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* Posts by SilverReindeer

3 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jul 2012

Microsoft to announce new Office version on Monday

SilverReindeer
FAIL

"Most transformational release"

Given that Microsoft Office owns a market share from 70 up to 80 percent in many countries, it begs the question why the company would even want to take this risk. They were able to climb to the top thanks to the software's wide-spread use in offices all around the world and they should do their best not to lose that advantage (over Open- or LibreOffice). It is vital to all these users that they can work with a piece of software or at least get something recognizable from an update.

Even today, more than five years after the ribbon interface has been introduced with Office 2007, I still know more companies that use prior versions because it is both an easier and cheaper solution. The reason is simple: administrators don't want an expensive revolution of any tool they were happy with, because it doesn't end with buying the software licenses. They also need to expensively re-train a whole lot of people if they don't want to see a drop in efficiency.

I'm not saying that one bad release would automatically end the dominance of Microsoft Office, but its momentum has certainly lessened in recent years. Every company that keeps using earlier versions of the software suite - until a couple of years ago, the 2003 version remained the most popular with over 50 percent of user share - is a possible lost sale for Microsoft.

Having written all that, I'm truly concerned now.

From the point of view of a private home user, I don't care a lot if the 2013 suite has been redesigned to fit the new metro surface and may even look forward to an office suite which allows for productive use on a tablet. It's a whole different ballgame in commercial use and I can't see this transformation being successful.

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Microsoft takes a $6.2bn bath with aQuantive web ads write-down

SilverReindeer
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Re: Big bets huh?

That's exactly what I meant when I wrote "With luck, fortitude and aggressive business practices, he conquered the most important markets". Yes, Gates had quite a bit of luck in the early days, there's no denying that. He was either the luckiest man in the world or there was more to it. Thus it's undeniable to me that Microsoft wouldn't be where it is today without Gates at the helm. While he made decisions that would prove incredibly lucky in hindsight, he was also a ruthless business man and had many goals he wanted to achieve.

You're also wrong about another thing. Microsoft never sold an operating system it didn't have. If you want to know more about the early days of the software giant - including what really happened with the first IBM PC and its DOS operating system - then you should read the book "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire" by James Wallace.

This book contains excerpts of interviews and quotes from multiple parties about what led to Microsoft's cooperation with IBM and how it ended. Here's the short of it: since the then standard CP/M operating system was only available in an 8bit version while the 16bit variant kept getting delayed, IBM asked Microsoft for their help. After some trouble with a referral to a developer, Microsoft ended up licensing and shortly afterwards even buying QDOS/86-DOS, a true quick and dirty operating system. This was Microsoft's first operating system and they hadn't even written it themselves.

There were certainly a number of (ideological) problems between Microsoft and IBM. The end of their cooperation only came years later when Microsoft started to focus on their own Windows OS instead of the shared development with IBM, while the latter looked to Apple for a continued development of OS/2.

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SilverReindeer
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Pint

Re: Big bets huh?

You're absolutely spot on. Bill Gates grew his company from infancy that way.

They were once only Bill Allen and himself writing a programming language called Micro-Soft Basic for a number of computer systems years before the IBM-PC existed. With luck, fortitude and aggressive business practices, he conquered the most important markets. Those are the operating system (where Microsoft managed to build decisive influence with PC manufacturers, creating the first ever standard, beginning with IBM), the office tools (where they made their first step into the business market) and later on the servers and services (which offered them unprecedented influence over many businesses).

Now, one has to understand that Gates was a very driven person who wanted every computer in the world to run with his software. While he never quite managed that, it was much more successful than everybody would have believed three decades ago.

But - and that's the big question - after Gates had achieved everything he wanted by the start of the new millennium, what was left for him? Microsoft was at the top, they had been able to dominate the ever evolving computer market for a very long time and Gates was advancing in age.

I'm convinced that Microsoft could have been supremely successful in the last decade. With Ballmer as the CEO and Gates less and less involved in day-to-day business, the company morphed - what was once the king of the hill is now an old and infirm pack-animal. Instead of a hunter on top of the food chain, Microsoft keeps missing important developments and spends most of their time following in the footsteps of the new up-and-comers (be they a revived Apple, Google, Facebook or whatever).

Microsoft's problem isn't that it missed the boat. Gates did that too, but he always tried again until he found something that worked. Ballmer on the other hand keeps missing and now the company has to play the difficult catch-up in markets that have been emerging for years.

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