The Microsoft Empire Reboots

How is it in this day and age a magazine like VanityFair can have such an awful UX on mobile:

- I can't read the article because some as keeps jumping me back to the top of the page a few seconds after I scroll

- the article font is tiny and hard to read anyway

- for some reason even though there is a large body of text, ios doesn't allow me to use reader mode

Thanks; changed to that.

(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 convinced that the company had to make hardware 
   too. The reason why goes back to his chart. The two companies which have 
   seen the greatest increases in the share of profits they take are Apple and 
   Samsung, particularly Apple, whose share of the technology industry’s 
   profits leapt from 7 percent in 2008 to 21 percent in 2013. To Ballmer, the 
   message was clear, and so, in December 2012, he began talking to the Finnish 
   smartphone-maker, Nokia, whose C.E.O., Stephen Elop, had worked at 
   Microsoft. There was a defensive reason for the deal as well as an offensive 
   one. Nokia was pretty much the only company left that was making Windows 
   phones. If Nokia went under, what would happen to Microsoft’s phone business?

Apple and Samsung's phone businesses are entirely different. Apple is selling ios to the high and middle end market. Samsung is getting devoured from the bottom, because there is very little difference between android oems, whereas Apple doesn't need (or want!) the bottom. It's pretty amazing that someone like Ballmer wouldn't see that coming, given that Xiaomi and the other chinese competitors are running a classic competitive playbook on Samsung.

Stratechery has written about this at length, though I don't recall if it was clearly discussed in a single article or my mental synthesis from a collection. Either way, differentiated companies -- apple -- require completely different strategies than nondifferentiated -- samsung.

They are pretty happy with Apple's empire. You don't need Microsoft's hardware to build stuff for Windows though.

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 Bing, IE, Xbox and Azure (I know the last 2 are popular, but the xbox has been a loss leader (and what it's leading too isn't clear yet) and Azure, like everyone else, is being crushed by Amazon (it really is, they spend a ton more money and get a fraction of the market (that's Bing-style success!))

I remember a story from the only time I was on their campus. An employee (I remember his name) was telling me how they wanted to make IIS great, so they hired an expert Apache consultant to learn more about apache. I'm listening, thinking "wow, this is great, they're really interested in bettering themselves." He then proudly went on to tell me how the Apache expert had an amusingly outdated understanding of IIS and by the end of the gig they'd convinced him of how great IIS was. They'd literally rather pay people to tell them how great they are, then admit they might have something to learn.

This perfectly encapsulated my time as a .NET developer. Lucky this was at the start of an MVP conference, so I took the hint, skipped most of the conference and visited Seattle (oh, but I did attend 1 talk where the speaker said Visual Studio would add a color picker and people applauded him).