And what if you're younger than that? If you're in your 20s or younger, you probably just don't care about Microsoft -- though you might not get why the older folks get so frothy about them. But know that your luxurious apathy is because an older generation considered Microsoft's offenses to be capital crimes -- and meted out punishment accordingly.
Microsoft proves that in technology you can get away with being predatory for a while -- maybe even a long while -- but not forever (at least not in a free society). And once the world moves against you, those that you so aggressively bullied will cheer your demise: you will never recover until you accept that you have failed your customers and violated their trust. Very, very few technology companies have gotten to a point of such vilification and recovered (indeed, the only example I can think of is IBM). And while I may be too early in calling it, I dare say that Oracle is (at long last) at that point or approaching it rapidly -- and I fully expect the same conversation to be had about their (coming) lost decade...
Oracle and IBM want to make money, period. They'll run their products on a competitor's platform if they can get a bite of the pie, they don't care. Further, I'd guess 7/10 geeks that "hate" oracle have never used their products and might not even understand what they do, it's just part of the hatred of really really successful companies. (That's part of it too, whenever a powerful and successful company actually competes, people tend to hate it.) I'm not going to defend them but when Oracle sued Google, I don't think there was ever an intention to make Google go away, they just wanted a cut of the action, it was all about money. Read up on what MS did to Digital Research and Lotus, MS wanted to "cut off the air supply," they refused to see a world where those companies could co-exist. It's just different, MS has wanted to kill the competition.
How come they don't port most apps to other platforms? Office on Mac is the only serious one I can think of.
Microsoft is only a failure if we expect them to build an ever more powerful monopoly with no possibility of escape. They may be trying to do that. Instead they have a large and solid business which is still very cash flow.
Tell me of Microsoft's failure when the profits of Google or Facebook surpass the profits of Google.
But look underneath, and you find failure in every attempt Microsoft has made to branch out of their existing businesses, except for the Xbox.
Mobile? Lost to Apple and Google. Music? Lost to Apple. Instant messaging and identity (.net Passport)? Lost to Facebook. Tablets? Lost to Apple. There are countless examples like this.
Given all those failures, that nice cash flow will only be sustained until the Windows monopoly is replaced by something else. Windows 8 is Microsofts desperate response to something that threatens to do that.
DEC was hugely successful in its day, but was a failure in the 90s because they couldn't manage the transition from minicomputers to PCs.
Also I am less convinced than others that Microsoft is flopping on everything. Azure is certainly a good start for example.
Seriously?
Azure is what - 4 years old? It's still yet to see significant adoption outside places that were already .NET/Windows shops.
Until that happens it's little more than another defensive play by Microsoft attempting to protect Windows revenue.
(Yes, I know it can run Linux VMs. Again - is anyone outside .NET shops using it?)
Slide to unlock was not a common place feature before it came out on the iPhone despite the prevalence of touch screen devices. It is hard to argue against the fact that the implementation was indeed unique at the time.
I can say just one thing and clearly demonstrate that it is your history that is revisionist: Neonode N1m
Apple has always made it very clear that they are quite content having a small slice of the overall market, just as long as they occupied the _best_ part of that market. They tend to be elite snobs, who seem to be fine with 90% of the market running linux netbooks as long as 10% are running Mac Laptops.
If Netscape has sued MS and won an injunction a lot of people would have cheered. Which brings up the old 'who's most like MS in mobile today?' question...
Microsoft made a netscape clone and gave away the product for free. Google made an iOS clone and gave away the product free.
Besides, Android device manufacturers effectively "pay" Google for Android in search traffic (or reduced revenue share from search traffic).
Actually google pays the android device manufacturers, not the other way around.
From what I've read on some blogs they never give numbers showing their profit or loss from Android, and looking at the situation from the outside I'd think it's more likely they're losing money on it at the moment.
.... you mean like using a near monopoly in search to finance paying manufacturers to use Android?
However once a corporation reaches a certain size, or perhaps in the process of reaching a certain size, corporations and other social tribes seem to acquire remarkably similar characteristics - the company becomes an ecosystem within which it is possible to thrive without actually serving the long-term interests of the company or customers at all - the corporate culture changes to one in which the most important achievement is to do well within the company, and others outside the company become a remote concern.
Perhaps this is inevitable when a company reaches the size of say Apple, Amazon or Microsoft - all of which have in their different ways abused their market position, and abused their power over smaller companies and competitors in order to make more money. They may not have broken the law very often, but they are all profoundly anti-social in their behaviour. All have tried to lock their customers in to ecosystems over which they have complete control (iOS, Kindle, Windows/Office), all have abused their power over their partners to make unreasonable demands, and all have ignored the long-term interests of their customers in pursuit of profit. They do this because they can, because no-one is stopping them, and because as a collective entity what is safest is for them to stamp out all competition anywhere - to completely dominate the marketplace (at least in the short term, ignoring that this is impossible in the long-term).
Perhaps that's just a natural outcome of capitalism, but as we have stronger limits in other areas of corporate malfeasance (for example regulations on pollution), we do perhaps need limits on the power of these larger companies in the marketplace which are stronger than antitrust laws (which seem to be unused and out of date at the present time).
We've seen Apple morph over the last 10 years (as MS did before it against IBM) from scrappy underdog to dominant corporation, and the transformation means that now they feel happy to arbitrarily ban partners from their devices (e.g. Google Voice, Kindle in-app purchase), sabotage their own production partners (e.g. Samsung), gouge partners with arbitrary licensing (iPod connectors), and ignore the effects on their users, or indeed on their own long-term survival. They are different from the Microsoft of the 90s (perhaps less cut-throat, a little less predictable), but in important ways are similar, and they're storing up the same sort of long-term resentment which is now undermining Microsoft in the consumer space. For example by banning all transactions on their devices which don't involve giving Apple a cut, they annoy both their users and their partners - the only entity this action serves is Apple, and that only in the short term.
The MS hate that was in the 90s/early 00s just doesn't exist any more. What should worry MS far more is that these days so many programming articles and guides just assume you are working on a Unix system. Windows is becoming irrelevant to the elite. It's a bizarre phenomenon given that MS is still dominant in the OS field that has been gaining serious traction for the last 3 or 4 years.
Also SQL Server is good. Very good. And cheap, very cheap compared to the other good DBs. While MySQL and Postgre are alright, in reality they really are quite bad compared to SQL server in terms of overall polish and quality. I got reminded of this the other day tracking down an excessively poorly performing query, fixed in MySQL by an index that MS SQL would have effectively just done for you.
And don't even get me started on how many business run exchange. Ugh.
Hatred for Microsoft doesn't exist any longer? Says who? I believe it runs much deeper and stronger than you realize. I haven't purchased a Microsoft product in well over a decade, and that "purchase" was a PC preloaded with an OEM license of Windows that I had no way of not buying. My loathing for Microsoft was sown over decades of the most user-hostile, winner-take-all, I-will-rip-off-your-head-and-shit-down-your-neck corporate culture I've ever witnessed. Bryan calling Microsoft "predatory" is being kind.
I'm not sure what "OS field that has been gaining serious traction for the last 3 or 4 years" refers to, but if you're talking about desktop computing, they are doing exactly the opposite of gaining traction: http://twitpic.com/a31jis They aren't just becoming irrelevant to the elite; Microsoft is rapidly becoming just plain irrelevant.
How does C#'s popularity debunk Bryan's entire argument? A lot of companies still use Windows (for now), which means a lot of people use C# to develop applications for those computers. I don't see how this debunks much of anything.
SQL Server is good. Is it better than MySQL in some ways? Sure. What are the chances I'd select SQL Server instead of PostgreSQL? Zero percent. So that's a false equivalence right there, but that's besides the point. The reason people use MySQL or PostgreSQL instead of SQL Server is that you don't need Windows. Why tie yourself to a user-hostile company that's only going to charge you ad infinitum upgrades for a malware-ridden operating system? Even if SQL Server were heads-and-shoulders above MySQL/PostgreSQL, people would avoid it because you can't get it without Windows.
As I said, Bryan really nailed this: you're either burned so badly by Microsoft that "hatred" doesn't even begin to describe your feelings, or you're apathetic because the world has moved on and Microsoft continues to pretend like they live in the 1990s. With Ballmer at the helm, steering Microsoft towards seemingly inevitable obsolescence, Microsoft appears destined to eventually join Wang, Sun, RIM, Nokia, and the other dead or soon-to-be-dead. It didn't have to end that way, but reaping what you sow is generally the way the world works.
Microsoft is to this day, beyond pervasive. I have over a decades worth of experience in data analysis, systems analysis, business intelligence and software design and I have never been in a big corporate office that does not use exchange, Outlook is de facto, period.
Clearly then all of those desktops are windows boxes.
With the release of MSBI as a competitor to all of the top flight BI suites that pretty much comes bundles with MSSQL... Watch this space - MS will be ubiquitous in BI within the next decade, I am an expert in the field and I have zero doubt about that.
The simple fact is that MS is still the 'safe' (define that as you will) choice for the dinosaurs that run corporate IT... The world you assert as real right now is a in my opinion a far future possible state, nothing more.
What do you propose as an alternative to the hundreds of thousands of mid-sized companies who use Exchange/Outlook now?
Regarding the BI, I think you're mistaking me for another person in this thread, I don't know much about that, nor do I have an opinion. I'm just saying that Exchange is unique and there is nothing out there that can replace it without making very different trade-offs in the way your IT infrastructure is set up.
If yes, how can you say that they are 'similar' except for the very most basic point that users can send email with them, much like both a Lamborghini Murcielago and a Ford Model T are both 'cars'?
If no, why do you suggest them?
At least they'll know the authorities are requesting the data...
> Do they think they can secure their email servers better than Google can?
Just because someone secures their servers better than you can doesn't mean you automatically have to trust them with your data.
Let's assume for a moment that I have the safest vault in the world. According to your reasoning, the logical thing to do would be to put your valuables in my vault? Gosh ..
And even if you do trust Google with your sensitive data, do you also trust all their employees that might have access to it? http://gawker.com/5638874/david-barksdale-wasnt-googles-firs... And Google is a rather big corporation, if anything were to go wrong, they are notoriously hard to hold accountable.
> Are they going to refuse to hand over data if requested by authorities?
Well, they do not necessarily answer to the same authorities as Google does, so in some cases, yes, absolutely.
> Let's assume for a moment that I have the safest vault in the world. According to your reasoning, the logical thing to do would be to put your valuables in my vault? Gosh .. No it wouldnt, silly argument really. You have less than zero rep.
There aren't any enterprise alternatives even though there should be one.
For instance, if RIM had half a clue and a nickel for every bad idea they've executed on they'd have built a messaging platform to compete with Microsoft.
It's obviously too late for this now, but there aren't many companies that people would trust their email to.
Should I have taken a closer look at GA? Thunderbird isn't the easiest to use, but I like how it's easy to work with shared IMAP folders.
But don't waste your time with Zimbra, really
That is a terrible symptom for their case. In that long term that is what will kill them. They ignore the geeks and people who eventually end up promoting technology.
For example, looking at some open source projects (say Redis), a Windows version is not even supported. Most just assume you have 'gcc' and 'make' installed and will compile the project that way.
Now they are trying to appeal to the cool kids, they got Erik Meijer, they have F# but it is just not enough.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/interoperability/archive/2012/04/26/...
The major issue I see MS having is one of perception. For many long years they had "not invented here" blinders on. They have (for the most part) moved past that.
Take a look at the Web Platform Installer next time you're working on a Windows box.
MS isn't going away (like they tried to do to so many of their competitors) but it may never be the same again. I don't see how Windows 8 can be a big enough win to be what they need it to be; they have set the benchmark as windows everywhere, not a plurality of windows. Really, the interesting question is what does Ballmer's successor do to shake it up and get the ship back on track. He could reset "normal." He could spin some stuff out (internet and games could/should be on their own.)
I think this is because IT is being moved out of the enterprise. I don't think it was ever a smart fit so more and more companies are moving to "off the shelf" solutions, SaaS, etc. The best programmers are going to startups or freelancing. The people still chugging away in big firms writing code are essentially the COBOL programmers of the late 90's: just trying to grab cash as long as it lasts.
SQL Server is good to, and the price point comparison is correct, pending the changes being made for SQL 2012, which may change the pricing advantage somewhat.
Today, the tools are keeping folks on the platform. That's dangerous to Microsoft's well being.
I remember when Novell had an absolute lock on server software, the alternatives were all jokes, and yet one day they'd completely disappeared from the landscape, not a single server remained.
When people jumped to NT, or scrambled to Linux, there wasn't much time to respond.
What killed Novell was that their product was perhaps too good, it was frighteningly fast and extremely durable even under the worst conditions, but not good enough because it couldn't run general purpose applications like the other OS options could. Like you say, the only thing keeping them there was file sharing and when people moved past file sharing and on to other things, they were dead in the water.
What will make Microsoft disappear is the industry moving beyond email and groupware and "office apps" and instead to something else. What that is, maybe we just don't know yet.
I remember wrestling with BTreive settings on a client's NW 3.1.1 server to make Solomon (their accounting software) play nicely with ArcServe (the backup software). There's something I'm glad to not have thought of in years.
It wasnt too long ago when I was a hardcore Nokia fanboy that forced my whole family to use Nokia-only, eagerly waiting for the next Meego phone, despite the lack of apps and user community.
You say that as though it's a contentious thing?
They were past that point even before the Sun acquisition. Hell, when were they ever innovative like MS was in their heyday?
Per-unit licensing, bundling, including the browser for free (which, BTW, screwed Spyglass out of any browser-related royalties).
(Thanks for reminding me of Spyglass, shudder.)
I suspect the real complaint was that Microsoft wasn't terribly innovative. Few things in tech are. The key is to steal from the best, and implement well. While it's arguable that Microsoft's technical implementations weren't all they could have been, the combined reach of their tech + business model worked very well, from the PoV of business success and spreading their "ecosystem" to borrow a more recent term, for most of 2-3 decades.
If you need proof of Gates' technical genius, I recommend Joel Spolsky's "My First BillG Review"
> Then I sat down to write the Excel Basic spec, a huge document that grew to hundreds of pages. I think it was 500 pages by the time it was done...
In those days we used to have these things called BillG reviews. Basically every major important feature got reviewed by Bill Gates...
Considering that we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier, he must have read it the night before...
He was flipping through the spec! [Calm down, what are you a little girl?]
... and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.
"Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don't understand."
"This history is SURPRISINGLY accurate. Rick Weiland and I (Bill Gates) wrote the 6502 BASIC."
(that whole blog is awesome if you're into 8-bit CPU's, by the way, and who isn't?).
I can't tell from the quote what your stance on this is, but I think history vindicates the viewpoint you ascribed to Gates.
Can you imagine a serious general purpose OS shipping without an OS today? The idea is ridiculous. Doesn't that then make Gates/MS' decision in this area innovative and forward-looking?
The problem wasn't that MS was bundling a free browser. The problem was when Microsoft forced PC builders to not only include Internet Explorer but explicitly forbid them from including another browser as part of their offering.
Additionally, Microsoft artificially integrated IE into Windows and then tried to claim that the two were designed to work together. It was easily demonstrated that Windows continued to work fine after un-bundling IE.
"Can you imagine a serious general purpose OS shipping without an OS today" should read "Can you imagine a serious general purpose OS shipping without a browser today".
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/19/peggy-no...
“The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.”
one of the first pre-prints of a book that made Wired famous (by Douglas Coupland).
Of the causes, of course the DoJ suit was in 1997, but the massive bureaucracy and its problems and C quality managers existed in 1993. Just nobody cared because of the boom times. I think a lot of the perception of Gates come from PR control and marketing.
[1] Say in a "degrees of turn per month per employee in total head count" metric of some sort.
Three things happened to Microsoft (IMHO):
1. The DoJ suit in 1997 was a serious blow to Microsoft inertia. Speaking as nothing more than an observer, it seemed that Gates lost his way. He simply didn't know what to do. From this I get the distinct impression he really believed Microsoft wasn't doing anything wrong and things like bundling a browser with the OS were just "innovations";
2. Microsoft became too hierarchical combined with more B and C managers. Once you don't have A managers in a software (or any tech) business it seems like it's all over. Nothing rots from within so deeply and completely as poor management; and
3. Ballmer had and has no business being CEO of a software business. This isn't simply due to him being a manager rather than an engineer but that certainly doesn't help. Gates was a programmer and actively participated in tech reviews in his heyday. Ballmer is the Carol Bartz of Microsoft. It's simply taking longer to kill Microsoft from within than it took Yahoo.
As far as stack ranking and these other things go: on the face of it I consider them symptoms rather than the root problem. The root problems are:
1. Microsoft, as an organization, is deathly afraid something will kill the Windows/Office golden goose;
2. Everything Microsoft does is done from the perspective of furthering the Windows/Office cash cow. It's why you hear Ballmer describe tablets as "just another PC form factor". He sees them as simply a means to an end and that end is selling licenses;
3. Microsoft is at the mercy of hardware OEMs that are shortsighted enough to run themselves into the ground taking Microsoft with them;
4. There doesn't seem to be any central strategy (beyond sell more Windows/Office licenses) or innovation; and
5. The "backwards compatibility" crowd lost out to the "breaking changes" crowd, which hastened the switch to Web-based applications.