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I don't feel that's true though... I look at Azure, the newer features and more rapid release cycle for Visual Studio + Windows Server + SQL Server, and I believe they DO realize that they need to continually develop their enterprise product stack. They just can't seem to keep themselves from competing in areas they a) have strong competitors in, and b) often have no real experience in (shout-out to Zune, Bing, Danger - props to Xbox for being a general exception).
Those examples you cite are all those same CONSUMER market products they are showing a good deal of ineptitude in building a market presence with. It's not surprising you're not using a WP8 phone or a Zune, and Xbox and Playstation are both established enough it's a tossup as to which a gamer might prefer.
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Its true. Microsoft is not cool and you wont see many people using a Microsoft device in your local coffee shop but a huge amount of the technology and infrastructure that underpins our daily lives is powered by Microsoft and I don't see any appetite at all for the big enterprise projects currently using Microsoft to move to other technology stacks.
I read somewhere that maybe we would one day see the enterprise part of Microsoft devolved away from the consumer side. If that ever happened it feels to me like the enterprise part would be far the stronger company.
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I think it definitely would make sense for them to refocus and cut out/spin off the consumer stuff. It seems as if they've misread the Bring-Your-Own-Device movement within businesses as somehow a threat to their enterprise server offerings - but until Apple starts replacing Microsoft on data center servers, why does it matter what the device being used is? My iPhone and iPad, in Safari or in a native app, have NO IDEA what stack is pushing them content. The consumer has NO idea. So why in the world would Microsoft not push to dominate the server side, and let the consumer brands duke it out over platforms that are often just acting as web clients?? Especially when they have very little leverage in that consumer area anyhow?!
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craigsaboe wrote: My iPhone and iPad, in Safari or in a native app, have NO IDEA what stack is
pushing them content. The consumer has NO idea.
Which doesn't bode well for Apple' strategy, either. The way most of us consume content is on an increasingly irrelevant commodity product, that has little to distinguish it from any other competitor's product - at least in any meaningful way.
Which does explain the marketing - "Buy our product, it crashes a little less, is a little more user friendly, is made from slightly better materials and has 20,000 more apps you'll never need - all for twice as much!" is not as effective as "Plastic!" 
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Absolutely correct. I've run through multiple Androids and iPhones, as well as an iPad and even a Nook Color. I used a Nokia 920 for a week recently too - and in every case, the sole meaningful differentiation between them (ignoring phone functionality) is native applications - not screens or storage or fingerprinting or really even network speed.
And at this point, like you said, we're reaching commoditization - an iPhone 3G and iPad 1G run a browser just as well as the newest ones, and unless you need the crappy social eating app that just took off, you're going to be reaching for "Plastic!!!" for your value proposition.
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craigsaboe wrote: So why in the world would Microsoft not push to dominate the server side, and
let the consumer brands duke it out...
Because, of course, there is more money to be made on the consumer side.
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I dont think you guys are considering the fact that once you lose relevance or brand equity ,it will be difficult to get it back.
Microsoft has to move into consumer space if not they will find out one day that even their enterprise space has been whittled away. What do you think will happen if apple and google move into enterprise space?
What i think will happen is that most of their current customers will also follow since they already trust them.
if microsoft has refused to even try out some of this things we call failures now, they will be in a far bigger mess than they are now.
In business you always have to think of the future, no one can predict the future 100%. Apple stocks for example have fallen $5 just this morning, no one could have predicted that just last year.
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Layinka wrote: Microsoft has to move into consumer space if not they will find out one day that
even their enterprise space has been whittled away. What do you think will
happen if apple and google move into enterprise space?
Err...I am rather certain that Microsoft is front and center in the consumer space right now. But perhaps you were referring to telephony (but then no idea how that relates to enterprise.)
Layinka wrote: What do you think will happen if apple and google move into enterprise space?
Pretty sure that the cloud offerings from google are really about the enterprise.
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What i mean about apple n google moving into enterpreise would have been better expressed as "Take over" instead of "move in".
My point is if microsoft decides,like everyone is saying to just stick with whatever they feel they are strongest in right now, and dont move into other things, pretty soon,even that there area of supposed strength will be threatened.
Consumer space? i was responding to what people said earlier and their classifiaction of MS into enterprise and consumer.
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craigsaboe wrote: Azure, the newer features and more rapid release cycle for Visual Studio + Windows Server + SQL Server,
That is half the damn problem from where I sit.
They are speeding up the release cycle by adding features, instead of supporting us developers by fixing the bugs and releasing a service pack. Why? Because we are not important to them, except in the sense that they can charge significant amounts of money for each new version, and not for service packs. Fixing bugs costs money, and adding features makes money. There are faults in VS2010 that were reported and slated for fixing "in the next release of product" in VS2005! Try it: create an abstract base UserControl, and derive a concrete UserControl from it. Then open the designer on the new control - I'd strongly suggest you don't do this on a project you actually like. This was reported in 2003, and I'm pretty sure it'll still be in VS2012...
This message is manufactured from fully recyclable noughts and ones. To recycle this message, please separate into two tidy piles, and take them to your nearest local recycling centre.
Please note that in some areas noughts are always replaced with zeros by law, and many facilities cannot recycle zeroes - in this case, please bury them in your back garden and water frequently.
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A part of the problem there might be that Web Forms has been tossed to pasture and they probably have no interest in fixing issues with it, especially where the Designer is involved and ASP.Net MVC + related stuff has been really deprecating both. I do agree we'll probably seen an uptick (if there isn't one already) in the bug fix backlog after a release or three in rapid release mode. On the other hand, it's POSSIBLE that a continually-evolving code base, being constantly iterated on, could mean the more rapid inclusion of larger bug fixes rather than patching here or there in between releases. POSSIBLY. Your optimism may vary.
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OriginalGriff wrote: This was reported in 2003, and I'm pretty sure it'll still be in VS2012...
And so which perfect development platform are you switching to which every single bug reported is fixed before a new version is released?
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Not forgetting dropping technologies for no apparent reason.
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NormDroid wrote: Microsoft couldn't give a sh*t about
a. Enterprise Market
b.
Developers.
As a Microsoft Developer for over 20 years
Just to be clear - are you suggesting that say 15 years ago that they were not focused on sales and markets then and instead were focused on developers?
If the answer to that is no, then why have you been doing it for 20 years?
NormDroid wrote: Had a good time with Microsoft
I program for a living so "good time" doesn't calculate much into technological choices.
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As a recreational MS developer for over 20 years, I have always found MS incredibly helpful to developers. Almost all their development systems/environments are free. If you ask questions in their blogs and newsgroups, you will usually get a good answer.
As a recreational and semi-professional Android programmer, Android sucks as an development ecosystem and environment, and Google doesn't subsidise staff to assist developers (white papers, code samples, tutorials, newsgroups) the same way as MS has for its products. The Java/Eclipse/Android development environment is far clunkier and more primitive than C#/Visual Studio/Windows.
In a typical Windows app, you might spend 20% of your time fiddling around laying out your UI. On a phone, where it is one different window size for everybody, it can take 50% of your time. Fancy spending half your time looking at how your app looks on 20 different screen sizes and resolutions? Welcome to Android.
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Microsoft is transitioning from software to devices and services. This move is not easy. Success and failure are all possible. Apple in fact experienced a transition from computer to devices and services. It has been very successful.
TOMZ_KV
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When I ran my own company I would have loved to have "failed" as bad as Microsoft.
As for Enterprise, if you go Microsoft, you need to go all in and then it can be extremely powerful.
I would say, though, that Great Plains is a real turkey. Don't know if they fixed it with Microsoft Dynamics GP.
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The journalists write stuff that sells, not stuff that makes sense. Despite many mistakes (and every large tech corporation has tons of mistakes), Microsoft still makes billions in profit each year.
It's also none of our business who the new Microsoft CEO will be. There are tons of tech CEOs in the industry whose name I will never know nor care about, and whether or not they do a great job or a terrible job doesn't affect me much. Just because a mob of journalists start giving themselves carpal tunnel by obsessing over one or two CEO's doesn't change things.
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You are definitely right, journalists get paid for clicks + views, not intelligence. That said, you deserve rebuke and intellectual dis-assembly when you pass off specious arguments, illogical assumptions and sheer idiocy as rigorous analysis. And what good is a Soapbox, if not a place to express to anyone but your target audience, your displeasure at them or their actions? 
Regarding your views regarding CEOs, I DO think it is a relevant thing to many in IT because skills and talent are often specific to given platforms. Those responsible for said platforms are the ones who will either make said skills/talents worth developing and having, or make them utterly worthless. For me, it's several years of experience developing on the Microsoft stack, and if they run that into the ground, I could end up in the developer demographic who's top skills are now "legacy". It works for some, but I don't know many that thrive on or enjoy classic ASP coding. Despite also developing skills on other platforms with other frameworks, etc., you're still behind the guys in the job market who started on the "winning" stack and now have that much more experience in it than you do. So I think the CEOs DO make a big difference and we should care, at least when we use/rely on/depend on/are skilled on what they're shipping.
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Yes, if a new Microsoft CEO screws up so bad that they run the development tools division to the ground, then I would care a lot. I can work with other languages and technologies, but my .NET skills are what I have the most experience in and what employers care about the most.
With that being said, it would take years of horrible decisions (bordering upon malicious sabotage) to kill their development tools division, and I'd have plenty of forewarning if it was happening.
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jesarg wrote: it would take years of horrible decisions (bordering upon malicious sabotage) to
kill their development tools division, and I'd have plenty of forewarning if it
was happening
There's a positive feedback loop involved where companies start hiring for the non-MS-dependent technologies, and developers start to retool for them. MS has some control over the ramp-up of that feedback loop, and their recent decisions that piss off developers, and the press they're getting over it, is only accelerating the ramp-up.
When the loop gets going in earnest, MS technologies will become like Cobol, possible to stay employed with them as your exclusive skill set, but a shrinking pool of jobs for you to choose from.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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craigsaboe wrote: Am I the only one who keeps seeing these ridiculous articles about Microsoft
dying,
I see all sorts of ridiculous predictions about the future about all sort of things.
The only difference between the same things that occurred 30 years ago is that the internet makes it possible for many more people to spout these predictions.
The one thing that one can be sure about people that make predictions in writing is that if they are not super rich then one can ignore what they say. After all if they were able to make predictions with even a slight bit of an edge then they could be making money in some sort of investment strategy (versus writing which almost always pays almost nothing.)
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Very true... and it makes it possible for people, e.g. me, to be subjected to many more of them.
The problem is when asinine claims become some sort of "inherent truth" or "common knowledge", and anyone trying to sound intelligent spouts off the same thing whenever Apple, Android or Microsoft come up. Some people don't care, some pity the poor idiot, and some people like me react as if we just saw the ratings for "Duck Dynasty".
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 I agree with the (implicit) thesis in your post: MS is not dying. I do think it, like every other major player, is constantly changing and transforming: we, in the peanut-gallery, see the internal, psychodramatic, events, like Sinofsky's abrupt technocide, and Ballmer's death-by-365-cut's slower one, leap-out at us, as both fiction-myth, and reality: seismographs don't register the slow creep of tectonic plates.
And, I share your conviction that a solid future for the enterprise side of MS, along with MS Office, and SharePoint, .NET, SQL, etc. ... in some form ... is a good bet. I also think the "cluster" of MS stuff related to gaming including XBox, Kinect (?), DirectX, etc., kind of has a "life of its own." And, the whole Office suite, in my mind, has a strong base that spans enterprise, and consumer, space.
The interesting question, to me, is: to what extent can MS, as a whole, as it kind-of is, now, survive without a kind of marketplace synergy between consumer-side status, and enterprise-side status ?
I believe I am an active consumer of "news," and I believe to the extent I consciously choose "who" I attend to, I'm not in a passive role, as the use of the word "subjected" in one of the replies on this thread, implies.
But, in the arena of the workplace, you may, indeed, be "subjected" to the decisions of others that influence what type of hardware, OS, applications, development stack, etc., you must use. I'm out of that loop, permanently.
And, depending on the future of the hardware and software tools you use today ... which may be directly related to you and your family's financial future ... I do understand the vital importance of keeping "up to date."
I went through a real struggle about whether to switch my focus from WinForms to WPF a few years ago. The powerful vector-based graphics engine, and great binding facilities in WPF were like siren-songs calling to me, but my experience in trying development was a nest of miseries, and having to touch XAML seemed to me like reverting to making fire with sparks from flints. So, today, I'm glad I didn't switch to WPF, because its future still seems uncertain to me (I'm still waiting for the news that Pete O'Hanlon mentioned was going to break some months ago, about WPF's future). Of course, my personal decision about which MS development tool to use is about as important as a gnat on an elephant in terms of MS's future .
I imagine a herd of elephants stampeding in a confined space, while outside their enclosure professional touts sell predictions on which elephants will survive, and those predictions are then debated, ad nauseam, by a mob of technicians of elephant warfare, surrounded by a vast swarm of "the rest of us," as Steve Jobs liked to use that phrase.
The interesting thing, though, is the secret underground cables connected to everyone watching, and the elephants.
To the extent the swarm comes to believe in certain elephants increased odds of survival, and, to the extent the technicians then are swayed by the collective sentiments of the swarm: the elephants are fed more energy through the secret cables.
But ... there's a missing party at the stampede: imagine a certain rarefied class of people who sit in privileged high-platforms, far above the technicians, and the swarm. Some of them may have a background as technicians, many may not. This managerial class operates with a logic of its own, and are at the mercy of unseen forces emanating from "shareholders." And, these folks are equipped with high-powered elephant rifles that can easily kill the stampeding beast of their choice.
What happens if the managerial class is more influenced by the swarm than the technicians, or, at random, make their own choices ?
Further complicating the circus that surrounds the stampede, is the fact that paid shills working for individual elephants are moving through the crowds planting false rumors, handing out candy to the swarm, and trying hard to seduce the technicians, and continually delivering gifts, bribes, and various forms of seduction to the high-and-mighty up on the raised-platforms. And another type of shill, unseen in the crowd, is operating off the books trying to hack the software and hardware that computes and distributes the stream-of-beliefs harvested from all the groups outside the stampede, to tap into the hidden cables that connect to the elephants, and plant false signals, and warp existing signals.
What to do ? Buy some pop-corn, and watch ?
What to buy ?
bill
Google CEO, Erich Schmidt: "I keep asking for a product called Serendipity. This product would have access to everything ever written or recorded, know everything the user ever worked on and saved to his or her personal hard drive, and know a whole lot about the user's tastes, friends and predilections." 2004, USA Today interview
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It does make me wonder what goes through the (presumably vacant) heads of people who loudly announce "Microsoft's profits are down to umpty-tum billions, this year, so they must be on the verge of bankruptcy!"
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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