That said, I do have one gripe:
> To oversimplify Notion to its demographics, it is Office 365 for people below age 35.
I recognize this is an oversimplification, but even so, it seems like a stretch. Notion is a decent product, and I have used it for a few small-scale team projects in uni (mainly for Kanban-related stuff) - but to call it a replacement for O365 is an exaggeration at best.
Yes, you can have pretty, nested documents in Notion and that's great, but a tabular database in Notion is by no means a replacement for Excel or even Google Sheets. The velocity that is afforded by Excel in terms of formulas is unmatched and there's a reason it has yet to be unseated as the kingpin of modern finance.
Most young people I know use a combination of Discord + Google Suite to collaborate. I am aware this is slightly anecdotal, but I am also having a hard time imagining myself as a founder and then asking my CFO to use Notion to prepare investor pitches.
Source: Am 23 :)
I use shitton of MS products, but I cannot switch from Google's gmail, docs and drive to anything.
I hate MS login page and endless redirects between their services
I cannot explain what puts me off, but Google's (gmail) login page and way better switching between apps feels way better.
Also I have feeling that MS account is more "formal", idk how to explain it.
It's something about their federation tech vs google. Google, if you are in wrong service, nice switch account, one redirect it feels like.
Here's my libre stack:
- Thunderbird for e-mail (whichever provider you like, i also self-host a mail server for automation etc.)
- LibreOffice, which i use as a local piece of software, because web office apps rub me the wrong way
- Nextcloud, which i also self-host and which has both desktop software and mobile apps
Until you:
- Use Google Drive and its subpar desktop experience of sync'n files (OneDrive is far worse, but Dropbox+MS Office beats it out)
- Experience Gmail's hostile user stance against non-Google calendaring. (1) Automatically creating Google Meets for every invite (or did they fix this recently?) and (2) the terrible formatting that gets sent to non Google-based accounts that gives me the "fingers on the chalkboard" feeling every time it gets sent to my O365 based email.
> I hate MS login page and endless redirects between their services
100% agree.
> Also I have feeling that MS account is more "formal", idk how to explain it.
Agreed. And I feel like anyone who sends me email/cal invites from GSuite are essentially amateurish. Can't explain it either.
I dread logging into any Microsoft product for this reason, I just know it’s 30 mins of BS trying to find different passwords for different accounts, none of which relate the thing I’m actually trying to do.
GSuite, Notion, Confluence, and others appeal to an audience that either never required MSFT office nor felt the need to become power users in it.
Another reason I use outlook is that I already gave everything else to Google so just diversify a bit.
whenever I login to Gmail it redirects me to YouTube and then back to Gmail
I’m using Apple stuff only (pages, numbers, keynote, mail, calendar, reminders, icloud). It’s completely different to anything else and there are a few small compatibility issues but it works really really well and doesn’t stab you in the face with complex problems. Add zoom and slack and you have enough interoperability.
I set three simple standards that I will not budge on which ensures this solution will remain working. Documents via PDF only. Copy via cut and paste on slack. Data via CSV and JSON only.
I also only use spreadsheets internally to my “partition”. They are shitty for everything else.
I’m not going into the long time rants with my extensive experience with O365 and GSuite and LibreOffice here but this feels like I’m being shafted the least hard at the moment.
I get that that it's a duck-on-water front end to OneDrive, SharePoint, Skype-for-Biz, etc... but it works well enough to get things done.
I have been waiting for this to change, but I can't yet free up the gigabytes of space on my work laptop that is currently occupied by MS software.
This is how other people feel about the Office suite FWIW.
At least it apparently isn't doing well in our security audit and the security team is telling us G-Suite is in our future.
What I do nowadays is I iterate my texts in Org Mode, get the comments on GitHub and when we're all happy about the text, I import it to Notion and lose the writing to the black hole of Notion search forever. Now when they have a public API, I'm thinking could there be an Emacs plugin that could sync the text between Notion and Org Mode, that would let me keep my texts in version control? I guess that's just a matter of time...
The thing that Notion brings (which I found hard to work with in Gsuite) was that shared documents aren't owned by any one individual, and copies are far less likely to proliferate. So its good for shared documentation that an Organization needs, as opposed to two people collaborating on a document, which google docs handles fine.
The basic tables and cards and stuff are nice for many things but are not a substitute for sheets by any stretch of the imagination. And Notion has no analog for Slides.
Lots of product managers seem only capable of thinking in slides when Notion would be better for documentation. I've received 500 pages of content for review written into CSV file for some insane reason. And yes, I've seen people struggle to run mathematical models in Notion when Excel is right there.
I try and remind people not to use a hammer when you need a screwdriver, but sometimes that's all they know.
The reasons why the modern productivity suite is winning (Notion, Coda, Airtable, etc) is because they've embraced the web and collaboration.
- ability to share the original source to people
- tag people right inside the document.
- set tasks to people and track them from within the doc.
- new age collaboration features - likes/comments/hashtags built-in
- ability to tag a document within another document
All these are small steps towards embracing the web's nature deeply inside product instead of just shipping the native features to run over the web.
But there's a catch, these modern solutions tend to lag a bit over the powerfulness of what native offers, like
- powerful charting capabilities
- the calculation engine of excel
- pagination of documents
- powerful set of formatting features
Interestingly it's much easier to build the new age features into the already powerful editor than vice versa - which is why google docs pivoted towards smart canvas features instead of launching an all new app.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-loop?ms.url=micros...
A lot of people (me included) aren’t using Excel beyond opening the files to look at the graphs or entering data in predefined fields. It’s the usual 20/80 split between the people actively creating and managing the data and the ones on the receiving end.
For a long time Microsoft pushed Office adoption by forcing the “viewer” to have licenses to access the data. That’s why a company would buy Office for every single employee. But now, you can have Office for the “20” part, and have them push their result to Notion for everyone else to view, do simple things with it.
Notion can effectively be a O365 replacement for the proverbial “80” part.
(Basically O365 is becoming a “power tool” and Notion can skoop the “casual users” slice. I see G\Suite inbetween)
So you still need Office 365 for each user.
And then, why pay for 2 tools when you can pay for 1.
There have been free, no-license viewers for MS Office files since the early 00s, if not earlier.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/supported-versions...
* Facebook seems to be a bunch of smart people working on pet projects. Monopoly profits drive a political empire where people at the top think up something random, and it gets built.
* Google has customer contempt. They started with brilliant people who were used to being smarter than everyone else. They also started in algorithm-driven markets like search and ad-words, where everything was statistical and individuals didn't matter. They've lost the smarts and the ethics, and they're in a bit of a hole. I think they've reached the end of the growth line.
* I know nothing about Apple. Too secretive.
* Microsoft has a bunch of cut-throat teams, competing with each other. Their technology is middling. However, they're the only one of the bunch you'd want to partner with for B2B.
* ... except for Amazon, which is hyper-customer-focused, and has a track record of successful forward-looking projects. AWS has been rock solid. On the other hand, I'd never want to work there; they treat employees like crap. But it somehow works out for them.
Perhaps controversially, I think Microsoft's real "B2B" success comes from treating end users like crap. Arguably their only successful "end user" product line is Gaming, and that (on Windows) has grown with comparatively modest investment on Microsoft's part or with phenomenal (bought, third-party IP-based) software and a bucketload of cash (Xbox division).
Microsoft's true success in the business world comes from ultimately targeting managers – be they in an IT department or otherwise. They are afforded real power over users. GPC can deny a user the ability to do something with their computer that other users can do. Permissions can be very finely grained. Office has, for many years, come with some form of document-based DRM. Microsoft as a company seems to love DRM; they invented activation, for god's sake. The net result of this is that they know what managers like, which is, in fact, to manage. They centralise. They absorb. They have created a huge, confusing, proprietary computer-verse completely orthogonal to the rest of the world (except inasmuch as the rest of the world needs to interact with it).
A lot of their product line boils down to implementing MBA newspeek in disguise: clearly; writing good web software is difficult and a good business-orientated app features database, GUI and user-interaction parts – thus Dynamics CRM is born. It's not the business's "core competence" to redevelop those skills -- they're hard. Tie it in with their other B2B offerings and you have central control over both employees' performance, and customer's offerings, in a very tailored, swish way. Sure, other companies can do this (looking at you, Salesforce) but this is just one example. Salesforce can't also do, say, long-term archival storage on Azure for less than a cent per GB, and won't provide you with a calendar-and-meeting-filled video-chat app that is "free" with your existing subscriptions.
All of these things tick boxes. They provide "return" on the "investment" of paying the microsoft tax. The broader their product offering, no matter how shit it is to the poor saps that have to use it, the cheaper it effectively becomes. That's the true success of microsoft: they've always been big enough to do things well enough, conglomorate enough stuff, and amortise its effective cost over lots of different offerings. The net result looks good on an Excel spreadsheet, features that managers care about are there - and they keep getting business. (And end-users be damned!)
Yes, this is for security and management. Pretty important stuff. We don't just set GPOs to be dicks.
[1] It’s 2021 and the Indian bureaucracy remains the greatest impediment to progress
https://theprint.in/opinion/its-2021-and-the-indian-bureaucr...
It goes both ways:
- people wanting to fix the corruption problem through technical means will make it more difficult for individual clerks to make decisions alone, and push for more paper trails.
- the harder the system is to navigate, the easier it is for clerks to get bribes and quid for pro. At some point it can become impossible to get anything done without bribing to accelerate or bypass the checks.
Inside the Bureaucracy That Crippled Microsoft
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/insid...
AWS is a hodgepodge of stellar, middling and some downright crap services. I think their strategy is to make a million flowers bloom and see what takes root. Unfortunately it's hard to tell at first sight which services offer a good experience and which are half baked. In my past experience teams tend to learn this through trial and error.
Put another way, is this a well researched opinion held after discussions with a variety of roles and time periods? Is the sample size enough to think it’s representative?
I think they still have some things set in motion during their old culture that have a chance grow up big.
But it does seem like their best bet would be to move all the good parts of Alphabet far, far away from the decaying center.
The local Seattle area is full of Amazon employee millionaires.
To become a millionaire, you have to get into a company where your equity will 10x or more. You'll have to pay cost of living, capital gains, and you'll probably want to diversify a bit along the way.
For this to happen with Amazon, inflation will have to be wild, or they'll have to enter and win a lot of new markets. I can't even image a $10-20T Amazon.
Right now today I could switch companies and make about 30% more if I was willing to take a corporate job. I don’t because I have a great work life balance and the money just isn’t worth it right now.
Of course it's not going to work well with Windows. Apple wants you to buy a Mac.
I really really really hate iOS. It has things that are nice and better than android. But for anybody to think that it is a “complete and integrated” ecosystem makes me … laugh. Like it’s just objectively terrible.
Having used cellphones since the 90s, my experiences with Android/Apple phones have been nothing short of remarkable and to be frank, life changing in terms of day-to-day utility.
Apple hardware is top notch, obviously. But I wish the software side was not so strictly controlled, look at the browser picture for example or in-app platforms or the shenanigans with the 30% cut.
Then small nits like:
- the alarm doesn't tell me how many hours to go when I set it
- the orange silent button is an abomination that needs to go. With Apple's focus on not having any buttons I have no idea why it has lasted this long
- the volume settings make no sense in the way that Android's make sense
So basically I'd like some wizard to take both of those phone systems, throw them in a cauldron, stir them together, throw away the slag, and sprinkle in some extra goodness. Ahhh some day maybe ...
In an odd turn of events the hardware has exceeded the software in the case of Surface supporting Android on the Duo.
Could you elaborate? Is there any info on that?
XAML, WPF, UWP, silverlight etc etc.
They owned with WinForms back in the day. There was nothing close to market share / productivity for LOB apps. Then it was like they just dynamited repeatedly, and kept on dynamiting?
I can't even imagine the wasted dev cycles, and now the wasted time using janky juddering online apps (even Vax/VMS green screen LOB apps were actually FASTER -> keyboard driven, no lag). If you tracked medical billing from vax/vms days (a fast typist could crank through billing slips and a tech forward clinical staff could checkin a patient and go with a few keyboard keys (including the good old F keys)). Now its wait wait wait, mouse click, mouse move, click, wait type, submit, wait.
I am not yet if they are a reliable partner to invest time in. Apple uses such a model, but then why would I use Windows if it just morphs into a worse clone of it? I dislike that model and believe it is extremely bad for digital/technical education.
Those that use open systems with software freedom will shield others from the worst exploits MS or Apple might come up with in the future.
VSCode is indeed nice. Github is ok.
Did they?
With TypeScript, Visual Studio Code, npm and GitHub alone they control by far the biggest share of development stack out there in 2022.
I would add on top of this some other libraries that I consider huge sleepers but I think will even further spread and conquer market such as pnpm, playwright and rush.js.
There's also C#, Visual Studio, DirectX and many other Microsoft technologies devs use every day.
Step by step they will keep integrating many new generation developers into their ecosystem which, if they keep improving on their azure, office and teams integration will considerably drive up their revenue.
As long as Microsoft keeps working hard in this direction and doesn't start alienating the customers I can see them cutting more and more shares of the dev and release markets.
dotnet has successfully transformed itself and is quite popular.
XAML is ok, I guess.
They have stumbled in the Mobile app dev frameworks, focusing on Xamarin, but seem to be moving to MAUI now.
I'd be more than happy to try .NET Maui but I have to keep a VM around to try it out on my main dev machine. I figure being a .NET developer on Linux you are always going to be slightly 2nd class in their eyes, but the experience with docker-ce and VSCode on Linux is streets ahead of Windows and WSL2 with that single glaring exception. It just can't be that hard.
So it mostly isn't.
Aka bunch of mediocre walled garden tech. I'd much prefer QT
You seem to suggest that it would be a good thing for everyone for those thing to succeed? The only people who benefit from those are MS and their developer base.
They're not a beloved consumer brand, yet.
Microsoft has made an enormous investment in consumer and developer sentiment.
VS Code, Microsoft Flight Simulator, WSL, and Xbox are huge, long term plays that are a rocket ship in their brand's sentiment.
Windows is now sprinkled with dark patterns like not allowing local accounts w/ windows 10 unless you turn off your internet during install. Windows 11 now requires a MS account. The number of advertisements in the OS continues to grow. The enormous and unforgivable amount of e-waste that they will soon create with the Windows 11 hardware requirements / the end of life date for 10. The sense that everything I do on their OS / software is being monitored through telemetry. The UI regressions w/ 11. Hard to quantify this but the I have encountered a lot of bugs with Windows in recent years and some of these bugs are infuriating.
I could go on, but I'll leave it there. Like I said, I'm sure I'm in the minority here, but I suspect that the number of dissatisfied users is growing.
I have zero joy using any of their products. I even stopped using GitHub when they brought it.
I don't get the hype for VScode either when we already have Atom with a bigger eco system and sublime with a better editor. Except several windows specific things it does nothing better or especially great.
I couldn't care less about WSL it doesn't feel like a real Linux, which is all I want. I don't game so meh Xbox, meh flight simulator.
Everything that's left is horrible either way. Comparingly at least.
The main reason I hear people using Windows is because they want to run Photoshop but don't like the apple ecosystem.
More than half the population doesn't use ad block when they browse the internet.
The mind boggles.
There is, clearly, an enormous gap between the Hackernews perception of Windows, and actual non-ad block using end users.
Microsoft is intrinsically following a pathway I've seen before with Reddit,
Reddit has two completely different value propositions to power users and the great unwashed.
Reddit has two modes, "new" reddit which is available by default, and the "official" Reddit mobile app. And "old" Reddit, which is buried in the settings menu, powered by a third party browser extension on desktops, alongside third party paid for mobile apps that use a Reddit API.
Microsoft to me is following the exact same strategy. They are screwballing "the internet explorer users" with Windows, and meanwhile they are creating a parallel, WSL enabled value proposition for power users.
And don't forget the new mandated corporate messenger: Teams. After burning messenger, killing skype and linq and all the "for teams" versions, this is their absolute worst yet.
The sad part for me is how you _do_ actually get used to this crap and workarounds. I was able to do a linux-only stint for a few months, which served me as a reset ground. Coming back to windows support was a real shocker at how bad doing _anything_ feels like.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#most-popular-...
Just wait for the next major office update and tell them that there is a piece of software that has a UI that still reflects what these people are used to.
As a developer just imagine about a company which gives you a developer tool to make a web application, using the company's provided compiler, which then can be deployed on a company's provided webserver and can store some data on company's provided database which is running on company's provided operating system.
The company also happens to provide end-to-end tools for running a company of a 5 people to a company of 500,000 people.
This is Microsoft.
They might be trying to change their image lately, still a hotbed of scumbags who learned from the best.
This applies to literally any billion/trillion dollar big tech company ever, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Dell, Facebook even Apple and Google. They all abuse their market dominance at the expense of their competitors when they get there. It's literally the M.O. of any major corporation.
Microsoft was just the first major successful big tech software company to make it there.
I have never spent a dime buying a MS product (directly) but they definitely don't "just work" based on my experience with my work computer. Windows is awfully slow, Office and Teams are sometimes just unusable because they take so much memory on my machine and keep freezing randomly. I do agree that MS used to be the company where products just worked (windows 95, 98, office 2003 and prior, hotmail etc.), but these days pretty much all MS products are awful.
Your Core2Duo machine is a little old now there buddy.
You have windows 95 as a OS that just "worked"
Windows 7 was the first Windows OS that "Just Worked"
This is not freedom. As a non-technical client that just wants to make a spreadsheet and share it with the rest of the corporation, that perhaps doesn't have to matter (as long as you can afford the ecosystem). But from a technical perspective, you give away the ability to learn from and develop your own software, to compete and innovate, to combine different parts and come up with something better.
As a developer, I don't understand why a developer would side with a company like Microsoft, unless your product ties deeply into their ecosystem and you are very optimistic about your relationship and the future.
Good luck getting wifi and graphic card to work.
App support was lackluster though. It always felt like companies and developers had absolutely no intention to reimplement their applications on Windows Phone, even when it had a bigger market share than iPhone, especially in mid/low-income countries.
So I was stuck in 2015 with no authenticators, no mobile banking, no public transport apps. Even some of the biggest apps out there like Facebook where not releasing all of their products, e.g. there was no Snapchat and many other big names.
Windows Phone ultimately was killed by lack of third party applications and Microsoft imho should've kept burning money for 3/4 years more into the ecosystem bringing more applications on their mobile platform.
Microsoft and Google are always on the lookout for the next bigger Evil. Google eagerly sheds anything that turns out not to be It. Microsoft is slower at that, not giving up as easily, and often late to the party, but sometimes things finally work out for them better than could have been expected (Xbox). The goal is literal World Domination, and odds are one or the other will achieve it. Younger generations won't even remember when they didn't already have it, or be able to imagine a world where they don't.
Is Apple actually less bad than Amazon, or do you just know less about what happens at and on behalf of Apple?
Here, read the leaked document. Does it say what you said? https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te...
Certainly Apple is deeply evil, and I would never, ever buy an Apple product, but the competition for Big Evil is stiff. Apple remains wholly avoidable. Besides Google and Microsoft, we have Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. And Russia.
they'd have to have justification for doing so - which i don't see any.
I wonder what was so wrong with Skype that many abandoned it? Now, i've been told that the enterprise variety is a different product that's way worse, but i use the regular Skype occasionally and it's okay.
Personally, i think that it was best before its many redesigns (e.g. the versions that you could get from sites like http://www.oldversion.com/windows/skype/ at least when they worked), but even nowadays it remains usable and does most of what i'd like for the basic use cases from a chat application, or even for video calls or group calls.
Then again, in my eyes many of these platforms are just reinventions of IRC in some capacity, with the occasional nice feature (e.g. Slack/Discord/... having threads, deep API integration with bots/apps etc.) that gets tacked on.
MAAAM?
Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft Hardcover by G. Pascal Zachary
Our products are built around Postgres/Elastic as the backend. On AWS we make heavy use of EKS, ALB, S3, CloudFront, managed Elasticsearch, Postgres RDS, managed Redis, etc.
On Oracle, we have to build and manage our own Postgres, Redis, Elastic, etc.
The only real managed solution Oracle has is Kubernetes, which apparently isn't even roadmapped to automatically cull nodes that enter into a Not Ready state.
I was generally OK with the Oracle migrations. I understand them from the money perspective why the executive decision was made.
The general uselessness of Oracle support when things do go wrong is going to bite us hard.
I nearly lost my shit last week when I had to explain how their own yum repositories work to their support rep on the Zoom call. TL;DR, whenever they come under heavy load from, say, three VMs in the same VCN all installing the same package set at the same time as part of an Ansible playbook, their yum/identity servers start throttling connections and handing out 401 errors. In the end I just put a retry loop on the yum portion of the playbooks, they eventually get enough of the RPMs.
I spent 10 hours last Saturday leading the troubleshooting effort with their network team for what I quickly identified as a region wide issue between OCI Mumbai and AWS us-east-1. There was a router somewhere in the path between the two data centers that was just dropping packets when the MTU needed to exceed 1478. It wasn't Oracle's fault, per se, but the process of getting their team to recognize and understand the issue was frustrating. I needed to get them to understand it so that they could then file a complaint upstream. BTW, if last Saturday your assets in AP-Mumbai-1 went dark on DataDog or you were unable to pull containers from Docker Hub for about 15 hours, this is why.
I don't know, maybe we're too small to get useful support, we're only spending $200k/month on OCI.
Oracle is rich for shrewd business arrangements. I'm not sure its considered a good company technically?
the reason for this is very simple: very few people choose to use Microsoft products willingly (except maybe the xbox)
their products either come with the computer by default or it's installed on your work machine
and the software is at the very best mediocre and somehow getting worse (trying to figure out how to save a Word document locally these days is NOT easy)
[1]: even for the original xbox Microsoft initially deliberately kept their name off of it
This is a great example of hostile UX. It appears designed to encourage people to use their cloud services, since they offer OneDrive as the first option in the list, and something like 90% of users choose the first option in a list.
IMHO, what Google and Microsoft are sorely lacking is an obsession with UX. It is what drives Apple to maintain the hardware integration, and it works. Google and Microsoft are making inroads here but it just feels very half-hearted by comparison.
My gut feeling is that, for PERSONAL use, the US has shifted to favor Apple products, over something running Windows. Even in my backwater neck of the woods, I'd say that Apple vs Microsoft is running at least 2 to 1. For 25 years, Gartner ran the same report saying that Microsoft "owned" the computing device landscape. Now their schtick is that Android rules the world. Fine. But what I want to see is the operating system market share data, by country, with the corporate purchases factored OUT. It doesn't seem that hard, but, naturally, that data is NOWHERE to be found online. If Gartner is actually using real numbers, then this would be "internal polling" data which I'm sure they consider their trade secret. If it were possible to get the data for the US, for personal use only, I think it would show that Apple is doing even better than most trade analysts begrudgingly give them credit for. With the demise of most Microsoft stores, and the way Microsoft is cannibalizing trust with the direct commercialization of Windows on factory-installed machines, I don't see how Windows on personal devices can be the "thing" it has been traditionally considered.
MS has a nice lock in with the big companies’ IT departments, which gave them nice recurring revenue but pointed their attention away from where the puck was going several times (most notably missing the Internet and missing phones and BYOD).
They are huge, but in my technical life I was never really exposed to them (except Excel and some Powerpoint). That’s why this board experience was such a surprise to me.
I work with customers who insist on Azure as long as they know it's an option, however they also have other vendors who are only on AWS and they seem to be okay with it.
This reminds me of the 2000 dot bomb: hardware companies were paying their customers to “buy” the product. That didn’t end well.
Because of this, I don't think it is a good example for startups to follow. I think that successful startups are innovators.
Every company I worked for has been using Windows. From POS terminals to C# dev machines.
On a more serious note: i doubt that they are alone in pushing for marketing and sales, since most large corporations do that: some are just better at not being very obvious at doing that. They are still a ways away from the likes of Oracle, though, at least in my experience.
I wouldn't (always) call doing sales effectively in a corporate environment bribery, though, that's a bit much. Now, personally i'd opt for libre software, be it a database or an operating system, but i understand that for many settings that's a non starter and oftentimes the larger entities will be willing to pay for support and also licensing.
One huge reason less to stay on Windows for a lot of people
This purchase would cement Microsoft firmly in the upcoming metaverse race, and provide a real set of legs to stand on to face off against Meta and Apple. Microsoft could also go after Unity, but this would make less sense as the acquisition price would be about the same as Epic, and with Unreal Engine they get a software suite that's getting scarily close to photorealism with Nanite, Lumen, and Metahuman.
Are we back in the 90's?
3D interfaces sounds cool on paper, but a good 2d interface is almost always gonna be a better long term experience.
I wasn't the last 5 times I heard it, what makes you think it will be this time?
Umm windows and office?
Great article, I still think that with thousands of amazing engineers in microsoft, they need to simplify 2 things. Focus on using 1 thing, then reiterate to make it better, i.e: why is there teams and skype? then there's teams for business, teams for personal, skype for business. Also teams app is built on angular instead of xamarin? I heard that teams of engineers within MS are free to choose any tech that they want. If they had chosen xamarin since the beginning (now MAUI), wouldn't it made xamarin much less buggy? It seems like every teams are going on different directions with different managements. you don't see that on apple (pushing swift everywhere), facebook is also using react for almost all their internal apps.
Second thing is it's so hard to make your voice heard in MS that most people just gave up lol. I have this bluetooth issue on windows 11 where my bluetooth speaker produce no sound after receiving call from teams. I have to reconnect every couple of hours. I've had it for 4 months, and I don't know where to give feedback at all (feedback hub is useless) other than asking strangers on reddit. If you have 96k engineers around the world, can't you assign at least 5-6 PM that focuses on consumer satisfaction, engineering excellence, or at least have a bug bash once in a while.
Again i'm not sure what's happening inside the company, maybe i'm to judgy, but at this point a lot of people are feeling the same way
So it's two, not one.
I share the sentiment of your reply though, e.g. I have a hard time associating Apple with the iPhone only also hard, would actually associated them with iOS products.
Are you kidding me? Why can't or won't you admit it's Windows? What did MS do to you?
* Sort out the single-sign on thing as others have said. Why do I have to tell you whether my account is work or personal? Why do you let me have 2 accounts for the same email address anyway?
* Endless tinkering with things like menus, control-panel settings (usually takes me 10 seconds to find the "Apps option", mostly pointless eye candy like in Windows 11 when most people would rather you just fixed the myriad of minor bugs that have never been fixed
* A proper support system, not just 1000s of call-centre types telling you to trying re-installing windows
* As a dev, not always making massive changed in .Net before sorting out the bugs they introduce far to easily. An example, I recently updated an MS extensions library and because they had added a load more constructors to a class, my dependency injection started failing but, of course, there were no obvious helpful errors.
* They have never sorted out the licensing. It is horrifically complicated and very expensive and would be easy enough to fix if they cared. Yes, we get that you are trying to make sure we don't avoid licensing by purchasing large multi-core machines or using VMs but you could do a better job
* Harmonising their hundreds of customer-facing sites like MSDN, Bizspark, Outlook, Office 365, Product Feedback etc. Even the design is all over the place but in some places you can login with the "wrong" account and it still lets you into a new account. Not cool. If I used the wrong login, tell me it isn't registered so I can find the correct one.
On the other hand, I do like their more open culture and you are more likely now to have a conversation on github with real devs who can explain some of those crazy choices they might have made.
Because the classic use-case is that people in corp environments have set up MS accounts on their work email addresses dating back many years, while the company had on-premise AD/Exchange and actually bought Office licenses. Now, the company switches to O365 + Azure AD because the CEO is following the hype train... and there comes the problem ahead: Microsoft is in a difficult legal position as they can't just blindly "merge" old accounts with corporate accounts (as the creators of the accounts may have created them on private devices, the accounts hold private data, ...), so the cleanest solution is what Microsoft has done: keep the "old" accounts around and don't contaminate them with corporate.
Microsoft already has top compiler / programming language / tooling engineers / people
Why would the need Replit? Is the product good? Why not JetBrains?
Uh, what?
1) owned x86 OSs for... 40 years and counting
2) office
I'm not MS historian, but those two effective monopolies (the first was leveraged for the second) have been the core of MS profits for decades.
Basically-free windows as I understand it fueled Azure to the third pillar only in the last... 5 years?
Questionable in my opinion and might be very dependent on how you separate here.
Are all these AD users that use Azure AD users of Azure? What if their MS 365 licence counted for Office or Azure? I believe revenue is trimmed to make it look good.
Do you think this is true? We are seeing more tech companies than ever before. But that could just be due to the pandemic and insanely high amount of money in the market.
If consolidation happens, innovation will plummet. This always happens. Any oil-based company hasn't innovated in 20 years. Most of the consolidated industries have little or no innovation.
As any product gets more complicated, consolidation does happen and innovation does plummet.
Think: 1) Web browsers: Ruled by Google and Safari now (+ Firefox so HN won't be offended, although they have 3.6% and it's going to keep declining over time). We have not seen any innovation in browsers in such a long time. 2) Operating Systems: Windows, Mac, and Linux haven't really done anything new in the last 5 years. Win+Mac just keep adding more "telemetry", but no innovation 3) Cloud: it's obviously really complex. It's consolidated. It's innovating today, but seeing the trajectory of browsers, OS and other products, innovation will stagnate there as well.
Should we just take it for granted that tech is supposed to be consolidated?
New fields in tech like crypto, mobile are still very active but are they also just moving towards consolidation?
Funny that you would take the example of oil companies : it was the small tight oil startups that did the latest round of innovation (in hydraulic fracturing, though it was a "take already existing innovations and integrate them" kind of innovation) and captured that market (even though they never became profitable as an industry), and some of the "7 sisters" themselves come from the antimonopoly forcible splitting of Standard Oil into 34 companies... (when the forced splitting of the GAFAMs ?)
Eh, Surface shouldn't be in this list, its from the 2010-2020 decade:
> Microsoft first announced Surface at an event on June 18, 2012, presented by former CEO Steve Ballmer in Milk Studios Los Angeles. Surface was the first major initiative by Microsoft to integrate its Windows operating system with its own hardware, and is the first PC designed and distributed solely by Microsoft. [1]
Zune, however, belongs to this list. Along with a plethora of other products. They were each ways (or 'hobby projects') to move profits from Windows/Office in different markets. Many of these failed, or had only marginal success at best.
Windows Phone is just the (failed) successor of Windows Mobile. It was an attempt to develop a capacitive touch-based OS and range of devices (Lumia) but it flopped because of two dominant market players with no market share gained.
A screen based table which one could place tags with IDs that would trigger tag specific menus around the card and a .NET SDK to go along with it.
They sell solutions to non-IT enterprise organisations, and while it’s reasonable to assume that a lot of HN simply aren’t in touch with this world, it’s one of the largest markets for IT software there is in the world, and the only real competition Microsoft has in this area is AWS.
With several decades worth of experience in enterprise organisations in the European public sector, and quite a few years in the European financial private sector, Microsoft has been the sole business partner in terms of IT that has always been a solid pick. There seem to be this notion that Microsoft sells shitty products by manipulating IT managers, and that is just wholly untrue. They sell the software people want, and they sell it in a package that includes real world telephone support with their actual headquarters. Not some chat-bot or forum like Google, not some outsourced call Center like Apple, but real phone lines directly to Seattle. When something big goes wrong on any of our user facing solutions, which is basically anything office365 including sharepoint Microsoft will call us, on the hour, every hour, with updates unti things get resolved. This is essentially the most valueable thing to any IT manager in an organisation of 20.000 employees where maybe 50 are IT related, because it lets you tell the organisation exactly what Microsoft is doing to resolve the issue that is currently stopping your business.
The reason Azure was capable of sneaking past AWS and securing itself a healthy market share wasn’t only that it makes sense to live in Azure when you already have Office365, it was that Amazon didn’t realise how much of a deal phone support meant to the European Enterprise market. They very quickly picked up on it though, and are now in some areas like HDPR a better option than Azure.
Mean while a company like Google had office365 before there was office365 and have some arguably interesting services in Google Cloud, but they will never sell anything to enterprise because Google still doesn’t understand how to sell things to enterprise. It doesn’t seem like Google really cares in terms of gsuite or Google Cloud, but they do care about education, and, still they struggle with delivering what we want from them even though they ask us and we tell them. Apple is in a somewhat similar boat, except they don’t really care what we think. They do things the Apple way and never reach out.
Anyway, the result is that Microsoft is a great business to business partner. Especially in recent years where they have inhoused more and more of their services so you almost never have to rely on some 3rd party “gold partner” or whatever they call themselves that essentially all suck and always have sucked. The only partner we have currently is for licensing, and even this is an area that I hope Microsoft inhouses because it’s just such a stupid mess.
In my eyes a lot of what Microsoft sells to private customers is know how. They don’t give Office365 to students because they are nice, they do so because it means that every hire we onboard already knows excel. This means it’s incredibly hard to compete in the office space. Similarly everyone we hire knows windows, some of these people can’t tell the difference between an android or an iOS devices when they call IT support (no I’m not kidding) but they all know windows. I know that a lot of techies want Linux to be a competitive choice for users in areas like the public sector, but those are the people who would need to use it, you can’t imagine how expensive retraining 20.000 employees who can’t tell an Android and an iOS device apparat to use Linux.
So as private users, we’re not really Microsoft customers. I mean, we are, but not really their primary customers. Because Microsoft makes their money in enterprise, and that position has probably never been more secure than it is today. Because what is the alternative to office365? Nothing. And when you already have your AD and licensing tied up to AzureAD and all the other integrations between Azure and windows + office365, then the business case to not use Azure as your cloud environment dwindles. It sometimes does make sense to use AWS, as I stated earlier, but not often.
As such Microsoft along with Apple (who have the private market of non-techies locked down) are probably some or the safest stock in the world of technology. I’d still rather invest in green energy though. Who doesn’t need energy?
It goes like this:
- Company is has IT in the 90s and 2000s. They have computers and a LAN and WAN. They use Windows. To manage Windows, Active Directory is needed/used. So Windows Server is also used. For email, the use Exchange. There is just no alternative because you want users to use the same account in the AD.
- Company starts virtualizing their DC with VMWARE later on, but stuff is still on-prem.
- In 2010 Office 365 comes out. Makes sense to have Office 365 host your email and Office as you are already on on-prem Exchange. So they migrate over the emails.
- When Azure comes out, it makes sense to move to that too. Your IT admins already know Microsoft. And you can use your Windows Server licenses etc.
Now if you are starting a brand new company in 2020, sure, use gsuite, notion or something else.
But its gonna be hard to switch over.
And this is not Tech debt. The stack actually works really well.
The only thing is that Teams is pretty heavy as a client, but its amazing in how you can just use Teams for an entire day as its integrated with SharePoint and OneDrive so all documents etc are there.
However not even Windows 8, or ads in a paid OS made that change happen.
Tea became murky. Was it water? Tannins? Milk? Sugar?
When you have MS as the amalgamation of the success of 100 mostly isolated little divisions which might as well be separate companies then what MS actually does is as murky as what Alphabet does. I think the sanest statement is that MS acts as a big pile of money and shared infrastructure for their “subsidiaries.”
Search for "schrems ii ruling" to read more about this.
Just from the beginning:
> Despite its scale, Microsoft is one of the most overlooked companies in tech.
What's the standard of overlookness? I never for a moment feel MSFT was overlooked, by any measure of sampling.
> It is not a beloved consumer brand like Apple, Facebook, Amazon, or Google.
In 90s, MSFT used to be thought as one of the 2 pillars of THE PC industry as a whole. And MSFT was commonly thought to be the more powerful one of the wintel dual.
MSFT lost its glamour when the anti monopoly suit hit them hard.
Then very loosely speaking MSFT lost a lot of battle in the 2010s.
But still, MSFT has a much longer history than FB and Google. Theese 3 enjoyed probably similar scale of love from their users. And FB is the one with the least amount of love in their hayday.
Apple is a different story. They always have a particularly cult like following that skewed every commentators' perspective.
> It was not a venture capital success story: Microsoft was too profitable to raise real VC money, so the founders owned 70% at IPO.
What? BC has been much smaller in the days of MSFT. You should say BC was not favored not MSFT was not relevant to VC. It was after MSFT created the PC market, and enabled Internet, then that the entrapeneriship becomes much cheaper through online economy. Then the VC becomes a central force of the high tech industry.
You are asking the father to be judged by its grandson for greatness...
> It is the oldest of FAMGA, hidden away in a different state.
What?... Why not included HP, DEC, Fairchild then... Of course some is old some is young. The fact that MSFT lives for so long is a symbol of success itself...
Thus mumbling of words are unbearable...
Wouldn't it be more interesting for Microsoft to actually improve its products, e.g. stop Excel making a nearly irrevocable assumption that something is a date just because it has two numbers and a hyphen between them? Make a successor to MS Access that doesn't suck? Fix the shitshow that is figures, tables, and cross references in Word? Make a nice new product inspired by FOSS projects that are way ahead of them, or failing that, at least some decent craftsmanship on existing products?
At some point, doesn't the endless lust for monopoly power become boring? Why not just actually do a good job at the thing your company is supposed to be about?
How many yachts do Satya and the MS board of directors need? Why not do something beautiful instead? Who needs to spend their life replaying the modern equivalent of an ambitious feudal lord?
Github never asked for login until Microsoft acquired it.
Broken windows help page. Try installing drivers and navigate to knowledge base.
When some thing does not work on windows you reboot and hope it works or just reinstall operating system.
Try tweaking all the settings in visual studio only to be reset on the next update
You have no control over updates. It happens especially when you want to give presentation. Also you can not poweroff whenever you like, because it chooses when the update should happen. No amount of changing setting can fix this.
These are few problems.
Don't forget *its* Microsoft. It won't change.
Any divisions that yell "Developers!" at events already know this. The rest are probably aware.
My only problem is how everything is going to subscription based pricing and requires a cloud account.
$10T is treated like a target which is naturally good. But so many acquisitions would be financed in significant part by stock swaps, so all you're doing is getting to the $10T by agglomeration rather than growth.
It's a fun business strategy essay but I didn't find a compelling strategy and the sustainable competitive "advantage" is odd, because it only empowers agglomeration instead of growth and actual competition. Needs more focus on why the agglomeration would be more efficient.
The rumor is Ballmer saw the rapidly growing license fees being paid by Amazon for running Windows Server and SQL Server. When he didn't see enough traction being made on cloud initiatives, he replaced Bob Muglia (then head of the Microsoft's Server and Tools Division) with Satya Nadella.
> With the right strategy and execution, Microsoft can become the first $10T company.What would I do if I were running the company?
I guess unfortunately they don't have OP has a CEO
I don’t know if they still do this, but about ten years ago I got accepted I in the BizSpark program and was given $150/month for three years to start a business. I ended up giving that up in a year, but really appreciated the support and thought it was a clever way to get people on Azure.
Number 1 should be documentation that accurately reflects the state of Azure services and tools. I should not be expected to translate names of things, or figure where things have moved since the documentation was last updated. Nor should I have to figure out the "microsoft way" of doing things. They should be simple, not needlessly obfuscated.
Resource groups is amazing though.
What? Employees use what the company bought. Every company I have worked for has used Office 365. Teams is fine, but Discord is the best. Yes Slack sucks too compared to Discord.
Office 365 now has all the collaboration features of Google Docs and has had for some time.
Trust in MS is also huge in enterprise. Nothing can also touch the management of computers and servers with AD/GPO or Intune. MacOS only has janky MDMs and Chromebooks are not used in real jobs.
Microsoft does have a play here. It's Microsoft Lists. The consumer version was even announced yesterday[0]. Sure it's not at the same level as Airtable yet, but the value of that market space is not lost on people at Microsoft.
[0] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/tr...
If I were charge at Microsoft, I would orient the entire company around enterprise VR Computing.[1]
[1]https://simulavr.com/blog/why-vrcs-are-better-than-pcs-and-l...
Imagine never having to actually build a microservice ever again, but just downloading and running some generic-microservice-app that loads plugins for whatever you need the microservice to do, and the only thing you'd have to "write" is 10 lines of business logic. Now imagine downloading a "template" of an entire B2B SaaS, and being able to tweak a couple lines and then run it in any cloud provider. You could launch a company over a weekend.
Aside from that. It is impressive how it missed the MS-DOS deal with IBM, subsequent dropping OS/2 and finally WinNT. How Microsoft was never forced to compete with UNIX - but Linux - because the Reagan administration allowed AT&T to leave monopoly control and ruin UNIX. It doesn't talk much about developers and actual ecosystems. Buying and investing is a necessity but the core is information technology.
It's hard to forget. :D
Set aside the culture piece, which is well described in the thread.
First, MSFT struggles a lot with keeping innovation going and a big piece of this is that in order to get the full value out of vertical integration with your existing product portfolio (and customer base), you need to build full integration with other products, which often handicaps the new product with old protocols.
Teams is a great (organic) example. The concept of slack+zoom+Dropbox is awesome. I think if it was executed well, it would be the market leader (or the other three would consolidate). But my experience doing anything with files in it has been very poor (it eats my files constantly!!!), and I think that is because it’s stuck using SharePoint as the backend, which was great for its time but was not intended for modern use cases.
On the flip side, MSFT has also done a great job of acquiring / building _noncore_ products that don’t struggle with this. GitHub is a good example—there aren’t a lot of legacy core dependencies. But I find it hard to believe that if they bought airtable they wouldn’t try to merge it with excel and get stuck with the .xls/xlsx limits. By the way, if you don’t… how do you sell to legacy clients, which is their advantage?
Second, Microsoft’s history has made it quite fearful of regulatory intervention. Yes, positioning themselves as “we’re not evil like Amazon, stealing your ideas” is a strategy, but it is also because they are terrified that they will be caught doing something like Amazon because everyone there remembers the ‘90s. It is amazing how often the phrase “we have to stay neutral” comes up in my meetings with my (multi year relationship) Microsoft sales reps.
Third, related to this… Microsoft probably would get slammed with antitrust action if they started buying every company with a $100mn market cap!
Fourth, I think this article drastically overestimates network effects. Actually, I think it misunderstands them. Zoom does not have network effects. If a client or vendor (or my boss) sends me a WebEx link, I am going to (begrudgingly) download the WebEx client and use it. There is no additional value to having more users (which is the definition of a network effect). This article is conflating scale with network effect.
As an aside, I thought some of the advice to startups was funny. Capital may be a nice moat, but it seems hard to action on (“ah, I realized what I was missing… I will go raise $5bn for my series A SaaS business!”) as does the concept of cross-selling, which requires multiple (compelling) products, a large and very capable sales force, and years of trust with the client. I think the core insight here is spot on—it is Microsoft’s sales team that is the special sauce here.
Finally, another aside—I think share buybacks are extremely appropriate for large tech companies. I get that people think about them in % terms, but we have _trillion dollar companies_ now. It’s very hard to imagine that the last marginal dollar of profit goes as far in innovation at a trillion dollar company as it does as a billion dollar company. I would much rather a firm like Microsoft return some of that capital to shareholders rather than spending every last penny on innovation, at least in its current form and structure.