11 ms·
I suspect many of the people reading HN these days aren't old enough to remember the "golden age" of Microsoft (or simply of "of age" at the time). Back in the
by cletus 14y ago
I suspect many of the people reading HN these days aren't old enough to remember the "golden age" of Microsoft (or simply of "of age" at the time). Back in the 80s and 90s Microsoft was an unstoppable behemoth that people would describe as a battleship that could turn on a dime (IIRC this referred to Microsoft reinventing itself in the mid-90s so that everything was about the Internet).
Three things happened to Microsoft (IMHO):
1. The DoJ suit in 1997 was a serious blow to Microsoft inertia. Speaking as nothing more than an observer, it seemed that Gates lost his way. He simply didn't know what to do. From this I get the distinct impression he really believed Microsoft wasn't doing anything wrong and things like bundling a browser with the OS were just "innovations";
2. Microsoft became too hierarchical combined with more B and C managers. Once you don't have A managers in a software (or any tech) business it seems like it's all over. Nothing rots from within so deeply and completely as poor management; and
3. Ballmer had and has no business being CEO of a software business. This isn't simply due to him being a manager rather than an engineer but that certainly doesn't help. Gates was a programmer and actively participated in tech reviews in his heyday. Ballmer is the Carol Bartz of Microsoft. It's simply taking longer to kill Microsoft from within than it took Yahoo.
As far as stack ranking and these other things go: on the face of it I consider them symptoms rather than the root problem. The root problems are:
1. Microsoft, as an organization, is deathly afraid something will kill the Windows/Office golden goose;
2. Everything Microsoft does is done from the perspective of furthering the Windows/Office cash cow. It's why you hear Ballmer describe tablets as "just another PC form factor". He sees them as simply a means to an end and that end is selling licenses;
3. Microsoft is at the mercy of hardware OEMs that are shortsighted enough to run themselves into the ground taking Microsoft with them;
4. There doesn't seem to be any central strategy (beyond sell more Windows/Office licenses) or innovation; and
5. The "backwards compatibility" crowd lost out to the "breaking changes" crowd, which hastened the switch to Web-based applications.
- wallflower 14y ago> Gates was a programmer and actively participated in tech reviews in his heyday. If you need proof of Gates' technical genius, I recommend Joel Spolsky's "My First BillG Review" > Then I sat down to write the Excel Basic spec, a huge document that grew to hundreds of pages. I think it was 500 pages by the time it was done... In those days we used to have these things called BillG reviews. Basically every major important feature got reviewed by Bill Gates... Considering that we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier, he must have read it the night before... He was flipping through the spec! [Calm down, what are you a little girl?] ... and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
- Luc 14y agoHere he is making a comment on an article about 8-bit BASIC: http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43&cpage=2#comment-103039 http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43&cpage=2#comment-103039 "This history is SURPRISINGLY accurate. Rick Weiland and I (Bill Gates) wrote the 6502 BASIC." (that whole blog is awesome if you're into 8-bit CPU's, by the way, and who isn't?).
- kalid 14y agoA telling quote from that article: "Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don't understand."
- bcantrill 14y agoSpot on. If I had to identify a root-cause of Microsoft's failure, it would be its voracious business practices in the 1990s. If you are in your mid-30s or older today, you grew up under this totalitarian regime -- and you hated it. And when you had the opportunity a decade or so ago, you were on the vanguard that led x86 server build-out with Linux, not Windows. To the degree that you had to care at all about Windows on the server, virtualization assured that it was in its own little box, never again to escape. And of course, you sure as hell don't trust Microsoft now: the last thing you'd ever do is buy a Windows phone or deploy on Azure -- you are of an entire generation that won't be fooled again. And what if you're younger than that? If you're in your 20s or younger, you probably just don't care about Microsoft -- though you might not get why the older folks get so frothy about them. But know that your luxurious apathy is because an older generation considered Microsoft's offenses to be capital crimes -- and meted out punishment accordingly. Microsoft proves that in technology you can get away with being predatory for a while -- maybe even a long while -- but not forever (at least not in a free society). And once the world moves against you, those that you so aggressively bullied will cheer your demise: you will never recover until you accept that you have failed your customers and violated their trust. Very, very few technology companies have gotten to a point of such vilification and recovered (indeed, the only example I can think of is IBM). And while I may be too early in calling it, I dare say that Oracle is (at long last) at that point or approaching it rapidly -- and I fully expect the same conversation to be had about their (coming) lost decade...
- keithnoizu 14y agoWhile this is true it seems ironic that we've replaced one predatory behemoth with another in the form of apple.
- epistasis 14y agoWhat made Microsoft so predatory is that they wanted to dominate the market and squash any competitors, and drive everything into a Microsoft monoculture. Apple doesn't act in the same way, and only seems to care about profits and products rather than marketshare. So even if Apple does something that seems incredibly controlling, you don't have to worry, because you can always buy somebody else's product. Microsoft was trying to make it so you couldn't buy anybody else's product.
- nirvana 14y agoEvery one of the problems you mention, except for #5, existed at Microsoft in 1993! It didn't really turn on a dime at all, in fact, I think probably Balmer has improved this aspect[1], when you account for the fact that Microsoft is much bigger in the last decade than it was in the 1990s. Of the causes, of course the DoJ suit was in 1997, but the massive bureaucracy and its problems and C quality managers existed in 1993. Just nobody cared because of the boom times. I think a lot of the perception of Gates come from PR control and marketing. [1] Say in a "degrees of turn per month per employee in total head count" metric of some sort.
- georgemcbay 14y ago'From this I get the distinct impression he really believed Microsoft wasn't doing anything wrong and things like bundling a browser with the OS were just "innovations";' I can't tell from the quote what your stance on this is, but I think history vindicates the viewpoint you ascribed to Gates. Can you imagine a serious general purpose OS shipping without an OS today? The idea is ridiculous. Doesn't that then make Gates/MS' decision in this area innovative and forward-looking?
- edster 14y agoFor some reason there is always common confusion between legally having a monopoly/monopoly power and abusing a monopoly/monopoly power. The problem wasn't that MS was bundling a free browser. The problem was when Microsoft forced PC builders to not only include Internet Explorer but explicitly forbid them from including another browser as part of their offering. Additionally, Microsoft artificially integrated IE into Windows and then tried to claim that the two were designed to work together. It was easily demonstrated that Windows continued to work fine after un-bundling IE.
- protomyth 14y agoI'm with you on this. I really think the DOJ went after Microsoft for wrong thing. It would have been better if they had gone after the bundling agreements where Microsoft got paid for every machine shipped regardless if a Microsoft os was on it. Or the buy Office and get a discount on Windows. Netscape had better lobbyists not a better case.
- georgemcbay 14y agoEdit (past the editing deadline, whoops): "Can you imagine a serious general purpose OS shipping without an OS today" should read "Can you imagine a serious general purpose OS shipping without a browser today".
- fpp 14y agoand of course then the famous 14 days in the life of a microserf (now called 7 days in the life ...) might also be unknown. one of the first pre-prints of a book that made Wired famous (by Douglas Coupland). http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.01/microserfs_pr.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.01/microserfs_pr.html
- MattRogish 14y agoI think it has something to do with what Steve Jobs identified - monopolistic companies don't value product folks, thus they end up getting run by sales and marketing people, and the company rots from within. http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/19/peggy-noonan-on-steve-jobs-and-why-big-companies-die/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/19/peggy-no... “The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.”