FTA: "Ballmer's Microsoft wasn't lacking for ideas; it was lacking execution."
Derek Sivers said it best "To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions." (see https://sivers.org/multiply)
Whatever the reason for Microsoft's inability to execute, the history shows that Gates (a programmer) could get stuff done, and Ballmer (a salesman) can't.
IMHO it's probably stack ranking that killed their execution (http://slate.me/19Jf74r). Salespeople (like Ballmer) use external fear to motivate people (Make the sale or my boss will fire me!). Programmers (like Gates) use internal fear to motivate themselves (Make this code work or my colleagues will think I'm stupid!). How can any programmer execute properly in an environment of both internal and external fear?
I know Gates was/is in favour of stack ranking, but I don't think it was in use during his term as CEO.
Ultimately the answer doesn't matter to me. The company has always been a bully, both in the marketplace and internally towards their staff. No one wants to see a bully succeed.
Root against Microsoft all you want - I just think that stack ranking is too convenient a scapegoat. Valve and Google stack rank, too, but that doesn't mean they're not great companies. Also, Wikipedia's not necessarily an infallible source; see [1] for evidence that stack ranking dates back to '96 or so (at the latest).
You may be right. As I said at the top it was just my humble opinion. I still stand by the statement that execution is vastly more important than ideas.
Besides, I gave up rooting against Microsoft years ago. I just don't care about any of their products anymore.
From what I understand, like you said, the problem was that they spent too many years in "lets fix that later" mode. They couldn't be agile because they had too much crap on the plate.
MS needs to have a haircut like Marissa Mayer gave Yahoo. Hardware and SAAS are not the way for MS; they need to get back into large(r) system OS dev in a big way, to run house and building automation. The game console should only be part of it. If they want to do hardware, it better be to run the code they write, otherwise they will be stomped.
Part of that is due to the way they do employee reviews. People are rewarded more (in the form of control over their own job, promotions, and bonuses) for building new things in a short time frame than they are for fixing old stuff that's broken or flawed.
Backstabbing happens everywhere, unfortunately. The main problem with MS was that it was too profit driven for too many years instead of trying to do what was best for the users. Making profit eventually has a direct correlation to providing consistent quality that is better than the next guy or more consistently better. It all comes back to happiness; customers are happier when they get what they expect (intuitive) and what the need (low bugs, fast), not what they want (shiny UI).
> In short, there is nothing really surprising in this leak. Microsoft does not steal open-source code. Their older code is flaky, their modern code excellent. Their programmers are skilled and enthusiastic. Problems are generally due to a trade-off of current quality against vast hardware, software and backward compatibility.
"Their programmers are skilled and enthusiastic." How would you get that from a code reading? Comments? No developer I know puts enthusiastic comments in unless they are being sarcastic. So, I think the summary tries to whitewash it.
The comments show some problems that never got fixed or addressed properly. They are signs that code at the time was being developed quickly and haphazardly. That is what I mean by crappy. And I'm talking about it being historically crappy, not the way it is today. I can't speak for the state of their code in every project they currently manage.
Innovation? Hardly. Innovation should not be confused with new projects. Imagine a car with a broken radio and a weird steering problem that causes it to veer to the left too often. At Microsoft the culture and incentives would drive them to put a panel over the old radio and install a brand new radio along side it that did most, but not all, of what the old radio did. Then they'd add rockets sticking out from the left front fender which turned on periodically to correct for the drift. It may seem like this exaggerates the situation a bit but it really doesn't, it's just that bad.
I don't contest the idea/execution thing but i don't think this is underwhelming, far from it.
What would that same conversation with an HCI expert yield today ? Even though it all seems obvious in retrospect, it mustn't have been that easy to forecast at the time
While it is seen here regularly -- and is always strangely given a pass -- this remains the most profoundly meaningless, if not outright stupid, thing that anyone in this industry can mutter.
I could just do something, literally anything, and me, having done a thing, would be worth way more than me, having an idea.
The overall claim has some limited merits, but don't overstate the case.
You generating an idea in your seat about a site that, say, scrapes some public resource and presents in a useful way, are more valuable than the you who uses that same time to make yourself a sandwich.
And the ideas you can have -- ideas which you can only execute after having the ideas themselves -- are of a higher quality than someone who doesn't have your cultural and intellectual resources. Your ideas are more valuable because they are informed by a more nuanced knowledge of how things actually get done.
Or to put another way, if you were approached at a party about an opportunity to work on someone's seed of a project, would you rather that person be an engineer or a fast food employee? No offense to fast food workers, but the engineer has more, and more salient, skills when it comes to this question.
The idea can't be cashed in until it's executed, and an executed idea is superior to an unexecuted one, but in choosing which idea to act on there are clearly better and worse ones.
You're missing the point. People usually have that brilliant idea about an useful service while making a sandwich. If you don't act on it, it's worth nothing regardless.
> someone who doesn't have your cultural and intellectual resources
Unless you are a scholar at the very top of your field, there are thousands other people with the same background and resources as you, or better. A good chunk of them will have had the exact same ideas, plus a thousand variations. A handful will actually do something.
> choosing which idea to act on there are clearly better and worse ones
The act of choosing is the beginning of execution, and is way harder and more valuable than generating ideas.
this remains the most profoundly meaningless, if not outright stupid, thing that anyone in this industry can mutter.
do you really not understand what this means?
here's an awesome idea. A sensor and software that can read your brain waves so you don't need mouse or keyboard. Awesome idea, right? Worthless without the implementation.
If you have that much talent on hand, you don't need an idea, you can simply copy and out-compete existing players in existing markets. To call that worthless is to seriously misunderstand the nature of business.
Fertilizer is worthless. Without water nothing can grow.
Gasoline is worthless. Without a spark it can't provide energy.
A 50" LED 120Hz display is worthless. Without a signal to display it can't provide value.
Are those meaningful or honest statements? Is it of any value for people to constantly parrot the nonsensical "parts of a whole are worthless" prattle?
I fully understand what people think they mean when they trot it out, and that is why I think it is garbage. It is refuse being vomited online.
Many of us are excellent software developers. Most of us bide our time developing projects for other people because we have no idea what to build ourselves. Many of the profoundly valuable changes in our industry have come because someone had an idea that was different and ended up changing the world.
Yes, of course the execution mattered. But without the idea the execution would be worthless. So where does that leave us? Some sort of nihilist everything is worthless depression?
The statement isn't saying "parts of a whole are worthless". It's saying that ideas are plentiful. It's saying that ideas that are astounding and fascinating to laymen and outsiders are just par for the course when taken to experts in the field. It's saying that seemingly novel ideas of solving a "pain point" in first-world life are usually fairly obvious if you'd spent an hour brainstorming with other intelligent people.
The statement isn't saying "parts of a whole are worthless".
Yes, most of the time that is exactly what it is saying. Though when engaged on it invariably the definition will start oozing around amorphously to the point of complete and utter meaninglessness.
Firstly, we aren't talking about laymen and outsiders. In this case we're talking about the company that was far and away the largest technology company. Secondly, ideas may be plentiful, but so is absolutely banal, no-value-added execution. If the quantity of poor examples qualifies the statement, saying that execution is worthless is just as viable, as the overwhleming majority of execution in virtually any domain is terrible.
I have to chuckle at bit at the notion that ideas are so bountiful, though. It's a bit like how everyone is going to write the great American novel...they just need to think of the plot...but anyone can think of a plot so...
It's saying that seemingly novel ideas of solving a "pain point" in first-world life are usually fairly obvious if you'd spent an hour brainstorming with other intelligent people.
This is what people without ideas say. Seriously. As someone who regularly struggles to find ideas that are worth executing on, I seriously wonder what imaginary world so many on here live in.
> I have to chuckle at bit at the notion that ideas are so bountiful, though. It's a bit like how everyone is going to write the great American novel...they just need to think of the plot...but anyone can think of a plot so...
But writing a great novel is all about execution...
That is because the phrase is typically given in response to the self-proclaimed "big-idea business guy" who is pitching his idea to somebody that he expects to 1) implement it, 2) grovel at his feet for being given the great opportunity of implementing it.
Not terribly applicable here... but at the same time not terribly irrelevant here either.
I've heard John Doerr echo "Ideas are worth nothing", and I think the phrase is born out of the VC mindset. From their perspective ideas are actually worth nothing. They need to see execution and traction. But from the perspective of an entrepreneur or an established business, ideas are valuable.
Wholeheartedly agree here, and I applaud you for saying it. I think I've had in the back of my mind somewhere that "Ideas are worthless" is bullshit, but reading your comment and the ones you made later really solidified that thought for me.
I agree that saying,"Ideas are worth nothing" is kind of weak, and I'd like to explain why.
Ideas are cheap and contagious, execution is expensive and risky.
When I think about the concept of an "idea" vs "execution," I think about the youtube, vimeo, blip, etc sprint. Each company had relatively the same idea--video on the internet--but no number of analysts could've predicted that youtube would be the outright success of the lot. All of them had excellent execution, but it's always risky, and for youtube, it paid off.
I'd have to agree with you. The problem is that good ideas (i.e. groundbreaking,implementable and profitable) are as rare as hen's teeth. Bad and so-so ideas are a dime a dozen.
There are patents on time machines and those that break the laws of thermodynamics. Because many patents lies at an abstract cross road midway between idea and execution.
How so? It's a testable factual statement about the world. Things are worth what someone's willing to pay for them, and the market value of a good idea is within a rounding error of nothing.
It's not like it's impossible to sell an idea, and the world is full of self-styled idea men who are happy to do so, but buyers are thin on the ground.
The missing two words there are "without execution", and it's true, not "profoundly meaningless", especially in this industry. Hell, this is the industry that invented "worse is better".
Ballmer building any of that would be equivalent to Microsoft actually building some of the technology from their latest "Vision" clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0
All of those things seem simple in hind sight, but there were very real hurdles preventing them from being realized at that time (for example, the Internet infrastructure for real-time video chat).
Concept videos like this are just the tech world's version of concept-cars by the auto industry. They make the company seem innovative and research oriented without the significant resources required to make a practical product. True, they sometimes yield useful research, but most of the time they're just meant to be good P.R.
You know what's really sad about that Video, even in the future Microsoft imagines them selves using low resolution displays. I mean, for god sakes, every time they would zoom in on that frameless phone thing you would clearly see pixels. Since it's all CGI, they actually went out of their way to give it low res screen look my painting in the pixel lines.
I think, at least for me, the true failure of MS Surface was the crappy display it came with.
I played with the Surface Pro for a week or two. I felt the display was actually one of the best ones I've seen. Especially considering the quality of the pen digitizer inside.
Are you maybe referring to the lower-res display on the Surface RT? (I haven't played with that one much.)
I wish the RT screen was as good as the pro. Played with it yesterday and it was great. Not as good as iPad, but so good that I think most people, including me, would not care. And I think the Windows 8 os is just marvelous, I just wish they would finish it. Right now it feels like beat still.
In terms of PPI:
-- Surface Pro is 207.82
-- iPad Retina is 264
-- Nexus 10 is 300
(The iPad Retina actually looks quite blurry to me for reading text after spending time with a Nexus 10.)
As for Windows 8. I've been using it on a laptop and have been pretty happy with it. I just upgraded to Windows 8.1 RTM and they've made tons of small refinements everywhere.
I loved my pocket PC. The stylus and palm style glyth input gave data entry a practicality Android tablets can't match today.
What the IPad had was style, a lot of style. The UI was beautiful. In terms of functionality didn't carry redundant desktop features like menus with it. But it was the style, the cool factor, that made it consumer in a way that nerdy Pocket PCs never were.
I feel, (like ValueAct), that Microsoft is losing consumer outside of games, and would do better to concentrate on enterprise.
SharePoint is not a successful product!! It is very frustrating to run Sharepoint as anything it is marketing for.
Document sharing - bad execution, horrible UI. Something that should take 2 clicks takes about 8 clicks on Sharepoint.
Sharepoint as a Website - don't even get me started with that. Unless you want to spend 3 months hiring a 3rd party sharepoint company to implement 3rd party tools to make it half usable, you are out of luck.
They also have very little marketing budget, and then when used was spent ineffectively. Apple reportedly lavished 700m on advertising the iPhones teaching people how to use it. Not only that, Apple figured out how to get free press for their product releases. Microsoft on the other hand, gets free press on product bungles.
They did, but their homegrown product, Lync, is far superior. They bought Skype for its user base, brand and reach on other platforms, not for the technology.
Since we've just barely gotten English audio recognition at a good state (and I'm talking in general, not just Microsoft), there hardly should be any surprise that non-English recognition is where it is.
I don't see how "catering to the needs of customers outside the US" is related to "audio recognition" other than that one of them is a thing. If you didn't realize, Microsoft products are available in a dozen languages, and localization tests take a long amount of time as it is. As a company, it supports an incredibly large number of countries, more than almost all companies posted here on HN, and definitely just as much if not more than most in the world. Just because one or two products is hard to localize does not mean that Microsoft has "severely lost in the last decade to catering to the needs of customers outside the US".
I see that Microsoft can get their software translated. Yet that is very different from actually supporting a country.
Some examples of this:
I want podcast support in my Windows Phone. Because I live outside the US, I don't have it. I simply cannot understand why.
I want support for DVB-C Media in Windows, because that is the standard in my country. Because the US have other standards, my only option is using some half-baked korean crap receiver. I want to bet that the upcoming XBox One will not really work with TV in my country.
XBox Music is the new Music service from Microsoft. Guess how good the local music selection is in my country. How does Microsoft want to compete with Spotify here? Is this product even serious?
Bing is just no good outside the US. Yet it will be an important part of Windows 8.1, so I really wonder how this is gonna play out in my country when people start using it.
Some of these were built, other ideas just don't scale.
But most of these? They exist now. Not quite as nice as the video shows, but they exist.
Kinect actually enabled a lot of the voice control experiences, Skydrive and Sharepoint do some of the other sharing scenarios, just not as nice as they all should be. I saw some awesome mapping stuff working on Windows Mobile well before the iPhone came out, including actual building maps and linking into ones "social network" (however limited that was at that time) to show where one's friends sat.
It is actually sort of sad that none of the experiences have been polished nearly as well as they should have been, by any of the players in the market really. Google Hangouts comes close with some of their collaborative tools, but then something falls apart in the experience, for example in the case of Hangouts, it can be a pain to start one depending on which UI path ones chooses to take, and various bugs pop up and just break the immersion of the experience.
MSN Messenger had a lot of good stuff, video and voice conferencing both worked long ago, but then that market fell apart.
Collaborative Document Editing was done right by Microsoft with One Note 2007, and then completely ignored from then on by the rest of the Office line. Amazing technology, not sure why it wasn't more widely adopted (I'm guessing due to file format needs, presumably the One Note team had the advantage of building up from scratch).
Perhaps most amusing in this video is what people thought LCD screens would look like! I am thankful the ID on LCDs did not go that way!
I was reading about the worlds navies around the turn of the 19th century. The British dominated the seas and were very innovative during the wars with the French and Dutch.
But then they stopped. They knew that they had the best sailing ships and knew that changing the technology will only disrupt seas in a way threatening their supremacy.
And so the torpedo was invented by the Austrians, the steam and iron ships were pioneered by the French and Americans. This continued even in the 19th century - the century was of Pax Britanica was a century of catchup.
In the end economics was important - Britain remained the worlds leader in industry and trade.
Most of these devices were built, some of them with Microsoft technology, but the technology wasn't ready, the implementation was bad (the interfaces are horrendous, for instance), the licensing was prohibitive and Microsoft didn't see themselves as a device company. They saw themselves as building the technologies that supported those devices, not the devices themselves.
We must all keep in mind these concepts were showcased 13 years before in the famous Knowledge Navigator video or in Sun's less known 1994 Starfire video.
And, probably, on many others that remained unseen by the masses.
Kind of reminds me of the Windows tablet being way before the iPad, yet the iPad blowing it out of the water. Microsoft had all these great ideas, but failed to execute. It really reinforces the 'ideas without good execution are worthless' motto.
FWIW, Windows Journal was epic, and nothing on the iPad even comes close (nor really can it, due to the inaccuracy of the input compared to an active pen digitizer). I provided some more details on this a long time ago on Quora (which kind of sucks, but it at least saves having to go into a long description ;P).
OneNote is incredible, couldn't find anything close on iPad - but feels like zero effective marketing there. If Apple made anything like that it would be all over their keynotes and ads as a USP.
Pen and touch computing are not competing technologies: you could have one or the other, or both, and the experiences would be complementary. Touch seems to have led to a much larger market than pen, which is still quite useful, just not something that everyone would wind up using like touch.
Would love to see Apple get into Pen computing, and this is one area where I think Surface could have really distinguished itself (including a digitizer on a low-end Surface RT, for example).
The problem with Pen computing is that it's too close to Mouse and Keyboard, so NEW user paradigms aren't developed or encouraged.... In short the entire story of MS Office on tablets.
Steve understood with the first iPhone WAY BACK that Touch was the way to go and people needed to be "reprogrammed" how to use it. Remember iPhone was only "Steve's way" for the first 18 months before only a few developers were invited to play too in a proto-App store. The whole path from iPhone to iPad was carefully mapped out with the next piece coming only when enough people agreed with "Steve's way". People still want iPad to be "just a pen based Mac" shows a large number of very important people don't get the subtle chane in HUMAN BEHAVIOR required to take the next step.
What's become more and more clear is that while Ballmer is resigning now, he actually largely abdicated the powers of CEO to the heads of the office/windows/mobile fiefdoms over a decade ago.
early in my tenure, our group of very clever graphics experts invented a way to display text on screen called ClearType...
Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed it made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The vice president for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control. As a result, even though it received much public praise, internal promotion and patents, a decade passed before a fully operational version of ClearType finally made it into Windows.
When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.
So once again, even though our tablet had the enthusiastic support of top management and had cost hundreds of millions to develop, it was essentially allowed to be sabotaged. To this day, you still can’t use Office directly on a Tablet PC. And despite the certainty that an Apple tablet was coming this year, the tablet group at Microsoft was eliminated.
Because they saw everything through Windows lenses - and in the end that's how they built those tablets anyway. They still see things that way. They killed Courier for the same reason - it wasn't Windows.
Because they did. Windows-powered touch-screen Pocket PCs and Tablet PCs existed years before the iPod. Microsoft just didn't find mobile devices important enough and wasn't willing to re-invent Windows for it. Windows Mobile was pretty terrible to use.
For the same reason they wont execute anything on that Microsoft 2019 video in 6 years. They'll ride Office to their deathbed, which is coming into clear view. Nice run.
This is how I feel as well. For a while I thought that Windows RT might be their stepping stone into these waters as a sort of clean break from the burden of backwards compatibility of x86 windows, but alas, it seems as though enterprise rules now until 6 feet under.
I've recently came across "The Road Ahead" written by Bill Gates in 1995, and in it he details many of the technologies we have today with surprising accuracy (We'll all have digital wallets that contain all our info, take movies and photos, allows us to converse with anyone anywhere wirelessly etc).
Microsoft had a great vision for the future they just failed in execution.
Their version of the web seems to be mostly A/V which is not really realistic as most people can't afford the time nor have the skills to contribute content in that fashion. Does that mean that they were underestimating how valuable user generated content would be?
Like all MS concept videos, it's all very pretty but useless except for the most shallow kinds of collaboration - it's not so much promising any specific technology so much as a future in which you don't actually have to do any work. How many people do companies really need whose role in its entirety consists of quickly slapping together pretty-looking "reports" full of 3D graphs?
These superficial concept videos have about as much relevance to the world of actual usable technology as porn has to the complexity and compromises of married life. The encyclopaedia we have today is Wikipedia, not Encarta, and no-one cares that it doesn't have embedded videos of antelopes bounding or the galaxy turning.
> and no-one cares that it doesn't have embedded videos of antelopes bounding or the galaxy turning.
I care. I think Wikipedia would be greatly improved with relevant embedded video content. Unfortunately, getting high quality relevant public domain video is virtually impossible. It is nice to think about though.
Hm. Well, I agree actually, and in fact it does have some media at least associated with articles, via the "wikimedia commons".
I was more trying to illustrate that multimedia alone does not make a high quality resource, as proved the downfall of the "Multimedia CD-ROM" era of content production, which I feel these concept videos are rooted in.
Ballmer and his stooges were too busy making fun of Apple and Google (aka. Microsoft's version of marketing). Gosh, when Ballmer leaves, I hope all his VP's would be taken out as well.
Whatever the reason for Microsoft's inability to execute, the history shows that Gates (a programmer) could get stuff done, and Ballmer (a salesman) can't.
IMHO it's probably stack ranking that killed their execution (http://slate.me/19Jf74r). Salespeople (like Ballmer) use external fear to motivate people (Make the sale or my boss will fire me!). Programmers (like Gates) use internal fear to motivate themselves (Make this code work or my colleagues will think I'm stupid!). How can any programmer execute properly in an environment of both internal and external fear?