The general gist? A minor update somewhere this year, but the real update won’t come until 2014. In the meantime, we’ll have to… “Resuming…” …settle for CardDAV/CalDAV support, some additional HTML5 support, and fixes for Xbox Music metadata. We were promised regular updates and an early access program for enthusiasts – but Microsoft failed to deliver, once more. For all intents and purposes, thanks… “Resuming…” …to the switch to the Windows NT kernel, the Windows Phone we’re using today has very little additional functionality to offer over what we were using on WP7 release day. I’ve been a Windows Phone user since WP7 release day, but Microsoft has lost me.
You may not even get the next major update. Hopefully everyone running wp8 will get 9 or whatever the new update next year will be called but, no matter what you think of wp or Microsoft, you have to acknowledge that they do not have a reliable track record of providing new major versions to “old” hardware for Windows Phone so far.
Which is why I have to wonder…what IS Ballmer’s gameplan? I used to think he was just a lousy CEO, but I don’t think anybody could be THAT consistently lousy for this long a period.
So I have to wonder what he is REALLY up to, is he trying to tank the stock so he and gates can take it private like Dell is trying to do with his old company? is he trying to make things so dire that the board won’t balk if he tries something radical like splitting off the parts of MSFT he wants and just burning the rest? What is the endgame here?
Because i just don’t believe one guy can rise to the level he is at, Gates little buddy or no, while being THAT incompetent. I mean some of the stuff he is doing, like burning the WinPhone 7 users when they don’t have much of a market, or giving the bird to the users with win 8.1 by having the “Start Button” slap you right back into the metro that everyone is trying to get the hell away from, this is practically something from a “How to NOT run a business” training video!
The mission of the CEO of a publicly traded corporation is to maximize the return on the investment of its shareholders. Do you own any Microsoft stock?
Then he should be fired RIGHT NOW, as you’d have had a better ROI by hiring a monkey to throw poo at a stock page and buying what had the largest chunks stuck to it.
But don’t give me that “mission of the CEO” bull because that is what it is, after all if that was ALL his job was he could just burn the company, sell off the assets, and give the shareholders the money.
No what we are seeing here is a CEO that lives in a bubble and refuses to even look at the data coming in, there is NOT ONE positive metric with metro, not a single positive metric with winPhone, if you look at the money he has blown trying to be Apple they have thrown a good 30 billion plus in the fire the past half a decade with ZERO ROI.
Zune,killing the very profitable playsforsure program (Frankly the ONLY real chance they had at taking on Apple in content and which used MSFT’s strengths by having everything from that $20 MP3 player at the checkout to a $300 PMP all able to run PFS), Sidekick, Kin, Zune market, shoving the X360 out with a 3 billion dollar hardware flaw, killing the forwards momentum they had with win 7 by pushing a cellphone OS onto the desktop, the insane amounts he paid for Yahoo Search, its been nothing but waste under Ballmer so by your own criteria he should be fired.
All those paragraphs and you still managed to not answer a simple question directly. So I’ll assume that your answer is NO.
Furthermore, given the melodramatics of your argument, I’ll also assume you are not acquainted with Microsoft’s financial performance in the past decade or so.
I notice this trend a lot, there’s so much armchair CEOing going on, but no one quite willing to put their money where their mouth is.
Nokia haters and doubters don’t short Nokia and people who claim Ballmer is a disaster (apparently oblivious to financial reporting) similarly do such pontificating without assuming any risk to validate their claims.
so if one does not like Microsoft and Ballmer is such a bad CEO. Shouldn’t they be encouraging him to remain in charge?
Edited 2013-07-13 18:59 UTC
Its feign concern for the purposes of getting a dig in at Microsoft, at least that’s my suspicion.
I agree. I do not complain about the CEO, or any of Microsoft’s recent choices. Instead I enjoy watching them suffer and validate my opinions of them. If the end result is a humbled Microsoft, then it is a good thing.
To be fair, I think the performance of Nokia’s management team has been disastrous. And I’m quite certain that I wouldn’t enjoy any social interaction with that Ballmer fellow. But at the end of the day, the main metric to judge the performance of a publicly traded for profit corporation is their finances.
For the majority of the past decade and a half Microsoft has experienced consistent returns and growth. Yes, they have taken some hits on their profit in the past couple of years. But if anyone is trying to spin a set of actions that still lead to a margin of over 75% as reason for gloom and doom. Then they either are off their meds or don’t have the slightest understanding of the financial context involved.
This to say, that even though I don’t like Microsoft’s consumer products at a personal level, I am not deluded as to assume my biases dictate reality.
I think we can agree to disagree (to an extent). Nokia mismanagement prior to Elop was unbelievable and even some moves after I found questionable. I thought their 256MB strategy with the 610 was weird given that it didn’t really save them much money, was overshadowed by the WP8 launch, and made a bad experience with some apps that weren’t optimized. I thought their 800 strategy of just dumping the phone on every carrier was stupid too, it was a blind drop and didn’t get them support from sales reps — as much as some people hate timed exclusives, they do help in the sales channel push.
I think though we’ll have much more interesting things to talk about on July 18th.
In general though, I think Microsoft has made some strategic blunders that they are successful in spite of, and not because of. Particularly dropping the ball in mobile, being way too late to the PMP market and investing in it after it was almost dead, and then they’ve made various strategic blunders with Windows Phone that made me scratch my head.
They have a severe messaging problem and a slow reaction to a lot of what’s in the market for consumers, but oddly enough they’re incredibly nimble and responsive in the enterprise. Its always baffled me how they are able to reconcile their two personalities.
I have great hopes for the reorg, but its far from a done deal. These things take time to implement and there may be a good amount of people leaving or even more internal strife if the new bosses don’t live up to the hype.
I did not mean to imply that Nokia’s leadership issues are recent, they have been a badly managed company for the better part of the last decade. Their current directorship are yet another continuation of a trend of bad management. But it is not my company to manage, so whatever.
As I said, I personally don’t care for many (most) of Microsoft’s products or technologies. So I’m not that emotionally vested in their well being, much less their success. But the point remains; Ballmer still runs one of the most profitable corporations out there, even if I find what the guy stands for abhorrent.
I am acquainted but that is unneeded when judging Ballmer.
Ballmer gets the final say and everything they have released in the last 3 years spells incompetence.
The stock is only up recently because an activist shareholder took an interest. That basically means a shark is swimming around the boat and Wall St. is hoping for blood.
http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/07/microsoft-corporation-msfts-cash-p…
But I can talk all day on Microsoft’s financials if you’d like. I can also talk about why I think Ballmer is the worst CEO in America. I’m also a Microsoft Partner and I can prove that if anyone would like.
Being a Microsoft Partner means you went online and filled out a form. Just saying. Lol.
What you think they approve anyone? Fill it out and tell them you run a lemonade stand. Let’s see how that goes.
Right, but you’re talking like you’re a fucking MVP. Calm down bro.
You filled out a form, right? You know, that three step process? Just so we’re clear. Because you’re flaunting it like it grants you some sort of authority.
I don’t have authority, it’s context.
But I do have authority when it comes to predicting the success of Microsoft products. However I don’t take much pride in this since only a complete idiot would think it is a good idea to release a product that has overwhelmingly negative feedback. Even the girl that runs a lemonade stand near my own house would never look at majority rejection of a new recipe and think I’m going to force them to like it.
Ok, so you providing that tidbit of useless information was exactly that, useless. That’s like saying you’re signed up to BizSpark. Big fucking deal.
You’re not insightful, authoritative, or even clever. You’re an annoying little troll who has a man crush on Sinofsky and can’t get over the fact that Microsoft isn’t kissing your ass anymore.
(double post)
Edited 2013-07-14 09:02 UTC
I’ve always thought the job of the CEO is to create strategic plans that ensures sustainable growth and profit in the long term but what do I know.
One thing that stood out during the BUILD 2013 was how they were trying to cater for developers.
In many talks the touch mantra was repeated multiple times, as well as, showing the demos running of surfaces in desktop mode.
Additionally there were a few sessions dedicated to iOS and Android developers about how to port software to Windows Phone. Including how Microsoft is supporting open source and middleware to part the experience easier.
I can foresee that the current situation and the recently announced reorganization are leaving little time to do a proper release.
Other than that, Apple is the exception.
The situation exists since there are mobiles, OEMs will always sell you a new phone than deliver updates.
I had thought that windows phone was supposed to be a hybrid between the android style and the apple style. The hardware and screen parts are limited by microsoft to reduce fragmentation and make it easier to push out updates to all phones.
But, it turns out that Microsoft doesn’t have the resources to do it.
Microsoft is now in a tough position, at least from a development standpoint. Their strategy has always been “good enough” and “slightly cheaper.” Which rewarded them handsomely for 3 decades. Problem is that now they have to compete against other “good enough” stacks which are “free.”
There is also a clear generational talent shift happening.
Developers developers developers!
*inhale*
DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS !!!
DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS !!!
WOOOO!!!
*DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!!!ELEVENTYONE1!*
Edited 2013-07-13 06:43 UTC
That’s old Microsoft.
NuMicrosoft is:
BeApple BeApple BeApple!
It’s not really working and they’re pissing off developers developers developers.
A WinForms developer is pissed. Microsoft needs to watch it, they might get the OLE/ActiveX guys mad next!
Are most .NET developers happy with Visual Studio 2012? Do they like the removal of color?
I don’t know, have you asked all estimated 8 million of them? What a useless question.
Right because forum feedback means nothing, even though it could have been used to predict the outcome of:
Vista
Windows 8
Kin
Xbox One
Surface
If hundreds of developers take the time to post about how much they hate how color was removed in Visual Studio 2012 then you assume they are outliers?. Do you work at Microsoft? If not you then would fit right in with management. You might also want to work for Republicans since many of them believe that polling means nothing even though Nate Silver blew up that sinking ship of an idea with a torpedo.
Edited 2013-07-14 02:52 UTC
No, I’m sorry, your sample size isn’t indicative of .NET developers as a whole and I challenge you to find a more compelling argument. I’d also like to see a break down of how the timeline of those complaints and how they coincided with the improvements to color in RC and RTM.
Furthermore, it is possible to dislike something Microsoft does, yet agree with their overall direction. Its perfectly reasonable that they disliked the VS2012 color choices, but appreciated the performance improvements over VS2010, and the improvements in .NET 4.5’s BCL.
Using the fact that (some) developers may dislike a particular design choice in the UI to make the logical leap that developers are up in arms in general with Microsoft is ludicrous, and I thought given your posting history would be beyond you. You used to be someone who at least had some insight. You’ve become a parody of yourself, unfortunately.
I just find it a little peculiar that you, who by your own admission have used no recent Microsoft technologies, feel so inclined to comment on the extent of developer satisfaction with Microsoft. You live in a 2003 time warp.
So when he said that, the same thing came to our mind 🙂
http://www.osnews.com/thread?567009
Hey, Ballmer had a video for that
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE
🙂
… We’re talking about Microsoft here so…. What the fuck did you expect? That microsoft would suddenly stop working the way it has since it’s creation just because you bought one of their phones? I think that’s the definition of wishful thinking.
Exactly.
MS is by far the worst company in tech(even worse than Oracle). They do so much evil stuff everywhere on this planet (see http://techrights.org/?stories) and their technology is so crappy it wastes our resources left and right, it is hard to excuse buying their shit IMO.
Everyone who buys WP8, RT, XB1, W8 or their other crap needs to get his head checked.
Banning their products from your life, family and country is the best thing you could do.
Yeah, sure. I am a hater, but with good reasons. I have strong feelings about where society, technology, education and freedom should be in this day and age, but MS stands pretty much exactly for all the things I don’t want: Collusion, bribery, lock-in, closed source, patents, aggression, spying etc.
I don’t know how the eff this got a score of 5, but if you use desktop Windows AS A PROGRAM LAUNCHER and don’t use any of the mediocre bundled apps, Windows is open enough for us Average Joes that make up the 99%, and has a really wide variety of software. Which is what matters really.
Windows Phone… Who cares? They dropped the ball with the WP7 -> WP8 transition by banning upgrades to WP8 even if the OEM wanted to release an upgrade for a phone. For example the Galaxy SII got ICS, Samsung WP7 phones didn’t got WP8. Even if they give free upgrades to whatever the next major version after WP8 is, it would be too late, as the OS war would be over by then. Windows Phone had one card, upgrades, and burned it. Nobody cares about it, almost got duped into getting one personally but fortunately didn’t.
Edited 2013-07-12 17:28 UTC
And you have no problem with the NSA spying your ass?
Adrian
Really? I’ll soon upgrade my PC.
There’s only two options: Microsoft and Apple. If you’re suggesting Linux for pleasant and pro (like video driver crashes don’t wipe out your document in word processors, starting copying file, hibernating, then waking up the PC and resuming copying file, etc………) desktop experience, then you are the one who should be checked, seriously.
And ofcourse I’ll go with Microsoft. Because for decent Apple specs I can order an “uber” PC.
And “good enough”? Okay, .NET is just good enough Java? Please, I sometimes watch my collegues work with Java. So primitive.. Good enough is only in mobile space. Now. I don’t care how MS was 10 years ago, I do not use that.
Edited 2013-07-12 18:00 UTC
People overlook the insane amount of innovation going on in many parts of Microsoft, they have a chokehold on the enterprise sector. They have incredible developer talent in DevDiv pumping out awesome tools. There’s really a lot going on in the company.
Its just unfortunate that the thick rhetorical bullshit that gets posted here by some is upvoted into the clouds because Microsoft shit in someone’s cornflakes apparently.
You clearly do not understand Microsoft’s monopoly. Microsoft is a monopoly because of the intellectual property laws (copyright, patents, trade secrets). Because windows is the most widely used os in the world, and because their software is protected by copyright as well as other ip laws (patents and trade secrets) there are no close substitute to the windows operating system.
Windows has 90-92% market-share with no close substitute (ie a windows like operating system). This allows ms to obtain billions of dollars every year licensing windows and office, and given that ms is a software company it cost pennies to make copies of windows, office, or any other of their software. Also their software is proprietary, meaning there is a lack of interoperability between windows and other operating systems (ie linux, bsd, os x, etc). Take directx for example. It’s not cross platform, and since dx is protected by ip there is no reason for ms to make dx cross platform like opengl is, and given that developers prefer to use dx instead of opengl all the gaming support is for Windows. I would say Microsoft has 95% of the gaming support. They show all the signs of a monopoly.
All the criticisms of ms is legit, they have billions of dollars, but they are hardly innovative, they only thing ms innovative in is corruption and vendor lock-in, and making the Xbox one. They sell their software at inflated prices, Windows despite the most widely used is in the world is broken and extremely prone to security risks. And microsoft can get away with these practices because of the intellectual property laws, the source of microsoft’s monopoly power.
And of course microsoft shits on your cornflakes, they shit one everyones cornflakes given that you have to use their software.
Edited 2013-07-12 22:54 UTC
I use Microsoft technologies for a living, I witness the innovations coming out of DevDiv first hand.
You just post bullshit on OSNews. Blah blah monopoly, patents, copyright (now that’s bad too? Give me a fucking break)
Keep in mind when I talk about monopolies. All monopolies are created by the government, that’s a fact, that cannot be disputed. When monopolies are formed, the government always has something to do with it. In this case of ms they are a monopoly because of ip law. All of Microsoft’s licensing agreements are backed up by ip law. You can’t fork windows, no one can redistribute a windows like operating system, you can’t use their source code, their api, you certainly can’t “pirate” windows. Given Microsoft’s market power, all the support they can get, and how they can make their software incompatible with the competition, now you how they obtain billions of dollars every year.
What does OS X, Linux, BSD, have in common? They are based off unix, they are unix like operating systems. But the unix-like operating systems only have 8% of the market-share, windows has 90-92% marketshare with no close substitutes.
The only area in which competition in the same product is explicitly permitted is the free software movement. That is why there is a fork of open office (LibreOffice) but there are no fork of ms office, the most widely used office suite in the world. Given Microsoft’s market power they can dedicate how the technology in the desktop market will be. Only a monopoly can do that, and that is also called vendor lock-in when the consumer is dependent on a corporation for their needs, but with no viable alternatives to the monopolists product.
Of course you have to use windows, because there are no windows-like operating systems, and Microsoft refuses to make their software compatible with the competition. If software wasn’t protected by ip this wouldn’t be an issue. Consumers would easily move from one OS to another without the hassle learning a whole different os.
Edited 2013-07-13 00:58 UTC
OS X is only UNIX by luck.
If Apple had bough BeOS instead, Mac OS X surely wouldn’t be UNIX.
As for refusing to work with competition, I am sure any older timer here has lots of stories since the dawn of computing about how commercial vendors work, regardless of what they sell.
Just look at Google transition, now that the shareholders have more to say in the whole process.
Edited 2013-07-13 14:02 UTC
Not sure I’d go that far. OS X is UNIX because Nextstep was. OS X is basically a continuation of that os, you can see it in every Core* library. Apple gotNext when Jobs came back, and used what was brought.
Maybe, maybe not. Apple, even if they had bought BeOS, might not have been able to turn themselves around. We might not even have OS X in that case, in any form. That’s the interesting thing about what-ifs, you never really can tell how close you are to what might have occurred. They might have gone under. Jobs still might have brought Next with him if they wanted him, in which case we might still have had a UNIX-based OS X with the addition of some BeOS features. Maybe BeOS would have helped them turn around without Jobs, in which case both the PC and mobile markets would look much different today. We’ll never know.
True, my what if was assuming everything else stayed, more or less, the same.
But as “back to the future” proves, a tiny change can bring lots of consequences.
I also use Microsoft technologies for a living and I think you’re one of the worst shills on the internet.
Here is one of DevDivs’s recent amazing innovations:
http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/sugge…
Forced B&W icons with no option for color. Amazing!
My coworkers are simply amazed by the genius work that comes out of Microsoft these days.
NEW FEATURE: NO MORE COLOR!!!!!
Truly amazing stuff.
While you conveniently ignore practically everything else they’ve done, I’m sure you, being a Microsoft Partner and all, know that DevDiv consists of more than icons in Visual Studio.
Moron.
Morons are people that needlessly remove color from icons despite overwhelming negative feedback from paying customers.
Total morons are people that defend such decisions.
Do you have a defense for removing color? If they change their position as they did with the Xbox One, Windows 8 and WPF fonts, are you going to defend those decisions as well or stick to your original shilling position? You do see the conundrum here, right? Does it bother you when Microsoft changes positions that you so desperately defend even against majority opinion of paying customers?
Did you read anything I said? I’m indifferent to their decision on color, it wasn’t the end of the fucking world, but I didn’t mind when they brought it back either. Your melodramatic bullshit gets old quick.
Now, back to the actual point, do you acknowledge that DevDiv does more than change the color of icons in Visual Studio? Right?
You can read release notes? I don’t know why I have to hold your hand through this.
People overlook it because we never get to see it. All we see is “forced” updates to software, and expensive software lock-in schemes. I use Microsoft products for work too, in addition to Autodesk, which is arguably worse. We wanted to use an workstation to speed up older computers in the shop, but it would have been thousands of dollars in software just because of Microsoft Office and Autodesk software requiring expensive software on top of that. Somehow to use a free piece of software and software we already license it would require $4000 in more licenses.
So whatever innovation Microsoft is making, goes unseen to most because we never see it.
So people overlook it because they are ignorant of the facts, ergo it isn’t Microsoft’s fault, it’s their own fault for not doing the research. Am I understanding you correctly?
You (or whoever) not understanding or appreciating innovation is your own problem, not theirs.
Microsoft innovation usually means piling layers upon layers of stuff. And even then the result is often a “me too” product that only signals customers that Microsoft still exists.
Whoever is able to in the enterprise sector, already works on a plan B for a future without Microsoft. Their partners are defecting left and right. The poor chaps who are locked into Microsoft products and have no choice are milked dry to keep the profits up.[1]
[1] http://www.softcat.com/news/industry-news/important-changes-to-micr…
Really? You are insulting people because they’re not using Windows?
Son, FYI, Linux is paying many people’s bills nowadays. Major companies and stock exchanges are running Linux. I haven’t touched Windows for ages.
I am sorry for you if you’re tied to a proprietary product, but that doesn’t mean free software is bad.
Adrian
I don’t know what spectacularly crappy computer / OS combination you’ve been using to base your Linux experience on, but I’ve been using Linux as my primary Desktop OS at work and home for more than 8 years now, and haven’t encountered any of the issues you describe.
Of course, I don’t grab a 10 year old computer and try to make Linux work like a brand new Windows computer, and I make sure all the hardware in my machine is well supported (typically NVidia with binary driver, because I don’t really care about the difference between BSD and GPL licensing).
At work, the two applications I absolutely have to use Windows for (seriously VMWare? STILL no linux console?!?), I run within a VirtualBox VM.
There are things I don’t like (Akonadi, Gnome 3), but all in all, it’s a solid, reliable desktop.
Ah yes, the never ending patches on top of patches to that bugfest that is .NET.
Stable and secure it is not. Sadly not a lot different from Java.
gates microsoft was fine, they made a lot of good products.
ballmer microsoft has made… fewer
I have noticed that Nokia are pumping out updates for their windows phone at a very frequent pace, these are firmware updates with new features, and updates for their maps and voice navigation apps.
They are doing this despite blogosphere reporting that they are actually a dead or mortally wounded company wollowing on the edge of existence.
I guess this is the reason that 80% of windows phones sold are Nokia and not HTC.
By the time they get this out IOS7 will be entrenched at and Android 5.0? will be out, and their fixes to 8 will look even more weak. Give them credit for trying, but Microsoft needs to get it together if they want to keep their head above water in mobile.
Lost you? Why did they ever get you? It was always a dud.
Major issues over at the WP team, this isn’t defendable at all. They’re shooting themselves in the foot, the face, and the chest by taking over a year.
This is unacceptable, and I find a lot about Microsoft acceptable.
The only bright spot is Nokia supporting WP8 with features through the end of this year, meanwhile WP development fell off the tracks at MSFT ever since they barely got WP8 out of the door in time.
I bet Microsoft is heavily doing offshoring, like most Fortune 500 companies with the quality consequences we all know.
Another impressive fact is how small the Visual C++ team currently is. For the comments scattered around MSDN I would be it is not bigger than 10.
They are also currently looking to expand the team.
I’m glad they are, and that Herb Sutter is so passionate about moving C++ forward. The pick up in speed in the adoption of the C++11 and beyond standards are encouraging too.
What is also encouraging is how they map a lot of the C++ intrinsics to WinRT ABI stuff, like a lot of their foundational collection classes map to STL collections cleanly. Same with their (yet another) string format.
On a more general note, I just think the NT kernel porting effort to the phone proved more chaotic than is let on, and some terrible program management screwed up some ship dates.
It really felt like WP8 barely eeked across the finish line, the SDK was months late for example. Given these issues, The Verge is reporting that Microsoft had specific issues with getting their new chipset support baked into the OS, especially around unlocked carrier-free devices being identified on the network.
Hopefully now that the guy who ran WP is in charge of Windows as a whole we’ll see much more resources dedicated to the mobile effort. For a while it seemed WP was treading water despite Windows and not because of it.
Windows Phone, Windows 8, IE11, the failure of Windows Vista and then success of Windows 7,the recent reorg. at Microsoft, the failure of the Surface, to me all point to the same.
It seems no one has realized it by now, but at this point i’m almost convinced.
The closed software development model of MS is making the company slow and unable to compete.
When all the industry was like Microsoft, they had the edge, but now all their competitors base much of their platforms in open technologies, and are able to advance their product development cycles much, much faster.
Microsoft sticking to NIH and doing everything in-house is clearly holding them back. They were always like this, pushing products earlier and then getting them to mature state after many release cycles. But this doesn’t work anymore in today’s software ecosystem.
So, they are falling behind the rest of the industry by releasing products that seem promising but are still not quite there (making users unhappy), or by being forced to abandon technologies because they have no longer resources or money to allocate to them (making developers unhappy). It also doesn’t help they want to focus into devices now (making hardware partners unhappy).
So, yeah, I believe their pride will be their doom if they don’t change course and start playing nice with everyone else.
Edited 2013-07-12 19:01 UTC
Whoah, let’s not go overboard. The Surface sold more than the Nexus 10, more than Chromebooks, and vaulted Microsoft to 7.5% of the tablet market earlier this year. They’re continuing to iterate on the device and launching new models. They’re including Outlook for Windows RT (I hear its all of Office) and writing Metro version of the Office apps.
You have a very peculiar definition of failure, given that Microsoft’s own financials show that the Surface lifted Windows revenues beyond what would’ve been a flat quarter.
Windows 8 has sold north of 90 million copies using conservative estimates at this point, and is selling licenses at the same rate as Windows 7 did (which no one regards as a failure, even you)
IE10 has recently displaced IE9 in usage share and IE11 will likely do the same — it is pushing their standards support forward in meaningful way. Not only that, they’ve actively removed compatibility APIs and become a more agile and forward facing browser. They even support WebGL, something I never thought they’d do in a million years.
What!? Microsoft released 8.1 a year after Windows 8, VS2013 a year after VS2012, IE11 a year after IE10, etc.
The improvements in VS2013 are especially dramatic, and the entire WinRT platform as a whole is more fleshed out. How is this a slow company? The entire company is operating on a yearly release cadence.
Sigh, I do not know how you get away with such pointless garbage. Microsoft is within their rights to develop in house whatever technologies they feel like, and in fact, they are wildly successful and profitable because of it.
VS is a billion dollar business, EACH OFFICE PROGRAM is a billion dollar business, their Cloud is a billion dollar business, enterprise management software, etc. You name it. They are more successful today than they’ve been in a while.
Microsoft is printing money well into the end of this decade.
Compared to what? I’d like to see an example of a polished product out of the gate, because if you’ve done a day of engineering you’ll know that to be patently false. Android was completely and utterly terrible on day one, so was iOS (didn’t even have 3G, MMS, etc), so was (and still is) various Linux distributions which ship with tons of experimental garbage, so what the hell are you even going on about?
Software is a game of trade offs, did Microsoft make the right ones, was Windows 8 tragically doomed? Hell no. It had problems, but all software has problems, shipping schedules are never easy to beat, and if Microsoft could just throw money at the problem it’d be a solved issue.
These are interesting and complex engineering challenges and whether something is open or closed source is inconsequential. By the same token, one could argue that the infighting and lack of centralized leadership on many open source projects (lets not get into the slow standard setting processes of shit like HTML5) is as much as a detriment.
I think you take Microsoft’s struggles in the phone segment and use it to cast judgment on the whole of MS, which is intellectually dishonest.
Microsoft has more money than they know what to do with, and has the resources to do whatever they want. However money as I said before doesn’t always solve the problem.
Microsoft had structural deficiencies and infighting which hampered innovation. Windows Phone and Windows divisions didn’t talk for a long time. WinDiv was more or less kicking and screaming into helping the WP team for 8.
The reorg attempts to fix this.
Another Microsoft dooms day comment, how new and exciting.
You don’t understand. It’s not about sales or how well Microsoft is doing today.
My post was purely about raising a point on how long it’s taking Microsoft to catch up, not that they aren’t or that they are not doing well.
Let’s agree on something:
-They have a successful business model, at least for now.
-They produce good quality products given enough time.
But also let’s also agree that:
-They are not setting trends anymore.
-They are playing catch up in all the new technologies and markets.
-It takes them a long time to catch up.
-In the meantime, they are forced to release unpolished products, or lacking in features in respect to the competition.
Then, in retrospect, how long did it take..
-Apple to create an OS from scratch?
-Google to react to iOS?
-Google to create a standards compliant browser?
-Google to create a Desktop OS from scratch?
-Apple to create a new standards compliant C/C++/ObjC compiler? (llvm)
-Firefox to create a Phone OS.
-Sony to create Orbis OS for PS4
Then there’s all the trends on virtualization, communication, streaming, etc. by using open technologies.
So the fact is that:
-Everyone is creating new products very quickly, thanks in great part to open technologies.
-Microsoft needs a long time to create new, quality products, with everything done inhouse, IE11 is finally getting there, Windows Phone and Windows 8 still have some way ahead,
And the question is: Can it survive, or at least stay relevant, in the long term with this strategy of creating everything 100% inhouse, given they are not setting trends anymore AND they are slow to catch up?
I hope i’m wrong, but I see it difficult.
Okay, I didn’t get that from your original point but for the sake of moving on I can certainly agree there. Microsoft is moving too slowly, specifically with their mobile phone offering.
Yes. Agree on all fronts. The reasons behind it are symptomatic of a broad disorganization that hopefully in light of the recent reorg can be addressed.
For example, Julie Larson Greene who Ballmer trusts and respects moved from SW to HW to run Surface, Xbox, and other hardware efforts both announced and unannounced.
Its a peculiar choice, but it makes sense if you view it through the prism of the mishandled Xbox One unveiling and messaging. She gets results. She cleaned up Office, and then cleaned up Windows post-Vista. Sinofsky gets a lot of credit, but she pulled a lot of the strings behind the scenes.
So I think a lot of the slowness is a self inflicted wound, and hopefully one that can be addressed. With Windows and Windows Phone (even Xbox) under one cohesive banner, we’ll see a lot of resource sharing and less duplication of effort.
For Phone7, those guys wrote their own custom kernel (CE6/7 hybrid), their own telephony and 3G/4G stacks, their own derivative of the .NET CF (3.7 vs 3.5 in WM), their own Silverlight fork (SL 3.5 roughly, then SL4), etc.
The situation was similar for Zune, their XNA port was completely custom. XNA wasn’t even really liked by the Xbox team.
In my opinion a lot of these internal power struggles are what doomed or severely hampered a lot of these efforts. Left hand not knowing what the right hand does type of thing. From this perspective, the criticism is warranted because this type of mismanagement is unacceptable.
Ballmer reacted, but only after others made it painfully obvious to him through iOS and Android successes. It shouldn’t be like this. They were ahead of the curve with slate computing, the Courier, and a lot of the innovations in Zune are just now being copied by competitors (Streaming subscription music services like Spotify were only a glimmer in their creators eyes).
A lot of these things were long times in the making, if you think about how long the iPhone and iOS was in development prior to the unveiling this will be obvious. The same goes with Android which was an acquisition, and the WebKit powering the core of Chrome.
I think what Google did and what Apple did are amazing feats no doubt, and Microsoft should be rightly criticized for moving slowly. I just think some of that criticism can be blunted given these facts.
The FFOS is far from done, and will likely have the traditional version one deficiencies that all projects have. The PS4 is in the same camp. Fully agreed on LLVM its a marvel.
Microsoft is currently eating VMware’s lunch with Hyper-V, this is actually a recent change. The advances in 2012 and 2012 R2 are huge shifts in virtualizations. MSFT was late to the IaaS thing with Azure though, but they’re having great success there now.
I see your point, definitely. I just think Microsoft uses a great deal of open tech, especially in their Cloud offerings and interoperates well with Hyper-V (they actually improved VM support for Linux as a host in 2012 R2)
Their developer division with .NET has embraced open technologies, the standard process, and they’ve open sourced large swaths of their frameworks and is actively accepting community input into the development process. Look at TypeScript for example, that’s a new Microsoft. They’ve put the top C# guy on the job.
I think they’re doing some stuff in house and out sourcing to existing tech where it makes sense. For example HD Insight on Azure is a distribution of Hadoop by HortonWorks, and their IaaS stuff means they get a lot of other databases (Mongo, Riak, etc.) for free by running them on Linux VMs in their cloud. They don’t need special Windows-ified versions of those things.
So its true to an extent in my opinion, but its a situation that’s actively being remedied.
My feelings about this is that it’s a waste that they don’t want to adapt. Microsoft is a great company, responsible for some of the best things that happened to computer history.
I honestly believe they have nothing to gain with their current behavior, especially in light of how much being more open obviously benefitted Google and Apple.
They obviously have a lot of creative talent and great ideas and you can see that in IE, Windows Phone, XBox and Windows 8.
But it’s like, the last decade and half they just spent it following the trends and not making any difference, instead of coming up with new products, and now they announce they want to focus on devices, a market in which they are tiny and very late to the party.
Of course they can do all this because they have their core revenue model unchanged, but at this point you would believe that they shouldn’t just aimlessly spend their time following trends and not making a difference. It’s like the say “Oh, this is profitable, let’s try to win this market” and fail, again and again. I mean, even Google shamelessly kills their attempts of stuff that didn’t work and move on.
So, it makes me sad that that they can’t be more open and more innovative, they have all the pieces, the talent, resources and the money to invest in new and groundbreaking technology, but management (Ballmer) has zero vision.
Jeez, your Microsoft-fanboysm is kinda annoying.
For you:
> http://www.osnews.com/thread?566910
I wonder what it takes for you to realize that Microsoft is one of the companies the world would be better off without them.
Seriously, are you holding Microsoft shares or work for them?
As for the Surface? What the f–k are you smoking? Surface is one of the worst-selling tablets ever. Microsoft even had to cut orders before they even shipped Surface! [1] I don’t know in what universe you live, but in this universe, Surface isn’t selling at all, the same goes for Windows 8.
And, no, OEM sells don’t really count because these are subsidized and people usually wipe Windows 8 immediately for Windows 7.
Adrian
> [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/digitimes-microsoft-cut-surface-tabl…
Edited 2013-07-13 20:26 UTC
If you’re not going to address my points, then don’t reply to my comment. Its quite obvious by your rhetoric that you have an irrational contempt for Microsoft. Its especially telling that you ignore actual financial and market results for the Surface.
http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/04/25/strategy-analytics-q1-tablet-sta… 7.4% market share for Windows tablets, excluding hybrids with touch.
http://www.citeworld.com/business/21749/microsofts-surface-strategy…
Surface helping Microsoft’s bottom line
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2013/04/20/microsoft-surface…
Surface outselling Nexus 10
http://bgr.com/2013/03/18/google-chromebook-sales-rumor-383110/
Surface outselling Chromebooks
And I don’t think I need to point out the high ASPs of Surface devices against others, especially the Surface Pro.
Edited 2013-07-13 20:43 UTC
Surface is such a great hit that they’re cutting the price by $150.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2044225/staples-preps-surface-rt-sal…
That’s already after their education fire sale
http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/17/microsoft-surface-rt-tablets-for…
Surface RT is headed for the Microsoft graveyard next to Kin and Zune. But go ahead and keep cheerleading this POS until they Silverlight it.
Edited 2013-07-14 01:39 UTC
You mean they’re clearing inventory for the next Surface, you do know that new models come out, right?
At Amazon Surface RT is #64 in tablets which puts it behind the Blackberry Playbook, the original iPad and more expensive Android tablets.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/1232597011/ref=pd_…
Did you defend the Kin as well? What about the Zune? The original Xbox One? Just wondering how far you take shilling.
I’m sure you’re aware that Amazon is not at all indicative of the overall market, and I have in fact provided links which show otherwise. You’re not just talking to yourself here, you are replying to my comments, so that comes with the implied requirement of actually reading.
I’m also sure you’re aware where exactly the Surface was sold for much of its availability, mainly in Microsoft stores. It has only recently moved into brick and mortars, and even more recently to authorized resellers.
Please, just stop.
Edited 2013-07-14 02:12 UTC
Not at all? Would you make that same statement if Surface was the top seller for three months straight?
I know you can’t honestly answer that question.
Look I’ll be right about Surface RT when they decide to Silverlight it. Even as a shill you lack judgement into what you should defend since your time and energy are limited. Windows without Windows compatibility was a dumb idea, eventually you will have to accept this and so will Microsoft.
I’ll take that bet, if they kill off the Surface RT as a product line we can revisit this and I’ll admit you were right.
Re Amazon Top Seller: If you’re going to ask me a question, then attempt to answer it for me, it isn’t really a question now is it? You want to try again?
Surface might be outselling Chromebooks. IMHO, a Chromebook is still too expensive.
After all most of the Chromebook makers are still paying MS their ‘Pay us loads-a-money if you dare not put windows on a PC or we’ll sue you into the ground’ stupid patent scam
Chromebooks were priced the same prior to their deals with Microsoft.
What about the fact that IE10 (fully patched) still does not work with some websites that handle Chrome and firefox and importantly IE9 perfectly well.
We have banned IE10 from all our systems.
IE9 with is frequent crashes is bad enough but IE10 fails to render a load of sites that IE9 at least handles half decently.
If this is progress according to MS then I’d hate to see what happens when they really go into decline.
I can’t begin to comment without knowing specifically why, but my guess is that those websites have faulty feature/browser detection that causes them not to work.
If you’re curious, I’d try those same websites with IE11 which goes a good way towards overcoming some of the obstacles thrown their way by web developers who mistakenly think that IE can’t handle certain features.
Also, there are some things that IE does better than Chrome/FF and vice versa. This is the point of competition.
I don’t think its a bad thing that IE is on a yearly release schedule now and gaining more standards support (and even WebGL, surprisingly) at a faster pace.
USB contact sync is planned for 2017/2018, depending on if there is a major API rewrite in WP9. WP10 has a new kernel that is going to be REALLY exciting for developers. Not sure if WP10 apps will be compatible in WP11 though. I am loving my Jessica Alba limited edition Windows Phone.