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Microsoft, Past and Future

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Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#171

Post by jimbokun »

scholia wrote: post #104
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

"Everybody else was adding a free browser to their OS"

Who else had an OS that mattered? Apple had single digit share, maybe BeOS? Sun? NeXT?

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#173

Post by jrmenon »

amaks wrote: post #150
shmerl wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netscape story? MS because dominant in browsers (for a while) because of the nasty lock-ins, not because of any positive iterating. Their own slowness became their downfall - IE didn't iterate for a long time, and when they realized that competition is way ahead it was too late for them. MS mentality barely changed. Lock-in remains their primary strategy in many areas (it's well described here: https://en.wikipedia.o…

Exactly. That's why I believe nothing will change in Microsoft with the new CEO, open sourcing of ASP.NET and other moves. It's simply not in their DNA to change and become fast followers. Lock-ins, closed silos - that's Microsoft areas of domination ever since.

Nothing unusual about the lock-in strategy. I would argue Apple does the same with iTunes/App Store walled-garden, same for Facebook, and Google - their Android playstore, GMail/GDocs esp. for small business.

It is been a dream for many companies to own the full stack - client onwards all the way till the server. MS tried with Active-X controls in their browsers which only worked well with IIS servers. Apple is pretty much doing the same with their offerings.

Full-spectrum dominance.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#174

Post by 10feet »

dkrich wrote: post #168

I don't see why people always compare Microsoft to Apple besides the fact that they are two of the oldest and highest-profile companies in the technology industry. This comparison always leads to them making the false claim that Microsoft "missed-out" on mobile. Microsoft has always been a software-first company. Their strategy has always been to create the OS and license it to hardware manufacturers and capture the…

I know, it is like comparing Apples and Oranges, two other similar fruits that are very comparable.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#175

Post by yuhong »

josefresco wrote: post #99
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you even use Netscape in the 90's? While most of the non tech loved it's bloated and "friendly" interface, the tech crowd I ran in used IE because it was lean, fast and didn't try to be some sort of "suite" that took over your PC. Sure MS leveraged their dominance in the OS world with brutal effectiveness, but Netscape was far from the ideal browser. In fact, Opera was our "Firefox" of the time as it could fit on…

Yea, it is unfortunate Netscape cancelled the "Mariner" project.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#176

Post by Aldo_MX »

6d0debc071 wrote: post #108
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 ar…

When I connect my surface to two 1080p monitors, and an 8-port USB hub, I don't even remember that I'm using a Surface, unless I need to do a resource-intensive task.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#177

Post by Zigurd »

stormbrew wrote: post #4

> No company today has reach or influence anything like what Microsoft had during the golden era of the PC. Not Apple, not Google, and not Microsoft itself. I think Google is pretty close, really. They obviously don't have an operating system for laptops or desktops that everyone uses, but using a computer without Google products is something that people just don't really do anymore. iOS, Android, OSX, Windows, Ubunt…

I predict Android will enjoy a period of dominance that will be remarkably the same as Windows. Android will dominate mobile devices, plus a few other areas like maybe cars, appliances, TVs, some wearables, and the random embedded things that used to run Windows CE and Windows Embedded, very much in the way Windows dominates PCs. Probably, like Windows, for decades.

The question is whether that will matter the way Windows mattered to computing. I would have expected, for example, a lot more people who write software for the enterprise to start making tablet apps. They're not. I don't know if this is a wave that is late coming in, or if vendors think touch Web apps will be good enough (which they are not, for anything that is popular in an app store), or if that kind of dominance just doesn't matter as much anymore.

Android is a pretty sweet tablet OS, and I could see there being a lot more of it where PCs are serving as office productivity nodes. Tablets have the potential to to change the workplace for the better: Users not tied to heavy PCs or laptops in cubicle workspaces, etc. But it's slow to take off.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#178

Post by tsax »

stormbrew wrote: post #11
gnaffle wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google recognized that the OS doesn't matter anymore and Microsoft continued to believe it was everything. I think they recognize all too well that it matters, which is seen by the massive effort in developing and supporting Android, Chrome OS etc. This is just Googles version of Microsoft giving away IE.

I think they do these projects more out of a concern of being shut out of other OS' the way Netscape was effectively shut out of Windows. And that shows in which of those platforms they've placed the most effort: the one where their competitor is the most likely to shut them out.

How was Netscape shut out of Windows?

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#179

Post by tsax »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #169

> The world is in need of high-quality, reliable, developer-friendly, trustworthy, privacy-guarding cloud computing platforms. No, no, no, that is exactly what I do _not_ want! I want all my computing devices to work completely offline in all circumstances. I want to install programs to my local computer so Incan be shure that I still can use them if the company goes bankrupt. I want to be able to install old version…

Personal Cloud, perhaps, will be the answer. No real vendors for that yet though. Urbit maybe but that has a year or so to go before it becomes usable.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#180

Post by mturmon »

mwfunk wrote: post #159
mwfunk wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe in your first sentence is absolutely their MO. I don't think anyone making any sort of serious attempt to understand Microsoft ignores that or is unaware of that. The whole uncertainty surrounding Microsoft for the last 10 years (fair or not) is the fact that that approach doesn't work for them anymore and hasn't worked in years, their lack of dominance in the mobile industry being the prime example…

Also, I think a big problem with Microsoft's strategy is it's based on attempting to replicate the same level of success they enjoyed with Windows and Office. Microsoft's strategy isn't to become a strong competitor, Microsoft's strategy all too often is to attempt to become the overwhelming market share leader. They see that things like Windows and Office enjoy 90-95% market share in their respective market segments…

One example of this effect is the packaging parody

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

which was made by a MS team as an illustration of their frustration.

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