16 ms·

Microsoft, Past and Future

325 points by locusm 13y ago

onli 13y ago
> The world is in need of high-quality, reliable, developer-friendly, trustworthy, privacy-guarding cloud computing platforms. That's the thing for me: That doesn't work anymore. Privacy-Guarding destroys that. Normally, I would fully agree that this is a good vision for Microsoft, continuing to be on the Desktop (especially corporate), trying to be on other markets and failing mostly, but becoming a big cloud player. But for me, the cloud is dead, and the NSA killed it - I try not to use it if it is not really helpful and without obvious privacy issues (like http://rsspusher.eu01.aws.af.cm/ http://rsspusher.eu01.aws.af.cm/, appfrog was fine for that, I still think that even if it predates that thought). And I know I'm not alone with that attitude. Maybe that doesn't mean that the cloud is dead, rather that there is a minority for which it is. I'm not sure how to predict the influence of the surveillance on the techological future. But what it means for sure is that for me and a few other guys, a Microsoft being a big cloud player would be as dead as it was before. We will see whether that matters.
- smokinn 13y ago
  What about recycling the "private cloud" into something actually useful? Microsoft has amazing expertise into taking any computer a 3rd party provides and making it work with their software. What about providing "cloud services" that can be guaranteed to never exit your own corporate firewall? I imagine this is going to be a huge need in the near future. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it were a standard EU regular within 5 years. This seems like an amazingly huge opportunity they could capitalize on. Become the standard software cloud solution of all software the way they they own email in the enterprise with exchange. Plenty of companies are large enough to own their own racks of virtualized servers and would pay good money to run well integrated Microsoft software on them.
  - arethuza 13y ago
    I think you might be straining the terminology just a bit by referring to cloud services installed inside a corporate firewall. What would make that different from traditional internally deployed applications like SharePoint? "Plenty of companies are large enough to own their own racks of virtualized servers and would pay good money to run well integrated Microsoft software on them." They already do - that's where a significant proportion of Microsoft's revenue comes from.
    - smokinn 13y ago
      You're right. I was purposely straining the term. What I'm saying is that CIOs of pretty much every medium to largish company needs to justify their salary to the other C*s. If he can justify it in terms of cost savings he justifies his salary. Right now, big companies either buy appliances (at huge cost and medium support cost) or build their own networks at small (or maybe huge) cost and huge support cost. And what I really mean by "cloud" is the fact that pretty much any CIO will call a rack of servers with any virtualization vendors' software running on the bunch of them as the cloud. And honestly it's not wrong. If your company's culture is built right whether your "cloud" is "private" or otherwise shouldn't matter. If Microsoft can turn the enterprise into the desktop, every enterprise on our software as a new goal. Which mean abandoning huge margins, they could make huge dents into SAP, CGI, IBM, Accenture and all these huge terrible enterprise software vendors. All of them combined are a huge opportunity for Microsoft to steal all market share from and honestly I think Microsoft could definitely pull their 90s tactics and be successful.
      - arethuza 13y ago
        "any CIO will call a rack of servers with any virtualization vendors' software running on the bunch of them as the cloud" Not if they are responsible for the CapEx, administration, upgrades, data center space etc. I would state that the defining characteristic of "cloud computing" as far as senior managers go is that these things are all someone else's problem and all you are left with is a predictable monthly/yearly fee, application support and making sure your users have a decent internet connection.
tempestn 13y ago
This piece seems pretty spot-on all around. That said, I don't know anything about Mr. Nadella, but I have spent a significant chunk of time trying to use the Bing API from the Azure market, as well as competing products from Yahoo and Google. I found the Microsoft API to be significantly behind both competitors in features, performance, documentation, terms of use, and price. Even with Yahoo BOSS using Bing's index, it manages to offer significantly better search features, a lower price, and less restrictive terms. (You can't use the paid Bing search API if you run any ads other than the Bing network!) And neither one holds a candle to Google in most cases. Anyway, but experience with Azure was deep rather than broad, but it was enough to give me a strong belief that if this represents the great hope for Microsoft's future, things aren't looking so bright.
- gnaffle 13y ago
  I think it is spot-on right up to the conclusion, which I disagree with. > The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device. I don't see how Gruber can come to this conclusion unless he has suddenly changed position and thinks the open web will eventually win out over native apps. The problem, of course, is that for a company that wants to be Microsofts size, they _need_ to own the platform, because the platform owners have an incentive to limit their dependence on you and make sure that their cloud services work better on their platform. iMessage and Hangouts? Integrated. Skype? Not so. The only way to "own" the platform owners is to have an essential, popular product that customers demand. As much as Microsoft would want to, they don't have such a product (perhaps Office in the business market, but that's about it). Edit: Wanted to add "How Microsoft Lost the API war" which is another interesting take on the platform thing and how Microsoft lost it: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
  - netnichols 13y ago
    > I don't see how Gruber can come to this conclusion unless he has suddenly changed position and thinks the open web will eventually win out over native apps. How does his statement have anything to do with 'open web' vs. native apps? How many native apps do you use that have no 'cloud' component whatsoever? Gruber isn't talking about Microsoft making a bunch of web applications, he's talking about them becoming a key player in the data services arena, i.e. offering a platform for providing data to both web applications and native applications alike.
jitl 13y ago
I think this is an interesting contrast with PG's "Microsoft is Dead (2006)," because it points to a reason why Microsoft lost their hunger and dominance: they had no driving company goal after they got to "a computer in every home (running Microsoft software)." Both read true to me, as a 20-something who never really appreciated Microsoft during its dominance. By the time I got to high school, Apple had already switched to Intel, and I purchased the first iPhone for $600 in 10th grade. I've never used Outlook, and I don't think I ever will.
- NDizzle 13y ago
  It's going to take a hell of a lot from MS in order to have someone like me buy back in. I'll present one of the other perspectives. I was all-Microsoft, from MS DOS up through Windows Server 2003. Late 90s MCSE, nothing but MS. Most of my time was spent building and maintaining NT4.0 installations and then migrating to 2000. I got tired of keeping pace with the amount of changes in all of the services somewhere between Server 2003 and Server 2008 and have since jumped ship. Now I use entirely open source software and a mix of AWS instances and dedicated servers in various parts of the country for heavy lifting. (I work with multiple small companies rather than one large company that would benefit from the perfect AWS deployment.) This is after having spent time and personally maintained dozens of machines in half a dozen different data centers stretching back to 1998. It's going to take a hell of a lot.
  - csmithuk 13y ago
    I did the opposite. I was a Unix/netware guy for years. Netware fell off a cliff and so did commercial Unix. Left me with Linux and FreeBSD. Whilst I rather like FreeBSD, when I have to throw an architecture together that will survive over a decade, Microsoft wins every time. They're the only company which provides certainty. RedHat are close but their support sucks.
    - acqq 13y ago
      I'm sorry but I just can't believe you're real. Red Hat has the most stable (measued in the years of support without the change in the underlying technologies) OS configurations of all commercial offerings. What was that that you got better supported from Microsoft than from Red Hat? Specifics please.
temuze 13y ago
> Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world. The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device. That sounds more like Google to me!
- 23arboo 13y ago
  Microsoft can can do in the enterprise, they are entrenched pretty deep!
  - gnaffle 13y ago
    Microsofts enterprise business is founded on the fact that everyone runs Windows, so no, that doesn't work well in the long run (ask Novell).
    - testrun 13y ago
      or IBM
stormbrew 13y ago
> No company today has reach or influence anything like what Microsoft had during the golden era of the PC. Not Apple, not Google, and not Microsoft itself. I think Google is pretty close, really. They obviously don't have an operating system for laptops or desktops that everyone uses, but using a computer without Google products is something that people just don't really do anymore. iOS, Android, OSX, Windows, Ubuntu, etc. no matter what you're probably using something Google wrote on it. Which is really a very old-school Microsoft strategy brought up to date to the early 21st century. Google recognized that the OS doesn't matter anymore and Microsoft continued to believe it was everything.
- gnaffle 13y ago
  > Google recognized that the OS doesn't matter anymore and Microsoft continued to believe it was everything. I think they recognize all too well that it matters, which is seen by the massive effort in developing and supporting Android, Chrome OS etc. This is just Googles version of Microsoft giving away IE.
  - stormbrew 13y ago
    I think they do these projects more out of a concern of being shut out of other OS' the way Netscape was effectively shut out of Windows. And that shows in which of those platforms they've placed the most effort: the one where their competitor is the most likely to shut them out.
    - gnaffle 13y ago
      Exactly.
    - tsax 13y ago
      How was Netscape shut out of Windows?
      - stormbrew 13y ago
        Aside from the fact that IE being bundled made it far less likely for someone to go looking for another browser, they were shut out from being bundled by OEMs and ISPs through restrictive covenants[0][1]. It obviously wasn't impossible to install Netscape, but situations where Netscape was the user's first entry to the web became extremely unlikely. This isn't really controversial, it was one of the major factors of the antitrust case against MS, and MS didn't argue they didn't do it, only that it wasn't illegal afaik. [0] http://www.businessweek.com/1998/42/b3600109.htm http://www.businessweek.com/1998/42/b3600109.htm [1] http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f2600/2613toc_htm.htm http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f2600/2613toc_htm.htm
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
corresation 13y ago
One angle that I expected Microsoft to eventually leverage is playing to their traditional strengths -- diversity, openness, freedom (and what that meant for the platform. GPUs, storage, media -- Microsoft and the Windows platform made that evolution happen): The classic montage through the computer age sort of thing, culminating in the Microsoft platform of today. Instead they fell for the trap of cargo culting off of what Apple was doing, essentially becoming a desperate wannabe, the Microsoft store being the ultimate demonstration of how utterly self-defeating that can be. Microsoft is still great -- even outside of raw financial might, they continue to make great software and tools (as one aside, it is quite remarkable how enormous of an impact Bill Gate's trustworthy computing manifesto had) -- but from an influence perspective they have had little for quite a few years.
no_gravity 13y ago
"Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world" There already are servers sending data everywhere. For example the servers of Google, Facebook and Wikipedia. How would Microsoft convince those guys or new companies to get rid of their solid, free and open stack and pay for Microsofts closed stuff? This is much different from "A computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software". Back then, there where no computers on desks and homes to begin with.
- csmithuk 13y ago
  Depends on what you mean by data. Google/Facebook mean social and crudely document shaped data. Wikipedia means data that looks like encylopedia pages. Microsoft mean ANY data you want to shift with the same languages and tools across all platform form factors which is why people buy into the ecosystem. Even going back to 2004, I could knock out an app (in C++/C#) that worked on the desktop, on the web and on mobile devices. In fact I did and it's still in use today managing private couriers with minimal code changes.
- josteink 13y ago
  How would Microsoft convince those guys or new companies to get rid of their solid, free and open stack and pay for Microsofts closed stuff? They don't have to. They can keep on using their free and open stack, but moving to Azure instead of using Google compute engine or AWS.
  - no_gravity 13y ago
    Then Microsoft would be just another provider of virtual servers. I dont think thats a good future goal for a 300 billion dollar company. Conversely to Gruber, I see Microsofts future in client software and hardware. Apple and Google have put computers in every pocket. But only the consumption part of it. The race for the production tablet has just started. And with the Surface Pro, Microsoft has the first product out there.
    - josteink 13y ago
beloch 13y ago
What I find surprising is that, in the process of writing a historical review on Microsoft, anyone would ignore the fact that MS has repeatedly identified areas of profit, moved in, failed spectacularly, iterated aggressively, and ultimately become dominant, at least for a time. e.g. What killed Netscape? Microsoft's surface tablets are signs of big things to come. They're currently too expensive for what they are, but they could find a huge niche. They're portable tablets meant for content creation, not mere consumption. If you want a tablet that will let you draw, take notes, etc. as easily as on paper, iPads aren't even close to the current Surface. The surface pro would have been exactly what I wanted in undergrad physics for a lecture-hall machine. Many artists probably feel the same way now. Tablets have long been too underpowered to tackle real creative tasks. The surface proves that the hardware has changed, although the cost is still high. I expect the next few generations of surfaces to get cheaper and more refined rapidly. People who love tablets are soon going to want something more than a glorified phone, and the Surface is going to be the go-to option. Yeah, so MS might dominate the content-creation/student/artist tablet niche. Big whoop. Well, success in any consumer hardware niche might do for MS what it did for Apple. Namely, make them a huge pile of cash and jump-start their supply-chain so they can move into other areas. It might not play out this way. Apple has been looking for ways to make the iPad more content-creation friendly beyond just marketing them as such. Still, iOS on an iPad is a huge step behind Win8 on a Surface pro for creative tasks right now. All MS has to do is keep iterating the Surface and avoid another Vista-style PR blunder with Win9.
- simonh 13y ago
  MS currently has an advantage in digitizer features on the Surface. But if a swing like this was going to happen, for the reasons you suggest, it would be happening right now. Furthermore, even if such a swing does begin, you are assuming two things: Firstly that Apple will not respond effectively to MS establishing such a niche. Secondly that Android will also fail to compete for that niche. The problem is that all the innovative new mobile creativity apps are currently coming out on iOS, digitizer tech or no. Apple has never subscribed to the creation/consumption world view, or even used the term 'consumption' to my knowledge. It sounds like something people died from in the Middle Ages. Their flagship day one launch apps for the iPad were all creative apps - Garageband, Pages, etc.
CamperBob2 13y ago
Steve Fucking Jobs said that (the desktop PC was dead and innovation had virtually ceased). He was exactly right. And who knows where we’d be today if Jobs and Next had not been reunified with Apple the next year. As a Windows user, I suspect I'd be about where I am today, except that I wouldn't have to install ClassicShell to get rid of Metro.
- valleyer 13y ago
  You don't think the success of the Mac over the last 10 years has pushed Windows to become better than it would have been?
  - carlio 13y ago
    IE stagnated for a long time before firefox arrived to compete. I imagine that could have played out with Windows too, were it not for the success of Apple.
  - CamperBob2 13y ago
    Honestly, no, not really. I can't think of any features from the Mac that Windows copied, that I personally benefit from. However, Microsoft under Ballmer thrashed around trying to copy other things from Apple, things that did not belong on a desktop PC, and made life more annoying for a great many Windows users as a result. Like another poster above suggested, another five years of that approach would have brought Microsoft down to the lowest level Apple ever reached.
gfodor 13y ago
Apple won by not fighting the last war. If Microsoft wants to stay relevant, they need to do the same. What's next? The smartphone, tablet, and cloud services ships have left port and are pretty far out on the horizon. Can Microsoft see what is around the corner the other guys cannot? They are, for the first time since they were founded, the underdog. They have a stellar research group whose output they seem to rarely take advantage of. It's time to get some stuff out of the lab and take some risks. The Kinect shows me the mojo is there -- and it was almost certainly Ballmer's narrow-mindedness that has prevented Microsoft from taking enough risks. I hope now that they have a technical visionary at the helm we'll really see them shake things up, and this is coming from someone who has loathed Microsoft products for quite some time now.
TorKlingberg 13y ago
His vision of a future Microsoft sounds an awful lot like "Don't you dare compete with Apple in any area". Server backends platforms and cloud computing are the areas that Apple don't care about owning or controlling.
rollthehard6 13y ago
What is missing in this article is any mention of Amazon and AWS. Surely that is the biggest roadblock in the way of Microsoft in the cloud?
codeulike 13y ago
I think the Windows 8 gamble could still pay off. We're starting to see 8" tablets that run full Windows. Give it 12 months and the 8" form factor will be powerful enough to cover a lot of enterprise needs. 8" tablet + docking station is a very compelling way to get work done.
- ZeroGravitas 13y ago
  Only if your data and apps are on that device you carry about, and not in the cloud so you can access them from both at once. And they just made the cloud guy CEO so he might be thought to favour that way.
  - mattmanser 13y ago
    Enterprise don't have their stuff in the cloud.
    - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
      Then maybe Microsoft shouldn't have promoted the guy in charge of Azure (in their own word's "Microsoft's Cloud Platform") to CEO.
  - codeulike 13y ago
    Even if everythings in the cloud, its still sometimes convenient to carry one device around - current state of work, open tabs, half written emails etc
- JohnBooty 13y ago
  As mundane as it sounds, "enterprise" needs often involve opening a bunch of spreadsheets every day, and those are pretty painful on a 7" or 8" screen.
  - Xdes 13y ago
    Hence the docking station. Full workstation when plugged in and 8" screen in meetings.
dewiz 13y ago
A computer on every desk. A computer in every pocket. A computer in every body. A computer as everybody.
- mmcconnell1618 13y ago
  A personal robot in every home running Microsoft OS?
grrowl 13y ago
I hope Nadella is adjusting strategy closer to a Google-Amazon-Microsoft hybrid; beefing up Hotmail, Office, SharePoint(?) and running them everywhere on Azure, while Windows platform fragments into Phone and Surface/Desktop.
blahbl4hblahtoo 13y ago
For a dead company people sure do like talking about it...
quesera 13y ago
> Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world. The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device. Yikes. If anyone can find Microsoft-sized margins and volume in that business, it will be more destructive than an OS monoculture ever was. "Cloud" is a low-margin high-volume business, perfect for players like Amazon and Google, with little boutiquey heroku bits thrown in to vacuum up the value-add-at-any-price edge case customers.
- gtirloni 13y ago
  Microsoft doesn't seem to be dreaming about Windows/Office margins with Azure: That’s why today we are also announcing a commitment to match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as compute, storage and bandwidth http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/04/16/the-power-of-and.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/04/16/the-...
forgotAgain 13y ago
Microsoft's future will be determined by its past profit margins. To maintain it's historical margins it must succeed with devices. Cloud services are a low margin business. Their online applications will never generate the profits that their packaged software has. The fact that they are losing money on every Surface they sell is not encouraging.
bane 13y ago
"Steve Fucking Jobs said that. He was exactly right." Well it's good he said that, otherwise Gruber would twist himself into a knot trying to argue otherwise. Though this is interesting "If we include all iOS and Android devices the “computing” market in Q3 2008 was 92 million units of which Windows was 90%, whereas in Q3 2013 it was 269 million units of which Windows was 32%." Actually doing the math, Q3 2008, Microsoft was about 83 million units. Q3 2013 Microsoft had just over 86 million units. So I guess it's still a growth? I'm sorry, revealing the actual numbers punctures Gruber's thesis. Rude of me. I mean, nobody really conflated these categories when it was just Blackberries and video game consoles. Do I get to add Xbox units to this too? Of course Microsoft missed the mobile boat and it's largely Ballmer's fault. That's well known and this kind of weird conflated analysis isn't insightful or interesting. "Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world. The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device." Ugh, please no. Data transmission has been hopelessly commoditized and I really don't want an Apple or a Microsoft inserting themselves into a low margin game and trying to figure out how to make it a high margin one.
- jasonpbecker 13y ago
  > I mean, nobody really conflated these categories when it was just Blackberries and video game consoles. Do I get to add Xbox units to this too? Did Xbox or Blackberry serve as direct substitutes for traditional PCs? No. Have Android and iOS phones and tablets serve as direct substitutes for traditional PCs? Yes.
  - bane 13y ago
    > Did Xbox or Blackberry serve as direct substitutes for traditional PCs? Yes. If you don't think a Blackberry served as an entire mobile office, almost replacing PCs for most use-cases, for millions of road warriors, then you never had one or lived through that time. The Xbox line has replaced PCs as both a gaming platform for millions as well as a media center and emulation platform for many many others. XBMC after all means "Xbox Media Center".
higherpurpose 13y ago
The idea that Microsoft would be "privacy-guarding" is completely laughable to me, when they have so much poorer security than even Google right now, and Google already has major privacy issues on its own. Microsoft would be one of the last company to trust with my privacy. At least when Google says they aren't giving direct access to their servers to the governments I somewhat believe them, but I wouldn't believe Microsoft at all if they said that to me. They've had too many Skype privacy blunders to trust them on this.
Zigurd 13y ago
Microsoft's malaise is part real, and part illusion: The illusion part is mostly obvious. Microsoft makes oceans of money. Heck of a malaise, right? The real part of the malaise stems from Microsoft not being objective about itself. For example, Microsoft could easily make vastly more money if they looked at Windows as a legacy product and raised prices on the people who really need Windows. Looking at Windows as a Product of the Future means they won't actually ship any Products of the Future, because that might contradict the dogma. That's a real malaise. That's what keeps the great ideas of the very smart people at Microsoft funneled through Windows product management. The new products that get through are mostly reactive, like IE, MSN, Bing Search, Bing Maps, etc. The malaise is even more basic than "Should Microsoft be a consumer and enterprise business?" Dividing Microsoft that way would probably help, but fail to see the underlying cause, and that would leave the consumer part vulnerable to a continuation of what ails it now.
amaks 13y ago
What a great post from Gruber. I generally don't like his posts because they are always fanboyish, but this one just nails it.
canistr 13y ago
In Canada, we have a campaign to "win" the Olympics called "Own the Podium". I liken this to Gruber's Microsoft strategy as being "Own the pipe". Not in the literal sense of becoming an ISP or backbone, but in the networking sense of being the middleman to all communications a la Cisco. They need to figure out something with the ARM architecture and servers to really advance the next decade.
whodaman 13y ago
Nice write up. While at it, another anathema to Microsoft's progress is Windows. If Satya can pull a OS X analog to Windows by using Linux as their base and developing their own MS Aqua.... they'll not only rule the connected world, they will eat Apple alive in 5-10 years time. If anyone has the cojones to pull something like this off, it'd be Microsoft. The more they resist Linux as their base and keep plugging Windows NT everywhere.... the worse things will get for them. My 2 cents.
dkrich 13y ago
I don't see why people always compare Microsoft to Apple besides the fact that they are two of the oldest and highest-profile companies in the technology industry. This comparison always leads to them making the false claim that Microsoft "missed-out" on mobile. Microsoft has always been a software-first company. Their strategy has always been to create the OS and license it to hardware manufacturers and capture the largest share of the market. Apple began as a hardware company that chose to pursue a strategy of building its own software so it could control the entire stack, bottom to top. One wanted to cast a wide net with limited quality control, the other wanted to produce products of the highest quality. But here's the thing- neither is necessarily "wrong" and you can't possibly simultaneously employ both strategies. As of today, Microsoft has a $297 billion market cap. Enterprise software sales (read the large multibillion-dollar entities that quietly purchase billions of dollars of Microsoft products without blog entries or TechCrunch critiques) aren't going anywhere for a long time. Anybody who works in one can tell you that. What's more is that Microsoft actually has a large and growing number of evangelists for their mobile products. The claim that Prices come down, chips get faster. Software evolves. cuts both ways and should apply as much to Microsoft as to Apple, especially now that the mobile device market is "mature."
- 10feet 13y ago
  I know, it is like comparing Apples and Oranges, two other similar fruits that are very comparable.
yoodenvranx 13y ago
> The world is in need of high-quality, reliable, developer-friendly, trustworthy, privacy-guarding cloud computing platforms. No, no, no, that is exactly what I do _not_ want! I want all my computing devices to work completely offline in all circumstances. I want to install programs to my local computer so Incan be shure that I still can use them if the company goes bankrupt. I want to be able to install old versions of programs in case I don't like a newer version... In my opinion it is wrong to put applications to the cloud because then I become dependent on the provider of this service. For me the cloud should only be used for one thing: to synchronize data between my computing devices!
- tsax 13y ago
  Personal Cloud, perhaps, will be the answer. No real vendors for that yet though. Urbit maybe but that has a year or so to go before it becomes usable.
mathattack 13y ago
This article paints a strong argument in favor of the new CEO. I think he stands a chance of pulling this off!
mwmeyer 13y ago
> Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world. The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device. Funny, that seems to be what dropbox is going for with their new datastore API

325 points by locusm 13y ago

onli 13y ago

> The world is in need of high-quality, reliable, developer-friendly, trustworthy, privacy-guarding cloud computing platforms. That's the thing for me: That doesn't work anymore. Privacy-Guarding destroys that. Normally, I would fully agree that this is a good vision for Microsoft, continuing to be on the Desktop (especially corporate), trying to be on other markets and failing mostly, but becoming a big cloud player. But for me, the cloud is dead, and the NSA killed it - I try not to use it if it is not really helpful and without obvious privacy issues (like http://rsspusher.eu01.aws.af.cm/ http://rsspusher.eu01.aws.af.cm/, appfrog was fine for that, I still think that even if it predates that thought). And I know I'm not alone with that attitude. Maybe that doesn't mean that the cloud is dead, rather that there is a minority for which it is. I'm not sure how to predict the influence of the surveillance on the techological future. But what it means for sure is that for me and a few other guys, a Microsoft being a big cloud player would be as dead as it was before. We will see whether that matters.

smokinn 13y ago
What about recycling the "private cloud" into something actually useful? Microsoft has amazing expertise into taking any computer a 3rd party provides and making it work with their software. What about providing "cloud services" that can be guaranteed to never exit your own corporate firewall? I imagine this is going to be a huge need in the near future. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it were a standard EU regular within 5 years. This seems like an amazingly huge opportunity they could capitalize on. Become the standard software cloud solution of all software the way they they own email in the enterprise with exchange. Plenty of companies are large enough to own their own racks of virtualized servers and would pay good money to run well integrated Microsoft software on them.
- arethuza 13y ago
  I think you might be straining the terminology just a bit by referring to cloud services installed inside a corporate firewall. What would make that different from traditional internally deployed applications like SharePoint? "Plenty of companies are large enough to own their own racks of virtualized servers and would pay good money to run well integrated Microsoft software on them." They already do - that's where a significant proportion of Microsoft's revenue comes from.
  - smokinn 13y ago
    You're right. I was purposely straining the term. What I'm saying is that CIOs of pretty much every medium to largish company needs to justify their salary to the other C*s. If he can justify it in terms of cost savings he justifies his salary. Right now, big companies either buy appliances (at huge cost and medium support cost) or build their own networks at small (or maybe huge) cost and huge support cost. And what I really mean by "cloud" is the fact that pretty much any CIO will call a rack of servers with any virtualization vendors' software running on the bunch of them as the cloud. And honestly it's not wrong. If your company's culture is built right whether your "cloud" is "private" or otherwise shouldn't matter. If Microsoft can turn the enterprise into the desktop, every enterprise on our software as a new goal. Which mean abandoning huge margins, they could make huge dents into SAP, CGI, IBM, Accenture and all these huge terrible enterprise software vendors. All of them combined are a huge opportunity for Microsoft to steal all market share from and honestly I think Microsoft could definitely pull their 90s tactics and be successful.
    - arethuza 13y ago
      "any CIO will call a rack of servers with any virtualization vendors' software running on the bunch of them as the cloud" Not if they are responsible for the CapEx, administration, upgrades, data center space etc. I would state that the defining characteristic of "cloud computing" as far as senior managers go is that these things are all someone else's problem and all you are left with is a predictable monthly/yearly fee, application support and making sure your users have a decent internet connection.

tempestn 13y ago

This piece seems pretty spot-on all around. That said, I don't know anything about Mr. Nadella, but I have spent a significant chunk of time trying to use the Bing API from the Azure market, as well as competing products from Yahoo and Google. I found the Microsoft API to be significantly behind both competitors in features, performance, documentation, terms of use, and price. Even with Yahoo BOSS using Bing's index, it manages to offer significantly better search features, a lower price, and less restrictive terms. (You can't use the paid Bing search API if you run any ads other than the Bing network!) And neither one holds a candle to Google in most cases. Anyway, but experience with Azure was deep rather than broad, but it was enough to give me a strong belief that if this represents the great hope for Microsoft's future, things aren't looking so bright.

gnaffle 13y ago
I think it is spot-on right up to the conclusion, which I disagree with. > The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device. I don't see how Gruber can come to this conclusion unless he has suddenly changed position and thinks the open web will eventually win out over native apps. The problem, of course, is that for a company that wants to be Microsofts size, they _need_ to own the platform, because the platform owners have an incentive to limit their dependence on you and make sure that their cloud services work better on their platform. iMessage and Hangouts? Integrated. Skype? Not so. The only way to "own" the platform owners is to have an essential, popular product that customers demand. As much as Microsoft would want to, they don't have such a product (perhaps Office in the business market, but that's about it). Edit: Wanted to add "How Microsoft Lost the API war" which is another interesting take on the platform thing and how Microsoft lost it: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
- netnichols 13y ago
  > I don't see how Gruber can come to this conclusion unless he has suddenly changed position and thinks the open web will eventually win out over native apps. How does his statement have anything to do with 'open web' vs. native apps? How many native apps do you use that have no 'cloud' component whatsoever? Gruber isn't talking about Microsoft making a bunch of web applications, he's talking about them becoming a key player in the data services arena, i.e. offering a platform for providing data to both web applications and native applications alike.

jitl 13y ago

I think this is an interesting contrast with PG's "Microsoft is Dead (2006)," because it points to a reason why Microsoft lost their hunger and dominance: they had no driving company goal after they got to "a computer in every home (running Microsoft software)." Both read true to me, as a 20-something who never really appreciated Microsoft during its dominance. By the time I got to high school, Apple had already switched to Intel, and I purchased the first iPhone for $600 in 10th grade. I've never used Outlook, and I don't think I ever will.

NDizzle 13y ago
It's going to take a hell of a lot from MS in order to have someone like me buy back in. I'll present one of the other perspectives. I was all-Microsoft, from MS DOS up through Windows Server 2003. Late 90s MCSE, nothing but MS. Most of my time was spent building and maintaining NT4.0 installations and then migrating to 2000. I got tired of keeping pace with the amount of changes in all of the services somewhere between Server 2003 and Server 2008 and have since jumped ship. Now I use entirely open source software and a mix of AWS instances and dedicated servers in various parts of the country for heavy lifting. (I work with multiple small companies rather than one large company that would benefit from the perfect AWS deployment.) This is after having spent time and personally maintained dozens of machines in half a dozen different data centers stretching back to 1998. It's going to take a hell of a lot.
- csmithuk 13y ago
  I did the opposite. I was a Unix/netware guy for years. Netware fell off a cliff and so did commercial Unix. Left me with Linux and FreeBSD. Whilst I rather like FreeBSD, when I have to throw an architecture together that will survive over a decade, Microsoft wins every time. They're the only company which provides certainty. RedHat are close but their support sucks.
  - acqq 13y ago
    I'm sorry but I just can't believe you're real. Red Hat has the most stable (measued in the years of support without the change in the underlying technologies) OS configurations of all commercial offerings. What was that that you got better supported from Microsoft than from Red Hat? Specifics please.

temuze 13y ago

23arboo 13y ago
Microsoft can can do in the enterprise, they are entrenched pretty deep!
- gnaffle 13y ago
  Microsofts enterprise business is founded on the fact that everyone runs Windows, so no, that doesn't work well in the long run (ask Novell).
  - testrun 13y ago
    or IBM

stormbrew 13y ago

> No company today has reach or influence anything like what Microsoft had during the golden era of the PC. Not Apple, not Google, and not Microsoft itself. I think Google is pretty close, really. They obviously don't have an operating system for laptops or desktops that everyone uses, but using a computer without Google products is something that people just don't really do anymore. iOS, Android, OSX, Windows, Ubuntu, etc. no matter what you're probably using something Google wrote on it. Which is really a very old-school Microsoft strategy brought up to date to the early 21st century. Google recognized that the OS doesn't matter anymore and Microsoft continued to believe it was everything.

gnaffle 13y ago
> Google recognized that the OS doesn't matter anymore and Microsoft continued to believe it was everything. I think they recognize all too well that it matters, which is seen by the massive effort in developing and supporting Android, Chrome OS etc. This is just Googles version of Microsoft giving away IE.
- stormbrew 13y ago
  I think they do these projects more out of a concern of being shut out of other OS' the way Netscape was effectively shut out of Windows. And that shows in which of those platforms they've placed the most effort: the one where their competitor is the most likely to shut them out.
  - gnaffle 13y ago
    Exactly.
  - tsax 13y ago
    How was Netscape shut out of Windows?
    - stormbrew 13y ago
      Aside from the fact that IE being bundled made it far less likely for someone to go looking for another browser, they were shut out from being bundled by OEMs and ISPs through restrictive covenants[0][1]. It obviously wasn't impossible to install Netscape, but situations where Netscape was the user's first entry to the web became extremely unlikely. This isn't really controversial, it was one of the major factors of the antitrust case against MS, and MS didn't argue they didn't do it, only that it wasn't illegal afaik. [0] http://www.businessweek.com/1998/42/b3600109.htm http://www.businessweek.com/1998/42/b3600109.htm [1] http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f2600/2613toc_htm.htm http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f2600/2613toc_htm.htm

deleted 13y ago

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corresation 13y ago

One angle that I expected Microsoft to eventually leverage is playing to their traditional strengths -- diversity, openness, freedom (and what that meant for the platform. GPUs, storage, media -- Microsoft and the Windows platform made that evolution happen): The classic montage through the computer age sort of thing, culminating in the Microsoft platform of today. Instead they fell for the trap of cargo culting off of what Apple was doing, essentially becoming a desperate wannabe, the Microsoft store being the ultimate demonstration of how utterly self-defeating that can be. Microsoft is still great -- even outside of raw financial might, they continue to make great software and tools (as one aside, it is quite remarkable how enormous of an impact Bill Gate's trustworthy computing manifesto had) -- but from an influence perspective they have had little for quite a few years.

no_gravity 13y ago

"Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world" There already are servers sending data everywhere. For example the servers of Google, Facebook and Wikipedia. How would Microsoft convince those guys or new companies to get rid of their solid, free and open stack and pay for Microsofts closed stuff? This is much different from "A computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software". Back then, there where no computers on desks and homes to begin with.

csmithuk 13y ago
Depends on what you mean by data. Google/Facebook mean social and crudely document shaped data. Wikipedia means data that looks like encylopedia pages. Microsoft mean ANY data you want to shift with the same languages and tools across all platform form factors which is why people buy into the ecosystem. Even going back to 2004, I could knock out an app (in C++/C#) that worked on the desktop, on the web and on mobile devices. In fact I did and it's still in use today managing private couriers with minimal code changes.
josteink 13y ago
How would Microsoft convince those guys or new companies to get rid of their solid, free and open stack and pay for Microsofts closed stuff? They don't have to. They can keep on using their free and open stack, but moving to Azure instead of using Google compute engine or AWS.
- no_gravity 13y ago
  Then Microsoft would be just another provider of virtual servers. I dont think thats a good future goal for a 300 billion dollar company. Conversely to Gruber, I see Microsofts future in client software and hardware. Apple and Google have put computers in every pocket. But only the consumption part of it. The race for the production tablet has just started. And with the Surface Pro, Microsoft has the first product out there.
  - josteink 13y ago

beloch 13y ago

What I find surprising is that, in the process of writing a historical review on Microsoft, anyone would ignore the fact that MS has repeatedly identified areas of profit, moved in, failed spectacularly, iterated aggressively, and ultimately become dominant, at least for a time. e.g. What killed Netscape? Microsoft's surface tablets are signs of big things to come. They're currently too expensive for what they are, but they could find a huge niche. They're portable tablets meant for content creation, not mere consumption. If you want a tablet that will let you draw, take notes, etc. as easily as on paper, iPads aren't even close to the current Surface. The surface pro would have been exactly what I wanted in undergrad physics for a lecture-hall machine. Many artists probably feel the same way now. Tablets have long been too underpowered to tackle real creative tasks. The surface proves that the hardware has changed, although the cost is still high. I expect the next few generations of surfaces to get cheaper and more refined rapidly. People who love tablets are soon going to want something more than a glorified phone, and the Surface is going to be the go-to option. Yeah, so MS might dominate the content-creation/student/artist tablet niche. Big whoop. Well, success in any consumer hardware niche might do for MS what it did for Apple. Namely, make them a huge pile of cash and jump-start their supply-chain so they can move into other areas. It might not play out this way. Apple has been looking for ways to make the iPad more content-creation friendly beyond just marketing them as such. Still, iOS on an iPad is a huge step behind Win8 on a Surface pro for creative tasks right now. All MS has to do is keep iterating the Surface and avoid another Vista-style PR blunder with Win9.

simonh 13y ago
MS currently has an advantage in digitizer features on the Surface. But if a swing like this was going to happen, for the reasons you suggest, it would be happening right now. Furthermore, even if such a swing does begin, you are assuming two things: Firstly that Apple will not respond effectively to MS establishing such a niche. Secondly that Android will also fail to compete for that niche. The problem is that all the innovative new mobile creativity apps are currently coming out on iOS, digitizer tech or no. Apple has never subscribed to the creation/consumption world view, or even used the term 'consumption' to my knowledge. It sounds like something people died from in the Middle Ages. Their flagship day one launch apps for the iPad were all creative apps - Garageband, Pages, etc.

CamperBob2 13y ago

Steve Fucking Jobs said that (the desktop PC was dead and innovation had virtually ceased). He was exactly right. And who knows where we’d be today if Jobs and Next had not been reunified with Apple the next year. As a Windows user, I suspect I'd be about where I am today, except that I wouldn't have to install ClassicShell to get rid of Metro.

valleyer 13y ago
You don't think the success of the Mac over the last 10 years has pushed Windows to become better than it would have been?
- carlio 13y ago
  IE stagnated for a long time before firefox arrived to compete. I imagine that could have played out with Windows too, were it not for the success of Apple.
- CamperBob2 13y ago
  Honestly, no, not really. I can't think of any features from the Mac that Windows copied, that I personally benefit from. However, Microsoft under Ballmer thrashed around trying to copy other things from Apple, things that did not belong on a desktop PC, and made life more annoying for a great many Windows users as a result. Like another poster above suggested, another five years of that approach would have brought Microsoft down to the lowest level Apple ever reached.

gfodor 13y ago

Apple won by not fighting the last war. If Microsoft wants to stay relevant, they need to do the same. What's next? The smartphone, tablet, and cloud services ships have left port and are pretty far out on the horizon. Can Microsoft see what is around the corner the other guys cannot? They are, for the first time since they were founded, the underdog. They have a stellar research group whose output they seem to rarely take advantage of. It's time to get some stuff out of the lab and take some risks. The Kinect shows me the mojo is there -- and it was almost certainly Ballmer's narrow-mindedness that has prevented Microsoft from taking enough risks. I hope now that they have a technical visionary at the helm we'll really see them shake things up, and this is coming from someone who has loathed Microsoft products for quite some time now.

TorKlingberg 13y ago

His vision of a future Microsoft sounds an awful lot like "Don't you dare compete with Apple in any area". Server backends platforms and cloud computing are the areas that Apple don't care about owning or controlling.

rollthehard6 13y ago

What is missing in this article is any mention of Amazon and AWS. Surely that is the biggest roadblock in the way of Microsoft in the cloud?

codeulike 13y ago

I think the Windows 8 gamble could still pay off. We're starting to see 8" tablets that run full Windows. Give it 12 months and the 8" form factor will be powerful enough to cover a lot of enterprise needs. 8" tablet + docking station is a very compelling way to get work done.

ZeroGravitas 13y ago
Only if your data and apps are on that device you carry about, and not in the cloud so you can access them from both at once. And they just made the cloud guy CEO so he might be thought to favour that way.
- mattmanser 13y ago
  Enterprise don't have their stuff in the cloud.
  - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
    Then maybe Microsoft shouldn't have promoted the guy in charge of Azure (in their own word's "Microsoft's Cloud Platform") to CEO.
- codeulike 13y ago
  Even if everythings in the cloud, its still sometimes convenient to carry one device around - current state of work, open tabs, half written emails etc
JohnBooty 13y ago
As mundane as it sounds, "enterprise" needs often involve opening a bunch of spreadsheets every day, and those are pretty painful on a 7" or 8" screen.
- Xdes 13y ago
  Hence the docking station. Full workstation when plugged in and 8" screen in meetings.

dewiz 13y ago

A computer on every desk. A computer in every pocket. A computer in every body. A computer as everybody.

mmcconnell1618 13y ago
A personal robot in every home running Microsoft OS?

grrowl 13y ago

I hope Nadella is adjusting strategy closer to a Google-Amazon-Microsoft hybrid; beefing up Hotmail, Office, SharePoint(?) and running them everywhere on Azure, while Windows platform fragments into Phone and Surface/Desktop.

blahbl4hblahtoo 13y ago

For a dead company people sure do like talking about it...

quesera 13y ago

> Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world. The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device. Yikes. If anyone can find Microsoft-sized margins and volume in that business, it will be more destructive than an OS monoculture ever was. "Cloud" is a low-margin high-volume business, perfect for players like Amazon and Google, with little boutiquey heroku bits thrown in to vacuum up the value-add-at-any-price edge case customers.

gtirloni 13y ago
Microsoft doesn't seem to be dreaming about Windows/Office margins with Azure: That’s why today we are also announcing a commitment to match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as compute, storage and bandwidth http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/04/16/the-power-of-and.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/04/16/the-...

forgotAgain 13y ago

Microsoft's future will be determined by its past profit margins. To maintain it's historical margins it must succeed with devices. Cloud services are a low margin business. Their online applications will never generate the profits that their packaged software has. The fact that they are losing money on every Surface they sell is not encouraging.

bane 13y ago

"Steve Fucking Jobs said that. He was exactly right." Well it's good he said that, otherwise Gruber would twist himself into a knot trying to argue otherwise. Though this is interesting "If we include all iOS and Android devices the “computing” market in Q3 2008 was 92 million units of which Windows was 90%, whereas in Q3 2013 it was 269 million units of which Windows was 32%." Actually doing the math, Q3 2008, Microsoft was about 83 million units. Q3 2013 Microsoft had just over 86 million units. So I guess it's still a growth? I'm sorry, revealing the actual numbers punctures Gruber's thesis. Rude of me. I mean, nobody really conflated these categories when it was just Blackberries and video game consoles. Do I get to add Xbox units to this too? Of course Microsoft missed the mobile boat and it's largely Ballmer's fault. That's well known and this kind of weird conflated analysis isn't insightful or interesting. "Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world. The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device." Ugh, please no. Data transmission has been hopelessly commoditized and I really don't want an Apple or a Microsoft inserting themselves into a low margin game and trying to figure out how to make it a high margin one.

jasonpbecker 13y ago
> I mean, nobody really conflated these categories when it was just Blackberries and video game consoles. Do I get to add Xbox units to this too? Did Xbox or Blackberry serve as direct substitutes for traditional PCs? No. Have Android and iOS phones and tablets serve as direct substitutes for traditional PCs? Yes.
- bane 13y ago
  > Did Xbox or Blackberry serve as direct substitutes for traditional PCs? Yes. If you don't think a Blackberry served as an entire mobile office, almost replacing PCs for most use-cases, for millions of road warriors, then you never had one or lived through that time. The Xbox line has replaced PCs as both a gaming platform for millions as well as a media center and emulation platform for many many others. XBMC after all means "Xbox Media Center".

higherpurpose 13y ago

The idea that Microsoft would be "privacy-guarding" is completely laughable to me, when they have so much poorer security than even Google right now, and Google already has major privacy issues on its own. Microsoft would be one of the last company to trust with my privacy. At least when Google says they aren't giving direct access to their servers to the governments I somewhat believe them, but I wouldn't believe Microsoft at all if they said that to me. They've had too many Skype privacy blunders to trust them on this.

Zigurd 13y ago

Microsoft's malaise is part real, and part illusion: The illusion part is mostly obvious. Microsoft makes oceans of money. Heck of a malaise, right? The real part of the malaise stems from Microsoft not being objective about itself. For example, Microsoft could easily make vastly more money if they looked at Windows as a legacy product and raised prices on the people who really need Windows. Looking at Windows as a Product of the Future means they won't actually ship any Products of the Future, because that might contradict the dogma. That's a real malaise. That's what keeps the great ideas of the very smart people at Microsoft funneled through Windows product management. The new products that get through are mostly reactive, like IE, MSN, Bing Search, Bing Maps, etc. The malaise is even more basic than "Should Microsoft be a consumer and enterprise business?" Dividing Microsoft that way would probably help, but fail to see the underlying cause, and that would leave the consumer part vulnerable to a continuation of what ails it now.

amaks 13y ago

What a great post from Gruber. I generally don't like his posts because they are always fanboyish, but this one just nails it.

canistr 13y ago

In Canada, we have a campaign to "win" the Olympics called "Own the Podium". I liken this to Gruber's Microsoft strategy as being "Own the pipe". Not in the literal sense of becoming an ISP or backbone, but in the networking sense of being the middleman to all communications a la Cisco. They need to figure out something with the ARM architecture and servers to really advance the next decade.

whodaman 13y ago

Nice write up. While at it, another anathema to Microsoft's progress is Windows. If Satya can pull a OS X analog to Windows by using Linux as their base and developing their own MS Aqua.... they'll not only rule the connected world, they will eat Apple alive in 5-10 years time. If anyone has the cojones to pull something like this off, it'd be Microsoft. The more they resist Linux as their base and keep plugging Windows NT everywhere.... the worse things will get for them. My 2 cents.

dkrich 13y ago

I don't see why people always compare Microsoft to Apple besides the fact that they are two of the oldest and highest-profile companies in the technology industry. This comparison always leads to them making the false claim that Microsoft "missed-out" on mobile. Microsoft has always been a software-first company. Their strategy has always been to create the OS and license it to hardware manufacturers and capture the largest share of the market. Apple began as a hardware company that chose to pursue a strategy of building its own software so it could control the entire stack, bottom to top. One wanted to cast a wide net with limited quality control, the other wanted to produce products of the highest quality. But here's the thing- neither is necessarily "wrong" and you can't possibly simultaneously employ both strategies. As of today, Microsoft has a $297 billion market cap. Enterprise software sales (read the large multibillion-dollar entities that quietly purchase billions of dollars of Microsoft products without blog entries or TechCrunch critiques) aren't going anywhere for a long time. Anybody who works in one can tell you that. What's more is that Microsoft actually has a large and growing number of evangelists for their mobile products. The claim that Prices come down, chips get faster. Software evolves. cuts both ways and should apply as much to Microsoft as to Apple, especially now that the mobile device market is "mature."

10feet 13y ago
I know, it is like comparing Apples and Oranges, two other similar fruits that are very comparable.

yoodenvranx 13y ago

> The world is in need of high-quality, reliable, developer-friendly, trustworthy, privacy-guarding cloud computing platforms. No, no, no, that is exactly what I do _not_ want! I want all my computing devices to work completely offline in all circumstances. I want to install programs to my local computer so Incan be shure that I still can use them if the company goes bankrupt. I want to be able to install old versions of programs in case I don't like a newer version... In my opinion it is wrong to put applications to the cloud because then I become dependent on the provider of this service. For me the cloud should only be used for one thing: to synchronize data between my computing devices!

tsax 13y ago
Personal Cloud, perhaps, will be the answer. No real vendors for that yet though. Urbit maybe but that has a year or so to go before it becomes usable.

mathattack 13y ago

This article paints a strong argument in favor of the new CEO. I think he stands a chance of pulling this off!

mwmeyer 13y ago