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Amid layoffs, Microsofties reveal further turmoil in Redmond

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Re: Amid layoffs, Microsofties reveal further turmoil in Redmond

#91

Post by maigret »

flomo wrote: post #78
wallflower wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always been amazed looking back at how IBM embraced open source back in the early 90s with a vengeance. I wonder if this saved the company.

Nope, IBM's open source efforts are generally 'lipstick on a pig' sex-appeal marketing efforts rather than something they are seriously invested in. What IBM doesn't tell you in their PR is that mainframes are still very much the profit engine of the company. Although the money is more in support services and business process outsourcing rather than the actual hardware/software.

Yep, and Linux keeps getting a bigger part of the cake for mainframe workloads.

Re: Amid layoffs, Microsofties reveal further turmoil in Redmond

#92

Post by varjag »

nostrademons wrote: post #66
timr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't tell anyone, but I think it's happening to Google right now . It's just early stages (like MS in 1995), and Google still has more good products than bad, so it isn't exceptionally noticeable. But the recent, high-profile launch disasters, the clutter that's slowly creeping into the result pages, and stuff like the search page background goofiness...they sure feel like early MS-style mistakes.....

MS in 1995 still had many, many years of good work ahead of it. Remember that they won the browser wars, after everyone had written them off as being too big and clumsy to adapt to change. That was also when we got Win2k and WinXP (arguably the best versions of Windows ever) and their Office product matured into its familiar form. I'd say Microsoft started going downhill after 2002, when they disbanded the IE team an…

It might be more a sign of you growing up than of MSFT changing its market position though ;)

Re: Amid layoffs, Microsofties reveal further turmoil in Redmond

#93

Post by timr »

nostrademons wrote: post #66
timr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't tell anyone, but I think it's happening to Google right now . It's just early stages (like MS in 1995), and Google still has more good products than bad, so it isn't exceptionally noticeable. But the recent, high-profile launch disasters, the clutter that's slowly creeping into the result pages, and stuff like the search page background goofiness...they sure feel like early MS-style mistakes.....

MS in 1995 still had many, many years of good work ahead of it. Remember that they won the browser wars, after everyone had written them off as being too big and clumsy to adapt to change. That was also when we got Win2k and WinXP (arguably the best versions of Windows ever) and their Office product matured into its familiar form. I'd say Microsoft started going downhill after 2002, when they disbanded the IE team an…

"MS in 1995 still had many, many years of good work ahead of it. Remember that they won the browser wars, after everyone had written them off as being too big and clumsy to adapt to change. That was also when we got Win2k and WinXP (arguably the best versions of Windows ever) and their Office product matured into its familiar form."

Eh. We also got WindowsME in 2000, which was arguably the worst version ever. And to be fair, Office has been mostly re-arranging the furniture and re-painting the walls since Office95. And...let's not forget Bob. Bob was Microsoft's Buzz, circa 1995.

That said, sure, it's not like MS got to their current state on January 1, 1996. And there's no way I'd argue that they (or Google) are going away soon. My point is only that Google is starting to show signs of lumbering corporate giant-hood, and that it has happened pretty quickly, in comparison to MS.

Re: Amid layoffs, Microsofties reveal further turmoil in Redmond

#94

Post by steamboiler »

nostrademons wrote: post #64
wallflower wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always been amazed looking back at how IBM embraced open source back in the early 90s with a vengeance. I wonder if this saved the company.

I think it both saved and killed the company. It saved the company in that it stopped the hemorrhaging of cash and gave them an actually profitable business model. Without this, they would've gone out of business entirely sometime in the early-mid 90s. It killed them as a center of innovation. IBM hasn't invented anything worthwhile since the IBM PC in 1981. (No, I don't count Eclipse: IntelliJ idea came out first an…

But most of their recent projects seem like they're trying to innovate and the coming out thoroughly mediocre, which isn't really a good combination.

Innovation and milking monopolies generally require different skills and attitudes. MS has tons of people good at the latter (starting with Balmer) and that very fact acts against them when it comes to innovation. Any innovation that happens (C# and LINQ come to mind) is limited in scope and is the work of individuals below senior management. These innovators have very little to do with steering the company.

If MS wishes to innovate they should start by firing or sidelining a lot of the entrenched senior hierarchy. Easier said than done.

Re: Amid layoffs, Microsofties reveal further turmoil in Redmond

#95

Post by nitrogen »

kenjackson wrote: post #48
evilduck wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What conspiracy theory? The vendor lock-in behavior of MS is practically advertised as a platform feature. To up and reverse their product lock-in policy would cast doubt on many (most?) of their other claims.

The conspiracy theory is that they want to lock you in for no other reason but to give you no other viable option. That's absurd. They want to sell you as much software as possible, of course, they're a company. But the reason they will stay in the mobile space isn't to keep you from getting any other mobile device. But because there's money to be made in it and it fits into their core competency.

I suggest reading the e-mails of the executive-level management (including Gates) that were disclosed in the antitrust case and in Comes v. Microsoft. Aggressive lock-in was a conscious and deliberate part of their business strategy. A mountain of evidence and testimony is available from http://groklaw.net/.

Re: Amid layoffs, Microsofties reveal further turmoil in Redmond

#96

Post by JMiao »

nkassis wrote: post #22
tmsh wrote: post #4

Can you think of a project, a product or a company that succeeded with a somewhat negative-sounding name (even if meant somewhat ironically or as sort of a renegade mentality)? I'm drawing a blank.... It's odd that I can't think of a single one though. Even among game studios, etc.

iOS, and considering Cisco used the name first, it only makes it look more dated.

um, cisco also had a "product" called the iphone.

Re: Amid layoffs, Microsofties reveal further turmoil in Redmond

#97

Post by [deleted] »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #72
timr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't tell anyone, but I think it's happening to Google right now . It's just early stages (like MS in 1995), and Google still has more good products than bad, so it isn't exceptionally noticeable. But the recent, high-profile launch disasters, the clutter that's slowly creeping into the result pages, and stuff like the search page background goofiness...they sure feel like early MS-style mistakes.....

Google is probably past an inflection point, they've still got plenty of upward momentum and almost certainly won't peak for many, many years. However, Google seems to have empire-itis just like any other big company. Eventually they'll start believing their own BS more than they will external truths, they'll become process bound and bureaucracy bound, they'll start to saddle themselves with more and more strategy ta…

[deleted]

Re: Amid layoffs, Microsofties reveal further turmoil in Redmond

#98

Post by philwelch »

kenjackson wrote: post #82
philwelch wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you snuck in an extra negation that I didn't and turned my sentence around, so now I don't know if either of us knows what the other meant! Me: "I see no evidence mobile phones are in any way even close to Microsoft's core competency" "in any way" and "even close to" are non-negating modifiers we can remove, so: Me: "I see no evidence mobile phones are Microsoft's core competency" You: "You see no evidence th…

My bad. Trying to be cute. Let me actually attempt to give a little evidence, since you claim to have none. First, if you think MS has no core competency or that software is not one of them, then we could end the discussion right here. But otherwise, it seems clear to me that mobile OS software is among their core competencies. I start with the premise that operating systems are one of their core competencies. They h…

Microsoft has the technical chops for OS's, no doubt.

The business chops to introduce and push device platforms is iffy--they got XBox through, but against weak competition and with very high expense. Apple and Google are much stouter competition than Sony and Nintendo and have significant advantages over Microsoft, not least among them the fact that Google has completely undercut Microsoft's traditional point of entry in the OS market (the low cost commodity OS).

Since Xbox, Microsoft can't get a decent offering together until well after the real competition and growth stage in the market is over. It's not like IE where they can leverage their desktop monopoly and deliver a compelling product 2-3 years after the competition and clean up--lately they're only really competing 4-8 years too late, in markets where their dominance in other markets gives them no advantage and their competitors have already moved on to newer, higher-growth markets. Maybe if they weren't spread too thin and were focused on Windows Phone 7 as much as Apple was focused on iPhone years ago and it was still 2008 or 2009, but none of these conditions are true. And they're not likely to become true in time to affect this particular project.

Re: Amid layoffs, Microsofties reveal further turmoil in Redmond

#99

Post by davidw »

btilly wrote: post #74
nostrademons wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it both saved and killed the company. It saved the company in that it stopped the hemorrhaging of cash and gave them an actually profitable business model. Without this, they would've gone out of business entirely sometime in the early-mid 90s. It killed them as a center of innovation. IBM hasn't invented anything worthwhile since the IBM PC in 1981. (No, I don't count Eclipse: IntelliJ idea came out first an…

Without this, they would've gone out of business entirely sometime in the early-mid 90s. There is a problem with your timeline. My memory says that IBM only openly embraced open source in 1998, which means that it saved them later than you indicate. Lemme look. (Searches, finds http://www.salon.com/technology/fsp/2000/09/12/chapter_7_par... , reads.) I was right. They joined the Apache Project in June. They released…

Your timeline is correct: the dam really started to break for open source and Linux when Mozilla got open sourced, and when Oracle announced they would release their Linux port. By the dot com boom, Linux was big business.

Re: Amid layoffs, Microsofties reveal further turmoil in Redmond

#100

Post by WorkerBee »

signa11 wrote: post #90
Anechoic wrote: post #3

Before succumbing to schadenfreude just remember that this will eventually happen to your favorite tech company in the future, be it HP, Dell, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Fog Creek, Amazon, Y Combinator, etc. Companies have ups and down. Hopefully MS will see this as a learning experience, become a better competitor and then we as consumers will benefit.

> Hopefully MS will see this as a learning experience... if the london-stock-exchange fiasco didn't change anything at microsoft, i doubt that this will have any impact at all.

the london-stock-exchange fiasco

Are you referring to this? http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_aban...

Despite the ignorant and inflammatory commentary that I linked to, I doubt that Accenture's failure to write a system in C# raised much of a wave inside Microsoft. Accenture could have made the same mistakes in Java or in any other language.

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