[lwneal]

Sundar is the Steve Ballmer of Google. And that's fine! Ballmer was a competent if uninspiring CEO: Microsoft under his leadership missed many new opportunities, but still made lots of money.

Most importantly, Ballmer's tenure is what made it possible for Satya Nadella to pivot Microsoft into what it is today. Realistically, Windows Phone was never going to beat Apple, Bing was not going to beat Google, Yammer was not going to be the next Facebook, but Microsoft had to try and fail in order to learn those lessons.

The real question is who- if anyone- will be the Satya Nadella of Google, bringing the company back for a third act in the post-AI world. And maybe, in this new world, the limiting factor of human progress is not the number of CS grads who can solve coding puzzles.

[bsaul]

Fully disagree with windows phone. It never reached enough maturity to be a true competitor to ios, but it absolutely could have won over android. the gui was truely innovative (with the « tiles » system), and the general feeling and smoothness was absolutely better than android. Microsoft missed a huge opportunity there. It never was a technical problem, MS knows how to make operating system. It was only a strategical one. Ballmer is 100% to blame for that.

[8note]

The windows phone would never win over android.

Google is the web monopolist, and would never build apps like YouTube or Maps for a Windows phone product, since it would compete with Android, and not have the market share of the iphone.

Microsoft tried making their own YouTube app, which Google had taken down. Without access to the Google web products, a new phone ecosystem is going to be dead on arrival

[charcircuit]

Microsoft added back the YouTube app a few months later.

[dashundchen]

In terms of UI, Windows Phone was so far ahead of Android and iOS at the time (and in many areas still beats both of them. Android is still a mess). The Nokia Lumia series of phones also were solid with great cameras in an era of plastic Android phones.

I agree Microsoft flubbed the strategy, same with Zune where they had a technically superior product but no commitment.

Platform reboots killed any developer momentum they built - Windows Phone 8 apps were not backwards compatible with Windows Phone 7 which itself was a clean break with Windows Mobile. A lot of trending apps like Instagram and Snapchat never released apps on the platform, so you had to use third party knock-offs that chased private APIs. Microsoft did build some great social media integrations that tied your contacts into a single local profile across platforms (Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook).

They also kept rebranding and shuffling services on the phones - for example Zune became Xbox Music became Groove.

[random314]

Windows phone was kneecapped by Sinofsky who abandoned .net for windows 8 app development for windows 8.

There were 200K apps in the windows phone store, that would have run on day one when windows 8 released. Instead Sinofsky wanted to kneecap devdiv, and created windows rt API, which was a C++ mess that led to developers completely abandoning the windows platform.

All app development on windows phone stopped when windows rt for windows 8 was announced. Windows phone was miles ahead of Android at that point. In terms of apps they had 200K in comparison to Androids 500-800K apps.

[jrm4]

Overall, I don't understand this "that's fine."

No. It's not. Which is to say, why do we value "CEO makes money?" That's NOT valuable to me. Microsoft doesn't pay me, therefore the pure question of whether or not they make money is literally meaningless to me, and should be meaningless to you if you are not in their employ. I'm not saying it's bad either, but it's such a weird gut reaction.

Which is to say -- if you find out the CEO is making the company more money, you still do not yet have enough information as to whether they're good...

[apetresc]

The CEO is answerable to the shareholders, who do get paid when the company makes money.

[jrm4]

Right. A few more people that I also don't care about because I'm not one of them.

[apetresc]

Well, millions of Americans are one of them, either directly or through their index funds, retirement funds, etc. When you said "I don't care", I assume you meant "I" as a representative of some larger public class.

Surely you understand that jrm4's interests, specifically, don't factor much into corporate/national decision-making?

[anonyfox]

1. The windows phone was actually well put (and I liked metro UI, as an apple person!), but suffered horribly from low population + tons of shit in their "app store" - iE: it was actually hard to find a non-scam facebook app!

2. Microsoft has an actual enterprise business that is stable and not prone to disruption, they can swallow huge projects that fail easily without endangering their cashflows. This is NOT true for google, search (their core channel for ads) is getting grilled in the new future by ChatBots + SocialCommerce + non-existing customer support + known to launch stuff only to kill it shortly after + many people hate/ignore google alltogether. It doesn't matter if they can build a better Bot on their own, these huge margins are gone now, innovators dilemma.

3. "post-AI world" for me means achieving technical singularity, and what comes afterwards is strictly not predictable, including the fact if humans continue to exist at all, let alone the concept of "programming jobs"

[moondistance]

Demis Hassabis has my vote.

[gibolt]

Microsoft had a diverse set of revenue sources through that period. Google makes 90% of their revenue through ads.

Microsoft could have very easily found another Ballmer instead and ended up very different today. Main takeaway is they aren't really comparable and we still don't know where the winds are blowing for Google.

[donnie12345]

All these companies are built on exploitation of cheap labour

[JohnFen]

> to pivot Microsoft into what it is today

You mean marginally less obnoxious than it used to be?

[tmtvl]

Hello, I am Cortana, would you like to play Bejeweled?

Sorry, that isn't fair, but still I think they were less obnoxious back in the Windows 3.1 days.

[JohnFen]

I think it depends on what you're looking at. If you're looking at those sorts of things, Microsoft is far more obnoxious than they used to be.

If you're looking at business practices, they're a little less obnoxious than they used to be.

[nh23423fefe]

Make an attempt to say something you believe, instead of inventing beliefs for others.

[JohnFen]

I was stating my personal opinion in an (attempted) humorous way. I doubt anyone seriously thought I was summarizing anyone else. I truly apologize for being unfunny here.