Microsoft Is Winning the Techlash

https://www.axios.com/microsoft-is-winning-the-techlash-4d16b1ba-2da5-4f9b-8fd2-d591b0a3b2ea.html

by kristianc • 7 years ago

151 149 7 years ago

d--b2• 7 years ago

Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates.

Apple's bad rep is probably due to high pricing, tech lock-in, horrible apple store experience, bad behavior regarding right-to-repair, pretty bad software overall.

denzil_correa• 7 years ago

Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates.

Microsoft has many business models and one of them is based on advertisements, example : LinkedIn.

d--b2• 7 years ago

Sure, but Microsoft is not exactly looking to brag about the fact that it owns LinkedIn. There's zero mention of Microsoft on the LinkedIn website.

organsnyder3• 7 years ago

My hunch is that LinkedIn derives a substantial (perhaps the majority) of revenue from premium memberships sold to recruiters.

bni• 7 years ago

Windows 10 business model for consumers is also based on ads and tracking/surveillance.

kristianc• 7 years ago

Microsoft has many business models and one of them is based on advertisements, example : LinkedIn.

LinkedIn make bank from selling Sales Navigator. Ads are a tiny proportion of their revenue.

zantana• 7 years ago

Yes, it is always a reality check from the feel good vscode/wsl/Nadella lovefest when they foist some unwanted telemetry or ads in various parts of Windows, that they are a beast with many heads.

manigandham3• 7 years ago

Bing is their major ad business, not Linkedin which makes its money mostly from subscriptions and jobs.

organsnyder3• 7 years ago

Apple's bad rep is probably due to high pricing, tech lock-in, horrible apple store experience, bad behavior regarding right-to-repair, pretty bad software overall.

How times have changed. It wasn't long ago that many of us (myself included) were saying virtually the same thing about Microsoft's product.

michaelcampbell• 7 years ago

How times have changed.

Including people at the top running things. Interesting (to me) how the sales guy CEO's having been changed led the companies in different directions afterwards.

Nasrudith3• 7 years ago

Ironically I recall a minority pointing out Apple would be even worse than Microsoft if they were in Microsoft's place given their controllingness - Microsoft was fine with third party manufacturers as opposed to suing to stop "Hackintoshes". There never was an equivalent for Microsoft.

sametmax2• 7 years ago

Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates.

You mean they don't put ads in the windows home menu or hundred of spywares in the OS ?

Or that they don't have ads in bings, skype or outlook ?

Apple's bad rep is probably due to high pricing, tech lock-in, horrible apple store experience, bad behavior regarding right-to-repair, pretty bad software overall.

Or maybe you mean they don't lock in with proprietary formats, avoiding to publish the specs and when they then do don't follow it like with Office ? Hopefully this has been compensated by the fantastic Windows Update experience and good behavior.

I'm not an FB, Apple or Google fan. In fact I don't have an FB account, I voluntarily don't buy Apple products and refused a job interview with Google.

But let's not forget the numerous bad deeds of MS. That's how we never solve the problems we have: we let people misbehave and after a while, they are all forgiven. It's the same with politics, bad bosses, abusive spouses, etc.

Don't let people forget.

flyingpenguin• 7 years ago

I mean every company has problems... Microsoft just seems to be generally headed in a better direction vs worse which seems way more common.

nightski• 7 years ago

First of all, I've never seen an ad in my start menu. You can disable live tiles.

Second, anonymous telemetry is not spyware.

diehunde2• 7 years ago

Maybe but it's not their main source of revenue like with Google and Facebook. So they don't have to go crazy doing unethical stuff in that area (privacy) which is what people tend to care most about these days.

reacweb• 7 years ago

Microsoft got a bad rep because of its nefarious behavior in the 90s. It has killed many concurrent. It has fought against linux, java, netscape, ...

It has tried to replace win32 many times creating a mess for developers. How do silverlight experts feel ?

Recently, Microsoft has changed. visual studio code is excellent and OSS. WSL is getting very good.

scarface743• 7 years ago

Apple only has a "bad rep" for tech lock-in and right to repair among the small "less space than the Nomad. No wireless." inward looking, geek crowd.

zrobotics• 7 years ago

I don't know if that is true anymore. One of my friends who is very much non-technical but has been an iPhone user since 2009 and Mac user for almost as long just asked me for a recommendation on an android phone a few weeks ago. He specifically cited the battery issues, and after having keyboard problems had done some googling for alternatives. Repairability was specifically mentioned, since he has had to have screens replaced on phones.

There has been a fair amount of negative press, this is filtering to 'normal' people, not just Lewis rossman's viewers

Yetanfou2• 7 years ago

Another reason Apple gets a bad rep is the often obnoxious behaviour of a group of people who defend the brand's every step and misstep with an almost religious fervour.

alasdair_3• 7 years ago

Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates.

I really hate Windows 10 automatically turning off all my privacy setting each time it updates, and re-installing ads for candy crush and other junk on my start menu after I'd explicitly removed it. Windows 10 tracks damn near everything you do and sends it back to Microsoft.

kerbalspacepro• 7 years ago

The answer is to use Microsoft apps on an Apple machine (or Linux if you're that kind of person)

JohnFen8• 7 years ago

I consider Windows 10 to be a privacy nightmare, and I don't use it outside of work (where it's necessary because it's one of our target platforms).

However, and this is big to me, Microsoft doesn't pretend that Windows 10 isn't doing what it's doing. That means, even though I don't consider Windows suitable for my own use, that doesn't reduce the amount of trust I have in them as a company.

stochastic_monk• 7 years ago

I think you're looking for 'bad rap' instead of 'bad rep', by the way.

babypuncher• 7 years ago

horrible apple store experience

Care to elaborate? I've never had a negative experience making purchases or getting devices repaired at the Apple store.

Compared to HTC, which left me without my brand new phone for two months while they shipped my $800 One M8 back and forth with a different defect every time it came back to me.

flyinglizard3• 7 years ago

Microsoft are selling an incredible suite of products and services. They are dependable, responsible and innovative. When I choose to use their platforms, I know they are taking me seriously, that they have a very long product support horizon, that they are embracing openness, have excellent documentation and integration with their tools (one fun exercise is debugging an Azure Function (their serverless lambdas) locally and seamless inside Visual Studio on your machine. Magical).

I would have thought they are a dying company just two years ago and today I have a completely opposite outlook of them.

arnvald• 7 years ago

Do others have similar experience? I'm not a fan of Microsoft products however I sometimes have to use them or want to give a try to something like Azure, and so far my experience has been pretty bad. I had to contact their customer service in 2 cases and in both cases they couldn't help me and told me to create a new account (one case was me asking to change billing country in Azure so that I could provide credit card from another country). Also in both cases I had to go through a few emails and a few phone calls and even after they told me they can't do anything, they kept calling me just to check whether I'm satisfied with their solution (!) so that they could close the ticket in their system.

eropple3• 7 years ago

I've had a profoundly awful experience with Azure in particular. Most of Microsoft's offerings are pretty good (I quite like Office 365 in both a browser and on an iPad) but Azure is hot garbage. Their APIs are inconsistent (the Ruby ADAL connector has been broken for a year, and it's an easy monkey-patch fix so that's doubly awful), Azure AD insists on being king-shit-of-all-it-surveys and does not want to federate with a (better) directory option (what Okta does to get even halfway-decent integration is kinda heroic, and also terrible), and even once you get past all that the technical offerings are, in my experience, significantly less reliable and comprehensive than AWS or GCP, to the point where I would regularly see stuff like "the audit log doesn't show the restart you requested on that server". And all this (because, again, the APIs are bad) has you swimming through the tar pit that is their web console. It's tremendously bad in ways I didn't think web applications could be. The horizontal-scrolling blade nonsense is unintuitive and doesn't correctly handle browser history (so on refreshes you get lost, sometimes, but not all the time) and it looks ugly and action buttons are in stupid places.

Then, when you have to ask for help, you get thrown into a tilt-a-whirl of awful, near-nonsensical customer support and it takes an act of Congress and God to get escalated to somebody who 1) speaks English clearly and with enough care as to be understood, and 2) understands the problem at hand. (And, not or.)

Granted, I'm probably not their target market. I don't want a more expensive datacenter in The Cloud(tm) so I'm not grateful for incremental improvements over racking servers. But it's a really unpleasant experience compared to either Amazon or Google and I'm mystified as to how it can be so cumulatively bad.

maxsilver3• 7 years ago

All just personal opinions, but Microsoft products and services are generally good, from my experience. Windows 10 works great (and I seem to be the only person who actually appreciates their update policy). Office works well. OneDrive used to work well, now it's just "okay", but still fine. My Surface Go is a champ and feels great, despite being silly cheap. My Microsoft Ergonomics keyboard + mouse are still going strong, and is still my all-time favourite Ergo keyboard. Xbox One X is a nice piece of kit. Azure can be kind of overwhelming, but it works well enough and is far less overwhelming than AWS, despite offering mostly similar services.

Microsoft still has legacy weirdness all over the place. It's 2019 and it still feels like nobody from Windows talks to anyone in Office, and no one in software talks to anyone doing hardware. And Microsoft botches acquisitions (Skype is still a tire fire, similar for LinkedIn). But generally, the quality of Microsoft products is good, despite their failings.

Microsoft consumer support is pretty poor. But I basically never need to use it, and some of competition is so much worse, that Microsoft look good in comparison. (Have a problem with anything Google, for example, and Microsoft Support suddenly looks like mana from heaven).

Anarch157a• 7 years ago

Adding my own anedocte, I tried to read some of their training material, the processes of creating an account was incredibly annoying and un-intuitive. Something that even "Web 1.0" companies back in 1997 had already figured out.

Then I tried following the examples of the training, start a small, free VM and do some stuff, but it won't let me, because the web interface was completely broken, no matter which browser I used. I even tried using that damn Edge on a W10 VM.

Yeah, MS might not have been the target of a lot of backlash recently, but their products are still as awful as ever.

banashark3• 7 years ago

My experience falls in line with yours.

I had an MVP in azure web services. I had 20 users in my "beta" phase that were using the product and giving me feedback.

One day, I got a message that I need to update my billing method. Strange, I was using mostly free tier with one paid component and the card on file was good til 2022, but ok. I put in another card because maybe there's something wrong with the system.

The next day I get a call that the site isn't working from one of my beta users. I log in and all of my azure resources are gone.

I immediately try to reach out to azure support via various mechanisms (their support chat, email, twitter, etc). Funny enough, twitter is always the fastest way to get support. Just write that something bad happened and tag their product, and you get someone who can communicate. However, they just redirected me to their support channel.

Two days go by and I get a template email response. I have an email chain going back and forth over the week to try and get the resources restored.

In the end, they tell me that not only will they be unable to restore my resources (a production database. the backups were all "gone" because the resource didn't exist anymore), but that I had to create a new azure account to use any services because of how screwed up my account got.

I tried escalating, but received the same response.

Now I just go with AWS. I'd even go with google as long as they don't delete my production database.

I've previous experience as a Devops engineer for a Large company which at the time was one of the larger customers of Azure (as in they'd put our company on the marketing materials). Support was obviously better when we could get a turn around time of <1 day to talk to an engineer that worked on a piece of infrastructure. Still wasn't a pleasant experience.

It's really unfortunate, all of this. I know that there are so many teams that are putting out great products, but their cloud approach is awful. _Some_ of the offerings are actually pretty nice, but combined with UI churn, the worst support (I'd rather take googles non-existent support as long as my data doesn't get deleted) of all cloud providers (IME) and empty apologies on the internet (you can say you're sorry, but I don't believe you unless you act on the mistake), I don't see myself going back anytime soon.

naravara• 7 years ago

Do others have similar experience?

As a habitual Microsoft hater who spent most of the 90s and early 2000s being constitutionally incapable of writing the company name without a $, yes I have.

They still suffer from an appalling lack of taste and poor design sensibilities, but their enterprise level products and services are top notch. And I'm developing a new appreciation for a business model that involves transparently charging me a known price in exchange for a known service. They could still get better at that though. They still have too many enterprise clients over a barrel.

peshooo• 7 years ago

I had a small app that pulled my agenda (calendar events) from an Exchange server. But my company switched to office 365. I spent a few days trying to figure out where I need to register and what API to use, etc so I can rewrite my app to work with Office 365. Now I don't have an app showing my agenda.

perfmode• 7 years ago

Let’s not occupy ourselves with establishing narratives. These are all stories and perspectives from which to view the world.

Microsoft has huge swaths of critical legacy systems held hostage. Governments, etc. How many of your tax dollars go to Microsoft? How much of their government influence is due to superiority of product versus lock-in, etc?

Mikeb852• 7 years ago

Too bad their OS barely works on the hardware it was pre-installed on. Things like wifi, suspend, brightness control are all extremely flaky under Windows 10 on my machine, but on Ubuntu work perfect. Most people I know have ditched Office for the most part, except for hardcore Excel users. Trying to install any sort of development tools on Windows is a pain, unless it's MS tools. As for their services, heard bad things about Azure and they're definitely not on the level of Google or Amazon as far as market share. They've also capitulated to Android on mobile and somewhat to Linux in the server space, so not sure how those are wins.

alasdair_3• 7 years ago

they are embracing openness

I've been personally burned over and over and over again by Microsoft "embracing openness" and I will never trust them again on this point.

wvenable• 7 years ago

What is Microsoft? It's not a singular person born in the 80s and is now 40 years old. It's individual people who have come and gone over decades. The same people who were ultimately responsible fpr "personally burning you over and over again" are either retired or happily leading at other companies that you support. And new people with fresh ideas and fresh ideals may have replaced them.

flyinglizard3• 7 years ago

This comment turned out an interesting experiment in internet crowd dynamics. I have over 40 upvotes at this point, but all the replies to my post have been more-or-less negative. My guess is that the people who are happy with Microsoft or generally agree can't be bothered to reply, while the few who've been burnt would take this as an opportunity to take out their anger (very justifiably so).

Most of us know internet opinions behave in this manner where you mostly get to hear discontent, but it's still fascinating to experience it first hand.

(I'm not in any way criticizing the replies to my post, which have been diligently written with real life examples and definitely given me some things to think about)

throwaway_9168• 7 years ago

Well, its certainly much easier to upvote than to write a comment - you don't have to actually justify your upvote nor will the words be scrutinized. If you feel happy with MSFT products, you can just upvote, but if you don't like them you can't just say "Well, I don't agree!".

And the lack of downvotes can be explained by another phenomenon - there is no incentive for some to downvote a comment like yours at this point, because nearly all replies are negative! If a comment thread surfaces some bad things about someone you don't like, and it becomes popular, you actually want it to become more popular isn't it?

banashark3• 7 years ago

I think that your comment turned into a "topic" of "opinions on azure". Perhaps it's that topic, rather than the content of your single starting comment, that is being upvoted.

I thought that the subcomments listing out experiences was valuable to me. I would be conflicted on downvoting your comment though, because it would hide the subcomments that I do feel are valuable to have visible.

To clarify, I don't think you wrote anything off topic or bad for discussion (which is why I would downvote something). Even though we have different perspectives, I feel both are valuable to have a comprehensive view.

justaguyhere• 7 years ago

One of my colleagues in a previous job had this super boring but very critical task - making sure the financial numbers entered in the system are correct. One mistake could cause serious problems for the company.

My boss (CTO) once remarked - "we never hear from or about Patrice, she must be doing a fantastic job!"

Point being, when things work, it is rare that people talk about it (like my boss), they just take it for granted. When things don't work though, that is a different story.

I suppose it is just human nature.

bartread• 7 years ago

I've had similar experiences on HN, and funnily enough the last time was for a comment that was fairly supportive of Microsoft. I got absolutely roasted in the comments, but received a ton of upvotes from the silent majority.

There are three areas I'd disagree with you though.

The first is Microsoft's Surface line of tablets and laptops. I literally cannot find a kind word to say about the (very expensive) Surface Book devices we bought en masse about 18 months ago. They are awful[1] and we are already starting to phase them out as a result. It makes no sense because Microsoft can clearly do hardware well: for example, I have no complaints about my Xbox One X - it's all round great.

The second may substantially be connected to the first, and that's Windows 10. I increasingly hate using it because I find it slow, finicky, and unresponsive/a serious resource hog. So much of the time my laptop is running hot and draining its battery because Windows is doing something or other not related to what I'm working on.

The third is Microsoft Teams. The functionality it offers is good and, for VOIP and video calls, it's probably second only to Zoom so does get a thumbs up from me there. However, it's painfully slow to switch views, doesn't support multiple windows (so you can't sensibly look at chat and wiki at the same time), takes an age to start up, and behaves like an absolute moron when it comes to switching networks or losing and regaining network connectivity (usually requires a restart of the app).

[1] Underpowered, overpriced, poor battery life, run very hot, ropey WiFi, poor speakers that are insufficiently loud, crappy trackpad, only a single display port built in, poorly designed/laid out ports, unreliable (and often weirdly slow) charging, drains battery within 12 - 18 hours whilst asleep, I could go on (and on). In short: DO NOT BUY UNLESS YOU HATE YOURSELF!

tracker14• 7 years ago

I have mixed feelings... I think Azure in general, and o365 specifically are pretty nice. I do think Azure is a bit overpriced, but they do offer a lot of discounts in a lot of ways, which offsets it for some. They've been a bit better than most at adapting to changes in tech, and if you put Windows aside for a moment, are overall moving in a very nice direction.

Windows' changes have been pretty bad in terms of invasiveness since Windows 8/10. I just really don't like several bits of it. I think LSW is pretty nice, but iirc SystemD support is probably over a year off still, and docker/podman still a ways off. Windows vs Linux containers and Docker has seriously muddied the waters so to speak.

MS, like most corporations isn't a single entity... there's various child entities with some areas of cooperation between them. I'm glad that Windows no longer steers the ship and appreciate a lot of the efforts I've seen. Open tooling and platforms in particular. I love VS Code, the Azure Data Studio (or whatever it's called) is nice and progressing for cross-platform. I do think its' weird that Teams is the odd man out as an electron app from MS without a proper Linux release. Moving Edge to blink/chromium is a good move overall.

I'm anywhere from luke warm to positive on MS in general. That said, it isn't generally my first choice for a lot of things (outside o365). I'm often frustrated with working in Windows at work after about 6 years working outside windows. I use bash (from git) with windows, and there's quirks, but less than with LSW.

I really want them to succeed as I think with the current leadership and direction a better MS means better options and tools for all. I wish they'd redouble their efforts on linux support for everything around Office and Teams though. I'd also like to be able to build/deploy a damned SQL project without windows too.

In 2 years, by my own estimation, it will be a very different world running Windows as a developer and at that point it may become my favorite environment for building Linux apps of all things. MS/Windows progresses while Mac stagnates and alienates its creative/development/pro users more and more.

0-_-0• 7 years ago

People with less than 500 karma can't downvote though, so it's possible to end up with 40 upvotes even if the majority of people dislike Microsoft.

Let's say 200 people wanted to vote on your post. 100 people with > 500 karma vote 45% up 55% down ending up with -10 karma total. 100 people with < 500 karma vote 45% up but the other 55% can't downvote = 35 total upvotes.

JohnFen8• 7 years ago

I consider Microsoft more trustworthy than the other big tech companies because they behave in a more trustworthy fashion by (generally) being forthright about what they do and what their intentions are.

That said, I avoid Microsoft products because I don't like what they do and what their intentions are.

The difference between my attitude toward Microsoft and (for example) Facebook is that I make my decisions about Microsoft based on their products and services. I make my decisions about Facebook, etc., based on the fact that I don't trust them even a little.

This means that Microsoft has the advantage -- if they cared whether or not I am on board with them (and they have no reason to), they could change my mind very quickly by altering their products.

Facebook, etc., could not affect my attitude in the same way, as my main problem with them is that they are entirely untrustworthy.

znfi• 7 years ago

Having been forced to dabble in the Microsoft world I have in general found documentation to, at least in some cases, be very sparse. Or maybe I've just not found the right resources?

For example, I was looking for some documentation on how to tune the CLR, and performance tips for writing C# in general. In Java there are lots of books on the topic, and I know of some blogs on the JVM internals, but for .Net all I could find was one small (selfpublished?) book. I'm not sure it would be fair for me to judge the state of the blogs and online resources, but at least I did not find what I was looking for at the time.

Similarly, I had to try some stuff with Service Fabric, and it felt more or less impossible to get it working with the publicly available documentation. I'm really not sure how they think one is supposed to learn how to use that technology.

Lastly I've been dealing with shipping and releasing natively compiled binaries for Windows etc, and here I've found online resources, but mostly unofficial ones. This whole area seems rather hairy and it feels a bit scary to rely on some random blogpost or stackoverflow answers for what (not) to do.

In general from what I've seen is that the Microsoft documentation is very much How-To focused. But there is often a lack for more comprehensive documentation like a man page, and in particular I've found it hard to get "sharp" information, like what are the exact guarantees for this thing.

stcredzero• 7 years ago

I would have thought they are a dying company just two years ago and today I have a completely opposite outlook of them.

The underdog has to do better to compete.

https://www.adweek.com/creativity/how-avis-brilliantly-pione...

eikenberry• 7 years ago

one fun exercise is debugging an Azure Function (their serverless lambdas) locally and seamless inside Visual Studio on your machine. Magical).

I read this initially as a red flag as it looks like they are coupling Azure with Windows/VS development. A better indication of how serious they are in creating an open platform would be how magical the experience is for people not using MS blessed tools.

Const-me• 7 years ago

I think many people working on development tools outside MS either don't understand value of debuggers, or don't have enough resources to implement them well.

I've been programming for living for 20 years now, did/doing various stuff including mobile, embedded, videogames incl. console, desktop, servers, a bit of web. In my experience, debuggers only work well on microsoft platforms.

Integration is simple on surface, press F5 and it will launch with debugger. Implementation of that can be very complex, launching may involve complicated deployment (over network, USB or worse), starting virtual machines, connecting multiple TCP streams using weird protocol each, and so on.

It works consistently for MS platforms, even very old ones like WinCE. It's broken consistently for the rest of them, even Android or iOS which have larger install base than Windows.

notacoward2• 7 years ago

The conclusion is contrary to the evidence presented.

companies untouched by scandal — including Microsoft — prospered in the eyes of consumers

Except that Amazon, which has gotten a bit of a black eye later (HQ2 + worker treatment + antitrust), has stayed steady near the very top of the cited poll. Apple, which has had few such problems, has sunk from near the top to #32. When you only have eight samples to begin with, and two strongly contradict your theory, your theory sucks. Microsoft in particular is doing relatively well for a variety of reasons, but not because of this one.

Funes-2• 7 years ago

Microsoft in particular is doing relatively well for a variety of reasons, but not because of this one.

Why exactly wouldn't Microsoft's newfound good reputation be included among those reasons? Your rebuttal would be just as unfounded as the theory you are dismissing. Perhaps it's not as determinant a factor as the author makes it out to be, but discarding it altogether doesn't look reasonable to me.

notacoward2• 7 years ago

Your rebuttal would be just as unfounded as the theory you are dismissing.

True enough, but that doesn't validate the higher-profile original either. Seems a bit "well actually" TBH.

levesque• 7 years ago

I agree that they completely ignore Amazon which has a similar curve to Microsoft, except higher in ranking.

endorphone• 7 years ago

Having Amazon topping that chart and then dutifully ignored as a narrative was spun makes the whole thing dubious. The rankings themselves seem a bit ridiculous and wholly unrelated to really anything at all. Not only has Apple had no such problems, in similar polls they rank at or near #1 year after year.

jeromebaek• 7 years ago

... while those companies most heavily affected by privacy-related scandals faced the steepest erosion in trust.

Amazon hasn't been involved in any large privacy-related scandals.

fishywang• 7 years ago

large scale human access to (and accessed) ring (after it's acquired by Amazon) video footage doesn't count?

yourbandsucks• 7 years ago

Apparently, they averaged about 300 interviews per company, then stack ranked on net favorability.

I'm not a social scientist, but that seems.. low? And while I'm sure the initial call list was demographically weighted, apparently they'd ask each respondent to talk about two companies they were more familiar with from the list of 100. That doesn't sound like the ~300 people rating each company had any proper demographic weighting at all.

Full report: https://theharrispoll.com/HarrisPoll_Axios_MostVisible_2019....

mhermher• 7 years ago

300 people rating 2 of 100 companies does seem very sparse. Thanks for the link.

jrs95• 7 years ago

Maybe they have a higher reputation but that doesn't mean people like or will buy their consumer products. They still have a huge problem there.

darkmuck• 7 years ago

Although Microsoft has been very successful lately, I wish they hadn't given up on competing in some consumer areas such mobile. Now we are stuck with only Apple & Google.

sgift• 7 years ago

I wonder if they wait for the right moment (e.g. when Android gets replaced with whatever Google tries to replace it with) for a new play on mobile or if they really are "done" with it.

sylens• 7 years ago

I think they are going to wait for the Progressive Web App (PWA) revolution to reenter the market.

WorldMaker4• 7 years ago

I think there is a still a possibility that Microsoft expects the phone and PC markets to merge and hopes to be there with welcoming arms when it does, but I'm getting the impression they won't build new hardware to do it if they can't convince other manufacturers to join in.

partiallypro2• 7 years ago

I'm betting that Microsoft is going to come out with a Surface branded Android phone in the next 2-3 years, and allow Android apps to be entered into the Microsoft Store. Use their leverage in developer tools to make publishing in all 3 stores easy. The groundwork is being laid, but I think they are very much focused on the cloud and catching up to AWS offerings.

granshaw• 7 years ago

I dunno if the new MS has much appetite for the consumer space TBH. Their strength and main source of revenue is business solutions

pickle-wizard• 7 years ago

I had a Windows Phone. I really liked it. What I didn't like is that there were no apps for it. So I ended up switching to an iPhone.

I also had a Windows RT tablet. It was pretty good, but I wish MS hadn't nerfed it. If I could have used a browser other than IE I would have likely bought another one when the SSD failed.

manigandham3• 7 years ago

"Tech industry/company" is a useless term. Facebook and Google are ad networks, and it's advertising that's getting a backlash.

Microsoft has a much smaller ad business with Bing (although still 3x bigger than Twitter) so of course they don't get the same amount of backlash because of it. Apple is in a similar position.

dingo_bat• 7 years ago

I really wish Microsoft would release a modern, capable smartphone. Not based on Android. Revive the windows phone UI, couple it to good hardware. Maybe partner with Samsung. A surface phone, so to speak. I'd buy it instantly. I don't care about apps. I care about a good browser, good screen, maybe whatsapp, long battery life.

jussij2• 7 years ago

I think the problem with Google is it can't decide if they are into software or into advertising.

Google had a big lead on Microsoft with their web based 'office like' products, but they just could not get the paying business customer.

Microsoft can see what Google is doing, quickly push out their 'Office 365' clone and without much effort find they have quickly become the biggest player in that field.

I think Google would have easily won that game it they could just convinced business they where more than just an advertising company.

I get the impression business is more than happy giving their data to Microsoft, while also paying for that privilege where as they are not so sure about trusting their data with Google.

coldpie3• 7 years ago

I would love so much to pay for Google services if it meant disabling all of their ads and data tracking. But they're just not interested in that kind of business model.

jussij2• 7 years ago

Exactly. They're hooked on their Ad Words income stream.

Kalium3• 7 years ago

If there's one uncomfortable thing Google has made painfully clear to all of us, it's that the vast majority of consumers just aren't interested in paying for things like email or search.

It isn't due to a lack of offerings. There are plenty of provides that will happily do so. Anyone who wants to can buy email from Google today! Yet in the face of this the vast majority of users choose not to pay for email.

My current operating hypothesis is that the vast majority of ordinary users value their privacy right up to the point where they have to put a price on it. At which point a handful of nerds (like us!) are willing to pay, but most people happily trade their privacy for services instead of involving money.

Mikeb852• 7 years ago

As opposed to Windows 10's ads in the start button and lock screen, and data tracking in every part of the OS? At least Google only puts up (mostly) relevant ads when you search for something.

skizm• 7 years ago

Google shuts services down left and right. What large business would trust google with all their documents / spreadsheets / etc. when there is a pretty good chance they just shut the service down in a few years? Microsoft on the other hand supports their office products basically forever.

partiallypro2• 7 years ago

The craziest part about GSuite right now, is that it costs -more- than O365...but has less features.

Google pushing all of their APIs to force you to sign up a GCS account has also rubbed me the wrong way.

dalbasal3• 7 years ago

...their office product or, more surprisingly & worryingly, their cloud services.

How could Google, come distant 3rd in the cloud infrastructure race. They were the ones that obsessed about milliseconds. They ran YouTube and Gmail and all the other services reliably, at massive scale. Due respect to Amazon's dogfooding, but Amazon never released novel internet applications at anything like the volume that Google did.

Google have generally displayed recurring problems getting products to real maturity, and making money from them. For all the high profile stuff that they bought or built over the years... There is still only one real revenue source.

It may be something like the "oil curse." It's hard to compete with search/ads on revenue.

riku_iki• 7 years ago

How could Google, come distant 3rd in the cloud infrastructure race.

Because MS utilized their vendor-locked(office, MS SQL Server, Windows, .NET, etc) user-base, which Google didn't have.

gowld3• 7 years ago

Google was built from the ground up writing software for itself to run. Microsoft made systems and development tools for customers to run. Google has to make a much larger cultural change to turn their monolithic infrastructure inside out into products, whereas Microsoft had to make a change in the reverse direction to try to compete in Internet/cloud services.

Nasrudith3• 7 years ago

Really the whole "techlash" feels incredibly manufactured in the first place - I think the uniform shallowness of criticisms is part of its smell. I mean most content it shallow but you expect a "bell curve" of nuance between slogan repeaters and those pondering more in depth at the edges. Look at other movements and their diversity of ideas - even if mostly in agreement differing implementations tend to be proposed by some even if most parrot shallow slogans.

The selectivity also stinks. Comcast, a serial worst company winner infamous for poor service is left unmentioned while social media somehow qualifies as "a monopoly" and the equivalent of Store Brands in Amazon is somehow monopoly abuse?

manigandham3• 7 years ago

Yes, the real backlash is people's trust in the media. Of course the media will never write about that.

kitotik2• 7 years ago

Don’t discount the gentrification issue. In places like Austin, San Fran, and West LA the “techlash” started when small businesses and non-tech workers could no longer afford to pay rent in their city, and their culture was pretty much replaced.

PorterDuff• 7 years ago

I was just musing about what makes a tech company more likeable.

Personally, I made money for years using Microsoft products, find Amazon quite useful (living in small towns) and just see Google as irritating. But then, if the internet were reduced to USENET, email, and maybe a curated list of serious websites like online banking, I'd be fine with it, and probably better off in some ways.

asark• 7 years ago

Personally, I made money for years using Microsoft products, find Amazon quite useful (living in small towns) and just see Google as irritating. But then, if the internet were reduced to USENET, email, and maybe a curated list of serious websites like online banking, I'd be fine with it, and probably better off in some ways.

You're not alone in this thinking. The vast bulk of the Web is of marginal benefit, or harmful, and I think in the end it's going to contribute to taking us (humanity) to a very, very bad place.

JohnFen8• 7 years ago

I made money for years using Microsoft products

My too, but that doesn't mean that Microsoft products are appropriate or desirable for me for personal use.

ddebernardy• 7 years ago

The chart is very misleading. Instead of charting rank year on year, Axios should have charted the actual reputation, and then placed a few household names next to them so they're more comparable.

https://theharrispoll.com/axios-harrispoll-100/

Facebook's score (58) is basically in the dumpster category, a notch behind Comcast (61.4), Bank of America (60.9), and Goldman Sachs (60), though still several notches ahead Trump Org (50.1), Philipp Morris (49.4), and the US government (48.6).

The other tech giants are within a few points of each other: Amazon gets 82.3, Microsoft 79.7, Netflix 77.3, Apple 76.4, and Google 75.4. Amazon is in the same category as Disney. The other 4 are comparable to the likes of Coca Cola, Procter and Gamble, Unilever, Nike, etc.

freewilly1040• 7 years ago

“Microsoft lost on search because they were so distracted by getting sued by the government” is a dubious take I've never heard anywhere else.

dalbasal3• 7 years ago

As an aside, FB's continued success, while having such a bad public image is astonishing.

They obviously have a moat, a very literal network effect. But, FB also has lots of competition (more than google, amzn, & msft anyway) and the type of product that should be substitutable.. with some combination of twitter-wechat-HN-or-whatnot. Social network, seems, at least to me, like something that lends to rising and waning popularity. They're not embedded in businesses or hard to turn off in any way.

It just seems that negative user opinion of FB should be a bigger deal than it would be for amazon of msft.

I dunno how to square this circle.

icelancer• 7 years ago

As an aside, FB's continued success, while having such a bad public image is astonishing.

The public image is a bunch of people who want them to be bad, not actual consumers. The media has narratives it drives and a bunch of nerds here hate them for legitimate reasons. The average consumer does not care and never will.

dalbasal3• 7 years ago

I disagree. The average FB user is opinionated about all sorts of things. I bet you if you polled random people on the street, they have an opinion on FB... and I bet it has gotten worse in the last few years.

bhauer• 7 years ago

The Axios Harris poll [1] as a general matter is pretty interesting. I am surprised at Amazon's position among the tech firms.

[1] https://theharrispoll.com/axios-harrispoll-100/#2019-ranking...

rchaud• 7 years ago

Microsoft is more B2B than B2C compared to the other companies, so it makes sense that they're barely ever in the news cycle. They've done a good job of creating separate identities for their Office, Azure and Xbox brands, so bad PR on the Xbox side won't adversely impact the company's reputation as a whole.

blueboo• 7 years ago

...says Axios, an outlet infamous for obsequious coverage of the wealthy and well-connected. In Tech, Microsoft is old money, thus this puff piece.

Just this year Microsoft's Outlook service had a massive breach, leaking ~800 million passwords. Their flagship product, Windows 10, is infamous for randomly blocking people from working. The recent October automatic update even went ahead and just deleted users' files. Remembebr Windows Phones? Remember Bing? MSN is still live... so I guess it outlasted Google Plus.

I guess since its efforts in social media are a whisper of a joke, that by default they're "winning" ? More likely it's just Axios being Axios.

meanwhile .. https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/, http://www.millwardbrown.com/brandz/rankings-and-reports/top..., and any other extant brand ranking shows Microsoft pretty far from the top

al2o3cr• 7 years ago

I just last week had to deal with customers that had locked-down computers stuck on IE11 and hit some JS that used unsupported features.

IE11 was released after the relevant features were in common use in the Javascript community, but Microsoft was still in its "the web is better with our proprietary extensions, trust us" mode so they aren't in IE11.

They can't upgrade their browser because IE11 is the last browser version Microsoft supports on their Microsoft operating system, because they want users to upgrade.

They can't use an alternative browser because they're in a security-sensitive industry with policies written in the Old Days when running third-party software was marketed as "dangerous", including by Microsoft.

They don't want to upgrade operating systems because that means a huge software spend to Microsoft, plus migrating all their other software, POS hardware, etc.

The point being, none of these are things Microsoft is doing today. But they're all decisions they made in the past, and the consequences of those decisions are still making people's jobs harder.

tracker14• 7 years ago

Edge is MS's current browser... IE11 was an incremental release over IE10 and several years old at this point. Most browsers update very frequently. IE never did.

Maybe you need to look at whoever locked said computers down to ONLY support IE? Chrome and Firefox are both better options at this point. It really isn't MS's fault that an organization can't be bothered to update their software for what, 4 years now?

WorldMaker4• 7 years ago

IE11 was well after the "web is better with our proprietary extensions" days. It even tried to disable add-ons and extensions entirely by default until (enterprise) backward compat anger forced their hand.

For IE11 (and 10 and Edge in either direction around it), Microsoft was firmly stuck in a "WebKit/Blink treadmill" where they had to run twice as fast to try to keep up and almost succeeded (until they gave up recently, RIP EdgeHTML).

Most of rest of these complaints sound like your customers should stop hitting themselves in the face.

Microsoft Is Winning the Techlash

Related Stories