Get ready for LAYOFFS: Nadella's coma-inducing memo, with subtitles Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has sent a six-page memo to the world warning of a company restructure at the end of the month. The open letter uses buzzwords and cliches to sugar-coat the news that he will tear up the Windows giant's approach to flogging devices and services. Instead, the biz will focus on building "productivity …
True dat.
Word 2003 was a dream. Did everything perfectly.
Word 2007 had my blood boiling. Simple tasks took 5x longer because it tried to help you TOO much and just got in the way, formatting was a nightmare, things just jumped around all over the place, it pretty much drove me into a rage. The ribbon was a disaster zone where the most commonly used and basic of features were pretty much buried underground and impossible to find. Rolled back to Office 2003 because Excel wasn't too endearing either.
Word (and Excel) 2010. Big improvements, but still not as good as the old days. MOST of what irritated me about 2007 had been improved, fixed, or removed entirely. The ribbon gave up most of its secrets, essential and simple features took centre stage once again.
Office 2013? I don't like seeing ALL MY MENUS IN CAPITAL LETTERS BECAUSE IT LOOKS AMATEURISH. I don't like my professional office suite looking Fisher Price with lots of big, chunky, coloured buttons. I don't like basic functionality being hidden away... yet again.
Even GTA V had a joke on one of the radio stations about a large software company making every version of their word processor more expensive and harder to use than the previous one. Microsoft, take note.
By Office 2003, people had pretty much figured out what was needed in productivity tools to make them function properly.
Like screwdrivers have only had mild innovations since 1800, MS should have pretty much stopped fiddling in 2003.
Unfortunately they want to make stuff look new. Then Microsoft also forgot their place: to listen to customers and serve.
Finally, the people who actually worked on Word from the 1980s to 2003 during the battles with other word processors have long gone. Under competitive pressures they had to listen to customers and understood what it takes to build a productivity tool.
Fast forward 10 years and we have a bunch of designers who favour cute UI features ahead of prime purpose.
It is no suprise that productivity with "productivity tools" takes a hit. Features like ribbons make it harder to navigate. They make help desk support a lot harder.
Nadella needs to figure out that unless you are serving the customer and adding value to the customer, then fiddling with the frilly bits won't help your business survive.
"Under competitive pressures they had to listen to customers and understood what it takes to build a productivity tool."
It used to be that way, in the ages long past. They (well, somebody influential in there) wanted to scrap the old boring toolmaker image and dip into entertainment. Thus bringing about those silly hide-and-seek games, weird selection of colours, myriad of uncanny ways to draw user's attention on the interface, changes for the sake of change, lots of babbling about "user experience". Attention whoring, to put it not-so-mildly.
In this regard, any talk about enhancing productivity has to be viewed as a good sign. Maybe the tools will get usable again, instead of trying to "entertain" users to the point of mental meltdown.
It may help MS in the UK if, in their adverts, they were to pronounce "azure" properly. The "az" is a soft sound, like "as" not a hard sound like "adze" or "adge". Every time I hear a MS advert mention it it sounds more like a tourettes tick than a brand name - it actually took me a few views before I realised what they were trying to say!
It's AZURE not ADJ-A or ADJ-UR. Got it? Good.
But I still don't want a bar of it.
I HATE any advert with that tune with a passion.
If pink slips are being handed out, the marketing department should be the first to go and whoever (if anyone) outside of the marketing department approved those bloody adverts.
Microsoft's products have improved IMHO but their appalling marketing is one of their biggest problems at the moment.
Apple stole the Nokia camera guy, they should steal some Apple marketing execs as, despite refusing to own an iDevice, I actually quite like the Apple adverts.
Yep - I'm well aware what azure is (actually, it was the name of a dye that gave its name to the colour, and then became the colour that gave its name to a MS brand). It's by knowing what azure is that I am able to know (and look-up) how the word is meant to be pronounced. Check the adverts and it sounds like they're saying "adja" or "adjur". That's not how you pronounce "azure".
Well, not quite, perhaps if I pronounced "dog" like "cat" then confusion would reign supreme.
That has no bearing on how the word "dog" is "meant" to be pronounced, because there is no attribute of the word which endorses a pronunciation. The conventions observed by a speech community which make language mutually intelligible are just that - conventions.
But think of all the bold new industries that will be enabled now that spreadsheets have a little fruit machine animation of spinning numbers when you change a cell.
Such as using recipes - the latest killer app that Nadella has discovered. Perhaps next year Microsoft will invent the checkbook-balancing application. Or something to keep track of collected memorabilia.
Generalize the tooling off the "MUH WINDOWS RIGHT OR WRONG" platform?
That's something that should have happened even before the War on Terror proceeded to the "Mission Accomplished" stage.
And get rid of anyone who doesn't agree - with extreme prejudice.
AND get rid of the RIBBON, FFS!!
Who make expensive Surface devices that combine laptop and tablet functionality but cost more than a laptop and tablet combined and are a bad compromise between the two. And have been a financial disaster. And the OS was hated by desktop users who got saddled with Win8.
And offer the services of Office 365 on a rental basis when you can do the amazingly complex tasks involving word processors and spreadsheets and email clients with freeware or older versions anyway (Not to mention Google's free-for-home-users competioin Google Docs)
And have a new and unproven virtual machine offering that is late to the party....
Give the guy a billion dollars like the last couple of bosses!
==-
...And giving NSA unlimited access to their servers, and letting them see everyone's unencrypted hotmail, and backdooring all their products for the government—all without complaining. See, there's no money in complaining about the NSA like the guy who shut his secure email server down rather than help the spies.
This may all be true. But you've also pissed off a lot of loyal customers, users and developers along the way... People that now want to see the back of you.... I'm talking here about the people below.... How are you going to win them back when there are now real alternatives....?
....Users who hated the Win8 changes and just want another Win7.
....Office users who felt you cynically changed Office and introduced the ribbon to create new lock-in and alienate loyal users on older versions...
....Developers who got certified, only to discover their programs were suddenly dropped.
....Developers who helped push .Net into the corporate space, who now see you backtrack away to JavaScript / html / html5....
....Resellers, who plugged MS product for years being punished for not pushing CloudFog offerings, when everyone knows early adopters will be guinea-pigs...
....Xbox fans alienated by user behavior monitoring, and draconian control tactics, who remain worried you'll reintroduce the beloved 'Trusted Computing' model later on..
that I wasted a few minutes reading Nadella's memo(email) before I wondered WTF I was doing. Microsoft = irrelevant, dinosaur, did I say irrelevant? Remember Nokia? They went from more than a 50% global market share to less than 10% in four years and are currently around 2%. Microsoft will undoubtedly go the same way that much is now certain but it could quite literally take ten times longer to do so.
I remember companies that were too big around the back end of last century to vanish and, yet they managed to do that. Long lost firms like Borland who brought us a good C compiler and also the very excellent Delphi who made great products and, yet, over the years lost everything.
Microsoft it seemed then invulnerable. It's turning out that due to its size, like the dinosaurs, they just took longer to die off.
I look at what the company does now and I don't understand what it does any more. I don't know what it stands for and it's certainly a million miles away from the tech-savvy outfit of last century.
A shame, but there we go. There's perhaps a lesson in there somewhere if only I could be bothered to rake over the dying embers.
There are very, very few companies that last more than a few decades and keep the same focus they had when founded. A well run company will keep a name but evolve to god knows what as the years pass. NCR, IBM, Siemens, Thales, General Electric, Alcoa, Honda, the list goes on. Thales would have raised a few eyebrows if they started business as 'A leading global provider of elevators (and motorized mobile cannon turrets)'.
Of course any company can die, eventually, but it's nearly impossible to kill a well run company. Massive, highly diversified companies can absorb stunning losses and be no worse for wear but companies with small catalogs of offerings are always incredibly vulnerable to changes in fashion and sea changes in their sector no matter how profitable they might be today.
Eventually, all companies must die (and be resurrected in China with hilariously off the mark products) but there's a lot, a whole, whole lot more to staying in business and making fucktons of money than terms like market share or profit and other terms people toss around as if those things meant anything by themselves.
>Microsoft seemed invulnerable due to its size.
They would have died after Vista but were still just about able to enjoy the last years of PC upgrades. That got them to Windows 8 which became a neo-Vista because fo the need to lock in what PC users still feared: Linux.
It wasn't size that did it but vendors like Dell and HP (and most other OEMs) being afraid of allowing the user to decide for themselves -which was just a matter of keeping the old hands at Indian help desks. Nothing to do with MS, everything to do with manufacturers of hardware.
In fact if it wasn't for the like of Zone Alarm and AVG etc., the OS would have had to earn its own keep 2 decades ago. They could keep on shovelling shit because that is what most users were scared of no longer using.
In fact it is a no-brainer when studying the charred offal left after a MS presentation. I would go so far as to say they deserve a medal for the bleeding obvious :
" Stuff like term papers, recipes and budgets"
Despite the attempt ("Stuff like ...") to sound casual this is the committee-of executives-and PR-Guys agonised-speech-writing to select punchy buzzwords for the business model. Schools, homes and businesses.
Oh and no sex please. We're American.
Yawn.
"Shouldn't that be dogs and penguins frolicking together!"
Yuck, imagine if they mated, it'd result in a Doguin, (or Pengdog... actually I think pengdog is a cool name).
Maybe offering Office on all possible platforms might be good (for a given value of 'good'). It would help MS to ensure Office remained dominant, if at the expense of their OS.
Linux might benefit from possible increased take-up in home and business settings if there were an Office version available.
Naww, Apple and Google users may be targetted with sweet talk and carrot waving but Linux is the insurgent in the jungle, ignored as radicals and targeted as dangerous.
Although, the recent Skype update surprised me, so maybe...
What the company really needs right now is a long series of short term visionaries to repurpose the whole organization, downsize confuse and demoralize the employees before being forcefully ejected, in turns. If Microsoft could work in some boardroom scandal shenanigans as well, that would be great. They've announced own-brand servers and storage, so that should just about do it for hardware partner support. Maybe they could attack software defined networking so as to enrage all three of the server room's Holy Trinity.
We haven't seen what Stephen Elop can do at the helm yet. That should be fabulous.
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