My qualm with Microsoft is all the little things that they let slip through. Little things like having a control panel with 100 different links with nondescript names. Is it really possible that not a single person at Microsoft tried changing a setting on their Windows machine and realized how difficult it was to even find the setting? Were they so entrenched in the Microsoft way of doing things that they were accustomed to a shitty user experience? Or did the aesthetically minded engineer have his voice drowned out by the bureaucracy?
If the higher-ups were yelling down the food chain, "build an Apple-killing UI!", I can see how they would settle on what became the app-centric look of Windows 8. But blatantly idiotic decisions around the little things like control panels, choosing wireless connections, and the sheer difficulty of navigation, make me realize that somewhere at Microsoft something is really fucked up.
Edit: I suspect the problem for MS is not lingering hate from the early-mid 90s, but more one of fading into irrelevance among people who are today 18-25 y/o
Original rant by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html
Answer from the guy working on the shutdown menu: http://moishelettvin.blogspot.no/2006/11/windows-shutdown-cr...
Another response from the guy that implemented the OSX shutdown menu: http://arno.org/arnotify/2006/11/the-design-of-the-mac-os-x-...
Between Windows Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft changed exactly one thing. They replaced the two icons with a single text label that said "Shut down."
Nothing else changed. There was still a fly-out menu. There were still half-a-dozen options that users vaguely understood. They still had strange labels like "Hibernate" and "Sleep." There was still a "Log out" option. There was still a "Lock" option.
Turns out, none of that was the problem. The problem was that people didn't understand what the power icon did. Replace the icon with text that said "Shut down", and suddenly they knew what it did, and started clicking on it. They stopped opening the fly-out menu, and the "Paradox of Choice" went away.
The lesson is not that you should stop offering choices to your users! You can offer simplicity and choice at the same time. Just stop replacing text labels with confusing icons.
Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000 had a "Shut down" text label. Windows XP had both an icon and text. Windows Vista had an icon but no text. Windows 7 went back to just text. The only design that caused confusion was Windows Vista.
Unfortunately we are down this road and I'm unhappy with software taking away features I use. I can't wait for chrome to be one white screen with no buttons.
Searching these settings sucked in XP but Windows 7 resolved that.
Windows 8 is one thing I can agree with you. It made using the PC unnecessarily hard for mouse and keyboard users.
1) Boot into desktop mode. This was introduced in 8.1 and definitely better for my uses than having to open a desktop from the metro UI in 8.0.
2) Win-f, I used to use win-r quite a bit to run programs quickly. However, with the changes MS has made with caching, win-f is just as fast and saves me from having to remember the commands for system preferences and the like.
3) Powershell. Win 8 ships with powershell and it's actually decent.
4) I have personally found it to run faster than win 7 as it shifts more UI load to the graphics card.
One thing to note is that for someone who knows what they're doing, the structure of settings don't make much of a difference, because you'll find things eventually. It makes a big difference when technology-inept people like my mom have to fix problems like "how do I make the computer screen not hurt my eyes?". They just don't connect the phrase "display settings" to the concept of brightness, so navigating settings becomes a nightmare for them.
It refers to where the seat of power is in the company which defines strategy and envelops products. A dev centric company like Microsoft does not become User centric by hiring a UI designer..
Hence, Windows UI will always be sub par. USer centric design is very deep, not superficially changeable, and can't be simply bolted on.
Reportedly Bill Gates was one such person: http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-...
When I was at MS, we usually used the command line to change settings. It was horrible. It used GUIDs. Literally GUIDs. But it was a stable target. You didn't have to relearn it every nightly build. And you could script it.
We sort of assumed that if the control panel would sit still we could learn it easily enough, but that assumption couldn't be tested until it was too late.
The same UI can have different themes easily.
Fast forward seven years, and some of the biggest names in software (Instagram, Lyft) have completely abandoned the web for "desktop" (really, native) software.
That so much code ships directly to mobile devices says a lot about the power of centralized app stores and truly sandboxed installations where one app can't trash the entire system. We've come a long way.
Despite this, I'm inclined to agree that the web is threatened. The desktop may be defined by local files but the web wasn't defined by remote ones. It was more about the culture. More about anyone-can-publish. To me, that's the baby at risk in the mobile bathwater.
That, and any aspect of personal computing that can't be performed on a phone. Which is most of them. I'll stick with the hemorrhoids and circadian disruption, thanks.
My wife and I were talking about this the other night: It's not that people who learned to compute on the desktop are abandoning it for mobile. It's that most people couldn't handle desktop computing in the first place. It's too abstract (dare I say difficult?). So the mobile revolution is really about the unwashed masses computing for the first time. Perhaps that's why mobile apps and operating systems eerily remind me of soap operas and reality TV.
Totally agree. For most everyday scenarios, using Windows is like flying a Boeing 737 for your daily commute: it's a huge overkill, requiring way too much setting up and maintenance and when you incidentally touches one switch the whole thing stops working.
Windows 8 didn't take off because what MSFT did was in addition to all the panels of the 737, they put an iPad in the cabin. For those familiar with Windows that's no big deal: this is why we see people shrug off all the Win 8 hate, saying "it's just Windows 7 plus touching interface". But for those had trouble coping with Windows in the first place, it's now doubly confusing.
The cycle takes 10 years or so but once you've seen a few you'll realize that the same things come round again and again. The only progress is through better hardware. Software guys, with their (our) fascination for the new and shiny and disdain for "legacy code" means we just reinvent the wheel over and over again.
And I'm not even including non-web apps like Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, Uber, Lyft etc. here.
The only place where I can see we would avoid to do native apps is for mobile apps. Because in the future mobiles will be faster but they stay limited by their small screen. So you will use higher level tools to do your "simple" app that doesn't require thousands buttons and stay more productive.
But don't those software only work by connecting to their cloud servers? Could you use Instagram if Instagram Ltd turned off their servers? That means it's inherently web software.
The web approaches native, with asm.js and webgl. It is not just a document anymore.
Native approaches web, just look at what Apple, or Dropbox are doing(they use native code for giving you network capabilities).
Web software basically runs anywhere and doesn't have to be updated; it has minimal platform dependencies.
Native code, on the other hand, is a 25-year-long story of install/uninstall, sophisticated package/dependency management, chroot jails, and viruses.
I fear that, if web software continues its crawl out of the browser sandbox, we'll get all the disadvantages of native code (security exploits, dependency problems) without any of the advantages (speed, high-performance graphics)
Apple is no longer hungry, nor foolish.
You mean like the plastic Cube, G3, G4, Macbook and iPod's that preceded them during Jobs tenure? Only with even better and novel quality plastics used?
>and the iPad mini (both products Jobs had resisted)
Jobs probably knew about the mini all along, it takes more than a year to prototype and ship such a device. Besides, what jobs "resisted" or not is mere speculation, unless there are actual sources of him rejecting them. But even then, Jobs, according to witness accounts, changed ideas about lots of things he once rejected (e.g the iBooks).
>and the more damning fact that for the first time a dividend of a serious size was paid. Jobs was adamant about growing the warchest.
At a time when the warchest was still small. When Jobs died it rivalled the US economy. After some point it's silly to ammass even more money.
>His assumption was that if a stockholder thought his/her investment was better placed elsewhere, stock could be sold and reinvested. The act of paying a dividend states that the board thinks the investor can do better elsewhere with that money.
Only, whatever the board thinks, the invester CAN go elsewhere with that money, and that would have an effect on stock, morale etc. Better throw a bone and keep investors happy too.
"Apple is no longer hungry, nor foolish" is such a facile statement that means absolutely nothing.
The iPad Mini actually sells really well, and Steve was around to ship the hundred iterations of iPod (nano, shuffle, etc.)
I knew Steve, I happen to agree, but de mortuis nil nisi bonum, as they say. :)
This may indicate a corporate shift from a visionary outlook to a managing perspective. Someone on the inside would have better insight, but as an outsider I have to wonder.
Anyway, if it isn't obvious, the article's credibility is killed by the use of the word dead. Microsoft clearly isn't dead it just isn't the biggest player on the internet, and isn't really a player in the start up space.
Except that it's 2014 and Microsoft is still relevant. The techy bubble on the west coast may all be using Mac's but microsoft products can still be found throughout the rest of the world.
I like PG, and love his essays, but this one was just bad. I'm not even talking about his prediction, just the way he puts it out there. It's just a very pathetic read.
For ~20 years Microsoft was a bully and received much criticism for it. Now they're just another tech company that's successful at the end of the day and has a lot of products out there being used by a lot of people. Now they're dead?
Give me a break. The whole Microsoft-hate bandwagon is absolutely pathetic to watch. It's just like the Apple-hate bandwagon.
How? The author clearly doesn't mean "out of business" when he says "dead". He means that what Microsoft once was, or what it represented, is dead. The idea once conveyed by the word "Microsoft" is dead. It's not sensationalist clickbait, it's a metaphor.
It would have been better if had said he wished they were dead because he doesn't like them, or because he thinks they are bullies or he thinks they are ruining the web or something of that nature. I would respect that.
A bit contradictory, no?
On top of that, Azure is competitive and is gaining more and more traction, and the person who headed the Azure department is now the new CEO. Their gaming division (Xbox) is profitable, which is mostly a hardware field, and they're slowly getting a foothold in mobile and have purchased a big mobile hardware manufacturer.
Their development tools (Visual Studio and .NET) are immensely popular and they've managed to capitalize on the whole JavaScript thing by making it easy to develop with VS.
They're anything but dead.
Of course things like Bing aren't a success yet but if MSFT figures out what do with that they'll have something other than people just Google stuff on.
Not being large players in the areas mentioned doesn't imply that they are somehow "dead".
APPL may soon be the next MSFT if they don't have another full-sized iPad up their sleeves to wow us with very soon. A solar powered flying watch that reads your mind and predictively orders groceries. :)
2013 - $77.85 billion
I'd love to die like that.
The old Microsoft isn't part of the computing platform of the future, mobile and services, but the server division is. For the division Nadella is from, their competition aren't Apple or Yahoo or even Google, it's Rackspace and AWS. For them Apple etc are customers and allies. The old Microsoft is dead in the water, but can a new Microsoft fully emerge from its shadow to take a valuable place in the future of the computing industry?
(PS, I've only actually worked at startups which have grown into larger companies. At no time did I or anyone else I was aware of feel the need for mobile Excel.)
The younger ones, in the last line, are all actually playing on Xbox. Microsoft has greater identification among younger people as brand than say, Apple given their decade long presence in console and PC gaming.
Yes, clearly he's not a 17-something gamer.
He also focused on things that matter. In Microsoft's bottom lime, the Xbox is marginal at best. For ages it has not even be profitable.
Every gamer could as well only use an Xbox, and it still wouldn't matter much for the kind of discussion we're having about Microsoft.
To put it in another way. Gaming (put together): not much of an industry, compared to IT/mobile sales.
Why are you comparing gaming to IT/mobile? It should be compared to other entertainment industries. It has already surpassed Hollywood in terms of revenue in the US ($17bil vs $9bil in 2011). Having a dominant product in the gaming industry begets a lot of influence.
Worldwide, The VG industry generates around $70 billion in revenue (excluding mobile gaming). In comparison the movie industry - (all countries combined, not just hollywood releases) generates around 120 billion.
>Every gamer could as well only use an Xbox, and it still wouldn't matter much for the kind of discussion we're having about Microsoft.
Please explain what you mean..
Now you say Xbox does not matter because it produces marginal income only?
Pulling out all of your infrastructure and software systems and logical processes and replacing it is hard. Swapping your console and signing up to another service is not.
Just an observation.
They tried to destroy linux, and they lost.
They tried to destroy apple, and they lost.
They tried to destroy android, and they lost.
That's why we, web, linux, apple, android fans hate microsoft with a passion.
While they succeeded in destroying so many other companies and technologies, we were there and we fought those fights.
We never forget.
If destroying meant: making yet a better product and marginalizing the competition (with the product or through marketing) it would be business as usual, but it seems microsoft didn't understand that their embrace-extend-extinguish method would backfire in the internet age.
Actually they make more on Android then Google. I would call that #winning.
As far as evil goes, to me, Google is much more scaring than MS.
For bonus fluency points, it reads better if you say "I fear Google much more than MS".
I apologize if feedback on your English was unwanted.
---
On another note, I generally agree. Google has a lot more scope for evil than Microsoft does. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish applies to what appeared to some Google properties too (eg Reader).
No need for apology when you give me a chance to improve my English.
Thank you.
You've said more about your knowledge of the history of computing than you have about Google or Microsoft.
Edit: I think it would be interesting and amusing to know the ages of people downvoting this. Microsoft has such an incredible history of anti-competitive behavior that I'm surprised anyone believes Google is even in the same league of evil as Microsoft.
But let me explain why I fear Google more than I would fear Microsoft if it was still "alive".
When they were at the top (let's say 1995 to 2005) Microsoft was always about controlling people's software (everybody should use Windows and Office ...).
However Google is about controlling people's information : the information you give them knowingly (in your Google Docs, Youtube videos etc) and the informations they gather in your profile / "dossier" (what searches are you doing, what videos are you watching, how long are you connected ...) whatever they call it.
And to me, my data is much more important than the computing platform I'm using. I can't delete what Google know about me but I can still wipe my hard-drive and install any BSD or Linux I want.
https://twitter.com/janettu/status/380824535714377728
Pretty interesting: they are still big, and they are arguably much more diversified than any other the other big players.
"Assembly? Bad! you should know the instructions op codes."
"C? Bad! you should know assembly! What are you trying to do? Write an operating system that is portable beyond the PDP architecture?"
"Java? Bad! You should manage your own memory! And the STL should be good enough for anyone."
Abstraction, by reducing complexity or making assumptions, allows developers to work faster or do more. Does this have negative side effects? Sure (see Joel's leaky abstractions article), but the benefits out weight the costs by several orders of magnitude. My evidence? The entire computer industry for the last 74 years.
Companies that try to use a language/platform combination to isolate the coder from the machine by creating a funnelled dumbed-down common interface and executing environment are pursuing a loose-loose path.
1. the HW evolves faster than the software 2. the coder wants to hack the most out of the hardware 3. the OpenSource community is a paradigm shift for software companies, you can't put the cat back in the bag.
Cheers
By that count, web apps would die even faster?
They still have a lot of momentum behind them because of all the PC applications that only work with Windows.
It's an interesting reality that Apple has their OS locked "officially" with their own hardware. In that respect, Microsoft seems more open to hardware competition. (IMO)
Perhaps it didn't take off due to the lack of wide-ranging Internet connectivity at the time. But they did at least attempt an online shop/store at the time. But everyone forgets this.
That was a false statement in 2007 and is still today. I'm the evidence, if no one else. And I don't think I'm alone, although it does puzzle me when I see Microsoft evangelists at conferences holding speeches from Apple computers.
And Microsoft will start to decline if they don't go after SAP's and Oracle's enterprise applications business before their server-side stuff becomes a low cost cloud based commodity.
I think both Apple and Microsoft are going down. Linux will rule the server side and the client side in the shape of Android/Chrome OS.
As a dominant monopolist, MSFT had little incentive to change the world, and as a large, mature company, it is much more likely to be reactive to change than to be the source of change.
There more interesting question to me now is, "Is Apple 'dead'?" Apple has similarly been reacting to change, rather than driving it since the iPad (yes, others may view this differently). Will they be able to create something new and revolutionary? Or will that be left to new, scrappy "startups"?
Apple is Dead! LONG LIVE APPLE!
PG thinks the web/startup scene == the world. 7 years proved he's wrong.
Btw thanks for your contribution, very interesting.
As both a developer and a consumer, I have a complaint against Google. It's going in every direction. Google has no stable, coherent, ecosystem on which you can build your products. You don't know where they are going between Android and Chrome OS. Or between DART and javascript. Or Java and Go. Microsoft is trying to attack exactly that by trying to create, brick by brick, a coherent software ecosystem. Coherent from a development, design and user experience point of view. This direction makes sense to me. I'm just not buying at the moment as the quality and experience is just not there yet. But I could buy.
Also I just watched Nadella speaking, and he says he wants to address the separation between consumer and business software. I think that's pretty cool. If you couple that with the fact more and more people work from home, or remotely, and the fact we have more and more devices around for both work and private usage, that begins to make sense.
You could argue that we are tired of Microsoft trying. But they are moving all their products together, and it takes more time, obviously. And some skills in the execution. Hence Nadella's new role. Well that's my interpretation anyway.
Now imagine he succeeds to make all these products marginally better. Microsoft doesn't need much, it's almost there. This could become an Apple-like come-back before even being gone.
While it seems that there is no longer the complete monopoly that Microsoft had, the new monopoly that Google has is functionally similar. While not fully there yet, they are heading towards near-complete lock-in to Google services. Web 2.0 may have raised the bar for monopoly (or lowered the bar for competition), it definitely didn't do away with it altogether.
You love something, then everyone loves it, then it's not as cool and special, then people start to hate it, then they tear it down and find something else to love. Microsoft has completed that cycle and is now potentially going to be loved again, whereas Apple is nearing the end of their cycle and is started to be hated.
Microsoft has done some well documented evil things but imagine if IBM had won the OS wars? Talk about locked down and monopolistic! And has the ascendance of Apple and Google been uniformly good? I think not - we are in less control over our software and our data than when Microsoft was in charge.
It kinda seems crazy stupid to not invite a company that makes $24B in income a year to your demo day. But then again, Microsoft has never been a company that is bamboozled by Nest Labs-style startup overvaluation bullshit, and maybe you knew that.
Microsoft is dead because of competition? How does that even make sense? Like I've said many times before, competition actually makes a company and their products better, not make them die. MS has had to turn their huge ship around and its a slow process.
Sure, they're making baby steps and getting there, but the hatred for them is beyond what I've seen for other companies. It's not just that they dominated and killed a bunch of competition in the 80's and 90's. Even now with the new products they're bringing to market, people are still hazing them and won't let them get off the mat.
It's almost fashionable these days to hate MS. They can't do mobile like Android and Apple, they can't do cloud stuff like Amazon and Salesforce. .Net is dead, everybody loves Ruby. MS can't do anything right, blah, blah, blah.
Nobody wants to see the small victories, they just want to pile on enough dirt and hope they go away.
Well, Apple's laptops, like their whole hardware range, look really nice and well made. My Toshiba Satellite is dusty, covered in bagel crumbs and stinks of roll-ups. I would be really embarrassed turning up in a public arena with a pig ugly piece of kit that looks like it has been used in a sewer.
Windows is still used by many businesses in the UK. That is the main reason I still have it on my laptop, most CV's are only accepted as .doc/.docx/.txt files.
The desktop no longer matters? Hell, the CLI is still alive and kicking. I find Vim works better in tty than in xterm.
right on the spot.
I understand if anybody says "hey! MS is not a company as you or others would prescribe to be and you don't get what surface is and what it is for!" Maybe that's true. But they had lots of chances of coming back as a competitive, innovative actor and they keep grounding their chances with products like Windows 8. Last month, may father, who is an author and do not get along well with any computer called me and said: "I just could not work with this Windows 8." To note, he barely learned to cope with the old fashioned windows interface. Loading a considerable amount of cognitive load to consumers upon whom your market penetration depends does not seem like good idea. It at least is not "innovation".
We will see what the concept will be like in 5 to 10 years or so, when the planned obsolescence time of the currently available MS running hardware (and software for that matter) comes. But to replace things like Word, Excel? Quite possible, but difficult. When those can be replaced, I think we will see whether the company stands over a house of cards or not.
One of the things that is starting to force this evolution is the growing realization that we must move from a server-based internet to a distributed data-based internet.
We need to popularize new or better ways of achieving cohesion while maintaining decoupling, diversity, and freedom to evolve different solutions.
I think there are a lot of ideas but the newest and best ideas for fundamental structural changes are not well known or tested. We need to test some radical changes to societal structures.
The first time through, I thought they were the footnotes, and, oddly enough, they sort-of made sense. Especially the 2nd one, which came off as a strange joke (as in "We better make sure Microsoft doesn't catch the Apple bug").
ON THE WAY. This article is before the iPhone came to dominate. Wow, did Microsoft miss that boat.
However, even a dying wounded can get intensive care and get back to life...
- Web - Google, Apple - Startup
Insight: Web: Infrastruture (Cloud) + Apps (HTML&co, Native) Are Apple & Goog better than MS @this ?
This is clearly amazing :D
