Google is poorly diversified and even Amazon is not as well diversified as one might think.
I wonder what falls in the "other" bucket. Visual Studio / MSDN come to mind. Perhaps Enterprise Services is split out from Azure & Windows Server. It looks like Dynamics might be reported separately from Office although I'd normally expect it to be grouped with it instead.
I think Amazon's apparent lack of diversification is actually a lack of granularity in the data presented. The real question is how diversified Amazon Products is.
- SQL Server
- Video games (Halo, Minecraft...)
- Hardware like mice, keyboards, hololens, ...
- Probably many others
The 18% other should be Windows Phone but it isn't.
I found Robert Gaskin's fascinating book on the history of PowerPoint and its acquisition by Microsoft in an HN comment a few weeks back and it's a fascinating read of that fascinating paradigm shift in productivity apps that happened in the mid-to-late 1980s (that Microsoft was able to play a hot hand in):
http://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bul...
They sent Lotus 1-2-3 and Visicalc packing. They destroyed WordStar and WordPerfect. Lotus Notes, Groupwise? Gone. They destroyed Novell. IBM couldn't even sell software for DOS/Windows. Borland? History. Netscape? See ya.
The only people safe from Microsoft's wrath were companies like Adobe.
Tower Records destroyed a lot of cool record stores.
Wall Mart destroyed a lot of neighborhood grocery stores. Lidl and Aldi did the same in Europe.
Barnes & Noble did the same for charming bookstores.
My point: it is not the winner that is ruthless, it is the game.
But in the case at hand it was a bit more than ‘the game’. MS broke the law multiple times and were at minimum deeply unethical in several other cases, and were held to account for it. Not enough in my opinion, but it was there.
Ultimately though they also made the right moves at the right times and their competitors didn’t.
Could you expand on that?
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that it's not against the law to be a monopoly, but it is against the law to abuse one's monopoly position.
What I'm hazy on is whether antitrust enforcement defendants are informed by the government that they're a monopoly prior to being charged with abusing said monopoly.
Is that the case, or no?
Did Microsoft break any laws that it wouldn't have broken had the government not decided that they were a monopoly?
If someone from the 80s or 90s got a time machine and skipped to today, one of their biggest surprises would be that Bill Gates is considered a beloved philanthropist rather than the personification of corporate evil.
Furthermore WordPerfect people were touch typists, users of function keys. In previous times these people were the typing pool. Now we don't have typing pools, managers and others that would have used secretaries worked out they could do okay by themselves in MS Word with its toolbar buttons to embolden text etc.
Sadly the touch typing WordPerfect crew that had ensured the DOS years didn't really make it to the new GUI ways of working. Their muscle memory and need to keep the fingers on the keyboard kept them at the WordPerfect level of working, much like how you have programmers using 'vim' instead of a modern GUI like 'Notepad', there was no perceived improvement.
I remember how lame the Wordperfect for Windows was, it was not performant and the last thing you need with a word processor is that feeling your computer could BSOD any moment. It was all wrong for the Windows world but, as mentioned, Microsoft had the jump on that, they could even build in features to Wondows to support what would become Office if need be, Wordperfect didn't have that under the hood access.
> If someone from the 80s or 90s got a time machine and skipped to today, one of their biggest surprises would be that Bill Gates is considered a beloved philanthropist rather than the personification of corporate evil.
The problem rather is that people have a short memory. I for myself have not forgotten.
The game Microsoft played was one of enclosures, monopoly-building, corporate warfare, bordering on corporate fraticide, and engrossment.
Mind, that's a fairly standard game across a whole slew of economic activities, within which I'm looking for (and seem to be finding) some common grounds. Software, operating systems, hardware platforms (chipsets), communications networks, broadcasting, print media, copyright cartels, transportation (road, rail, sea, canal, air), and the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors all seem to share that certain je ne sais quois.
It seems fundamentally dendritic.
It is how monopolies, fueled and protected by copyright and patent laws, who themselves are breaking the laws (anti competitive), work. You see, being a monopoly isn't against the law but abusing your overly dominant market position is.
> Lidl and Aldi did the same in Europe.
(There's no such thing as Aldi. There's Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud [0])
Hi, I'm from Europe. Aldi has 431 stores in The Netherlands, Albert Heijn 947. And that's probably nothing compared to what Superunie owns. [1] UK is a similar story. Lidl and Aldi are nowhere near the market share of Co-op or Tesco. [2] So... what did Lidl and Aldi do in Europe? Lidl or Aldi are nothing even close to a monopolist. Wall Mart is huge, but has healthy competition as well. [3]
Microsoft had virtually no competition in the desktop OS market from mid to late 90s until recent due to tablets and ChromeOS finally becoming a competitor. That actively stiffened the innovation on desktop in other related areas such as the browser market where everyone had to run dirty hacks in HTML and CSS to adhere to the defacto standard called MSIE. It was a horrible cesspit where the only browser you could reliably use only ran on one OS (Windows) and was also terribly insecure. And hey, it used to run on different OSes but Microsoft decided to quit those ports. The port they maintained the longest was for that 1% market share company "we're not a monopoly excuse cause Apple".
We didn't mention Intel yet. They're an entire different subject, another parasite who run in symbiosis with the monster of the 90s and 00s called Microsoft (or Mammon ;) [4]). Microsoft lies dormant now, as the market it had previously in complete control is marginalized by iOS and Android. Thank you, Apple and Google. And we shouldn't forget the wonderful work by KHTML/Konqueror team (which spawned Safari and Chrome), or Mozilla (and formerly Netscape) who initially was the dominant competitor of Microsoft in the browser space.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldi#Geographic_distribution
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_supermarket_chains_in_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_supermarket_chains_in_...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_supermarket_chains_in_...
Microsoft used astroturfing campaigns in newspapers and magazines talking up their products and talking down their competitors. These tactics are much more widely known today, primarily because MS.
Microsoft created all kinds of undocumented apis that enabled their products to function much better than the competition. This is illegal for monopolists to do. IBM was forced to document all of their OS APIs because they were a monopoly, so that application developers would be on the same level and able to compete with IBM.
Microsoft changed apis and functionality that somehow always seemed to break their competitors products, but not their own.
Microsoft dominated to such an extent, that they essentially were forced to bail out Apple so that they could have a fig leaf excuse that they weren't actually a monopoly.
Lotus notes: some good ideas but horrible outdated app
wordperfect/wordstar: not even close to matching MS Word's feature or ease of use
Novell: what did they make other than networking that ended up being a standard part of all machines and all OSes, not just windows
Lotus 123/Visicalc: did Visicalc ever make it out of text mode? Excel beat those be being a better product.
Borland: also got out competed. Their only product that didn't suck was they're dev products but they couldn't keep up with Visual Studio. They had one database product that took them year to try to update to be competitive and lost their market by taking too long.
None of that has anything to do with "wrath" of MS.
The 'wrath' of any company is one juggernaut leader at the top. Apple's 'wrath' was Steve Jobs and Microsoft's 'wrath' was/is Bill Gates.
As much as we like to state it otherwise, Bill Gates was ruthless at execution, and he was workaholic with no parallel. People aren't exactly replaceable, and by that definition what they bring to the table.
Oh wait, that's not what happened. Maybe some selection bias is going on?
I think the selection bias is 1980s companies because that was the context. (Linux is 1991, Java 1995, Google 1998, etc)
From the 1980s, the major software companies that's still alive today, you have:
Intuit (Quicken/TurboTax),
Adobe,
Computer Associates,
Autodesk
Adobe and Autodesk survived because Microsoft never entered the professional graphics editing market of Photoshop and CAD drafting. If Microsoft did try to compete, they still might have lost to Adobe and Autodesk but it sure helps when Microsoft ignores that market. (Microsoft sort of had a competing edocument standard of XPS to Adobe's PDF but that initiative didn't seem to have all of MS's attention behind it.)
Computer Associates (now CA Technologies) was this weird corporation that basically did a bunch of acquisitions of forgettable companies. I can't think of an instance where CA and Microsoft competed head-to-head. CA bought a database programming 4GL (Nantucket Clipper) in 1992 but the DOS based programming languages were already starting to die by then so MS Visual Basic for Windows didn't really compete fiercely with it.
Most of 1980s companies didn't survive, whether they competed with Microsoft or not. Microsoft did, but that doesn't mean it killed every other company that didn't.
But Microsoft competed with Apple, and Apple didn't die. Xenix - Microsoft's UNIX offering - went nowhere (though it wasn't even MS product, technically), and other Unixes still alive. In DOS times, there were pretty successful competitors to MS-DOS (of course, those died when DOS computing died, but I'm not sure this qualifies as direct competition).
It was a scavenger that extracted the remaining value from failing and failed companies.
I'm not saying it was bad for the ecosystem ;-)
>> MSIE? Dominates the world.
IE did dominate the world. Remember Netscape? IE was at like 90% in the early 2000's until Firefox showed up.
>> Java? Completely unknown
Never made much of an impact on the desktop. What's the most widely used Java desktop app? Was there ever one? Eclipse/Netbeans comes to mind.
For a brief period. So did many other short-term phenomena, from BASIC to MS Access to Clipper to Pacman. And now they are stuff for the museums. Except for Pacman, of course.
> Never made much of an impact on the desktop
So? It still survived competition with Microsoft - and, arguably, won on every platform except Windows, non-Windows .net use is still basically zero and Linux rules server world, so...
> What's the most widely used Java desktop app?
I honestly have no idea. Well, Eclipse of course, IntelliJ suite of tools, probably, but it could be some other apps are Java too and I just don't know it. The point is Java is alive and well despite competition from mighty invincible Microsoft.
Ironic, because these are just Java IDEs.
It's worth mentioning that Windows NT was their third try at a high-end OS, and it was the only one that was entirely homegrown.
First was Xenix, which was a collaboration with SCO and based on Unix code licensed from AT&T. Then, the government gave AT&T the go-ahead to commercialize Unix themselves, so Microsoft panicked and abandoned Xenix, eventually giving SCO full ownership.
To replace Xenix, Microsoft partnered with IBM to create OS/2. Ultimately, Microsoft and IBM fell out, and IBM ended up with ownership of OS/2, so that didn't work out.
But DEC was going through a bunch of turmoil at the time, so Microsoft took advantage of it and poached VMS creator Dave Cutler and had him create NT.
It's amazing how things worked out.
(just something I heard a couple decades ago, don't sue me)
I think that's just that the market has changed. Google has programming languages, operating systems and office suites, and they're all more complicated than the offerings of 30 years ago, but given away for free (with advertising).
There's no direct value in any of those. Google gets very little direct revenue from the things you list nor could they ever hope to transform any of them a significant revenue source in the event their primary revenue stream (ads) went into a downturn.
In my view, Chrome and Android are part of a defensive strategy. Imagine a Google without Chrome or Android. Microsoft and Apple (or someone else) would own the devices that users use to access Google services. They could easily choke Google off if they wanted to. Remember how Apple decided Google Voice should be a web app? As much as people say Google is vulnerable, it would be much more vulnerable. Chrome and Android are worth every penny Google spends on them even if they make zero revenue. Plus, with Chrome and Android, Google not only gets a seat in the table for discussions on how to steer the web forward, Google pretty much drives the discussions on how to steer the web forward. For all the talk about Microsoft et al. using sponsorship money to influence FOSS projects like Maria DB, it is far more effective to do things in house (Google Chrome) as opposite to paying an outsider (Mozilla Firefox).
They don’t have to do that for customers and platforms that use chrome by default.
Here's one way to squint: they'd have to pay a lot more if they didn't have Android.
Totally:
"As it happened, Gates's mother sat on the same charity board as IBM's chairman. She got IBM to talk to Gates with the promise of an OS for their underwhelming PC (which was nothing two kids in a garage couldn't have come up with – in fact, it perpetrated many of the flaws of the Apple II, which for its flaws was still very innovative for the time). Gates didn't have an OS, so sent IBM to talk to Gary Kildall of CP/M fame, but Kildall was not prepared to talk to IBM, so IBM went back to Gates. Gates was friends with the chairman of Seattle Computer Systems, who he convinced to sell him the OS for $50,000 – that bit is accurate. Gates did bluff IBM, but he then bought QDOS for Quick and Dirty Operating System from SCS." [1]
Rather, what people should realize is that back in 80s it was IBM who was the monopolist, and it was Microsoft who became the monopolist IBM once was. The smartphone and mobile markets [2] have smashed up the tech sector. Nokia, once a giant, is no more, and Microsoft is far less relevant because they missed the boat.
Regarding Windows NT, its interesting to note who Dave Cutler [3] was (one of the designers of DEC's OpenVMS, and a UNIX hater). Windows NT put a dent in the UNIX server market because it was a cheap alternative running on commodity hardware (the happy Wintel marriage), but in the end it was *BSD and Linux (or GNU/Linux) which replaced UNIX and partly Windows NT as Linux dominates the server market.
> [...] so Jetbrains hires Andy Ruben [...]
Andy Rubin.
[1] http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~ijoyner/Ian_Joyner/Pirates.htm...
[2] No source here, I'd just like to note its Apple iPod which created a cash cow for Apple. Its what caused the momentum (and cash) for Apple to start the iPhone.
> Rather, what people should realize is that back in 80s it was IBM who was the monopolist, and it was Microsoft who became the monopolist IBM once was.
This is true, but Microsoft only became the IBM of PC software. Intel became the IBM of processors. Cisco became the IBM of routers. And so on....
IBM was the IBM of everything, and at one point, was twice as big as every other IT company put together. Today's youngsters have absolutely no idea how powerful it was. (And after decades of failure, IBM is still almost a $90 billion company.) Microsoft never had that degree of power.
In the end, IBM's monopoly was split between a lot of different but less powerful companies, each with its own niche. Today, I think, only IBM's mainframe monopoly is left....
They didn't miss the boat, they got on a much earlier boat that wasn't quite going in the right direction. Some better touch screen controls and MS would have had the iPhone a decade earlier.
That, with the exception that Instagram is more of a "cool idea that caught on with a run-of-the-mill implementation" and had the luck of getting acquired else they'd still be looking for a revenue source, whereas technically what MS did was far more impressive (and with actual paying customers).
MS-DOS was before MS Word and Excel. It took a long time for Word or Excel to really gain ground against the market leaders, and arguably they weren't really dominant forces until they were packaged together as Office in the 90s.
Windows NT may have started development in the late 80s but it certainly wasn't released until the 90s and took a while to find success.
You also miss out on the main reason Microsoft was able to become a dominant force in so many fields; MS-DOS. DOS was the PC operating system from the 80s into the 90s, until Windows 95 finally took over, and gave Microsoft the money and position to do whatever it wanted.
None of the rest of its software suite would have become dominant without being built on top of DOS and later Windows.
Way back in my angrier days when I would have spelled Microsoft as Micro$oft The Evil Empire, I would have totally agreed with you.
I've since revised my opinion. The reason is counterexamples of other wildly software that didn't need operating systems to be successful like Intuit Quicken, Photoshop, Duke Nukem games, etc. If others can sell millions of copies without an os to run on MS-DOS, Microsoft itself can too. Also MS-DOS & Windows dominance doesn't guarantee success because MS Money lost to Intuit's Quicken.
For example, with MS Word, was it successful because of Windows or was it better than WordPerfect? Sure, Windows is a part of it but MS Word was actually easier to use and crashed less often the WordPerfect-for-Windows. Wordperfect-DOS wasn't WYSIWIG. Wordperfect-DOS required memorization of function keys F01 to F12 to bold and italicize. MS Word early versions[1] had obvious buttons for bold and italics.
Now that Microsoft is weakened by iPhone/Android and Amazon AWS, I think I'm able to look back at MS in a more detached perspective. I now think they did amazing work in the 1980s and 1990s which got later overshadowed by the ugly "browser wars" and antitrust lawsuit.
[1] https://tmft.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/krnl386_004.png
I'm not saying that the Office products were bad, nobody was going to buy software that totally didn't work, and I'm not trying to argue the relative merits of Wordstar or WordPerfect or Lotus 123 or whatever, but if you don't think the "home field advantage" of DOS and Windows is a big part of the success of Office, then I think you're in denial.
I remember that MS kicked off an office suite price war and that Borland and Lotus matched the low prices with their suites. MS Office still outsold Borland and Lotus when prices were the same. Borland Quattro & Approach and Lotus Ami Pro word processors were not enough of a differentiator.
MS Word and Excel were also the biggest sellers on Apple Mac and obviously, there was no Windows os there.
For laypeople, that may be fine. MS Word was atrociously bad for high-volume typing. Had family in transcription, and they could fly with WordPerfect, doing > 100 WPM. This was a combination of having external tools ("plugins", effectively, to do word expansion with macros), WP being DOS-based (faster screen UI/etc), and, to some measure, experience.
One family member got switched to MS Word on Windows. Well.. the whole department did. They suffered through an immediate drop to about 60% of previous productivity, and it took a couple of years and severe hardware upgrades to get most of the people back to around 80% of previous productivity levels.
Why switch? MS was bundling the whole offering and tempting the company to upgrade. The management of an 'integrated stack' was seen as attractive, and the massive drop off in dept-level productivity was accepted. Management still bitched that stuff was late, and quality dropped, but... hey, network admins have a bit less work to do, and some other dept saved a few bucks.
The bundling/integration of stuff on to the OS was a big selling point, even when it led to demonstrably poorer results for some parties involved. Cool! - there's a menu with a button to do some funky text manipulation. That only takes 8 seconds instead of "having" to memorize some arcane keystrokes. When the keystrokes are memorized, though, it takes .4 seconds to accomplish the same thing.
Totally agree. That's one of the reasons why law firms and their typists hung on to Wordperfect-DOS for a decade even after MS Word was mainstream. Very long legal documents that would choke MS Word worked fine in WordPerfect DOS.
When Windows 95 first came out, it crashed daily on my computer and friends of mine had the same experience. Sometimes it crashed multiple times a day.
I was young then and thought nothing of it. I just rebooted and played whatever game had been interrupted. But now I wonder how they got away with it.
Microsoft was excellent at marketing and when they achieved their monopoly position, they did an excellent job of shutting out competitors. By the late nineties the phrase "No one has ever been fired for buying Microsoft products" was a very popular phrase. But I wouldn't say I was wowed by their work. Windows 95, COM, MFC, etc... I don't see (or read) anyone thinking back on those days fondly.
It was perfectly possible to run Windows 95 without it crashing. I ran it for around a year before the launch (the Chicago beta) and it was very stable by the end IF you had decent hardware and IF you set it up correctly.
But the PC hardware industry wasn't very well developed in 1995, and there was a huge variation in products that took a while to shake out.
Bear in mind that Windows 95 was running on tens of millions of PCs that had never been designed to run it, and that had never been tested with it. A lot of the ones in the field were almost unique (because of variations in processors, RAM, graphics cards etc), and Microsoft had never seen many of them.
And they got away with it because people could get a PC with a good GUI and masses of compatible software for a very low price.
This is the second time recently I've seen someone on HN refer to this expression with a Microsoft branding.
The late nineties are a little too early for me to have had any awareness of technology politics. I never heard the expression you describe.
I did hear, many times, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". It seems odd that that would have been a later form of the expression than "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft".
The saying was based on the fact that IBM, like the 7th Cavalry, would ride in to rescue large accounts if they screwed up.
I never heard it said of Microsoft in the 90s because Microsoft was never a big proportion of anybody's spending. It sold to hundreds of millions of consumers and small companies, rather than Fortune 500 companies.
I did once discuss this with one of the Microsoft salesmen who handled giant corporations, and who had been hired from IBM. He said IBM tried to get 33% of a company's IT sending whereas Microsoft tried to get 3%.
Microsoft's original DOS spreadsheet was called Multiplan.
I'm impressed with he way the succeeded with different approaches: plenty of homegrown applications, some acquisitions, some joint ventures. Sure, there were plenty of projects that didn't work out, but the ones that did work out did really, really well.
That's like saying Apple's major revenue is still people paying cash in exchange for products — ads isn't a product, but a revenue model, an exchange currency that apparently people are happy to pay instead of money.
Btw, Google has 2 really successful operating systems, Android and Chrome OS. That they don't have much direct revenue from them is inconsequential for the topic at hand, because these operating systems ensure their continued dominance of the marketplace.
Microsoft genius was to control the market with its operating systems. Even if Office and Internet Explorer were good from a technical perspective, having their own merits, I'll always suspect that the tight integration with Windows, along with the deals Microsoft did with computer makers (possible because of MS DOS and Windows) is what killed their competition.
And now Google has taken that to the next level. To not see it is ignorant and unhealthy for the ecosystem. Because yes, Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.
The "ads" (uncapitalized generic word) is not a product but AdWords™ is: https://www.google.com/search?q=adwords&source=lnms&tbm=isch
AdWords is the system that advertisers log into to see their keywords campaigns, dashboards, analytics, pay with their credit-cards, etc. That's been Google/Alphabet's major cash cow.
Google wants other multi-billion profit sources besides AdWords. Google Cloud Platform is growing in revenue but I don't think they've publicly disclosed whether they are making significant profits from it yet.
Their X divisionp[1] is arguably tasked with finding more multi-billion dollar ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(company)
Just scroll through that list and it's going to get you amazed and marveled.
To be fair, Google has released number of products in many of the same areas as Microsoft but usually with different spin including Office, Sharepoint, SQL Server, Outlook and so on. With about 1/3rd of the size and 1/4th of the age, they have been immensely productive as well.
I seem to recall that MS Word at least drew on an existing wordprocessing system, though I can't pin that down.
I believe there may have been a word processor out of PARC itself that went on to become a product elsewhere. I don't know if that became or directly fed into MS Word or not.
And I'm really hazy on this, so don't take me too seriously.
The really young techies won't remember this since it was over 30 years ago but what Microsoft did during the 1980s in the software space was astounding.
The 1970s Microsoft was originally a "programming languages" company. They sold MS BASIC and MS COBOL.
In the 1980s, they added productivity apps like word processors and spreadsheets (Word and Excel). What's amazing is that they didn't acquire those from a competitor (like the later acquisitions of Spyglass for IE or Vermeer for MS Frontpage). Word & Excel were homegrown at Microsoft and Bill Gates hired Charles Simonyi to lead their development.
They added operating systems like MS-DOS and later MS Windows & Window NT. MS-DOS was an acquisition but Windows NT was homegrown by hiring Dave Cutler.
Nobody else replicated Microsoft's successful diversity in software. That included Lotus, Ashton-Tate, Computer Associates, Adobe, etc.
That's 3 very different areas of software : programming + MS Office + operating systems. All 3 were huge profit machines.
In the 1990s, they continued success with server-side software like SQL Server and MS Exchange.
To give a modern analogy, imagine Jetbrains just selling programming IDEs like IntelliJ and PHPStorm. And then Samsung comes along and says, "we need an operating system for the millions of smartphones we're going to sell" so Jetbrains hires Andy Ruben[1] to write the Android os for Samsung. And then Jetbrains decides that Android also needs a picture sharing app and hires Kevin Systrom[2] to develop Instagram. That absurd combination from one company is what Microsoft did in the 1980s and in that alternate universe, the Jetbrains owners would be multi-billionaires.
Compare that to Google where it's almost 20 years old and its major revenue is still AdWords. Diversifying revenue is not easy.
A comparable (and possibly more astounding diversification) in modern times would be Amazon's origins from selling books & CDs to selling AWS computation resources.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#His...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram#History