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I addressed XBox specifically. They wrote off $1.5Bn over the XBox 360 red rings of death issue. It's possible they might have recouped that since, with inflati

by simonh 5y ago

I addressed XBox specifically. They wrote off $1.5Bn over the XBox 360 red rings of death issue. It's possible they might have recouped that since, with inflation and interest adjustment, but doubtful. Windows and Azure are the tent poles I was thinking of when I said they had more than one now. I tend to see Windows and Office as fundamentally the same business though, along with development tools, in the same way that I think it's unreasonable to consider Apple's applications business separately from MacOS. Split Office from Windows and I think it would struggle, certainly it wouldn't have got to where it is now. It's an add-on to the Windows business. On it's own it wouldn't be industry dominating the way Windows, AWS, Google Search, etc are. It's a good business but not industry shaping, not anymore anyway.

fossuser 5y ago
Arguably Windows was starting to fail and Microsoft appeared to be in serious trouble. Then Nadella replaced Ballmer and corrected course: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ Now they’ve pivoted to grow azure and O365 successfully in addition to leverage the Xbox via game pass to fit into that strategic world. I think this mostly supports your point - it took an existential crisis and ousting a CEO that couldn’t adapt in order to save them when their cash cow started to falter.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  Windows never failed in desktop OS. And didn't succeed in mobile in the first place. Nadella could quickly release office cross-platform because of work during Ballmer.
  - fossuser 5y ago
    Desktop operating systems as a differentiating feature started being a strategic failure because of the web. Ballmer doubled down on Windows at the expense of other stuff. There is a common HN trope that Ballmer was doing everything perfectly and Nadella just continued it. I don’t buy it and neither did the market. (Neither did Microsoft’s board presumably) I think Ballmer’s entire strategic direction was long-term wrong and Nadella changed it. This isn’t to say no projects started under Ballmer (they definitely did) it’s about whether those were prioritized or would have ever shipped under him successfully. If the wrong things are considered important - it doesn’t really matter what projects are happening.
    - zeusk 5y ago
      Google was the one pushing web relentlessly and has arguably made computing UX worse for everyone. From bad performance and overdone advertising+tracking to relatively smaller issues like bad accessibility. They're still trying very hard to put everything on web so Chrome can be what windows used to be.
      - fossuser 5y ago
        The web won because it's cross platform, keeps state across everything and puts collaboration among users first. In a lot of ways that's easier for users - it's the closest thing to a universal OS. This is mostly a failure of desktop operating systems to be interoperable and perhaps most seriously fail to support good network first/collaborative thinking in design. I think they did this in part because they saw being distinct as a way to differentiate themselves, but also because they were created pre-internet before a lot of modern application use cases were really possible or relevant, in the end this made them less competitive and native applications less desirable (in most cases). I also wish it wasn't that way because the web has a lot of issues, it's slow, creates incentives towards megacorps that run centralized servers and ads, etc. All this is one of the reasons I'm hopeful Urbit might succeed against all odds - they're rebuilding the OS with network first in mind. Chrome isn't really comparable to windows because anyone can make a browser that reads the open web standards - while only Microsoft could make an OS that ran windows apps (outside of hacks). This reason is why web won out over native even though native apps have nice performance advantages. That plus limited amounts of high quality devs can target the web and ship to everyone without having to build multiple native applications for multiple platforms, and again native platforms still haven't solved collab really.
        zeusk 5y ago
        Keeping state across and putting collab first is something native apps can do as well. You don't need a web interface to do that. I do however agree about the positive cross-platform support. From my experience, which is very limited - it is the decades of backward compat and complexity that makes native development so tiresome. It gets even worse when there are multiple platforms with not much in common. Thanks, I'll check out Urbit. And? How many non-Chrome browsers do we have? Even Microsoft gave in to Chromium. Can't wait for Google's next move to tie their protocols deeper into the browser just like they did with Android and playstore services. This was another eye opener to me, how limited high quality developers are.
NicoJuicy 5y ago
> I tend to see Windows and Office as fundamentally the same business though, along with development tools, i What? Windows, Office ( cross-platform since recently) and dev tools are totally different cash cows. The ring of death ( = console) isn't even related to the cash cow in consoles. It's the 30% commission on 60€ games. Anti-competitive behavior for not releasing it to other platforms in the past, doesn't mean it's "just an add-on".
- simonh 5y ago
  >What? Windows, Office ( cross-platform since recently) and dev tools are totally different cash cows. Office for Windows was released in the same year as Windows 3.0, supporting all the new core technologies including OLE. Before then MS desktop software products were also-rans. From this point on they dominated, because they had been engineered natively for Windows right alongside the development of Windows itself before any of their competitors even had access to the frameworks and dev tools, or Windows 3.0 to develop and test on. It was part of a single coherent integrated platform strategy for Windows. Now it's grown beyond the platform, but the reason it matters is because of it's privileged position on the Windows platform. XBox just doesn't matter. It's not big enough. If it died, Microsoft's bottom line would barely shift. Office does matter, we just see it's strategic position differently.
  - zeusk 5y ago
    > It was part of a single coherent integrated platform strategy for Windows. Now it's grown beyond the platform, but the reason it matters is because of it's privileged position on the Windows platform. Just like iOS and Apple apps or Chrome and Google sites? > XBox just doesn't matter. It's not big enough. If it died, Microsoft's bottom line would barely shift. Office does matter, we just see it's strategic position differently. xbox was $3.5B (8.5%) of the $41B revenue last quarter - not sure why you think that wouldn't affect bottom line or understand the fact that gaming/xbox is a growth business with a recognizable brand. To give you a perspective, xbox alone made more than all apple services except for App store (even then the difference isn't that huge).

by simonh 5y ago

fossuser 5y ago

Arguably Windows was starting to fail and Microsoft appeared to be in serious trouble. Then Nadella replaced Ballmer and corrected course: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ Now they’ve pivoted to grow azure and O365 successfully in addition to leverage the Xbox via game pass to fit into that strategic world. I think this mostly supports your point - it took an existential crisis and ousting a CEO that couldn’t adapt in order to save them when their cash cow started to falter.

NicoJuicy 5y ago
Windows never failed in desktop OS. And didn't succeed in mobile in the first place. Nadella could quickly release office cross-platform because of work during Ballmer.
- fossuser 5y ago
  Desktop operating systems as a differentiating feature started being a strategic failure because of the web. Ballmer doubled down on Windows at the expense of other stuff. There is a common HN trope that Ballmer was doing everything perfectly and Nadella just continued it. I don’t buy it and neither did the market. (Neither did Microsoft’s board presumably) I think Ballmer’s entire strategic direction was long-term wrong and Nadella changed it. This isn’t to say no projects started under Ballmer (they definitely did) it’s about whether those were prioritized or would have ever shipped under him successfully. If the wrong things are considered important - it doesn’t really matter what projects are happening.
  - zeusk 5y ago
    Google was the one pushing web relentlessly and has arguably made computing UX worse for everyone. From bad performance and overdone advertising+tracking to relatively smaller issues like bad accessibility. They're still trying very hard to put everything on web so Chrome can be what windows used to be.
    - fossuser 5y ago
      The web won because it's cross platform, keeps state across everything and puts collaboration among users first. In a lot of ways that's easier for users - it's the closest thing to a universal OS. This is mostly a failure of desktop operating systems to be interoperable and perhaps most seriously fail to support good network first/collaborative thinking in design. I think they did this in part because they saw being distinct as a way to differentiate themselves, but also because they were created pre-internet before a lot of modern application use cases were really possible or relevant, in the end this made them less competitive and native applications less desirable (in most cases). I also wish it wasn't that way because the web has a lot of issues, it's slow, creates incentives towards megacorps that run centralized servers and ads, etc. All this is one of the reasons I'm hopeful Urbit might succeed against all odds - they're rebuilding the OS with network first in mind. Chrome isn't really comparable to windows because anyone can make a browser that reads the open web standards - while only Microsoft could make an OS that ran windows apps (outside of hacks). This reason is why web won out over native even though native apps have nice performance advantages. That plus limited amounts of high quality devs can target the web and ship to everyone without having to build multiple native applications for multiple platforms, and again native platforms still haven't solved collab really.
      - zeusk 5y ago
        Keeping state across and putting collab first is something native apps can do as well. You don't need a web interface to do that. I do however agree about the positive cross-platform support. From my experience, which is very limited - it is the decades of backward compat and complexity that makes native development so tiresome. It gets even worse when there are multiple platforms with not much in common. Thanks, I'll check out Urbit. And? How many non-Chrome browsers do we have? Even Microsoft gave in to Chromium. Can't wait for Google's next move to tie their protocols deeper into the browser just like they did with Android and playstore services. This was another eye opener to me, how limited high quality developers are.

NicoJuicy 5y ago

> I tend to see Windows and Office as fundamentally the same business though, along with development tools, i What? Windows, Office ( cross-platform since recently) and dev tools are totally different cash cows. The ring of death ( = console) isn't even related to the cash cow in consoles. It's the 30% commission on 60€ games. Anti-competitive behavior for not releasing it to other platforms in the past, doesn't mean it's "just an add-on".

simonh 5y ago
>What? Windows, Office ( cross-platform since recently) and dev tools are totally different cash cows. Office for Windows was released in the same year as Windows 3.0, supporting all the new core technologies including OLE. Before then MS desktop software products were also-rans. From this point on they dominated, because they had been engineered natively for Windows right alongside the development of Windows itself before any of their competitors even had access to the frameworks and dev tools, or Windows 3.0 to develop and test on. It was part of a single coherent integrated platform strategy for Windows. Now it's grown beyond the platform, but the reason it matters is because of it's privileged position on the Windows platform. XBox just doesn't matter. It's not big enough. If it died, Microsoft's bottom line would barely shift. Office does matter, we just see it's strategic position differently.
- zeusk 5y ago
  > It was part of a single coherent integrated platform strategy for Windows. Now it's grown beyond the platform, but the reason it matters is because of it's privileged position on the Windows platform. Just like iOS and Apple apps or Chrome and Google sites? > XBox just doesn't matter. It's not big enough. If it died, Microsoft's bottom line would barely shift. Office does matter, we just see it's strategic position differently. xbox was $3.5B (8.5%) of the $41B revenue last quarter - not sure why you think that wouldn't affect bottom line or understand the fact that gaming/xbox is a growth business with a recognizable brand. To give you a perspective, xbox alone made more than all apple services except for App store (even then the difference isn't that huge).