Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I had a whole long thing written but deleted it (seems like I wrote another whole thing now), fearing it would read to negative, just to leave:
The first 20 minutes leave me, as a listener, perplexed.
Wonder what others’ takes were.
Maybe just one wish: please extend your view of the market from a) “normal people” (people who consume cheap schrott mindlessly) and b) “enthusiasts” (people who consume shiny expensive things mindlessly) to include c) “people who want Microsoft to be a stand-up company that is a stellar corporate citizen, plays well with other brands in the sense of supporting their customers reach their goals and not only their treasures, that drives progress and not mindless innovation, that values and fosters open source as much as it profits from it, that has a customer-facing policy that you would want to have a beer with as a customer and company alike”. They excel at none of those things expected by group c. I am pretty sure about Leo and Paul being in that group.
I always fear for our future if “our fourth democratic pillar” sees the general population as a division into dumb and dumber. (And if neither dumb nor dumber feel there’s a problem, it’s not a problem to “sneak one in”. In short: to probe the waters for companies on what they can get away with. Until the the fourth pillar looses access since their role as a facilitator became irrelevant - quelle surprise.)
Let’s not demand Microsoft to work for dumb and dumber and for it to get idiotically rich in the process just to win the prize of who has the largest bank account. Let’s demand Microsoft to be the best company they can be, at great, sustainable, and reasonable profitability.
And I am only at minute 25. This is a tough one. Probably I am too harsh here or taking things too far, but this is part of the intuitive take of a fan-of-10-years’ mind to the first 20 minutes of this episode.
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Agreed. I think Carbonga is on the right track. Few want that Microsoft of Gates’ or Ballmer’s dreams where Microsoft had a mission critical goal to be dominant in search, in OSes, on mobile.
Becoming dominant means worse products, relationships, and outcomes. Look at Google Search these days vs 10 years ago in 2012. Look at iOS & Android these days vs 5 years ago. Look at IE, Chrome, etc.
Of course, some always argue, “But Google’s shareholders are super rich, like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft! They’re all winning the game.” As Leo pointed out with Amazon, much is unfortunately dependent on past momentum that’s been often sustained through egregious anti-trust failures.
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Microsoft & these other companies in their heyday used to solve major problems that held us back: information, integration, access, communication, etc. Everyone was an “enthusiast” for technology because these companies were creating the future by fixing today’s problems.
To me, there are a lot of today-problems Microsoft could’ve solved for their users, e.g., Paul’s mention of secure payments, but simply doesn’t. See below: productivity, collaboration, reliability, privacy, security, sustainability, access, etc.
I can list a dozen tools & technologies that are fixing today’s problems and Windows is very, very, very far down the list not because “it’s just the canvas for your other apps!”, but because Microsoft doesn’t understand the canvas is slowly wearing out.
To be concrete, Windows today has not solved the existing problems of computing / Windows 10 years ago, as they apply to most users in…
- privacy, protection
- file availability (cloud, local, etc.)
- backups, reliability
- multi-device usage
- languages, translation
- efficiency, power
- search
- security, updates
- accessibility, ease-of-use
I don’t mean these as small things you throw in a C week Cumulative Update Preview, but quite critical problems. Do the world’s multi-lingual speakers have OS-wide dictionary syncing, translation, and proofing throughout the OS? (No, we don’t.) Forget third-party apps: see Microsoft’s own UI & built-in applications. Do families have simple ways to manage their household’s PCs updates, security, privacy? Do human rights defenders / journalists trust Windows’ security? Are Windows’ most secure features even accessible or do only major enterprise customers get those benefits?
These are “sellable” benefits to anyone that uses Windows, in any segment.
In the end, today’s problems are not only being forgotten, but often ignored when brought up as “irrelevant to the goal of increasing the next quarter’s earnings.” The Windows unit is not trying, IMHO, with small revisions every five years or half-baked launches of “rewrites” (e.g., RT, 10X) or “modern versions” (e.g., 10S, Windows-on-Arm).
I could have missed things here, but this is my soapbox…
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First the comedy thing: In the late 1970s, the US producers sent a copy of M*A*S*H to the UK with the laughter track added, until that time the BBC had been showing the series without the laughter track and people worked out for themselves, when it was funny. There was a complete uproar in the press and hundreds of complaints were received by the BBC, which had to make an on-air apology about the mix-up and assure viewers that it wouldn’t happen again.
I agree with @carbonga and also with @Leo, @MaryJo and @thurrott about the state of Microsoft then and now. Modern tech, along with modern business in general, has moved away from excelling and providing the best products and the best experience. We have moved into an era where customer satisfaction is irrelevant, only the shareholder value is important (and when I was growing up, it was the dividends that were important, now it is the daily stock price, when considering if a company is doing well).
We are also in a era where small companies just can’t compete. If a small company comes along with something innovative, it is gobbled up by one of the giants, or it quickly goes out of business, there are very few exceptions of businesses that can grow organically (the dreadful, so-called, “gigeconomy” platforms aside, which gain investor money, but don’t seem to be able to make a real profit).
We have gone from a world where manufacturers took pride in releasing now products that were of high quality to an era, where we throw something out the door and if it doesn’t work properly, we’ll throw a new version out in a few months and the goldfish-like attention spans of consumers will have forgotten our last debacle and will eagerly buy the next shiny-shiny we throw at them.
This goes for all areas, not just tech. I have a feeling that the current model is no longer sustainable, either from a financial viewpoint or an ecological and environmental viewpoint. Businesses need to stop and take a deep breathe and actually start looking at the long term.
But as long as they are afraid of the markets, which are only interested in the daily stock price and the next quarter’s profit, not whether that means the business has a sustainable business model and will still be there this time next year - just as long as they can dump their shares before the whole pyramid collapses - they won’t be able to do that.
Goodwill and customer loyalty aren’t what they used to be. Word of mouth no longer really sells, it has to be flashy ads. My mother received a Sunbeam mixer as a wedding present in the 1960s, it lasted until the early 2000s, with weekly use, the brushes finally wore out and the motor burnt out. But she recommended them to friends. We’ve had 3 different mixers in the last 15 years and we probably only use them a couple of times a month. The quality is not comparable, the new ones have space-age design, but internals made to break at the first sign of real work. That has meant, we have bought mixers from 3 different manufacturers, because we have said each time, “that was a waste of time, the build quality sucks, let’s see if we can find something from another manufacturer that actually works.”
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Around 1:20 , the show eerily takes a turn of sounding like you were speaking about getting reliable info from the Kremlin, but failing to do so. But maybe I just turned nuts by the constant war reporting as of late.
Sorry. I know how much everyone loves discussions turning political (and everything being political).