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Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

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Re: Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

#51

Post by ekianjo »

macspoofing wrote: post #18
martinced wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was working in the mobile business before the iPhone came and owned everybody (waiting then for Android) and I recall things totally differently than you. The smartphone market was owned by Nokia and their Sxx series. That and the BlackBerries. We were working on mostly Nokia (either native or Java), Qualcomm BREW (C++) and, granted, we had some demand for Windows Mobile but they were pretty much a nobody in that p…

>There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones ... That's not really true because there was the PDA market, which was dominated by Palm and Microsoft. So you had RIM and Nokia in one corner, and Palm and Microsoft in the other. Any one of them could have created the iPhone but none of them really got it, and they are where they are.

The PDA market was ridiculously small (I owned one and I hardly knew anyone else who did) and was not growing at the time. PDAs were pricey, and while they could do many of the things that the iPhone did later, most people did not see its value back then. Well, it was a very fragmented market focused only on professionals. It was never aimed to consumers (a big mistake).

Re: Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

#52

Post by rbanffy »

bunderbunder wrote: post #27
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I partially agree. I think it's a combination of 2 things (the second being more or less the same as what you are saying): 1) Their brand reputation became toxic over time. Windows ME was seen as a bad product. XP prior to service pack 1 was seen as a bad product. Normal people knew what the blue screen of death with. Normal people made jokes about the quality of Windows. Correct or not, their market dominance (seen…

> Their brand reputation became toxic over time. This. Combined with their failure to realize this. I strongly suspect that Windows Phone would have been more successful if they hadn't given it a name that evokes innumerable products with which everyone has a love-hate relationship at best. > They are just an old company. They're 362 days older than Apple.

> Combined with their failure to realize this.

Something potatolicious explained so wonderfully.

Re: Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

#53

Post by rbanffy »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #29
bunderbunder wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their brand reputation became toxic over time. This. Combined with their failure to realize this. I strongly suspect that Windows Phone would have been more successful if they hadn't given it a name that evokes innumerable products with which everyone has a love-hate relationship at best. > They are just an old company. They're 362 days older than Apple.

> They're 362 days older than Apple. This Apple is really NeXT.

Which, in turn, had a lot of the original Apple Computer.

Re: Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

#55

Post by AnthonyMouse »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #17
taligent wrote: post #4

It seems pretty clear that Microsoft's problem isn't with their ability to innovate. It's in their complete inability to get to market quickly, take risks and work together. And that is directly related to their HR policies in particular their ranking system.

I partially agree. I think it's a combination of 2 things (the second being more or less the same as what you are saying): 1) Their brand reputation became toxic over time. Windows ME was seen as a bad product. XP prior to service pack 1 was seen as a bad product. Normal people knew what the blue screen of death with. Normal people made jokes about the quality of Windows. Correct or not, their market dominance (seen…

>There can only be one Google/Microsoft in technology.

I don't buy it. A decade ago Google and Microsoft were on different planets. It's totally possible for one company to sell operating systems to everyone and a different company to provide ad-supported services to the same people.

The mistake Microsoft made was to take Google's nominal preference for open standards and open source technologies as a declaration of war. So they started pushing Bing solely for the purpose of pissing in Google's oatmeal and started astroturfing and lobbying against them left and right, and the next thing you know Google is putting more resources behind Google Docs, they release Chrome and take a huge chunk of Internet Explorer's market share, and by the time Google realizes that Apple is poised to take over the expanding mobile device market in ~2006 the chances of them looking to Microsoft to act as a check on Apple's power would have been such a ridiculous suggestion that I doubt they even considered it, so instead we saw Google's full might behind Android which is obviously what did Microsoft in for the mobile space and what may destroy them yet.

Microsoft's mistake was to attack something they couldn't kill, and in so doing they turned what might have been a thorn in their side into a major war. And it's a war they're losing.

Re: Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

#56

Post by macspoofing »

edderly wrote: post #28
macspoofing wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones ... That's not really true because there was the PDA market, which was dominated by Palm and Microsoft. So you had RIM and Nokia in one corner, and Palm and Microsoft in the other. Any one of them could have created the iPhone but none of them really got it, and they are where they are.

This is fairly illusory as a comparison. I don't believe the PDA market ever amounted to more than 12 million devices a year. Whilst by the year 2000 the entire mobile phone market was around 700 million. Plus it didn't help that MS were trying to charge unrealistic prices for the OS, in 1999 they were asking for $80 per unit....

Pre-iPhone, there was a small PDA market, a bigger smartphone market, and a huge cell phone market. PDAs are a precursor to the iPhone, as much as (if not more than) Blackberries and Symbian phones. Both Palm and Microsoft were experimenting with PDAs with phone functionality years before the iPhone (which is why Ballmer was so dismissive of the iPhone at launch). They were so very close.

Re: Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

#57

Post by macspoofing »

ekianjo wrote: post #51
macspoofing wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones ... That's not really true because there was the PDA market, which was dominated by Palm and Microsoft. So you had RIM and Nokia in one corner, and Palm and Microsoft in the other. Any one of them could have created the iPhone but none of them really got it, and they are where they are.

The PDA market was ridiculously small (I owned one and I hardly knew anyone else who did) and was not growing at the time. PDAs were pricey, and while they could do many of the things that the iPhone did later, most people did not see its value back then. Well, it was a very fragmented market focused only on professionals. It was never aimed to consumers (a big mistake).

>Whilst by the year 2000 the entire mobile phone market was around 700 million.

What was the size of the smartphone market? I'd guess it wasn't that big either, certainly it isn't anywhere near present-day numbers. And yes, I am differentiating between "smartphone" and "cell phone" market. The former was small, the latter was huge.

> Well, it was a very fragmented market focused only on professionals. It was never aimed to consumers (a big mistake).

You could say the same for RIM, who was never that interested in building a consumer phone. Many mistakes were made by all incumbents..

Re: Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

#58

Post by jmduke »

ekianjo wrote: post #50

It's not like Microsoft ever innovated much anyway. DOS was bought from a hobbyist and repackaged as MS-DOS in the early days, Windows was not the first OS with GUI (on the contrary, it was quite late in the game), the Xbox 1 was no more no less than a PC under the hood, DirectX was Microsoft's own library to copy OpenGL, etc... In that sense, what they are doing nowadays reflects their past history of poor innovatio…

This level of dismissal could undermine any potential accomplishment.

If you're talking 'innovation' like Marie Curie, then sure. But its willfully disingenuous to say that they weren't -- or aren't -- an innovative company, relative to so many others.

Re: Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

#59

Post by larsberg »

Jare wrote: post #46
larsberg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue against your statement that the company doesn't: > take risks and work together When I was there, I was _constantly_ being told (as a manager in DevDiv) that our next release had to work together with each and every new technology that might almost be ready near our ship time (Windows, SQL, Office, etc.). This added not only a huge amount of schedule risk, but dramatically slowed everything down. When your…

I believe the point is that while the software HAS to work together, the people (product owners and stakeholders) often don't. The result is that features cost a lot, and innovation costs even more; overall quality is driven by the lowest common denominator, and most products stagnate naturally because of that.

I certainly agree with your point about the goal and the issue in some companies.

However, having seen Microsoft in action from the inside, any collaborations - most of which are _required_ at gunpoint from top-down - result in a horde of program managers shuttling themselves from building to building "owning" the X->Y relationship, one each per group-pair and arrow direction. It's a win-win for them, as those are a quicker path to promotion than trying to build up internal scope or working with the external market (godforbid ).

Frankly, it's really, really expensive and painful for ~2000 developers on three different teams to each be adding a slew of features with one of those teams building on top of and coordinating the other two. Even with huge amounts of communication, tracking, and the best of intents, until the products at the bottom of the chain settle down, you can't make any progress at the top. And when the top is finally making progress, you actually can put developers in front of APIs (in our case) and then you find out that the stuff at the bottom is totally unusable, but it's too late, because they finally stopped churning and want to ship soon.

I don't claim there's an easy answer, but throwing more people or tools at the coordination problem doesn't (I've seen it tried).

Re: Bill Gates 'not satisfied' with Microsoft's innovations

#60

Post by OGinparadise »

maeon3 wrote: post #43

I think the most telling evidence of Bill Gates satisfaction level is on the following page: http://biz.yahoo.com/t/38/567.html 6-Feb-13 3,189,267 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.44 per share. (Proceeds of $87,513,486) 5-Feb-13 3,810,733 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.56 per share. (Proceeds of $105,023,801) 4-Feb-13 3,000,000 MSFT Automatic Sale at $27.64 per share. (Proceeds of $82,920,000) 1-Feb-13 5,500,000 MSFT Automatic…

I think the most telling evidence of Bill Gates satisfaction level is on the following page:

http://biz.yahoo.com/t/38/567.html

Bill, IIRC, sells to give it to his foundation and his foundation sells to donate. Eric Schmidt is also selling about 50% of his holdings, but after a while it's accepted as estate planning or whatever, not as lacking confidence in the stock.

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