FAANG Is Dead. Long Live MANAMA! (Microsoft, Apple, Netflix ...

PG tried calling it in 2007: http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

They really changed when Satya Nadella came in, however.

(Not to romanticize. Big tech has a smarmy evil these days. Ballmer just wanted to sell Windows and Office like products to big enterprises. It was less disturbing than donning their sith robes and joining the rest of big tech in trying to posses our incorporeal souls through massive amounts of data and 'nudges'.)

Yes, but actually, NO. I know it's fashionable to bash Ballmer for being the stereotypical image of the late '90's corporate villain, pulled right out of Office Space[1], but he was also the one who got the ball rolling on what we today know as Azure and saved the Xbox division during the red ring of death and other major issues that plagued the Xbox 360 and cost Microsoft billions.

If he only cared about the enterprise stuff, he would have sold the Xbox division or let it sink at the first sign of losses, but instead he propped it up despite the massive losses. IMHO, he should get some kudos for that as Xbox is currently the only competitor to the Play Station (Nintendo isn't since they do their own thing).

"I am trembling, sat in front of Steve (Ballmer), who I love to death, but he can be an intimidating human being. And Steve said, 'OK, talk me through this,'" Moore added. "I said, 'If we don't do this, this brand is dead.'" If we hadn't made that decision there and then, and instead tried to fudge over this problem, then the Xbox brand and Xbox One wouldn't exist today."[2]

Ballmer also set the stage for Microsoft's entry into the cloud space in the early days before it was even called Azure, when he saw what AWS was doing.

"Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, initially resisted the idea of embracing the software services paradigm fearing that it would cannibalize Windows and Office business which was contributing to 80% of the revenue. Eventually, Ballmer was not only convinced but pushed Microsoft to become a fully-fledged cloud company through “we’re-all-in” war cry."[3]

Not saying you should like him or anything, but this guys really deserves more credit that he gets for where Microsoft is today (the good and the bad).

As a bonus, for added humor, here he is going crazy on stage about 'DEVELOPERS', like a hamster on cocaine. [4].

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/

[2] https://www.vg247.com/rrod-xbox-360-ballmer-xbox-one

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2020/02/03/a-look-...

[4] https://youtu.be/I14b-C67EXY?t=12

I guess some people found it funny, but everyone I work around as a software developer (not for native Windows/MS, mind) all found it incredibly embarrassing.

I think this is driven by an addiction of big tech to being 'relevant' and engagement is the metric that gives them that sweet hit of relevancy. Heaven forbid they just turn out a useful product for a reasonable profit.

Even that goofball is now calling for FAAMG[0] (well, MAMAA) while (some) devs want to cling on to FAANG. Bit funny how Facebook's name change was apparently the trigger for him.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/29/cramer-new-acronym-to-replac...

Microsoft minted millionaires of its employees like popcorn. In the 90s the newspaper estimated that 10,000 Microsoft millionaires lived in the area.

Before Microsoft, for example, Kirkland was where you bought a house if you didn't have much money. Microsoft built their campus next door, and that was the end of cheap Kirkland real estate.

Housing prices were closely related to commuting distance from the campus.

Such that the "campus" of other companies is a discrete thing.

How this fits for housing is that many new hires to Amazon don't have cars, and choose to live close to where they don't need them. Not really an option for the campus centric companies, where folks live further out and commute.

The current problem is Sound Transit does not recognize that the metropolitan area rings Lake Washington, and the sensible thing is to build mass transit around that ring. I don't think the ST people have ever looked at a map. Even worse, the old rail corridors that ringed the lake were deliberately destroyed.

I find it more useful to make my own assessments about what I could make elsewhere, and whether or not (all things considered) I want to continue with my current employer.

At least until lately. Washington is working overtime to raise taxes to California levels.

Because Netflix pays Senior Engineers ~$500k/year in cash and MS pays Principal Engineers $300k TC?

E.g., I stopped using Netflix for several reasons: uninteresting content, obnoxious UI, and unhelpful/implausible recommendations system.

But I was always very happy with the reliability and performance of their streaming system.

Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, Adobe

Maybe I'm misguided, but what I believe made FAANG a thing is a strong software-focused culture that maintained a level of quality and innovation that usually gets lost at that scale, as was the case with Microsoft and things like IBM.

https://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-...

In any case Im going to throw NAMMA out there too because I can say it easier and it leaves room for infinite M companies :)

Doo doo do do do.

MANAMA

https://youtu.be/8N_tupPBtWQ

I prefer MANAAM, which is derived from the word “sleep” in Arabic.

Do doo do doo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU6QVlPq4gA

Same reason Cornell is typically left out of conversations about Ivy league schools.

It's just not that prestigious. Seeing MS on a resume is not as impressive as the others, and that's also reflected pretty clearly in the comp. It's not nearly as competitive to get a job at MS. The stock performance over the past decade has been pretty meh compared to the others.

Microsoft has some really cool stuff going on aside from .NET Core. Simon Peyton Jones has been there since the late 90s working on Haskell. Some notable ones for me: F#, F*, Z3 (SMT solver), C# and its ubiquity in products like Unity, WSL2, VS Code, etc...

What's up with Hololens 2? Any uptake? I would like to make a short video of the ultimate PC vs. Mac parody with two armies facing each other with one wearing the stylish MR glasses coming from Apple vs. the more typical-looking HMD Hololens for nostalgia's sake.

I have been in computing for a long time, and all of my jobs have been on PCs with Windows other than the weird Banyan Vines, VMS, Irix, and QNX systems I have worked with over the years. All my graphic artist friends had Apple products. I have had one job where I used Quickbooks on an old Apple Macintosh (1994), but not much else with it. I did put a deposit on a NeXT machine, but that fell through!

I have had a computer since 1977, a Commodore PET 2001 followed by a Vic-20. A Toshiba dual-floppy laptop that probably wouldn't fit under the seat in front in Economy Class seating. My first Apple was a Power Macintosh in 1995/96 (I think the 7200) on which I loaded Minix or some Minix derivative at a later date, a pen-based NCR 3125. Amazingly slim for the time, and I updated the drive in it a year or two later. My first real micro-electronics project. The Newton came out around the same time. The NCR 3125 was a 386 running PenOS that I eventually put Windows with pen support on. Various PCs I built (a RAID 0, Dual-Athlon anyone?) in the early 2000s running Blender3D. I donated $50 to support Ton's efforts to take it open source back then. And so on...Microsoft has always had the tech, but not the marketing or style of Apple. I currently use a Windows 10 gaming laptop, an old Lenovo running Kali, a 2011 iMac (1TB HD! 16 or 32 GB of RAM - I have to look). I just want tools I can use. The only computer/OS I was evangelical about was mh Amiga 1000 and 500!

I dunno, but every time I head over to that end of the island it seems pretty dead. There is the Graduate Hotel with the swanky Panorama Room bar on top that’s fun to visit (watch seaplanes land every half hour some days), the fancy cafe is open, there’s nice open plazas between buildings, it connects to the park overlooking the river (and FDR memorial beyond) … but it’s all so empty. I can’t imagine it’s operating at normal capacity.

North end is better anyway ;)

[1] https://praeclarum.org/

[2] http://continuous.codes/

MSFT’s ten year total return (1482%) is better than AAPL’s (1256%) or GOOG’s (815%), but not as good as AMZN’s (1629%) or NFLX’s (6250%). FB hadn’t IPOed yet ten years ago.

This is per a site called finbox.

https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/