I'm as big of a Satya fan as anyone, but someone who doesn't get enough credit is Ballmer.
It wasn't a coincidence that on the day Ballmer stepped down and Satya became CEO (2014), Microsoft also announced Office for iOS, Cloud first strategy, and a whole slew of cloud/Azure product announcements.
All of which was developed under Ballmer watch and he handed off the launch and continued execution to Satya.
Steve Ballmer was a guy who restlessly milked two Microsoft cash cows (Windows and Office) to accommodate investors quarter after quarter. He didn't have a vision or courage to push Microsoft in some other direction, and my impression was that all good things that started under his regime (Azure, more openness) was either reactionary or he simply didn't care (most of early open source push was from his lieutenants).
At the end of his regime MS lost top-tier tech place (when someone says "big tech" it's Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, not MS), he lost the main Microsoft advantage - an army of Windows programmers. MS under Ballmer lost couple of generations of programmers, to the point where MS needs to ship Linux kernel with Windows just to get cosy with programmers again.
Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook. I can't wait for him to be replaced.
> Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook. I can't wait for him to be replaced.
Comments like this make zero sense to me. Apple might be better if Jobs was still alive. But without a time machine, and potentially better medicine, that's not an option.
Under Cook Apple:
- Increased profitability and market share massively.
- Created the most successful watch brand in the world.
- Turned Beats into Beats + AirPods, the two most successful headphone brands in the world.
- Avoided the sort of ridiculous cash burning acquisitions to inflate growth Ballmer was guilty of.
Apple has a bunch of mis-steps under Cook, but none of them have had long term company damaging impact. Many of the things people beat Cook up over were actually things Jobs was as bad/ worse with. For example almost all the App Store policies everyone hates were created under Jobs. Jobs was also far more protective and litigious.
Cook isn't Jobs, since Jobs is dead the comparison is pointless. Cook has done better than the vast majority of CEOs who have taken over successful brands. Apple is doing just fine.
+1. I'm far from an Apple zealot, but Tim Cook added $1.7 Trillion to apple's market cap since taking over as chief executive. He certainly isn't the product visionary that Jobs was, but a rare few are. IMO Cook may have even been a better executer than Jobs, even if his decisions are more risk averse. And he has still taken a few notable ones – e.g. Apple's recent shift to services revenue (news, music, card, etc) was a surprisingly smooth & fast success. Barring some huge future misstep, I'd be surprised if he didn't go down as one of history's most successful company leaders in his own right.
Good thing that's not the only feather in Tim's cap. He's vastly expanded Apple's valuation while simultaneously introducing new, successful products, and growing Apple's place in the tech world.
Steve was visionary, but Tim has taken that vision farther than anyone ever gives him credit for.
Most of the stuff was in development during Jobs' time, including Airpods, the latest one. With Jony Ive gone, I doubt Apple has the prowess to continue that finesse. It would be akin to von Holzhausen leaving Tesla, imo.
> Most of the stuff was in development during Jobs' time,
We're 10 years past Jobs and Cook was running quite a bit of Apple even before Jobs passed away. Not even Jobs is prescient enough to have predicted where the market would have gone this far out. He was good at being where the puck was going, but he didn't have a crystal ball.
I think it may be the other way around. In the Jony Ive post-Steve-Jobs era, we got the iPhones 6-11, and, in my opinion, all of them are considerably worse physical designs than the 5. Now Apple has (imminently) the 12 and 12 Mini, which are, IMO, the best designs from Apple in years.
I'm very excited about the 12 mini, after being blah on many before. iphone 1 was my first iphone so have been around for a while. Don't see the point of 5G, Jobs used to actually really delay introducing some of the new tech until it was ready, I'd have been fine if they'd waited a year on that but...
What new products? The iPhone and iPads I use today are materially the same things as the ones I had half a decade ago. The only new products that come to mind are airpods and the Watch, and I credit Tim Cook with those, but I can't think of anything else.
Apple's valuation doesn't do me any good (or ill!) as a customer. I feel like there are a lot more bugs in Mac OS than there were in the past, and I'd happily trade Apple's market cap for a return to confident OS upgrades.
Other than earpods, I'm not sure what they person above you is talking about. All the stuff started and matured under Jobs and otherwise Apple made some good company buys with beats, etc. Cook is a great CEO, but he's not a visionary, Apple needs to find one of those as well.
> shift to services revenue (news, music, card, etc) was a surprisingly smooth & fast success
After having purchased most every iPhone release since launch, with the prior model gifted to family, this year we switched to iPhone-as-a-Service subscription on the Apple Card.
Post shift, Apple moves me out of making a $1300 buying evaluation decision to simply ‘staying current’ for forty bucks a month for the flagship model.
This was available for a while, took a while to break through my sense I should “own” my device each year instead of subscribe to it, but the mental stress of buying new and reselling old, inevitably ending up with some in a drawer (iPhone 6s anyone?) ... the subscription is hassle free for me, recurring revenue for Tim, and shockingly well priced given the convenience.
Imagine what their numbers would look like to Wall Street if he could turn most of their hardware buyers into subscribers...
Agree with all of this. I also think Cook should get credit for the Apple Pay / Apple Card ecosystem, and for Car Play.
In addition, under Cook, Apple also made great strides in ecological manufacturing and supplier accountability. And early on, Cook had the courage to fire a highly visible but toxic executive.
> Apple also made great strides in ecological manufacturing and supplier accountability
Do you have evidence of that? It seems like it is quite the opposite. Apple prefer to destroy not working phones or Macs instead of repairing them. They make sure independent repair shops cannot repair any of their products and design them in a way so that they fail in short space of time, so customers can either pay for repair through the nose or buy a new Mac.
Even Greenpeace acknowledges quite a bit of progress in many respects: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/GG... — keep in mind that they used to picket Apple annual meetings. Admittedly, they still have plenty of criticisms, and several of them echo yours.
Personally, I think "designed to fail" is a downright false charge, and "repairability" is a trickier trade-off than repair advocates make it out to be — how much weight, size, and fragility does the repairability add, and how often is the device in fact repaired?
Personally, I think "designed to fail" is a downright false charge, and "repairability" is a trickier trade-off than repair advocates make it out to be ...
Somebody should tell the UK Parliament, they need some feedback and Apple cannot spare anybody to clear up this "downright false charge" :
I don't see "designed to fail" or any corresponding language on that page.
There is concern about repairability there. I seem to recall that the UK was a member of a trans-national organization that recently passed tougher repairability legislation, and quit that organization to be rid of all that burdensome regulation.
For the life of me, I can't understand why Apple wouldn't take the UK seriously…
Perhaps there has been an improvement in other parts of the supply chain, but the situation in DR Congo (where e.g. coltan used for capacitors is mined) seems to only be getting worse.
Apple specifically used to call out the DR Congo as one area where their supply chain responsibility was not yet up to their standards, but in recent years, they claim to have established an audited supply chain: https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Conf...
(I'm going by Apple's own claims here, would be interested to hear whether you have information contradicting these claims).
Did the child labour lawsuit [1] get settled? I think your link is describing audited Smelters and Refiners. The kids work in the Cobalt mines and Apple is one of the biggest consumers of Cobalt in the world.
As far as Wikipedia knows, that lawsuit is still pending (it would be extremely early for an US lawsuit of that complexity with that many defendants to settle).
The complaint [1] is interesting and disturbing. But I'm not convinced it's entirely in good faith. It spends a lot of time expounding on the DRC's sordid history (Whatever you want to blame Apple for, they had nothing to do with King Leopold). It cites extensively from Amnesty's 2016 report on conditions in Cobalt mining [2], but entirely fails to mention Amnesty's 2017 followup report [3] that credits many of the defendants (especially Apple) of having taken significant steps in the right direction since 2016. And the complaint appears to dismiss any positive measures taken by the defendants merely as evidence that their prior bad conduct was knowing.
Of course, a company improving their conduct does not mean they cannot be found liable for their earlier conduct, but I would not take this complaint as an objective assessment of the defendants' current cobalt sourcing practices.
+1. Apple isn't the same as it was under Steve Jobs, but it's stayed successful and relevant. I miss the old Apple software quality — the Apple apps were once a reason to use macOS or iOS, and it's pretty rare I actually use them anymore — and the stronger hardware innovation (Watch is cool but not industry-defining on the scale of the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad), but the overall Apple ecosystem has if anything grown stronger under Cook... And their edge on hardware has grown significantly, especially with respect to chip design, to the point where their in-house-designed ARM chips are likely to give them not only a generational advantage on phones, which they already have, but also soon on laptops and desktops as well. Apple under Tim Cook isn't going to wow the world with innovative new products to the same degree it did under Steve Jobs, but its product lines will relentlessly improve and Apple will in many ways stay ahead of the competition because Tim is a great operator. I can't say the same for Ballmer: not only did Microsoft innovate less successfully under his leadership than Apple has under Cook (at least Cook has Watch and Airpods!), but also Microsoft's cash cow product lines didn't do well under his leadership — Windows 8, for example, was a travesty.
That being said I'm also very impressed with Satya Nadella, and have recently been using Windows more and more again, something I thought would be pretty unlikely (to put it mildly) a decade ago when Ballmer was at the helm. I'm pretty excited about future products from both companies.
While that's true, pancreatic cancer is nasty enough that even with prompt treatment, there was a good chance he'd succumb to it anyway, although he'd definitely have way better chances.
His cancer was the least deadly of the cancers and with treatment he would have lived much longer. My mom had stage one pancreatic cancer 4 years ago and she is still alive today and cancer free for over four years. So it is possible.
Yeah, I'm not sure how such an intelligent person could get suckered in by that mumbo jumbo. I guess one can be a savante in some things and dumb as a rock at others.
There's pancreatic cancer and cancer of the pancreas. (There might be more, i know about these two). The difference in life expectancy is staggering. One is basically starting the clock (in months to a handful of years), with the other, recovery is possible.
Pancreatic cancer essentially forms a barrier around the cancer that prevents drugs from reaching the tumors as I understood layman's descriptions of the disease when one of my friends died of it.
I think there was some initial success in attaching vitamin d to some drugs to bypass the "firewall", but it was still hard.
IIRC, he had insulinoma, which is a rather slow cancer. I’m not sure if treatment beyond surgery would have prolonged his life, as 10 year survival is around 30%.
> Avoided the sort of ridiculous cash burning acquisitions to inflate growth
It's funny how Apple has often been exhorted by industry observers to make large acquisitions, and instead has done quite well with smaller ones. Beats has been a commercial success. PA Semi (dating back to the Jobs era) was the foundation to a hugely successful VLSI design division. The success of Siri is a bit more disputed, but it's playing an important role in many products.
This is exactly why I mentioned it, Microsoft burned through 10s of billions in bad acquisitions, Google has a few massive multi-billion dollar mis-steps.
Apple under Tim enjoy short term gains and greed has blinded them. The company will soon start failing because of their anti-consumer and anti-environment culture. They create false image of themselves to be super friendly innovative brand for creative people, but the truth is far from this. Their products are designed to fail and to be only repairable by Apple. If your charging port dies on a new Mac, you cannot repair it yourself even if you have all required tools and skills. Their policy is essentially if it breaks you have to pay us through the nose or buy a new model. Then there is the anti-competitive Apple Store that is milking the iOS ecosystem and developers.
Sounds like you've got an axe to grind with Apple though, and are biased negatively because of it.
Apple's products are demonstrably supported in software far longer than other manufacturers. People rate the physical build quality of their products very high as well.
It seems that people like the benefits and features of Apple hardware enough to overlook the problems with self-repairability.
And regarding the app store, maybe because you're in the industry you think it's a generally big problem, because you're affected. But it's a 1% privilege issue to most of the world.
It seems Apple is doing enough right that its value is climbing.
Yeah I don't like the walled garden myself, but the hardware I've bought from them has been well designed, supported for quite some time, and trustworthy. I never even had to get anything repaired. My line of work requires me to have both Linux and Apple machines and Apple is working just fine along with Linux.
Apple lost its way when they shoved Scott Forstall out the door for refusing to take the blame for the Apple Maps debacle. Apple has been gliding on the backs of Steve's vision since then and they're terrified to make any wrong decision. That's why they overlap generations of products as they don't have a clue what will succeed.
> Apple has been gliding on the backs of Steve's vision since then and they're terrified to make any wrong decision.
That has been some of my view as well. But some of their approach have changed.
The old Apple was about making something great, charge a premium. That is about the same with current Apple. Except its whole Services Strategy reeks of money grabbing. There is nothing about Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great.
> There is nothing about Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great.
I'm not sure how you'd consider Apple Music a money grab but are ok with iTunes music purchases? Basically they were expanding their business to follow the industry trend of streaming music instead of buying it. iTunes has been a revenue stream at Apple since the iPod was born.
Also, Apple selling supplemental services and software that are... not amazing is not new either.
The big one? iTunes. For a few years it was great, but for a long long time it was just a giant mess. iHome, iMovie (Garage Band is pretty rad), iPhoto (Photos is way better), Mobile Me, Ping didn't even last 2 years I don't think. Most of those products were meh at best, they did the basic thing they needed to do and that's about it.
The big difference between Apple then and Apple now is they have the money to contract out for their own content.
> Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great.
Apple TV+ has a paltry selection because they didn't go out and buy a huge external library of content to bootstrap themselves. The content they have is—Decent and getting better. They know this and there is a reason they aren't really charging for it yet.
Apple Fitness doesn't even exist so not sure how you can criticize it.
Yeah, it's all a "Money Grab", they are growing the business, that's what companies do. Fortunately all of this stuff is optional. You can enjoy your computer/ phone/ tablet without any of it. IMO the only egregious "money grab" is their paltry 5GB free iCloud storage. Considering that's the best and for many only way of backing up their $1000 phone with their life stored on it, that's messed up.
Beats + AirPods, the two most successful headphone brands in the world
How are you working out "most successful"? Beats aren't rated particularly highly apart from by label-followers; while blinkeredness has always been a notable criticism of Apple product appraisal, it did in the past occasionally lead the field - that's not at all obvious with Beats etc.
Sales. How else do you measure success of a consumer electronics product?
> Beats aren't rated particularly highly apart from by label-followers
While Beats haven't been highly rated by audiophiles, they are popular and sound quality and in particular Bluetooth performance has improved significantly under Apple.
AirPods... well they are AirPods. They are might well be the most universally loved product in Apple's product line right now. Maybe the most loved consumer electronics product on the market right now.
Sales. How else do you measure success of a consumer electronics product?
There are clearly many measures of success. It's best if you mean best-selling maybe just to say that, as it may be important to salespeople but not so much to (say) end users.
[Airpods...]Maybe the most loved consumer electronics product on the market right now.
That sounds more like a subjective or emotional claim than one measurable, and that's part of the problem with Apple in particular (though not only Apple) as I've already mentioned; the seeming lack of ability of its champions to consider it's products in a reasonably neutral way.
To an extent, that's a compliment to the way it has built it's brand over time, but it means it's important to bear it in mind when judging rather sweeping superiority claims.
> That sounds more like a subjective or emotional claim than one measurable, and that's part of the problem with Apple in particular (though not only Apple) as I've already mentioned; the seeming lack of ability of its champions to consider it's products in a reasonably neutral way.
People have been spewing nonsense like this for decades. As if customers being happy with a product is a worthless concept.
The AirPods are successful because people love them. When AirPods were first launched, they were widely panned and people laughed at the design, but everyone who bought them loved them. I could go into details about why, but it's irrelevant, if they hadn't been so well liked, they wouldn't be the best selling headphones on the market.
People have been spewing nonsense like this for decades.
More emotion.
As if customers being happy with a product is a worthless concept.
No, customers not being able to look at things with a reasonable sense of perspective and ability to judge things reasonably impartially is to be borne in mind when considering sweeping claims. Somewhat different.
Just an aside. Steve Jobs was only CEO of Apple for a few months in 97,98,& 99. The rest of the 90s he was running NEXT & Pixar after getting the boot from Apple in the 80s.
We're a 40 person Design agency, that has been running on Mac hardware for almost 40 years now.
Everybody of us used to be a huge apple fanboy, now every one of us hates them with a passion.
They completely ignored their customers for the iPhone money grab. Their hardware and software used to be synonymous with quality, nowadays their shoddy quality has become a meme at work.
"Oops reboot." - "What did you expect, it's a mac."
We're looking for the door, and slowly started to introduce windows machines. We were shocked how fast computers got
without apple catching up.
Apple used to he one of the pillars of our productivy, nowadays it's a liability.
And from a developer perspective, they murdered their own App ecosystem.
Mac software used to be really really good. But who do you expect to write great apps for 70ct per sale. That's just ridiculous. Also, why should I get an iPad pro, if I can't even write software on it.
They could've dominated the PC market if iPad Os was actually a real OS.
I doubt that apple can keep its brand relevant without opinion leaders like design professionals.
I mean, c'mon, even Ive left.
Apple is dead, it's only a matter of time for the rot to bring it down.
> I doubt that apple can keep its brand relevant without opinion leaders like design professionals.
I know a fair number of developers and most of them still use Macs. Not because they are fan boys, but because MacOS still sucks less than Windows.
For me and likely many, OS choice is a pragmatic thing and for the moment MacOS is the least bad option. It's going to be interesting seeing what happens with the new CPUs which have the potential to push the Mac ahead of the pack in terms of price/ performance as well.
> I mean, c'mon, even Ive left.
Ive is 54 years old. He's was at Apple for ~26 years when he left. I have no idea how wealthy he is at this point, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's a billionaire based on his position and likely large stock option grants in the 00s.
You are a designer, how many years would you put in cranking out designs for mass consumption consumer electronics after you were a many times over millionaire? How many black aluminium iPhones would you design? Another 40 years worth?
And I know a fair amount of devs who are forced to use Mac hardware because of Apple restricting dev and testing environments to the MacOS. Says a lot when a developer recommended me to use a Linux+Hackintosh (I'm not from a dev background).
About your last point, it would be every designer's dream to work in a company with as powerful a brand as Apple, with as big a war chest and as global a reach for massive adoption. Yet Ive left, perhaps due to feeling that Apple has drained itself of ideas and doesn't have any concrete plans in future. FWIW, most of its recent products were envisioned when Jobs was alive.
I’m a developer, I use a Mac, it’s still the best Unix laptop out there.
But I have a Ryzen 3950X desktop with a real GPU (RTX 2080) running Windows and Linux, for when I am not portable.
Same dotfiles for all, any operating system these days has the terminal + browser story covered, if you then use VS Code and languages like Go or Rust, you don’t really need to care what the OS is.
Getting religious over any one platform is a waste of time IMO.
Well I use Windows and Linux currently, with a hackintosh for macOS after a bad spell with a Mac. I find the Linux OS to be the best for programming, since it just runs everything like a breeze. Windows is what I use for Office since macOS office is clunky and I'm locked in to the Windows shortcuts.
The issue with Macs for me is not the usability of the OS (apart from the lock in that Apple tried to do), but because of its irreparability. Spilt a few dropfuls water on your PC while using? Tough luck, gotta go to the Apple Care centre and wait till they fix it in a week or more. Meanwhile once I accidentally spilt water on my ThinkPad, I just disconnected everything, left it to dry for a day and voila! All of my data was preserved, no issues at all. Another time, I accidentally dropped the ThinkPad from my desk, yet it still works as good as new. Even if some issue were to happen to it, I can be assured of getting out-of-warranty support anywhere in the world - heck, I've had an old Dell repaired at the bloke's who runs a computer shop in my grandfather's village in rural India.
Another gripe I have is with Mac's updates. People complain about Windows updates, but it just takes an hour or two tops if it's a big one, and can be done on restart. Compare that to Mac - last year, Catalina took more than 10 hours on my Mac. Those are wasted hours of productivity, and it's always the same story with Mac every year.
> but because MacOS still sucks less than Windows.
I completely agree that it's still less bad, but look at the language you're using.
It's not that MacOS is a great platform, it's just less bad than the other options.
It had a great starting position from which it declines.
It's a lot worse than it used to be and it continues to decline, so the trend and outcome are clear.
> How many black aluminium iPhones would you design? Another 40 years worth?
EXACTLY!
The iPhone is now 14 years old. The iPod lasted 6 years until it got replaced with the iPhone.
Apples great advantage used to be that they competed with themselves. It was the Macintosh Team vs. the Rest of Apple for example. The Macintosh was allowed to completely cannibalise all other Machines, the iPhone was allowed to completely canibalise the iPod, the iMac replaced the Cube and was allowed to completely cannibalise most tower macs.
They didn't create a huge product portfolio trying to balance features so that they all sell equally well, crippling some for the survival of others (e.g. where's the iPad Pro with XCode, or a MacBook with LTE). They tried to make the best product that would revolutionise the markets, even if it would kill their other products. Because the Products were front and center, not the profits.
If apple was still apple, we wouldn't have Macbooks anymore. We'd all use iPad Pros with proper software and keyboards that can balance them on your laps.
We probably wouldn't use iPhones either, we'd simply have Airpods, an appleWatch, and an optional larger screen that you slide into your shirt pocket or your wallet, or carry as a pocket mirror. Doing 90% of interactions through Siri (which is also 8 years old now, ancient by computer standards, still worse than what it used to be, because apple wants to save money on compute).
Why would Ive leave if he had the power to shape that future.
That's a gross oversimplification. If Apple were just another Dell turning out machines you'd have a point but Apple, above all else, is an aesthetic brand designed to inspire passion. It's like comparing Ruby with Java. Ruby appeals to the developer's aesthetic, inspring passion in its community. Java does not.
Exactly, Satya Nadella is an awesome leader. Who is to say Tim Cook could have taken all these difficult challenges which MSFT was facing at the time? It's 100% speculation.
It's important not to let our biases get in the way here. Clearly, it was Satya who turned Microsoft around. Ballmer had the opportunity for years and did nothing as the stock prices clearly show.
Since Satya took over, MSFT stock has been soaring... You can't deny the evidence. That's 100% clear
Hum, I think this is missing the main points. AirPods and Watches are gimmick. Nothing crazy innovative happened to the iPhones - apart the flatnessisation of iOS which in my opinion was a mistake - and Macs actually went backwards. The real Tim Cook test will be the ARM Macs. Can be game changing or it can’t sink Macs for good.
Gimmick or not, wearables (Watch + Airpods) are a massive business for Apple. Large enough that they would be a F500 company if spun out at current revenue numbers.
No strong opinions on Cook but a Ballmer of the current era is Sundar Pichai. Google of the last few years is utterly rudderless, losing all the mojo and goodwill they once had. That shows in the Stock price, in (a lack of) successful new products, in Google’s loss of reputation as the “coolest company to be at”, in the bloated middle management occupied in turf wars, in essentially most of the things that matter.
That's extremely unfair to Ballmer- Ballmer made lots of bets and put a lot of effort into them. Some were given up on- the phone, but you can't critize Azure, among many. Microsoft has developed lots of products and can develop more. They did plenty under Ballmer. When they fail they try again, or invest more effort.
Google has only one cash cow. They don't know how to develop products and how to win customers. I feel like products at Google get developed when someone has a bright idea, and then as soon as they get promoted they go do other stuff, and the business isn't really about nurturing a new product. All they care about is their big ads cash cow, with which nothing can compare.
LOL, I agree. Ballmer at least came across as a strong leader, if wrong-headed at times. Sundar just comes across as a weakling yes-man trying to please all the sides.
I couldn't / can't get my work calendars to work on google home, but I can get my work calendars to work on Alexa - let that sink in! Been a top complaint for years - they just don't care - it's really all about the new stuff.
Apple - a lot of nice features that solve problems I had usually on new releases.
That's what you get for hiring the B-school type who I doubt has coded even one line after undergrad (or even in undergrad). Google has just been McKinseying a ton of products in the name of poor sales instead of actively changing them for better. Not to mention the loss of workplace culture, the end of TGIF dinners, and zero diversification from the ads business.
If when people say big tech they exclude msft (and include Facebook), they are simply wrong. .net, sqlserver, power bi, hell office are the blood flowing through Government and industry. Gaming is also tech and azure will get there if they just keep at it. The startup world is only a slice of the pie, and not the largest or most important .
If you don’t live on the coasts, and you want to invest in a stack that will keep you employed indefinitely and wherever you go, you pick dotnet hands down, and I say this as someone who hasn’t written a line of dotnet code
No matter what technologies MSFT have, the number one thought in people’s minds these days when you say big tech is simply FB G Amazon and Apple. It’s no longer MSFT up there with them. Definitely a stigma thing.
FB is big ad. To say that MSFT is not big tech is absurd.
They have a widely used desktop operating system, a top-3 public cloud, they make their own laptops and other hardware, they make multiple widely used programming languages, they have one of the most widely used databases, they have a well regarded research division ... the list goes on
The scope of tech that MSFT works on is as big as anyone, and is what they primarily make their money from ... so why wouldn't anyone think it's "big tech"?
The Silicon Valley's idea of Big Tech didn't include MS a few months ago when they were leading the pack for most valuable company in the world. And somehow they're escaping anti-trust scrutiny right now too, so maybe it's better to have a less sexy profile.
Part of that could also be that Microsoft is much more willing to do things in order to avoid looking like a monopoly more than just forbidding the word monopoly. A lot of effort has been spent in bringing SQL Server to Linux as opposed to continuing to use it as a way to lock people into using Windows Server. That's not a charitable act mind you, but I doubt Microsoft under Balmer would have done it.
Disclaimer: I do work for Microsoft on SQL, but I am not in management nor do I speak in any capacity for Microsoft.
The only tech company that my grandparents from the old country could name is Microsoft. I think there is definitely a skewed perception from the commentators living in USA/CAN.
I was considering .NET Core for a project but they appear to have fallen behind the JVM rather dramatically when it comes to GC performance. The JVM now has low latency collectors for very large heaps. Is there any work being done in .NET Core to catch up?
Yeah I work in the Midwest and have been learning .NET for a project I was recently onboarded on. C#/.NET has a stronghold in most enterprise companies out here.
That's interesting. The .NET Core experience shows a lot of promise. I'd fear getting into an old school .NET shop almost as much as I'd fear getting into a "stuck in Java <= 1.7" shop.
No need, just code a fully compatible alternative implementation. It's very unclear what is the situation with Mono (unlike alternative JVM implementations).
Cook hasn't damaged Apple nearly as much as Ballmer hurt MS. During Ballmer's tenure, Microsoft launched the Zune, the various disastrous incarnations of Windows Phone, Windows 8, and the Xbox One (which halved its marketshare vs the 360). Cook may not be innovative, but he has yet to have a real failure, much less a disaster on the scale of those.
> the various disastrous incarnations of Windows Phone
Surprisingly the phone was loved. What wasnt loved was the one desktop everywhere so when they tried to push 'Metro' to the PC, tablet and phone it struggled. But the tiled phone interface was good, and a lot of people liked it.
I really think Ballmer and Cook are manifestations of the same person. Mac OS quality is the worst it's been in probably a decade+? Hardware design for the laptops have been under massive scrutiny. Cook brought the Watch to the table which is a massive success. Their services business plan is just a money grab like their approach to accessories. But Apple isn't innovating much, they have been cashing in in recent years (besides the watch imo, maybe airpods but Id personally disagree)
As a consumer, I loved the phone. As a developer, I was afraid to touch it. Dumping the old Windows Mobile platform for Windows Phone was understandable, but the compatibility break between Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 was really off-putting.
Though I think the biggest problem there is that it didn't happen in a vacuum. It was one more event in a fairly long list of Microsoft technologies and APIs that were shipped to much fanfare, and then abandoned shortly after release. It made it hard to feel comfortable trying any Microsoft tech that wasn't at least a fewy years old. Including mobile APIs. Which, given what happened with Windows Phone 8, did not turn out to be an overabundance of caution.
The problem hurt more than Windows Phone, too. A lot of people got sick of having the rug repeatedly yanked out from under them, and started developing on non-Microsoft tech stacks. Which then removed a lot of the need to run Windows Server, and things sort of snowballed.
Despite all his infamous ranting about the importance of keeping developers happy early on, the Ballmer years turned out to be the era when Microsoft perfected the art of alienating developers.
If you bailed out after WP8, you missed the really tragic one. Windows Mobile 10 changed everything again (and had the gall to call the new one 'Universal' apps), and they missed their target of all the wp8 phones being upgradable to wm10, and for those that were upgradable, the OS was awful for the first year, and Edge was a worse experience than Mobile IE (which says a lot).
Oh, and they decided to only target the high end of the market, instead of a full range, so they lost the low end market that was selling a lot of phones in poorer nations.
/rant of a dedicated windows phone enthusiast.
At least firefox lets me put the urlbar at the bottom now! And Android picked up dark mode from WP as well.
I think part of that was the size of the paradigm shift MS tried to accomplish. It was a huge gamble and its important to take chances like that, but to change all three platforms so drastically made it hard for developers (table, PC and phone). And then I dont believe MS either A) invested enough or B) gave it enough time so when they pulled support developers definitely felt it.
They were also a couple years late, as for android and iphone had considerable market share.
I think the same can be said for google these days, there is no reason to risk investing time or money into one of their new technologies because it will get dropped if its not one of the big 4 (search, ads, youtube, GCP, maybe arguably android)
Indeed. I'm actually in the middle of dealing with blowback from some Google product yanking right now.
The big difference is, Google pulls stunts like that small things that aren't critical to the company's business. Microsoft, on the other hand, was blithely jackhammering away at the foundation of their business.
They did fine, insofar as they're still profitable and well-capitalized, but one has to wonder what things could have been like for them if they hadn't spent the aughties playing Dr Strangelove's Hand with themselves.
OTOH, one could argue that spending a decade eating humble pie was a necessary step in teaching them how to play nice with others.
> The big difference is, Google pulls stunts like that small things that aren't critical to the company's business. Microsoft, on the other hand, was blithely jackhammering away at the foundation of their business.
For sure, I think MS was panicking tbh. They missed the mobile revolution (This was Ballmer and Gates), and then cloud was starting to take off and realized their OS and Office products were not optimized or read for that shift. I think they realized they had to change, and change fast and as a result didn't go well. But at least it started the change we see today with MS (for good or bad).
> "Dumping the old Windows Mobile platform for Windows Phone was understandable, but the compatibility break between Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 was really off-putting."
My memory is fuzzy on the specifics but the breaks weren't done just for the fun of it. If I recall correctly, refactoring on a titanic scale on the Windows Phone OS was underway along with the same on Windows itself to both make Windows a componentized OS that would work on anything from a tiny mobile device to a huge server and to synchronize the architecture of WP to Windows. By the time of WP10, as the old joke goes, "the operation was a success but the patient died". It's kind of a pity.
It's not that they didn't have a plan, it's that the plan was so thoroughly ill-conceived and ill-executed.
iOS has not been unified with OS X, and Android has not been unified with Chrome OS. And all four OSes are quite successful despite the lack of unification. Meanwhile, the Windows RT Surface tablets never took off, and the Windows 8 unified experience was universally recognized as an unmitigated disaster on launch day, if not earlier.
They were always going to struggle to get app developers to port to Windows Mobile, so I'm not sure it was ill conceived to provide a single target for desktop and mobile, with the hope that more developers would take the time to support all form factors if they could use a single code base.
It was a gamble that enough native desktop apps would remain for this strategy to pay off, but they lost to web and electron apps.
Tried to push Metro on servers too. I remember the brief time where Server didn't have a start button but you could go to the bottom left most pixel to get the start menu to show. What were they thinking? Metro is fine now but that first iteration was a disaster
The last iteration of the phone was loved and was genuinely an interesting product, but by then it was way, way too late. The disastrous limitations and compromises in the earlier iterations doomed the series.
The phone carriers doomed Windows Phone. AT&T and Verizon both agreed they didn't want to sell three OSes, they barely wanted to sell two. You could have the best phone OS there is, but if no one is selling it it doesn't matter.
MSFT could have opened up retail stores with their boatloads of cash like Apple.
But they didn’t want to take the risk with a low margin high cost center activity like providing in person support and expanding headcount. Hence no reward.
And with their recent closing of Microsoft stores, it’s clear that they are doubling down on rent seeking from Office and Windows licenses.
I still think Retail Stores were a red herring. Even if people bought unlocked Windows phones directly from Microsoft Stores they couldn't get SIMs from half the major carriers at any given time as Microsoft was forced not to support given Verizon SIMs as one point due to a dumb war with them and Verizon flat out refusing to allow the devices on to the network. (At a different point AT&T almost did the same thing, but relented.)
On top of that, even though that was towards the end of the era of massive phone hardware subsidies from the carriers, it was still the era of massive phone hardware subsidies from the carriers if you bought directly from them.
Apple had/has "luxury brand" caché that Microsoft couldn't build into its stores if it wanted to, and first mover advantage on top of that. Many consumers didn't blink if there was a huge sticker price difference between the iPhone in the AT&T Store and the unlocked one in the Apple Store, because it was a luxury brand. Microsoft was never going to earn that. Additionally, if a lot of people showed up to an AT&T or Verizon store with an unlocked iPhone and were refused a SIM that would be a major scandal, and would get a lot of luxury good "entitlement" people out of the woodwork. People told that they couldn't buy an unlocked Microsoft phone and use it on their carrier just shrugged and moved on (to an iPhone or an Android).
> And with their recent closing of Microsoft stores, it’s clear that they are doubling down on rent seeking from Office and Windows licenses.
Windows and Office are still getting improvements, it is a bit disingenuous to consider those products "rent seeking".
Xbox and Surface are doing just fine with or without Microsoft-specific Stores.
Besides, both before and after the Microsoft Stores, Microsoft had good retail relationships with Best Buy and others. It's not like there is "zero" Microsoft retail exposure without Microsoft owning their own boutique retail stores.
> Apple had/has "luxury brand" caché that Microsoft couldn't build into its stores if it wanted to, and first mover advantage on top of that.
I disagree. It takes time, money, and effort to earn people’s trust, but it’s possible. They obviously weren’t going to reverse a decade of shipping malware ridden computers, but they could have put out quality Microsoft products, and spent years earning back people’s trust.
And yes, maybe it wouldn’t work, and taking risks is part of business. But this is one of the most profitable companies in the history of the world, and they could have afforded it.
Up until the Surface line, Microsoft never shipped any computers at all, much less "malware ridden" ones. I think that exactly illuminates how high of a mountain Microsoft would have needed to climb to earn people's trust when Microsoft is also in general mainstream mindsets saddled with the problems of other company's behaviors.
But if the point was to save the marketshare of Windows phone products via retail store presence, Microsoft didn't have time, they were racing a losing money clock and the shareholders were watching retail operations worried Microsoft was just "throwing good money after bad".
Owned one. It was a damn good phone, had a great UI that remains unsurpassed to this day, but it clearly came at least two years too late to gain the critical mass needed for a thriving ecosystem.
I loved the UX on it too, but the crappy locked-down web browser killed it for me.. I don't even use apps, but since I couldn't load Firefox with uBlock on there, and there weren't any single-purpose apps, it was really rough
I think the software was loved. It was years before Apple and Android did their own 'natively digital' designs which echoed Metro and Zune's design aesthetic.
> The software was not loved and the app store was lacking.
The app store was definitely lacking. In my own circle of real life users I did not meet one person that did not really like the phone (software included). Granted this is just my own experience so very limited but its also a group of non-technical people just sharing with me. I never heard one complaint in fact it was usually more accolades.
The phone had great software and could run on incredibly low-end hardware like the Nokia 520. I had that phone and it was functional, fast and far better designed than any of the Android equivalent low-ends at the time.
Biggest flaw at the time was Google's shady nonsense involving banning Google Maps/Youtube on Windows Phone without a native app.
So who is “innovating” more in electronics hardware?
As far as the Macs, outside of the keyboard fiasco which has been rectified, the recent Macs are getting good reviews from people who were rightfully critical a few years ago. The ARM Macs will soon be as far ahead of equivalent PCs as the iPhones are Androids when it comes to processing power.
Things like USB ports, touchbar, etc... Mac still makes a good laptop, but in a historical sense I think this is a still a lowpoint for their hardware comparatively to themselves in quality and functionality.
Apple has been aggressively ditching “legacy” ports since the first iMacs in 1998. How is Apple going USB-C only now different than the original iMac going USB only?
USB-C is fine, its the number of ports that is the issue and not consumer friendly..
And I think USB-A isn't quite legacy just yet (it's OK they ditched the VGA and/or DVI ports), there are still a lot of need for one of those ports. Same with a card reader slot. I also think there is a need for a headphone jack even though bluetooth is qutie viable.
There was need for all of the “legacy” ports when the iMac was introduced. The idea of getting rid of ports and standardizing on one when it became technically possible didn’t start under Cook.
The ARM processors will not be "far ahead of" PCs. They will almost certainly give better battery life, but their performance will not trump what Intel and AMD are doing by a long shot. Don't buy into the hype
I'll concede the Xbox One wasn't Ballmer's fault, but he still gets a fair share of the blame for WP. It was (or should have been) Microsoft's most important new initiative for years, Ballmer could clearly see that it was failing, and yet he kept promoting Myerson and giving him more power. A better CEO would have intervened.
and my impression was that all good things that started under his regime (Azure, more openness)
I think a lot of that was Ray Ozzie. I guess Balmer deserves some credit at least for hiring him?
MS under Ballmer lost couple of generations of programmers
A lot of younger programmers may not realize this, but in the 90’s, all roads led to Microsoft. If you were a programmer and you didn’t know at least some of the MS acronym soup of Win32/VB/ATL/MFC/etc/etc, you weren’t getting paid. Microsoft and Windows completely dominated commercial software development. And then what happened?
Balmer tried stupidly to kill the web. He redeployed the IE team and assumed that the web would stagnate without his attention. He’d killed Netscape and the threat had passed. In the meantime, Mozilla and Apple and Google were forming the whatwg and architecting the next generation of the web. And MS was not only not a part of it, but had lost all credibility in the eyes of web and browser devs.
And then of course he also got caught flat-footed by the iPhone. Balmer was a serial failure as a CEO. Maybe he deserves some credit, a little bit at least for Azure? But he’ll always be remembered for all of those stupid quips he made about how Apple wasn’t going to be able to make headway in the smartphone biz.
The comment about the 90's is simply not true. I've been a successful (e.g., getting paid) developer since the 80s and have never been in the Microsoft stack. With the exception of a small bit of VMS-hosted development in the 80s, everything I have done in my career has been hosted on some sort of Unix. And I'm not some outlier. Sun Microsystems dominated the 90s for problems of just about any scale beyond the small workgroup.
I make this point because many of us (both engineers and customers alike) pushed back hard against Microsoft. They actively fought against open standards and interoperability. We literally thought of them as the evil empire. Even as late as the mid 2000s, when I was at Yahoo and there was talk of a Microsoft acquisition, I would have quit rather than work at Microsoft.
Economics aside, changing that toxic culture is what I appreciate most about Nadella's time as CEO. He has (it appears) made Microsoft into a citizen.
You jumped from ship to ship while you could have just been a Windows developer the whole time. Not that you wouldn't have had a bunch of ships to jump between in Windows-land.
I think one factor was at some point Microsoft stopped trying to make the desktop and web one platform (which was distinctly Microsoft controlled) which seemed to be the push with ActiveX, VBscript, and HTML Application technologies. I think the relentless plague of security holes in ActiveX was a factor here. This is idle speculation, but that is my sense of things.
They did the Apple Watch, AirPods, Apple Music under Cook. Lots of innovations in the phone and tablet (pencil, photo processing, 120hz screen, neural engine and more) And now they make as good processors as Intel does and will be deploying them in macs which they seem to be doing thoughtfully. Even in AI, while they are not as strong as others, they have led with their push for privacy and on-device models.
Microsoft stock was flat under Ballmer because of hangover from the massive dotcom bust in 2000 and the DOJ consent decree which didn't expire until 2011. It would've been hard for anyone else to do better.
That said, the one thing Ballmer did right is that he took on the difficult problem of locking down Microsoft products on a security front. This was a hard and thankless task, but absolutely necessary in the long run.
He's talking about the TwC initiative, which came from Gates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustworthy_computing. Even after stepping down as CEO, Gates maintained an informal role at MS as an ideas guy for a number of years.
The usual tendency is to give credit to the person who comes up with the idea, and the blame to the person who implements it.
But ideas are a dime a dozen. I give credit not to coming up with the idea, but to actually putting in the elbow grease. And there is no question that Ballmer put a lot of elbow grease into keeping the initiative going.
Inflating your stock price by buybacks is easier said than done.
In fact according to the CAPM economic model, it is impossible. The assets of the company decrease by the money spent on buybacks, which matches the value of stock bought and destroyed. This should leave the price per remaining stock unchanged.
Sounds to me like the CAPM economic model is in need of revision. Buybacks are a common tool for increasing shareholder value and investor sentiment figures heavily in asset pricing.
Ok as a general point, but those criticisms simply do not apply to Cooke. The company has done absolute gang busters both in products and fundamental performance, and that's what has driven up the stock price.
At first I was going to be critical of your point but thinking about it for a minute. I think your right. Apple and Microsoft aren't as innovative anymore. It's sad. But I do think Microsoft is leading this front between the two. Some of their acquisitions of SAS products have grown and improved, where Apple isn't doing something significant to improve the lives of it's users. Does a photo really add that much value? Or an emoji? Whereas many of the SAS products Microsoft has is a business model that is to speed up it's users productivity.
As for losing out on programmers which (my words) essentially reduce the exponential behavior that tech was experiencing. I'll say this. It is sad. Rent seeking is a typical behavior of any company that gets large.
I'm actually now wondering if something is preventing these companies from growing very fast, like a national actor.
If you look at Amazon, they are in numerous industries and have a little market share of them and are trying to innovate in them. Amazon isn't slowing down either. I find it an interesting case study. Only AWS is helping programmers, many other products are actually against user's interests.
Another case study would be Tesla. They are emerging as a most likely monopoly due to their relentless innovation. But they don't harness community programmers either. I believe this will change overtime, since Musk has said this for many years but I doubt there will be a lot of freedom in their system either.
I want to see a company that is innovative and allowing others to innovate on their platform. It would be very valuable to society if we do this.
I disagree. Tim Cook has been pretty solid. He's no Steve Jobs, but he's done a fine job. Although he hasn't produced any new cash cows so far, he's been a decent steward of the ones they already had and he's taken the company into new markets with the Apple Watch. It's not the most inspiring product, but it is the premium wearable and clear leader. Then there are the AirPods, which fit in nicely in wearable category. And I love what Apple is doing with their own silicon.
Sure, there are no home runs here, but he's effectively executing a coherent strategy and hasn't really had any big mistakes. I wouldn't put him as high up as Nadella and I certainly wouldn't put him as low as Ballmer. It's tough to be the guy who follows the founder and Cook has handled it well. I don't know who is out there who looks like a better candidate or a suitable replacement for Cook.
> Although he hasn't produced any new cash cows so far ...
> Sure, there are no home runs here, ...
Huh?
AirPods + Apple Watch are bigger than either the Mac or the iPad and are growing much faster.
Companies don't crank out iPhone class "home runs" every 10 years. Microsoft had the Windows and Office, Google had Search and GMail (and made solid acquisitions in the form of YouTube and Docs). Facebook had Facebook... and bought everything else they own worth a damn.
Apple created a $25 billion/ year product line (AirPods/ Beats/ Watch) under Cook... but it's not a home run?
I didn't realize they generate that much money. When you put it in those terms, he looks even better. In any case, I think the guy has done a pretty good job.
I wonder what your thoughts are on Sundar Pichai. Has Google created anything interesting under his leadership? I would put Cook above Pichai if I ranked top tech CEOs.
Google hasn't had a major new product for a decade.
Prior to 2010: Search, Doubleclick, Maps, Mail, GSuite, AppEngine (which was first serverless platform). All of which were category makers or category killers.
Well VR is a thing now for $300. And there is tiktok and snapchat as far as social media goes. Companies are slowly marching to deliver AR as a product too. Consumer drones are another thing along with cheap digital large sensor cameras, and once something like waymo and boom delivers, those would be revolutions of their own. Also solar is cheaper than coal now as an energy source, and complete DNA sequencing now costs $1000 vs $100’000. Electric cars are now something that the upper-middle class can own practically.
Am I the only that finds SM platforms like snapchat and tiktok infantile and vacuous? Say what you want about Facebook and Reddit, but in the right forums you can have thoughtful debates and discussions. I don't see TT and SC as anything but fads. TT is the same 10 or 15 takes on the same thing over and over and SC is just a 1 hit music star that somehow still lingers around.
In fairness, Google Cloud Platform is a huge new product. GAE (which I love) was but a tiny drop compared to the vast ocean that is GCP today. And GCP is really a multitude of products.
Android was launched in 2008, although I think it really deserves to be in the post-2010 category. Today's Android is a whole different beast.
Google Home is a new product. And tied in with Home & Android is voice recognition, which is definitely post-2010. Voice recognition may not be a standalone product but it has radically changed how I interact with technology. It counts.
Google Hangouts launched in 2013. Google's whole messaging platform has become a muddled mess that they're only just now untangling, but hangouts video was a huge hit for a while.
Of course it's hard to top hits like Search, Gmail, GSuite, and Maps... but there's progress.
Does it define the category? Is Google Cloud 'the' cloud provider? "Just spin up a box on GCP" the default thing for people to do in tech?
> Today's Android is a whole different beast.
Is it? Android 4 (which was around that time) is pretty close to android as it is now.
> Google Home is a new product
And? Is it category defining like maps or Mail or GSuite, did it create something entirely new like GAE did for serverless? Is it the default home assistant? Do people outside tech even know the name 'Google Home'?
> hangouts video was a huge hit for a while
And now it's close to dead. Never reached the heights of Skype or Zoom.
GCP is nowhere near Azure or AWS, either in terms of functionality, or in terms of support. GCP cannot compete at all with those two for enterprise customers, since a.) lack of functionality and risk of closure and b.) the big customers have already been locked in. Of all the GCP customers I've heard of, the only big one is Spotify, while the landscape is largely dominated by independent devs.
As far as Cook. There is no next iPhone. The iPhone was a once in a lifetime product. There were already 1 billion phones being sold a year when the iPhone was introduced - Jobs said he wanted to sell 10 million phones and capture 1% of the market. The smart phone (not the iPhone) has 70-80% penetration. What we call an electronic communication device that’s always connected may change, but there is no larger conceivable electronic market.
As much as HN poo poos the Apple Watch and the AirPods, from a technical standpoint it is much more innovative than the iPad - the last product that was introduced under Jobs. Once you have the iPhone, using the same technology in something with less constraints was easy. The Watch is just the oppposite.
From a financial standpoint. The Watch already produced more in revenue and profit than the iPod at peak. As does the AirPods.
Not to mention that Apple could have never shipped in volume without Cooks supply chain management expertise.
Then there are the upcoming ARM Macs that will probably be the fastest personal computers in the industry in a year or two. The $399 iPhone SE is already faster than any Android phone at any price.
The iPad merely replicated the already known notebook and tablet workflow. The Apple watch originally tried to be a smaller iPhone (and failed at it), but Apple was smart and innovative enough to pivot to a new workflow which smartphones can't easily replicate.
Technically? It’s easy when you have more space, larger batteries and higher thermal limits to have more features. But the original iPad had technically inferior processor (256MB RAM vs 512MB than the iPhone that came out 3 months later).
The Watch being smaller, it’s technically much more impressive that it has an always on display, cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, heart rate sensors, altimeter, gyroscope, 32GB Storage, and it still gets 12-16 hours of battery life.
While the Apple’s A series is already 2 or 3 years ahead of everything else in the mobile market, nothing is even coming that close to the S series chip.
> Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook. I can't wait for him to be replaced.
Easy to say "making good quarters" is table stakes, much harder to come up with a vision that works. What do you see as possible visions Cook could pursue given Apple's positioning?
As someone who was at MS during those years, directly involved with Azure, OSS, Mobile/phone I can verify that Steve was a great biz guy but had very little sense for where the tech world was headed.
What Satya has done is incredibly impressive and will be much studied IMHO
I agree completely. Steve Ballmer put all of Microsoft eggs in the Office Basket that let mobile die on the vine. He pushed licensing and marketing and left developers and new tech to languish. It's why to this day, Microsoft doesn't have a place in the mobile space, it's iOS or Android. I also aggree that pushing MS in a more Open source direction has helped make them more palatable to developers.
Cook was also running Apple ops for a decade before being CEO. It's not like he appeared out of nowhere. One can argue Apple's design chops and freedom to innovate were because of Cook, who cleaned up all the business and ops shenanigans that were driving Apple bankrupt under Scully, Spindler and Amelio, and create a stable foundation for Jobs to work his magic.
I am certainly not happy with Tim Cook from a Product and Strategy perspective. But from an Operation / COO perspective. He is second to none. So good that I put him as Genius in this Category.
> when someone says "big tech" it's Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, not MS
For what it's worth (and this is mostly seperate from your point I guess), most of the time when people say "big tech", they're talking about the negative cultural, political, and economic impacts of those companies. Maybe its not so bad to not be lumped in with Facebook?
To not include Microsoft when you say 'big tech' is blinkered.
They are currently the 2nd biggest company in the world by market cap. Around double the size of Facebook.
They might not be cool or trendy in tech circles anymore, but they are without a doubt a big tech company.
Their OS runs over 70% of desktops [1] and their office suite has over 80% of the market share [2]. And that's just the sectors they completely dominate in before we even talk about other sectors that they are involved in with major competitive products. Xbox, Surface, Azure, SQL server, Power BI, Windows Server, .net, Visual Studio, BizTalk, are all huge popular widely used tech products. And I'm sure there's more that I don't know.
And then add GitHub and LinkedIn if you want to count recent acquisitions that still seem to operate mostly independently at the moment.
Steve Ballmer made some mistakes, but after enough years went by, he realized that and changed his approach, setting up MS for success once again. He just didn't have enough time to execute on his new vision before he got ousted.
I remember being an intern at Microsoft in 2009 and going to a talk with Ballmer.
What I remember is the most charismatic human being I've ever seen. The man could have been a cult leader. He had and maybe still has power in his ability to speak. Any question we asked (and we were interns, we asked lots of them) he had not just an answer but a good answer. He spoke of his failures well too: "They ask if we should make a video game console or a phone, and I chose the console- I should have said 'both'!".
But nobody cares about how well you can speak. People want results.[0]
The original schedule for the event actually got cancelled at the last minute- there was a huge announcement that had to be made, a big deal that was going to change the face of Microsoft, and it overlapped with our time. He was very apologetic about that, and rescheduled us for the next week, and then spoke at length about this incredible thing that was about to happen.
That big announcement? Bing was teaming up with Yahoo on Search. (We all remember the day of that earth-changing event, right?)
I was at MS for his last company meeting and you're right. That guy has charisma and PASSION for Microsoft.
I never liked working there, but watching him scream "I LOVE THIS COMPANY" while in tears made me feel like I was part of something huge and important.
The man's natural speaking voice is the loudest I have ever heard. I could identify him coming down a long corridor by his voice well before I could by sight.
He drove a several-year old dark red Mercury Montego in which he almost ran me over in a parking lot behind the EBC. He was on the phone.
Ballmer created an indescribably toxic culture around reviews with his David Welch inspired "up or out" and "fire the bottom five percent" policies. Stack rankings were more like knife fights than honest appraisals of people's abilities and contributions. Teams used to deliberately hire underperformers so they could fire them, thus shielding productive people they would otherwise have to get rid of.
I'm not going to get started on his miserable technical leadership. Things more or less just happened under him, he didn't seem that involved in the quality of what was being produced.
If there is someone at Microsoft who didn't got enough credit it was Ray Ozzie. Remember him when he was Chief Software Architect? He started Azure / Microsoft transition to the cloud. He created that shift in focus that Microsoft now rides on. Had he not gotten that brief period as BillG's replacement, Microsoft would have continued to live in the past where windows and on-premise office suite was king. Ray Ozzie changed the direction of Microsoft without ever really getting any credits for it.
This [1] wired interview provides an insight into the structured thinking at Microsoft/Gates even back in 1996.
I'm sure this kind of thinking permeates any successful company, to have a video of this depth, and now available for public viewing, is really unique.
Satya ran the entire cloud strategy before being promoted. The things you're giving Ballmer credit for were literally things Satya worked on :)
In February 2011 Nadella was promoted to president of the Server and Tools Division, which oversaw products for companies’ data centers like Windows Server and the SQL Server database. This department also oversaw the Azure cloud platform. When he took over this area it was doing $16.6 billion in revenue. In two years, by 2013, Nadella raised that number to $20.3 billion.
The things is I never read about any major decisions Sundar Pichai has made. There's tons online about Tim Cook, Satya, Netflix's various SLs, Daniel Ek, Elon Musk (admittedly more about his tweets than business strat these days) etc. But I never read about Sunder Pichai's strategies or decisions. What is he actually doing?
What's the incentive to do anything at that level? He's going to walk away after 5-10 years with OOM a billion dollars regardless of how anything he does or doesn't do pans out for Google. Why not just play the quiet card and pin anything that happens to the fiefdom lords who now have free reign and no oversight?
If good things happen, he gets credit for delegating well. If bad things happen, it's their fault. But if he loudly tries something different and it fails, the failure is more likely to get pinned on him. And again, he's already going to walk away with a billion regardless, so "financial upside" as a motivator for success is largely an illusion.
He's a "just gotta keep my nose clean and get out with a middling reputation and a shitload of money" CEO.
My sense is that people who think like this don't make it this high up. Sundar has already had opportunities to sell out much earlier; Money stopped becoming a problem for him long ago.
Now that I think about it, I'm really curious as well. I didn't work in Cloud, but my perception is TK is really reshaping GCP as well as the Gsuite to whatever it is now.
Sundar's role seems to really be give his lieutenants free reign which I guess makes sense seeing as how he now oversees all of Alphabet.
Office for iOS is hardly a company-changing announcement. And wasn't Azure the baby of Satya? And let's not forget decades of failed products under Balmer.
The way I remember it, when Microsoft fiiiinaly launched something successful other than office/windows, it's father was quickly made the new king they had been looking for since so long.
Under Ballmer, MS dropped the ball on mobile. They had Windows CE, Windows on every desktop, and Xbox on the set top. And with all that, they couldn't put together a viable mobile product? They had the chance to make a holistic ecosystem that would span desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, TV, and everything in between. And they dropped the ball. Now we have to deal with a Duopoly between the largest advertiser and the largest media merchant. UGH.
No kidding... WinCE should have been a stripped down NT. Instead it was this 'other' thing that they drug along that was 'windows' but not quite 'windows' and a pain to dev for. They were stuck in this weird spot where they had to create a build system that took into account of every BOM every crappy cell phone the ODMs could come up with. Then married to cell phones that would forget everything you setup on the drop of a hat. Apple did something different that changed the market. They put an unlimited plan on it, decent amount of NAND, a good touchscreen, and a straight forward GUI that worked in the small screen market.
> "They were stuck in this weird spot where they had to create a build system that took into account of every BOM every crappy cell phone the ODMs could come up with."
Well before Windows Phone existed, they already had to deal with that for Windows CE 1.0 to 6.x and all the PDAs/phones that used them. Android has to deal with the same thing. Nothing was new about that for Windows Phone.
Aside from that, Microsoft had to deal with that already anyway because of Windows CE Embedded / Windows Automotive and all the miscellaneous gadgets people wanted to use it with.
It’s an example of the company trying to avoid kneecapping the cash cow when experimenting. I really liked the Workpad z50, which was really the first netbook. Its windows CE runtime was light and useful, and booted instantly with execute-in-place. Its flaws were, in my opinion, entirely due to Microsoft not wanting to let CE become a viable alternative to NT. (That, and using a mask ROM instead of flash).
They really messed that whole thing up. They were complacent before and after the iPhone was released, they should have ported it to their tablet instead of ruining Windows desktop and they wasted billions buying Nokia.
The funny thing is everyone I spoke to who used it loved Windows phone.
I think Balmer takes a lot of the blame that should probably be directed more towards the board. Balmer was doing exactly what they asked him to do and had he made the type of decisions Satya is making, they would have replaced him with a more conservative CEO.
Balmer was very successful in doing what he was tasked with. You can’t blame him for that.
I worked for MS under ballmer and turner. And they are in my opinion definitly, with Gates in the background, the ones that are the reason why the shared have rocketed.
Satya did not invent the "platform wins" strategy. That was long before him. And that's what the company is still capitalizing on.
That's what Microsoft is still the best at. Platform. And tools.
No one comes even close to having the developer experience MS offers. And that plays directly into the platform strategy.
The problems at Microsoft started under Bill. Microsoft's tablet and mobile platform initiatives went absolutely nowhere. Pen computing, MPC and Origami were complete flops. Longhorn never even happened, Vista was a disaster. Windows 8 was after Bill left as software architect but he was still involved with the company at that time.
Yes Office on iOS was a smart move, buy why was it even necessary? It was a white flag after over a decade of missed opportunities. Only under a new leader could it be re-branded as a refreshing change of direction.
I honestly don't know to what extent the problems there can be laid at Ballmer's door, but it really wasn't just him, frankly it was him and Bill. They were fantastic at executing on established products and technologies pioneered by others but dropped the ball time and again at innovating into new areas.
Wait wasn't Satya the head of the cloud division before he became the CEO? I was thinking that he had started these things and pushed it further after becoming CEO!
Very true. Ballmer didn't make Microsoft cool but he left a very healthy, highly profitable company with plenty of reserves. I wouldn't call what Nadella did a turnaround but just a change of direction and focus. I am not too impressed either with what MS is doing with Windows right now. The Windows 10 developer story seems pretty confusing and I am urging my company to go away from Windows for our devices.
I read somewhere that Satya openly expressed is views against Ballmer's Nokia/windows phone strategy and every other strategy which ended in failure during Ballmer's tenure during their meetings and that it played a crucial role in appointing him to the top role later on.
> It wasn't a coincidence that on the day Ballmer stepped down and Satya became CEO (2014), Microsoft also announced Office for iOS, Cloud first strategy, and a whole slew of cloud/Azure product announcements.
It was a few weeks later. Office for iOS was ready to go but I suspect Ballmer was holding it back (not wanting to give up precious Windows exclusives) rather than driving it.
> It wasn't a coincidence that on the day Ballmer stepped down and Satya became CEO (2014), Microsoft also announced Office for iOS, Cloud first strategy, and a whole slew of cloud/Azure product announcements.
They might have been developed while he was at the helm, but how do you know he wasn't the one blocking their release?
100%. A lot of these things were set in motion under Ballmer and he tee'd it up for Satya. That doesn't excuse Ballmer's missteps and of course Satya deserves credit for a lot of the execution, but I think people like to latch on to the simple narrative of Satya Good, Ballmer Bad.
What on earth are you talking about? Ballmer should have been met at the airport and given his walking papers when he got back from laughing at the iPhone on the Today Show.
He basically won the lottery by getting assigned to the same dorm floor at Harvard as Bill Gates, and has been coasting ever since.
It wasn't a coincidence that on the day Ballmer stepped down and Satya became CEO (2014), Microsoft also announced Office for iOS, Cloud first strategy, and a whole slew of cloud/Azure product announcements.
All of which was developed under Ballmer watch and he handed off the launch and continued execution to Satya.