"It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
Creatives build companies, and if you are not careful, sales will destroy them.
I don't know how many times my team has ganged up on a document in Google Cloud and collaboratively banged it out. Likewise, I can only remember a couple times I've done it with Office and not ended up with n different copies of the doc that we had to manually merge back together, if we even could.
The visual bugs are annoying and the document-syncing with multiple editing people feels like 2005. As of last year, it couldn't even render a .docx file properly. It tried to render input fields as images. LibreOffice Writer opened the doc better than /Word/ Online.
I am a student who has access to office online and have tried to encourage my peers to use it for group projects so that we don't have to use Google. However after repeatedly having to make up excuses for their neglected product, I have given up and just request anonymous editing links for Google Docs.
You dont know where files are saved, you cannot connect a file to a file, lots of options seem to be disabled (e.g. collaborative Excel on Teams).
Did you miss an /s? I just tried using this again and it's slow and buggy. Office has a lot of advantages, but collaborative document editing is not one of them.
Everyone else just lets you multi edit without the steel-trap lock-in layer.
Microsoft certainly did some shitty things in terms of unethical and monopolistic sales practices, but their competitors also made some amazingly stupid strategic errors. In particular WordPerfect was slow to port their product to Windows. And when they finally did, they kept it too similar to the legacy MS-DOS version which was poison for gaining new sales.
Word integrated an entire programming language (WordBasic), with which you could not just create macros, but entire applications complete with dialog boxes. I used WordBasic to add features to Word years before they were offered, such as page numbering that spanned documents.
Then there's the lost-in-the-weeds, defect-riddled shitshow that is post-XP Windows.
Microsoft's #1 priority now is hounding the shit out of you to LOG IN WITH YOUR MICROSOFT ACCOUNT!
LOG IN WITH YOUR MICROSOFT ACCOUNT! LOG IN WITH YOUR MICROSOFT ACCOUNT! ...
Up yours, Microsoft. Nobody wants your stupid account; we have WAY too many already.
Josh from the Game Helpin' Squad actually tries to get some work done. Or, rather, he complains about how people didn't appreciate it when he got some work done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug
"Google Buzz: Like Twitter, But With Bees"
"I've Got A Bad Feeling About This" Button
"The Third Time's The Button" Button
It was NeXT that saved Apple with their tools (including Interface Builder and the use of Objective-C) that gave Apple the technological lead that allowed them to grow into the company they are today.
Scott Forstall was the NeXT guy that headed the iOS (née iPhone OS)team and we know how that turned out.
It could have gone the other way too, like how Boeing's purchase of McDonnell Douglas, and McDonnel Douglas's takeover of key Boeing positions ended up eroding Boeing's culture of engineering excellence.
It was also market timing too. The iPhone was not Forstall's first attempt at a device like this. He was part of the team that was trying to develop something similar back in the era of the Apple Newton in the late 90s. And all of that were seeded from two of the three form factors (tab, pad, and board) that Xerox Parc experimented with back in the 70s, along with the mouse, the GUI, and OOP.
But it's also the only way to move the area forward.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johannaread/2021/05/05/the-sheb...
Normally, a cash-cow business would be a great thing to own. Unfortunately the accumulated cash plus (feared or actual) slowing of growth equal a big red flag.
People love to say that reducing Ive's involvement is what righted the ship, but I feel internally there must have been way more management house cleaning that they so massively reversed course with the Macbook line, and the price reduction + increased innovation on the iPhone line.
> ...Genzo Hattori, the son of founder Kintaro, recognized that the existing company structure of both factories was limiting their ability to innovate. In 1953 he decided to install different management groups for the Kameido and Nagano factories and have them perform their research and development independently....
https://www.beyondthedial.com/post/seiko-history-daini-suwa-...
There is a difference between taking out the competition on acquiring IP by taking over vs doing it to innovate. Google has gone down this road already from what I've seen but Microsoft impresses me how they are keeping balance.
