Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Two Microsofts

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 50 posts

Re: Two Microsofts

#31

Post by andrewfong »

jMyles wrote: post #20
mbillie1 wrote: post #5

> I don’t think any company should have both horizontal (i.e. services) and vertical (i.e. devices) businesses. I find it curious that Microsoft is the target of this criticism, and I am further curious what the author thinks about Apple.

Outside this box, I think this critique takes on an even stranger tone: * Tesla - sells devices (cars) and services (auto repair, charging stations, consulting, etc) * Equal Exchange - sells devices (Cocoa, Coffee and Coffee gear, etc) and services (reports on working conditions and other quality control data) * A private university - sells devices (classrooms, living space, all sorts of retail items) and services (c…

The distinction in the article is not devices vs. services but vertical vs. horizontal. Tesla sells services, but those services are either vertically integrated with their cars (e.g. they don't repair non-Tesla vehicles) or have strategic value for their primary business (e.g. making superchargers compatible with non-Teslas expands the supply of EV charging stations generally, which is good for Tesla owners).

Re: Two Microsofts

#32

Post by [deleted] »

chj wrote: post #22
Spearchucker wrote: post #3

I'm not sure I entirely agree with this. Office on iOS and Android is (in my opinion) geared at being able to read and maybe edit Office documents. While these apps can certainly create Office documents, they're not really suited to it. One would ideally do that using a laptop or PC. And that then simply makes mobile a way of further entrenching Office - people who use it at work can now use it on their devices. Peop…

Totally agree. MS doesn't really have any choice but to offer office for free in the age of App Stores, and more importantly free alternatives are everywhere. Apple pages/numbers aren't going anywhere outside their garden, but Google docs are real deal. It's painful for MS to take this move, but it is really impressive to see them coming out of the comfort zone. Clearly the strategy of MS is to expand their services…

[deleted]

Re: Two Microsofts

#33

Post by jMyles »

andrewfong wrote: post #31
jMyles wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside this box, I think this critique takes on an even stranger tone: * Tesla - sells devices (cars) and services (auto repair, charging stations, consulting, etc) * Equal Exchange - sells devices (Cocoa, Coffee and Coffee gear, etc) and services (reports on working conditions and other quality control data) * A private university - sells devices (classrooms, living space, all sorts of retail items) and services (c…

The distinction in the article is not devices vs. services but vertical vs. horizontal. Tesla sells services, but those services are either vertically integrated with their cars (e.g. they don't repair non-Tesla vehicles) or have strategic value for their primary business (e.g. making superchargers compatible with non-Teslas expands the supply of EV charging stations generally, which is good for Tesla owners).

Yeah, I thought that when I wrote it. The same is somewhat true of Equal Exchange (ie, presumably their advocacy is intended to drive market expansion).

But what about the other examples I've named?

Re: Two Microsofts

#34

Post by Joeri »

roc wrote: post #29
Spearchucker wrote: post #3

I'm not sure I entirely agree with this. Office on iOS and Android is (in my opinion) geared at being able to read and maybe edit Office documents. While these apps can certainly create Office documents, they're not really suited to it. One would ideally do that using a laptop or PC. And that then simply makes mobile a way of further entrenching Office - people who use it at work can now use it on their devices. Peop…

> "That was Microsoft coming late to the party." Late? They threw the party. Damn near a decade ago.

But they were so uncool nobody came, and too proud to go to apple and google's party until quite recently.

Re: Two Microsofts

#35

Post by ha292 »

Does anyone else think that MS folks are just plain and simple desperate and are trying new things ?

I think it is entirely feasible that they haven't really thought through what they are doing. It feels that they are simply streamlining and opening up without an end game in mind.

Re: Two Microsofts

#36

Post by bestham »

swartkrans wrote: post #10
mbillie1 wrote: post #5

> I don’t think any company should have both horizontal (i.e. services) and vertical (i.e. devices) businesses. I find it curious that Microsoft is the target of this criticism, and I am further curious what the author thinks about Apple.

NextStep was built with enterprise in mind but became wholly consumer in its next life as OS X and then iOS. The massive consumer success of the iPhone led to employers giving in to employees who wanted iOS devices instead of Blackberry devices, a phenomenon called BYOD, "bring your own device". BYOD has given rise to an entirely new Apple presence in enterprise which I think Apple is just getting started with. Prior…

Just a nit pick, BYOD is when a employee brings his/her own device to work in order to use it to do work. At some places it's viable to let employees choose the tools that work best for them, and not force every employee onto the same 6 pound HP or Lenovo or Blackberry.

New and improved provision schemes will make this even more viable in the future, where applications and data that belongs to the employer can still be kept reasonably secure no matter who owns the hardware.

Re: Two Microsofts

#37

Post by tracker1 »

Aloha wrote: post #23

I think the guys enterprise map is off - while the future might be the cloud, the current is still firmly rooted in windows desktop, windows server, active directory and exchange.

While I don't completely disagree, I think with the relative success of Azure, and with the opening up on .Net itself (just announced) that MS is clearly hedging some bets on being a tools/application stack provider as well as it's services.

I actually really like Office 365 and their hosted mail offerings, though I think Outlook has become a bit more annoying with the changes for scalability that MS needed to make. The world is moving away from windows as a platform, so it makes sense to double-down where they have a lot of hold...

Developing end to end solutions with VS is usually more pleasant than competing options, and windows licensing has been their bottleneck. With the push to cloud hosting, MS is in a better position than most to leverage their tooling... Though I really hated the early marketing of Azure within the .Net community, for a while it seemed like every MS tech presentation was an advertisement for Azure. (which kind of pushed men out)...

That said, actually using Azure is pretty nice, and imho quite a bit easier, even for Linux than using AWS and others. I'm not developing new solutions with MS's windows+.net in mind. But opening up .Net more may change my stance there.

Re: Two Microsofts

#38

Post by andrewfong »

jMyles wrote: post #33
andrewfong wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distinction in the article is not devices vs. services but vertical vs. horizontal. Tesla sells services, but those services are either vertically integrated with their cars (e.g. they don't repair non-Tesla vehicles) or have strategic value for their primary business (e.g. making superchargers compatible with non-Teslas expands the supply of EV charging stations generally, which is good for Tesla owners).

Yeah, I thought that when I wrote it. The same is somewhat true of Equal Exchange (ie, presumably their advocacy is intended to drive market expansion). But what about the other examples I've named?

Same situation. Those are all examples of vertically integrated businesses (or alternatively, different components of a single output).

A university sells education. Classrooms, dorms, teachers, etc. are all part of the same 'supply chain' for education.

A trial lawyers sells legal services. Research, evidence, appearing in court, and so forth are just incident to the basic legal service provided.

A restaurant sells a 'dining experience'. The food, wait service, and so forth are all part of that same experience.

What OP means by a company that has both horizontal and vertical businesses is a company offering something as a standalone revenue-generating output (the "horizontal" business) and something else that incorporates that standalone output as part of another output (the "vertical" business).

This would apply, for instance, to a fast food company that not only sold hamburgers via its chain of fast food restaurants (vertical) but also supplied those same hamburgers to other, possibly competing competing fast food restaurants as a separate business (horizontal).

Re: Two Microsofts

#39

Post by Spearchucker »

roc wrote: post #29
Spearchucker wrote: post #3

I'm not sure I entirely agree with this. Office on iOS and Android is (in my opinion) geared at being able to read and maybe edit Office documents. While these apps can certainly create Office documents, they're not really suited to it. One would ideally do that using a laptop or PC. And that then simply makes mobile a way of further entrenching Office - people who use it at work can now use it on their devices. Peop…

> "That was Microsoft coming late to the party." Late? They threw the party. Damn near a decade ago.

Maybe "touch party" would been a better choice. I know, I used to build MSMQ apps for Pocket PC and Windows Mobile. My GPS app from the early 2000's (1) makes me cringe today and yet still leaves me with fond memories.

(1) https://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=5d4b7d53-a77b-4fa...

Post reply on HN