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Mar 11, 10 - 11:57 am Comment from: jjjj

Gates, with WinMo, made the same error he made with regards to Google's cloud apps: Expecting the world to embrace 'MSOffice-centric" world.

But poor Bill doesn't realize that the masses don't really need portable versions of PowerPoint, Word or Excel.

Mar 11, 10 - 11:58 am Comment from: zmarc

Kodesh sounds like a smart guy. No wonder he left.

I'll bet ya that Kodesh then went to apple after that!

Windows as a swiss army knife. Brilliant. Windows tried to be all things to all people and support all hardware and in doing so therefore winds up being the proverbial jack of all trades and master of none.

So then carrying the analogy further, it goes without saying then that when it comes to a mobile product, do you now want to carry a keychain fob with a file, a small knife and maybe a light, or do you want to haul a big ass swiss army knife with you??

Should've listented to the guy Bill...

Ha Ha Ha!!!! Bill Gates, what an incredible loser!!!

The other half of the WinTel family went through a comparable course decision, but with very different results.

Some of us recall when, for Intel, raw cycle speed was all that mattered. But they were coming up against a wall. Power consumption and heat were rising, but things weren't getting much faster. Intel's Israel team argued for a major change in architecture, but HQ resisted. The battle went on for months. Ultimately the Israeli team won out. The end result was Centrino, Core, and the current i-processors. (It's all documented in Signor and Singer's "Start-Up Nation".)

Mar 11, 10 - 12:07 pm Comment from: TowerTone

"We don’t have time to start from scratch"

Where have I heard that lately?

Mar 11, 10 - 12:07 pm Comment from: Ouate de Phoque

Harold Kodesh:
http://www.emc.com/about/emc-at-glance/exec-team/kodesh.htm

Another great observation:

"To Kodesh, Microsoft’s initiatives were driven by the dictates of the company’s technology, rather than the wishes of consumers."

Bingo. Once upon a time, MS actually listened to and cared about what their customers wanted. Now it what MS wants from their customers that matters.

Or as someone else put it so well once, MS software used to work for you. Now it works for MS.

Two words: Uncle Fester

Haha TT, good point!

Mar 11, 10 - 12:24 pm Comment from: Jubei

MS is so lucky that IBM were clueless with how MS BS their way into getting their OS ( which didn't exist, then purchased of a clone OS ) sold for their PCs. How lucky for MS to negotiate access of Apple crown jewels to use for their Windows OS from that sugar water CEO who had no balls to stand up against them. If you dig hard, MS has never really invented, innovated anything close to what Apple has done from the get go.

Now we know where the "sloth" in Microsloth came from

Let me tell you a story about a man named Ed...

I'll probably be repeating this story a few times in the coming days. I used to have an iPhone 3GS. Last week, the same day I was boarding a plane for a trip to Las Vegas, my iPhone quit talking to ATTs 3G network. No calls, no SMS, no internet.

I arrive in Vegas and first thing next day I find the closest Apple store (In Fashion Square Mall). Make online genius appointment for same day right after lunch. (There were morning appts still available too) I go into the store and spend 30 min with Apple tech. Determine that indeed the 3G chip got fried and walked out with brand new 3GS phone 30 min later for FREE!

At that point in time, I'm saying to myself, and my wife who is only half listening, that I'm pretty glad I have an Apple phone, since I would have been out of business for several days, almost definitely for entire vacation, with ANY OTHER brand of phone. Including the Nexus One, some WiMo POS, Palm, BB or whatever. This is why Apple is dominating.

That explains Bill Gates' comment after the iPad presentation in January that he did not see anything that he wished Microsoft had done. He just doesn't get it.

MS software as Swiss Army Knife;

The Swiss Army Knife is a fine tool in and if itself.

But when my contractors show up, I notice that they don't just bring Swiss Army Knives.

Microsoft is like the 1950's. yesterdays news

Mar 11, 10 - 12:45 pm Comment from: Burrell

Microsoft has BET THEIR FUTURE on maintaining a price for an OS by itself, whether installed by a PC maker or by an individual.

That OS cost is now the largest cost of sub-00 PCs from what I recall. MS has not seen and understood the convergence of hardware, software OS, apps & user interface in a seamless device.

Ballmer is doing everything to protect "Windows" profits and it will doom Microsoft. The slowdown has already become evident from Desktops, Laptops, handheld notepad-iPads, phones.

The view of the arrogance of elite billionaires lost in the cloud of their own desires @ 40,000 feet in their own 757 bubble plane is sad to have seen.

Real world & really better new products are not imagined, prototyped and hashed and mashed together in boardrooms.

They are designed, planned & executed by & for people who are associated from the average citizen & his world.

@KiLleR: "Ha Ha Ha!!!! Bill Gates, what an incredible loser!!!"

Need to make that,'an incredibly RICH loser!!!'

Thank God Gates shot down Kodesh's ideas and point of view. Otherwise we might all be listening on the most popular MP3 Player "The Zune" and Zunecasts and buying all our smart phone apps from "The MarketPlace" instead of those items being MS feeble attempt at catching up to Apple and trying to be a relevant company.

Mar 11, 10 - 12:51 pm Comment from: Predrag

The story of Ed is the perfect example why Apple will win in the end. It is just the whole widget, and that includes OS, applications, hardware, peripherals, support, service, retail, plus heavy integration with content providers.

Nobody else will ever come close.

And on the subject of topic, Bill Gates never really had much vision. All he was is a shrewd (read: unscrupulous) business man. At some point, he had some talented engineers, who were able to churn out software that was acceptable. But never anything revolutionary. Windows won not on merit, but on business deals and wrangling.

Nobody should forget Bill's first edition of "The Road Ahead" where his opinions on the importance of the internet were so wildly off the mark:

..."popularity of the Internet is the most important single development in the world of computing since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981, but today's Internet is not the information highway I imagine, although you can think of it as the beginning of the highway, the information highway I envisioned would be as different from the Internet as the Oregon Trail was to Interstate 84."

The book came out in the November of 1995. Amazon.com begun operations almost two years earlier...!!!

I like the preview of the book, the java/sun legal case thing. Worth a read, how the MS top executives discuss strategy:

"I think Steve [Ballmer] feels totally overwhelmed right now. He does not know how he's going to solve the problems and he doesn't know who he'll be able to count on."

Mar 11, 10 - 12:59 pm Comment from: Greg L

Who needs Gates? Ballmer seems to be doing a splendid job of acting like a bald ape and sinking Microshaft.

Mar 11, 10 - 01:03 pm Comment from: Mac-nugget

This just proofs that Microsoft got on top by shear luck and kept it's momentum by coercive business practices. Microsoft is going down. I don't see Microsoft disappearing completely, but they certainly have lost the clout. This will get even worse for them as time progresses and other players take further market share from them.

Mar 11, 10 - 01:04 pm Comment from: Think

@ Ed

Can't imagine how that would have gone with a Google phone.

"Please submit an email to get support. We'll get back to you in a few days"

Microsoft tried to start over with Longhorn. They failed had to grab the Windows 2003 base and start over based on Windows Legacy. When they finished they pooped out Windows Vista. While Windows 7 is not new it's just a patched up Vista. And just goes to show how dysfunctional Microsoft is and how poor it's management is. Microsoft will never again try to revolutionize and rewrite Windows from the ground up. It just going to milk what it has till the market dries up. Ballmer is hoping that he'll have his Advertising baby running by then so he can shot Bill Baby (Windows) and just have Microsoft focus on his Baby! BING.

Mar 11, 10 - 01:25 pm Comment from: TheMacAdvocate

So M$ isn't first in mobile because some engineer said CE sucked and Bill Gates said kthxbye?

There's the actual next step of building the alternative, which could have sucked just as hard. I went out with a few buddies last week with the intent of outlining the next great American novel. We ended up passing out on my basement floor.

The intent to do a thing and its execution have nothing to do with each other - something Apple teaches companies like M$ every time Redmond spews vapor and Apple actual brings a device to market.

In any way intimating that M$'s lack of dominance hinged on this exchange is kind of stupid. If anything, M$ lost out on a chance to hype a product in advance that it had no intent of delivering.

@Rot'nApple
"Thank God Gates shot down Kodesh's ideas and point of view..."

While I agree & am exceedingly thankful that Gate's shot down the idea, I think the article shows that it isn't really god that we have to thank for this.

What is does is give the lie to the idea of Gate's brilliance as a geek, getting M$ to where it is (was?). It was stupid luck, and Gate's being shrewd at business. Gate's has never been a visionary. Just shrewd & lucky.

And Ballmer is just the punchline to a really bad joke.

As mentioned above Billy boy still has no real idea when you se his reaction to the iPad. He still seems to think that a fully fledged but inappropriate OS milking battery life and adding bulk is the answer despite the fact that it is unable to offer a worthwhile multi touch based interaction to the user and thus makes it much less useful than a laptop or indeed a netbook when considering overall use characteristics. He then decides because of these problems you simply add more spaghetti to this complex mess of a mixture and solve the problem by adding a further mix of speech and real keyboard.

Yup this guy is a genius in the same way that the guy who proposed adding more horses to the cart to compete against the car was a genius when faced with starting again from scratch.

The universe where MS work's is ... Dead... Or was just an illusion in their eyes...

Look at what they just did for the Zune HD users. Tnks for buying it. But is a dead platform now!

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Gates simply didn't know what he didn't know. All he could see was somehow leveraging the Windows/Office monopoly in a very, very narrow way. There could have been several other ways to do this.

And BTW, isn't MS really at least fourth or fifth on the pecking order behind Apple, RIM, Android and Nokia?

Mar 11, 10 - 02:12 pm Comment from: MacMan

No one loathes Micro$oft as much as I do, but the fact is that they have at least another decade ahead of survival. The truth is that 60-70% of all computers are bought by business and Apple is notorious in the Enterprise for not working with business the way business expects (i.e., the way Micro$oft works with them). The Enterprise market alone will keep them afloat for quite some time (until, that is, the business world wakes up and realizes just how much their crappy PCs are really costing them).

It's a depressing thought, really: M$ is here to stay (while they will almost certainly be eliminated fairly quickly from the mobile market, Windoze OS and Word/Excel/PP are here to stay for some time...).

Of course, if Apple were to use some of their $40 billion and lower their margins (from 35% to say 20%) for a year or two, we would see the demise of M$ much sooner. But I guess many Apple shareholders (of which I am one, btw) would object (even though the increased market share would not seriously impact profit. Oh well...

Mar 11, 10 - 02:17 pm Comment from: Jubei

@MacMan

Plus don't count them out on giving up locking in the internet with Windows. There are many technologies they have given businesses to make sure that IE will only work on their net based workflow and initiatives. Lock the net with IE/Windows and you perpetuate your monopoly. Guaranteed.

Mar 11, 10 - 02:28 pm Comment from: Olmecmystic

The irony of this to me is we now have NeXTStep/OpenStep/OS X/iPhone OS on all these different devices, from the desktop to portables to now the tablet, and that was GATES'S "vision"! HE wanted Windoze leveraged onto everything coming down the pike, and Windoze wasn't up to the challenge. And now we see (surprise, surprise) that M$ wasn't willing to do the work to optimize Windoze for each device and, therefore, each user experience like Steve insists upon.

I also don't understand how a man who repeatedly makes decisions like that can remain the richest person in the world for 14 out of the last 15 YEARS! Decisions like that would have brought down lesser companies. Maybe it's unfolding in slow motion, but I'd like to see M$ have to deal with the consequences of making fucked up decisions like that over time.

Apple was on the brink because of choices just like that ("Let's give away the keys to the kingdom. No big deal."). When will it be M$'s turn? And who's going to come back in save THEM? Bill GATES? Mr. "The Road Ahead" himself? Yeah, right.

Peace.
Olmecmystic

P.S. By comparison in the year in question, 2001, Apple dropped the original iTunes on the masses, the world's FIRST 15" (titanium) laptop, the original OS X, the first several of many Apple retail stores, AND the original iPod.

Mar 11, 10 - 02:40 pm Comment from: LordRobin

Here's my big question: Could Microsoft have "started from scratch"? Have they ever? With anything?!?

I am trying to think of a single successful product Microsoft ever created from scratch. (Successful, so Microsoft Bob doesn't count.) To the best of my knowledge, every single successful piece of software Microsoft has ever produced began as something either purchased or ripped off from another company.

It goes all the way back to their earliest products. Microsoft Basic was just their own implementation of a common standard. MS-DOS was purchased as Q-DOS. Microsoft Windows' concepts were first licensed from, then ripped off from Apple.

The current version of Windows can be traced back to Windows NT, which in turn was developed from something purchased from DEC.

"Starting from scratch", i.e. "innovation", just isn't in Microsoft's DNA. It's just not what they do.

------RM

Mar 11, 10 - 02:47 pm Comment from: KingMel

From LinkedIn:

Harel Kodesh’s Experience

Currently Group President at Amdocs
(Public Company; Telecommunications industry)

Vice President IAD Microsoft
(Public Company; Telecommunications industry)
1990 — 2000 (10 years )

Group Lead Ready Systems
(Telecommunications industry)
1987 — 1989 (2 years )

Gee, . . . I thought that Bill Gates was one of Steve Jobs' most admired people, even though Microsoft and Windows were an anathema to Apple.

What a loser! . . . The second richest person on earth.

Not completely right article.. Gates (Microsoft + Gates Foundation Money) is still the richest man.. Same case can be argued with Walton family (Wal-mart)..

Mar 11, 10 - 04:22 pm Comment from: Connor MacBook

MS thought it could shoehorn a desktop OS into a handheld form factor and people would buy it, Even Windoze fanboys think WinMo is toxic.

Mar 11, 10 - 04:49 pm Comment from: disposableidentity

Correct me if I'm wring, but isn't it:

1. Nokia (if you can call their products "smart" phones)
2. RIM
3. Apple (passing RIM and day now)
4. MS
5. Google (quickly gaining on MS)

Mar 11, 10 - 04:50 pm Comment from: disposableidentity

I mean correct me if I'm "wrong".
I see the irony.

align said: "'To Kodesh, Microsoft’s initiatives were driven by the dictates of the company’s technology, rather than the wishes of consumers.'

Bingo. Once upon a time, MS actually listened to and cared about what their customers wanted. Now it what MS wants from their customers that matters."

MS has mostly cared what enterprise wanted. MS grew their OS dominance through enterprise. First, from companies using their OS and then from people essentially being functionally required to use the same OS at home (either from a software perspective or from a "I can only learn one OS" perspective). They never really had to cared what CONSUMERS wanted.

The iPod and iPhone were both aimed at consumers and were designed for ease of use. While MS and or MS & partners offered more choice (theoretically, at least, PlaysForShit), they did not actually think about user experience. They never had to do that and apparently never wanted to.

Left to do only that, MS can actually make something good. Xbox and Xbox360 are both good, competitve gaming systems.

For mobile devices, I think Microsoft COULD do it technically. They have fine programmers and engineers. However, it is against their corporate DNA and against their top level view of how to make software. So they won't do it for quite some time. Maybe Ray Ozzie will shock us with their cloud...

Mar 11, 10 - 05:54 pm Comment from: MidWest Mac

Windows design is to blame. You can't properly scale down Windows efficiently. With OS X, Apple has shown it can be done masterfully.

In the end, it's still the Mac OS beating up on the Windows OS.

Not that anyone clamors for the return of OS 9, it just goes to show that Apple did the right thing buying NeXt. Probably one day will go down as the single greatest acquisition in tech history (if it isn't already).

Mar 11, 10 - 06:02 pm Comment from: m159

Try telling a roomful of otherwise well educated people that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer do not understand technology, and are not really very smart. You will get nothing but argument. I know,; I've done it.

DRMSSDB said:

"They (MS) never really had to cared what CONSUMERS wanted."

Totally agree. Notice I said customers, not consumers. Customers, MS has decided, are the enterprise and OEMs. But ask even enterprise guys these days if they think MS listens to them. In fact, I think if it wasn't for Linux rearing its enterprise head that they would probably listen to them even less. MS flat out thought they had an undefeatable monopoly for awhile and totally acted like they did.

Indeed I agree, MS's great failure has been that since the end user was not their customer, they developed virtually no consumer sales or marketing experience whatsoever and it's absolutely killing them today. Look at the bloatware that comes preloaded on most Windows systems now. About as anti-consumer as you can get, but the OEMs love it.

Agree also that MS has good people that could do lots of things, but I don't know if MS can bring itself to turn the ship and admit that windows everywhere, at least in it's current form, just won't cut it, and after a decade it indeed may be too late to start over like they should have. It must be galling for Bill and MS to see Steve Jobs and Apple succeed at this (OS X is in most of Apple's products now) while MS has failed utterly.

And I may be wrong, but I don't have a lot of faith in Ozzie either. Ozzie did Lotus Notes, and while it had a lot of great ideas and power, just like Windows, the interface sucked imho and it crippled it. It's primary function that users needed above all else, email, was perhaps it's worst feature. Apple's genuis is harnessing great power with great interfaces, while I swear a lot of MS's culture still secretly yearn to go back to keyboard commands and command lines and views Windows' interface as a dos shell toy for newbs.

And don't get me started on the cloud. Trust me, MS would love that, they're dying to go back to the mainframe days and "rent" you everything so they'd have a continual source of revenue but could pull the plug on a whim. No thanks.

Mar 11, 10 - 07:43 pm Comment from: Foris

Gates has always understood that Jobs' creativity runs rings around him... and this so perfectly shows why. Presented by Kodesh with a clear black and white picture of what needed to be done to regain the edge, Gates held onto the past with both hands and couldn't understand the simple, obvious vision.

Even Gates's ability to copy and bully and cheat has atrophied in the face of smarter competition from Apple and Google - no wonder he felt the need to get out, and try to buy the respect he felt was lacking.

Gates rejected the suggestions. “It’s very disappointing you feel that way,” he told Kodesh. “We don’t have time to start from scratch.”

The rest of Gates' reply read...

"However, we have the time to create the best crapware in the world to kill ourselves unconstrained by the needs of the rest of the company".

They didn't have to start from scratch, they could have bought another company and screwed it up. Oh wait, they already did that several times. There are several examples, but Danger is most obvious recent one pertinent to this discussion.

Mar 12, 10 - 04:07 am Comment from: Derek Currie

I always laugh when some lost person says "Well, that Bill Gates! He was always ahead of the pack on everything!" As if Bill Gates ever had a successful futurist prediction in his life. HardyHarHar.

The guy was a parasite on the entire computer community and clearly was a parasite within his own company. I have to wonder if ever in history anyone made so much money for doing so little.

If the MS board has a brain cell between them they'd boot Gates out of the chairman's chair and send him packing. It's possible MS could one day actually contribute to the computer community. But having the spectre of Gates hanging around is a definitive hinderance.

Then there's Ballmer, the marketing moron who thought he could rule...

Mar 12, 10 - 08:00 am Comment from: Wingsy

@edster
Your story makes me want to tell mine: The resident teen here dropped her iPhone and cracked the glass in the corner. Everything still worked, but she had a friend replace the glass for her. After that the backlight wouldn't work nor would the touchscreen. She took it into the Apple store and simply told them her phone wouldn't work. Lucky for her they didn't ask any questions about the phone's history. Within 10 minutes she walked out with a brand new one. She was already a satisfied customer but now she'll be checking the "Very Satisfied" box if she is ever part of a customer survey.

Classic Microsoft arrogance, hubris and complacency led to its current irrelevance in mobile computing. The company figured its dominance of the desktop would be extended to smartphones and similar devices by mere fiat and leveraging of its brand. Except that, unlike the desktop arena (which Microsoft dominated not by meritorious product offerings but rather by a combination of sheer luck, illicit business practices and savvy decisions in the early 80's) when it comes to mobile computing -- surprise, surprise -- people are actually demanding products that work well, and Windows mediocrity, which people tolerated on the desktop because it was the tax paid for low-cost computing, simply doesn't cut it anymore. Now, for the first time in its existence, Microsoft is forced to compete in a marketplace on merit alone, and is unsurprisingly coming up short. On the desktop, Microsoft reaped billions by staying away from the headaches and low margins of the hardware game and churning out cruddy software for that hardware. Now, it is clear that a synergy between hardware and software is necessary to create the preeminent user experience, as Apple has ably proven. Karma's a bitch.