The biggest shift I've noticed in Microsoft in recent years is its support and push for open source, cross platform components and projects. It seems that there may be a paradigm shift towards selling tools and an integrated platform while providing more choice and making inroads into the open source comminities.<p>This is exciting for me because I absolutely love .net and friends, but I'm also a Linux engineer and lean heavily toward open source and cross platform technologies. In recent years I have noted that with the existence of mono and mono develop(xamarin) C#/F# is right on the verge of being an excellent choice for open source tools and projects. I've been lamenting the fact that Microsoft's early platform lock in approach has prevented .net from being a serious java alternative(or the alternative it deserves to be). Its nature stiffling the open source ecosysytem .<p>The outlook has been getting rosier over the past 2 years though. Now we have OWIN, ASP.NET vNext, MVC6, entity framework 7, F#, and a strange officially unofficial interest in mono. Projects on github! These are welcome steps in an attempt to boost relevancy IMHO.
Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it was amazing knowing that i could create an application simply by dragging and dropping some elements and writing some code. I never had to worry about things like gtk bindings and makefiles etc. The earlier version of visual studio started up in less then a second and I never experienced any lag. The killer feature was probably the combination of both an just-in-time interpretator and a full-blown compiler. I could simply click play and the app would run, if i need an exe, it would also export one. This feature put most modern "repl-based languages" and "test-driven development" to shame. A lot of people complain that vb 6 is not object-orientated enough, but remember, C is not object-orientated either, and it still tops the tiobe programming list. Windows is sorely in need of an Rapid application development framework. Although vb6 still installs on windows 7, a lot of its features are broken. I really miss having an IDE that doesnt get in your way, starts up quickly, and allows you to get things done fast. The argument that vb6 encourages bad programming practices etc. is not really that valid when the user is not an professional programmer. After all, would you rather teach your kids to code by teaching him about build tools and commandlines and gui bindings or would you simply give them an environment where they can create whatever they want in a fuss-free way? Now, lets just hope that microsoft isnt stupid enough to nerf asp.net web forms.......
> The holy grail for Microsoft would be getting developers to write new software for Windows again, putting Windows back at the center of a new virtuous circle.<p>And yet there is no currently properly supported way to write desktop applications for Windows! MFC = obsolete, WinForms = maintenance mode, WPF = Dead on arrival, WinRT = Metro only.<p>For all the people saying "web is where it's at", there are some things that are simply still best done on desktop. And native development in iOS and Android is still going strong.
(I think) it's not hard to understand where microsoft went wrong. Ballmer just doesn't seem to get where the industry is going. As evidence, this quote from the article:<p><pre><code> Indeed, Ballmer seemed to have no intention of leaving when he announced a
massive reorganization of the entire company in July 2013. Behind the scenes
he had also begun negotiating an acquisition that was meant to transform
Microsoft. He had become convinced that the company had to make hardware
too. The reason why goes back to his chart. The two companies which have
seen the greatest increases in the share of profits they take are Apple and
Samsung, particularly Apple, whose share of the technology industry’s
profits leapt from 7 percent in 2008 to 21 percent in 2013. To Ballmer, the
message was clear, and so, in December 2012, he began talking to the Finnish
smartphone-maker, Nokia, whose C.E.O., Stephen Elop, had worked at
Microsoft. There was a defensive reason for the deal as well as an offensive
one. Nokia was pretty much the only company left that was making Windows
phones. If Nokia went under, what would happen to Microsoft’s phone business?
</code></pre>
Apple and Samsung's phone businesses are entirely different. Apple is selling ios to the high and middle end market. Samsung is getting devoured from the bottom, because there is very little difference between android oems, whereas Apple doesn't need (or want!) the bottom. It's pretty amazing that someone like Ballmer wouldn't see that coming, given that Xiaomi and the other chinese competitors are running a classic competitive playbook on Samsung.<p>Stratechery has written about this at length, though I don't recall if it was clearly discussed in a single article or my mental synthesis from a collection. Either way, differentiated companies -- apple -- require completely different strategies than nondifferentiated -- samsung.
>I put the A-team resources on Longhorn, not on phones or browsers.<p>Hilarious. It wasn't the lack of an A-team resource on browsers, it was the lack of any team. Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing.<p>Microsoft's other big sin is counting on its hardware partners. They could have preempted the iPod, for instance, but they just hoped Creative and others would deliver a great experience, while they sat back and wrote the software and cashed in on licenses. Same for tablets. Tablet PCs were great in the 00s, and I loved using them. Except, they were clunky and had little mass appeal. Once again, MS just counted on its partners and never gave a thought to the full experience.<p>Also, the fact that Windows <i>still</i> is touch/pen unfriendly outside of Metro just shows they Don't Get It. Instead of working on some tech to make Windows work well across all its apps, they ditch everything and hope Metro will work. It's hard to imagine that anyone could be so myopic.
More oft repeated history apart from the later part of the article which discusses the present and the future direction.<p>"The holy grail for Microsoft would be getting developers to write new software for Windows again ", this necessarily isn't true. The developer go where users and money are. And users not necessarily go to devices which have lot of apps. This might sound like a chicken and egg problem, but look at amazon, if developers are writing software for its devices, Amazon is bootstrapping its devices with software. I take out the other devices, the desktop and servers, might not have as much impact as it may sound.<p>Second, Xbox, Bing, may sound looser, but they may be interesting in the next round of battle. The smart phone battle is more or less is over and it is not going to make much difference, but the future of the smart device fields will be another story, if only MS can concentrate on the future in coherent way.
There is a Macintosh in the background of the picture "JUST KIDS Gates and former C.E.O. Steve Ballmer at Microsoft’s offices in Bellevue, 1985."<p>Not unexpected given the date and the relationship between Apple and Microsoft at the time, but interesting that it shares the desk (albeit off in a corner) with the IBM-PC.
Realistically... the biggest reason for irrelevance is Microsoft's concept that an operating system should be a prime source of revenue. An OS <i>is</i> the garden you want people to come to so you have prime real estate to sell your wares. Charging admission works great if you're the only garden in town... and not so much if you're not. Microsoft is putting itself into this position by forcing the market to move into the other, more easily accessible gardens. It has very little to do with UX/UI or anything like that. Most consumers actually don't want to learn how to do anything new if they can ever help it.<p>I'm constantly amazed that all these "experts" haven't figured out what happened to the 800 pound gorilla. Quite simply put, other gardens that people could live with and easier to access suddenly showed up. The vendors making and selling their wares went to the place people were at or wanted to go to. Its simple economics and you can point directly to the people who decided that WGA was a good idea for killing MS. Piracy <i>itself</i> is what made windows dominant to begin with.
<i>> Around three-quarters of Microsoft’s profits come from the two fabulously successful products on which the company was built: the Windows operating system, which essentially makes personal computers run, and Office, the suite of applications that includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.</i><p>All of which are on quite shaky grounds with competition eating at them. MS know they can't keep these cash cows forever.<p>On the other hand, parasitic income that MS gets is just crazy huge: <a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/lawsuit-reveals-samsung-paid-microsoft-1-billion-a-year-for-android-patents/" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/lawsuit-reveals-s...</a><p>And this attitude doesn't seem to change, despite some cosmetic shifts like more usage of open source.<p>Such kind of companies better fall into irrelevance sooner than later. We need real innovators, not humongous parasites.
Bethany McLean is the best in business writing. The Smartest Guys in the Room was fantastic.<p>As for Microsoft: the adage goes that success has many fathers. Failure has even more. It would have been nothing short of amazing if Microsoft was as dominant now as it was in the early days of PCs.
A long but intense article. I read just to test my attention span. The result weren't good, but I managed to finish the article in a single sitting, albeit with a couple of YouTube video watches in between.<p>One thing I hold bitterly against Microsoft is their abuse of monopoly. During the time they were kings of technology, there was little progress in Browser market, OS market, both PCs and phones. But I believe Microsoft has learnt their lesson, and under Nadella, the company is going to take the community along with it.
Impossible to read on my phone. Single page print version is better:<p><a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/11/satya-nadella-bill-gates-steve-ballmer-microsoft.print" rel="nofollow">http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/11/satya-nadella-bil...</a>
How is it in this day and age a magazine like VanityFair can have such an awful UX on mobile:<p>- I can't read the article because some as keeps jumping me back to the top of the page a few seconds after I scroll<p>- the article font is tiny and hard to read anyway<p>- for some reason even though there is a large body of text, ios doesn't allow me to use reader mode
Microsoft has some of the most amazing products and many terrific engineers.<p>Unfortunately, it is also has some extremely negative associations, most of which have been earned and even, perhaps, proven.<p>* unfair and sometimes illegal business practices<p>* sabotage of innovative technologies when they conflict with Microsoft's monopolies<p>* eugenics<p>* empire<p>* surveillance state (Skype/NSA)
Microsoft seems to be a crumbling empire. They seem not even able to maintain their websites. Here is a message I got today from Microsoft Azure: "NO ACTION REQUIRED: We want to notify you of an upcoming maintenance operation to your Virtual Machines in West Europe, starting at 23:00 Saturday, October 18th UTC. Single instance virtual machine deployments that are not in availability sets will reboot once during this maintenance operation. We expect the update to finish within six to eight hours of the start time. Please note that Cloud Services using Web or Worker roles aren't impacted by this maintenance operation. This link contains additional information: <a href="http://aka.ms/vax58"" rel="nofollow">http://aka.ms/vax58"</a>. The link they give leads to a 404 error.