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Microsoft reorganizes

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Re: Microsoft reorganizes

#251

Post by marcosdumay »

bornhuetter wrote: post #16
bryanlarsen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the OP was arguing that Windows is currently a walled garden, but is arguing that Windows is moving in that direction.

If OP had said criticized Microsoft for moving toward being more closed, I would have completely agreed with him (to the extent that it is relevant to the link, which it isn't really). But he said "full steam ahead to the biggest walled garden on earth. We are still the Borg", and so his comment loses all credibility.

"full steam ahead to the biggest walled garden on earth."

Ok, English is not my first language, and that "to" seems a bit ambiguous to me... But in context that was pretty clearly a move toward a walled garden, not a move done by a walled garden.

Re: Microsoft reorganizes

#252

Post by firegrind »

A fellow had just been hired as the new CEO of a large high tech corporation. The CEO who was stepping down met with him privately and presented him with three numbered envelopes. "Open these if you run up against a problem you don't think you can solve," he said.

Well, things went along pretty smoothly, but six months later, sales took a downturn and he was really catching a lot of heat. About at his wit's end, he remembered the envelopes. He went to his drawer and took out the first envelope. The message read, "Blame your predecessor."

The new CEO called a press conference and tactfully laid the blame at the feet of the previous CEO. Satisfied with his comments, the press -- and Wall Street - responded positively, sales began to pick up and the problem was soon behind him.

About a year later, the company was again experiencing a slight dip in sales, combined with serious product problems. Having learned from his previous experience, the CEO quickly opened the second envelope. The message read, "Reorganize." This he did, and the company quickly rebounded.

After several consecutive profitable quarters, the company once again fell on difficult times. The CEO went to his office, closed the door and opened the third envelope.

The message said, "Prepare three envelopes."

Re: Microsoft reorganizes

#253

Post by mattzito »

jussij wrote: post #230
onedev wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what amazing products Microsoft is working on.

From all accounts their Office 365 and Azure platforms are doing well. The say more than 50% of the Fortune 500 are now using Azure: http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-azure-now-used-by-over-50... These are fairly radical changes as they are getting off the desktop platform amd moving straight into the cloud.

I dunno, I work in the cloud space, largely with fortune 500 companies, and I don't know of any off the top of my head that are investing in Azure.

That doesn't mean the article isn't technically accurate, of course, but I'd suspect that MSFT is being very generous with their definition of "using" and counting any pilot project in some engineering team as "using" - in which case I'm sure that most of the fortune 500 have someone somewhere playing with Azure.

But that's not the same as using from the standpoint that we typically think about it.

Re: Microsoft reorganizes

#254

Post by soupboy »

"The frontier of high-value scenarios we enable will march outward, but we have strengths and proven capabilities on which we will draw." What does that even mean? The letter is filled with nonsense sentences like this.

Re: Microsoft reorganizes

#255

Post by ryanhuff »

snowwrestler wrote: post #250
md224 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it weird that Google's mission statement doesn't describe their primary revenue stream? I suppose they could say that they're making information universally accessible and useful to individuals as well as advertisers. But I don't know, their mission statement makes them sound like the best library ever. Not an advertising company.

It's becoming an bigger and bigger stretch to wrap that mission statement around what Google does. Reader was a great tool for organizing information--they killed it. Cell phone hardware has very little to do with organizing information, but they spent $12 billion on Motorola.

I dont see an issue with investing in mobile. The cell phone is (mostly) a new distribution channel; a means of reaching consumers. It was critical that Google have unfettered access to its users, although these days mobile is increasingly a producer of information to be collected and organized.

Re: Microsoft reorganizes

#256

Post by yuhong »

lmm wrote: post #59
kvb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you ensure that performance is rewarded fairly and consistently across an organization with tens of thousands of engineers? I'm not wild about the concept of stack ranking but I don't see any alternatives that don't have serious drawbacks of their own.

Trust your managers and allow people to move freely internally? If a manager is too stingy their people will move away from them; if a manager is paying a lot either they'll get results that justify it or they won't, and in the latter case they correct things or you fire them.

I think that is what michaelochurch means by open allocation. See this: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/tech-companie...

Re: Microsoft reorganizes

#257

Post by cloudwalking »

snowwrestler wrote: post #250
md224 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it weird that Google's mission statement doesn't describe their primary revenue stream? I suppose they could say that they're making information universally accessible and useful to individuals as well as advertisers. But I don't know, their mission statement makes them sound like the best library ever. Not an advertising company.

It's becoming an bigger and bigger stretch to wrap that mission statement around what Google does. Reader was a great tool for organizing information--they killed it. Cell phone hardware has very little to do with organizing information, but they spent $12 billion on Motorola.

Cell phone hardware is the "make [information] universally accessible" part.

Re: Microsoft reorganizes

#258

Post by bad_user »

Silhouette wrote: post #204
bad_user wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps the most profound was that Microsoft has basically said "Oh by the way, the PC is dead." and by that tacit admission they fulfill the prophecy of this being the 'post PC' era All this talk about the "Post PC" era is misguided, with people leaving out the elephant in the room. It's not PCs that are dead - PCs are fine, you can find one in most homes and most people interact with PCs daily. This isn't going t…

Software is becoming a cheap commodity, due to open-source, due to the freemium model on the web, due to piracy, due to the $0.99 or ads-enabled apps that are so popular lately. Cheap software is becoming a cheap commodity. It's relatively easy for any competent software developer to write a diary app with a pretty UI skin, or a basic text editor and formatting engine to drive a lightweight word processor, or a simpl…

> Not until Google Docs does footnotes and cross-references and tables of contents and careful page layout, it isn't.

LibreOffice does footnotes and cross-references just fine and LibreOffice is 0 USD. Here's the thing - MS Office is innovative and still the best at what it does. But it's old and like anything old, it becomes a commodity.

Adobe Photoshop is also innovative and still the best at what it does (by far). The problem that Adobe has though is that many Photoshop licensees are not professionals and can be served just as well by cheaper or even free software. Companies like Adobe also benefited a lot from piracy, as a lot of people ended up using Photoshop, even though not that many people can afford it.

Also, what you're seeing here unfolding with web apps is only the begging. In relative terms, the concept of a web app is still young. Even in early 2000, people had no idea that they can have apps running in their browser and broadband / 3G / 4G is still not a reality in many parts of this world. The combination of cheap and easily accessible on any platform, without any lock-in whatsoever, is extremely powerful. Couple this with devices that are designed to be portable and always connected and you've got a killer that will cannibalize everything else.

> The reality of modern web and mobile software is that a lot of it is cheap, and it should be cheap, because it adds only a little value and it isn't very hard to create it

Things like Google Docs / Google Calendar / Google Maps / Twitter / Wikipedia give me a hell of a lot more value than anything a desktop app could. Are you saying that you could build these in a weekend?

Re: Microsoft reorganizes

#259

Post by lotso »

Zigurd wrote: post #82

All the critical decisions have already been made: Microsoft branded hardware, running Windows, everywhere. No courier. Bring XBOX solidly into the Windows fold. It's all Windows. Why reorg? Who would accept the job of telling Ballmer that, when Nokia goes under, the "devices" part of that story is a fable? On top of that, the press release was apparently written by a student of Vogon poetry.

I'm not sure why people bring up axing the courier as a negative thing. It was always a niche concept idea than a product that could survive in the market.

Re: Microsoft reorganizes

#260

Post by lotso »

jkolko wrote: post #101
czr80 wrote: post #7

Wow, re-organising the company by function. They're going all in on copying Apple. Who knows if it will work, but it's a fascinating experiment.

They seem to be missing functions like "design" and "product", which is unfortunate. I'm sure they roll up to engineering and I bet they continue to garner little respect.

The design groups at Microsoft are highly respected within the company.
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