VF's article missed out on more than a few things Microsoft has done very well and should get credit for.
This will be my final blog post on the Vanity Fair article as I’m as tired of it, as you probably are.
Writer Kurt Eichenwald exposed quite a bit of failures within his article on Microsoft’s “lost decade,” but he seems to have missed out on some obvious successes, too. Many of the complaints – stack ranking, internal politics, crippling bureaucracy, benefit cuts – could easily have been gleaned from Mini Microsoft, the long-running blog that has detailed internal Microsoft problems for years.
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The fact is, despite all of the challenges, Ballmer’s troops have done some things very right. Despite what you may think after the last few blogs, I do want to be fair. So let’s give Microsoft praise where it’s due:
Windows 7: Eichenwald’s fawning over Mac OS seems to have occluded a few realities. First, Mac OS X “Tiger” may have been what Longhorn aspired to be, but it didn’t just work smoothly. Tiger was a rough launch with a lot of incompatibilities and fixes needed.
Second, he goes over the failure of Windows Vista but says not a word about Windows 7 – not one mention – and 7 is a universally praised operating system that set fire to the PC market for a few years before tablets and the economy changed the market.
Windows Server: At the start of the “lost decade,” Windows Server was considered at best a departmental server. Today, IDC says Windows Server sales represent 45.5% of overall quarterly factory revenue and 71% of all quarterly server shipments. It powers most major ecommerce servers, where Unix ruled the roost a decade ago. And Windows Server 2012 looks tremendous as the first fully cloud-designed operating system. Server software isn’t as sexy as iOS, but it still runs many businesses.
Visual Studio: What started out as Visual Basic and Visual C++ together in one box is now an industry standard development environment that supports HTML, Java and JavaScript, Web languages like Python as well as debuggers, testing and deployment tools. And on the back end you have great support networks like Channel 9 and MSDN.
Xbox: I was with Wired News as a freelancer back when Xbox was announced. In fact, I was at the E3 conference in 2001 when the Xbox was formally introduced in between press conferences by Sony and Nintendo. The reaction among my colleagues was basically snickering. Sony and Nintendo owned the game console business like Coke and Pepsi own cola, and now this upstart with no prior experience in consoles was going to make a run?
No one is laughing now. Microsoft now owns the market and far too many PC games start out on the console and are up ported to the PC later. Over time, the Xbox 360 has been expanded to become a more comprehensive living room entertainment device, and the Xbox 720 will only build on this.
Kinect: Part of the Xbox 360’s success, Microsoft has done for motion sensors what iPhone did for touch screens. After it revitalized the console, Microsoft brought Kinect to the PC and we’re only just beginning to tap its potential.
Trustworthy Computing and Security Development Lifecycle: This is a separate group from the security group that hunts malware. These two groups have made a major effort to improve the quality of software before it’s released, to harden them from attack and reduce the exposed surface area.
No one else is anywhere near these two groups in getting people to employ best practices in making secure software, and there isn’t a dime of money to be made by these groups because they are trying to educate, not sell products. TwC is the group behind Patch Tuesday, a patch cycle that Google and Apple have not even come remotely close to matching. Apple exploits are known to go for months without being fixed.
MSRC: As much as I love Malwarebytes Antimalware and ESET’s NOD32 antivirus, neither firm, nor any other security company, has the resources to do anything close to Microsoft’s enormous effort to track down the bad guys. Microsoft, not Symantec or McAfee, took down Rustock and Conficker. They don’t make a dime of money for it, but they are doing a great thing for everyone.
And finally, a few hairballs from the article:
The e-reader: Eichenwald documents a Microsoft-built e-reader in 1998 that Bill Gates scuttled. This ignores the fact that the hardware wasn’t anywhere near ready. I documented this in a 2005 article for Tom’s Hardware Guide. Seven years after Gates killed the Microsoft e-reader, the technology still wasn’t ready for prime time. It really wasn’t until E Ink perfected its screen and Amazon came along and made the content deals that e-readers finally worked. Any e-reader released in 1998 would have belly flopped.
“Still long-awaited Windows 8.” Eh? Long-awaited? Really, he said that. It’s more like, who wants the damn thing?
And finally, one last thought on stack ranking from my friend and source at Microsoft, who has already provided enough insight into the most troubling aspect of Microsoft’s management style:
“I’ve heard there have been actual suicides over bad stack-rankings, and considering some of these Type A H-1Bs who’ve never been ‘average’ in their lives and face unimaginable pressures to excel, I believe it may be so. On that note, I know a therapist who has treated many Microsoft spouses and family over the years. She has horrible things to say about what this system does to people in its orbit. There’s also ‘Stack Rank This! Memoirs of a Microsoft Couple,’ a Kindle Single that was making the rounds a few weeks back. Those two got the worst of the viciousness by far.”
