Comment by piker
2 days ago
People forget that Microsoft was in position to compete because of Gates' and Allen's stellar BASIC. They were hand-picked by IBM because the market loved BASIC to the point of pirating it before that was even a thing. They cared about the product.
In some of the Microsoft lore there seems to be a split between Gates as an "end user" guy and Ballmer as an "enterprise" guy. Despite taking his lumps in the late 2010s, it seems like Ballmer has prevailed as correct in his "enterprise" push. Microsoft has gotten really good at selling over steak dinners. Now Azure and M365 are starting to dominate. This gives Microsoft a strong distribution platform to push crappy initial versions of any would-be competitors to drive them out. They do tend to iterate those into decent products around the 3rd version.
But will people tire of that? I think so. In which case Microsoft will get what's coming.
Gates cared about products deeply. This lot? They only care about the shareholder, not the customer, and we all know how that turned out for GE and Boeing. It's a long path, but it's a path of degradation.
I am pretty sure the the file explorer is "slow" because it's doing cloud sync crap in order to collect my data.
Balmer figured out the most profitable product is compliance sold to governments and other corporations. And Nadella figured out it's more profitable to lease it.
Considering Gates was instrumental in bringing MS and OpenAI together, I think this is just greatmanning.
I thought that while Ballmer started the idea, Nadella is the one seen as pivoting the whole company towards the whole cloud first concept
To the point the whole desktop development experience makes us grey hairs miss Balmer.
Nadella would rather sell thin clients into Azure OS mainframe.
As someone that (for now) only ever has 2 digits worth of grey hairs at a time, I feel the same.
It definitely seems like Visual Studio is no longer feeling the love.
IMO Visual Studio presented an incredible opportunity to sell Copilot. Implement a MCP server, give the LLMs in Copilot all the tools available to a human developer to analyze and debug a codebase. Instead it's just a shitty autocomplete you have to turn off in order to get the good, IntelliSense autocomplete working.
Our parent company went hilt-deep into Copilot and ... now they're backing off, because nobody likes it!
I just don't get it. They couldn't get the AI people and the Visual Studio people in a room together? I guess, cynically, probably not, because the AI people aren't on the same continent as the Visual Studio people?
Very frustrating.
2 replies →
That might be true, but I think Ballmer claims the "Enterprise Agreement" concept where they just tack on everything as available and have a box for every possible product in the EA. [Edit: The note is really more about founders originally in position to influence the company culture.]
> People forget that Microsoft was in position to compete because of Gates' and Allen's stellar BASIC. They were hand-picked by IBM because the market loved BASIC to the point of pirating it before that was even a thing. They cared about the product.
I thought the whole MS-DOS thing happened due to Billy's mom being secretary for the law firm that had IBM as a client.