24 ms·

Microsoft Is Winning the Techlash

151 points by kristianc 8y ago

d--b 8y ago
Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates. Apple's bad rep is probably due to high pricing, tech lock-in, horrible apple store experience, bad behavior regarding right-to-repair, pretty bad software overall.
- denzil_correa 8y ago
  > Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates. Microsoft has many business models and one of them is based on advertisements, example : LinkedIn.
  - d--b 8y ago
    Sure, but Microsoft is not exactly looking to brag about the fact that it owns LinkedIn. There's zero mention of Microsoft on the LinkedIn website.
  - organsnyder 8y ago
    My hunch is that LinkedIn derives a substantial (perhaps the majority) of revenue from premium memberships sold to recruiters.
    - JohnFen 8y ago
      The recruiters and amount of spam (those two overlap heavily in the Venn diagram) are what drove me to delete my LinkedIn account.
  - bni 8y ago
    Windows 10 business model for consumers is also based on ads and tracking/surveillance.
  - kristianc 8y ago
    > Microsoft has many business models and one of them is based on advertisements, example : LinkedIn. LinkedIn make bank from selling Sales Navigator. Ads are a tiny proportion of their revenue.
    - cosmie 8y ago
      I was surprised to see this is true about their advertising! While dated, their 2016 disclosures showed ads making up only 18% of revenue ($109mm)[1]. Which was only about 10% of the $1.6bn that Bing pulled in around that time[2]. Having managed ad campaigns on LinkedIn, that's both surprising and not. They have a horrifically high cost per click compared to other channels, but the results in B2B verticals were usually enough to warrant putting up with it. So it's surprising it was only pulling in around $100mm. But then, their self-service component didn't allow for accessing all of their inventory, and none of my clients wanted to go in with the commitments necessary for the high-touch placements. So that may have dampened demand a good bit. That said, Sales Navigator (and premium subscriptions) is an equally small portion of revenue. 65% of their money came from their "talent solutions" recruiting features. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120214/how-does-linkedin-lnkd-make-money.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120214/how-does-lin... [2] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/313837/microsoft-revenue-from-bing-search-ads-rose-in-201.html https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/313837/micros...
  - zantana 8y ago
    Yes, it is always a reality check from the feel good vscode/wsl/Nadella lovefest when they foist some unwanted telemetry or ads in various parts of Windows, that they are a beast with many heads.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Bing is their major ad business, not Linkedin which makes its money mostly from subscriptions and jobs.
- organsnyder 8y ago
  > Apple's bad rep is probably due to high pricing, tech lock-in, horrible apple store experience, bad behavior regarding right-to-repair, pretty bad software overall. How times have changed. It wasn't long ago that many of us (myself included) were saying virtually the same thing about Microsoft's product.
  - michaelcampbell 8y ago
    > How times have changed. Including people at the top running things. Interesting (to me) how the sales guy CEO's having been changed led the companies in different directions afterwards.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    Ironically I recall a minority pointing out Apple would be even worse than Microsoft if they were in Microsoft's place given their controllingness - Microsoft was fine with third party manufacturers as opposed to suing to stop "Hackintoshes". There never was an equivalent for Microsoft.
    - pwinnski 8y ago
      Microsoft was in the position of the Hackintoshes, though. It was IBM in Apple's position, and IBM did sue. A software company (MS) and a hardware company (Apple) definitely make different choices!
      - sneakernets 8y ago
        Isn't MS making hardware now?
        pwinnski 8y ago
        Sure, though not enough to really be called a hardware company. The comparison was between MS in the 90s and Apple now, as I understood it. At the time they might have been making peripherals, maybe? But not computers.
- sametmax 8y ago
  > Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates. You mean they don't put ads in the windows home menu or hundred of spywares in the OS ? Or that they don't have ads in bings, skype or outlook ? > Apple's bad rep is probably due to high pricing, tech lock-in, horrible apple store experience, bad behavior regarding right-to-repair, pretty bad software overall. Or maybe you mean they don't lock in with proprietary formats, avoiding to publish the specs and when they then do don't follow it like with Office ? Hopefully this has been compensated by the fantastic Windows Update experience and good behavior. I'm not an FB, Apple or Google fan. In fact I don't have an FB account, I voluntarily don't buy Apple products and refused a job interview with Google. But let's not forget the numerous bad deeds of MS. That's how we never solve the problems we have: we let people misbehave and after a while, they are all forgiven. It's the same with politics, bad bosses, abusive spouses, etc. Don't let people forget.
  - flyingpenguin 8y ago
    I mean every company has problems... Microsoft just seems to be generally headed in a better direction vs worse which seems way more common.
    - sametmax 8y ago
      Every people have problems too. Some beat their wife, some are a bit moody. MS has been repeatedly caught lying, cheating, insulting and corrupting. Can I slap you if I give a treat to a puppy later ? Because being pro-microsoft now that their PR is more human and their actions more positive looks pretty much like that. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they make TypeScript and VSCode. But they need 20 years of being a good boy to compensate for what they did. More if we want to take in consideration they became incredibly rich doing it.
      - intern4tional 8y ago
        They don't need 20 years of anything; they simply needed a change in leadership, which they got. Satya is drastically changing the culture and with it the business. I get there are people out there that will always have an ax to grind (you seem to be one of those) but if you wait 20 years to trust a business again, you'll be left behind with any improvements or optimizations that happen in the meantime. If Microsoft sustains its direction for a few more years at most, given the pace at which the industry they are in evolves, the legacy practices they had won't much matter.
- reacweb 8y ago
  Microsoft got a bad rep because of its nefarious behavior in the 90s. It has killed many concurrent. It has fought against linux, java, netscape, ... It has tried to replace win32 many times creating a mess for developers. How do silverlight experts feel ? Recently, Microsoft has changed. visual studio code is excellent and OSS. WSL is getting very good.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Apple only has a "bad rep" for tech lock-in and right to repair among the small "less space than the Nomad. No wireless." inward looking, geek crowd.
  - zrobotics 8y ago
    I don't know if that is true anymore. One of my friends who is very much non-technical but has been an iPhone user since 2009 and Mac user for almost as long just asked me for a recommendation on an android phone a few weeks ago. He specifically cited the battery issues, and after having keyboard problems had done some googling for alternatives. Repairability was specifically mentioned, since he has had to have screens replaced on phones. There has been a fair amount of negative press, this is filtering to 'normal' people, not just Lewis rossman's viewers
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Well. We have more than anecdotes. We have retention rates. https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/11/apple-narrows-ios-loyalty-rate-gap-with-android-in-q3-retention-rates-at-all-time-high https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/11/apple-narrows-ios...
  - Yetanfou 8y ago
    Another reason Apple gets a bad rep is the often obnoxious behaviour of a group of people who defend the brand's every step and misstep with an almost religious fervour.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Have you heard of a guy name Richard Stallman?
      - Yetanfou 8y ago
        I don't think he uses Apple products so in that respect he is unlikely to fit the category. He has been implicated in giving Apple a bad rap in other ways though.
- alasdair_ 8y ago
  >Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates. I really hate Windows 10 automatically turning off all my privacy setting each time it updates, and re-installing ads for candy crush and other junk on my start menu after I'd explicitly removed it. Windows 10 tracks damn near everything you do and sends it back to Microsoft.
  - kerbalspacepro 8y ago
    The answer is to use Microsoft apps on an Apple machine (or Linux if you're that kind of person)
    - gowld 8y ago
      What are the caveats of running Wine to get Windows apps? http://go/wiki/Wine_(software)#Other_versions_of_Wine http://go/wiki/Wine_(software)#Other_versions_of_Wine
      - filoleg 8y ago
        You don't need Wine to run majority of MSFT apps on macOS these days. The whole Office suite has native apps, as well as VS Code.
    - JohnFen 8y ago
      It's even easier to simply not use Microsoft apps.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    I consider Windows 10 to be a privacy nightmare, and I don't use it outside of work (where it's necessary because it's one of our target platforms). However, and this is big to me, Microsoft doesn't pretend that Windows 10 isn't doing what it's doing. That means, even though I don't consider Windows suitable for my own use, that doesn't reduce the amount of trust I have in them as a company.
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  I think you're looking for 'bad rap' instead of 'bad rep', by the way.
- babypuncher 8y ago
  > horrible apple store experience Care to elaborate? I've never had a negative experience making purchases or getting devices repaired at the Apple store. Compared to HTC, which left me without my brand new phone for two months while they shipped my $800 One M8 back and forth with a different defect every time it came back to me.
sproketboy 8y ago
A) What FT is a "techlash"? B) No they are not winning. C) Fuck you shill.
flyinglizard 8y ago
Microsoft are selling an incredible suite of products and services. They are dependable, responsible and innovative. When I choose to use their platforms, I know they are taking me seriously, that they have a very long product support horizon, that they are embracing openness, have excellent documentation and integration with their tools (one fun exercise is debugging an Azure Function (their serverless lambdas) locally and seamless inside Visual Studio on your machine. Magical). I would have thought they are a dying company just two years ago and today I have a completely opposite outlook of them.
- arnvald 8y ago
  Do others have similar experience? I'm not a fan of Microsoft products however I sometimes have to use them or want to give a try to something like Azure, and so far my experience has been pretty bad. I had to contact their customer service in 2 cases and in both cases they couldn't help me and told me to create a new account (one case was me asking to change billing country in Azure so that I could provide credit card from another country). Also in both cases I had to go through a few emails and a few phone calls and even after they told me they can't do anything, they kept calling me just to check whether I'm satisfied with their solution (!) so that they could close the ticket in their system.
  - eropple 8y ago
    I've had a profoundly awful experience with Azure in particular. Most of Microsoft's offerings are pretty good (I quite like Office 365 in both a browser and on an iPad) but Azure is hot garbage. Their APIs are inconsistent (the Ruby ADAL connector has been broken for a year, and it's an easy monkey-patch fix so that's doubly awful), Azure AD insists on being king-shit-of-all-it-surveys and does not want to federate with a (better) directory option (what Okta does to get even halfway-decent integration is kinda heroic, and also terrible), and even once you get past all that the technical offerings are, in my experience, significantly less reliable and comprehensive than AWS or GCP, to the point where I would regularly see stuff like "the audit log doesn't show the restart you requested on that server". And all this (because, again, the APIs are bad) has you swimming through the tar pit that is their web console. It's tremendously bad in ways I didn't think web applications could be. The horizontal-scrolling blade nonsense is unintuitive and doesn't correctly handle browser history (so on refreshes you get lost, sometimes, but not all the time) and it looks ugly and action buttons are in stupid places. Then, when you have to ask for help, you get thrown into a tilt-a-whirl of awful, near-nonsensical customer support and it takes an act of Congress and God to get escalated to somebody who 1) speaks English clearly and with enough care as to be understood, and 2) understands the problem at hand. (And, not or.) Granted, I'm probably not their target market. I don't want a more expensive datacenter in The Cloud(tm) so I'm not grateful for incremental improvements over racking servers. But it's a really unpleasant experience compared to either Amazon or Google and I'm mystified as to how it can be so cumulatively bad.
notacoward 8y ago
The conclusion is contrary to the evidence presented. > companies untouched by scandal — including Microsoft — > prospered in the eyes of consumers Except that Amazon, which has gotten a bit of a black eye later (HQ2 + worker treatment + antitrust), has stayed steady near the very top of the cited poll. Apple, which has had few such problems, has sunk from near the top to #32. When you only have eight samples to begin with, and two strongly contradict your theory, your theory sucks. Microsoft in particular is doing relatively well for a variety of reasons, but not because of this one.
- Funes- 8y ago
  >Microsoft in particular is doing relatively well for a variety of reasons, but not because of this one. Why exactly wouldn't Microsoft's newfound good reputation be included among those reasons? Your rebuttal would be just as unfounded as the theory you are dismissing. Perhaps it's not as determinant a factor as the author makes it out to be, but discarding it altogether doesn't look reasonable to me.
  - notacoward 8y ago
    > Your rebuttal would be just as unfounded as the theory you are dismissing. True enough, but that doesn't validate the higher-profile original either. Seems a bit "well actually" TBH.
    - Funes- 8y ago
      >that doesn't validate the higher-profile original either. You're right, it doesn't. I never said that, either. >Seems a bit "well actually" TBH I'm sorry if it came across that way, really. I like to be as precise as I can with everything I say, so it just came out that way naturally. Actually, one of the first replies I got here (not too long ago) was a similar kind of comment to the one we are discussing now. At first, my reaction was negative, as in "this guy is just trying to one-up me by nitpicking my comment"; then, I realized it was an opportunity to start to make myself as clear as possible whenever I wrote any other comments. Anyhow, I hope you can understand where I'm coming from.
yourbandsucks 8y ago
Apparently, they averaged about 300 interviews per company, then stack ranked on net favorability. I'm not a social scientist, but that seems.. low? And while I'm sure the initial call list was demographically weighted, apparently they'd ask each respondent to talk about two companies they were more familiar with from the list of 100. That doesn't sound like the ~300 people rating each company had any proper demographic weighting at all. Full report: https://theharrispoll.com/HarrisPoll_Axios_MostVisible_2019.pdf https://theharrispoll.com/HarrisPoll_Axios_MostVisible_2019....
- mhermher 8y ago
  300 people rating 2 of 100 companies does seem very sparse. Thanks for the link.
jrs95 8y ago
Maybe they have a higher reputation but that doesn't mean people like or will buy their consumer products. They still have a huge problem there.
darkmuck 8y ago
Although Microsoft has been very successful lately, I wish they hadn't given up on competing in some consumer areas such mobile. Now we are stuck with only Apple & Google.
- sgift 8y ago
  I wonder if they wait for the right moment (e.g. when Android gets replaced with whatever Google tries to replace it with) for a new play on mobile or if they really are "done" with it.
  - sylens 8y ago
    I think they are going to wait for the Progressive Web App (PWA) revolution to reenter the market.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    I think there is a still a possibility that Microsoft expects the phone and PC markets to merge and hopes to be there with welcoming arms when it does, but I'm getting the impression they won't build new hardware to do it if they can't convince other manufacturers to join in.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  I'm betting that Microsoft is going to come out with a Surface branded Android phone in the next 2-3 years, and allow Android apps to be entered into the Microsoft Store. Use their leverage in developer tools to make publishing in all 3 stores easy. The groundwork is being laid, but I think they are very much focused on the cloud and catching up to AWS offerings.
  - granshaw 8y ago
    I dunno if the new MS has much appetite for the consumer space TBH. Their strength and main source of revenue is business solutions
    - 8y ago
manigandham 8y ago
"Tech industry/company" is a useless term. Facebook and Google are ad networks, and it's advertising that's getting a backlash. Microsoft has a much smaller ad business with Bing (although still 3x bigger than Twitter) so of course they don't get the same amount of backlash because of it. Apple is in a similar position.
dingo_bat 8y ago
I really wish Microsoft would release a modern, capable smartphone. Not based on Android. Revive the windows phone UI, couple it to good hardware. Maybe partner with Samsung. A surface phone, so to speak. I'd buy it instantly. I don't care about apps. I care about a good browser, good screen, maybe whatsapp, long battery life.
jussij 8y ago
I think the problem with Google is it can't decide if they are into software or into advertising. Google had a big lead on Microsoft with their web based 'office like' products, but they just could not get the paying business customer. Microsoft can see what Google is doing, quickly push out their 'Office 365' clone and without much effort find they have quickly become the biggest player in that field. I think Google would have easily won that game it they could just convinced business they where more than just an advertising company. I get the impression business is more than happy giving their data to Microsoft, while also paying for that privilege where as they are not so sure about trusting their data with Google.
- coldpie 8y ago
  I would love so much to pay for Google services if it meant disabling all of their ads and data tracking. But they're just not interested in that kind of business model.
  - jussij 8y ago
    Exactly. They're hooked on their Ad Words income stream.
  - Kalium 8y ago
    If there's one uncomfortable thing Google has made painfully clear to all of us, it's that the vast majority of consumers just aren't interested in paying for things like email or search. It isn't due to a lack of offerings. There are plenty of provides that will happily do so. Anyone who wants to can buy email from Google today! Yet in the face of this the vast majority of users choose not to pay for email. My current operating hypothesis is that the vast majority of ordinary users value their privacy right up to the point where they have to put a price on it. At which point a handful of nerds (like us!) are willing to pay, but most people happily trade their privacy for services instead of involving money.
    - BethGagaShaggy 8y ago
      Rather, users value the service up to the point where it has got a price on it.
Nasrudith 8y ago
Really the whole "techlash" feels incredibly manufactured in the first place - I think the uniform shallowness of criticisms is part of its smell. I mean most content it shallow but you expect a "bell curve" of nuance between slogan repeaters and those pondering more in depth at the edges. Look at other movements and their diversity of ideas - even if mostly in agreement differing implementations tend to be proposed by some even if most parrot shallow slogans. The selectivity also stinks. Comcast, a serial worst company winner infamous for poor service is left unmentioned while social media somehow qualifies as "a monopoly" and the equivalent of Store Brands in Amazon is somehow monopoly abuse?
- manigandham 8y ago
  Yes, the real backlash is people's trust in the media. Of course the media will never write about that.
  - kitotik 8y ago
    Don’t discount the gentrification issue. In places like Austin, San Fran, and West LA the “techlash” started when small businesses and non-tech workers could no longer afford to pay rent in their city, and their culture was pretty much replaced.
    - Nasrudith 8y ago
      That is a separate issue and far more local. For LA they were going wannabe terrorists about gentrification back in the the late 90s with the Yuppie Eradication Project - it seems nobody was sympathetic to them and who can blame them? I think most would rather have the most obnoxious yuppie stereotype than those idiot self-righteous vandals. Gentrification seems to be a noisy minority issue - I hear far most people who would want gentrification. Which I suppose points to another cultural divide. To suburbanites and even other major cities they look like huge spoiled brats - conplaining about things other areas would kill for, and already offer more for far less. I am aware of differing situations and needs but it seems that someone isn't being reasonable.
PorterDuff 8y ago
I was just musing about what makes a tech company more likeable. Personally, I made money for years using Microsoft products, find Amazon quite useful (living in small towns) and just see Google as irritating. But then, if the internet were reduced to USENET, email, and maybe a curated list of serious websites like online banking, I'd be fine with it, and probably better off in some ways.
- asark 8y ago
  > Personally, I made money for years using Microsoft products, find Amazon quite useful (living in small towns) and just see Google as irritating. But then, if the internet were reduced to USENET, email, and maybe a curated list of serious websites like online banking, I'd be fine with it, and probably better off in some ways. You're not alone in this thinking. The vast bulk of the Web is of marginal benefit, or harmful, and I think in the end it's going to contribute to taking us (humanity) to a very, very bad place.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > I made money for years using Microsoft products My too, but that doesn't mean that Microsoft products are appropriate or desirable for me for personal use.
ddebernardy 8y ago
The chart is very misleading. Instead of charting rank year on year, Axios should have charted the actual reputation, and then placed a few household names next to them so they're more comparable. https://theharrispoll.com/axios-harrispoll-100/ https://theharrispoll.com/axios-harrispoll-100/ Facebook's score (58) is basically in the dumpster category, a notch behind Comcast (61.4), Bank of America (60.9), and Goldman Sachs (60), though still several notches ahead Trump Org (50.1), Philipp Morris (49.4), and the US government (48.6). The other tech giants are within a few points of each other: Amazon gets 82.3, Microsoft 79.7, Netflix 77.3, Apple 76.4, and Google 75.4. Amazon is in the same category as Disney. The other 4 are comparable to the likes of Coca Cola, Procter and Gamble, Unilever, Nike, etc.
freewilly1040 8y ago
“Microsoft lost on search because they were so distracted by getting sued by the government” is a dubious take I've never heard anywhere else.
dalbasal 8y ago
As an aside, FB's continued success, while having such a bad public image is astonishing. They obviously have a moat, a very literal network effect. But, FB also has lots of competition (more than google, amzn, & msft anyway) and the type of product that should be substitutable.. with some combination of twitter-wechat-HN-or-whatnot. Social network, seems, at least to me, like something that lends to rising and waning popularity. They're not embedded in businesses or hard to turn off in any way. It just seems that negative user opinion of FB should be a bigger deal than it would be for amazon of msft. I dunno how to square this circle.
- icelancer 8y ago
  > As an aside, FB's continued success, while having such a bad public image is astonishing. The public image is a bunch of people who want them to be bad, not actual consumers. The media has narratives it drives and a bunch of nerds here hate them for legitimate reasons. The average consumer does not care and never will.
  - dalbasal 8y ago
    I disagree. The average FB user is opinionated about all sorts of things. I bet you if you polled random people on the street, they have an opinion on FB... and I bet it has gotten worse in the last few years.
bhauer 8y ago
The Axios Harris poll [1] as a general matter is pretty interesting. I am surprised at Amazon's position among the tech firms. [1] https://theharrispoll.com/axios-harrispoll-100/#2019-rankings https://theharrispoll.com/axios-harrispoll-100/#2019-ranking...
rchaud 8y ago
Microsoft is more B2B than B2C compared to the other companies, so it makes sense that they're barely ever in the news cycle. They've done a good job of creating separate identities for their Office, Azure and Xbox brands, so bad PR on the Xbox side won't adversely impact the company's reputation as a whole.
blueboo 8y ago
...says Axios, an outlet infamous for obsequious coverage of the wealthy and well-connected. In Tech, Microsoft is old money, thus this puff piece. Just this year Microsoft's Outlook service had a massive breach, leaking ~800 million passwords. Their flagship product, Windows 10, is infamous for randomly blocking people from working. The recent October automatic update even went ahead and just deleted users' files. Remembebr Windows Phones? Remember Bing? MSN is still live... so I guess it outlasted Google Plus. I guess since its efforts in social media are a whisper of a joke, that by default they're "winning" ? More likely it's just Axios being Axios. meanwhile .. https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/ https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/, http://www.millwardbrown.com/brandz/rankings-and-reports/top-us-brands/2019 http://www.millwardbrown.com/brandz/rankings-and-reports/top..., and any other extant brand ranking shows Microsoft pretty far from the top
al2o3cr 8y ago
I just last week had to deal with customers that had locked-down computers stuck on IE11 and hit some JS that used unsupported features. IE11 was released after the relevant features were in common use in the Javascript community, but Microsoft was still in its "the web is better with our proprietary extensions, trust us" mode so they aren't in IE11. They can't upgrade their browser because IE11 is the last browser version Microsoft supports on their Microsoft operating system, because they want users to upgrade. They can't use an alternative browser because they're in a security-sensitive industry with policies written in the Old Days when running third-party software was marketed as "dangerous", including by Microsoft. They don't want to upgrade operating systems because that means a huge software spend to Microsoft, plus migrating all their other software, POS hardware, etc. The point being, none of these are things Microsoft is doing today. But they're all decisions they made in the past, and the consequences of those decisions are still making people's jobs harder.
- tracker1 8y ago
  Edge is MS's current browser... IE11 was an incremental release over IE10 and several years old at this point. Most browsers update very frequently. IE never did. Maybe you need to look at whoever locked said computers down to ONLY support IE? Chrome and Firefox are both better options at this point. It really isn't MS's fault that an organization can't be bothered to update their software for what, 4 years now?
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  IE11 was well after the "web is better with our proprietary extensions" days. It even tried to disable add-ons and extensions entirely by default until (enterprise) backward compat anger forced their hand. For IE11 (and 10 and Edge in either direction around it), Microsoft was firmly stuck in a "WebKit/Blink treadmill" where they had to run twice as fast to try to keep up and almost succeeded (until they gave up recently, RIP EdgeHTML). Most of rest of these complaints sound like your customers should stop hitting themselves in the face.

151 points by kristianc 8y ago

d--b 8y ago

Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates. Apple's bad rep is probably due to high pricing, tech lock-in, horrible apple store experience, bad behavior regarding right-to-repair, pretty bad software overall.

denzil_correa 8y ago
> Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates. Microsoft has many business models and one of them is based on advertisements, example : LinkedIn.
- d--b 8y ago
  Sure, but Microsoft is not exactly looking to brag about the fact that it owns LinkedIn. There's zero mention of Microsoft on the LinkedIn website.
- organsnyder 8y ago
  My hunch is that LinkedIn derives a substantial (perhaps the majority) of revenue from premium memberships sold to recruiters.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    The recruiters and amount of spam (those two overlap heavily in the Venn diagram) are what drove me to delete my LinkedIn account.
- bni 8y ago
  Windows 10 business model for consumers is also based on ads and tracking/surveillance.
- kristianc 8y ago
  > Microsoft has many business models and one of them is based on advertisements, example : LinkedIn. LinkedIn make bank from selling Sales Navigator. Ads are a tiny proportion of their revenue.
  - cosmie 8y ago
    I was surprised to see this is true about their advertising! While dated, their 2016 disclosures showed ads making up only 18% of revenue ($109mm)[1]. Which was only about 10% of the $1.6bn that Bing pulled in around that time[2]. Having managed ad campaigns on LinkedIn, that's both surprising and not. They have a horrifically high cost per click compared to other channels, but the results in B2B verticals were usually enough to warrant putting up with it. So it's surprising it was only pulling in around $100mm. But then, their self-service component didn't allow for accessing all of their inventory, and none of my clients wanted to go in with the commitments necessary for the high-touch placements. So that may have dampened demand a good bit. That said, Sales Navigator (and premium subscriptions) is an equally small portion of revenue. 65% of their money came from their "talent solutions" recruiting features. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120214/how-does-linkedin-lnkd-make-money.asp https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120214/how-does-lin... [2] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/313837/microsoft-revenue-from-bing-search-ads-rose-in-201.html https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/313837/micros...
- zantana 8y ago
  Yes, it is always a reality check from the feel good vscode/wsl/Nadella lovefest when they foist some unwanted telemetry or ads in various parts of Windows, that they are a beast with many heads.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Bing is their major ad business, not Linkedin which makes its money mostly from subscriptions and jobs.
organsnyder 8y ago
> Apple's bad rep is probably due to high pricing, tech lock-in, horrible apple store experience, bad behavior regarding right-to-repair, pretty bad software overall. How times have changed. It wasn't long ago that many of us (myself included) were saying virtually the same thing about Microsoft's product.
- michaelcampbell 8y ago
  > How times have changed. Including people at the top running things. Interesting (to me) how the sales guy CEO's having been changed led the companies in different directions afterwards.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Ironically I recall a minority pointing out Apple would be even worse than Microsoft if they were in Microsoft's place given their controllingness - Microsoft was fine with third party manufacturers as opposed to suing to stop "Hackintoshes". There never was an equivalent for Microsoft.
  - pwinnski 8y ago
    Microsoft was in the position of the Hackintoshes, though. It was IBM in Apple's position, and IBM did sue. A software company (MS) and a hardware company (Apple) definitely make different choices!
    - sneakernets 8y ago
      Isn't MS making hardware now?
      - pwinnski 8y ago
        Sure, though not enough to really be called a hardware company. The comparison was between MS in the 90s and Apple now, as I understood it. At the time they might have been making peripherals, maybe? But not computers.
sametmax 8y ago
> Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates. You mean they don't put ads in the windows home menu or hundred of spywares in the OS ? Or that they don't have ads in bings, skype or outlook ? > Apple's bad rep is probably due to high pricing, tech lock-in, horrible apple store experience, bad behavior regarding right-to-repair, pretty bad software overall. Or maybe you mean they don't lock in with proprietary formats, avoiding to publish the specs and when they then do don't follow it like with Office ? Hopefully this has been compensated by the fantastic Windows Update experience and good behavior. I'm not an FB, Apple or Google fan. In fact I don't have an FB account, I voluntarily don't buy Apple products and refused a job interview with Google. But let's not forget the numerous bad deeds of MS. That's how we never solve the problems we have: we let people misbehave and after a while, they are all forgiven. It's the same with politics, bad bosses, abusive spouses, etc. Don't let people forget.
- flyingpenguin 8y ago
  I mean every company has problems... Microsoft just seems to be generally headed in a better direction vs worse which seems way more common.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    Every people have problems too. Some beat their wife, some are a bit moody. MS has been repeatedly caught lying, cheating, insulting and corrupting. Can I slap you if I give a treat to a puppy later ? Because being pro-microsoft now that their PR is more human and their actions more positive looks pretty much like that. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they make TypeScript and VSCode. But they need 20 years of being a good boy to compensate for what they did. More if we want to take in consideration they became incredibly rich doing it.
    - intern4tional 8y ago
      They don't need 20 years of anything; they simply needed a change in leadership, which they got. Satya is drastically changing the culture and with it the business. I get there are people out there that will always have an ax to grind (you seem to be one of those) but if you wait 20 years to trust a business again, you'll be left behind with any improvements or optimizations that happen in the meantime. If Microsoft sustains its direction for a few more years at most, given the pace at which the industry they are in evolves, the legacy practices they had won't much matter.
reacweb 8y ago
Microsoft got a bad rep because of its nefarious behavior in the 90s. It has killed many concurrent. It has fought against linux, java, netscape, ... It has tried to replace win32 many times creating a mess for developers. How do silverlight experts feel ? Recently, Microsoft has changed. visual studio code is excellent and OSS. WSL is getting very good.
scarface74 8y ago
Apple only has a "bad rep" for tech lock-in and right to repair among the small "less space than the Nomad. No wireless." inward looking, geek crowd.
- zrobotics 8y ago
  I don't know if that is true anymore. One of my friends who is very much non-technical but has been an iPhone user since 2009 and Mac user for almost as long just asked me for a recommendation on an android phone a few weeks ago. He specifically cited the battery issues, and after having keyboard problems had done some googling for alternatives. Repairability was specifically mentioned, since he has had to have screens replaced on phones. There has been a fair amount of negative press, this is filtering to 'normal' people, not just Lewis rossman's viewers
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Well. We have more than anecdotes. We have retention rates. https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/11/apple-narrows-ios-loyalty-rate-gap-with-android-in-q3-retention-rates-at-all-time-high https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/11/apple-narrows-ios...
- Yetanfou 8y ago
  Another reason Apple gets a bad rep is the often obnoxious behaviour of a group of people who defend the brand's every step and misstep with an almost religious fervour.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Have you heard of a guy name Richard Stallman?
    - Yetanfou 8y ago
      I don't think he uses Apple products so in that respect he is unlikely to fit the category. He has been implicated in giving Apple a bad rap in other ways though.
alasdair_ 8y ago
>Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates. I really hate Windows 10 automatically turning off all my privacy setting each time it updates, and re-installing ads for candy crush and other junk on my start menu after I'd explicitly removed it. Windows 10 tracks damn near everything you do and sends it back to Microsoft.
- kerbalspacepro 8y ago
  The answer is to use Microsoft apps on an Apple machine (or Linux if you're that kind of person)
  - gowld 8y ago
    What are the caveats of running Wine to get Windows apps? http://go/wiki/Wine_(software)#Other_versions_of_Wine http://go/wiki/Wine_(software)#Other_versions_of_Wine
    - filoleg 8y ago
      You don't need Wine to run majority of MSFT apps on macOS these days. The whole Office suite has native apps, as well as VS Code.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    It's even easier to simply not use Microsoft apps.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  I consider Windows 10 to be a privacy nightmare, and I don't use it outside of work (where it's necessary because it's one of our target platforms). However, and this is big to me, Microsoft doesn't pretend that Windows 10 isn't doing what it's doing. That means, even though I don't consider Windows suitable for my own use, that doesn't reduce the amount of trust I have in them as a company.
stochastic_monk 8y ago
I think you're looking for 'bad rap' instead of 'bad rep', by the way.
babypuncher 8y ago
> horrible apple store experience Care to elaborate? I've never had a negative experience making purchases or getting devices repaired at the Apple store. Compared to HTC, which left me without my brand new phone for two months while they shipped my $800 One M8 back and forth with a different defect every time it came back to me.

sproketboy 8y ago

A) What FT is a "techlash"? B) No they are not winning. C) Fuck you shill.

flyinglizard 8y ago

Microsoft are selling an incredible suite of products and services. They are dependable, responsible and innovative. When I choose to use their platforms, I know they are taking me seriously, that they have a very long product support horizon, that they are embracing openness, have excellent documentation and integration with their tools (one fun exercise is debugging an Azure Function (their serverless lambdas) locally and seamless inside Visual Studio on your machine. Magical). I would have thought they are a dying company just two years ago and today I have a completely opposite outlook of them.

arnvald 8y ago
Do others have similar experience? I'm not a fan of Microsoft products however I sometimes have to use them or want to give a try to something like Azure, and so far my experience has been pretty bad. I had to contact their customer service in 2 cases and in both cases they couldn't help me and told me to create a new account (one case was me asking to change billing country in Azure so that I could provide credit card from another country). Also in both cases I had to go through a few emails and a few phone calls and even after they told me they can't do anything, they kept calling me just to check whether I'm satisfied with their solution (!) so that they could close the ticket in their system.
- eropple 8y ago
  I've had a profoundly awful experience with Azure in particular. Most of Microsoft's offerings are pretty good (I quite like Office 365 in both a browser and on an iPad) but Azure is hot garbage. Their APIs are inconsistent (the Ruby ADAL connector has been broken for a year, and it's an easy monkey-patch fix so that's doubly awful), Azure AD insists on being king-shit-of-all-it-surveys and does not want to federate with a (better) directory option (what Okta does to get even halfway-decent integration is kinda heroic, and also terrible), and even once you get past all that the technical offerings are, in my experience, significantly less reliable and comprehensive than AWS or GCP, to the point where I would regularly see stuff like "the audit log doesn't show the restart you requested on that server". And all this (because, again, the APIs are bad) has you swimming through the tar pit that is their web console. It's tremendously bad in ways I didn't think web applications could be. The horizontal-scrolling blade nonsense is unintuitive and doesn't correctly handle browser history (so on refreshes you get lost, sometimes, but not all the time) and it looks ugly and action buttons are in stupid places. Then, when you have to ask for help, you get thrown into a tilt-a-whirl of awful, near-nonsensical customer support and it takes an act of Congress and God to get escalated to somebody who 1) speaks English clearly and with enough care as to be understood, and 2) understands the problem at hand. (And, not or.) Granted, I'm probably not their target market. I don't want a more expensive datacenter in The Cloud(tm) so I'm not grateful for incremental improvements over racking servers. But it's a really unpleasant experience compared to either Amazon or Google and I'm mystified as to how it can be so cumulatively bad.

notacoward 8y ago

The conclusion is contrary to the evidence presented. > companies untouched by scandal — including Microsoft — > prospered in the eyes of consumers Except that Amazon, which has gotten a bit of a black eye later (HQ2 + worker treatment + antitrust), has stayed steady near the very top of the cited poll. Apple, which has had few such problems, has sunk from near the top to #32. When you only have eight samples to begin with, and two strongly contradict your theory, your theory sucks. Microsoft in particular is doing relatively well for a variety of reasons, but not because of this one.

Funes- 8y ago
>Microsoft in particular is doing relatively well for a variety of reasons, but not because of this one. Why exactly wouldn't Microsoft's newfound good reputation be included among those reasons? Your rebuttal would be just as unfounded as the theory you are dismissing. Perhaps it's not as determinant a factor as the author makes it out to be, but discarding it altogether doesn't look reasonable to me.
- notacoward 8y ago
  > Your rebuttal would be just as unfounded as the theory you are dismissing. True enough, but that doesn't validate the higher-profile original either. Seems a bit "well actually" TBH.
  - Funes- 8y ago
    >that doesn't validate the higher-profile original either. You're right, it doesn't. I never said that, either. >Seems a bit "well actually" TBH I'm sorry if it came across that way, really. I like to be as precise as I can with everything I say, so it just came out that way naturally. Actually, one of the first replies I got here (not too long ago) was a similar kind of comment to the one we are discussing now. At first, my reaction was negative, as in "this guy is just trying to one-up me by nitpicking my comment"; then, I realized it was an opportunity to start to make myself as clear as possible whenever I wrote any other comments. Anyhow, I hope you can understand where I'm coming from.

yourbandsucks 8y ago

Apparently, they averaged about 300 interviews per company, then stack ranked on net favorability. I'm not a social scientist, but that seems.. low? And while I'm sure the initial call list was demographically weighted, apparently they'd ask each respondent to talk about two companies they were more familiar with from the list of 100. That doesn't sound like the ~300 people rating each company had any proper demographic weighting at all. Full report: https://theharrispoll.com/HarrisPoll_Axios_MostVisible_2019.pdf https://theharrispoll.com/HarrisPoll_Axios_MostVisible_2019....

mhermher 8y ago
300 people rating 2 of 100 companies does seem very sparse. Thanks for the link.

jrs95 8y ago

Maybe they have a higher reputation but that doesn't mean people like or will buy their consumer products. They still have a huge problem there.

darkmuck 8y ago

Although Microsoft has been very successful lately, I wish they hadn't given up on competing in some consumer areas such mobile. Now we are stuck with only Apple & Google.

sgift 8y ago
I wonder if they wait for the right moment (e.g. when Android gets replaced with whatever Google tries to replace it with) for a new play on mobile or if they really are "done" with it.
- sylens 8y ago
  I think they are going to wait for the Progressive Web App (PWA) revolution to reenter the market.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  I think there is a still a possibility that Microsoft expects the phone and PC markets to merge and hopes to be there with welcoming arms when it does, but I'm getting the impression they won't build new hardware to do it if they can't convince other manufacturers to join in.
partiallypro 8y ago
I'm betting that Microsoft is going to come out with a Surface branded Android phone in the next 2-3 years, and allow Android apps to be entered into the Microsoft Store. Use their leverage in developer tools to make publishing in all 3 stores easy. The groundwork is being laid, but I think they are very much focused on the cloud and catching up to AWS offerings.
- granshaw 8y ago
  I dunno if the new MS has much appetite for the consumer space TBH. Their strength and main source of revenue is business solutions
  - 8y ago

manigandham 8y ago

"Tech industry/company" is a useless term. Facebook and Google are ad networks, and it's advertising that's getting a backlash. Microsoft has a much smaller ad business with Bing (although still 3x bigger than Twitter) so of course they don't get the same amount of backlash because of it. Apple is in a similar position.

dingo_bat 8y ago

I really wish Microsoft would release a modern, capable smartphone. Not based on Android. Revive the windows phone UI, couple it to good hardware. Maybe partner with Samsung. A surface phone, so to speak. I'd buy it instantly. I don't care about apps. I care about a good browser, good screen, maybe whatsapp, long battery life.

jussij 8y ago

I think the problem with Google is it can't decide if they are into software or into advertising. Google had a big lead on Microsoft with their web based 'office like' products, but they just could not get the paying business customer. Microsoft can see what Google is doing, quickly push out their 'Office 365' clone and without much effort find they have quickly become the biggest player in that field. I think Google would have easily won that game it they could just convinced business they where more than just an advertising company. I get the impression business is more than happy giving their data to Microsoft, while also paying for that privilege where as they are not so sure about trusting their data with Google.

coldpie 8y ago
I would love so much to pay for Google services if it meant disabling all of their ads and data tracking. But they're just not interested in that kind of business model.
- jussij 8y ago
  Exactly. They're hooked on their Ad Words income stream.
- Kalium 8y ago
  If there's one uncomfortable thing Google has made painfully clear to all of us, it's that the vast majority of consumers just aren't interested in paying for things like email or search. It isn't due to a lack of offerings. There are plenty of provides that will happily do so. Anyone who wants to can buy email from Google today! Yet in the face of this the vast majority of users choose not to pay for email. My current operating hypothesis is that the vast majority of ordinary users value their privacy right up to the point where they have to put a price on it. At which point a handful of nerds (like us!) are willing to pay, but most people happily trade their privacy for services instead of involving money.
  - BethGagaShaggy 8y ago
    Rather, users value the service up to the point where it has got a price on it.

Nasrudith 8y ago

Really the whole "techlash" feels incredibly manufactured in the first place - I think the uniform shallowness of criticisms is part of its smell. I mean most content it shallow but you expect a "bell curve" of nuance between slogan repeaters and those pondering more in depth at the edges. Look at other movements and their diversity of ideas - even if mostly in agreement differing implementations tend to be proposed by some even if most parrot shallow slogans. The selectivity also stinks. Comcast, a serial worst company winner infamous for poor service is left unmentioned while social media somehow qualifies as "a monopoly" and the equivalent of Store Brands in Amazon is somehow monopoly abuse?

manigandham 8y ago
Yes, the real backlash is people's trust in the media. Of course the media will never write about that.
- kitotik 8y ago
  Don’t discount the gentrification issue. In places like Austin, San Fran, and West LA the “techlash” started when small businesses and non-tech workers could no longer afford to pay rent in their city, and their culture was pretty much replaced.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    That is a separate issue and far more local. For LA they were going wannabe terrorists about gentrification back in the the late 90s with the Yuppie Eradication Project - it seems nobody was sympathetic to them and who can blame them? I think most would rather have the most obnoxious yuppie stereotype than those idiot self-righteous vandals. Gentrification seems to be a noisy minority issue - I hear far most people who would want gentrification. Which I suppose points to another cultural divide. To suburbanites and even other major cities they look like huge spoiled brats - conplaining about things other areas would kill for, and already offer more for far less. I am aware of differing situations and needs but it seems that someone isn't being reasonable.

PorterDuff 8y ago

I was just musing about what makes a tech company more likeable. Personally, I made money for years using Microsoft products, find Amazon quite useful (living in small towns) and just see Google as irritating. But then, if the internet were reduced to USENET, email, and maybe a curated list of serious websites like online banking, I'd be fine with it, and probably better off in some ways.

asark 8y ago
> Personally, I made money for years using Microsoft products, find Amazon quite useful (living in small towns) and just see Google as irritating. But then, if the internet were reduced to USENET, email, and maybe a curated list of serious websites like online banking, I'd be fine with it, and probably better off in some ways. You're not alone in this thinking. The vast bulk of the Web is of marginal benefit, or harmful, and I think in the end it's going to contribute to taking us (humanity) to a very, very bad place.
JohnFen 8y ago
> I made money for years using Microsoft products My too, but that doesn't mean that Microsoft products are appropriate or desirable for me for personal use.

ddebernardy 8y ago

The chart is very misleading. Instead of charting rank year on year, Axios should have charted the actual reputation, and then placed a few household names next to them so they're more comparable. https://theharrispoll.com/axios-harrispoll-100/ https://theharrispoll.com/axios-harrispoll-100/ Facebook's score (58) is basically in the dumpster category, a notch behind Comcast (61.4), Bank of America (60.9), and Goldman Sachs (60), though still several notches ahead Trump Org (50.1), Philipp Morris (49.4), and the US government (48.6). The other tech giants are within a few points of each other: Amazon gets 82.3, Microsoft 79.7, Netflix 77.3, Apple 76.4, and Google 75.4. Amazon is in the same category as Disney. The other 4 are comparable to the likes of Coca Cola, Procter and Gamble, Unilever, Nike, etc.

freewilly1040 8y ago

“Microsoft lost on search because they were so distracted by getting sued by the government” is a dubious take I've never heard anywhere else.

dalbasal 8y ago

As an aside, FB's continued success, while having such a bad public image is astonishing. They obviously have a moat, a very literal network effect. But, FB also has lots of competition (more than google, amzn, & msft anyway) and the type of product that should be substitutable.. with some combination of twitter-wechat-HN-or-whatnot. Social network, seems, at least to me, like something that lends to rising and waning popularity. They're not embedded in businesses or hard to turn off in any way. It just seems that negative user opinion of FB should be a bigger deal than it would be for amazon of msft. I dunno how to square this circle.

icelancer 8y ago
> As an aside, FB's continued success, while having such a bad public image is astonishing. The public image is a bunch of people who want them to be bad, not actual consumers. The media has narratives it drives and a bunch of nerds here hate them for legitimate reasons. The average consumer does not care and never will.
- dalbasal 8y ago
  I disagree. The average FB user is opinionated about all sorts of things. I bet you if you polled random people on the street, they have an opinion on FB... and I bet it has gotten worse in the last few years.

bhauer 8y ago

The Axios Harris poll [1] as a general matter is pretty interesting. I am surprised at Amazon's position among the tech firms. [1] https://theharrispoll.com/axios-harrispoll-100/#2019-rankings https://theharrispoll.com/axios-harrispoll-100/#2019-ranking...

rchaud 8y ago

Microsoft is more B2B than B2C compared to the other companies, so it makes sense that they're barely ever in the news cycle. They've done a good job of creating separate identities for their Office, Azure and Xbox brands, so bad PR on the Xbox side won't adversely impact the company's reputation as a whole.

blueboo 8y ago

...says Axios, an outlet infamous for obsequious coverage of the wealthy and well-connected. In Tech, Microsoft is old money, thus this puff piece. Just this year Microsoft's Outlook service had a massive breach, leaking ~800 million passwords. Their flagship product, Windows 10, is infamous for randomly blocking people from working. The recent October automatic update even went ahead and just deleted users' files. Remembebr Windows Phones? Remember Bing? MSN is still live... so I guess it outlasted Google Plus. I guess since its efforts in social media are a whisper of a joke, that by default they're "winning" ? More likely it's just Axios being Axios. meanwhile .. https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/ https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/, http://www.millwardbrown.com/brandz/rankings-and-reports/top-us-brands/2019 http://www.millwardbrown.com/brandz/rankings-and-reports/top..., and any other extant brand ranking shows Microsoft pretty far from the top

al2o3cr 8y ago

I just last week had to deal with customers that had locked-down computers stuck on IE11 and hit some JS that used unsupported features. IE11 was released after the relevant features were in common use in the Javascript community, but Microsoft was still in its "the web is better with our proprietary extensions, trust us" mode so they aren't in IE11. They can't upgrade their browser because IE11 is the last browser version Microsoft supports on their Microsoft operating system, because they want users to upgrade. They can't use an alternative browser because they're in a security-sensitive industry with policies written in the Old Days when running third-party software was marketed as "dangerous", including by Microsoft. They don't want to upgrade operating systems because that means a huge software spend to Microsoft, plus migrating all their other software, POS hardware, etc. The point being, none of these are things Microsoft is doing today. But they're all decisions they made in the past, and the consequences of those decisions are still making people's jobs harder.

tracker1 8y ago
Edge is MS's current browser... IE11 was an incremental release over IE10 and several years old at this point. Most browsers update very frequently. IE never did. Maybe you need to look at whoever locked said computers down to ONLY support IE? Chrome and Firefox are both better options at this point. It really isn't MS's fault that an organization can't be bothered to update their software for what, 4 years now?
WorldMaker 8y ago
IE11 was well after the "web is better with our proprietary extensions" days. It even tried to disable add-ons and extensions entirely by default until (enterprise) backward compat anger forced their hand. For IE11 (and 10 and Edge in either direction around it), Microsoft was firmly stuck in a "WebKit/Blink treadmill" where they had to run twice as fast to try to keep up and almost succeeded (until they gave up recently, RIP EdgeHTML). Most of rest of these complaints sound like your customers should stop hitting themselves in the face.