Earlier quoted context omitted.
So has Steve Jobs missed social and search as well? No. All companies need not do the exact same thing. Missing mobile is relevant because it is eating into Microsoft's PC revenues, but social and search is a whole new business that Microsoft didn't need to get involved in at all. In my view, Ballmer's mistake is to not go after Oracle and SAP much more than chasing Apple and Google.
What about Bing? Microsoft didn't get into social because that is entirely outside their market. The limit of it seemed to be something like msn messenger, which had business use cases as much as social ones. I mean, its not like MS didn't try the search thing, but search is something Google will own until they fuck it up, not from anyone entering to compete with them, because free & good enough are hard to break. Al…
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
421–430 of 784 posts
Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the mobile market, Google was the fast follower. MSFT's entries with windows phone and the surface cannot be called fast .
To be fair, Windows Mobile existed and gained market dominance long before the iPhone was around. Tablet PCs were introduced with Windows XP, long before the iPad was around. Microsoft's failure was in hesitating to change with the market, not a failure to have products on the market.
I'd go so far as to argue that it really wasn't the same market - the one that Windows Mobile was in was not anything like the smartphone market created by Apple and Google.
Tablets, you can make a case for, as above, I guess, but again, the leap with the iPad was so great that it wasn't just an iteration but a leap, leaving it open for a fast follower to come on (as Google did there too).
Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm no fan of Ballmer, but I think "insulting OEMs" is one of the good things he did. The OEMs carry a great deal of blame for the collapse of Windows. While Apple was shipping beautiful metal enclosures with great convenient features like MagSafe and magnetic latches, OEMs like Dell were shitting all over the Windows brand with plasticky (and still expensive!), heavy, unreliable, loud-as-shit laptops with terrible s…
OEMs like Dell were shitting all over the Windows brand with plasticky (and still expensive!), heavy, unreliable, loud-as-shit laptops with terrible screens. This is utter nonsense. There simply is no other way to put it. There have always been premium Windows machines (Sony was doing the extremely-thin, fits in an envelope, made-with-unobtanium laptop thing years before Apple did), and discount machines. Focus-on-ae…
Even the $3000+ laptops from Sony or other oems were littered with crapware. When consumers shifted from desktops to mobile all of the hardware innovation was moved to the oems' suppliers, which led them to drop all of their technical talent. Now the likes of dell and hp are full of mbas whose job is to make deals with companies like McAfee to squeeze an extra penny out of each sale and to annoy clueless consumers who buy that shit.
Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
not to mention loading up the OS with a ton of crapware and free trials.
This is honestly the worst of it IMO. Apple does have better hardware, yes, but the difference in speed out of the box is stunning when bloatware is involved. Microsoft didn't have a chance to keep up with OSX.
Apple does have better hardware, yes, but the difference in speed out of the box is stunning when bloatware is involved
Aside from the odd "Apple has better hardware" bit (they use the same binned devices that other OEMs like Dell do, so not sure where that comes from), you've benchmarked this purported speed difference?
Because most of the crapware that companies like Dell, HP, and others put on, while irritating, consumes exactly 0% of processor or I/O time, and has zero impact on performance of the device, beyond the hysterical, easily-convinced responses of the placebo effect. The vast majority is nothing more than trials. It's irritating, and wastes users time if you want to clean up your desktop and app lists, but the commonly stated impact is just not at all supported.
And then there's the issue of what exactly is crapware and what isn't. Buy a pure Windows device and you'll be pestered endlessly for Skydrive, Hotmail, Bing, photo backups, Xbox coupling, active your Office trial, etc (just as if you buy an xbox 360 and then pay for the privilege of using it online, in return you get ads and sponsored placements on your dashboard).
Apple is predominately a hardware vendor that has made enormous bank on that (pivoting their MP3 player market into a smartphone market into a tablet market into a bonafide desktop market). Microsoft is predominately a software vendor.
Everyone told Microsoft that they should mirror Apple: it got them a billion dollar+ write down so far, and offended all of their prior allies to start grouping behind alternatives. This "Microsoft should be like Apple" plan isn't really paying dividends.
Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on market share Windows Phone is a disaster, so yeah that's a miss.
A disaster that was released in 2012? In the fourth quarter of 2012 Windows 8 phones had sold around 6 million handsets. http://www.neowin.net/news/gartner-windows-phone-sales-incre... I'm sure you must have been saying the same thing about Android then huh? By comparison they only sold around 640K handsets in 2008 (their first year of release) then sold around 6 million in 2009. http://digithoughts.com/post/21428797…
WP7 was released in 2010. Three years later they now have an estimated 3.3% market share. If that's not a failure for company the size of Microsoft, and with the millions spent on marketing, I don't know what is.
I'll never say never, but it's looking pretty much like the Zune. Nice and solid product with some nifty features, but not different enough to dethrone the dominant players.
The problem is that Apple dominates the high-end and calls the shots regarding the operators (that by experience knows that they will lose customers if they don't offer the iPhone), while Google panders to all the OEMs by giving away a very capable operating system with top notch apps, and to operators by allowing them to customize it with crapware.
Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
Azure probably will get credited to Ray Ozzie. Rest of them are from Gates era. There are some monumental fuck-ups that happened under his guard though - Vista, Windows Phone are enough proof.
Vista Most hardware was not powerful enough for Vista when it was released. It's the pressed who killed it. Windows 7 received glamorous reviews. However, in hindsight, Vista and 7 are not all that different. Most of the changes that daily users would encounter are cosmetic. Windows Phone Microsofts primary problem was that it was late and (as one of the consequences) there are not that many Windows Phone apps. Howev…
Hardware wasn't powerful enough because Vista was terrible. At the time of Vista's launch I had a 2yr old PC running ubuntu with compiz with full 3D effects (but more importantly generally working window composition) while adverts on TV were trying to tell me Vista had "WOW!" while it ran poorly on new machines but actually had not much in the way of wow! like visuals.
And even if many changes between vista and 7 were "cosmetic", that's how people interact with their PCs, and things like having different UI styles all over the place is a huge dealbreaker that puts people off using it. (See also: Windows 8).
Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He will be remembered for missing mobile. Wait, what? That's like saying RIM missed mobile. Microsoft was doing mobile years before Apple or Google ever entered the market[1]. My guess is that Microsoft and Ballmer's real-world experience in mobile actually constrained their imaginations. Their failure to see how mobile could be reinvented was due more to hubris than naivete. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe…
Saying RIM missed mobile would be like saying the Wright Company missed aviation. ...that is to say, it is a fairly reasonable thing to say. They just "missed it" in the opposite direction from how companies usually miss things. They came and went too soon. They sold smartphones and airplanes before everybody was buying them.
I remember a friend who owned a MS phone (winphone?) around the time that iphone began. He was really happy that he could integrate exchange, use excel and word and do lots of other things with windows. After a month of living with the phone, he told me, "you won't believe how much I hate this thing." It kept crashing, freezing, and locking up on him and he returned it 3 times already. He said that if he had to return it again, he was going to get something else. Now he uses an Android phone and loves it.
Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does feel like MS just shows up like that. Azure did (and does) give that impression; Zune, as well. And Surface tablets are also a clear response to the iPad (whether MS ever had anything in R&D previously or not, they certainly didn't ship). But I think Google is much more prone to jump in to a market with force, they just seem to execute "better" (I leave that open to interpretation). FB comes out and MS buys i…
That's because that has been Microsoft's strategy from the beginning: let someone else take the risk of proving whether a market for something exists, and then, if it does, get in there quick with their own offering. They got into the PC OS business with MS-DOS after the Apple II; into the GUI business with Windows after the Mac; into the word-processor business with Word after WordPerfect; into the browser business…
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I don't believe that was true for the BASIC through beginning MS-DOS era. Putting a BASIC interpreter on the Altair 8800 and other early microcomputers was an "obvious" thing to do at the time given the language's popularity in minicomputers, and MS-DOS and its wild success essentially fell into their lap, with their critically being willing to bet the company on it (DRI, the CP/M company wasn't willing to do business on IBM's terms, hardly surprising at the time) and successful execution.
After that, yeah, a lot of following, then again for the GUI introduction era everyone was following Douglas Engelbart, and Xerox PARC for the graphical part.
Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#429What were the key Ballmer era highlights? == Negatives == * Clashes with Gates during CEO transition of power: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121261241035146237.html * Developer relations / motivational speaking (thanks mathattack): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvsboPUjrGc * Employee retention (thanks JonnieCache, Ziomislaw): http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/microsoft-ceo-im-going... * Windows Phone: http://…
Add another positive, he knew that LOC is not a good measurement of software development[1]
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWylb_5IOw0&feature=player_de... (go to 38:59 time mark)
Re: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to retire within 12 months
#430> Steve Ballmer joined Microsoft on June 11, 1980, and became Microsoft's 30th employee, the first business manager hired by Gates.
> Ballmer was initially offered a salary of $50,000 as well as a percentage of ownership of the company. When Microsoft was incorporated in 1981, Ballmer owned 8 percent of the company. In 2003, Ballmer sold 8.3% of his shareholdings, leaving him with a 4% stake in the company
Wow. How common is it for such a late employee to have so much percentage of a company?