* Facebook seems to be a bunch of smart people working on pet projects. Monopoly profits drive a political empire where people at the top think up something random, and it gets built.
* Google has customer contempt. They started with brilliant people who were used to being smarter than everyone else. They also started in algorithm-driven markets like search and ad-words, where everything was statistical and individuals didn't matter. They've lost the smarts and the ethics, and they're in a bit of a hole. I think they've reached the end of the growth line.
* I know nothing about Apple. Too secretive.
* Microsoft has a bunch of cut-throat teams, competing with each other. Their technology is middling. However, they're the only one of the bunch you'd want to partner with for B2B.
* ... except for Amazon, which is hyper-customer-focused, and has a track record of successful forward-looking projects. AWS has been rock solid. On the other hand, I'd never want to work there; they treat employees like crap. But it somehow works out for them.
This is a good and thorough article. The author got down to brass tacks pretty quickly and brings up interesting hypothesis about $MSFT.
That said, I do have one gripe:
> To oversimplify Notion to its demographics, it is Office 365 for people below age 35.
I recognize this is an oversimplification, but even so, it seems like a stretch. Notion is a decent product, and I have used it for a few small-scale team projects in uni (mainly for Kanban-related stuff) - but to call it a replacement for O365 is an exaggeration at best.
Yes, you can have pretty, nested documents in Notion and that's great, but a tabular database in Notion is by no means a replacement for Excel or even Google Sheets. The velocity that is afforded by Excel in terms of formulas is unmatched and there's a reason it has yet to be unseated as the kingpin of modern finance.
Most young people I know use a combination of Discord + Google Suite to collaborate. I am aware this is slightly anecdotal, but I am also having a hard time imagining myself as a founder and then asking my CFO to use Notion to prepare investor pitches.
I'm stuck on Notion since my much older CTO thinks Notion is 'hip'. I think it's more fair to say Notion is just the counter culture solution to the same problem O365 and G-Suite try to solve. I suppose Notion kind of made sense back when were tiny, but these days Notion is just clunky and has one of the worst search functions I have ever had the displeasure of using.
At least it apparently isn't doing well in our security audit and the security team is telling us G-Suite is in our future.
Lotta people make this mistake. They think Notion, or Google Sheets, or Slides is the only tool they need. In truth they need all three, depending on the task at hand.
Lots of product managers seem only capable of thinking in slides when Notion would be better for documentation. I've received 500 pages of content for review written into CSV file for some insane reason. And yes, I've seen people struggle to run mathematical models in Notion when Excel is right there.
I try and remind people not to use a hammer when you need a screwdriver, but sometimes that's all they know.
The reasons why the modern productivity suite is winning (Notion, Coda, Airtable, etc) is because they've embraced the web and collaboration.
- ability to share the original source to people
- tag people right inside the document.
- set tasks to people and track them from within the doc.
- new age collaboration features - likes/comments/hashtags built-in
- ability to tag a document within another document
All these are small steps towards embracing the web's nature deeply inside product instead of just shipping the native features to run over the web.
But there's a catch, these modern solutions tend to lag a bit over the powerfulness of what native offers, like
- powerful charting capabilities
- the calculation engine of excel
- pagination of documents
- powerful set of formatting features
Interestingly it's much easier to build the new age features into the already powerful editor than vice versa - which is why google docs pivoted towards smart canvas features instead of launching an all new app.
IMHO the most important period for microsoft is the 90s. There is nothing about it in this article. 1990 is windows 3.0. In 2000, it was the start of Ballmer's era with the erratic management.
A lot of people (me included) aren’t using Excel beyond opening the files to look at the graphs or entering data in predefined fields. It’s the usual 20/80 split between the people actively creating and managing the data and the ones on the receiving end.
For a long time Microsoft pushed Office adoption by forcing the “viewer” to have licenses to access the data. That’s why a company would buy Office for every single employee. But now, you can have Office for the “20” part, and have them push their result to Notion for everyone else to view, do simple things with it.
Notion can effectively be a O365 replacement for the proverbial “80” part.
(Basically O365 is becoming a “power tool” and Notion can skoop the “casual users” slice. I see G\Suite inbetween)
For me, as a developer, Microsoft is a company with deep roots in compilers and operating systems. All of the business empire started from these two foundations.
Since its inception till today, Microsoft has been producing some global products every decade. And then making these products unbeatable in the global marketes.
Be it Windows, Office, Exchange, Developer tools & Compilers, Web Servers, XBox, Azure, Teams etc. You just name it and Microsoft is right there in almost every field with profitable products.
A lot of people don't like the traditional Microsoft products but all of the products just work and are being used for tens of millions of customers around the globe every day.
Any Software company with ability to create profitable products every decade is a killer company. That is the secret souce Microsoft has.
As a developer just imagine about a company which gives you a developer tool to make a web application, using the company's provided compiler, which then can be deployed on a company's provided webserver and can store some data on company's provided database which is running on company's provided operating system.
The company also happens to provide end-to-end tools for running a company of a 5 people to a company of 500,000 people.
> No singular power law product defines Microsoft like Google’s Search, Apple’s iPhone, Amazon’s e-commerce, or Facebook’s social network.
Umm windows and office?
Great article, I still think that with thousands of amazing engineers in microsoft, they need to simplify 2 things.
Focus on using 1 thing, then reiterate to make it better, i.e: why is there teams and skype? then there's teams for business, teams for personal, skype for business. Also teams app is built on angular instead of xamarin? I heard that teams of engineers within MS are free to choose any tech that they want. If they had chosen xamarin since the beginning (now MAUI), wouldn't it made xamarin much less buggy?
It seems like every teams are going on different directions with different managements. you don't see that on apple (pushing swift everywhere), facebook is also using react for almost all their internal apps.
Second thing is it's so hard to make your voice heard in MS that most people just gave up lol. I have this bluetooth issue on windows 11 where my bluetooth speaker produce no sound after receiving call from teams. I have to reconnect every couple of hours. I've had it for 4 months, and I don't know where to give feedback at all (feedback hub is useless) other than asking strangers on reddit. If you have 96k engineers around the world, can't you assign at least 5-6 PM that focuses on consumer satisfaction, engineering excellence, or at least have a bug bash once in a while.
Again i'm not sure what's happening inside the company, maybe i'm to judgy, but at this point a lot of people are feeling the same way
I share the sentiment of your reply though, e.g. I have a hard time associating Apple with the iPhone only also hard, would actually associated them with iOS products.
For a company that had a dude yelling Developers on stage - how in the world did they blow their dev stack so badly?
XAML, WPF, UWP, silverlight etc etc.
They owned with WinForms back in the day. There was nothing close to market share / productivity for LOB apps. Then it was like they just dynamited repeatedly, and kept on dynamiting?
I can't even imagine the wasted dev cycles, and now the wasted time using janky juddering online apps (even Vax/VMS green screen LOB apps were actually FASTER -> keyboard driven, no lag). If you tracked medical billing from vax/vms days (a fast typist could crank through billing slips and a tech forward clinical staff could checkin a patient and go with a few keyboard keys (including the good old F keys)). Now its wait wait wait, mouse click, mouse move, click, wait type, submit, wait.
> how in the world did they blow their dev stack so badly?
Did they?
With TypeScript, Visual Studio Code, npm and GitHub alone they control by far the biggest share of development stack out there in 2022.
I would add on top of this some other libraries that I consider huge sleepers but I think will even further spread and conquer market such as pnpm, playwright and rush.js.
There's also C#, Visual Studio, DirectX and many other Microsoft technologies devs use every day.
Step by step they will keep integrating many new generation developers into their ecosystem which, if they keep improving on their azure, office and teams integration will considerably drive up their revenue.
As long as Microsoft keeps working hard in this direction and doesn't start alienating the customers I can see them cutting more and more shares of the dev and release markets.
They lost the mobile war and web tech creeped in. Their tech stack is quite good but they stuck to Windows only and that turned from an advantage to a disadvantage. They're turning it around at least.
Aka bunch of mediocre walled garden tech. I'd much prefer QT
You seem to suggest that it would be a good thing for everyone for those thing to succeed? The only people who benefit from those are MS and their developer base.
Microsoft's biggest failure was Windows Mobile. If they got Mobile right hands down they would be on a highway to $10T company but otherwise they are riding the wave of cloud, AI and gaming. Like Steve Jobs[0] said they are strong opportunists, they have no taste, they don't have original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product but they keep on coming. Microsoft uses its big cash pile to either acquire companies or to copy them.
I feel if Windows Mobile had just kept at it for ten years straight they would finally have had something - continually changing strategy killer any hope they had of being in a solid third place.
We have Android apps running on Windows now, and devices like the Duo which are not quite phone-like but pretty close and we know they've been experimenting with running Windows 10 X on those, so it wouldn't be far fetched to go back down into mobile space with a Windows 10 device running Android apps in an emulator (alongside the limited native app catalog).
I maintain, the Windows 8.1/10 mobile OS was superior to iOS and Android. At least in terms of UX. Microsoft should have tripled down on app support and brute forced their way into the market, as they're doing now with Game Pass.
> It is not a beloved consumer brand like Apple, Facebook, Amazon, or Google.
the reason for this is very simple: very few people choose to use Microsoft products willingly (except maybe the xbox)
their products either come with the computer by default or it's installed on your work machine
and the software is at the very best mediocre and somehow getting worse (trying to figure out how to save a Word document locally these days is NOT easy)
[1]: even for the original xbox Microsoft initially deliberately kept their name off of it
>and the software is at the very best mediocre and somehow getting worse (trying to figure out how to save a Word document locally these days is NOT easy)
This is a great example of hostile UX. It appears designed to encourage people to use their cloud services, since they offer OneDrive as the first option in the list, and something like 90% of users choose the first option in a list.
IMHO, what Google and Microsoft are sorely lacking is an obsession with UX. It is what drives Apple to maintain the hardware integration, and it works. Google and Microsoft are making inroads here but it just feels very half-hearted by comparison.
> very few people choose to use Microsoft products willingly
My gut feeling is that, for PERSONAL use, the US has shifted to favor Apple products, over something running Windows. Even in my backwater neck of the woods, I'd say that Apple vs Microsoft is running at least 2 to 1. For 25 years, Gartner ran the same report saying that Microsoft "owned" the computing device landscape. Now their schtick is that Android rules the world. Fine. But what I want to see is the operating system market share data, by country, with the corporate purchases factored OUT. It doesn't seem that hard, but, naturally, that data is NOWHERE to be found online. If Gartner is actually using real numbers, then this would be "internal polling" data which I'm sure they consider their trade secret. If it were possible to get the data for the US, for personal use only, I think it would show that Apple is doing even better than most trade analysts begrudgingly give them credit for. With the demise of most Microsoft stores, and the way Microsoft is cannibalizing trust with the direct commercialization of Windows on factory-installed machines, I don't see how Windows on personal devices can be the "thing" it has been traditionally considered.
At the large retailer I work for, AWS is off limits. Strategically, they don't want to base their IT operations in a cloud of a company that is also a competitor in online retail. I can understand that. Here Azure has a great advantage.
This is very common for my clients. Another common variant are B2B focused clients where their customers contractually require them not to put data onto AWS. IE, Walmart doesn't want any of their data to end up on AWS, and if you want to do business with Walmart you need to similarly protect their data.
Couldn't agree more. If regulators ever attack the Amazon stack and split up the company, AWS could become one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Does anyone else find it boring to kibitz on how an absurdly powerful company could become more powerful?
Wouldn't it be more interesting for Microsoft to actually improve its products, e.g. stop Excel making a nearly irrevocable assumption that something is a date just because it has two numbers and a hyphen between them? Make a successor to MS Access that doesn't suck? Fix the shitshow that is figures, tables, and cross references in Word? Make a nice new product inspired by FOSS projects that are way ahead of them, or failing that, at least some decent craftsmanship on existing products?
At some point, doesn't the endless lust for monopoly power become boring? Why not just actually do a good job at the thing your company is supposed to be about?
How many yachts do Satya and the MS board of directors need? Why not do something beautiful instead? Who needs to spend their life replaying the modern equivalent of an ambitious feudal lord?
Github never asked for login until Microsoft acquired it.
Broken windows help page. Try installing drivers and navigate to knowledge base.
When some thing does not work on windows you reboot and hope it works or just reinstall operating system.
Try tweaking all the settings in visual studio only to be reset on the next update
You have no control over updates. It happens especially when you want to give presentation. Also you can not poweroff whenever you like, because it chooses when the update should happen. No amount of changing setting can fix this.
Can Microsoft please make a Windows phone after all? Both Apple and Android ecosystems and hardware together are terrible in various ways and don't work well with Windows.
The one idea I question here is advising Microsoft to acquire Zoom. Microsoft has almost as bad a track record with chat/videocall apps as it does with cell phones. Plus, Zoom has perhaps already seen its best days. It was in the right place in the right time, but the public is fickle. If Apple ever gets around to putting enterprise features into FaceTime, the entire product space will be disrupted with unpredictable results. Better I think for Microsoft to spend a couple of billion at figuring out what went wrong with Skype (free hint: reliability and call quality) than to throw $150b at Zoom and just repeat the same mistakes. BTW Microsoft, why does your Skype website still feature a "Shang-Chi" movie tie-in? Is anybody paying attention to keeping your landing pages up to date?
I was on the board of a company with a product offering on Azure (because one big customer used AZ for part of their stack). Expanding outside was tough: few prospects were interested as few used Azure (and we had a lot of uptime issues with Azure). This was in 2020 and 2021. The devs complained but porting to AWS saved the product.
MS has a nice lock in with the big companies’ IT departments, which gave them nice recurring revenue but pointed their attention away from where the puck was going several times (most notably missing the Internet and missing phones and BYOD).
They are huge, but in my technical life I was never really exposed to them (except Excel and some Powerpoint). That’s why this board experience was such a surprise to me.
Did the company end up dropping their big customer or did the company use both Azure and AWS?
I work with customers who insist on Azure as long as they know it's an option, however they also have other vendors who are only on AWS and they seem to be okay with it.
What the article misses is the essential core: Microsoft is the Big Evil. Only Google really competes in that space. The others might like to compete, but Apple is too stand-offish, Amazon too random, Facebook too inept, Russia too old.
Microsoft and Google are always on the lookout for the next bigger Evil. Google eagerly sheds anything that turns out not to be It. Microsoft is slower at that, not giving up as easily, and often late to the party, but sometimes things finally work out for them better than could have been expected (Xbox). The goal is literal World Domination, and odds are one or the other will achieve it. Younger generations won't even remember when they didn't already have it, or be able to imagine a world where they don't.
Amazon just little ago killed some employees to keep them working during a storm, makes people pee in a bottle, Facebook ignored and hid the burden it puts on teenagers development, and you say they're not as bad? I would say the only not as bad, despite hating it, is Apple
And Apple is not evil? Charging 30% on top of a subscription w/ no value add isn't evil? I think according to your definition every company would be evil.
> Even to avid Silicon Valley historians, Microsoft is hard to define succinctly. No singular power law product defines Microsoft like Google’s Search, Apple’s iPhone, Amazon’s e-commerce, or Facebook’s social network.
Are you kidding me? Why can't or won't you admit it's Windows? What did MS do to you?
I think 90% of the time I use MS products, I am happy enough but there are some things that definitely would make them suck less:
* Sort out the single-sign on thing as others have said. Why do I have to tell you whether my account is work or personal? Why do you let me have 2 accounts for the same email address anyway?
* Endless tinkering with things like menus, control-panel settings (usually takes me 10 seconds to find the "Apps option", mostly pointless eye candy like in Windows 11 when most people would rather you just fixed the myriad of minor bugs that have never been fixed
* A proper support system, not just 1000s of call-centre types telling you to trying re-installing windows
* As a dev, not always making massive changed in .Net before sorting out the bugs they introduce far to easily. An example, I recently updated an MS extensions library and because they had added a load more constructors to a class, my dependency injection started failing but, of course, there were no obvious helpful errors.
* They have never sorted out the licensing. It is horrifically complicated and very expensive and would be easy enough to fix if they cared. Yes, we get that you are trying to make sure we don't avoid licensing by purchasing large multi-core machines or using VMs but you could do a better job
* Harmonising their hundreds of customer-facing sites like MSDN, Bizspark, Outlook, Office 365, Product Feedback etc. Even the design is all over the place but in some places you can login with the "wrong" account and it still lets you into a new account. Not cool. If I used the wrong login, tell me it isn't registered so I can find the correct one.
On the other hand, I do like their more open culture and you are more likely now to have a conversation on github with real devs who can explain some of those crazy choices they might have made.
What most analysis if Microsoft misses, and I think this one does as well, is that Microsoft is mostly not an innovator. What they have always excelled at is execution. They were late to the internet, phones, and now the cloud. But given their foothold (in the IBM days, this used to be called Account Control, but we don't whisper that anymore). So when it was clear that cloud was the thing, they came up with Azure, and as usual, are executing on this very well.
Because of this, I don't think it is a good example for startups to follow. I think that successful startups are innovators.
I think this is a really solid analysis and strategy. I want to briefly expound on the data side which is a huge growth area: mSFT would do well to SHOW the rank and file analyst and developer machine learning in context of their daily work, not TELL CEOs about its transformational possibilities. They own the world’s most popular surface for interacting with data. Why not make Azure’s machine learning be keystrokes away? Give away credits and training, suggest use cases, provide actual value. Sell a $0.000000000001/unit cost that makes it safe for anyone to try in their daily work. It doesn’t need to do much, some cool forecasting, predicting the value of the next cell inline, etc would be delightful. I’m a but disconnected from their ecosystem at this point but I see a window where the can captivate the long tail with pragmatic ML and assert their centrality for the coming decades.
[+] [-] blip54321|4 years ago|reply
* Facebook seems to be a bunch of smart people working on pet projects. Monopoly profits drive a political empire where people at the top think up something random, and it gets built.
* Google has customer contempt. They started with brilliant people who were used to being smarter than everyone else. They also started in algorithm-driven markets like search and ad-words, where everything was statistical and individuals didn't matter. They've lost the smarts and the ethics, and they're in a bit of a hole. I think they've reached the end of the growth line.
* I know nothing about Apple. Too secretive.
* Microsoft has a bunch of cut-throat teams, competing with each other. Their technology is middling. However, they're the only one of the bunch you'd want to partner with for B2B.
* ... except for Amazon, which is hyper-customer-focused, and has a track record of successful forward-looking projects. AWS has been rock solid. On the other hand, I'd never want to work there; they treat employees like crap. But it somehow works out for them.
[+] [-] logshipper|4 years ago|reply
That said, I do have one gripe:
> To oversimplify Notion to its demographics, it is Office 365 for people below age 35.
I recognize this is an oversimplification, but even so, it seems like a stretch. Notion is a decent product, and I have used it for a few small-scale team projects in uni (mainly for Kanban-related stuff) - but to call it a replacement for O365 is an exaggeration at best.
Yes, you can have pretty, nested documents in Notion and that's great, but a tabular database in Notion is by no means a replacement for Excel or even Google Sheets. The velocity that is afforded by Excel in terms of formulas is unmatched and there's a reason it has yet to be unseated as the kingpin of modern finance.
Most young people I know use a combination of Discord + Google Suite to collaborate. I am aware this is slightly anecdotal, but I am also having a hard time imagining myself as a founder and then asking my CFO to use Notion to prepare investor pitches.
Source: Am 23 :)
[+] [-] tester756|4 years ago|reply
I use shitton of MS products, but I cannot switch from Google's gmail, docs and drive to anything.
I hate MS login page and endless redirects between their services
I cannot explain what puts me off, but Google's (gmail) login page and way better switching between apps feels way better.
Also I have feeling that MS account is more "formal", idk how to explain it.
[+] [-] ucm_edge|4 years ago|reply
At least it apparently isn't doing well in our security audit and the security team is telling us G-Suite is in our future.
[+] [-] notjustanymike|4 years ago|reply
Lots of product managers seem only capable of thinking in slides when Notion would be better for documentation. I've received 500 pages of content for review written into CSV file for some insane reason. And yes, I've seen people struggle to run mathematical models in Notion when Excel is right there.
I try and remind people not to use a hammer when you need a screwdriver, but sometimes that's all they know.
[+] [-] lewisjoe|4 years ago|reply
The reasons why the modern productivity suite is winning (Notion, Coda, Airtable, etc) is because they've embraced the web and collaboration.
- ability to share the original source to people
- tag people right inside the document.
- set tasks to people and track them from within the doc.
- new age collaboration features - likes/comments/hashtags built-in
- ability to tag a document within another document
All these are small steps towards embracing the web's nature deeply inside product instead of just shipping the native features to run over the web.
But there's a catch, these modern solutions tend to lag a bit over the powerfulness of what native offers, like
- powerful charting capabilities
- the calculation engine of excel
- pagination of documents
- powerful set of formatting features
Interestingly it's much easier to build the new age features into the already powerful editor than vice versa - which is why google docs pivoted towards smart canvas features instead of launching an all new app.
[+] [-] cfcfcf|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-loop?ms.url=micros...
[+] [-] webreac|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jamie9912|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] makeitdouble|4 years ago|reply
A lot of people (me included) aren’t using Excel beyond opening the files to look at the graphs or entering data in predefined fields. It’s the usual 20/80 split between the people actively creating and managing the data and the ones on the receiving end.
For a long time Microsoft pushed Office adoption by forcing the “viewer” to have licenses to access the data. That’s why a company would buy Office for every single employee. But now, you can have Office for the “20” part, and have them push their result to Notion for everyone else to view, do simple things with it.
Notion can effectively be a O365 replacement for the proverbial “80” part.
(Basically O365 is becoming a “power tool” and Notion can skoop the “casual users” slice. I see G\Suite inbetween)
[+] [-] tegeek|4 years ago|reply
As a developer just imagine about a company which gives you a developer tool to make a web application, using the company's provided compiler, which then can be deployed on a company's provided webserver and can store some data on company's provided database which is running on company's provided operating system.
The company also happens to provide end-to-end tools for running a company of a 5 people to a company of 500,000 people.
This is Microsoft.
[+] [-] robertwt7|4 years ago|reply
Umm windows and office?
Great article, I still think that with thousands of amazing engineers in microsoft, they need to simplify 2 things. Focus on using 1 thing, then reiterate to make it better, i.e: why is there teams and skype? then there's teams for business, teams for personal, skype for business. Also teams app is built on angular instead of xamarin? I heard that teams of engineers within MS are free to choose any tech that they want. If they had chosen xamarin since the beginning (now MAUI), wouldn't it made xamarin much less buggy? It seems like every teams are going on different directions with different managements. you don't see that on apple (pushing swift everywhere), facebook is also using react for almost all their internal apps.
Second thing is it's so hard to make your voice heard in MS that most people just gave up lol. I have this bluetooth issue on windows 11 where my bluetooth speaker produce no sound after receiving call from teams. I have to reconnect every couple of hours. I've had it for 4 months, and I don't know where to give feedback at all (feedback hub is useless) other than asking strangers on reddit. If you have 96k engineers around the world, can't you assign at least 5-6 PM that focuses on consumer satisfaction, engineering excellence, or at least have a bug bash once in a while.
Again i'm not sure what's happening inside the company, maybe i'm to judgy, but at this point a lot of people are feeling the same way
[+] [-] epolanski|4 years ago|reply
So it's two, not one.
I share the sentiment of your reply though, e.g. I have a hard time associating Apple with the iPhone only also hard, would actually associated them with iOS products.
[+] [-] tempnow987|4 years ago|reply
XAML, WPF, UWP, silverlight etc etc.
They owned with WinForms back in the day. There was nothing close to market share / productivity for LOB apps. Then it was like they just dynamited repeatedly, and kept on dynamiting?
I can't even imagine the wasted dev cycles, and now the wasted time using janky juddering online apps (even Vax/VMS green screen LOB apps were actually FASTER -> keyboard driven, no lag). If you tracked medical billing from vax/vms days (a fast typist could crank through billing slips and a tech forward clinical staff could checkin a patient and go with a few keyboard keys (including the good old F keys)). Now its wait wait wait, mouse click, mouse move, click, wait type, submit, wait.
[+] [-] twoodfin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epolanski|4 years ago|reply
Did they?
With TypeScript, Visual Studio Code, npm and GitHub alone they control by far the biggest share of development stack out there in 2022.
I would add on top of this some other libraries that I consider huge sleepers but I think will even further spread and conquer market such as pnpm, playwright and rush.js.
There's also C#, Visual Studio, DirectX and many other Microsoft technologies devs use every day.
Step by step they will keep integrating many new generation developers into their ecosystem which, if they keep improving on their azure, office and teams integration will considerably drive up their revenue.
As long as Microsoft keeps working hard in this direction and doesn't start alienating the customers I can see them cutting more and more shares of the dev and release markets.
[+] [-] jayd16|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kumarvvr|4 years ago|reply
dotnet has successfully transformed itself and is quite popular.
XAML is ok, I guess.
They have stumbled in the Mobile app dev frameworks, focusing on Xamarin, but seem to be moving to MAUI now.
[+] [-] tartoran|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsonha|4 years ago|reply
Aka bunch of mediocre walled garden tech. I'd much prefer QT
You seem to suggest that it would be a good thing for everyone for those thing to succeed? The only people who benefit from those are MS and their developer base.
[+] [-] mrkramer|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSg3fU9XWow
[+] [-] bombcar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gigel82|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gareth321|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blibble|4 years ago|reply
the reason for this is very simple: very few people choose to use Microsoft products willingly (except maybe the xbox)
their products either come with the computer by default or it's installed on your work machine
and the software is at the very best mediocre and somehow getting worse (trying to figure out how to save a Word document locally these days is NOT easy)
[1]: even for the original xbox Microsoft initially deliberately kept their name off of it
[+] [-] Gareth321|4 years ago|reply
This is a great example of hostile UX. It appears designed to encourage people to use their cloud services, since they offer OneDrive as the first option in the list, and something like 90% of users choose the first option in a list.
IMHO, what Google and Microsoft are sorely lacking is an obsession with UX. It is what drives Apple to maintain the hardware integration, and it works. Google and Microsoft are making inroads here but it just feels very half-hearted by comparison.
[+] [-] TheRealDunkirk|4 years ago|reply
My gut feeling is that, for PERSONAL use, the US has shifted to favor Apple products, over something running Windows. Even in my backwater neck of the woods, I'd say that Apple vs Microsoft is running at least 2 to 1. For 25 years, Gartner ran the same report saying that Microsoft "owned" the computing device landscape. Now their schtick is that Android rules the world. Fine. But what I want to see is the operating system market share data, by country, with the corporate purchases factored OUT. It doesn't seem that hard, but, naturally, that data is NOWHERE to be found online. If Gartner is actually using real numbers, then this would be "internal polling" data which I'm sure they consider their trade secret. If it were possible to get the data for the US, for personal use only, I think it would show that Apple is doing even better than most trade analysts begrudgingly give them credit for. With the demise of most Microsoft stores, and the way Microsoft is cannibalizing trust with the direct commercialization of Windows on factory-installed machines, I don't see how Windows on personal devices can be the "thing" it has been traditionally considered.
[+] [-] mongol|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpitman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhickok|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jen20|4 years ago|reply
Why not GCP?
[+] [-] civilized|4 years ago|reply
Wouldn't it be more interesting for Microsoft to actually improve its products, e.g. stop Excel making a nearly irrevocable assumption that something is a date just because it has two numbers and a hyphen between them? Make a successor to MS Access that doesn't suck? Fix the shitshow that is figures, tables, and cross references in Word? Make a nice new product inspired by FOSS projects that are way ahead of them, or failing that, at least some decent craftsmanship on existing products?
At some point, doesn't the endless lust for monopoly power become boring? Why not just actually do a good job at the thing your company is supposed to be about?
How many yachts do Satya and the MS board of directors need? Why not do something beautiful instead? Who needs to spend their life replaying the modern equivalent of an ambitious feudal lord?
[+] [-] thorwawayrus53|4 years ago|reply
Github never asked for login until Microsoft acquired it.
Broken windows help page. Try installing drivers and navigate to knowledge base.
When some thing does not work on windows you reboot and hope it works or just reinstall operating system.
Try tweaking all the settings in visual studio only to be reset on the next update
You have no control over updates. It happens especially when you want to give presentation. Also you can not poweroff whenever you like, because it chooses when the update should happen. No amount of changing setting can fix this.
These are few problems.
Don't forget *its* Microsoft. It won't change.
[+] [-] foobarian|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zuminator|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] urthor|4 years ago|reply
They're not a beloved consumer brand, yet.
Microsoft has made an enormous investment in consumer and developer sentiment.
VS Code, Microsoft Flight Simulator, WSL, and Xbox are huge, long term plays that are a rocket ship in their brand's sentiment.
[+] [-] gumby|4 years ago|reply
MS has a nice lock in with the big companies’ IT departments, which gave them nice recurring revenue but pointed their attention away from where the puck was going several times (most notably missing the Internet and missing phones and BYOD).
They are huge, but in my technical life I was never really exposed to them (except Excel and some Powerpoint). That’s why this board experience was such a surprise to me.
[+] [-] PaulWaldman|4 years ago|reply
I work with customers who insist on Azure as long as they know it's an option, however they also have other vendors who are only on AWS and they seem to be okay with it.
[+] [-] ncmncm|4 years ago|reply
Microsoft and Google are always on the lookout for the next bigger Evil. Google eagerly sheds anything that turns out not to be It. Microsoft is slower at that, not giving up as easily, and often late to the party, but sometimes things finally work out for them better than could have been expected (Xbox). The goal is literal World Domination, and odds are one or the other will achieve it. Younger generations won't even remember when they didn't already have it, or be able to imagine a world where they don't.
[+] [-] lnxg33k1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seabriez|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GlennS|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] excalibur|4 years ago|reply
Are you kidding me? Why can't or won't you admit it's Windows? What did MS do to you?
[+] [-] ngc248|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lbriner|4 years ago|reply
* Sort out the single-sign on thing as others have said. Why do I have to tell you whether my account is work or personal? Why do you let me have 2 accounts for the same email address anyway?
* Endless tinkering with things like menus, control-panel settings (usually takes me 10 seconds to find the "Apps option", mostly pointless eye candy like in Windows 11 when most people would rather you just fixed the myriad of minor bugs that have never been fixed
* A proper support system, not just 1000s of call-centre types telling you to trying re-installing windows
* As a dev, not always making massive changed in .Net before sorting out the bugs they introduce far to easily. An example, I recently updated an MS extensions library and because they had added a load more constructors to a class, my dependency injection started failing but, of course, there were no obvious helpful errors.
* They have never sorted out the licensing. It is horrifically complicated and very expensive and would be easy enough to fix if they cared. Yes, we get that you are trying to make sure we don't avoid licensing by purchasing large multi-core machines or using VMs but you could do a better job
* Harmonising their hundreds of customer-facing sites like MSDN, Bizspark, Outlook, Office 365, Product Feedback etc. Even the design is all over the place but in some places you can login with the "wrong" account and it still lets you into a new account. Not cool. If I used the wrong login, tell me it isn't registered so I can find the correct one.
On the other hand, I do like their more open culture and you are more likely now to have a conversation on github with real devs who can explain some of those crazy choices they might have made.
[+] [-] wglb|4 years ago|reply
Because of this, I don't think it is a good example for startups to follow. I think that successful startups are innovators.
[+] [-] reilly3000|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freeone3000|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]