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Microsoft Mission Impossible

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Re: Microsoft Mission Impossible

#11

Post by jmcqk6 »

quesera wrote: post #7
bane wrote: post #6

One of the really surprising things about Microsoft is that despite all the caustic internal politics, CEO antics, missteps, misfires, a business model designed to extract maximum money from everybody, and even questionable development and design practices, on occasion really great software (and hardware) comes out of there. World class, amazing, top of the industry with no true peers. For example, despite all of the…

I'd be interested to hear what your other examples are, but that doesn't surprise me at all. If OpenOffice (etc) ever had comparable staffing (quantity and variety, not even questioning quality) that MSOffice has had for 15-20 years, I'd expect more comparable results.

>If OpenOffice (etc) ever had comparable staffing (quantity and variety, not even questioning quality) that MSOffice has had for 15-20 years, I'd expect more comparable results.

Isn't that sort of the point, at least from their perspective?

Re: Microsoft Mission Impossible

#12

Post by sliverstorm »

quesera wrote: post #7
bane wrote: post #6

One of the really surprising things about Microsoft is that despite all the caustic internal politics, CEO antics, missteps, misfires, a business model designed to extract maximum money from everybody, and even questionable development and design practices, on occasion really great software (and hardware) comes out of there. World class, amazing, top of the industry with no true peers. For example, despite all of the…

I'd be interested to hear what your other examples are, but that doesn't surprise me at all. If OpenOffice (etc) ever had comparable staffing (quantity and variety, not even questioning quality) that MSOffice has had for 15-20 years, I'd expect more comparable results.

The Microsoft Hardware division in general makes a lot of good stuff. Microsoft makes some of my favorite mice & keyboards, and the Xbox has been an impressive business venture- only one generation to go from brand-new to top-dog.

Windows Media Center was quite good, although it has been allowed to wither on the vine somewhat as market research apparently found it just wasn't used much

Internet Explorer has of course picked up a lot of slack quite quickly. Has not surpassed open source, but they have done a pretty good job with it in recent times. Yes, it's still behind, but they started from behind. They are much less behind now.

Re: Microsoft Mission Impossible

#13

Post by wsc981 »

bane wrote: post #6

One of the really surprising things about Microsoft is that despite all the caustic internal politics, CEO antics, missteps, misfires, a business model designed to extract maximum money from everybody, and even questionable development and design practices, on occasion really great software (and hardware) comes out of there. World class, amazing, top of the industry with no true peers. For example, despite all of the…

For what it's worth (probably nothing :P), I find Office a horrible piece of software that I avoid like the plague. I think the interfaces of apps like Word, Excel is too crowded (too much buttons, options) and rather use more limited alternatives, even if they're a bit crappy (looking at you, Google Docs). With regards to PowerPoint, I think Apple's Keynote is a much better designed and usable app for presentations.

Re: Microsoft Mission Impossible

#14

Post by filestar »

The way to tell if a particular analysis of Microsoft's performance is baseless is the complete omission of the enterprise division in the analysis.

Here are revenues by division:

>Windows Division: 1.09 billion profit on $4.411 billion in revenue >Servers and Tools: $2.33 billion profit on $5.502 billion in revenue >Online Services: $372 million loss on $800 million in revenue >Business Division: $4.87 billion profit on $7.231 billion in revenue >Entertainment and Devices: $110 million loss on $1.915 billion in revenue

The Server & Tools revenue grew 11% just in the last quarter. The writer may dismiss this with a counter argument, but not even acknowledging its presence shows that the writer is extremely shortsighted and only wants to talk about iPhones/iPads and casts doubts on the rest of the "analysis".

Re: Microsoft Mission Impossible

#15

Post by mtinkerhess »

quesera wrote: post #7
bane wrote: post #6

One of the really surprising things about Microsoft is that despite all the caustic internal politics, CEO antics, missteps, misfires, a business model designed to extract maximum money from everybody, and even questionable development and design practices, on occasion really great software (and hardware) comes out of there. World class, amazing, top of the industry with no true peers. For example, despite all of the…

I'd be interested to hear what your other examples are, but that doesn't surprise me at all. If OpenOffice (etc) ever had comparable staffing (quantity and variety, not even questioning quality) that MSOffice has had for 15-20 years, I'd expect more comparable results.

Visual Studio is probably the best way to write C++. Windows is probably the best operating system for the enterprise and is ahead of OS X and Linux in bringing a desktop OS to tablets and touch laptops. C# is arguably the best language for writing enterprise applications. Xbox arguably won the console war of the current generation. Kinect is the only consumer product like it. Surface Pro is probably the best desktop replacement tablet. (disclosure: microsoftie)

Re: Microsoft Mission Impossible

#16

Post by bane »

quesera wrote: post #7
bane wrote: post #6

One of the really surprising things about Microsoft is that despite all the caustic internal politics, CEO antics, missteps, misfires, a business model designed to extract maximum money from everybody, and even questionable development and design practices, on occasion really great software (and hardware) comes out of there. World class, amazing, top of the industry with no true peers. For example, despite all of the…

I'd be interested to hear what your other examples are, but that doesn't surprise me at all. If OpenOffice (etc) ever had comparable staffing (quantity and variety, not even questioning quality) that MSOffice has had for 15-20 years, I'd expect more comparable results.

Bear in mind, I have no particular love for the company (I'm typing this on my rMBP right now). But I like to acknowledge good work when it happens. I know that all of these can be argued against, and some of my choices below are easy to argue as not great software -- but compared to any other competitor is still better (e.g. if mail and calendars are so easy why aren't there loads of Outlook/Exchange competitors?)

- Remote Desktop is really good. VNC is "ok" but my God I miss Remote Desktop in the Apple world

- Pretty much any MS-Office product, highlights are Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook. (Much better on Windows machines than Macs BTW, in much the same way iTunes is better on Macs than Windows)

- Visio, not without it's quirks but other competitors are all "ok"

- Project - are there any serious competitors?

- OneNote

- Explorer, I've yet to see a file manager as good. It's lightyears beyond the abomination that is Finder for example. I could go on, but it's probably one of the reasons alternative media organizers are not as common on Windows machines as Macs

- Visual Studio - I can see some arguments one way or the other, but it really is a world-class dev environment.

- Online Office apps are easily the best office web apps by far

- SQL Server is actually very good.

- Flight Simulator

now outdated, but top of the game for many years - Midtown Madness as an open world driving game

- Encarta was awesome

- Halo series

and hardware - the Xbox systems

- really nice mice and keyboards

- Xbox controllers

- Kinect

- the surface pro is actually a pretty amazing full fledged portable PC, I'd put one up against an Air anytime, except it has the slight edge of the much more robust Windows software ecosystem

Re: Microsoft Mission Impossible

#17

Post by programminggeek »

The biggest problem with Microsoft after say 2005 was that it let things like Windows and Office drag it down to the point that if things competed with either, they were killed with fire.

For example, look at what Ray Ozzie got built with Azure, or what J Allard did with the Xbox, Xbox 360, Zune, and Courier. Azure was in a prime spot to do what Amazon ended up doing - being the computing platform for the cloud. Instead, nobody at Microsoft wanted to listen to Ray because selling Windows and Office on PC's and servers is the thing that drives MSFT today. Thus, if it competed with either, it's not going to get the kind of respect it deserves.

Look at where Microsoft is now on the consumer side. J Allard and his team were basically paving the way for Microsoft to make great consumer devices. Zune basically gave them Metro UI, Xbox 360 showed them how to do consumer hardware and supply chain management worldwide, and they were working on the Courier about the time the iPad hit. Microsoft did nothing with it and the iPad replaced literally millions of low end Windows laptops and netbooks. It took Microsoft something like 3 or 4 years to have an even competitive touch tablet experience with the Surface, and then it bundled desktop Office on a touch device.

The iPhone debuted in like 2007 and Microsoft is still peddling a desktop mode Word Processor on a touch tablet as a good idea.

The Surface launched without consulting the one team that had shipped tens of millions of hardware devices at Microsoft - the Xbox team and consequently built about 3 million too many Surface RT units which cost the company $900 million in losses.

For as much as Microsoft is trying, and they really are trying, Windows and Office are as much of a curse as they are a blessing in the modern era of devices, services, and the cloud. Where they end up is anyone's guess, but all the people who seemed to "get it" at Microsoft the last 7 years or so basically got ran out of the company and I have no idea if the people who are still there really "get it" enough to compete with the likes of Samsung, Google, Sony, Amazon, and Apple.

Also, remember when Microsoft was so terrified of Google owning search that they tried to buy Yahoo! for $45 billion? Imagine if that had gone through.

Re: Microsoft Mission Impossible

#18

Post by melling »

bane wrote: post #6

One of the really surprising things about Microsoft is that despite all the caustic internal politics, CEO antics, missteps, misfires, a business model designed to extract maximum money from everybody, and even questionable development and design practices, on occasion really great software (and hardware) comes out of there. World class, amazing, top of the industry with no true peers. For example, despite all of the…

You're really looking at this from so many incorrect ways that I'm not really sure where to start.

First of all, "good ideas, theory and philosophy" only go so far when we're talking thousands of more developers and billions of dollars. Excel, is pretty awesome but it's not perfect. I often find myself using Open Office because of some UTF8 issues when importing data into Excel. I own Excel but I use Open Office just as often.

Visio, Access, and PowerPoint were purchased by Microsoft. Sure they continued to develop them, but at one point I used Access for 5-6 years and it hardly got any major features when Microsoft upgraded Office. So, these great innovations didn't originate with Microsoft.

The major reason that you don't see much competition with Office is because of their proprietary formats have basically won. People don't want 99% compatibility, they need 100%, so other vendors have fallen out of the game because they can't make the same level of investment.

As for being easy to learn, I think if you Google "Microsoft Office classes", you'll find that lots of people still require training. Just switching to the Ribbon Bar caused problems for many users.

Re: Microsoft Mission Impossible

#19

Post by programminggeek »

clarky07 wrote: post #8

I think the people who say Microsoft has been a huge failure for the last decade should take a better look at the numbers that matter. The stock price doesn't matter. In 2000, we were at the top of the tech bubble. Bubble means valuations were stupid. The story talks about 2000 report with 19.3 billion from windows and 23 billion total revenue. On the other hand, Microsoft made 19.9 billion in revenue just last quart…

Microsoft has done quite well financially, but where they look bad is when you see how much Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc. have grown in the same period.

One thing I learned in business school is the measure of a CEO is not whether or not they did a good job, but rather if they did a better job than someone else in the same position. It's hard to look at Microsoft in the last 10 years and think that they have done as well as they could.

Re: Microsoft Mission Impossible

#20

Post by bane »

wsc981 wrote: post #13
bane wrote: post #6

One of the really surprising things about Microsoft is that despite all the caustic internal politics, CEO antics, missteps, misfires, a business model designed to extract maximum money from everybody, and even questionable development and design practices, on occasion really great software (and hardware) comes out of there. World class, amazing, top of the industry with no true peers. For example, despite all of the…

For what it's worth (probably nothing :P), I find Office a horrible piece of software that I avoid like the plague. I think the interfaces of apps like Word, Excel is too crowded (too much buttons, options) and rather use more limited alternatives, even if they're a bit crappy (looking at you, Google Docs). With regards to PowerPoint, I think Apple's Keynote is a much better designed and usable app for presentations.

I don't disagree. I fire up much simpler ASCII editors quite frequently to just get stuff done. But they're really worth learning beyond the surface level use-cases as extra tools in the toolbox.

re: Keynote - I think Keynote tends to just produce better looking presentations, but you'd be impressed with some of the ways I've seen Powerpoint pressed in to service that had nothing to do with presentations. A few of them are so useful to me (e.g., Powerpoint is actually a pretty decent easy-to-use graphics and chart maker, vector graphics tool, logo designer, UI mockup tool etc.) that the ability to do those things are so important to me that I won't switch to another presentation tool until they can do them.

edit

for example, I made this entire image out of nothing but powerpoint vectors and a few power point vector effects

http://i.imgur.com/qK7XxM5.jpg

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