First observation without reading the article: Microsoft put all its eggs in one basket – software. Most of the opportunities for innovating new products are in hardware.
Exactly. Has there been any innovation in MS Office since Office 97 that the average user really needed?
Office 97 might even be a bridge too far, but the versions following it are definitely a progression of less stability and usability. Why the endless and pointless screwing around with the user interface, for instance? As for Windows, its problems are generic to commercial operating systems as a taxonomic class of software. Support for truly ancient hardware stuff does eventually fall off the back, but there’s always more new stuff to support, most of it not at all well thought out from a global optimization point of view, and old software interfaces seem to fade even more slowly. The result is each new release has more setscrews than the last and, at any given time, an increasing absolute number of them will be loose or tightened down in the wrong places. For biological systems, there is a word for something that grows without limit and becomes more unstable as it grows – cancer. Major software products are, in effect, digital tumors.
Microsoft products are only the worst exemplars because they support so much more stuff than the Mac OS or Linux. The current Mac and Linux releases seem – based on intra-tribal grumbling that makes it out into the wider world – to be roughly at the same level of fucked-upness as decade-old MS equivalents – say, Windows and Office 2000. This will become increasingly apparent as Macs, in particular, begin to attract serious attention from malware hackers, some of which is already being reported. It’s easy to pretend your box is bulletproof when nobody’s shooting at you. Check back with me in five years or so and tell me then how “virus-proof” the Mac OS is.
Why the endless and pointless screwing around with the user interface, for instance?
I hope an especially unpleasant corner of Hell is reserved for those responsibile for screwing up the Office 2007 and 2010 user interface. It sucks so strong as to risk starting a new black hole.
“Most of the opportunities for innovating new products are in hardware.”
Or the the ability to do -both-. A long list of the Apple successes have the ‘device teardown’ people going “There’s no -there- there!”. That is: Nothing in here is particularly amazing. There’s the ‘finish’ on the outside – which is obviously solid and not to be dismissed. But -pure- style wouldn’t sell much either. The sucker has to do the freaking job it was given.
Macroshaft built a business assuming it could shut down or buy up competition. Introduce competitors that it can’t remove, producing superior products, and it only has institutional inertia to keep it going.
Add the management techniques described, setting cow-orkers at each other’s throats, and it’s amazing they’ve held on as well as they have.
They need a cultural reboot. They have the money to last a while.
If I were them I’d set up whole sections of the company like Valve Software – no managers, just programmers working on whatever team they feel like. It’s an extreme solution, but I don’t see any other way to untie the Gordion knot of its corporate culture.
Sooo…bailout, right?
Please Titus… don’t give ’em any ideas.
The article is wrong. Microsoft has NEVER been about innovation. BG was selling paper tape BASIC after others had come up with it. The BG cried about how other people were stealing his stuff. They never had an original product since. What they did was win the OS wars when the rest of the world didn’t realize they were at war.
The rest was just inertia.
In their entire existence they’ve done two things right. They were ahead of everyone else on the use of CD storage. They did actual research with real people watching them use their products to improve the interface.
Everything else was follow the leaders. If they can’t buy the market leader (Intuit for example) they come up with a me too product and finance it to the lead.
That the article thinks this is something new is the amazing part.
In the 90s MS could decide to go after an existing market leader (Lotus, WordPerfect, Novell, IBM, Netscape) and make something good enough to take over that market. With the possible exception of the Xbox they haven’t done that lately, and that is something new.
Take all the air out of the room and the fire goes out. Not something I would describe as new.
In their entire existence they’ve done two things right.
Making add-ons to Flight Simulator free and what else?
Minesweeper?
(filling in random characters because “your posting was too short”)
Much of Microsoft’s issues keeping up are due to their own corporate culture. You just have to look at what happened with the Kin phone to see the issues. It used to be that Microsoft could create a small team, give them room to work, and they would push out a competing product quickly. Then they pushed more funds and people into it and the second product would be as good or better than the market leader. With the Kin you had some people at Microsoft working in a low cost smartphone which were constantly being torpedoed by the other divisions. I suspect Ballmer merged the Windows 8 and Windows Phone efforts precisely to prevent their OS and apps divisions from torpedoing the effort. The problem with is choice is that a touchscreen OS and a desktop OS are different enough that users will likely end up with a subpar product for both environments. This is already happening in Linux with users leaving the Unity and GNOME desktop environments because they optimized them so much for touchscreen that other users have found them to be a lot less productive.
Soooo… Glengarry Glen Ross 2.0
Would anyone like to see second prize? . . . a pack of floppy disks.
It’s so easy to jump onto the Microsoft hat8rs bandwagon. Because like Micro$oft $uck$ dude like OMG eleventy + 1 billion !11!!
But I don’t think there is any other operating system out there that is compatible with as wide a range of hardware solutions. I mean, I can go to Microcenter and just randomly pick up motherboards, processors, memory, video cards, expansion cards, USB do-dads, bluetooth thing-a-ma-boppers and they all will plugin in and install in fairly straight order. It displays a amazing degree of robustness and backwards compatibility. It can go from crunching a seriously large database by day and then crank up the latest video game by night. Of course I understand this robustness does perhaps come at the sacrifice of some stability. But for as much as they take on it does amazingly well in my opinion. In fact, I’ve got a Dell Precision M65 laptop sitting on a desk next to me that as of this moment has an uptime of 267 days, 4 hours, 44 minutes, and 28 seconds. And that’s on a WinXP build that’s probably 5 years old.
Plus, there are a lot of solutions that MS has innovated that most end-users don’t get to see because they take place on the enterprise wide level behind the scenes. And I love the Microsoft Deployment Tool for applying our standard baseline image. The MDT slipstreams your hardware drivers and customized suite of apps directly into a clean install of Windows 7. Since we’ve moved to that from the usual practice of imaging systems with Ghost the performance of our systems has skyrocketed and quirky-odd behaviors and error messages have diminished a great deal. And the best thing is it boots from USB and just needs to be pointed to the deployment server. Then I can walk away and come back about 45 minutes later have a totally clean install of Windows with all the applications and hardware drivers installed and ready to go. And hell, our data center doesn’t even have anybody actually sitting in the building where all the servers are housed. Everything is managed remotely by a handful of techs working through remote consoles.
Of course, it could just be that Microsoft products are all I know how to work on and I’m chattering my nails between my teeth hoping they don’t screw this all up.
>>But I don’t think there is any other operating system out there that is compatible with as wide a range of hardware solutions.
You’re joking, right?
Macroshaft windoze is pretty much a PC hardware OS. It has good support for peripherals within that hardware base by virtue of being the Monopoly OS for so long. For awhile a lot of hardware makers couldn’t be bothered to write drivers for other platforms, and many still object to documenting the hardware interface.
Linux, on the other hand, operates on a wide range of hardware, and is quickly catching up on PC peripheral support. Even with video cards, long a weak spot, linux has good support if you can accept a binary blob driver.
Yeah, but you can’t run Micropep on anything later than Windows XP. And that sucks!
Josh, what I hate is not Microsoft or their billions. What I hate is that the industry chose to go to court against BG instead of fighting fire with fire. There was a time when Microsoft did not dominate and others could have competed.
As for hardware working, they are forcing new hardware to not work with software from other companies by including hardware lockouts in the BIOS (calling it an antivirus feature. Funny since many consider Windows itself a virus.) BTW, BIOS are written by companies other than Microsoft. Which is to say, Microsoft is able to force others to do what antitrust is supposed to prevent.
Hardware makers have to make their stuff work with Microsoft. This is not a great accomplishment for Microsoft.
Third prize – a pack of AOL disks.
AOL must have made enough of those things to build a spiral staircase to LEO.
Microsoft: Where innovative ideas go to die!
Peterh, it seems your statements are full of conditional modifiers that only serve to further support my claim. My experience with Linux is everything is all well and good if you happen to be using a piece of hardware that someone in the development community just so happens to own. Perfect example is with video capture cards. If you got a Hauppauge your all well and good. But if you have a pinnacle or some such well good luck. And pray tell, what success have you had getting multi-monitors working? I got it working on a d630 only because someone had written a script that writes xorg for you. But then I tried it with an d620 with ATI chipset and there was no such luck. And simply copying lines from one to the other only served to prevent the shell from loading. Not to mention getting wireless to work is like a 3 day ordeal to get it working effectively. And often you have to run WINE to import, guess what, the Windows driver.
How long has it been since you took a serious look at linux?
We have a ton of multi-monitor Linux machines. I seem to remember that the systems with ATI graphics were a pain, but Nvidia and Intel graphics seem to work out of the box. Same with any big-name Wifi hardware I’ve used.
This laptop took about twenty minutes to get running with Ubuntu, and everything just works. Reinstalling Windows on it from the recovery disks takes three hours and crashes and burns if you replace the hard drive with larger one.
Microsoft won. Obama won. Winning has consequences.
An OS is by nature monopolistic. I just wish I were hating QNX because they won. I just wish the group that developed the IBM PC didn’t think BASIC was an OS and made BG. Stuff happens.
First observation without reading the article: Microsoft put all its eggs in one basket – software. Most of the opportunities for innovating new products are in hardware.
Exactly. Has there been any innovation in MS Office since Office 97 that the average user really needed?
Office 97 might even be a bridge too far, but the versions following it are definitely a progression of less stability and usability. Why the endless and pointless screwing around with the user interface, for instance? As for Windows, its problems are generic to commercial operating systems as a taxonomic class of software. Support for truly ancient hardware stuff does eventually fall off the back, but there’s always more new stuff to support, most of it not at all well thought out from a global optimization point of view, and old software interfaces seem to fade even more slowly. The result is each new release has more setscrews than the last and, at any given time, an increasing absolute number of them will be loose or tightened down in the wrong places. For biological systems, there is a word for something that grows without limit and becomes more unstable as it grows – cancer. Major software products are, in effect, digital tumors.
Microsoft products are only the worst exemplars because they support so much more stuff than the Mac OS or Linux. The current Mac and Linux releases seem – based on intra-tribal grumbling that makes it out into the wider world – to be roughly at the same level of fucked-upness as decade-old MS equivalents – say, Windows and Office 2000. This will become increasingly apparent as Macs, in particular, begin to attract serious attention from malware hackers, some of which is already being reported. It’s easy to pretend your box is bulletproof when nobody’s shooting at you. Check back with me in five years or so and tell me then how “virus-proof” the Mac OS is.
Why the endless and pointless screwing around with the user interface, for instance?
I hope an especially unpleasant corner of Hell is reserved for those responsibile for screwing up the Office 2007 and 2010 user interface. It sucks so strong as to risk starting a new black hole.
“Most of the opportunities for innovating new products are in hardware.”
Or the the ability to do -both-. A long list of the Apple successes have the ‘device teardown’ people going “There’s no -there- there!”. That is: Nothing in here is particularly amazing. There’s the ‘finish’ on the outside – which is obviously solid and not to be dismissed. But -pure- style wouldn’t sell much either. The sucker has to do the freaking job it was given.
Macroshaft built a business assuming it could shut down or buy up competition. Introduce competitors that it can’t remove, producing superior products, and it only has institutional inertia to keep it going.
Add the management techniques described, setting cow-orkers at each other’s throats, and it’s amazing they’ve held on as well as they have.
They need a cultural reboot. They have the money to last a while.
If I were them I’d set up whole sections of the company like Valve Software – no managers, just programmers working on whatever team they feel like. It’s an extreme solution, but I don’t see any other way to untie the Gordion knot of its corporate culture.
Sooo…bailout, right?
Please Titus… don’t give ’em any ideas.
The article is wrong. Microsoft has NEVER been about innovation. BG was selling paper tape BASIC after others had come up with it. The BG cried about how other people were stealing his stuff. They never had an original product since. What they did was win the OS wars when the rest of the world didn’t realize they were at war.
The rest was just inertia.
In their entire existence they’ve done two things right. They were ahead of everyone else on the use of CD storage. They did actual research with real people watching them use their products to improve the interface.
Everything else was follow the leaders. If they can’t buy the market leader (Intuit for example) they come up with a me too product and finance it to the lead.
That the article thinks this is something new is the amazing part.
In the 90s MS could decide to go after an existing market leader (Lotus, WordPerfect, Novell, IBM, Netscape) and make something good enough to take over that market. With the possible exception of the Xbox they haven’t done that lately, and that is something new.
Take all the air out of the room and the fire goes out. Not something I would describe as new.
In their entire existence they’ve done two things right.
Making add-ons to Flight Simulator free and what else?
Minesweeper?
(filling in random characters because “your posting was too short”)
Much of Microsoft’s issues keeping up are due to their own corporate culture. You just have to look at what happened with the Kin phone to see the issues. It used to be that Microsoft could create a small team, give them room to work, and they would push out a competing product quickly. Then they pushed more funds and people into it and the second product would be as good or better than the market leader. With the Kin you had some people at Microsoft working in a low cost smartphone which were constantly being torpedoed by the other divisions. I suspect Ballmer merged the Windows 8 and Windows Phone efforts precisely to prevent their OS and apps divisions from torpedoing the effort. The problem with is choice is that a touchscreen OS and a desktop OS are different enough that users will likely end up with a subpar product for both environments. This is already happening in Linux with users leaving the Unity and GNOME desktop environments because they optimized them so much for touchscreen that other users have found them to be a lot less productive.
Soooo… Glengarry Glen Ross 2.0
Would anyone like to see second prize? . . . a pack of floppy disks.
It’s so easy to jump onto the Microsoft hat8rs bandwagon. Because like Micro$oft $uck$ dude like OMG eleventy + 1 billion !11!!
But I don’t think there is any other operating system out there that is compatible with as wide a range of hardware solutions. I mean, I can go to Microcenter and just randomly pick up motherboards, processors, memory, video cards, expansion cards, USB do-dads, bluetooth thing-a-ma-boppers and they all will plugin in and install in fairly straight order. It displays a amazing degree of robustness and backwards compatibility. It can go from crunching a seriously large database by day and then crank up the latest video game by night. Of course I understand this robustness does perhaps come at the sacrifice of some stability. But for as much as they take on it does amazingly well in my opinion. In fact, I’ve got a Dell Precision M65 laptop sitting on a desk next to me that as of this moment has an uptime of 267 days, 4 hours, 44 minutes, and 28 seconds. And that’s on a WinXP build that’s probably 5 years old.
Plus, there are a lot of solutions that MS has innovated that most end-users don’t get to see because they take place on the enterprise wide level behind the scenes. And I love the Microsoft Deployment Tool for applying our standard baseline image. The MDT slipstreams your hardware drivers and customized suite of apps directly into a clean install of Windows 7. Since we’ve moved to that from the usual practice of imaging systems with Ghost the performance of our systems has skyrocketed and quirky-odd behaviors and error messages have diminished a great deal. And the best thing is it boots from USB and just needs to be pointed to the deployment server. Then I can walk away and come back about 45 minutes later have a totally clean install of Windows with all the applications and hardware drivers installed and ready to go. And hell, our data center doesn’t even have anybody actually sitting in the building where all the servers are housed. Everything is managed remotely by a handful of techs working through remote consoles.
Of course, it could just be that Microsoft products are all I know how to work on and I’m chattering my nails between my teeth hoping they don’t screw this all up.
>>But I don’t think there is any other operating system out there that is compatible with as wide a range of hardware solutions.
You’re joking, right?
Macroshaft windoze is pretty much a PC hardware OS. It has good support for peripherals within that hardware base by virtue of being the Monopoly OS for so long. For awhile a lot of hardware makers couldn’t be bothered to write drivers for other platforms, and many still object to documenting the hardware interface.
Linux, on the other hand, operates on a wide range of hardware, and is quickly catching up on PC peripheral support. Even with video cards, long a weak spot, linux has good support if you can accept a binary blob driver.
Yeah, but you can’t run Micropep on anything later than Windows XP. And that sucks!
Josh, what I hate is not Microsoft or their billions. What I hate is that the industry chose to go to court against BG instead of fighting fire with fire. There was a time when Microsoft did not dominate and others could have competed.
As for hardware working, they are forcing new hardware to not work with software from other companies by including hardware lockouts in the BIOS (calling it an antivirus feature. Funny since many consider Windows itself a virus.) BTW, BIOS are written by companies other than Microsoft. Which is to say, Microsoft is able to force others to do what antitrust is supposed to prevent.
Hardware makers have to make their stuff work with Microsoft. This is not a great accomplishment for Microsoft.
Third prize – a pack of AOL disks.
AOL must have made enough of those things to build a spiral staircase to LEO.
Microsoft: Where innovative ideas go to die!
Peterh, it seems your statements are full of conditional modifiers that only serve to further support my claim. My experience with Linux is everything is all well and good if you happen to be using a piece of hardware that someone in the development community just so happens to own. Perfect example is with video capture cards. If you got a Hauppauge your all well and good. But if you have a pinnacle or some such well good luck. And pray tell, what success have you had getting multi-monitors working? I got it working on a d630 only because someone had written a script that writes xorg for you. But then I tried it with an d620 with ATI chipset and there was no such luck. And simply copying lines from one to the other only served to prevent the shell from loading. Not to mention getting wireless to work is like a 3 day ordeal to get it working effectively. And often you have to run WINE to import, guess what, the Windows driver.
How long has it been since you took a serious look at linux?
We have a ton of multi-monitor Linux machines. I seem to remember that the systems with ATI graphics were a pain, but Nvidia and Intel graphics seem to work out of the box. Same with any big-name Wifi hardware I’ve used.
This laptop took about twenty minutes to get running with Ubuntu, and everything just works. Reinstalling Windows on it from the recovery disks takes three hours and crashes and burns if you replace the hard drive with larger one.
Microsoft won. Obama won. Winning has consequences.
An OS is by nature monopolistic. I just wish I were hating QNX because they won. I just wish the group that developed the IBM PC didn’t think BASIC was an OS and made BG. Stuff happens.