-in from companies to build apps and services. I'm sad to see MS do so poorly with their mobile OS, considering how good it is.

wvenable 9y ago
The way I see it, MS had a great product for the corporate/business market and could have put a nail in the coffin of Blackberry a few years sooner. But instead they wanted a piece of the consumer app market so badly that they rebooted their platform 3-4 times chasing an impossible dream.
- pwthornton 9y ago
  The thing is there really isn't a corporate/business market anymore. The company I worked for stopped buying corporate phones and plans and just gives us money every month to put to a BYOD solution. We just need to use a phone with certain security requirements. We also have started procuring software and services to fit into this world.
  - wvenable 9y ago
    We still have people buying Blackberries on their own. There are plenty of people who want a phone that's good for work. A phone that works great with corporate networks, allows for editing Word and Excel documents, could have gone very far a few years ago. Even getting corporate app developers to port their apps to Windows phone would have been easier than chasing Zynga down.
    - chucksmash 9y ago
      > We still have people buying Blackberries on their own. There are plenty of people who want a phone that's good for work. This article[1] seems to run counter to your intuition: > In the fourth quarter of 2016, more than 432 million smartphones were sold, according to a report published on Wednesday by the research firm Gartner. Of those, just 207,900 were BlackBerry devices running its own operating system. > That gives the Canadian smartphone company a share of the overall phone market of less than a single percentage point. To be precise, it's 0.0481%. > Even when you include BlackBerry's devices running Android, its numbers are still incredibly low. Last year, CEO John Chen said the company sold only about 400,000 devices in the second quarter. Blackberry's market share is much nearer my own (i.e. 0 phones manufactured or sold) than it is Apple's or Google's. [1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/blackberry-smartphone-marketshare-zero-percent-gartner-q4-2016-2017-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/blackberry-smartphone-markets...
yourapostasy 9y ago
> ...it's whether or not MS can build an ecosystem with enough buy-in from companies to build apps and services. I think there might be a titanic fight shaping up in the economy to build out and secure ecosystems in a more Net-centric future. The WalMart diktats to truckers to not drive Amazon loads are just opening salvos in this war, for example. I see healthy, vibrant ecosystems with a bidirectional value exchange as a way for very large companies to mitigate much of the damage inflicted by their own size. Unfortunately, most large companies are trying their damnedest to build out ecosystems as command and control bot networks, and see it only as a profit source to unidirectionally squeeze. That's tempting because it's so easy, but it means your command and control decisions must be better and more timely than the ecosystem's wisdom of crowds, or you'll suffer the consequences.

WalterBright 9y ago

I used to have a piece of paper with the top 10 US companies by market cap, decade by decade. You didn't have to go very far back in time to find companies you don't recognize :-)

dredmorbius 9y ago
Tenancy on that list has dropped tremendously. The list of Dow components is a particularly compelling study. It firms up in the 1920s and 1930s, and is relatively stable through the 1950s, then starts turning over at an accelerating pace. See also Deloitte's "Shift Index". A Forbes writer has covered this for years. A long-term secular decline dating to the mid-1960s. Measuring return on invested capital.

gaius 9y ago

Oddly enough Microsoft is the only company I can see bucking this trend right now. I'll second that - both Azure and Surface are best-in-class.

tomrod 9y ago
Eh, Azure is not that great. It's okay.
- MandieD 9y ago
  Azure is an absolute joy to use and administer compared to IBM Bluemix.
  - antod 9y ago
    >> Eh, Azure is not that great. It's okay. > Azure is an absolute joy to use and administer compared to IBM Bluemix. Note to other readers: although slightly tangential, these two comments do not actually disagree or contradict each other.
  - jtmcmc 9y ago
    very low bar there...
  - tomrod 9y ago
    I have no doubt. I spent some time recently diving into Azure ML Studio. It's a rough product still, with a lot of opportunity for optimizations/better UX. I reckon the administration is much nicer, and probably closer to the designers/architects' UX understanding.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Angostura 9y ago
Surface has just been turned into a meaningless marketing term, like Watson. See the Surface laptop as an example.