Microsoft has a new CEO in former cloud and server chief Satya Nadella and readers have been asking me what this means? Certainly Nadella was the least bad of the internal candidates but an external selection would have been better. Whether it works out well or not probably comes down to Bill Gates, who leaves his job as chairman to become Nadella’s top technical advisor.
You might ask why Nadella, whose technical chops are easily the equal of BillG’s (and a lot more recent, too) would even need Gates in that advisory role? I believe the answer lies in my recent column where I argued that the best new Microsoft CEO would be Gates, himself, because only he could stand up to departing CEO Steve Ballmer.
Ballmer still owns 333 million Microsoft shares, has a huge ego, and that ego is likely to be invested at first in bullying Nadella toward following line-for-line the devices and services strategy Ballmer came up with last year that so far isn’t working too well. If Nadella wants to veer very far from that path by, for example, getting rid of Nokia or making Microsoft an enterprise software company, only Gates will be able to stand between the two men and, frankly, spare Nadella’s job.
This promotion is at best a compromise. My understanding is that the Microsoft board really wanted Alan Mulally from Ford to come in and clean house for a couple years before handing a much leaner company over to a younger successor. It would have been a smart move. But Mulally didn’t want to have to deal with either Gates or Ballmer. Why should he? Mulally’s price for returning to Seattle, I’ve been told, was for Gates to give up the chairmanship and Ballmer to leave the board entirely. Ballmer wouldn’t budge (with $12+ billion in Microsoft shares I might not have budged either) and so Mulally wisely walked.
Let’s assume, then, that Nadella comes into his new job with some immunity to Ballmer so he can make at least a few dramatic changes. What should those be? I’m not going to give the guy advice here but I will say what I expect to happen.
The xBox isn’t going anywhere. Those who have suggested Microsoft sell its console game platform aren’t thinking that process through very far. What Microsoft needs more than anything else is to be in markets where it can be first or second in market share. xBox qualifies there and so the company can’t and won’t sell the division even if Nadella transforms the rest of the company into enterprise software.
Speaking of enterprise, that’s where the money is, as IBM has been showing for the last 15 years. Pundits who have been suggesting Microsoft drop consumer Windows to $20 don’t understand that doing so would undermine the larger enterprise market at $100. Rather than chase a waning market it is better to stand firm on consumer and chase the still-growing enterprise. Readers should understand this is me speaking not as a consumer but as a pundit, so this is as much about Microsoft’s corporate health and anything else.
Nadella was Microsoft’s cloud guy and has to know that business is a quagmire of low margins and dubious returns. I’m not saying Microsoft doesn’t belong there because the cloud has become vital in different ways to every part of its business, but I am saying that Microsoft will not survive as mainly a cloud company.
Nokia is a crap shoot tied to the success of Windows Phone, which I don’t think is even possible. Microsoft can’t afford to be number three and losing money, especially while they are making $2 billion per year already from Android royalties. I think Nokia will eventually be resold much as Motorola Mobility was sold by Google.
No devices, then — at least not inherently mobile ones — for that devices and services strategy. Ballmer won’t like that.
What Microsoft should do with Windows Phone is kill it and embrace Android. This probably sounds odd to some, but Microsoft is fully entrenched in enterprise and the future success of enterprise will depend on the company’s ability to seamlessly integrate all its data center offerings with mobile clients. They can do that by being successful with Windows Phone except that won’t happen or they can embrace Android and do whatever it takes to make Android work beautifully in a Microsoft environment. This would leverage a Microsoft strength and take advantage of an Apple weakness as the latter company proudly ignores the enterprise in favor of individual users.
Microsoft’s route to success in mobile, then, is by becoming the next Blackberry.
I think most of these things will eventually happen and at least one or two of them will start under Nadella. Whether he survives the inevitable Ballmer backlash is something I can’t know.
“Apple…proudly ignores the enterprise in favor of individual users.” Understatement of the year and it’s only February. I would go as far as to say that Apple is actively hostile to enterprise use of their devices.
Actively hostile?
Is your real name Rip Van Winkle?
Apple added Windows authentication to iOS7 -which is huge for enterprises- but it only sort of kind of works sometimes. Apple needs to fix this urgently.
“I would go as far as to say that Apple is actively hostile to enterprise use of their devices.”
I disagree. I admit that Apple is not going out of its way (and adding user-unfriendly complexities in the passing) in order to satisfy the wishes of those CIO’s/CTO’s who have grown up using MS-only.
But disregarding someone is not an unfriendly act (unless you’re GWB and saying “if you ain’t with us, your opposed to us”). Apple know well, that any new corporate user is a potential convertee – it’s just that Apple so solidly focuses on consumers.
Perhaps by “actively hostile” he is thinking of the tech support angle. Apple has historically gone after the “easy money”. Anything that’s expensive to do or support is left to others. Not just the enterprise stuff but some consumer stuff like encrypted copy protection. For example, OSX and iOS can’t integrate with cable cards for cable TV playback or natively playback Blu-ray disks since they may require HDCP.
“What Microsoft should do with Windows Phone is kill it and embrace Android.
They can do that by being successful with Windows Phone except that won’t happen or they can embrace Android and do whatever it takes to make Android work beautifully in a Microsoft environment”
What makes embracing android any more likely? Microsoft learned this lesson with PC Paintbrush’s PCX format in the Windows 3 era. They licensed ZSoft’s code and format then got stuck using it (and paying for it) years after they had developed their own BMP format. When audio and video became strategic, they made or bought their own WMA and WMV formats. It didn’t matter that they were inferior or than no one really used them. What mattered is that Microsoft wasn’t beholden to anyone for key components of their strategy.
Not saying that integration won’t happen, but why would Microsoft put themselves in a position to be beholden to Google?
I don’t know enough to agree knowledgeably, but I do agree with Bob.
Windows Phone, and for that matter the Metro add-on UI for Windows 8, ought to be abandoned in my humble opinion. Android is the best open OS for mobile devices and despite what a lot seem to think Windows 8.1 (specifically the .1 latest version so far) is actually a great system – and I’m an Apple OS X user! (I own licenses for Windows too etc).
With Android and Win 8.1 together I really think Microsoft would be on to something. The secret being to enable the close-knit sync and share that OS X does with iOS. If that happened the enterprise sector and Microsoft would benefit.
Except that Android is already a fragmented OS (what with the myriad carriers, versions, hardware vendors and other associate flavors – there are even a few genuine or emerging forks) and corporate IT shops HATE nonstandard anything with the heat of a thousand suns. If Microsoft wants to be the “new Blackberry” as Bob puts it, they would be better off just buying what’s left of BB and making it their “enterprise mobile division” or whatever.
Satya, congratulations. I think Microsoft has huge untapped potential and could quickly do great things. My first suggestion is to listen and collect feedback. Talk to your employees. Talk to your customers. Seek out outsiders with good ideas. Don’t make any hasty decisions. Figure out where Microsoft has to do things better or differently. If you do this a great business plan will become obvious. Then if you act on it with Microsoft’s legendary gusto it won’t be long until the world takes notice.
Read somewhere that Bill complained to Nadella that he couldn’t get Windows 8 installed. Revamp of the OS, here we come!
hey, I couldn’t get Windows 8.1 installed on a new laptop, either, that had 8.0.
not until I ran 2-1/2 hours of vendor and MS updates would it show up in the MS Store.
at that point, and 1 hour 15 minutes later on a 9 megabit DSL circuit, it was up and running.
if you don’t turn off all your antivirus type stuff, you still won’t get it installed. just saying, this is a beast compared to Windows 98 or NT. if you ever installed Windows 1.0 off 5-1/4 inch 360K floppies, you’d put in the same sort of time mumbling at the screen.
Windows 8 is actually pretty easy to install if you have supported hardware. That article was satire.
Windows 8.1 installs on top of Windows 8 pretty easily. You’re supposed to be installing security updates, anyway, so that was totally your bad for disabling it. And I doubt that Bill Gates suffers from 9 Mbps DSL.
“Read somewhere that Bill complained to Nadella that he couldn’t get Windows 8 installed. Revamp of the OS, here we come!”
That article was a satire.
I can believe the desktop market continues to shrink. I also believe for Windows to remain relevant in the enterprise, it must remain relevant in enterprise worker homes. It may be a thin client into the enterprise or cloud service.
I suggest redefining the desktop to be large format display and complex input devices; where the compute node exists matters little in a well connected world.
Microsoft has proven Windows can exist on many processors even though they’ve dropped many. AMD/Intel seems secure, ARM is growing, PowerPC has IBM but for how long is growing concert; all others are fading fast with some niche hold outs.
Ultimately processor architectures or instructions sets won’t matter, eventually only features, performance, energy efficiency, and cost shall matter. All require intense capital investment to advance.
I’d like to see AMD move their fab business to Intel as both would benefit by extending the rich x86 ecosystem’s lifetime. AMD keeps their engineering team alive. Intel recovers more of their sunken fab plant investment. IBM can design and fab but will probably move away in the future.
Who does that leave to step forward to help keep Moore’s Law going? A necessary predicate to maintaining the Windows market.
AMD use Intel foundries? Lol!
When AMD starts using Intel as a foundry we will all have seen the sign of the Apocalypse.
Moore’s Law is accelerating the decline of the PC.
On the PC, Moore’s Law is failing to bring doubled performance every 18 months the way it used to. We still have improved performance, but it’s on the order of 10% every 18 months, not 100%. The Pentium 4 was designed to hit 5 or 10 GHz eventually, but it only reached 3.8 GHz. A new PC is dramatically faster than a 10-year-old PC, but a new PC is not much faster than a 2-year-old PC, unless the old computer was an Atom or Sempron. This is why GPU computing is so important.
On mobile, Moore’s Law is bringing increasing features and power efficiency. As the mobile forms are desirable, and the PC forms already achieved market saturation, this means people are buying mobiles instead of PCs. Mobile isn’t getting dramatically improving CPU performance, either, but it benefits more from being able to fit more functions into the System on Chip.
Moore’s law never had anything to do with PC performance. Newer PC hardware (with many times the processing power of older PCs) requires Vista, 7, or 8 to run today’s software, including the bloat that results from depending on the faster hardware to create the same performance “feel” as older software running on slower hardware.
Come on, Ronc. I’m sure you were around during the 1970’s to 2000, back when Moore’s Law did bring large exponential performance increases. Moore’s Law actually said that transistor density was doubling every 18 months or so, but increasing density allowed for increasing instruction-level parallelism and corresponding increasing clock speeds. A Pentium III from February 1999 ran at up to 500 MHz, while a Pentium III from May 2000 ran at up to 1 GHz.
The race for clock speeds hit a metaphorical brick wall around 2 GHz, and we’ve been doing slow increases ever since. A 2nd generation Core i7 from October 2011 went up to 3.9 GHz, and a 4th generation Core i7 from June 2013 also goes up to 3.9 GHz, with maybe up to 20% better performance per clock cycle, according to benchmarks.
Transistor densities are still going up, but we have to find other uses for them. First, thread-level parallelism via SMT, multicore, and then multicore + SMT. Now we seem to be into data parallelism: The 4th generation Core i7’s GPU is around 3 times faster than the 2nd generation Core i7 (more if you get the variant with the Iris Pro 5200), and able to do much more different types of calculations. These improvements are all more difficult to exploit than the improvements before 2000.
There is very little software that won’t run on Windows XP. But if the performance disappoints you, you can always run FreeDOS on a 4th generation Intel Core system, and get truly astounding performance.
Microsoft has been shockingly considerate of resources, recently. In the old days, people used to say, “What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.” Recently, I installed Windows 8.1 on an 8-year-old PC. It’s certainly slower than a modern PC, but it’s not worse than Windows XP on the same machine. It helps that this particular machine has an NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT, not a GeForce 2 or Matrox Mystique or something, so it has drivers that work. A fun combination of the performance wall and the emphasis on mobile means that Microsoft has to be more careful with resources than they used to be.
Indeed, if the hardware supports it, I would recommend switching from Windows XP to Windows 8.1 or Windows 7. Windows XP is old, old, old. I don’t want to see it anymore. Also, Microsoft is discontinuing free security updates for it. But if the hardware does not support XP, I would recommend Linux or FreeBSD or something else, that does have support.
I think you alluded to my point when you said “What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.” But I’m not blaming Microsoft, just the fact that it’s natural for coders to code for the latest hardware. As a result many things we did on Windows 95 on a 133 MHz system with 16 Megs of RAM (like Notepad or web surfing) seemed faster then than they do now on a 1.8 GHz system with 2 Gigs of RAM. That’s a hardware improvement of 10 times in speed and 100 times in memory along with the performance gain from an SSD over an HDD. But it still feels slower now since the coders collectively said to themselves “it’s good enough”.
Just because software cancels out the performance improvement, so that the experience is the same or worse, doesn’t mean the performance improvement isn’t there.
On the one hand, all this bloatware takes forever to load, and the elaborate animations are so unnecessary.
On the other hand, we now have HD video in under 5 Mbps, and the picture isn’t a blocky, jerky mess. That’s a definite performance improvement compared to anything we had before H.264.
Notepad is not noticeably different than before, except now Notepad does Unicode, and the system can be doing a whole lot of different things at the same time as Notepad instead of just running Notepad by itself. If you have a large document, then Search and Replace runs a lot better on a modern processor than on an old processor.
Also, web surfing was not that great in the old days. I remember waiting minutes for all the images on a page to load. Yahoo was revolutionary for having so many images all over the place, taking forever to load. Even web pages on CD-ROM took longer than many pages today, because processors were slow. Web pages with table-based layouts took so very long to render compared to CSS on a modern system. And let’s not get started on Javascript, which had terrible performance until modern systems with lots of RAM and lots of research could do JIT compiling.
I agree 100% with the political aspects of your column. This is much like what happened at Apple with Jobs, except Jobs’ subordinates had not shined elsewhere so their names weren’t as recognizable in the press.
If Microsoft wants to stay in the mobile OS space, it should not act like Blackberry, it should buy Blackberry or at a minimum get unrestricted rights to the BB OS. Then it can compete and outdo Google and Android. If BB had any sense, they’d know that the need Microsoft more than MSFT needs them. The alternative is to begin the process to end the UNIX and UNIX-like OS reign. It’s an antiquated OS and it’s time for some OS innovation in the industry, but Microsoft isn’t the right company for that unless Nadella really means what he said during his coronation as MSFT CEO. If MSFT embraces Android it’ll wither under the weight of Google. A Symbian resurgence is a possibility with the Nokia acquisition, but not likely.
BlackBerry is even more of a has-been than Windows Phone. While Microsoft could be interested in Blackberry Enterprise Server, they have zero interest in switching from their sinking boat to another even faster sinking boat.
Blackberry does have a “has been” phone, but the OS is leading edge. The OS is the market leader in several industries where consistent and good micro-kernel performance is required, a long with security. With the latest level of the code, all Android applications now work under Blackberry, and work is already underway to make iOS work virtualized under the OS. The OS has a lock on several industries, including nuclear, power generation measurement systems, sensors and is rapidly growing.
Don’t let the smartphone debacle mislead you. The OS is the only diamond in the rough at BB.
I appreciate what you have to say, but, once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away there was a technically brilliant operating system called OS/2.
It was swamped by the technically inferior Windows 3.0., and for nearly a decade users clung to MS operating systems, and millions of man hours of productivity were lost as documents were destroyed whenever the OS locked up.
Windows did not rise up to the technical capabilities of OS/2 until XP, but XP was a massive bloatware compared to the svelt OS/2.
IBM had a small chance to make OS/2 work in gaining the necessary market share, and that was by giving it away.
Now for quite some time, top notch specialty software continued to use OS/2, but eventually even that went away. I can’t help but think that the BB OS is in an identical position as OS/2. And I can’t see any strategies or tactics that could alter the fate of BB OS from that of OS/2 (that certainly doesn’t mean there isn’t one). Apple had the BMW position in the PC world and it maintains that position in the Mobile world. MS had the Chevy position in the PC world but it lost that to Android in the Mobile world.
As one of the authors of the never released but developed and tested IBM versions of the Windows 32 and 64 bit API’s and Win GUI’s that were developed in IBM labs for OS/2 Warp, I’m pretty aware of the OS/2 story. Today, there are still about 18K OS/2 users which I contract to support, mostly in the banking industry in branch platform support systems.
What really killed OS/2 was MSFT”s legal bullet that stopped OS/2 from being able to go to the 32-bit and 64-bit API, so once Microsoft went to the new GUI and API OS/2 could no longer run those applications. That problem, of course can’t happen with Android if they stay open source.
You are correct about the marketing bit, and Blackberry is a disaster there. However, MSFT could buy the rights of QNX (and not necessarily BB) and re-brand it under an MSFT name. As a matter of fact, MSFT with its Nokia acquisition may through the shipments of symbian be the largest (by unit sales) seller of a single version Linux distribution worldwide since the Android market is so split up with its many versions.
Wow, that’s off. Symbian is not Linux. Not even close. And Symbian sales fell off a cliff when Elop announced that Nokia was moving away from it with no transition plan.
S40 is not Linux, either.
Probably Samsung ships the most of a single version of Linux.
I don’t see a good reason for Microsoft to buy QNX. NT is supposed to be pretty good these days. XP was horrible, and Windows 8.1 retains a huge amount of bloat for backwards compatibility, but the NT kernel was drastically cleaned up during the development of Windows Vista. See, for example, MinWin. It still has stupidities like the nature of the Device Tree, but that doesn’t matter on a phone. All reports say that Windows Phone 8 runs decently on the phones that meet Microsoft’s hardware requirements.
So, if Microsoft were to buy BlackBerry, it would be for other assets.
You suggest incorrectly further down that “MSFT with its Nokia acquisition may through the shipments of symbian be the largest (by unit sales) seller of a single version Linux distribution worldwide ”
You had me wondering but after some quick research – no, you’ve made a mistake. Symbian is NOT based on Linux.
Whatever Microsoft does, they need to do it quickly, or they’ll lose the enterprise market. In the near future, companies are going to ask “Why do we have all these desktop computers everywhere?” And, that be the end of Microsoft.
What would enterprises quickly move to exactly? There is a reason Windows XP is still being used…
Nadella is in a placeholder situation with a very real no-win potential. No doubt he is smart and adequately company politic savvy. The main difficulty might be in rallying the Microsoft troops while throwing a bone to distract Ballmer (he always makes me think of a bulldog). The deck of “meaningful change” is stacked against Nadella; however, if he gets the employees behind him somehow, that could negate Ballmer.
The founder of Micron Technology, JR Simplot, fired the company CEO, Steve Appleton, only to have thousands of employees threaten to sick-strike. CEO got reinstated quickly with some “I was only foolin’ with ya…” explanation from Simplot. Employees and CEO never forgot that either.. they had each others back against a powerful board member. Nadella needs to get all the employees completely behind him. They are the key to his CEO strength.
Is Nadella stepping into an internal ethnic “war” between the Chinese and Indian employees? It’s been a few years now but that was how a friend of mine characterized working at Microsoft…
Did they stop hiring Caucasians?
No, but from what my friend was saying, the Indian and Chinese communities within Microsoft had grown to such an extent that their rivalry had become a noticeable part of the company culture.
Bob:
Bill is poison! Remember “Embrace! Extend! Extinguish!”? Remember “Evangelism is War”? This is the aggressive, anti-competitive philosophy of Bill Gates.
I wish Satya Nadella all the best. But squeezed between Bill and Monkey Boy — he doesn’t have a chance!
@Mary Biggs
I agree with you completely.
I wouldn’t want Satya Nadella job for any amount of money. With Bill Gates as “Technical Adviser” he is not going to be able to take a pee without tripping over “Boss Gates”. If he farts, Bill will smell it first.
Bill Gates is a legend in his own mind as well as the minds of the Microsoft minions who after almost 30 years (a millennium in Moore’s universe) still can’t get it right. You would think that there can’t be a line of code in Windows X that hasn’t been examined for flaws and yet Microsoft still sends out security patches every month.
I too question the visionary wisdom of Bill Gates. His recent comments on a late night talk show about the next big thing being handwriting recognition really had me shaking my head.
His philanthropic work is admirable. I hope he continues to focus his energies there.
I recall a former MS competitor (SJ) once saying, “Microsoft has no taste. I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way.” Bill Gates never had any panache for making great products. He had great sense for what would make a buck, but second-rate products were his staple.
I bet Nadella is not to thrilled about the job either. He already has 22 years at MS and he is probably dreaming about retirement about now. Trying to save an aging tech company that is still relying on the same products it was selling when Nadella first joined, namely Windows and Office would seem a daunting task. It’s gonna take a huge culture change at MS to compete in this brave new world. This ain’t your fathers 16-bit DOS anymore…
I agree 100% with your view on Microsoft’s best mobile course. (Which, given my own record, probably means you’re totally wrong, but I’m going to go with it anyway.)
It is far, far too late for Microsoft to dominate the mobile OS market. They’re done. That space belongs to Android and Apple, now, and Microsoft’s best bet would be to make “Windows phone” a value-added stack on top of Android, building in enterprise integration features that neither Apple nor Google have done well, so far. They could do this easily, at a profit, and (unlike their present mobile strategy) without cutting themselves off from the overwhelming bulk of the actual real-world market.
So Ballmer is out, but he’s still trying to run the company.
Ballmer is not out. he’s in stealth mode on the board .rank and file don’t have to fear him any more, but all the big money in the room has to put up with him. he can threaten to play Carl Icahn any time he doesn’t like what’s in the papers, particularly WSJ and IBD.
Of course he’s still running the company. He’s the fellow who came up with the vertical reorganization, and the devices and services strategy, so he is the right one to implement them.
I can’t seem them dropping Windows Phone in favor of Android. The more closely they integrate Phone with the other operating systems, the more apps will be available. I can’t picture Microsoft sending customers to Google for their phone apps, where they’re likely to lose them to Google Docs or some other service instead of their own.
It seems to me that Windows Phone could be made a lot more enterprise friendly, and Microsoft could position it to be another part of an integrated Windows platform of PCs, tablets, and phones. IMO trying to go consumer first was a mistake for Phone, where customers buy whatever the cool 22-year old Verizon rep tells them is the newest great thing. I know people with Android phones who don’t even know what Android is. They can’t operate them and they should be iPhone customers, but that cell phone rep said this was the best phone they offer, and it was only $99, so how could they go wrong?
heh, let them integrate with Server, then 😉
The Windows Phone train has left the station. Nadella should only spend as much money on it as it takes to look busy while devising a new phone strategy similar to what I have described. Look at Microsoft’s participation in Open Server, announced only last week. That’s exactly analogous to the phone strategy I’ve described. For every Open Server that’s installed at low cost in some corporate data center Microsoft will be getting hundreds or thousands for the proprietary code required to sync it all with the MS products.
There’s a downside to what Bob is proposing.
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Punting Windows Phone for Android would leave Microsoft open to enterprises guessing what else would they dump. Would Microsoft dump Windows for Linux? What about dumping Outlook for outlook.com?
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I think Ballmer buying Nokia means at least three years of TRYING to make Windows Phone work in the marketplace. Yes it will remain in third place, perhaps challenge iOS in some international markets, but I don’t see how Microsoft can dump Windows Phone without business buyers wondering what’s next to go and that will freeze enterprise customers from making a commitment.
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I think embracing and extending Android would have been a more gutsy, better move, but Windows Phone has to go nowhere for a couple years before killing it would be perceived as a mercy killing. In the meantime, get that Android-Windows hybrid model up and going.
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I love the phrase “a quagmire of low margins and dubious returns”. I see that more and more in Microsoft’s future. Office is the obvious product to leverage. Google has put Gmail, Maps and the Chrome browser on iOS to keep users invested in their cloud. Microsoft should push Office out onto Android and iOS too for the same reasons.
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It’s a tough market, but once the cutting starts, where will it end? Where is the business? At some point Microsoft has to take a stand and say “this is our technology, we will defend it.”
That’s the same sunk-cost fallacy that led to Vietnam. Microsoft has no qualms deprecating technologies that were “strategic” just months before – they did it with Windows CE, Zune, VB, Silverlight, and so on. Enterprises are well aware that the MS technology they are committing to today could be gone in a quarter.
Should Microsoft have just surrendered when Netscape had 100% of the browser market? And majority of the Internet server market?
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A business has to decide what business it’s in. Mobile is not going away. Microsoft HAS to have a presence there and dumping Nokia just after buying them will drive customers away, especially in the enterprise. It’s not about sunk-cost as much as “Can we trust these guys to deliver?”
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I don’t believe enterprises think MS technology could be gone the next quarter. Enterprises expect support, not abandonment.
Microsoft would be in a good position should Apple or Google make a strategic mistake in the mobile space.
You mean like history repeating itself? Microsoft has already made its mistake in the mobile space and lost its leadership there. That sounds like a “waiting in the wings” kind of strategy that depends on others to make mistakes to then create an opportunity while your core business dries up and dies.
A business today cannot be in every market, it must carefully choose which markets make sense and meet its margin, revenue and market share requirements it also be willing to totally destroy its past if necessary to move on to a new and better future. I’ve not seen that from Microsoft yet.
Mobile may be here to stay, but is it the type of business that MSFT should be in? I’m not sure and Apple’s recent performance in China may tell us a lot about the future of the viability of past giants to operate in the mobile market with “iterative innovation” type of products.
Well, regarding Silverlight, the *name* may be abandoned, but the technology?
I don’t see a huge difference between Silverlight C#/XAML and WPF C#/XAML or the Windows8 store apps based on C#/XAML. Yes, the names and namespaces have been changed, but it’s not huge.
We’re doing a conversion from Silverlight at my work – it’s like going from Guatemalan Spanish to Mexican Spanish – lots of little details, but not a complete rewrite.
I have no idea if it’s true, but according to the coverage on CNBC this morning, if Gates continues to sale his shares in Microsoft at his recent pace (to fund Gates Foundation) then by next quarter Ballmer will be the single biggest shareholder in Microsoft.
The Microsoft MO would be to just steal Android, call it something else, build in Microsoft hooks and give it away. What’s anybody going to do about it?
Right to dump Ballmer’s dumb strategy.
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Ballmer doesn’t and has never understood technology. That’s why Windows Phone and Windows 8 are a mess; he’s never sat down to use either of them.
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Ok, maybe he has, but he’s not looked at the detail and really challenged either. My email client, Windows Live Mail, has bugs for just searching emails (date filtering doesn’t work right). Searching my file system returns emails! And to filter results I’ve got to enter command line like instructions in a GUI OS! Baffling.
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Nadellas needs to change to a new strategy; his strategy. He needs to ensure that to the user the OS is 100% functional; just the way Jobs would do.
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And that’s really a huge point. Apple have stolen a lot of shine in the technology sector, yet MS ignore this. MS has to embrace not just Google products as Bob says but also Apple. That’s not to say that they shouldn’t compete with a Nokia product, but it should be possible to have, say, Word on each platform able to share files seamlessly between them.
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The biggest mistake Microsoft could have made was taking on Alan Mulally. It would have been like employing an even more clueless Ballmer. With respect to Mulally I’m sure he know the car industry exceptionally well, but a technology company needs someone with a technology background. Employing from inside Microsoft has given MS someone who hits the ground running. Employing someone with an electronics and software background gives MS a future.
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MS has a future just as long as Ballmer doesn’t interfere!
“With respect to Mulally I’m sure he know the car industry exceptionally well, but a technology company needs someone with a technology background.”
Mulally would have been a hatchet man a la Gerstner for IBM.
That I don’t doubt.
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He’d have taken a ruler and drawn a line between what’s making money, and what was losing money. It’s a good business strategy to quickly make a company look profitable, but in the case of a technology company that may be at the expense of it’s future products.
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Nadellas needs to now come up with his own vision of what Microsoft will look like in the near and distant future. He should be given the time and space to create that vision; it’s vitally important for Microsoft’s future.
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Yes, he will make mistakes and I hope he does. Not through any desire to see him fail, far from it, but to see him succeed. If he doesn’t have some failure he’s not been bold enough to succeed. I know that may sound silly but Microsoft is big enough to handle that! And if he’s big enough to recognise those mistakes and fix them, and that’s the important bit to recognise and fix, then Microsoft will have the leader it so desperately needs.
Alan Mulally is an engineer. You’d better believe he knows about technology. Also, he didn’t commit any IBM-style hatchet jobs at Boeing and Ford, so why assume he would do so with Microsoft?
I am not saying Mulally would have been the best choice to run MS, but I do think he is being mischaracterized here.
For brevity we do tend to simplify and generalise!
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He may be an engineer but he’s not the right type of engineer. I speak as an engineer myself (electronics). But now if you had to pigeon hole him you’d say he’s management not an engineer!
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What he’s done to turn-around Ford I think is excellent, but short sighted. Unfortunately he seen the books and I didn’t. He sold everything off to save the main company. Now the likes of Jaguar & Land Rover are doing wonderfully under new bolder management. Management who’ll let them change the look of their cars to a modern style. Ford were super in bringing in new quality systems and processes, but they never updated the product; Tata built upon those systems by refreshing the product and as a result Jaguar & Land Rover are a huge success.
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Question – Why couldn’t Ford do that?
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So I have to say that Mulally would have been a very safe choice to continue the path that Ballmer had set and done a hatchet job to the under performing sectors. But like Jaguar & Land Rover that could be where the future growth in profits would have come from. Ballmer’s trajectory was downwards; Mulally would have followed.
“My email client, Windows Live Mail, has bugs for just searching emails (date filtering doesn’t work right).” You might try WLM from 2009/10, the one before the Ribbon. It’s easier to navigate, has fewer bugs, but I rarely use date filtering, mostly keyword searches within a folder.
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” Searching my file system returns emails! ” Uncheck the /appdata folder in Control Panel’s Indexing options.
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“And to filter results I’ve got to enter command line like instructions in a GUI OS! Baffling.” In the 2009 version of WLM I use Edit>Find>Message from the old fashioned menu bar at the top to start a keyword search.
Ronc – some very good tips, thank you!
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I’ve had to keep thousands of emails as proof of conversations just in case a company I was working with turned nasty on me. Thankfully the soon realised that I was able to quote from what they’d said back to them so the don’t try any funny business with me any more!
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One of the problems with the old version of Windows Live Mail (WLM) is that every now and again it dumps all of your emails. There’s a very serious bug that it looses thousands of emails and if you don’t notice they’re not being loaded quickly they’re gone. You have to quickly find where the temporary files are stored and copy them out.
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The current version may make it very difficult to find those old emails but at least it still holds them!
“looses thousands of emails” I’m using WLM 2009 Build 14.0.8117.0416 (the latest before the ribbon versions). If I lost any emails I haven’t noticed.
Just to prove that it does happen (although I’m more than happy you’ve not suffered from this) here’s a link:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windowslive/forum/livemail-email/suddenly-lost-all-my-emails-in-windows-live-mail/f2a09ef5-a4fa-4966-822c-c271932d7ae0
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My Google search showed others having the same; this is just one example and other links may give you a better solution than this.
@Dr. John: In the link you posted, the o.p. responds “Which version of Windows Live Mail are you using ? Version 2011 (15.4.3538.513)”. That’s why I posted the Build number of the 2009 version I’m using. I never upgraded due to hearing about numerous bugs in 2011 which were never fixed; not even in so-called “updates” or name changes from WLM to WEM.
It was pre-ribbon version that I lost emails with. Couldn’t tell you the build number.
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Not a fan of the Ribbon either. Been using Office for many years and I’m having to search the help to figure out which hieroglyph I need to press to get a function I could easily find before. Biggest problem is there’s no menu to back up the hieroglyphics. You end up using less functions than you did before because it limits your exploration of Office – you can’t see what each is going to do for you.
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So I bought a Mac. And on it I put Pages and Numbers. I still use my PCs as I have to but when given a choice I’m using the Mac. If I could change the other computers over (each tend to do certain functions for electronics engineering, one for PIC programming, another for Atmel, one for general office work etc) I would. And that’s a problem for Microsoft.
Open-source versions of .NET and C#.
Keep talent from leaving.
Bring more SF and Silicon Valley to Seattle.
Buy a TelCo and give away service.
Push data-mining (Windoop?) for biz.
As someone who is a fairly happy user of the entire Microsoft ecosystem (PC, Xbox, and Windows Phone), Satya needs to continue down the One Microsoft path and INTEGRATE, INTEGRATE, INTEGRATE! True professional and personal productivity is not found by using lots of “best of breed” apps that don’t talk to each other. Having Microsoft use Android would be giving the market over to Google (i.e. cutting your nose off to spite your face.)
Everyone writes that the mobile game is already over when, in fact, it is just getting started. People forget that Apple’s marketshare was horrendous until they opened their own retail stores. This gave them the opportunity to “sell” their message. Microsoft has a similar problem right now. The only place to see their ecosystem working is their own retail stores. Even the mini-stores in Best Buy cannot/do not give a good impression of their integration story. And don’t even get me started with ATT, Verizon, T-Mobile or Sprint, they don’t know jack about the Windows ecosystem story.
Microsoft needs to hurry up and finish integrating their solutions around the Win 8 User Interface. Touch is the future and Microsoft currently owns that market.
Finally, I agree that Satya is using Gates as leverage against Ballmer. It will be fun to watch.
While I don’t disagree with the thrust of Bob’s article, I just don’t think Microsoft can afford to chuck Windows Phone so soon after buying Nokia. Here’s 10 things I think are in store for their new CEO that I mentioned on Twitter (@pdxmobile) and in a blog post on pdxmobile.com:
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(1) Push for Windows Phone divergence from Windows desktop OS. No grand unification.
(2) Azure cloud integration into both Windows Phone and Windows desktop OS.
(3) Return of 3rd party OEMs for Windows Phone to balance Google Android clout.
(4) A new speech (voice) interface for Office.
(5) The return of rumors that Microsoft will buy Yahoo. This time for sure.
(6) Dropping Nokia low-end Asha phone line like a hot potato by selling to white label OEM.
(7) Copycat Chromebook-like version of Windows using Azure services.
(8) Stephen Elop resigns as divison head of Nokia group, now that he’s lost the CEO sweepstakes.
(9) Xbox and Windows Phone OS game integration.
(10) Windows server moves beyond x86 to ARM and Power ISA.
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Microsoft isn’t an investment bank yet and they will strive to improve and sell the technology they have.
You are right. Forget about competing with Android – co opt it.
God Cringely you write crap!
Google with Android is going Microsoft’s way licence! With Android OS#3 or lower free and OS#6 or higher costing say $20 per phone to get all Google’s goodies. It has what Google likes volume with crap and quality at a price.
Microsoft’s problem is TIME too late too little too stupid an idea for their phone. They need to FLOOD the market with FREE OS FIRST to get %%%% percentage of market. And its too late. Its like starting a race when the others started hours ago SUPER EFFORT is needed to win — the only way is if the rabbit goes to sleep.
OH that’s what Microsoft is and did a sleeping rabbit!
Cringely might write crap (I disagree), but at least Cringely doesn’t write like crap. I might disagree with his opinions, but I always appreciate his coherence and the thought that went into each piece.
Your little screed here, on the other hand, is incomprehensible, which causes it to make zero sense. I literally have no idea what you’re trying to say, nor would anyone else with even the faintest grasp of English.
I’m penalizing you 4 Internets and assigning you a “do over”.
[…] who will stay on at the company as a technology advisor and a board member, respectively. The very well-connected Bob Cringely writes that that Nadella would be wise to keep Gates at his side early in his tenure because he’ll […]
[…] who will stay on at the company as a technology advisor and a board member, respectively. The very well-connected Bob Cringely writes that that Nadella would be wise to keep Gates at his side early in his tenure because he’ll need […]
[…] who will stay on at the company as a technology advisor and a board member, respectively. The very well-connected Bob Cringely writes that that Nadella would be wise to keep Gates at his side early in his tenure because he’ll need […]
Check the Slashdot user rebellion re: forced beta switch over…
Is your Mulally reasoning conjecture or based on facts not known to us? I am a huge Mulally fan, but still think he would have been an awful fit for MS. Feel free to hire him in a consulting position, but his expertise is in the manufacturing sector.
“Feel free to hire him in a consulting position, but his expertise is in the manufacturing sector.”
There is this fallacy amongst techies that the CEO of a tech. company has to be an uber-geek. That is simply not true. A LARGE tech company ( revenue, employee base, etc ) has the same characteristics of any other large company and needs to be managed with a focus on operational execution. The hiring of Mulally would have been a water-shed moment as Gerstner ( ex-Nabisco and McKinsey ) was at IBM. He would have slashed divisions, refocused the company (IMHO) on the enterpise and spun off the fickle , consumer-based divisions. There is a lot of fat that can be cut off the beast in Redmond, and once the Windows/Office Gravy train plateaus and begins to drop , Nadella is going to have make some hard decisions AND piss off Monkey Boy while trying not be undermined by billg…
Fun times again
Every time I whip out my Nokia Lumia 1520, my Android-sporting cohorts stop and gape at it and exclaim what a beautiful screen and interface that is!
Windows Phone is not going to be killed off, simple as that. Microsoft was perpetually behind all of the Java and Palm OS phones back in the Windows Mobile days and they still hung on. Now they have a much better OS, arguably much better than anything else out there, and it works in the Enterprise space very well, thank you very much. Soon, the ARM Windows RT and Windows Phone ecosystems will be merged, and that should provide a big boost to the app market. On my Nokia Lumia 2520 Windows RT tablet, I can print to my HP prnter, connect to my company’s Exchange email system and open a remote desktop to any Windows server on my network, all without the aid of ‘helper’ or third-party software required on iOS or Android.
So, tell me again how bad Windows Phone and Windows RT is?
Being a strong #3 is not that bad, and it’s clear that Apple is faltering and that interest in their mobile platform is waning, hence the rush to open up new market segments in order to maintain the revenue stream. Google has pretty much won the market, but it’s the hardware vendors (like Samsung) who are reaping the majority of the rewards.
Microsoft is completely vertical, much like Apple, but they have a much better and continually evolving product.
Google and Samsung have made a deal that will make it even harder for the other Android OEMs to make a profit on Android. Sony, HTC and Motorola might very well switch to Windows Phone, if Microsoft is willing to work with them and if Microsoft puts more resources in it. And they seem to be doing that; the Windows Phone team now works directly with the Windows team. There will be more synergy, more enterprise features and easier development.
Windows Phone still has a chance, if Microsoft is serious with it. Up until the reorganisation, it was more of a side project that was kept alive buy subsidizing Nokia.
Everyone now sees that Google has become just another Microsoft and not a saviour from Microsoft. The smarter OEMs will realise that they need to support both companies, instead of choosing only one, to keep both humble.
To sum up, What Cringely is saying is that Microsoft quit pretending to be a vertically integrated company like Apple, and be a horizontally integrated like Google. Seems like a fair idea.
Bob wrote: “This would leverage a Microsoft strength and take advantage of an Apple weakness as the latter company proudly ignores the enterprise in favor of individual users.”
Apple ignores the enterprise? Where the heck did that come from?
“Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer repeatedly talked about the company’s growth in the enterprise sector during a Monday earnings call. A recent IDC report placed iPhones and iPads in the majority of businesses and while this is a major success for the tech giant, the executives also let everyone know that there is a lot more to come.”
http://business.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=003000918JUF
iOS 7’s inclusion of Numbers, Pages and Keynote pretty much make it the only out-of-box ready to go business platform with standard readers for spreadsheets, documents and presentations, 90% of what business users use. Android has a lot of equivalent apps, but of varying quality and usefulness. Microsoft will eventually get most businesses to use Windows tablets because of tradition or whatever, but until then Apple is the business platform.
Numbers and Pages are a joke for the Enterprise. Those are consumer products. Google Docs has some success in small companies and universities, because of the simple setup, low cost and real-time collaboration. But without extensive macro support, deep integration with other business tools, remote management and a private cloud aka Sharepoint, no product can compete with Office. Google is the one to watch out for and Microsoft has reacted with better and free web apps and real-time collaboration.
Not sure how much MS can really do to integrate Android with the Windows ecosystem. Google holds all the cards seems like.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/neither-microsoft-nokia-nor-anyone-else-should-fork-android-its-unforkable/#p3
The photo in this article speaks volumes. The body language says bill and ballmer will isolate and suppress nadella
The three of them have been working together since 1992. So I would not expect anything to change. That’s good since there’s no point in throwing out the baby with the bath water.
IMHO… BillG stood in his spot first. Then Satya and Steve flanked him. Satya is respectfully giving him personal space, not wanting to glom all over him. Steve is more comfortable being chummy with his long-time friend. No big deal.
Does Nokia producing an Android based phone constitute a win for the suggestion above that M$ should embrace Android?
https://www.nokia.com/global/products/phone/nokia-x/
The first thing they should do is bring back the VB6 programming language.
http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/3440221-bring-back-classic-visual-basic-an-improved-versi