Topic: Microsoft

Contrasting Apple and Microsoft’s Product Strategy: A Tale of Two Spills

Bernhard Kappe, Monday, August 10, 2009 @ 9:55 pm

Daring Fireball had another insightful article on the contrasting product strategies of Microsoft and Apple last week. Well worth a read in it's entirety if you're thinking about your own product strategy.

A few observations were particularly trenchant and relevant to me in light of my own recent experience:

Microsoft is no longer ignoring Apple’s market share gains and successful “Get a Mac” ad campaign. But the crux of these ads from Apple is that Macs are better; Microsoft’s response is a message that everyone already knows — that Windows PCs are cheaper. Their marketing and retail executives publicly espouse the opinion that, now that everyone sees Apple computers as cool, Microsoft has Apple right where they want them.

They’re a software company whose primary platform no longer appeals to people who like computers the most. Their executives are either in denial of, or do not perceive, that there has emerged a consensus — not just among nerds but among a growing number of regular just-plain users — that Windows PCs are second-rate. They still dominate in terms of unit-sale market share, yes, but not because people don’t recognize Windows as second-rate, but because they don’t care, in the same way millions of people buy metric tons of second-rate products from Wal-Mart every hour of every day.

That’s the business Wal-Mart wants to be in — selling a zillion cheap low-margin items and turning a profit on volume. That’s not the business Microsoft is in.

The truth of this was particularly relevant to me because just a few hours before reading this, I had spilled a full glass of water all over the keyboard of my laptop. An occupational hazard of talking a lot with your hands, but one I'd successfully resisted for the last two years, since my last such incident. It's a still rather painful memory.
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Software Development

What will Happen to a Giant

Joe Gillespie, Monday, July 6, 2009 @ 4:08 pm

Although I’ve seen so many players rise and fall over the years, what has inspired this post is the irony of what is happening to Microsoft. In the early years of my technology career it was Microsoft’s ownership of the PC O/S market that primarily allowed other compatible hardware manufacturers to create innovation and eventually marginalize IBM’s dominance of that market.

In the early years of PCs, the applications on top of the O/S weren’t even Microsoft applications. It was only later that Microsoft started developing their own applications and with them the predatory practice of squeezing out other application providers to rule the desktop.

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business rules engines

Everything’s Coming Up Windows

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, October 30, 2008 @ 7:07 pm

I've been beating the drum of cloud computing and the advantage that it gives to companies building solutions on Linux. Microsoft needed to respond. Well, now we have two solutions for Windows on demand:

• Amazon EC2 is offering Windows on EC2, with the pricing at $0.125 per hour for a small instance running Windows Server (as compared to $0.10 for a Linux instance). You can run SQL Server Express at no extra charge. The SQL Server Standard smallest instance (Stadard Large) rings in at $1.10 per hour, however, which ain't such a good deal.
• Microsoft's Azure Services Platform. It's still in community evaluation mode, but there is one thing that is already clear about it: it's as confusing as all git out. One of the advantages of Amazon's services like S3 and EC2 is that they are simple and can form the building blocks for other applications and services.

If I'm provisioning a web application, I'm pretty comfortable thinking in terms of virtual servers or instances. Not sure how to think about scaling and cost with Azure. I think MS would have done better to start out with a KISS approach to drive adoption. Time will tell if their "it can cure cancer" approach will work out.

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Microsoft to Jump on Board EC2

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, October 2, 2008 @ 12:57 pm

Hold on to your hats; Microsoft has just made a radical change in business model. A couple of months ago I wrote about the competitive advantage that firms using Linux and Amazon's EC2 cloud computing had over their competitors.

Server-on-demand providers like Amazon's EC2, Joyent,
and others have reduced the capital necessary to launch scalable,
server intensive businesses. Google has just launched a similar
on-demand service, and companies like RightScale and CohesiveFT are building mature businesses around managing EC2 configurations.

...

Facebook applications are just the most extreme example of business initiatives that can be scaled on demand from $70/month on one EC2 server to $10,000/month on many dozens of servers running web, application and database server clusters and farms. Compare that with the old school of investing in a large data center with a significant fraction of the hardware and bandwidth that you might need if your business is a success. What used to cost $100k in capital can now be done with just a few hundreds of dollars.

...

And it's all possible as long as you are using a unix variant - Linux for the most part - to power your apps. So there is a whole class of companies out there using Linux that can out compete their Windows-using rivals - again, the capital they need to launch is much smaller because of cloud computing. That means Linux will win among the class of young entrepreneurial businesses that are so vital to the US economy.

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Software Development

Microsoft Eats Its Young: AjaxPro is no more

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, January 24, 2008 @ 5:49 am

Back when .NET didn't have an Ajax pot to piss in, I voraciously read Michael Schwarz's blog and followed his Ajax.NET framework. He eventually released a companion "Pro" version. Now, several Microsoft MVP awards later, he is packing it in. I, for one, will miss the competition in the .NET world. That leaves two major alternatives that I'm aware of:

1. Anthem.NET
2. Gaia Ajax Widgets

Since the concepts around how Ajax apps should be built are still in flux, it would be nice to have a few alternatives in the .NET world (especially ones that don't produce the XHR salad that ASP.NET Ajax does).

Technorati Tags: ajax, .net, ajaxpro.net, gaia widgets, anthem.net

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