14 ms·

The Microsoft Empire Reboots

191 points by aseem 12y ago

deanclatworthy 12y ago
How is it in this day and age a magazine like VanityFair can have such an awful UX on mobile: - I can't read the article because some as keeps jumping me back to the top of the page a few seconds after I scroll - the article font is tiny and hard to read anyway - for some reason even though there is a large body of text, ios doesn't allow me to use reader mode
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Which is why I say Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. I wish pretty much every damned site in existence rendered as on Readability.
  - noir_lord 12y ago
    > I wish pretty much every damned site in existence rendered as on Readability. Yeah, my partially completed blog platform (who doesn't have one of those somewhere) uses pretty much exactly that design.
  - Roboprog 12y ago
    There is something to be said for getting to HTML paragraphs and lists, and then stopping. None of this "Everybody has a 2048 pixel wide monitor to view my 4 huge columns in" (I used divs instead of tables, so it's OK that it takes 2 K pixels to render, right? Right?)
    - dredmorbius 12y ago
      I also like headings, tables of contents, and super and subscript. LaTeX equation input is also something that's creeping up my "must have" list.
- chrisabrams 12y ago
  Hey, I just started as Director of Engineering at VanityFair, and I can definitely agree with you our site is in much need of a UX overhaul. We are working to address the points you made plus may more issues that affect the site.
  - taway2012 12y ago
    Hopefully the redesign won't give us light gray text on a white background, which seems to the rage these days. :) I had zero problems reading the print version.
    - chrisabrams 12y ago
      Haha! It's definitely #000 on #fff. The design is very clean; on mobile it's almost as clean as the readability function on iOS.
SandB0x 12y ago
Impossible to read on my phone. Single page print version is better: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/11/satya-nadella-bill-gates-steve-ballmer-microsoft.print http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/11/satya-nadella-bil...
- dang 12y ago
  Thanks; changed to that.
higherpurpose 12y ago
Oh, good. Because it's a corporate empire what consumers want.
- CmonDev 12y ago
  They are pretty happy with Apple's empire. You don't need Microsoft's hardware to build stuff for Windows though.
- ptx 12y ago
  What, aren't you excited to be "accessed" by Microsoft as they exploit the world that rightfully belongs to them, as the article puts it?
x0x0 12y ago
(I think) it's not hard to understand where microsoft went wrong. Ballmer just doesn't seem to get where the industry is going. As evidence, this quote from the article: Indeed, Ballmer seemed to have no intention of leaving when he announced a massive reorganization of the entire company in July 2013. Behind the scenes he had also begun negotiating an acquisition that was meant to transform Microsoft. He had become convinced that the company had to make hardware too. The reason why goes back to his chart. The two companies which have seen the greatest increases in the share of profits they take are Apple and Samsung, particularly Apple, whose share of the technology industry’s profits leapt from 7 percent in 2008 to 21 percent in 2013. To Ballmer, the message was clear, and so, in December 2012, he began talking to the Finnish smartphone-maker, Nokia, whose C.E.O., Stephen Elop, had worked at Microsoft. There was a defensive reason for the deal as well as an offensive one. Nokia was pretty much the only company left that was making Windows phones. If Nokia went under, what would happen to Microsoft’s phone business? Apple and Samsung's phone businesses are entirely different. Apple is selling ios to the high and middle end market. Samsung is getting devoured from the bottom, because there is very little difference between android oems, whereas Apple doesn't need (or want!) the bottom. It's pretty amazing that someone like Ballmer wouldn't see that coming, given that Xiaomi and the other chinese competitors are running a classic competitive playbook on Samsung. Stratechery has written about this at length, though I don't recall if it was clearly discussed in a single article or my mental synthesis from a collection. Either way, differentiated companies -- apple -- require completely different strategies than nondifferentiated -- samsung.
- latch 12y ago
  That might be one of the mistakes, but it isn't the start of the problem. Tangibly, it's either United States v. Microsoft Corporation or Longhorn / Vista. Intangibly, it's the attitude that permeated the company that said "we are right because we are Microsoft." There were few people you could talk to who'd think you had anything to offer someone who worked at Microsoft. You still see this today around products like Bing, IE, Xbox and Azure (I know the last 2 are popular, but the xbox has been a loss leader (and what it's leading too isn't clear yet) and Azure, like everyone else, is being crushed by Amazon (it really is, they spend a ton more money and get a fraction of the market (that's Bing-style success!)) I remember a story from the only time I was on their campus. An employee (I remember his name) was telling me how they wanted to make IIS great, so they hired an expert Apache consultant to learn more about apache. I'm listening, thinking "wow, this is great, they're really interested in bettering themselves." He then proudly went on to tell me how the Apache expert had an amusingly outdated understanding of IIS and by the end of the gig they'd convinced him of how great IIS was. They'd literally rather pay people to tell them how great they are, then admit they might have something to learn. This perfectly encapsulated my time as a .NET developer. Lucky this was at the start of an MVP conference, so I took the hint, skipped most of the conference and visited Seattle (oh, but I did attend 1 talk where the speaker said Visual Studio would add a color picker and people applauded him).
__Joker 12y ago
More oft repeated history apart from the later part of the article which discusses the present and the future direction. "The holy grail for Microsoft would be getting developers to write new software for Windows again ", this necessarily isn't true. The developer go where users and money are. And users not necessarily go to devices which have lot of apps. This might sound like a chicken and egg problem, but look at amazon, if developers are writing software for its devices, Amazon is bootstrapping its devices with software. I take out the other devices, the desktop and servers, might not have as much impact as it may sound. Second, Xbox, Bing, may sound looser, but they may be interesting in the next round of battle. The smart phone battle is more or less is over and it is not going to make much difference, but the future of the smart device fields will be another story, if only MS can concentrate on the future in coherent way.
Immortalin 12y ago
Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it was amazing knowing that i could create an application simply by dragging and dropping some elements and writing some code. I never had to worry about things like gtk bindings and makefiles etc. The earlier version of visual studio started up in less then a second and I never experienced any lag. The killer feature was probably the combination of both an just-in-time interpretator and a full-blown compiler. I could simply click play and the app would run, if i need an exe, it would also export one. This feature put most modern "repl-based languages" and "test-driven development" to shame. A lot of people complain that vb 6 is not object-orientated enough, but remember, C is not object-orientated either, and it still tops the tiobe programming list. Windows is sorely in need of an Rapid application development framework. Although vb6 still installs on windows 7, a lot of its features are broken. I really miss having an IDE that doesnt get in your way, starts up quickly, and allows you to get things done fast. The argument that vb6 encourages bad programming practices etc. is not really that valid when the user is not an professional programmer. After all, would you rather teach your kids to code by teaching him about build tools and commandlines and gui bindings or would you simply give them an environment where they can create whatever they want in a fuss-free way? Now, lets just hope that microsoft isnt stupid enough to nerf asp.net web forms.......
- gurkendoktor 12y ago
  I was a huge fan of Delphi 5 at the time, and hoped it would win over VB6 (I guess it's a Coke/Pepsi thing). Now I'm in the same boat as you, because it seems both Delphi and its competitor, VB, have lost. I'm not even sure if there are any winners. I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools...
  - Nitramp 12y ago
    > I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools... I think that's the web. The development that used to happen in VB6 & Delphi simply has migrated there, desktop apps from that segment are dead.
scientist 12y ago
Microsoft seems to be a crumbling empire. They seem not even able to maintain their websites. Here is a message I got today from Microsoft Azure: "NO ACTION REQUIRED: We want to notify you of an upcoming maintenance operation to your Virtual Machines in West Europe, starting at 23:00 Saturday, October 18th UTC. Single instance virtual machine deployments that are not in availability sets will reboot once during this maintenance operation. We expect the update to finish within six to eight hours of the start time. Please note that Cloud Services using Web or Worker roles aren't impacted by this maintenance operation. This link contains additional information: http://aka.ms/vax58" http://aka.ms/vax58". The link they give leads to a 404 error.
- asdfologist 12y ago
  Yes, they sent out one broken link, and therefore they're a crumbling empire.
  - scientist 12y ago
    It's not the first time they send broken links. I've also received some in marketing emails from them. And it's not the only issue with Microsoft, but it's illustrative for how they are unable to manage the complexity of their stuff.
gvb 12y ago
There is a Macintosh in the background of the picture "JUST KIDS Gates and former C.E.O. Steve Ballmer at Microsoft’s offices in Bellevue, 1985." Not unexpected given the date and the relationship between Apple and Microsoft at the time, but interesting that it shares the desk (albeit off in a corner) with the IBM-PC.
- melling 12y ago
  Microsoft was busy copying the Macintosh in 1985. Late in the year Windows 1.0 was released. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0
  - outside1234 12y ago
    I can tell they brainwashed you well in Cupertino. ;) They probably left out the part where Jobs borrowed the ideas for the Mac from Xerox I suspect too. More accurately, there is probably a Mac here because they were building Office for it.
    - melling 12y ago
      Nah. All the cool kids in the 80's wanted the Amiga. The Mac was a toy. The story of Jobs' visit to Xerox Parc is well documented. They paid a million dollars for the visits. http://www.macstories.net/linked/parc-scientist-larry-tesler-recalls-jobs-famous-xerox-visits/ http://www.macstories.net/linked/parc-scientist-larry-tesler... http://www.cultofmac.com/126863/in-defense-of-steve-jobs/ http://www.cultofmac.com/126863/in-defense-of-steve-jobs/
      - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
        As Microsoft surpassed Apple and of course Amiga to become the absolute necessity of practicality that they are today, I don't think they cared as much about what the "cool kids" wanted. I think it's apparent and I am thankful that Microsoft didn't copy Apple's UI and instead went with a much more practical and utilitarian approach than Apple. This along with Microsoft's business model obviously works better for the mass market and has stood the test of time whereas Apple has capitulated many times both on their UI principles and on their business model.
grokys 12y ago
> The holy grail for Microsoft would be getting developers to write new software for Windows again, putting Windows back at the center of a new virtuous circle. And yet there is no currently properly supported way to write desktop applications for Windows! MFC = obsolete, WinForms = maintenance mode, WPF = Dead on arrival, WinRT = Metro only. For all the people saying "web is where it's at", there are some things that are simply still best done on desktop. And native development in iOS and Android is still going strong.
- damian2000 12y ago
  AFAIK WPF isn't dead, its popular with line of business apps. But yeah, disappointing there's been only minor improvements to it in the last 4 years, during which they've been focusing their efforts on WinRT. I was just reading something about the subject here http://pragmateek.com/is-wpf-dead-the-present-and-future-of-wpf http://pragmateek.com/is-wpf-dead-the-present-and-future-of-...
  - grokys 12y ago
    Oh I mean I use it almost every day and it has many good points, but the complete lack of interest from MS is obvious. I mean, even renaming a window doesn't work properly in Visual Studio. Most of it hasn't even been updated to use generics. It still uses DX9. But there's no better option.
    - mistermann 12y ago
      A massive strategic error on Microsoft's part. They're now stuck on the wrong side of what Joes Spolsky called I think fire and motion. They still own the desktop, yet they ignore it.
- eps 12y ago
  Plain Win32 hasn't gone anywhere and with few days of work you can get an MFC-like framework up and running. Not the beginners task, but not a rocket science either. But the UI framework availability is not a cause of people writing less for Windows now than they did before. Far from it. The problem was the high-level mesaging from Microsoft. They weren't about desktop anymore, apparently, but that's exactly where I make money being a Windows software developer. They were now mobile. They were Metro-shmetro. They wanted to leave behind everyhting that helped me make living by writing Windows apps and move on to conquer new domains. They neglected me and my interests. But I can say that I like how things are changing now. They put Start button back. They appear to be opening Windows Store to non-Metro apps. Good, excellent, they are on the right track... that's assuming they don't screw the hell out of Windows 10 with their Asimov telemtry bullshit, but it's an altogether different issue. At least they are paying a bit more attention to what people actually want instead of what Microsoft thinks they should be wanting.
MichaelGG 12y ago
>I put the A-team resources on Longhorn, not on phones or browsers. Hilarious. It wasn't the lack of an A-team resource on browsers, it was the lack of any team. Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing. Microsoft's other big sin is counting on its hardware partners. They could have preempted the iPod, for instance, but they just hoped Creative and others would deliver a great experience, while they sat back and wrote the software and cashed in on licenses. Same for tablets. Tablet PCs were great in the 00s, and I loved using them. Except, they were clunky and had little mass appeal. Once again, MS just counted on its partners and never gave a thought to the full experience. Also, the fact that Windows still is touch/pen unfriendly outside of Metro just shows they Don't Get It. Instead of working on some tech to make Windows work well across all its apps, they ditch everything and hope Metro will work. It's hard to imagine that anyone could be so myopic.
- bambax 12y ago
  > Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing. Yes, but wasn't that intentional? Once IE4, then 6, had conquered the world, the point was to keep people from leaving Windows for the Web, and so IE dev was stopped dead.
  - alex_hitchins 12y ago
    "Browser tabs will only confuse people". Ha!
    - rconti 12y ago
      Actually I still argue that tabs are a Bad Thing. Developers have taken a thing that SHOULD be handled by the window manager, and written their own way of doing it -- every application slightly differently, naturally. It's not as big a deal on Windows where the look+feel of various applications was always inconsistent as hell -- remember when Trillian was the most popular IM client, it seemed like in those days virtually every application handled windowing differently, it was terrible. But it's a bigger issue on OS X and in Linux. Since both have functionality to cycle through windows of a given application, tabs become less important. Of course, we still end up with visual clutter, so even luddites like myself use tabs now and again. But this should really be implemented as an OS feature, not on a per-application basis. Google, of course, vehemently disagrees, since they implement their own terrible look-and-feel everywhere. (see: crappy windowing inside of GMail, crappy windowing behavior of Hangouts, etc).
Rapzid 12y ago
The biggest shift I've noticed in Microsoft in recent years is its support and push for open source, cross platform components and projects. It seems that there may be a paradigm shift towards selling tools and an integrated platform while providing more choice and making inroads into the open source comminities. This is exciting for me because I absolutely love .net and friends, but I'm also a Linux engineer and lean heavily toward open source and cross platform technologies. In recent years I have noted that with the existence of mono and mono develop(xamarin) C#/F# is right on the verge of being an excellent choice for open source tools and projects. I've been lamenting the fact that Microsoft's early platform lock in approach has prevented .net from being a serious java alternative(or the alternative it deserves to be). Its nature stiffling the open source ecosysytem . The outlook has been getting rosier over the past 2 years though. Now we have OWIN, ASP.NET vNext, MVC6, entity framework 7, F#, and a strange officially unofficial interest in mono. Projects on github! These are welcome steps in an attempt to boost relevancy IMHO.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  I don't think it's a huge shift as much as it is getting back to its roots. MS got its start by being the company that supported the PC as an open platform. Anyone could build a PC, any individual, any OEM, and put DOS or Windows on it. And anyone could write an app to run on DOS or Windows. For the time it was a remarkably free wheeling and open system, especially compared to what other companies like Apple was doing. And let us not forget that it was the success and growth of the open PC which made it possible for linux to come along and put itself on the same hardware. MS has certainly been guilty of various unfair business practices from time to time, and from trying to use its power to gain unfair advantage in the market, but for the most part I think that behavior tends to be the exception over Microsoft's history. Most of the time they are trying to pull customers and developers to them by offering a good platform and at some times even facilitating their own competition. In that regard, embracing open source is very much in keeping with that spirit, updated to reflect the new norms for what openness means today.
  - Rapzid 12y ago
    Sure, you could choose your hardware as long as you were running Windows. This is a new, different type of choice that MS is backing. ASP.NET(and MVC) vNext is goingt to be tested against mono. And mono represents code running on non-Windows platforms. I certainly view this as a shift; how large a shift is rather subjective.
ilaksh 12y ago
Microsoft has some of the most amazing products and many terrific engineers. Unfortunately, it is also has some extremely negative associations, most of which have been earned and even, perhaps, proven. * unfair and sometimes illegal business practices * sabotage of innovative technologies when they conflict with Microsoft's monopolies * eugenics * empire * surveillance state (Skype/NSA)
- curiousDog 12y ago
  Eugenics? Are you high or just incredibly stupid and listen to that nut job Alex Jones?
  - ilaksh 12y ago
    I'm not high or stupid. Eugenics has earned a very poor reputation, but its advocacy is still going strong under other names. Bill Gates and his family have a long history of promoting it, unfortunately.
  - cbd1984 12y ago
    This might be what they're talking about: http://skeptoid.com/blog/2013/12/16/why-would-bill-gates-want-to-kill-one-billion-people/ http://skeptoid.com/blog/2013/12/16/why-would-bill-gates-wan... Yes, it is "drunk or high or Alex Jones"-level idiocy. It is, in fact, fractally stupid: Believing it requires you believe multiple other things, each of which is just as dumb as the whole. For example, it requires you to believe the following things are evil: GMOs in general, vaccines, and wanting to reduce the world's population.
mtdewcmu 12y ago
Bethany McLean is the best in business writing. The Smartest Guys in the Room was fantastic. As for Microsoft: the adage goes that success has many fathers. Failure has even more. It would have been nothing short of amazing if Microsoft was as dominant now as it was in the early days of PCs.
shmerl 12y ago
> Around three-quarters of Microsoft’s profits come from the two fabulously successful products on which the company was built: the Windows operating system, which essentially makes personal computers run, and Office, the suite of applications that includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. All of which are on quite shaky grounds with competition eating at them. MS know they can't keep these cash cows forever. On the other hand, parasitic income that MS gets is just crazy huge: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/lawsuit-reveals-samsung-paid-microsoft-1-billion-a-year-for-android-patents/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/lawsuit-reveals-s... And this attitude doesn't seem to change, despite some cosmetic shifts like more usage of open source. Such kind of companies better fall into irrelevance sooner than later. We need real innovators, not humongous parasites.
sidcool 12y ago
A long but intense article. I read just to test my attention span. The result weren't good, but I managed to finish the article in a single sitting, albeit with a couple of YouTube video watches in between. One thing I hold bitterly against Microsoft is their abuse of monopoly. During the time they were kings of technology, there was little progress in Browser market, OS market, both PCs and phones. But I believe Microsoft has learnt their lesson, and under Nadella, the company is going to take the community along with it.
mkhpalm 12y ago
Realistically... the biggest reason for irrelevance is Microsoft's concept that an operating system should be a prime source of revenue. An OS is the garden you want people to come to so you have prime real estate to sell your wares. Charging admission works great if you're the only garden in town... and not so much if you're not. Microsoft is putting itself into this position by forcing the market to move into the other, more easily accessible gardens. It has very little to do with UX/UI or anything like that. Most consumers actually don't want to learn how to do anything new if they can ever help it. I'm constantly amazed that all these "experts" haven't figured out what happened to the 800 pound gorilla. Quite simply put, other gardens that people could live with and easier to access suddenly showed up. The vendors making and selling their wares went to the place people were at or wanted to go to. Its simple economics and you can point directly to the people who decided that WGA was a good idea for killing MS. Piracy itself is what made windows dominant to begin with.
praetorian84 12y ago
The most useful thing Microsoft ever made (OK, funded) was Age of Empires. Now if only they'd make another.
fdezjose 12y ago
Nadella likes to ask, "How would the world be different if we weren't here?" Profound question...

191 points by aseem 12y ago

How is it in this day and age a magazine like VanityFair can have such an awful UX on mobile: - I can't read the article because some as keeps jumping me back to the top of the page a few seconds after I scroll - the article font is tiny and hard to read anyway - for some reason even though there is a large body of text, ios doesn't allow me to use reader mode

dredmorbius 12y ago
Which is why I say Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. I wish pretty much every damned site in existence rendered as on Readability.
- noir_lord 12y ago
  > I wish pretty much every damned site in existence rendered as on Readability. Yeah, my partially completed blog platform (who doesn't have one of those somewhere) uses pretty much exactly that design.
- Roboprog 12y ago
  There is something to be said for getting to HTML paragraphs and lists, and then stopping. None of this "Everybody has a 2048 pixel wide monitor to view my 4 huge columns in" (I used divs instead of tables, so it's OK that it takes 2 K pixels to render, right? Right?)
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    I also like headings, tables of contents, and super and subscript. LaTeX equation input is also something that's creeping up my "must have" list.
chrisabrams 12y ago
Hey, I just started as Director of Engineering at VanityFair, and I can definitely agree with you our site is in much need of a UX overhaul. We are working to address the points you made plus may more issues that affect the site.
- taway2012 12y ago
  Hopefully the redesign won't give us light gray text on a white background, which seems to the rage these days. :) I had zero problems reading the print version.
  - chrisabrams 12y ago
    Haha! It's definitely #000 on #fff. The design is very clean; on mobile it's almost as clean as the readability function on iOS.

SandB0x 12y ago

Impossible to read on my phone. Single page print version is better: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/11/satya-nadella-bill-gates-steve-ballmer-microsoft.print http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/11/satya-nadella-bil...

dang 12y ago
Thanks; changed to that.

higherpurpose 12y ago

Oh, good. Because it's a corporate empire what consumers want.

CmonDev 12y ago
They are pretty happy with Apple's empire. You don't need Microsoft's hardware to build stuff for Windows though.
ptx 12y ago
What, aren't you excited to be "accessed" by Microsoft as they exploit the world that rightfully belongs to them, as the article puts it?

x0x0 12y ago

(I think) it's not hard to understand where microsoft went wrong. Ballmer just doesn't seem to get where the industry is going. As evidence, this quote from the article: Indeed, Ballmer seemed to have no intention of leaving when he announced a massive reorganization of the entire company in July 2013. Behind the scenes he had also begun negotiating an acquisition that was meant to transform Microsoft. He had become convinced that the company had to make hardware too. The reason why goes back to his chart. The two companies which have seen the greatest increases in the share of profits they take are Apple and Samsung, particularly Apple, whose share of the technology industry’s profits leapt from 7 percent in 2008 to 21 percent in 2013. To Ballmer, the message was clear, and so, in December 2012, he began talking to the Finnish smartphone-maker, Nokia, whose C.E.O., Stephen Elop, had worked at Microsoft. There was a defensive reason for the deal as well as an offensive one. Nokia was pretty much the only company left that was making Windows phones. If Nokia went under, what would happen to Microsoft’s phone business? Apple and Samsung's phone businesses are entirely different. Apple is selling ios to the high and middle end market. Samsung is getting devoured from the bottom, because there is very little difference between android oems, whereas Apple doesn't need (or want!) the bottom. It's pretty amazing that someone like Ballmer wouldn't see that coming, given that Xiaomi and the other chinese competitors are running a classic competitive playbook on Samsung. Stratechery has written about this at length, though I don't recall if it was clearly discussed in a single article or my mental synthesis from a collection. Either way, differentiated companies -- apple -- require completely different strategies than nondifferentiated -- samsung.

latch 12y ago
That might be one of the mistakes, but it isn't the start of the problem. Tangibly, it's either United States v. Microsoft Corporation or Longhorn / Vista. Intangibly, it's the attitude that permeated the company that said "we are right because we are Microsoft." There were few people you could talk to who'd think you had anything to offer someone who worked at Microsoft. You still see this today around products like Bing, IE, Xbox and Azure (I know the last 2 are popular, but the xbox has been a loss leader (and what it's leading too isn't clear yet) and Azure, like everyone else, is being crushed by Amazon (it really is, they spend a ton more money and get a fraction of the market (that's Bing-style success!)) I remember a story from the only time I was on their campus. An employee (I remember his name) was telling me how they wanted to make IIS great, so they hired an expert Apache consultant to learn more about apache. I'm listening, thinking "wow, this is great, they're really interested in bettering themselves." He then proudly went on to tell me how the Apache expert had an amusingly outdated understanding of IIS and by the end of the gig they'd convinced him of how great IIS was. They'd literally rather pay people to tell them how great they are, then admit they might have something to learn. This perfectly encapsulated my time as a .NET developer. Lucky this was at the start of an MVP conference, so I took the hint, skipped most of the conference and visited Seattle (oh, but I did attend 1 talk where the speaker said Visual Studio would add a color picker and people applauded him).

__Joker 12y ago

More oft repeated history apart from the later part of the article which discusses the present and the future direction. "The holy grail for Microsoft would be getting developers to write new software for Windows again ", this necessarily isn't true. The developer go where users and money are. And users not necessarily go to devices which have lot of apps. This might sound like a chicken and egg problem, but look at amazon, if developers are writing software for its devices, Amazon is bootstrapping its devices with software. I take out the other devices, the desktop and servers, might not have as much impact as it may sound. Second, Xbox, Bing, may sound looser, but they may be interesting in the next round of battle. The smart phone battle is more or less is over and it is not going to make much difference, but the future of the smart device fields will be another story, if only MS can concentrate on the future in coherent way.

Immortalin 12y ago

Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it was amazing knowing that i could create an application simply by dragging and dropping some elements and writing some code. I never had to worry about things like gtk bindings and makefiles etc. The earlier version of visual studio started up in less then a second and I never experienced any lag. The killer feature was probably the combination of both an just-in-time interpretator and a full-blown compiler. I could simply click play and the app would run, if i need an exe, it would also export one. This feature put most modern "repl-based languages" and "test-driven development" to shame. A lot of people complain that vb 6 is not object-orientated enough, but remember, C is not object-orientated either, and it still tops the tiobe programming list. Windows is sorely in need of an Rapid application development framework. Although vb6 still installs on windows 7, a lot of its features are broken. I really miss having an IDE that doesnt get in your way, starts up quickly, and allows you to get things done fast. The argument that vb6 encourages bad programming practices etc. is not really that valid when the user is not an professional programmer. After all, would you rather teach your kids to code by teaching him about build tools and commandlines and gui bindings or would you simply give them an environment where they can create whatever they want in a fuss-free way? Now, lets just hope that microsoft isnt stupid enough to nerf asp.net web forms.......

gurkendoktor 12y ago
I was a huge fan of Delphi 5 at the time, and hoped it would win over VB6 (I guess it's a Coke/Pepsi thing). Now I'm in the same boat as you, because it seems both Delphi and its competitor, VB, have lost. I'm not even sure if there are any winners. I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools...
- Nitramp 12y ago
  > I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools... I think that's the web. The development that used to happen in VB6 & Delphi simply has migrated there, desktop apps from that segment are dead.

scientist 12y ago

Microsoft seems to be a crumbling empire. They seem not even able to maintain their websites. Here is a message I got today from Microsoft Azure: "NO ACTION REQUIRED: We want to notify you of an upcoming maintenance operation to your Virtual Machines in West Europe, starting at 23:00 Saturday, October 18th UTC. Single instance virtual machine deployments that are not in availability sets will reboot once during this maintenance operation. We expect the update to finish within six to eight hours of the start time. Please note that Cloud Services using Web or Worker roles aren't impacted by this maintenance operation. This link contains additional information: http://aka.ms/vax58" http://aka.ms/vax58". The link they give leads to a 404 error.

asdfologist 12y ago
Yes, they sent out one broken link, and therefore they're a crumbling empire.
- scientist 12y ago
  It's not the first time they send broken links. I've also received some in marketing emails from them. And it's not the only issue with Microsoft, but it's illustrative for how they are unable to manage the complexity of their stuff.

gvb 12y ago

There is a Macintosh in the background of the picture "JUST KIDS Gates and former C.E.O. Steve Ballmer at Microsoft’s offices in Bellevue, 1985." Not unexpected given the date and the relationship between Apple and Microsoft at the time, but interesting that it shares the desk (albeit off in a corner) with the IBM-PC.

melling 12y ago
Microsoft was busy copying the Macintosh in 1985. Late in the year Windows 1.0 was released. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0
- outside1234 12y ago
  I can tell they brainwashed you well in Cupertino. ;) They probably left out the part where Jobs borrowed the ideas for the Mac from Xerox I suspect too. More accurately, there is probably a Mac here because they were building Office for it.
  - melling 12y ago
    Nah. All the cool kids in the 80's wanted the Amiga. The Mac was a toy. The story of Jobs' visit to Xerox Parc is well documented. They paid a million dollars for the visits. http://www.macstories.net/linked/parc-scientist-larry-tesler-recalls-jobs-famous-xerox-visits/ http://www.macstories.net/linked/parc-scientist-larry-tesler... http://www.cultofmac.com/126863/in-defense-of-steve-jobs/ http://www.cultofmac.com/126863/in-defense-of-steve-jobs/
    - WorldWideWayne 12y ago
      As Microsoft surpassed Apple and of course Amiga to become the absolute necessity of practicality that they are today, I don't think they cared as much about what the "cool kids" wanted. I think it's apparent and I am thankful that Microsoft didn't copy Apple's UI and instead went with a much more practical and utilitarian approach than Apple. This along with Microsoft's business model obviously works better for the mass market and has stood the test of time whereas Apple has capitulated many times both on their UI principles and on their business model.

grokys 12y ago

> The holy grail for Microsoft would be getting developers to write new software for Windows again, putting Windows back at the center of a new virtuous circle. And yet there is no currently properly supported way to write desktop applications for Windows! MFC = obsolete, WinForms = maintenance mode, WPF = Dead on arrival, WinRT = Metro only. For all the people saying "web is where it's at", there are some things that are simply still best done on desktop. And native development in iOS and Android is still going strong.

damian2000 12y ago
AFAIK WPF isn't dead, its popular with line of business apps. But yeah, disappointing there's been only minor improvements to it in the last 4 years, during which they've been focusing their efforts on WinRT. I was just reading something about the subject here http://pragmateek.com/is-wpf-dead-the-present-and-future-of-wpf http://pragmateek.com/is-wpf-dead-the-present-and-future-of-...
- grokys 12y ago
  Oh I mean I use it almost every day and it has many good points, but the complete lack of interest from MS is obvious. I mean, even renaming a window doesn't work properly in Visual Studio. Most of it hasn't even been updated to use generics. It still uses DX9. But there's no better option.
  - mistermann 12y ago
    A massive strategic error on Microsoft's part. They're now stuck on the wrong side of what Joes Spolsky called I think fire and motion. They still own the desktop, yet they ignore it.
eps 12y ago
Plain Win32 hasn't gone anywhere and with few days of work you can get an MFC-like framework up and running. Not the beginners task, but not a rocket science either. But the UI framework availability is not a cause of people writing less for Windows now than they did before. Far from it. The problem was the high-level mesaging from Microsoft. They weren't about desktop anymore, apparently, but that's exactly where I make money being a Windows software developer. They were now mobile. They were Metro-shmetro. They wanted to leave behind everyhting that helped me make living by writing Windows apps and move on to conquer new domains. They neglected me and my interests. But I can say that I like how things are changing now. They put Start button back. They appear to be opening Windows Store to non-Metro apps. Good, excellent, they are on the right track... that's assuming they don't screw the hell out of Windows 10 with their Asimov telemtry bullshit, but it's an altogether different issue. At least they are paying a bit more attention to what people actually want instead of what Microsoft thinks they should be wanting.

MichaelGG 12y ago

>I put the A-team resources on Longhorn, not on phones or browsers. Hilarious. It wasn't the lack of an A-team resource on browsers, it was the lack of any team. Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing. Microsoft's other big sin is counting on its hardware partners. They could have preempted the iPod, for instance, but they just hoped Creative and others would deliver a great experience, while they sat back and wrote the software and cashed in on licenses. Same for tablets. Tablet PCs were great in the 00s, and I loved using them. Except, they were clunky and had little mass appeal. Once again, MS just counted on its partners and never gave a thought to the full experience. Also, the fact that Windows still is touch/pen unfriendly outside of Metro just shows they Don't Get It. Instead of working on some tech to make Windows work well across all its apps, they ditch everything and hope Metro will work. It's hard to imagine that anyone could be so myopic.

bambax 12y ago
> Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing. Yes, but wasn't that intentional? Once IE4, then 6, had conquered the world, the point was to keep people from leaving Windows for the Web, and so IE dev was stopped dead.
- alex_hitchins 12y ago
  "Browser tabs will only confuse people". Ha!
  - rconti 12y ago
    Actually I still argue that tabs are a Bad Thing. Developers have taken a thing that SHOULD be handled by the window manager, and written their own way of doing it -- every application slightly differently, naturally. It's not as big a deal on Windows where the look+feel of various applications was always inconsistent as hell -- remember when Trillian was the most popular IM client, it seemed like in those days virtually every application handled windowing differently, it was terrible. But it's a bigger issue on OS X and in Linux. Since both have functionality to cycle through windows of a given application, tabs become less important. Of course, we still end up with visual clutter, so even luddites like myself use tabs now and again. But this should really be implemented as an OS feature, not on a per-application basis. Google, of course, vehemently disagrees, since they implement their own terrible look-and-feel everywhere. (see: crappy windowing inside of GMail, crappy windowing behavior of Hangouts, etc).

Rapzid 12y ago

The biggest shift I've noticed in Microsoft in recent years is its support and push for open source, cross platform components and projects. It seems that there may be a paradigm shift towards selling tools and an integrated platform while providing more choice and making inroads into the open source comminities. This is exciting for me because I absolutely love .net and friends, but I'm also a Linux engineer and lean heavily toward open source and cross platform technologies. In recent years I have noted that with the existence of mono and mono develop(xamarin) C#/F# is right on the verge of being an excellent choice for open source tools and projects. I've been lamenting the fact that Microsoft's early platform lock in approach has prevented .net from being a serious java alternative(or the alternative it deserves to be). Its nature stiffling the open source ecosysytem . The outlook has been getting rosier over the past 2 years though. Now we have OWIN, ASP.NET vNext, MVC6, entity framework 7, F#, and a strange officially unofficial interest in mono. Projects on github! These are welcome steps in an attempt to boost relevancy IMHO.

InclinedPlane 12y ago
I don't think it's a huge shift as much as it is getting back to its roots. MS got its start by being the company that supported the PC as an open platform. Anyone could build a PC, any individual, any OEM, and put DOS or Windows on it. And anyone could write an app to run on DOS or Windows. For the time it was a remarkably free wheeling and open system, especially compared to what other companies like Apple was doing. And let us not forget that it was the success and growth of the open PC which made it possible for linux to come along and put itself on the same hardware. MS has certainly been guilty of various unfair business practices from time to time, and from trying to use its power to gain unfair advantage in the market, but for the most part I think that behavior tends to be the exception over Microsoft's history. Most of the time they are trying to pull customers and developers to them by offering a good platform and at some times even facilitating their own competition. In that regard, embracing open source is very much in keeping with that spirit, updated to reflect the new norms for what openness means today.
- Rapzid 12y ago
  Sure, you could choose your hardware as long as you were running Windows. This is a new, different type of choice that MS is backing. ASP.NET(and MVC) vNext is goingt to be tested against mono. And mono represents code running on non-Windows platforms. I certainly view this as a shift; how large a shift is rather subjective.

ilaksh 12y ago

Microsoft has some of the most amazing products and many terrific engineers. Unfortunately, it is also has some extremely negative associations, most of which have been earned and even, perhaps, proven. * unfair and sometimes illegal business practices * sabotage of innovative technologies when they conflict with Microsoft's monopolies * eugenics * empire * surveillance state (Skype/NSA)

curiousDog 12y ago
Eugenics? Are you high or just incredibly stupid and listen to that nut job Alex Jones?
- ilaksh 12y ago
  I'm not high or stupid. Eugenics has earned a very poor reputation, but its advocacy is still going strong under other names. Bill Gates and his family have a long history of promoting it, unfortunately.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  This might be what they're talking about: http://skeptoid.com/blog/2013/12/16/why-would-bill-gates-want-to-kill-one-billion-people/ http://skeptoid.com/blog/2013/12/16/why-would-bill-gates-wan... Yes, it is "drunk or high or Alex Jones"-level idiocy. It is, in fact, fractally stupid: Believing it requires you believe multiple other things, each of which is just as dumb as the whole. For example, it requires you to believe the following things are evil: GMOs in general, vaccines, and wanting to reduce the world's population.

mtdewcmu 12y ago

Bethany McLean is the best in business writing. The Smartest Guys in the Room was fantastic. As for Microsoft: the adage goes that success has many fathers. Failure has even more. It would have been nothing short of amazing if Microsoft was as dominant now as it was in the early days of PCs.

shmerl 12y ago

> Around three-quarters of Microsoft’s profits come from the two fabulously successful products on which the company was built: the Windows operating system, which essentially makes personal computers run, and Office, the suite of applications that includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. All of which are on quite shaky grounds with competition eating at them. MS know they can't keep these cash cows forever. On the other hand, parasitic income that MS gets is just crazy huge: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/lawsuit-reveals-samsung-paid-microsoft-1-billion-a-year-for-android-patents/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/lawsuit-reveals-s... And this attitude doesn't seem to change, despite some cosmetic shifts like more usage of open source. Such kind of companies better fall into irrelevance sooner than later. We need real innovators, not humongous parasites.

sidcool 12y ago

A long but intense article. I read just to test my attention span. The result weren't good, but I managed to finish the article in a single sitting, albeit with a couple of YouTube video watches in between. One thing I hold bitterly against Microsoft is their abuse of monopoly. During the time they were kings of technology, there was little progress in Browser market, OS market, both PCs and phones. But I believe Microsoft has learnt their lesson, and under Nadella, the company is going to take the community along with it.

mkhpalm 12y ago

Realistically... the biggest reason for irrelevance is Microsoft's concept that an operating system should be a prime source of revenue. An OS is the garden you want people to come to so you have prime real estate to sell your wares. Charging admission works great if you're the only garden in town... and not so much if you're not. Microsoft is putting itself into this position by forcing the market to move into the other, more easily accessible gardens. It has very little to do with UX/UI or anything like that. Most consumers actually don't want to learn how to do anything new if they can ever help it. I'm constantly amazed that all these "experts" haven't figured out what happened to the 800 pound gorilla. Quite simply put, other gardens that people could live with and easier to access suddenly showed up. The vendors making and selling their wares went to the place people were at or wanted to go to. Its simple economics and you can point directly to the people who decided that WGA was a good idea for killing MS. Piracy itself is what made windows dominant to begin with.

praetorian84 12y ago

The most useful thing Microsoft ever made (OK, funded) was Age of Empires. Now if only they'd make another.

fdezjose 12y ago

Nadella likes to ask, "How would the world be different if we weren't here?" Profound question...