11 ms·

Spot 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 old

Spot 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 ago
While this is true it seems ironic that we've replaced one predatory behemoth with another in the form of apple.
- epistasis 14y ago
  What 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.
  - finnw 14y ago
    Really? Apple are trying very hard to stop you buying an HTC phone.
    - flyinRyan 14y ago
      They're trying to stop copycats. Do you see any lawsuits over the Windows phones?
  - prairiedock 14y ago
    You haven't been following Apple's lawsuits against Samsung much, have you?
    - Steko 14y ago
      There's a bit of a difference between trying to kill the entire phone industry and suing obvious copycats who don't differentiate their products. If Netscape has sued MS and won an injunction a lot of people would have cheered. Which brings up the old 'who's most like MS in mobile today?' question... Microsoft made a netscape clone and gave away the product for free. Google made an iOS clone and gave away the product free.
      - jasomill 14y ago
        Sure, but there's an important difference between "giving away one product to sell others" and "using a monopoly position in one market to eliminate competition in another", namely, that the latter is illegal but the former is not. Grey areas? Sure, lots, whence so may lawyers. But IE and IIS were clearly (to regulators, not me) not mere loss-leaders, but prongs of a coordinated response to a perceived threat to Microsoft's PC hegemony. Besides, Android device manufacturers effectively "pay" Google for Android in search traffic (or reduced revenue share from search traffic).
        rmah 14y ago
        Besides, Android device manufacturers effectively "pay" Google for Android in search traffic (or reduced revenue share from search traffic). Actually google pays the android device manufacturers, not the other way around.
- ori_b 14y ago
  I'm not so sure that it's ironic as inevitable. There are exceptions, but the winners of this marketshare game tend to be those who are willing to play at least a little dirty.
- grey-area 14y ago
  While Apple and Microsoft are very different animals with a completely different corporate culture, there are interesting similarities in their behaviour. That doesn't mean we should simply class them as exactly the same, as there are profound differences in their founding culture, outlook, and aspirations. However once a corporation reaches a certain size, or perhaps in the process of reaching a certain size, corporations and other social tribes seem to acquire remarkably similar characteristics - the company becomes an ecosystem within which it is possible to thrive without actually serving the long-term interests of the company or customers at all - the corporate culture changes to one in which the most important achievement is to do well within the company, and others outside the company become a remote concern. Perhaps this is inevitable when a company reaches the size of say Apple, Amazon or Microsoft - all of which have in their different ways abused their market position, and abused their power over smaller companies and competitors in order to make more money. They may not have broken the law very often, but they are all profoundly anti-social in their behaviour. All have tried to lock their customers in to ecosystems over which they have complete control (iOS, Kindle, Windows/Office), all have abused their power over their partners to make unreasonable demands, and all have ignored the long-term interests of their customers in pursuit of profit. They do this because they can, because no-one is stopping them, and because as a collective entity what is safest is for them to stamp out all competition anywhere - to completely dominate the marketplace (at least in the short term, ignoring that this is impossible in the long-term). Perhaps that's just a natural outcome of capitalism, but as we have stronger limits in other areas of corporate malfeasance (for example regulations on pollution), we do perhaps need limits on the power of these larger companies in the marketplace which are stronger than antitrust laws (which seem to be unused and out of date at the present time). We've seen Apple morph over the last 10 years (as MS did before it against IBM) from scrappy underdog to dominant corporation, and the transformation means that now they feel happy to arbitrarily ban partners from their devices (e.g. Google Voice, Kindle in-app purchase), sabotage their own production partners (e.g. Samsung), gouge partners with arbitrary licensing (iPod connectors), and ignore the effects on their users, or indeed on their own long-term survival. They are different from the Microsoft of the 90s (perhaps less cut-throat, a little less predictable), but in important ways are similar, and they're storing up the same sort of long-term resentment which is now undermining Microsoft in the consumer space. For example by banning all transactions on their devices which don't involve giving Apple a cut, they annoy both their users and their partners - the only entity this action serves is Apple, and that only in the short term.
yuhong 14y ago
My favorite is the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco, particularly how it relates to DR-DOS (clue: OS/2 did not depend on DOS): http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?p=516&cpage=1#comment-9086 http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?p=516&cpage=1#comment-9086
- protomyth 14y ago
  I'm still a little bitter about Microsoft getting paid for the box I bought to run NeXTSTEP.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
mattmanser 14y ago
I think you're being a bit lax with history here and looking with rose-tinted glasses, Apache had made far too many inroads in the server way before MS really tackled servers properly. That C# is as popular as it is kinda debunks your entire argument, it's a firmly entrenched behemoth in the corporate world. The MS hate that was in the 90s/early 00s just doesn't exist any more. What should worry MS far more is that these days so many programming articles and guides just assume you are working on a Unix system. Windows is becoming irrelevant to the elite. It's a bizarre phenomenon given that MS is still dominant in the OS field that has been gaining serious traction for the last 3 or 4 years. Also SQL Server is good. Very good. And cheap, very cheap compared to the other good DBs. While MySQL and Postgre are alright, in reality they really are quite bad compared to SQL server in terms of overall polish and quality. I got reminded of this the other day tracking down an excessively poorly performing query, fixed in MySQL by an index that MS SQL would have effectively just done for you. And don't even get me started on how many business run exchange. Ugh.
- bcantrill 14y ago
  I disagree about the sense of IIS v. Apache: Apache won because of Linux not the other way around. (There is, after all, a port of Apache to Windows -- it seems to have done nothing to stop the bleeding according to Netcraft.) As for the "bizarre phenomenon" that Windows seems to be "irrelevant" despite that it's "dominant", there is of course a simple answer: it's not dominant. Windows lost; humanity won.
- SnowLprd 14y ago
  I don't think Bryan is being lax with history at all. In fact, he completely nailed it. The only points in your comment that I found persuasive, on the other hand, are that Windows is indeed becoming irrelevant, SQL Server probably has an edge over MySQL in some ways, and Exchange needs to die a quick death. The rest just doesn't fly. Hatred for Microsoft doesn't exist any longer? Says who? I believe it runs much deeper and stronger than you realize. I haven't purchased a Microsoft product in well over a decade, and that "purchase" was a PC preloaded with an OEM license of Windows that I had no way of not buying. My loathing for Microsoft was sown over decades of the most user-hostile, winner-take-all, I-will-rip-off-your-head-and-shit-down-your-neck corporate culture I've ever witnessed. Bryan calling Microsoft "predatory" is being kind. I'm not sure what "OS field that has been gaining serious traction for the last 3 or 4 years" refers to, but if you're talking about desktop computing, they are doing exactly the opposite of gaining traction: http://twitpic.com/a31jis http://twitpic.com/a31jis They aren't just becoming irrelevant to the elite; Microsoft is rapidly becoming just plain irrelevant. How does C#'s popularity debunk Bryan's entire argument? A lot of companies still use Windows (for now), which means a lot of people use C# to develop applications for those computers. I don't see how this debunks much of anything. SQL Server is good. Is it better than MySQL in some ways? Sure. What are the chances I'd select SQL Server instead of PostgreSQL? Zero percent. So that's a false equivalence right there, but that's besides the point. The reason people use MySQL or PostgreSQL instead of SQL Server is that you don't need Windows. Why tie yourself to a user-hostile company that's only going to charge you ad infinitum upgrades for a malware-ridden operating system? Even if SQL Server were heads-and-shoulders above MySQL/PostgreSQL, people would avoid it because you can't get it without Windows. As I said, Bryan really nailed this: you're either burned so badly by Microsoft that "hatred" doesn't even begin to describe your feelings, or you're apathetic because the world has moved on and Microsoft continues to pretend like they live in the 1990s. With Ballmer at the helm, steering Microsoft towards seemingly inevitable obsolescence, Microsoft appears destined to eventually join Wang, Sun, RIM, Nokia, and the other dead or soon-to-be-dead. It didn't have to end that way, but reaping what you sow is generally the way the world works.
einhverfr 14y ago
What failure? I don't know what you mean by failure here. If you mean "fails to be the rockstar of the tech industry" that isn't much of a failure. Microsoft is only a failure if we expect them to build an ever more powerful monopoly with no possibility of escape. They may be trying to do that. Instead they have a large and solid business which is still very cash flow. Tell me of Microsoft's failure when the profits of Google or Facebook surpass the profits of Google.
- gnaffle 14y ago
  Microsofts failure is most evident in their stock staying flat or dropping the last years, while all their competitors stock has soared, including Apples. That's the overall indicator of failure, and the one their owners care about. But look underneath, and you find failure in every attempt Microsoft has made to branch out of their existing businesses, except for the Xbox. Mobile? Lost to Apple and Google. Music? Lost to Apple. Instant messaging and identity (.net Passport)? Lost to Facebook. Tablets? Lost to Apple. There are countless examples like this. Given all those failures, that nice cash flow will only be sustained until the Windows monopoly is replaced by something else. Windows 8 is Microsofts desperate response to something that threatens to do that.
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    At their height they had plenty of failures too. Bob comes to mind....
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    But my larger point is that if my business only grows to be the size of Microsoft and ends up with a steady profit that size I won't care about the failures, only count the successes at that point.
    - gnaffle 14y ago
      Of course, but the question at that point becomes: How do you sustain those steady profits? DEC was hugely successful in its day, but was a failure in the 90s because they couldn't manage the transition from minicomputers to PCs.
bluedanieru 14y ago
>I dare say that Oracle is (at long last) at that point or approaching it rapidly You say that as though it's a contentious thing? They were past that point even before the Sun acquisition. Hell, when were they ever innovative like MS was in their heyday?
- berntb 14y ago
  What was innovative? Copying other's stuff and integrating a browser into the OS?
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    Microsoft's business model was innovative, even where their software wasn't. Per-unit licensing, bundling, including the browser for free (which, BTW, screwed Spyglass out of any browser-related royalties).
    - berntb 14y ago
      Doesn't the illegal use of monopoly powers seem new here, because it was in a newer field? (Thanks for reminding me of Spyglass, shudder.)
      - dredmorbius 14y ago
        Even that's arguable. IBM, Xerox, and AT&T all certainly exploited monopolies for some time in tech. I suspect the real complaint was that Microsoft wasn't terribly innovative. Few things in tech are. The key is to steal from the best, and implement well. While it's arguable that Microsoft's technical implementations weren't all they could have been, the combined reach of their tech + business model worked very well, from the PoV of business success and spreading their "ecosystem" to borrow a more recent term, for most of 2-3 decades.
Nelson69 14y ago
You misunderstand the MS hate to compare it to Oracle and IBM. Oracle and IBM want to make money, period. They'll run their products on a competitor's platform if they can get a bite of the pie, they don't care. Further, I'd guess 7/10 geeks that "hate" oracle have never used their products and might not even understand what they do, it's just part of the hatred of really really successful companies. (That's part of it too, whenever a powerful and successful company actually competes, people tend to hate it.) I'm not going to defend them but when Oracle sued Google, I don't think there was ever an intention to make Google go away, they just wanted a cut of the action, it was all about money. Read up on what MS did to Digital Research and Lotus, MS wanted to "cut off the air supply," they refused to see a world where those companies could co-exist. It's just different, MS has wanted to kill the competition. How come they don't port most apps to other platforms? Office on Mac is the only serious one I can think of.

keithnoizu 14y ago

While this is true it seems ironic that we've replaced one predatory behemoth with another in the form of apple.

epistasis 14y ago
What 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.
- finnw 14y ago
  Really? Apple are trying very hard to stop you buying an HTC phone.
  - flyinRyan 14y ago
    They're trying to stop copycats. Do you see any lawsuits over the Windows phones?
- prairiedock 14y ago
  You haven't been following Apple's lawsuits against Samsung much, have you?
  - Steko 14y ago
    There's a bit of a difference between trying to kill the entire phone industry and suing obvious copycats who don't differentiate their products. If Netscape has sued MS and won an injunction a lot of people would have cheered. Which brings up the old 'who's most like MS in mobile today?' question... Microsoft made a netscape clone and gave away the product for free. Google made an iOS clone and gave away the product free.
    - jasomill 14y ago
      Sure, but there's an important difference between "giving away one product to sell others" and "using a monopoly position in one market to eliminate competition in another", namely, that the latter is illegal but the former is not. Grey areas? Sure, lots, whence so may lawyers. But IE and IIS were clearly (to regulators, not me) not mere loss-leaders, but prongs of a coordinated response to a perceived threat to Microsoft's PC hegemony. Besides, Android device manufacturers effectively "pay" Google for Android in search traffic (or reduced revenue share from search traffic).
      - rmah 14y ago
        Besides, Android device manufacturers effectively "pay" Google for Android in search traffic (or reduced revenue share from search traffic). Actually google pays the android device manufacturers, not the other way around.
ori_b 14y ago
I'm not so sure that it's ironic as inevitable. There are exceptions, but the winners of this marketshare game tend to be those who are willing to play at least a little dirty.
grey-area 14y ago
While Apple and Microsoft are very different animals with a completely different corporate culture, there are interesting similarities in their behaviour. That doesn't mean we should simply class them as exactly the same, as there are profound differences in their founding culture, outlook, and aspirations. However once a corporation reaches a certain size, or perhaps in the process of reaching a certain size, corporations and other social tribes seem to acquire remarkably similar characteristics - the company becomes an ecosystem within which it is possible to thrive without actually serving the long-term interests of the company or customers at all - the corporate culture changes to one in which the most important achievement is to do well within the company, and others outside the company become a remote concern. Perhaps this is inevitable when a company reaches the size of say Apple, Amazon or Microsoft - all of which have in their different ways abused their market position, and abused their power over smaller companies and competitors in order to make more money. They may not have broken the law very often, but they are all profoundly anti-social in their behaviour. All have tried to lock their customers in to ecosystems over which they have complete control (iOS, Kindle, Windows/Office), all have abused their power over their partners to make unreasonable demands, and all have ignored the long-term interests of their customers in pursuit of profit. They do this because they can, because no-one is stopping them, and because as a collective entity what is safest is for them to stamp out all competition anywhere - to completely dominate the marketplace (at least in the short term, ignoring that this is impossible in the long-term). Perhaps that's just a natural outcome of capitalism, but as we have stronger limits in other areas of corporate malfeasance (for example regulations on pollution), we do perhaps need limits on the power of these larger companies in the marketplace which are stronger than antitrust laws (which seem to be unused and out of date at the present time). We've seen Apple morph over the last 10 years (as MS did before it against IBM) from scrappy underdog to dominant corporation, and the transformation means that now they feel happy to arbitrarily ban partners from their devices (e.g. Google Voice, Kindle in-app purchase), sabotage their own production partners (e.g. Samsung), gouge partners with arbitrary licensing (iPod connectors), and ignore the effects on their users, or indeed on their own long-term survival. They are different from the Microsoft of the 90s (perhaps less cut-throat, a little less predictable), but in important ways are similar, and they're storing up the same sort of long-term resentment which is now undermining Microsoft in the consumer space. For example by banning all transactions on their devices which don't involve giving Apple a cut, they annoy both their users and their partners - the only entity this action serves is Apple, and that only in the short term.

yuhong 14y ago

My favorite is the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco, particularly how it relates to DR-DOS (clue: OS/2 did not depend on DOS): http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?p=516&cpage=1#comment-9086 http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?p=516&cpage=1#comment-9086

protomyth 14y ago
I'm still a little bitter about Microsoft getting paid for the box I bought to run NeXTSTEP.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

mattmanser 14y ago

I think you're being a bit lax with history here and looking with rose-tinted glasses, Apache had made far too many inroads in the server way before MS really tackled servers properly. That C# is as popular as it is kinda debunks your entire argument, it's a firmly entrenched behemoth in the corporate world. The MS hate that was in the 90s/early 00s just doesn't exist any more. What should worry MS far more is that these days so many programming articles and guides just assume you are working on a Unix system. Windows is becoming irrelevant to the elite. It's a bizarre phenomenon given that MS is still dominant in the OS field that has been gaining serious traction for the last 3 or 4 years. Also SQL Server is good. Very good. And cheap, very cheap compared to the other good DBs. While MySQL and Postgre are alright, in reality they really are quite bad compared to SQL server in terms of overall polish and quality. I got reminded of this the other day tracking down an excessively poorly performing query, fixed in MySQL by an index that MS SQL would have effectively just done for you. And don't even get me started on how many business run exchange. Ugh.

bcantrill 14y ago
I disagree about the sense of IIS v. Apache: Apache won because of Linux not the other way around. (There is, after all, a port of Apache to Windows -- it seems to have done nothing to stop the bleeding according to Netcraft.) As for the "bizarre phenomenon" that Windows seems to be "irrelevant" despite that it's "dominant", there is of course a simple answer: it's not dominant. Windows lost; humanity won.
SnowLprd 14y ago
I don't think Bryan is being lax with history at all. In fact, he completely nailed it. The only points in your comment that I found persuasive, on the other hand, are that Windows is indeed becoming irrelevant, SQL Server probably has an edge over MySQL in some ways, and Exchange needs to die a quick death. The rest just doesn't fly. Hatred for Microsoft doesn't exist any longer? Says who? I believe it runs much deeper and stronger than you realize. I haven't purchased a Microsoft product in well over a decade, and that "purchase" was a PC preloaded with an OEM license of Windows that I had no way of not buying. My loathing for Microsoft was sown over decades of the most user-hostile, winner-take-all, I-will-rip-off-your-head-and-shit-down-your-neck corporate culture I've ever witnessed. Bryan calling Microsoft "predatory" is being kind. I'm not sure what "OS field that has been gaining serious traction for the last 3 or 4 years" refers to, but if you're talking about desktop computing, they are doing exactly the opposite of gaining traction: http://twitpic.com/a31jis http://twitpic.com/a31jis They aren't just becoming irrelevant to the elite; Microsoft is rapidly becoming just plain irrelevant. How does C#'s popularity debunk Bryan's entire argument? A lot of companies still use Windows (for now), which means a lot of people use C# to develop applications for those computers. I don't see how this debunks much of anything. SQL Server is good. Is it better than MySQL in some ways? Sure. What are the chances I'd select SQL Server instead of PostgreSQL? Zero percent. So that's a false equivalence right there, but that's besides the point. The reason people use MySQL or PostgreSQL instead of SQL Server is that you don't need Windows. Why tie yourself to a user-hostile company that's only going to charge you ad infinitum upgrades for a malware-ridden operating system? Even if SQL Server were heads-and-shoulders above MySQL/PostgreSQL, people would avoid it because you can't get it without Windows. As I said, Bryan really nailed this: you're either burned so badly by Microsoft that "hatred" doesn't even begin to describe your feelings, or you're apathetic because the world has moved on and Microsoft continues to pretend like they live in the 1990s. With Ballmer at the helm, steering Microsoft towards seemingly inevitable obsolescence, Microsoft appears destined to eventually join Wang, Sun, RIM, Nokia, and the other dead or soon-to-be-dead. It didn't have to end that way, but reaping what you sow is generally the way the world works.

einhverfr 14y ago

What failure? I don't know what you mean by failure here. If you mean "fails to be the rockstar of the tech industry" that isn't much of a failure. Microsoft is only a failure if we expect them to build an ever more powerful monopoly with no possibility of escape. They may be trying to do that. Instead they have a large and solid business which is still very cash flow. Tell me of Microsoft's failure when the profits of Google or Facebook surpass the profits of Google.

gnaffle 14y ago
Microsofts failure is most evident in their stock staying flat or dropping the last years, while all their competitors stock has soared, including Apples. That's the overall indicator of failure, and the one their owners care about. But look underneath, and you find failure in every attempt Microsoft has made to branch out of their existing businesses, except for the Xbox. Mobile? Lost to Apple and Google. Music? Lost to Apple. Instant messaging and identity (.net Passport)? Lost to Facebook. Tablets? Lost to Apple. There are countless examples like this. Given all those failures, that nice cash flow will only be sustained until the Windows monopoly is replaced by something else. Windows 8 is Microsofts desperate response to something that threatens to do that.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  At their height they had plenty of failures too. Bob comes to mind....
- einhverfr 14y ago
  But my larger point is that if my business only grows to be the size of Microsoft and ends up with a steady profit that size I won't care about the failures, only count the successes at that point.
  - gnaffle 14y ago
    Of course, but the question at that point becomes: How do you sustain those steady profits? DEC was hugely successful in its day, but was a failure in the 90s because they couldn't manage the transition from minicomputers to PCs.

bluedanieru 14y ago

>I dare say that Oracle is (at long last) at that point or approaching it rapidly You say that as though it's a contentious thing? They were past that point even before the Sun acquisition. Hell, when were they ever innovative like MS was in their heyday?

berntb 14y ago
What was innovative? Copying other's stuff and integrating a browser into the OS?
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  Microsoft's business model was innovative, even where their software wasn't. Per-unit licensing, bundling, including the browser for free (which, BTW, screwed Spyglass out of any browser-related royalties).
  - berntb 14y ago
    Doesn't the illegal use of monopoly powers seem new here, because it was in a newer field? (Thanks for reminding me of Spyglass, shudder.)
    - dredmorbius 14y ago
      Even that's arguable. IBM, Xerox, and AT&T all certainly exploited monopolies for some time in tech. I suspect the real complaint was that Microsoft wasn't terribly innovative. Few things in tech are. The key is to steal from the best, and implement well. While it's arguable that Microsoft's technical implementations weren't all they could have been, the combined reach of their tech + business model worked very well, from the PoV of business success and spreading their "ecosystem" to borrow a more recent term, for most of 2-3 decades.

Nelson69 14y ago

You misunderstand the MS hate to compare it to Oracle and IBM. Oracle and IBM want to make money, period. They'll run their products on a competitor's platform if they can get a bite of the pie, they don't care. Further, I'd guess 7/10 geeks that "hate" oracle have never used their products and might not even understand what they do, it's just part of the hatred of really really successful companies. (That's part of it too, whenever a powerful and successful company actually competes, people tend to hate it.) I'm not going to defend them but when Oracle sued Google, I don't think there was ever an intention to make Google go away, they just wanted a cut of the action, it was all about money. Read up on what MS did to Digital Research and Lotus, MS wanted to "cut off the air supply," they refused to see a world where those companies could co-exist. It's just different, MS has wanted to kill the competition. How come they don't port most apps to other platforms? Office on Mac is the only serious one I can think of.