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The Microsoft Empire Reboots

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Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#11

Post by curiousDog »

latch wrote: post #10
x0x0 wrote: post #6

(I think) it's not hard to understand where microsoft went wrong. Ballmer just doesn't seem to get where the industry is going. As evidence, this quote from the article: Indeed, Ballmer seemed to have no intention of leaving when he announced a massive reorganization of the entire company in July 2013. Behind the scenes he had also begun negotiating an acquisition that was meant to transform Microsoft. He had become…

That might be one of the mistakes, but it isn't the start of the problem. Tangibly, it's either United States v. Microsoft Corporation or Longhorn / Vista. Intangibly, it's the attitude that permeated the company that said "we are right because we are Microsoft." There were few people you could talk to who'd think you had anything to offer someone who worked at Microsoft. You still see this today around products like…

Just curious, do you work for Microsoft? Last I heard, Azure was doing pretty well, considering Office 365, TFS and a host of other internal services are hosted on it. They seem to be the most formidable competition to AWS right now (and I believe that, I tried all GCE, AWS and Azure over the weekend and while AWS was the best, Azure was a close second while GCE was just slow and buggy).

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#12

Post by latch »

curiousDog wrote: post #11
latch wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be one of the mistakes, but it isn't the start of the problem. Tangibly, it's either United States v. Microsoft Corporation or Longhorn / Vista. Intangibly, it's the attitude that permeated the company that said "we are right because we are Microsoft." There were few people you could talk to who'd think you had anything to offer someone who worked at Microsoft. You still see this today around products like…

Just curious, do you work for Microsoft? Last I heard, Azure was doing pretty well, considering Office 365, TFS and a host of other internal services are hosted on it. They seem to be the most formidable competition to AWS right now (and I believe that, I tried all GCE, AWS and Azure over the weekend and while AWS was the best, Azure was a close second while GCE was just slow and buggy).

No, I don't. Also, my view of Azure pretty much comes from experience with it long ago and a year-old Gartner analysis [1]. I can easily accept that Azure is very different than it used to be. I can also easily accept that it's doing better against AWS than anyone else.

But I'd need hard numbers to refute that Gartner analysis. Spending 50% more than your competitor and having a market share less than 1/5 (probably a lot more, since the 1/5 is 15 providers combined), is something I struggle to call "success". I'd be less harsh if this didn't fit a pattern. And I know spending more and having less is the price that challengers face, but again, not being an incumbent (and failing to mount a real challenge) is a pattern we've seen before.

[1] http://readwrite.com/2013/08/21/gartner-aws-now-5-times-the-...

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#13

Post by __Joker »

More oft repeated history apart from the later part of the article which discusses the present and the future direction.

"The holy grail for Microsoft would be getting developers to write new software for Windows again ", this necessarily isn't true. The developer go where users and money are. And users not necessarily go to devices which have lot of apps. This might sound like a chicken and egg problem, but look at amazon, if developers are writing software for its devices, Amazon is bootstrapping its devices with software. I take out the other devices, the desktop and servers, might not have as much impact as it may sound.

Second, Xbox, Bing, may sound looser, but they may be interesting in the next round of battle. The smart phone battle is more or less is over and it is not going to make much difference, but the future of the smart device fields will be another story, if only MS can concentrate on the future in coherent way.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#14

Post by curiousDog »

latch wrote: post #12
curiousDog wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, do you work for Microsoft? Last I heard, Azure was doing pretty well, considering Office 365, TFS and a host of other internal services are hosted on it. They seem to be the most formidable competition to AWS right now (and I believe that, I tried all GCE, AWS and Azure over the weekend and while AWS was the best, Azure was a close second while GCE was just slow and buggy).

No, I don't. Also, my view of Azure pretty much comes from experience with it long ago and a year-old Gartner analysis [1]. I can easily accept that Azure is very different than it used to be. I can also easily accept that it's doing better against AWS than anyone else. But I'd need hard numbers to refute that Gartner analysis. Spending 50% more than your competitor and having a market share less than 1/5 (probably a…

Ah, I believe this is what I came across and is more recent: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/05/heres-why-m...

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#15

Post by Immortalin »

Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it was amazing knowing that i could create an application simply by dragging and dropping some elements and writing some code. I never had to worry about things like gtk bindings and makefiles etc. The earlier version of visual studio started up in less then a second and I never experienced any lag. The killer feature was probably the combination of both an just-in-time interpretator and a full-blown compiler. I could simply click play and the app would run, if i need an exe, it would also export one. This feature put most modern "repl-based languages" and "test-driven development" to shame. A lot of people complain that vb 6 is not object-orientated enough, but remember, C is not object-orientated either, and it still tops the tiobe programming list. Windows is sorely in need of an Rapid application development framework. Although vb6 still installs on windows 7, a lot of its features are broken. I really miss having an IDE that doesnt get in your way, starts up quickly, and allows you to get things done fast. The argument that vb6 encourages bad programming practices etc. is not really that valid when the user is not an professional programmer. After all, would you rather teach your kids to code by teaching him about build tools and commandlines and gui bindings or would you simply give them an environment where they can create whatever they want in a fuss-free way? Now, lets just hope that microsoft isnt stupid enough to nerf asp.net web forms.......

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#16

Post by gurkendoktor »

Immortalin wrote: post #15

Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it w…

I was a huge fan of Delphi 5 at the time, and hoped it would win over VB6 (I guess it's a Coke/Pepsi thing). Now I'm in the same boat as you, because it seems both Delphi and its competitor, VB, have lost. I'm not even sure if there are any winners.

I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools...

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#17

Post by Nitramp »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #16
Immortalin wrote: post #15

Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it w…

I was a huge fan of Delphi 5 at the time, and hoped it would win over VB6 (I guess it's a Coke/Pepsi thing). Now I'm in the same boat as you, because it seems both Delphi and its competitor, VB, have lost. I'm not even sure if there are any winners. I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools...

> I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools...

I think that's the web. The development that used to happen in VB6 & Delphi simply has migrated there, desktop apps from that segment are dead.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#18

Post by scientist »

Microsoft seems to be a crumbling empire. They seem not even able to maintain their websites. Here is a message I got today from Microsoft Azure: "NO ACTION REQUIRED: We want to notify you of an upcoming maintenance operation to your Virtual Machines in West Europe, starting at 23:00 Saturday, October 18th UTC. Single instance virtual machine deployments that are not in availability sets will reboot once during this maintenance operation. We expect the update to finish within six to eight hours of the start time. Please note that Cloud Services using Web or Worker roles aren't impacted by this maintenance operation. This link contains additional information: http://aka.ms/vax58". The link they give leads to a 404 error.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#19

Post by david927 »

Nitramp wrote: post #17
gurkendoktor wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a huge fan of Delphi 5 at the time, and hoped it would win over VB6 (I guess it's a Coke/Pepsi thing). Now I'm in the same boat as you, because it seems both Delphi and its competitor, VB, have lost. I'm not even sure if there are any winners. I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools...

> I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools... I think that's the web. The development that used to happen in VB6 & Delphi simply has migrated there, desktop apps from that segment are dead.

I think you're right, and it's a huge indictment. The web, as an application platform, is worse than VB ever was.

Think about that for a moment: We've regressed from VB.

The usual tradeoff is: easy to write, hard to extend and maintain. But the web is hard to write and hard to extend/maintain.

We have some of the smartest people in the world in our industry, and evidently we're all idiots.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#20

Post by asdfologist »

scientist wrote: post #18

Microsoft seems to be a crumbling empire. They seem not even able to maintain their websites. Here is a message I got today from Microsoft Azure: "NO ACTION REQUIRED: We want to notify you of an upcoming maintenance operation to your Virtual Machines in West Europe, starting at 23:00 Saturday, October 18th UTC. Single instance virtual machine deployments that are not in availability sets will reboot once during this…

Yes, they sent out one broken link, and therefore they're a crumbling empire.
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