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>But selling software to consumers is different from selling highly technical operating systems directly to computer companies. To compete against sophisticated

by jasode 9y ago

>But selling software to consumers is different from selling highly technical operating systems directly to computer companies. To compete against sophisticated marketers like Lotus, The really young techies won't remember this since it was over 30 years ago but what Microsoft did during the 1980s in the software space was astounding. The 1970s Microsoft was originally a "programming languages" company. They sold MS BASIC and MS COBOL. In the 1980s, they added productivity apps like word processors and spreadsheets (Word and Excel). What's amazing is that they didn't acquire those from a competitor (like the later acquisitions of Spyglass for IE or Vermeer for MS Frontpage). Word & Excel were homegrown at Microsoft and Bill Gates hired Charles Simonyi to lead their development. They added operating systems like MS-DOS and later MS Windows & Window NT. MS-DOS was an acquisition but Windows NT was homegrown by hiring Dave Cutler. Nobody else replicated Microsoft's successful diversity in software. That included Lotus, Ashton-Tate, Computer Associates, Adobe, etc. That's 3 very different areas of software : programming + MS Office + operating systems. All 3 were huge profit machines. In the 1990s, they continued success with server-side software like SQL Server and MS Exchange. To give a modern analogy, imagine Jetbrains just selling programming IDEs like IntelliJ and PHPStorm. And then Samsung comes along and says, "we need an operating system for the millions of smartphones we're going to sell" so Jetbrains hires Andy Ruben[1] to write the Android os for Samsung. And then Jetbrains decides that Android also needs a picture sharing app and hires Kevin Systrom[2] to develop Instagram. That absurd combination from one company is what Microsoft did in the 1980s and in that alternate universe, the Jetbrains owners would be multi-billionaires. Compare that to Google where it's almost 20 years old and its major revenue is still AdWords. Diversifying revenue is not easy. A comparable (and possibly more astounding diversification) in modern times would be Amazon's origins from selling books & CDs to selling AWS computation resources. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#His... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram#History

klipt 9y ago
> Compare that to Google where it's almost 20 years old and its major revenue is still AdWords. Diversifying revenue is not easy. I think that's just that the market has changed. Google has programming languages, operating systems and office suites, and they're all more complicated than the offerings of 30 years ago, but given away for free (with advertising).
- vilmosi 9y ago
  Yeah but they're not dominant in anything else. Microsoft was different.
  - brucephillips 9y ago
    Google is dominant in mobile operating systems.
    - AgentIcarus 9y ago
      Do you think they would be if they charged?
      - brucephillips 9y ago
        It doesn't matter. They derive much value from their market dominance.
        simonh 9y ago
        They make about twice as much money from mobile ads iOS as they do from Android, hence they pay Billions to Apple to be the default search provider on iOS. That can’t be a comfortable position to be in, and hardly looks like a position of dominance no matter how much you squint.
        mcny 9y ago
        > They make about twice as much money from mobile ads iOS as they do from Android, hence they pay Billions to Apple to be the default search provider on iOS. That can’t be a comfortable position to be in, and hardly looks like a position of dominance no matter how much you squint. Here's one way to squint: they'd have to pay a lot more if they didn't have Android.
      - rafiki6 9y ago
        They do charge. The Android most manufacturer's sell with google's services isn't free. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-android-generates-31-billion-revenue-oracle-says-ijor8hvt https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-...
smitherfield 9y ago
I can think of several companies that produced similarly "diverse" software portfolios in the 70's and 80's (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Commodore, Apple ...), although certainly none were anywhere near as commercially-successful as Microsoft.
rpeden 9y ago
I think SQL Server was a little different in that it wasn't quite from scratch, but was a JV that built on existing Sybase code? They eventually went their separate ways, though, and after the split is when MS really started bringing in SQL Server revenue. I'm impressed with he way the succeeded with different approaches: plenty of homegrown applications, some acquisitions, some joint ventures. Sure, there were plenty of projects that didn't work out, but the ones that did work out did really, really well.
ebbv 9y ago
Your ordering is kind of wonky. MS-DOS was before MS Word and Excel. It took a long time for Word or Excel to really gain ground against the market leaders, and arguably they weren't really dominant forces until they were packaged together as Office in the 90s. Windows NT may have started development in the late 80s but it certainly wasn't released until the 90s and took a while to find success. You also miss out on the main reason Microsoft was able to become a dominant force in so many fields; MS-DOS. DOS was the PC operating system from the 80s into the 90s, until Windows 95 finally took over, and gave Microsoft the money and position to do whatever it wanted. None of the rest of its software suite would have become dominant without being built on top of DOS and later Windows.
- jasode 9y ago
  >None of the rest of its software suite would have become dominant without being built on top of DOS and later Windows. Way back in my angrier days when I would have spelled Microsoft as Micro$oft The Evil Empire, I would have totally agreed with you. I've since revised my opinion. The reason is counterexamples of other wildly software that didn't need operating systems to be successful like Intuit Quicken, Photoshop, Duke Nukem games, etc. If others can sell millions of copies without an os to run on MS-DOS, Microsoft itself can too. Also MS-DOS & Windows dominance doesn't guarantee success because MS Money lost to Intuit's Quicken. For example, with MS Word, was it successful because of Windows or was it better than WordPerfect? Sure, Windows is a part of it but MS Word was actually easier to use and crashed less often the WordPerfect-for-Windows. Wordperfect-DOS wasn't WYSIWIG. Wordperfect-DOS required memorization of function keys F01 to F12 to bold and italicize. MS Word early versions[1] had obvious buttons for bold and italics. Now that Microsoft is weakened by iPhone/Android and Amazon AWS, I think I'm able to look back at MS in a more detached perspective. I now think they did amazing work in the 1980s and 1990s which got later overshadowed by the ugly "browser wars" and antitrust lawsuit. [1] https://tmft.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/krnl386_004.png https://tmft.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/krnl386_004.png
  - ebbv 9y ago
    A big part of why Office gained ground was that it was offered cheaper than its competitors. A big part of why they could do that was it was subsidized by DOS and Windows licenses. Then there are enterprise customers who got bundling discounts for getting Office software as well as operating system software from Microsoft. I'm not saying that the Office products were bad, nobody was going to buy software that totally didn't work, and I'm not trying to argue the relative merits of Wordstar or WordPerfect or Lotus 123 or whatever, but if you don't think the "home field advantage" of DOS and Windows is a big part of the success of Office, then I think you're in denial.
WorldMaker 9y ago
PowerPoint was an acquisition, though Microsoft had considered building a competitor in house like Word and Excel. I found Robert Gaskin's fascinating book on the history of PowerPoint and its acquisition by Microsoft in an HN comment a few weeks back and it's a fascinating read of that fascinating paradigm shift in productivity apps that happened in the mid-to-late 1980s (that Microsoft was able to play a hot hand in): http://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bullets/gaskins-sweating-bullets-webpdf-isbn-9780985142414.pdf http://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bul...
coldtea 9y ago
>And then Jetbrains decides that Android also needs a picture sharing app and hires Kevin Systrom[2] to develop Instagram. That absurd combination from one company is what Microsoft did in the 1980s and in that alternate universe, the Jetbrains owners would be multi-billionaire That, with the exception that Instagram is more of a "cool idea that caught on with a run-of-the-mill implementation" and had the luck of getting acquired else they'd still be looking for a revenue source, whereas technically what MS did was far more impressive (and with actual paying customers).
RandomOpinion 9y ago
Visual Capitalist has a set of pie charts that show the breakdown of revenue streams for 5 of the top tech giants, including MS, Google, Amazon, etc. that illustrate exactly what you're talking about: http://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-5-tech-giants-make-billions/ http://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-5-tech-giants-make-bil... Google is poorly diversified and even Amazon is not as well diversified as one might think.
- enitihas 9y ago
  The link is an eye opener. Xbox contributes to 11% of MS revenue, and Window 9%. The world of personal computing has truly changed and Microsoft has really diverse revenue streams.
  - uiri 9y ago
    Keep in mind that that is consumer Windows. Active Directory and Exchange run on Windows Server and I'm sure every large business has a fleet of those (or has decided to ditch them in favour of Azure). I wonder what falls in the "other" bucket. Visual Studio / MSDN come to mind. Perhaps Enterprise Services is split out from Azure & Windows Server. It looks like Dynamics might be reported separately from Office although I'd normally expect it to be grouped with it instead.
- auggierose 9y ago
  Nice link! Also very interesting that while Apple and Microsoft are clearly Tech companies, Google and Facebook are clearly Media companies.
  - ec109685 9y ago
    Why would you say that? Google isn’t purely monetizing it’s own content pages like a media company. Selling ads doesn’t make oneself a media company.
- Santosh83 9y ago
  Does anyone know what constitutes the 'Other' portion of Microsoft's pie chart, accounting for 18% of their share of revenue?
amyjess 9y ago
> They added operating systems like MS-DOS and later MS Windows & Window NT. MS-DOS was an acquisition but Windows NT was homegrown by hiring Dave Cutler. It's worth mentioning that Windows NT was their third try at a high-end OS, and it was the only one that was entirely homegrown. First was Xenix, which was a collaboration with SCO and based on Unix code licensed from AT&T. Then, the government gave AT&T the go-ahead to commercialize Unix themselves, so Microsoft panicked and abandoned Xenix, eventually giving SCO full ownership. To replace Xenix, Microsoft partnered with IBM to create OS/2. Ultimately, Microsoft and IBM fell out, and IBM ended up with ownership of OS/2, so that didn't work out. But DEC was going through a bunch of turmoil at the time, so Microsoft took advantage of it and poached VMS creator Dave Cutler and had him create NT. It's amazing how things worked out.
- Eric_WVGG 9y ago
  I’ve heard rumors that Windows NT wasn’t so much a rehash of Cutler’s own VMS — increment each letter by one. (just something I heard a couple decades ago, don't sue me)
bluedino 9y ago
Microsoft also destroyed every competitor they had. They sent Lotus 1-2-3 and Visicalc packing. They destroyed WordStar and WordPerfect. Lotus Notes, Groupwise? Gone. They destroyed Novell. IBM couldn't even sell software for DOS/Windows. Borland? History. Netscape? See ya. The only people safe from Microsoft's wrath were companies like Adobe.
- diego_moita 9y ago
  Well, that's how capitalism works, right? Tower Records destroyed a lot of cool record stores. Wall Mart destroyed a lot of neighborhood grocery stores. Lidl and Aldi did the same in Europe. Barnes & Noble did the same for charming bookstores. My point: it is not the winner that is ruthless, it is the game.
  - simonh 9y ago
    And communism wipes out all private companies completely replacing them with monolithic state monopolies. But in the case at hand it was a bit more than ‘the game’. MS broke the law multiple times and were at minimum deeply unethical in several other cases, and were held to account for it. Not enough in my opinion, but it was there. Ultimately though they also made the right moves at the right times and their competitors didn’t.
    - hasenj 9y ago
      The "black markets" in officially communist countries tend to be diverse, though.
    - WalterGR 9y ago
      MS broke the law multiple times Could you expand on that? I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that it's not against the law to be a monopoly, but it is against the law to abuse one's monopoly position. What I'm hazy on is whether antitrust enforcement defendants are informed by the government that they're a monopoly prior to being charged with abusing said monopoly. Is that the case, or no? Did Microsoft break any laws that it wouldn't have broken had the government not decided that they were a monopoly?
Fnoord 9y ago
> The really young techies won't remember this since it was over 30 years ago but what Microsoft did during the 1980s in the software space was astounding. Totally: "As it happened, Gates's mother sat on the same charity board as IBM's chairman. She got IBM to talk to Gates with the promise of an OS for their underwhelming PC (which was nothing two kids in a garage couldn't have come up with – in fact, it perpetrated many of the flaws of the Apple II, which for its flaws was still very innovative for the time). Gates didn't have an OS, so sent IBM to talk to Gary Kildall of CP/M fame, but Kildall was not prepared to talk to IBM, so IBM went back to Gates. Gates was friends with the chairman of Seattle Computer Systems, who he convinced to sell him the OS for $50,000 – that bit is accurate. Gates did bluff IBM, but he then bought QDOS for Quick and Dirty Operating System from SCS." [1] Rather, what people should realize is that back in 80s it was IBM who was the monopolist, and it was Microsoft who became the monopolist IBM once was. The smartphone and mobile markets [2] have smashed up the tech sector. Nokia, once a giant, is no more, and Microsoft is far less relevant because they missed the boat. Regarding Windows NT, its interesting to note who Dave Cutler [3] was (one of the designers of DEC's OpenVMS, and a UNIX hater). Windows NT put a dent in the UNIX server market because it was a cheap alternative running on commodity hardware (the happy Wintel marriage), but in the end it was *BSD and Linux (or GNU/Linux) which replaced UNIX and partly Windows NT as Linux dominates the server market. > [...] so Jetbrains hires Andy Ruben [...] Andy Rubin. [1] http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~ijoyner/Ian_Joyner/Pirates.html http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~ijoyner/Ian_Joyner/Pirates.htm... [2] No source here, I'd just like to note its Apple iPod which created a cash cow for Apple. Its what caused the momentum (and cash) for Apple to start the iPhone. [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler
- flukus 9y ago
  > The smartphone and mobile markets [2] have smashed up the tech sector. Nokia, once a giant, is no more, and Microsoft is far less relevant because they missed the boat. They didn't miss the boat, they got on a much earlier boat that wasn't quite going in the right direction. Some better touch screen controls and MS would have had the iPhone a decade earlier.
- scholia 9y ago
  I don't disagree with your comment, but I'd like to introduce a small refinement.... > Rather, what people should realize is that back in 80s it was IBM who was the monopolist, and it was Microsoft who became the monopolist IBM once was. This is true, but Microsoft only became the IBM of PC software. Intel became the IBM of processors. Cisco became the IBM of routers. And so on.... IBM was the IBM of everything, and at one point, was twice as big as every other IT company put together. Today's youngsters have absolutely no idea how powerful it was. (And after decades of failure, IBM is still almost a $90 billion company.) Microsoft never had that degree of power. In the end, IBM's monopoly was split between a lot of different but less powerful companies, each with its own niche. Today, I think, only IBM's mainframe monopoly is left....
simonh 9y ago
To be fair though MS-DOS was an acquisition from one guy who wrote the whole thing. A single developer could still develop a complete OS or competitive major software package back then.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dredmorbius 9y ago
WinNT drew tremendously on VMS (even the old saw: VMS -> WNT), Cutler's previous project at DEC, and on OS/2, on which IBM had partnered with Microsoft. NT had a lot of external boost. I seem to recall that MS Word at least drew on an existing wordprocessing system, though I can't pin that down.
- megaman22 9y ago
  I think there is still compatibility in Word for WordPress keyboard shortcuts https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Yeah, that was just a compatibility thing though. I believe there may have been a word processor out of PARC itself that went on to become a product elsewhere. I don't know if that became or directly fed into MS Word or not. And I'm really hazy on this, so don't take me too seriously.
bad_user 9y ago
> Compare that to Google where it's almost 20 years old and its major revenue is still AdWords. Diversifying revenue is not easy. That's like saying Apple's major revenue is still people paying cash in exchange for products — ads isn't a product, but a revenue model, an exchange currency that apparently people are happy to pay instead of money. Btw, Google has 2 really successful operating systems, Android and Chrome OS. That they don't have much direct revenue from them is inconsequential for the topic at hand, because these operating systems ensure their continued dominance of the marketplace. Microsoft genius was to control the market with its operating systems. Even if Office and Internet Explorer were good from a technical perspective, having their own merits, I'll always suspect that the tight integration with Windows, along with the deals Microsoft did with computer makers (possible because of MS DOS and Windows) is what killed their competition. And now Google has taken that to the next level. To not see it is ignorant and unhealthy for the ecosystem. Because yes, Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.
- jasode 9y ago
  >ads isn't a product, The "ads" (uncapitalized generic word) is not a product but AdWords™ is: https://www.google.com/search?q=adwords&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=adwords&source=lnms&tbm=isch AdWords is the system that advertisers log into to see their keywords campaigns, dashboards, analytics, pay with their credit-cards, etc. That's been Google/Alphabet's major cash cow. Google wants other multi-billion profit sources besides AdWords. Google Cloud Platform is growing in revenue but I don't think they've publicly disclosed whether they are making significant profits from it yet. Their X divisionp[1] is arguably tasked with finding more multi-billion dollar ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(company)
sytelus 9y ago
Still, your post doesn't do justice to the true scale and productivity of Microsoft. Here's all the product Microsoft has ever released: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_software Just scroll through that list and it's going to get you amazed and marveled. To be fair, Google has released number of products in many of the same areas as Microsoft but usually with different spin including Office, Sharepoint, SQL Server, Outlook and so on. With about 1/3rd of the size and 1/4th of the age, they have been immensely productive as well.

by jasode 9y ago

klipt 9y ago

> Compare that to Google where it's almost 20 years old and its major revenue is still AdWords. Diversifying revenue is not easy. I think that's just that the market has changed. Google has programming languages, operating systems and office suites, and they're all more complicated than the offerings of 30 years ago, but given away for free (with advertising).

vilmosi 9y ago
Yeah but they're not dominant in anything else. Microsoft was different.
- brucephillips 9y ago
  Google is dominant in mobile operating systems.
  - AgentIcarus 9y ago
    Do you think they would be if they charged?
    - brucephillips 9y ago
      It doesn't matter. They derive much value from their market dominance.
      - simonh 9y ago
        They make about twice as much money from mobile ads iOS as they do from Android, hence they pay Billions to Apple to be the default search provider on iOS. That can’t be a comfortable position to be in, and hardly looks like a position of dominance no matter how much you squint.
        mcny 9y ago
        > They make about twice as much money from mobile ads iOS as they do from Android, hence they pay Billions to Apple to be the default search provider on iOS. That can’t be a comfortable position to be in, and hardly looks like a position of dominance no matter how much you squint. Here's one way to squint: they'd have to pay a lot more if they didn't have Android.
    - rafiki6 9y ago
      They do charge. The Android most manufacturer's sell with google's services isn't free. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-android-generates-31-billion-revenue-oracle-says-ijor8hvt https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-...

smitherfield 9y ago

I can think of several companies that produced similarly "diverse" software portfolios in the 70's and 80's (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Commodore, Apple ...), although certainly none were anywhere near as commercially-successful as Microsoft.

rpeden 9y ago

I think SQL Server was a little different in that it wasn't quite from scratch, but was a JV that built on existing Sybase code? They eventually went their separate ways, though, and after the split is when MS really started bringing in SQL Server revenue. I'm impressed with he way the succeeded with different approaches: plenty of homegrown applications, some acquisitions, some joint ventures. Sure, there were plenty of projects that didn't work out, but the ones that did work out did really, really well.

ebbv 9y ago

Your ordering is kind of wonky. MS-DOS was before MS Word and Excel. It took a long time for Word or Excel to really gain ground against the market leaders, and arguably they weren't really dominant forces until they were packaged together as Office in the 90s. Windows NT may have started development in the late 80s but it certainly wasn't released until the 90s and took a while to find success. You also miss out on the main reason Microsoft was able to become a dominant force in so many fields; MS-DOS. DOS was the PC operating system from the 80s into the 90s, until Windows 95 finally took over, and gave Microsoft the money and position to do whatever it wanted. None of the rest of its software suite would have become dominant without being built on top of DOS and later Windows.

jasode 9y ago
>None of the rest of its software suite would have become dominant without being built on top of DOS and later Windows. Way back in my angrier days when I would have spelled Microsoft as Micro$oft The Evil Empire, I would have totally agreed with you. I've since revised my opinion. The reason is counterexamples of other wildly software that didn't need operating systems to be successful like Intuit Quicken, Photoshop, Duke Nukem games, etc. If others can sell millions of copies without an os to run on MS-DOS, Microsoft itself can too. Also MS-DOS & Windows dominance doesn't guarantee success because MS Money lost to Intuit's Quicken. For example, with MS Word, was it successful because of Windows or was it better than WordPerfect? Sure, Windows is a part of it but MS Word was actually easier to use and crashed less often the WordPerfect-for-Windows. Wordperfect-DOS wasn't WYSIWIG. Wordperfect-DOS required memorization of function keys F01 to F12 to bold and italicize. MS Word early versions[1] had obvious buttons for bold and italics. Now that Microsoft is weakened by iPhone/Android and Amazon AWS, I think I'm able to look back at MS in a more detached perspective. I now think they did amazing work in the 1980s and 1990s which got later overshadowed by the ugly "browser wars" and antitrust lawsuit. [1] https://tmft.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/krnl386_004.png https://tmft.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/krnl386_004.png
- ebbv 9y ago
  A big part of why Office gained ground was that it was offered cheaper than its competitors. A big part of why they could do that was it was subsidized by DOS and Windows licenses. Then there are enterprise customers who got bundling discounts for getting Office software as well as operating system software from Microsoft. I'm not saying that the Office products were bad, nobody was going to buy software that totally didn't work, and I'm not trying to argue the relative merits of Wordstar or WordPerfect or Lotus 123 or whatever, but if you don't think the "home field advantage" of DOS and Windows is a big part of the success of Office, then I think you're in denial.

WorldMaker 9y ago

PowerPoint was an acquisition, though Microsoft had considered building a competitor in house like Word and Excel. I found Robert Gaskin's fascinating book on the history of PowerPoint and its acquisition by Microsoft in an HN comment a few weeks back and it's a fascinating read of that fascinating paradigm shift in productivity apps that happened in the mid-to-late 1980s (that Microsoft was able to play a hot hand in): http://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bullets/gaskins-sweating-bullets-webpdf-isbn-9780985142414.pdf http://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bul...

coldtea 9y ago

>And then Jetbrains decides that Android also needs a picture sharing app and hires Kevin Systrom[2] to develop Instagram. That absurd combination from one company is what Microsoft did in the 1980s and in that alternate universe, the Jetbrains owners would be multi-billionaire That, with the exception that Instagram is more of a "cool idea that caught on with a run-of-the-mill implementation" and had the luck of getting acquired else they'd still be looking for a revenue source, whereas technically what MS did was far more impressive (and with actual paying customers).

RandomOpinion 9y ago

Visual Capitalist has a set of pie charts that show the breakdown of revenue streams for 5 of the top tech giants, including MS, Google, Amazon, etc. that illustrate exactly what you're talking about: http://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-5-tech-giants-make-billions/ http://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-5-tech-giants-make-bil... Google is poorly diversified and even Amazon is not as well diversified as one might think.

enitihas 9y ago
The link is an eye opener. Xbox contributes to 11% of MS revenue, and Window 9%. The world of personal computing has truly changed and Microsoft has really diverse revenue streams.
- uiri 9y ago
  Keep in mind that that is consumer Windows. Active Directory and Exchange run on Windows Server and I'm sure every large business has a fleet of those (or has decided to ditch them in favour of Azure). I wonder what falls in the "other" bucket. Visual Studio / MSDN come to mind. Perhaps Enterprise Services is split out from Azure & Windows Server. It looks like Dynamics might be reported separately from Office although I'd normally expect it to be grouped with it instead.
auggierose 9y ago
Nice link! Also very interesting that while Apple and Microsoft are clearly Tech companies, Google and Facebook are clearly Media companies.
- ec109685 9y ago
  Why would you say that? Google isn’t purely monetizing it’s own content pages like a media company. Selling ads doesn’t make oneself a media company.
Santosh83 9y ago
Does anyone know what constitutes the 'Other' portion of Microsoft's pie chart, accounting for 18% of their share of revenue?

amyjess 9y ago

> They added operating systems like MS-DOS and later MS Windows & Window NT. MS-DOS was an acquisition but Windows NT was homegrown by hiring Dave Cutler. It's worth mentioning that Windows NT was their third try at a high-end OS, and it was the only one that was entirely homegrown. First was Xenix, which was a collaboration with SCO and based on Unix code licensed from AT&T. Then, the government gave AT&T the go-ahead to commercialize Unix themselves, so Microsoft panicked and abandoned Xenix, eventually giving SCO full ownership. To replace Xenix, Microsoft partnered with IBM to create OS/2. Ultimately, Microsoft and IBM fell out, and IBM ended up with ownership of OS/2, so that didn't work out. But DEC was going through a bunch of turmoil at the time, so Microsoft took advantage of it and poached VMS creator Dave Cutler and had him create NT. It's amazing how things worked out.

Eric_WVGG 9y ago
I’ve heard rumors that Windows NT wasn’t so much a rehash of Cutler’s own VMS — increment each letter by one. (just something I heard a couple decades ago, don't sue me)

bluedino 9y ago

Microsoft also destroyed every competitor they had. They sent Lotus 1-2-3 and Visicalc packing. They destroyed WordStar and WordPerfect. Lotus Notes, Groupwise? Gone. They destroyed Novell. IBM couldn't even sell software for DOS/Windows. Borland? History. Netscape? See ya. The only people safe from Microsoft's wrath were companies like Adobe.

diego_moita 9y ago
Well, that's how capitalism works, right? Tower Records destroyed a lot of cool record stores. Wall Mart destroyed a lot of neighborhood grocery stores. Lidl and Aldi did the same in Europe. Barnes & Noble did the same for charming bookstores. My point: it is not the winner that is ruthless, it is the game.
- simonh 9y ago
  And communism wipes out all private companies completely replacing them with monolithic state monopolies. But in the case at hand it was a bit more than ‘the game’. MS broke the law multiple times and were at minimum deeply unethical in several other cases, and were held to account for it. Not enough in my opinion, but it was there. Ultimately though they also made the right moves at the right times and their competitors didn’t.
  - hasenj 9y ago
    The "black markets" in officially communist countries tend to be diverse, though.
  - WalterGR 9y ago
    MS broke the law multiple times Could you expand on that? I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that it's not against the law to be a monopoly, but it is against the law to abuse one's monopoly position. What I'm hazy on is whether antitrust enforcement defendants are informed by the government that they're a monopoly prior to being charged with abusing said monopoly. Is that the case, or no? Did Microsoft break any laws that it wouldn't have broken had the government not decided that they were a monopoly?

Fnoord 9y ago

> The really young techies won't remember this since it was over 30 years ago but what Microsoft did during the 1980s in the software space was astounding. Totally: "As it happened, Gates's mother sat on the same charity board as IBM's chairman. She got IBM to talk to Gates with the promise of an OS for their underwhelming PC (which was nothing two kids in a garage couldn't have come up with – in fact, it perpetrated many of the flaws of the Apple II, which for its flaws was still very innovative for the time). Gates didn't have an OS, so sent IBM to talk to Gary Kildall of CP/M fame, but Kildall was not prepared to talk to IBM, so IBM went back to Gates. Gates was friends with the chairman of Seattle Computer Systems, who he convinced to sell him the OS for $50,000 – that bit is accurate. Gates did bluff IBM, but he then bought QDOS for Quick and Dirty Operating System from SCS." [1] Rather, what people should realize is that back in 80s it was IBM who was the monopolist, and it was Microsoft who became the monopolist IBM once was. The smartphone and mobile markets [2] have smashed up the tech sector. Nokia, once a giant, is no more, and Microsoft is far less relevant because they missed the boat. Regarding Windows NT, its interesting to note who Dave Cutler [3] was (one of the designers of DEC's OpenVMS, and a UNIX hater). Windows NT put a dent in the UNIX server market because it was a cheap alternative running on commodity hardware (the happy Wintel marriage), but in the end it was *BSD and Linux (or GNU/Linux) which replaced UNIX and partly Windows NT as Linux dominates the server market. > [...] so Jetbrains hires Andy Ruben [...] Andy Rubin. [1] http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~ijoyner/Ian_Joyner/Pirates.html http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~ijoyner/Ian_Joyner/Pirates.htm... [2] No source here, I'd just like to note its Apple iPod which created a cash cow for Apple. Its what caused the momentum (and cash) for Apple to start the iPhone. [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler

flukus 9y ago
> The smartphone and mobile markets [2] have smashed up the tech sector. Nokia, once a giant, is no more, and Microsoft is far less relevant because they missed the boat. They didn't miss the boat, they got on a much earlier boat that wasn't quite going in the right direction. Some better touch screen controls and MS would have had the iPhone a decade earlier.
scholia 9y ago
I don't disagree with your comment, but I'd like to introduce a small refinement.... > Rather, what people should realize is that back in 80s it was IBM who was the monopolist, and it was Microsoft who became the monopolist IBM once was. This is true, but Microsoft only became the IBM of PC software. Intel became the IBM of processors. Cisco became the IBM of routers. And so on.... IBM was the IBM of everything, and at one point, was twice as big as every other IT company put together. Today's youngsters have absolutely no idea how powerful it was. (And after decades of failure, IBM is still almost a $90 billion company.) Microsoft never had that degree of power. In the end, IBM's monopoly was split between a lot of different but less powerful companies, each with its own niche. Today, I think, only IBM's mainframe monopoly is left....

simonh 9y ago

To be fair though MS-DOS was an acquisition from one guy who wrote the whole thing. A single developer could still develop a complete OS or competitive major software package back then.

deleted 9y ago

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dredmorbius 9y ago

WinNT drew tremendously on VMS (even the old saw: VMS -> WNT), Cutler's previous project at DEC, and on OS/2, on which IBM had partnered with Microsoft. NT had a lot of external boost. I seem to recall that MS Word at least drew on an existing wordprocessing system, though I can't pin that down.

megaman22 9y ago
I think there is still compatibility in Word for WordPress keyboard shortcuts https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Yeah, that was just a compatibility thing though. I believe there may have been a word processor out of PARC itself that went on to become a product elsewhere. I don't know if that became or directly fed into MS Word or not. And I'm really hazy on this, so don't take me too seriously.

bad_user 9y ago

> Compare that to Google where it's almost 20 years old and its major revenue is still AdWords. Diversifying revenue is not easy. That's like saying Apple's major revenue is still people paying cash in exchange for products — ads isn't a product, but a revenue model, an exchange currency that apparently people are happy to pay instead of money. Btw, Google has 2 really successful operating systems, Android and Chrome OS. That they don't have much direct revenue from them is inconsequential for the topic at hand, because these operating systems ensure their continued dominance of the marketplace. Microsoft genius was to control the market with its operating systems. Even if Office and Internet Explorer were good from a technical perspective, having their own merits, I'll always suspect that the tight integration with Windows, along with the deals Microsoft did with computer makers (possible because of MS DOS and Windows) is what killed their competition. And now Google has taken that to the next level. To not see it is ignorant and unhealthy for the ecosystem. Because yes, Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.

jasode 9y ago
>ads isn't a product, The "ads" (uncapitalized generic word) is not a product but AdWords™ is: https://www.google.com/search?q=adwords&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=adwords&source=lnms&tbm=isch AdWords is the system that advertisers log into to see their keywords campaigns, dashboards, analytics, pay with their credit-cards, etc. That's been Google/Alphabet's major cash cow. Google wants other multi-billion profit sources besides AdWords. Google Cloud Platform is growing in revenue but I don't think they've publicly disclosed whether they are making significant profits from it yet. Their X divisionp[1] is arguably tasked with finding more multi-billion dollar ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(company)

sytelus 9y ago

Still, your post doesn't do justice to the true scale and productivity of Microsoft. Here's all the product Microsoft has ever released: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_software Just scroll through that list and it's going to get you amazed and marveled. To be fair, Google has released number of products in many of the same areas as Microsoft but usually with different spin including Office, Sharepoint, SQL Server, Outlook and so on. With about 1/3rd of the size and 1/4th of the age, they have been immensely productive as well.