Is Bill Gates the Cure For What Ails Microsoft? 337
theodp writes "After reading the recent call for Steve Ballmer to step down, gdgt's Ryan Block concludes that it's time for Bill Gates to come back to Microsoft. 'I've long seen it as a foregone conclusion that Ballmer isn't the guy to be running what was until quite recently the world's preeminent technology company,' writes Block. 'The more pressing question is: who should replace him? I think we all know damn well who — but I'm not so sure he's available. Yet.' Block adds: 'I'm not saying Bill's going to leave his new gig as the world's greatest living philanthropist with aplomb, but the multi-billion dollar wheels at The Gates Foundation have been set in motion — and lest we all forget, the Foundation's endowment is tied directly to Microsoft's long-term success. It may just happen that Bill can help the Foundation more by securing Microsoft's future.'"
What? (Score:3)
With Buffett and a few others pitching in to help the Gates Foundation I hardly think the Foundation is reliant on MS. Also, I would hardly think Gates would be interesting in "saving" what is still a very profitable organisation - he's much more into pushing boundaries.
new Steve Jobs (Score:2)
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Does that mean they'll soon need Apple to save their collective asses?
Gates Is Not The Answer (Score:4, Insightful)
MS probably needs to remove one or two levels of management to allow things to speed up again. Ideas and progress are slowed by too many filters.
Re:Gates Is Not The Answer (Score:4, Interesting)
Too many management layers and probably too many of the wrong people have been promoted over the years. It's not going to be as easy as saying "replace Balmer". Whoever takes over is going to have to do some serious housecleaning to get rid of those people who are making the decisions to ship bad products.
They should have done what the anti-trust fans wanted done years ago. Split the company up into at least 3 major segments and spin things off. Shove the MS-Office bunch into their own company, shove the server folks into their own company, shove the hardware products into yet another company, etc.
Which cuts down on the layers of bureaucracy and forces those product lines to compete on merit instead of relying on other corporate cash cows (or being used as a cash cow).
Re:Gates Is Not The Answer (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but they used to catch up with the guys they were chasing.
Re:Gates Is Not The Answer (Score:4, Interesting)
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No, not always. They did a few cool and interesting things. Their business practices then became like the people they were battling: proprietary, herding, FUD-driven, and obfuscatory to the max.
Then they pitted divisions against each other, used darwinian project management and became slaves to Wall Street, this ending any morality that was left.
Gates as a leader? No. Visionary? A bit of one, but that's lost to the mythos of others these days.
Let them swim on their own... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nice font (Score:3)
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I'm going to offer a workshop that teaches the same sort of thing, but I won't focus just on Jobs. On day one you will throw Newtons, and on day two you will throw chairs.
It's the (Score:2)
It's not as bad as looks like (Score:3, Interesting)
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Exactly my thought, those who long for Gates must have very short memories.
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For me, Bill Gates is the symbol of the dynamic (and yes, also monopolist) Microsoft that got his OS on every personal computing device on earth. He was part of the Microsoft that was able kill any competitor cloning his software and improving it until it was the best choice, even if the tech was not the best. The most close thing these days is Google's Chrome (yes, IMO the tech under it -Javascript/DOM- is crap)
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Hey WIndows 95 and 98 didn't suck. Sure Windows 2000 and XP where big improvements but at the time 95 and 98 where big leaps forward. Windows 95 was when the PC actually caught up with the Amiga from 1985 in many ways.
Re:Gates was the captain of a ship too large (Score:3)
Gates could not control every aspect of the company. Remember his usability rants? [edibleapple.com]
He knows what is needed, but there are too many project managers and fiefdoms and it's not a single company working towards a single goal. No Fortune 100 company could possibly be run by a single person. He gives up some control to people, they are expected to focus on that aspect.
In my mind, I would rather have the CEO finding problems with a product and complaining about it.
But that's not the point. The point is, so many
amazon (Score:2)
MS may want to acquire their way into a profitable market, such as eBay or Amazon, (eBay is cheaper and they'd get PayPal with it), and then if they do get Skype, they could come up with tech to do 'peer-to-peer' sales, something that eBay/Amazon don't offer because they don't have that kind of tech and something Skype doesn't offer, because it's not their business, but if they did something like that, they could then have an online bank, an online retailer, an communications company all in one package, and
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The problem is that whatever Microsoft buys gets tainted by their bad rep amongst users and soon abandoned. Just look at how many jumped ship from Yahoo as soon as Bing took over their search results.
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I know they used to own it, they couldn't figure out what to do with it, even though it was staring right into their faces. They can't think beyond their current box.
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Well, they could use XBox and MS platform on wireless devices to go full Skype, and then connect Skype and PayPal to build an on-line/wireless payment system. As to the online retailer - they could build their own of-course, but it's easier to acquire a known one, like eBay and then build a sales platform, something like a retail specific OS platform and come up with some sort of p2p sales system. I don't know, maybe it's all crap.
Ballmer is not the problem. (Score:3, Insightful)
Its overly simplistic to put the blame on Ballmer since it was Bill Gates that got Microsoft under close scrutiny from monopoly enforcement agencies all over the world. Bill Gates was also the one that won Microsoft the biggest EU fine in history for Bills predatory practices.
What Ballmer has done is followed in Bill Gates footstep with so-so products sold by extremely hard marketing and very shoddy business practices. If anything Ballmer is just a bleaker version of Bill. The return of Bill Gates would just be about more pressure on OEMs, more underhanded deals and more of using the monopoly again.
Personally i would love it if Bill Gates took the helm as it would make Microsoft become irrelevant even faster than today. The mobile and computing industry at large is right now liquid mercury and the tighter Microsoft squeezes the sooner it will slip.
Re:Ballmer is not the problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
Translation: Ballmer isn't as good as Gates. Under Bill Gate's leadership, Microsoft garnered so much market share that it scared nations.
Wrong. Ballmer is relying on momentum to keep Microsoft afloat. This is what the share holders are upset about. They see a future where most of the money are in mobile computing appliances and it appears to the man on the street that Microsoft's extensive portfolio is stuck on the desktop. This isn't necessarily true but their server products and mobile OSs haven't been stellar performers.
Personally I think its a shame someone can't enjoy their retirement without a bunch of whiny shareholders begging him to come back to work. Shareholder's are holding on the illusion that if Bill Gates returns then somehow he would be able to bring Microsoft back into a strategic marketing position that would preserve their market share.
Sounds like a pipe dream. Microsoft is building strategic alliances with cell phone manufacturers (eg. Nokia) and renewing their commitment to the smart phone market that they neglected since they dropped the ball on Windows CE back when Gates was preaching "Windows Everywhere". I wouldn't count Microsoft out just yet.
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Its overly simplistic to put the blame on Ballmer since it was Bill Gates that got Microsoft under close scrutiny from monopoly enforcement agencies all over the world. Bill Gates was also the one that won Microsoft the biggest EU fine in history for Bills predatory practices.
It's overly simplistic to regard Gates' actions as a failure. Ashcroft under Bush gave Gates and Microsoft a free pass on actions in the USA, and the EU fines were not enough to make Microsoft unprofitable, and thus they were a worthless, token effort that surely made a few individuals richer than they already were and otherwise had no real effect. If Ballmer were to follow in Gates' footsteps then Microsoft would flourish.
Typical Ryan Block Garbage (Score:2)
If you want Bill Gates to be Steve Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think you're getting what you think you are asking for.
These are large crude parallels being drawn here: "Steve Jobs returned to Apple and saved it" is an interesting story, but Apple's story is certainly exceedingly unique.
Not many companies crawl back from hasbeens to dominance. Apple was a joke in the 1990s, a shell of its former '80s self. The natural arc is to go from dominance to hasbeen. This is Microsoft's fate. Google's. Facebook's. etc. Apple is the weird exception, not the rule, and I wouldn't let its experience try to teach us anything. It's like seeing someone hit the lottery and trying to figure out how they did and repeat that. No, Apple is a pretty unique story in technology and business. Microsoft can't find their Steve Jobs in Bill Gates.
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In a sense, Steve Jobs renovated the shell of 20th century Apple to create 21st century Apple. The current version only really owes elements of the MacOS UI to the original macintosh. So Apple didn't really survive the revival.
exactly (Score:2)
to further the parallel, you would be asking bill gates to come back and somehow microsoft becomes a force that kills the cable giants and netflix as everyone moves to their boxes for television and movie content. and this is what microsoft becomes known for in the late 2010s
someone's going to converge the internet and the traditional cable company's market space, it could be microsoft. and then to complete the parallel to apple's story, windows 8 or 9 or 10 etc becomes a has been as Google OS takes over th
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In a sense, Steve Jobs renovated the shell of 20th century Apple to create 21st century Apple. The current version only really owes elements of the MacOS UI to the original macintosh. So Apple didn't really survive the revival.
So was the 70s Apple dead in the 80s, since the Mac owed nothing to speak of to the Apple I/II? There may be a case for your claim, but the lack of a direct descendant of the original MacOS in the current product lineup isn't it. (I acknowledge that a case can be made that the original Apple start-up did not survive into the 80s, but what start-up organization does survive its growth into a multinational?)
Re:If you want Bill Gates to be Steve Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
If the natural arc is to go from dominance to hasbeen, how do you explain IBM? Have they found some type of middle ground of the IT landscape that makes them immune to bubbles and fluctuations in the market? They seem to be doing well for themselves, and have been for a long time.
well said (Score:2)
IBM is not the picture of gold in middle age. IBM is the picture of gold in the elderly years. IBM's business acumen makes steve job's heroics look tiny
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IBM secured major defense contracts early on, and also understands the idea of selling the customer what they will buy. IBM has had its massive flops, for example the PS/Valuepoint line, and OS/2. One led to selling out to OS/2 and the other led to Microsoft dominance of PC operating systems.
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As I said farther up I think the difference, in both Apple and IBM's, cases is that they had to go to the brink before they rebuilt themselves. Apple was particularly a hairsbreadth from death when Jobs returned, and IBM wasn't much better off when they started to turn around in the 90s. Microsoft remains, for now, highly profitable. They aren't growing, they aren't dominating new markets, but they're making lots of money. Until that stops, until they start to fail, they aren't likely to turn it around.
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Microsoft can't find their Steve Jobs in Bill Gates.
Gentlemen, I invoke rule 34.
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some become vampires, and feast on the living
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apple is a business. it is a not a shell of its former self, it is a roaring success
but i think you are speaking of apple in the religious sense. while the apple fanboy is an odd pitiable creature, oddballs like you probably kept apple afloat in the 90s. if you didn't do that, apple wouldn't have been around in the early 2000s to turn around and reach their current mass market popularity
so, thanks for that, apple fundamentalists, even though you can safely be forgotten and discarded now, your life support d
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apple is a business. it is a not a shell of its former self, it is a roaring success
Hence the "Profitability aside" phrase. I think you have me pegged wrong. I am in no way a fan of Apple.
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uh, profit is success, for a business. i don't understand how you can talk about success or failure for a business without talking about profit
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i don't understand how you can talk about success or failure for a business without talking about profit
By "profitability aside" I mean "If you consider factors other than their success in business such as their moral direction or culture"
Profit is not the only method of measuring the success of a business.
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That's a pretty big aside....
Re:If you want Bill Gates to be Steve Jobs (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, during the 90's, Apple still had a HUGE warchest of money (close to a billion) - that $150M was barely a drop in the bucket. Now, at the rate Apple was losing money, it would exhaust itself in probably a decade or so.
Apple was literally in a good positoin to shut down and return all the money to investors - it still had significant assets. It just had no future - and shutting down would be a great possibility because of it (shutdown now while there's tons of assets).
The fact that people believe that $150M "saved" Apple was the result. Apple didn't need the cash (Microsoft cashed out a few years later around the millennium), but they needed the business optics. And Microsoft throwing money into a company seen as having no future means they probably know something.
It was more of a confidence builder that Apple had a bright(er) future ahead. Money talks on Wall Street, and $150M was small enough that Apple wouldn't be owned significantly by Microsoft, but large enough to get the attention of everyone.
Microsoft's Mistake not promoting Ray Ozzie (Score:3)
This was the man that should have taken the reigns of Microsoft by now. Instead he has left the company. He was a worthy successor to Gates in drive and vision.
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Ray Ozzie? The guy who created Lotus Notes and recently tried to re-create it using RSS [wikipedia.org]?
Better than Ballmer (Score:2)
Gates would be a better option than Ballmer but that's faint praise. My dog would do a better job than Ballmer. There are certainly better options out there. People with the ability to gut the entrenched internal bureaucracy and drag Microsoft into the modern world of technology.
The age of $150 operating systems running on an $800 desktop with $400 productivity software are drawing to a close. If Microsoft wants to stay relevant, they need new ideas that come from people who aren't being stifled by mi
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Totally agree, my move away from MS desktop PC products has been driven by price as they don't have magnitudes of added value compared to their competitors in order to justify the additional expense.
As someone who is seen as the local 'IT Guy' by friends and family this has also resulted in their machines moving away from MS products too. Microsoft need to maybe look at Steam and learn about how to price things.
I'm puzzled (Score:2)
And if I were in Gates's shoes, I'd rather that Balmer had the thankless task of trying to find a new Windows/Office complex while I slowly sold off my Microsoft stock. That seems to be what happened.
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Pretty sure Apple stock doesn't reflect what you're saying.
Compare P/E of AAPL to most any other stock with even half the growth rates that Apple has. Wall Street either doesn't see or doesn't agree that Apple/Jobs has a vision of the future. In spite of them proving it, quarter after quarter, for about 5 years now.
If Bill Gates were the cure... (Score:2)
...I would rather have the illness ;-)
And if he wanted to help MS *and* philantropy... (Score:2)
He'd dedicated the company to developing scalable, human-like artificial intelligence. He'd dominate the computer industry AND get those who need aid by getting answers to all questions for which there are answers.
actually (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather they just go out of business. It is long overdue.
Mark Russinovich! (Score:4, Interesting)
I vote for Mark [wikimedia.org]! He is an excellent and awesome technical fellow that has impressed me a number of times. It's time for Microsoft to learn from Google; let the engineers take control again.
Dear Steve Ballmer (Score:3)
Thank you for making our jobs easier by continuing to pursue bad products with bad management. When we saw your pitiful attempt at a search engine, we laughed until our sides split.
Sincerely,
Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, and Sergei Brin
Sure... bring back the guy... (Score:2)
who thought the Internet was a passing fad and "one person, one pc" was mantra.
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I'm one person. I have about 7 PCs, if you count work & home computers, phones, tablets, entertainment devices.
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We don't count your work computers unless you're self-employed.
One day, you may be able to have just three devices, one will probably look like a cellphone, one a tablet with a slide, flip, or docking keyboard as an option, and another will either be a desktop or dedicated (and tiny) server.
I, too, have a grip of machines. But I would prefer not to...
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Well, re-reading the GP comment, I believe he actually believed the one pc, one person comment. And maybe I could see that - everything stored on a remote server (ie the cloud) that you access from any device. And the PC becomes the data not the interface to get to the data. But I'm not sure Bill Gates saw that either.
The best way to fix Microsoft (Score:2)
Is Gates the cure or the cause? (Score:2)
.
What Microsoft needs now is a real visionary, not a phony one who built a company on borderline-illegal business practices.
I
Bill Gates is the one who screwed MS (Score:2)
seriously this is the guy who 10 years ago was preaching "consistent user experience" for mobile devices. he had vision to put windows on mobile devices but screwed it up buy trying to jam a desktop GUI on a tiny screen.
MS needs some fresh blood. Ballmer has been there almost as long as gates and paul allen founded the company. they need someone with no PC baggage to lead the company
The smartest thing Bill Gates ever did... (Score:2)
...was stop running Microsoft.
History is littered with wildly successful startup companies turning into boring ones. It happened to Xerox. It happened to Apple. It happened to Microsoft. And it will happen to Google and Facebook too, to pick the current companies of the moment.
Gates was, I think, smart enough to realize this and found something more exciting to do with his time than run a boring office products company.
Sigh (Score:2)
Gates can't do it again (Score:2)
He won't be back; M$ has jumped the shark. (Score:2)
Tool #2 is to buy-up the competition and kill it (Skype for Asterisk) thereby eliminating the possibility of any alternatives disrupting the Microsoft market space. This doesn't work so well with Open Source software. But that hasn't stopped M$ from trying.
Tool #3 is to FUD,FUD,FUD the bejeezes out of the competition until a false sense of reality is created/belie
what ails Microsoft, what's good for us all (Score:4, Interesting)
The business was built up on desktop and office app dominance. But now operatings systems are turning into commodities with the advent of virtualization/emulation/cross-platform frameworks and with widespread, sophisticated web standards. Applications are turning into commodities with the reverse engineering of formats and the advent of new standards.
Essentially, interoperability is bleeding the life out of Microsoft.
Microsoft's (current state of) livelihood is based on barriers; let them suffer. They won't die, not any time soon -- they make solid operating systems. They do make good products, despite all the security issues and bugs we've seen. But now that they've lost their stranglehold on the market they become just another player. They won't grow this big again based on being just another vendor.
This is what all those crazy advocates of "open standards" have been trying to achieve all this time. If all that griping about secret APIs and protocol pollution didn't make sense to you before, maybe it begins to make sense now.
Where Microsoft clamped down on diversity, it can no longer. And the gradual technological progress that Microsoft offered can now be replaced with the fertile offerings of a far wider sphere of operating systems and applications developers. Things like the Great Languish -- IE's stagnation for half a decade during what should have been a period of explosive growth for web technology -- are no longer possible.
I look forward to watching technology take huge strides, relative to what it had been doing under Microsoft's control.
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Yeah, but if you own enough money to hire thousands of people your time is probably best spent looking for other people with good ideas. That will be more productive than pursuing any idea you can come up with yourself.
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I don't think Bill Gates did anything miraculous. He sold MS-DOS to IBM, and then rode their success as the IBM PC became the default standard for computers. The PC "won" the computing battle therefore the microsoft OS won.
Basically he got lucky, and if he had picked somebody else, like Commodore or Atari or TI to sell his OS, then he'd be in the same place they are (bankrupt). Ever heard of Berkeley Softworks? No because even though they developed a nice GUI-based OS in 1985, they chose the wrong team
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To be accurate, they neither disappeared, nor chose the "wrong team", as GEOS was available for the Apple II as well. The company changed their name to "GeoWorks" when they went with the PC, and renamed their product "GeoWorks Ensemble". This eventually became "Breadbox Ensemble" when the company by that name bought the product line. They still call it that to this day, with references to PC/GEOS as its core software, though their website is hardly up-to-date.
Re:Bill Gates (Score:5, Informative)
MicroSoft sold Basic to all the computer companies you name and pretty much all others. MS was already a pretty significant software company before they released MS-DOS, in fact they had released OS's before MS-DOS. MS didn't get lucky by picking the right company; they picked all companies, including the right one.
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Incidentally, Microsoft didn't have an OS product at the time, but were well (and mainly) known for their BASIC interpreters. They bought the rights to Quick and Dirty DOS (aka 86-DOS), a CP/M clone, and then redirected a DEC lawsuit against them for infringement to Seattle Computer Products (the creator of QDOS) and DEC sued them out of existence for a product they no longer had rights to sell.
MS probably would have never won the OS battle without a little help, especially in the windows GUI age where thei
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Incidentally, Microsoft didn't have an OS product at the time
Before MS-DOS, Microsoft had Xenix, a quite popular unix clone at the time.
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That wasn't his only stroke of luck. It was lucky that IBM licensed PC-DOS rather than insisting on buying it outright, lucky that his parents both worked for IBM, lucky that Compaq came along and cloned the IBM's BIOS, and lucky in a lot of other ways.
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Actually Microsoft sold Basic to just about every company including Commodore. Yes Microsoft got lucky but they did make the most of it. They also kept with it. Windows was a failure in versions one and two. I remember Selling machines that had it bundled. People took it off to get more disk space.
It wasn't until Windows 386 and Windows 3 that it was actually really useful.Then you have Microsoft Office mainly Word and Excel. Some of those same computers also included Word 1.0 for DOS. I tired it out and t
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Peterbuilt doesn't make compact cars.
Peterbilt isn't even an independent company any more. They were bought out by PACCAR way back in the 50s, along with Kenworth. Compared to Freightliner (a division of Daimler), PACCAR hasn't done that well: PACCAR made only $15 billion in '07 (for both Peterbilt and Kenworth and all their other operations combined), compared with $32 billion for Freightliner all by itself in '06.
But this probably isn't the best comparison anyway: Peterbilt doesn't look like it was ever
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I use a Mac and Linux but they are really only barley making a dent in the PC market. The question will be what is going to happen to laptops. Mobile devices are good but limited. You need a keyboard to do any real communication or content creation. So will the market go to tablets that dock to a keyboard like the ASUS Transformer? Will they mo6ve to mobile devices that dock with a notebook like frame like the AtrixII?
Microsoft will still be making money for a very long time and keep doing very well for a l
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I can't completely agree with this. I'm pretty sure Intel would love to get rid of a lot of the cruft in the X86 ISA, and release a properly new product. Partly because they've tried it once already. The reason they can't is that so much software is compiled to work well on X86.
And in the end, when people are buying a PC, they expect to get a PC that does everything they want of it. ARM are doing very well, as smartphones become better and so bought by more people, and tablets take off. But in the end,
Re:Bill Gates (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think Bill Gates did anything miraculous. He sold MS-DOS to IBM, and then rode their success as the IBM PC became the default standard for computers. The PC "won" the computing battle therefore the microsoft OS won.
Basically he got lucky, and if he had picked somebody else, like Commodore or Atari or TI to sell his OS, then he'd be in the same place they are (bankrupt). Ever heard of Berkeley Softworks? No because even though they developed a nice GUI-based OS in 1985, they chose the wrong team (commodore) and disappeared off the planet.
Had they chosen IBM PC instead, maybe we'd all be using Berkeley Windows instead of MS windows. And Bill Gates would be in the same camp as Nolan Bushnell or Jack Tramel.
Selling MS-DOS to IBM and riding it was indeed a streak of luck, of having a vision that could be worked, and having it at the right place and the right time. But to assume that such a streak of luck is the only thing that propelled MS to its position of dominance is as bad an oversimplification of things as one can make. Removing the typical moral overtones we at /. like to put on things, Gates did a hell of a lot more (as one of the few people that can be geek/technocrat and businessman at the same time) in driving MS's direction. Getting a streak of luck is great. Being able to capitalize on it for decades, expanding into so many markets (both software and hardware), and even managing to fund one of the biggest private R&D on Earth today (MS Research), that is no luck.
I'm not a fan of MS products, and I've always prefer to work in predominantly Unix/Linux systems and development environments (for practical and ideological reasons). But even I can find some objective neurons left to give credit where credit is due.
Re:Bill Gates (Score:5, Insightful)
Being able to capitalize on it for decades, expanding into so many markets (both software and hardware), and even managing to fund one of the biggest private R&D on Earth today (MS Research), that is no luck.
No, it took at lot of illegal coercing of computer manufacturers, embrace/extend/extinguish, breaking monopoly laws, creating broken standards and closed up de-facto standards and generally being assholes. Not luck, but illegal activities. Praising Microsoft is equal to praising the mafia.
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I completely agree here...
The problem with Microsoft is not something one person can solve. The problem with Microsoft is that it competes with every freaken tech company on the planet! You can't run a company where the entire world is your enemy. It is nearly impossible to focus on any particular solution since doing so is the lowest common denominator and that means crap...
Microsoft needs to split itself apart and then start attacking its competitors....
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The problem with Microsoft is that it has grown big enough and entrenched enough that it is slow to respond to changes. There is a maintenence and creativity cost-per-feature, and MS's software has been feature-ing for years now. They don't generally create light and usable tools like Dropbox, BackpackIt, etc because as a company they entrench teams on fighting for expansion of specific parts of larger applications. They're just not setup to compete with small teams doing strange offshoot things.
That's n
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Well this is part of the problem. Let's say Office wants to create a new release. That means they need feedback from the consumer, the home user, and the professional. These three groups are not necessarily the same group and hence you get the symptom of slow to change. The problem is not slow to change, but the fact that they get so many cross currents.
When you are a Dropbox you only have one client in mind. If Microsoft had to create dropbox they would have to think of the developer, the enterprise, the h
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From what I hear each division within the company is practically at war with all the others, so it's competing with itself too. That's rarely a good thing.
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I would agree there...
Re:I'll answer that. (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I understand, the Kin is an indicator of what's wrong with MS. MS bought Danger with the idea of making feature phones. Danger made the popular phones widely but incorrectly known as Sidekicks that was popular with teenagers. The initial plan was to launch new products 6 months after the purchase. It was ambitious but workable plan.
Then MS executives started making a series of decisions that doomed it. First of all Danger used Java. That was never going to be allowed at MS. Project Pink would have to use CE. This would seriously delay any launch plans.
At the same time, there were feudal wars. See MS already has a phone division. While Windows Mobile was more of a business phone than consumer model, they had their own ideas and strategy for a consumer model that would become WP7. Unfortunately the rumor is that the Mobile division denied programming resources to Project Pink so they had to make the migration from Java to CE by themselves. Remember most of the Project Pink members were former Danger employees.
Had the Kin came out in 6 months, it might been a successful product. The market was changing while Project Pink was stuck in development battles. While texting is still popular, the focus was shifting to twitter and FaceBook. These features were bolted onto the product adding further delay. Other features like Calendar and contacts were delayed.
By the time the Kin was launched 18 months late, it was noticeable that the product had no clear identity and was rushed out. It was not a smart phone because it did not really have apps, yet it was not a feature phone either especially at smart phone prices. It was buggy and lacked basic features.
MS cut their losses early on it. Six months later, Verizon relaunched it as a feature phone with numerous fixes. While sales figures are not cited, it is assumed Verizon sold off their inventory.
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Danger made the popular phones widely but incorrectly known as Sidekicks
Wrong. Why would you start out with an incorrect, inflammatory, weird statement like this? You have some interesting points re how Microsoft made every wrong move conceivable WRT the acquisition of Danger and its products, but credibility==zero hen you start off with some nit-picky undies-too-tight pronouncement. And you make it mildly fun to pick on you.
For the record, Danger's "Hiptop" phone platform was sold under the Hiptop name o
Frankentech? (Score:2)
The problem with Microsoft is that it competes with every freaken tech company on the planet!
I read that as "every Frankentech company", which was confusing, because surely only Microsoft has achieved such a nefarious status.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree
Why do you think he left in the first place? So his fingerprints would not be on the decline of Microsoft.
Look at Windows "rise" through Vista. The code base kept multiplying in size. Requiring larger teams and more management, until the whole thing collapses on itself. The company provided double digit growth EVERY YEAR as the PC market expanded and every business purchased new PCs. Then as business only purchased replacement PCs, the home use market expanded. This trend could not continue on foreve
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Technology is becoming social graph driven...
What the fuck does that even mean? Stop reading blogs about startups. "inventing" a way for your friends to know you just stepped into a restaurant and ordered a taco, and that is was delicious... is a far cry from a flying car, new energy source, or cure for cancer.
All Microsoft has to do is be good at what it does. Be a good provider of video game consoles, search engine results, computer and cell phone operating systems. And now I guess, do something with Skype. But none of that has anything to do with t
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, MS is Windows - Office - Outlook - Sharepoint. I'm not even sure if Sharepoint is for revenue yet, or just lock-in.
http://www.tannerhelland.com/2962/where-does-microsoft-make-its-money-2010/ [tannerhelland.com]
Re: (Score:2)
no it's not. a very small portion of the industry in social graph driven, and a very small portion of that portion is making any kind of revenue (shareholders are faring a little better though, and have a vested interest in keeping that bubble alive).
back in the real world, real users willing to pay real money for something that provides a real service is still the norm.
I don't remember billg having any kind of aura though. Actually, i don't really see a difference between him and Ballmer, apart from chair
Re:Not so sure (Score:4, Interesting)
Bing actually has a good market share in US now - 30%. And by market demographics those who use Bing tend to be richer, better educated people.
You mean the kind of people who could afford to buy a computer or laptop but could not afford the time to change from the default MS recommended one?
Re:Not so sure (Score:4, Informative)
Bing has about 8% in the US and about 3% worldwide according to statcounter and most other sources. 30% is a dream number bing hasnt even been close to. I have never ever heard of seodesignsolutions before but as their numbers are very different from the established players i call bullshit on their statistics until correlated from more respected sources.
For all we know seodesignsolutions might just be a shell setup by Bing PHBs trying to get atleast one payment for good performance in their lifetime.
Re: (Score:3)
This is actually a pretty interesting point. Ballmer is clearly the business side, and you'd think from that he'd be socially adept. Gates is clearly all geek, and appears to be borderline Autistic on occasion, and you'd expect him to be socially inept. Yet as TFA points out, Gates has that something that makes you listen to him, makes you consider his words, makes him a leader. Ballmer doesn't and it's not something you can fake.
I'm not a Gates fan, or a Microsoft fan, but I don't think you have to ad
Re: (Score:2)
MSFT has two "products" that make them money. Windows and Office.
You take either one away, and the rest of the company will collapse into itself quickly. Xbox technically still isn't profitable. all the money MSFT spent on Xbox has yet to be earned back as revenue. (it is getting close though)
Bing, Xbox, windows Live. Only MSFT can afford to spend billions to keep money losing operations going for a decade before they finally start to become profitable.
That is how much MSFT rely's on Windows and Office
Re: (Score:3)
Come on, now. Scully is in an elite group. His only peers in his industry are John Akers and maybe Jack Tramiel. At best, Ballamer will be a Carly Fiorina.