The problem is that they just could not commit to anything for more than 2 years after Win32.

They had something reasonably good in WinRT. They should have stuck to that. But Nadella came in, said Azure Cloud is the future and abandoned the Windows platform.

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rbanffy 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

At this point one must ask if Microsoft is still a software platform company - whether their products form a substrate where an ecosystem can form and build a coherent software environment for the users of their platform.

Microsoft used to be the Windows company (after being the BASIC company, then the DOS company). Then it became the Office company. Now it’s SharePoint and Office365 and Azure, a utility. Windows is a relatively small part. Office is both desktop and web (and spacecraft, where they have two versions of Outlook and none of them works). If you are confused at this point, so am I. There is no vision as to what Microsoft is. If Satya Nadella knows what Microsoft is, he isn’t communicating it properly. It’s not Azure, because there is also Office and Windows. And on-prem server products. And a line of hardware products. And stores (do they still exist?).

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hyperrail 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Microsoft has always had a broad vision of itself as a technology company; I feel it's perfectly fine to not be able to describe Microsoft in one sentence without using platitudes like "empower every person on Earth to achieve more" or "put a computer in every home and every office" (both paraphrases of actual MSFT company mission statements), and I suspect many other current and former Microsoft employees would feel the same way.

IMO Microsoft's best long-lived products have always been both finished solutions to your problems and platforms to help you develop more solutions, and Microsoft leadership has always recognized this. Examples: Windows. Office. Dynamics (their Salesforce competitor).

But even if a product doesn't meet that "why not both?" ideal, there is always going to be room for it at Microsoft, as long as it is not only a good or at least mediocre product by itself, but also works to sell you on the whole Microsoft ecosystem. Sometimes that is a bad thing (see all the Windows adware for Bing, Copilot, and M365). But that at least is where Microsoft remains consistent.

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pdonis 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

MS has never been a software platform company. That's the fundamental reason behind the issue the article talks about.

MS has always been a software application company. Windows was never anything more than a way to sell MS applications--and Windows 3.0 and later wouldn't even have existed in the first place if IBM hadn't dawdled so long over OS/2. Even in the MS-DOS days, when MS was reaping the benefits of IBM's previous bonehead decision to hand the PC OS market to them, MS was selling Office applications--on the Macintosh.

The basic Windows API, in all of its many incarnations, has always been a second-class citizen; MS Office applications have always done their own things that other Windows applications couldn't do without using undocumented features that MS could change at any time (and often did). One could argue that the only reason MS even allowed third-party Windows developers to exist was so that they would, in the words of one of PG's essays, do market research for MS. When a third-party dev came up with something that got enough traction, MS would simply incorporate it into their apps.

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coliveira 3 hours ago | parent [-]

This makes sense, because even in the best times Windows was not the biggest money maker for Microsoft, it was Office. So MS was never fully behind Windows, it was only the means to an end, which was selling the most software for enterprises.

	▲	kmeisthax an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Ironically, Office was the original poster child for Microsoft reinventing it's own widget toolkits, even back when Microsoft had a coherent visual design and developer story.

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drob518 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Nadella thought he could take the reins and start yelling “Cloud! Cloud! Cloud!” and that would be successful. He doesn’t have a strategy and now that’s becoming apparent.

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gdhkgdhkvff 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Nadella took the reins in 2014 and the stock has 10x’d since then. In the same timeframe, the sp500 has 2.5x’d. Sounds pretty successful to me?

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a_vanderbilt 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In theory, the market should be pricing in based on future potential. As it has become increasingly clear this past decade, the market is not rational.

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drob518 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In a bubble, everyone looks like they’re doing well. Don’t confuse that with an actual strategy.

	▲	gdhkgdhkvff 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But I compared it to sp500. Even QQQ only 6x’d in that timeframe. Which bubble are you talking about? Even if you remove everything after January 1 2020, it’s still up 4x since nadella took over. And that follows a decade of stagnation under Balmer. What numbers do you know of that show that Microsoft hasn’t been successful since nadella took charge? Complain all you want about the products, but the stock under nadella has been a success.

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bigstrat2003 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Stock price going up is not the success criterion for a business. Making money is. And Microsoft's decisions are undermining their ability to make money in the future, which makes them bad decisions even if the stock price has gone up or if they make more money in the short term.

	▲	andsoitis 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Stock price going up is not the success criterion for a business. Making money is. Microsoft’s net income is up roughly 5.4x from ~$22B in 2014 to $119B today. Profit margin also expanded, from ~25% net margins in 2014 to over 36% today.

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stefan_ 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

WinRT was technologically terrible (which immediately flows from "no one at Microsoft was actually using it to make anything useful"). But that wasn't even what sunk it - the whole requirements around "of course your WinRT app is going to be in the Microsoft Store^TM its the future" did that. The fucking store is a joke, and those requirements existed solely to boost a bunch of idiots internal careers.

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collabs 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The Windows Store thing was so terrible that I would argue the only good thing that came out of it was that it made Valve/Steam invest in Linux.

I still don't understand why the windows store search sucked so badly. It isn't like they had billions of apps. So why did it suck?

	▲	coliveira 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Most probably it was on purpose. MS is famous for the infighting of internal groups and how the management doesn't know how to control their divisions.

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garganzol 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My favorite example of that was when WinRT app .exe files could not be launched from the command line. Only via some Windows Store voodoo dance with approvals, signatures and "security" that made WinRT for developers essentially a dead-on-arrival technology.

I would not be surprised if you still cannot launch a fricking .exe.