Spot on. If I had to identify a root-cause of Microsoft's failure, it would be its voracious business practices in the 1990s. If you are in your mid-30s or older today, you grew up under this totalitarian regime -- and you hated it. And when you had the opportunity a decade or so ago, you were on the vanguard that led x86 server build-out with Linux, not Windows. To the degree that you had to care at all about Windows on the server, virtualization assured that it was in its own little box, never again to escape. And of course, you sure as hell don't trust Microsoft now: the last thing you'd ever do is buy a Windows phone or deploy on Azure -- you are of an entire generation that won't be fooled again.
And what if you're younger than that? If you're in your 20s or younger, you probably just don't care about Microsoft -- though you might not get why the older folks get so frothy about them. But know that your luxurious apathy is because an older generation considered Microsoft's offenses to be capital crimes -- and meted out punishment accordingly.
Microsoft proves that in technology you can get away with being predatory for a while -- maybe even a long while -- but not forever (at least not in a free society). And once the world moves against you, those that you so aggressively bullied will cheer your demise: you will never recover until you accept that you have failed your customers and violated their trust. Very, very few technology companies have gotten to a point of such vilification and recovered (indeed, the only example I can think of is IBM). And while I may be too early in calling it, I dare say that Oracle is (at long last) at that point or approaching it rapidly -- and I fully expect the same conversation to be had about their (coming) lost decade...
I think you're being a bit lax with history here and looking with rose-tinted glasses, Apache had made far too many inroads in the server way before MS really tackled servers properly. That C# is as popular as it is kinda debunks your entire argument, it's a firmly entrenched behemoth in the corporate world.
The MS hate that was in the 90s/early 00s just doesn't exist any more. What should worry MS far more is that these days so many programming articles and guides just assume you are working on a Unix system. Windows is becoming irrelevant to the elite. It's a bizarre phenomenon given that MS is still dominant in the OS field that has been gaining serious traction for the last 3 or 4 years.
Also SQL Server is good. Very good. And cheap, very cheap compared to the other good DBs. While MySQL and Postgre are alright, in reality they really are quite bad compared to SQL server in terms of overall polish and quality. I got reminded of this the other day tracking down an excessively poorly performing query, fixed in MySQL by an index that MS SQL would have effectively just done for you.
And don't even get me started on how many business run exchange. Ugh.
I don't think Bryan is being lax with history at all. In fact, he completely nailed it. The only points in your comment that I found persuasive, on the other hand, are that Windows is indeed becoming irrelevant, SQL Server probably has an edge over MySQL in some ways, and Exchange needs to die a quick death. The rest just doesn't fly.
Hatred for Microsoft doesn't exist any longer? Says who? I believe it runs much deeper and stronger than you realize. I haven't purchased a Microsoft product in well over a decade, and that "purchase" was a PC preloaded with an OEM license of Windows that I had no way of not buying. My loathing for Microsoft was sown over decades of the most user-hostile, winner-take-all, I-will-rip-off-your-head-and-shit-down-your-neck corporate culture I've ever witnessed. Bryan calling Microsoft "predatory" is being kind.
I'm not sure what "OS field that has been gaining serious traction for the last 3 or 4 years" refers to, but if you're talking about desktop computing, they are doing exactly the opposite of gaining traction: http://twitpic.com/a31jis They aren't just becoming irrelevant to the elite; Microsoft is rapidly becoming just plain irrelevant.
How does C#'s popularity debunk Bryan's entire argument? A lot of companies still use Windows (for now), which means a lot of people use C# to develop applications for those computers. I don't see how this debunks much of anything.
SQL Server is good. Is it better than MySQL in some ways? Sure. What are the chances I'd select SQL Server instead of PostgreSQL? Zero percent. So that's a false equivalence right there, but that's besides the point. The reason people use MySQL or PostgreSQL instead of SQL Server is that you don't need Windows. Why tie yourself to a user-hostile company that's only going to charge you ad infinitum upgrades for a malware-ridden operating system? Even if SQL Server were heads-and-shoulders above MySQL/PostgreSQL, people would avoid it because you can't get it without Windows.
As I said, Bryan really nailed this: you're either burned so badly by Microsoft that "hatred" doesn't even begin to describe your feelings, or you're apathetic because the world has moved on and Microsoft continues to pretend like they live in the 1990s. With Ballmer at the helm, steering Microsoft towards seemingly inevitable obsolescence, Microsoft appears destined to eventually join Wang, Sun, RIM, Nokia, and the other dead or soon-to-be-dead. It didn't have to end that way, but reaping what you sow is generally the way the world works.
Although I agree with all of your emotions because I share many of them, certain of your comments have me wondering how much time you have spent around big corporates.
Microsoft is to this day, beyond pervasive. I have over a decades worth of experience in data analysis, systems analysis, business intelligence and software design and I have never been in a big corporate office that does not use exchange, Outlook is de facto, period.
Clearly then all of those desktops are windows boxes.
With the release of MSBI as a competitor to all of the top flight BI suites that pretty much comes bundles with MSSQL... Watch this space - MS will be ubiquitous in BI within the next decade, I am an expert in the field and I have zero doubt about that.
The simple fact is that MS is still the 'safe' (define that as you will) choice for the dinosaurs that run corporate IT... The world you assert as real right now is a in my opinion a far future possible state, nothing more.
Companies using Microsoft SQL (and sometimes requiring the same from others, which is very odd) are often viewed as somewhat clueless. I think for business people, Microsoft has some positive aura (I don't really know why), but everyone else just tries to stay mostly away from them.
Of course it will - everyone needs to understand their data, how else do you think they make an informed decision?
If anything this market is increasing in size, and the Microsoft suite does an excellent job of filling the mid size end of the market.
Dont knock MSSQL till youve tried it because its pretty fucking awesome at the moment.
I use MSSQL every day. But that's because I'm currently working in IT for a very large company. I don't expect the job I do to exist for another 10 years so I think it's irrelevant what's popular here.
Google Apps my friend - even Mining companies of 2000+ staff are right now eveluating it and loving it.
As for your BI statements you must have a short memory. In the last decade alone the strategy for MS BI changes every 3 years or so, products that partners have spent thousands on training etc have been cut without notice, acquisitions in the space have been squandered with very little IP making it into MS product.
You must have picked the worst example to disprove the OPs argument. Open source based BI solutions have made serious progress over the last 4-5 years.
If you are seriously claiming that Exchange and Google Apps provide the same features except for the most basic, one-sentence description of those features (as in, 'they both send mail and store contacts'), you clearly don't have the slightest idea of what Exchange is or does.
Regarding the BI, I think you're mistaking me for another person in this thread, I don't know much about that, nor do I have an opinion. I'm just saying that Exchange is unique and there is nothing out there that can replace it without making very different trade-offs in the way your IT infrastructure is set up.
You have obviously never used Google Apps Premium edition. It does the bits that actually matter to users. I havent looked after Exchange since the 2007 version but am well aware what it can do.
Do Google apps allow you to have your own server completely cut off from Google? (cos no way would the company I am in want to let google see their mail)
Yeah, that's going to be a dealbreaker for a lot of businesses. Some of them actually take confidentiality of their own and clients' data somewhat seriously. And for good reasons, too. Besides, you're not just trusting Google with your internal communications and sensitive customer data, but it's also an American corporation that's been known to willingly share data with government agencies. If you're not based in the US yourself, why place such trust? To illustrate, imagine there's a service like "Yandex Apps" (maybe there even is, I don't know), of course some businesses would not care as long as the product is good, but you can also imagine there'd be many that would be rather hesitant to host their sensitive business data on a Russian webserver on a different continent... :)
Do you know how Exchange works, and how Zimbra works, from a user and management point of view? (I'm not even taking GoogleApps seriously, because many organizations don't want to outsource the storage of their private data).
If yes, how can you say that they are 'similar' except for the very most basic point that users can send email with them, much like both a Lamborghini Murcielago and a Ford Model T are both 'cars'?
I find the "organizations don't want to outsource the storage of their private data" an interesting one.
Do they think they can secure their email servers better than Google can?
Are they going to refuse to hand over data if requested by authorities?
As far as I know Google doesnt do anything more than say a spam filtering service like MessageLabs would do - i.e. index some text to see if it should be classified as spam / malware etc.
You can read their policies on this here
http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6...
Do you know what the word "trusted" means in the context of security?
> Do they think they can secure their email servers better than Google can?
Just because someone secures their servers better than you can doesn't mean you automatically have to trust them with your data.
Let's assume for a moment that I have the safest vault in the world. According to your reasoning, the logical thing to do would be to put your valuables in my vault? Gosh ..
And even if you do trust Google with your sensitive data, do you also trust all their employees that might have access to it? http://gawker.com/5638874/david-barksdale-wasnt-googles-firs... And Google is a rather big corporation, if anything were to go wrong, they are notoriously hard to hold accountable.
> Are they going to refuse to hand over data if requested by authorities?
Well, they do not necessarily answer to the same authorities as Google does, so in some cases, yes, absolutely.
> Just because someone secures their servers better than you can doesn't mean you automatically have to trust them with your data.
When coupled with credibility of course it does.
> Let's assume for a moment that I have the safest vault in the world. According to your reasoning, the logical thing to do would be to put your valuables in my vault? Gosh ..
No it wouldnt, silly argument really. You have less than zero rep.
I know how Zimbra works, yes. And I think it is a bit harsh if you call Exchange a Model T - even though the search facilities through Outlook are crap, and many Exchange instances are configured with ridiculously little mail storage (eg. 250 MB/user).
If any comment ever deserved an "El Oh El" it's surely this one.
There aren't any enterprise alternatives even though there should be one.
For instance, if RIM had half a clue and a nickel for every bad idea they've executed on they'd have built a messaging platform to compete with Microsoft.
It's obviously too late for this now, but there aren't many companies that people would trust their email to.
I recently set up an email system for a small company using cPanel, hMailserver and Thunderbird. I actually looked at Zimbra but decided to go with a Windows-based solution. I also considered Google Apps, but was afraid it wouldn't allow for fine-grained control over access permissions (i.e. managers seeing subordinates' accounts and restricted shared folders) and also unrestricted creation email aliases/accounts.
Should I have taken a closer look at GA? Thunderbird isn't the easiest to use, but I like how it's easy to work with shared IMAP folders.
I disagree about the sense of IIS v. Apache: Apache won because of Linux not the other way around. (There is, after all, a port of Apache to Windows -- it seems to have done nothing to stop the bleeding according to Netcraft.) As for the "bizarre phenomenon" that Windows seems to be "irrelevant" despite that it's "dominant", there is of course a simple answer: it's not dominant. Windows lost; humanity won.
>Windows is becoming irrelevant to the elite. It's a bizarre phenomenon given that MS is still dominant in the OS field that has been gaining serious traction for the last 3 or 4 years.
I think this is because IT is being moved out of the enterprise. I don't think it was ever a smart fit so more and more companies are moving to "off the shelf" solutions, SaaS, etc. The best programmers are going to startups or freelancing. The people still chugging away in big firms writing code are essentially the COBOL programmers of the late 90's: just trying to grab cash as long as it lasts.
> Windows is becoming irrelevant to the elite. It's a bizarre phenomenon given that MS is still dominant in the OS
That is a terrible symptom for their case. In that long term that is what will kill them. They ignore the geeks and people who eventually end up promoting technology.
For example, looking at some open source projects (say Redis), a Windows version is not even supported. Most just assume you have 'gcc' and 'make' installed and will compile the project that way.
Now they are trying to appeal to the cool kids, they got Erik Meijer, they have F# but it is just not enough.
The major issue I see MS having is one of perception. For many long years they had "not invented here" blinders on. They have (for the most part) moved past that.
Take a look at the Web Platform Installer next time you're working on a Windows box.
Isn't it a little ironic that they don't matter to the "elites" and "geeks" and then this article was in Vanity Fair? There is another aspect of bubble bursts, there is a point in which every sort of starts to expect it. I'm of the belief that once there is some critical mass of burst acceptance, it's an inevitability.
MS isn't going away (like they tried to do to so many of their competitors) but it may never be the same again. I don't see how Windows 8 can be a big enough win to be what they need it to be; they have set the benchmark as windows everywhere, not a plurality of windows. Really, the interesting question is what does Ballmer's successor do to shake it up and get the ship back on track. He could reset "normal." He could spin some stuff out (internet and games could/should be on their own.)
Having worked with MSSQL for 12 years, now PostgreSQL full time, I would like to hear what in your opinion is bad. Other that the lack of query parallelism, I find Postgres to be a pleasure to work with.
SQL Server is good to, and the price point comparison is correct, pending the changes being made for SQL 2012, which may change the pricing advantage somewhat.
You made his point again. In the golden Microsoft years, Exchange, SQL, SMS, etc all sucked. Really sucked. But you needed to take your medicine (aka buy the Windows platform), because the oxygen was snuffed out from the alternatives.
Today, the tools are keeping folks on the platform. That's dangerous to Microsoft's well being.
Bubbles like this have a way of collapsing so damned quickly.
I remember when Novell had an absolute lock on server software, the alternatives were all jokes, and yet one day they'd completely disappeared from the landscape, not a single server remained.
When people jumped to NT, or scrambled to Linux, there wasn't much time to respond.
What killed Novell was that their product was perhaps too good, it was frighteningly fast and extremely durable even under the worst conditions, but not good enough because it couldn't run general purpose applications like the other OS options could. Like you say, the only thing keeping them there was file sharing and when people moved past file sharing and on to other things, they were dead in the water.
What will make Microsoft disappear is the industry moving beyond email and groupware and "office apps" and instead to something else. What that is, maybe we just don't know yet.
> but not good enough because it couldn't run general purpose applications like the other OS options could.
I remember wrestling with BTreive settings on a client's NW 3.1.1 server to make Solomon (their accounting software) play nicely with ArcServe (the backup software). There's something I'm glad to not have thought of in years.
I cant speak for too many, but among my community of Linux users, Nokia has turned from Linux champion to piece of turd overnight.
It wasnt too long ago when I was a hardcore Nokia fanboy that forced my whole family to use Nokia-only, eagerly waiting for the next Meego phone, despite the lack of apps and user community.
Nokia was Symbian, it was the enterprise Symbian devices in Europe contributing to their marketshare. The future of lowend could have been Meltemi, but the hardware would have been made in China and sold by Nokia, Meego is gone (last people pushed into their own company, per the planets today), Nokia (with their Microsoft transplant CEO) announced an EOL for Symbian and marketshare dried up.
You misunderstand the MS hate to compare it to Oracle and IBM.
Oracle and IBM want to make money, period. They'll run their products on a competitor's platform if they can get a bite of the pie, they don't care. Further, I'd guess 7/10 geeks that "hate" oracle have never used their products and might not even understand what they do, it's just part of the hatred of really really successful companies. (That's part of it too, whenever a powerful and successful company actually competes, people tend to hate it.) I'm not going to defend them but when Oracle sued Google, I don't think there was ever an intention to make Google go away, they just wanted a cut of the action, it was all about money. Read up on what MS did to Digital Research and Lotus, MS wanted to "cut off the air supply," they refused to see a world where those companies could co-exist. It's just different, MS has wanted to kill the competition.
How come they don't port most apps to other platforms? Office on Mac is the only serious one I can think of.
What failure? I don't know what you mean by failure here. If you mean "fails to be the rockstar of the tech industry" that isn't much of a failure.
Microsoft is only a failure if we expect them to build an ever more powerful monopoly with no possibility of escape. They may be trying to do that. Instead they have a large and solid business which is still very cash flow.
Tell me of Microsoft's failure when the profits of Google or Facebook surpass the profits of Google.
Microsofts failure is most evident in their stock staying flat or dropping the last years, while all their competitors stock has soared, including Apples. That's the overall indicator of failure, and the one their owners care about.
But look underneath, and you find failure in every attempt Microsoft has made to branch out of their existing businesses, except for the Xbox.
Mobile? Lost to Apple and Google. Music? Lost to Apple. Instant messaging and identity (.net Passport)? Lost to Facebook. Tablets? Lost to Apple. There are countless examples like this.
Given all those failures, that nice cash flow will only be sustained until the Windows monopoly is replaced by something else. Windows 8 is Microsofts desperate response to something that threatens to do that.
But my larger point is that if my business only grows to be the size of Microsoft and ends up with a steady profit that size I won't care about the failures, only count the successes at that point.
Apple is using Azure for ICloud which is pretty huge.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/is-apple-really-using-wi...
The Vanity Fair article is almost identical to the articles released before Windows 7 came out in 2009 predicting the same kind of stuff than never comes true. Windows 8 has the potential to be a huge so I am sure these cookie cutter "MS is doomed" articles are going to be more prevalent as we get closer to release.
What made Microsoft so predatory is that they wanted to dominate the market and squash any competitors, and drive everything into a Microsoft monoculture. Apple doesn't act in the same way, and only seems to care about profits and products rather than marketshare. So even if Apple does something that seems incredibly controlling, you don't have to worry, because you can always buy somebody else's product. Microsoft was trying to make it so you couldn't buy anybody else's product.
Well, while they might seem that way because they are a hardware company, they are incredibly aggressive in that arena. Take the bannings and attempted bannings of Motorola, HTC, and Samsung devices for example. They are definitely trying everything they can to prevent you from buying someone else's product.
Exactly. Apple as great as their products are, have started to resurrect the look/feel lawsuits of the 90s with their patents on trivial things such as how to unlock a phone, having a jump bar, etc.
Sure, but only because they apparently don't have enough non-bullshit, non-FRAND patents with which to play the "IP litigation counter-counter-...-counter strike" game. Apple sucks, but so does every other major player in the "mobile" industry. I could be wrong here, but no counterexamples come to mind.
Slide to unlock was not a common place feature before it came out on the iPhone despite the prevalence of touch screen devices. It is hard to argue against the fact that the implementation was indeed unique at the time.
No, they're trying to stop devices they see as copies from entering the market place. They have no way of stopping competing but different things from entering the market. MS did and used it.
You nailed it - I lived under Microsoft's "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" philosophy for more years than I care to remember. Microsoft wasn't just happy being profitable, it only recognized success when it both destroyed the competition and locked alternatives from arising. It was core to their culture.
Apple has always made it very clear that they are quite content having a small slice of the overall market, just as long as they occupied the _best_ part of that market. They tend to be elite snobs, who seem to be fine with 90% of the market running linux netbooks as long as 10% are running Mac Laptops.
There's a bit of a difference between trying to kill the entire phone industry and suing obvious copycats who don't differentiate their products.
If Netscape has sued MS and won an injunction a lot of people would have cheered. Which brings up the old 'who's most like MS in mobile today?' question...
Microsoft made a netscape clone and gave away the product for free.
Google made an iOS clone and gave away the product free.
Sure, but there's an important difference between "giving away one product to sell others" and "using a monopoly position in one market to eliminate competition in another", namely, that the latter is illegal but the former is not. Grey areas? Sure, lots, whence so may lawyers. But IE and IIS were clearly (to regulators, not me) not mere loss-leaders, but prongs of a coordinated response to a perceived threat to Microsoft's PC hegemony.
Besides, Android device manufacturers effectively "pay" Google for Android in search traffic (or reduced revenue share from search traffic).
From what I've read on some blogs they never give numbers showing their profit or loss from Android, and looking at the situation from the outside I'd think it's more likely they're losing money on it at the moment.
>Sure, but there's an important difference between "giving away one product to sell others" and "using a monopoly position in one market to eliminate competition in another"
.... you mean like using a near monopoly in search to finance paying manufacturers to use Android?
I'm not so sure that it's ironic as inevitable. There are exceptions, but the winners of this marketshare game tend to be those who are willing to play at least a little dirty.
While Apple and Microsoft are very different animals with a completely different corporate culture, there are interesting similarities in their behaviour. That doesn't mean we should simply class them as exactly the same, as there are profound differences in their founding culture, outlook, and aspirations.
However once a corporation reaches a certain size, or perhaps in the process of reaching a certain size, corporations and other social tribes seem to acquire remarkably similar characteristics - the company becomes an ecosystem within which it is possible to thrive without actually serving the long-term interests of the company or customers at all - the corporate culture changes to one in which the most important achievement is to do well within the company, and others outside the company become a remote concern.
Perhaps this is inevitable when a company reaches the size of say Apple, Amazon or Microsoft - all of which have in their different ways abused their market position, and abused their power over smaller companies and competitors in order to make more money. They may not have broken the law very often, but they are all profoundly anti-social in their behaviour. All have tried to lock their customers in to ecosystems over which they have complete control (iOS, Kindle, Windows/Office), all have abused their power over their partners to make unreasonable demands, and all have ignored the long-term interests of their customers in pursuit of profit. They do this because they can, because no-one is stopping them, and because as a collective entity what is safest is for them to stamp out all competition anywhere - to completely dominate the marketplace (at least in the short term, ignoring that this is impossible in the long-term).
Perhaps that's just a natural outcome of capitalism, but as we have stronger limits in other areas of corporate malfeasance (for example regulations on pollution), we do perhaps need limits on the power of these larger companies in the marketplace which are stronger than antitrust laws (which seem to be unused and out of date at the present time).
We've seen Apple morph over the last 10 years (as MS did before it against IBM) from scrappy underdog to dominant corporation, and the transformation means that now they feel happy to arbitrarily ban partners from their devices (e.g. Google Voice, Kindle in-app purchase), sabotage their own production partners (e.g. Samsung), gouge partners with arbitrary licensing (iPod connectors), and ignore the effects on their users, or indeed on their own long-term survival. They are different from the Microsoft of the 90s (perhaps less cut-throat, a little less predictable), but in important ways are similar, and they're storing up the same sort of long-term resentment which is now undermining Microsoft in the consumer space. For example by banning all transactions on their devices which don't involve giving Apple a cut, they annoy both their users and their partners - the only entity this action serves is Apple, and that only in the short term.
Even that's arguable. IBM, Xerox, and AT&T all certainly exploited monopolies for some time in tech.
I suspect the real complaint was that Microsoft wasn't terribly innovative. Few things in tech are. The key is to steal from the best, and implement well. While it's arguable that Microsoft's technical implementations weren't all they could have been, the combined reach of their tech + business model worked very well, from the PoV of business success and spreading their "ecosystem" to borrow a more recent term, for most of 2-3 decades.
And what if you're younger than that? If you're in your 20s or younger, you probably just don't care about Microsoft -- though you might not get why the older folks get so frothy about them. But know that your luxurious apathy is because an older generation considered Microsoft's offenses to be capital crimes -- and meted out punishment accordingly.
Microsoft proves that in technology you can get away with being predatory for a while -- maybe even a long while -- but not forever (at least not in a free society). And once the world moves against you, those that you so aggressively bullied will cheer your demise: you will never recover until you accept that you have failed your customers and violated their trust. Very, very few technology companies have gotten to a point of such vilification and recovered (indeed, the only example I can think of is IBM). And while I may be too early in calling it, I dare say that Oracle is (at long last) at that point or approaching it rapidly -- and I fully expect the same conversation to be had about their (coming) lost decade...