Microsoft's new CEO: The technology isn't his problem If Satya Nadella is the answer, what was the question? Let's begin by saying money was not the problem that needed solving: on that, the world's largest software company is printing cash. In January Microsoft announced yet another record quarter, this time thanks in huge part to Xbox sales over Christmas and its server …
Windows 7 versus Windows 8 isn't a horse versus car comparison, it's car versus car. In Win 8, Microsoft rearranged the pedals and put the steering wheel in front of the passenger's seat. Not an improvement in my book (and many other peoples', judging from the lackluster sales).
China will not deal with an Indian CEO, so forget that any revenue growth there. So 400million WindowsXP users and new gamers market , lets not try for any profit there.
Nadella is like Yahoo taking over Microsoft without the benefit of any Alibaba revenue, just the neater logo and prrttier search results.
Though it is quite an achievement to scale up a cloud on Windows servers!
"China will not deal with an Indian CEO"
Why would that be seeing as the Chinese are largely Asian in heritage?
"Though it is quite an achievement to scale up a cloud on Windows servers!"
It's very easily actually - hence why Microsoft already have 30% of new virtualisation installs.
And actually Microsoft's cloud services don't run on Windows. They run on Hyper-V Server - which is a dedicated hypervisor like vSphere and does not include Windows.
It is also completely free to download and use with all features enabled!
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/evalcenter/dn205299.aspx
Isn’t Bill Gates the guy who decided to switch file-formats periodically to mess up the whole world so they would buy the latest release? Isn’t he the one who decided PCs should slow down so that people would buy a new one every few years? How did that work out for you? How did it work out for M$? The world decided to create ODF and nearly sunk the corporation for consumers. Last I heard, there were a hell of a lot more PCs and OS sold to consumers than businesses. Nevertheless, Gates threatened every business with destruction just for using M$’s products. There’s a recipe for long-term success. It was in the news for months that M$ was threatening whole countries over OOXML. What are those whole countries doing now? In the end, M$ had to support ODF or lose entirely. How much time, money and energy was wasted in the process?
M$ has lots of money to waste. Think real big, Bill!
For all his faults, Gates is a clever and successful businessman. He also seems to be a pretty nice guy, at least in terms of committing his fortune to fighting various diseases in the third world rather than winning sailing boat races or just taking a bath in money.
I don't know who this new guy is, but on the plus side, he's not Steve Ballmer. If Gates is going to be more involved in the business again, that is probably a good thing for Microsoft.
At least they've gone for a candidate who has a computing background. Going for the Ford guy would have been catastrophic. The world of tech changes fast, you need a CEO with a bit of vision to see how different things could be in 5-10 years. Jobs had that vision, Gates did too (and maybe still does). Ballmer most definitely did not.
The days of MS monopoly are gone; both Apple and Google have entire offerings to rival Microsoft in OS, mobile, cloud, apps, etc. More choice, is good for the consumer, and despite the obvious hatred many seem to have for MS, keeping them in the game benefits the consumer - even if they prefer Apple and Google stuff.
"Tablets and Office on Android did not compute"
Bill Gates basically invented the tablet. He demoed an "ipad" years and years before Jobs did. Microsoft had moved on from a tablet strategy, because the market had resounding responded that they DID NOT WANT TABLETS.
People changed their minds. That isn't Microsoft's fault. They had moved on to other things. Windows Vista would have been touch-centric like Windows 8, had consumers not rejected tablets the first time they were offered.
It's not as simple as it being just a tablet though. It's not the hardware that plays the trick.
It's the whole experience of Apple's iPad, and the interaction with it that people responded to. It's desirability was built in on purpose.
Ergonomics, visual smoothness, and all that fluffy stuff is the key. And no, people don't mind buying Apps in a walled garden - who'd have known. : )
Actually, it is the lack of marketing at Microsoft is the problem. Bill Gates built up Microsoft by copying existing technology, but then added the magic sauce of marketing. Although Bill Gates had no formal training, he had the ability to see the company's products from its customer's point of view. This is the very essence of marketing, as marketing is the study of customer behaviour, customer motivation and customer requirements. The aim of marketing is to help a company to produce the products that its customers want. It was marketing that made Apple under Steve Jobs so successful. Steve Balmer however came from a background of sales. Sales is actually not the same as marketing. Sales is the study of pushing what ever products, which the company is currently producing, out the door at the highest possible volume and the best possible price. Sales oriented companies seek to exploit existing products for maximum return. However, the lack of customer focus by sales oriented companies means that they are not innovative in anything that will capture their customers' imagination. This is exactly the problem that Microsoft is having. Steve Balmer has been able to maximise income, but has lost the drive in the computer industry, because he has only focused on profits and not on products. The new products that Microsoft has introduced under Steve Balmer have been very pedestrian and for the most part, huge loss generators. They simply have not been able to capture the customers' imaginations, because they were for the most part poor knock-offs of other products. Unless the new CEO of Microsoft changes the focus back to the customer, there is little chance that the company's fortunes will improve.
Ian
reading all this it's little wonder why MS never really innovated, it's because its critics only talk bits and bytes and can't see the world around.
Get real, less than 25% of all intelligent devices shipped today run MS. They're fast becoming irrelevant and that's the their problem.
Promoting from within will never allow them to see beyond the horizon of their own bull and hype and release them from people who debate XP and VMS etc. Meanwhile the world of computing has fundamentally changed and MS's challenge is no longer to dominate but to remain relevant.
Microsoft has always done well at several things. The third party developer environment. The packaging of software for diverse but actually quite related purposes. The proliferation of ways of doing one thing and the backward compatibility, as well as the semi-consistency of user presentation. Productivity tools for individuals, for firms, and for developers.
They've never been great at design per se. Nor have they been innovators, any more than Apple has been.
The thought that diverse platforms and form factors might present a unified experience is a good one, although I suspect unrealizable as long as physical screens and keyboards and pointing devices remain the main interfaces. But nobody likes any of those things anyway. Humans on their own don't communicate that way!
Perhaps our contraptions ought not to either.
<quote> reclaim its place among the technology innovators?</quote>
Innovators? The only thing Microsoft ever did in-house was Microsoft Word, and even then they had to resort to dirty tricks to get rid of the competition. Pretty much everything else they've bought or stolen from someone else, including their first product, DOS.
Microsoft was successful not because of their innovation, but because they ruthlessly (and illegally) used their unethically acquired dominant position to beat everyone else up and leverage their other products into the market. There's a reason that just about every company that has either "partnered" or tried to compete with Microsoft while Gates was CEO ended up broken and bloody in the ditch, and it definitely wasn't because they were "technology innovators".
More like "dirty tricks innovators", that I'd agree with.
> including their first product, DOS.
Actually it wasn't their first product. Ignoring the traf-o-data origins, the first product was BASIC for the Altair*. This was redone for many machines including the Apple II under the AppleSoft brand, and also for CP/M. Microsoft also had Pascal and COBOL compilers for CP/M. The most revenue came from their Z80 Softcard running CP/M for the Apple II.
* which seems to be based on a public domain DEC BASIC for which source code was available, and as Bill had access to the DEC machine at Harvard it is likely that he had a copy of this.
"The reason Ballmer's seat is being occupied by somebody else today is because Redmond's chair-flinging former boss failed to anticipate market-changing shifts that allowed Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon to be mentioned in the same breath as Microsoft."
I completely disagree. Ballmer, or more accurately, the Ballmer organisation are ensconsed in a different space-time continuum. The earth is flat, so don't give it none of that 'curvature' talk. The world IS Windows and apps are things that run ON Windows ON 'devices' Devices are either PCs or things we haven't invented yet.
At least as an ex-staffer, that's how I see it. To say that Ballmer did not 'anticipate' things that had already been happening for some time before 'me-too-ing' them is anathema. And always from the perspective that 'we'll catch up'. Italy do not take the field against the All-Blacks in rugby with this perspective (as Microsoft did with Bing, Zune, Windows Store, etc, etc and oh, etc.). They know the All Blacks are very good at Rugby and will paste them. It's by how much that matters. So they would rather get into a cookery contest with them and probably win convincingly (given the choice).
Choice is the key word here. Napping whilst Google stole a march on search is forgiveable - who would have thought that we needed search in the way we use it today? Inventing something (like the smartphone, for instance) and then letting a company (Apple, who they had flayed in PC) take their idea, not do much with it except make it sexy and win BIG? That is a crime in any stakeholder's book. As is letting Google do it again with Android, Apple again (or was it before?) with the iPod and then again with the iPad.
Bill was crazy about the idea of Tablets and it was Microsoft who brought the first pen'n'bricks to market with those BEndy M400s or whatever they were.
The major feature in all these failures was that if no-one could make these things a success IN THE MICROSOFT ECOSYSTEM, then it wasn't really happening. I got 'bollocked' for buying an iPod over a Zune in Seattle on a company trip despite the fact that the Zune was never released in the UK. Good call for me then.
No, there is the real world where real things really happen, then there is the Microsoft world in a Microsoft Galaxy far, far away. From reality. Stevie Wonder would have greater vision than Stevie Ballmer on things like this. Trouble is, he polluted from above and got polluted from below by a Dalek-mentality. Surely we don't expect anything like this from Nadela....or is that Nutella?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
