[HN Gopher] Microsoft execs on Apple's music store (2003)
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Microsoft execs on Apple's music store (2003)
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 103 points
Date : 2023-04-15 19:22 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| PokemonNoGo wrote:
| Honest question. Does this even exist today? I dont know.
| kingcharles wrote:
| I really like these "leaked" emails because a couple of times
| I've gotten to see behind the curtain of projects, like this one,
| that I was involved in.
|
| I remember one issue here was trying to demo Microsoft's DRM to
| music execs. At the time Microsoft's software was unusable on
| Mac, but the music industry was Mac all the way through.
| Microsoft was first through the door, through outside agencies,
| they would do the grunt work of turning the labels on to selling
| their music, then Apple would turn up, sometimes literally the
| next day, with a much slicker promotion and win the deal.
|
| Microsoft's biggest problem through all of this was its absolute
| certainty that it should only provide the pick axes and not build
| this thing itself. It was certain the end user wanted a choice of
| 50 weak music players and a dozen different badly-developed music
| stores.
|
| If you want a job done properly do it yourself. Apple won because
| they did that and owned the whole vertical.
| bagacrap wrote:
| Big brain Bill Gates predicting that subscription music services
| wouldn't work
| bobleeswagger wrote:
| More proof that Microsoft should not exist, a company that drops
| the ball this hard, this consistently should be dissolved
| immediately.
| thecupisblue wrote:
| >Both teams on both sides wanted this to come together
|
| >It takes apple to make a move for us to break through
| communication issues and get anything done
|
| Imagine paying millions of dollars for "the best" developers,
| designers, managers, yet they can't even communicate with each
| other properly to align with common interests. FAANG culture is
| becoming so slow and ineffective that I'm not surprised they are
| cutting tens of thousands of employees.
|
| Where I'm from we have an expression - "many grandmas,
| lazy/spoiled child" - and it's especially rings true in creative
| work.
|
| For something truly brilliant to be created, you need someone
| with a vision and freedom to implement it. It's extremely rare
| for something brilliant to come from committee or top-down
| designed by managers delegating work to a bunch of teams. It's
| one of the reasons even open-source struggles with design - you
| need one or a tiny team of aligned brilliant people to work
| together, and you need to give them freedom to do it. Not
| constrain them with meetings, micromanaging the product and
| letting everyone express their opinion. That's how you get a
| terrible, bland, uninspiring design.
|
| Recently I had a chance to work at a theatre production that
| ended up suffering from the same issue - the director had no
| vision but only an idea, so he delegated different work to
| everyone, then micromanaged people and intersected into every
| attempt at collaboration with his own opinions and ideas. As new
| people were coming in, their ideas were added into the mix,
| creating a show that ended up being even worse than mediocre.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| >FAANG culture is becoming so slow and ineffective that I'm not
| surprised they are cutting tens of thousands of employees.
|
| In my experience it wasn't the excess employees (everyone
| seemed to be busy) but that processes in the org didn't match
| the size and leadership from the top down couldn't see the
| problem. So no efforts were made to make teams work better
| together and align their incentives.
|
| A great example was API teams would ship incomplete and
| untested work as "done" because they were overworked and on an
| insane timeline. My front-end team tested the APIs for
| implementation and discovered all the missing parts, and then
| we had to document all of it and ask the team to fix it. The
| API team would then push back claiming we were wrong. My devs
| would have to spend hours on calls with them going over each
| missing piece and the API devs played dumb every time.
|
| I would have to escalate to my manager and he felt pushing back
| on the other leads would burn political capital he didn't have.
| This wasn't just one API team, it was _seven_. Somehow the
| culture of the org caused them all to follow the same strategy
| to push their QA to other teams and delay completion. It was so
| crazy that they would get defensive saying "we have the best
| developers in the world, that is not possible."
|
| A true organizational illness.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Happens everywhere. I just advised a dev team manager not to
| push a code base to the test team while it was very visibly
| broken. You don't need a tester to tell you it's obviously
| broken, and any testing they do will just have to be redone
| anyway once the basic issues are sorted.
|
| Nope.
|
| "We have to show progress!"
| operatingthetan wrote:
| It happens much less in organizations where leadership set
| dates based on following basic scrum estimation and an
| earnest conversation rather than some manager throwing a
| dart at the calendar and using that random date as a lever
| against the teams driving artificial velocity.
|
| Other parts of the org like UX and product need to fulfill
| their obligations as well or it won't work. I've found a
| lot of teams deep into a death march who never bothered to
| push product on incomplete requirements.
| ecshafer wrote:
| I've never liked having an API team / Front End Team
| distinction. I don't think it makes good software in most
| cases, it creates that combative element between the teams
| due to different priorities that you saw. A team with a
| product, needs to have the freedom and ability to work at any
| level of the stack to get that product out, sure that rarely
| happens 100% and there is coordination between teams, but
| Vertical slice teams do it better than Horizontal slice teams
| in my experience.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| That's a major reason why graphql was invented, to my
| knowledge.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| I've been called a conspiracy theorist before, but I
| believe this is why many frontend developers make their
| tooling and stack so complicated - to carve out their own
| niche to remain relevant. Just compare how simple and easy
| Java is to get up and running.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Ehhh... Java didn't start out that way. It felt like
| confusing hell and I wasn't sure what I was doing for a
| good reason and what I did because that's just what you
| did. EJB, Glassfish, Apache, WAL, something something
| Enterprise. Java the language is quite nice, the tooling
| can be quite insane. Yeah, don't forget the custom
| convoluted setup at some companies which only work with
| Eclipse, which suddenly slows down for no reason until
| you restart it. Then, you throw in some plugins and 50%
| of your screen real estate is gone.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I quite like Java and the good
| tooling, but I'm more exposed to C# these days and Java
| feels like 90% the same, so I'm never compelled to go
| back.
|
| Or you are maybe sarcastic, impossible to tell in text...
|
| _Side-edit: from the very beginning, Java was simple,
| when it was released. But in 2010 it felt super confusing
| to me._
| the-smug-one wrote:
| >Just compare how simple and easy Java is to get up and
| running.
|
| Is it? I come from a very different background and I'm
| trying to get a small Java back-end up and running
| (Quarkus) and wow, it's so painful! There's a huge amount
| of buy in, to me, in the framework. I found Node, Go and
| Python to be easier in simply delivering a HTTP(S)
| server. I've gotta do it in Java for _reasons_.
| sibit wrote:
| I agree with this take.
|
| I work on a small team (2 backend devs, 2 frontend). The we
| are always arguing about the API. The frontend devs want
| the data for their components pre-formatted in 1 API call.
| The backend team wants to run a SQL query and return the
| entire record as JSON.
| andruby wrote:
| This is one of the reason I dislike separating API and
| frontend into different teams.
|
| Find people who can do both, or create cross-functional teams
| that can ship things somewhat independently
| Yoric wrote:
| Is that Microsoft?
| [deleted]
| duxup wrote:
| I think that's just a typical big company bog that sorta forms
| at every company. It's a human thing, not a valley thing or
| anything like that.
|
| I work in a small company, 3 or 4 devs, couple business ops
| guys, sales guy and head of company.
|
| Even I decide sometimes "naw I'm just making the call on this
| so it is consistent and works" and don't bring anyone else in
| on things because it is time to just make a call.
|
| At a big company, I can't imagine the scale of human
| involvement in every decision... just takes one idiot to gum up
| the works too.
|
| We're working with one company now who is paying through the
| nose because we keep having meeting after meeting about the
| same things over and over and this company has a "meeting
| terrorist" (my term) who is absolutely determined to bring up
| the decisions from last meeting to start every meeting and re-
| debate everything for no reason at all. It's madness.
| xigency wrote:
| > I think that's just a typical big company bog that sorta
| forms at every company.
|
| It's somewhat intentional. They want the manpower to make big
| moves, but don't actually want to shake things up.
|
| So you put red tape all over the place and start games of
| phone tag with a dozen teams.
| duxup wrote:
| I think it also happens "because this one time something
| went wrong" so they establish a policy ... and another ...
| and it just never ends.
|
| And god help you when people establish polices just because
| they imagine something might happen.
| dagmx wrote:
| There's an irony in your post that you're complaining about
| FAANG culture , but Microsoft isn't a FAANG. Meanwhile, Apple
| which is, did manage to pull it off.
| tpmx wrote:
| Yeah, this isn't a FAANG culture issue, it's an MSFT culture
| issue.
| umeshunni wrote:
| Their ability to move fast and build successful products that
| bloated big companies couldn't was what made FAANG what they
| were.
|
| Then, they themselves became the big bloated companies they
| once beat.
| rco8786 wrote:
| > FAANG culture is becoming so slow and ineffective
|
| This article is 20 years old.
| lightbendover wrote:
| This is well-aligned with why I am soon leaving my moderately
| high six figures to work on my own thing for a while completely
| unpaid. Success to me is building something great and that is
| something that no longer can be accomplished at a FAANG for the
| vast, vast majority of engineers at all levels. Sure you can
| twist some knobs and increase as revenue by 0.01% and be
| extremely valuable, but that is dead empty work.
| badrabbit wrote:
| In big companies a winning strategy I found is to avoid
| communicating with managers and get things done and then show
| them what you did and let them do their best to manage it to
| death. Communicate with other technical people you trust as you
| develop your solution but don't give managers an opportunity to
| say yes or no as much as possible.
|
| In these emails it looks like managers/execs are trying to
| figure out how they could/can beat apple. My answer: get out of
| the way of the highly talented people you've hired. The
| business aspect is only possible with a technical solution
| people like (not zune!). MS has many products like that that
| feel like a committee of managers designed them and really
| smart engineers did their best to overcome those decisions
| (until the last few years at least).
|
| Making the guy who wrote sysinternals (got shit done despite
| MS) as head of Azure is one if their best decisions. Not that
| Azure is the best but it is definetly very usable and very
| popular with enterprise customers.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Gates being incredibly candid about Jobs and the music store
| situation is quite admirable. I'd like to find myself always
| working with management and executive types who speak and act
| that way.
| chasing wrote:
| I really don't think MS had the consumer product vision at the
| time to pull anything like a music store off. Apple had the
| vision to get from point A to point B and have huge swaths of
| consumers hop on board for the ride.
|
| Wild oversimplification, but I always felt that MS suffered from
| their monopoly during the 90s in that simply never had to make
| products people really cared about. Apple did. And when the
| consumer market exploded -- especially after touchscreen phones
| hit -- MS just didn't have any good muscles to use in the fight.
| They'd been sort of cheating it for so long that the stuff they
| kept bringing to market was just a total mess.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Steve Jobs and Apple can put together a music store and iPod
| prototype that was sexy, easy to use, and wowed the music
| executives who knew Napster and iPods were the future.
| Meanwhile Microsoft still manages to infuriate their own users
| with things like Windows 11 start menu. Not to mention the
| Microsoft Zune was definitely a dud.
|
| https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/itunes-10t...
| rospaya wrote:
| > Not to mention the Microsoft Zune was definitely a dud.
|
| Can't comment on the ecosystem since back then my only option
| was piracy, but the second and third generation players were
| very good. The HD is still one of the sleekest pieces of
| hardware that I used. But Apple couldn't be beat at that
| point.
| MBCook wrote:
| I've heard the final generation of Windows phones were very
| good too. But it was the same problem.
|
| By then all their partners had abandoned them and
| developers were annoyed by multiple total SDK changes.
|
| But it really didn't matter. Because Android and iOS were
| so entrenched I can't imagine they would have ever
| succeeded.
| toast0 wrote:
| Windows Mobile 10 was pretty garbage, until the last
| release or two, after it was already very discontinued
| and suddenly the UI performance got good. If it had
| launched like that, and if Intel hadn't dropped x86 for
| phones days before the Continuum demo, and maybe if
| Microsoft had kept their promises about WP8 devices being
| upgradable to 10 and relatedly if WM10 was viable on low
| end hardware like wp 7 and 8 were... It might have been
| worth it for developers to rebuild their apps as
| 'universal windows' apps that only worked on windows
| mobile 10, not the versions that actually had an install
| base.
|
| I don't think Windows Phone was necessarily going to get
| beyond a strong third place, but WP 8.1 on a low end
| phone was a lot more usable than Android on similar
| specs, and Apple had/has no desire to touch that part of
| the market. Continuum on the high end, if the desktop
| side included win32, could have anchored the other end of
| the market.
|
| Would have been nice if they hadn't told Firefox they
| couldn't build for WP though. Mobile IE was garbage, and
| Mobile Edge for WM10 managed to be worse.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > Windows Mobile 10 was pretty garbage, until the last
| release or two, after it was already very discontinued
| and suddenly the UI performance got good.
|
| Oh I can guess what happened. Management and the talkers
| in general lost interest so some programmers could
| finally do what they wanted without anyone removing the
| start button or putting it in the middle of the task bar.
| mnd999 wrote:
| The Nokia N9 was slick. The Windows ballcrap they shipped
| on the devices instead was a shit show.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The second and third generations came out after the iPod
| Touch that had a full App Store.
| illiarian wrote:
| There's another batch of emails from those times (can't
| find the link, but they will definitely appear again) where
| Gates is fuming that Apple has iPods, and none of their
| partners that have privileged access to Microsoft (like
| Creative) can come up with anything even closely resembling
| it. A few years later MS came out with Zune (so they had to
| do this themselves), but yeah, it was already too late.
| junon wrote:
| This. It's always been wild to me how tone deaf Microsoft has
| always been. I always read these internal emails thinking how
| wildly out of touch with their own users they are.
| MBCook wrote:
| Microsoft is not, and never has been, a consumer company.
| They're a business that does things for other businesses.
| They understand that really well.
|
| MS has had one successful consumer product: the Xbox. That
| seems to have been given total autonomy. And they have
| still screwed up a few times (Xbox One launch) by falling
| into old patterns.
|
| Apple was a user company under Jobs. Is still kind of is
| (they clearly don't care about businesses), but not as
| much, and I'm getting a bit worried.
| alexsereno wrote:
| I think the real tell for Apple's future will be who Tim
| Cook chooses to replace him. Financially, Apple is
| incredibly strong. You could argue that operations was
| Apple's weakest point when Jobs left, and that Cook was
| the right choice to cement profitability and the ops side
| of the business as CEO. Now it's time for some new
| product lines to cannibalize existing products and bring
| the company forward. If Tim picks another business /
| operations guy to run the company instead of a product
| person, I do think the product first culture and DNA Jobs
| left will die out over time.
| Yoric wrote:
| I have friends who worked at Microsoft Xbox. As far as I
| understand, they indeed work like a completely separate
| company from the rest of Microsoft.
| MBCook wrote:
| I know it was purposefully stated that way. Gates
| recognized "normal Microsoft" would ruin it. And I think
| they still tried by trying to get it based on normal
| Windows at one point as opposed to something highly
| custom based on the same kernel.
| SCHiM wrote:
| Sometimes I start edge when something does not work in
| firefox. Everyone knows you want your browser to be quick,
| snappy and use few resources.
|
| What does Edge do? It shows you a unskippable, un-closable
| "how-to" (as if I've never used a browser), and a make-an-
| account-and-sync nag. It takes a minute to click though,
| what a turn off!
|
| It hasn't popped up for me in a while, but it definitively
| happens sometimes.
| toast0 wrote:
| Well, this is coming from the people who brought you the
| old Edge; the first browser with a input queue, so that
| the stop button waits until the browser engine is ready
| to stop it; and then all of your many other button
| presses play out after that.
|
| Edge as a Chrome reskin is better than that at least. But
| then again, so was IE.
| siriusfeynman wrote:
| Interestingly I've had the same experience with firefox,
| I keep it installed as a fallback if something isn't
| working in chrome but every time I (infrequently) use it
| I have to dismiss several popups about new features and
| how to switch to it as my primary browser/import history
| etc.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| This resonates so hard. I really wish that SW stop
| assuming that if they are just installed, then the user
| is a complete ignoramus who needs to be educated and
| onboarded. I (for reasons) frequently install OSes from
| scratch and all the boilerplate is so tedious.
| SCHiM wrote:
| I think I saw this too with firefox. My memory is a
| little hazy on this detail, but the _critical_ difference
| with firefox is that ctrl+t let me open a new tab and
| leave the sync-a-nag alone. Edge did not allow that, and
| I actually hat to wait while it was "Working on it".
| dustedcodes wrote:
| That's still the case until today. Microsoft has zero
| innovation capabilities. Nothing they built themselves since
| the 90s became even remotely a product which consumers enjoy.
| Everything they have today is Office which is kind of okay and
| the rest are acquisitions.
| silisili wrote:
| I think for a company to innovate, you need both to have a)
| an innovative person or team, and just as importantly, b)
| give them a lot of freedom/power. Just having one or the
| other doesn't work.
|
| I've been at companies with innovative people, who just get
| stifled by higher ups, get bored, then leave. Most big
| companies have too many layers of power in place to keep
| anyone from shaking things up.
|
| I guess that's to say, I wouldn't single out MSFT. It's a
| disease of every large company.
| iosono88 wrote:
| [dead]
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Xbox is very popular.
| mahmoudhossam wrote:
| I'd argue that PlayStation is dominating that segment.
|
| And even if we're talking about PC gaming, Xbox wouldn't be
| the word you'd be thinking of.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Not sure I'd say 'dominating', they have a 60-40 split
| IIRC.
| bangonkeyboard wrote:
| In the context of innovation, the original Xbox truly was a
| trailblazer. Standard PC processors, onboard storage and
| high-speed networking in every unit, online service
| subscriptions, downloadable updates and content, game
| achievements, huge and ugly: the following three console
| generations have closely followed the path cut by Xbox 20+
| years ago.
| scarface74 wrote:
| For perspective, Microsoft has sold around 20 million of
| the latest generation consoles that have been on sale since
| early 2021.
|
| Back in the iPod's heyday, Apple was selling 20 million
| iPods during the Christmas quarter.
|
| Apple now sells from 40-65 million iPhones per quarter
| according to third party estimates.
| tester756 wrote:
| Visual Studio Code? Visual Studio?
|
| C# / .NET (Core) / Typescript?
|
| Teams are... "OK" at best. For school they're decent, for
| work their video-co is good I'd say, but chat is bad.
| blibble wrote:
| in the 90s/early 2000s visual studio was a poor imitation
| of Borland's tools
|
| now they're a poor imitation of Jetbrains'
| blibble wrote:
| office ripped off every other product too
|
| (wordperfect, 123, ...)
| duxup wrote:
| I'd argue it has slowly gotten worse at Microsoft, and that's
| pretty bad.
|
| I login to windows and everything feels like they're coding /
| designing AT ME. It's like nobody making decisions is thinking
| about me accomplishing anything, more how they can make me do
| whatever it is they want.
|
| Don't get me started with the dozen (ok maybe not exactly a
| dozen) or so design languages inside Windows and how unfriendly
| some are.
| dagmx wrote:
| I'd argue that Microsoft still doesn't have a consumer product
| vision outside their gaming division.
|
| I think they're quite content with that now though. They're
| firmly developer, enterprise and gaming focused these days.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| The 2019 Surface Pro X is an excellent little machine.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| I loved my Surface Book too. Until during the pandemic,
| Microsoft updates ran constantly. So I let the Surface Book
| powered on for several weeks. Foolish me didn't realize
| that the CPU was maxed out and the heat would eventually
| cause the battery to swell and cause the display panel to
| become unglued.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| I think they're being "Appled" by Sony and Nintendo in the
| gaming industry though. The Xbox division has been on a
| downward spiral. Brand loyalty and Game Pass is arguably the
| only thing keeping them around. But as Sony continues to put
| out killer first party titles only on PS5, they will suffer.
|
| I think a lot of Xbox Series X/S buyers wish they had a PS5
| or buy a PS5 as well to play Sony first party titles. And
| come next generation, if Xbox doesn't have anything to
| compete with the quality of Sony's games, then I think
| they're dead. We're 2.5 years into the current generation and
| Microsoft has almost nothing to show for it except Forza and
| Halo, which was a delayed mess of a game. Add in to that the
| fact that most third party games perform better on PS5.
|
| They've been on a downward trajectory after Xbox One, where
| they refuse to state how successful it is, with analysts
| predicting the PS4 outsold them 2-1. Xbox One was a terrible
| announcement and launch.
|
| Xbox Series X/S are great pieces of hardware but they just
| can't compete with PlayStation in every other aspect. They've
| let down developers with the Series S since developers have
| to target 2 separate SKUs for Xbox, increasing developer
| effort. And in some cases developers are withholding their
| games from Xbox if they can't run on the weaker Series S, as
| you are not allowed to launch on Series X only (see Baldur's
| Gate 3). If Microsoft changes the rules around this it will
| benefit developers but it will let down consumers. PS5 is
| predicted to be outselling the Xbox even more so this
| generation. There's practically no reason for a consumer to
| buy an Xbox unless you're a fan of their exclusives, which
| they have done an excellent job of killing interest in.
|
| I think next generation will be when Microsoft taps out and
| leaves the gaming hardware market, except for maybe their
| controllers. They will pivot to software only and focus on
| selling Game Pass for PC players and game streaming for the
| remaining consumers. Personally, I don't think that will have
| a good outcome.
| etempleton wrote:
| I respectively disagree.
|
| I think Microsoft has put Sony in an impossible spot and,
| with the Activision merger about to go through, Sony is
| going to have an even harder time. The pandemic, I believe,
| has masked that people are migrating more and more to PC.
| Migrating to PC is a win for Microsoft. Kids play Switch
| and then are jumping right to PC. I don't hear about a lot
| of Gen Z kids talk about PlayStation and have even heard it
| referred to as a boomer console and anecdotally the
| PlayStation crowd seems to be predominately 30+.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > I don't hear about a lot of Gen Z kids talk about
| PlayStation and have even heard it referred to as a
| boomer console and anecdotally the PlayStation crowd
| seems to be predominately 30+.
|
| Has "boomer" slipped into meaning "people older than me"
| now? There are no boomer consoles.
| nanidin wrote:
| Atari perhaps?
| dagmx wrote:
| Afaik relative market share of consoles vs PC for gaming
| has stayed about the same with single digit shifts in the
| last few years.
|
| Consoles are still dominant. I'd like to see statistics
| back up what you're saying though.
|
| PC gaming being a win for Microsoft doesn't make a ton of
| sense to me. On console, they get a cut of every game
| sold. On PC they only get to profit of game pass games.
|
| The only major win I see is preventing users from moving
| away from their OS.
| chasing wrote:
| I would say that they seem to recognize that they need to
| appeal to the users of their products and not just those
| users' managers. And that means playing ball with the
| ecosystem and not just trying to crush it. Baby steps, I
| guess.
|
| But a lot of their product line remains a mess. (Although the
| Xbox shouldn't be discounted -- that was a consumer success.)
| chongli wrote:
| _I would say that they seem to recognize that they need to
| appeal to the users of their products and not just those
| users' managers_
|
| Some of them recognize it, but not everyone. The company
| also seems to be pretty heavily invested into monetizing
| users to the hilt with telemetry and advertising. This is
| the sort of approach that will slowly drive people away
| from the platform, as users gradually tire of the ever-
| increasing intrusiveness of the ads.
| macintux wrote:
| > I would say that they seem to recognize that they need to
| appeal to the users of their products and not just those
| users' managers.
|
| Someone forgot to tell the Teams team.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The definition of SaaS is basically where the buyer is
| not the user. The managers write multi year six and seven
| figure checks not the user.
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