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Microsoft, Past and Future

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Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#101

Post by 72deluxe »

stormbrew wrote: post #90
72deluxe wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there isn't brand loyalty with free web products. Users are fickle. I happily used AltaVista, Yahoo! and Lycos before moving to this weirdly named Google thing. I happen to use it because it is the default but change the default (without asking) and eventually people won't mind. Having said that, I do find Bing awkward, so perhaps I do use Google out of necessity, but not loyalty.

If Lycos was the last thing you used before switching to google that means that it's been probably about 13-15 years since you switched. On the web that's an eternity. If that's fickle then Google must be pretty happy to have its users be so fickle.

Haha good point

I used Altavista to the last to be honest. I used to have an email account with Altavista, then had to go to Hotmail after they closed, then GMail when it was brand new (fortunate enough to have an invitation from someone). I only used Lycos for their FTP search.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#102

Post by gtirloni »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #95
dasil003 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it was the most innovative browser from '95 to '99.

Well that's one way to spin a monopolist giving away a bundled product for free and reducing the incentive for others to enter that market.

What one product being innovative has to do with it providing incentive for others to enter that specific market? Either IE provided innovative features at that time, or it didn't.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#103

Post by carlio »

valleyer wrote: post #78
CamperBob2 wrote: post #29

Steve Fucking Jobs said that (the desktop PC was dead and innovation had virtually ceased). He was exactly right. And who knows where we’d be today if Jobs and Next had not been reunified with Apple the next year. As a Windows user, I suspect I'd be about where I am today, except that I wouldn't have to install ClassicShell to get rid of Metro.

You don't think the success of the Mac over the last 10 years has pushed Windows to become better than it would have been?

IE stagnated for a long time before firefox arrived to compete. I imagine that could have played out with Windows too, were it not for the success of Apple.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#104

Post by scholia »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #95
dasil003 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it was the most innovative browser from '95 to '99.

Well that's one way to spin a monopolist giving away a bundled product for free and reducing the incentive for others to enter that market.

Everybody else was adding a free browser to their OS and it was obviously going to become a requirement, as it is today with smartphones. It would have been foolish for Microsoft not to do it, and it was foolish of the US DoJ to think otherwise.

Otherwise, Microsoft rewrote the browser so that the components could be used by other programs and by outside developers, so it wasn't a bundled product, it was integrated into the operating system. This might have been a mistake (or not), but it was required because Microsoft had already signed a consent decree with Janet Reno that stated that Microsoft was allowed to add to the OS but not to tie separate products.

Life is hard when politicians interfere with software design.

Componentizing IE resulted in it being a better browser than Netscape, and made it much easier for third parties like AOL to adapt it using the SDK Microsoft provided. Netscape couldn't offer that, though it probably wouldn't have: Netscape prevented third parties from changing Navigator, and it could only be downloaded from Netscape.

Netscape finally lost for a lot of reasons. One was because it decided to rewrite its crap code just as Microsoft had done. That meant it stopped shipping new browser versions with new features. Its market share plunged and AOL, which had bought it, decided to make it open source, which is where Mozilla came in....

Incidentally, Microsoft didn't run into the same problem because it had two browser development teams working in parallel, one on the old version and one on the componentized version.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#105

Post by emehrkay »

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?

I have a first generation Surface RT and I want nothing more than to put Ubuntu on it and get real work done. Since that is not possible, it goes unused.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#106

Post by josteink »

no_gravity wrote: post #74
josteink wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would Microsoft convince those guys or new companies to get rid of their solid, free and open stack and pay for Microsofts closed stuff? They don't have to. They can keep on using their free and open stack, but moving to Azure instead of using Google compute engine or AWS.

Then Microsoft would be just another provider of virtual servers. I dont think thats a good future goal for a 300 billion dollar company. Conversely to Gruber, I see Microsofts future in client software and hardware. Apple and Google have put computers in every pocket. But only the consumption part of it. The race for the production tablet has just started. And with the Surface Pro, Microsoft has the first product ou…

Just like Amazon they are adding their own custom services to the package which is easy to consume.

This can be storage, authentication, federation, messaging, queueing, etc.

And like Amazon they are building their own services (like AD in the cloud, Xbox Live, hosted exchange, Office 365, etc) on top of this infrastructure, so like for Amazon, the infrastructure they are selling literally comes for free.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#107

Post by gtirloni »

quesera wrote: post #100

> Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world. The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device. Yikes. If anyone can find Microsoft-sized margins and volume in that business, it will be more destructive than an OS monoculture ever was. "Cloud" is a low-margin high-volume business, perfect for players like Amazon and Google, with…

Microsoft doesn't seem to be dreaming about Windows/Office margins with Azure:

That’s why today we are also announcing a commitment to match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as compute, storage and bandwidth

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/04/16/the-...

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#108

Post by 6d0debc071 »

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…

I'm not seeing a large niche for them in content creation. If we were starting off with tablets being the dominant player; the thing that most people used and grew up with, then it'd be different. However, the content creation market is already fairly competitive, and the pain points this would solve over and above what's already there don't seem significant.

The questions in that regard seem as follows: Why would artists opt for a, relatively small, imprecise pen over something from Waccom?

Why would programmers opt for working on a small laptop analogue compared to a computer with multiple monitors?

Why would writers opt for this over a computer or a laptop?

I can see people writing a blog post on one, or sitting in a lecture hall with one - but even there, the advantage over an apple laptop; which is pretty light already; seems negligible.

Unless you have to travel a significant distance on foot. There it has the advantages that tablets always had: Light device, relatively good battery life.

But by and large, the competition for Surface in the tablet space seems likely not to be other tablets. It seems more likely to be the tools - some of which are, when you get down to it, fairly specialised - that people are already using.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#109

Post by mattmanser »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #86
codeulike wrote: post #67

I think the Windows 8 gamble could still pay off. We're starting to see 8" tablets that run full Windows. Give it 12 months and the 8" form factor will be powerful enough to cover a lot of enterprise needs. 8" tablet + docking station is a very compelling way to get work done.

Only if your data and apps are on that device you carry about, and not in the cloud so you can access them from both at once. And they just made the cloud guy CEO so he might be thought to favour that way.

Enterprise don't have their stuff in the cloud.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#110

Post by 6d0debc071 »

ancarda wrote: post #72
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Microsoft profit from browsers? Or was it a threat to existing platform profits that it temporarily pushed back via antitrust-inducing bundling tactics in order to scorch the earth for others trying to make inroads? And looking back, how did that go for them, they may have stalled human progress for a while, but what did they do with the time it bought them?

The Web is/was a threat to Microsoft because if everything is a web app you suddenly have no platform lock in. I think Google foresaw this, or is at-least betting on it, with Chrome OS. Why would anyone use Windows; an expensive, proprietary, bug ridden OS when they can use Linux or Chrome OS to perform the same tasks?

> Why would anyone use Windows; an expensive, proprietary, bug ridden OS when they can use Linux or Chrome OS to perform the same tasks?

Because for most people, for most setups, for most use cases, it just works. Expensive? It's rolled into the price of the PC they bought. Proprietary? They don't care. Bug ridden? I rarely see a Windows machine crash these days. Even the years old XP machines I deal with sometimes, for all they need a good fix to be running at acceptable speeds, still run.

With Chrome there's certainly an argument that it can be more convenient than Windows. However, the argument for Linux needs to be stronger than being a free version of Windows or Mac OS with relatively poor hardware support and access to the underlying code that most people won't understand anyway.

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