Open sourcing the C# compiler represents a fair amount of effort (code cleansing, IP review, license selection/compliance checking, etc) -- likely more work than could be completed in Nadella's short tenure. Therefore, it is likely that the compiler had been prepared, and his actions represent the long standing desires of the technical staff that were ignored/denied by Ballmer. Ditto goes for the iPad version of Office. As such, I wouldn't say these moves represent Nadella's changing the company, as much as him ending Ballmer's repression.
I'd find this to be the most likely scenario, have met lots of Microsoft employees and a surprising number of them were on board with open source + acknowledging mistakes. I'd love to think that it wasn't his performance that drove Ballmer out so much as his mismatch for the actual corporate culture of those beneath him.
It does sound like they were debating this for quite a while. Eric Lippert used to work on the C# compiler and published a blog post[1] immediately after the announcement:
Since I always knew that open sourcing was a possibility I tried to write my portions of it as cleanly and clearly as possible; hopefully I succeeded.
Keep in mind that Satya was running the Tools Division that makes the C# compiler, before he became CEO. So if the preparation you speak of had been happening, it was still happening under Satya.
My suspicion is that Ballmer's departure was choreographed to coincide with seemingly "sudden" 360 to make it seem like some sort of internal revolution instead of a carefully planned business strategy. I certainly appreciate it. As a career c# developer it has given me some sort of new cred around the office like I was on the inside track on something cool instead of a guy who was hooked on some lame corporate language.
Right. Unlikely that anything was done carelessly, and in the end, Ballmer had to go, even if he was a great CEO - only a new, hip CEO could get people's attention and project a new image. And they'd been building up to that moment (when they could withstand the world's attention for a while) - the new logo, the product and web visual unification, etc etc.
I think most of the people who find Microsoft as a sinister mega-corporation forget the majority of work force in Microsoft are developers and share the "culture" with developer community in general. I read Scott Hanselman blogging that Microsoft is too damn unorganized to come with a master evil plan. I think the Nixonian conspiracy lot of Microsoft bashers use to portray is mostly their imagination.
I don't think it is sinister, or a conspiracy, just the kind of coordinated rebranding and messaging modern corporations do all the time. I don't think it takes a PR genius to say "why don't we wait until after Ballmer leaves before we roll out our new initiatives, while the new CEO is still in his honeymoon stage". Microsoft 2.0, finally emerging, instead of poor old Ballmer, always late to the party with hamfisted plans.
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist,[1] although the general concept is much older.[2] The observation has also been called "Davis' law"[3][4] or just the "journalistic principle".[5]
If that law did hold at any time, could it possibly still hold now? I would think that at least some headline writers would be somewhat genre-savvy, and would write headlines specifically to subvert this line of thought. Example:
If you pick apart the intent of the law, rather than getting caught up in literal semantics, you'll see that the law is suggesting that when a headline asks a question intending to cast doubt or contradiction on some accepted fact, paradigm or otherwise, that the doubt itself can be called into question because if were based on any solid evidence, then it would not be presented as a question but rather as a statement of fact. Hence it still applies to your example without contradicting the intent of the law; in your case "yes" is the correct answer.
Agreed, I'm just trying to say that the apparent "exception" quoted by the parent, while seeming to contradict Betteridge's Law, actually doesn't really contradict the law when you attempt to interpret the spirit of the law without getting into semantics.
It's not too late as long as they're still in business. Market share changes happen so rapidly in these industries. You can lose a huge chunk of market share in two or three years, but you can gain it back just as quickly. For a long time it looked like Apple was going to be dominant in the smartphone market even though Android had already started to show up on handsets. But very very quickly the cell phone industry in its entirety adopted Android - because of its low price and lack of licensing restrictions - and it outgrew the iPhone in terms of market share very rapidly. Same thing could happen with Microsoft.
Of course, then there's BlackBerry...
I'd be a bit worried if I were Apple. They are still making money hand over fist - and the market is big enough that you can be extremely profitable even if you aren't dominant in market share. But having to compete with one free operating system is hard enough. Now they will have to compete with two. It's like a replay of the OS wars in the 80s and 90s. Things could change quickly.
Actually if anyone should worry it would be Google. Microsofts play here is very much like Google's, offer a free OS for a variety of phone hardware companies and make money off of the services and app sales. Microsoft can offer a better OS and app store than google but still be on just as many pieces of hardware. Windows 8.1 on a phone is actually a better experience in a lot of ways than Android 4.4 already and it's just going to continue to go that way IMO.
100% spot on. Google is the one people need to be worried about.
Should Siri and Cordova get to the point that people stop going to the browser to search then it could severely impact Google's mobile revenues. And what happens if Microsoft doubles down on Bing and convinces Apple to make it the default ? Android may have a large market share but iOS has a disproportionate share of browser usage.
Google has a lot of enemies and zero friends. Precarious place to be in.
'Zero friends' is a strong statement, don't you think?
IMHO, Google is in its adolescence as a company. Its values of "don't be evil", transparency, etcetera are in the right place. Google has many bright and good-hearted people in its employ, and it's in them that I have the greatest faith.
Cloud-hosted services and social networks, Google among them, are only beginning to work out their strengths, weaknesses, and consequences of their actions.
But when I see how easily-rooted Android and Chrome OS are, Google's resistance to censorship in some countries, epidemiology outreach and more, I'm reminded that while there is darkness implicit in any company's great store of information, in Google's case there is a capacity and willingness to do good at scale. For that, I remain an optimist.
For me this is not about whether it is too late or not, but what is the underlying motive? We can agree that these recent changes and releases are superficially good but what is the long term impact? Is this just another ploy to lock people into their office/cloud platform and/or tooling because they've decided that the operating system game is over?
This gift horse deserves a good look in the mouth.
Last I checked, they're still trying to go after open source projects to squeeze patent money from them - so I'd say no, it isn't a "new" company. It just has new PR tactics: "Look at us, we released one open source app - we're basically now a kitten-loving company".
If you set the bar at "regain their 1990s level dominance", yeah that probably won't ever happen. But so what? Given where they're at, an outcome such as "don't end up another RIM et al" is perfectly reasonable. To put it in context, their odds are better than most startups.
They have a huge amount of cash on hand. The cash cows will throw off billions before they finally dry up. Although they've had a talent drain, that trend is likely to reverse somewhat.
Also, they are creating new cash cows to replace the old ones. While maybe the windows licenses is no more the big one, now azure is becoming it, Xbox(/devices) division is finally becoming profitable, office license model is being replaced by subscription model very easily, etc etc
Long story short: As you I think they will never become again "monopolist" in a market (and I am happy about this), but I think they will still be one of the main protagonists in it for very long time (and I am happy also about this).
Do you work in an enterprise ? Because I can't remember the last time I've seen a Word or Excel doc and work emails are often ignored. Increasingly business wikis and social networks are the norm. It's why I see Microsoft's acquisition of Yammer and Skype as brilliant acquisitions and OneNote and lighter Office 365 apps as their future.
Microsoft if they were really smart would acquire Atlassian and Evernote and look at taking over Wave.
I've worked in several fortune 500 companies over the past 5 years. Yes, wikis are becoming more common, but MS Office is deeply engrained in nearly every corporation I ever worked for.
It's easy when you deal with technology every day to say you don't see Excel spreadsheets and ignore your email, but for most people whose lives don't revolve around technology like you and me, this is all they know. I was just at a huge corporation and do you know how they handled their project management? With emails and Excel spreadsheets. They had just started doing Agile and even then, no plans to buy a software package like Atlassian, just keep on with the spreadsheets approach.
The company I'm at now? I privately held multimillion dollar company. We're in the process of a 2 year ERP project. How did the company they hire do it? Excel spreadsheets and email.
Sad but true. Considering companies like Atlassian have some amazing tools both companies really need and could really utilize, the sales job is an uphill battle.
Yes, and believe me the business world at large still runs on Windows/Office from top to bottom. I work at a major financial institution on a data team and we log into Windows 7, open up Excel, log it into our SSAS cube, make pretty graphs and tables, put the results into Power Point, and then send through Exchange to the execs. It will take a very long time to overcome that kind of momentum.
Oh I don't, it's a system that works quite well for us. I was adding a counterpoint to this statement: "Increasingly business wikis and social networks are the norm." I don't believe that to be the case outside of silicon valley, unless you count the stampede of completely terrible sharepoint implementations we have floating around. But I don't think that is what the poster of that statement was referring to.
Yes, I can't imagine a modern company of practically any size that doesn't revolve around Word and Excel as the cornerstone of the technology behind their business processes.
Of all the big players in 2014, none are as diversified as Microsoft - they have Windows, XBox, Enterprise, Office, Mobile, Azure - all of which would be huge businesses even on their own. Hence you could argue they are a lot less vulnerable than people assume them to be.
They're traditionally heavily interdependent on each other and almost mutually inclusive.
Traditionally if you use Enterprise, you must use Exchange, you must use Office, you must use Windows, etc. You could fudge it and try to use other tools, but it was generally a complete PITA.
It's getting better than that (Azure for example & node.js), but the change has come in the last 3 years or so and as someone else noted in thread, that they could open source so much stuff so rapidly shows there was a lot of departments chomping at the bit to start decoupling themselves and moving forward.
Their various units, with the exception of Xbox, are mutually reinforcing. If you don't use Office, there is little reason to use SharePoint. If you don't use Exchange, AD or SQL Server, there is little reason to use Windows servers. If you don't use Office, there is no reason to use Windows. If you don't use a Microsoft stack, Azure has little special appeal to you.
If one or two of their businesses fail, the rest will crumble.
The lynchpin is Office. Microsoft realizes that Windows is no longer ascendant. It's a post-PC world. But Office, thanks in part to Microsoft's efforts is successfully sabotaging the ISO standards decisions (OOXML vs. OpenDocument), is still a near-requirement - you at least need to be able to open .doc and .xls files.
I still expect Microsoft will treat Windows as "first among equals" similar to how Google treats Chrome for enhanced web features (not unlike how Apple did with Safari), but it's no longer going to be Windows-only.
Microsoft is showing a lot of clue lately. I would not count them out.
As much as I'm genuinely excited and sincerely optimistic about the great work from their developer group (e.g., the open source announcements this week), I also feel that their "if you can't compete on product, slander" negative ad campaigns (e.g., scroogled) will continue to hold Microsoft back as a company and as a culture.
This engineer, for example, would never consider going back and working there again as long as their executives think that negativity is a good business policy. And ultimately, their employees can (and have) voted with their feet.
Fix that, though, and yes, Microsoft is very much capable of reinventing itself for a new era.
Edit: To clarify, I'm sure that there are some readers who agree with the particular points raised in these negative campaigns. Generally speaking, I don't, but that's not my point here.
What bothers me is when, rather than promoting the values of one's own product, companies try to (sometimes even hypocritically) find or invent flaws in the competition instead. Be humble and respectful of your competitors and customers alike, build the best product you can (better than the competition if possible), and win on merit. I truly believe the talented, hard-working engineers deserve that much.
The first headline on that page is about google being accused of "wiretapping in gmail scans". Didn't both companies knowingly participate in mass spying along side the government? As far as I'm concerned, neither company is trustworthy. Who cares what a virtual document says in this day and age.
>Microsoft asks for explicit permission for any information sharing in their OS and software.
I just don't believe it. I can't believe it. For one thing, we know they're helping the government spy on people. But that doesn't matter, because if I sat down with just about any randomly selected windows user, they would have no idea what the MS TOS says, or any TOS associated with MS. I've never been using a MS service and had a pop-up come up and explicitly tell me they're sending my info to x y x.
IMHO we should do away with TOS altogether and rather than individuals having to agree to all sorts of crap they don't understand, the corporations should have to follow a TOS written by some consortium of smart tech-minded people and not bought and sold congressmen and lawyers.
edit: and also, how does the MS TOS work when I access a MS based server and upload information to it? I'm assuming it comes down to what the service providers TOS says, but then doesn't every service running on a windows based server need to have you agree to both the windows TOS and their TOS before taking your information (even if you agree to one TOS within another TOS)? Serious question.
Well, I like having the option to say "no", even if most users don't know to do so.
> For one thing, we know they're helping the government spy on people.
The NSA used windows error reporting, which works by sending stack dumps to Microsoft.
The use of Windows Error Reporting is opt-in.
> ...the corporations should have to follow a TOS written by some consortium of smart tech-minded people and not bought and sold congressmen and lawyers ...
We should have better privacy laws that treat personal information as a valuable user-owned commodity that can't be aggregated and sold; the dangers inherent in a self-sufficient private surveillance apparatus are just too staggering:
- It is far too easily co-opted by the state, as evidenced by NSA revelations.
- The power and information asymmetry between individuals and corporations can easily grow to the point where fair trade is simply not viable. A hypothetical:
- Google knows the contents of your e-mails
- Google has cookies in your browser
- Google knows where you log in from
- Google notices that you (or your business) is planning
a trip.
- Google sells this information to the airlines
- The airlines adjust their rates based on the perceived likelihood
of your paying the higher or lower rate, based on insider knowledge
of your income and need.
This is hardly science fiction in a world where Target knows its customers are pregnant before their immediate family does.
Google (and others) are already tracking you around the web, reading your communications, hosting your corporate e-mail. Google Analytics is in everything.
"The power of individual targeting — the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them," says Eric Schmidt.
I find it hard to understand how you would be against Microsoft pointing out an obviously bad thing Google has done (in reference specifically to them altering the behavior of their shopping product). Since when is it a bad thing to highlight differences between your and competing products? In many cases your competition are the only ones with the resources to effectively alert your customers to such a change. This is market forces at work.
>I also feel that their "if you can't compete on product, slander" negative ad campaigns (e.g., scroogled) will continue to hold Microsoft back as a company and as a culture.
Well wouldn't the PC vs MAC ads be similarly slander? Apple got away with it, heck it even increased its sales, and for a long period of time, not only was it listed on Apple's website but it was also the general consensus that owning a MAC meant not worrying about viruses.
Despite most people (including me) disliking these slander commercials (especially political), they kept being made because they are effective and they work.
The "Get a Mac" campaign portrayed the PC as a lovable, if incompetent and comic, laughable even, character. You can feel sympathy for him. The "Gmail Man" portrays Google doing some frankly disgusting things.
>The "Get a Mac" campaign portrayed the PC as a lovable, if incompetent and comic, laughable even, character.
That is totally subjective. Some may have viewed him as "lovable" but others viewed him as "ignorant", "unclassy" and "filthy" similar to how someone could take the "Gmail Man" as "funny", "sarcastic" and simply "nosy".
Any platform can win if they win the developers and thus a thriving platform. Microsoft has been repelling developers for the past decade but most recently it is now attracting them with more open broad market technologies.
They built their platforms/empire on developers first originally, every platform since has also done this. The signals out of the new Microsoft seems to be old school developer love.
They are pushing people to their new 'OS' Azure, higher up the stack, and their tools push you in that way. But they are no longer religious about the language, platform, code, etc. This supports their tools, cloud and ultimately platform. But they have to reconvince developers that they won't grow distance again.
Is it too late is just a headline to attract readers.
Microsoft (in contrary to the general believe here) is doing very well. Their profits are good, XBox is attracting and etc..
They do have some marketing issues concerning Windows Phone and Windows 8. But don't over eggagerate... Windows is the most used platform on desktops and servers (definatly in SMB's, because not the whole world is a fortune 500 company and has their own IT departement). People who are running MAC are using dualboot or Parallels to use Windows and Microsoft gets a lot of money from mobile (even though it is Android mostly).
Their profits are up in the business sector and with Azure, they have a great platform (i use it myselve) and with Bizspark, they help startups in their most critical period.
The only thing that is changing, is that microsoft is more open and are improving their public image. But that's affecting the IT knowledgable persons more then anyone else.
People who have non-it jobs don't really care about the difference and i see even a trend where IT knowledgable persons don't want anything to do with businesses like Apple.
In that extent, i see more and more people countering Apple then Microsoft. (I'm speaking from a personal view in Belgium, the observations i have from talking with my parents and my non-IT friends, i don't know for sure how it is outside of Belgium.)
For example, the hardware stores who have almost no access to Apple devices (and if they do, a very limited profit margin and a lot more hassle) and people who give lessons in using a tablet to other people, who have expressed their concerns about Apple are just 2 examples i can think of)
>People who have non-it jobs don't really care about the difference [..]
You're right, however, if I tell my mother that 'Apple is better than a PC running windows' over the course of 10 years; then very time she talks to someone about buying a new computer she'll remember that..
The only reason microsoft is the dominant platform is because of inertia.
if we were able to retrofit a generation of people with knowledge of other operating systems then I very much doubt microsoft would have even half of it's market share, since it's main merits are backwards-compatibility and very few of the applications that run on top of windows adhere to the same principles anyway.
Your mom will say something in the line of: my son said that...
But still, when they buy a computer in the hardware store, the chances are plausible they would advice against Apple. From a business view, they don't have any interests in earning less. So advicing Apple would be bad for them.
Your mom's friends would still buy a Windows PC, after she talked to the salesman. And still, if they give her a possibility of a Windows PC and a MAC in front of her. Your mom's friend would recognize Windows and will buy what she is more associated with. The most used sales pitch for hardware salesmen is probably: you can have your classic menu back with that app.
Reprogramming is harder then you think, although i have to admit, i have never seen a company do it so fast (referring to Apple + Mobile, not OS)
If my mom's friend was put in front of OS X and Windows 8.1 (giving the start menu the benefit of the doubt), she'd find OS X to look much more like the computer she knows than Windows. Even Microsoft is acknowledging that with the return of the start button and recently revealed return of the start menu.
My wife is a psychologist who works in HR. She hates Word. She hates Excel (and the monstrosities people do with it as excuses not to call the IT people to build something for them). And don't get her started on SharePoint. Or Windows ("a confusing mess").
The video game market basically resets every five years with a new generation of consoles. Totally different from software platforms, where consumers stick to an old choice because they have legacy software written for it.
A puff piece. All the significant announcements made since Nadella took office will have been in the pipeline for months if not years. You don't port Office to iPad in 8 weeks.
I must admit that I'm a little surprised at the number of people who have been so keen to heap praise on Microsoft recently.
I'm very glad that they are making moves towards increasing openness and collaborating more with other ecosystems. From my perspective, software development has always felt like it was split into two camps: the "open source" platform, and the "Microsoft" one, with developers working across both being pretty rare in my experience. Being able to break down those barriers and maybe starting to see genuine cross-platform Microsoft technologies is really, really exciting.
However, I'm convinced it's prudent to remain cautious. Microsoft have a long and colourful history of doing real damage to open standards, free software, and their own business partners. Even their development community has been harmed by repeated changes of direction in their development efforts – damage which is made worse by that fact that the ecosystem is traditionally so closed. Maybe we are seeing a core of developers who are actually too young to have experienced this firsthand, or at least with limited experience of other platforms, who are a little less skeptical.
Anyway, Microsoft's recent bout of openness is nothing but a good thing. It'll be a while before I'm comfortable deploying a cross-platform app on .NET, but baby steps…
To make windows machines truly useable they should create a good shell. I would even go as far as to say they should install and set up python natively. If I am not using MS technology there is no reason to use a windows OS. Of course I realize a huge percentage of users are not developers.
Right now Microsoft reminds me of GM. Capable of producing a good car model or two for a few years when the boss is really focusing the entire company around this. But utterly incapable of across-the-board Toyota-level quality. I'm asked every once in a while why I don't buy this or that American car and I respond (thinking about the decades of bad cars GM and Ford produced), "when most of the lineup a company puts out is clearly reliable and of high quality, and they can do this over two model generations, then I'll think about it." Because this means that the entire company culture has changed, and they've managed to sustain it. A bad care is then an anomaly.
Actually, I think Ford is pretty close to this. Hyundai is a very good example of this culture change. It wasn't all that long ago that people were afraid of driving their Hyundais at Highway speeds, now they build quality vehicles across the entire lineup and have for 3 or 4 complete model generations.
Right now Microsoft has a couple open source projects, a couple multi-platform projects, and the rest is still more or less old Microsoft. They've killed Stack Rankings, which I think is helping lead to some of these new changes. But the across-the-board Microsoft still looks like Microsoft from 10-15 years ago. If they can implement this kind of "new friendlier Microsoft" across the entire company, and do it for two major version changes across all products, I think then and only then can we consider Microsoft a new company.
It might be, perhaps probably is, too late for Windows Phone. This might be the last generation of high-end game consoles. Buying Nokia was a bad idea. But those things are not existential threats.
Microsoft has a long way to go in other areas, such as embracing the right side of DRM, patent, and open source.
But there is no chance of Microsoft becoming RIM in the next five years. Microsoft could suck in an ocean of money just by raising the price of enterprise-oriented editions of Windows.
They have plenty of time, and many very good people.
> By this same logic, Google is too late to the enterprise and will fail.
It very well might be.
Google had been making a huge push to try and get "enterprise" companies to use Google Docs in place of Microsoft Office. I can only imagine that effort suffered a major setback in the wake of NSA revelations.
I can't see how any serious business would trust private data to "the cloud" today.
At least if they subpoena you directly, you're aware of it, and your lawyers can fight back. They'll probably still lose, but it's better than having your data slurped up secretly behind your back.
I think most of this considering the work required was Ballmer's last push..Remember BG is still on the board, and the tell he gave in indicating disagreement with Ballmer was the lack of thanks when Ballmer left.
Let me tell you why it might be this way. Ballmer was behind the push to settle with the DOJ and the States over BG's objections..its why BG ws asked to leave Chairmen spot.
If it was Ballmer's push than its not anew company..just a small pivot..
95 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadYou are correct. During the build conference there were several mentions of Project Rosyln being a 3-4 year old endeavor.
Next comes the real excitement.
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist,[1] although the general concept is much older.[2] The observation has also been called "Davis' law"[3][4] or just the "journalistic principle".[5]
If you get shot in the head at point blank range with a Magnum 44 then is it likely to be life threatening?
:-)
Of course, then there's BlackBerry...
I'd be a bit worried if I were Apple. They are still making money hand over fist - and the market is big enough that you can be extremely profitable even if you aren't dominant in market share. But having to compete with one free operating system is hard enough. Now they will have to compete with two. It's like a replay of the OS wars in the 80s and 90s. Things could change quickly.
Should Siri and Cordova get to the point that people stop going to the browser to search then it could severely impact Google's mobile revenues. And what happens if Microsoft doubles down on Bing and convinces Apple to make it the default ? Android may have a large market share but iOS has a disproportionate share of browser usage.
Google has a lot of enemies and zero friends. Precarious place to be in.
IMHO, Google is in its adolescence as a company. Its values of "don't be evil", transparency, etcetera are in the right place. Google has many bright and good-hearted people in its employ, and it's in them that I have the greatest faith.
Cloud-hosted services and social networks, Google among them, are only beginning to work out their strengths, weaknesses, and consequences of their actions.
But when I see how easily-rooted Android and Chrome OS are, Google's resistance to censorship in some countries, epidemiology outreach and more, I'm reminded that while there is darkness implicit in any company's great store of information, in Google's case there is a capacity and willingness to do good at scale. For that, I remain an optimist.
This gift horse deserves a good look in the mouth.
If you set the bar at "regain their 1990s level dominance", yeah that probably won't ever happen. But so what? Given where they're at, an outcome such as "don't end up another RIM et al" is perfectly reasonable. To put it in context, their odds are better than most startups.
They have a huge amount of cash on hand. The cash cows will throw off billions before they finally dry up. Although they've had a talent drain, that trend is likely to reverse somewhat.
Long story short: As you I think they will never become again "monopolist" in a market (and I am happy about this), but I think they will still be one of the main protagonists in it for very long time (and I am happy also about this).
Microsoft if they were really smart would acquire Atlassian and Evernote and look at taking over Wave.
It's easy when you deal with technology every day to say you don't see Excel spreadsheets and ignore your email, but for most people whose lives don't revolve around technology like you and me, this is all they know. I was just at a huge corporation and do you know how they handled their project management? With emails and Excel spreadsheets. They had just started doing Agile and even then, no plans to buy a software package like Atlassian, just keep on with the spreadsheets approach.
The company I'm at now? I privately held multimillion dollar company. We're in the process of a 2 year ERP project. How did the company they hire do it? Excel spreadsheets and email.
Sad but true. Considering companies like Atlassian have some amazing tools both companies really need and could really utilize, the sales job is an uphill battle.
Traditionally if you use Enterprise, you must use Exchange, you must use Office, you must use Windows, etc. You could fudge it and try to use other tools, but it was generally a complete PITA.
It's getting better than that (Azure for example & node.js), but the change has come in the last 3 years or so and as someone else noted in thread, that they could open source so much stuff so rapidly shows there was a lot of departments chomping at the bit to start decoupling themselves and moving forward.
If one or two of their businesses fail, the rest will crumble.
I still expect Microsoft will treat Windows as "first among equals" similar to how Google treats Chrome for enhanced web features (not unlike how Apple did with Safari), but it's no longer going to be Windows-only.
Microsoft is showing a lot of clue lately. I would not count them out.
This engineer, for example, would never consider going back and working there again as long as their executives think that negativity is a good business policy. And ultimately, their employees can (and have) voted with their feet.
Fix that, though, and yes, Microsoft is very much capable of reinventing itself for a new era.
Edit: To clarify, I'm sure that there are some readers who agree with the particular points raised in these negative campaigns. Generally speaking, I don't, but that's not my point here.
What bothers me is when, rather than promoting the values of one's own product, companies try to (sometimes even hypocritically) find or invent flaws in the competition instead. Be humble and respectful of your competitors and customers alike, build the best product you can (better than the competition if possible), and win on merit. I truly believe the talented, hard-working engineers deserve that much.
Why do you think Scroogled is slander? Some of this stuff seems pretty accurate:
http://www.scroogled.com/privacy
By comparison, Microsoft asks for explicit permission for any information sharing in their OS and software.
The first headline on that page is about google being accused of "wiretapping in gmail scans". Didn't both companies knowingly participate in mass spying along side the government? As far as I'm concerned, neither company is trustworthy. Who cares what a virtual document says in this day and age.
>Microsoft asks for explicit permission for any information sharing in their OS and software.
I just don't believe it. I can't believe it. For one thing, we know they're helping the government spy on people. But that doesn't matter, because if I sat down with just about any randomly selected windows user, they would have no idea what the MS TOS says, or any TOS associated with MS. I've never been using a MS service and had a pop-up come up and explicitly tell me they're sending my info to x y x.
IMHO we should do away with TOS altogether and rather than individuals having to agree to all sorts of crap they don't understand, the corporations should have to follow a TOS written by some consortium of smart tech-minded people and not bought and sold congressmen and lawyers.
edit: and also, how does the MS TOS work when I access a MS based server and upload information to it? I'm assuming it comes down to what the service providers TOS says, but then doesn't every service running on a windows based server need to have you agree to both the windows TOS and their TOS before taking your information (even if you agree to one TOS within another TOS)? Serious question.
Well, I like having the option to say "no", even if most users don't know to do so.
> For one thing, we know they're helping the government spy on people.
The NSA used windows error reporting, which works by sending stack dumps to Microsoft.
The use of Windows Error Reporting is opt-in.
> ...the corporations should have to follow a TOS written by some consortium of smart tech-minded people and not bought and sold congressmen and lawyers ...
We should have better privacy laws that treat personal information as a valuable user-owned commodity that can't be aggregated and sold; the dangers inherent in a self-sufficient private surveillance apparatus are just too staggering:
- It is far too easily co-opted by the state, as evidenced by NSA revelations.
- The power and information asymmetry between individuals and corporations can easily grow to the point where fair trade is simply not viable. A hypothetical:
This is hardly science fiction in a world where Target knows its customers are pregnant before their immediate family does.Google (and others) are already tracking you around the web, reading your communications, hosting your corporate e-mail. Google Analytics is in everything.
The end-game just doesn't seem ideal here.
It's truly not: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/08/eric-schmidt-on-fut...
"The power of individual targeting — the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them," says Eric Schmidt.
Even if Microsoft is hypocritical, that doesn't magically turn what they're claiming into "slander".
It just demonstrates that their arguments against an advertising-driven vertically integrated Google cloud can also apply to their own cloud services.
By comparison, no, Microsoft doesn't stand up very well. That's what none of the Microsoft apologists don't seem to understand:
Microsoft Fined $731 Million by EU Over Browser Accord (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-06/microsoft-fined-731...)
Microsoft sniffed blogger's Hotmail account to trace leak (http://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-sniffed-bloggers-hotmail-...)
Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results (http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-...)
Microsoft is Attacking Free Software and Standards in the UK, Behind Closed Doors (http://techrights.org/2012/04/17/leakage-of-dirty-tricks/)
Microsoft Has Hired 1,000 ‘Viral Marketers’ to Astroturf the Xbox One & PS4 Launches (http://furiousfanboys.com/2013/11/microsoft-has-hired-1000-v...)
Microsoft changes its story, concedes death of Zune hardware (http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/04/microsoft_changes_...)
But that is mostly thanks to Google and Facebook setting the bar very, very low.
Well wouldn't the PC vs MAC ads be similarly slander? Apple got away with it, heck it even increased its sales, and for a long period of time, not only was it listed on Apple's website but it was also the general consensus that owning a MAC meant not worrying about viruses.
Despite most people (including me) disliking these slander commercials (especially political), they kept being made because they are effective and they work.
[1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwQpPqPKbAw
That is totally subjective. Some may have viewed him as "lovable" but others viewed him as "ignorant", "unclassy" and "filthy" similar to how someone could take the "Gmail Man" as "funny", "sarcastic" and simply "nosy".
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMbQCom7VTY
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/03/business/mark-penn-ex-clin...
They built their platforms/empire on developers first originally, every platform since has also done this. The signals out of the new Microsoft seems to be old school developer love.
They are pushing people to their new 'OS' Azure, higher up the stack, and their tools push you in that way. But they are no longer religious about the language, platform, code, etc. This supports their tools, cloud and ultimately platform. But they have to reconvince developers that they won't grow distance again.
Microsoft (in contrary to the general believe here) is doing very well. Their profits are good, XBox is attracting and etc..
They do have some marketing issues concerning Windows Phone and Windows 8. But don't over eggagerate... Windows is the most used platform on desktops and servers (definatly in SMB's, because not the whole world is a fortune 500 company and has their own IT departement). People who are running MAC are using dualboot or Parallels to use Windows and Microsoft gets a lot of money from mobile (even though it is Android mostly).
Their profits are up in the business sector and with Azure, they have a great platform (i use it myselve) and with Bizspark, they help startups in their most critical period.
The only thing that is changing, is that microsoft is more open and are improving their public image. But that's affecting the IT knowledgable persons more then anyone else.
People who have non-it jobs don't really care about the difference and i see even a trend where IT knowledgable persons don't want anything to do with businesses like Apple.
In that extent, i see more and more people countering Apple then Microsoft. (I'm speaking from a personal view in Belgium, the observations i have from talking with my parents and my non-IT friends, i don't know for sure how it is outside of Belgium.) For example, the hardware stores who have almost no access to Apple devices (and if they do, a very limited profit margin and a lot more hassle) and people who give lessons in using a tablet to other people, who have expressed their concerns about Apple are just 2 examples i can think of)
You're right, however, if I tell my mother that 'Apple is better than a PC running windows' over the course of 10 years; then very time she talks to someone about buying a new computer she'll remember that..
The only reason microsoft is the dominant platform is because of inertia.
if we were able to retrofit a generation of people with knowledge of other operating systems then I very much doubt microsoft would have even half of it's market share, since it's main merits are backwards-compatibility and very few of the applications that run on top of windows adhere to the same principles anyway.
Your mom will say something in the line of: my son said that...
But still, when they buy a computer in the hardware store, the chances are plausible they would advice against Apple. From a business view, they don't have any interests in earning less. So advicing Apple would be bad for them.
Your mom's friends would still buy a Windows PC, after she talked to the salesman. And still, if they give her a possibility of a Windows PC and a MAC in front of her. Your mom's friend would recognize Windows and will buy what she is more associated with. The most used sales pitch for hardware salesmen is probably: you can have your classic menu back with that app.
Reprogramming is harder then you think, although i have to admit, i have never seen a company do it so fast (referring to Apple + Mobile, not OS)
No offence, but end-users just want the start menu back. That has nothing todo with OS X.
I don't know, I think the fact that you can buy a sub-$400 family PC at WalMart might have something to do with it too.
I'm very glad that they are making moves towards increasing openness and collaborating more with other ecosystems. From my perspective, software development has always felt like it was split into two camps: the "open source" platform, and the "Microsoft" one, with developers working across both being pretty rare in my experience. Being able to break down those barriers and maybe starting to see genuine cross-platform Microsoft technologies is really, really exciting.
However, I'm convinced it's prudent to remain cautious. Microsoft have a long and colourful history of doing real damage to open standards, free software, and their own business partners. Even their development community has been harmed by repeated changes of direction in their development efforts – damage which is made worse by that fact that the ecosystem is traditionally so closed. Maybe we are seeing a core of developers who are actually too young to have experienced this firsthand, or at least with limited experience of other platforms, who are a little less skeptical.
Anyway, Microsoft's recent bout of openness is nothing but a good thing. It'll be a while before I'm comfortable deploying a cross-platform app on .NET, but baby steps…
Actually, I think Ford is pretty close to this. Hyundai is a very good example of this culture change. It wasn't all that long ago that people were afraid of driving their Hyundais at Highway speeds, now they build quality vehicles across the entire lineup and have for 3 or 4 complete model generations.
Right now Microsoft has a couple open source projects, a couple multi-platform projects, and the rest is still more or less old Microsoft. They've killed Stack Rankings, which I think is helping lead to some of these new changes. But the across-the-board Microsoft still looks like Microsoft from 10-15 years ago. If they can implement this kind of "new friendlier Microsoft" across the entire company, and do it for two major version changes across all products, I think then and only then can we consider Microsoft a new company.
It might be, perhaps probably is, too late for Windows Phone. This might be the last generation of high-end game consoles. Buying Nokia was a bad idea. But those things are not existential threats.
Microsoft has a long way to go in other areas, such as embracing the right side of DRM, patent, and open source.
But there is no chance of Microsoft becoming RIM in the next five years. Microsoft could suck in an ocean of money just by raising the price of enterprise-oriented editions of Windows.
They have plenty of time, and many very good people.
In other words, this article has a static view of the world in that it thinks markets "are done" and not constantly in motion.
That's a flawed view of markets as we have seen time and time again.
This is the same view people had with AOL vs. Microsoft and we know how that turned out. There was a shift in the market to broadband and AOL died.
It very well might be.
Google had been making a huge push to try and get "enterprise" companies to use Google Docs in place of Microsoft Office. I can only imagine that effort suffered a major setback in the wake of NSA revelations.
I can't see how any serious business would trust private data to "the cloud" today.
If you are a US-based company, your data is already one legal maneuver away from having your data copied.
I think most of this considering the work required was Ballmer's last push..Remember BG is still on the board, and the tell he gave in indicating disagreement with Ballmer was the lack of thanks when Ballmer left.
Let me tell you why it might be this way. Ballmer was behind the push to settle with the DOJ and the States over BG's objections..its why BG ws asked to leave Chairmen spot.
If it was Ballmer's push than its not anew company..just a small pivot..