In both cases, what is unusual for Microsoft is the positivity the gizmos have generated. Fair or not (and I’d argue probably not), Microsoft isn’t expected to blaze new trails and develop hot new products that have the potential to create new markets or shake up existing ones. We know Microsoft’s history – too early with tablets, too early with smartphones, too early with wearables – and this generates a degree of skepticism around what it does. But with HoloLens and Surface Book, much of that cynicism seems to have evaporated.
Desktop operating systems (Windows, Linux, OS X – all of them) are in a pretty piss-poor state right now for various different reasons, and in the case of Windows, I find this truly sad because Microsoft seems to be doing some really cool stuff in the laptop and tablet front. Sadly, the software just isn’t up to par.
Much like the Apple, we can hope 2016 brings some major improvements, but considering Microsoft’s endless promises and failures to deliver, I’m not holding my breath.
My personal experiences aside, I’m still rather startled at the rate at which MS is burning good will generated during the Win7 and XP era with their current “ram it down your throat” attitudes.
Watching this with a number of people that have come from the OSS and Apple camps and gradually over the XP/7 era gone from “Windows? No. Yuck” ..to “yeah it’s pretty okay” to “dammit.. why did I trust and start to believe these guys?”
I honestly think it’s sad.
Good luck MS.. I think you’ll need it this year
A long time ago this was written:
http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
I still think this true. No startup or new company is using/will use MS and even if MS is trying very hard it seems they have lost relevance.
Traditionally MS made money in 4 ways:
– Windows OS
– Servers OS/MS SQL/Business software
– Office
– Xbox
On Windows they are still making money but for how long? They couldn’t charge money for it to consumers and now they are hoping to migrate businesses for big money from Win 7 to Win 10, maybe succeeding but I think a lot will remain on Win 7.
On servers they lost slowly but surely to Linux, Oracle and others. This will continue.
On Office they are still going strong, brilliant move to the cloud with subscription, just in time. This seems to be their last solid pilar.
Xbox seems to struggle as well, Sony is doing better and PC gaming in general has a renaissance because of Steam (and it is a LOT cheaper)
In the mean time the world changed to mobile and MS couldn’t make a dent even after pumping billions into it.
But most important, as the article (FROM 2007) states: MS has no Mindshare: ask yourself as developer/company if you are going to make some magic, are you going to use MS??? Simple answer is no.
This is probably the only thing I think the guy got right in his article. Nobody fears MS anymore as nobody thinks they got what it takes anymore to write competitive software.
dpJudas,
I would agree with you, except that MS software has always been pretty awful with bugs, crashes, exploits, vulnerabilities in everything from their development platforms with activex to their web browser to their operating system to their office suite. If anything, most MS stuff probably has better coding standards today than it ever used to have.
I think it’s a simple matter of MS having trouble competing on level ground, because that’s something MS rarely needed to do in the past. Ever since those lawsuits, MS can’t follow their old playbook because federal and international regulators who are watching them like a hawk.
Another reason is that tech markets are maturing. Companies that are dependent upon endless upgrade cycles, including MS, are finding themselves struggling to maintain the demand that used to be there.
The thing is, if you can’t match a certain level of software quality it doesn’t matter that you can bundle it with your OS. Back then they could reach that level of quality. Today they seemingly can’t.
“For example, Microsoft invented CSS.”
I have to correct you there. CSS was invented by a guy called H~Ayenkon Wium Lie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A5kon_Wium_Lie
Okay, so it was Opera that invented it. In any case, Internet Explorer 4’s CSS support was light years ahead of Netscape at the time.
LOL. This was one of the most creative historical revisions I have read in a while. But then again, I’m a sucker for fictional literature.
dpJudas,
Well, I agree with shotsman, the win7 era seems to hit the sweet spot for OS/VisualStudio/Office/etc. Even the hardware is “good enough” for most.
How does MS make money from businesses and users who have little need to upgrade their installed hardware or software for the next decade? This “holdout” trend already started with WinXP, and it had little to do with Win7 being any lower quality. The old OS is supported and runs their programs, so why bother upgrading at all? The maturity of the windows platform means few customers really need to upgrade. This is very likely the underpinnings of microsoft’s decision to kill the “legacy desktop” and come up with a new incompatible baby desktop.
Some people might think win8 to be the beginning of MS’s struggles, but I see win8 as a deliberate reaction to the upgrade struggles MS was already facing. We know in hindsight that the reception of win8 would be extremely poor, but even knowing that, it’s still not clear what MS could have done to get massive numbers of users to buy upgrades on cue. When it comes to justifying upgrades, maturity is enemy #1. Now MS is toying with advertising and developer fee business models, oh how much I hate that… Even if they can maintain their monopoly by giving windows away for free, I think ultimately they’re just going to have to scale back until the size of the operation meets customer demand, software is not the easy money it used to be when the market was expanding.
Edited 2015-12-29 20:19 UTC
That’s Ballmer age thinking. There is no reason why you *have* to sell every software improvement you do to Windows. At least the new CEO got that (partly) right. They could easily have deployed Win8 as a service pack to Windows 7 if they really wanted to. Not that it would have helped them much as WinRT in Windows 8 didn’t meet the quality requirements.
dpJudas,
They could have done that, but in the meantime there’s still the question of generating revenue.
For the majority of consumers, even those who are loyal to windows, the 3-year upgrade intervals doesn’t work for them – they are unwilling/unable to buy upgrades this frequently regardless of the “quality” factors. They mostly want to treat their computers as long term appliances.
Consider a car analogy: someone may own a 2013 model, and the 2016 model may be better in absolutely every way, but quality is irrelevant if the customer is not in the market to replace their old car. When they finally do need a new car, they will buy one even if the quality of current models is worse than their previous one.
Computers aren’t going away, and there’s always going to be demand, but it’s just not going to be at historic hyperactive levels. Ultimately everyone has to adopt, and it remains to be seen if advertisers will be able to offset microsoft’s drop in customer sales, or if MS is going to have to scale back in proportion to the new norms of the market. Even tablets and phones are going to mature and have the same fate.
Edited 2015-12-30 17:19 UTC
I’d say they almost already reached that level. Tablets did last year I think.
MS stack would be great for sites of a certain size, budget, security, and performance requirements. I don’t think I’d want to write the next facebook with it however.
That is to say, if your business plan requires massive growth in traffic, don’t use MS.
Edited 2015-12-29 16:43 UTC
You work in a bubble it seems. It’s not impossible some places, but in the global picture is is pretty uncommon.
Edited 2015-12-29 17:39 UTC
Sigh, the software WAS fine, just look at Windows 7. The problem with MSFT is they missed the boat on mobile (yet another failure of the Ballmernator) and simply refuse to accept this, instead thinking they can continue the growth of the PC bubble era by going from aping Apple to aping Google.
Windows 10? Its all datamining right out of the Google playbook but done so poorly and hamfisted (just like they did iOS with Windows 8) that the customers simply do not want it. They could easily release Windows 11 tomorrow and if they just made it Win 7 with the Windows 8 speed ups? It’d fly off the shelves and the web would be tripping over themselves praising it.
But sadly MSFT has fallen into the classic big company trap, the “We want ALL the money or nothing!” and we have seen what that attitude gets you, it gets you nothing because you end up just aping what is popular and making a poor ersatz knockoff. Its like what we saw in gaming with all the bad CoD and WoW knockoffs, they look at what is popular and say “We will not settle for less than what THEY are getting!” and end up shitting all over what WAS a decent solid business in the name of pure greed.
What will happen next? I USED to think Linux would never have a shot but I bet the OEMs are getting pretty damned sick of being handed MSFT OS after MSFT OS that customers find about as appealing as ass cancer so I could easily see HP, Dell, and Asus getting together and saying “Look lets just all agree to support this distro. We’ll all write drivers for it, put our own UIs on it, and if MSFT doesn’t give us what we want (which is Win 7 with more speed) we’ll put their option on the back page and call it a day”. If you had the OEMs throw in together it really wouldn’t be hard to do and you know they have to be getting tired of being stuck with units nobody wants.
Will it happen? Who knows, but I know I’m hearing little old ladies saying Windows 10 will listen into their phone calls and when it gets to the point the little old ladies are hearing and buying the conspiracy stories? Stick a fork you are done. Win 10 will be the third fail, whether they will get a chance at a fourth is the question.
Don’t confuse upgrades with sales. Compared to 20 years ago, new operating systems (of any flavour) don’t really provide a lot in the way of user must-haves. And the cost of distribution (online vs duplicating floppies / CDs) has fallen dramatically.
So Microsoft are now starting to realise what others already have; that there is more benefit to MS, it’s partners – and importantly, users – in getting everyone upgraded to the latest code, instead of charging for those upgrades.
They are still selling an awful lot of Windows copies to consumers though, just in the way that they have always done – OEM copies preloaded on to new hardware purchases.
Yes I will, if targeting the desktop and tablet/foldable laptops markets.
On my country Macs are for the upper layer society and I cannot envision myself going back to coding as if my computer is a PDP-11.
I already did that in the 80 and 90’s.
A big source of revenue for Microsoft is the military sector where MS provides both specialized hardware and software. I understand why it’s not discussed more but it’s also not a secret. Anyone who actually believes Microsoft is dead or dying is a fool.
Microsoft is most definitively not dying. And the military sector is by far not their main source of revenue. What is happening is that MS is no longer be the dominant player in the field, after a 2+ decade dominance. Microsoft is basically where IBM was at the beginning of the 90s.
The company I work for has swallowed the Office-365 snake oil. Boy are we having problems. Lookout will only work when connected to the corporate VPN (not alone here). Trying to connect to the Azure server gets a ‘This software is not licensed’ block.
I have to work with SQL-Server and Server 2008/2012/next.
Like has been saidm Windows 7/Server 2008 seemed to hit the sweet spot (IMHO). Server 2012 has gone down hill in terms of usability. What purpose does all that whitespace on thr Admin panels serve? Crap.
If Apple is ticking over then MS has seized its motor a long time ago.
And don’t even get me started on the train crash that is Windows 10. Should be called Windows for Spying if you ask me.
When I finally call it a day and retire (maybe this year) I will take great delight in removing each and every bit of MS software that has infected my systems.
Technology is getting more casual these days and is being used by non technical people more often than needed.
We no longer have geeks that showed off their pocket PC where they did many stuff, but average people that just need now an app so that their friends can tell him what to wear tonight or where he/she can get a nice deal.
I don’t see Microsoft in a much peculiar state than it was some years ago, just that the number of people that use technology “stuff” is far greater nowadays than anybody would have imagined in the past.
Even Microsoft former staff did not believe the mobile technology was a thing until they saw the results.
The rest is just companies that invest their money in something that is profitable…
PC’s are just too good these days for them to make profit out of it.
For me, the big promising changes at MS have been:
– TypeScript. They did something that takes web development to a whole new professional level, completely openly. No lock-in motivation attached.
– CoreCLR. It’s way more open than Java now (MIT license, no Oracle risk factor), and C# is just much better engineered language than Java. Cross platform focus (i.e. MS does the Linux version) removes the “forcing Windows on unwilling participants” factor completely.
– Visual Studio Code. It’s currently almost as fast as sublime text (i.e. faster than Atom), open source and cross platform. They are delivering new features at a fast pace, and provide an extension api. It’s better than the paid Visual Studio in many ways.
The OSs (all of them) reached a plateau of usefulness some time ago, but the developers – for various reasons – just have to go on adding extra bells and whistles and fiddling under the bonnet (hood). These changes affect usefulness and stability, often to the detriment.
How many times did you update your OS because you MUST the “new” feature? For me it’s usually to get over some bug or security lapse that won’t be fixed in the old one, or end of support.
Am I being paranoid when I say that I feel that some OSs become less stable as they are patched with updates? It would certainly be to their advantage.
Whether the new OS is charged or free doesn’t matter to me, compared with the grief of making everything work (me included) efficiently again.
Although I have to work with new OSs (for the reasons above), my all time favourites are:
OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard
Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx
Windows 7
Oh, and the trend towards typing into a search box instead of picking an icon defeats the usefulness of a GUI, especially for people who suffer from word blindness. I’m fine with Terminal, but give me all it’s tools if you want me to type.
And don’t get me started about “notifications” popping up all over my screen while I’m trying to do my job.
Last rant of the year!
I think a big part of it is that as other major players have reached success and reached the mainstream, people are seeing the flaws in other products.
Microsoft does not look as ‘bad’. Before you could point to the monopoly and say… damn they suck. They don’t do a,b,c and d,e,f are so stupid. Now, you can do that with Apple, Google, Amazon, LG, Samsung… whatever
Our work recently switched all the e-mail to MS Cloud.
I have no idea what went on behind the scenes, but the switch over was smooth, email works, and apparently it’s saving the company a crap load of money. They’re definitely doing some things right.
Even as a developer, Azure might not be perfect, but I’ve had more than my share of bad experiences with Amazon and IBM. Every one of them has things you need to tweak to get work. Or some are strong in some areas and weak in others.
I personally think Microsoft future is in online services. If they can bring everyone to Office 365 and own the email backend, they can just sleep on that cash flow.
Microsoft gets more leeway today because people are exposed to major players and see all their flaws as well.
Now for my personal Microsoft gripe
If the future is online services, just this past weekend, I tried to buy a xbox-one party game. But lo and behold, I could not as somehow my account was tied to the US, but I’m Canadian, so my credit card could not be registered. I’m literally like WTF. You don’t want my money. I tried for like half hour before returning to the guests.
So yeah, they have a lot of work to do.