I hope that this is just doublespeak to reassure people who think Gates is important to Microsoft's future success. Personally, I think both Microsoft and the world would be better off if Gates stepped away completely and focussed all of his efforts on the Gates Foundation's work.
I understood the Foundation's primary problem to be figuring out how to efficiently spend all of their money they are required to spend every year without accidentally funding Al Qaeda. Does Gates have to be around for that?
I don't know, but unfortunately I am very skeptical of NGOs, and charities
It looks like 80% of the money goes for "management" and the rest goes to the actual people in need. Not to mention the contracted "fundraisers" that are paid poorly. (I have nothing against the fundraisers per se, they're usually college kids trying to make some money)
It's true that governments are much more efficient at delivering funds than charities. It's an economy of scale. Also governments have a lot more oversight than charities do.
That is the complete, 100% opposite of reality. Charities have tons of reporting requirements that they have to meet to demonstrate--to the government--that they aren't at least a money laundering operation, say nothing about using the funds appropriately. There is no such equivalent oversight of government bureaus.
You're right in a way, but wrong in a more important way.
Charities can spend their money on administration, marketing, etc., such that very little can end up going to their chosen task. A government is the opposite. There are millions of people clamouring to whinge about any amount of waste in government. So you end up with governments being up to 6 times more efficient at delivering aid. The classic example is the cancer cure charities that deliver almost no research funding, while government grants are an excellent source of funding.
Full disclosure: my mother and my sister both work in fundraising. I've also done some freelancing for university fundraising departments.
80% is pretty good in the fundraising industry. Usually it's closer to 90%. Don't ever do one of those "text 12345 to donate to hurricane victims in the tropics" sort of thing, the returns on those are abysmal. But really, what do you expect? People doing work have to get paid. Most of the fuel in a rocket is for getting the rest of the fuel in the rocket off the ground.
One of the ways that fundraising departments try to keep the costs down is to use volunteer work (i.e., a form of donation of time) and internships to do the grunt work of calling people on the phone. Nobody expects those college kids to stay in those internships for their entire careers. Usually, they're only there for the "busy season", the end of the year where people rush to get donations in to count towards their tax writeoffs. For many of the kids, it's either that or a completely unpaid internship in advertising.
And government is actually a lot worse. In the US, only about 55% of your tax dollar goes towards social services. Then you have to take the admin percentage off the top of that. To beat an 80% number like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they'd have to keep overhead down to less than 64%. That's so absurdly low that I can't imagine it is possible.
My comment in my original post refers to the fact that every charity in the US is required to spend a certain percentage of their endowment every year. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a HUGE endowment. They have to spend so much that they can't find enough outlets for it. They have to fund projects that aren't necessarily part of their core goals because they can't fund their core goals anymore.
And the snarky comment about Al Qaeda is a commentary on the nature of Al Qaeda, they are not a single organization that operates above the board, they are themselves more of a foundation and loose conglomeration of various groups for mutual benefit. But the way our government casts it, if you help any organization that has any ties to Al Qaeda, then you are helping The Al Qaeda Man Who Is A Single Person Who 9/11 9/11 9/11.
So, when you have more money then you literally know what to do with, just tossing it around makes it very easy to hit Al Qaeda.
At most established nonprofits relatively little money actually goes to management. There have been a very few cases that have gotten a lot of publicity, but it's relatively a small (and dangerously over-stated) issue.
That said, 'administrative expenses' are a notoriously poor way to measure nonprofits. The group GiveWell is known for attempting to rate charities based on impact.
http://givewell.org/
Basically,
A) The average charity doesn't spend that much on management.
B) Even if the 'average' did, there are plenty that don't.
C) Even so, try using 'impact' rather than 'administrative costs'
D) There are many great causes to give to, and that's really all that matters here.
That said, I would typically expect large companies to have large biases to help local causes rather than the best things for the world.
I think you're missing the point that Gates will be spending more time at Microsoft to lend gravitas to Nadella amongst the other Microsoft managers he beat out for the job. I imagine once they get the message and give the guy a chance to get his sea legs, Gates will back away.
I agree with your assessment but I think its a negative. Nadella needs to be able to command respect on his own. If you're right in your thinking then it indicates that the board really doesn't have confidence in him.
It was mentioned several times he has a calm and thoughtful approach, which is 180 from Balmer. It will be interesting to see if they can all make the adjustment.
I agree, I find it difficult to see how Gates lurking around would be productive for Microsoft. A new CEO needs to establish their own direction and rapport among employees, but the mere presence of Gates could prove too much in the way of politics there.
I think Bill Gates is brilliant, but if I was a major shareholder in MSFT, I would have him focus all his efforts on his foundation.
If the new CEO wants to change the culture for the better, Gates could be helpful, the Ballmer regime eliminated a lot of the failsafes Gates put into it.
Without a cultural change Microsoft should end its here to now futile attempts to expand outside of its core (has the Xbox, at net, ever made the a lot of money?), put Windows and Office in maintenance mode after restoring the utility of the former for normal desktops, and mostly become a stodgy enterprise software company.
I'm not arguing against that. I'm asking have they been able to make serious money off of it, and while I'm at it, what's the potential for the future?
I assume the first generation wasn't wildly profitable due to the costs in establishing the ecosystem.
The second generation's hardware execution was infamously botched; we know they took a $900 million write-down on that debacle, and can be sure there were massive additional costs in e.g. brand equity.
I have a Chromecast (plugged into the HDMI input on my Xbox One, actually). I don't see that being a credible threat to Xbox among consumers who can afford an Xbox. Possibly something used in tandem when there's not a native app (the Xbox apps for YouTube and Netflix are a much better experience than Chromecasting from a laptop or phone for me).
What do you mean by cloud gaming? Something like the Ouya or Steam's new device?
VR will be interesting. I'm not familiar enough with the hardware requirements to comment intelligently about that. I haven't done much with VR since the late 90s. Is the PS4/XB1's hardware not powerful enough to drive the kind of things that we're seeing the beginning of with Oculus Rift?
Cloud gaming is when a server renders your content for you, then streams the video to you. So you could play a very resource intensive game on e.g. a cheap tablet.
In the US, at least, I see that severely limited by the small usage caps most of us with wired connections live under.
I expect it to follow whatever path Netflix et. al. blaze. Depending; Moore's Law is very much alive, but doesn't apply to batteries. What's the attraction of a cheap tablet vs. a not quite so cheap capable tablet now, or a cheap capable tablet tomorrow, and how much will this depend on battery capacity?
Regarding VR: Valve claims that pc's are a better fit to VR and they've done some serious research on VR. I'm taking it on face value(maybe i shouldn't ?).
Cloud gaming is when games are run on a server and streamed to your home. Combine chromecast and cloud gaming, and you suddenly got a huge platform, with much more users than xboox one/ps4. And since it's google ,it would probably run android games which there are tons. This could make the platform preferable for AAA gaming.
One more element that could be important in this is microsoft's "project spark" which let users build games with amazing creativity and amazing graphics. It's still in beta , but when it's release it could be a huge force in gaming , especially together with VR.
I'd heard of this before, but never tried it myself. Out of curiosity, I just tried playing a game through OnLive, using my relatively high-end (for the US) business broadband connection.
I chose Witcher 2 since it was featured on the OnLive home page.
As the intro video streamed, I was impressed. It was smooth and the quality was good.
After the intro video, it all fell apart. The round trip latency on the menu screen was very jarring. Gameplay significantly magnified the latency issues. I felt like my character was drunk, trying to walk around even in the tutorial phase. I can't imagine how terrible that would be during demanding phases of the game. It really was terrible.
Maybe this would be useful for less demanding games, where latency isn't so crucial, but isn't that the whole point? A low powered device probably wouldn't need to outsource rendering in the first place if the game is slow enough that latency doesn't matter. Maybe I'm missing something.
Ironically, playing a few minutes on the OnLive trial made me interested in buying and downloading the real game via Steam, and made me never want to try anything on OnLive again.
For low latency, That's the sort of problem google likes to have: hard technical problems that require a lot of capital(building plenty of gaming clouds physically close to users).Maybe onlive just didn't had enough money so your cloud is far from you.
BTW: sony will be also offering it , so maybe the tech is ready ?
If Wikipedia's to be believed, OnLive has a datacenter here in Georgia with me, probably in metro Atlanta. This same machine I used to try OnLive has a 10-12ms ping to my Linode here in their Atlanta datacenter. It's not going to get much quicker than that over the WAN. If they can't give a decent experience to someone like me, I wouldn't want to see the average user's experience.
It will be very interesting to see what this means. When he dropped the CEO title, the goal was to be more of a visionary too.
An open question... What's the big thing he brings to the table? Strategic thinking? Vision? Competitiveness? Respect in the Company? All of the above? What's the best way to harness this? (Ok, that's open questionS)
Good point. It's very hard to be partially committed to either technology or running a huge firm. Mastering the internals of a huge company is a full time job. So is staying on top of technology in the marketplace. Hiring an insider does help on the first point.
> Good luck to Bill in his new roll on the Board as "Founder and Technology Advisor".
Probably more of a honorary title than anything else. I doubt he'll be as active as Microsoft makes it seem. If anything, Microsoft would be smart to let the new CEO follow his own visions, not Gates's visions.
I'm curious about his accent. It sounds like it would've taken a lot of work to develop. Is sounding American-ish a requirement of rising to the upper echelons of a company like Microsoft?
He's been in the U.S since his masters, an accent change over that many years is quite natural, and hardly has anything do with the fact that he's in a high powered position in the company.
Is it racist to not understand half of what is said through a thick accent? if it is I'm a big jerk.
edit: why the down votes? Honest question, parent seems to be implying that its a bad thing that he adjusted to his environment, an environment where clear communication is paramount,.
We all have accents whether we were born in America or not. Have you ever been in the South? Just because we talk slow doesn't mean we think slow ;)
Typically, it just requires spending time around the person and interacting with them. It doesn't matter where they are from or what sort of accent they have. After a few days, you'll understand them.
And also, an accent has no bearing on intelligence.
This is not always the case, for instance I've worked with a great guy from China, after almost a year I still have a hard time understanding him and often have to ask him to repeat himself. It makes working collaborating difficult face to face.
My Argentinian TA once said "if I have an accent and you have an accent, we might have a problem." That said, all my coworkers are Chinese (many have never been to the states or outside of china) and I don't have a problem with anyone's accent (they can barely understand my Chinese though).
I do fine on the street, but my Chinese isn't technical enough to work at work, I just don't have the vocabulary (thankfully, English is supposed to be our working language anyways).
Do you mean Nadella's in particular? I didn't think it was that bad. Anyway it's only racist if you think less of a person just because you can't understand them. Remember there are lots of people who can't understand you, either.
He still sounds Indian - eg 'more meaning', 'unbounded' has the emphasis on the vowels which is quite Indian. He also pronounces 'perseverance' differently from an American. I don't think he's putting anything on.
Let me give you a perspective on this. I moved to the US from India when I was about 17 and I am almost 33 now. My accent has definitely evolved over the years and it sounds a little more American-ish even though I can never be a native speaker. I actually prefer that people can understand me when I talk to them. If someone thinks that I sound American-ish, good for me because they will feel comfortable striking a conversation with me. If someone thinks that I am faking it, they can choose whether they want to interact with me or not and I respect that.
So the point is that accents can evolve naturally over a period if the person makes an attempt. Yes it gets harder as you get older. Just because someone sounds American-ish doesn't mean that they are not speaking it naturally.
A lot of people do not realize that their accent can actually be a hindrance in communication. They might have near perfect grammar but accents do cause a problem. I know this is a controversial topic and even pg got some flak for saying this but a "neutralized" (notice the American spelling) accent is important for communication. If you are a leader/CEO, even more important.
Being able to communicate is extremely important for even mid-level executives. If the accent makes understanding continuous speech more difficult and lacking vocabulary prevent the creation of accurate metaphors, it's a big problem.
Nadella shows no sign of this. He may not sound "perfectly american" but he's understandable enough for me. In fact, he sounds vaguely European. Keep in mind I am a Hungarian, born in Brazil who learned Hungarian, Portuguese and English in that order. If I can understand him, I suppose Americans will have little trouble ;-)
I'll be more interested when he unleashes his "arse kicking" on the company and starts pushing roadmaps out. That's a make or break moment for a lot of us involved in Microsoft's ecosystem.
You know for the first time in a very long time I actually want to make Windows software. It's not really Microsoft's fault though. I really like twitch.tv, and streaming games from Windows is really easy thanks to OBS. I want to build stuff that makes user and streamer interaction easier via OBS on Windows. I wouldn't put it in the Windows store though. Heh.
It looks like Microsoft is starting to head in a better direction given their backtracking on "metro" style for desktop applications. I hope they develop more software for non-Windows devices. I really wouldn't mind using Microsoft software on non-Windows. I only use Windows for testing and gaming.
I wish Nadella and Microsoft luck, and hope they make a real turn around.
As a side note it is also exciting to see some more diversity in the top ranks of one of our biggest technology companies. If I were a young aspiring engineer from India, or anywhere in the world really, I'd feel pretty good about the future right now.
Also amazing is that they're publishing and embedding Google YouTube videos on that page.
I'd think a SJW would be more concerned that he's an able bodied cishet male. That's only marginally better than the dreaded able bodied cishet white male.
That comment is basically impossible to refute. You can say it to anyone and automatically win the argument, regardless of content. You call me a racist, well, I call you a cheapskate.
I'm sure his diversity is only skin deep, and that being born in Hyderabad to an Indian civil servant and migrating to America as an adult had no effect on his personality, experience, or opinions.
Ha ha ha! Because he doesn't look different enough! Get it? Cause he's basically a white guy with darker colored skin, get it? Because being born in a different country and moving here basically makes you white, get it?
I'd take PowerShell over bash any day. If you mean the console window, that's completely independent of the applicating running inside both on Unix-likes and Windows and admittedly there are things to improve. However, there are ConEmu, Console2 and others which by now work really, really well.
Sure you can! Right click on the console window bar (top) and look in Settings. You will need to increase the horizontal buffer size or something like that.
Right, but that's a considerable inconvenience compared to the usual ways of resizing a window. Also, IIRC, there's no Win32 SIGWINCH equivalent, so full-screen interactive console utilities won't respond correctly to resizing.
While there are reasonable third-party workarounds for the most pressing problems, the Windows console subsystem could use lots of love.
Why can I resize all other windows by dragging the bottom right but not cmd.exe?
I also forgot to mention how slow text output is on cmd.exe when compared against terminals like xterm on linux. If the new CEO can improve the windows command line experience I for one would be immensely grateful.
Because cmd.exe is a fixed width based on the character count. You can drag the height down but not the width sideways. If you right click on the black C:\ icon in the top left and go to properties, the layout tab will let you set the character count width and in turn change that, or alternatively set the font size which will scale the window to suit the character count at the new font size.
You might have been facetious to prove a point but surprisingly few know you can change those settings there, and I like making my terminal oldschool-hacker-green :)
edit: Actually, I've no idea what I've done but now I can drag the window arbitrarily and it'll just show more characters. Maybe I set a font and now can do it? I don't know!
edit 2: I made it go to 160 characters, then set it back to 80, and now it'll let me drag it out to 160 but no more? This is so confusing Microsoft is on drugs
edit 3: Oh, ok. Screen buffer size sets the 'you can resize to this maximum' whereas screen size sets the 'you start at this size'. I'll stop making edits now.
That's ridiculous. PowerShell's #1 selling point, object oriented streams, is only available to .NET languages! Which is why the community will never prosper.
I use TCC from these guys (jpsoft.com). It used to be called 4NT and before that 4DOS. Basically it's a superset of cmd.exe (a super-dooper-set these days) and lets you do pretty much anything you can do with shells like bash.
If you're from a Unix background, you're probably better off running bash from Cygwin, but if you're a Windows guy, TCC is a great shell.
It's the first thing I install on a Windows machine.
I think the #1 thing Microsoft needs to do in order to right itself is become a platform that developers love, which isn't the case today. Becoming fully posix compliant would be a great start to that.
They abandoned it when they dominated developer mindshare, which they do not today.
Also, I'm not talking about a posix layer that is all but hidden, I'm talking about making Windows a posix system. Coreutils (or something like it), a free compiler, a terminal.
Microsoft already provides "something like" coreutils, free compilers, and a console subsystem. While these things could use considerable improvement — particularly the console subsystem — I'm not sure that the best approach for either Microsoft or the market is to encourage a POSIX/GNU monoculture. I'd rather see Microsoft incorporate good ideas from the competition into future products, and vice versa.
I'd hazard a guess and say that they didn't use it much and only noticed »Whoa, I have to type Get-ChildItem instead of ls? That's so bloated, get me out of here.«
(Side note: I'm a developer, not an administrator and I use PowerShell as such – I have no clue of how to query AD or manage IIS, but I do know the language very well. I also was a technical reviewer of the PowerShell Cookbook 2nd ed.)
From my experience the language has some quirks (that are being slowly remedied in recent versions, e.g. handling of one-element arrays), but otherwise is quite well designed. The quite consistent naming of cmdlets give you enough hints to figure out what a command would be, if you only knows it exists, e.g. querying things always start with Get, projection is done with Select, etc. In a way, PowerShell is more unixy than traditional Unix utilities in that they really do one thing and only one thing. This can lead some to consider PowerShell overly verbose, because the pipeline often looks like
Get-Things | Select-Things | Format-Things
But to me this is actually nicer because I can concentrate on each part individually and not figure out the switch to ls that tells me the file size. And well, PowerShell passes objects through the pipeline so most of the time you can cut text processing to a minimum because you already get what you need directly (which is not to say that text processing is poor in PowerShell – -match, -replace represent grep and sed and switch -regex is very nice for quickly writing parsers for semi-structured text content).
I started out code-golfing Project Euler problems in PowerShell and later noticed that because it's .NET-based it can complement .NET development fairly well. Examples below are all things I did recently.
Need to fiddle around with a format string to get it right?
'{0:yyyy-MM-dd}' -f (Get-Date)
Or need to quickly test a web service whether the new method works correctly?
IIRC (old Windows NT4 MCSE here) POSIX subsystem never had access to TCPIP, which made it pointless. It was a sales point, rather than a genuinely useful subsystem.
That said, I think OSs are irrelevant: people are happy to pay for apps, cloud hosting etc and MS are happy to provide it to them, Windows or not, for money.
Per http://www.unityisplural.com/2012/01/windows-posix-complianc... due to a procurement lawsuit in 1995 the Coast Guard was forced to accept a NT based "open system" bid. I don't know if they actually cared at the time, but the UNIX(TM) losing bidders certainly did, and it certainly made a big difference in subsequent adoption of NT/Windows.
What I recall hearing was that wherever the standard allowed a POSIX call to just set errno to indicate "sorry, we don't support this", MS's POSIX compatibility library did so, rendering it useless.
The CLR, .NET and Visual Studio are quite nice, some of the best in the IDE world.
However, it's Microsoft's tendency to squeeze and coerce compliance that drove people away. Proprietary everything means you don't play nice with everyone else.
Now the web has leveled the playing field somewhat, and they can't be coercive to be successful. It'll be interesting to see them play will on other companies' turf and platforms.
What is a good change here is simplicity of language & clarity - Who Am I?, Why am I here, Why are you here and What do we do next.
A good departure from corporate bs that is spewed when there is a change of guard.
That said Satya Nadella has a task like none other in the business. Good Luck to Satya and MSFT.
Mobile and cloud first could be emphasizing being where customers want Microsoft to be, rather than Windows, which has a tiny portion of mobile and cloud.
Microsoft already produce some apps for the web, iOS and Android, and Azure can run Linux VMs.
Hopefully they just go wherever people want to pay them, eg, to access MS Office where they need it, even if it isn't via a Windows device.
It is interesting how devoid of content it is. I think that much better way to motivate the troops is to give tangible goals and be brief.
Anyway good luck be with him - from what I read in his bio he was heading the only part of MS recently that managed to not alienate its customer and developer base.
Having been at a company that recently underwent a CEO change, the first email is always fluffy. It's a greeting, gives their "big picture" strategy to give some idea of what's new with the new CEO, because that's every employee's concern right now.
In the next few weeks, the new CEO will be solidifying everything with Q&As, visiting the various campuses, and announce any new org changes. Org changes will be the big thing that impacts what individual contributors actually do in their jobs. Major changes to the 2014 strategy or goals would be announced soon, but seeing as how it's mid Q1 it's probably going to be changes for Q2 or 2H.
Although his email is filled with "corporate BS" and buzzwords it's surprisingly humane.
He introduces himself, explains about his way of thinking, tells about his family, for example
It's something MS needs. A fresh departure from Ray Ozzie, who looked like said Good Morning to his wife with a Corporate Memo, or from Ballmer, who, although energetic, didn't have a good aim for things (well, to be fair it's difficult to throw chairs with precision)
Well Congrats to their new CEO, there is a lot of work to do to put MSFT on the right path for the future. The industry has changed, consumers have changed, MSFT needs to evolve too.
John W. Thompson was once general manager of the division of IBM that produced OS/2[1], which was soundly defeated by Microsoft. I wonder how he feels about being chairman of Microsoft now given that previous experience.
[1] Around this time, he reported to an executive named John M. Thompson, hence the use of middle initials.
It's all well and good to recognize that he clearly hasn't let his personal feelings about his past project's destruction hinder his career. That's an admirable quality in him and worth noting.
It's another thing to pretend he's a robot and has no feelings on the matter, which is what you're implying. I think the original question is a valid one. Clearly he would have thoughts on the matter and they may be interesting to hear.
Another way you can read it is with a comparison with Stephen Elop and Rick Belluzzo. Could he have intentionally mis-managed OS/2 leaving the space open for Windows 3, being then rewarded by a position at Microsoft's board?
I know nothing about his career or his decisions WRT the OS/2 product, but, after having a closer look at the other two, a pattern of executive placement as an offensive weapon starts to form.
> I know nothing about his career, but, after having a closer look at the other two, a pattern of executive placement as an offensive weapon starts to form.
A critical historical factor that doomed OS/2 from the outside was that following IBM tradition, after the evolution of PC -> XT -> AT, they told IT managers the PC-AT would be the last microcomputer they'd have to buy for a long time.
Unfortunately, per Bill Gates, its 286 was "brain dead chip" and absolutely hopeless and slow in Protected Mode, which is where it needed to run for a modern, large address space computer. As I understand it, the OS/2 inability to abandon the 286/PC-AT for the 386 is what really drove the split.
(It wasn't even IBM that came out with the first major 386 system, but Compaq.)
The 286 really had a lot of technical issues and IBM's apparent reluctance to embrace the 386 did hurt them in the long run (as well as MCA). Yet, for software built for OS/2, the 286 was just fine. Its main problem was dealing with DOS programs that wanted direct access to hardware. The fact that developing for OS/2 was painful and expensive was not helping. IBM made a lot of stupid decisions and Microsoft benefited greatly from those decisions.
What I was told by various people who tried this is that Intel had no idea how people actually coded for the x86/weren't willing to make segment sizes larger than the original 64 KiB, and the penalty for loading a new segment register was "tens of cycles" per Wikipedia, I've heard on the order of 40 earlier.
So a lot of existing code bases, including a couple I worked on for PCs (Gosling Emacs and a write once filesystem) ran, or would run, fantastically slower in Protected Mode.
Yeah, sure, you could with no small amount of pain write more efficient code for OS/2 1.x, but why bother after Windows 3.x became a big hit?
Oh, yeah, now you're reminding me that the cost to develop for it was $6K for the SDK in 2013 dollars, plus of course a PC-AT with a lot of memory (at least 1.5 MiB, which wasn't cheap back then, nor was the AT).
The 32-bit OS/2 2.x and "NT OS/2" was a different story however, and while this decision was made before MS turned this project into a fiasco, this reminds me of how abandoning segmentation altogether and going for a flat address space for OS/2 2.0 and "NT OS/2" was a mistake for security reasons, and I realized that the Morris worm spread around Sept 1988, when both was in development (MS sent the first OS/2 2.0 SDKs to developers at the end of 1989).
He's only been on the Microsoft board since 2012, which is nearly 20 years after the release of OS/2 Warp. That is pretty a far-fetched scenario in this case.
I agree. I don't know where he was in the meantime and what his relationship with Microsoft was during that time. If OS/2 was sabotaged from within, it was, quite possibly, the first time Microsoft did it.
It's far-fetched anyway. Belluzzo is much less far-fetched and Elop is pretty obvious.
Indeed. Enterprise is where Microsoft has the most traction, and benefits most inertia and lock-in. It faces competition from SaaS companies, but that's an unavoidable transition Microsoft will have to make.
Office 365 seems to be doing very well. In that case, it's the SaaS companies that should be deeply afraid of Microsoft. As a total offering (consisting of cloud components and PC-based components) it's pretty hard to beat.
Running O365 on Azure has probably substantially improved the platform.
I can't see why Microsoft would take the slightest interest in the mobile software world of 100,000 different $1 crapware products. There's no money in it.
Rovio is one of the most successful mobile developers there is, with annual income of $150 million, across pretty much every mobile platform. They're great at it.
$150 million isn't even visible next to Microsoft's $60 billion yearly income.
I think MS had disregard the enterprise/line of business apps a long time ago. There is no talk about WPF. It's all about apps and mobile. HTML5/JS and not a lot of xaml. I can't find a article or blog about WPF that is written after 2011.
I don't want to jump to conclusions, but after watching the video I have a really good feeling about Satya. He doesn't strike me as a neurotic Microsoft evangelist salesman like Steve Ballmer.
I would love to see Nadella's Microsoft get more involved in open source projects, and win back some developer love that has become lost in darker years.
> He joined Microsoft 22 years ago because he saw how clearly Microsoft empowers people to do magical things and ultimately make the world a better place.
Twenty-two years ago, Windows 95 was three years in the future. As I recall, Microsoft's only truly great product was Word (Excel was getting there, I think), although I guess Flight Simulator wasn't too bad. Microsoft was trying to pretend that Windows 3.1 was a competitor to the Mac. Lisp machines were still trying to make a go of it.
In 1991, Microsoft was already ascendant. You may be too young to remember, but MS-DOS was everywhere. Given the failures of Commodore and Atari, the rise and fall of the 80's unix wars, and with Jobs no longer at Apple, Microsoft essentially took visionary leadership of the computing scene by default.
Instead of using proper unix machines, my early computing years were spent on DOS and Win 3.1.
I was around back then, and was using Macs and Unix, looking down on folks for using Windows & DOS. To this day, I can't begin to fathom the sort of mindset it takes to settle for worst.
I certainly would not have agreed that Microsoft ca. 1992 was at all visionary. I felt embarrassed for them and their users back then, much as I would for an adult who shows up at the office proud of the childish fingerpainting he spent the last month making. Grasping, copying, but not visionary.
Interesting that they chose a walk and talk kind of thing, in a completely vacant office. What where they hurrying towards that they couldn't take the time to sit down?
It made me think of the logistics behind the video. "Hey everyone, the hallway is closed off for the next two hours because we want to show our new leader in an environment completely devoid of people."
I don't recognize the building, but the layout is reminiscent of their Conference Center, with its very wide, open hallways and no personal offices. Every time I ever went in there when there wasn't a big event happening, it was vacant just like that. It wouldn't really have been any effort at all to reserve it for filming. [edit: as to why they'd want to show them wandering around in a vacant building, I have no idea other than pure aesthetics]
I was just disappointed he didn't hop on the vespa and putter away at the end.
Adobe is the monopoly in the desktop graphics tool market. Not sure why no VC targets it at this moment, which does seem like a slow dinosaur to attack on.
Pixelmator's proprietary, and can't run on non OS X ATM due to reliance on, IIRC, CoreGraphics or similar. If they recreated those libraries on other platforms they may have a PS competitor.
Probably related to who is or was CEO of Adobe Moto. Anyways, correlation is not causation, or in this case, not even meaningful. It was a racist statement.
I am Indian and I am heavily suspicious towards the very tow-the-line and do not argue attitude many have. Not saying I agree with the comment I responded to, but to say that some general level statements cannot be said is ridiculous.
The sad thing is that I'm of Indian heritage and I have to agree with him. It's not related to race, it's more about the education that most Indians receive. All are taught more about being bean-counters than striving to create new and innovative (gah, hate that word) solutions. I like the Metro approach. It just needs to be split into two configurations for both desktop and a tablet OS, and Microsoft could have a real winner.
I'm afraid that we'll backtrack all the way back to the 7 days and inhibit progress. It's been shown to happen in the past, and it's not an illegitimate concern, however racist it may seem.
it's more about the education that most Indians receive.
He was educated in the US. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella:
"Nadella earned an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business."
For what it's worth (and I don't plan to weigh-in on the topic of Indian education one way or the other, as I have no knowledge in this area) he did receive his BS in EE at Mangalore University[0], in India.
Once again, I'm amazed at the level of racist comments on HN. The truly sad thing is, reading this guy's other comments, you get a sense he/she is a truly intelligent person.
There's something deeply symbolic about watching those enthusiastic people doing their Sorkin walks for the camera through the vast and completely empty halls of the Microsoft offices (or is it a museum, I can't tell).
By the numbers, Microsoft is still incredibly relevant. At the same time, I can't even remember when I last used any MS product. It's not a boycott, there are simply no points where their stuff intersects with my life. I can imagine I'm not the only one, and that's not a comfortable position to be in for them. However, it's also difficult to see how they could ever break out of that. From where I'm standing they look like a partly consumer-focused IBM: rich, powerful, calcified, eternal, but computing has largely moved on and left them behind.
As a former MS user, I wish them all the success in the world turning this around.
You must not work in the corporate world. Microsoft has a massive foothold in enterprise: email, instant messaging (lync), excel, word, visio, project, even sharepoint and those are just the pieces you can see not to mention whats going in the backend.
Being one of the only Mac users in my office I constantly have to find work arounds for everything. Sadly they will be relevant for a long time we have almost 30,000 people using windows and they wont be learning anything new for a long time if ever.
I do hope the changing of the guard will help microsoft to build better products that integrate with OS's beside windows.
There is nothing in my comment to suggest otherwise.
On a meta note, I've been getting these "corrections" a lot here on HN lately, I'm just not sure why that's happening. Am I just too sensitive? Should I be more explicit in my comments? I'm not being touchy, I'd really like to know.
> I do hope the changing of the guard will help microsoft to build better products that integrate with OS's beside windows.
Agreed, it would be great if they aimed for integration as a more general goal too.
The second sentence you quoted appears to be backing up the assumption, or giving you a clue as to where it came from. I don't think he was "correcting" you
I think the world has gotten a little weird. You have real life businesses today that have no Microsoft stuff in them at all. If you live in a corporate environment defined by your Windows XP desktop, it's difficult to imagine a world where grey, 9 lb laptops and horrible corporate Windows installs aren't the norm.
> I can't even remember when I last used any MS product
> Microsoft has a massive foothold in enterprise
> You must not work in the corporate world
You said you never interact with MS products, those products have a massive foothold in the corporate world, therefore you probably do not work in the corporate world.
If you are doing corporate work, not just software development (though even that too) in a corporate setting but business analysis, etc., and you do not use powerpoint/excel/visio then you are very much outside the norm.
>On a meta note, I've been getting these "corrections" a lot here on HN lately, I'm just not sure why that's happening.
The "corrections" as above, are an attempt to offer a different opinion that counteracts yours because it is seen as outside the normal expirience people are having and since you are getting them often I would think that is because there are many aspects of your comments that are outside the norm.
>Am I just too sensitive? Should I be more explicit in my comments?
I don't think so, your comment seems to add a valuable perspective from someone who does not use MS products in their daily activities, pointing that it is possible when surrounded by the right work culture.
Well, count me outside that norm too. I work in a pretty corporate environment and nobody here uses Microsoft stuff. In fact, I've never worked anywhere where the vast majority of people weren't on a Mac.
In the past 20 years I've been employed, Mac has never been a majority. First PCs with Windows, now increasingly Linux on developer machines and management with Macs.
But we still have Mac machines, because our customer data comes in in Excel, our applications are written to be compatible with IE8, etc.
>I've never worked anywhere where the vast majority of people weren't on a Mac.
If you are a web designer or creative professional I could see how this could be true for your team. My company provides people with a Dell but for those that wish you can BYOD. 98% of people use the company laptop.
In my job, each year I end up in dozens of meetings between corporate executives from different countries around the world. Nowadays, it is true that I see them bringing mostly Macs and iPads.
But this is, in my experience, a rather astonishing change from even 5 years ago, when 95% of the computers I would see these visitors bring would be Windows (and the majority of those still being Windows XP).
> On a meta note, I've been getting these "corrections" a lot here on HN lately, I'm just not sure why that's happening. Am I just too sensitive? Should I be more explicit in my comments? I'm not being touchy, I'd really like to know.
No, it's not you, I'm seeing it a lot as well. Especially the "you actually don't know what you're talking about" threads citing Dunning–Kruger or the equivalent.
I work in the corporate world. Only thing I use a Microsoft product for is running games. I do have Excel installed on my Mac, but haven’t touched it in ages (though this is mostly because things I deal with polarized themselves between „I can just do it in Numbers” and „where’s my Matlab”).
EDIT: I don’t mean it’s irrelevant, I just mean your assumption wasn’t really legitimate. There’s now many big companies that only use Microsoft in limited ways, and probably even some that don’t use the software at all.
> I do hope the changing of the guard will help microsoft to build better products that integrate with OS's beside windows.
It's not about integration, for Microsoft it's about migration. Why give customers, who are already well and truly invested, any leeway to migrate part of their infrastructure to a competing product?
Interoperability only makes business sense to allow people to migrate to your product, not when there's a risk of allowing customers to ease moving away from it. Given that they've already taken over the corporate/office world, there's not much left out there to suck in. Most of their battles are now in mobile and in the server room. Both of which they're coming from a losing position.
The decline of Microsoft will be a generational thing. At some point, those offices are going to be inhabited by kids who grew up with google docs, dropbox, a variety of IM options, and who have never seen a native email client.
When these kids grow up and enter the workforce, they will want to use the tools they know, and will not understand the point of in-house Windows sysadmins, or the software licensing fees.
My 21-year old daughter grew up using Microsoft products, and has abandoned them completely. Everything she does is in the cloud, (mostly google, yahoo for email). She enters the workforce in one year.
Whatever the new CEO does, he basically cannot win back a generation that has learned to do office tasks on non-Microsoft products. It's sort of like what happened with GM. They produced absolutely shitty cars in the 80s, and many people who had early experiences with those cars started buying Japanese cars and stayed there. (No, I don't have statistics to cite, that's just my impression and personal experience.)
I give Microsoft ten years until their first quarterly loss.
>> When these kids grow up and enter the workforce, they will want to use the tools they know, and will not understand the point of in-house Windows sysadmins, or the software licensing fees.
When your company reaches a certain size, auditors and such will put an end to that.
Yep we only install virus scanners at email gateways to make the exchange servers not die. The virus scanners are for windows, never had any auditor for sox or pci ask about software, sounds like a shit auditor.
Our PCI auditors like to see anti-virus on every machine, Windows, Linux, Mac, or Unix. That might not be a requirement, but every year they ask to see our AV solution for everything.
Also: The success of BYOD suggests that things aren't quite so fixed. And seriously, if you're concerned about viruses, you're going to REQUIRE Microsoft products?
>When these kids grow up and enter the workforce, they will want to use the tools they know, and will not understand the point of in-house Windows sysadmins, or the software licensing fees.
I am inclined to agree. Already I can see the difference in the new interns and new hires at my job. Many of them are using chrome books at home so they tend to use chrome plugins to do everything at work.
Also professors and departments at universities are starting to use open source products in their curriculum as opposed to the traditional Microsoft suite. Even the school I graduated from uses google for email.
These are the kids that change their tools whenever a better one comes along. They are exactly the people who CAN be won over by the first better client they see.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, except I wanted to point out that I still greatly prefer native email clients (I'm 24, for what it's worth). Outlook is actually a very competent piece of software on OS X and I use it at work; it's easily on par with Mail.app for me. I prefer either of these to any web email interface I've used, as they are considerably more responsive (even Gmail seems laggy in comparison).
"I give Microsoft ten years until their first quarterly loss."
Hahah - If i had a penny for every time I've heard that. I'm an apple user myself - but MS offers all of what you are describing your daughter to be using as well - in fact I know many companies are already rolling their staff onto Office360 and so on. As for google docs etc - if you ever had to really crunch data - nothing comes close to Excel even today. I'm not saying they should keep doing what they are doing - I do think it's foolish to assume that they dont know whats going on in the world outside and aren't capable to grow with it.
It doesn't matter that Office360 does blah blah blah -- the next generation of office workers aren't using it now, and that's a problem for Microsoft.
I agree that google doc products are inferior to MS Office. (I find that Libre Office is good enough for me.) It's a funny argument to bring up though. Ignoring the cheaper, inferior alternative is exactly what led to Microsoft's dominance over IBM.
> I agree that google doc products are inferior to MS Office. (I find that Libre Office is good enough for me.) It's a funny argument to bring up though. Ignoring the cheaper, inferior alternative is exactly what led to Microsoft's dominance over IBM.
But Microsoft is not ignoring Google Docs. The Office web apps are also free, have more features than Google Docs, and have better compatibility with Office files. Microsoft is even bundling desktop Office for free with certain tablets, such as the Dell Venue 8 Pro.
There have always been cheaper products. Microsoft even used to sell one. Back when Office was $500, Works was $100. And yet -- even back then, companies opted to pay the extra money for Office.
The only difference now is that the lower-priced product is free. But as a percentage of the worker's salary, Microsoft Office has actually gotten cheaper over time.
No, thanks, I prefer to drink water. Sounds like you bought too much Kool-Aid. You must be tired of drinking it. I recommend that you return it to the store.
Office 365 (not 360) already generates over a billion dollars in annual revenues -- and that includes the desktop versions of Office. Even the consumer version of Office 365 Office has already sold about 2 million subscriptions.
And there are 50 million users of the Office web apps. If you don't know any of them, then perhaps you should think about whether your own experiences are skewed, and unrepresentative of what's actually happening out in the marketplace.
Most people don't, that's why it doesn't matter. I volunteer as treasurer of a cub scout pack. We switched from Excel to Google docs spreadsheet. We're using about 1/1000th the power and limitations of google docs, and google's capabilities are expanding faster than our needs are expanding. I don't care if Excel would be "better" because we'd only need 1/100000th its capabilities or it would take 20 times longer to learn how to use.
Most business tasks run into exactly the same scaling issue.
Business decisions are never made by qualified techs on the basis of pessimism, they're always by completely technologically unqualified managers in a hurry on the basis of optimism.
You probably use services running on Microsoft-based platforms all the time if you e.g. have a bank account, use commercial airports, have insurance of any form, etc. Those big numbers you're waving away represent real, significant businesses.
Even if you assume I didn't know that (which is somewhat audacious of you), this sounds exactly like IBM. Which was my point, and I'm not waving anything away. I guess there's nothing wrong with being another IBM per se, on the other hand they wouldn't have had to change CEOs if they were all that satisfied with their general trajectory.
I'm not assuming anything, I'm reading what you wrote:
> there are simply no points where their stuff intersects with my life.
As to your other point: Microsoft is big. A "general trajectory" is very vague at their scale. Failure in one area (mobile, tablet) does not imply failure in another (enterprise), or indeed overall. I don't see what's wrong with trying to find a CEO who can turnaround that failure, and don't think it's really indicative of anything other than a missed opportunity.
That's nitpicking. But yes, technically you're correct, I didn't cover the cases where other people outside of my control are using MS software behind the scenes which has an influence on my life. However, we're getting very far away from the original point just for the sake of one-upmanship.
I'm not asserting MS is failing. We basically agree though that there are areas where a turnaround would be exceedingly beneficial or even actually needed. I was trying to illustrate something about those areas, namely that I'd like MS to come back and make contributions to things I care about. It's not selfish, it was merely a wish to make our ecosystem richer again. And I wouldn't have guessed this opinion to be that controversial, but here we go.
It's not notpicking, and your constant attempts to belittle critical responses to your opinion is becoming annoying.
Your argument is: because you don't see their products intersecting with your life, and - you imagine - that of many others, you imagine that's an undesirable position for them to be in, and that computing has largely moved on and left them behind.
I'm pointing out that your argument is focused on one niche -- a big one, but by all means not one that makes them "left behind" just because they have a small presence within it.
Perhaps you think Walmart [1a] is irrelevant and left behind because you never shop there? Or that Apple [1b] is irrelevant and left behind because you don't own an i*device/service?
I apologize if my comments seem belittling, I assure you they're not meant that way. In fact, condescension is the main impression I got from your first reply. At the same time I feel your tone has taken on a personal and aggressive quality that is not acceptable. I was merely trying to rectify what I thought was a miscommunication or maybe a misunderstanding of my original post. Now I see that's not likely to be productive, so excuse me for bowing out of this thread.
As a counterpoint, I use Microsoft stuff more than ever now. I migrated my email from Gmail to Outlook.com, I subscribe to Office 365 Home Premium, I use Skydrive as my cloud storage provider, and I'm starting to dabble in ASP.Net for web development again.
Oh, and I use (and enjoy) Windows 8.
So, yes, people like you exist. But so do people like me.
I'd say, from my armchair: take a long hard look at what's really happening out there, step out of your bubble. Stop this ridiculous attitude towards competitors and open source, at least long enough to see what they have to offer. Get your people some Macs, get your server people exposed to some Linux, get them some iPhones and iPads and Android devices, and make them see why you've been losing ground. Those competitors aren't perfect, they all have distinct and horrible weaknesses that you can exploit by making something better. Step out of your bubble and make something.
I am no fan of MS given what I went through with them in the '90s, but I'll give Satya the benefit of the doubt. Here's what I'd say to him:
Recognise that operating systems are less relevant than they were and port everything to everywhere. This means dev tools, Office, etc. People will pay for Visual Studio on the Mac and on Linux if it's the same experience as it is on Windows.
De-complexify Windows and focus on its number one use case: Office. Windows is essentially a platform for running Office and playing games.
Make Visual Studio Pro free or unify Express and allow extensions. Make ASP.NET & friends as easy to deploy on Linux as it is on Windows (or put some serious energy into mono).
Not sure if they are good suggestions or not for the business but they would certainly help me out!
If he focuses the entirety of MS on cloud and mobile, while offering some level of innovation, he will have done a good job. I think the real challenge is how do you make a company whose flagships are non-mobile and non-cloud products like Office and Windows go mobile and cloud? Those are massive institutional forces of inertia.
In Bill Gates' video, at 0:28, does he laugh just a little bit as he says "we took advantage of the internet" when listing their historical innovations?
I hope the new CEO has the courage and the power to set out a vision and stick to it for more than just a few years in a row.
Microsoft under Ballmer has been a study in short attention span. Changing themes, names, and directions every three to five years. When I was a Windows sysadmin back in the day, it was incredibly frustrating to build anything on the Microsoft platform because by the time you wrapped your brain around the new way of doing things, the next server OS release would change everything. From what I've seen since I moved on to a different career, that pattern hasn't changed.
Apple's success has come from a laser focus and constant improvement for the past 17 years. Microsoft used to be similarly focused. Remember the old adage that Microsoft would get it right by Version Three, and wipe out the competition? Well, they haven't stuck to any particular plan for long enough to come up with a version three of anything in 15 years.
Hell, Microsoft pioneered tablet computers, but after some promising early models and some decent push into the innovation required, they kind of just let that project wither on the vine until Apple came up with a workable model. Then MS desperately tried to pivot and turn everything, even the server OS, into a tablet-and-desktop-friendly mess.
I'm not sure this is a helpful diagnosis - Microsoft didn't have a short attention when it came to tablets (as you say, they pioneered them, and they haven't abandoned them), they just didn't get the form factor right, and many of the Live services have just been rebranded. Likewise, Apple has also demonstrated a short attention span at times. Remember Ping?
It's not that they didn't get the form factor right, it's that they didn't align as a company to make sure it was a success. To my knowledge, in-fighting between different divisions in Microsoft lead to the Tablet PC's ultimate demise and as an early adopter myself I definitely felt the pain of it. Tablet pen functionality in Office was a pathetic, tacked-on afterthought, for instance.
Good point - there were several problems with Microsoft's tablet approach, and you're certainly right that application software is one of them. The main thing I wanted to say is that "short attention span" and "abandonment" don't accurately describe what went wrong.
In those early iterations the stylus support was pathetic. In contrast, Today's stylus hardware/software integration on their Surface Pro line is great.
I look forward to Microsoft finding their own perspective not only in hardware, but in software/search as well.
> Remember Zune? Remember Live? Remember the Kin??
We should be very careful about criticizing others for their failed products. The side-effect of experimentation and innovation is that some of the experiments will result in failure to find market fit. Market fit failure isn't a good thing for a company, but it's much worse to not experiment at all.
Moreover, it's surprising that the grandparent evokes Apple as a counter-example, since it discontinued iTools, MobileMe (or perhaps more importantly iDisk), Ping, Xserve, etc. With the exception of Ping, products that a large group of people relied on.
I'm most familiar with the example of the Kin, and it was not an example of "experimentation and innovation", but a case study in how Microsoft has largely lost its ability to execute on a proven concept.
For that matter, the Zune was a (late) iPod clone; sure, it had some experimental features (that didn't pan out, but, hey, they tried), but it was hardly seriously innovative.
It also was yet another example in how you'd best not trust Microsoft, as part of it they threw their PlaysForSure ecosystem under the bus.
Hmmm, getting whole sectors of the world to trust Microsoft in the future is going to be a tall order for the next CEO, assuming he doesn't just punt on many of them, which might be the wisest thing to do.
Execution matters. Zune Pass died a few months ago. I can still use account credit I put on my AppleID from 10 years ago (in fact I still have a few bucks on one of my early accounts).
A small startup that gets squished by larger competition has an excuse as to why it shut down services and let down it's customers. Microsoft has no such excuse. They failed to compete, then the failed their customers. Innovation is wasted if it's improperly handled.
I guess I failed to make my point clearly. These were not necessarily bad ideas. The Kin got pushed out too early and too sloppily. It would have been better to kill the project before launch than what happened.
Zune could have been a good brand but rather than sticking to their guns, they abandoned it. Live was another unifying brand that they gave up on too quickly in favor of new rebrandings -- Bing, Office365, etc.
My point is that the constant jumping from idea to idea and rebranding instead of sticking with good ideas and revising until they're successful is a pattern of the Ballmer years that is a big part of Microsoft's lack of impact in the computing world over the past 5-10 years as Apple and Google and Amazon have risen to the forefront.
Microsoft is often being thumbed as being thickheaded and stubborn as well as unable to be flexible and quick enough to change with the market. "Short attention span" is definitely something new.
Are those mutually exclusive? Couldn't they miss a trend and then eventually bring it to market late, and then change their minds about it shortly afterwards?
> When I was a Windows sysadmin back in the day, it was incredibly frustrating to build anything on the Microsoft platform because by the time you wrapped your brain around the new way of doing things, the next server OS release would change everything.
[...]
> Apple's success has come from a laser focus and constant improvement for the past 17 years.
Really? OS 9, OS X, iOS? Sure, it's not quite the same number of platforms as Microsoft have done in that time. But I don't think that they're on polar opposites of the spectrum here as you suggest (nor do I think that being at one end of this spectrum is necessarily good).
I'm not sure I totally understand what you're saying, but I'll try to respond:
When Apple bought NeXT and Steve Jobs took over as CEO, the OSX project was born at that moment. Before that Apple had been stabbing wildly in the dark for a solution to their outdated OS, with a bunch of failed efforts at a rewrite. Yes, they updated the old MacOS a couple of times, which needed to happen, but as soon as OSX was ready for prime timee, they made the switch.
iOS is to some extent based on the same internals as OSX, but even if it were a completely different architecture, I'd say it's actually a good example of Apple's focus. Rather than forcing crossover and synergy where it doesn't make sense (ie, forcing the Metro interface onto the desktop and server, without actually providing Metro interfaces to their most popular desktop apps or server tools), Apple created separate OSes for devices that have completely different roles.
I tried to buy one not long ago and was sad that they had been discontinued. I don't know if this is still the case today (or even relevant in the world of smartphones) but I could not for the life of me find an MP3 player with an FM tuner in it. But the Zune had one, did it not?
> I tried to buy one not long ago and was sad that they had been discontinued. I don't know if this is still the case today (or even relevant in the world of smartphones) but I could not for the life of me find an MP3 player with an FM tuner in it. But the Zune had one, did it not?
A Nokia Lumia 520 is dirt-cheap and has an FM tuner.
All you have to do is to pretend that it isn't also a phone.
You said you were looking for an MP3 player with FM radio, and couldn't find one. I just meant that you could've found what you needed by expanding your search to include phones.
I have considered phones, hence the smartphone comment above in my post. Before this time last year, I'd never owned a smartphone before, and hence they weren't on my radar too much when I was looking for a device that included an FM tuner.
Right, my point is that they didn't have the guts to stick with that product or the brand. It didn't do well after a couple of revisions, and they dropped it for the newest unified marketing idea.
I also found it interesting that they felt the need to include a photo of Satya looking chilled out in a hoodie. Just feels really forced - it seems completely out of character based on all of his other imagery / appearances elsewhere.
There is nothing wrong with the guy wearing suits to work if he wants, but it seems that they're trying unnecessarily hard to make him fit some sort of cool geek stereotype.
Sidenote: the videos are embedded from YouTube. I'm impressed and even a bit encouraged that Microsoft set aside NIH long enough to use a competitor's product.
A part of me was hoping for an outside technologist, as I'm almost instinctively suspicious of anyone who could grow and thrive in the dysfunctional stack rank regime, but this is so much better than the CEO of a soft drink company, for example.
Stack ranking is largely attributed to Lisa Brummel, Executive VP at MSFT. And it's been stated in many articles that stack ranking caters to the top 10% and nobody else.
I wasn't thinking it was his idea, but he obviously did very well in the stack ranking ecosystem, which implies (among other things) looking at your own success in terms of a peer's failure.
For a system with a set turnover ratio, you could make a claim that everyone in the company views their own success as a result of someone else's failure. Be it a VP, GPM, Team Lead, etc. Because it happens at every level within the organization.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] threadAlthough this has been rumored to happen for some time, its still a big "changing of the guard" step for Microsoft.
Good luck to Bill in his new roll on the Board as "Founder and Technology Advisor".
It looks like 80% of the money goes for "management" and the rest goes to the actual people in need. Not to mention the contracted "fundraisers" that are paid poorly. (I have nothing against the fundraisers per se, they're usually college kids trying to make some money)
Charities can spend their money on administration, marketing, etc., such that very little can end up going to their chosen task. A government is the opposite. There are millions of people clamouring to whinge about any amount of waste in government. So you end up with governments being up to 6 times more efficient at delivering aid. The classic example is the cancer cure charities that deliver almost no research funding, while government grants are an excellent source of funding.
80% is pretty good in the fundraising industry. Usually it's closer to 90%. Don't ever do one of those "text 12345 to donate to hurricane victims in the tropics" sort of thing, the returns on those are abysmal. But really, what do you expect? People doing work have to get paid. Most of the fuel in a rocket is for getting the rest of the fuel in the rocket off the ground.
One of the ways that fundraising departments try to keep the costs down is to use volunteer work (i.e., a form of donation of time) and internships to do the grunt work of calling people on the phone. Nobody expects those college kids to stay in those internships for their entire careers. Usually, they're only there for the "busy season", the end of the year where people rush to get donations in to count towards their tax writeoffs. For many of the kids, it's either that or a completely unpaid internship in advertising.
And government is actually a lot worse. In the US, only about 55% of your tax dollar goes towards social services. Then you have to take the admin percentage off the top of that. To beat an 80% number like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they'd have to keep overhead down to less than 64%. That's so absurdly low that I can't imagine it is possible.
My comment in my original post refers to the fact that every charity in the US is required to spend a certain percentage of their endowment every year. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a HUGE endowment. They have to spend so much that they can't find enough outlets for it. They have to fund projects that aren't necessarily part of their core goals because they can't fund their core goals anymore.
And the snarky comment about Al Qaeda is a commentary on the nature of Al Qaeda, they are not a single organization that operates above the board, they are themselves more of a foundation and loose conglomeration of various groups for mutual benefit. But the way our government casts it, if you help any organization that has any ties to Al Qaeda, then you are helping The Al Qaeda Man Who Is A Single Person Who 9/11 9/11 9/11.
So, when you have more money then you literally know what to do with, just tossing it around makes it very easy to hit Al Qaeda.
How are you defining social services? And do you mean all govmt spending, or only federal govmt spending?
At most established nonprofits relatively little money actually goes to management. There have been a very few cases that have gotten a lot of publicity, but it's relatively a small (and dangerously over-stated) issue.
See Charity Navigator to see the 'management' costs, which are often quite small. http://www.charitynavigator.org/
That said, 'administrative expenses' are a notoriously poor way to measure nonprofits. The group GiveWell is known for attempting to rate charities based on impact. http://givewell.org/
Basically, A) The average charity doesn't spend that much on management. B) Even if the 'average' did, there are plenty that don't. C) Even so, try using 'impact' rather than 'administrative costs' D) There are many great causes to give to, and that's really all that matters here.
That said, I would typically expect large companies to have large biases to help local causes rather than the best things for the world.
I think Bill Gates is brilliant, but if I was a major shareholder in MSFT, I would have him focus all his efforts on his foundation.
Without a cultural change Microsoft should end its here to now futile attempts to expand outside of its core (has the Xbox, at net, ever made the a lot of money?), put Windows and Office in maintenance mode after restoring the utility of the former for normal desktops, and mostly become a stodgy enterprise software company.
I assume the first generation wasn't wildly profitable due to the costs in establishing the ecosystem.
The second generation's hardware execution was infamously botched; we know they took a $900 million write-down on that debacle, and can be sure there were massive additional costs in e.g. brand equity.
How has it done since then?
What do you mean by cloud gaming? Something like the Ouya or Steam's new device?
VR will be interesting. I'm not familiar enough with the hardware requirements to comment intelligently about that. I haven't done much with VR since the late 90s. Is the PS4/XB1's hardware not powerful enough to drive the kind of things that we're seeing the beginning of with Oculus Rift?
I expect it to follow whatever path Netflix et. al. blaze. Depending; Moore's Law is very much alive, but doesn't apply to batteries. What's the attraction of a cheap tablet vs. a not quite so cheap capable tablet now, or a cheap capable tablet tomorrow, and how much will this depend on battery capacity?
Cloud gaming is when games are run on a server and streamed to your home. Combine chromecast and cloud gaming, and you suddenly got a huge platform, with much more users than xboox one/ps4. And since it's google ,it would probably run android games which there are tons. This could make the platform preferable for AAA gaming.
One more element that could be important in this is microsoft's "project spark" which let users build games with amazing creativity and amazing graphics. It's still in beta , but when it's release it could be a huge force in gaming , especially together with VR.
I chose Witcher 2 since it was featured on the OnLive home page.
As the intro video streamed, I was impressed. It was smooth and the quality was good.
After the intro video, it all fell apart. The round trip latency on the menu screen was very jarring. Gameplay significantly magnified the latency issues. I felt like my character was drunk, trying to walk around even in the tutorial phase. I can't imagine how terrible that would be during demanding phases of the game. It really was terrible.
Maybe this would be useful for less demanding games, where latency isn't so crucial, but isn't that the whole point? A low powered device probably wouldn't need to outsource rendering in the first place if the game is slow enough that latency doesn't matter. Maybe I'm missing something.
Ironically, playing a few minutes on the OnLive trial made me interested in buying and downloading the real game via Steam, and made me never want to try anything on OnLive again.
BTW: sony will be also offering it , so maybe the tech is ready ?
An open question... What's the big thing he brings to the table? Strategic thinking? Vision? Competitiveness? Respect in the Company? All of the above? What's the best way to harness this? (Ok, that's open questionS)
MS clearly need a rethink, but I'm of the view it's time for Bill to walk away to give more space to the others.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ8Hiss2EkE
Probably more of a honorary title than anything else. I doubt he'll be as active as Microsoft makes it seem. If anything, Microsoft would be smart to let the new CEO follow his own visions, not Gates's visions.
edit: why the down votes? Honest question, parent seems to be implying that its a bad thing that he adjusted to his environment, an environment where clear communication is paramount,.
Typically, it just requires spending time around the person and interacting with them. It doesn't matter where they are from or what sort of accent they have. After a few days, you'll understand them.
And also, an accent has no bearing on intelligence.
Out of curiosity, has anyone ever articulated why your Chinese is hard to understand? Is it tone or phonemes?
Do you mean Nadella's in particular? I didn't think it was that bad. Anyway it's only racist if you think less of a person just because you can't understand them. Remember there are lots of people who can't understand you, either.
He still sounds Indian - eg 'more meaning', 'unbounded' has the emphasis on the vowels which is quite Indian. He also pronounces 'perseverance' differently from an American. I don't think he's putting anything on.
So the point is that accents can evolve naturally over a period if the person makes an attempt. Yes it gets harder as you get older. Just because someone sounds American-ish doesn't mean that they are not speaking it naturally.
A lot of people do not realize that their accent can actually be a hindrance in communication. They might have near perfect grammar but accents do cause a problem. I know this is a controversial topic and even pg got some flak for saying this but a "neutralized" (notice the American spelling) accent is important for communication. If you are a leader/CEO, even more important.
Nadella shows no sign of this. He may not sound "perfectly american" but he's understandable enough for me. In fact, he sounds vaguely European. Keep in mind I am a Hungarian, born in Brazil who learned Hungarian, Portuguese and English in that order. If I can understand him, I suppose Americans will have little trouble ;-)
https://github.com/jp9000/obs-studio
I wish Nadella and Microsoft luck, and hope they make a real turn around.
As a side note it is also exciting to see some more diversity in the top ranks of one of our biggest technology companies. If I were a young aspiring engineer from India, or anywhere in the world really, I'd feel pretty good about the future right now.
Also amazing is that they're publishing and embedding Google YouTube videos on that page.
Because true diversity is people who look different!
I don't want to draw any conclusions, but I have a good feeling about that.
While there are reasonable third-party workarounds for the most pressing problems, the Windows console subsystem could use lots of love.
I also forgot to mention how slow text output is on cmd.exe when compared against terminals like xterm on linux. If the new CEO can improve the windows command line experience I for one would be immensely grateful.
You might have been facetious to prove a point but surprisingly few know you can change those settings there, and I like making my terminal oldschool-hacker-green :)
edit: Actually, I've no idea what I've done but now I can drag the window arbitrarily and it'll just show more characters. Maybe I set a font and now can do it? I don't know!
edit 2: I made it go to 160 characters, then set it back to 80, and now it'll let me drag it out to 160 but no more? This is so confusing Microsoft is on drugs
edit 3: Oh, ok. Screen buffer size sets the 'you can resize to this maximum' whereas screen size sets the 'you start at this size'. I'll stop making edits now.
I'd never even consider using a Windows machine without it.
http://lifehacker.com/5185647/mintty-gives-cygwin-a-native-w...
/sarcasm
If you're from a Unix background, you're probably better off running bash from Cygwin, but if you're a Windows guy, TCC is a great shell.
It's the first thing I install on a Windows machine.
Also, I'm not talking about a posix layer that is all but hidden, I'm talking about making Windows a posix system. Coreutils (or something like it), a free compiler, a terminal.
(Side note: I'm a developer, not an administrator and I use PowerShell as such – I have no clue of how to query AD or manage IIS, but I do know the language very well. I also was a technical reviewer of the PowerShell Cookbook 2nd ed.)
From my experience the language has some quirks (that are being slowly remedied in recent versions, e.g. handling of one-element arrays), but otherwise is quite well designed. The quite consistent naming of cmdlets give you enough hints to figure out what a command would be, if you only knows it exists, e.g. querying things always start with Get, projection is done with Select, etc. In a way, PowerShell is more unixy than traditional Unix utilities in that they really do one thing and only one thing. This can lead some to consider PowerShell overly verbose, because the pipeline often looks like
But to me this is actually nicer because I can concentrate on each part individually and not figure out the switch to ls that tells me the file size. And well, PowerShell passes objects through the pipeline so most of the time you can cut text processing to a minimum because you already get what you need directly (which is not to say that text processing is poor in PowerShell – -match, -replace represent grep and sed and switch -regex is very nice for quickly writing parsers for semi-structured text content).Need to fiddle around with a format string to get it right?
Or need to quickly test a web service whether the new method works correctly? Or quickly figure out whether a license key matches with the lib you have lying around anyway: For me it dramatically reduced the number of ConsoleApplication8624 projects in VS. In any case, if there are questions you can also drop me a mail.That said, I think OSs are irrelevant: people are happy to pay for apps, cloud hosting etc and MS are happy to provide it to them, Windows or not, for money.
Per http://www.unityisplural.com/2012/01/windows-posix-complianc... due to a procurement lawsuit in 1995 the Coast Guard was forced to accept a NT based "open system" bid. I don't know if they actually cared at the time, but the UNIX(TM) losing bidders certainly did, and it certainly made a big difference in subsequent adoption of NT/Windows.
Another lost opportunity. Microsoft could've captured the academic and web-developer market that eventually turned to OS X as a client OS.
However, it's Microsoft's tendency to squeeze and coerce compliance that drove people away. Proprietary everything means you don't play nice with everyone else.
Now the web has leveled the playing field somewhat, and they can't be coercive to be successful. It'll be interesting to see them play will on other companies' turf and platforms.
Still a bit less buzzwordy than Ballmer.
Microsoft already produce some apps for the web, iOS and Android, and Azure can run Linux VMs.
Hopefully they just go wherever people want to pay them, eg, to access MS Office where they need it, even if it isn't via a Windows device.
Anyway good luck be with him - from what I read in his bio he was heading the only part of MS recently that managed to not alienate its customer and developer base.
In the next few weeks, the new CEO will be solidifying everything with Q&As, visiting the various campuses, and announce any new org changes. Org changes will be the big thing that impacts what individual contributors actually do in their jobs. Major changes to the 2014 strategy or goals would be announced soon, but seeing as how it's mid Q1 it's probably going to be changes for Q2 or 2H.
He introduces himself, explains about his way of thinking, tells about his family, for example
It's something MS needs. A fresh departure from Ray Ozzie, who looked like said Good Morning to his wife with a Corporate Memo, or from Ballmer, who, although energetic, didn't have a good aim for things (well, to be fair it's difficult to throw chairs with precision)
New blood will surely bring in fresh ideas and approaches - I hope Microsoft manages to raise the bar even higher and make me an MS evangelist again.
[1] Around this time, he reported to an executive named John M. Thompson, hence the use of middle initials.
It's another thing to pretend he's a robot and has no feelings on the matter, which is what you're implying. I think the original question is a valid one. Clearly he would have thoughts on the matter and they may be interesting to hear.
I know nothing about his career or his decisions WRT the OS/2 product, but, after having a closer look at the other two, a pattern of executive placement as an offensive weapon starts to form.
edit: minor clarifications
Good Lord, that is some serious speculation :)
Unfortunately, per Bill Gates, its 286 was "brain dead chip" and absolutely hopeless and slow in Protected Mode, which is where it needed to run for a modern, large address space computer. As I understand it, the OS/2 inability to abandon the 286/PC-AT for the 386 is what really drove the split.
(It wasn't even IBM that came out with the first major 386 system, but Compaq.)
What I was told by various people who tried this is that Intel had no idea how people actually coded for the x86/weren't willing to make segment sizes larger than the original 64 KiB, and the penalty for loading a new segment register was "tens of cycles" per Wikipedia, I've heard on the order of 40 earlier.
So a lot of existing code bases, including a couple I worked on for PCs (Gosling Emacs and a write once filesystem) ran, or would run, fantastically slower in Protected Mode.
Yeah, sure, you could with no small amount of pain write more efficient code for OS/2 1.x, but why bother after Windows 3.x became a big hit?
Oh, yeah, now you're reminding me that the cost to develop for it was $6K for the SDK in 2013 dollars, plus of course a PC-AT with a lot of memory (at least 1.5 MiB, which wasn't cheap back then, nor was the AT).
It's far-fetched anyway. Belluzzo is much less far-fetched and Elop is pretty obvious.
Scrap Ballmer's toys and go after the big enterprise boys.
That's where the money is :)
Running O365 on Azure has probably substantially improved the platform.
I can't see why Microsoft would take the slightest interest in the mobile software world of 100,000 different $1 crapware products. There's no money in it.
Rovio is one of the most successful mobile developers there is, with annual income of $150 million, across pretty much every mobile platform. They're great at it.
$150 million isn't even visible next to Microsoft's $60 billion yearly income.
What's the future of WPF? What's the road map?
I would love to see Nadella's Microsoft get more involved in open source projects, and win back some developer love that has become lost in darker years.
Bad start.
Instead of using proper unix machines, my early computing years were spent on DOS and Win 3.1.
I certainly would not have agreed that Microsoft ca. 1992 was at all visionary. I felt embarrassed for them and their users back then, much as I would for an adult who shows up at the office proud of the childish fingerpainting he spent the last month making. Grasping, copying, but not visionary.
Interesting that they chose a walk and talk kind of thing, in a completely vacant office. What where they hurrying towards that they couldn't take the time to sit down?
Am I too cynical?
I was just disappointed he didn't hop on the vespa and putter away at the end.
Any startup that sets out to recreate Photoshop would also compete with GIMP and Pixelmator.
GIMP is poor quality.
But barely no one likes Adobe flash. Their software quality is getting lower and lower. Too much bureaucracy always shown in these companies.
I see a clear pattern here.
I'm open to other possible interpretations.
I'm afraid that we'll backtrack all the way back to the 7 days and inhibit progress. It's been shown to happen in the past, and it's not an illegitimate concern, however racist it may seem.
He was educated in the US. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella: "Nadella earned an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business."
[0]: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/exec/nadella/
Wonder if he has read Vikram Seth's Golden Gate. Looks to be an interesting person despite the corpspeak.
By the numbers, Microsoft is still incredibly relevant. At the same time, I can't even remember when I last used any MS product. It's not a boycott, there are simply no points where their stuff intersects with my life. I can imagine I'm not the only one, and that's not a comfortable position to be in for them. However, it's also difficult to see how they could ever break out of that. From where I'm standing they look like a partly consumer-focused IBM: rich, powerful, calcified, eternal, but computing has largely moved on and left them behind.
As a former MS user, I wish them all the success in the world turning this around.
Being one of the only Mac users in my office I constantly have to find work arounds for everything. Sadly they will be relevant for a long time we have almost 30,000 people using windows and they wont be learning anything new for a long time if ever.
I do hope the changing of the guard will help microsoft to build better products that integrate with OS's beside windows.
That's an interesting assumption.
> Microsoft has a massive foothold in enterprise
There is nothing in my comment to suggest otherwise.
On a meta note, I've been getting these "corrections" a lot here on HN lately, I'm just not sure why that's happening. Am I just too sensitive? Should I be more explicit in my comments? I'm not being touchy, I'd really like to know.
> I do hope the changing of the guard will help microsoft to build better products that integrate with OS's beside windows.
Agreed, it would be great if they aimed for integration as a more general goal too.
> Microsoft has a massive foothold in enterprise
> You must not work in the corporate world
You said you never interact with MS products, those products have a massive foothold in the corporate world, therefore you probably do not work in the corporate world.
If you are doing corporate work, not just software development (though even that too) in a corporate setting but business analysis, etc., and you do not use powerpoint/excel/visio then you are very much outside the norm.
>On a meta note, I've been getting these "corrections" a lot here on HN lately, I'm just not sure why that's happening.
The "corrections" as above, are an attempt to offer a different opinion that counteracts yours because it is seen as outside the normal expirience people are having and since you are getting them often I would think that is because there are many aspects of your comments that are outside the norm.
>Am I just too sensitive? Should I be more explicit in my comments?
I don't think so, your comment seems to add a valuable perspective from someone who does not use MS products in their daily activities, pointing that it is possible when surrounded by the right work culture.
But we still have Mac machines, because our customer data comes in in Excel, our applications are written to be compatible with IE8, etc.
If you are a web designer or creative professional I could see how this could be true for your team. My company provides people with a Dell but for those that wish you can BYOD. 98% of people use the company laptop.
In my job, each year I end up in dozens of meetings between corporate executives from different countries around the world. Nowadays, it is true that I see them bringing mostly Macs and iPads.
But this is, in my experience, a rather astonishing change from even 5 years ago, when 95% of the computers I would see these visitors bring would be Windows (and the majority of those still being Windows XP).
The Apple hegemony is still a pretty new thing.
No, it's not you, I'm seeing it a lot as well. Especially the "you actually don't know what you're talking about" threads citing Dunning–Kruger or the equivalent.
EDIT: I don’t mean it’s irrelevant, I just mean your assumption wasn’t really legitimate. There’s now many big companies that only use Microsoft in limited ways, and probably even some that don’t use the software at all.
It's not about integration, for Microsoft it's about migration. Why give customers, who are already well and truly invested, any leeway to migrate part of their infrastructure to a competing product?
Interoperability only makes business sense to allow people to migrate to your product, not when there's a risk of allowing customers to ease moving away from it. Given that they've already taken over the corporate/office world, there's not much left out there to suck in. Most of their battles are now in mobile and in the server room. Both of which they're coming from a losing position.
When these kids grow up and enter the workforce, they will want to use the tools they know, and will not understand the point of in-house Windows sysadmins, or the software licensing fees.
My 21-year old daughter grew up using Microsoft products, and has abandoned them completely. Everything she does is in the cloud, (mostly google, yahoo for email). She enters the workforce in one year.
Whatever the new CEO does, he basically cannot win back a generation that has learned to do office tasks on non-Microsoft products. It's sort of like what happened with GM. They produced absolutely shitty cars in the 80s, and many people who had early experiences with those cars started buying Japanese cars and stayed there. (No, I don't have statistics to cite, that's just my impression and personal experience.)
I give Microsoft ten years until their first quarterly loss.
When your company reaches a certain size, auditors and such will put an end to that.
"This gets backed up where?"
"Where's your antivirus?"
"Why aren't you using _STANDARD_PRODUCTS_?"
etc
Ours never did. Processes, yes, specific brands? No way.
Asking doesn't necessarily facilitate the need to do that thing necessarily.
I am inclined to agree. Already I can see the difference in the new interns and new hires at my job. Many of them are using chrome books at home so they tend to use chrome plugins to do everything at work.
Also professors and departments at universities are starting to use open source products in their curriculum as opposed to the traditional Microsoft suite. Even the school I graduated from uses google for email.
Hahah - If i had a penny for every time I've heard that. I'm an apple user myself - but MS offers all of what you are describing your daughter to be using as well - in fact I know many companies are already rolling their staff onto Office360 and so on. As for google docs etc - if you ever had to really crunch data - nothing comes close to Excel even today. I'm not saying they should keep doing what they are doing - I do think it's foolish to assume that they dont know whats going on in the world outside and aren't capable to grow with it.
I agree that google doc products are inferior to MS Office. (I find that Libre Office is good enough for me.) It's a funny argument to bring up though. Ignoring the cheaper, inferior alternative is exactly what led to Microsoft's dominance over IBM.
But Microsoft is not ignoring Google Docs. The Office web apps are also free, have more features than Google Docs, and have better compatibility with Office files. Microsoft is even bundling desktop Office for free with certain tablets, such as the Dell Venue 8 Pro.
There have always been cheaper products. Microsoft even used to sell one. Back when Office was $500, Works was $100. And yet -- even back then, companies opted to pay the extra money for Office.
The only difference now is that the lower-priced product is free. But as a percentage of the worker's salary, Microsoft Office has actually gotten cheaper over time.
Desktop versions are close irrelevant to this discussion.
Office web apps are completely irrelevant, I think. I've never met anyone who has ever used them. 100% of people I know who use web apps use Google's.
Office 365 (not 360) already generates over a billion dollars in annual revenues -- and that includes the desktop versions of Office. Even the consumer version of Office 365 Office has already sold about 2 million subscriptions.
And there are 50 million users of the Office web apps. If you don't know any of them, then perhaps you should think about whether your own experiences are skewed, and unrepresentative of what's actually happening out in the marketplace.
Most people don't, that's why it doesn't matter. I volunteer as treasurer of a cub scout pack. We switched from Excel to Google docs spreadsheet. We're using about 1/1000th the power and limitations of google docs, and google's capabilities are expanding faster than our needs are expanding. I don't care if Excel would be "better" because we'd only need 1/100000th its capabilities or it would take 20 times longer to learn how to use.
Most business tasks run into exactly the same scaling issue.
Business decisions are never made by qualified techs on the basis of pessimism, they're always by completely technologically unqualified managers in a hurry on the basis of optimism.
> there are simply no points where their stuff intersects with my life.
As to your other point: Microsoft is big. A "general trajectory" is very vague at their scale. Failure in one area (mobile, tablet) does not imply failure in another (enterprise), or indeed overall. I don't see what's wrong with trying to find a CEO who can turnaround that failure, and don't think it's really indicative of anything other than a missed opportunity.
I'm not asserting MS is failing. We basically agree though that there are areas where a turnaround would be exceedingly beneficial or even actually needed. I was trying to illustrate something about those areas, namely that I'd like MS to come back and make contributions to things I care about. It's not selfish, it was merely a wish to make our ecosystem richer again. And I wouldn't have guessed this opinion to be that controversial, but here we go.
Your argument is: because you don't see their products intersecting with your life, and - you imagine - that of many others, you imagine that's an undesirable position for them to be in, and that computing has largely moved on and left them behind.
I'm pointing out that your argument is focused on one niche -- a big one, but by all means not one that makes them "left behind" just because they have a small presence within it.
Perhaps you think Walmart [1a] is irrelevant and left behind because you never shop there? Or that Apple [1b] is irrelevant and left behind because you don't own an i*device/service?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_re...
[1a] The largest US company by revenue
[1b] The largest US company by market cap
Oh, and I use (and enjoy) Windows 8.
So, yes, people like you exist. But so do people like me.
You don't use Twitter or Facebook (their auto-translations are powered by Bing)? You don't play games? You don't use Skype?
I can believe these happen to be possible for you, but if they are, it seems like you're the outlier rather than the average.
Or
What suggestions would you give Satya, if you were to meet him today?
Recognise that operating systems are less relevant than they were and port everything to everywhere. This means dev tools, Office, etc. People will pay for Visual Studio on the Mac and on Linux if it's the same experience as it is on Windows.
De-complexify Windows and focus on its number one use case: Office. Windows is essentially a platform for running Office and playing games.
Buy Oculus VR.
Not sure if they are good suggestions or not for the business but they would certainly help me out!
Microsoft under Ballmer has been a study in short attention span. Changing themes, names, and directions every three to five years. When I was a Windows sysadmin back in the day, it was incredibly frustrating to build anything on the Microsoft platform because by the time you wrapped your brain around the new way of doing things, the next server OS release would change everything. From what I've seen since I moved on to a different career, that pattern hasn't changed.
Apple's success has come from a laser focus and constant improvement for the past 17 years. Microsoft used to be similarly focused. Remember the old adage that Microsoft would get it right by Version Three, and wipe out the competition? Well, they haven't stuck to any particular plan for long enough to come up with a version three of anything in 15 years.
Hell, Microsoft pioneered tablet computers, but after some promising early models and some decent push into the innovation required, they kind of just let that project wither on the vine until Apple came up with a workable model. Then MS desperately tried to pivot and turn everything, even the server OS, into a tablet-and-desktop-friendly mess.
Remember Zune? Remember Live? Remember the Kin??
I look forward to Microsoft finding their own perspective not only in hardware, but in software/search as well.
We should be very careful about criticizing others for their failed products. The side-effect of experimentation and innovation is that some of the experiments will result in failure to find market fit. Market fit failure isn't a good thing for a company, but it's much worse to not experiment at all.
For that matter, the Zune was a (late) iPod clone; sure, it had some experimental features (that didn't pan out, but, hey, they tried), but it was hardly seriously innovative.
It also was yet another example in how you'd best not trust Microsoft, as part of it they threw their PlaysForSure ecosystem under the bus.
Hmmm, getting whole sectors of the world to trust Microsoft in the future is going to be a tall order for the next CEO, assuming he doesn't just punt on many of them, which might be the wisest thing to do.
A small startup that gets squished by larger competition has an excuse as to why it shut down services and let down it's customers. Microsoft has no such excuse. They failed to compete, then the failed their customers. Innovation is wasted if it's improperly handled.
Zune could have been a good brand but rather than sticking to their guns, they abandoned it. Live was another unifying brand that they gave up on too quickly in favor of new rebrandings -- Bing, Office365, etc.
My point is that the constant jumping from idea to idea and rebranding instead of sticking with good ideas and revising until they're successful is a pattern of the Ballmer years that is a big part of Microsoft's lack of impact in the computing world over the past 5-10 years as Apple and Google and Amazon have risen to the forefront.
I always thought that was GO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GO_Corp.
Although I suspect more people know about GO from Jerry Kaplan's book Startup than from their products.
[...]
> Apple's success has come from a laser focus and constant improvement for the past 17 years.
Really? OS 9, OS X, iOS? Sure, it's not quite the same number of platforms as Microsoft have done in that time. But I don't think that they're on polar opposites of the spectrum here as you suggest (nor do I think that being at one end of this spectrum is necessarily good).
When Apple bought NeXT and Steve Jobs took over as CEO, the OSX project was born at that moment. Before that Apple had been stabbing wildly in the dark for a solution to their outdated OS, with a bunch of failed efforts at a rewrite. Yes, they updated the old MacOS a couple of times, which needed to happen, but as soon as OSX was ready for prime timee, they made the switch.
iOS is to some extent based on the same internals as OSX, but even if it were a completely different architecture, I'd say it's actually a good example of Apple's focus. Rather than forcing crossover and synergy where it doesn't make sense (ie, forcing the Metro interface onto the desktop and server, without actually providing Metro interfaces to their most popular desktop apps or server tools), Apple created separate OSes for devices that have completely different roles.
A Nokia Lumia 520 is dirt-cheap and has an FM tuner.
All you have to do is to pretend that it isn't also a phone.
You said you were looking for an MP3 player with FM radio, and couldn't find one. I just meant that you could've found what you needed by expanding your search to include phones.
Either way, thanks for the suggestion.
There is nothing wrong with the guy wearing suits to work if he wants, but it seems that they're trying unnecessarily hard to make him fit some sort of cool geek stereotype.