12 ms·

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

by 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.
- sz4kerto 13y ago
  It's very difficult to change fundamental things in your well-established, popular OS. See Windows x86/x64, see the difficulties of redesigning iOS in version 7, see the disappointed people who buy an Android hybrid and try to use it as a laptop replacement. For some reason, I have all kinds of tablets at home -- iPad Air, Surface 2 (with RT), Sony Xperia Z, ... Currently I feel that it'd be a shame if the Surface didn't become more popular, even the RT version is so much more that the other two platforms. I am not speaking about Metro, you can love it or hate it -- but the fact that it has proper support for keyboards (with shortcuts and everything) and also it's much more gesture-driven than the other two platforms. Obviously it's severely lacking apps compared to the other platforms, but the fundamentals are simply great and I'd be sad to see this platform disappearing. As I said, it's features will not be easily and quickly integrated into Android or iOS, as 'responding effectively' is not as simple as it might seem.
  - simonh 13y ago
    Apple performed a complete, ground-up redesign of their entire iOS UI layer from drawing board to shipping product in less than a year. Evolving a platform isn't a quick or easy task. It took Google maybe 3-4 years to pivot Android into a truly effective iOS competitor, and MS took even longer to respond because they had to start again from scratch. However adding a digitiser and better keyboard support, if they ever bother, would take a few months work. Even for much more ambitious projects Apple has demonstrated they are at the top of their game and as agile as ever, or as anyone else. They may well add the digitizer, but I don't think Apple will bother with better keyboard support than they already have. I think they view laptops and tablets as being complementary devices. A digitizer might make a tablet a better tablet, but a keyboard just turns it into an inferior laptop. As tablets do evolve Apple's advantages in market share, app ecosystem dominance, software development and their 64-bit processor technology head start all place them on the strategic high ground in all the ways that matter.
    - sz4kerto 13y ago
      > Apple performed a complete, ground-up redesign of their entire iOS UI layer from drawing board to shipping product in less than a year. Well, but that's mostly redrawing the existing widgets, it looks different, but works like how it used to work. (They added some stuff like the control center on the bottom, but they haven't really _changed_ how things work.) Also, I don't consider it to be a successful restyling (it's less straigthforward to figure out whether an icon is a button or not, and so on), but that might also be a matter of taste. What I'm trying to say is adding a digitizer to iOS does not mean that you only need to write drivers and design the hardware -- you need to change some UI paradigms. And that's hard. Windows classic desktop is now touch and digitizer-enabled in the case of Surface Pro, but the whole thing is not too useful. Apple is in a difficult position exactly because iPad Mini is so successful at the moment. Eventually large phones will devour that market as one mobile device (large phone) is usually better than two mobile devices (phone+tablet), or at least that's my prediction. They must target the same use case what Surface is trying to target: a super-lightweight laptop replacement what can sometimes be used as a tablet but renders your old, clunky laptop mostly irrelevant.
gnaffle 13y ago
Microsoft already has a huge pile of cash. That's not the problem. The problem is that the execution is good, but not good enough. Compromize and difficult choices (Surface vs Surface RT) everywhere. They released the music kit for the Surface, but where are the vast amount of great music production / performance apps from various well established companies such as Korg, Moog, Cubase, all of which are available on iOS?
sillysaurus2 13y ago
Which problems do Surface tablets solve? For example, iPhone completely changed my life overnight, mostly due to its navigation features and ability to look up phone numbers. I think Surface will only be dominant if it solves a problem for people. So, which problem does it solve, and why is it useful for people?
- klipt 13y ago
  > What problem do Surface tablets solve? Art problems, apparently. Gabe of Penny Arcade seemed pretty positive about the Surface Pro: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/02/22/the-ms-surface-pro http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/02/22/the-ms-surface-pro
  - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
    He gave up on Windows phone after a year though: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2014/01/22/so-many-games1 http://www.penny-arcade.com/2014/01/22/so-many-games1 "I made the switch back to an iphone recently after having a Windows phone for about a year. I really liked the OS but I had nothing but trouble with the hardware. I went through three different handsets and all of them ended up failing on me. Eventually I gave up and just bought an iPhone 5c. I have to say that after a year on the Windows phone I had forgotten what the Apple app store looks like. I think I had managed to convince myself that the Windows app store was pretty solid. Jesus Christ was I wrong."
    - pmelendez 13y ago
      >"I think I had managed to convince myself that the Windows app store was pretty solid. Jesus Christ was I wrong." True, but keep in mind only refers to games in that article, which is hands down the stronger point of the app store. I don't play games any more and I hardly miss anything from iOS that doesn't exist in the Windows Phone Store.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      I really liked the OS but I had nothing but trouble with the [phone] hardware This tells us what, exactly, about the Surface Pro?
k-mcgrady 13y ago
>> "Yeah, so MS might dominate the content-creation/student/artist tablet niche" I doubt it. A keyboard alone isn't enough to win that market, great software is. Look at the content creation apps available on iOS - iMovie, Garageband, iWork, Paper, Brushes, DM1, Amplitube, Notion. It's going to be hard to catch up with that. They are built for touch. The people using them don't need a keyboard. A keyboard isn't really the ideal input device for someone creating content unless it is written content. For everything else touch seems to work better.
- whitef0x 13y ago
  I would like to add to that, quality of design that third party apps and native apps on Mac OSX seem to have (in general) is much higher; this brings the more 'artsy' and student vertical onboard. UI/UX has obviously been a large part of OSX for quite sometime, which is obviously aided by Apple's minimalist design philosophy. Moving from OSX to Windows I have noticed a large lack of ease of use and good UX flows in a lot of third party apps.
  - jrs99 13y ago
    a while back i noticed this when i moved from windows to osx. and still i feel a little (not as much though) that osx is not as "fluid" and has less "finesse" and that the UI in osx is not well designed, especially things like buttons, menu, placement of items, and even the look of the buttons, the dock, etc. It seemed possible that it was due to my getting used to Windows and not being familiar with os x. A part of me though thinks that Windows UI is in fact superior to OSX ui, and that OSX has a somewhat amateurish feel to it. If I ran a design-centric company and my OS looked like that for a decade, it would bother me strongly.
  - pmelendez 13y ago
    >"Moving from OSX to Windows I have noticed a large lack of ease of use and good UX flows in a lot of third party apps." I would say that is because you were really used to OSX. I was the other way around and really dislike the whole OSX UI experience. I think it is just a bias based on our previous experience. Right now after moving freely between OSX, Ubuntu and Windows at different jobs for the last 5 years, I still prefer the UI experience of Windows (I only wish Windows would have a command line similar to Linux's one and it would be perfect)
hrktb 13y ago
There seems to be an underlying assumption that in a year or two, the Surface will have fixed all it's main flaws while the iPad and android tablets will stay more or less the same. One can argue if the iPad is a glorified phone or not, but I think Apple isn't moving any slower than Microsoft, and it is reasonable to expect a more capable iPad in the years to come. Although it's third party hardware, stylus support has come a long way, even if it might not be as good as the Surface digitizer, it might as well be good enough for average users. The race is on, and I wouldn't bet my shirt on Microsoft taking the lead anytime soon (in 5 or 10 years, I don't know)
ZeroGravitas 13y ago
Did Microsoft profit from browsers? Or was it a threat to existing platform profits that it temporarily pushed back via antitrust-inducing bundling tactics in order to scorch the earth for others trying to make inroads? And looking back, how did that go for them, they may have stalled human progress for a while, but what did they do with the time it bought them?
- timje1 13y ago
  Internet Exploder, stalling human progress since '95.
  - dasil003 13y ago
    Actually it was the most innovative browser from '95 to '99.
    - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
      Well that's one way to spin a monopolist giving away a bundled product for free and reducing the incentive for others to enter that market.
      - josefresco 13y ago
        Did you even use Netscape in the 90's? While most of the non tech loved it's bloated and "friendly" interface, the tech crowd I ran in used IE because it was lean, fast and didn't try to be some sort of "suite" that took over your PC. Sure MS leveraged their dominance in the OS world with brutal effectiveness, but Netscape was far from the ideal browser. In fact, Opera was our "Firefox" of the time as it could fit on a floppy disk (I'm dating myself here) and seemed lightweight in comparison to even IE. Speaking of FF, Firefox was born out of Netscape's overall crappiness/bloated nature. IE didn't start sucking until after the US gov came down hard and MS essentially threw their hands up and abandoned innovation as a result of being pounded in the courts. Firefox re-lit the fire of web innovation (along with the whole web 2.0 movement and post dot com bubble rebuild) and then Google simply out Firefoxed Firefox with Chrome.
DrJokepu 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 ... When was the last time they have actually managed to pull this off? Maybe the Xbox? It was never dominant or an area of profit. .NET? Never dominant or a direct source of profit. The days you are referring to are long gone. It's not the same company anymore and it's not the same world anymore.
- jrs99 13y ago
  Microsoft isn't even close to where apple was in terms of hitting a low.
  - hcentelles 13y ago
    Maybe hit that low is what they need to make a comeback.
  - mortenjorck 13y ago
    Another five years with Ballmer probably would have done it.
  - blueskin_ 13y ago
    Give it time with this new 'cloud' guy.
- octo_t 13y ago
  Azure is ramping up towards something like that.
- angersock 13y ago
  Xbox, Xbox Live, Xbox 360... yeah, sorry, they pretty much perfectly illustrated that point. Considering the early advantage Java had over C#, who seems to be laughing now? Business apps (you know, the boring 90% of software) seems overwhelmingly in favor of those two languages, with C# doing a bit better. I think you're rather wrong.
6d0debc071 13y ago
I'm not seeing a large niche for them in content creation. If we were starting off with tablets being the dominant player; the thing that most people used and grew up with, then it'd be different. However, the content creation market is already fairly competitive, and the pain points this would solve over and above what's already there don't seem significant. The questions in that regard seem as follows: Why would artists opt for a, relatively small, imprecise pen over something from Waccom? Why would programmers opt for working on a small laptop analogue compared to a computer with multiple monitors? Why would writers opt for this over a computer or a laptop? I can see people writing a blog post on one, or sitting in a lecture hall with one - but even there, the advantage over an apple laptop; which is pretty light already; seems negligible. Unless you have to travel a significant distance on foot. There it has the advantages that tablets always had: Light device, relatively good battery life. But by and large, the competition for Surface in the tablet space seems likely not to be other tablets. It seems more likely to be the tools - some of which are, when you get down to it, fairly specialised - that people are already using.
- Aldo_MX 13y ago
  When I connect my surface to two 1080p monitors, and an 8-port USB hub, I don't even remember that I'm using a Surface, unless I need to do a resource-intensive task.
bovermyer 13y ago
Speaking as an artist, my Samsung Series 7 Slate running Windows 8 with the Mischief art application is pretty much the perfect portable digital art studio for me.
programminggeek 13y ago
If you think the Surface tablets are overpriced, then you don't understand why Apple makes so much money when all the other computer companies are failing - profit. Without profit, it's hard to do interesting things. The Xbox is quite successful, but it's a lot of work to make not a lot of money. Why? The razors and blades concept doesn't work so well as making a 30% margin on a product people really, really want to buy.
Spooky23 13y ago
The problem with that is that they cannot make Win32 a legacy product. They tried to do so because you can argue that in the enterprise, iPad can deliver a better Windows experience via VDI than the garbage PCs that dominate the market. Once I'm delivering a quality Windows experience to my users by turning the client device into a TV, the next step is to further simplify. That expense app? I can use VDI to deliver some awful Enterprise Software via IE9.... or buy a solution with an iOS app! Something like 40% of enterprise users are using a defined set of < 7 PC applications to do specific things. That's easy pickings for a mobile application, and a great way to reduce Microsoft spend -- which is a big black hole in every enterprise org. The other issue is the channel. If they get real about hardware, they are screwing Dell, HP, Lenovo. That's a symbiotic relationship that generates alot of MSFT business.
shmerl 13y ago
Netscape story? MS because dominant in browsers (for a while) because of the nasty lock-ins, not because of any positive iterating. Their own slowness became their downfall - IE didn't iterate for a long time, and when they realized that competition is way ahead it was too late for them. MS mentality barely changed. Lock-in remains their primary strategy in many areas (it's well described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_lock-in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_...). In today's world though it's only backfiring at them, because they have no domination as in the past.
- amaks 13y ago
  Exactly. That's why I believe nothing will change in Microsoft with the new CEO, open sourcing of ASP.NET and other moves. It's simply not in their DNA to change and become fast followers. Lock-ins, closed silos - that's Microsoft areas of domination ever since.
  - jrmenon 13y ago
    Nothing unusual about the lock-in strategy. I would argue Apple does the same with iTunes/App Store walled-garden, same for Facebook, and Google - their Android playstore, GMail/GDocs esp. for small business. It is been a dream for many companies to own the full stack - client onwards all the way till the server. MS tried with Active-X controls in their browsers which only worked well with IIS servers. Apple is pretty much doing the same with their offerings. Full-spectrum dominance.
- cgh 13y ago
  Yes, exactly. And not just lock-in. For those that were around at the time, think of the IE5 tcp shenanigans to make IE seem "faster" when talking to IIS by messing with sequence numbers, sending RST instead of FIN, etc.
- mratzloff 13y ago
  No, that's revisionist history. IE 3 was a better browser than Netscape at the time, and IE 5 was much better than Netscape 4. CSS support, for example.
mwfunk 13y ago
What you describe in your first sentence is absolutely their MO. I don't think anyone making any sort of serious attempt to understand Microsoft ignores that or is unaware of that. The whole uncertainty surrounding Microsoft for the last 10 years (fair or not) is the fact that that approach doesn't work for them anymore and hasn't worked in years, their lack of dominance in the mobile industry being the prime example of that failure, despite having a significant head start (likewise for tablets). Yet, in a lot of ways, they still to this day cling to that strategy. You cited Netscape as an example, but Netscape is the most recent example I can think of of this strategy working for them. I actually want Microsoft to succeed; I want them to do much better than they have been. Microsoft does certain things really well that their competitors don't, and I would especially love to see more competition in the mobile and tablet space. Their own processes and business strategies seem to have calcified around 2003, which have since dragged down a lot of things that could have been great products. Totally tangential, but this is ignoring the fact that they actually have been doing really well in the one area that you would think would be the only thing people care about: profit. But no one seems to care about that, even though I personally don't think that that profit is going to dry up anytime soon. They could keep going like this forever, and people would still talk about how they're dead or dying. I understand why this is, it's just unfortunate that simply being a successful business isn't enough to avoid being branded a failure.
- mwfunk 13y ago
  Also, I think a big problem with Microsoft's strategy is it's based on attempting to replicate the same level of success they enjoyed with Windows and Office. Microsoft's strategy isn't to become a strong competitor, Microsoft's strategy all too often is to attempt to become the overwhelming market share leader. They see that things like Windows and Office enjoy 90-95% market share in their respective market segments, so new products are designed with that goal in mind (achieving monopolies rather than trying to simply put great products on the market and having those products compete solely on their own merit). This is why everything they make tries to be everything to everyone, but such products usually end up appealing to no one. I think a lot of Apple's success (one possible example of many) is due to the fact that they consciously don't try to please everyone. In fact, they make many decisions about such things knowing full well that those decisions will turn off many potential customers and put a ceiling on their potential market share. Their goal is to make what they think will be very desirable products for some target audience, as opposed to making something that they think will appeal to every customer in every segment of the market. IMO, Microsoft is constantly forcing itself to strive for an ambitious but impossible goal that tends to water down whatever the original product vision was.
hifier 13y ago
So you can draw on a surface... How many tablet users need more drawing capabilities than an iPad grants? The Surface, in it's existing form, is not a viable product.
zimpenfish 13y ago
Out of pure academic interest, how many New Yorker covers have been drawn on the "content creation" Surface tablets compared with the "mere consumption" iOS devices? Or how many world renowned artists are having exhibitions of their Surface art vs their iOS art?

by beloch 13y ago

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.

sz4kerto 13y ago
It's very difficult to change fundamental things in your well-established, popular OS. See Windows x86/x64, see the difficulties of redesigning iOS in version 7, see the disappointed people who buy an Android hybrid and try to use it as a laptop replacement. For some reason, I have all kinds of tablets at home -- iPad Air, Surface 2 (with RT), Sony Xperia Z, ... Currently I feel that it'd be a shame if the Surface didn't become more popular, even the RT version is so much more that the other two platforms. I am not speaking about Metro, you can love it or hate it -- but the fact that it has proper support for keyboards (with shortcuts and everything) and also it's much more gesture-driven than the other two platforms. Obviously it's severely lacking apps compared to the other platforms, but the fundamentals are simply great and I'd be sad to see this platform disappearing. As I said, it's features will not be easily and quickly integrated into Android or iOS, as 'responding effectively' is not as simple as it might seem.
- simonh 13y ago
  Apple performed a complete, ground-up redesign of their entire iOS UI layer from drawing board to shipping product in less than a year. Evolving a platform isn't a quick or easy task. It took Google maybe 3-4 years to pivot Android into a truly effective iOS competitor, and MS took even longer to respond because they had to start again from scratch. However adding a digitiser and better keyboard support, if they ever bother, would take a few months work. Even for much more ambitious projects Apple has demonstrated they are at the top of their game and as agile as ever, or as anyone else. They may well add the digitizer, but I don't think Apple will bother with better keyboard support than they already have. I think they view laptops and tablets as being complementary devices. A digitizer might make a tablet a better tablet, but a keyboard just turns it into an inferior laptop. As tablets do evolve Apple's advantages in market share, app ecosystem dominance, software development and their 64-bit processor technology head start all place them on the strategic high ground in all the ways that matter.
  - sz4kerto 13y ago
    > Apple performed a complete, ground-up redesign of their entire iOS UI layer from drawing board to shipping product in less than a year. Well, but that's mostly redrawing the existing widgets, it looks different, but works like how it used to work. (They added some stuff like the control center on the bottom, but they haven't really _changed_ how things work.) Also, I don't consider it to be a successful restyling (it's less straigthforward to figure out whether an icon is a button or not, and so on), but that might also be a matter of taste. What I'm trying to say is adding a digitizer to iOS does not mean that you only need to write drivers and design the hardware -- you need to change some UI paradigms. And that's hard. Windows classic desktop is now touch and digitizer-enabled in the case of Surface Pro, but the whole thing is not too useful. Apple is in a difficult position exactly because iPad Mini is so successful at the moment. Eventually large phones will devour that market as one mobile device (large phone) is usually better than two mobile devices (phone+tablet), or at least that's my prediction. They must target the same use case what Surface is trying to target: a super-lightweight laptop replacement what can sometimes be used as a tablet but renders your old, clunky laptop mostly irrelevant.

gnaffle 13y ago

Microsoft already has a huge pile of cash. That's not the problem. The problem is that the execution is good, but not good enough. Compromize and difficult choices (Surface vs Surface RT) everywhere. They released the music kit for the Surface, but where are the vast amount of great music production / performance apps from various well established companies such as Korg, Moog, Cubase, all of which are available on iOS?

sillysaurus2 13y ago

Which problems do Surface tablets solve? For example, iPhone completely changed my life overnight, mostly due to its navigation features and ability to look up phone numbers. I think Surface will only be dominant if it solves a problem for people. So, which problem does it solve, and why is it useful for people?

klipt 13y ago
> What problem do Surface tablets solve? Art problems, apparently. Gabe of Penny Arcade seemed pretty positive about the Surface Pro: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/02/22/the-ms-surface-pro http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/02/22/the-ms-surface-pro
- ZeroGravitas 13y ago
  He gave up on Windows phone after a year though: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2014/01/22/so-many-games1 http://www.penny-arcade.com/2014/01/22/so-many-games1 "I made the switch back to an iphone recently after having a Windows phone for about a year. I really liked the OS but I had nothing but trouble with the hardware. I went through three different handsets and all of them ended up failing on me. Eventually I gave up and just bought an iPhone 5c. I have to say that after a year on the Windows phone I had forgotten what the Apple app store looks like. I think I had managed to convince myself that the Windows app store was pretty solid. Jesus Christ was I wrong."
  - pmelendez 13y ago
    >"I think I had managed to convince myself that the Windows app store was pretty solid. Jesus Christ was I wrong." True, but keep in mind only refers to games in that article, which is hands down the stronger point of the app store. I don't play games any more and I hardly miss anything from iOS that doesn't exist in the Windows Phone Store.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    I really liked the OS but I had nothing but trouble with the [phone] hardware This tells us what, exactly, about the Surface Pro?

k-mcgrady 13y ago

>> "Yeah, so MS might dominate the content-creation/student/artist tablet niche" I doubt it. A keyboard alone isn't enough to win that market, great software is. Look at the content creation apps available on iOS - iMovie, Garageband, iWork, Paper, Brushes, DM1, Amplitube, Notion. It's going to be hard to catch up with that. They are built for touch. The people using them don't need a keyboard. A keyboard isn't really the ideal input device for someone creating content unless it is written content. For everything else touch seems to work better.

whitef0x 13y ago
I would like to add to that, quality of design that third party apps and native apps on Mac OSX seem to have (in general) is much higher; this brings the more 'artsy' and student vertical onboard. UI/UX has obviously been a large part of OSX for quite sometime, which is obviously aided by Apple's minimalist design philosophy. Moving from OSX to Windows I have noticed a large lack of ease of use and good UX flows in a lot of third party apps.
- jrs99 13y ago
  a while back i noticed this when i moved from windows to osx. and still i feel a little (not as much though) that osx is not as "fluid" and has less "finesse" and that the UI in osx is not well designed, especially things like buttons, menu, placement of items, and even the look of the buttons, the dock, etc. It seemed possible that it was due to my getting used to Windows and not being familiar with os x. A part of me though thinks that Windows UI is in fact superior to OSX ui, and that OSX has a somewhat amateurish feel to it. If I ran a design-centric company and my OS looked like that for a decade, it would bother me strongly.
- pmelendez 13y ago
  >"Moving from OSX to Windows I have noticed a large lack of ease of use and good UX flows in a lot of third party apps." I would say that is because you were really used to OSX. I was the other way around and really dislike the whole OSX UI experience. I think it is just a bias based on our previous experience. Right now after moving freely between OSX, Ubuntu and Windows at different jobs for the last 5 years, I still prefer the UI experience of Windows (I only wish Windows would have a command line similar to Linux's one and it would be perfect)

hrktb 13y ago

There seems to be an underlying assumption that in a year or two, the Surface will have fixed all it's main flaws while the iPad and android tablets will stay more or less the same. One can argue if the iPad is a glorified phone or not, but I think Apple isn't moving any slower than Microsoft, and it is reasonable to expect a more capable iPad in the years to come. Although it's third party hardware, stylus support has come a long way, even if it might not be as good as the Surface digitizer, it might as well be good enough for average users. The race is on, and I wouldn't bet my shirt on Microsoft taking the lead anytime soon (in 5 or 10 years, I don't know)

ZeroGravitas 13y ago

Did Microsoft profit from browsers? Or was it a threat to existing platform profits that it temporarily pushed back via antitrust-inducing bundling tactics in order to scorch the earth for others trying to make inroads? And looking back, how did that go for them, they may have stalled human progress for a while, but what did they do with the time it bought them?

timje1 13y ago
Internet Exploder, stalling human progress since '95.
- dasil003 13y ago
  Actually it was the most innovative browser from '95 to '99.
  - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
    Well that's one way to spin a monopolist giving away a bundled product for free and reducing the incentive for others to enter that market.
    - josefresco 13y ago
      Did you even use Netscape in the 90's? While most of the non tech loved it's bloated and "friendly" interface, the tech crowd I ran in used IE because it was lean, fast and didn't try to be some sort of "suite" that took over your PC. Sure MS leveraged their dominance in the OS world with brutal effectiveness, but Netscape was far from the ideal browser. In fact, Opera was our "Firefox" of the time as it could fit on a floppy disk (I'm dating myself here) and seemed lightweight in comparison to even IE. Speaking of FF, Firefox was born out of Netscape's overall crappiness/bloated nature. IE didn't start sucking until after the US gov came down hard and MS essentially threw their hands up and abandoned innovation as a result of being pounded in the courts. Firefox re-lit the fire of web innovation (along with the whole web 2.0 movement and post dot com bubble rebuild) and then Google simply out Firefoxed Firefox with Chrome.

DrJokepu 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 ... When was the last time they have actually managed to pull this off? Maybe the Xbox? It was never dominant or an area of profit. .NET? Never dominant or a direct source of profit. The days you are referring to are long gone. It's not the same company anymore and it's not the same world anymore.

jrs99 13y ago
Microsoft isn't even close to where apple was in terms of hitting a low.
- hcentelles 13y ago
  Maybe hit that low is what they need to make a comeback.
- mortenjorck 13y ago
  Another five years with Ballmer probably would have done it.
- blueskin_ 13y ago
  Give it time with this new 'cloud' guy.
octo_t 13y ago
Azure is ramping up towards something like that.
angersock 13y ago
Xbox, Xbox Live, Xbox 360... yeah, sorry, they pretty much perfectly illustrated that point. Considering the early advantage Java had over C#, who seems to be laughing now? Business apps (you know, the boring 90% of software) seems overwhelmingly in favor of those two languages, with C# doing a bit better. I think you're rather wrong.

6d0debc071 13y ago

I'm not seeing a large niche for them in content creation. If we were starting off with tablets being the dominant player; the thing that most people used and grew up with, then it'd be different. However, the content creation market is already fairly competitive, and the pain points this would solve over and above what's already there don't seem significant. The questions in that regard seem as follows: Why would artists opt for a, relatively small, imprecise pen over something from Waccom? Why would programmers opt for working on a small laptop analogue compared to a computer with multiple monitors? Why would writers opt for this over a computer or a laptop? I can see people writing a blog post on one, or sitting in a lecture hall with one - but even there, the advantage over an apple laptop; which is pretty light already; seems negligible. Unless you have to travel a significant distance on foot. There it has the advantages that tablets always had: Light device, relatively good battery life. But by and large, the competition for Surface in the tablet space seems likely not to be other tablets. It seems more likely to be the tools - some of which are, when you get down to it, fairly specialised - that people are already using.

Aldo_MX 13y ago
When I connect my surface to two 1080p monitors, and an 8-port USB hub, I don't even remember that I'm using a Surface, unless I need to do a resource-intensive task.

bovermyer 13y ago

Speaking as an artist, my Samsung Series 7 Slate running Windows 8 with the Mischief art application is pretty much the perfect portable digital art studio for me.

programminggeek 13y ago

If you think the Surface tablets are overpriced, then you don't understand why Apple makes so much money when all the other computer companies are failing - profit. Without profit, it's hard to do interesting things. The Xbox is quite successful, but it's a lot of work to make not a lot of money. Why? The razors and blades concept doesn't work so well as making a 30% margin on a product people really, really want to buy.

Spooky23 13y ago

The problem with that is that they cannot make Win32 a legacy product. They tried to do so because you can argue that in the enterprise, iPad can deliver a better Windows experience via VDI than the garbage PCs that dominate the market. Once I'm delivering a quality Windows experience to my users by turning the client device into a TV, the next step is to further simplify. That expense app? I can use VDI to deliver some awful Enterprise Software via IE9.... or buy a solution with an iOS app! Something like 40% of enterprise users are using a defined set of < 7 PC applications to do specific things. That's easy pickings for a mobile application, and a great way to reduce Microsoft spend -- which is a big black hole in every enterprise org. The other issue is the channel. If they get real about hardware, they are screwing Dell, HP, Lenovo. That's a symbiotic relationship that generates alot of MSFT business.

shmerl 13y ago

Netscape story? MS because dominant in browsers (for a while) because of the nasty lock-ins, not because of any positive iterating. Their own slowness became their downfall - IE didn't iterate for a long time, and when they realized that competition is way ahead it was too late for them. MS mentality barely changed. Lock-in remains their primary strategy in many areas (it's well described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_lock-in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_...). In today's world though it's only backfiring at them, because they have no domination as in the past.

amaks 13y ago
Exactly. That's why I believe nothing will change in Microsoft with the new CEO, open sourcing of ASP.NET and other moves. It's simply not in their DNA to change and become fast followers. Lock-ins, closed silos - that's Microsoft areas of domination ever since.
- jrmenon 13y ago
  Nothing unusual about the lock-in strategy. I would argue Apple does the same with iTunes/App Store walled-garden, same for Facebook, and Google - their Android playstore, GMail/GDocs esp. for small business. It is been a dream for many companies to own the full stack - client onwards all the way till the server. MS tried with Active-X controls in their browsers which only worked well with IIS servers. Apple is pretty much doing the same with their offerings. Full-spectrum dominance.
cgh 13y ago
Yes, exactly. And not just lock-in. For those that were around at the time, think of the IE5 tcp shenanigans to make IE seem "faster" when talking to IIS by messing with sequence numbers, sending RST instead of FIN, etc.
mratzloff 13y ago
No, that's revisionist history. IE 3 was a better browser than Netscape at the time, and IE 5 was much better than Netscape 4. CSS support, for example.

mwfunk 13y ago

What you describe in your first sentence is absolutely their MO. I don't think anyone making any sort of serious attempt to understand Microsoft ignores that or is unaware of that. The whole uncertainty surrounding Microsoft for the last 10 years (fair or not) is the fact that that approach doesn't work for them anymore and hasn't worked in years, their lack of dominance in the mobile industry being the prime example of that failure, despite having a significant head start (likewise for tablets). Yet, in a lot of ways, they still to this day cling to that strategy. You cited Netscape as an example, but Netscape is the most recent example I can think of of this strategy working for them. I actually want Microsoft to succeed; I want them to do much better than they have been. Microsoft does certain things really well that their competitors don't, and I would especially love to see more competition in the mobile and tablet space. Their own processes and business strategies seem to have calcified around 2003, which have since dragged down a lot of things that could have been great products. Totally tangential, but this is ignoring the fact that they actually have been doing really well in the one area that you would think would be the only thing people care about: profit. But no one seems to care about that, even though I personally don't think that that profit is going to dry up anytime soon. They could keep going like this forever, and people would still talk about how they're dead or dying. I understand why this is, it's just unfortunate that simply being a successful business isn't enough to avoid being branded a failure.

mwfunk 13y ago
Also, I think a big problem with Microsoft's strategy is it's based on attempting to replicate the same level of success they enjoyed with Windows and Office. Microsoft's strategy isn't to become a strong competitor, Microsoft's strategy all too often is to attempt to become the overwhelming market share leader. They see that things like Windows and Office enjoy 90-95% market share in their respective market segments, so new products are designed with that goal in mind (achieving monopolies rather than trying to simply put great products on the market and having those products compete solely on their own merit). This is why everything they make tries to be everything to everyone, but such products usually end up appealing to no one. I think a lot of Apple's success (one possible example of many) is due to the fact that they consciously don't try to please everyone. In fact, they make many decisions about such things knowing full well that those decisions will turn off many potential customers and put a ceiling on their potential market share. Their goal is to make what they think will be very desirable products for some target audience, as opposed to making something that they think will appeal to every customer in every segment of the market. IMO, Microsoft is constantly forcing itself to strive for an ambitious but impossible goal that tends to water down whatever the original product vision was.

hifier 13y ago

So you can draw on a surface... How many tablet users need more drawing capabilities than an iPad grants? The Surface, in it's existing form, is not a viable product.

zimpenfish 13y ago

Out of pure academic interest, how many New Yorker covers have been drawn on the "content creation" Surface tablets compared with the "mere consumption" iOS devices? Or how many world renowned artists are having exhibitions of their Surface art vs their iOS art?