Microsoft isn't going for the developers as much as for the development managers and technology company management. They build up a grand picture of the universal MS platform that can be used to target any platform and try to sell it to corporate.
Microsoft sells a platform. The success of that platform is based on convincing users and their agents to buy the platform. The platform is appealing because developers make money by creating apps or it. Has Microsoft done awful and possibly illegal things to competitors? Of course. But they've been the best for developers. Best dev tools, most powerful and widely deployed OS, at least in the PC era that made them famous and infamot.
Microsoft does a good job of making an easy to manage server/desktop ecosystem for any sized business (assuming they have at least some IT.) They do it better than anyone. Trying to break into other markets is if anything a mark that the management doesn't recognize their core competencies and is trying to overreach. What they should be working on is next generation CRM tools, directly competing with Oracle, IBM, and the businesses that rely on their overpriced stacks.
What this article misses is that despite the successes and failures of SteveB, to the outside world Microsoft is largely considered as a company without a vision. I don’t know if they ever had one, but all those talks all these years about tablets and handheld devices and those beautifully crafted videos about how computing will be 20 years from now, all that don’t materialize into products.
Take for example Surface (the table not the tablet). They go and produce a sci-fi table with a touch surface which looks amazing but costs an outrageous $10.000 and has no freaking applications. And that coming from a software company which has spend the better part of the last 30 years building APIs. Where’s the vision in that?
I use .NET daily as a platform for building web apps. I love it. I consider it a pretty solid platform and the IDE is like the golden standard in the industry. But in the long term I don’t think that they have a clue as to where they’d like to take things. Right now MS seems like the company that waits others to innovate and then follow on their steps. They spend $7B yearly on R&D and you get to wonder what’s the end result.
Sure but Microsoft isn’t really offering a coherent solution for general company data and processes. They have the power platform, but because there’s no happy path, best practices, laid out it requires a lot more buy in from actual engineers who don’t have a lot of love for nocode platforms.
It’s totally feasible to build a IT ticketing system in power platform. And then to build a sales/CRM solution and then also build a bunch of analytics and compliance and such for finance, but because Microsoft doesn’t have the barebones platforms there it’s a lot more work to stand up, and you end up maintaining a very custom product that is totally dependent on Microsoft not suddenly changing their pricing or deciding to kill the platform due to lack of revenue. At that point you may as well just build your own thing in actual cloud products instead of depending on the “baby proofed cloud”.
There are two new Microsofts, both trying to make great big piles of money.
One is the tech infrastructure provider. They're keeping the corporate customers but now also going after consumer-facing tech and startups. To do the latter, they've finally had to shed their dogma and go where the devs are. OSS, platform-agnostic, this is the MS of .NET Core, VSCode, and family. There's good people working here, and they'll make Azure make heaps of money.
The other Microsoft does "platforms". They've had a lock on corporate for a long time, though no one enjoyed it. Now they want to expand their brand and their lock-in into the personal lives of upper-class knowledge workers, challenging Apple by being the "serious" to Apple's luxury-hipster positioning, and challenging Google by being coherent and playing a long game.
The first Microsoft knows that the second is no place for their audience, so they're in a hurry to separate themselves and their wares from the platform-provider. It's not just .NET Core and VSCode, there's a ton of smaller projects all moving in the same direction. Sql Operations Studio, Sql Server for Linux, Blazor, x-plat Azure tooling, x-plat Powershell, opensourcing MSBuild, it's comprehensive.
I wish they'd just split and become two separate companies.
I'm not a MS fanboy by any stretch of the imagination but, and you have to realize this, MS already has that platform. They're so far ahead with said platform that all of this is just play money to them and they have ample time to invest heavily into R&D.
No other platform is even remotely ready for corporate environment. Not by a long shot. The billions invested in Windows software by every company on the planet means incredible vendor lock and the momentum required to move past that is so immense that is just not possible.
Any possibility of their "death" is ridiculous. This is just a slight bump in the road for them, they'll shift strategy and lather, rinse, repeat.
Microsoft is struggling to get developers excited about their platform. If they can't convince companies to invest the time to build software, they'll never convince anyone to manufacture hardware; hardware has a real cost per unit.
I think Microsoft has vision, it's just more in terms of the customer via one product (Windows). Their vision is to own the market and do what is needed to get there. It does help that they have some amazing people working there. It would help more if they could trim the turf-protecting management down.
The genius of Microsoft is in the long-term thinking. The individual products are easily critiqued. Their planning often mistimes stuff or gets caught out by new developments, and they play a lot of hardball to get where they want to go (which has never made anyone look good), but when they hit, they hit big, and make not just a product but an entire kingdom, which has all the downsides of monopoly but also substantial upside too.
While the Ballmer years saw the company coast along on its old crown jewels, missing nearly every opportunity, Nadella's MSFT has shaped up to be one that is building a few new kingdoms - in the cloud space, open dev tools, new consumer hardware (see the upcoming Surface lineup) - it's definitely not the Windows + Office company of old.
MS isn't a serious hardware company. They're a software and services company, and they make money when people use their software. Putting software on more devices is in their interest.
Exactly. Everything that "new Microsoft" does right is targeted squarely at developers. I'll judge Microsoft by how it treats the rest of the world: dark patterns to accelerate Windows 10 adoption, using consumers as beta testers, protecting their Office monopoly above all else.
Based on comments like yours, and general awareness of MS, I think Microsoft has long ago moved from <choose any category you like> to generic mega corporation. In such a company, an individual's success depends on learning how to operate the corporation, and operate within it.
It's a destination for MBAs and project managers, not a place to innovate.
I don’t think any company with the size of MS can have a unified tech stack strategy. Inevitably, competing departments will push different technologies.
reply