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Microsoft, Past and Future

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Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#41

Post by sz4kerto »

simonh wrote: post #34
beloch wrote: post #28

What I find surprising is that, in the process of writing a historical review on Microsoft, anyone would ignore the fact that MS has repeatedly identified areas of profit, moved in, failed spectacularly, iterated aggressively, and ultimately become dominant, at least for a time. e.g. What killed Netscape? Microsoft's surface tablets are signs of big things to come. They're currently too expensive for what they are, b…

MS currently has an advantage in digitizer features on the Surface. But if a swing like this was going to happen, for the reasons you suggest, it would be happening right now. Furthermore, even if such a swing does begin, you are assuming two things: Firstly that Apple will not respond effectively to MS establishing such a niche. Secondly that Android will also fail to compete for that niche. The problem is that all…

It's very difficult to change fundamental things in your well-established, popular OS. See Windows x86/x64, see the difficulties of redesigning iOS in version 7, see the disappointed people who buy an Android hybrid and try to use it as a laptop replacement. For some reason, I have all kinds of tablets at home -- iPad Air, Surface 2 (with RT), Sony Xperia Z, ... Currently I feel that it'd be a shame if the Surface didn't become more popular, even the RT version is so much more that the other two platforms. I am not speaking about Metro, you can love it or hate it -- but the fact that it has proper support for keyboards (with shortcuts and everything) and also it's much more gesture-driven than the other two platforms. Obviously it's severely lacking apps compared to the other platforms, but the fundamentals are simply great and I'd be sad to see this platform disappearing. As I said, it's features will not be easily and quickly integrated into Android or iOS, as 'responding effectively' is not as simple as it might seem.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#42

Post by gnaffle »

beloch wrote: post #28

What I find surprising is that, in the process of writing a historical review on Microsoft, anyone would ignore the fact that MS has repeatedly identified areas of profit, moved in, failed spectacularly, iterated aggressively, and ultimately become dominant, at least for a time. e.g. What killed Netscape? Microsoft's surface tablets are signs of big things to come. They're currently too expensive for what they are, b…

Microsoft already has a huge pile of cash. That's not the problem. The problem is that the execution is good, but not good enough. Compromize and difficult choices (Surface vs Surface RT) everywhere.

They released the music kit for the Surface, but where are the vast amount of great music production / performance apps from various well established companies such as Korg, Moog, Cubase, all of which are available on iOS?

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#43

Post by sillysaurus2 »

beloch wrote: post #28

What I find surprising is that, in the process of writing a historical review on Microsoft, anyone would ignore the fact that MS has repeatedly identified areas of profit, moved in, failed spectacularly, iterated aggressively, and ultimately become dominant, at least for a time. e.g. What killed Netscape? Microsoft's surface tablets are signs of big things to come. They're currently too expensive for what they are, b…

Which problems do Surface tablets solve?

For example, iPhone completely changed my life overnight, mostly due to its navigation features and ability to look up phone numbers.

I think Surface will only be dominant if it solves a problem for people. So, which problem does it solve, and why is it useful for people?

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#44

Post by gfodor »

Apple won by not fighting the last war. If Microsoft wants to stay relevant, they need to do the same. What's next? The smartphone, tablet, and cloud services ships have left port and are pretty far out on the horizon. Can Microsoft see what is around the corner the other guys cannot? They are, for the first time since they were founded, the underdog. They have a stellar research group whose output they seem to rarely take advantage of. It's time to get some stuff out of the lab and take some risks. The Kinect shows me the mojo is there -- and it was almost certainly Ballmer's narrow-mindedness that has prevented Microsoft from taking enough risks. I hope now that they have a technical visionary at the helm we'll really see them shake things up, and this is coming from someone who has loathed Microsoft products for quite some time now.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#45

Post by stormbrew »

josteink wrote: post #26
stormbrew wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there some particular reason to exclude that? Because most of those people who 'just' use their search use their search a lot.

People use Google-search because it's the default in all browsers. That's why Google is still paying Mozilla money to make it the default in Firefox and it's why Google made Android and Chrome to be able to control what web-services people use by default, also on their mobile devices. If the defaults switch from Google, most people wont notice. If you have any doubts about that, observe all people which has their sea…

And most people used Windows in the late 90s/early 2000s because Microsoft effectively paid every single OEM to do so and locked them in to restrictive covenants against shipping anything else. For the purposes of comparison it doesn't really matter why everyone uses their products, all that matters is that they do.

I'm not really sure on what you're judging my thoughts on their fragility. I made a pretty simple claim, that the vast majority of people use something Google made regardless of who made their OS. Could someone topple them out of that? Of course. Just like someone toppled Microsoft and IBM before them. It will cost a boatload of money, but someone will eventually do it.

I just don't see how an arbitrary exclusion refutes the claim, or what relevance it has to the price of rice in china. It'd be like saying "Not everyone uses a Microsoft product every day because Windows doesn't count" in 1999. Well... ok then.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#46

Post by sz4kerto »

gnaffle wrote: post #31
spiderPig wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't sound like a good habit to have in this industry, things change and software evolves. Android's first few versions sucked..a lot for instance. Heck, most the of the early versions of OSS suck. Are you saying there should be a constant rate of change? If you're a programmer, you should really try coding on Visual Studio 2012/.NET/F# and C#. It's a breeze. Very smooth compared to Eclipse.

How is it compared to IntelliJ?

It's different. On Windows, it has brilliant debugging capabilities. IntelliJ is maybe the best general-purpose IDE out there, so even being comparable to IntelliJ is a big feat.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#47

Post by gnaffle »

netnichols wrote: post #40
gnaffle wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is spot-on right up to the conclusion, which I disagree with. > The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device. I don't see how Gruber can come to this conclusion unless he has suddenly changed position and thinks the open web will eventually win out over native apps. The problem, of course, is that for a company that wants to be Microsofts size, they _need_ to own the platfo…

> I don't see how Gruber can come to this conclusion unless he has suddenly changed position and thinks the open web will eventually win out over native apps. How does his statement have anything to do with 'open web' vs. native apps? How many native apps do you use that have no 'cloud' component whatsoever? Gruber isn't talking about Microsoft making a bunch of web applications, he's talking about them becoming a ke…

I know he's not talking about web apps. But how is Microsoft going to be a dominant player providing services to apps running on platforms that are controlled by others?

Both Apple and Google want to control their own cloud platform, and they can make sure that their cloud solution is better integrated than Microsofts offerings on their own platforms. And at least Google knows how to do this kind of thing really, really well.

So my point is, unless one expects platforms / operating systems to overall become irrelevant (which some web proponents believe), I can't see how he can draw this conclusion in earnest. It's exactly the same argument he's criticized others for making time and time again with Apple, the only difference being that "Apple should give up their operating system, bundle Windows and only focus on hardware". Of course it's obvious today why that would have been a terrible idea.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#48

Post by k-mcgrady »

beloch wrote: post #28

What I find surprising is that, in the process of writing a historical review on Microsoft, anyone would ignore the fact that MS has repeatedly identified areas of profit, moved in, failed spectacularly, iterated aggressively, and ultimately become dominant, at least for a time. e.g. What killed Netscape? Microsoft's surface tablets are signs of big things to come. They're currently too expensive for what they are, b…

>> "Yeah, so MS might dominate the content-creation/student/artist tablet niche"

I doubt it. A keyboard alone isn't enough to win that market, great software is. Look at the content creation apps available on iOS - iMovie, Garageband, iWork, Paper, Brushes, DM1, Amplitube, Notion. It's going to be hard to catch up with that. They are built for touch. The people using them don't need a keyboard. A keyboard isn't really the ideal input device for someone creating content unless it is written content. For everything else touch seems to work better.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#49

Post by arethuza »

smokinn wrote: post #35
onli wrote: post #10

> The world is in need of high-quality, reliable, developer-friendly, trustworthy, privacy-guarding cloud computing platforms. That's the thing for me: That doesn't work anymore. Privacy-Guarding destroys that. Normally, I would fully agree that this is a good vision for Microsoft, continuing to be on the Desktop (especially corporate), trying to be on other markets and failing mostly, but becoming a big cloud player…

What about recycling the "private cloud" into something actually useful? Microsoft has amazing expertise into taking any computer a 3rd party provides and making it work with their software. What about providing "cloud services" that can be guaranteed to never exit your own corporate firewall? I imagine this is going to be a huge need in the near future. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it were a standard EU…

I think you might be straining the terminology just a bit by referring to cloud services installed inside a corporate firewall. What would make that different from traditional internally deployed applications like SharePoint?

"Plenty of companies are large enough to own their own racks of virtualized servers and would pay good money to run well integrated Microsoft software on them."

They already do - that's where a significant proportion of Microsoft's revenue comes from.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#50

Post by klipt »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #43
beloch wrote: post #28

What I find surprising is that, in the process of writing a historical review on Microsoft, anyone would ignore the fact that MS has repeatedly identified areas of profit, moved in, failed spectacularly, iterated aggressively, and ultimately become dominant, at least for a time. e.g. What killed Netscape? Microsoft's surface tablets are signs of big things to come. They're currently too expensive for what they are, b…

Which problems do Surface tablets solve? For example, iPhone completely changed my life overnight, mostly due to its navigation features and ability to look up phone numbers. I think Surface will only be dominant if it solves a problem for people. So, which problem does it solve, and why is it useful for people?

> What problem do Surface tablets solve?

Art problems, apparently. Gabe of Penny Arcade seemed pretty positive about the Surface Pro:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/02/22/the-ms-surface-pro

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