I'm as big of a Satya fan as anyone, but someone who doesn't get enough credit is Ballmer.
It wasn't a coincidence that on the day Ballmer stepped down and Satya became CEO (2014), Microsoft also announced Office for iOS, Cloud first strategy, and a whole slew of cloud/Azure product announcements.
All of which was developed under Ballmer watch and he handed off the launch and continued execution to Satya.
Steve Ballmer was a guy who restlessly milked two Microsoft cash cows (Windows and Office) to accommodate investors quarter after quarter. He didn't have a vision or courage to push Microsoft in some other direction, and my impression was that all good things that started under his regime (Azure, more openness) was either reactionary or he simply didn't care (most of early open source push was from his lieutenants).
At the end of his regime MS lost top-tier tech place (when someone says "big tech" it's Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, not MS), he lost the main Microsoft advantage - an army of Windows programmers. MS under Ballmer lost couple of generations of programmers, to the point where MS needs to ship Linux kernel with Windows just to get cosy with programmers again.
Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook. I can't wait for him to be replaced.
> Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook. I can't wait for him to be replaced.
Comments like this make zero sense to me. Apple might be better if Jobs was still alive. But without a time machine, and potentially better medicine, that's not an option.
Under Cook Apple:
- Increased profitability and market share massively.
- Created the most successful watch brand in the world.
- Turned Beats into Beats + AirPods, the two most successful headphone brands in the world.
- Avoided the sort of ridiculous cash burning acquisitions to inflate growth Ballmer was guilty of.
Apple has a bunch of mis-steps under Cook, but none of them have had long term company damaging impact. Many of the things people beat Cook up over were actually things Jobs was as bad/ worse with. For example almost all the App Store policies everyone hates were created under Jobs. Jobs was also far more protective and litigious.
Cook isn't Jobs, since Jobs is dead the comparison is pointless. Cook has done better than the vast majority of CEOs who have taken over successful brands. Apple is doing just fine.
+1. I'm far from an Apple zealot, but Tim Cook added $1.7 Trillion to apple's market cap since taking over as chief executive. He certainly isn't the product visionary that Jobs was, but a rare few are. IMO Cook may have even been a better executer than Jobs, even if his decisions are more risk averse. And he has still taken a few notable ones – e.g. Apple's recent shift to services revenue (news, music, card, etc) was a surprisingly smooth & fast success. Barring some huge future misstep, I'd be surprised if he didn't go down as one of history's most successful company leaders in his own right.
Good thing that's not the only feather in Tim's cap. He's vastly expanded Apple's valuation while simultaneously introducing new, successful products, and growing Apple's place in the tech world.
Steve was visionary, but Tim has taken that vision farther than anyone ever gives him credit for.
Most of the stuff was in development during Jobs' time, including Airpods, the latest one. With Jony Ive gone, I doubt Apple has the prowess to continue that finesse. It would be akin to von Holzhausen leaving Tesla, imo.
> Most of the stuff was in development during Jobs' time,
We're 10 years past Jobs and Cook was running quite a bit of Apple even before Jobs passed away. Not even Jobs is prescient enough to have predicted where the market would have gone this far out. He was good at being where the puck was going, but he didn't have a crystal ball.
I think it may be the other way around. In the Jony Ive post-Steve-Jobs era, we got the iPhones 6-11, and, in my opinion, all of them are considerably worse physical designs than the 5. Now Apple has (imminently) the 12 and 12 Mini, which are, IMO, the best designs from Apple in years.
I'm very excited about the 12 mini, after being blah on many before. iphone 1 was my first iphone so have been around for a while. Don't see the point of 5G, Jobs used to actually really delay introducing some of the new tech until it was ready, I'd have been fine if they'd waited a year on that but...
What new products? The iPhone and iPads I use today are materially the same things as the ones I had half a decade ago. The only new products that come to mind are airpods and the Watch, and I credit Tim Cook with those, but I can't think of anything else.
Apple's valuation doesn't do me any good (or ill!) as a customer. I feel like there are a lot more bugs in Mac OS than there were in the past, and I'd happily trade Apple's market cap for a return to confident OS upgrades.
Other than earpods, I'm not sure what they person above you is talking about. All the stuff started and matured under Jobs and otherwise Apple made some good company buys with beats, etc. Cook is a great CEO, but he's not a visionary, Apple needs to find one of those as well.
> shift to services revenue (news, music, card, etc) was a surprisingly smooth & fast success
After having purchased most every iPhone release since launch, with the prior model gifted to family, this year we switched to iPhone-as-a-Service subscription on the Apple Card.
Post shift, Apple moves me out of making a $1300 buying evaluation decision to simply ‘staying current’ for forty bucks a month for the flagship model.
This was available for a while, took a while to break through my sense I should “own” my device each year instead of subscribe to it, but the mental stress of buying new and reselling old, inevitably ending up with some in a drawer (iPhone 6s anyone?) ... the subscription is hassle free for me, recurring revenue for Tim, and shockingly well priced given the convenience.
Imagine what their numbers would look like to Wall Street if he could turn most of their hardware buyers into subscribers...
Agree with all of this. I also think Cook should get credit for the Apple Pay / Apple Card ecosystem, and for Car Play.
In addition, under Cook, Apple also made great strides in ecological manufacturing and supplier accountability. And early on, Cook had the courage to fire a highly visible but toxic executive.
> Apple also made great strides in ecological manufacturing and supplier accountability
Do you have evidence of that? It seems like it is quite the opposite. Apple prefer to destroy not working phones or Macs instead of repairing them. They make sure independent repair shops cannot repair any of their products and design them in a way so that they fail in short space of time, so customers can either pay for repair through the nose or buy a new Mac.
Even Greenpeace acknowledges quite a bit of progress in many respects: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/GG... — keep in mind that they used to picket Apple annual meetings. Admittedly, they still have plenty of criticisms, and several of them echo yours.
Personally, I think "designed to fail" is a downright false charge, and "repairability" is a trickier trade-off than repair advocates make it out to be — how much weight, size, and fragility does the repairability add, and how often is the device in fact repaired?
Personally, I think "designed to fail" is a downright false charge, and "repairability" is a trickier trade-off than repair advocates make it out to be ...
Somebody should tell the UK Parliament, they need some feedback and Apple cannot spare anybody to clear up this "downright false charge" :
I don't see "designed to fail" or any corresponding language on that page.
There is concern about repairability there. I seem to recall that the UK was a member of a trans-national organization that recently passed tougher repairability legislation, and quit that organization to be rid of all that burdensome regulation.
For the life of me, I can't understand why Apple wouldn't take the UK seriously…
Perhaps there has been an improvement in other parts of the supply chain, but the situation in DR Congo (where e.g. coltan used for capacitors is mined) seems to only be getting worse.
Apple specifically used to call out the DR Congo as one area where their supply chain responsibility was not yet up to their standards, but in recent years, they claim to have established an audited supply chain: https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Conf...
(I'm going by Apple's own claims here, would be interested to hear whether you have information contradicting these claims).
Did the child labour lawsuit [1] get settled? I think your link is describing audited Smelters and Refiners. The kids work in the Cobalt mines and Apple is one of the biggest consumers of Cobalt in the world.
As far as Wikipedia knows, that lawsuit is still pending (it would be extremely early for an US lawsuit of that complexity with that many defendants to settle).
The complaint [1] is interesting and disturbing. But I'm not convinced it's entirely in good faith. It spends a lot of time expounding on the DRC's sordid history (Whatever you want to blame Apple for, they had nothing to do with King Leopold). It cites extensively from Amnesty's 2016 report on conditions in Cobalt mining [2], but entirely fails to mention Amnesty's 2017 followup report [3] that credits many of the defendants (especially Apple) of having taken significant steps in the right direction since 2016. And the complaint appears to dismiss any positive measures taken by the defendants merely as evidence that their prior bad conduct was knowing.
Of course, a company improving their conduct does not mean they cannot be found liable for their earlier conduct, but I would not take this complaint as an objective assessment of the defendants' current cobalt sourcing practices.
+1. Apple isn't the same as it was under Steve Jobs, but it's stayed successful and relevant. I miss the old Apple software quality — the Apple apps were once a reason to use macOS or iOS, and it's pretty rare I actually use them anymore — and the stronger hardware innovation (Watch is cool but not industry-defining on the scale of the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad), but the overall Apple ecosystem has if anything grown stronger under Cook... And their edge on hardware has grown significantly, especially with respect to chip design, to the point where their in-house-designed ARM chips are likely to give them not only a generational advantage on phones, which they already have, but also soon on laptops and desktops as well. Apple under Tim Cook isn't going to wow the world with innovative new products to the same degree it did under Steve Jobs, but its product lines will relentlessly improve and Apple will in many ways stay ahead of the competition because Tim is a great operator. I can't say the same for Ballmer: not only did Microsoft innovate less successfully under his leadership than Apple has under Cook (at least Cook has Watch and Airpods!), but also Microsoft's cash cow product lines didn't do well under his leadership — Windows 8, for example, was a travesty.
That being said I'm also very impressed with Satya Nadella, and have recently been using Windows more and more again, something I thought would be pretty unlikely (to put it mildly) a decade ago when Ballmer was at the helm. I'm pretty excited about future products from both companies.
While that's true, pancreatic cancer is nasty enough that even with prompt treatment, there was a good chance he'd succumb to it anyway, although he'd definitely have way better chances.
His cancer was the least deadly of the cancers and with treatment he would have lived much longer. My mom had stage one pancreatic cancer 4 years ago and she is still alive today and cancer free for over four years. So it is possible.
Yeah, I'm not sure how such an intelligent person could get suckered in by that mumbo jumbo. I guess one can be a savante in some things and dumb as a rock at others.
There's pancreatic cancer and cancer of the pancreas. (There might be more, i know about these two). The difference in life expectancy is staggering. One is basically starting the clock (in months to a handful of years), with the other, recovery is possible.
Pancreatic cancer essentially forms a barrier around the cancer that prevents drugs from reaching the tumors as I understood layman's descriptions of the disease when one of my friends died of it.
I think there was some initial success in attaching vitamin d to some drugs to bypass the "firewall", but it was still hard.
IIRC, he had insulinoma, which is a rather slow cancer. I’m not sure if treatment beyond surgery would have prolonged his life, as 10 year survival is around 30%.
> Avoided the sort of ridiculous cash burning acquisitions to inflate growth
It's funny how Apple has often been exhorted by industry observers to make large acquisitions, and instead has done quite well with smaller ones. Beats has been a commercial success. PA Semi (dating back to the Jobs era) was the foundation to a hugely successful VLSI design division. The success of Siri is a bit more disputed, but it's playing an important role in many products.
This is exactly why I mentioned it, Microsoft burned through 10s of billions in bad acquisitions, Google has a few massive multi-billion dollar mis-steps.
Apple under Tim enjoy short term gains and greed has blinded them. The company will soon start failing because of their anti-consumer and anti-environment culture. They create false image of themselves to be super friendly innovative brand for creative people, but the truth is far from this. Their products are designed to fail and to be only repairable by Apple. If your charging port dies on a new Mac, you cannot repair it yourself even if you have all required tools and skills. Their policy is essentially if it breaks you have to pay us through the nose or buy a new model. Then there is the anti-competitive Apple Store that is milking the iOS ecosystem and developers.
Sounds like you've got an axe to grind with Apple though, and are biased negatively because of it.
Apple's products are demonstrably supported in software far longer than other manufacturers. People rate the physical build quality of their products very high as well.
It seems that people like the benefits and features of Apple hardware enough to overlook the problems with self-repairability.
And regarding the app store, maybe because you're in the industry you think it's a generally big problem, because you're affected. But it's a 1% privilege issue to most of the world.
It seems Apple is doing enough right that its value is climbing.
Yeah I don't like the walled garden myself, but the hardware I've bought from them has been well designed, supported for quite some time, and trustworthy. I never even had to get anything repaired. My line of work requires me to have both Linux and Apple machines and Apple is working just fine along with Linux.
Apple lost its way when they shoved Scott Forstall out the door for refusing to take the blame for the Apple Maps debacle. Apple has been gliding on the backs of Steve's vision since then and they're terrified to make any wrong decision. That's why they overlap generations of products as they don't have a clue what will succeed.
> Apple has been gliding on the backs of Steve's vision since then and they're terrified to make any wrong decision.
That has been some of my view as well. But some of their approach have changed.
The old Apple was about making something great, charge a premium. That is about the same with current Apple. Except its whole Services Strategy reeks of money grabbing. There is nothing about Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great.
> There is nothing about Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great.
I'm not sure how you'd consider Apple Music a money grab but are ok with iTunes music purchases? Basically they were expanding their business to follow the industry trend of streaming music instead of buying it. iTunes has been a revenue stream at Apple since the iPod was born.
Also, Apple selling supplemental services and software that are... not amazing is not new either.
The big one? iTunes. For a few years it was great, but for a long long time it was just a giant mess. iHome, iMovie (Garage Band is pretty rad), iPhoto (Photos is way better), Mobile Me, Ping didn't even last 2 years I don't think. Most of those products were meh at best, they did the basic thing they needed to do and that's about it.
The big difference between Apple then and Apple now is they have the money to contract out for their own content.
> Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great.
Apple TV+ has a paltry selection because they didn't go out and buy a huge external library of content to bootstrap themselves. The content they have is—Decent and getting better. They know this and there is a reason they aren't really charging for it yet.
Apple Fitness doesn't even exist so not sure how you can criticize it.
Yeah, it's all a "Money Grab", they are growing the business, that's what companies do. Fortunately all of this stuff is optional. You can enjoy your computer/ phone/ tablet without any of it. IMO the only egregious "money grab" is their paltry 5GB free iCloud storage. Considering that's the best and for many only way of backing up their $1000 phone with their life stored on it, that's messed up.
Beats + AirPods, the two most successful headphone brands in the world
How are you working out "most successful"? Beats aren't rated particularly highly apart from by label-followers; while blinkeredness has always been a notable criticism of Apple product appraisal, it did in the past occasionally lead the field - that's not at all obvious with Beats etc.
Sales. How else do you measure success of a consumer electronics product?
> Beats aren't rated particularly highly apart from by label-followers
While Beats haven't been highly rated by audiophiles, they are popular and sound quality and in particular Bluetooth performance has improved significantly under Apple.
AirPods... well they are AirPods. They are might well be the most universally loved product in Apple's product line right now. Maybe the most loved consumer electronics product on the market right now.
Sales. How else do you measure success of a consumer electronics product?
There are clearly many measures of success. It's best if you mean best-selling maybe just to say that, as it may be important to salespeople but not so much to (say) end users.
[Airpods...]Maybe the most loved consumer electronics product on the market right now.
That sounds more like a subjective or emotional claim than one measurable, and that's part of the problem with Apple in particular (though not only Apple) as I've already mentioned; the seeming lack of ability of its champions to consider it's products in a reasonably neutral way.
To an extent, that's a compliment to the way it has built it's brand over time, but it means it's important to bear it in mind when judging rather sweeping superiority claims.
> That sounds more like a subjective or emotional claim than one measurable, and that's part of the problem with Apple in particular (though not only Apple) as I've already mentioned; the seeming lack of ability of its champions to consider it's products in a reasonably neutral way.
People have been spewing nonsense like this for decades. As if customers being happy with a product is a worthless concept.
The AirPods are successful because people love them. When AirPods were first launched, they were widely panned and people laughed at the design, but everyone who bought them loved them. I could go into details about why, but it's irrelevant, if they hadn't been so well liked, they wouldn't be the best selling headphones on the market.
People have been spewing nonsense like this for decades.
More emotion.
As if customers being happy with a product is a worthless concept.
No, customers not being able to look at things with a reasonable sense of perspective and ability to judge things reasonably impartially is to be borne in mind when considering sweeping claims. Somewhat different.
Just an aside. Steve Jobs was only CEO of Apple for a few months in 97,98,& 99. The rest of the 90s he was running NEXT & Pixar after getting the boot from Apple in the 80s.
We're a 40 person Design agency, that has been running on Mac hardware for almost 40 years now.
Everybody of us used to be a huge apple fanboy, now every one of us hates them with a passion.
They completely ignored their customers for the iPhone money grab. Their hardware and software used to be synonymous with quality, nowadays their shoddy quality has become a meme at work.
"Oops reboot." - "What did you expect, it's a mac."
We're looking for the door, and slowly started to introduce windows machines. We were shocked how fast computers got
without apple catching up.
Apple used to he one of the pillars of our productivy, nowadays it's a liability.
And from a developer perspective, they murdered their own App ecosystem.
Mac software used to be really really good. But who do you expect to write great apps for 70ct per sale. That's just ridiculous. Also, why should I get an iPad pro, if I can't even write software on it.
They could've dominated the PC market if iPad Os was actually a real OS.
I doubt that apple can keep its brand relevant without opinion leaders like design professionals.
I mean, c'mon, even Ive left.
Apple is dead, it's only a matter of time for the rot to bring it down.
> I doubt that apple can keep its brand relevant without opinion leaders like design professionals.
I know a fair number of developers and most of them still use Macs. Not because they are fan boys, but because MacOS still sucks less than Windows.
For me and likely many, OS choice is a pragmatic thing and for the moment MacOS is the least bad option. It's going to be interesting seeing what happens with the new CPUs which have the potential to push the Mac ahead of the pack in terms of price/ performance as well.
> I mean, c'mon, even Ive left.
Ive is 54 years old. He's was at Apple for ~26 years when he left. I have no idea how wealthy he is at this point, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's a billionaire based on his position and likely large stock option grants in the 00s.
You are a designer, how many years would you put in cranking out designs for mass consumption consumer electronics after you were a many times over millionaire? How many black aluminium iPhones would you design? Another 40 years worth?
And I know a fair amount of devs who are forced to use Mac hardware because of Apple restricting dev and testing environments to the MacOS. Says a lot when a developer recommended me to use a Linux+Hackintosh (I'm not from a dev background).
About your last point, it would be every designer's dream to work in a company with as powerful a brand as Apple, with as big a war chest and as global a reach for massive adoption. Yet Ive left, perhaps due to feeling that Apple has drained itself of ideas and doesn't have any concrete plans in future. FWIW, most of its recent products were envisioned when Jobs was alive.
I’m a developer, I use a Mac, it’s still the best Unix laptop out there.
But I have a Ryzen 3950X desktop with a real GPU (RTX 2080) running Windows and Linux, for when I am not portable.
Same dotfiles for all, any operating system these days has the terminal + browser story covered, if you then use VS Code and languages like Go or Rust, you don’t really need to care what the OS is.
Getting religious over any one platform is a waste of time IMO.
Well I use Windows and Linux currently, with a hackintosh for macOS after a bad spell with a Mac. I find the Linux OS to be the best for programming, since it just runs everything like a breeze. Windows is what I use for Office since macOS office is clunky and I'm locked in to the Windows shortcuts.
The issue with Macs for me is not the usability of the OS (apart from the lock in that Apple tried to do), but because of its irreparability. Spilt a few dropfuls water on your PC while using? Tough luck, gotta go to the Apple Care centre and wait till they fix it in a week or more. Meanwhile once I accidentally spilt water on my ThinkPad, I just disconnected everything, left it to dry for a day and voila! All of my data was preserved, no issues at all. Another time, I accidentally dropped the ThinkPad from my desk, yet it still works as good as new. Even if some issue were to happen to it, I can be assured of getting out-of-warranty support anywhere in the world - heck, I've had an old Dell repaired at the bloke's who runs a computer shop in my grandfather's village in rural India.
Another gripe I have is with Mac's updates. People complain about Windows updates, but it just takes an hour or two tops if it's a big one, and can be done on restart. Compare that to Mac - last year, Catalina took more than 10 hours on my Mac. Those are wasted hours of productivity, and it's always the same story with Mac every year.
> but because MacOS still sucks less than Windows.
I completely agree that it's still less bad, but look at the language you're using.
It's not that MacOS is a great platform, it's just less bad than the other options.
It had a great starting position from which it declines.
It's a lot worse than it used to be and it continues to decline, so the trend and outcome are clear.
> How many black aluminium iPhones would you design? Another 40 years worth?
EXACTLY!
The iPhone is now 14 years old. The iPod lasted 6 years until it got replaced with the iPhone.
Apples great advantage used to be that they competed with themselves. It was the Macintosh Team vs. the Rest of Apple for example. The Macintosh was allowed to completely cannibalise all other Machines, the iPhone was allowed to completely canibalise the iPod, the iMac replaced the Cube and was allowed to completely cannibalise most tower macs.
They didn't create a huge product portfolio trying to balance features so that they all sell equally well, crippling some for the survival of others (e.g. where's the iPad Pro with XCode, or a MacBook with LTE). They tried to make the best product that would revolutionise the markets, even if it would kill their other products. Because the Products were front and center, not the profits.
If apple was still apple, we wouldn't have Macbooks anymore. We'd all use iPad Pros with proper software and keyboards that can balance them on your laps.
We probably wouldn't use iPhones either, we'd simply have Airpods, an appleWatch, and an optional larger screen that you slide into your shirt pocket or your wallet, or carry as a pocket mirror. Doing 90% of interactions through Siri (which is also 8 years old now, ancient by computer standards, still worse than what it used to be, because apple wants to save money on compute).
Why would Ive leave if he had the power to shape that future.
That's a gross oversimplification. If Apple were just another Dell turning out machines you'd have a point but Apple, above all else, is an aesthetic brand designed to inspire passion. It's like comparing Ruby with Java. Ruby appeals to the developer's aesthetic, inspring passion in its community. Java does not.
Exactly, Satya Nadella is an awesome leader. Who is to say Tim Cook could have taken all these difficult challenges which MSFT was facing at the time? It's 100% speculation.
It's important not to let our biases get in the way here. Clearly, it was Satya who turned Microsoft around. Ballmer had the opportunity for years and did nothing as the stock prices clearly show.
Since Satya took over, MSFT stock has been soaring... You can't deny the evidence. That's 100% clear
Hum, I think this is missing the main points. AirPods and Watches are gimmick. Nothing crazy innovative happened to the iPhones - apart the flatnessisation of iOS which in my opinion was a mistake - and Macs actually went backwards. The real Tim Cook test will be the ARM Macs. Can be game changing or it can’t sink Macs for good.
Gimmick or not, wearables (Watch + Airpods) are a massive business for Apple. Large enough that they would be a F500 company if spun out at current revenue numbers.
No strong opinions on Cook but a Ballmer of the current era is Sundar Pichai. Google of the last few years is utterly rudderless, losing all the mojo and goodwill they once had. That shows in the Stock price, in (a lack of) successful new products, in Google’s loss of reputation as the “coolest company to be at”, in the bloated middle management occupied in turf wars, in essentially most of the things that matter.
That's extremely unfair to Ballmer- Ballmer made lots of bets and put a lot of effort into them. Some were given up on- the phone, but you can't critize Azure, among many. Microsoft has developed lots of products and can develop more. They did plenty under Ballmer. When they fail they try again, or invest more effort.
Google has only one cash cow. They don't know how to develop products and how to win customers. I feel like products at Google get developed when someone has a bright idea, and then as soon as they get promoted they go do other stuff, and the business isn't really about nurturing a new product. All they care about is their big ads cash cow, with which nothing can compare.
LOL, I agree. Ballmer at least came across as a strong leader, if wrong-headed at times. Sundar just comes across as a weakling yes-man trying to please all the sides.
I couldn't / can't get my work calendars to work on google home, but I can get my work calendars to work on Alexa - let that sink in! Been a top complaint for years - they just don't care - it's really all about the new stuff.
Apple - a lot of nice features that solve problems I had usually on new releases.
That's what you get for hiring the B-school type who I doubt has coded even one line after undergrad (or even in undergrad). Google has just been McKinseying a ton of products in the name of poor sales instead of actively changing them for better. Not to mention the loss of workplace culture, the end of TGIF dinners, and zero diversification from the ads business.
If when people say big tech they exclude msft (and include Facebook), they are simply wrong. .net, sqlserver, power bi, hell office are the blood flowing through Government and industry. Gaming is also tech and azure will get there if they just keep at it. The startup world is only a slice of the pie, and not the largest or most important .
If you don’t live on the coasts, and you want to invest in a stack that will keep you employed indefinitely and wherever you go, you pick dotnet hands down, and I say this as someone who hasn’t written a line of dotnet code
No matter what technologies MSFT have, the number one thought in people’s minds these days when you say big tech is simply FB G Amazon and Apple. It’s no longer MSFT up there with them. Definitely a stigma thing.
FB is big ad. To say that MSFT is not big tech is absurd.
They have a widely used desktop operating system, a top-3 public cloud, they make their own laptops and other hardware, they make multiple widely used programming languages, they have one of the most widely used databases, they have a well regarded research division ... the list goes on
The scope of tech that MSFT works on is as big as anyone, and is what they primarily make their money from ... so why wouldn't anyone think it's "big tech"?
The Silicon Valley's idea of Big Tech didn't include MS a few months ago when they were leading the pack for most valuable company in the world. And somehow they're escaping anti-trust scrutiny right now too, so maybe it's better to have a less sexy profile.
Part of that could also be that Microsoft is much more willing to do things in order to avoid looking like a monopoly more than just forbidding the word monopoly. A lot of effort has been spent in bringing SQL Server to Linux as opposed to continuing to use it as a way to lock people into using Windows Server. That's not a charitable act mind you, but I doubt Microsoft under Balmer would have done it.
Disclaimer: I do work for Microsoft on SQL, but I am not in management nor do I speak in any capacity for Microsoft.
The only tech company that my grandparents from the old country could name is Microsoft. I think there is definitely a skewed perception from the commentators living in USA/CAN.
I was considering .NET Core for a project but they appear to have fallen behind the JVM rather dramatically when it comes to GC performance. The JVM now has low latency collectors for very large heaps. Is there any work being done in .NET Core to catch up?
Yeah I work in the Midwest and have been learning .NET for a project I was recently onboarded on. C#/.NET has a stronghold in most enterprise companies out here.
That's interesting. The .NET Core experience shows a lot of promise. I'd fear getting into an old school .NET shop almost as much as I'd fear getting into a "stuck in Java <= 1.7" shop.
No need, just code a fully compatible alternative implementation. It's very unclear what is the situation with Mono (unlike alternative JVM implementations).
Cook hasn't damaged Apple nearly as much as Ballmer hurt MS. During Ballmer's tenure, Microsoft launched the Zune, the various disastrous incarnations of Windows Phone, Windows 8, and the Xbox One (which halved its marketshare vs the 360). Cook may not be innovative, but he has yet to have a real failure, much less a disaster on the scale of those.
> the various disastrous incarnations of Windows Phone
Surprisingly the phone was loved. What wasnt loved was the one desktop everywhere so when they tried to push 'Metro' to the PC, tablet and phone it struggled. But the tiled phone interface was good, and a lot of people liked it.
I really think Ballmer and Cook are manifestations of the same person. Mac OS quality is the worst it's been in probably a decade+? Hardware design for the laptops have been under massive scrutiny. Cook brought the Watch to the table which is a massive success. Their services business plan is just a money grab like their approach to accessories. But Apple isn't innovating much, they have been cashing in in recent years (besides the watch imo, maybe airpods but Id personally disagree)
As a consumer, I loved the phone. As a developer, I was afraid to touch it. Dumping the old Windows Mobile platform for Windows Phone was understandable, but the compatibility break between Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 was really off-putting.
Though I think the biggest problem there is that it didn't happen in a vacuum. It was one more event in a fairly long list of Microsoft technologies and APIs that were shipped to much fanfare, and then abandoned shortly after release. It made it hard to feel comfortable trying any Microsoft tech that wasn't at least a fewy years old. Including mobile APIs. Which, given what happened with Windows Phone 8, did not turn out to be an overabundance of caution.
The problem hurt more than Windows Phone, too. A lot of people got sick of having the rug repeatedly yanked out from under them, and started developing on non-Microsoft tech stacks. Which then removed a lot of the need to run Windows Server, and things sort of snowballed.
Despite all his infamous ranting about the importance of keeping developers happy early on, the Ballmer years turned out to be the era when Microsoft perfected the art of alienating developers.
If you bailed out after WP8, you missed the really tragic one. Windows Mobile 10 changed everything again (and had the gall to call the new one 'Universal' apps), and they missed their target of all the wp8 phones being upgradable to wm10, and for those that were upgradable, the OS was awful for the first year, and Edge was a worse experience than Mobile IE (which says a lot).
Oh, and they decided to only target the high end of the market, instead of a full range, so they lost the low end market that was selling a lot of phones in poorer nations.
/rant of a dedicated windows phone enthusiast.
At least firefox lets me put the urlbar at the bottom now! And Android picked up dark mode from WP as well.
I think part of that was the size of the paradigm shift MS tried to accomplish. It was a huge gamble and its important to take chances like that, but to change all three platforms so drastically made it hard for developers (table, PC and phone). And then I dont believe MS either A) invested enough or B) gave it enough time so when they pulled support developers definitely felt it.
They were also a couple years late, as for android and iphone had considerable market share.
I think the same can be said for google these days, there is no reason to risk investing time or money into one of their new technologies because it will get dropped if its not one of the big 4 (search, ads, youtube, GCP, maybe arguably android)
Indeed. I'm actually in the middle of dealing with blowback from some Google product yanking right now.
The big difference is, Google pulls stunts like that small things that aren't critical to the company's business. Microsoft, on the other hand, was blithely jackhammering away at the foundation of their business.
They did fine, insofar as they're still profitable and well-capitalized, but one has to wonder what things could have been like for them if they hadn't spent the aughties playing Dr Strangelove's Hand with themselves.
OTOH, one could argue that spending a decade eating humble pie was a necessary step in teaching them how to play nice with others.
> The big difference is, Google pulls stunts like that small things that aren't critical to the company's business. Microsoft, on the other hand, was blithely jackhammering away at the foundation of their business.
For sure, I think MS was panicking tbh. They missed the mobile revolution (This was Ballmer and Gates), and then cloud was starting to take off and realized their OS and Office products were not optimized or read for that shift. I think they realized they had to change, and change fast and as a result didn't go well. But at least it started the change we see today with MS (for good or bad).
> "Dumping the old Windows Mobile platform for Windows Phone was understandable, but the compatibility break between Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 was really off-putting."
My memory is fuzzy on the specifics but the breaks weren't done just for the fun of it. If I recall correctly, refactoring on a titanic scale on the Windows Phone OS was underway along with the same on Windows itself to both make Windows a componentized OS that would work on anything from a tiny mobile device to a huge server and to synchronize the architecture of WP to Windows. By the time of WP10, as the old joke goes, "the operation was a success but the patient died". It's kind of a pity.
It's not that they didn't have a plan, it's that the plan was so thoroughly ill-conceived and ill-executed.
iOS has not been unified with OS X, and Android has not been unified with Chrome OS. And all four OSes are quite successful despite the lack of unification. Meanwhile, the Windows RT Surface tablets never took off, and the Windows 8 unified experience was universally recognized as an unmitigated disaster on launch day, if not earlier.
They were always going to struggle to get app developers to port to Windows Mobile, so I'm not sure it was ill conceived to provide a single target for desktop and mobile, with the hope that more developers would take the time to support all form factors if they could use a single code base.
It was a gamble that enough native desktop apps would remain for this strategy to pay off, but they lost to web and electron apps.
Tried to push Metro on servers too. I remember the brief time where Server didn't have a start button but you could go to the bottom left most pixel to get the start menu to show. What were they thinking? Metro is fine now but that first iteration was a disaster
The last iteration of the phone was loved and was genuinely an interesting product, but by then it was way, way too late. The disastrous limitations and compromises in the earlier iterations doomed the series.
The phone carriers doomed Windows Phone. AT&T and Verizon both agreed they didn't want to sell three OSes, they barely wanted to sell two. You could have the best phone OS there is, but if no one is selling it it doesn't matter.
MSFT could have opened up retail stores with their boatloads of cash like Apple.
But they didn’t want to take the risk with a low margin high cost center activity like providing in person support and expanding headcount. Hence no reward.
And with their recent closing of Microsoft stores, it’s clear that they are doubling down on rent seeking from Office and Windows licenses.
I still think Retail Stores were a red herring. Even if people bought unlocked Windows phones directly from Microsoft Stores they couldn't get SIMs from half the major carriers at any given time as Microsoft was forced not to support given Verizon SIMs as one point due to a dumb war with them and Verizon flat out refusing to allow the devices on to the network. (At a different point AT&T almost did the same thing, but relented.)
On top of that, even though that was towards the end of the era of massive phone hardware subsidies from the carriers, it was still the era of massive phone hardware subsidies from the carriers if you bought directly from them.
Apple had/has "luxury brand" caché that Microsoft couldn't build into its stores if it wanted to, and first mover advantage on top of that. Many consumers didn't blink if there was a huge sticker price difference between the iPhone in the AT&T Store and the unlocked one in the Apple Store, because it was a luxury brand. Microsoft was never going to earn that. Additionally, if a lot of people showed up to an AT&T or Verizon store with an unlocked iPhone and were refused a SIM that would be a major scandal, and would get a lot of luxury good "entitlement" people out of the woodwork. People told that they couldn't buy an unlocked Microsoft phone and use it on their carrier just shrugged and moved on (to an iPhone or an Android).
> And with their recent closing of Microsoft stores, it’s clear that they are doubling down on rent seeking from Office and Windows licenses.
Windows and Office are still getting improvements, it is a bit disingenuous to consider those products "rent seeking".
Xbox and Surface are doing just fine with or without Microsoft-specific Stores.
Besides, both before and after the Microsoft Stores, Microsoft had good retail relationships with Best Buy and others. It's not like there is "zero" Microsoft retail exposure without Microsoft owning their own boutique retail stores.
> Apple had/has "luxury brand" caché that Microsoft couldn't build into its stores if it wanted to, and first mover advantage on top of that.
I disagree. It takes time, money, and effort to earn people’s trust, but it’s possible. They obviously weren’t going to reverse a decade of shipping malware ridden computers, but they could have put out quality Microsoft products, and spent years earning back people’s trust.
And yes, maybe it wouldn’t work, and taking risks is part of business. But this is one of the most profitable companies in the history of the world, and they could have afforded it.
Up until the Surface line, Microsoft never shipped any computers at all, much less "malware ridden" ones. I think that exactly illuminates how high of a mountain Microsoft would have needed to climb to earn people's trust when Microsoft is also in general mainstream mindsets saddled with the problems of other company's behaviors.
But if the point was to save the marketshare of Windows phone products via retail store presence, Microsoft didn't have time, they were racing a losing money clock and the shareholders were watching retail operations worried Microsoft was just "throwing good money after bad".
Owned one. It was a damn good phone, had a great UI that remains unsurpassed to this day, but it clearly came at least two years too late to gain the critical mass needed for a thriving ecosystem.
I loved the UX on it too, but the crappy locked-down web browser killed it for me.. I don't even use apps, but since I couldn't load Firefox with uBlock on there, and there weren't any single-purpose apps, it was really rough
I think the software was loved. It was years before Apple and Android did their own 'natively digital' designs which echoed Metro and Zune's design aesthetic.
> The software was not loved and the app store was lacking.
The app store was definitely lacking. In my own circle of real life users I did not meet one person that did not really like the phone (software included). Granted this is just my own experience so very limited but its also a group of non-technical people just sharing with me. I never heard one complaint in fact it was usually more accolades.
The phone had great software and could run on incredibly low-end hardware like the Nokia 520. I had that phone and it was functional, fast and far better designed than any of the Android equivalent low-ends at the time.
Biggest flaw at the time was Google's shady nonsense involving banning Google Maps/Youtube on Windows Phone without a native app.
So who is “innovating” more in electronics hardware?
As far as the Macs, outside of the keyboard fiasco which has been rectified, the recent Macs are getting good reviews from people who were rightfully critical a few years ago. The ARM Macs will soon be as far ahead of equivalent PCs as the iPhones are Androids when it comes to processing power.
Things like USB ports, touchbar, etc... Mac still makes a good laptop, but in a historical sense I think this is a still a lowpoint for their hardware comparatively to themselves in quality and functionality.
Apple has been aggressively ditching “legacy” ports since the first iMacs in 1998. How is Apple going USB-C only now different than the original iMac going USB only?
USB-C is fine, its the number of ports that is the issue and not consumer friendly..
And I think USB-A isn't quite legacy just yet (it's OK they ditched the VGA and/or DVI ports), there are still a lot of need for one of those ports. Same with a card reader slot. I also think there is a need for a headphone jack even though bluetooth is qutie viable.
There was need for all of the “legacy” ports when the iMac was introduced. The idea of getting rid of ports and standardizing on one when it became technically possible didn’t start under Cook.
The ARM processors will not be "far ahead of" PCs. They will almost certainly give better battery life, but their performance will not trump what Intel and AMD are doing by a long shot. Don't buy into the hype
I'll concede the Xbox One wasn't Ballmer's fault, but he still gets a fair share of the blame for WP. It was (or should have been) Microsoft's most important new initiative for years, Ballmer could clearly see that it was failing, and yet he kept promoting Myerson and giving him more power. A better CEO would have intervened.
and my impression was that all good things that started under his regime (Azure, more openness)
I think a lot of that was Ray Ozzie. I guess Balmer deserves some credit at least for hiring him?
MS under Ballmer lost couple of generations of programmers
A lot of younger programmers may not realize this, but in the 90’s, all roads led to Microsoft. If you were a programmer and you didn’t know at least some of the MS acronym soup of Win32/VB/ATL/MFC/etc/etc, you weren’t getting paid. Microsoft and Windows completely dominated commercial software development. And then what happened?
Balmer tried stupidly to kill the web. He redeployed the IE team and assumed that the web would stagnate without his attention. He’d killed Netscape and the threat had passed. In the meantime, Mozilla and Apple and Google were forming the whatwg and architecting the next generation of the web. And MS was not only not a part of it, but had lost all credibility in the eyes of web and browser devs.
And then of course he also got caught flat-footed by the iPhone. Balmer was a serial failure as a CEO. Maybe he deserves some credit, a little bit at least for Azure? But he’ll always be remembered for all of those stupid quips he made about how Apple wasn’t going to be able to make headway in the smartphone biz.
The comment about the 90's is simply not true. I've been a successful (e.g., getting paid) developer since the 80s and have never been in the Microsoft stack. With the exception of a small bit of VMS-hosted development in the 80s, everything I have done in my career has been hosted on some sort of Unix. And I'm not some outlier. Sun Microsystems dominated the 90s for problems of just about any scale beyond the small workgroup.
I make this point because many of us (both engineers and customers alike) pushed back hard against Microsoft. They actively fought against open standards and interoperability. We literally thought of them as the evil empire. Even as late as the mid 2000s, when I was at Yahoo and there was talk of a Microsoft acquisition, I would have quit rather than work at Microsoft.
Economics aside, changing that toxic culture is what I appreciate most about Nadella's time as CEO. He has (it appears) made Microsoft into a citizen.
You jumped from ship to ship while you could have just been a Windows developer the whole time. Not that you wouldn't have had a bunch of ships to jump between in Windows-land.
I think one factor was at some point Microsoft stopped trying to make the desktop and web one platform (which was distinctly Microsoft controlled) which seemed to be the push with ActiveX, VBscript, and HTML Application technologies. I think the relentless plague of security holes in ActiveX was a factor here. This is idle speculation, but that is my sense of things.
They did the Apple Watch, AirPods, Apple Music under Cook. Lots of innovations in the phone and tablet (pencil, photo processing, 120hz screen, neural engine and more) And now they make as good processors as Intel does and will be deploying them in macs which they seem to be doing thoughtfully. Even in AI, while they are not as strong as others, they have led with their push for privacy and on-device models.
Microsoft stock was flat under Ballmer because of hangover from the massive dotcom bust in 2000 and the DOJ consent decree which didn't expire until 2011. It would've been hard for anyone else to do better.
That said, the one thing Ballmer did right is that he took on the difficult problem of locking down Microsoft products on a security front. This was a hard and thankless task, but absolutely necessary in the long run.
He's talking about the TwC initiative, which came from Gates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustworthy_computing. Even after stepping down as CEO, Gates maintained an informal role at MS as an ideas guy for a number of years.
The usual tendency is to give credit to the person who comes up with the idea, and the blame to the person who implements it.
But ideas are a dime a dozen. I give credit not to coming up with the idea, but to actually putting in the elbow grease. And there is no question that Ballmer put a lot of elbow grease into keeping the initiative going.
Inflating your stock price by buybacks is easier said than done.
In fact according to the CAPM economic model, it is impossible. The assets of the company decrease by the money spent on buybacks, which matches the value of stock bought and destroyed. This should leave the price per remaining stock unchanged.
Sounds to me like the CAPM economic model is in need of revision. Buybacks are a common tool for increasing shareholder value and investor sentiment figures heavily in asset pricing.
Ok as a general point, but those criticisms simply do not apply to Cooke. The company has done absolute gang busters both in products and fundamental performance, and that's what has driven up the stock price.
At first I was going to be critical of your point but thinking about it for a minute. I think your right. Apple and Microsoft aren't as innovative anymore. It's sad. But I do think Microsoft is leading this front between the two. Some of their acquisitions of SAS products have grown and improved, where Apple isn't doing something significant to improve the lives of it's users. Does a photo really add that much value? Or an emoji? Whereas many of the SAS products Microsoft has is a business model that is to speed up it's users productivity.
As for losing out on programmers which (my words) essentially reduce the exponential behavior that tech was experiencing. I'll say this. It is sad. Rent seeking is a typical behavior of any company that gets large.
I'm actually now wondering if something is preventing these companies from growing very fast, like a national actor.
If you look at Amazon, they are in numerous industries and have a little market share of them and are trying to innovate in them. Amazon isn't slowing down either. I find it an interesting case study. Only AWS is helping programmers, many other products are actually against user's interests.
Another case study would be Tesla. They are emerging as a most likely monopoly due to their relentless innovation. But they don't harness community programmers either. I believe this will change overtime, since Musk has said this for many years but I doubt there will be a lot of freedom in their system either.
I want to see a company that is innovative and allowing others to innovate on their platform. It would be very valuable to society if we do this.
I disagree. Tim Cook has been pretty solid. He's no Steve Jobs, but he's done a fine job. Although he hasn't produced any new cash cows so far, he's been a decent steward of the ones they already had and he's taken the company into new markets with the Apple Watch. It's not the most inspiring product, but it is the premium wearable and clear leader. Then there are the AirPods, which fit in nicely in wearable category. And I love what Apple is doing with their own silicon.
Sure, there are no home runs here, but he's effectively executing a coherent strategy and hasn't really had any big mistakes. I wouldn't put him as high up as Nadella and I certainly wouldn't put him as low as Ballmer. It's tough to be the guy who follows the founder and Cook has handled it well. I don't know who is out there who looks like a better candidate or a suitable replacement for Cook.
> Although he hasn't produced any new cash cows so far ...
> Sure, there are no home runs here, ...
Huh?
AirPods + Apple Watch are bigger than either the Mac or the iPad and are growing much faster.
Companies don't crank out iPhone class "home runs" every 10 years. Microsoft had the Windows and Office, Google had Search and GMail (and made solid acquisitions in the form of YouTube and Docs). Facebook had Facebook... and bought everything else they own worth a damn.
Apple created a $25 billion/ year product line (AirPods/ Beats/ Watch) under Cook... but it's not a home run?
I didn't realize they generate that much money. When you put it in those terms, he looks even better. In any case, I think the guy has done a pretty good job.
I wonder what your thoughts are on Sundar Pichai. Has Google created anything interesting under his leadership? I would put Cook above Pichai if I ranked top tech CEOs.
Google hasn't had a major new product for a decade.
Prior to 2010: Search, Doubleclick, Maps, Mail, GSuite, AppEngine (which was first serverless platform). All of which were category makers or category killers.
Well VR is a thing now for $300. And there is tiktok and snapchat as far as social media goes. Companies are slowly marching to deliver AR as a product too. Consumer drones are another thing along with cheap digital large sensor cameras, and once something like waymo and boom delivers, those would be revolutions of their own. Also solar is cheaper than coal now as an energy source, and complete DNA sequencing now costs $1000 vs $100’000. Electric cars are now something that the upper-middle class can own practically.
Am I the only that finds SM platforms like snapchat and tiktok infantile and vacuous? Say what you want about Facebook and Reddit, but in the right forums you can have thoughtful debates and discussions. I don't see TT and SC as anything but fads. TT is the same 10 or 15 takes on the same thing over and over and SC is just a 1 hit music star that somehow still lingers around.
In fairness, Google Cloud Platform is a huge new product. GAE (which I love) was but a tiny drop compared to the vast ocean that is GCP today. And GCP is really a multitude of products.
Android was launched in 2008, although I think it really deserves to be in the post-2010 category. Today's Android is a whole different beast.
Google Home is a new product. And tied in with Home & Android is voice recognition, which is definitely post-2010. Voice recognition may not be a standalone product but it has radically changed how I interact with technology. It counts.
Google Hangouts launched in 2013. Google's whole messaging platform has become a muddled mess that they're only just now untangling, but hangouts video was a huge hit for a while.
Of course it's hard to top hits like Search, Gmail, GSuite, and Maps... but there's progress.
Does it define the category? Is Google Cloud 'the' cloud provider? "Just spin up a box on GCP" the default thing for people to do in tech?
> Today's Android is a whole different beast.
Is it? Android 4 (which was around that time) is pretty close to android as it is now.
> Google Home is a new product
And? Is it category defining like maps or Mail or GSuite, did it create something entirely new like GAE did for serverless? Is it the default home assistant? Do people outside tech even know the name 'Google Home'?
> hangouts video was a huge hit for a while
And now it's close to dead. Never reached the heights of Skype or Zoom.
GCP is nowhere near Azure or AWS, either in terms of functionality, or in terms of support. GCP cannot compete at all with those two for enterprise customers, since a.) lack of functionality and risk of closure and b.) the big customers have already been locked in. Of all the GCP customers I've heard of, the only big one is Spotify, while the landscape is largely dominated by independent devs.
As far as Cook. There is no next iPhone. The iPhone was a once in a lifetime product. There were already 1 billion phones being sold a year when the iPhone was introduced - Jobs said he wanted to sell 10 million phones and capture 1% of the market. The smart phone (not the iPhone) has 70-80% penetration. What we call an electronic communication device that’s always connected may change, but there is no larger conceivable electronic market.
As much as HN poo poos the Apple Watch and the AirPods, from a technical standpoint it is much more innovative than the iPad - the last product that was introduced under Jobs. Once you have the iPhone, using the same technology in something with less constraints was easy. The Watch is just the oppposite.
From a financial standpoint. The Watch already produced more in revenue and profit than the iPod at peak. As does the AirPods.
Not to mention that Apple could have never shipped in volume without Cooks supply chain management expertise.
Then there are the upcoming ARM Macs that will probably be the fastest personal computers in the industry in a year or two. The $399 iPhone SE is already faster than any Android phone at any price.
The iPad merely replicated the already known notebook and tablet workflow. The Apple watch originally tried to be a smaller iPhone (and failed at it), but Apple was smart and innovative enough to pivot to a new workflow which smartphones can't easily replicate.
Technically? It’s easy when you have more space, larger batteries and higher thermal limits to have more features. But the original iPad had technically inferior processor (256MB RAM vs 512MB than the iPhone that came out 3 months later).
The Watch being smaller, it’s technically much more impressive that it has an always on display, cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, heart rate sensors, altimeter, gyroscope, 32GB Storage, and it still gets 12-16 hours of battery life.
While the Apple’s A series is already 2 or 3 years ahead of everything else in the mobile market, nothing is even coming that close to the S series chip.
> Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook. I can't wait for him to be replaced.
Easy to say "making good quarters" is table stakes, much harder to come up with a vision that works. What do you see as possible visions Cook could pursue given Apple's positioning?
As someone who was at MS during those years, directly involved with Azure, OSS, Mobile/phone I can verify that Steve was a great biz guy but had very little sense for where the tech world was headed.
What Satya has done is incredibly impressive and will be much studied IMHO
I agree completely. Steve Ballmer put all of Microsoft eggs in the Office Basket that let mobile die on the vine. He pushed licensing and marketing and left developers and new tech to languish. It's why to this day, Microsoft doesn't have a place in the mobile space, it's iOS or Android. I also aggree that pushing MS in a more Open source direction has helped make them more palatable to developers.
Cook was also running Apple ops for a decade before being CEO. It's not like he appeared out of nowhere. One can argue Apple's design chops and freedom to innovate were because of Cook, who cleaned up all the business and ops shenanigans that were driving Apple bankrupt under Scully, Spindler and Amelio, and create a stable foundation for Jobs to work his magic.
I am certainly not happy with Tim Cook from a Product and Strategy perspective. But from an Operation / COO perspective. He is second to none. So good that I put him as Genius in this Category.
> when someone says "big tech" it's Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, not MS
For what it's worth (and this is mostly seperate from your point I guess), most of the time when people say "big tech", they're talking about the negative cultural, political, and economic impacts of those companies. Maybe its not so bad to not be lumped in with Facebook?
To not include Microsoft when you say 'big tech' is blinkered.
They are currently the 2nd biggest company in the world by market cap. Around double the size of Facebook.
They might not be cool or trendy in tech circles anymore, but they are without a doubt a big tech company.
Their OS runs over 70% of desktops [1] and their office suite has over 80% of the market share [2]. And that's just the sectors they completely dominate in before we even talk about other sectors that they are involved in with major competitive products. Xbox, Surface, Azure, SQL server, Power BI, Windows Server, .net, Visual Studio, BizTalk, are all huge popular widely used tech products. And I'm sure there's more that I don't know.
And then add GitHub and LinkedIn if you want to count recent acquisitions that still seem to operate mostly independently at the moment.
Steve Ballmer made some mistakes, but after enough years went by, he realized that and changed his approach, setting up MS for success once again. He just didn't have enough time to execute on his new vision before he got ousted.
I remember being an intern at Microsoft in 2009 and going to a talk with Ballmer.
What I remember is the most charismatic human being I've ever seen. The man could have been a cult leader. He had and maybe still has power in his ability to speak. Any question we asked (and we were interns, we asked lots of them) he had not just an answer but a good answer. He spoke of his failures well too: "They ask if we should make a video game console or a phone, and I chose the console- I should have said 'both'!".
But nobody cares about how well you can speak. People want results.[0]
The original schedule for the event actually got cancelled at the last minute- there was a huge announcement that had to be made, a big deal that was going to change the face of Microsoft, and it overlapped with our time. He was very apologetic about that, and rescheduled us for the next week, and then spoke at length about this incredible thing that was about to happen.
That big announcement? Bing was teaming up with Yahoo on Search. (We all remember the day of that earth-changing event, right?)
I was at MS for his last company meeting and you're right. That guy has charisma and PASSION for Microsoft.
I never liked working there, but watching him scream "I LOVE THIS COMPANY" while in tears made me feel like I was part of something huge and important.
The man's natural speaking voice is the loudest I have ever heard. I could identify him coming down a long corridor by his voice well before I could by sight.
He drove a several-year old dark red Mercury Montego in which he almost ran me over in a parking lot behind the EBC. He was on the phone.
Ballmer created an indescribably toxic culture around reviews with his David Welch inspired "up or out" and "fire the bottom five percent" policies. Stack rankings were more like knife fights than honest appraisals of people's abilities and contributions. Teams used to deliberately hire underperformers so they could fire them, thus shielding productive people they would otherwise have to get rid of.
I'm not going to get started on his miserable technical leadership. Things more or less just happened under him, he didn't seem that involved in the quality of what was being produced.
If there is someone at Microsoft who didn't got enough credit it was Ray Ozzie. Remember him when he was Chief Software Architect? He started Azure / Microsoft transition to the cloud. He created that shift in focus that Microsoft now rides on. Had he not gotten that brief period as BillG's replacement, Microsoft would have continued to live in the past where windows and on-premise office suite was king. Ray Ozzie changed the direction of Microsoft without ever really getting any credits for it.
This [1] wired interview provides an insight into the structured thinking at Microsoft/Gates even back in 1996.
I'm sure this kind of thinking permeates any successful company, to have a video of this depth, and now available for public viewing, is really unique.
Satya ran the entire cloud strategy before being promoted. The things you're giving Ballmer credit for were literally things Satya worked on :)
In February 2011 Nadella was promoted to president of the Server and Tools Division, which oversaw products for companies’ data centers like Windows Server and the SQL Server database. This department also oversaw the Azure cloud platform. When he took over this area it was doing $16.6 billion in revenue. In two years, by 2013, Nadella raised that number to $20.3 billion.
The things is I never read about any major decisions Sundar Pichai has made. There's tons online about Tim Cook, Satya, Netflix's various SLs, Daniel Ek, Elon Musk (admittedly more about his tweets than business strat these days) etc. But I never read about Sunder Pichai's strategies or decisions. What is he actually doing?
What's the incentive to do anything at that level? He's going to walk away after 5-10 years with OOM a billion dollars regardless of how anything he does or doesn't do pans out for Google. Why not just play the quiet card and pin anything that happens to the fiefdom lords who now have free reign and no oversight?
If good things happen, he gets credit for delegating well. If bad things happen, it's their fault. But if he loudly tries something different and it fails, the failure is more likely to get pinned on him. And again, he's already going to walk away with a billion regardless, so "financial upside" as a motivator for success is largely an illusion.
He's a "just gotta keep my nose clean and get out with a middling reputation and a shitload of money" CEO.
My sense is that people who think like this don't make it this high up. Sundar has already had opportunities to sell out much earlier; Money stopped becoming a problem for him long ago.
Now that I think about it, I'm really curious as well. I didn't work in Cloud, but my perception is TK is really reshaping GCP as well as the Gsuite to whatever it is now.
Sundar's role seems to really be give his lieutenants free reign which I guess makes sense seeing as how he now oversees all of Alphabet.
Office for iOS is hardly a company-changing announcement. And wasn't Azure the baby of Satya? And let's not forget decades of failed products under Balmer.
The way I remember it, when Microsoft fiiiinaly launched something successful other than office/windows, it's father was quickly made the new king they had been looking for since so long.
Under Ballmer, MS dropped the ball on mobile. They had Windows CE, Windows on every desktop, and Xbox on the set top. And with all that, they couldn't put together a viable mobile product? They had the chance to make a holistic ecosystem that would span desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, TV, and everything in between. And they dropped the ball. Now we have to deal with a Duopoly between the largest advertiser and the largest media merchant. UGH.
No kidding... WinCE should have been a stripped down NT. Instead it was this 'other' thing that they drug along that was 'windows' but not quite 'windows' and a pain to dev for. They were stuck in this weird spot where they had to create a build system that took into account of every BOM every crappy cell phone the ODMs could come up with. Then married to cell phones that would forget everything you setup on the drop of a hat. Apple did something different that changed the market. They put an unlimited plan on it, decent amount of NAND, a good touchscreen, and a straight forward GUI that worked in the small screen market.
> "They were stuck in this weird spot where they had to create a build system that took into account of every BOM every crappy cell phone the ODMs could come up with."
Well before Windows Phone existed, they already had to deal with that for Windows CE 1.0 to 6.x and all the PDAs/phones that used them. Android has to deal with the same thing. Nothing was new about that for Windows Phone.
Aside from that, Microsoft had to deal with that already anyway because of Windows CE Embedded / Windows Automotive and all the miscellaneous gadgets people wanted to use it with.
It’s an example of the company trying to avoid kneecapping the cash cow when experimenting. I really liked the Workpad z50, which was really the first netbook. Its windows CE runtime was light and useful, and booted instantly with execute-in-place. Its flaws were, in my opinion, entirely due to Microsoft not wanting to let CE become a viable alternative to NT. (That, and using a mask ROM instead of flash).
They really messed that whole thing up. They were complacent before and after the iPhone was released, they should have ported it to their tablet instead of ruining Windows desktop and they wasted billions buying Nokia.
The funny thing is everyone I spoke to who used it loved Windows phone.
I think Balmer takes a lot of the blame that should probably be directed more towards the board. Balmer was doing exactly what they asked him to do and had he made the type of decisions Satya is making, they would have replaced him with a more conservative CEO.
Balmer was very successful in doing what he was tasked with. You can’t blame him for that.
I worked for MS under ballmer and turner. And they are in my opinion definitly, with Gates in the background, the ones that are the reason why the shared have rocketed.
Satya did not invent the "platform wins" strategy. That was long before him. And that's what the company is still capitalizing on.
That's what Microsoft is still the best at. Platform. And tools.
No one comes even close to having the developer experience MS offers. And that plays directly into the platform strategy.
The problems at Microsoft started under Bill. Microsoft's tablet and mobile platform initiatives went absolutely nowhere. Pen computing, MPC and Origami were complete flops. Longhorn never even happened, Vista was a disaster. Windows 8 was after Bill left as software architect but he was still involved with the company at that time.
Yes Office on iOS was a smart move, buy why was it even necessary? It was a white flag after over a decade of missed opportunities. Only under a new leader could it be re-branded as a refreshing change of direction.
I honestly don't know to what extent the problems there can be laid at Ballmer's door, but it really wasn't just him, frankly it was him and Bill. They were fantastic at executing on established products and technologies pioneered by others but dropped the ball time and again at innovating into new areas.
Wait wasn't Satya the head of the cloud division before he became the CEO? I was thinking that he had started these things and pushed it further after becoming CEO!
Very true. Ballmer didn't make Microsoft cool but he left a very healthy, highly profitable company with plenty of reserves. I wouldn't call what Nadella did a turnaround but just a change of direction and focus. I am not too impressed either with what MS is doing with Windows right now. The Windows 10 developer story seems pretty confusing and I am urging my company to go away from Windows for our devices.
I read somewhere that Satya openly expressed is views against Ballmer's Nokia/windows phone strategy and every other strategy which ended in failure during Ballmer's tenure during their meetings and that it played a crucial role in appointing him to the top role later on.
> It wasn't a coincidence that on the day Ballmer stepped down and Satya became CEO (2014), Microsoft also announced Office for iOS, Cloud first strategy, and a whole slew of cloud/Azure product announcements.
It was a few weeks later. Office for iOS was ready to go but I suspect Ballmer was holding it back (not wanting to give up precious Windows exclusives) rather than driving it.
> It wasn't a coincidence that on the day Ballmer stepped down and Satya became CEO (2014), Microsoft also announced Office for iOS, Cloud first strategy, and a whole slew of cloud/Azure product announcements.
They might have been developed while he was at the helm, but how do you know he wasn't the one blocking their release?
100%. A lot of these things were set in motion under Ballmer and he tee'd it up for Satya. That doesn't excuse Ballmer's missteps and of course Satya deserves credit for a lot of the execution, but I think people like to latch on to the simple narrative of Satya Good, Ballmer Bad.
What on earth are you talking about? Ballmer should have been met at the airport and given his walking papers when he got back from laughing at the iPhone on the Today Show.
He basically won the lottery by getting assigned to the same dorm floor at Harvard as Bill Gates, and has been coasting ever since.
With VSCode and Typescript, Microsoft owned the web developer space - a feat that I would not have predicted them doing 10 years ago. How did Google/Facebook get beaten here?
Well I'd point out that Facebook gave us react, basically altering the default programming paradigm for webdev, and Google, well Google plays God and judges all Webdevs via SEO. Plus regardless of what folks think of Flutter, Google has done some incredible work there. There's some very interesting things happening with it related to WebDev that are slowly but surely coming. Real cross platform native desktop support (as in compiled, not interpreted, imagine no more electron apps taking up huge amounts of RAM and being slow while they do it), ahead of time compilation to native platform code for arbitrary dart executables, and transpilation to js from Dart, which will soon have sound null safety enabled by default, all in a single code base is pretty wild. So, I'd say Google is making moves in a very interesting direction.
I really hope Flutter for web does come together and doesn't get abandoned or become nerfed or neglected via Google's ever shifting product teams, I like it so much better than any javascript framework out there.
There's angular for Google and Microsoft too, even though React is better for a lot of use cases, a lot of traditional devs still place their bets in Angular. As a brazilian a see this a lot in some regions of the country. We can't forget the differences in context of the different parts of the world
I think WSL should also be listed among awesome new developer amenities from Microsoft. I know a lot of people view it as a capitulation considering its Microsoft, but WSL is such a great tool.
I purchased a Macbook about 2 years ago out of curiosity, as it seems a lot of developers prefer them. I'll admit the screen is beautiful, but so much of the developer niceties are simply the Mac taking advantage of POSIX interoperability. As WSL continues to grow, I could definitely see going back to a Windows machine.
POSIX interoperability isn't to be taken lightly. WSL is currently still pretty far imo from the native experience you get in Linux and Mac. Mac is also the only system that allows easy development of any platform, though of course that's primarily because of locking down development for their stuff.
Macs are popular dev machines because they couple the above with a very polished and stable widely compatible OS. The broad market appeal with the advantages of Unix like terminal and file system and a package manager. The screen isn't even that great, I'd take the XPS screen over the Macbook's.
I think WSL will get there eventually but in its current state it's just more tedious to use for permissions/networking/compatability issues.
Mostly things you can work around but just a bit more tinkering
(disclosure I work for Microsoft but not on this stuff)
Biggest benefit for me has been how simple it has made ssh on Windows. I got a nicer spec'd Surface Laptop 3 during my last hardware refresh and haven't missed Macbook at all.
Confusing. Do you mean as an ssh server? Because there is no functional difference between Cygwin ssh client running in mintty vs WSL (1 or 2, doesn't matter) ssh running in wsltty. I think if I sat you down in front of them and switched them out you wouldn't notice a thing.
That they did, but VS had always been aimed at MS tech stack: VC++, VB, C#, F#. And then VS Code appeared seemingly out of the blue, rapidly becoming the editor of choice for languages all across the tech landscape.
I think the VSCode extension marketplace greatly helps with the huge breadth of tooling. Not sure if this is applicable to regular Visual Studio as well, I've honestly never used it.
Visual Studio (full edition) doesn't have extensions. It's a full blown IDE and everything is built-in. Despite having a similar name, the two products sharing almost nothing in common.
The first version of Microsoft made BASIC interpreters for any and every "home computer" that asked them to (and was willing to buy it). For a large chunk of the lifetime of the Macintosh, Microsoft was the largest Mac OS application developer, and cross-platform C++ tools was important for that. The Microsoft of "only one tech stack" is probably the outlier, more than the rule.
TypeScript is miles ahead of others I'm surprised. Swift can't even tell it's no longer a "nil" after "if some_var != nil" and felt like I'm helping the language instead of the other way and PHP's typing is still very young and Ruby seems to be introducing some weird declaration file instead of simple inline typing.
nah, he turned the stock price around which is why Wall Street and MSFT employees love him.
Every single thing he's credited for "turning around" was launched under Ballmer.
My reading of Ballmer from the outside (I'd left long before the recent transition years) is that he probably trusted his division heads too much. He figured they knew what they were doing and he just had to steer the giant ship gently in a general direction.
What other explanation is there for letting Sinofsky run amok with the horseshit that was Windows 8 ? Or Office refusing to ship WinRT apps, ever ?
Ballmer had Microsoft in his blood and I loved him for that. People like to make fun of his "Developers, Developers, Developers" video, but that man put his soul in his work.
Nadella is bent on competing on low-price Linux VMs with AWS and he will lose that bet in the long run.
I don't feel like I need to go into the abomination that is Windows 10.
Or maybe I'm just a bitter Windows Phone user shaking my fist at the clouds (no pun intended).
> Every single thing he's credited for "turning around" was launched under Ballmer.
That's nonsense. Ballmer kept Microsoft in the 90's style of doing business, but this didn't work so well in the 2000's. After Satya took over he embraced opensource. He allowed Linux into Azure, which is bold. He killed the Windows division, which is very bold. He made Windows free. He made Office free for devices with small screens. He opensourced .NET and other products such as VSCode and TypeScript. He incorporated Linux kernel into Windows. None of these things would have happened under Balmer. These are bold moves and these moves are responsible for why customers, developers and investors love the new Microsoft.
>He killed the Windows division, which is very bold.
You say bold, I say stupid. Windows is still a big chunk of earnings and all that Nadella/Panos have managed to do is piss off long-standing customers by producing a half-assed Windows 10 version every six months.
>He made Office free for devices with small screens
Again, 2012 is when Office mobile was launched.
>He opensourced .NET and other products such as VSCode and TypeScript.
I hate to keep harping on 2012, but yeah, Typescript was announced in 2012 as well.
I'm not going to Fisk every line of your points. There seems to be some sort of blind hatred for Ballmer on HN such that it makes people think there was a magic wand waved by Nadella to suddenly spread enlightenment throughout Microsoft.
The fact of the matter is that Microsoft was already changing.
You realize Satya was at Microsoft before he became CEO, right? Sure, some of these decisions were made before Satya became CEO, but Satya made them. For example bringing Linux into Azure. Ballmer/Gates were very opposed to opensource. They may have dipped their toes a bit but it is Satya that brought about the enormous cultural change.
> You say bold, I say stupid. Windows is still a big chunk of earnings and all that Nadella/Panos have managed to do is piss off long-standing customers by producing a half-assed Windows 10 version every six months.
I don't know if you're joking or not. The "successes" prior to Satya were Windows 8 and Vista :)
If you talk to people at Microsoft, Satya has also turned around a lot of the internal culture from the Ballmer days. This included getting rid of some of those division heads you mentioned for both Windows, Sales and more.
Most importantly, he said and acted as if Windows wasn't the core of the company. A challenging but right decision.
It's still a 40-year-old company, so it still has some historic issues. But yes, I do feel like Satya has done a great job.
Microsoft seems like one of the few companies that can actually succeed with cloud. They have a massive inbuilt market of customers using microsoft server products that they can transition into their cloud, I don't know that there's any other company other than AWS better positioned to do well in that market?
> letting Sinofsky run amok with the horseshit that was Windows 8 ? Or Office refusing to ship WinRT apps, ever ?
Strikes me that these two things are the same failure. WinRT wasn't up to the task due to Windows 8 being poorly thought out, so Office couldn't use it.
I'm using Windows 10 because I want to run modern programs, but I still don't see the usability of the operating system to be as good that it was with Windows 7.
If I go to settings, or open the start menu, I have latencies measured in seconds, even though I have a fast gaming laptop.
As a comparision on my iPad most of the settings windows have about 0.2s rendering latency (some shorter, some longer), but in reality I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be the part of the continuous testing of any operating system.
Another important example is that I find it harder to find installed programs in Windows 10 than what it was in Windows 7, as Windows 7 grouped shortcuts installed by programs into folders, now I just see a big mess of shortcuts where I have to remember the name of the shortcut to be able to run it.
agree to this. They had a good going with windows 7. The freaking windows 10 photos app intermittently hangs forever when opening a simple image file. I was just using Videos and it crashed when opening settings. Skype is still a disaster years after swinching from skype classic. The abomination that replaced control panel is designed intentionally like a maze from which you cant get out. I dare you to find the bluetooth pair button, or your wifi passwords.
They are not all bad, but the Modern UI is crap, stupid animations blocking the user from doing things. If i wanted eyecandy i 'd buy a mac or use a wobbly linux WM. MS please go back to making boring things that work.
The Windows Master Control Panel shortcut, labeled All Tasks and also called Windows God Mode by bloggers and All Tasks folder by at least one Microsoft developer, is a shortcut to access various control settings in Windows Vista and later operating systems, including Windows 10. By creating a folder with a certain name, users have access to all of the operating system's control panels from within a single folder.
The shortcut is implemented by creating a folder with the extension .{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}. GodMode was the original folder name used when the feature was publicised, but any name can be used.
Many of the settings aren't available on the new settings pages. You go to the settings for network, then click additional settings and it opens the old settings menu where you can find what you want.
It's terrible.
At least they finally put a screen brightness slider on the notification center.
I was invited to interview for a position working on the Skype backend. I have no idea if it is a good idea.. since I personally can't take Skype seriously or believe that it is something good to work on.
Is that something people at huge companies have to think about often?
Good money vs working on a product you believe in.
I think skype is good and important, it just isn't trending, but who cares. The problems are in the frontend unfortunately. It seems to be a Javascript app, and that s just bad choice for a real-time video app. Split mode doesnt work, scrollback fails on long conversations, can't control the placement of windows, designed for maximized windows, private mode disconnects randomly. And please do not ring all the devices in the house when there's a call, let me select only the one i m using its ridiculous, like a band playing the skype ringtone in the house.
I went for a big company, put all my salary into investment, and retired at 35 as it turned out well. I was lucky, but I would choose big money and making sure that I put my money in tech investments that I believe in over working on something I believe in. If you don't believe in Microsoft, excercise your options early, and put your money working for you.
wait.... i am not the only one whose image viewer takes like 10s of seconds to show up! It's so horribly slow that i instead open browser and then drag the image onto browser. I beat default 100% of time!
I initially wrote it off as my core i3 laptop with Windows being slow but then same thing was happening with my shiny new Windows 10 Core i7 workstation. It's really not cool. It all the UWP apps. The new Calculator opens much slower than the older application also.
Apropos of nothing, I will note that pretty much all of Microsoft's testers got laid off in 2014, shortly after Nadella became CEO, and were never replaced. Whether it was in motion while Ballmer was still CEO or not, Nadella still would've had to acquiesce to it for it to happen and bears responsibility.
At my work I have to look at details on images often. Photos have a zoom button that randomly disappears. And together with slowness and other bugs I had to revert to using Paint for viewing images, since I'm blocked from installing other programs.
Wow, I thought I was the only one too! Ridiculous how bad this damn app is. It just makes me more angry dealing with it now that I will know that it's not just my PC that's to blame.
Just want to let you know: irfanview is your friend. I had the same woes with the Ms default, needed to download this to view a texture file for skyrim modding and was kinda pussed I hadn't switched years ago. Great piece of software, unfortunately not open source but has been around forever.
I've never tried to find Bluetooth in Settings, but I just tried and found it pretty quickly.
Start Button > Settings Icon > Devices, which is in the top-middle, and has the subtitle "Bluetooth, printers, mouse"
But why bother? Without having any idea where it is I can still find it even faster than that.
Start Button > "bluetooth" > Enter
And with search autocomplete I only needed to get as far as "bl" before it suggests the right thing. And my desktop doesn't have wifi, but I only need to get as far as typing "wi" for the start menu to suggest the wireless settings anyway. The Control Panel always sucked, and the settings menu sucks on iOS or Android too. Typing in the start menu to search has been around since roughly Vista.
And their apps aren't great, but I haven't experienced anything like the problems you describe. They're barebones but fine.
The problem is that options are scattered on 2 interfaces now , some of which are grouped by hardware, others by concept and others randomly. Plus the new interface has 3 columns you need to scan. You may be right about bluetooth options, but you are not going to find wifi passwords via search.
The path is: Network & Internet -> Status -> Network&Sharing center -> <Connection name> -> Wireless properties -> Security -> show characters.
omg its so annoying when you click on an image and the photo viewer hangs forever. I've installed 'One Photo Viewer' instead, nice and simple and works instantly https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9PM6W4F0XW3H
Photo viewer worked perfectly for a year and then started hanging on about every third photo. None of the "fixes" worked so I just lived with it. About a week ago, it started to work perfectly again and I have no idea why.
All the last 5 months or so of using Windows 10, I thought this issue was only on my computer because I installed TechSmith's Capture app. Now I know it's not. Viewing/Opening photos is a very common task people do on PC. How could this have passed the QA tests is beyond believable to me.
Windows 10 search function is completely broken, it won't even find a program that's in start menu, not sure if it's because I disabled all the online functionality of search.
If I want to find something online instead of my computer I use a browser.
Thankfully there are great alternatives for the atrocity, such as Everything, it's mind-blowing how a third party program is orders of magnitude faster than native system search.
It was broken - very broken, so broken that you had to enter the exact text of the thing you wanted.
It was that way for years, but at some point recently they finally seem to have fixed it - I can now enter the start, end, or just part of anything I want to find, and it finds it! You know, the bare minimum you'd expect from a search function!
I'm actually a big fan of Windows 10, but it boggles the mind how long they left such a key part of the Windows experience in such a sorry state.
If you disable “Background Apps” in Settings, Windows 10 will “helpfully” disable indexing (backed by Cortana service?) as well, rendering your index completely stale, which manifests as items in start menu don’t show, apps deleted a year ago still show, etc. All the garbage “solutions” when you search for this problem online don’t help at all. This problem once wasted me hours.
Dang. I thought you may have inadvertently pointed me in the right direction as to why I can't even get my indexing service to start. But, no luck. Maybe I'll get around to putting more hours in to fixing it someday.
When I worked for a consultant to Microsoft in the early 2000s, they were excited about the powerful search features they were planning to deliver in Longhorn. But Apple beat them to market with Spotlight, and to my knowledge, search has never turned into a differentiating feature for Windows.
It's kind of crazy to think back to those conversations with Microsoft about their long-range plans. Some they have delivered well, like the transition to a subscription model for client applications. Some they have not, like native peer-to-peer social networking in the OS.
I find it ironic that an operating system called Windows won't let me open Settings in multiple windows. It's perhaps the greatest illustration of how Microsoft has lost their way in UI design.
Yeah, I don't feel that Windows is meaningfully better than it's been in years, it just feels like the awful waterfall development is going to break it and introduce weird UI inconsistencies all the time and that's just the way it is.
Gaming on Windows is almost more confusing than it's been due to all the things and settings you have to make sure are set up right.
Meanwhile, I'm finding that gaming on Linux is easier than ever (at least on the limited selection, older titles I tend to play), and I no longer need to keep a Windows partition for that purpose. I still have a Windows 10 PC around, but I'm not really sure why I keep it.
I noticed a horrendous slowdown of the default image viewer. Double-clicking on a small JPEG file (less then 1MB) can take up to 20s to finally view.
Got so bad, that I now have MS Paint as default image viewer.
I kinda like the image viewer's ability to view other pictures in the same directory, but the performance and waiting time to view anything was just way too terrible.
It's all those little things where Apple really shines. Preview on the Mac is a fantastic piece of software.
Another example is Time Machine compared to the backup which comes with Windows. Microsoft have constantly mucked about with backup but have never managed to get it right. I can't imagine anybody relying on it. Time Machine is fantastic in comparison.
I use a Windows 8.1 tablet for work and really like that while 8.1 has the same excruciatingly long load time for the default image viewer, the old one from 7 (or maybe going back to XP?) is still available to set as the default. As long as I avoid the fullscreen apps, I think I like 8.1 better than 10 for usability.
Are you referring to the WIndows 10 image viewer? Yes it is now a "Metro" app I think. The good news is that you can restore the old Windows 7 picture viewer. There are instructions on how to restore this if you Google. Think its a registry change.
Agreed. Windows 7's UI is blazing fast compared to Windows 10. Windows 7 inherited all the good things of Windows XP, while Windows 10 tried to look similar to both Windows 8 and Windows 7
I dunno man, maybe there's something wrong with your rig. My machine doesn't have lag like that. The start menu always opens immediately. As for finding programs, I never have trouble. I just press the windows key (brings up start menu) and start typing the name of the program I want. It shows up at the top of the search.
As I'm getting older it's getting harder for me to remember the names of the programs that I have. It's great that the search is working well, but it shouldn't be the only efficient way to find programs on my computer.
Thanks for posting this. I thought it was just me or my laptop or my hardward config. Or the thousands of photos. YES the lag after hitting the windows icon... or searching or trying to open a folder with more than 100 items... it is very real and annoying.
Probably the icons for the Windows Store entries were already in the cache for you. Things work the second time, but the fact that it's unpredictable makes the experience less smooth than what it was before.
Also I have things like ,,Candy Crash Friends'' icon that's very bright, takes my focus away on what I want to do, and I don't know how to turn it off, as I don't find it in the settings (to tell you the truth, I haven't even played it, but I'm waiting for Cyberpunk 2077, so I don't want to try other games right now).
Same, but on a new laptop. Ryzen 5 4500U. Maybe it'll degrade with time, but I remember how bad the Windows 10 start menu used to be on a fresh install. Nearly unusable. It's fine now for me.
I've changed the way I launch applications since W10. Now I just hit the Windows key and type the name of the app or setting I'm looking for. The search is very quick and usually throws what I'm looking for. Here are two examples of how I use this that I think are great:
I created a quick ppt or xls file yesterday, not sure how I named it. I hit the Windows key, type Excel (usually you don't need to type the whole word, specially if it's a frequent search) and it immediately shows the Excel shortcut and a list of the last few files I've opened.
The other case is I wanted to modify the action when closing the laptop lid. I know that setting is somewhere in the power configuration, but can't remember exactly where. So I just hit the Windows key, type lid and voila! there's the setting
This is the way to go and so much more efficient. I don't understand or use the new Settings because I don't have to. The search is good enough, albeit barely. What really rustled my jimmies was when Bing was down (which I don't care for and don't use), but it caused your local search (from SUPER-key) to also be down, due to its tight integration with Bing. Silent failure with an all-black window, the worst of all.
Does anybody know how to fix the problem of the taskbar's icons getting stuck to "orange" (notification)? This is for me a problem especially with Skype as I never know if somebody posted a new message into the chat or not (but it happens as well with other programs).
I've been using Win10 on multiple machines since release day and I have never once seen a forced restart. That was a problem on Windows 7, but I honestly don't know how people are still having this problem with 10.
I typically don't restart my MBP for months at a time. With Windows 10, it'll tell me I need to restart after updates. I can ignore it to a point, but eventually it just reboots without asking, and whatever was opened at the time is lost.
To me nothing better exemplifies W10 "we know better than you" attitude than the desktop shortcut regressions. On W7 if you want a desktop shortcut to Notepad you open Start, begin typing Notepad, and when it shows up in the menu you either click and drag it onto the desktop or your right-click it and hit "send to desktop create shortcut". Neither of those work on Windows 10 without third party software.
Amen. I've used all the versions of Windows for a couple decades and there seems to be a randomness to their improvements. Updating is just a fact of life, something we must do, it doesn't inherently come with "upgrades" for us as the consumers.
What % of the improvement in computer technology has come on this slow crawl of OS, vs all the hardware, browser apps, etc?
For me even with the newest Windows version installing PyTorch with compatible CUDA was not as easy as it should be, and even now I'm not sure if I can use mixed precision training. If I would have stayed on Windows 7, it adds one more uncertainty in the hardware-software configuration that I don't want to spend time with.
Yeah you just have to give up on the "modern" UWP apps and change back to classic ones, even when they are third-party.
Use the Control Panel instead of settings, Everything for search, IrfanView for an image viewer... the list goes on. Just remove all UWP bloat and telemetry. You'll find many scripts on the internet to automate that.
The control panel is just a big mess of old and new with a set of overlapping functionality. You need to know both because some features are in the old control panel and some in the new. It's hard to comprehend how a multi-billion dollar company hasn't been able to straighten this out since Windows 8 release in 2012.
That's unusual. You have better specs than I do, and I certainly don't experience any latency on Windows 10 at all -- definitely not any in the seconds range. Anecdotally at my workplace, I haven't heard any complaints either. There might be something that is idiosyncratic to your setup.
I spent $10k on a computer in 2008 to get rid of latencies.
Now computers are so much faster and some latencies just get greater? It's Windows that is broken. I don't see the same thing happening often on my Mac or iOS.
I think the points you're making are accurate and fair, however I also think these issues are solvable only because of the strategic direction Satya has led, specifically referring to the evolution of MSFTs business models.
At some point, I hope such hidden heroes get their success outspoken more publicly: Dave cutler, Dianne hackborn are prime examples. I do like the fact John Carmack and Linus who are well-deserved to have a public following. But there are many more. And it doesn't have to be a showoff as much understanding the context in which Dave Cutler or Dianne Hackborn et al actually succeeded as engineers and the deep technical work they are lauded for.
There's a good book, "Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft", which documents the original development of Windows NT in the late 80's and early 90's. A large amount of the focus in the book is on Cutler himself, including some of his history coming from DEC, and his personal style of running the project at the time. I found it quite an interesting read!
Windows 7 definitely beats Windows 10 from a privacy, simplicity, and UX consistency perspective. I wish MS had backported the kernel improvements and relegated UWP to to third-party apps instead of integrating it everywhere.
I must disagree with you on Office 365 though. It is a marvel. Microsoft has re-engineered compatibility with document, spreadsheet, and presentation formats with a 30 year legacy from scratch, enabled multi-user editing on these formats, and crafted a web experience almost equivalent to desktop. They've really had to innovate to keep up with the advantages of Google Docs, and while they have not matched it from a speed perspective, they're no longer out of the running with consumers. Word and Excel Online are now free with a Microsoft account, and I found them just last week to have a rich selection of templates and had compatibility with Office documents I was sent. Office 365 is also very reasonably priced for it's Family license.
I haven’t been a power user in Office for a while, but yes perhaps I have missed a lot of the innovations you have mentioned above. Cross collaboration is something our company should definitely take more advantage of, although it’s hard to train users due to inertia (so I’m left compiling all the changes as always). I agree with you that their web apps are really good now.
That said, I still find google docs much easier to use for simplicity (and I at least up to Office 2013, I knew and used every feature in Excel PowerPoint Word) - but a lot of that is UX, Windows 10 and O365 I find too “clunky” and a tad slow on some button clicks
Excel Online lacks pivot tables, which I cannot live without. LibreOffice is equally helpless when it comes to them, so I am limited to the proper Office.
Most of us already bought office before in a perpetual license.
I’m not sure but I assume companies also had perpetual licenses of Office, so for them to fork over a consistent stream to Microsoft for O365 just to ensure they have the latest version with all the updates is quite expensive over the long run. But most people think in terms of the sticker cost of 1 year and Office 365 and other subscription apps look cheap in that light.
Making it free for a year on new computers with automatic renewal is an easy way to inflate the subscription numbers. How many people are silently paying for something they don't use and aren't concerned about because it's "only" $10 a month?
Sorry I worded poorly - we don’t like it but we are stuck with it to some degree due to it being always updated (not sure if they even allow personal users now to buy a perpetual license?)
Standalone Office releases are still available though. They're just don't have the bleeding edge updates and collaboration capabilities that O365 does, but it was never built for that anyway.
1. That might have been a good thing back when updates weren't dreaded, because they would rarely if ever add distracting UI elements or take away useful features.
2. If you're a small-scale Office user who's happy not to have the latest and the greatest, and you're happy to update your copy of Office every 5-7 years, then a yearly subscription will not be a good trade-off.
Fair enough. I just have a general aversion to subscriptions, they add up over time! And how many times do we need to repay for Office? I have probably bought it at least 5 times in the last 20 years, but that’s partly on me too for not being organized and transferring licenses over.
Storage imo is a non point since it’s very easy to get free or super cheap storage with a bit of searching.
My girlfriend used Dropbox for her business, I was horrified when I saw how much she was paying each month!
Moved over to google and her needs are covered in the free plan, so that’s a quality 50$ per month saved.
I’m not as rich as I used to be, so have really started to feel the pinch with all these subs, incl office which I don’t have anymore. Before I had the same view as you as it doesn’t feel like a lot. But given we’ve been paying for Office from 1990s onwards, you can see that Microsoft is milking it a fair bit given updates (whilst important, and very important in “enterprise” companies) are not that significant to justify paying for it every year.
IT all depends on your needs. I'm using Libreoffice and Google Drive at home myself, as I'm cheap. But if I was doing more than the occaisional financial spreadsheet, or had lots of writing, or had lots of backups to do my need starts to change. At the end of the day, their success is evidence enough that people heartily agree with their value proposition in light of other offerings.
Yes, he did. One of the best tech CEOs. Got his MS in CS from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Later got an MBA from Chicago but that's a BS degree for the resume. Shows you can succeed no matter where you start, you just need to work harder usually and not letting others to put you down.
Later got an MBA from Chicago but that's a BS degree for the resume.
What makes you think that?
The tech industry on aggregate has plenty of disdain for MBA's, both the degree programs and people with those degrees. Some of it is deserved, but MBA's aren't automatically BS degrees.
Maybe calling it a BS degree is too harsh. But I have a major problem with programs that exist just to milk money, cost a fortune ($90K for like 15 months in some schools), and almost everyone who is enrolling in these programs do it for the wrong reasons (i.e., not for the knowledge but for the prestige and networking; but I don't blame them, it's part of the system and they are just following the rules). They are also much less competitive than many people think. Getting into an MBA at Harvard is 100 times easier than let's say Math. It's not as bad as their executive programs, those are really BS and I always laugh when people put it on their resume cause they think the name Harvard would help them.
Perhaps it can be BS but perhaps (and perhaps unfortunately) it can also be a necessary BS credential/rubberstamp if you want to move into management at big tech.
And if it can flip you from an marketing engineer in a fading semiconductor fabrication (Applied Materials) industry into a leading a $1-2 Trillion adtech/AI company and equip you with the skills necessary to handle being on the frontlines of a DOJ trial.
And an undergrad degree from Manipal, a private university whose reputation pales in comparison to the publicly funded Indian Institutes of Technology that a lot of Indian CEOs seem to be an alumnus of.
Being an IIT grad mainly proves how well you could prepare for its brutal entrance exam (<1% acceptance). At work, I've seen IIT grads fare no better than other people. Sure, there are some brilliant people among IIT grads but that's to be expected with a filter that selects the top 1% of any population.
A less known aspect of IITs in the past is their gaming of the GRE/US grad school application process, ranging from straight out cheating in the GRE (in the paper-pencil version, IIT students were given a single block of time for all sections rather than having time-limits for the sections, a blatant cheat made possible by their self-proctoring), to creating GRE question banks by collectively memorizing the test, to using the Australian time zone (ahead of India's) to find out the questions on the GRE. When applying to grad school in the US, IIT students would divvy up the schools among the graduating class so that no more than 1-2 would apply to top schools and claim to be in their class' top 10%, regardless of actual standing.
So, anytime I see an IIT grad at work, I'm not really impressed by that aspect. The fact that Satya isn't from an IIT is of no consequence and actually makes him more credible in my eyes.
What I see, is that MS acted like a small-company startup for many years; ferociously competitive, fairly agile (not the Agile Manifesto kind; just flexible and responsive). That paid off for them (and it's arguable whether or not it was a good thing for the industry in general -it sank a number of companies, but also put Seattle firmly into the center of the tech world).
Then they became a blue-chip company, and all that startup-y stuff wasn't working anymore. Also, the consumer market changed a lot, with mobile overtaking desktop systems. For many, many folks, smartphones are the only computers that they will ever use.
He did have the right vision for a new corporate direction.
This. I feel like Satya brought in fresh eyes to the "project" (that being the running of the office of the CEO of Microsoft). Microsoft was locked into a certain way of doing things, and with Satya, they were free to pop their head up and look around at how the world was evolving without them. And you can see how that led them directly into bold new areas, such as WSL, Azure as it is today (highly Linux-and-kubernetes-focused), Github, Linkedin, lots of gaming companies (Mojang, Havok, etc.). It also allowed them to question areas where Microsoft probably thought it "should be winning", but just wasn't working, and might have poured billions into, such as Nokia phones, Skype, Bing, etc.
From a business standpoint, I would have to agree he did turn them around from a business standpoint.
As a user of Windows since 3.1 (w/out networking). I do the same as MekaiGS "I honestly have no idea where all the Windows settings are anymore so I just search instead."
It was like multiple teams designed different parts of the settings but they never had any meetings or talked with each other.
There are days when I would rather use Microsoft Bob
than Windows 10
Or better yet, Microsoft Joe Bob
http://www.bytebrothers.org/joebob.htm
"Go Microsoft -- Go Intel -- Go America," and "QuickTime is for Pinko Hippie Wimps."
Sometimes success is a matter of being at the right place at the right time. As the article mentions, many customers were afraid of AWS because they feared Amazon snooping in their retail intel. Because MS doesn't have a big e-store presence, they were not a retail threat. And Azure integrates better with existing Windows networks. Compatibility is still a key here, not raw merit. AWS is technically better.
That being said, Satya has been a steady hand and has made it fairly easy to keep running legacy software rather than pulling the carpet out, like VB-classic (desktop) did. Google, on the other hand, changes products like a teen changes fashion.
The VB-Classic fiasco under Ballmer sent panic through the industry, making customers realize they can no longer bet the farm on any MS tech, which they had been doing. Dot-Net was not backward compatible. COBOL still lives largely because co's don't or can't F with it. That's a lesson to not be ignored. (The need for a network GUI standard with similar properties is still out there.)
Businesses hate upgrading just for the sake of upgrading. Satya seems to understand this, making transitions gentler and more gradual.
This. A lot of founders seem to underestimate the effect of timing. I've read so many many stories where a startup took off when another product got worse/shut down (for example, Feedly really took off when Google Reader shut down, and so on.)
For better or for worse, time will tell, but there is no denying this at this point. To take an organization of that size with that much legacy managment and business processes, code and do what he has done is quite the feat.
Just to play devils advocate, isn't that the whole point of a CEO? It seems to me that true change can only happen if it comes from the highest influence. Of course that's not to say that just because the CEO changes that business change will happen
Right, many CEOs don’t seem to understand their own business all that well, much less are they able to deal with the political and cultural challenges of driving a company in the right direction. So many CEOs are just filling space at the top while their company just sort of continues working under its own inertia. Nadella is one of the few who not only clearly had a meaningful vision for his company, but was able to take charge and successfully steer the ship.
Nadella understands something most CEOs don't: The core business of any business is making money. Ballmer thought Microsoft's core business was Windows, Nadella understands it's software as a whole. Ballmer thought for MS to win, Linux had to lose. Nadella understands as long as MS is selling software and services, they win. Ballmer was a great number-two for Gates, but not a leader. Not everyone has it, and that's ok.
It's tough to argue with success. They obviously wanted someone who was going to go all-in on the cloud angle when they picked Nadella, and to give credit where it's due, the stock price chart for Microsoft says everything you need to say about the results he's delivered.
What's worrying in a broader sense is that our societies have come to depend heavily on Microsoft's previous flagship offering, Windows. As the article observes, the focus has shifted elsewhere under Nadella's term. And as many people can attest, Windows 10 is far from the Windows we used to rely on, particularly for those not in enterprise world or academia. Many millions of people are now fundamentally depending on a product that is no longer the goose laying golden eggs for its maker, and the maker's economic incentives are no longer aligned with the best interests of their users.
Windows still directly generates annualized revenue of $22 billion. Plus Microsoft's dominance in that platform creates a ton of synergies in its other product lines. For example how many Azure customers pick it over AWS because they need a Windows-first cloud. It easily contributes hundreds of billions to Microsoft's market cap.
I'm sure Windows is no longer considered the sexy department in Micrsoft's internal culture. But corporate management would have to be ridiculously incompetent to let that business line get significantly neglected.
This seems like a classic case of enterprise vs. small business vs. personal use. The serious money is at the enterprise end, and most of the effects you described will be most profitable there. And of course the Windows 10 editions for large organisations don't try to play the same games with things like forced updates and mandatory telemetry, because they know very well that no professional IT department supporting thousands of users is ever going to surrender control of its equipment like that.
Still, the reason the makers of expensive professional software have largely turned a blind eye to privacy forever and/or given away very cheap or free copies to students or home users is because they're well aware that it's a huge advantage for their software to be the cultural default. For example, would Adobe really have become dominant in digital content creation software if loads of enthusiastic design students hadn't been honing their skills on ripped off copies of Photoshop? Would Microsoft have come to dominate business desktops if home and school PCs hadn't all come with Windows so everyone already knew how to use it, or if they hadn't given away their development tools mostly for free to anyone who wanted them? We'll never know for sure, but it would be naive to discount the effects of familiarity.
This feels a bit like Apple's recent trend for messing up its laptops and largely ignoring the rest of desktop/server space other than producing an occasional statement piece. Sure, they make the vast majority of their money from their mobile devices and the surrounding ecosystem, but someone still has to write the apps that drive that ecosystem, and those people are primarily using Apple laptops. If you ruin your development platform, and the developers start shifting their efforts towards other platforms (presumably Android in this case) then your users will follow, and now your business model is dead, even though the part you neglected was only directly responsible for a tiny part of your revenue stream.
Obviously the danger isn't quite the same for Microsoft because strategically it's banking on cloud rather than mobile for its big revenues. But even so, cloud hosting is a pretty competitive space right now, and the Windows-friendly integrations (for developers as well as users) are a competitive advantage, one that is at risk if the very long tail of smaller developers start getting fed up of Windows and shifting to other systems. I suspect Microsoft's leadership are well aware of this danger and the often better developer experience on Linux is a big driver for introducing WSL, but still, if that's all they've got then you can just as well use a real Linux box and not pay the Microsoft tax or deal with all the unwanted games that Windows 10 keeps trying to play. If Windows 10 becomes too much of a liability for small businesses and power users, sooner or later that will inevitably have consequences for the whole business model and all those synergies you mentioned, even if it only happens over a period of years.
As long as important software still runs on Windows and isn't available on other platforms, the answer will clearly be yes. In time, particularly with the shift towards online systems where the browser is now playing the standardised platform role that desktop operating systems used to play, hopefully the dependencies on Windows are becoming fewer and weaker. However, I think we're still a few years away from being able to assume that anyone can move off Windows without losing anything important to them.
Microsoft was happy to extort money from Linux distros via its patent racket until it realised it had no choice but to embrace Linux after the failure of Windows Phone. This is not about Satya Nadella or VS Code or cross-platform .Net Core - it's about The Nature of the Beast. Microsoft is a monopolistic enterprise and always will be. Cross-platform doesn't change this fact.
I've found Azure support reasonable. It's still not an easy product to use overall compared to AWS but the support engineers have been very proactive and keen to jump on calls to fix stuff.
Making bad software in hopes to fix it later for a lot of money would never be a business model anybody can sustain for longer than a few years, let alone 2 decades which Microsoft managed to pull out through extraordinary effort.
If anyone here subscribes to Stratechery I strongly recommend the interview sent out yesterday with Microsofts head of gaming. There's chat there about how gaming shifted internally in part due to how Nadella rethought gaming as it's own strategy and a key future component of Azure, rather than just a part of Windows strategy. He particularly highlights how gaming is a key differentiator vs the other top tech companies. Shows some seriously smart strategic thinking.
Main take away I had from his book "Hit Refresh", was that he made sure products don't hold other products back... Example: Office is free to go and make Office for Mac and grow Office numbers on iOS, Android... Without any burden to prefer Windows to drive Windows sales, Windows has to deliver numbers them self... Same goes for Windows on Azure or many other products that overlap...
No he didn't. He turned the company even harder to farming plumpy corporate clients whom they already had on software+service deals with "cloud" thing subscriptions. A Microsoft salesman who visited us last year was almost begging us to switch to Cloud AD from regular AD. This is how hard they are moving toward that.
It was just a long delayed admission that you can't make a lot of money on offline boxed software sales today.
Of course they're moving to cloud, that's the direction of travel all software companies want, with nice recurring monthly revenue and plently of lock-in.
Microsoft's achievement (in relation to their "legacy" enterprise peers like Oracle and IBM) is making a much better job of the transition. For example, where are IBM cloud and Oracle cloud in terms of market share, relative to Azure...
> It was just a long delayed admission that you can't make a lot of money on offline boxed software sales today.
Well, yeah. That's the turnaround. And it's worked. It's not easy to get a large company, fat off the proceeds of boxed software to actually reinvent their business model to shift to what lots of companies actually want (easy-in/easy-out licenses on their whole software stack to scale with their workforce, like with O365).
Ballmer and Nadella have pulled it off remarkably well - few legacy companies manage to stay in with their existing clientele whilst also adapting themselves to changing landscapes like that.
It's not easy to get a large company, fat off the proceeds of boxed software to actually reinvent their business model to shift to what lots of companies actually want
I'm not so sure. The biggest problem Windows has long had in this respect is that its application installation and update model is awful. Installation is haphazard and every program does its own thing. Updates even more so. Data security and application access control are barely existent, which wasn't so bad 30 years ago when the worst you were going to suffer was a virus wiping your disk and having to restore from backups, but has become a (perhaps the) critical problem for software management in today's connected world.
Microsoft could have fixed almost all of that relatively quickly at any time, by providing the kind of robust installation/update/permissions models we see on numerous other platforms today, implementing an online store for vetted software from credible sources, and then perhaps extending that idea from selling the single licences that facilities like the mobile app stores offer up to selling and managing organisation-wide licensing for serious professional software. It would have made life easier for developers at all scales, it would have made life easier for users, it would have given them an extremely lucrative store model to use as a revenue generator, and they wouldn't even have had to shut down installing software from other sources and try to lock their systems down, just provide the option to limit installation on centrally managed systems for organisational users. But instead all we've seen is variations on poor imitation app stores, which have mostly offered toy applications using half-baked runtimes instead of the full power of Windows, as Microsoft tried to dumb the big desktop OS down to mobile OS levels instead of realising that it could still dominate professional and power user desktops.
All of that makes sense from a user perspective, but why take 30% of a wide base of consumers and businesses when you can take 100% from the most profitable ones?
They want to sell you an Office365 subscription for each user, whose computing needs are provided by a remote desktop served on Azure compute, which you access from a Surface device, where your business information is stored and accessed through databases on their servers and software they provide. They want your enterprise identity to be managed through their offering, and your warehouse automation microservices to run on their k8s platform.
Their consumer play is looking more and more like it's Xbox focused, and some personal software interoperability with their enterprise offering. The consumer OS layer is less important now they missed mobile - they get end consumers by selling the cloud [0] to the business who sell to them, not providing the shopfront to the end user.
The model they're moving towards is that the "desktop" is largely going to go. You want some software? Here's a dumb terminal and a burst of virtual CPU from the cloud to run it for the 45 minutes you need. "Installing" things (from an end user perspective) is going to seem old hat within many of our working lives.
That being said, am sure a shopfront will emerge at some point, but for cloud based software, not for installable onto an OS software. That only really comes after this whole transition is complete though.
[0] and "cloud" in this context not being commodity access, but the vertical software integration to go with it.
We're just seeing the next swing of the eternal localised-centralised pendulum. At some point, it will swing back, as people realise that handing control of things they depend on over to centralised organisations that will naturally tend to act in their own interests isn't necessary or desirable, and as businesses realise that a lot of the claimed advantages of cloud computing are overstated or entirely illusory. There are some clear advantages to everyone being connected online, but it's not necessary (from a technical perspective) for everyone to follow the models that have become popular so far in order to enjoy those advantages.
The question is when that will happen, because obviously the powerful interests running Big Software are almost all heavily invested in promoting the cloud model for now since they're the ones most able to benefit from it. It wouldn't surprise me if the effective opposition eventually comes from some sort of grass roots movement towards open hardware and open software, even if it takes a decade or more, rather than from any of the established tech giants voluntarily changing strategy within that time frame. It's just a shame about all the billions we're going to waste due to lost productivity and security/privacy problems with the dumbed down software and corporate exploitation that will be the norm for IT in the meantime. :-(
> It wouldn't surprise me if the effective opposition eventually comes from some sort of grass roots movement towards open hardware and open software
Would be nice to see, however I see it coming more from one of the major players screwing up - whether a large scale hack, huge amounts of downtime or a verrrry public issue migrating a high value customer, regulatory break up, or pushing prices just too high.
For a large amount of users of Microsoft's products in enterprises, local government, even SMBs, the experience will likely be better though. "Dumbed down" software is a feature, not a bug. Usage based renting is a preference, compared to large scale IT capex.
I'm just waiting for the O365 + Surface subscriptions to start (unless I've missed it and they have already?). Hardware, software and services for one monthly payment. They're already doing something similar for Xbox and the Game Pass in some markets I believe.
> rather than from any of the established tech giants voluntarily changing strategy within that time frame
They'll go where the money takes them. If the market starts moving, they'll undoubtedly stick their toes in the water. If the current picks up, they'll look to turn the ship to go along with it.
All of the above being said, it still I think reinforces the point that Microsoft's shift from boxed software to services is superbly well done. Whether or not we want that as our future, they've handled the shift toward the current vision of the future well.
Would be nice to see, however I see it coming more from one of the major players screwing up - whether a large scale hack, huge amounts of downtime or a verrrry public issue migrating a high value customer, regulatory break up, or pushing prices just too high.
I would really like to agree with that, but no matter how much they screw up, it won't matter if there isn't a viable alternative strategy anyway. With basically all of Big Tech pushing the same way right now, I think the momentum is too much for any of those things to cause a significant change in direction in the near future.
We've already seen some pretty horrendous failures in terms of reliability, privacy and security. Some of them have come from some very big names. And yet so far I see little if any consequence, other than perhaps some regulatory slaps on the wrist. The big customers paying the big bills are still paying, because what choice do they have? It doesn't gain them much to migrate to a competitor that is still pushing in the same basic direction and vulnerable to the same basic threats, and migrations of key software at corporate scale are financially expensive and have timescales measured in years so there's a big incentive to accept the devil you know.
All of the above being said, it still I think reinforces the point that Microsoft's shift from boxed software to services is superbly well done. Whether or not we want that as our future, they've handled the shift toward the current vision of the future well.
Indeed. As I wrote in another comment, it's tough to argue with success. It's unfortunate that Microsoft's success here doesn't necessarily correlate positively with a better experience for the users of Microsoft software, and the lack of competition for the desktop market is going to leave a lot of people and businesses vulnerable to whatever Microsoft decides is best for Microsoft over the next few years.
Of the possible big events you mentioned, I suspect that means regulatory break-up in an attempt to rejuvenate effective competition in the market is the most promising. But I still wouldn't bet on that happening faster than a grass roots effort powered by the kinds of people who believe in things like rights to repair and meaningful online privacy, and who enjoy writing their own software or experimenting with things like 3D printers and Raspberry Pis. A young generation might take a different view of programming and hobbyist hardware than those 20 or 40 years older who have perhaps become too accepting of the way things are. They might be driven by not wanting to feel trapped by big businesses they think aren't acting in their best interests, or perhaps other concerns about longevity and adaptability driven by positive motivations from outside of pure tech fields, such as protecting the environment. Given the right figurehead(s) to lead a movement, I could believe that might actually happen, but probably over the next decade or two more than the next year or two.
Well AAD has a load of advantages, including far wider single sign-on capabilities across loads of apps.
And the cloud based features of office make absolute sense from a user perspective. Collaborative document editing on sharepoint just makes sense compared to the old 'non cloud' world, where you had to share documents around documents on emails and save twenty copies for version control (v0.5, v1, v1 final, v1 final final) on some shared drive that you have to VPN into from your home.
Azure AD is much better for a lot of companies in the long term than regular AD. No more FSMO, spending weekends troubleshooting replication errors after dcpromo, or wondering why the heck Microsoft wouldn’t enable the darn AD recycle bin out of the box. If you don’t need LDAP and your apps all support SAML, it really is better. And cheaper, since it’s free with anything you buy in Microsoft 365 (No more CALs that only work for a single release of Windows Server). And they have fairly decent zero-trust in the form of Conditional Access, which is like an extra dollar or two per user per month, and is included in many of the higher plans.
I don't know, this seems like it falls in the category of "a company's goal is to make money". Corporate clients just have no right to complain that Microsoft's sales model isn't structured in the way they'd prefer.
It's different for personal usage, of course, but all of their personal usage software I'm aware of still has an offline option.
> Corporate clients just have no right to complain that Microsoft's sales model isn't structured in the way they'd prefer.
How do you figure? If I'm a business and I want things a certain way, and you won't provide that way to me, then I have every right to complain. Complaining is how I tell you I'm not satisfied and therefore might not buy or continue with your product.
Several commenters make the point that the big successes under Nadella were initiated when Ballmer was CEO. This is true, but business success is often the absence of big, ego-driven mistakes. <cough>Nokia</cough>
Microsoft has a huge number of very smart people. Aligning the company behind what they are good at will enable Microsoft to thrive.
As a casual user, I actually like the "look" of W10, and do not pay much attention to the latency that others have pointed out.
What irks me most though is the constant request for updates and strong arm restarts to install them.
I love hate Microsoft. I love the dev tooling for enterprise, but hate the OS. I really want to like Windows 10, but I feel like I am working against it more than it is helping me. I think OSX is also trending toward making my life harder, but the curve is much slower. I think the next step is to try to really use Linux and see if I can finally find a 'home' os...
Linux these days works fine for a daily driver as long as the software you need is available on it. It still definitely doesn't win any awards for UX though.
What bugs? I know of some that are left in for backwards compatibility, but otherwise its clearly working well enough to be the dominant tool for so many industries. And the parts that work are good enough that its easier to just change the industry to fit excel then change excel at this point since so many people have different requirements- see what happened with genetics recently
- Why does search not work when the spreadsheet has a few thousand rows? Sometimes, I'll do Ctrl + A, select the entire data set, move my cursor to cell A1, then type Ctrl+F to find text, finds nothing. But if I filter the column where I think it might be for what I was looking for then it finds it.
- Sometimes the opposite of the first occurs. I'll filter for something in a column, finds nothing, but Ctrl+A and then Ctrl+F finds it. Super weird. Again, I'm talking like 5000 rows and maybe 25 columns worth of data, a spreadsheet a few Megabytes big. Not the biggest dataset.
I also make sure I have no extraneous columns like some people tend to make by mistake which makes the searching take longer.
- Ever try to undo (ctrl + z), if you have many sheets open, sometimes your ctrl+ z will start going through the undo history of other files (i.e. not the ones that you're actually working on or the foreground. The ones in the background or minimized. Guess what? Now you can't tell if you altered data on the other sheets because for some reason Excel registers everything as a change to sheet. You want to expand your columns to fit your text. Good, that counts as a change. Filtering your columns? That's a change.) etc. etc. Every action is worthy of a: 'Do you want to save your changes' even if never really added or updated data. So good luck trying to sort through undos that you didn't mean to make.
That's but a few things and don't get me started on number and date formatting. And btw, these are bugs I noticed around 2003 btw. Why are they still there?
Working on Excel and making sure that it doesn't make mistakes is work on top of the actual work that needs to be done.
I've become so distrusting of Excel that I've learned Python so I can use Pandas so that I can get the truth about a spreadsheet because I can't trust Excel.
That's incredibly depressing that I have to do that.
> I know of some that are left in for backwards compatibility, but otherwise its clearly working well enough to be the dominant tool for so many industries.
Some sort of a strict mode or a way to designate data types on table columns would solve probably 90% of the issues people have with Excel.
In the case of Excel, I'd be willing to bet that for any given bug ∃ at least one spreadsheet that relies on that bug to make multi-million dollar decisions.
More importantly, the people who use the above spreadsheets are the ones who give Microsoft the real money, and therefore the ones whose cries are heard the most loudly.
I agree 100%. Satya Nadella stepped up to the CEO role and almost single-handedly turned Microsoft around. You could see the effects within the first few months. He is a genius. A natural born leader.
How can I read the full article without having a economist subscriber? It is really annoying to have this walled garden for news that do not support price parity for lower income countries (I live in one).
surprised microsoft still has 72% of server market. I thought by now Linux servers will be reigning supreme. Though, I will admit IIS[0] is wonderful piece of software. Also does the open source world have a direct match for active directory etc, that are used by enterprises and smb's ?
But then, maybe I could be wrong a killing could be made selling linux boxes to be servers on the intranets around the world.
Who are the geniuses / slimeballs at Microsoft who snatched the JEDI contract away from AWS for dubious reasons, and who partnered with Duck Duck Go, the most visible complainant about Google's search dominance, and central to the government's antitrust case that it just filed?
Bloomberg has a probably similar article[1] that doesn't have a hard paywall. I used it during a uni leadership course for a short essay and found it informative. Just wanted to drop the link here in case anyone's interested.
Is this not a market forces cause rather than Nadella? It seems everyone is fighting to control data. Sometimes it seems to me that we forgot that this whole industry comes under the banner of information technology.
Have you ever sailed an enormous tri-masted clipper ship across an ocean to a safe harbour and arrived with your cargo intact, on time, with no illness or injury to yourself or your crew?
Was that a wind force thing or your masterful captaincy?
They sell it for money. You will never hear about it. It may pass through a single person's hands. Remember the article on here that told about how all major cell providers are selling your location data through a two man mob-like operation?
"In order to provide this computing experience, we collect data about you, your device, and the way you use Windows. "
"We also share data with Microsoft-controlled affiliates and subsidiaries; with vendors working on our behalf; when required by law or to respond to legal process; to protect our customers; "
Obviously when they sell to data broker, they call them a vendor.
The thing is, when you're talking about an operating system with access to everything you do on your own equipment, it doesn't necessarily matter what they do with the data. The fact that any data is uploaded involuntarily is already a big problem.
I've been a Windows desktop user for most of my professional life, because in most fields, that's where you'd find the best quality and range of software and the best hardware support. But since the shift to 10, and the attempted abuse of 7 upwards via updates, I've become very cautious about Microsoft and its user-hostile actions. In my own businesses, we run many different platforms now and each computer or device we buy is configured individually according to the needs of its user. The major exception is Windows 10, which we don't use at all as a primary desktop OS. How can you ever trust a system that will update itself against your will and upload your data against your will, run by a business that is apparently building its whole strategy around continuing to do those things and overpowering any user resistance?
What amazes me is that lawyers and compliance officers working in smaller businesses aren't blowing the roof off over this stuff, which seems to all but guarantee that you can't comply with privacy regulations like the GDPR or typical corporate non-disclosure agreements. It seems that several European privacy regulators do have similar concerns and may be investigating various aspects of modern Microsoft systems. Is this just a case of everyone keeping their head down and hoping for the best because they don't see any better options than continuing to use Windows anyway?
Error reporting and usage telemetry, same as many apps and websites.
Ever notice how, for all the furor about Windows telemetry, nobody is ever able to explain how that data is being abused or point out anything specifically that's problematic? That's because the people who keep bringing it up haven't been able to find any (yet, of course) despite proclaiming loudly how terrible it is. That really tells you all you need to know about them.
It wasn't a coincidence that on the day Ballmer stepped down and Satya became CEO (2014), Microsoft also announced Office for iOS, Cloud first strategy, and a whole slew of cloud/Azure product announcements.
All of which was developed under Ballmer watch and he handed off the launch and continued execution to Satya.