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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

#81

Post by quattrofan »

twodayslate wrote: post #63
quattrofan wrote: post #8

He should be very unsatisfied with the total abortion that is Win8. One of the single biggest mistakes MS have ever made IMHO.

Bigger than Vista? Or the red rings of death?

IMHO certainly bigger than Vista dont know about RRD. Vista was not THAT bad and SP1 fixed most of the issue. W8 is wrong at a fundamental level, its an OS for a tablet scotchtaped onto a desktop OS. What made my mind up is trying to help a woman in the shop the other week who had unknowlingly bought a new PC with Win8 on and was totally confused. I tried to help her and even I was lost... its a mess.

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

#82

Post by Jare »

larsberg wrote: post #59
Jare wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hehe you just described my past 9 months to the T. :) (Unrelated to Microsoft, anyway)

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

#83

Post by maeon3 »

fjarlq wrote: post #78
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…

You are right. I was not looking at the whole picture. But still, if Bill is putting that money into another growth vehicle, that means that he believes Microsoft isn't going to rise to superstar status again. It's not a place where his money will even retain it's base value. He wants to get it out as soon as possible without crushing the stock. A decade long opinion that Microsoft isn't going to get better with time.

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

#84

Post by robgough »

r00fus wrote: post #76
ekianjo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wha…

Absolutely this. I had an XDA II, then an XDA Mini S pretty much from launch (rebranded HTC phones on O2-UK), but as a student simply couldn't afford the data plans to go with them.

The iPhone (and really, the iPhone 3G for me) is when prices started to become reasonable.. nowadays, you can get decent data plans with (almost) everyone here.

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

#85

Post by kabdib »

pablasso wrote: post #67
kabdib wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code base for WinMobile was a horrible, disgusting mess. The build system is one of the worst I've ever seen. MS let WinMobile rot internally for years, building up tons of technical debt, and they paid for it in market share. I was on a project that was repurposing pieces of the WM6 code, just cherry-picking drivers and stuff. We used to go rummaging through the source code on "Wait, you thought /that/ was bad..…

That's really insightful. The code ended up being that awful to maintain because of deadlines pressures or Microsoft inherited the code base from a buyout of another company?

The code was awful because there was no accountability. No oversight. Nothing happened to you if you checked in junk, as long as it compiled. Q/A was happy if their tests ran and every function did mindless NULL checking on parameters.

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

#86

Post by seanmcdirmid »

nextstep wrote: post #77
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By Chinese standards, any city less than 10million is not big. By Swiss standards, any city larger than 100k is huge.

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

#87

Post by kingr »

ekianjo wrote: post #69
macspoofing wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ai…

By the way, you may not be aware of this, but RIM had (and still has, somehow), a huge consumer following in certain countries like Indonesia because of the chat applications it provided ahead of the rest. Until not too long ago it was bigger than the iphone and Android phones there (I need to find a link for that, though...)

I live in South Africa. We are one of the countries with a huge RIM following, you can find a black berry device on every street corner.

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

#88

Post by quattrofan »

twodayslate wrote: post #63
quattrofan wrote: post #8

He should be very unsatisfied with the total abortion that is Win8. One of the single biggest mistakes MS have ever made IMHO.

Bigger than Vista? Or the red rings of death?

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/380044/windows-7-still-being-sol...

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

#89

Post by fjarlq »

maeon3 wrote: post #83
fjarlq wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are right. I was not looking at the whole picture. But still, if Bill is putting that money into another growth vehicle, that means that he believes Microsoft isn't going to rise to superstar status again. It's not a place where his money will even retain it's base value. He wants to get it out as soon as possible without crushing the stock. A decade long opinion that Microsoft isn't going to get better with time…

> if Bill is putting that money into another growth vehicle, that means that he believes Microsoft isn't going to rise to superstar status again.

But Gates is not putting his money into another growth vehicle, he's putting it into his philanthropic projects, which he spends most of his time managing.

He has made it clear (with both words and actions) that he wants to use the rest of his life doing the most good with his money that he can. And he has almost entirely redirected his career toward those non-Microsoft goals. If he was interested in making the most money he can, he would be doing totally different things.

Of course, he can't (sensibly) sell his entire stake in MSFT at once. Instead he is selling it slowly but steadily.

Also of course, he can't (sensibly) spend all his money at once. It is being invested in a diversified manner: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_Investment

Diversifying his wealth makes a great deal of fiscal sense, considering his goals, and the fact that he is no longer running Microsoft.

So, I don't see how you reasonably conclude that his MSFT sales mean he has lost faith in Microsoft.

> It's not a place where his money will even retain it's base value.

The MSFT dividend yield has historically been over 2% and is now over 3%, so it's not like it's doing completely nothing before he can sell it.

So it seems we agree that Gates wants to sell his MSFT as quickly as is reasonably possible, we just don't agree on his motivation. I suspect he will continue doing so until he isn't risking so many eggs in one basket, because he has other goals besides wealth accumulation.

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

#90

Post by mynameisvlad »

RyJones wrote: post #80
mynameisvlad wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, de…

I was using whatever information is available publicly about the teams. Blame the internet for an oversimplification.
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