4 ms·
> our transformation to a devices and services company This is what I find the most worrying. Are there no more "software companies" anymore? That you know, se
by nnq 13y ago
> our transformation to a devices and services company
This is what I find the most worrying. Are there no more "software companies" anymore? That you know, sell software as a product and only as a side-business they sell related services? Like the kind of companies that can "shaft their customers from time to time" because they know they make enough money from their great software not to care? Will they stop making great developer tools and will they start to not give a fuck about developers just like everybody else? Will they stop funding the cool research they currently do, like in the programming languages field?
This is the saddest news imho, because it will fuel up the current trend in industry. An in "services" or "devices" companies programmers are seen more and more as just "code monkeys". And developing tools for developers or "power users" becomes less of a priority. Catering to "the needs of many" is nice and fluffy and all but we still need techno-elites somewhere, and they're not gonna truly exist outside of companies that make enough money and have the privilege of occasionally showing the finger to both the customers and the minority shareholders because they know that in the end they have real products they can leverage to milk enough money from the customers and poor into the shareholders' pockets... "service" companies can't really do this because they always need to be perceived as "good" and "devices" companies will have a hell of a time competing in the new "so-cheap-they-are-almost-disposable devices" economy.
Winter is coming here. But there is hope for more summery weather for companies in the fields of AI/ML/BigData.
- einhverfr 13y agoOne of Microsoft's big problems is that software and hardware lifecycles are slowly extending to the point where Windows' primary competitor is Windows. In other words, older versions are good enough, people don't upgrade until they get new computers and they do that less often. Microsoft has been trying to transform themselves into a services business since at least 1999. I am not holding my breath.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- yuhong 13y agoWell, I think a lot of open source business models involves selling services relating to the software instead.
- nnq 13y ago...because this is like the only viable business model in open source. And this model does here the same thing it does anywhere else: it makes it so that developers are undervalued and underpaid or paid nothing at all. Don't get me wrong, I support open source and I believe most "infrastructure software", like OSs, compilers etc. should be open source. But I'm kind of split since the best viable option when it comes to OSs is still some flavor or *nix/BSD (after 40 freakin years and tons of cool ideas, nothing else turned into a "usable product"!) and nothing better and usable seems to come from the open source community. Microsoft had some very cool ideas in their research department (see Singularity OS for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)), and I'm afraid lots of them will go to the trashcan if Microsoft stops seeing software as a "product". If I weren't talking about Microsoft, we could at least hope they would open source the cool new research projects they loose interest in but I don't have high hopes for this, or for the open source community's ability to innovate and do really new and cool stuff.
- justincormack 13y agoBut Microsoft Research has always been largely experimental and ships few products. It would ship more if Windows was open source of course as much is Windows based...