2000-2009: Microsoft's Decade of Shattered Dreams

http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/20002009-Microsofts-decade-of-shattered-dreams/1262204767?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bn+(Betanews+Full+Content+Feed+-+BN)&utm_content=Bloglines

by ssp • 17 years ago

78 77 17 years ago

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NathanKP• 17 years ago

That is simply incredible. I didn't realize that Microsoft had come up with so many good ideas and then abandoned them. If they had come up with good implementations of each of those ideas and stuck with them they would have easily had a monopoly on most of computing.

papachito• 17 years ago

I was told recently that ideas are cheap and easy. Market value and execution aren't.

rbanffy8• 17 years ago

Microsoft's innovative ideas of the past decade have a negative value. The writer has Microsoft in much higher regard than the facts would allow him.

fauigerzigerk2• 17 years ago

I'm not a Microsoft hater at all and contrary to some others I think they have been an innovative company (e.g. VB, XMLHTTPRequest, Linq, ...). But Wilcox's list of "visionary" Microsoft innovation is weird.

I mean just because they did something before Apple did it doesn't mean they invented it, nor that they were particularly visionary. Most of the items on that list were talking points at the time and many wanted to do them in the .com bubble years. What Microsoft was talking about then was just part of the general "vision hyper-inflation" of the time.

Hailstorm was a concept for an XML Web Services platform. Yes it was supposed to support API access to things like address books among many other things, but presenting this as the predecessor to Facebook is a stretch to say the least. Facebook started out as a web site, not as a platform. Turning that on its head is not visionary. It's an old blueprint for certain failure.

And the tablet PC a precursor to the iPhone? Excuse me but the iPhone is a phone. It's primarily a communication device on which people play some games as well, and a very small minority does one or two other things with it. Is everything with a touch screen now a would be iPhone?

And then there's the NTFS successor. As far as I remember it was not planned to be a distributed file system or some kind of virtualized cloud/cluster thing. It was supposed to be a file system that had database-like features like a rich data model, and it used SQL Server technology. Scaling out was not the vision but that's exactly the point of "cloud" storage.

Microsoft as the largest OS vendor completely missed the boat on virtualization, which is probably the most important OS trend in the past 10 years. Ok, they took the next boat, but the fact that it's not even mentioned is telling.

And then there is Office collaboration. What a horrible mess. There's nothing even remotly usable. They piled on useless features in Office but stuff like editing a Word file in a group, something really obvious, is so horribly broken and has been forever. That's an anti vision.

So no, they haven't just been bad at executing. Their visions were either of me-too quality or the kind of failed platform grandstanding that IBM was known for.

That said, they have created some solid high quality stuff in the past 10 years as well. Windows is a good solid OS. .NET is a good solid development platform and C# hasn't stalled as Java has. They have opened up Office file formats and invented a sane alternative to PDF. It's good engineering work and a little bit visionary in some places.

Tichy• 17 years ago

"Most of the items on that list were talking points at the time and many wanted to do them in the .com bubble years."

That goes for most innovations - they are floating around when the time is right.

andrewcooke• 17 years ago

> Facebook started out as a web site, not as a platform. Turning that on its head is not visionary. It's an old blueprint for certain failure.

Wave? [edit for clarification: isn't that a platform first? not that we know it's a success, of course]

rbanffy8• 17 years ago

Just to remind those who were too young in the low-to-mid 90s, I am not sure who invented the UMPC, but at that time, they were called Zoomer, Momenta, Newton, which is the real precursor to the iPhone.

Also, the whole anythingFS Microsoft kept announcing since NT4 was called Cairo never made it even to beta. It was, mostly, a very long-lived research project that kept getting fashionable features according to the age of the press-release they were announced.

"stuff like editing a Word file in a group, something really obvious, is so horribly broken and has been forever."

And would be really easy to implement on top of MSN or Office Communicator.

clofresh3• 17 years ago

Not sure if the .NET dynamic languages (IronPython, IronRuby, etc) came before the JVM dynamic languages (Jython, JRuby, etc), but it also seems like Microsoft let the .NET languages languish and missed out on a opportunity to bring a lot of the dynamic language programmers into the .NET fold. Meanwhile the the JVM has experienced a rebirth with the vibrant JVM language communities.

rdtsc• 17 years ago

> missed out on a opportunity to bring a lot of the dynamic language programmers into the .NET fold.

I think one of the reasons is that they are well ... Microsoft. It is irrational, it doesn't make sense, but that's the vibe I get.

Their languages and ideas are not bad, I think it is the association with their company that is somehow hurting them. For example, F# is a very nice language, but I think the fact that it runs on .NET is putting off a lot of people. It seems to me if F# wasn't related in any way to Microsoft, it would have fared a lot better.

prodigal_erik• 17 years ago

Blub paradox. There are a limited number of programmers who wouldn't automatically dismiss F# as too weird to bother learning, and the ones who don't need .NET support are already using OCaml (or Haskell or whatever).

halo2• 17 years ago

I'm not sure what makes you think Microsoft have let .NET languish.

The .NET runtime and languages have been updated regularly with significant changes and improvements, and Microsoft themselves support C#, VB.NET and F# as "first-class" languages, as well as developing IronPython and IronRuby and working on the Dynamic Language Runtime project to ease dynamic language implementation. All of these equal or better Sun's support of Java.

There are also quite a few non-Microsoft languages based on .NET including IronScheme and Boo. .NET's CLR also supports tail-call optimisation, something the JVM doesn't.

bad_user3• 17 years ago

The CLR may support tail-call optimization, but that's not much. You can have support for TCO in a JVM language, it's just that interoperability with Java suffers.

When comparing the CLR to the JVM, I'm only jealous of one feature of the CLR ... stack-allocated objects.

On the other hand, saying that .NET's support for multiple languages is "equal or better" then that of the JVM is just flat wrong.

The CLR doesn't optimize call-sites where the called method is virtual. This is alleviated somewhat by the semantics of C# (all methods are non-virtual by default), but for dynamic languages it's a disaster. The JVM on the other hand does this ever since Java 1.3 (when hotspot was added as an option).

And the DLR is a cool framework for language designers, but it's one layer above the CLR, and it's just code extracted from the IronPython implementation. And related to speed, if you compare Jython with IronPython, Jython does a lot better right now, although it's not the most active language-implementation on the JVM.

The upcoming InvokeDynamic for the JVM will really kick ass for dynamic invocations ... the JVM will allow one to make calls without knowing the type of the object used in single dispatch ... and those call-sites will be optimized (like method-inlining) just as with a normal "invoke_interface".

And then there's the little things that make your life easier on the JVM ... for example it's easier to generate .class files, or .jar files ... along with debugging symbols. And the JVM is truly multi-platform.

You mentioned tail-calls ... well, the tail-calls in Mono have always been broken and unusable and there's no fix on the horizon. Also speaking of Mono, the GC is not generational and does not defragment the heap. IMHO, it's a low quality implementation that's only optimized for C#.

clofresh3• 17 years ago

I didn't mean .NET in general, I just meant .NET support for ports of existing open source languages like IronPython and IronRuby.

Admittedly, I don't really dabble with the .NET ecosystem much, but when I had to use SQL Server Reporting Services for a work project and we had to create a custom data source, we had to write the component in C#, it didn't support other .NET languages (I think it also supported VB.NET, but yeah, no thanks). That would have been a logical place to allow for extending their code with a language that I was more comfortable with.

There's also the ignored opportunity to provide better scripting in their Office offerings. While Resolver One is a really cool idea (spreadsheet built and scripted in IronPython), what I would REALLY love is to be able to call IronPython from Excel, but it's probably not gonna happen.

ams6110• 17 years ago

Back in 2003 or so, I was at a conference where a former Microsoft manager of some variety told me (paraphrased) that Microsoft's product strategies always revolved around selling more server licenses: Windows Server, Exchange Server, SQL Server. So all their product development was bent in that direction, causing some otherwise good ideas to miss hitting the customer need because there always had to be a tie-in to selling more licenses. Seems to explain a lot of the failures that are outlined in this piece.

OTOH, any company the size of Microsoft has a lot of failed ideas, or poorly executed ones. Not every idea is a home run; foul balls are part of the game.

flipper• 17 years ago

In the early '90s I wrote some software in Microsoft C++ that was distributed as an executable. An IBMer MBA friend of mine was horrified that anyone could distribute as many copies of my program as they liked without each user having to buy a C++ compiler.

Almost 20 years on Microsoft sound like IBM did back in the day.

blasdel• 17 years ago

My parents started a software company out of their apartment in the early 80s that lasted about twenty years with a sole product, which was based entirely around a PC database / development environment. When I was cleaning out their office before they sold the apartment a couple years ago, I found a little cubbyhole next to my Mom's old desk.

It contained a stack of shrinkwrapped end-user software licenses for the long-dead database environment their product was based on, one for each of their 60-70 customers over the life of the company. Cost at least a half-million dollars total, and went right into the dumpster.

jasonlbaptiste4• 17 years ago

If Microsoft trimmed the friction points (management/bloat) they would actually be rocking it. Look to the XBox team for inspiration. They've absolutely come out of nowhere, dominated, innovated (look at the tech behind xbox live), and even beat apple so far in the living room.

Have you guys ever checked out windows home server? Probably not. They don't promote it enough, but it's the best product they have made in ages. It's functionality pisses on Apple's Time Capsule and I love time capsule to death.

My guess in the next decade? Their core businesses get shaken up (office, windows, etc.) causing them to trim a LOT of this fat after the stock takes a rocking. They finally get the gut check they need and start pulling ahead in other areas (Bing, XBox/Entertainment, etc.)

TeHCrAzY• 17 years ago

I have a legit copy of home server. Next step: Convince my parents to turn this old pc into a home server as well. S many hassles solved, especially with the backups.

jasonlbaptiste4• 17 years ago

I think it's the marketing. Server is just a scary word. Most people don't know it exists either. I'm REALLY hoping they update it at CES with the 2008 Server platform without jacking up the OEM costs.

jbeda• 17 years ago

The XBox 360 may be a great machine and have great software (I have friends that have worked on it) but from a business perspective it is a disaster. It is pretty clear that Microsoft will never make up for the billions that were sunk into the original XBox and the 360. I know that the old Microsoft Bag Holder blog (which seems to have disappeared) ran the numbers.

Once you add the RROD issues and the fact that the Wii is kicking the Xbox's butt from a marketshare/penetration perspective it is hard to say that the XBox is a slam dunk success.

snprbob863• 17 years ago

Maybe you haven't heard, but we've been profitable for 5 quarters. The org is well on it's way towards climbing out of the hole it dug. I think getting the foot into the living room was well with the price of admission. Well, except maybe that $1B RRoD loss...

axod5• 17 years ago

The battle over the living room was firmly won by the wii. Households that have never had games consoles, now have a wii in the living room. I'd be willing to bet there are far more wii's in living rooms than any other console.

I think one reason the xbox looks like a great success is due to how badly the ps3 sucks, and how stupid Sony got. £300 for a games console is ridiculous, and basing it on a soon to be obsolete bluray standard is just more idiocy. They never seem to learn - minidisc, UMD etc - they always try to lock in these ridiculous new formats.

For me, the only innovator lately has been Nintendo. They have absolutely turned gaming on its head, and come out with some truly imaginative games that focus soley on fun and gameplay. They've captured amazing large new markets of gamers who have never played before.

The xBox is a good all round console, but it's just more of the same IMHO. I don't see much innovation going on there. I'm sure ms are pleased with xbox, but I wonder just how much money they've lost in total doing it. Maybe they'll break even in the next generation, or maybe Sony will realize just how stupid they've been. Maybe they'll go back to their playstation 1 roots.

mrduncan2• 17 years ago

I'd be willing to bet there are far more wii's in living rooms than any other console.

And you would be correct. According to data from manufacturers [1], Nintendo has sold nearly twice as many Wiis as Microsoft has sold Xbox 360s.

    Wii       56 million (as of Sept. 30th)
    Xbox 360  34 million (as of Oct. 23rd)
    PS3       27 million (as of Sept. 30th)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_game_consoles_...

jasonlbaptiste4• 17 years ago

the nintendo wii is the farthest thing from winning the actual living room. It created a new segment of gaming/consoles/etc and opened it up to the mainstream, which is awesome.

I actually had a Wii. I even waited in line to get it. I returned it within 24 hours. I wanted something more. The ability to rent movies, stream media, download new games, multiplayer over xbox live,etc. I'm not even a hardcore gamer. I only own the Halo franchise of games. The wii is best described as a very very advanced toy, rather than a gaming console. I don't think that's a bad thing either.

Imprecate• 17 years ago

Why do you think the PS3 sucks? It's priced similarly to the Xbox and has a powerful CPU and GPU, good game selection, nice controllers, and support for what's currently the most viable way to watch 1080p movies along with streaming capabilities for the future. The Xbox has better game selection, but since I'm not a serious gamer, I'd rather have Blu-ray capability.

I think the Wii is cool and it definitely broke into new markets. Party/casual games are a big thing and I like playing it at friends' places. Families I know get really into it, with parents playing as much as their kids.

I'm sure there's little incentive for Nintendo to do so, but I'd gladly pay another $100 for a more powerful version with HD graphics and more HTPC-like capabilities.

ETA: The only bad thing I've heard about PS3 is how difficult it is to program for from former game developers. Publishers seem to be pretty good at getting good results with it, plus you can install Linux and tinker with Cell programming if you're so inclined. MIT has some really good slides and notes from one of their courses online (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/cag/ps3/).

DaniFong• 17 years ago

Hackers often blame MBAs, management, and hierarchy for technological mishaps.

As often did I. But it turns out that managing people is hard. It is amazing to me that an organization that is Microsoft's size can decide and execute on anything at all, much less on the number of things that it actually does.

Cutting five layers of management, which is already few for an organization that's Microsoft's size, is really a recipe for chaos.

tentonova• 17 years ago

It is amazing to me that an organization that is Microsoft's size can decide and execute on anything at all.

Cutting five layers of management, which is already few for an organization that's Microsoft's size, is really a recipe for chaos.

I'd say Microsoft's barely navigable size might have a lot to do with those 5+ layers of middle management.

wglb• 17 years ago

This article lists missed opportunities for market penetration when MS had technology ready.

I think the article is a bit harsh, even hostile. The criteria Most every technology decision must be justified by some data point. No company spends on research like Microsoft is not unlike the criticism leveled at Google by that departing designer. Large companies need operate this way.

The heart of the challenge is what transformations are necessary for a seriously successful company to stay vital. IBM went through a catastrophic point and came out due to some very astute business leadership. MS is more technologically focused.

gamble• 17 years ago

Steve frickin' Ballmer... Does anyone believe that he'd still be CEO if Bill Gates hadn't anointed him as his successor? He's the Gordon Brown to Gates' Tony Blair. Microsoft is never going to be relevant until Ballmer and his horde of bean counting lackeys get the boot.

jacquesm8• 17 years ago

That's a beautiful analogy, with more than just a grain of truth to it.

Especially the Gates - Blair bit.

IBM managed to 'reinvent' itself after a very rough patch, maybe microsoft will manage to do that too but definitely not with the current leadership. To solve these issues you first have to be able to admit (maybe even publicly) that there are issues. Until then it's down.

I remember IBM passing out little flashlights with 'I've seen the light', and they really had.

Microsoft is at least a decade away from a moment like that.

Give google another 10 years to figure out how to kill office and they probably will.

willwagner2• 17 years ago

I'm not sure passing on Youtube and Yahoo were bad decisions for Microsoft as stated by the article.

As far as Youtube is concerned, AFAIK it still hasn't been profitable for Google and would have likely bled more red ink with Microsoft in higher bandwidth charges, or alternatively, MS might have tried monetizing sooner slowing Youtube's growth. It's doubtful purchasing Yahoo in this economic climate would have been a big winner either.

I also don't really buy the article's description of the Xbox business defying the data and business common sense. For a long time, Microsoft has wanted to be in the living room, purchasing WebTV in 1997. If anything, it's an example of how Microsoft has succeeded in the past; constantly improving upon it's past mistakes and not giving up as quickly as other companies might. The original XBox wasn't all that successful, but they did some smart moves with the 360, getting it out earlier than the PS3, providing good tools and support to their development community, and realizing that good networking support at the OS level to allow seamless multiplayer experiences was going to be a game changer for this generation of consoles.

msg• 17 years ago

As far as YouTube's bandwidth bill goes, it is probably low, as discussed a couple months back:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=886109

I wouldn't deny that the Microsoft seems to be improving the Xbox from the customer's point of view... but I think the larger point is that the Xbox program is in the red.

There was already a convergent device for the living room. It's a computer with an HDMI cable and a wireless keyboard, or maybe a wireless tablet. Packaging it as a console with funky controllers is not a game changer, no matter how many games come out for it.

xsmasher• 17 years ago

The thrust of that article is that YouTube's bandwidth bill at Google is zero, because of Google's dark fiber / peering. If MS had bought them the bill might be astronomical.

willwagner2• 17 years ago

If Microsoft had purchased YouTube, I don't think it would have had the same low bandwidth costs that Google enjoys per that article.

mixmax• 17 years ago

Microsofts biggest problem is that "they just have no taste" to qoute Steve Jobs.

Taste is what the enduser sees. Endusers don't care about strategy, proprietary technology, bottomlines, acquisitions, tie-ins, and what have you.

The big problem here is that having good taste is like being a good hacker - you have to be one to spot one. And since Microsoft doesn't seem to have many people with taste they don't recognize it when they see it. This is why Microsoft isn't doing well on the web - it's easy to switch to a competitor if a site doesn't just work right away, and many Microsoft offerings don't. They're clunky, hard to navigate and often have a hidden agenda thought up by a MBA. This is also the primary reason that Apple is doing so well: Their CEO has taste.

Endusers just want shiny stuff that works.

moon_of_moon• 17 years ago

Sorry this article is borderline ridiculous. Comparing for example, Amazon S3 to NTFS is like comparing an online storage platform used for building web services on top of, to a local file system used for storing files on desktops. Oh wait.

Seems to me like its a hurried piece of negative PR in part of a much larger war. Probably a response to the "Top 9 products Google killed" story somewhere else on the internets.

bad_user3• 17 years ago

Actually that comparison is not so ridiculous.

Customers want storage, lots of it. One way to do it is to provide the technology to make that storage cheap and easy to maintain. Another way to have cheap/maintainable storage is by using an external provider.

motters2• 17 years ago

This doesn't mention the elephant in the room - open source. 2000-2009 saw open source software become completely mainstream, probably best illustrated by the Firefox browser. Microsoft really failed to adapt to the rise of open source and the increasing developer mindshare which it commanded. Instead of trying to harness its potential and ride the wave their strategy was mostly one of antagonism and FUD.

rbanffy8• 17 years ago

Microsoft's business model (as with any proprietary software company) is to keep the user dependent on them. Since they exist since before FLOSS became mainstream, they do it by providing an adequate technology for a reasonable cost with incremental upgrades to existing technology, effectively preventing many legacy owners to migrate to greener pastures, and by providing excuses for the executives to use when a legacy-disrupting migration to FLOSS could be the best option.

It's been rather effective.

motters2• 17 years ago

It hasn't been all that effective so far. Microsoft has lost significant market share in browsers to FLOSS, and it looks like something similar is happening with its office productivity software too.

jacquesm8• 17 years ago

IE vs Firefox is Microsoft vs Open source in a nutshell.

If not for Office they'd be a lot hotter water right now. Lock in is really nice when you've got it, even if your customers hate it.

Open Office still has a lot of rough edges, even after all those years, it's one of the few things that buys microsoft more time. If open office were to be ported to C, trimmed of it's bloat and made more compatible (ok, that would add some bloat back in) Ballmer would sleep a lot less good.

artagnon• 17 years ago

Office/ Groupware (Microsoft Exchange, Outlook) AND their development tool chain. Visual Studio with its fantastic compiler and debugger kicks GCC + GDB in the arse.

TotlolRon• 17 years ago

The MBAs (and lawyers) will do the same to GOOG. Correction: are doing the same to GOOG.

2000-2009: Microsoft's Decade of Shattered Dreams

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