Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#31

Post by dasil003 » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 6:36 PM UTC

michael_dorfman wrote: post #23

dasil003 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. But I don't think the situation is as dire as the article paints it. Office is not going anywhere anytime soon. The rise of smartphones does not suddenly mean that there is any lesser demand for Office. The enterprise trusts Microsoft (with good reason IMHO) and if they stay on their game they can continue to dominate the market. Can you imagine trusting your billion dollar company to Google's half-assed supp…

I get the feeling he looks at how Apple is thriving on a closed ecosystem ("OS X Everywhere") and wants to succeed in a similar way, but he is utterly incapable of it. Ah, but that's the thing-- Apple didn't go for "OS X Everywhere", they were willing to segment their OS strategy, and developed iOS for the iPhone and iPad. There's no telling what the tech world would look like now if Microsoft hadn't tied their table…

iOS is based on OS X though, but anyway the technical distinction is irrelevant to my point.

The point is that Apple integration is very tight across devices, in a way that must be very appealing to Microsoft from a business perspective.

But Microsoft has it's own strengths, such as catering to the support and feature needs of the enterprise. In a way it mirrors Apple's strategy of targeting the high-end consumer market, Microsoft targets the highest-end software market, period.

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#32

Post by MartinCron » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 6:36 PM UTC

danilocampos wrote: post #11

mw63214 wrote: post #7

I still don't get how all these articles frame the debate as Microsoft playing catch-up with all the "innovation" coming out of Apple? I get the management culture and internal struggles and "analysis paralysis" that comes with the cover-your-butt mentality, but as far as I can tell, Microsoft is one of the very few companies that has entire departments dedicated bringing cutting-edge technologies to market. The only…

> Microsoft is one of the very few companies that has entire departments dedicated bringing cutting-edge technologies to market. So where are these technologies? And why isn't Microsoft hauling huge sacks of money home each year from multiple products that didn't exist in the 90's? As far as I can tell, they make money from vendor lock-in with Office and Windows, and a gaming division founded by a visionary who left…

Office is also legitimately innovative. Love it or hate it, the whole "ribbon" thing was a big deal.

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#33

Post by kenjackson » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 6:36 PM UTC

ibdknox wrote: post #25

As a recently departed (read 5 months) ex-PM at Microsoft, I think MS's problems, at least in my division, stem from three things: a lack of vision/leadership, too inward of a focus, and the ridiculous bevy of meaningless communication. I think the article touches on each of these in a certain way, but not exactly in the same way I mean them. One thing I noticed about the middle management at MS was that they never d…

The article makes a point of MS being focused too much on itself, and I wholeheartedly agree. One of the things I was praised for was knowing what the rest of the tech world was doing (I worked on VS).

I have to admit that I find this odd for a few reasons:

1) VS is one of the best products MS ships. And its probably best in industry.

2) VS has done a fair bit of really good work in the past few years. The work in C# has definitely been ahead of its peers in the industry. The debugger continuously seems to get better. And even where it plays catch up, like ASP.NET MVC, its doing so rapid and smartly.

3) VS is where it seems like there are a lot of people who look outside the company. I've never met Scott Hanselman, but he seems like the type of person who could rattle off every open source project in existence.

4) Scott Guthrie seems pretty visionary and he's in VS isn't he?

I'm not doubting any of what you said, but it seems like VS is the one place in MS that I'd tell the rest of the company to look for inspiration -- although as an insider it appears otherwise.

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#34

Post by kenjackson » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 6:38 PM UTC

MartinCron wrote: post #29

kenjackson wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The open question is whether Google and Facebook will also end up in this same spot. As you said, everyone will end up here. There's virtually no way a rational company can avoid it. It's textbook Innovator's Dilemma. Eventually you're faced with a situation that there is a new product/service that is cannibalizing your product. You can hasten the cannibalization of your cash cow and maybe succeed in this new space (…

Even if integrating desktop, tablet, and phone in a way that has never been envisioned is a good idea at all (and I can't say). I feel that Windows 8 will either be way too soon to do it well, or they will way take too long to ship Windows 8. We haven't even got one proven good iteration of anything Windows on phone or tablet yet.

I agree... I suspect if it is a good idea it will be too soon to do it well. And in five years Apple will do it well. That's the story of the MS product pipeline. Do something five years too early to do it well -- get stuck in the decisions made at that point in time and can't come back and realize that the decisions of five years ago no long apply.

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#35

Post by MartinCron » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 6:39 PM UTC

danilocampos wrote: post #11

mw63214 wrote: post #7

I still don't get how all these articles frame the debate as Microsoft playing catch-up with all the "innovation" coming out of Apple? I get the management culture and internal struggles and "analysis paralysis" that comes with the cover-your-butt mentality, but as far as I can tell, Microsoft is one of the very few companies that has entire departments dedicated bringing cutting-edge technologies to market. The only…

> Microsoft is one of the very few companies that has entire departments dedicated bringing cutting-edge technologies to market. So where are these technologies? And why isn't Microsoft hauling huge sacks of money home each year from multiple products that didn't exist in the 90's? As far as I can tell, they make money from vendor lock-in with Office and Windows, and a gaming division founded by a visionary who left…

Another example would be on the developer tools side. Things like C# 4.0, Linq, Entity Framework, ASP.NET MVC.

Not all of the their developer stuff is great (I actually had a MSFT PM to apologize to me for the unit-testing stuff built into Visual Studio) but I can't imagine life without Linq.

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#36

Post by shareme » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 6:40 PM UTC

dsuriano wrote: post #2

"Windows Everywhere" is a bad strategy for Microsoft. I still don't think Windows Phone 7 was a good name. Why didn't they just go with Microsoft Phone or something?

CE=Communicate Everywhere, was not a good name either

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#37

Post by forgotAgain » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 6:40 PM UTC

mw63214 wrote: post #7

I still don't get how all these articles frame the debate as Microsoft playing catch-up with all the "innovation" coming out of Apple? I get the management culture and internal struggles and "analysis paralysis" that comes with the cover-your-butt mentality, but as far as I can tell, Microsoft is one of the very few companies that has entire departments dedicated bringing cutting-edge technologies to market. The only…

I've begun to wonder lately if all of the money they've spent on "innovative technologies" shouldn't be counted as marketing expense for their core products.

I mean they're not going to convince many people to buy Office for the first time with advertising. People buy Office because it's what you do when you have a PC.

On the other hand by spending money to appear to be a cutting edge technical company they can more easily justify (sell) to their business customers the need for another round of version upgrades.

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#38

Post by danilocampos » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 6:44 PM UTC

MartinCron wrote: post #32

danilocampos wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft is one of the very few companies that has entire departments dedicated bringing cutting-edge technologies to market. So where are these technologies? And why isn't Microsoft hauling huge sacks of money home each year from multiple products that didn't exist in the 90's? As far as I can tell, they make money from vendor lock-in with Office and Windows, and a gaming division founded by a visionary who left…

Office is also legitimately innovative. Love it or hate it, the whole "ribbon" thing was a big deal.

Excel is a thing of beauty. But let's be real:

When you've got other companies bringing home billions in revenue on product categories that did not even exist five years ago, it's tough to be impressed that Microsoft gave a facelift to a product that was new in the early 90's.

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#39

Post by MartinCron » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 6:45 PM UTC

kkshin wrote: post #21

One of Microsoft's biggest problems that contributes to their insular view is that they are located in Redmond. They're insulated from the rest of the highly competitive technology field (except for Amazon). This works out great for them when it comes to retaining talent in Redmond as employees are usually not willing to uproot their lifestyle to head to 'greener pastures'. Contrast this to how Google handles compens…

I'm not going to claim that Microsoft isn't too insular (it is) and I live and work in Seattle on purpose, so I'm a little biased about this, but I don't think it's just about the location. Besides Amazon being a huge presence, more and more established tech companies are opening development offices here (Google, Facebook, Zynga) just to take advantage of the talent that's here. Not to mention the fairly healthy startup culture that feeds from and back into the beast in Redmond.

Leadership, culture, and politics are all much bigger problems than geography.

Re: Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way

#40

Post by ibdknox » Thu, Apr 07, 2011, 6:46 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #33

ibdknox wrote: post #25

As a recently departed (read 5 months) ex-PM at Microsoft, I think MS's problems, at least in my division, stem from three things: a lack of vision/leadership, too inward of a focus, and the ridiculous bevy of meaningless communication. I think the article touches on each of these in a certain way, but not exactly in the same way I mean them. One thing I noticed about the middle management at MS was that they never d…

The article makes a point of MS being focused too much on itself, and I wholeheartedly agree. One of the things I was praised for was knowing what the rest of the tech world was doing (I worked on VS). I have to admit that I find this odd for a few reasons: 1) VS is one of the best products MS ships. And its probably best in industry. 2) VS has done a fair bit of really good work in the past few years. The work in C#…

1) I agree. It's probably one of the best IDE's out there and C# is undoubtedly a fantastic language.

2) In what ways is C# ahead of its peers in the industry? I think Async is a great step forward, but it's been in other languages for a while now.

3) He could and he has no impact on VS whatsoever. Scott is essentially a community PM. He talks for a living about stuff. He's a great guy and he's done some good on the web side, but he has no influence on the core of VS.

4) He's actually on the platform, not VS, though he does take a lot of interest in the core component itself. I like ScottGu a lot, I've worked with him a couple of times, but he's driving something very specific (.NET framework and its components).

MS is quite good at building platforms and not nearly as good at building interfaces. A big part of what I did before I left was prove that most people don't understand how to use VS. Moreover, there's a lot you don't see - all of the failed attempts to do things even more amazing than async. While VS itself seems like a model citizen, I would argue that's because it started out as the conglomeration of fairly strong original products and hasn't needed to move too far from where it started to be "best in industry."