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Nathan3219

What Happened to Microsoft?

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Anyone who has ever done an MBA (or even a BA for that matter) knows about the various phases of a company. One of those phases is the transition from the entrepreneur that founded the company, gave it the creativity that it grew by and provided the soul that held it together to that of the bureaucrat that was demanded by the stockholders. Apple is a perfect example of a Board of Directors that realized that their caving to the demands of Wall Street were destroying the company and brought Jobs back to bring the company back to the innovative and profitable company that it had been. The MS Board has not quite figured that lesson out yet.

 

Since the late 80's when Wall Street and the all mighty ROI became king, hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs, and consumers have paid the price for it. Those that have 401K's and stock holdings have profited (and who doesn't fall into that category), but at the expense of their jobs and those of their friends and family as a result of those jobs being exported to hold costs down and increase the ROI. I lived through two of the transitions from entrepreneur to "professional" manager, and would never want to experience that again.

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The ZuneHD was a slick piece of hardware and software. Unfortunately it was poorly marketed as it seems most MSFT products have been in recent history. More importantly, it was too late to a market dominated by iPods. Seems like deja vu, with the Window phone.

 

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4

 

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The ZuneHD was a slick piece of hardware and software. Unfortunately it was poorly marketed as it seems most MSFT products have been in recent history.

 

And it was only available in the US for most of it's short lived existence. After a while they released them up here north of the 49th, but I don't think I ever saw one in a store, let alone actually out in public being used. The Surface tablets have followed a similar pattern of being exclusive to the US, and even then availability was limited. Meanwhile, Apple made the iPod and iPad available in as many countries as possible (largely based on manufacturing capacity). If you want people to buy your product, you have to give them the opportunity to do so. Instead they eventually cancelled the Zune because demand was so poor, and now they've taken a $900 million hit with the Surface RT tablets. What's that saying about people who don't learn from history?

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Microsoft has no vision or focus at this point.  Windows 8 received ghastly reviews while it was in beta and Microsoft seemed unresponsive or uncaring about the whole thing and had the attitude of this is the new OS that will ship with PC's/Tablets/Laptops and the end user will just have to get used to it.

 

They had the same attitude about Flight... 


A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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As for Windows 8 interface, a $5 payware product Start8 turns into a clone of Winodows7 (or optionally you can choose to keep many or few of Windows 8 gizmos around). Of course I first heard about right here in Hagar Chat. For me it turned W8 from a real pain to a familiar pleasure. Now why couldn't MS have included that option? They could have, but they wanted every old dog to leap forward and get hooked on their new trick.


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As for Windows 8 interface, a $5 payware product Start8 turns into a clone of Winodows7 (or optionally you can choose to keep many or few of Windows 8 gizmos around). Of course I first heard about right here in Hagar Chat. For me it turned W8 from a real pain to a familiar pleasure. Now why couldn't MS have included that option? They could have, but they wanted every old dog to leap forward and get hooked on their new trick.

 

Start8 is a great app that MS should have included in 8 to begin with. $5 extra dollars to make 8 sanely functional on a desktop, go figure. 8.1 brings a so called 'Start Button' back that plops you back to the Metro screen. I wonder how Start8 will manage that. Hopefully disabling Microsoft's crap in favor of Start8 will be the way to go (unless MS figured out a way to block any other Start Button option but theirs).


FS2020 

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What happened to Microsoft  --   Bill Gates left  :(

 

quote-Bill-Gates-microsoft-is-not-about-

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Whatever happened is still happening. Win 8.1 doesn't look like it is going to rescue the PC desktop.

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Fellow old-timers will remember that Microsoft was slow to catch on to the internet.  I remember going to Comp USA in those heady days of the mid '90s, and *none* of the internet related products were being produced by Microsoft.  Bill Gates himself thought the internet was just a fad, but when he realized he was wrong he foisted IE on the world and made it 'inconvenient' to use any other browser.

 

I don't know that Microsoft was ever an innovator as much as it was an effective competition killing machine, and it's not even that now.

 

Richard Kelly


Richard P. Kelly

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Since the late 80's when Wall Street and the all mighty ROI became king, hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs, and consumers have paid the price for it. Those that have 401K's and stock holdings have profited (and who doesn't fall into that category), but at the expense of their jobs and those of their friends and family as a result of those jobs being exported to hold costs down and increase the ROI. I lived through two of the transitions from entrepreneur to "professional" manager, and would never want to experience that again.

 

This

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I don't know that Microsoft was ever an innovator as much as it was an effective competition killing machine, and it's not even that now.

 

The only "original innovation" that MS can claim is that of DOS for the original IBM PC's of the time in my opinion. I am not even sure that they don't owe a bit of the "originality" to Steve Jobs. Everything (major products I am referring to here; Word, Excel, IE, etc.) else since then has been a "me too" or an out right procurement - the Bruce Artwick FS1 being the prime example here.

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(unless MS figured out a way to block any other Start Button option but theirs).

They did block the use of the start menu/button in the Developer Preview of Windows 8... The button and menu were "add-able" by changing a registry setting, but they deleted the registry key.

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The only "original innovation" that MS can claim is that of DOS for the original IBM PC's of the time in my opinion.

 

MS-DOS.. Who really created it?  Not Microsoft.  Microsoft just sold it to IBM.

 

In 1980, IBM approached Bill Gates to discuss an operating system for their IBM Computer.   Bill Gates suggested that IBM investigate an OS called CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers), written by Gary Kildall.  IBM tried to contact Gary Kildall, but Gary was not interested and refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement with IBM.  IBM then returned to Bill Gates to discuss a contract to write a new operating system.  

 

Deal of the Century...

 

Bill Gates forms a company called Microsoft and buys all rights to a OS called QDOS.  The "Microsoft Disk Operating System" or MS-DOS was based on Microsoft's purchase of QDOS, the "Quick and Dirty Operating System" written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products.  Ironically QDOS was based (or copied from as some historians feel) on Gary Kildall's CP/M. Tim Paterson had bought a CP/M manual and used it as the basis to write his operating system in six weeks. Bill Gates then talked IBM into letting Microsoft retain the rights, to market MS-DOS separate from the IBM PC project, Gates and Microsoft proceeded to make a fortune from the licensing of MS-DOS.

 

RJ

 

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In or around 2000 (about when Ballmer took control), he decided that local US programing resources were too costly and much cheaper resources could "get the job done" from external countries and save Microsoft A LOT of money.  So Microsoft started to bring over less qualified developers and paid them a lot less ... in fact, they are still very much on the H1-B band wagon and want to hire even more less expensive programming resources:

 

http://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/current-h1b-visa-system-incredibly-disruptive-microsoft/article4647817.ece

 

The quality and innovation of Microsoft coincidentally started to decline in 2000.  Many of the very talented developers (now big shareholders with a lot of cash) started leaving, many starting their own companies from the profits they made at Microsoft or just checking out and retiring young.  Microsoft was bleeding quality developers and replacing them with less experienced, less qualified, and cheaper developers.

 

The less experienced developers started building overly complex products because they just didn't have the overall design experience to know better.  They may have been great coders, but without experience to draw from it was just a mess in terms of maintainability and overall design direction.  As a result, we got layers and layers of compatibility code, a horrible patch work security model, the Registry became a dumping ground, and their products got slower and RAM hungry.  They became their own worst enemy as product divisions started to undermine each other in the fight for project funding.

 

Bill Gates supported the process of hiring external resources for less cost.  Bill isn't coming back to Microsoft because he wouldn't know what to do and I just don't think he cares about MS any more (there is nothing in MS that sparks his interests).  Bill however is a good guy, he's donate considerable sums of money to charity and education ... he's on a mission to try and educate the world, that's what interests him ... it's a good and noble cause.

 

I do agree with Bill that "the internet" is not our final destination, it's just a stepping stone to what I hope will be a MUCH better solution.  The internet is just one giant security risk with no agreement on anything (as companies battle for market share) and every browser flavor interprets HTML differently (which isn't supposed to happen but does because of the lack of proper definitions of standards) ... it's not good that developers (myself included) have to write volumes of code to deal with specific browsers and then within that, specific versions of a browser.  Coding web applications is a horribly inefficient world and now the push is for HTML5 that's still in "Last Call" phase of specification which is due to close around Dec 2014, which means a final and complete ratification of the specification is estimated to be around 2022, yes 2022!  This means more of the same interpretation of an incomplete specification leaving yet again a wide range of differences in how the HTML5 should be presented by various Browsers ... in other words, it's the same mess we have now being repeated for the next 10 years.

 

Over the 30+ years of coding, I have seen the level of "acceptance" increase in regards to bugs, bad UI design, and poor performance.  It's as if the consumer has been trained to tolerate more problems and accept less product so that development cycles are shorten and software is released too early in order to capture market share and/or improve ROI.  This reflects in FSX, just think how much better FSX could have been if Aces weren't under the ROI gun and were given another year to finish the product (especially DX10).

 

As of today, the only thing keeping Microsoft from failing is their Enterprise division (Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, etc.) - their $900,000,000 write down for Win8 Surface/RT hurt them ... it's kept the company going while their bizarre Windows 8 "one-OS-does all" product failed and it looks like Windows 8.1 will suffer the same fate.  Microsoft need to produce products people want, not follow whatever someone else does or try to leverage the consumer into something they don't want or need.  Clearly, people didn't want Windows 8 regardless of the long list of excuses on why it failed, facts are it has failed.  Sinofsky (Window division head at the time) left Microsoft soon after Windows 8 release (fired or quit, doesn't really matter) -- when interviewed recently Sinofsky said "it could take years until we know if Windows 8 failed or succeeded".  Sinofsky is an intelligent guy, but he's clearly out of touch with reality or just has a massive ego problem ... in the world of technology development, no ONE has the luxury of "taking years" to see if a product will succeed or fail.

 

Did the iPod take years to succeed or fail?  Did the iPhone take years to succeed or fail?  Technology doesn't have "years" to prove itself, it needs to come out of the gate "on fire" where demand is higher than supply.

 

It's sad to see this happen to Microsoft, but they made the bed, now they must sleep in it -- they're not at rock bottom yet, that is still to come.  When that does come, there will be a executive shuffle but who could be dynamic enough to bring the company back, not Bill, so who?

 

My 2 cents, Rob.

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