5 ms·

A lot of the criticism of Ballmer seems to miss the point. Did Microsoft miss key trends? Maybe a few but who doesn't. Microsoft saw and got involved in most

A lot of the criticism of Ballmer seems to miss the point. Did Microsoft miss key trends? Maybe a few but who doesn't. Microsoft saw and got involved in most of those trends they "missed" and even often got there well ahead of the parties that own the markets today. In 2000 I was hired by Microsoft. One of the big initiatives was to make tablet PCs a reality. Microsoft spent years working on marketing consumer smartphones before the iPhone. That Microsoft lost a leading position in the market for computing devices is surprising given how much effort they put into devices eventually popularized by other companies, particularly Google and Apple. Why doesn't Microsoft own the tablet and consumer smart phone market right now? The answer must be in execution rather than understanding of where the market was headed. Why couldn't they develop (and why can't they still develop) products folks like in these areas? When I was there the mentality was that Microsoft would be first to market, would fail for a few major releases but still beat everyone else with a quality product. Yet they spent time producing products nobody wanted while first Apple and later Google ended up walking away with the tablet and consumer smartphone markets. What went wrong? That's the real question.

bcantrill 13y ago
As it apparently needs to be explained: Microsoft's predatory behavior in 1990s resulted in an incalculable and unrecoverable loss of trust among technologists -- which was bound to ultimately catch up to the company. You can get away with predatory behavior when you're dominant, but when you miss new markets -- as Microsoft did repeatedly in the lost decade of the 2000s -- you can be damned sure no one is going to be foolish enough to open those markets to a known monopolist. Microsoft is left with two choices: invent new markets or try to earn back the public's trust. They have no track record in either department; as the Magic 8-ball says, "outlook not so good"...
- tomphoolery 13y ago
  What about Apple and Google? They have repeatedly violated the trust of hackers, yet only a small minority have fully divorced themselves from these companies' products. As much as I'd love to believe in the morality of our market, I don't really think that's the case. Not that I believe MS's predatory behavior helped their cause at all, but I still think the primary reason why people don't use, or don't want to use, Microsoft products anymore is because they are inferior to others' products. There was definitely a time where, for most people, that was not the case. Edit: Just a little example...I don't remember continuously hearing about Microsoft employees going to fucked-up countries and running clandestine rescue missions http://pastebin.com/CuUcHM6m http://pastebin.com/CuUcHM6m
  - iopq 13y ago
    The difference is that Google had the trust of hackers when it launched Android. Apple is a different demographic, it's almost the "luxury" line of tech products.
  - lukifer 13y ago
    From where I sit, Google and Apple have been steadily hemorrhaging enthusiasts with their creepiness and arrogance, respectively. They're still the least worst options in their fields, but they no longer seem like the golden saviors they did in the early 2000s.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  But my point is still this. All of the new computing areas are ones that were big areas of development when I was there. Yet Microsoft still can't produce a product in these areas that people want to buy. I think you are right that it goes to predatory behavior, but I think there is another aspect too. There is very little groundbreaking work in UI paradigms to come out of Microsoft. They didn't invent the WIMP approach. They did manage to invent Bob.... But it means that they had no expertise in the things that were needed to catch the trends they were trying to ride. It took Apple to develop a really good touchscreen interface. So I keep coming back to problems of execution. Yeah. Outlook(TM) not so good ;-)
- marvin 13y ago
  I'm 26; I wasn't around to see Microsoft's monopolistic behavior. I've only read about it from the history books. So people my age don't have the same emotional reaction to this. I'm pretty sure that engineers' perception of Microsoft will change back to neutral as my generation enters the industry.
  - icefox 13y ago
    Don't worry you guys will have your own version of Microsoft, perhaps Facebook. In 5-10 years time when there are good enough alternatives to whatever feature of Facebook you require today you will never go back and actively encourage others to switch.
tomphoolery 13y ago
I think Microsoft has always been a software company, and never really intended to get into any other business. At the same time, Apple grew from being a strictly hardware company into a "platform" company. That is, they began developing the software that ran on their hardware. This put them in a much better position to begin developing devices that were not traditional computers. Microsoft, on the other hand, has done all they can to avoid making hardware. It shows with the Surface...while it's a nice piece of hardware there are many failures with the device that perhaps a company with more experience building those kinds of things would have caught early on in development. Only recently have they began working in hardware, and developing full products. I don't believe they would have even had this capability had it not been for the extraordinary work that Microsoft Research does. But Microsoft has made a ton of money by pushing both their consumer software and their tools/infrastructure for companies to develop their own software on the .NET platform. It's widely known that Microsoft's developer support channels (if you want to pay for them) are much more developed than Apple's, whose dev environments are geared for far simpler setups. .NET shops, for example, pretty much do not need to worry about the latest and greatest tools. Microsoft can provide everything you need to get work done on their platform. But personally, I don't think you could possibly develop as good of a business relationship between hardware manufacturer and software developer as a company which includes both facets of product development. These days, the real money is in getting people to buy your gadget, as Apple has shown. Microsoft missed out on that, because they did not invest properly in building hardware when they could have. And that's where Microsoft went "wrong". Though they may not have...
- jacquesm 13y ago
  > Apple grew from being a strictly hardware company into a "platform" company. Apple always was a platform company. Microsoft -> software Dell -> hardware Apple -> platform (Hardware + OS)
  - agumonkey 13y ago
    Can't we say Microsoft is a software platform company ? in the 90s it had a platform feel to it, that's how I perceive the win95 era : - graphical desktop user os for other vendors to develop on - monopoly driving device manufacturers around it It seemed scaled just enough to be the core of an ecosystem.
guelo 13y ago
Ballmer's biggest mistake was killing Windows Mobile 7. Microsoft had a huge lead with Windows Mobile 5 in 2005; a decent OS with decent hardware and a huge app ecosystem. Leaked WM7 screenshots show that it would have been competitive with the iPhone if it had been released in 2007-08 as originally planned (http://pocketnow.com/smartphone-news/windows-mobile-7-exclusive-screenshots-and-analysis http://pocketnow.com/smartphone-news/windows-mobile-7-exclus...). But they inexplicably killed the project and let Apple conquer the world. Microsoft didn't respond until 2011 with Windows Phone, which was a new OS written from scratch.
- harrytuttle 13y ago
  Agree with win mobile 7 point. However WP7 is basically WinCE 7 with CLR (compact framework) and a new UI. Good move with bad timing. If they released WP7 in a form close to what it is now in 2007, Apple would have been laughed off the scene.
- aaronbrethorst 13y ago
  You mean Photon? Yeah, that was never going to happen. > But they inexplicably killed the project Oh, it was definitely not inexplicable. Check out Apple's doomed Copland project, e.g.
- pavlov 13y ago
  The post you linked to is from October 2009. By that time, it was far too late for Microsoft to "fix" Windows Mobile by simply updating the UI of the built-in applications to be more iPhone-like, which is what the screenshots show. This approach would have left most of the OS and third-party applications stuck in the stylus-oriented 2002 look and feel. I don't think anyone would have been happy with the resulting compromise of an operating system. The Windows Phone 7 reset was unavoidable. For comparison, Nokia tried doing what you advocate: instead of starting over, they updated Symbian to be modestly touch-friendly and proceeded to improve the apps and libraries piecewise over several OS iterations. It didn't work out, the resulting products were a mess (even though they eventually managed to get it to a pretty good state with the 2011/12 releases, it was far too late). Nokia ended up throwing away the entire Symbian OS -- a project whose R&D costs had accumulated to tens of billions of dollars by then.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
What went wrong? The corporate culture degraded until it was poison to both retaining good employees and taking on challenging projects. What went wrong? Ballmer expended a lot of effort to remove any potential challengers to the throne during his tenure, ridding the company of many talented and ambitious high-level managers, having an obvious impact on the company. What went wrong? Microsoft reacted to the economic downturn in '08 by treating its employees like shit for a few years in order to pinch pennies even while it kept tens of billions of dollars of cash on hand. What went wrong? Instead of making each part of the company more autonomous and independent, or even spinning off parts of the company into separate ventures, the whole company remained one giant, bloated empire while the industry changed dramatically around it. Most parts of the company aren't "hungry" the way they would be if they were spun off as startups. What went wrong? The strategy tax got shoved down everyone's throats in every way imaginable. Microsoft wanted to own every market out there instead of concentrating on its core strengths and executing well on what it could. It dumped a lot of money into trying to catch google et al with the "live" rebrand and then "bing". It dumped a lot of money and opportunity cost through strategy tax in trying to catch flash through silverlight, which is now virtually defunct. What went wrong? At nearly every step MS is capable of executing on engineering ground well but failing to make things that people actually want. The Xbox One is by far the most impressive console of the next generation but it's marketed so poorly that few people are aware of its actual capabilities and advantages though many are aware of its downsides and limitations. Windows phone and surface are solid products but they're not the products they need to be to actually compete against samsung and apple. And the list just continues. What went wrong? The company made a lot of key mistakes over the last half decade, many of them at a strategic level. Who exactly is most responsible for that?
- foamdino 13y ago
  As someone that spends a lot of time reading about games, gaming culture and gaming hardware, I can assert that the Xbox One is not the most impressive console of the next (soon to be launched) gen. In terms of GPU hardware it is a reduced version of the PS4 GPU (50% fewer compute units). As a package XBox One + Kinect 2 might be quite impressive, but in which markets? None of the TV integration technology works outside of the US (as far as anyone can tell). Between PS4 and XBox One there are many similarities and a few differences - and in terms of console hardware they're both very impressive pieces of kit. Microsoft's messaging has been atrocious though - a case study in how not to launch a games console.
mandeepj 13y ago
The experience with Microsoft devices was not so great. I will give you one instance - They never left the keyboard from tablet and phone. Ballmer laughed off iphone when he heard it is a $500 device and have no keyboard, and he said no one is going to buy this device. He still not understood the point. While apple made the interaction with idevices very sexy. Rest is history and you very well know it.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  This is sort of one of the things I am getting at. Microsoft wasn't able to appreciate how different the UI would have to be.
- mandeepj 13y ago
  Downvoters - May I ask you for the reason behind downvotes?
ArcticCelt 13y ago
One of the things that I remember from 1996 Gate's book "The Road Ahead" is him calling the day when everyone will walk around with his smart phone. "You'll be able to carry the wallet PC in your pocket or purse. It will display messages and schedules and also let you read or send electronic mail and faxes, monitor weather and stock reports, play both simple and sophisticated games, browse information if you're bored, or choose from among thousands of easy-to-call up photos of your kids." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_book) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_book...
optimiz3 13y ago
From 2003 to 2005 I worked in Windows Mobile. In a mad dash to achieve checklist-style feature parity with RIM, features were bolted-on with little thought given towards achieving real cohesion amongst what was being built. The culture was stifling because the strategy was to fast-follow rather than to take risks innovating. EDIT: Apple and Google simply changed who Microsoft was following, rather than the overall execution strategy.
primitur 13y ago
>What went wrong? That's the real question. I work in the OS world, so I have thought about this question. What I think 'went wrong' with Microsoft - as is happening with other "Operating Systems" developers, is that they have forgotten that they are there to serve their users, not an onboard business-model. Seriously, think about it. Let us take the example of shared filesystems, a common 'posession' of the OS in certain terms .. OS, filesystem, network, its all right there in the kernel .. but .. Why, on gods green earth, are we relying on 'startups' and 'upstarts' to deliver us peer-to-peer networking at the front-end user interface instead of actually having it, de-branded, at the operating system level as a matter of course? Things Dropbox, if Microsoft was awake, wouldn't have happened, because the peer-network shared filesystem thingy was sorted out .. in the 80's, I might add .. and then promptly forgotten about. Because the OS vendors have lost the plot on what is an operating system (hint: its the source, stupid!) and what is a 'branded service which produces other revenues for the OS vendor', and because the anti-trust thing happened, in the first place: OS vendors have lost the plot. Also, the very first sign that things were going awry was when someone decided that a user operating system should not ship with its own compiler(s), onboard! The separation of those tools, and the sheer bloat that results from not having a tight Build/OS binding, means that things got out of control on the developer, developer, developer(s), side of things, imho. I think this disconnect of the User-is-the-Developer mentality from the "what service is sold -outside- the box of the OS" profit excuse, with the ease of device manufacturing these days, OS vendors have new challenges ahead, and the crux of the argument is this: Its damned easy to make a new OS, for your own device, and then serve the hell out of your customers. In a very real sense, who needs a desktop if all you have to do is turn something on, and press play, in the first place.. ? With the way things are going, cheap light computing built-for-task is the new hotness, and .. well at least imho .. There may well come a point where the new hot OS ships with everything you could possibly need, already onboard and working, to build something new for the platform, itself. Put that ethos back, and lets talk again in a year about it ..

bcantrill 13y ago

As it apparently needs to be explained: Microsoft's predatory behavior in 1990s resulted in an incalculable and unrecoverable loss of trust among technologists -- which was bound to ultimately catch up to the company. You can get away with predatory behavior when you're dominant, but when you miss new markets -- as Microsoft did repeatedly in the lost decade of the 2000s -- you can be damned sure no one is going to be foolish enough to open those markets to a known monopolist. Microsoft is left with two choices: invent new markets or try to earn back the public's trust. They have no track record in either department; as the Magic 8-ball says, "outlook not so good"...

tomphoolery 13y ago
What about Apple and Google? They have repeatedly violated the trust of hackers, yet only a small minority have fully divorced themselves from these companies' products. As much as I'd love to believe in the morality of our market, I don't really think that's the case. Not that I believe MS's predatory behavior helped their cause at all, but I still think the primary reason why people don't use, or don't want to use, Microsoft products anymore is because they are inferior to others' products. There was definitely a time where, for most people, that was not the case. Edit: Just a little example...I don't remember continuously hearing about Microsoft employees going to fucked-up countries and running clandestine rescue missions http://pastebin.com/CuUcHM6m http://pastebin.com/CuUcHM6m
- iopq 13y ago
  The difference is that Google had the trust of hackers when it launched Android. Apple is a different demographic, it's almost the "luxury" line of tech products.
- lukifer 13y ago
  From where I sit, Google and Apple have been steadily hemorrhaging enthusiasts with their creepiness and arrogance, respectively. They're still the least worst options in their fields, but they no longer seem like the golden saviors they did in the early 2000s.
einhverfr 13y ago
But my point is still this. All of the new computing areas are ones that were big areas of development when I was there. Yet Microsoft still can't produce a product in these areas that people want to buy. I think you are right that it goes to predatory behavior, but I think there is another aspect too. There is very little groundbreaking work in UI paradigms to come out of Microsoft. They didn't invent the WIMP approach. They did manage to invent Bob.... But it means that they had no expertise in the things that were needed to catch the trends they were trying to ride. It took Apple to develop a really good touchscreen interface. So I keep coming back to problems of execution. Yeah. Outlook(TM) not so good ;-)
marvin 13y ago
I'm 26; I wasn't around to see Microsoft's monopolistic behavior. I've only read about it from the history books. So people my age don't have the same emotional reaction to this. I'm pretty sure that engineers' perception of Microsoft will change back to neutral as my generation enters the industry.
- icefox 13y ago
  Don't worry you guys will have your own version of Microsoft, perhaps Facebook. In 5-10 years time when there are good enough alternatives to whatever feature of Facebook you require today you will never go back and actively encourage others to switch.

tomphoolery 13y ago

I think Microsoft has always been a software company, and never really intended to get into any other business. At the same time, Apple grew from being a strictly hardware company into a "platform" company. That is, they began developing the software that ran on their hardware. This put them in a much better position to begin developing devices that were not traditional computers. Microsoft, on the other hand, has done all they can to avoid making hardware. It shows with the Surface...while it's a nice piece of hardware there are many failures with the device that perhaps a company with more experience building those kinds of things would have caught early on in development. Only recently have they began working in hardware, and developing full products. I don't believe they would have even had this capability had it not been for the extraordinary work that Microsoft Research does. But Microsoft has made a ton of money by pushing both their consumer software and their tools/infrastructure for companies to develop their own software on the .NET platform. It's widely known that Microsoft's developer support channels (if you want to pay for them) are much more developed than Apple's, whose dev environments are geared for far simpler setups. .NET shops, for example, pretty much do not need to worry about the latest and greatest tools. Microsoft can provide everything you need to get work done on their platform. But personally, I don't think you could possibly develop as good of a business relationship between hardware manufacturer and software developer as a company which includes both facets of product development. These days, the real money is in getting people to buy your gadget, as Apple has shown. Microsoft missed out on that, because they did not invest properly in building hardware when they could have. And that's where Microsoft went "wrong". Though they may not have...

jacquesm 13y ago
> Apple grew from being a strictly hardware company into a "platform" company. Apple always was a platform company. Microsoft -> software Dell -> hardware Apple -> platform (Hardware + OS)
- agumonkey 13y ago
  Can't we say Microsoft is a software platform company ? in the 90s it had a platform feel to it, that's how I perceive the win95 era : - graphical desktop user os for other vendors to develop on - monopoly driving device manufacturers around it It seemed scaled just enough to be the core of an ecosystem.

guelo 13y ago

Ballmer's biggest mistake was killing Windows Mobile 7. Microsoft had a huge lead with Windows Mobile 5 in 2005; a decent OS with decent hardware and a huge app ecosystem. Leaked WM7 screenshots show that it would have been competitive with the iPhone if it had been released in 2007-08 as originally planned (http://pocketnow.com/smartphone-news/windows-mobile-7-exclusive-screenshots-and-analysis http://pocketnow.com/smartphone-news/windows-mobile-7-exclus...). But they inexplicably killed the project and let Apple conquer the world. Microsoft didn't respond until 2011 with Windows Phone, which was a new OS written from scratch.

harrytuttle 13y ago
Agree with win mobile 7 point. However WP7 is basically WinCE 7 with CLR (compact framework) and a new UI. Good move with bad timing. If they released WP7 in a form close to what it is now in 2007, Apple would have been laughed off the scene.
aaronbrethorst 13y ago
You mean Photon? Yeah, that was never going to happen. > But they inexplicably killed the project Oh, it was definitely not inexplicable. Check out Apple's doomed Copland project, e.g.
pavlov 13y ago
The post you linked to is from October 2009. By that time, it was far too late for Microsoft to "fix" Windows Mobile by simply updating the UI of the built-in applications to be more iPhone-like, which is what the screenshots show. This approach would have left most of the OS and third-party applications stuck in the stylus-oriented 2002 look and feel. I don't think anyone would have been happy with the resulting compromise of an operating system. The Windows Phone 7 reset was unavoidable. For comparison, Nokia tried doing what you advocate: instead of starting over, they updated Symbian to be modestly touch-friendly and proceeded to improve the apps and libraries piecewise over several OS iterations. It didn't work out, the resulting products were a mess (even though they eventually managed to get it to a pretty good state with the 2011/12 releases, it was far too late). Nokia ended up throwing away the entire Symbian OS -- a project whose R&D costs had accumulated to tens of billions of dollars by then.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

What went wrong? The corporate culture degraded until it was poison to both retaining good employees and taking on challenging projects. What went wrong? Ballmer expended a lot of effort to remove any potential challengers to the throne during his tenure, ridding the company of many talented and ambitious high-level managers, having an obvious impact on the company. What went wrong? Microsoft reacted to the economic downturn in '08 by treating its employees like shit for a few years in order to pinch pennies even while it kept tens of billions of dollars of cash on hand. What went wrong? Instead of making each part of the company more autonomous and independent, or even spinning off parts of the company into separate ventures, the whole company remained one giant, bloated empire while the industry changed dramatically around it. Most parts of the company aren't "hungry" the way they would be if they were spun off as startups. What went wrong? The strategy tax got shoved down everyone's throats in every way imaginable. Microsoft wanted to own every market out there instead of concentrating on its core strengths and executing well on what it could. It dumped a lot of money into trying to catch google et al with the "live" rebrand and then "bing". It dumped a lot of money and opportunity cost through strategy tax in trying to catch flash through silverlight, which is now virtually defunct. What went wrong? At nearly every step MS is capable of executing on engineering ground well but failing to make things that people actually want. The Xbox One is by far the most impressive console of the next generation but it's marketed so poorly that few people are aware of its actual capabilities and advantages though many are aware of its downsides and limitations. Windows phone and surface are solid products but they're not the products they need to be to actually compete against samsung and apple. And the list just continues. What went wrong? The company made a lot of key mistakes over the last half decade, many of them at a strategic level. Who exactly is most responsible for that?

foamdino 13y ago
As someone that spends a lot of time reading about games, gaming culture and gaming hardware, I can assert that the Xbox One is not the most impressive console of the next (soon to be launched) gen. In terms of GPU hardware it is a reduced version of the PS4 GPU (50% fewer compute units). As a package XBox One + Kinect 2 might be quite impressive, but in which markets? None of the TV integration technology works outside of the US (as far as anyone can tell). Between PS4 and XBox One there are many similarities and a few differences - and in terms of console hardware they're both very impressive pieces of kit. Microsoft's messaging has been atrocious though - a case study in how not to launch a games console.

mandeepj 13y ago

The experience with Microsoft devices was not so great. I will give you one instance - They never left the keyboard from tablet and phone. Ballmer laughed off iphone when he heard it is a $500 device and have no keyboard, and he said no one is going to buy this device. He still not understood the point. While apple made the interaction with idevices very sexy. Rest is history and you very well know it.

einhverfr 13y ago
This is sort of one of the things I am getting at. Microsoft wasn't able to appreciate how different the UI would have to be.
mandeepj 13y ago
Downvoters - May I ask you for the reason behind downvotes?

ArcticCelt 13y ago

One of the things that I remember from 1996 Gate's book "The Road Ahead" is him calling the day when everyone will walk around with his smart phone. "You'll be able to carry the wallet PC in your pocket or purse. It will display messages and schedules and also let you read or send electronic mail and faxes, monitor weather and stock reports, play both simple and sophisticated games, browse information if you're bored, or choose from among thousands of easy-to-call up photos of your kids." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_book) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_book...

optimiz3 13y ago

From 2003 to 2005 I worked in Windows Mobile. In a mad dash to achieve checklist-style feature parity with RIM, features were bolted-on with little thought given towards achieving real cohesion amongst what was being built. The culture was stifling because the strategy was to fast-follow rather than to take risks innovating. EDIT: Apple and Google simply changed who Microsoft was following, rather than the overall execution strategy.

primitur 13y ago

>What went wrong? That's the real question. I work in the OS world, so I have thought about this question. What I think 'went wrong' with Microsoft - as is happening with other "Operating Systems" developers, is that they have forgotten that they are there to serve their users, not an onboard business-model. Seriously, think about it. Let us take the example of shared filesystems, a common 'posession' of the OS in certain terms .. OS, filesystem, network, its all right there in the kernel .. but .. Why, on gods green earth, are we relying on 'startups' and 'upstarts' to deliver us peer-to-peer networking at the front-end user interface instead of actually having it, de-branded, at the operating system level as a matter of course? Things Dropbox, if Microsoft was awake, wouldn't have happened, because the peer-network shared filesystem thingy was sorted out .. in the 80's, I might add .. and then promptly forgotten about. Because the OS vendors have lost the plot on what is an operating system (hint: its the source, stupid!) and what is a 'branded service which produces other revenues for the OS vendor', and because the anti-trust thing happened, in the first place: OS vendors have lost the plot. Also, the very first sign that things were going awry was when someone decided that a user operating system should not ship with its own compiler(s), onboard! The separation of those tools, and the sheer bloat that results from not having a tight Build/OS binding, means that things got out of control on the developer, developer, developer(s), side of things, imho. I think this disconnect of the User-is-the-Developer mentality from the "what service is sold -outside- the box of the OS" profit excuse, with the ease of device manufacturing these days, OS vendors have new challenges ahead, and the crux of the argument is this: Its damned easy to make a new OS, for your own device, and then serve the hell out of your customers. In a very real sense, who needs a desktop if all you have to do is turn something on, and press play, in the first place.. ? With the way things are going, cheap light computing built-for-task is the new hotness, and .. well at least imho .. There may well come a point where the new hot OS ships with everything you could possibly need, already onboard and working, to build something new for the platform, itself. Put that ethos back, and lets talk again in a year about it ..