Microsoft’s new CEO is an immigrant from India who most recently was involved in leading the effort to switch the corporate business model for Office from buying software to renting it. Real Clear politics asks where will the company go from here?
http://www.realcleartechnology.com/articles/2014/02/06/top_five_items_on_microsofts_to-do_list_964.html
The line that jumped out at me was when discussing the future of Windows – and what can Microsoft do to create a good unified Windows platform for software developers.
What software developers? Seriously?
Microsoft systematically stomped out competing products developed for windows. When Netscape started to own the web browser market, Bill Gates realized too late the Internet was not just a fad and rolled out the security flaw called Internet Explorer that just keeps on giving. A company called Nullsoft created a simple streaming audio player called Winamp that started to fuel this thing called Internet streaming. Microsoft responded with windows Media Player, with am over engineered proprietary streaming protocol which they later abandoned, but to this day deliberately won’t support .pls playlists.
I have visual C++ on my Windows XP machine and learned it well enough to know I didn’t want to learn any more. The complexity of the Windows event driven programming model meant you had to rely extensively on using proprietary DLLs and microsft written “frameworks” to do anything, locking you into a development world where Microsoft called all the shots and frequently changed its mind when products failed.
Java was one response by Sun (now owned by Oracle) to create a platform independent programming environment so a developer could write applications one time that didn’t care if you were using Windows, Unix or Apple.
The business world was quickly moving to “thin clients”. As the Internet took off, business functions moved business functions to web browsers on the company intranet. People started to book their flights themselves online, not going to travel agents hooked into networks that required custom software to access. Portable data entry devices still pretending they are a 1970s IBM 3270 80×24 monochromatic character mode screen can be replaced with web servers an inexpensive simple web browsers.
Microsoft still owns a chunk of the web server business (IIS) and SQl (MSSQL), but where does that give opportunity for 3rd party developers? Apache has a Windows compatible version, but nobody uses it. Oracle dominates the corporate database market. A web browser user interacting with an Oracle database doesn’t care who made the device in their hand or what OS it runs.
Apple does have a ton of young independent software developers where the application actually still runs on the device in your hand. The software distribution model of the app store with direct revenue sharing to the developer has killed the go to a brick and mortar store and buy software in a box business model. The touch screen replaced the mouse. Microsoft was again outflanked. They missed the market, and are now trying to play catchup with Windows 8 – trying to bridge the gap by forcing a touchscreen interface onto a keyboard/mouse operating system, leaving nobody thinking this is the future of personal computing or corporate desktops. Windows XP users are being shoved out the door.
Google is more than capable of stepping in and filling the void. They supported the development of Firefox and developed Chrome. The Android OS which Google developed owns most of the smart phone business not running apple iOS (which is also based on Linux, not Microsoft anything).
Microsoft’s cell phone platform was such a disaster they ended up buying Nokia to try to salvage something. The Windows (like) proprietary tablet called Surface was not compatible with existing windows software and did little more thn piss off their hardware business partners by taking the open “IBM PC” Intel platform and turning it into a proprietary hardware platform with patents ready to destroy competitors. 4th quarter sales of Surface doubled to $800 million (in a $70 billion global market) as retailers dumped their remaining inventory.
Microsoft has gone from owning 37% of handheld computing devices to about 3%. As the Nokia merger becomes a reality, the still independent company in the past few days released its first Android based smart phone, and the Indian government is making it clear they will fight Mirosoft inside of India.
Good luck, Mr Madella. You have quite a legacy on your plate to manage, not to mention Bill Gates looking over your shoulder. You are generation two of the Microsoft empire. Anything you do – you will receive the blame for the failures and none of the credit for the successese. Just remember the Ford family and the Edsel. Try to learn from history.
The mistake was choosing someone inside the system. Much like incest, nothing good can come from it. Had they instead chosen outside the system, it could have signaled that they reached the first of 12 steps – awareness that they have a problem.
Nothing Microsoft does is compatible with anything else and certainly nothing else that Microsoft did prior. The current IE is 11 which is compatible with nothing but can connect to SQL Server 2012 (and we are in 2014) which often has apps developed in Visual Studio 2013 (and we are in 2014) and so forth. Windows 8.1 is an acknowledgement that people want the “Start” button back, but I simply go to “Desktop” mode and ignore the “touch screen” tiles that mean nothing to a keyboard and screen laptop (as Art points out). Rome fell, the US is falling, Microsoft has been falling since the early 2000’s.
They named a breakfast cereal after Microsoft – Clusters.
Yep. I agree with all the above. The dum-asses at corporate headquarters for the company I work for are drinking the cool-aid and have said we’re going to ‘office 365’ but have been trying to roll that out for 4 months now, & I saw it was pushed back another 3 weeks. Its cheit. Office 2013 sux badly, it will make you go blind.
I un-installed it and rolled back to office 2007. I bet I will be in for a rude awakening when corporate IT finds this out.
XP was windows high water mark. Windows 7 OS is kinda weird, it looks like it has double everything, 32 bit and a 64bit executable. Not really fast or smooth, will drag down a good computer in a new york minute. A friend of mine bought two windows 7 computers just to have them into the future cause 8 sux so bad.
I refuse to use IE, but that’s corporate standard. idiots
parrott
My XP machine dates to 2008 I think (maybe 2009). My prior computer was wiped out by a lightning strike right outside my window. Microsoft had stopped selling it to home users but you could still get XP Pro, which is what I did.
It would be nice to get a more decent graphics capability and take advantage of the higher LAN and external disk options, but at this point I favor stability over new stuff.
I will never voluntarily sign up for their “rent software” proposal. That may work for the big business enterprise model with hundreds of corporate users, but small business needs the stability of having software always work on demand even when cash flow is short. That means you buy it up front and use it until it’s obsolete.
I will use Office 2010 and Windows 7 as long as it’s convenient, but after that I’m moving to Kubuntu LINUX and OpenOffice. And LINUX usually offers free or low cost C and FORTRAN compilers. Those compilers cost thousands on the Windows platform.
MS is a already behind the curve on this… Adobe started ‘app renting’ with Creative Cloud (aka CS apps) and it’s created a cold front with end-users.
I was thinking of other examples where an independent developer created a market, then Microsoft crushed them
Volkswriter
Novell Netware
Desqview
Lotus 1-2-3
Borland Pascal, Quattro Pro
DR-DOS
Realplayer
QuickTime for Windows
Can you think of some others?
Ashton-Tate (dBase III/ IV) -> Fox (FoxPro & Visual FoxPro)
Visio
I still use VFP. After MS bought FoxPro, they relegated it to 2nd class status behind their own ‘Access’… probably the most pathetic database app ever: clunky, no command line (‘dot’ notation) so everything is done ‘visually’.
Agree with all your observations & experiences regarding MS development tools: let’s add .NET, C#, and J++ (Microsoft’s version of Java) to the list.
BTW, I consider Mr. Mardella to be the 3rd generation of MS. The 2nd generation being the era from around the time of Win 2000 thru Win 7.
Actually, I’ve tried to create a poll related to this subject (software developers), but my login only seems to work for these blog posts. ???
That would be correct, sir.
I used to have a unified login, but was considering killing the web site but keeping the blog so I turned off the SRGuide authentication plugin in WordPress. I vaguely remember some other problems with it.
I have a more positive opinion about MS Access, but only to a point. The first thing that trips people up
(Including NASDAQ) is the JET database engine is a single user database engine that caches indexes on the client. You can’t just put the .mdb file on a network share and think you have a multi user database. You need the back end pointing to a real multi user database like Oracle, mS SQL or in my case MySQL via ODBC.
Back a decade ago I wrote stuff using DAO and ADO to access the MySQL tables. Most (but not all) was rewritten to just direction open ODBC connections and use mySQL syntax. Some of this isn’t Microsoft’s fault – SQL morphed a lot from standard to standard – and using mySQL inside Mucrosoft land relies on the “connector” software working correctly, it’s adequate for my needs, but not appropriate for critical real world business functions,
To this day, I have no idea why I need .NET
PHP is incredibly easy to use. It can be run in a standalone scripting mode and used to manipulate databases. I’ve also been known in the past to use BASIC to do scripting. I don’t need REXX or PERL.
Word Perfect. It was (and still is) a far better word processor than MS-Word. I can do things with an old version of WordPerfect-12 that absolutely cannot be done with Word. WP can do in one program what it takes both MS-Word and MS-Publisher to accomplish. I remember when Microsoft gave away MS-Word practically for free to users so as to kill off WordPerfect, same as they did to Netscape. Now Word (MS-Office) costs a fortune compared to what WP-Office costs.
My understanding is Worfperfect owns the lawyer business.
It feels like I’m always fighting with Word. Writing documentation for a large system (like Supermontage) was in theory ideal to do with a master document and sub documents with designers working for me able to write into their sub documents and then periodically repaginate and reindex the combined document, but something always seemed to break.
Art: FWIW, my partner is an attorney and she insists on using WordPerfect… she absolutely despises Word.
WP has a ‘legal’ mode which is setup for pleadings, etc.
The only reason she’ll use Word is because a few of her clients (law firms) ‘standardized’ on Office 2007/2010.
Yep CC, I still find myself ‘keying’ WordStar shortcuts.
WordStar
LOL
Ctrl-K, Ctrl-K-Q, Ctrl-S etc. My all time favorite word processor. I started using it on an Osborne.
Electric Pencil!
This short URL rules!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mOY2eWO2qw
O/S 2 lol
Interesting I hadn’t OS 2 ‘warp’ in a long time. I started out in my current company using OS2, it was fading, Windows NT was making inroads.
Sys Internals. Good diagnostic tools and the microsoft bought them and no longer and development.
There was a good outlook mail tool called ‘Lookout’ around 03/04. It was a great searching tool to find emails directly in the .pst files. microsoft bought them and tore them up.
A lot of good stuff has come and went Office 2013/365 what ever you want to call it, is a major suck.
parrott
sorry guys, Rolling Rock makes me type funny, or leave out things
parrott
You’ve wandered off track – its a list of products made by others for Windows and MSDOS that Microsoft stabbed in the back and destroyed.
A list of Microsoft’s own disasters would overflow my disk drive.
Well… in point of fact, OS/2 began as a joint project by Microsoft and IBM. MS scuttled it by developing their ‘New Technology’ version of OS/2 and branding it ‘NT’.
In 1993-94, I was using OS/2. Win95 and NT were positioned directly against IBM’s OS/2 to destroy it.
IMO, that was the final showdown of MS vs. IBM in the battle for the PC desktop. IBM had a shot, but blew it.
By the time IBM branded it ‘Warp’, the game was over.
Warp was to Windows what “Micro Channel” was to Dell/HP/Compaq. Micro channel did play well with tolken ring though… could you imagine if all the internet computers were connected together with IBM’s tolken ring and someone somewhere forgot to leave their computer on at night? lmfao
I purchased a very low serial # 6 MHz IBM AT – I had to buy it through a company that sold to business customers. The 80286 chip was rated to run at 8 MHz, but IBM slowed down the crystal in order to generate future revenue from upgrading it.
IBM was deadly afraid that this PC thing was going to kill the market for 3270 computer terminals and move simple applications from their mainframes to $2k PCs
One of the nails in the coffin of Tandem was they forced customers to purchase their 6530 proprietary terminals (or use IBM 3270s). Tandem’s revenue model was largely built on selling those terminals.
Oldsmobile (1983ish) deployed this new thing called a local area network and put IBM PCs out on the factory floor replacing all the 3270s and avoided having to buy tandem’s terminals.
Bing lmfao
I will admit to being somewhat out of touch, living in my Linux, Apache, MySQL, Php world the past 15 years. I’m thimking my Chicago employer is typical of a big business. They were running Windows XP on the standard desktop, Office 2003 – only last year did they allow upgrades to Office 2007. Most windows applications were moved off the PCs and run under VMware in virtual PCs running on a blade server farm. Most phone calls are VOIP within the company and funneled through the corporate phone system for the outside world.
Employees in the warehouses are using Windows CE handheld devices. Truck drivers have some cell phone data network device with a bar code reader for proof of delivery. An IBM mainframe handles a lot of the work and Tndems run the warehouses. Customer interfaces are moving to the web. Purchasing is done on a Windows home brew application that is clunky, difficult to maintain (it actually runs on the buyer’s computer) and requires integration with the other systems to pull real time data so the buyer sees what is in the warehouse and what is on order.
So what is the upside to this Company to be forced to upgrade all its desktops and Office to Windows 8? Less and less is done via email. People don’t reserve conference rooms, they talk to each other on conference calls or Skype. People generally don’t make lots of PowerPoint slides any more.
“I was thinking of other examples where an independent developer created a market, then Microsoft crushed them”
Skype
Well, Skype is a derivative of the list. They didn’t destroy Skpe by breaking the software in the OS or creating a competing product – they just opened their wallet and bought it.
The day the news broke that Microsoft had voluntarily turned over data to the US Government without subpoenas was the dayI cancelled my Skype account
Do you use One Drive? lol
Allen Ludden would say “the password is “si” ”
lmfao
Get it? C:\ drive? lol
I extended the nesting depth to C: how deep we can nest our subthreads
Deep into the sea
Not to the best of my knowledge.
Apple though is probably doing a pretty good job of pushing my data into the NSA cloud.
Just curious… which flavor/version of Linux are you currently using for SRG?
It’s Fedora something. Their upgrade cycles are so annoying I’m probably 4 or 5 releases out of date.
I was previously burned by a broken upgrade that left the system unbootable – so I’m kind of in the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it mode.
This is running Fedora 16. The current release is Fedora 20
Yeah, I remember trying to help you with that ‘update’… GRUB or chain loader reference got corrupted, if I recall.
Just wondered if you had switched distros or were loyal to Fedora. 😉
Let’s jut say I’m comfortable with it. It works (for now). I’m confident I’m slipping behind in mySQL and Php upgrades, but see no reason to upgrade as long as there isn’t some horrendous security issue.