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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

#71

Post by ekianjo »

jmduke wrote: post #58
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.

Well Microsoft had "I can do it too" kind of innovation, if you like, but rarely pushed for something very new on the market by themselves. I have rather known Bill Gates and his friends for his "innovative" market practices to crush competition than actual product innovation (having OEMs install Windows by default, and threatening the ones who would not do that to get the next versions of Windows later, and so on).

I reckon that PocketPCs were probably an exception to that point, and there are here and there innovative parts in the company, but it feels more that it's "innovative DESPITE its roots" than anything else.

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

#72

Post by Amanda_Panda »

Windows Mobile still goes strong in the PDA market with retailers and for POS devices. My company makes custom software for WinMo PDAs, and admittedly my opinion is colored by the fact that our software is also a POS (pun intended), but I can't really believe that WinMo once held a dominant market share. Or rather, I can believe it, and can believe that the iPhone had it for lunch.

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

#73

Post by bunderbunder »

olefoo wrote: post #68
bunderbunder wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft's got a weird dual personality in that regard. There are plenty of smaller units within Microsoft that manage to do really great things. At the same time, oftentimes when the Mothership decides to try and get involved, what ensues frequently looks more like meddling than coordination. For example, look at how their mobile offering's .NET-based APIs and "WCF lite" GUI toolkit lasted for precisely one generat…

> collateral damage in an internal power struggle Why I'm leery of Windows Azure, even though it seems to be doing mostly the right thng.

Ditto. Azure looks nice enough, but at this point I can't in good faith recommend to my employer that we become any more exposed to opportunities for the carpet to get yanked out from under us by an executive in Redmond who's forgotten to take his Ritalin.

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

#74

Post by RDeckard »

taligent wrote: post #37
kvb wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of what you wrote is obvious to me. Partly this is because Microsoft is big enough that I find descriptions that treat Microsoft as a monolithic entity unconvincing. After all, they got Kinect to market quickly. SharePoint seemed to come out of nowhere to dominate its market, too. Thankfully, I've never had to deal with stack ranking, but I find it unlikely that it's the explanation behind Microsoft's various fa…

Kinect was acquired and SharePoint is popular but it really did so on the back of existing infrastructure i.e. it was like an upsell. And I am not saying that stack ranking is responsible for all its failures but I fail to see how it encourages co-operation which is so critical for successful companies.

Kinect was not acquired.

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

#75

Post by edderly »

macspoofing wrote: post #56
edderly wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, PDAs existed and you could see an evolution of phone to smartphone which included PDA like features.

However, in the early 00s the money was in dumbphones simply because the BOM cost of the RAM/ROM, AP and modem was pretty high.

The real migration path was from phones, either in terms of incorporating PDA like features in to existing platforms like Series 40, or using an OS capable of running in low memory, execute in place environments.

IMO Symbian was much more capable of achieving that need than either Palm or MS, at least because of it's low memory requirements and it's OS architecture was more advanced so it didn't have pseudo-arbitrary limits such as the 32 process limit that W/E had:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Embedded_CE_6.0

Also obviously the Symbian heritage was from PDAs (EPOC32 from PSION). I'm not saying that Symbian was a great OS, however, it really had the measure of MS technically in those times and Palm OS at that time was well known to be in the stone-age OS wise.

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

#76

Post by r00fus »

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).

The iPhone did what it could do because it bundled a data plan that was reasonable at the time ($20/month unlimited, though 2G only, was a pretty damn good deal). Prior to my iPhone I used a Treo 6xx series that Verizon wanted me to pay $45/m for data (2G also).

The lack of native data connectivity made PDAs deal with the continually nasty and ever under-estimated problem of sync. With iPhoneOS v1, Apple matched what Palm had to offer - an iPod touch was almost as good as a Palm PDA, an iPhone better than a Treo. With iOS2 and ActiveSync, it blew away it's competition.

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

#77

Post by nextstep »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #35
potatolicious wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you were downvoted. Upvoted even though I don't particularly agree. Having lived in Seattle for a couple of years, and knowing many Microsoft employees during that time, my outsider's view is that MS's consumer-side failures are largely geographical and cultural. Redmond, or even Bellevue, is extremely isolated from Seattle, which in and of itself is not exactly deeply intertwined with the cultural cente…

I graduated from high school in Bothell (just north of Kirkland) and I'm a Microsoft employee, but I've never been based in Redmond before. I find your post is a bit weird, bizarre, and maybe a bit biased. Yes, suburb Seattle is quite different from urban Seattle, but ALOT more people live in the suburbs. You also have to compare it to San Francisco and San Jose, how many of your friends from the city will visit you…

Mega-cities on the West Coast? Portland and Vancouver are mega-cities? San Francisco and Seattle are not mega-cities either. It's really funny how things can look so differently depending on where you sit.

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

#78

Post by fjarlq »

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…

You've omitted a lot of context.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7106589/ljbox/doc/MSFT-shares.png

Gates has been selling his stock at a steady pace for over a decade. Since Sept '01 he has sold an average of about 78.4 million shares per year.

Using your link you can see that he sells 20 million shares quarterly, with each block of 20M selling within one week. So he did his usual 80 million in the past year.

Since the rate of his selling has neither increased nor decreased significantly in at least 11.5 years, are you sure you can conclude something about his satisfaction level? What about the possibility that he is diversifying and funding his philanthropic goals?

As of today he still owns about 421 million common shares of MSFT, worth $11.8 billion.

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

#80

Post by RyJones »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #26
dman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft invented their own troubles in this market. How many parallel mobility teams can one company reasonably sustain - a) Windows phone 6.5 b) Windows phone 7.x c) Windows phone 8.x d) Project Pink / Kin e) Danger f) Windows 8 RT g) Courier

To be fair, those teams were not parallel. 6.5 died with 7, which died with 8. Danger was a subsidiary, and they made Project Pink, so they're the same. Windows on ARM, yes, was a team, but not associated with Mobility. They're a Windows 8 team, not a Windows Phone team, so they're not actually competing with WP nor are they working on mobility-specific platforms. They simply deal with Windows on ARM processors. And…

PMX wasn't Danger, and PMX did Pink/Kin. Danger was folded into PMX, true, but the history is way messier than you're letting on. Some of the survivors of the PMX fiasco / power grab went on to Courier.

WoA did absorb some parts of WiMo (power management, for example).

The whole thing makes me want to cry in frustration. The day the iPhone was announced, the halls of 116-117-118-119 were filled with shell shocked, demoralized, pissed off people.

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