6 ms·

The problem is that they just could not commit to anything for more than 2 years after Win32. They had something reasonably good in WinRT. They should have stu

• rbanffy 6mo ago
  At this point one must ask if Microsoft is still a software platform company - whether their products form a substrate where an ecosystem can form and build a coherent software environment for the users of their platform. Microsoft used to be the Windows company (after being the BASIC company, then the DOS company). Then it became the Office company. Now it’s SharePoint and Office365 and Azure, a utility. Windows is a relatively small part. Office is both desktop and web (and spacecraft, where they have two versions of Outlook and none of them works). If you are confused at this point, so am I. There is no vision as to what Microsoft is. If Satya Nadella knows what Microsoft is, he isn’t communicating it properly. It’s not Azure, because there is also Office and Windows. And on-prem server products. And a line of hardware products. And stores (do they still exist?).
  • drob518 6mo ago
    Nadella thought he could take the reins and start yelling “Cloud! Cloud! Cloud!” and that would be successful. He doesn’t have a strategy and now that’s becoming apparent.
    • gdhkgdhkvff 6mo ago
      Nadella took the reins in 2014 and the stock has 10x’d since then. In the same timeframe, the sp500 has 2.5x’d. Sounds pretty successful to me?
      • a_vanderbilt 6mo ago
        In theory, the market should be pricing in based on future potential. As it has become increasingly clear this past decade, the market is not rational.
      • drob518 6mo ago
        In a bubble, everyone looks like they’re doing well. Don’t confuse that with an actual strategy.
        • gdhkgdhkvff 6mo ago
          But I compared it to sp500. Even QQQ only 6x’d in that timeframe. Which bubble are you talking about? Even if you remove everything after January 1 2020, it’s still up 4x since nadella took over. And that follows a decade of stagnation under Balmer. What numbers do you know of that show that Microsoft hasn’t been successful since nadella took charge? Complain all you want about the products, but the stock under nadella has been a success.
      • bigstrat2003 6mo ago
        Stock price going up is not the success criterion for a business. Making money is. And Microsoft's decisions are undermining their ability to make money in the future, which makes them bad decisions even if the stock price has gone up or if they make more money in the short term.
        • andsoitis 6mo ago
          > Stock price going up is not the success criterion for a business. Making money is. Microsoft’s net income is up roughly 5.4x from ~$22B in 2014 to $119B today. Profit margin also expanded, from ~25% net margins in 2014 to over 36% today.
        • adrianN 6mo ago
          If the market agreed, the stock wouldn’t go up.
      • sph 6mo ago
        If your only metric is stock price, yes. That’s the value proposition of enshittification.
      • user____name 6mo ago
        Sure, but how much of that had to do with the design and implementation of Windows? You know, the OS that runs half of the modern economy. Microsoft is just milking it without a coherent vision.
      • pndy 6mo ago
        Maybe financially MS is successful but at the cost of flagship product becoming adware and people fleeing slowly away
        • deleted 6mo ago
          [deleted]
      • snarfy 6mo ago
        Cloud was taking off at the same time. Anybody in his spot would have been successful.
    • wvenable 6mo ago
      Cloud is now massively larger than any other part of Microsoft. It's why he became the CEO in the first place. He maybe never had a strategy for Windows but he wasn't hired to have a strategy for Windows.
    • orthoxerox 6mo ago
      He had a strategy and it worked very well. But every strategy must be updated. It's basic BCG matrix stuff every MBA graduate knows by heart: sooner or later your star product becomes a cash cow and then a dog. To keep your company growing, you need to identify your next potential stars among question marks, boost them with cash from the cash cows, put competent managers in charge and remove those who get in the way. Gates did this with Windows, Office, XBox among other things. Ballmer failed to do this this with Windows Phone. Nadella did it with Azure, but he needs to do it once again with AI. You can see that he's pushing hard with Copilots everywhere, what's missing is a manager that has a coherent vision of what AI at MS should look like. ScottGu is in charge of both Azure and AI at MS, but I don't know if he can deliver.
      • drob518 6mo ago
        I agree with most of that. To be charitable to Nadella, at the time he first came into the role, Microsoft needed someone yelling "Cloud! Cloud! Cloud!" because the company was certainly behind folks like AWS. But for a long time he basically stopped there. Office migrated to the cloud and they pushed out Azure. Then he went on the AI rant and they decided that putting AI into everything, whether customers wanted it or not, was "the next thing." But now we're learning that Azure is a steaming pile of crap with customers leaving, and this article about GUI strategy shows they don't have an application development strategy. Everybody is fed up with Windows. Everybody is fed up with all the numerous "CoPilots." You actually have regular people investigating moving off Windows to Linux desktops. The one thing that Microsoft did exceptionally well through the 1990s and early 2000s was keep enterprises and app developers moving in the same direction. They bent over backwards to keep old Windows 3.1 applications running even on Win32 systems. That all ensured that nobody questioned whether they would work with Microsoft. They were the default and they commanded huge market power because of it. But that's all changed, and they have nothing to replace it. With everybody starting to ask questions that Nadella doesn't have answers for, it's going in a bad direction. Nadella needs to call his EVPs to account and force them to make some hard decisions about what lives or dies and then pressure test the resulting strategy with his customers, both old customers and potential customers. Surely, cloud and AI are a part of that future strategy, but he needs to figure out the rest of it.
  • pdonis 6mo ago
    MS has never been a software platform company. That's the fundamental reason behind the issue the article talks about. MS has always been a software application company. Windows was never anything more than a way to sell MS applications--and Windows 3.0 and later wouldn't even have existed in the first place if IBM hadn't dawdled so long over OS/2. Even in the MS-DOS days, when MS was reaping the benefits of IBM's previous bonehead decision to hand the PC OS market to them, MS was selling Office applications--on the Macintosh. The basic Windows API, in all of its many incarnations, has always been a second-class citizen; MS Office applications have always done their own things that other Windows applications couldn't do without using undocumented features that MS could change at any time (and often did). One could argue that the only reason MS even allowed third-party Windows developers to exist was so that they would, in the words of one of PG's essays, do market research for MS. When a third-party dev came up with something that got enough traction, MS would simply incorporate it into their apps.
    • coliveira 6mo ago
      This makes sense, because even in the best times Windows was not the biggest money maker for Microsoft, it was Office. So MS was never fully behind Windows, it was only the means to an end, which was selling the most software for enterprises.
      • kmeisthax 6mo ago
        Ironically, Office was the original poster child for Microsoft reinventing it's own widget toolkits, even back when Microsoft had a coherent visual design and developer story.
    • furyofantares 6mo ago
      How do you reconcile this with their history of bending over backwards to achieve backwards compatibility for third parties?
      • pdonis 6mo ago
        Because their strategy for getting their applications in front of everyone has always been to get Windows in front of everyone, and that meant having to support third party applications that they chose not to try to incorporate into their own apps, but which got enough usage that not supporting them would mean losing those Windows desktops, and thus losing those users of the MS applications that were on every Windows desktop. It's quite possible that this attributes too much intentional strategy to MS, and also treats them as a single entity with a single strategy more than they deserve. The MS internal teams that were bending over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility were not the same as the teams that were churning out new APIs, building Azure, etc., and quite likely had very different incentives.
  • hyperrail 6mo ago
    Microsoft has always had a broad vision of itself as a technology company; I feel it's perfectly fine to not be able to describe Microsoft in one sentence without using platitudes like "empower every person on Earth to achieve more" or "put a computer in every home and every office" (both paraphrases of actual MSFT company mission statements), and I suspect many other current and former Microsoft employees would feel the same way. IMO Microsoft's best long-lived products have always been both finished solutions to your problems and platforms to help you develop more solutions, and Microsoft leadership has always recognized this. Examples: Windows. Office. Dynamics (their Salesforce competitor). But even if a product doesn't meet that "why not both?" ideal, there is always going to be room for it at Microsoft, as long as it is not only a good or at least mediocre product by itself, but also works to sell you on the whole Microsoft ecosystem. Sometimes that is a bad thing (see all the Windows adware for Bing, Copilot, and M365). But that at least is where Microsoft remains consistent.
    • com2kid 6mo ago
      > "put a computer in every home and every office" That was such an amazing mission statement. It was a real measurable goal, and progress towards it was quantifiable. And Microsoft actually did it! That mission statement drove actual strategies (lower costs, don't complete with Apple on the high end, force OEMs to compete against each other on price, etc) that resulted in its ultimate fulfillment.
• stefan_ 6mo ago
  WinRT was technologically terrible (which immediately flows from "no one at Microsoft was actually using it to make anything useful"). But that wasn't even what sunk it - the whole requirements around "of course your WinRT app is going to be in the Microsoft Store^TM its the future" did that. The fucking store is a joke, and those requirements existed solely to boost a bunch of idiots internal careers.
  • collabs 6mo ago
    The Windows Store thing was so terrible that I would argue the only good thing that came out of it was that it made Valve/Steam invest in Linux. I still don't understand why the windows store search sucked so badly. It isn't like they had billions of apps. So why did it suck?
    • coliveira 6mo ago
      Most probably it was on purpose. MS is famous for the infighting of internal groups and how the management doesn't know how to control their divisions.
    • cyberax 6mo ago
      At one point, I worked on an app that periodically appeared in the top 10 of Windows Store sales. Its income? Around $500 a month.
  • garganzol 6mo ago
    My favorite example of that was when WinRT app .exe files could not be launched from the command line. Only via some Windows Store voodoo dance with approvals, signatures and "security" that made WinRT for developers essentially a dead-on-arrival technology. I would not be surprised if you still cannot launch a fricking .exe.
    • pjmlp 6mo ago
      This was sorted out in Windows 10 with the unification of WinRT programming models under UWP.