Apple and Microsoft, Then and Now

If you picked up The New York Times in December 2000, you would have seen very different headlines than exist today. Microsoft was projected to generate revenue of $6.4 billion for the last fiscal quarter of 2000, whereas Apple, the company’s almost-lifeless competitor, was clawing to reach $1 billion in revenue.

“I’m not proud of this,” Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive said at the time, while also noting that the company would not make its quarterly revenue goals.

This was same year that Steven A. Ballmer, who joined Microsoft in 1980 as the company’s first sales manager, had taken over as chief executive of Microsoft after its co-founder, Bill Gates, stepped down.

Mr. Ballmer was taking control of a company that was nicknamed “The Evil Empire” because size, power and aggression had brought on a long antitrust fight with the Justice Department.

Now, it seems that Microsoft is having a moment it is not proud of.

Mr. Ballmer, 57, announced on Friday that he would retire from the company within the next 12 months.

Under Mr. Ballmer’s leadership for the last 13 years, Microsoft has struggled to transition from a PC-driven company to a mobile-centric one. Observing his attempts to move into new product categories has been like watching someone try to run a marathon with her shoelaces tied together. Each step has ended with a fall.

As Nicholas Thompson of The New Yorker wrote: “Ballmer proved to be the anti-Steve Jobs” in his tenure. “He missed every major trend in technology. His innovations alienated people.”

In comparison, Apple, which was once believed moribund, has seen its market capitalization rise from $4.8 billion in December 2000, to $455 billion today.

Certainly, Apple had its failures over the last 13 years â€" the Power Mac G4 Cube and first iterations of the Apple TV and Apple Maps were flops.

But Microsoft has seemed almost clueless as consumer and even business spending has shifted toward smartphones and tablets. After Apple popularized the importance of simplicity of design, Microsoft stayed the course with confusing and geeky designs from the ’90s.

As I wrote in a column last month, forces within Microsoft have been trying to change things for for years, hoping to shed the reputation for trumpeting features over simplicity. But often, it was an uphill battle … and Microsoft’s stock continued to go downhill.

Microsoft was able to make some beautiful products under Mr. Ballmer â€" the Xbox and Windows Phone 7 were intuitive to consumers and marketed with a fair amount of finesse â€" but the company has been unable to change its DNA, building for the tech guys in the backroom rather than savvy consumers.

Investors clearly weren’t happy with Mr. Ballmer’s product choices for some time. In 2011, the hedge fund manager David Einhorn called for Mr. Ballmer to step down, saying that Microsoft was “stuck in the past.” At the time, Mr. Einhorn attacked Microsoft’s efforts to create a search engine as a “sinkhole.”

That wasn’t the company’s only sinkhole. In July, Microsoft announced that it was taking a $900 million write-down to reflect unsold inventory of the Surface RT tablet. It was estimated that the company sold 1.5 million to 1.7 million Surface tablets in the eight months it was on sale.

That’s a stark comparison to Apple’s iPad, which sold 3 million devices over just three days in November. 

But this is the difference between Apple and Microsoft, then and now.

The Rise and Fall of Windows Mobile, Under Ballmer

Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system is hardly as influential as its desktop counterpart. And now that Steven A. Ballmer has announced plans to retire, it is easy to point fingers at the Microsoft chief executive for the lackluster success the company has had in mobile computing.

But that would be an inaccurate recounting of the story. Mr. Ballmer took the helm at Microsoft in 2000, just as the company was preparing to enter the mobile business with Pocket PC 2002, the earliest version of Microsoft’s mobile software.

For several years, before Apple introduced an iPhone, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software system was a dominant product in what was then a niche category, back when smartphones were still luxury devices for businesspeople who wanted a portable computing device that doubled as a phone.

“Microsoft was a natural company to step up and provide that service, and as a result it achieved significant market share, at least in the U.S.,” said Jan Dawson, a telecom analyst for Ovum. Microsoft’s market share peaked at about 60 percent in 2007, the year the iPhone was released, and BlackBerry took over the top spot shortly after (though BlackBerry later plummeted as well).

That’s not to say there weren’t missteps under Mr. Ballmer. Microsoft, like Nokia and BlackBerry, was slow to react to the new expectations created by the iPhone.

Unlike previous smartphones, the iPhone catered to everyday consumers. Its touch screen made it easy to use for both work and play, and eventually users could add apps and games to customize its capabilities however they wanted. That was a stark alternative to earlier smartphones with keyboards and styluses running Windows software.

Google, with its newer Android software, was quick to come out with a compelling, more “open” alternative to the iPhone â€" the G1 from HTC was the first handset to feature Android in 2008.

By contrast, Microsoft took longer to overhaul its Windows software system. It scrapped plans to do a minor upgrade for Windows Mobile and started fresh with Windows Phone 7, an operating system designed for touch-screen devices and capable of downloading third-party apps and games, similar to iPhones and Android phones.

The first phones with Windows Phone 7 hit the market in late 2010, but by then Apple’s iOS software and Google’s Android completely dominated the mobile market, giving little room for a relevant third player.

In 2011, Microsoft announced a big partnership with Nokia, in which the struggling Finnish handset maker agreed to ship most of its devices with Microsoft’s Windows Phone software.

But while Nokia’s Windows-powered Lumia devices have gained traction in some parts of the world, they haven’t done much for Microsoft. Windows Phone software runs on a mere 3.7 percent of smartphones worldwide, far behind Android, with 79.3 percent of the market, and iOS, with 13.2 percent, according to IDC.

As Mr. Ballmer looks toward the exit, he may regret his infamous words during a television interview with CNBC in January 2007, in reaction to Apple’s introduction of the iPhone.

“That is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good e-mail machine,” Mr. Ballmer said. “I kinda look at that and I say, well, I like our strategy. I like it a lot.”

Confused by How YouTube Assigns Dates, Russians Cite False Claim on Syria Videos

Citing “reports circulating on the Internet,” a spokesman for Russia’s foreign ministry claimed on Friday that video posted online by opposition activists in Syria, said to show victims suffering from a chemical weapons strike outside Damascus on Wednesday, was fake.

Apparently referring to the sleuthing of pro-Hezbollah bloggers cited by Russian state media, Aleksandr Lukashevich, a ministry spokesman, suggested in a video statement that some of the distressing images of dead and wounded civilians had been uploaded to YouTube one day “before the so-called attack.” That indicated, Mr. Lukashevich said, the claims of an attack might have been part of “a previously planned action” by Syrian rebels intended to provoke anger at President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

A screenshot from YouTube shows the video-sharing site assigned Tuesday’s date to video Syrian activists said was recorded early Wednesday.

What the Russian official called “evidence” of rebel propaganda however â€" the fact that some of the first video clips said to show victims of the attack on Wednesday were stamped with Tuesday’s date on YouTube â€" appears to be based on widespread confusion about how the video-sharing site, based in California, assigns dates to clips uploaded by users around the world.

As YouTube has previously confirmed to The Lede, its computers automatically assign a date to each video based on the current time in California when the upload begins, which can be different from the date in the user’s time zone. Given that California is ten hours behind Syria, that means that any clip uploaded to YouTube before 10 a.m. on Wednesday was stamped with Tuesday’s date.

Video uploaded to YouTube early Wednesday from Syria, said to show a victim of a chemical attack, was assigned Tuesday’s date by the video-sharing site’s computers in California.

Malachy Browne, an editor who helps to verify the authenticity of video of news events posted online for the Storyful news service, noted in a discussion of the Russian claim that his site’s study of the YouTube metadata indicated that the first video said to show attack victims was uploaded to YouTube very early on Wednesday in Syria, when it was still Tuesday in California:

At Storyful, we extract the precise date and time of upload from YouTube videos as we add them to our system. The first video we have seen relating to the massacre was uploaded at 2:50:47am on August 21 local time in Syria. This is approximately 20 minutes after the attacks are reported by eyewitnesses to have happened. The video was uploaded by a YouTube account active in the Erbin area, an uploader Storyful is familiar with and whose videos have been verified in the past. Very quickly, other videos and photos documenting similar scenes were uploaded to YouTube and other social media sites.

Images of Bomb Blast and Aftermath in Lebanon

Security camera footage from inside the Al-Salam mosque, broadcast by LBCI.

Videos from a security camera and from witnesses in the northern city of Tripoli in Lebanon on Friday captured the moment a bomb exploded at a Sunni mosque and the aftermath of a blast at another mosque, in attacks that killed more than two dozen people and wounded hundreds.

Video of the bomb aftermath at the Taqua mosque.

As my colleagues Ben Hubbard, Hwaida Saad and David Jolly reported, the twin blasts were a major escalation of violence in a country deeply unsettled by the conflict in neighboring Syria. The Lebanese Red Cross said at least 29 people were killed and more than 500 were wounded when the bombs struck the Taqua and Al-Salam mosques on a day of the week when there were large gatherings of worshipers for communal prayers.

The site of one of the Tripoli bombings in front of the al-Salam mosque. The crater is in bottom left corner. http://t.co/aTdOgJBLd9

â€" Ben Hubbard (@NYTBen) 23 Aug 13

Near al-Salam mosque in Tripoli. Many saying this is the remains of bomb car more than 50 meters from the crater. http://t.co/kSgQObFhn9

â€" Ben Hubbard (@NYTBen) 23 Aug 13

On its YouTube page, The Associated Press posted footage from Lebanese state news media showing the wounded being evacuated and the fiery aftermath of the explosions.

Lebanese state news agency footage via A.P.

Friday’s Tripoli bombings came just over a week after a car bomb in a Hezbollah stronghold in a southern suburb of Beirut.

Ballmer to Retire as Microsoft’s Chief

Ballmer Announces Retirement From Microsoft

Robert Galbraith/Reuters

Steve Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, delivered an address at the Microsoft "Build" conference in San Francisco in June.

Steve Ballmer, who succeeded Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates as chief executive of the company in 2000, will retire within the next 12 months, the software giant said Friday.

“There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time,” Mr. Ballmer said in a statement on the company’s Web site.

Mr. Ballmer, 57, will stay on until a successor is chosen by a special committee of the board of directors that includes John W. Thompson, the board’s lead independent director, and Mr. Gates, chairman of the company. The committee will consider both internal and external candidates, the company said.

“My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company’s transformation to a devices and services company,” Mr. Ballmer said in the statement. “We need a C.E.O. who will be here longer term for this new direction.”

In early trading, Microsoft stock jumped more than 7 percent to $34.84 a share.

Ballmer to Retire as Microsoft’s Chief

Ballmer Announces Retirement From Microsoft

Robert Galbraith/Reuters

Steve Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, delivered an address at the Microsoft "Build" conference in San Francisco in June.

Steve Ballmer, who succeeded Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates as chief executive of the company in 2000, will retire within the next 12 months, the software giant said Friday.

“There is never a perfect time for this type of transition, but now is the right time,” Mr. Ballmer said in a statement on the company’s Web site.

Mr. Ballmer, 57, will stay on until a successor is chosen by a special committee of the board of directors that includes John W. Thompson, the board’s lead independent director, and Mr. Gates, chairman of the company. The committee will consider both internal and external candidates, the company said.

“My original thoughts on timing would have had my retirement happen in the middle of our company’s transformation to a devices and services company,” Mr. Ballmer said in the statement. “We need a C.E.O. who will be here longer term for this new direction.”

In early trading, Microsoft stock jumped more than 7 percent to $34.84 a share.

Daily Report: Pentagon Becomes Source of Support for Silicon Valley

SAN FRANCISCO â€" In the ranks of technology incubator programs, there is AngelPad here in San Francisco and Y Combinator about 40 miles south in Mountain View. And then there is the Pentagon, Somini Sengupta reports.

In the last year, former Department of Defense and intelligence agency operatives have headed to Silicon Valley to create technology start-ups specializing in tools aimed at thwarting online threats. Frequent reports of cyberattacks have expanded the demand for security tools, in both the public and private sectors, and venture capital money has followed. In 2012, more than $1 billion in venture financing poured into security start-ups, more than double the amount in 2010, according to the National Venture Capital Association.

For years, the Pentagon has knocked on Silicon Valley’s door in search of programmers to work on its spying technologies. But these days, it’s the Pentagon that is being scouted for expertise. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are finding it valuable to have an insider’s perspective on the national security apparatus when trying to find or prevent computer vulnerabilities or mine large troves of data.

“They have unique insights because they’ve been on the front line,” said Matthew Howard, a former intelligence analyst in the Navy and now a managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners, referring to former military and intelligence operatives who have hatched start-ups. He has invested in several such companies. “Now they’ve got commercial desires. The lines are blurring.”

One of the start-ups is Synack, which promises to vet an army of hackers to hunt for security vulnerabilities in the computer systems of government agencies and private companies. The company’s co-founders, Jay Kaplan and Mark Kuhr, met in Fort Meade, Md., in the counterterrorism division of the National Security Agency. They left the agency in February after four years there, and later decamped to Silicon Valley. Within weeks, they had raised $1.5 million in seed money; they are now working with their first customers and pitching their experience in the spy agency.

“Doing things on a classified level really opens your eyes,” Mr. Kaplan said. “The government is doing a lot of interesting things they don’t disclose. You have a unique perspective on what the adversary is doing and the state of computer security at a whole other level.”