It is a pretty damning indictment that Microsoft had to spend hundreds of millions on front end apps for its own platform –Microsoft Exchange — and it should send alarm bells ringing.
Microsoft has a long history of not getting product trends. They didn’t get the iPod, tablets, iPhone and a host of other products that it could have made a lot of money on. Microsoft is profit-focused, which means it makes shitty products. Apple is product-focused, which means people buy the quality and Apple makes a lot of money. Reading this, Microsoft will have no idea what the difference is.
It makes some shitty products. Apple wishes they made server side stuff as good as MS. Open Directory has never even been in the same realm as Active Directory, and MS’s management tools have gotten amazingly better over the last few iterations.
There’s also MS’s DFS work, Exchange, which starting about 2010 stopped sucking wind, EAS which is everywhere, and they out document the crap out of Apple on the IT side. Admittedly a one-winged bird with a soft beak writing on granite could out-document Apple on the IT side.
oh, and dev support, etc.
Apple could learn a lot about a lot of things from MS.
No, Microsoft gets product trends – they were involved with all those products before Apple stepped in. What they don’t get is that their one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work with form factors that are literally different shapes and sizes. They keep trying to make the form factor work with Windows rather than vice versa. They always try to add things to make Windows work with different form factors, but they never subtract the way Apple did when they stripped down OS X to make it work on the iPhone. They never listened to Ray Ozzie’s final lesson on complexity.
Microsoft is enterprise focused. The reason why MSFT did this is the other side of the coin of why Apple had to partner with IBM on the enterprise side.
Microsoft understands product trends. Tablets, smartphones, smart watches. They were all there before Apple released their solution.
The problems Microsoft has is that they have a hammer (Windows) and in their view, the world is full of nails.
Ray Ozzie lecturing anyone on software complexity, given the only major successful product he ever made was friggin’ IBM nee Lotus Notes is the clueless lecturing the gullible.
Jim really meant to say consumer products. Microsoft makes some good THINGS. Some of those things technically count as products. But Microsoft and Apple have very different definitions of “product.” Those sort of things you mentioned would be labeled as technology at Apple, not a product.
Microsoft really doesn’t have the same kind of all-encompassing intuitive understanding of the entire picture, the entire product. A product where the total is greater than the sum of its parts.
I couldn’t have said this better myself. Apple’s enterprise strategy is as bad as Microsoft’s consumer strategy.
Well, I was referring to his prescient but futile attempts to change things at Microsoft while he was CTO and Chief Software Architect, but Gates certainly wasn’t batting a hundred on personnel picks.
This post sounds like Microsoft’s version of people who still say “Apple is doomed without Jobs!”. Outdated, out of the loop (pun intented) and unaware of Satya Nadella’s new Microsoft.
“Microsoft is profit-focused, which means it makes shitty products.”
This misses the point. After all, Apple is margin focused, but the difference is that Apple sells to the people who use their products whereas MSFT does not. They sell to companies for the most part and companies don’t buy with user experience and great design as primary factors. This, in turn, has meant that MSFT doesn’t invest in product design past the point where a product is good enough to not drive people away.
Ben Thomson said this quite well on Stratchery (- http://stratechery.com/2014/best/) where he notes that enterprise stuff is bought by people who aern’t the end users of the products and who judge products on things other than user experience (licensing terms, IT considerations, etc). MSFT had their success in that environment so their product groups never really had to compete on UX. Consumer products are bought by the people who use them, though, so UX is really important.
It’s less that MS designed shitty stuff and more that they’ve never had to design great stuff so they haven’t built those capabilities.
Consumer products? You mean like the Xbox, Xbox Live, Encarta…
It’s easy to find microsoft misses, but tarring even all their consumer products as crap is not even vaguely correct.
That’s a solid point. Microsoft’s core audience is really, really different from Apple’s. MS, as it turns out, is really good at catering to that audience, just as Apple is with theirs. It’s when they try to move out of that core that they stumble the most. But not always. I’d not call the Xbox a failure, and while both were eventually cancelled, both the Xserve and the Xserve RAID forced a lot of changes on the industry, most notably in driving the price of RAID and lower end rackmount servers drastically down.
So even though not a lonnnnng term success, the effect apple had outside of its comfort zone is significant.
Where did I tar Xbox? I meant to say that Xbox was the rare exception. That is, until they squandered their lead with the Xbox One. I have an Xbox, I love it, but it’s fair to say that Sony has made better technical decisions with the PS4, and Microsoft is now far behind the PS4 in sales and mindshare amongst gamers. But being the exception does not make it an indication of Microsoft as a products company in general. Just like you cherry picked things that Apple isn’t great at, I find your comment just a tad hypocritical. Whereas with Apple, it’s a minor list of misses in a sea of breakout wins in the consumer products space. Microsoft on the other hand, it’s a minor list of wins in the consumer space with a strong list of misses in the consumer space, saved by all their wins in the enterprise or IT markets.
I’m not tarring Microsoft. I was just bringing a little clarity to Jims comments. Like I said, Microsoft makes some great THINGS. I just don’t think Microsoft has that same deep intuitive understanding of the entire puzzle when it comes to real consumer products. That’s all.
I think Microsoft should become “the” services company for iOS. Honestly, Microsoft is much better at server side offerings than Apple. Azure, Office365, and even Bing are pretty darn good when compared to AWS and Google Products. A real partnership between the two would be pretty tough to beat and both companies would get better from the relationship.
If Apple is product focused, why does the iPhone 6 have only 16GB storage, half the RAM and lower battery than the competitors?
Apple’s a great company, but don’t kid yourself they’re not profit focused.
The “new” Microsoft has yet to show me anything more profound than thirty minutes of actual product within a two-hour presentation. Nadella’s corporate-speak yields about as much usable information as Ballmer’s sales-speak.
Wasn’t the original Xbox developed as an internal skunkworks project, specifically protected from the rest of Microsoft’s management?
Hmmm. That’s the starting point. It generates a price point. It goes all the way to 11 these days.
I’ll tar Xbox. The Entertainment and Devices lost BILLIONS for YEARS before it became profitable. I last did the math back in 2012 and MS still hadn’t made back what it spent. It probably has by now, but it took a decade. If you look at the time-value of that money, Microsoft would have made a lot more money quicker putting it in CDs, let alone Apple stock.
I wouldn’t call Apple’s enterprise strategy bad. Actually I wouldn’t even call it a strategy. I’d call it apathy.
The enterprise is a shitty market anyway. It has long upgrade cycles, PITA procurement processes, enormous support requirements, and awful margins. Microsoft had a good run pushing down into consumer, but that’s come back to bite them on the ass.
Apple has done pretty well pushing up into the enterprise from consumer, but that wasn’t a specific strategy so much as cause and effect of good design. The partnership with IBM says Apple isn’t ignoring the enterprise anymore, but it also says it isn’t going stay up nights worrying about it.
For once I totally agree with Sumocat. Microsoft expects you to do things the Microsoft way. When you do, it tends to work pretty well, but the problem is when you don’t. For way too long, the powers that be in Redmond figured that Windows was their hammer and every problem was a nail. That worked when every business had Windows, and everyone needed their personal stuff to have Windows because that’s what they had at work. Blackberry exposed the first chink in that armor, but at least BES still used Exchange. BB paved the way for iPhone, then iPhone paved the way for iPad, and now I see more brushed aluminum in the IT department than I ever saw Snow White in the Graphics department in the 90s.
Enterprise does not have “awful margins”. Start looking with Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.
I don’t think Apple “had” to do anything. I think they realized they were leaving money on the table, and that they could pick up a big chunk of that with the right partner. Now IBM does all the work and Apple moves a few hundred thousand units more each year without any effort.
If you can’t capitalize on the trend to really “understand” it? I’d say Microsoft, or at least parts of it can recognize trends, but making itself part of that trend is a different story.
Just because the product isn’t focused on you, doesn’t mean it’s not focused. As rattyuk said, it lowers the ‘price of entry’ to current generation hardware for cost-conscious buyers. More importantly, a low-memory, high-power handheld computer has LOTS of value in industrial, commercial, and retail. You think all those museums buying iPhones for audio exhibit narration needs more than 16GB of storage?
Those are all software companies. Apple isn’t selling Aperture or iWorks to the enterprise. Talk to a hardware VAR about price-pressure on their quotes.
Point taken. Another way to look at this: Microsoft is about as successful of a hardware company as Apple is as an application software company.
Given the look of some of the specialized apps now available from IBM, I’d say at least a bit of effort was involved on Apple’s part.
It usually takes a few years before reality catches up to me. You have the benefit of reading this one nine years after it first emerged (and they’re still swinging that same hammer).
Microsof Ottice for iPad is kind of a big deal. And it’s mostly free.
Adding flash storage does not significantly increase cost.
AFAIK. The funy part was that the unreleased XBox used a variant of THR PPC processor, so MS was ‘caught’ with a palette of new G5 towers, that were presumably purchased so they could emulate the cell processors… Also MS bought Bungie.
Apple could have had much better LDAP – maybe equaling MS’s AD. Apple had only worked on this for maybe a decade, while Microsoft has had a few decades to hone and develop AD … also, AD, Exchange is more of MS’s core (real core).
I think had the iPhone not taken off, we may have seen Apple stay in the low to mid range enterprise market and maybe even shift with the market (as most mid to high level operations use some sort of VM for most of their stuff). Such a shame, really. Also, I would argue that MS’s tools, were made better, but the fact that Apple showed them how to do it (again).
Yes and MS Outlook is pretty damn horrible… its the single tasking application that does (or tries to) do ‘everything’ – sometimes all at once.
Also, with Windows 8.0 – MS was determined to deliver the WORST of both worlds – in terms of traditional computer GUI and mobile interface … and as we have seen, nobody liked it (though a few do try to defend it). This was clearly an over reaction to the iPhone/iPad – yet they still refused to sell or put MS office mobile on iOS (probably another over/under reaction).
How did Apple show MS how to make good enterprise management tools? What, from Netinfo Manager?
also, AD dates back to an early beta release in 1999, so work started, we’ll be generous, in 1997.
LDAP first shows up in 10.3 server in 2003. So assume initial work was done a year or so earlier, which means 2001-2002.
that’s not a few decades. That’s a few years. Big difference.
Define “significantly.” Look, the guys who have all the data made a call, and judging by last week’s numbers they made the right one.
I’m rather tired of this ’16GB isn’t enough storage’ whine. I don’t think there’s an iOS feature or app that won’t run on a 16GB iPhone 6, but there are plenty that won’t run on older models despite their storage space. Aside from the market for those devices intended as single-purpose computing platforms, it says a lot that there’s a commercially non-negligible market segment that would rather pay more for a 16GB iPhone 6 than a 32G Android device. That’s a customer that’s willing to sacrifice a bit of the user experience for the sake of entering The Ecosystem, and so that’s a customer Apple doesn’t want to price out.
MS understands nothing – except maybe AD/LDAP and Exchanged. I mean someone mentioned DFS, which is good, but Sharepoint? Common!!! that’s so damn useless and slow!!!
Look at Windows 8 – the worst of both worlds. MS never really understood technology (and they still don’t) as it applies to people. They do understand it as it (mostly) applies to companies. They have always tried to copy Apple in consumer space – even Bill Gates said something to the effect that the Mac was ‘truly innovative’ or something – back in the day.
I would say Apple is (mostly) focused on great products/gadgets/computers etc… most other companies would be focused on “features”, but would never care how they actually work (well, bad, complex, elegant, etc..). You could even say,
Apple is an anti feature technology company – as they will not put a feature in a product if or when they feel that feature is “not good enough” – because they do care about how that feature works (or does not work). – just look at MMS, Adobe Flash, 4G, etc… were all delayed or left out because they were not good enough at the time or would never be good enough (Flash).
I think some rumors indicate iCloud runs on Azure – though who knows – it could be a mix and Apple has built a few of its own massive data centers. Pitty they could not leverage OS X Server/OD.
Do you really think that adding flash storage would have necessitated raising the selling price of the iPhone?
Oye. External flash storage increases complexity. There is always a “cost”.
Maybe I was not clear. I’m not saying Apple showed MS anything on the LDAP side. I am saying Apple showed Microsoft the GUI and MS was one of the first developers to cut their teeth on a GUI type OS – for Apple, which also helped MS build Windows (though one would wonder why it was so awful).
Then Apple came out with the iPod … MS tried to copy that. Then Apple came out with display postscript (Quartz – from Adobe/Next) and MS sort of copied that with Windows Vista/Aero. Then Apple came out with the iPhone… then Apple came out with the iPad… and MS tried to copy it ALL – into one OS to rule them all – that was W8 – yuck.
I simply wanted to point out that Apple (and Next) had not been working in LDAP for long and it was pretty good, depending on the business needs … where as LDAP for MS is its real core and AD is not all that – though they do make high end versions of AD/Exchange – it works pretty good on the back end. I would say Apple dropped this, once the iPhone took off.
HP did try to ditch its PC business – (yes they gave that CEO a golden parachute) -though that was dumb, even with the low margins – the volume of business made its other endeavors more profitable.
— also check Dell.
To do it Apple’s way – yes. Though I think you are TOO focused on price/feature. Apple is anti feature. Just be happy with your ‘droid’ and leave it at that. Sounds like you want a droid/iPhone hybrid.
MS gets “product trends” like Kodak got product trends. The only difference is MS still have a few big things making them a ton of money … AFAIK MS makes more on their Android royalties than Xbox (not sure about Xbox live).
MS gets “product trends” like the Newton and the Palm Pilot? I remember every liking the idea of tablets (from Microsoft – circa 2001) and they would show them off – they may show the display detaching or what not, but then after about a week of this, they would no longer be using the tablet and they would go back to a full laptop or desktop … so those must be the trends you are speaking of.
And MS gets products trends with W8 – where again – as you indicate – it is (or was?) a one OS fits all … and MS delivered the worst of both.
I would give Ray the benefit of the doubt. I mean he did some good things and Lotus, IIRC – and for the time Lotus Notes and Netware had some really cool features and was very efficient and stable … not so much for AD and Exchange (depending). There was always a lot of bad inertia at MS. If you think about what MS really did – it was Basic and later, Visual Basic … which are high level programming environments – now they have .Net and AJAX? … I mean MS is probably best in those – then comes Exchange/AD, then maybe DFS/sharepoint (- share point sucks, though – IME) and then maybe MS Office and then maybe MS Outlook (which is also horrible)… and few have liked MS’s recent changes – with Office or Windows.
If Apple and Microsoft are so different, then why is Yosemite so much like Vista (ugly, transparent blotches, endless bugs) and iOS 7/8 so much like Windows Phone (hidden buttons you find almost randomly, absolutely no art in it, inscrutable glyphs floating in empty space, totally unreliable, glaring design and engineering bugs)? The latest Apple software does not evoke the same emotional connection of past versions — it evokes the frustration of Microsoft software. I still enjoy using my original iPad with iOS 5 more than my current iPad with iOS 8, which treats me very badly. There are 3 ways to add a Favorite in iOS 8 Safari (that I have found so far) and all of them take more taps than the one way in iOS 5 Safari.
To me, the biggest problem with Microsoft is not profit-focus, it is that their designers design for other designers — not for users — and their engineers engineer for other engineers — not users. I think Apple has jumped into this trap with both feet over the past couple of years. And neither of them currently has any vision for their software and is literally copying the Web.
Xbox One is a great product?
And Xbox has still not made any money.
And I genuinely wish them success with it. Late to the party, but at least they brought some good booze.
The rest of their spiel sounds like slogans for internal all-hands meetings.