Microsoft, Past and Future

http://daringfireball.net/2014/02/microsoft_past_and_future

by locusm • 12 years ago

325 199 12 years ago

jitl• 12 years ago

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

NDizzle• 12 years ago

It's going to take a hell of a lot from MS in order to have someone like me buy back in.

I'll present one of the other perspectives.

I was all-Microsoft, from MS DOS up through Windows Server 2003. Late 90s MCSE, nothing but MS. Most of my time was spent building and maintaining NT4.0 installations and then migrating to 2000.

I got tired of keeping pace with the amount of changes in all of the services somewhere between Server 2003 and Server 2008 and have since jumped ship.

Now I use entirely open source software and a mix of AWS instances and dedicated servers in various parts of the country for heavy lifting. (I work with multiple small companies rather than one large company that would benefit from the perfect AWS deployment.) This is after having spent time and personally maintained dozens of machines in half a dozen different data centers stretching back to 1998.

It's going to take a hell of a lot.

csmithuk10• 12 years ago

I did the opposite. I was a Unix/netware guy for years. Netware fell off a cliff and so did commercial Unix. Left me with Linux and FreeBSD.

Whilst I rather like FreeBSD, when I have to throw an architecture together that will survive over a decade, Microsoft wins every time. They're the only company which provides certainty. RedHat are close but their support sucks.

spiderPig• 12 years ago

That doesn't sound like a good habit to have in this industry, things change and software evolves. Android's first few versions sucked..a lot for instance. Heck, most the of the early versions of OSS suck. Are you saying there should be a constant rate of change? If you're a programmer, you should really try coding on Visual Studio 2012/.NET/F# and C#. It's a breeze. Very smooth compared to Eclipse.

temuze• 12 years ago

Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world. The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device.

That sounds more like Google to me!

23arboo2• 12 years ago

Microsoft can can do in the enterprise, they are entrenched pretty deep!

gnaffle8• 12 years ago

Microsofts enterprise business is founded on the fact that everyone runs Windows, so no, that doesn't work well in the long run (ask Novell).

stormbrew8• 12 years ago

No company today has reach or influence anything like what Microsoft had during the golden era of the PC. Not Apple, not Google, and not Microsoft itself.

I think Google is pretty close, really. They obviously don't have an operating system for laptops or desktops that everyone uses, but using a computer without Google products is something that people just don't really do anymore. iOS, Android, OSX, Windows, Ubuntu, etc. no matter what you're probably using something Google wrote on it.

Which is really a very old-school Microsoft strategy brought up to date to the early 21st century. Google recognized that the OS doesn't matter anymore and Microsoft continued to believe it was everything.

csmithuk10• 12 years ago

using a computer without Google products is something that people just don't really do anymore

This is rather naive. In certain circles yes but by far the majority of people use just their search.

stormbrew8• 12 years ago

Is there some particular reason to exclude that? Because most of those people who 'just' use their search use their search a lot.

zerohm• 12 years ago

This is rather naive. In certain circles yes but by far the majority of people use just their search.

So you are saying a vast majority of people don't use gmail, google maps, or youtube. I'd venture to guess a vast majority of people use at least one of those things on a regular basis.

gnaffle8• 12 years ago

Google recognized that the OS doesn't matter anymore and Microsoft continued to believe it was everything.

I think they recognize all too well that it matters, which is seen by the massive effort in developing and supporting Android, Chrome OS etc. This is just Googles version of Microsoft giving away IE.

stormbrew8• 12 years ago

I think they do these projects more out of a concern of being shut out of other OS' the way Netscape was effectively shut out of Windows. And that shows in which of those platforms they've placed the most effort: the one where their competitor is the most likely to shut them out.

antimagic• 12 years ago

No, not really. It's still exceedingly easy to make Google a bit player in your life. For example, I use Apple gear for my home computer / phone / tablet (although I have a custom AOSP tablet for work - we flash our own firmware for it though, so it's not really google-y). I use Google for maybe 5% of my searches, I only use GMail for work, and quite frankly we could switch at a moment's notice to another email solution), and I only use Google Maps when I want to look at a map on my work PC, which runs linux.

Apart from the 5% of search that I find I need Google for, the rest is very easy to switch out. Compare that to the world of computing in the 90s. Your computer needed to be able to read FAT32. Your web site needed to work well for IE. There was only one valid office suite out there. Most peripherals only came with Windows drivers, shutting everyone else out of the fun. Indeed one part of the rebirth of the Mac was the recognition that peripheral driver support would have to be done in-house, rather than relying on 3rd parties to provide Mac drivers for their products.

The Microsoft dominance of the 90s made computing on competing platforms difficult. Google does not have anything like that level of domination / lock-in.

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

I predict Android will enjoy a period of dominance that will be remarkably the same as Windows. Android will dominate mobile devices, plus a few other areas like maybe cars, appliances, TVs, some wearables, and the random embedded things that used to run Windows CE and Windows Embedded, very much in the way Windows dominates PCs. Probably, like Windows, for decades.

The question is whether that will matter the way Windows mattered to computing. I would have expected, for example, a lot more people who write software for the enterprise to start making tablet apps. They're not. I don't know if this is a wave that is late coming in, or if vendors think touch Web apps will be good enough (which they are not, for anything that is popular in an app store), or if that kind of dominance just doesn't matter as much anymore.

Android is a pretty sweet tablet OS, and I could see there being a lot more of it where PCs are serving as office productivity nodes. Tablets have the potential to to change the workplace for the better: Users not tied to heavy PCs or laptops in cubicle workspaces, etc. But it's slow to take off.

onli• 12 years ago

The world is in need of high-quality, reliable, developer-friendly, trustworthy, privacy-guarding cloud computing platforms.

That's the thing for me: That doesn't work anymore. Privacy-Guarding destroys that. Normally, I would fully agree that this is a good vision for Microsoft, continuing to be on the Desktop (especially corporate), trying to be on other markets and failing mostly, but becoming a big cloud player. But for me, the cloud is dead, and the NSA killed it - I try not to use it if it is not really helpful and without obvious privacy issues (like http://rsspusher.eu01.aws.af.cm/, appfrog was fine for that, I still think that even if it predates that thought). And I know I'm not alone with that attitude.

Maybe that doesn't mean that the cloud is dead, rather that there is a minority for which it is. I'm not sure how to predict the influence of the surveillance on the techological future. But what it means for sure is that for me and a few other guys, a Microsoft being a big cloud player would be as dead as it was before. We will see whether that matters.

smokinn2• 12 years ago

What about recycling the "private cloud" into something actually useful?

Microsoft has amazing expertise into taking any computer a 3rd party provides and making it work with their software. What about providing "cloud services" that can be guaranteed to never exit your own corporate firewall? I imagine this is going to be a huge need in the near future. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it were a standard EU regular within 5 years.

This seems like an amazingly huge opportunity they could capitalize on. Become the standard software cloud solution of all software the way they they own email in the enterprise with exchange. Plenty of companies are large enough to own their own racks of virtualized servers and would pay good money to run well integrated Microsoft software on them.

arethuza2• 12 years ago

I think you might be straining the terminology just a bit by referring to cloud services installed inside a corporate firewall. What would make that different from traditional internally deployed applications like SharePoint?

"Plenty of companies are large enough to own their own racks of virtualized servers and would pay good money to run well integrated Microsoft software on them."

They already do - that's where a significant proportion of Microsoft's revenue comes from.

tempestn• 12 years ago

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

Anyway, but experience with Azure was deep rather than broad, but it was enough to give me a strong belief that if this represents the great hope for Microsoft's future, things aren't looking so bright.

gnaffle8• 12 years ago

I think it is spot-on right up to the conclusion, which I disagree with.

The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device.

I don't see how Gruber can come to this conclusion unless he has suddenly changed position and thinks the open web will eventually win out over native apps.

The problem, of course, is that for a company that wants to be Microsofts size, they _need_ to own the platform, because the platform owners have an incentive to limit their dependence on you and make sure that their cloud services work better on their platform. iMessage and Hangouts? Integrated. Skype? Not so.

The only way to "own" the platform owners is to have an essential, popular product that customers demand. As much as Microsoft would want to, they don't have such a product (perhaps Office in the business market, but that's about it).

Edit: Wanted to add "How Microsoft Lost the API war" which is another interesting take on the platform thing and how Microsoft lost it: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

netnichols• 12 years ago

I don't see how Gruber can come to this conclusion unless he has suddenly changed position and thinks the open web will eventually win out over native apps.

How does his statement have anything to do with 'open web' vs. native apps? How many native apps do you use that have no 'cloud' component whatsoever?

Gruber isn't talking about Microsoft making a bunch of web applications, he's talking about them becoming a key player in the data services arena, i.e. offering a platform for providing data to both web applications and native applications alike.

23arboo2• 12 years ago

Speculation: Azure will get a decent priority now that Nadedlla is CEO. Azure has been playing catcup with aws for quite some time now.

josteink5• 12 years ago

Azure has been playing catcup with aws for quite some time now.

And it shows. A year ago I wouldn't even consider Azure as a platform. Now I'm starting to wonder if AWS is worth it.

They've been iterating like crazy.

corresation• 12 years ago

One angle that I expected Microsoft to eventually leverage is playing to their traditional strengths -- diversity, openness, freedom (and what that meant for the platform. GPUs, storage, media -- Microsoft and the Windows platform made that evolution happen): The classic montage through the computer age sort of thing, culminating in the Microsoft platform of today. Instead they fell for the trap of cargo culting off of what Apple was doing, essentially becoming a desperate wannabe, the Microsoft store being the ultimate demonstration of how utterly self-defeating that can be.

Microsoft is still great -- even outside of raw financial might, they continue to make great software and tools (as one aside, it is quite remarkable how enormous of an impact Bill Gate's trustworthy computing manifesto had) -- but from an influence perspective they have had little for quite a few years.

no_gravity2• 12 years ago

"Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world"

There already are servers sending data everywhere. For example the servers of Google, Facebook and Wikipedia. How would Microsoft convince those guys or new companies to get rid of their solid, free and open stack and pay for Microsofts closed stuff?

This is much different from "A computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software". Back then, there where no computers on desks and homes to begin with.

csmithuk10• 12 years ago

Depends on what you mean by data.

Google/Facebook mean social and crudely document shaped data. Wikipedia means data that looks like encylopedia pages.

Microsoft mean ANY data you want to shift with the same languages and tools across all platform form factors which is why people buy into the ecosystem. Even going back to 2004, I could knock out an app (in C++/C#) that worked on the desktop, on the web and on mobile devices. In fact I did and it's still in use today managing private couriers with minimal code changes.

josteink5• 12 years ago

How would Microsoft convince those guys or new companies to get rid of their solid, free and open stack and pay for Microsofts closed stuff?

They don't have to. They can keep on using their free and open stack, but moving to Azure instead of using Google compute engine or AWS.

no_gravity2• 12 years ago

Then Microsoft would be just another provider of virtual servers. I dont think thats a good future goal for a 300 billion dollar company.

Conversely to Gruber, I see Microsofts future in client software and hardware. Apple and Google have put computers in every pocket. But only the consumption part of it. The race for the production tablet has just started. And with the Surface Pro, Microsoft has the first product out there.

beloch• 12 years ago

What I find surprising is that, in the process of writing a historical review on Microsoft, anyone would ignore the fact that MS has repeatedly identified areas of profit, moved in, failed spectacularly, iterated aggressively, and ultimately become dominant, at least for a time. e.g. What killed Netscape?

Microsoft's surface tablets are signs of big things to come. They're currently too expensive for what they are, but they could find a huge niche. They're portable tablets meant for content creation, not mere consumption. If you want a tablet that will let you draw, take notes, etc. as easily as on paper, iPads aren't even close to the current Surface. The surface pro would have been exactly what I wanted in undergrad physics for a lecture-hall machine. Many artists probably feel the same way now.

Tablets have long been too underpowered to tackle real creative tasks. The surface proves that the hardware has changed, although the cost is still high. I expect the next few generations of surfaces to get cheaper and more refined rapidly. People who love tablets are soon going to want something more than a glorified phone, and the Surface is going to be the go-to option.

Yeah, so MS might dominate the content-creation/student/artist tablet niche. Big whoop. Well, success in any consumer hardware niche might do for MS what it did for Apple. Namely, make them a huge pile of cash and jump-start their supply-chain so they can move into other areas. It might not play out this way. Apple has been looking for ways to make the iPad more content-creation friendly beyond just marketing them as such. Still, iOS on an iPad is a huge step behind Win8 on a Surface pro for creative tasks right now. All MS has to do is keep iterating the Surface and avoid another Vista-style PR blunder with Win9.

simonh3• 12 years ago

MS currently has an advantage in digitizer features on the Surface. But if a swing like this was going to happen, for the reasons you suggest, it would be happening right now.

Furthermore, even if such a swing does begin, you are assuming two things: Firstly that Apple will not respond effectively to MS establishing such a niche. Secondly that Android will also fail to compete for that niche.

The problem is that all the innovative new mobile creativity apps are currently coming out on iOS, digitizer tech or no. Apple has never subscribed to the creation/consumption world view, or even used the term 'consumption' to my knowledge. It sounds like something people died from in the Middle Ages. Their flagship day one launch apps for the iPad were all creative apps - Garageband, Pages, etc.

sz4kerto3• 12 years ago

It's very difficult to change fundamental things in your well-established, popular OS. See Windows x86/x64, see the difficulties of redesigning iOS in version 7, see the disappointed people who buy an Android hybrid and try to use it as a laptop replacement. For some reason, I have all kinds of tablets at home -- iPad Air, Surface 2 (with RT), Sony Xperia Z, ... Currently I feel that it'd be a shame if the Surface didn't become more popular, even the RT version is so much more that the other two platforms. I am not speaking about Metro, you can love it or hate it -- but the fact that it has proper support for keyboards (with shortcuts and everything) and also it's much more gesture-driven than the other two platforms. Obviously it's severely lacking apps compared to the other platforms, but the fundamentals are simply great and I'd be sad to see this platform disappearing. As I said, it's features will not be easily and quickly integrated into Android or iOS, as 'responding effectively' is not as simple as it might seem.

boomzilla• 12 years ago

I think Android will always play catch up due to the fragmentation. Great quality apps take a lot refinement and it's near impossible to do when you have > 10 main devices to build/test against.

I think MS took the right approach with the Surface/Metro, they really needed to reconsolidate their consumer software/hardware stack to provide a good user experience.

"When you care enough about software, you'll make your own hardware" -- Alan Kay.

gnaffle8• 12 years ago

Microsoft already has a huge pile of cash. That's not the problem. The problem is that the execution is good, but not good enough. Compromize and difficult choices (Surface vs Surface RT) everywhere.

They released the music kit for the Surface, but where are the vast amount of great music production / performance apps from various well established companies such as Korg, Moog, Cubase, all of which are available on iOS?

sillysaurus2• 12 years ago

Which problems do Surface tablets solve?

For example, iPhone completely changed my life overnight, mostly due to its navigation features and ability to look up phone numbers.

I think Surface will only be dominant if it solves a problem for people. So, which problem does it solve, and why is it useful for people?

klipt• 12 years ago

What problem do Surface tablets solve?

Art problems, apparently. Gabe of Penny Arcade seemed pretty positive about the Surface Pro:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/02/22/the-ms-surface-pro

dingle_thunk• 12 years ago

Apple were not the first company to create a phone with navigation features.

Surface is a tablet which can also run Photoshop, AutoCAD, MATLAB, Visual Studio, Flash, and whatever other weird legacy apps are kicking around. It can multitask. It has a proper digitizer. It has a kickstand and a very innovative cover. Yes it's not a laptop. No it doesn't have the Android store. That doesn't mean it's useless.

(P.S. just noticed my hacker news account is 1337 days old today. wheee.)

nivla• 12 years ago

For me its the form factor + the power to use a full blown OS when travelling. I don't have to lug around my laptop anymore. On my way I can get some work done; when feeling tired I can switch to the Metro, play games for sometime and get back to work again. I find it to be really productive. I have also set it up so when I am back home it automatically syncs the changes to my laptop (using BitTorrent Sync).

codeulike4• 12 years ago

Contractor problems. I have a second hand Surface Pro. Its much lighter than a laptop, but more powerful than the laptop I had before. It runs Visual Studio, Eclipse and all the other tools I need very well. When I'm at a client site or at home I can use the USB port to dock into monitor, keyboard and ethernet. When I'm in meetings I make notes with the pen. When I'm in between on the train I can use it in tablet mode or mini-laptop mode.

I figure that in a few years I'll be able to do all of that on a smaller 8" form factor - even better.

JonoW• 12 years ago

Combining 2 devices into 1. This is useful for many people. While there are compromises with hybrids, sometimes the end result is good enough for people, e.g. camera phones.

josteink5• 12 years ago

iPhone completely changed my life overnight, mostly due to its navigation features and ability to look up phone numbers.

I'm not disputing that the iPhone changed smartphones forever, but looking up numbers was something existing smartphones had apps for, long before the iPhone.

emehrkay• 12 years ago

I have a first generation Surface RT and I want nothing more than to put Ubuntu on it and get real work done. Since that is not possible, it goes unused.

k-mcgrady• 12 years ago

> "Yeah, so MS might dominate the content-creation/student/artist tablet niche"

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

whitef0x2• 12 years ago

I would like to add to that, quality of design that third party apps and native apps on Mac OSX seem to have (in general) is much higher; this brings the more 'artsy' and student vertical onboard. UI/UX has obviously been a large part of OSX for quite sometime, which is obviously aided by Apple's minimalist design philosophy.

Moving from OSX to Windows I have noticed a large lack of ease of use and good UX flows in a lot of third party apps.

raverbashing• 12 years ago

One thing that makes a good difference in the iPad is using it with a Stylus

jrs993• 12 years ago

It's already kind of happening.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3gG8TlUVyU

many designers look at the surface pro and find that it has very appealing features, and it's only going to get better.

hrktb• 12 years ago

There seems to be an underlying assumption that in a year or two, the Surface will have fixed all it's main flaws while the iPad and android tablets will stay more or less the same.

One can argue if the iPad is a glorified phone or not, but I think Apple isn't moving any slower than Microsoft, and it is reasonable to expect a more capable iPad in the years to come. Although it's third party hardware, stylus support has come a long way, even if it might not be as good as the Surface digitizer, it might as well be good enough for average users.

The race is on, and I wouldn't bet my shirt on Microsoft taking the lead anytime soon (in 5 or 10 years, I don't know)

ZeroGravitas8• 12 years ago

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

timje1• 12 years ago

Internet Exploder, stalling human progress since '95.

ancarda2• 12 years ago

The Web is/was a threat to Microsoft because if everything is a web app you suddenly have no platform lock in. I think Google foresaw this, or is at-least betting on it, with Chrome OS. Why would anyone use Windows; an expensive, proprietary, bug ridden OS when they can use Linux or Chrome OS to perform the same tasks?

DrJokepu2• 12 years ago

What I find surprising is that, in the process of writing a historical review on Microsoft, anyone would ignore the fact that MS has repeatedly identified areas of profit, moved in, failed spectacularly, iterated aggressively, and ultimately become dominant ...

When was the last time they have actually managed to pull this off? Maybe the Xbox? It was never dominant or an area of profit. .NET? Never dominant or a direct source of profit.

The days you are referring to are long gone. It's not the same company anymore and it's not the same world anymore.

jrs993• 12 years ago

Microsoft isn't even close to where apple was in terms of hitting a low.

octo_t• 12 years ago

Azure is ramping up towards something like that.

angersock• 12 years ago

Xbox, Xbox Live, Xbox 360... yeah, sorry, they pretty much perfectly illustrated that point.

Considering the early advantage Java had over C#, who seems to be laughing now? Business apps (you know, the boring 90% of software) seems overwhelmingly in favor of those two languages, with C# doing a bit better.

I think you're rather wrong.

Guvante2• 12 years ago

I don't know why you are saying the Xbox was never dominant. I don't think anyone could see the 360 doing any better. .NET is doing extremely well given the alternatives.

Azure is picking up speed fairly well too.

vailripper• 12 years ago

.NET is massive driver for their Enterprise business which is an absolute goldmine for them currently. So I'd say they're doing okay there.

cm2012• 12 years ago

Bing is also getting better and better. As an advertiser we're seeing more and better viewers and upping our bing spend significantly. Their reps are also great and showing up at conferences pretty often.

6d0debc0712• 12 years ago

I'm not seeing a large niche for them in content creation. If we were starting off with tablets being the dominant player; the thing that most people used and grew up with, then it'd be different. However, the content creation market is already fairly competitive, and the pain points this would solve over and above what's already there don't seem significant.

The questions in that regard seem as follows: Why would artists opt for a, relatively small, imprecise pen over something from Waccom?

Why would programmers opt for working on a small laptop analogue compared to a computer with multiple monitors?

Why would writers opt for this over a computer or a laptop?

I can see people writing a blog post on one, or sitting in a lecture hall with one - but even there, the advantage over an apple laptop; which is pretty light already; seems negligible.

Unless you have to travel a significant distance on foot. There it has the advantages that tablets always had: Light device, relatively good battery life.

But by and large, the competition for Surface in the tablet space seems likely not to be other tablets. It seems more likely to be the tools - some of which are, when you get down to it, fairly specialised - that people are already using.

Aldo_MX• 12 years ago

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

bovermyer• 12 years ago

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

programminggeek• 12 years ago

If you think the Surface tablets are overpriced, then you don't understand why Apple makes so much money when all the other computer companies are failing - profit. Without profit, it's hard to do interesting things.

The Xbox is quite successful, but it's a lot of work to make not a lot of money. Why? The razors and blades concept doesn't work so well as making a 30% margin on a product people really, really want to buy.

Spooky23• 12 years ago

The problem with that is that they cannot make Win32 a legacy product.

They tried to do so because you can argue that in the enterprise, iPad can deliver a better Windows experience via VDI than the garbage PCs that dominate the market.

Once I'm delivering a quality Windows experience to my users by turning the client device into a TV, the next step is to further simplify. That expense app? I can use VDI to deliver some awful Enterprise Software via IE9.... or buy a solution with an iOS app! Something like 40% of enterprise users are using a defined set of < 7 PC applications to do specific things. That's easy pickings for a mobile application, and a great way to reduce Microsoft spend -- which is a big black hole in every enterprise org.

The other issue is the channel. If they get real about hardware, they are screwing Dell, HP, Lenovo. That's a symbiotic relationship that generates alot of MSFT business.

shmerl2• 12 years ago

Netscape story? MS because dominant in browsers (for a while) because of the nasty lock-ins, not because of any positive iterating. Their own slowness became their downfall - IE didn't iterate for a long time, and when they realized that competition is way ahead it was too late for them.

MS mentality barely changed. Lock-in remains their primary strategy in many areas (it's well described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_...).

In today's world though it's only backfiring at them, because they have no domination as in the past.

amaks3• 12 years ago

Exactly. That's why I believe nothing will change in Microsoft with the new CEO, open sourcing of ASP.NET and other moves. It's simply not in their DNA to change and become fast followers. Lock-ins, closed silos - that's Microsoft areas of domination ever since.

cgh2• 12 years ago

Yes, exactly. And not just lock-in. For those that were around at the time, think of the IE5 tcp shenanigans to make IE seem "faster" when talking to IIS by messing with sequence numbers, sending RST instead of FIN, etc.

mratzloff• 12 years ago

No, that's revisionist history. IE 3 was a better browser than Netscape at the time, and IE 5 was much better than Netscape 4. CSS support, for example.

mwfunk2• 12 years ago

What you describe in your first sentence is absolutely their MO. I don't think anyone making any sort of serious attempt to understand Microsoft ignores that or is unaware of that. The whole uncertainty surrounding Microsoft for the last 10 years (fair or not) is the fact that that approach doesn't work for them anymore and hasn't worked in years, their lack of dominance in the mobile industry being the prime example of that failure, despite having a significant head start (likewise for tablets). Yet, in a lot of ways, they still to this day cling to that strategy. You cited Netscape as an example, but Netscape is the most recent example I can think of of this strategy working for them.

I actually want Microsoft to succeed; I want them to do much better than they have been. Microsoft does certain things really well that their competitors don't, and I would especially love to see more competition in the mobile and tablet space. Their own processes and business strategies seem to have calcified around 2003, which have since dragged down a lot of things that could have been great products.

Totally tangential, but this is ignoring the fact that they actually have been doing really well in the one area that you would think would be the only thing people care about: profit. But no one seems to care about that, even though I personally don't think that that profit is going to dry up anytime soon. They could keep going like this forever, and people would still talk about how they're dead or dying. I understand why this is, it's just unfortunate that simply being a successful business isn't enough to avoid being branded a failure.

mwfunk2• 12 years ago

Also, I think a big problem with Microsoft's strategy is it's based on attempting to replicate the same level of success they enjoyed with Windows and Office. Microsoft's strategy isn't to become a strong competitor, Microsoft's strategy all too often is to attempt to become the overwhelming market share leader. They see that things like Windows and Office enjoy 90-95% market share in their respective market segments, so new products are designed with that goal in mind (achieving monopolies rather than trying to simply put great products on the market and having those products compete solely on their own merit). This is why everything they make tries to be everything to everyone, but such products usually end up appealing to no one.

I think a lot of Apple's success (one possible example of many) is due to the fact that they consciously don't try to please everyone. In fact, they make many decisions about such things knowing full well that those decisions will turn off many potential customers and put a ceiling on their potential market share. Their goal is to make what they think will be very desirable products for some target audience, as opposed to making something that they think will appeal to every customer in every segment of the market. IMO, Microsoft is constantly forcing itself to strive for an ambitious but impossible goal that tends to water down whatever the original product vision was.

hifier• 12 years ago

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

zimpenfish• 12 years ago

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

CamperBob22• 12 years ago

   Steve Fucking Jobs said that (the desktop PC was dead and 
   innovation had virtually ceased). He was exactly right. 
   And who knows where we’d be today if Jobs and Next had not 
   been reunified with Apple the next year.

As a Windows user, I suspect I'd be about where I am today, except that I wouldn't have to install ClassicShell to get rid of Metro.

valleyer• 12 years ago

You don't think the success of the Mac over the last 10 years has pushed Windows to become better than it would have been?

carlio• 12 years ago

IE stagnated for a long time before firefox arrived to compete. I imagine that could have played out with Windows too, were it not for the success of Apple.

CamperBob22• 12 years ago

Honestly, no, not really. I can't think of any features from the Mac that Windows copied, that I personally benefit from.

However, Microsoft under Ballmer thrashed around trying to copy other things from Apple, things that did not belong on a desktop PC, and made life more annoying for a great many Windows users as a result. Like another poster above suggested, another five years of that approach would have brought Microsoft down to the lowest level Apple ever reached.

gfodor• 12 years ago

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

TorKlingberg• 12 years ago

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

rollthehard6• 12 years ago

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

codeulike4• 12 years ago

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

ZeroGravitas8• 12 years ago

Only if your data and apps are on that device you carry about, and not in the cloud so you can access them from both at once. And they just made the cloud guy CEO so he might be thought to favour that way.

mattmanser• 12 years ago

Enterprise don't have their stuff in the cloud.

codeulike4• 12 years ago

Even if everythings in the cloud, its still sometimes convenient to carry one device around - current state of work, open tabs, half written emails etc

JohnBooty4• 12 years ago

As mundane as it sounds, "enterprise" needs often involve opening a bunch of spreadsheets every day, and those are pretty painful on a 7" or 8" screen.

Xdes• 12 years ago

Hence the docking station. Full workstation when plugged in and 8" screen in meetings.

dewiz• 12 years ago

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

mmcconnell1618• 12 years ago

A personal robot in every home running Microsoft OS?

grrowl• 12 years ago

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

blahbl4hblahtoo• 12 years ago

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

quesera• 12 years ago

Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world. The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device.

Yikes. If anyone can find Microsoft-sized margins and volume in that business, it will be more destructive than an OS monoculture ever was.

"Cloud" is a low-margin high-volume business, perfect for players like Amazon and Google, with little boutiquey heroku bits thrown in to vacuum up the value-add-at-any-price edge case customers.

gtirloni2• 12 years ago

Microsoft doesn't seem to be dreaming about Windows/Office margins with Azure:

That’s why today we are also announcing a commitment to match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as compute, storage and bandwidth

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/04/16/the-...

forgotAgain• 12 years ago

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

bane2• 12 years ago

"Steve Fucking Jobs said that. He was exactly right."

Well it's good he said that, otherwise Gruber would twist himself into a knot trying to argue otherwise.

Though this is interesting

"If we include all iOS and Android devices the “computing” market in Q3 2008 was 92 million units of which Windows was 90%, whereas in Q3 2013 it was 269 million units of which Windows was 32%."

Actually doing the math, Q3 2008, Microsoft was about 83 million units. Q3 2013 Microsoft had just over 86 million units. So I guess it's still a growth? I'm sorry, revealing the actual numbers punctures Gruber's thesis. Rude of me.

I mean, nobody really conflated these categories when it was just Blackberries and video game consoles. Do I get to add Xbox units to this too?

Of course Microsoft missed the mobile boat and it's largely Ballmer's fault. That's well known and this kind of weird conflated analysis isn't insightful or interesting.

"Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world.

The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device."

Ugh, please no. Data transmission has been hopelessly commoditized and I really don't want an Apple or a Microsoft inserting themselves into a low margin game and trying to figure out how to make it a high margin one.

jasonpbecker• 12 years ago

I mean, nobody really conflated these categories when it was just Blackberries and video game consoles. Do I get to add Xbox units to this too?

Did Xbox or Blackberry serve as direct substitutes for traditional PCs? No. Have Android and iOS phones and tablets serve as direct substitutes for traditional PCs? Yes.

bane2• 12 years ago

Did Xbox or Blackberry serve as direct substitutes for traditional PCs?

Yes. If you don't think a Blackberry served as an entire mobile office, almost replacing PCs for most use-cases, for millions of road warriors, then you never had one or lived through that time.

The Xbox line has replaced PCs as both a gaming platform for millions as well as a media center and emulation platform for many many others. XBMC after all means "Xbox Media Center".

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

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

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

Microsoft's malaise is part real, and part illusion:

The illusion part is mostly obvious. Microsoft makes oceans of money. Heck of a malaise, right?

The real part of the malaise stems from Microsoft not being objective about itself. For example, Microsoft could easily make vastly more money if they looked at Windows as a legacy product and raised prices on the people who really need Windows.

Looking at Windows as a Product of the Future means they won't actually ship any Products of the Future, because that might contradict the dogma. That's a real malaise. That's what keeps the great ideas of the very smart people at Microsoft funneled through Windows product management. The new products that get through are mostly reactive, like IE, MSN, Bing Search, Bing Maps, etc.

The malaise is even more basic than "Should Microsoft be a consumer and enterprise business?" Dividing Microsoft that way would probably help, but fail to see the underlying cause, and that would leave the consumer part vulnerable to a continuation of what ails it now.

amaks3• 12 years ago

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

canistr• 12 years ago

In Canada, we have a campaign to "win" the Olympics called "Own the Podium".

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

dkrich• 12 years ago

I don't see why people always compare Microsoft to Apple besides the fact that they are two of the oldest and highest-profile companies in the technology industry. This comparison always leads to them making the false claim that Microsoft "missed-out" on mobile.

Microsoft has always been a software-first company. Their strategy has always been to create the OS and license it to hardware manufacturers and capture the largest share of the market. Apple began as a hardware company that chose to pursue a strategy of building its own software so it could control the entire stack, bottom to top.

One wanted to cast a wide net with limited quality control, the other wanted to produce products of the highest quality.

But here's the thing- neither is necessarily "wrong" and you can't possibly simultaneously employ both strategies.

As of today, Microsoft has a $297 billion market cap. Enterprise software sales (read the large multibillion-dollar entities that quietly purchase billions of dollars of Microsoft products without blog entries or TechCrunch critiques) aren't going anywhere for a long time. Anybody who works in one can tell you that.

What's more is that Microsoft actually has a large and growing number of evangelists for their mobile products. The claim that Prices come down, chips get faster. Software evolves. cuts both ways and should apply as much to Microsoft as to Apple, especially now that the mobile device market is "mature."

10feet• 12 years ago

I know, it is like comparing Apples and Oranges, two other similar fruits that are very comparable.

yoodenvranx• 12 years ago

The world is in need of high-quality, reliable, developer-friendly, trustworthy, privacy-guarding cloud computing platforms.

No, no, no, that is exactly what I do _not_ want! I want all my computing devices to work completely offline in all circumstances. I want to install programs to my local computer so Incan be shure that I still can use them if the company goes bankrupt. I want to be able to install old versions of programs in case I don't like a newer version...

In my opinion it is wrong to put applications to the cloud because then I become dependent on the provider of this service. For me the cloud should only be used for one thing: to synchronize data between my computing devices!

tsax3• 12 years ago

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

mathattack• 12 years ago

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

mwmeyer• 12 years ago

Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world. The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device.

Funny, that seems to be what dropbox is going for with their new datastore API

Microsoft, Past and Future

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