Microsoft haters: You gotta lop off a lot of legs to slay Ballmer's monster Contrary to increasingly popular belief, Microsoft is not a “dead” company, nor at immediate risk of collapse. I do, however, believe that Microsoft’s “Windows on the endpoint” monopoly days have passed, that Microsoft’s senior management are aware of this and are actively taking steps to compensate. Similarly, I believe that …
"The terrific outlay for a new console may be their undoing. It will rob them of the cash flows they need to support their mobile and online efforts."
Seems unlikely considering the billions they have flowing in from Xbox 360, versus Sony making a loss...
The Xbox 360 just overtook the Wii to take first place in current generation console sales in the UK!
Not a whit. I think you underestimate how many people aren't fond of the NSA pedocam - software-only off switch or not - or the insulting "compromises" Microsoft threw out as it tried to halfheartedly backpedal in the face of Sony kicking their ass.
Additionally: People give way fewer fucks about cable/satellite/etc integration than you seem to think. Oh, and they keep grudges. Why invest in the XBone when Microsoft was hell bent on screwing the public the first time around and shows no sign of changing their tune in the future?
With the XBone Microsoft can make you an unperson at the flick of a switch, separate you from your entire content library, invalidate years of investment, spy on you and change the terms such that you have to fork over more to get less than the month before.
Sony can do this too...but there is significantly less reason to believe they would. Selling consumer products - and asking consumers to put their content library investment in your hands - is difficult when your name is "mud." What possible reason would anyone have to have faith in "subscribe now" Microsoft?
I could go on about why they shouldn't, but I've been there, done that and I really don't feel like bumping your salary any more tonight. (I'm assuming you get paid on a per-shoddy-and-baseless-refutation.) MY piece is spoke, I think the proles are by now immune to "the message."
"WP doesn't appeal to the mass market but only a niche one. Surface RT is the same"
Have you used them? They are significantly better in terms of usability and UI than Android or IOS. I think the appeal is there.
It's more the app store maturity - and that many people have not seen them yet or are not even aware of them. That's starting to change though - for instance Lumia sales are growing at over 30% a quarter....
"B) You're full of shit. Android is by far the best mobile UI."
Android is horribly glitchy and laggy - as to be expected with an OS that requires background garbage collection. Even with 8 cores thrown at it, it can't match the performance and smoothness of Windows phone on 2 cores....Plus the Windows Phone UI is much faster and more intuitive to use.
The windows phone UI is smoother. You can have that one for free.
It is not more intuitive. It is actually a sack of dogshit covered in vomit speckled with the brightly coloured pustules of all of humanity's worst diseases. Android's UI is far simpler to user, far more flexible and the operating itself far - far - more open to customization.
Stock Android roms as provided by the OEMs are generally terrible (though increasingly less so when we're talking about Samsung and HTC.) The Nexus UI is smooth as silk and Cyanogen is better still. (Probably why Samsung hired the dude in charge of Cyanogen.)
If you compare Windows phone to a $50 ZTE special then yeah, you're going to compare against teh worst that Android has to offer. But when you put flasgship against flagship you're comparing OS/2 warp to Windows 2000, with Android playing the role of Windows 2000. A better app ecosystem, way more flexibility, customisibility, far easier UI and ultimately more user control over the device and the interface.
Windows Phone - like Metro itself - is a straight jacket restraining the user from doing anything useful or productive except in the very specific ways that the designer thought they should be done. It is an attempt to impose one man's view of how the world should work on 7 billion unique individuals and - fucking shocker - most people don't want anything to do with that.
To put this in terms that I hope you are capable of understanding:
Whether it is a phone or a PC, a tablet or a notebook, whether it is a desktop or an embedded device it is my fucking computer and it will do as I say, not the other way around. Microsoft doesn't understand this. That's okay.
We don't need them any more.
I'm adopting the position that it's down to their broken "stack ranking" HR policy:
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer
You promote people based on their contempt for co-operation and other developers, and you get a management class with contempt for co-operation and other developers.
I only have one question..........have you tried to print anything from your wonderful Android device (without relying on some sort of wireless or remote cloud printing solution)?.....I thought not, because you can't!
Same goes for IOs unless you have an Airprint facility.
These non desktop solutions are not computers in the desktop sense they are glorified calculators.
Who prints things? Between Docusign and eFax I haven't killed a tree in 8 months.
Maybe next time you're shambling down the aisle at the grocer's in your walker you can think really hard about how some day we might be able to send pictures down those crazy newfangled telegraph lines. What a rush!
Great article - maybe because it matches my views :) But it's a realistic response with real details. Most articles only consider the desktop side of things, and yep that's falling but still huge. Server side, for many companies to move away from Microsoft is just not feasable - and not because of vendor lockin, but having to learn so many different technologies and actually spend the huge amount of time and money to migrate. On top of that, a lot of the specialised 3rd party vendors/companies align themselves with Microsoft technologies - how many Office Suite addons are out there, and how many 3rd parties only officially support Microsoft (or even have their app available on a non-MS OS)?
Even if Microsoft fall a long way from where they are, their server side of things will go on for a very long time.
@AdamFowler_IT also there is a significant number of companies such as the one I work for where there is a ton of code developed and refactored over the years that uses the MS Server set up and there is no way we are going to change.
As a multi billion dollar company we have sway over our customers and our market. Almost whatever Apple/Linux do we will not leave MSFT.
We have twice stuck a toe in the water and offered some Linux based back ends but as the take up was so insignificant we just gave up.
We cannot change our technologies which all work rather well unless there is a some huge economic driver – and I can’t see what that is.
Oops - best get on with getting all those local machine calibrations and templates set up as a remote service by some dick who doesn't have a clue (or any interest at all - other than grabbing a share of the budget). And if the big expensive piece of hardware running here at this location in these conditions with this history doesn't respond well then its probably broke and needs replacing.
I know that the IT industry is plagued by people who think that knowledge of the dirty end is completely uneccessary and that the answer is always in the model and not in the actual but you try selling that to someone who makes stuff for a living and you might get a surprise. *aas, cloud, app - marketing and accounting terms which are meaningless in the context of whether the problem is solved. They are frameworks for how you spend your IT budget - not the basis of how you use IT to make things work better.
Bitbashing is already niche. Sorry you missed "USB" and everything that came after that. Have you been introduced to x86 virtualisation? Network virtualisation? Anything in the past 10 years?
I never said bitbashers were going to evaporate entirely, just that they were going to be rare, (niche!) and probably very expensive. Everything else will be "virtual" and "cloudy" and "as a service." We're already mostly there.
" Everything else will be "virtual" and "cloudy" and "as a service." We're already mostly there."
In my view you are massively overstating it.
Not everyone will drink the kool-aid. VMs might be the new "ShinyShiny" in the Wonky World of Wintel but let's be honest here, they are mostly deployed to work around the application packaging & deployment short-comings of the x86 world. They also come at a cost in terms of extra components to the system (more stuff to break), extra skills (to fix the extra stuff) and performance (yeah you personally may not care about it but some folks do care).
Given the enthusiasm of the folks riding on the VM bandwagon I am a little bit surprised there hasn't been more noise on the MIT Exokernel front, surely binning the OS next natural step for the VM fundamentalistas. :)
I prefer Beer to Kool-Aid.
Quoting the Article: "that Microsoft’s senior management are aware of this and are actively taking steps to compensate."
And look what they've been doing in their panic! Shooting themselves in the foot continuously...
Completely forgetting that you have to make products tasty to customers, rather than just dishing them out like slimy soup in a prison, to match their latest monthly twist in corporate strategy.
Without their actively taken steps of fear and greed, much damage to their finances and brand perception would have been prevented.
"..."the cloud" was a joke... [now] everything from management applications to my new thermostat all have a "cloud" component....[in future] "the internet of things" will be utterly dependant on the SaaS cloud, and we'll be looking at entirely local apps as niche and quaint."
Thanks for that. Meanwhile in the real world, world+dog uses MS on the desktop, Linux in the server room, a full suite of local apps, and businesses large and small continue to dodge the cloud because they like privacy and dislike all the butt-stuff that cloud fluffers want to perform on their data assets.
I use linux on the desktop.
I'm not a management geek, I've never bought a book at an airport telling me how to take over the world - and manage it - in my life but I have long held to the theory of remembered pain.
What made me decide this was a piece of management speak that had some truth to it was the fate of IBM. Even at its pomp, through the 70s and 80s, everybody hated IBM. They hated its arrogance, its dominance, its threatening sales behaviour (if you Mr DPM don't buy our stuff when we tell you to we'll tell your bosses you're not up to the job) even while IBM's sales continued to grow.
But the remembered pain that was being generated would have its day and as soon as any opportunity presented itself that said not buying the IBM solution was the right solution, people in their 1,000s made the move away to alternative technology.
This is why the author of this piece is so right when he emphasises the community engagement aspect of company success. You annoy, frustrate and disenchant your user base long term at your peril. They will turn and bite you as soon as they can.
There will be many people just waiting for the day they can ditch WORD simply because Microsoft have annoyed them for years by not fixing the document preview bug. There is a similar number of network admins waiting to out Windows Server because of the pain Microsft caused them in Windows Server 2008 by not recognising 4096 byte disk sector size and the same thing is happening now with Windows 8.
It is almost impossible ever to get a meaningful response from anyone meaningful in the Microsoft empire when something is clearly wrong and forums all over the place are full of people complaining about something in a Microsoft product that doesn't work and they can't get fixed.
Why a company the size of Microsoft can't manage this crowd speak to its advantage is beyond me. And it will be their undoing.
I think there's a certain maximum size a company can get to before it becomes too big for its own good.
IBM got to that size, their management became arrogant, the arrogance infected the company culture then that became their undoing.
I heard somewhere that a manager can reliably be responsible for about 7 people. Beyond that, the manager misses too much of what's going on. This of course does not limit company size, the size can easily grow if the people reporting to that manager are also managing around 7 others.
As a company grows though, it's harder for information to flow in the organisation. Work becomes less about the business at hand, and more about the towering bureaucracy that's slowly strangling the business from within. Either that, or management becomes blissfully unaware of what's going on beneath them. The company changes from being this sprightly dynamic organisation that quickly reacts to user demand, to a slow lumbering obese Goliath. They develop too much inertia to be able to change direction rapidly.
Microsoft is now that Goliath. Yes, you can turn a steering wheel of a large truck and attempt to round a sharp corner at high speed, but it's not going to handle like a sports car… it'll skid, it'll slide, and as we've seen with Windows 8, the result is not pretty!
I think we'd be better off, with separate companies that co-operate, than the current monolithic mess we have now. Half a dozen smaller firms that can react more quickly, be responsive to user demands, better manage the crowd speak. It'd bring each division down to a size where the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.
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