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The Microsoft Empire Reboots

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Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#71

Post by MichaelGG »

>I put the A-team resources on Longhorn, not on phones or browsers.

Hilarious. It wasn't the lack of an A-team resource on browsers, it was the lack of any team. Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing.

Microsoft's other big sin is counting on its hardware partners. They could have preempted the iPod, for instance, but they just hoped Creative and others would deliver a great experience, while they sat back and wrote the software and cashed in on licenses. Same for tablets. Tablet PCs were great in the 00s, and I loved using them. Except, they were clunky and had little mass appeal. Once again, MS just counted on its partners and never gave a thought to the full experience.

Also, the fact that Windows still is touch/pen unfriendly outside of Metro just shows they Don't Get It. Instead of working on some tech to make Windows work well across all its apps, they ditch everything and hope Metro will work. It's hard to imagine that anyone could be so myopic.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#72

Post by dragonwriter »

demallien wrote: post #45
Immortalin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur, the combination of css + js + html is an nightmare especially if you are are trying to design a simple database-backed website for your startup. Webforms might have been hard to maintain for some, but at least it worked well. There was no need to figure out all the background stuff if you are not a professional developer. If I need a fancier website based on mvc, I would have hired a fullstack django develo…

Yup, and if you are trying to do the full stack, you had better toss in some node.js or Ruby on Rails, plus SQL. Web development is really hard for non-developers to grok. I keep thinking back to an Access application that I threw together in a couple of days, back in the 90s for managing a team of about 40 technicians. It was being used for task tracking, and had some wiki-like features as well. When I started that…

> These days, rather than dealing with that mess, many companies just go for an off-the-shelf hosted solution that sort of fits their needs, such as Basecamp, or Jira, or Igloo. The existence of these products is a sign that we've gone off in the wrong direction somewhere

No, its a sign that the web has enabled easier application delivery with greater reach at lower cost; Access is still around, after all, and most businesses have it right at hand, so if the alternatives were worse, they'd still be using it.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#73

Post by bambax »

MichaelGG wrote: post #71

>I put the A-team resources on Longhorn, not on phones or browsers. Hilarious. It wasn't the lack of an A-team resource on browsers, it was the lack of any team. Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing. Microsoft's other big sin is counting on its hardware partners. They could have preempted the iPod, for instance, but they just hoped Creative and others would deliver a great experience, while they sat bac…

> Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing.

Yes, but wasn't that intentional? Once IE4, then 6, had conquered the world, the point was to keep people from leaving Windows for the Web, and so IE dev was stopped dead.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#74

Post by alex_hitchins »

MichaelGG wrote: post #71

>I put the A-team resources on Longhorn, not on phones or browsers. Hilarious. It wasn't the lack of an A-team resource on browsers, it was the lack of any team. Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing. Microsoft's other big sin is counting on its hardware partners. They could have preempted the iPod, for instance, but they just hoped Creative and others would deliver a great experience, while they sat bac…

I think this is spot on the money.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#75

Post by alex_hitchins »

bambax wrote: post #73
MichaelGG wrote: post #71

>I put the A-team resources on Longhorn, not on phones or browsers. Hilarious. It wasn't the lack of an A-team resource on browsers, it was the lack of any team. Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing. Microsoft's other big sin is counting on its hardware partners. They could have preempted the iPod, for instance, but they just hoped Creative and others would deliver a great experience, while they sat bac…

> Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing. Yes, but wasn't that intentional? Once IE4, then 6, had conquered the world, the point was to keep people from leaving Windows for the Web, and so IE dev was stopped dead.

"Browser tabs will only confuse people". Ha!

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#76

Post by bartwe »

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #40
Nitramp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Modern day WinForms in .Net work just as well for coding up simple GUIs.

Winforms is fine, not as powerful as what came before it but otherwise good. The problem with winforms is WPF supposedly deprecating it.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#77

Post by gnaritas »

Immortalin wrote: post #33
thomasahle wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Young programmers today tend to start with the Javascript family. There have probably never been languages with the same visual tools built in, rapidness of feedback and ease of sharing with friends.

Not true, I am a young programmer and I learned vb6 as my first language. It ran perfectly well on windows xp.

Being an exception doesn't make what he said not true. What he said is absolutely true for the vast majority of new programmers.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#78

Post by mwfunk »

blinkingled wrote: post #58
personZ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either way, differentiated companies -- apple -- require completely different strategies than nondifferentiated -- samsung. How is Apple differentiated? To a user that wants a smartphone to send emails, visit websites, play fantasy football, take pictures, etc, Apple is every bit in competition with Xiaomi as Samsung is. To many, many users, smartphones are effectively a commodity now. Which is why Apple devices feat…

>How is Apple differentiated? Don't forget marketing. I don't think anyone plays the marketing game better than Apple. They are essentially marketing themselves as different and the fact that it works is nothing short of miraculous in the face of actuality!

Samsung spends significantly more on marketing their mobile devices than Apple does. Not just a little more, a lot more [1]. Not just advertising, but deals with carriers to pay bonuses to retail staff for selling the devices. Microsoft doesn't spend quite as much promoting Windows Phone and the Surface, but it's still a lot more than Apple [2].

Marketing, at best, gets customers in the door. It doesn't generate brand loyalty or repeat customers, and marketing alone certainly doesn't sustain a company or product line for years (or decades!) on end. The "Apple is all marketing" trope is usually invoked in discussions that are more about tribalism than analysis, by otherwise-rational people making a conscious decision to not accept the fact that there are other rational people in the world who see value in things that they don't.

I'm sure there's no shortage of people who will read this and immediately have a knee-jerk reaction along the lines of, "yeah, OK, maybe Apple spends way less on marketing than those other companies, but that just proves that they have magically effective marketing, because there's no other possible explanation for their success!" If there is a litmus test for rationality, they just failed it. A more plausible explanation is that success in business is a combination of a lot of different things- every company/tech/device/platform has a unique fingerprint of pros and cons that help it or hurt it in different market segments, and there is no perfect combination of any of those things. It's the ability to say, "I don't see value in this, but I can see how other people who care about different things might like it". This is an incredibly valuable ability to have, and people should be actively cultivating it if they want to make a positive difference in the industry.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732409640... [2] https://twitter.com/asymco/status/396253597551570944

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#79

Post by WorldWideWayne »

melling wrote: post #47
outside1234 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell they brainwashed you well in Cupertino. ;) They probably left out the part where Jobs borrowed the ideas for the Mac from Xerox I suspect too. More accurately, there is probably a Mac here because they were building Office for it.

Nah. All the cool kids in the 80's wanted the Amiga. The Mac was a toy. The story of Jobs' visit to Xerox Parc is well documented. They paid a million dollars for the visits. http://www.macstories.net/linked/parc-scientist-larry-tesler... http://www.cultofmac.com/126863/in-defense-of-steve-jobs/

As Microsoft surpassed Apple and of course Amiga to become the absolute necessity of practicality that they are today, I don't think they cared as much about what the "cool kids" wanted.

I think it's apparent and I am thankful that Microsoft didn't copy Apple's UI and instead went with a much more practical and utilitarian approach than Apple. This along with Microsoft's business model obviously works better for the mass market and has stood the test of time whereas Apple has capitulated many times both on their UI principles and on their business model.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#80

Post by bambax »

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…

This rings true. I had some relations with Microsoft last year and it's incredible how inward-looking they are. They spend most of the time telling you how great everything Microsoft-like is or will be, and don't seem to be well aware of the outside world.

They know there are things like iPhones and Android devices, but they appear truly baffled that anyone would want one. They think it's some kind of conspiratory rebellion, that the world uses those out of spite for Microsoft.

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