Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

don — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:12:15 -0000

Your right I haven't been reading for more than a month I got sick of you on channel9 with all of the crazy laughing you would do in the microphone. God that was annoying.

It is not that important to me to go do homework on you. So, based on your response I will just assume you have a very limited knowledge of actually creating software vs. talking about.

Feel free to call me names and act like a child because I'm to busy creating new software than doing research on the "scobleizer."

Good luck i'm sure you will make a fortune giving an opinion on things where you have no real knowledge.

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

Robert Scoble — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 01:39:03 -0000

The first clue is I've already answered that question hundreds of times. Go do your own homework. The answer is in the blogosphere if you need to look. It's pretty obvious you haven't been reading me for more than a month if you need to ask a question like that.

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

Don — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 18:31:22 -0000

So can you give me a clue?

Can you tell me how you just change your story over night?

Can you tell me where I'm clueless?

I will admit to being clueless if you can will just answer two question. Have you ever written ship quality code in a real product or just talk about it? Also have you personally innovated any software product that was used by more than 100k people?

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

Robert Scoble — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 21:10:06 -0000

Don: you're so clueless it isn't even funny.

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

Don — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 17:30:26 -0000

Scoble,

Dude I lost all of the little respect I had for you. Channel9 was cool and you were such a Microsoft cheer leader. Every video was "wow this is so cool! We (microsoft) are doing so many great things!"

Now less than a year out of the company you are basicallly bad mouthing the company.

Have you ever written software or just talked about it?

Have you ever sat in a meeting and said ok we have N amount of weeks, N developers ,N features what can we build in this time. Oh yeah we still have to worry about backward compatability and still ship a good product.

How can you compare Amazon to Microsoft? Amazon is a retail store. Their web services are for people to integrate into their store. Do we really care how big their data center is? No.

If Microsoft actually did what Apple did and said F backward compatibility you would be so suprised by what could be done.

Why would MS buy flicker? For Ads? That is a crazy idea. I will be glad when people truly start looking at the future of software as software not as retail store or an ad engine or search. Yes those are all important things but without core software you can't get them done.

I think we are looking at a hype much like the internet boom. Everyone is rushing to be the next Google. I truly don't know what Google has done that warrants stock of $490/share.

I have a test for you take all of the big software companies. Imagine what would happen if you could just make all of their software stop working for 24 hours.

If google was gone would it make a difference in you life? No.

If all Microsoft software just paused for 24 hours all hell would break loose!

Think about it.

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

foobar — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 03:23:43 -0000

I work at MS and have had most of the projects I've worked on over the past year cut - for no real reason and at the moment when we were ready to ship. WTF? If our managers are so bright then why couldn't they let us know about a decision to cut a product earlier in the development (or perhaps design) cycle? What a waste... but I guess that's why they get paid so much.

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

bla — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 12:06:47 -0000

Old men moaning...that’s what I see ...having some pointless discussion about who is hot and who is not- pointless as talking about the weather...go and have some friends, or make some babies...or stop your president from ruining you country! That would be innovative for a change….ha ha ha… no…you rather whine the "GooglevsMSvsLinuxvsApplevsFirefoxvsVSvsEcliplsevsJavavsvsVistavsXPvsC#vsFlahvsBlavsBlablablablabla" pattern - as probably the least innovative of all time...

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

sam64 — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 21:52:11 -0000

I get it now! Microsoft partnering up with Firefox was an attempt to kill it!

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

Robert Scoble — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 03:59:02 -0000

KFSone: I stopped reading when you said Microsoft's games are laughable. Halo 2.0 sold the most games in history. The most. What part of that don't you understand? People waited in lines for hours to buy them.

Microsoft makes billions of dollars off of advertising on the Internet. It's an Internet company.

They make billions of dollars off of SQL Server. That isn't an OS.

They make billions of dollars off of Office. That isn't an OS.

I'd rather go read feeds from someone who at least makes a decent argument. Sigh.

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

kfsone — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 03:53:11 -0000

All I can say is: Kudos to the exec who chose not to buy Flickr. That would have been a bad move for MS. People are tired of seeing innovations swallowed by MS and then vomited out again years later by the MS-hype machine.

And there's no real, long-term stability for Microsoft to gain in buying itself into a market that is too fast and dynamic for the behemoth to stay in tune with.

Some of you think Microsoft is a software company. It isn't. It's an operating system developer. Microsoft's field of excellence is long-term, mature staples: operating systems, stock-business services (excel, word, powerpoint, visual studio).

Where Microsoft struggles is where people have convinced the giant that it can do all things. It can't. Microsoft games are just outright laughable. How many Xbox 1s sold last quarter? 10,000 units? Compared to how many prev-gen PS2s?

When Microsoft design a keyboard, they wind up with a wireless keyboard that has a state that enables/disables function keys, with no hard default toggle - the only way a user can get a keyboard which has working function keys is to buy a different model...

If MS had bought Flickr, they wouldn't have known what to do with it. If you think otherwise, you really need to take a step back and recover your sanity, because you've become part of Microsoft's disease. And note the use of the posessive - I didn't say Microsoft is a disease; but it has one. Maybe it's caught it from wearing IBM's old panties.

Vista is the worst tragedy to happen to Microsoft. It's a collection of cool with no real raison de etra. Exactly what the OpenSource/Linux community has been giving that us for years. Exactly what kept Linux off desktops. Now Vista is full of the same annoying, trashy featurettes, fluff, bloat and frippery that Gnome or KDE are. Because Apple lovers "helped shape" Windows XP into a new operating system, worrying less about the real issues that Windows had, technically as an operating system, and more about nuances that, frankly, Microsoft had already mastered and outclassed anything anyone else is going to offer for years to come.

But that expertise has been slowly drowning in the derth of buy-ups Microsoft has gobbled up. So I'm never the least bit surprized that Microsoft can't ship software. You've forgotten that software isn't all made the same.

Years ago I inspired a group of guys to take their product to Microsoft. Someone at MS saw great potential in their product and in short order their product was part of Windows. I was thrilled something I'd been a part of would now be a standard feature of Windows.

But MS had no natural grasp of this new aquisition, no real understanding other than that it 'had potential' and, slashdots inferences aside, MS lacked the ability to assimilate everything about the little company that had brewed up that product.

Transfered from the rich stew of entrepreneurial startup to the watery, piss-like broth of MS's development stagnation, it died a pointless death while simultaneously setting back that market sector by years. Rod Toll/ShadowFactor's GameVoice product.

Microsoft needs to climb out of some of the beds it has climbed into. You said yourself, "Growth comes from startups, not Microsoft partners". Well then quit buying stuff up, because everybody else knows what happens if you go through the pains of creating an MS-derived startup and actually look like turning a profit.

It's not a technology issue, Windows (well, XP, not Vista) is perfectly capable of turning out successful startups, but the process is so insidious and so costly with Windows that the kinds of individuals and teams you need to innovate something are more likely to turn elsewhere or skip the process entirely.

Over the years I've known several teams who've given up on a concept in the early funding stages because they know that if they take the Windows route, that their investors are going to be looking to get an MS-buyout before they break even and can secure their own independence.

Hell - this is exactly what we're seeing Microsoft, intentionally or not, try to do to its gaming sector. MS has done appallingly in that market - but it doesn't have the good sense to give up and focus on what it used to do really well - provisioning - instead it's trying to choke the independence out of the market so it can snatch up anything seems to make money. An abject failure to understand how money is made in that sector.

The whole Dx10/Vista Games concept is blatant thumb sucking by people who can't make games insisting that the people who can not only accept MS have a hand round their throat but that they smile for the camera too.

"Microsoft is run by people who ... don’t see the value in Web stuff"

If you want to work for a web company, please do so. Microsoft is not a web company, and it is too huge to try and become one.

"If Microsoft gets the marketing teams, the executives who are constantly reorging teams, the bean counters who don’t want to spend money to acquire interesting companies, out of the way, watch out."

Yes - because it might actually grow in a positively received fashion if it were actually to do what it does best instead of turning out backwards, arm-twisting-required still-borns like Vista.

If you like what Amazon is doing, go work for them or buy shares in them.

They're pulling in customers because they specialize in what they're doing. They're good at it, and they deliver a great product.

None of that will be true if those technologies are bought up by Microsoft.

They are doing it and doing it well because its something they do; Microsoft aren't doing it because its not something Microsoft do, and buying it wouldn't change that fact.

But if you can't desist in buying stuff your corporation isn't competent to build/innovate in the first place, then please do all of us - and your stock values - a huge favor and separate out the part of the company that creates Windows. Its the single biggest favor you could do the universe and protect that precious investment so that whatever whimsies and fads you persuade the software company into, our computers will be protected from it.

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

Victor Riley — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 20:39:47 -0000

This is an old product but perhaps a new application of it. I've been using PowerPoint and Excel with VBA (on both sides) to build interactive prototypes of user interfaces and use them for portable usability testing. People are amazed that PowerPoint can be so fully interactive, and even more so when they see that user inputs can be captured automatically and recorded to Excel with time tags. I started developing these little prototypes to resolve design issues on interfaces I'm working on, and I'm more amazed by how flexible and powerful the environment is for this application the more I learn about it.

On the corporate culture question, I think MSFT's biggest problem is Steve Balmer's apparent belief that any problem can be overcome by grit and determination. It seems to me that in tech, creativity and flexibility will beat shear determination any day, and that saying you innovate all the time doesn't necessarily mean that you do.

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

blogger@wordpress — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:56:36 -0000

"I still don’t like the Wii"

Are you from Mars?

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

Robert Scoble — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:05:11 -0000

Rob: tomorrow I'll be at Adobe. They have a much better cross-platform story. Their stuff is being used by the world's biggest sites where WPF is mostly being ignored. I'll report more from Adobe tomorrow.

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

Robert Scoble — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:03:06 -0000

Colby: you must have missed where last week I talked about Amazon. :-)

XNA is cool, but it's not aimed at the Internet. Unless you know something I don't.

Google isn't into gaming, so I wouldn't expect to hear about Google at that conference.

YouTube won Visionary of the Year there. Hint: that's now a Google property.

They also won best Video on Demand Service. So, Google won two prizes there.

Which is more likely to make billions of dollars to contribute to the bottom lines? XNA or YouTube?

I'll take YouTube every day of the week, sorry.

Interesting that Wii didn't win, even though I know tons of people who are trading in their Xbox 360s (I'm not, I still don't like the Wii) for the Wii.

Even more fun, two Microsoft employees are on the advisory board. That raises questions in my head. http://www.demmx.com/demmx/...

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

Colby — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:47:44 -0000

This blog has way too many topics on Google and Microsoft (and, to a lesser extent, Apple). Talk about something besides these for a nice change of pace! :)

As for some software inducing a "Wow" out of me, I'm not easily wowible, but this XNA Channel9 video made we "wow"
http://channel9.msdn.com/Sh...

And I think that's far cooler than anything Google, Apple, or other Microsoft projects in years.
And I'm not alone, as Microsoft won the "Innovator of the Year" and "Game Innovation of the Year" awards at the 2006 DEMMX awards, both for XNA.
http://www.demmx.com/demmx/...

As a reference, note that Apple won the "Television Technology of the Year" for the Video iPod, and Google won nothing (though they were nominated for "brand of the year").

Office 2007 is pretty wowable too. But that's me. Internet services, Robert's passion, bore me to tears.

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

Keith Patrick — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 13:40:47 -0000

John, why would Microsoft integrate CVS/Subversion into Visual Studio? They already have 2 competing products (SourceSafe and Team Foundation), AND they allow for 3rd party source control to plug-in.
The sell a competitive product and they put hooks in for others to integrate with their environment, so they've done all they need to in good faith in that area, IMO

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

Will — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 13:00:01 -0000

Local.live.com did make me wow - but I'm away from home using a mac with a 3G mobile internet connection.

local.live doesn't work with safari, so I have to use firefox but it won't load at all over this connection.

maps.google.co.uk wins - works perfectly and impressively fast considering the connection speed.

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

John C. Welch — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 09:04:23 -0000

John, I am ignoring your angry language. Instead responding to the content of your comments.

When Microsoft stops doing stupid shit that makes my job suck, I'll be less angry at them.

First, you are a bit inconsistent from your previous comment to this. In the previous comment you tried to say that our voice is not included in Ballmer’s voice because what really mattered is one person’s opinion. Now you are saying is that okay, our voice is included in Ballmer’s voice but that’s our internal matter.

No, i'm saying that internally, people hear and pay attention to what you say, including contradictions between teams. Externally, the only voice that matters is Ballmer's. Everyone else can have an interop polka party, but when Ballmer starts talking the stupid, then his voice wins. Always. So, your love or lack thereof of interop is meaningless. Ballmer hates Linux, ergo, Microsoft hates Linux. Don't like it? Quit, or get a new voice for your company.

You need to realize that Ballmer’s voice is often not his personal voice only but a collective voice of the Microsoft, in the interest of Microsoft’s customers, partners, employees, and share-holders.

You need to realize that voice makes Microsoft look like it hasn't learned a damned thing since 1997.

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

John C. Welch — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 08:58:12 -0000

This thread is not about Linux vs Microsoft. You should refrain from bringing in topics of independent interest.

It applies, because it has a great deal to do with how the outside world sees you, and it's still not good, esp. if you manage heterogenous networks, and get hit with the Microsoft "pain tax" for not being 100% windows.

But I should point out that briefly that Microsoft on a daily basis fight with fear, uncertainty, and doubt of patent infringements.

Speaking as someone who has been the recipient of the full on MS FUD campaign targeted at IT for years, please, let me say this:

Wah.

We ourselves license technologies, fight in courts, make settlements, pay penalties in case we lose. This is all in addition to creating our own technologies (90% of the time!).

Yes, again, the IT field is well aware of Microsoft's growing addiction to the NIH crack. It's yet another way Microsoft causes you pain in a heterogenous network.

All this cost is built in the licencing fee of our software.

Oh, we know that. We see it every time we look at the what, 6 versions of Vista (dude, the only purpose for that is to vacuum money) and the what, 8, 9 versions of Office 2007, the complete dilution of both the Office and Windows branding, (what's next, Windows MSN Office Live for Workgroups?), the licensing schemes that make you seriously doubt your sanity, etc.

We know what we're paying for. However, we also realize that in many cases, we don't have to face Redmond for everything we need, and now, instead of HAVING to use Microsoft products, we use them when they best fit the needs. You guys don't do so well when that comes up.

All those years of arrogance and running roughshod over IT? That's what you're paying for now.

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

Scooby Snax — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:05:35 -0000

"Name a single Microsoft Internet product/service that made you say “wow” in the past three years"

Name a single custom web business application made using a MS product/service that made you say wow in the past three years?

I lost count.

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

blogger@wordpress — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 22:52:13 -0000

@83, apparently chasing the market is the very reason of microsoft's success -ie, if you agree with a harvard PhD- http://blog.guykawasaki.com...

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

blogger@wordpress — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 22:46:34 -0000

"You guys don’t decide shit"
John, when you say this Are you refering to the decisions that affect the products/services or the public statement that Ballmer makes?

If it is the former - its simply impossible to have that kind of control. There are close to 40000 employees in product development. Roughly 3-4 employees correspond to a single feature. We are talking about 8000-10000 individual features across all Microsoft products. INclude a error margin of 10%. Thats atleast 7200-9000 features. OUt of which let's assume 90% are simple not so important features. That still leaves us with 700 things. It's physically impossible for Ballmer or even bill gates to exert any meaningful control these things. Things like interoperability and cross platform would belong to this category too. So if OWA doesn't work on non-IE browser it's not because Ballmer asked them not to do it or that the OWA team doesn't like FIrefox. The team has a release target to meet. A schedule to adhere to. They try to prioritize things and put in as many features as possible. May be when firefox based access to an exchange server hits a reasonable amount they *would* do it.

Microsoft has done more for Linux interop than Apple has done for non-iTunes interop with iPod. (I normally hate to say 'they did it too'. I am just trying to make the point that nobody is going to do something just because it makes them feel good. It has to make economic sense and justify the cost involved)

Going back to the initial paragraph - if you are refering to how an individual softie doesn't affect what Ballmer says : I agree. CEOs are CEOs. They have to dance to the shareholders tunes. I would take issue with a statment that Bill Gates would make rather than one from SteveB.

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

Diego — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 22:21:07 -0000

"But, it took a kicking from Google Maps to get the resources to do Virtual Earth."

Exactly! A lot of the wow associated with MS is when people say stuff like.. "Wow! Microsoft has done a Google Maps", or "Wow! Microsoft's Soapbox is a YouTube competitor". All sarcastic of course. ;)

Or... "Wow! Microsoft finally released Longhorn, um Vista."

Microsoft has no "Wow".

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

Kamal Jain — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 21:02:34 -0000

John, I am ignoring your angry language. Instead responding to the content of your comments.

First, you are a bit inconsistent from your previous comment to this. In the previous comment you tried to say that our voice is not included in Ballmer's voice because what really mattered is one person's opinion. Now you are saying is that okay, our voice is included in Ballmer's voice but that's our internal matter.

You need to realize that Ballmer's voice is often not his personal voice only but a collective voice of the Microsoft, in the interest of Microsoft's customers, partners, employees, and share-holders.

This thread is not about Linux vs Microsoft. You should refrain from bringing in topics of independent interest. But I should point out that briefly that Microsoft on a daily basis fight with fear, uncertainty, and doubt of patent infringements. We ourselves license technologies, fight in courts, make settlements, pay penalties in case we lose. This is all in addition to creating our own technologies (90% of the time!). All this cost is built in the licencing fee of our software.

Re: Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema?

John C. Welch — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 20:31:36 -0000

Leadership 101.

The underlings only matter internally. When it comes to the outside world, the only voice that counts is the one from the top. Rob and you and everyone else at Microsoft can hold hands and have a big linux lovefest on top of the building with Ballmer's office, and it won't matter when compared with Ballmer (and gates to a lesser extent) saying they're thinking about suing linux users.

You can talk all you want internally. All that does is make you feel good. It's what people hear externally, and externally, there's one voice that matters, and if your name ain't ballmer, then it ain't yours.

The fact is, what has Microsoft actually *done* for linux interop?

Not much. They announce a lot, (Sun announcement from a few years ago anyone?), but when it comes to DOING much for interop, well, once you get outside of the Mac BU, it falls down.

Hell, OWA still requires IE on Windows, or you're still stuck in OWA Lite.

When you see all the statements from Microsoft showing that they haven't learned a damned thing, who's making them?

Why, it's ballmer:

http://www.computerworld.co...

All linux steals Microsoft IP? Ballmer
Linux is a cancer? Ballmer

But right. Of course, Ballmer never says any of that. it's just my personal bias.