131–140 of 255 posts
Long story, short: 1. Realize the world is moving beyond Windows 2. Cede mobile OS to Android/iOS, that battle is lost. 3. Realize, next great revenue stream is the Cloud (Azure).
Regarding #1, eventually I expect Microsoft to release their own Linux distribution and keep Windows as a GUI. I would not be surprised if their failed project Astoria was reused to run android apps on that.
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> For whatever reason, the industry press never liked Ballmer, and I guess they like Satya Ballmer made several missteps: 1. Fruitless foray into mobile with acquisition of Nokia and Windows Mobile and Windows Phone strategies. 2. Billion+ dollar acquisition of Skype that basically went no where. 3. Remember a company called aQuantive? Don't worry, neither does anyone else. Ballmer's MS purchased them for $6 billion.…
"Ballmer made several missteps:" Growing an already massive company company by 3x in revenue is the important thing, which is the 'bottom line' in which missteps have to be contextualized. Any company in tech is going to make mistakes, this should be happening, so listing them off doesn't so much help - what matters is how all of this works out in the mix. I worked in mobile during that time, it was vicious. Surely M…
Apple made $17.5B in revenue in FY18 in "Other Products". A sizable chunk of that is bound to be headphone revenue (and homepod may also have profited from the Beats acquisition).
Given the healthy margins that Apple tends to have across all its products, it seems plausible that even under quite conservative assumptions Apple easily made a billion or so in profit from that segment. And that's not even counting Apple Music.
https://s22.q4cdn.com/396847794/files/doc_financials/quarter...
Disclaimer: Working for Apple in a non-fiscal, non-Beats related role.
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> The problem is they are no longer best-of-breed for any of their markets Operating systems? I personally love Windows 10 (now its more mature), and Windows Server 2019 is embracing containers. On cloud, AWS is very entrenched, but Microsoft can capture a lot of the enterprise market. I've worked extensively with Azure, and I think it's a fantastic product. TBH, I'm not sure there is a "best of breed" cloud provider…
Are we talking about the same windows 10 that blows-up every November to add nonsuch features?
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How are they ruining Windows? People have been saying this since XP (before SP1 or SP2, when everyone hated it.) Yet there's not much evidence to support it...they are actually doing some really cool things with Windows now like adding bash and having different flavor Linux subsystems. The main issue I've had is some lack of quality control since they let go tons of testers and used Insiders instead. That has not eff…
The heavy-handed updates forcing frequent reboots are the deal-breaker for me. It seriously pisses me off to come back to my machine only discover that all those editor windows I had open gone, the IDE close, and all the open browser tabs lost, etc. Why are frequent full reboots even necessary in this day and age?!
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3250464/microsoft-wind...
No forced updates, no store apps, no Cortana.
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> The problem is they are no longer best-of-breed for any of their markets Operating systems? I personally love Windows 10 (now its more mature), and Windows Server 2019 is embracing containers. On cloud, AWS is very entrenched, but Microsoft can capture a lot of the enterprise market. I've worked extensively with Azure, and I think it's a fantastic product. TBH, I'm not sure there is a "best of breed" cloud provider…
Are we talking about the same windows 10 that blows-up every November to add nonsuch features?
[0] https://m.windowscentral.com/how-fix-taskbar-search-not-work... Had to have a work PC reimaged to fix this. True story.
"When Satya Nadella took Microsoft Corp.’s helm five years ago, the conventional wisdom was that the company’s glory days were behind it." Have a look at this MS revenues [1] and consider why for a moment there is any 'conventional wisdom' like this? MSFT stock price did languish during this time of amazing growth which I guess validates that 'conventional wisdom' was in fact sour, but it's hard to see why it was. Ro…
> For whatever reason, the industry press never liked Ballmer, and I guess they like Satya Ballmer made several missteps: 1. Fruitless foray into mobile with acquisition of Nokia and Windows Mobile and Windows Phone strategies. 2. Billion+ dollar acquisition of Skype that basically went no where. 3. Remember a company called aQuantive? Don't worry, neither does anyone else. Ballmer's MS purchased them for $6 billion.…
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> Windows 95 ... should have never existed because... NT was a thing. Windows NT needed way high-end hardware to be usable at the time. (Even Linux did, if you wanted to use a Win95-like GUI and not be limited to the text-only CLI.) Windows 95 was a hack, but it was still miles better than pure MS-DOG and 16-bit versions of Windows. > Windows 98 ...introduced completely unnecessary IE integration and the Active Deskt…
> Guess what, that integrates the web browser at a far deeper level than Win98 ever did. That's the entire point; it uses the web browser because the web browser became an operating system (in the "application platform" sense of the word, not in the "kernel" sense) in its own right, and ChromeOS is Google's attempt to follow it to its conclusion. This is categorically different than Windows' deep and arbitrary integr…
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Uh, Azure revenue, by many accounts, is greater than AWS: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/10/29/1-microsof... https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/04/27/microsoft-... And sorry, G Suite is a joke compared to desktop Office for serious work. It doesn't matter what the youngin's prefer, what matters is what gets (or facilitates getting) real work done in the enterprise, which generally revolves aroun…
Microsoft includes a bunch of non-Azure products under their cloud revenue. And they do it to confuse people and falsely claim they're outpacing AWS, which as you just proved, works.
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There are for sure features that I disagree with in Win10 like telemetry and automatic reboots while I'm using the computer (which has been resolved), but it's a far stretch to say they're ruining windows. I don't think I've ever had a full crash on my current Win10 box that I use daily. Driver issues are almost nonexistent. It does everything I need it to without issue. I'm not sure what else I would want from an OS…
How about not having spyware? I don't think we should use the word "telemetry" when we do actually mean spyware. Telemetry, in connotation, is data used for diagnostic, maintenance, and 'real' quality assurance. I opt-in to various forms of telemetry for a number of different pieces of software I use. I'm happy to help other developers create a better product. What Microsoft is doing goes far above any reasonable not…
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/diagnostic-data-viewer/9n8...
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/01/24/micro...
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The problem is they are no longer best-of-breed for any of their markets, except maybe Office. Microsoft doesn't break out Azure revenue, but by all accounts it's quite small compared to AWS. And Office is very much under threat. If you work with young people you'll notice they tend to prefer G Suite apps over Office - most likely because Google has done a great job getting their software into schools.
Uh, Azure revenue, by many accounts, is greater than AWS: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/10/29/1-microsof... https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/04/27/microsoft-... And sorry, G Suite is a joke compared to desktop Office for serious work. It doesn't matter what the youngin's prefer, what matters is what gets (or facilitates getting) real work done in the enterprise, which generally revolves aroun…
And this is one of countless random things I could do with PowerPoint 15 years ago, when I was drawing slides for a freaking CS conference.