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[Izick]

I agree that Internet Explored 6 was complete shit, but at least they rectified that eventually. Hell, I don't care for it, but IE 9 seems like at least a fairly capable and somewhat attractive looking browser.

Sure, did MS fuck some things up and miss out on some shit? Of course, but they have been doing really well. Ever since the 360, they've seemed to really be doing things well. A lot of things are up in the air right now, and they could have the rug completely pulled out from under them (the 360's successor is going to be an odd beast, with MS giving up on first party games and not caring about exclusives anymore; and with Windows 8 alienating a lot of people, but also giving a true competitor to Android and the iPad) but for now they're doing great.

I think it's easy to be Captain Hindsight and look back and talk shit. Hindsight is always 20/20.

 

[Burai]

Always playing catch up is poorly in the tech field.

Is the correct answer. When things start passing you by, that's when the decline starts. It becomes ingrained in the culture - all your best people are trying to copy what everyone else is doing, and failing, whereas they should have created the technology in the first place.

That passage about the Bing team creating a great search engine and then spending their time just copying and bolting on Google features is so depressing. Who wants Bing to be Google from six month ago when they had the platform to make it Google six months in the future?

Windows/Office can and probably will decline in time. Someone will come out of left field with a business solution that bypasses the Windows PC and they'll have nothing to counter with. You've got kids coming through school and college who use and aren't afraid of alternatives to Wintel. They'll bring that culture into their places of work. BYOD is the biggest threat Microsoft have faced in a long time.

There's a great line in Steve Jobs' biography when they are developing the iPad and various execs are worried it's going to eat into MacBook sales and Jobs replies "If we don't cannibalize ourselves, someone else will." it happened to Sony, RIM, HP, Kodak and countless others and you can see it happening at Microsoft.

 

[Vulcano's assistant]

dat first comment on the site

 

[Izick]

It does now, to a small extent. The gaming division has lost huge amounts of money since it's inception, and has only recently become profitable. But those profits pale in comparison to their OS division.

They've spent a tremendous amount of money on Xbox/Xbox 360 and have only been able to recuperate some of it in the past few years. They're in second place (in total sales) despite a head start, they can't seem to get any ground in Japan and next gen could shake up things again (especially since they're giving a competitor a head start of maybe a year).

So indeed given everything I wouldn't call it a blazing success. If they manage to be profitable the next few years and establish its successor I'm willing to change my opinion though.

You're missing the point though. MS is in this for the long term game. If they can be profitable only slightly now, they have a chance to increase on that with the Nextbox. They already have a strong brand-name out there, and lots of fans of the product. It's all about the long-term plans.

The only reason that they're in second place is because the Wii was something that became a cultural phenomenon, and like other fads, died out with the mass market almost completely. I'm not saying it didn't have its games for the hardcore fans, but the mass market is long-gone now.

 

[railGUN]

dat first comment on the site

Did you expand the replies to it though? In particular, this one...

On the contrary I do think it's pretty darn close to accurate. I joined Microsoft eons ago and have seen it wither away from the inside. I was working on Longhorn when the decision was made to start afresh. In fact I was involved in reverting the codebase back to the Server 2003 release while trying to salvage as much of work as possible. C# was supposed to be a major part of the OS. Major parts of the windows shell were relying on managed code and they got to a point where it was not feasible to do so and the decision was made. The major features of Longhorn before the reset were WinFS and Avalon (what became WPF) and the whole OS extensively exposed to .net as a first class citizen.

I've been through several groups in the company and can tell you that while the culture in the company is not consistent across the groups, the few consistencies that stank across the board: stack ranking, business backed short term product goals trumping cross group collaboration as well proper long term solutions.

 

[ThatObviousUser]

I agree that Internet Explored 6 was complete shit, but at least they rectified that eventually. Hell, I don't care for it, but IE 9 seems like at least a fairly capable and somewhat attractive looking browser.

Sure, did MS fuck some things up and miss out on some shit? Of course, but they have been doing really well. Ever since the 360, they've seemed to really be doing things well. A lot of things are up in the air right now, and they could have the rug completely pulled out from under them (the 360's successor is going to be an odd beast, with MS giving up on first party games and not caring about exclusives anymore; and with Windows 8 alienating a lot of people, but also giving a true competitor to Android and the iPad) but for now they're doing great.

I think it's easy to be Captain Hindsight and look back and talk shit. Hindsight is always 20/20.

Hindsight is 20/20 but company's as big as Microsoft need to always be looking ahead. That's why this article is lambasting them. For years, they settled on coasting on Windows/Office sales and tossing out halfhearted copycat products, instead of leading. Last decade, Apple was a good example of a forward-thinking company. And as the article mentioned, Google and Facebook too. They started the trends, not Microsoft. Even the Xbox wasn't innovative in its own industry -- its primary contribution to gaming was leveraging Microsoft's resources for the internet.

Microsoft finally has a modern, cohesive design language to call its own and are facing a good direction. But it wasn't always that way, and that's the point of the article.

 

[Izick]

Hindsight is 20/20 but company's as big as Microsoft need to always be looking ahead. That's why this article is lambasting them. For years, they settled on coasting on Windows/Office sales and tossing out halfhearted copycat products, instead of leading. Last decade, Apple was a good example of a forward-thinking company. And as the article mentioned, Google and Facebook too. They started the trends, not Microsoft. Even the Xbox wasn't innovative in its own industry -- its primary contribution to gaming was leveraging Microsoft's resources for the internet.

Microsoft finally has a modern, cohesive design language to call its own and are facing a good direction. But it wasn't always that way, and that's the point of the article.

Apple definitely fucked shit up last decade with the touch markets. By the way, that sounds dirty. Touch markets. Anyway, they killed it with the iPhone, and then (the much easier to think of) iPad. They basically had the right design, but more importantly Jobs' crazy attention to detail and user-experience lead them to a golden age of usability and consumers.

Now it seems Google is the forward-thinker. Their problem though is that they seem to debut their products a few years too early for the public, and in far too rough of a shape for people to be interested in them as more than a passing idea. The Google VR glasses come to mind.

Microsoft seems to be doing very interesting things. Nothing groundbreaking, but neither is Apple these days. They have something that looks to be the first true competitor to the iPad, and the first tablet that looks like it could be a fully functional computer as well; it has a possible successor to what seems to be the most positive console to come out of this generation (360 is still selling), and it has an OS that is going to rival Android and the IOS. Things definitely look good now. Then again, the Surface could suck, the Nextbox could lose all its fans due to poor decisions (ala the PS2 to the PS3) and nobody may give a shit about Windows 8. It's all almost chance at this point for how far out we are on some of this stuff.

 

[kruis]

Microsoft finally has a modern, cohesive design language to call its own and are facing a good direction. But it wasn't always that way, and that's the point of the article.

A good direction? Windows 8 is a Frankenstein OS that will play well with MS's biggest customer base. The only reason a tablet OS is bolted to a desktop OS is because Redmond wants to capture the tablet market by leveraging their popularity on the desktop. But if customers would rather stick with Windows 7 or look elsewhere MS is in a world of hurt. It doesn't look good when some of MS' biggest fans are lambasting Windows 8 in the press.

 

[bean breath]

Silicon Valley>

 

[mattiewheels]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMrhoOHNOrI&feature=youtube_gdata_player

This is grotesque on so many levels.

 

[I H8 Memes]

You're missing the point though. MS is in this for the long term game. If they can be profitable only slightly now, they have a chance to increase on that with the Nextbox. They already have a strong brand-name out there, and lots of fans of the product. It's all about the long-term plans.

The only reason that they're in second place is because the Wii was something that became a cultural phenomenon, and like other fads, died out with the mass market almost completely. I'm not saying it didn't have its games for the hardcore fans, but the mass market is long-gone now.

Banking on being number 1 in the console market is not a smart move. It's a fickle industry. XBOX has yet to even achieve the #1 position. And being #1 across multiple generations is impossible.

They are #1 in the OS market, and that is where they make almost all of their money.

 

[ThatObviousUser]

A good direction? Windows 8 is a Frankenstein OS that will play well with MS's biggest customer base. The only reason a tablet OS is bolted to a desktop OS is because Redmond wants to capture the tablet market by leveraging their popularity on the desktop. But if customers would rather stick with Windows 7 or look elsewhere MS is in a world of hurt. It doesn't look good when some of MS' biggest fans are lambasting Windows 8 in the press.

Well, I have mixed feelings on Windows 8 but it's an important sign that Microsoft is willing to take risks again. The article goes into detail that innovative products would be completely axed if they even threatened to touch Windows/Office, now that doesn't seem to be the case. It will probably be a rough ride in the next few years but I finally have confidence in MS's ability to actually compete again. Who knows how long it will last, though.

 

[subversus]

Well, I have mixed feelings on Windows 8 but it's an important sign that Microsoft is willing to take risks again. The article goes into detail that innovative products would be completely axed if they even threatened to touch Windows/Office, now that doesn't seem to be the case. It will probably be a rough ride in the next few years but I finally have confidence in MS's ability to actually compete again. Who knows how long it will last, though.

what risks does it take??? it piggybacks on the latest market trends, but clumsily + they intend to close down the OS.

it's quintessential MS of 00s.

 

[D.Lo]

Or they were simply unable to leverage existing illegal monopolies to create more illegal monopolies anymore?

Microsoft managed to enter the video game industry with the Xbox, and dominated it with its successor. It fucked up it's operating system, and then rectified it with the best OS out there right now in Windows 7.

lol "dominated" by coming distant second and still not having covered the losses of the first Xbox and early 360 years?

 

[ThatObviousUser]

what risks does it take??? it piggybacks on the latest market trends, but clumsily + they intend to close down the OS.

it's quintessential MS of 00s.

Maybe, but it changes the core UI in a radical way. It clings to the traditional desktop, but just the fact that they've introduced a completely new UI is a sign of taking a risk.

I agree that the UI and goals of Windows 8 itself are chasing market trends, of course. But now Windows isn't an untouchable God. I think that's worth noting is all.

 

[hodgy100]

The Tech industry has just become more broad that's all.

Microsoft are as big as they always have been (if not bigger) in the desktop PC space.

 

[Vinterbird]

The Tech industry has just become more broad that's all.

Microsoft are as big as they always have been (if not bigger) in the desktop PC space.

But Microsoft needs to become relevant in the tablet space, since the desktop is going to die within a forseeable future, at least in the context of mainstream users.

Tablets/hybrid laptops will be the next step in computing, and if Microsoft doesn't hit it out of the park with Win8 and 9, and really show the way, someone is going to come in and take a massive, and important, chunk of the market by providing the next natural step in tablet computing, and banishing the desktop for normal users.

 

[nemesun]

The spark of inspiration for the device had come from a 1979 work of science fiction, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. The novel put forth the idea that a single book could hold all knowledge in the galaxy. An e-book, the Microsoft developers believed, would bring Adams’s vision to life. By 1998 a prototype of the revolutionary tool was ready to go. Thrilled with its success and anticipating accolades, the technology group sent the device to Bill Gates—who promptly gave it a thumbs-down. The e-book wasn’t right for Microsoft, he declared.

“He didn’t like the user interface, because it didn’t look like Windows,” one programmer involved in the project recalled. But Windows would have been completely wrong for an e-book, team members agreed. The point was to have a book, and a book alone, appear on the full screen. Real books didn’t have images from Microsoft Windows floating around; putting them into an electronic version would do nothing but undermine the consumer experience.

The group working on the initiative was removed from a reporting line to Gates and folded into the major-product group dedicated to software for Office.

Ouch.

 

[Cheebo]

MS gets a lot of negative articles like this, imagine if they were actually doing poorly!

What are you trying to say?

In the business world lack of growth IS doing poorly. A company that isn't growing is seen as a company not worth investing in. And Microsoft has had basically no growth at all for an entire decade. Thus the lost decade.

I mean look at Apple. Their last quarter results had everything up. Profit up, revenue up, sales of product lines were up. But it was seen as a bad quarter because to Wall Street it wasn't up enough growth as they wanted. Microsoft hasn't been up in years.

 

[Cipherr]

The spark of inspiration for the device had come from a 1979 work of science fiction, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. The novel put forth the idea that a single book could hold all knowledge in the galaxy. An e-book, the Microsoft developers believed, would bring Adams’s vision to life. By 1998 a prototype of the revolutionary tool was ready to go. Thrilled with its success and anticipating accolades, the technology group sent the device to Bill Gates—who promptly gave it a thumbs-down. The e-book wasn’t right for Microsoft, he declared.

“He didn’t like the user interface, because it didn’t look like Windows,” one programmer involved in the project recalled. But Windows would have been completely wrong for an e-book, team members agreed. The point was to have a book, and a book alone, appear on the full screen. Real books didn’t have images from Microsoft Windows floating around; putting them into an electronic version would do nothing but undermine the consumer experience.

The group working on the initiative was removed from a reporting line to Gates and folded into the major-product group dedicated to software for Office.

Ouch.

Yeah... assuming thats true, thats pretty damn messed up.

 

[Doffen]

what risks does it take??? it piggybacks on the latest market trends, but clumsily + they intend to close down the OS.

it's quintessential MS of 00s.

You are talking about Windows RT; this is not to be confused with Windows 8. A rookie mistake.

 

[Oemenia]

Is it wrong to call out that Vanity Fair are pretentious and hipsters?

 

[Lancehead]

Stack ranking seems like a terrible idea in a corporate structure that Microsoft has. Valve employ similar methods - stack ranking and peer reviews. But they don't have any hierarchies or "positions", so it works very well for them.

 

[maeh2k]

Here's a response to the article from Microsoft's corporate VP of corporate communications:

There are so many things wrong with this that I don’t even know where to start. I’ll leave the C# comment alone, since others have already zombie bashed Biggs for that one. Instead, I’ll focus on some equally other poorly reasoned points. Let’s start by simply dismissing anything that relies on Eichenwald’s piece in VF, where he pretends to be an expert on all things ms and performance management, cleverly neglecting to mention that nearly every company has a perf management system, and that all have plusses and minuses. In case nobody noticed, we don’t live in a Lake Woebegone or Pee Wee Soccer worlds!

I’m not clear what decade Biggs is talking about here, but let’s look at some numbers while Steve B has been CEO. How about:

•tripled revenue from $23 billion in 2000 to $70 billion in 2011.

•increased profits from $9 billion in 2000 to $23 billion in 2011.

•returned $194 billion to shareholders via dividends and stock buyback.

Hmm, those look pretty good. And what about products that sell, you know, like windows 7 and Office of all stripes, and oh yeah, hmm, I’m forgetting something…let me think… oh, got it! During the same period, Microsoft also created entirely new businesses, such as Xbox, the #1 gaming console in the world last year and Kinect, a pretty darn hot consumer electronic device. And, the company’s enterprise Server & Tools business grew significantly in the same time period, reaching $17 billion in 2011. Gee, lost has NEVER looked so good.

Finally, how do you square words like “sclerotic” with what we’ve done with Windows 8, the new Office, Widows Azure, the great reviews for windows phone, Kinect, Halo freaking 4 on its way, Xbox as entertainment hub, the social integration in Bing that makes Google’s SPY world look as cheesy as it really is and so on?

Hey, feel free to take shots at us. Call us out when we miss or mess up. But when you tell us we lost a decade, then look at the whole decade, don’t cherry pick a bunch of random things and call it good. Lost? Really? here we are, well out of the “lost” decade, with billions of customers and more coming and still, last time I looked third most valuable company in the world. And an epic few months behind us, and incredible set of products ahead. Don’t look now, but if this is lost, there are a whole bunch of companies trying hard to lose themselves for that kind of decade.

fxs

cvp corporate communications, Microsoft.

http://pulse2.com/2012/07/28/frank-x-shaw-responds-to-microsoft-lost-decade-articles/

Ouch.

Doesn't mean it would have been successful and it's not clear at what quality and price it could have been sold. And I doubt the publishers would have embraced it.

"Sometimes being early is indistinguishable from being wrong."


Amazon's Kindle only launched in 2007. How would that have worked in 1998?

 

[remnant]

Microsoft managed to enter the video game industry with the Xbox, and dominated it with its successor. It fucked up it's operating system, and then rectified it with the best OS out there right now in Windows 7. It has a semi-successful phone OS. It has a good future with the Surface, and Windows 8 should finally be a viable opponent to Android and the iPad. Yeah, what a shitty decade.

Wow. None of that is true. At all. The 360 is still behind the Wii. W7 lost marketshare to Apples OS, their phone is irrelevant compared to ios and android and they are years late to the tablet market.

 

[jey_16]

Was that article written in 2007? Doesn't mention windows 7 or Xbox at all

 

[Hari Seldon]

They seem to have a really destructive internal management process. Has there ever been a case where this curve rating system style has actually worked in the long term? It seems like there is some asshole consultant going around promoting this and it is just a fucking terrible idea.

 

[Daydream Sequence]

I left my first employer out of college when they shifted to stack rankings. It's one of the most idiotic forms of rating your employees in existence. Making your co-workers the competition instead of the actual competition is inherently fucking stupid.

The article fails though by glossing over where they have succeeded. They helped knock Sony from the #1 position in gaming all the way down to dead last and put Sony in a position where it's spent an entire generation attempting to copy all of Microsofts Successes.

What disgusted me most about Microsoft was when the Kin phones failed and then employees admitted it was sent to die so that the guy in charge of the Windows Phone 7 team would get more power within the company. What an incredibly stupid way to run things. All the Kin did was embarrass the entire organization.

Wow. None of that is true. At all. The 360 is still behind the Wii. W7 lost marketshare to Apples OS, their phone is irrelevant compared to ios and android and they are years late to the tablet market.

And yet at this point the 360 is generating tons of profit and is loved by third parties whereas the Wii is dead and shunned by third parties. I'm pretty sure Nintendo would love a taste of Microsoft's failure.

 

[shantyman]

This is an interesting article, but none of it is truly new.

 

[gcubed]

Here's a response to the article from Microsoft's corporate VP of corporate communications:



http://pulse2.com/2012/07/28/frank-x-shaw-responds-to-microsoft-lost-decade-articles/

well, at least it appears they are hiring young "hip" people to man higher up roles with the comment from the CVP of corporate communications. At least let him graduate from high school before you let him put out a statement next time

 

[Azih]

This article seems it might have been a whole lot more relevant in 2011.

While the information on stack ranking and the insider anecdotes of missed opportunities is good stuff the substance does not justify the tone or the conclusion.

There's just a hell of a lot of cherry picking going on and not only completely fails to account for quite a lot of success that MS has in fact achieved over the past decade it also paints a picture of a corporation unable to make bold choices at a time when it's been making nothing *but* bold choices. It's jarring.

 

[Hari Seldon]

MS has some wins but if they don't fix that corporate culture they are going to continue to have serious problems. I think Win8 is going to be a giant clusterfuck of a failure for them.

 

[SouthernDragon]

Here's a response to the article from Microsoft's corporate VP of corporate communications:

All I'm seeing is a lot of XBOX (which managed to tie the Gamecube and be actually competitive this generation) and OMG INCREASED PROFITS which... is expected in a boom sector.

Sure, perhaps they produced a few new things, but even fewer that had a good and positive influence on the rest of the industry.

 

[Azih]

All I'm seeing is a lot of XBOX (which managed to tie the Gamecube and be actually competitive this generation) and OMG INCREASED PROFITS which... is expected in a boom sector.

Sure, perhaps they produced a few new things, but even fewer that had a good and positive influence on the rest of the industry.

.NET and C# I would say have been successes.

 

[Cipherr]

Here's a response to the article from Microsoft's corporate VP of corporate communications:



http://pulse2.com/2012/07/28/frank-x-shaw-responds-to-microsoft-lost-decade-articles/

Doesn't mean it would have been successful and it's not clear at what quality and price it could have been sold. And I doubt the publishers would have embraced it.

Umm, you could explain away every single missed opportunity in the world with that sort of reasoning.

 

[Azih]

Umm, you could explain away every single missed opportunity in the world with that sort of reasoning.

Well it's more arguing against calling it a 'lost decade' not claiming that MS hasn't had any missed opportunities.

 

[ThatObviousUser]

And yet at this point the 360 is generating tons of profit and is loved by third parties whereas the Wii is dead and shunned by third parties. I'm pretty sure Nintendo would love a taste of Microsoft's failure.

There is no way Nintendo would trade the Wii's success for the 360's. The Wii generated a huge amount of profit for them since the first day, and still does with each system sold. It's floundering now but Nintendo increased their amount of cash on hand massively and are also about to introduce its successor.

 

[lupinko]

And yet at this point the 360 is generating tons of profit and is loved by third parties whereas the Wii is dead and shunned by third parties. I'm pretty sure Nintendo would love a taste of Microsoft's failure.

I'm sure Nintendo really cares about that especially with all the money the Wii printed for them.

 

[Daydream Sequence]

I'm sure Nintendo really cares about that especially with all the money the Wii printed for them.

Of course they care about it. Are you really intimating that they don't give a shit about posting huge losses and not being able to engender quality support from third parties? Good god.

There is no way Nintendo would trade the Wii's success for the 360's. The Wii generated a huge amount of profit for them since the first day, and still does with each system sold. It's floundering now but Nintendo increased their amount of cash on hand massively and are also about to introduce its successor.

And they're once again begging for third party support. There's no way Nintendo wouldn't trade their lack of success with third party support that Microsoft has.

 

[ReBurn]

If anyone would know it is Vanity Fair.

 

[commish]

Of course they care about it. Are you really intimating that they don't give a shit about posting huge losses and not being able to engender quality support from third parties? Good god.




And they're once again begging for third party support. There's no way Nintendo wouldn't trade their lack of success with third party support that Microsoft has.

I'm pretty sure Nintendo doesn't give a fuck about third party support if they are making enormous profits. Of course, going forward they may (rightly) believe that, in order to make those huge profits, they need better third party support.

 

[lastflowers]

I left my first employer out of college when they shifted to stack rankings. It's one of the most idiotic forms of rating your employees in existence. Making your co-workers the competition instead of the actual competition is inherently fucking stupid.

The article fails though by glossing over where they have succeeded. They helped knock Sony from the #1 position in gaming all the way down to dead last and put Sony in a position where it's spent an entire generation attempting to copy all of Microsofts Successes.

What disgusted me most about Microsoft was when the Kin phones failed and then employees admitted it was sent to die so that the guy in charge of the Windows Phone 7 team would get more power within the company. What an incredibly stupid way to run things. All the Kin did was embarrass the entire organization.




And yet at this point the 360 is generating tons of profit and is loved by third parties whereas the Wii is dead and shunned by third parties. I'm pretty sure Nintendo would love a taste of Microsoft's failure.

[IIRC from my team reading about the KIN]
They were contractually obligated to put out the phone. The reboot had already happened before the phone was sent out.

 

[Ether_Snake]

Must be a big time cocaine user.

 

[neojubei]

He threw a chair against the wall. “Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy!” Ballmer yelled, according to the court document. “I’m going to fucking bury that guy! I have done it before and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google.”

I can picture him doing that. Boy he had a bad day that day.

 

[Subitai]

A blogger at Forbes picked apart the article for focusing on the wrong things, but in the end agrees Microsoft has a lot of big problems. Although, those problems cannot be addressed by getting rid of stack ranking and Ballmer.


Forbes: Real Reason for Microsoft's Woes

But I was sorely disappointed. The article, despite the research and extensive interviewing that clearly went into it, entirely misses the forest for the trees. It is deeply superficial. It confuses effect for cause, spins the entire tale around caricatured larger-than-life personalities, and uncritically takes insider accounts of the politicized culture at face value. It only just stops short of being pure TMZ-style celebrity sensationalism. Unfortunately he is never able to rise above his attraction to the human drama, and the temptation to inflate its importance and make it the main plot (he would do well on Aaron Sorkin’s staff). His biggest failing is in what he leaves out: discussion of broader industry structure trends, which in my opinion are the real, if duller, story.

So ultimately, this amounts to little more than an eloquent hatchet job on Ballmer. The sort of thing that adds momentum to a lynching discourse but is ultimately an unimportant subplot. Ballmer is a minor part of the problem, and if replacing him becomes necessary, it will be a minor part of the solution.

This focus on human drama is a common pathology that rears its head when mainstream media (though I suppose, with my Forbes hat on, I am nominally part of it) tackles technology. Industry structure trends and analysis are boring. People-centric stories, especially “glorious leader” heroic narratives, are so much more fun to read and write.

But ultimately, they suggest a dangerous sort of path-dependent “it could have been different if only such and such key person had been different” narrative that gets its emotional power from more hopeful, but ultimately specious counterfactuals. Technological evolution is more robust than that.

Single individuals, sadly for those fond of human dramas, are never that important. Even really big personalities like Ballmer, Gates and Jobs are products rather than makers of history.

So what is the real reason for Microsoft’s woes? The answer lies in that boring old MBA subject of industry structure dynamics. There is less entertaining human drama in that story, but you get both a more robust narrative that is not so sensitive to the speculative impact of individual personalities, and (to the technologist) more interesting conclusions.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has very weak table stakes in the new battlegrounds (mobile and cloud, the two ends of the emerging computing world). On the mobile end, it has turned into a contest between Google and Apple, and Google is winning (the Nexus 7 is the most serious shot across Apple’s bows yet).

Ironically, Google is winning using Microsoft’s original winning horizontal strategy: a relatively open OS layer of the stack, commodity hardware based on increasingly open architectures, a new kid on the processing block (ARM) and an exploding market of software innovation much like the eighties world of desktop software.

Apple, to its credit, has managed to adapt its vertical DNA to this increasingly horizontally structured environment in the world of apps, taking advantage of the tighter usability constraints of mobile devices (compared to desktop computers) to sustain a walled garden app model, but ultimately, the economics are not in Apple’s favor. If it does not gradually open up, lower cost and more open Android models will win the day.

Microsoft has no credible offering at this end of the game. Google is out-Microsofting Microsoft.

 

[Daydream Sequence]

They were contractually obligated to put out the phone. The reboot had already happened before the phone was sent out.

Contractually obligated by the cell provider. The same cell provider that reneged on the promise to create special data packages that would in theory encourage people to buy a Kin.

I'm pretty sure Nintendo doesn't give a fuck about third party support if they are making enormous profits.

I'm pretty sure they do care. A lot.

 

[ElRenoRaven]

Damn good read. I believe it too based off just things I saw when I was an MVP there years back. You could see the decline starting then. It's a shame too because I always had a respect for Microsoft. Now days while I'm thinking about eventually buying a new computer here, I find myself more and more thinking about going with a mac over another windows PC. That's something I never thought I'd do.

 

[neojubei]

The death of the e-book effort was not simply the consequence of a desire for immediate profits, according to a former official in the Office division. The real problem for his colleagues was that a simple touch-screen device was seen as a laughable distraction from the tried-and-true ways of dealing with data. “Office is designed to inputting with a keyboard, not a stylus or a finger,” the official said. “There were all kinds of personal prejudices at work.”


Indeed, executives said, Microsoft failed repeatedly to jump on emerging technologies because of the company’s fealty to Windows and Office. “Windows was the god—everything had to work with Windows,” said Stone. “Ideas about mobile computing with a user experience that was cleaner than with a P.C. were deemed unimportant by a few powerful people in that division, and they managed to kill the effort.”

wow. i am going to save this article to my reading list and read more later.

 

[balladofwindfishes]

Of course they care about it. Are you really intimating that they don't give a shit about posting huge losses and not being able to engender quality support from third parties? Good god.

then they look at their international sales and they laugh all the way to the bank.

Their losses this quarter are lower than last quarter btw. They're making more money now, and with the release of the Wii U it'll skyrocket again. MS lost money during the hayday of the 360 and only in recent years, the decline of the generation, have they made any money at all.

You are talking about Windows RT; this is not to be confused with Windows 8. A rookie mistake.

The fact people can even be confused proves a failure of brand. It's not a good thing that consumers think the product does something it doesn't.

 

[Daydream Sequence]

then they look at their international sales and they laugh all the way to the bank.

No they don't. They fret over why they've lost so much core audience and why the past two years of the Wii have been such a disaster for them. Hopefully Nintendo aren't as blind to their mistakes as their fans appear to be.