21 ms·

Microsoft Full Circle

176 points by simonpure 4y ago

kurtreed 4y ago
How do you pronounce Stratechery?
- dspillett 4y ago
  I read the “tech” like in technology: stra-tech-ery. Though at first I misread it as stratrechery which has other connotations!
  - _huayra_ 4y ago
    Ben Thompson cohosts a podcast [0] that comes out very irregularly, but is a true gem. He says "stra-tech-ery" there, so you are correct :) [0] https://exponent.fm/ https://exponent.fm/
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      Yeah, but for some reason I prefer "stra-tuh-cherry"
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Exponent.fm has been dead forever. He has three paid podcast now.
  - jszymborski 4y ago
    This is the correct answer, but I always read it as "straight-cherry' in my mind.
- authpor 4y ago
  I thought it was a one word combination of "strategy" + "tech"
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Andrex 4y ago
  Stra-teachery. My brain misinterpreted it at first and now it's too late to fix it.
- jrootabega 4y ago
  I assumed it was derived from "strategery". (strə-TEE-jər-ee) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategery
  - jdminhbg 4y ago
    It is, but Ben pronounces the "tech" in the middle as it's pronounced independently.
    - jrootabega 4y ago
      Right, a reasonable person would understand that in order to map the pronunciation of "strategery" to "stratechery", you would substitute "TEK" for "TEEJ".
- maxfurman 4y ago
  I always hear it as Will Ferrell's GWB saying "strategery" instead of "strategy." I know it's incorrect but that's my brain for you.
gw99 4y ago
Microsoft is only early to VR because it universally screwed everything else up. Wrapping all this text around it and marketing bullshit is disingenuous. What is the truth is that they had all the opportunities and staff and squandered both on mismanagement and quality issues and continue to do so to this day. What we have left is pissed off customers, pissed off developers and a declining market position other than where they could lock businesses in. The only market keeping them alive is entrenchment and naive MSPs and retail pushing their crap. I look forward to their VR strategy going down the toilet with Meta, where it belongs. Fire the board. Kill off the marketing situation which is basically lies at this point, remove telemetry from your products, invest in QA again rather than getting “insiders” to do it, remove decades of bloat and build quality not quantity and perhaps people will have confidence again.
- desiarnezjr 4y ago
  It isn't dissimilar to other missteps they made in the past as well. Early tablets powered by Windows XP. Windows CE and embedded. Phones. Their wins are massive. Really enterprise and XBOX lately (no doubt more, but just off the top of my head), but I've considered Windows only marginally usable for years, and that's more based on legacy, but it still has a place bloated as it is. It's an essential OS and platform, but with no focus -- they're just shuffling the same deck chairs UX wise, though no doubt improving the scaffolding bits.
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  They didn't quite screw everything up. Cloud is making a killing. Office monthly subs is a goldmine, and Windows online subs will be too. That's why they constantly talk cloud, it's their new bread and butter. And, in a highly related way, Xbox is also killing it. They have half the hardware sales, but their Xbox live ultimate sub is awesome. Lots of games, pretty cheap, and pretty, pretty recurring revenue. Oh, recurring revenue that feeds their cloud a gigantic customer, too. They went so far as to force most games to be compatible with both the new and old generation of Xbox's, so they could keep getting Xbox sub money. This has been successful enough that Sony has both been forced to do likewise, and Sony has resorted to the courts to stop it.
- 4y ago
dmitriid 4y ago
> Windows was demoted to one section of the company’s Surface announcements held as a precursor to the main event. We see this with Windows and with MacOS. MacOS's downfall is the more visible one. The OS is no longer prioritized except where it needs to be somewhat presentable in screenshots. The OS becomes a vehicle to sell company goods. The OS rots to the point that there's no one left at the company with even the most basic competence to create first-party apps for it. Because the money is elsewhere. I wonder at which point this neglect makes the OS so unusable that it actively hurts the development of the money-making machines. Though strangely enough MS would survive this better than Apple.
- timeimp 4y ago
  The “death blow” for macOS would be when you can develop, compile, test and publish iOS apps without a Mac. It would become on life support at that case. Any Apple engineers reading this - an update like Snow Leopard would go a long way!
  - gw99 4y ago
    I doubt it. Most of the Mac users I know came from iOS and aren’t developers. The iOS developer community is a tiny portion of apple users.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    You really think the majority of Mac users are creating iOS apps?
- gw99 4y ago
  Do you actually use macOS? It actually works. Unlike most of windows these days. There is near parity across all platforms on all apple apps and functions. I can transition from any device to another one smoothly. People don’t care about that. They want the computer to go away and actually stop bugging them.
  - jacobr1 4y ago
    One of the other complaints you here on HN is that software is changing for sake of change rather than remaining relatively stable once the core feature-set has been built out. Well, MacOS strikes a pretty good balance on that score. They introduce new features, but haven't radically changed anything in a long time ... and that enables people to get work done.
localhost 4y ago
There is a really key quote towards the end of this piece that really captures the spirit of this post, and that's from Satya Nadella. I'm including it in its entirety because I think it does a really good job at summarizing what Ben is writing about here: "Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware, because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. Right now the abstraction of hardware has to start by abstracting all of the hardware in your life, so the notion that this is one device is interesting and important, it doesn’t mean the kernel that boots your device just goes away, it still exists, but the point of real relevance I think in our lives is “hey, what’s that abstraction of all the hardware in my life that I use?” – some of it is shared, some of it is personal. And then, what’s the app model for it? How do I write an experience that transcends all of that hardware? And that’s really what our pursuit of Microsoft 365 is all about." The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life". I use a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an iPhone interchangeably in my life. When I switch between them pretty much nothing changes - I have access to the same core apps: Office, Obsidian, 1Password, web browser. If there were a new device, say some kind of headset, I suspect that would plug right into my existing ecosystem of hardware and software. There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft. That could change of course, but there are so many interesting problems to solve along the way. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft.
- mupuff1234 4y ago
  > There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft. I just don't see that. How exactly is Microsoft better placed than Apple or Google?
  - number6 4y ago
    I think the "OS" that abstracts everything away is the web. Foremost these Javascript Applications. With Microsoft 365 they took the Idea of Google Suit and integrated it in their OS. Google tried it the other way and failed. But ultimately they are talking about the Chrome Book. Well even beyond that. It shouldn't matter which hardware you use and this is brilliant; it's just not Microsofts Idea.
WorldMaker 4y ago
Microsoft is "early" to VR because it was already a player in VR and has very long been "early". Microsoft has been investing in AR/MR/VR research since before the original Surface, not the tablet one but the giant table that got rebranded and then sold off, and since before the original Kinect. Microsoft is still making plenty of HoloLens devices (some on huge contracts) despite them not being "sexy". Windows 10 has had AR/MR/VR apps bundled for a long time despite most users never using them. It's hard for it to be a "full circle" when for the most part it looks like a straight line. The surprise shift here isn't in Microsoft but in Meta finally asking for help and partners after seeming to believe they could do it all on their own.
- karmakaze 4y ago
  Initially I thought MS might have learned from missing out on mobile to get ahead in AR/MR/VR and be a device and platform leader. It seems what they learned is to give up before entering and focus on partnering instead. That is something they've always succeeded at PC+DOS, IBM+WindowsNT, Apple+Office, JavaVM. To me it does seem a low target to aim for. VSCode shows they can execute, but for some reason when the stakes are higher they don't do as well Windows Phone, Edge browser, etc. I suppose I could call that corporate self-awareness.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    Here specifically too: Microsoft has such a weird lead in AR/MR/VR and have mostly just been sitting on it. For example, because of early Kinect work, they own the patents that would have made Meta's weird journey between "no legs" to "everyone gets legs if they want them! excitement!" irrelevant or much faster had the partnership happened sooner. They built the first "metaverse cloud" on Azure and they've used it and they've made something as exciting in theory as the HoloLens boring Enterprise products. The other possible takeaway is that after Windows Phone, Microsoft really has been truly risk adverse when it comes to consumer products, even in areas where they had a lead and could have delivered something no one else could. > VSCode shows they can execute, but for some reason when the stakes are higher they don't do as well Windows Phone Windows Phone was arguably very well executed at the software level. Microsoft's troubles with Windows Phone were at the hardware levels and (worse) the economic levels where the phone carriers had already decided they prefer a duopoly and selling three things is one too many things to sell.
robertlagrant 4y ago
Meta owning Giphy is anticompetitive, but Microsoft bundling Teams for (basically) free is fine?
- scarface74 4y ago
  If Facebook had built Gliphy from the ground up, there wouldn’t be a problem. Besides MS is not a monopoly with messaging. Are you saying that bo company should be allowed to include a free messaging app?
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    > Are you saying that bo company should be allowed to include a free messaging app? No. I'm saying that it kills the messaging app market to have the de facto monopoly company for office software release a basically-free messaging app for offices.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      If you haven’t checked, tte messaging app market is far from dead. It’s not like Slack is some tiny startup. It’s owned by Salesforce. Not to mention Google has like five messaging apps by itself. There is also no “monopoly” in the office software space. Apple and Google have alternatives
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        I have checked; this move is likely the main reason why Slack was for sale. Slack even tried to make an anticompetition claim against Microsoft for this reason [0]. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53503710 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53503710
        scarface74 4y ago
        So in that case should all software companies not be allowed to bundle anything? Should Google not release a free messaging app either? Would have been okay if Microsoft had sold Teams as an add on like it does Visio?
patientplatypus 4y ago
Kukumber 4y ago
Sony managed to do VR at scale properly many years ago for their PlayStation The fact that a trillion dollar company failed is insane to me, this plus the poor reception of the Hololens by the army.. there is something that's not working at the HW/R&D microsoft divisions Just insane, whoever is managing these teams should step down, laying off 1k people every once in a while won't change anything if that's to repeat the same mistakes with the same execs
pphysch 4y ago
The underlying game is that there is no "WeChat for the West" and Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, Twitter/Musk/"X" et al want to own that. The problem is that they're all fighting really hard, and they all have their own moats. That will never produce the "everything app".
- unhammer 4y ago
  > The problem is a good thing. A monocultural WeChat future sounds utterly dystopian (in the Huxley sense)
mark-r 4y ago
So "365" refers to the number of days a year you need to pay for it, right?
- low_tech_punk 4y ago
  No, it's the dollar amount per user per day, only if you get a discount.
killjoywashere 4y ago
VR Microsoft 365. FML.
mike_hearn 4y ago
> the entire reason why Windows faltered as a strategic linchpin is that it was tied to a device — the PC — that was disrupted by a paradigm shift in hardware. Microsoft 365, on the other hand, is attached to the customer This part doesn't make sense. Windows was no more tied to PC/Intel hardware than macOS was. Windows was ported to phones. The problems that are hurting Windows are organizational, not some inherent attribute of the OS itself.

176 points by simonpure 4y ago

kurtreed 4y ago

How do you pronounce Stratechery?

dspillett 4y ago
I read the “tech” like in technology: stra-tech-ery. Though at first I misread it as stratrechery which has other connotations!
- _huayra_ 4y ago
  Ben Thompson cohosts a podcast [0] that comes out very irregularly, but is a true gem. He says "stra-tech-ery" there, so you are correct :) [0] https://exponent.fm/ https://exponent.fm/
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    Yeah, but for some reason I prefer "stra-tuh-cherry"
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Exponent.fm has been dead forever. He has three paid podcast now.
- jszymborski 4y ago
  This is the correct answer, but I always read it as "straight-cherry' in my mind.
authpor 4y ago
I thought it was a one word combination of "strategy" + "tech"
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Andrex 4y ago
Stra-teachery. My brain misinterpreted it at first and now it's too late to fix it.
jrootabega 4y ago
I assumed it was derived from "strategery". (strə-TEE-jər-ee) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategery
- jdminhbg 4y ago
  It is, but Ben pronounces the "tech" in the middle as it's pronounced independently.
  - jrootabega 4y ago
    Right, a reasonable person would understand that in order to map the pronunciation of "strategery" to "stratechery", you would substitute "TEK" for "TEEJ".
maxfurman 4y ago
I always hear it as Will Ferrell's GWB saying "strategery" instead of "strategy." I know it's incorrect but that's my brain for you.

gw99 4y ago

Microsoft is only early to VR because it universally screwed everything else up. Wrapping all this text around it and marketing bullshit is disingenuous. What is the truth is that they had all the opportunities and staff and squandered both on mismanagement and quality issues and continue to do so to this day. What we have left is pissed off customers, pissed off developers and a declining market position other than where they could lock businesses in. The only market keeping them alive is entrenchment and naive MSPs and retail pushing their crap. I look forward to their VR strategy going down the toilet with Meta, where it belongs. Fire the board. Kill off the marketing situation which is basically lies at this point, remove telemetry from your products, invest in QA again rather than getting “insiders” to do it, remove decades of bloat and build quality not quantity and perhaps people will have confidence again.

desiarnezjr 4y ago
It isn't dissimilar to other missteps they made in the past as well. Early tablets powered by Windows XP. Windows CE and embedded. Phones. Their wins are massive. Really enterprise and XBOX lately (no doubt more, but just off the top of my head), but I've considered Windows only marginally usable for years, and that's more based on legacy, but it still has a place bloated as it is. It's an essential OS and platform, but with no focus -- they're just shuffling the same deck chairs UX wise, though no doubt improving the scaffolding bits.
xen2xen1 4y ago
They didn't quite screw everything up. Cloud is making a killing. Office monthly subs is a goldmine, and Windows online subs will be too. That's why they constantly talk cloud, it's their new bread and butter. And, in a highly related way, Xbox is also killing it. They have half the hardware sales, but their Xbox live ultimate sub is awesome. Lots of games, pretty cheap, and pretty, pretty recurring revenue. Oh, recurring revenue that feeds their cloud a gigantic customer, too. They went so far as to force most games to be compatible with both the new and old generation of Xbox's, so they could keep getting Xbox sub money. This has been successful enough that Sony has both been forced to do likewise, and Sony has resorted to the courts to stop it.
4y ago

dmitriid 4y ago

> Windows was demoted to one section of the company’s Surface announcements held as a precursor to the main event. We see this with Windows and with MacOS. MacOS's downfall is the more visible one. The OS is no longer prioritized except where it needs to be somewhat presentable in screenshots. The OS becomes a vehicle to sell company goods. The OS rots to the point that there's no one left at the company with even the most basic competence to create first-party apps for it. Because the money is elsewhere. I wonder at which point this neglect makes the OS so unusable that it actively hurts the development of the money-making machines. Though strangely enough MS would survive this better than Apple.

timeimp 4y ago
The “death blow” for macOS would be when you can develop, compile, test and publish iOS apps without a Mac. It would become on life support at that case. Any Apple engineers reading this - an update like Snow Leopard would go a long way!
- gw99 4y ago
  I doubt it. Most of the Mac users I know came from iOS and aren’t developers. The iOS developer community is a tiny portion of apple users.
- scarface74 4y ago
  You really think the majority of Mac users are creating iOS apps?
gw99 4y ago
Do you actually use macOS? It actually works. Unlike most of windows these days. There is near parity across all platforms on all apple apps and functions. I can transition from any device to another one smoothly. People don’t care about that. They want the computer to go away and actually stop bugging them.
- jacobr1 4y ago
  One of the other complaints you here on HN is that software is changing for sake of change rather than remaining relatively stable once the core feature-set has been built out. Well, MacOS strikes a pretty good balance on that score. They introduce new features, but haven't radically changed anything in a long time ... and that enables people to get work done.

localhost 4y ago

There is a really key quote towards the end of this piece that really captures the spirit of this post, and that's from Satya Nadella. I'm including it in its entirety because I think it does a really good job at summarizing what Ben is writing about here: "Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware, because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. Right now the abstraction of hardware has to start by abstracting all of the hardware in your life, so the notion that this is one device is interesting and important, it doesn’t mean the kernel that boots your device just goes away, it still exists, but the point of real relevance I think in our lives is “hey, what’s that abstraction of all the hardware in my life that I use?” – some of it is shared, some of it is personal. And then, what’s the app model for it? How do I write an experience that transcends all of that hardware? And that’s really what our pursuit of Microsoft 365 is all about." The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life". I use a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an iPhone interchangeably in my life. When I switch between them pretty much nothing changes - I have access to the same core apps: Office, Obsidian, 1Password, web browser. If there were a new device, say some kind of headset, I suspect that would plug right into my existing ecosystem of hardware and software. There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft. That could change of course, but there are so many interesting problems to solve along the way. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft.

mupuff1234 4y ago
> There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft. I just don't see that. How exactly is Microsoft better placed than Apple or Google?
- number6 4y ago
  I think the "OS" that abstracts everything away is the web. Foremost these Javascript Applications. With Microsoft 365 they took the Idea of Google Suit and integrated it in their OS. Google tried it the other way and failed. But ultimately they are talking about the Chrome Book. Well even beyond that. It shouldn't matter which hardware you use and this is brilliant; it's just not Microsofts Idea.

WorldMaker 4y ago

Microsoft is "early" to VR because it was already a player in VR and has very long been "early". Microsoft has been investing in AR/MR/VR research since before the original Surface, not the tablet one but the giant table that got rebranded and then sold off, and since before the original Kinect. Microsoft is still making plenty of HoloLens devices (some on huge contracts) despite them not being "sexy". Windows 10 has had AR/MR/VR apps bundled for a long time despite most users never using them. It's hard for it to be a "full circle" when for the most part it looks like a straight line. The surprise shift here isn't in Microsoft but in Meta finally asking for help and partners after seeming to believe they could do it all on their own.

karmakaze 4y ago
Initially I thought MS might have learned from missing out on mobile to get ahead in AR/MR/VR and be a device and platform leader. It seems what they learned is to give up before entering and focus on partnering instead. That is something they've always succeeded at PC+DOS, IBM+WindowsNT, Apple+Office, JavaVM. To me it does seem a low target to aim for. VSCode shows they can execute, but for some reason when the stakes are higher they don't do as well Windows Phone, Edge browser, etc. I suppose I could call that corporate self-awareness.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  Here specifically too: Microsoft has such a weird lead in AR/MR/VR and have mostly just been sitting on it. For example, because of early Kinect work, they own the patents that would have made Meta's weird journey between "no legs" to "everyone gets legs if they want them! excitement!" irrelevant or much faster had the partnership happened sooner. They built the first "metaverse cloud" on Azure and they've used it and they've made something as exciting in theory as the HoloLens boring Enterprise products. The other possible takeaway is that after Windows Phone, Microsoft really has been truly risk adverse when it comes to consumer products, even in areas where they had a lead and could have delivered something no one else could. > VSCode shows they can execute, but for some reason when the stakes are higher they don't do as well Windows Phone Windows Phone was arguably very well executed at the software level. Microsoft's troubles with Windows Phone were at the hardware levels and (worse) the economic levels where the phone carriers had already decided they prefer a duopoly and selling three things is one too many things to sell.

robertlagrant 4y ago

Meta owning Giphy is anticompetitive, but Microsoft bundling Teams for (basically) free is fine?

scarface74 4y ago
If Facebook had built Gliphy from the ground up, there wouldn’t be a problem. Besides MS is not a monopoly with messaging. Are you saying that bo company should be allowed to include a free messaging app?
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  > Are you saying that bo company should be allowed to include a free messaging app? No. I'm saying that it kills the messaging app market to have the de facto monopoly company for office software release a basically-free messaging app for offices.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    If you haven’t checked, tte messaging app market is far from dead. It’s not like Slack is some tiny startup. It’s owned by Salesforce. Not to mention Google has like five messaging apps by itself. There is also no “monopoly” in the office software space. Apple and Google have alternatives
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      I have checked; this move is likely the main reason why Slack was for sale. Slack even tried to make an anticompetition claim against Microsoft for this reason [0]. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53503710 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53503710
      - scarface74 4y ago
        So in that case should all software companies not be allowed to bundle anything? Should Google not release a free messaging app either? Would have been okay if Microsoft had sold Teams as an add on like it does Visio?

patientplatypus 4y ago

Kukumber 4y ago

Sony managed to do VR at scale properly many years ago for their PlayStation The fact that a trillion dollar company failed is insane to me, this plus the poor reception of the Hololens by the army.. there is something that's not working at the HW/R&D microsoft divisions Just insane, whoever is managing these teams should step down, laying off 1k people every once in a while won't change anything if that's to repeat the same mistakes with the same execs

pphysch 4y ago

The underlying game is that there is no "WeChat for the West" and Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, Twitter/Musk/"X" et al want to own that. The problem is that they're all fighting really hard, and they all have their own moats. That will never produce the "everything app".

unhammer 4y ago
> The problem is a good thing. A monocultural WeChat future sounds utterly dystopian (in the Huxley sense)

mark-r 4y ago

So "365" refers to the number of days a year you need to pay for it, right?

low_tech_punk 4y ago
No, it's the dollar amount per user per day, only if you get a discount.

killjoywashere 4y ago

VR Microsoft 365. FML.

mike_hearn 4y ago

> the entire reason why Windows faltered as a strategic linchpin is that it was tied to a device — the PC — that was disrupted by a paradigm shift in hardware. Microsoft 365, on the other hand, is attached to the customer This part doesn't make sense. Windows was no more tied to PC/Intel hardware than macOS was. Windows was ported to phones. The problems that are hurting Windows are organizational, not some inherent attribute of the OS itself.