[Slackwise]

Uhh, no, not really; quite the opposite in fact.

Under Eric Schmidt they were engineer-driven, during the golden era of the 2000s. Nowadays they're MBA driven, which is why they had 4 different messaging apps from different product managers.

[hot_gril]

Lack of top-down direction is what allowed that situation. Microsoft is MBA-driven and usually has a coherent product lineup, including messaging.

Also, "had." Google cleaned things up. They still sometimes do stuff just cause, but it's a lot less now. I still feel like Meet using laggy VP9 (vs H.264 like everyone else) is entirely due to engineer stubbornness.

[robertlagrant]

I would say that Microsoft's craziness around buying Kin and Nokia, and Windows 8, RT edition, etc etc, was far more fundamental product misdirection than anything Google has ever done.

[hot_gril]

Microsoft failed to enter the mobile space, yeah. Google fumbled with the Nexus stuff, even though they succeeded with the Android software. But bigger picture, Microsoft was still able to diversify their revenue sources a lot while Google failed to do so.

[robertlagrant]

That's true, although Pixel seems good as a successor, but the big thing Microsoft did was use what they had to get into new markets.

Procuring Azure is a good option for lots of companies because most companies' IT staff know AD and Microsoft in general, and Microsoft's cloud offers them a way to use the same (well, not the same, but it's too late by then) tools to manage their company IT.

I'm not disagreeing with its success, but I do think they had a much simpler journey, as to my understanding a lot of it involved cloudifying their locked-in enterprise customers, rather than diversifying into new markets.

[hot_gril]

What frustrates me about Google is they fumbled in a lot of markets that aren't far from their established ones. Zoom ate their lunch with video chat, and now MS Teams seems to be beating GSuite. Maybe YouTube -> social networking would've been doable, but they botched it with G+. The old Google was only good at facing new technical challenges, not making products. Now that's changing, and I think at least they can make Google Cloud work.

I also don't see anything big Google has leveraged Android for, besides Pixel, which is actually more to cement Android cause they know they don't have enough control with software alone. At least I have decent amount of faith in them pulling that off.

[gscott]

20 versions of .net is wonderful. Changing the names of features over and over again is great too. I am also pleased that windows ten is the last version of windows.

[gardenhedge]

The same Microsoft that squandered MSN messenger and Skype and then brought us the abomination that is MS teams?

[godelski]

The same Microsoft that recently brought us "New Teams" and "New Outlook" and gave us a reskinned version of the same programs but now we have it installed twice?

[hot_gril]

Those are two messaging apps regular people can actually name, unlike all of Google's messaging apps. MSN Messenger survived 13 years supposedly. Skype was also a big thing for several years MS owned it.

And I hate Teams personally, but lots of teams use it.

[antifa]

> but lots of teams use it.

I bet most team members who switched from Slack to Microsoft Teams do not feel like they consented or were asked for their opinions beforehand.

[hot_gril]

That distinction doesn't matter to Microsoft. Also it's funny how Google chat products once again go unmentioned... Their alternative is Chat (or idk, chat.google.com), and it's possibly even worse than Teams.

[antifa]

I think Google chat(s)'s issue may be lack of features and marketing, Microsoft Teams is drowning with bugs, performance issues, poor UI/UX design, etc.

[addicted]

The golden era of the 2000s produced no revenue stream other than ads on Google Search.

[hot_gril]

Exactly. I never cared for the "golden age" Google. Maybe the old days were fun, but it wasn't going to be tenable forever.