3 ms·

That's not the point of the title. The point of the article (and their coverage of MS for years) is that Microsoft used to be all about Windows: An operating sy

• MichaelZuo 4y ago
  > Everyone used to be on Windows Not true. IBM was one of the top 10 most profitable companies in the world as recently as 2015. After adjusting for real inflations rates, inclusive of asset inflation, they actually made greater profits some years then either Google or Meta or Amazon do today.
  • sho_hn 4y ago
    You're of course right, I was exaggerating for effect. What I mean is that the PC stole a lot of other people's lunches, and PCs across the world had an almost equal likelihood across the world to be running Windows, and that mattered when the PC and what you could run on it (i.e. the app format) mattered. Now it doesn't matter all that much anymore if you're on a Mac or a Windows or a Linux computer. You can largely use the same apps and services across them (with the exception of gaming, which, as an interesting aside, is now much better on Linux than on Mac). Anyone expending the effort to make a new app will usually build them that way, while in the past, you had a lot of platform exclusives. But what is new and interesting is that a Google account doesn't deliver you as much value in South Korea because a lot of its services are unavailable or bad there, while it's nigh on impossible to live without a Kakao account, which in turn is entirely optional in, well, most everywhere else. I find it fascinating that the global reach of user-centric/service-oriented computing is less than the reach of the previous device-oriented computing. It's certainly also not true that geopolitics have never mattered before in computing and reaching users, but I'd say they matter more than ever before.
    • MichaelZuo 4y ago
      To me this difference is to be expected. When things were device-oriented whoever had the better devices naturally got easy footholds in every country. Since any country that tries to outcompete the world leading products would have needed to invest vast sums of money. And even then 90% of the supply chain would still be in the typical locations. It simply made sense for everyone to leave the multi-billion dollar investments to a few multinationals, at least for consumer products. The only real exception being Japan pre-iPhone, when they had the manufacturing diversity to make nearly everything domestically and enough wealthy consumers who also didn't care much for international interoperability. And even then the major Japanese firms were making very slim profits. Whereas since the entry bar for creating competitive software is so much lower, many countries can afford to nurture genuinely homegrown products, and have a reasonable expectation that they will be competitive.
      • soundnote 4y ago
        > Whereas since the entry bar for creating competitive software is so much lower, many countries can afford to nurture genuinely homegrown products, and have a reasonable expectation that they will be competitive. I don't think it's that. It's that eg. Kakao has KakaoTalk, a chat app. And chat apps tend towards monopolies and oligopolies because of network effects. The value of the app is less in how good it is, and more in who else uses it. If you're just buying a music player or an office suite for a common file format, what you use doesn't really matter to anyone else, and their choices to you. Chat apps, collaboration platforms? Suddenly, who else uses them matters a lot, since it's about the people, not the physical function. And once you get big enough, the network effects turns from a hurdle into a gigantic moat.
        • MichaelZuo 4y ago
          > If you're just buying a music player or an office suite for a common file format, what you use doesn't really matter to anyone else, and their choices to you. The question of how many people use any given physical product, such as music players, certainly matters to supply chain executives and factory managers at the very least. Because the same network effects applies to manufactured products, notably in economics of scale. More generally, it's true that KakaoTalk benefits from network effects, but Facebook Korea could have benefited from the same. It's just that a homegrown Korean chat app is viable against Facebook Korea because the entry bar is lower, whereas a homegrown Korean iPod would have been laughable against Apple, even in Korea. There's very few people that would have paid 5x more for an all Korean iPod, but most are fine with being slightly inconvenient by Kakao's smaller international userbase.
• WorldMaker 4y ago
  > Microsoft used to be all about Windows This feels like a Citation Needed assumption both in this comment and in the article. Again, there's too much of a straight line here: Microsoft has always been one of (if not the) largest software development companies for the Macintosh. That has never changed. We all know Ballmer was a huge Windows cheerleader and "home team supporter" and wanted to make sure that the best experiences were always on Windows. But he never killed Macintosh support. He championed the iPad versions of Office that Nadella is credited for (which the article even points out!). The closest Microsoft ever came to being "Windows only" was maybe the brief glimmer of optimism under Nadella where the Windows 10 team briefly imagined that every device could run Windows (and then felt the crushing disappointment to realize that most wouldn't). Again, it doesn't look like a full circle to me but a mostly straight line with a few zigs and zags if you zoom in micro-enough. I understand where some of this is coming from that Microsoft did have years, especially under Ballmer, where they seemed to care too much about Windows, but Microsoft was never "just" The Windows Company in any era.
  • sho_hn 4y ago
    Yes, this is fair.