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Steve Ballmer's Microsoft

dcurt.is

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Re: Steve Ballmer's Microsoft

#81

Post by CubicleNinjas »

DeepDuh wrote: post #77
CubicleNinjas wrote: post #70

"While Microsoft is no disruptive force in tech today, the truth is that it has never been." This is so false it is painful for me to read. I'm embarrassed for the author. "The company's core competency is a process it uses for entering and consuming existing industries. After it enters a market, it rides off the innovations of its competitors, uses its existing brand power and sheer size to tackle a large surface ar…

Courier looked extremely promising and I'm saying that as an OSX,iPhone,iPad user. How they could kill that thing off still blows my mind. Then again we have only ever seen an interface mockup, haven't we? Maybe the software / device they had didn't work. Still no excuse to just let this idea go, I still think that a booklet style tablet with pen, capacitive touchscreen and these GUI ideas would be great for many use…

I completely agree!

The rumor I'd heard was that Courier was killed because independent teams created the device components. When put together it wasn't refined enough to pass review. Plus, they didn't see tablets as a viable market...again. Fingers crossed there was a much cooler reason.

I'm happy to say leaders from the Courier team left and started Paper on iOS. It is a dream to use and shows that they had the talent to make the Courier happen, if given the chance. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paper-by-fiftythree/id5060038...

Ha, ha - agreed on the start menu as well. I really do wish MS well (they can't have not tested this, right?), as their plan is pretty much a Hail Mary pass. But these sorts of decisions don't instill hope.

Re: Steve Ballmer's Microsoft

#82

Post by DeepDuh »

throwaway63-90 wrote: post #79
DeepDuh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's 'Numbers' is actually quite good for most use cases, it's quite a bit more elegant as Excel anyway. The problem with Apple is their lack of experience in business support and their shortcomings in Q&A in the mac department lately. But windows 8 will definitely open up opportunities for contenders like Apple and Google in the business world.

Interesting.

Here's the key feature of Numbers vs. Excel: It not only has multiple Sheets, but multiple tables per sheet. Besides tables you can for example add text fields and images to a sheet. This makes it much much more natural to create reports and it encourages to split up your huge tables in logical units.

Oh and one other thing: Modifying columns/rows is consistant over all iWorks applications: Alt + arrow-keys let's you insert rows/columns above, below, to the right or left. MS Office's inconsistency and lack of hotkeys for such an essential feature makes me rage every time I use it.

Numbers sure has shortcomings though: no pivot tables, very limited scripting support, limited filtering / data manipulation. That's why I look at it as a very good spreadsheet tool, but not a data analysis tool - that's when Excel and/or Matlab come into play.

Re: Steve Ballmer's Microsoft

#83

Post by Drbble »

snowwrestler wrote: post #73
dcurtis wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't really an issue that you can take an extreme on. Even in relative "failure," Microsoft has executed correctly in mobile. Actually, their execution has been way better than I would have expected. It is losing money, sure, but short term losses are not important when you're talking about entering a market as large as the mobile phone market after the existing players are firmly entrenched. The traditional me…

> It is losing money, sure, but short term losses are not important when you're talking about entering a market as large as the mobile phone market after the existing players are firmly entrenched. I think the point on mobile is that Microsoft itself was a well-entrenched player in mobile, and they laughed[1] while allowing that position to get completely eroded by less experienced competitors. It's true that after t…

On business, The only score worth keeping is present/future. Past isn't really relevant, except for how it is prologue.

Re: Steve Ballmer's Microsoft

#84

Post by Drbble »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #80
InclinedPlane wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correctly? Hardly. They've executed competently on some aspects. But if they hope to be a serious competitor they have to do better.

They've managed to avoid electrocuting any of their users. Other than that, if they've done anything "competently" in the mobile space, I haven't seen it.

They competently extracted patent license revenuen

Re: Steve Ballmer's Microsoft

#85

Post by Drbble »

shepbook wrote: post #74
fleitz wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give us a realistic game plan that starts with the iPhone launch & WinMo6 and ends better? After iPhone excellent execution gets you failure, that's just the current state of the market. They've made awesome deals with companies like HTC, even convincing HTC to pay them $15 for every Android phone they sell, etc. They've pretty much got Nokia on lockdown almost exclusively WinPhone7.

"They've made awesome deals with companies like HTC, even convincing HTC to pay them $15 for every Android phone they sell, etc." Suing hardware companies like HTC is not "convincing" them of anything. It's strong arming them using "software patents" (aka. patented math) because they realized they were losing. I believe I read somewhere that microsoft makes more money from suing manufacturers over Android than they m…

It's a profitable business.

Re: Steve Ballmer's Microsoft

#86

Post by Drbble »

jarrett wrote: post #48

"Microsoft makes an endless quantity of software that is alluring to big businesses, like Office, SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, etc..." Let me offer some perspective on this. I worked for a number of years as a programmer at a large (read: "enterprise-scale") entity. Being in closer physical proximity to the general workforce than our IT department, I was often the go-to guy when employees needed tech support. An…

Yeah MS business software is the worst, except for everything else.

Re: Steve Ballmer's Microsoft

#87

Post by Drbble »

brudgers wrote: post #29
dean wrote: post #6

The stock market is all about the future, not the past. A lot of people see Microsoft's future as being less profitable than its past. That's why people belittle it. Microsoft makes a ton of money, no one will deny that, but they make less money than they used to. It's funny how the OP shows the financial numbers for one quarter and says the "the trend here is clear". You can't determine a trend on one quarter, you h…

> "The stock market" Microsoft isn't beholden to the stock market in the way Google or Apple are. The two largest shareholders are Gates and Balmer. They have about 9% of the company between them - that's more than the three largest institutional investors. As part of Dow Jones Industrial Average, many index funds have to hold Microsoft stock and have a strong disincentive to create turmoil which might drive the pric…

Page Brin and Schmidt own over half of GOOG voting shares, and intend to never sell off their majority stake.

I expect Jobs was similar, but what happened with his estate?

Re: Steve Ballmer's Microsoft

#88

Post by Drbble »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #40
dean wrote: post #6

The stock market is all about the future, not the past. A lot of people see Microsoft's future as being less profitable than its past. That's why people belittle it. Microsoft makes a ton of money, no one will deny that, but they make less money than they used to. It's funny how the OP shows the financial numbers for one quarter and says the "the trend here is clear". You can't determine a trend on one quarter, you h…

>The stock market is all about the future, not the past. A lot of people see Microsoft's future as being less profitable than its past. That's why people belittle it. Google's stock is worth less than what it was 4 years ago, it has also basically stagnated. > but they make less money than they used to No, they make more money in absolute terms than they used to. Their margins went down because they're investing more…

99% of America is worth less than 4 years ago. We had a recession.

Re: Steve Ballmer's Microsoft

#89

Post by Drbble »

6ren wrote: post #72

It's true there's much to be learned from microsoft on commercially successful platforms. They began with BASIC interpreters - a platform - which became a standardization across machines, to the extent that manufacturers boasted they were Microsoft BASIC compatible. Then, their insight that DOS was important. The original PC had a choice of three OS's - MSDOS was cheapest. Start at the low end, as the article says. P…

iPhone sexy hardware and OS made the market, not the lack of an app store

Re: Steve Ballmer's Microsoft

#90

Post by Drbble »

dm8 wrote: post #24
rpikeca wrote: post #21

Blamer should have been gone a long time ago. They have lost some real visionaries because of him and lost site of what they are in the market to provide.

Why? Kinect and Xbox came to fruition under his leadership. And that division alone can become billion dollar business for MSFT. Agreed WP7 was late but MSFT takes pride in being late to any market. After all, they are last man standing in most of the markets. Zune failed but can't he have couple of failures? Btw, their core enterprises business is growing.

"Billion dollar business" is a miserable failure at MSFT current size.
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