What I find surprising is that, in the process of writing a historical review on Microsoft, anyone would ignore the fact that MS has repeatedly identified areas of profit, moved in, failed spectacularly, iterated aggressively, and ultimately become dominant, at least for a time. e.g. What killed Netscape?
Microsoft's surface tablets are signs of big things to come. They're currently too expensive for what they are, but they could find a huge niche. They're portable tablets meant for content creation, not mere consumption. If you want a tablet that will let you draw, take notes, etc. as easily as on paper, iPads aren't even close to the current Surface. The surface pro would have been exactly what I wanted in undergrad physics for a lecture-hall machine. Many artists probably feel the same way now.
Tablets have long been too underpowered to tackle real creative tasks. The surface proves that the hardware has changed, although the cost is still high. I expect the next few generations of surfaces to get cheaper and more refined rapidly. People who love tablets are soon going to want something more than a glorified phone, and the Surface is going to be the go-to option.
Yeah, so MS might dominate the content-creation/student/artist tablet niche. Big whoop. Well, success in any consumer hardware niche might do for MS what it did for Apple. Namely, make them a huge pile of cash and jump-start their supply-chain so they can move into other areas. It might not play out this way. Apple has been looking for ways to make the iPad more content-creation friendly beyond just marketing them as such. Still, iOS on an iPad is a huge step behind Win8 on a Surface pro for creative tasks right now. All MS has to do is keep iterating the Surface and avoid another Vista-style PR blunder with Win9.
> What I find surprising is that, in the process of writing a historical review on Microsoft, anyone would ignore the fact that MS has repeatedly identified areas of profit, moved in, failed spectacularly, iterated aggressively, and ultimately become dominant ...
When was the last time they have actually managed to pull this off? Maybe the Xbox? It was never dominant or an area of profit. .NET? Never dominant or a direct source of profit.
The days you are referring to are long gone. It's not the same company anymore and it's not the same world anymore.
MS currently has an advantage in digitizer features on the Surface. But if a swing like this was going to happen, for the reasons you suggest, it would be happening right now.
Furthermore, even if such a swing does begin, you are assuming two things: Firstly that Apple will not respond effectively to MS establishing such a niche. Secondly that Android will also fail to compete for that niche.
The problem is that all the innovative new mobile creativity apps are currently coming out on iOS, digitizer tech or no. Apple has never subscribed to the creation/consumption world view, or even used the term 'consumption' to my knowledge. It sounds like something people died from in the Middle Ages. Their flagship day one launch apps for the iPad were all creative apps - Garageband, Pages, etc.
There seems to be an underlying assumption that in a year or two, the Surface will have fixed all it's main flaws while the iPad and android tablets will stay more or less the same.
One can argue if the iPad is a glorified phone or not, but I think Apple isn't moving any slower than Microsoft, and it is reasonable to expect a more capable iPad in the years to come. Although it's third party hardware, stylus support has come a long way, even if it might not be as good as the Surface digitizer, it might as well be good enough for average users.
The race is on, and I wouldn't bet my shirt on Microsoft taking the lead anytime soon (in 5 or 10 years, I don't know)
Microsoft already has a huge pile of cash. That's not the problem. The problem is that the execution is good, but not good enough. Compromize and difficult choices (Surface vs Surface RT) everywhere.
They released the music kit for the Surface, but where are the vast amount of great music production / performance apps from various well established companies such as Korg, Moog, Cubase, all of which are available on iOS?
>> "Yeah, so MS might dominate the content-creation/student/artist tablet niche"
I doubt it. A keyboard alone isn't enough to win that market, great software is. Look at the content creation apps available on iOS - iMovie, Garageband, iWork, Paper, Brushes, DM1, Amplitube, Notion. It's going to be hard to catch up with that. They are built for touch. The people using them don't need a keyboard. A keyboard isn't really the ideal input device for someone creating content unless it is written content. For everything else touch seems to work better.
What you describe in your first sentence is absolutely their MO. I don't think anyone making any sort of serious attempt to understand Microsoft ignores that or is unaware of that. The whole uncertainty surrounding Microsoft for the last 10 years (fair or not) is the fact that that approach doesn't work for them anymore and hasn't worked in years, their lack of dominance in the mobile industry being the prime example of that failure, despite having a significant head start (likewise for tablets). Yet, in a lot of ways, they still to this day cling to that strategy. You cited Netscape as an example, but Netscape is the most recent example I can think of of this strategy working for them.
I actually want Microsoft to succeed; I want them to do much better than they have been. Microsoft does certain things really well that their competitors don't, and I would especially love to see more competition in the mobile and tablet space. Their own processes and business strategies seem to have calcified around 2003, which have since dragged down a lot of things that could have been great products.
Totally tangential, but this is ignoring the fact that they actually have been doing really well in the one area that you would think would be the only thing people care about: profit. But no one seems to care about that, even though I personally don't think that that profit is going to dry up anytime soon. They could keep going like this forever, and people would still talk about how they're dead or dying. I understand why this is, it's just unfortunate that simply being a successful business isn't enough to avoid being branded a failure.
Did Microsoft profit from browsers? Or was it a threat to existing platform profits that it temporarily pushed back via antitrust-inducing bundling tactics in order to scorch the earth for others trying to make inroads? And looking back, how did that go for them, they may have stalled human progress for a while, but what did they do with the time it bought them?
Netscape story? MS because dominant in browsers (for a while) because of the nasty lock-ins, not because of any positive iterating. Their own slowness became their downfall - IE didn't iterate for a long time, and when they realized that competition is way ahead it was too late for them.
Speaking as an artist, my Samsung Series 7 Slate running Windows 8 with the Mischief art application is pretty much the perfect portable digital art studio for me.
If you think the Surface tablets are overpriced, then you don't understand why Apple makes so much money when all the other computer companies are failing - profit. Without profit, it's hard to do interesting things.
The Xbox is quite successful, but it's a lot of work to make not a lot of money. Why? The razors and blades concept doesn't work so well as making a 30% margin on a product people really, really want to buy.
I'm not seeing a large niche for them in content creation. If we were starting off with tablets being the dominant player; the thing that most people used and grew up with, then it'd be different. However, the content creation market is already fairly competitive, and the pain points this would solve over and above what's already there don't seem significant.
The questions in that regard seem as follows:
Why would artists opt for a, relatively small, imprecise pen over something from Waccom?
Why would programmers opt for working on a small laptop analogue compared to a computer with multiple monitors?
Why would writers opt for this over a computer or a laptop?
I can see people writing a blog post on one, or sitting in a lecture hall with one - but even there, the advantage over an apple laptop; which is pretty light already; seems negligible.
Unless you have to travel a significant distance on foot. There it has the advantages that tablets always had: Light device, relatively good battery life.
But by and large, the competition for Surface in the tablet space seems likely not to be other tablets. It seems more likely to be the tools - some of which are, when you get down to it, fairly specialised - that people are already using.
The problem with that is that they cannot make Win32 a legacy product.
They tried to do so because you can argue that in the enterprise, iPad can deliver a better Windows experience via VDI than the garbage PCs that dominate the market.
Once I'm delivering a quality Windows experience to my users by turning the client device into a TV, the next step is to further simplify. That expense app? I can use VDI to deliver some awful Enterprise Software via IE9.... or buy a solution with an iOS app! Something like 40% of enterprise users are using a defined set of < 7 PC applications to do specific things. That's easy pickings for a mobile application, and a great way to reduce Microsoft spend -- which is a big black hole in every enterprise org.
The other issue is the channel. If they get real about hardware, they are screwing Dell, HP, Lenovo. That's a symbiotic relationship that generates alot of MSFT business.
Out of pure academic interest, how many New Yorker covers have been drawn on the "content creation" Surface tablets compared with the "mere consumption" iOS devices? Or how many world renowned artists are having exhibitions of their Surface art vs their iOS art?
So you can draw on a surface... How many tablet users need more drawing capabilities than an iPad grants? The Surface, in it's existing form, is not a viable product.
> The world is in need of high-quality, reliable, developer-friendly, trustworthy, privacy-guarding cloud computing platforms.
That's the thing for me: That doesn't work anymore. Privacy-Guarding destroys that. Normally, I would fully agree that this is a good vision for Microsoft, continuing to be on the Desktop (especially corporate), trying to be on other markets and failing mostly, but becoming a big cloud player. But for me, the cloud is dead, and the NSA killed it - I try not to use it if it is not really helpful and without obvious privacy issues (like http://rsspusher.eu01.aws.af.cm/, appfrog was fine for that, I still think that even if it predates that thought). And I know I'm not alone with that attitude.
Maybe that doesn't mean that the cloud is dead, rather that there is a minority for which it is. I'm not sure how to predict the influence of the surveillance on the techological future. But what it means for sure is that for me and a few other guys, a Microsoft being a big cloud player would be as dead as it was before. We will see whether that matters.
What about recycling the "private cloud" into something actually useful?
Microsoft has amazing expertise into taking any computer a 3rd party provides and making it work with their software. What about providing "cloud services" that can be guaranteed to never exit your own corporate firewall? I imagine this is going to be a huge need in the near future. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it were a standard EU regular within 5 years.
This seems like an amazingly huge opportunity they could capitalize on. Become the standard software cloud solution of all software the way they they own email in the enterprise with exchange. Plenty of companies are large enough to own their own racks of virtualized servers and would pay good money to run well integrated Microsoft software on them.
This piece seems pretty spot-on all around. That said, I don't know anything about Mr. Nadella, but I have spent a significant chunk of time trying to use the Bing API from the Azure market, as well as competing products from Yahoo and Google. I found the Microsoft API to be significantly behind both competitors in features, performance, documentation, terms of use, and price. Even with Yahoo BOSS using Bing's index, it manages to offer significantly better search features, a lower price, and less restrictive terms. (You can't use the paid Bing search API if you run any ads other than the Bing network!) And neither one holds a candle to Google in most cases.
Anyway, but experience with Azure was deep rather than broad, but it was enough to give me a strong belief that if this represents the great hope for Microsoft's future, things aren't looking so bright.
I think it is spot-on right up to the conclusion, which I disagree with.
> The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device.
I don't see how Gruber can come to this conclusion unless he has suddenly changed position and thinks the open web will eventually win out over native apps.
The problem, of course, is that for a company that wants to be Microsofts size, they _need_ to own the platform, because the platform owners have an incentive to limit their dependence on you and make sure that their cloud services work better on their platform. iMessage and Hangouts? Integrated. Skype? Not so.
The only way to "own" the platform owners is to have an essential, popular product that customers demand. As much as Microsoft would want to, they don't have such a product (perhaps Office in the business market, but that's about it).
Apple won by not fighting the last war. If Microsoft wants to stay relevant, they need to do the same. What's next? The smartphone, tablet, and cloud services ships have left port and are pretty far out on the horizon. Can Microsoft see what is around the corner the other guys cannot? They are, for the first time since they were founded, the underdog. They have a stellar research group whose output they seem to rarely take advantage of. It's time to get some stuff out of the lab and take some risks. The Kinect shows me the mojo is there -- and it was almost certainly Ballmer's narrow-mindedness that has prevented Microsoft from taking enough risks. I hope now that they have a technical visionary at the helm we'll really see them shake things up, and this is coming from someone who has loathed Microsoft products for quite some time now.
Microsoft's malaise is part real, and part illusion:
The illusion part is mostly obvious. Microsoft makes oceans of money. Heck of a malaise, right?
The real part of the malaise stems from Microsoft not being objective about itself. For example, Microsoft could easily make vastly more money if they looked at Windows as a legacy product and raised prices on the people who really need Windows.
Looking at Windows as a Product of the Future means they won't actually ship any Products of the Future, because that might contradict the dogma. That's a real malaise. That's what keeps the great ideas of the very smart people at Microsoft funneled through Windows product management. The new products that get through are mostly reactive, like IE, MSN, Bing Search, Bing Maps, etc.
The malaise is even more basic than "Should Microsoft be a consumer and enterprise business?" Dividing Microsoft that way would probably help, but fail to see the underlying cause, and that would leave the consumer part vulnerable to a continuation of what ails it now.
> No company today has reach or influence anything like what Microsoft had during the golden era of the PC. Not Apple, not Google, and not Microsoft itself.
I think Google is pretty close, really. They obviously don't have an operating system for laptops or desktops that everyone uses, but using a computer without Google products is something that people just don't really do anymore. iOS, Android, OSX, Windows, Ubuntu, etc. no matter what you're probably using something Google wrote on it.
Which is really a very old-school Microsoft strategy brought up to date to the early 21st century. Google recognized that the OS doesn't matter anymore and Microsoft continued to believe it was everything.
> Google recognized that the OS doesn't matter anymore and Microsoft continued to believe it was everything.
I think they recognize all too well that it matters, which is seen by the massive effort in developing and supporting Android, Chrome OS etc. This is just Googles version of Microsoft giving away IE.
No, not really. It's still exceedingly easy to make Google a bit player in your life. For example, I use Apple gear for my home computer / phone / tablet (although I have a custom AOSP tablet for work - we flash our own firmware for it though, so it's not really google-y). I use Google for maybe 5% of my searches, I only use GMail for work, and quite frankly we could switch at a moment's notice to another email solution), and I only use Google Maps when I want to look at a map on my work PC, which runs linux.
Apart from the 5% of search that I find I need Google for, the rest is very easy to switch out. Compare that to the world of computing in the 90s. Your computer needed to be able to read FAT32. Your web site needed to work well for IE. There was only one valid office suite out there. Most peripherals only came with Windows drivers, shutting everyone else out of the fun. Indeed one part of the rebirth of the Mac was the recognition that peripheral driver support would have to be done in-house, rather than relying on 3rd parties to provide Mac drivers for their products.
The Microsoft dominance of the 90s made computing on competing platforms difficult. Google does not have anything like that level of domination / lock-in.
I predict Android will enjoy a period of dominance that will be remarkably the same as Windows. Android will dominate mobile devices, plus a few other areas like maybe cars, appliances, TVs, some wearables, and the random embedded things that used to run Windows CE and Windows Embedded, very much in the way Windows dominates PCs. Probably, like Windows, for decades.
The question is whether that will matter the way Windows mattered to computing. I would have expected, for example, a lot more people who write software for the enterprise to start making tablet apps. They're not. I don't know if this is a wave that is late coming in, or if vendors think touch Web apps will be good enough (which they are not, for anything that is popular in an app store), or if that kind of dominance just doesn't matter as much anymore.
Android is a pretty sweet tablet OS, and I could see there being a lot more of it where PCs are serving as office productivity nodes. Tablets have the potential to to change the workplace for the better: Users not tied to heavy PCs or laptops in cubicle workspaces, etc. But it's slow to take off.
Steve Fucking Jobs said that (the desktop PC was dead and
innovation had virtually ceased). He was exactly right.
And who knows where we’d be today if Jobs and Next had not
been reunified with Apple the next year.
As a Windows user, I suspect I'd be about where I am today, except that I wouldn't have to install ClassicShell to get rid of Metro.
I think this is an interesting contrast with PG's "Microsoft is Dead (2006)," because it points to a reason why Microsoft lost their hunger and dominance: they had no driving company goal after they got to "a computer in every home (running Microsoft software)." Both read true to me, as a 20-something who never really appreciated Microsoft during its dominance. By the time I got to high school, Apple had already switched to Intel, and I purchased the first iPhone for $600 in 10th grade. I've never used Outlook, and I don't think I ever will.
It's going to take a hell of a lot from MS in order to have someone like me buy back in.
I'll present one of the other perspectives.
I was all-Microsoft, from MS DOS up through Windows Server 2003. Late 90s MCSE, nothing but MS. Most of my time was spent building and maintaining NT4.0 installations and then migrating to 2000.
I got tired of keeping pace with the amount of changes in all of the services somewhere between Server 2003 and Server 2008 and have since jumped ship.
Now I use entirely open source software and a mix of AWS instances and dedicated servers in various parts of the country for heavy lifting. (I work with multiple small companies rather than one large company that would benefit from the perfect AWS deployment.) This is after having spent time and personally maintained dozens of machines in half a dozen different data centers stretching back to 1998.
"Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world"
There already are servers sending data everywhere. For example the servers of Google, Facebook and Wikipedia. How would Microsoft convince those guys or new companies to get rid of their solid, free and open stack and pay for Microsofts closed stuff?
This is much different from "A computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software". Back then, there where no computers on desks and homes to begin with.
Google/Facebook mean social and crudely document shaped data. Wikipedia means data that looks like encylopedia pages.
Microsoft mean ANY data you want to shift with the same languages and tools across all platform form factors which is why people buy into the ecosystem. Even going back to 2004, I could knock out an app (in C++/C#) that worked on the desktop, on the web and on mobile devices. In fact I did and it's still in use today managing private couriers with minimal code changes.
"Steve Fucking Jobs said that. He was exactly right."
Well it's good he said that, otherwise Gruber would twist himself into a knot trying to argue otherwise.
Though this is interesting
"If we include all iOS and Android devices the “computing” market in Q3 2008 was 92 million units of which Windows was 90%, whereas in Q3 2013 it was 269 million units of which Windows was 32%."
Actually doing the math, Q3 2008, Microsoft was about 83 million units. Q3 2013 Microsoft had just over 86 million units. So I guess it's still a growth? I'm sorry, revealing the actual numbers punctures Gruber's thesis. Rude of me.
I mean, nobody really conflated these categories when it was just Blackberries and video game consoles. Do I get to add Xbox units to this too?
Of course Microsoft missed the mobile boat and it's largely Ballmer's fault. That's well known and this kind of weird conflated analysis isn't insightful or interesting.
"Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world.
The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device."
Ugh, please no. Data transmission has been hopelessly commoditized and I really don't want an Apple or a Microsoft inserting themselves into a low margin game and trying to figure out how to make it a high margin one.
His vision of a future Microsoft sounds an awful lot like "Don't you dare compete with Apple in any area". Server backends platforms and cloud computing are the areas that Apple don't care about owning or controlling.
> Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world. The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device.
I think the Windows 8 gamble could still pay off. We're starting to see 8" tablets that run full Windows. Give it 12 months and the 8" form factor will be powerful enough to cover a lot of enterprise needs. 8" tablet + docking station is a very compelling way to get work done.
As mundane as it sounds, "enterprise" needs often involve opening a bunch of spreadsheets every day, and those are pretty painful on a 7" or 8" screen.
Only if your data and apps are on that device you carry about, and not in the cloud so you can access them from both at once. And they just made the cloud guy CEO so he might be thought to favour that way.
I don't see why people always compare Microsoft to Apple besides the fact that they are two of the oldest and highest-profile companies in the technology industry. This comparison always leads to them making the false claim that Microsoft "missed-out" on mobile.
Microsoft has always been a software-first company. Their strategy has always been to create the OS and license it to hardware manufacturers and capture the largest share of the market. Apple began as a hardware company that chose to pursue a strategy of building its own software so it could control the entire stack, bottom to top.
One wanted to cast a wide net with limited quality control, the other wanted to produce products of the highest quality.
But here's the thing- neither is necessarily "wrong" and you can't possibly simultaneously employ both strategies.
As of today, Microsoft has a $297 billion market cap. Enterprise software sales (read the large multibillion-dollar entities that quietly purchase billions of dollars of Microsoft products without blog entries or TechCrunch critiques) aren't going anywhere for a long time. Anybody who works in one can tell you that.
What's more is that Microsoft actually has a large and growing number of evangelists for their mobile products. The claim that Prices come down, chips get faster. Software evolves. cuts both ways and should apply as much to Microsoft as to Apple, especially now that the mobile device market is "mature."
> The world is in need of
high-quality, reliable, developer-friendly, trustworthy, privacy-guarding cloud computing
platforms.
No, no, no, that is exactly what I do _not_ want! I want all my computing devices to work completely offline in all circumstances. I want to install programs to my local computer so Incan be shure that I still can use them if the company goes bankrupt. I want to be able to install old versions of programs in case I don't like a newer version...
In my opinion it is wrong to put applications to the cloud because then I become dependent on the provider of this service. For me the cloud should only be used for one thing: to synchronize data between my computing devices!
I hope Nadella is adjusting strategy closer to a Google-Amazon-Microsoft hybrid; beefing up Hotmail, Office, SharePoint(?) and running them everywhere on Azure, while Windows platform fragments into Phone and Surface/Desktop.
The idea that Microsoft would be "privacy-guarding" is completely laughable to me, when they have so much poorer security than even Google right now, and Google already has major privacy issues on its own. Microsoft would be one of the last company to trust with my privacy. At least when Google says they aren't giving direct access to their servers to the governments I somewhat believe them, but I wouldn't believe Microsoft at all if they said that to me. They've had too many Skype privacy blunders to trust them on this.
[+] [-] beloch|12 years ago|reply
Microsoft's surface tablets are signs of big things to come. They're currently too expensive for what they are, but they could find a huge niche. They're portable tablets meant for content creation, not mere consumption. If you want a tablet that will let you draw, take notes, etc. as easily as on paper, iPads aren't even close to the current Surface. The surface pro would have been exactly what I wanted in undergrad physics for a lecture-hall machine. Many artists probably feel the same way now.
Tablets have long been too underpowered to tackle real creative tasks. The surface proves that the hardware has changed, although the cost is still high. I expect the next few generations of surfaces to get cheaper and more refined rapidly. People who love tablets are soon going to want something more than a glorified phone, and the Surface is going to be the go-to option.
Yeah, so MS might dominate the content-creation/student/artist tablet niche. Big whoop. Well, success in any consumer hardware niche might do for MS what it did for Apple. Namely, make them a huge pile of cash and jump-start their supply-chain so they can move into other areas. It might not play out this way. Apple has been looking for ways to make the iPad more content-creation friendly beyond just marketing them as such. Still, iOS on an iPad is a huge step behind Win8 on a Surface pro for creative tasks right now. All MS has to do is keep iterating the Surface and avoid another Vista-style PR blunder with Win9.
[+] [-] DrJokepu|12 years ago|reply
When was the last time they have actually managed to pull this off? Maybe the Xbox? It was never dominant or an area of profit. .NET? Never dominant or a direct source of profit.
The days you are referring to are long gone. It's not the same company anymore and it's not the same world anymore.
[+] [-] simonh|12 years ago|reply
Furthermore, even if such a swing does begin, you are assuming two things: Firstly that Apple will not respond effectively to MS establishing such a niche. Secondly that Android will also fail to compete for that niche.
The problem is that all the innovative new mobile creativity apps are currently coming out on iOS, digitizer tech or no. Apple has never subscribed to the creation/consumption world view, or even used the term 'consumption' to my knowledge. It sounds like something people died from in the Middle Ages. Their flagship day one launch apps for the iPad were all creative apps - Garageband, Pages, etc.
[+] [-] hrktb|12 years ago|reply
One can argue if the iPad is a glorified phone or not, but I think Apple isn't moving any slower than Microsoft, and it is reasonable to expect a more capable iPad in the years to come. Although it's third party hardware, stylus support has come a long way, even if it might not be as good as the Surface digitizer, it might as well be good enough for average users.
The race is on, and I wouldn't bet my shirt on Microsoft taking the lead anytime soon (in 5 or 10 years, I don't know)
[+] [-] gnaffle|12 years ago|reply
They released the music kit for the Surface, but where are the vast amount of great music production / performance apps from various well established companies such as Korg, Moog, Cubase, all of which are available on iOS?
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|12 years ago|reply
I doubt it. A keyboard alone isn't enough to win that market, great software is. Look at the content creation apps available on iOS - iMovie, Garageband, iWork, Paper, Brushes, DM1, Amplitube, Notion. It's going to be hard to catch up with that. They are built for touch. The people using them don't need a keyboard. A keyboard isn't really the ideal input device for someone creating content unless it is written content. For everything else touch seems to work better.
[+] [-] mwfunk|12 years ago|reply
I actually want Microsoft to succeed; I want them to do much better than they have been. Microsoft does certain things really well that their competitors don't, and I would especially love to see more competition in the mobile and tablet space. Their own processes and business strategies seem to have calcified around 2003, which have since dragged down a lot of things that could have been great products.
Totally tangential, but this is ignoring the fact that they actually have been doing really well in the one area that you would think would be the only thing people care about: profit. But no one seems to care about that, even though I personally don't think that that profit is going to dry up anytime soon. They could keep going like this forever, and people would still talk about how they're dead or dying. I understand why this is, it's just unfortunate that simply being a successful business isn't enough to avoid being branded a failure.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmerl|12 years ago|reply
MS mentality barely changed. Lock-in remains their primary strategy in many areas (it's well described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_...).
In today's world though it's only backfiring at them, because they have no domination as in the past.
[+] [-] bovermyer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] programminggeek|12 years ago|reply
The Xbox is quite successful, but it's a lot of work to make not a lot of money. Why? The razors and blades concept doesn't work so well as making a 30% margin on a product people really, really want to buy.
[+] [-] 6d0debc071|12 years ago|reply
The questions in that regard seem as follows: Why would artists opt for a, relatively small, imprecise pen over something from Waccom?
Why would programmers opt for working on a small laptop analogue compared to a computer with multiple monitors?
Why would writers opt for this over a computer or a laptop?
I can see people writing a blog post on one, or sitting in a lecture hall with one - but even there, the advantage over an apple laptop; which is pretty light already; seems negligible.
Unless you have to travel a significant distance on foot. There it has the advantages that tablets always had: Light device, relatively good battery life.
But by and large, the competition for Surface in the tablet space seems likely not to be other tablets. It seems more likely to be the tools - some of which are, when you get down to it, fairly specialised - that people are already using.
[+] [-] Spooky23|12 years ago|reply
They tried to do so because you can argue that in the enterprise, iPad can deliver a better Windows experience via VDI than the garbage PCs that dominate the market.
Once I'm delivering a quality Windows experience to my users by turning the client device into a TV, the next step is to further simplify. That expense app? I can use VDI to deliver some awful Enterprise Software via IE9.... or buy a solution with an iOS app! Something like 40% of enterprise users are using a defined set of < 7 PC applications to do specific things. That's easy pickings for a mobile application, and a great way to reduce Microsoft spend -- which is a big black hole in every enterprise org.
The other issue is the channel. If they get real about hardware, they are screwing Dell, HP, Lenovo. That's a symbiotic relationship that generates alot of MSFT business.
[+] [-] sillysaurus2|12 years ago|reply
For example, iPhone completely changed my life overnight, mostly due to its navigation features and ability to look up phone numbers.
I think Surface will only be dominant if it solves a problem for people. So, which problem does it solve, and why is it useful for people?
[+] [-] zimpenfish|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hifier|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onli|12 years ago|reply
That's the thing for me: That doesn't work anymore. Privacy-Guarding destroys that. Normally, I would fully agree that this is a good vision for Microsoft, continuing to be on the Desktop (especially corporate), trying to be on other markets and failing mostly, but becoming a big cloud player. But for me, the cloud is dead, and the NSA killed it - I try not to use it if it is not really helpful and without obvious privacy issues (like http://rsspusher.eu01.aws.af.cm/, appfrog was fine for that, I still think that even if it predates that thought). And I know I'm not alone with that attitude.
Maybe that doesn't mean that the cloud is dead, rather that there is a minority for which it is. I'm not sure how to predict the influence of the surveillance on the techological future. But what it means for sure is that for me and a few other guys, a Microsoft being a big cloud player would be as dead as it was before. We will see whether that matters.
[+] [-] smokinn|12 years ago|reply
Microsoft has amazing expertise into taking any computer a 3rd party provides and making it work with their software. What about providing "cloud services" that can be guaranteed to never exit your own corporate firewall? I imagine this is going to be a huge need in the near future. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it were a standard EU regular within 5 years.
This seems like an amazingly huge opportunity they could capitalize on. Become the standard software cloud solution of all software the way they they own email in the enterprise with exchange. Plenty of companies are large enough to own their own racks of virtualized servers and would pay good money to run well integrated Microsoft software on them.
[+] [-] tempestn|12 years ago|reply
Anyway, but experience with Azure was deep rather than broad, but it was enough to give me a strong belief that if this represents the great hope for Microsoft's future, things aren't looking so bright.
[+] [-] gnaffle|12 years ago|reply
> The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device.
I don't see how Gruber can come to this conclusion unless he has suddenly changed position and thinks the open web will eventually win out over native apps.
The problem, of course, is that for a company that wants to be Microsofts size, they _need_ to own the platform, because the platform owners have an incentive to limit their dependence on you and make sure that their cloud services work better on their platform. iMessage and Hangouts? Integrated. Skype? Not so.
The only way to "own" the platform owners is to have an essential, popular product that customers demand. As much as Microsoft would want to, they don't have such a product (perhaps Office in the business market, but that's about it).
Edit: Wanted to add "How Microsoft Lost the API war" which is another interesting take on the platform thing and how Microsoft lost it: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
[+] [-] 23arboo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gfodor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zigurd|12 years ago|reply
The illusion part is mostly obvious. Microsoft makes oceans of money. Heck of a malaise, right?
The real part of the malaise stems from Microsoft not being objective about itself. For example, Microsoft could easily make vastly more money if they looked at Windows as a legacy product and raised prices on the people who really need Windows.
Looking at Windows as a Product of the Future means they won't actually ship any Products of the Future, because that might contradict the dogma. That's a real malaise. That's what keeps the great ideas of the very smart people at Microsoft funneled through Windows product management. The new products that get through are mostly reactive, like IE, MSN, Bing Search, Bing Maps, etc.
The malaise is even more basic than "Should Microsoft be a consumer and enterprise business?" Dividing Microsoft that way would probably help, but fail to see the underlying cause, and that would leave the consumer part vulnerable to a continuation of what ails it now.
[+] [-] stormbrew|12 years ago|reply
I think Google is pretty close, really. They obviously don't have an operating system for laptops or desktops that everyone uses, but using a computer without Google products is something that people just don't really do anymore. iOS, Android, OSX, Windows, Ubuntu, etc. no matter what you're probably using something Google wrote on it.
Which is really a very old-school Microsoft strategy brought up to date to the early 21st century. Google recognized that the OS doesn't matter anymore and Microsoft continued to believe it was everything.
[+] [-] gnaffle|12 years ago|reply
I think they recognize all too well that it matters, which is seen by the massive effort in developing and supporting Android, Chrome OS etc. This is just Googles version of Microsoft giving away IE.
[+] [-] csmithuk|12 years ago|reply
This is rather naive. In certain circles yes but by far the majority of people use just their search.
[+] [-] antimagic|12 years ago|reply
Apart from the 5% of search that I find I need Google for, the rest is very easy to switch out. Compare that to the world of computing in the 90s. Your computer needed to be able to read FAT32. Your web site needed to work well for IE. There was only one valid office suite out there. Most peripherals only came with Windows drivers, shutting everyone else out of the fun. Indeed one part of the rebirth of the Mac was the recognition that peripheral driver support would have to be done in-house, rather than relying on 3rd parties to provide Mac drivers for their products.
The Microsoft dominance of the 90s made computing on competing platforms difficult. Google does not have anything like that level of domination / lock-in.
[+] [-] Zigurd|12 years ago|reply
The question is whether that will matter the way Windows mattered to computing. I would have expected, for example, a lot more people who write software for the enterprise to start making tablet apps. They're not. I don't know if this is a wave that is late coming in, or if vendors think touch Web apps will be good enough (which they are not, for anything that is popular in an app store), or if that kind of dominance just doesn't matter as much anymore.
Android is a pretty sweet tablet OS, and I could see there being a lot more of it where PCs are serving as office productivity nodes. Tablets have the potential to to change the workplace for the better: Users not tied to heavy PCs or laptops in cubicle workspaces, etc. But it's slow to take off.
[+] [-] CamperBob2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valleyer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jitl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NDizzle|12 years ago|reply
I'll present one of the other perspectives.
I was all-Microsoft, from MS DOS up through Windows Server 2003. Late 90s MCSE, nothing but MS. Most of my time was spent building and maintaining NT4.0 installations and then migrating to 2000.
I got tired of keeping pace with the amount of changes in all of the services somewhere between Server 2003 and Server 2008 and have since jumped ship.
Now I use entirely open source software and a mix of AWS instances and dedicated servers in various parts of the country for heavy lifting. (I work with multiple small companies rather than one large company that would benefit from the perfect AWS deployment.) This is after having spent time and personally maintained dozens of machines in half a dozen different data centers stretching back to 1998.
It's going to take a hell of a lot.
[+] [-] no_gravity|12 years ago|reply
There already are servers sending data everywhere. For example the servers of Google, Facebook and Wikipedia. How would Microsoft convince those guys or new companies to get rid of their solid, free and open stack and pay for Microsofts closed stuff?
This is much different from "A computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software". Back then, there where no computers on desks and homes to begin with.
[+] [-] csmithuk|12 years ago|reply
Google/Facebook mean social and crudely document shaped data. Wikipedia means data that looks like encylopedia pages.
Microsoft mean ANY data you want to shift with the same languages and tools across all platform form factors which is why people buy into the ecosystem. Even going back to 2004, I could knock out an app (in C++/C#) that worked on the desktop, on the web and on mobile devices. In fact I did and it's still in use today managing private couriers with minimal code changes.
[+] [-] josteink|12 years ago|reply
They don't have to. They can keep on using their free and open stack, but moving to Azure instead of using Google compute engine or AWS.
[+] [-] bane|12 years ago|reply
Well it's good he said that, otherwise Gruber would twist himself into a knot trying to argue otherwise.
Though this is interesting
"If we include all iOS and Android devices the “computing” market in Q3 2008 was 92 million units of which Windows was 90%, whereas in Q3 2013 it was 269 million units of which Windows was 32%."
Actually doing the math, Q3 2008, Microsoft was about 83 million units. Q3 2013 Microsoft had just over 86 million units. So I guess it's still a growth? I'm sorry, revealing the actual numbers punctures Gruber's thesis. Rude of me.
I mean, nobody really conflated these categories when it was just Blackberries and video game consoles. Do I get to add Xbox units to this too?
Of course Microsoft missed the mobile boat and it's largely Ballmer's fault. That's well known and this kind of weird conflated analysis isn't insightful or interesting.
"Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world.
The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device."
Ugh, please no. Data transmission has been hopelessly commoditized and I really don't want an Apple or a Microsoft inserting themselves into a low margin game and trying to figure out how to make it a high margin one.
[+] [-] TorKlingberg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] temuze|12 years ago|reply
That sounds more like Google to me!
[+] [-] 23arboo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codeulike|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnBooty|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rollthehard6|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkrich|12 years ago|reply
Microsoft has always been a software-first company. Their strategy has always been to create the OS and license it to hardware manufacturers and capture the largest share of the market. Apple began as a hardware company that chose to pursue a strategy of building its own software so it could control the entire stack, bottom to top.
One wanted to cast a wide net with limited quality control, the other wanted to produce products of the highest quality.
But here's the thing- neither is necessarily "wrong" and you can't possibly simultaneously employ both strategies.
As of today, Microsoft has a $297 billion market cap. Enterprise software sales (read the large multibillion-dollar entities that quietly purchase billions of dollars of Microsoft products without blog entries or TechCrunch critiques) aren't going anywhere for a long time. Anybody who works in one can tell you that.
What's more is that Microsoft actually has a large and growing number of evangelists for their mobile products. The claim that Prices come down, chips get faster. Software evolves. cuts both ways and should apply as much to Microsoft as to Apple, especially now that the mobile device market is "mature."
[+] [-] dewiz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmcconnell1618|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yoodenvranx|12 years ago|reply
No, no, no, that is exactly what I do _not_ want! I want all my computing devices to work completely offline in all circumstances. I want to install programs to my local computer so Incan be shure that I still can use them if the company goes bankrupt. I want to be able to install old versions of programs in case I don't like a newer version...
In my opinion it is wrong to put applications to the cloud because then I become dependent on the provider of this service. For me the cloud should only be used for one thing: to synchronize data between my computing devices!
[+] [-] grrowl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] higherpurpose|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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