Why Apple makes better products than Microsoft and AWS has better customer service than GCP
How vision and values shape a company's output
TLDR
The key to understanding the way a company operates is to read and assess the quality of their mission/vision statement
Apple, Google, and Amazon have great mission statements, whereas Microsoft does not.
A company’s values and vision will determine its strengths and weaknesses.
Vision vs Mission
The difference between vision and mission statements is not that important; some companies merge these together, whereas others use vision as a longer-term strategy and mission to set more immediate goals for the company. In this post, we will use these terms interchangeably.
The Importance of Vision and Values
Simon Sinek puts the importance of a good vision brilliantly in the following quote:
“When we know WHY we do what we do, everything falls into place. When we don’t, we have to push things into place.”
Vision is paramount. It helps your engineering teams pick the right solutions and brainstorm the right ideas with ease and inspires them to work tirelessly on them. Vision paves the way into flow state for engineers by providing an overarching goal, a quest for those embarked on your company’s journey. Vision is purpose. Vision and values are also the constraints that define the type of work that’s important and what isn’t. Without it, a company is just aimless, coming up with random ideas or continuously changing directions in response to competitors. Vision-driven companies are proactive; companies without vision are reactive.
Dan Pink, in his great talk “The Puzzle of Motivation”, demonstrates that more money doesn’t motivate creative individuals nearly as much as autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Purpose is one of the key ingredients in hiring, retaining, and motivating great engineering talent. A great purpose is essential to help get engineers into flow state, it is why the highest caliber engineers and scientists would rather get paid less money to work at NASA than get rich at some ACME corporation doing less work.
Why are Apple’s products loved more than Microsoft's?
Let’s take a look at two companies, one with a mission statement that sucks (Microsoft) and another one that relentlessly lives up to its well-crafted vision statement (Apple)
Apple’s Mission
I have been very critical of Apple in the past, and I used to make fun of people who spent so much money on every product they made or queued up for new releases. I would complain about how expensive the products were, the lack of customization, and the close-source nature of their software.
Was I right in my criticisms of Apple? Absolutely, I agree with my old self, but I was also missing the big picture; it took me using Apple’s products for a while to completely change my mind about them. Now I understand the strengths of their vision, and I can accept the tradeoffs.
Apple’s products are spectacular in terms of user experience, quality, and design; love them or hate them, it’s hard to deny the engineering feat that the new Apple Architecture is, how their laptop can continuously run so cool, and for so long without compromising on performance. Or how Apple Vision makes the next best VR/AR headset look 8 years old by comparison.
So why is it that Apple can consistently deliver this level of quality? I believe that the key is clearly stated in their mission statement; consider this snippet from it:
“We believe in the simple, not the complex. We believe we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution”
Let’s break it down:
We believe in the simple, not the complex: Apple’s products are known for their obsession with simplicity, which goes hand in hand with user experience. They focus on providing fewer but higher-quality features.
Control the primary technologies behind the products: Apple can deliver the best possible experience with everything they give you because they control the entire design and implementation, both hardware and software. Many people have criticized Apple for not making products more customizable or being control freaks, but that’s not the point; that’s not Apple’s vision, and that’s okay because Apple is not trying to be the best at everything; they are just living up to their vision and playing to their strengths.
Participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution: Apple does not operate like Samsung or Microsoft, greedily entering all markets where they see others make a profit to create similar or slightly better products. They make fewer but conscious decisions that align with their core expertise and release products that align with their values in ways that are far ahead of the competition.
In other words, by having a clear vision and living up to it, Apple can consistently live up to their standards.
Microsoft’s Mission
First, a little rant about my history with Microsoft and why they are not my favorite company…
It started with Windows 98 and Windows NT; at the time, I was getting daily bluescreens, and the operating system as a whole was really bad, very insecure, buggy, and terribly designed; instead of learning from Unix or Apple and make it better, Microsoft made an OS that was much worse (but man did they copy). And even though they got a lot better from Windows XP onwards, the quality of their products always left a lot to be desired.
When I started my career in IT support, I was working mainly with Microsoft products, and the issues were just ludicrous. For example, I couldn’t go a day without Outlook issues of some sort, whether on the client side (utterly clunky application) or on the server side (you gotta pay more money for licenses to be able to store more than 80 gigs on Exchange or ask user to delete emails)
And aside from crappy products, I got to witness just how ruthless Microsoft could be with the competition, they just didn’t focus on improving their technology to outcompete them - something I can respect; they would go out of their way to destroy them. For example, threatening vendors to pull Windows from their machines if they included a competitor product, implementing web standards wrong on IE (incompetence or deliberately, I don’t know) when they had a monopoly so websites wouldn’t work correctly on competitor’s browsers or patent trolling… and the list goes on.
Some people say that Microsoft has changed, that they are a better company; whether there is some truth there or not, I can’t say for sure (I am guessing not entirely). I know that they tried to destroy Google like they did with many other companies before them and couldn’t do it, so now their only option is to emulate them, which is probably why Microsoft became so open-source friendly, not so much because they believed in it from day 1 (in fact Bill Gates HATED the idea), but because Google was doing it and becoming more successful because of it, Microsoft did the smart thing and embraced it too, credit where its due.
In this sense, I have to give Microsoft a lot of credit for pivoting, acting fast, and delivering software quickly. I think that’s something that they have always been amazing at. They also have sharp business acumen and have made some very wise purchasing decisions, such as GitHub or OpenAI.
And it’s not that Microsoft cannot do great things (I love VSCode); the problem with Microsoft is just the general lack of vision driving them, or rather, the hidden vision that they don’t reveal to the public. Let’s look at Microsoft’s stated mission:
“Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”
That mission statement sucks because it’s too vague. It really doesn’t say anything; every other company does that. My supermarket helps me achieve more; by shopping in it, I don’t have to grow my own food; a gym helps you achieve more, so does Apple, and Google, and Amazon; how is this vision statement useful or differentiating? It isn’t, that’s why it sucks.
Also, does Microsoft even live up to this statement? When they released Windows Phone, did that help anyone achieve more than Android or iPhone? What about IE? Consider this excerpt from an old paper about Microsoft’s anticompetitive practices; at the time it was written, IE was the dominant browser:
“Since Microsoft’s success in exterminating Netscape, however, it has invested little in developing its Internet Explorer web browser. During Microsoft’s push to destroy Netscape, it released four major new versions of Internet Explorer in two years. But after it successfully excluded Netscape from the market, Microsoft slowed browser development, releasing only two new versions between 1998 and 2001, neither of which was a major upgrade. After 2001, Microsoft “effectively disbanded the Internet Explorer group after killing Netscape.” Microsoft did not introduce a new version of Internet Explorer for Windows until 2006, and even then reviewers labeled the new version as an underwhelming catch-up release.”
Microsoft effectively destroyed the competition, reached a monopoly, and then stopped working on improving their browser. Not only that, they also implemented standards wrong so websites wouldn’t look “right” on competing browsers, making it very difficult for users to safely switch to a different, better browser. Microsoft managed to maintain that monopoly until Google finally dethroned them with Chrome. Chrome was an staggering 70 times faster than IE at rendering javascript on its first release and had Google’s home page to promote it, a few of the main reasons why they were able to dethrone them.
Instead of helping people achieve more, Microsoft’s historical actions seem to align more with a company that’s hell-bent on attaining and maintaining a monopoly by any means necessary, Microsoft is also fiercely sales-driven, according to people I’ve met who worked there, but none of this would make a great mission statement:
“Our mission is to achieve monopoly by vanquishing our competitors at any cost, preferably by litigation, defamation, or hustling other vendors to do it for us, but if that doesn’t work, we will emulate what they do and try to offer features that they haven’t and push it to our corporate customers. Our main goal is essentially to sell more, no matter the cost”
That mission statement is a lot more accurate about Microsoft based on their past behaviour but is it different now? Maybe, to give due credit to Microsoft, I believe they have been more proactive in emulating the good things that worked for other companies, and they are investing more in innovation and open source, not just blindly copying others, so I give them some credit for it. But frankly, I still have zero excitement about using any of their products except for VSCode and a few other open-source projects they have going. Especially when I have so many friends and ex-colleagues constantly telling me how much they hate Azure.
The sentiment online seems to have changed towards Microsoft in recent years, with people saying that they are truly a more ethical, better company. I don’t know if this is objectively true or just because they are now seen as an “underdog” in some key areas, or because the mob has shifted towards hating Google now, or maybe because they feel that Bill Gates's charity makes him a great guy, but either way, I remain very skeptical about Microsoft myself, perhaps one day something will change my mind.
Why AWS has better customer service than GCP
Both Google and Amazon have very good mission statements and values outlined on their sites, and for the most part, they align with them. Here I will explain how they both affect their cloud products.
Google
I’ve spoken in the past ad nauseam about why I think that GCP is better than AWS. TLDR, the user experience is far superior in GCP. However, multiple reports online and from colleagues mention that AWS provides their customers with better customer service (with some exceptions), especially when things go wrong.
This, I believe, is also reflected in the company’s values; here is a snippet of Google’s company’s values:
Focus on the user, all else will follow
It’s best to do one thing really well
(From Google Cloud’s vision) Accelerate every organization’s ability to digitally transform
And Amazon’s company values, as mentioned in its mission statement, are:
customer obsession rather than competitor focus
passion for invention
commitment to operational excellence
long-term thinking
These values are very telling of the way that Amazon and Google do things in their respective clouds. I remember reading somewhere in a book about Google that Larry Page believed that the software should be able to solve the issues for the user without needing to talk to someone. This is very much reflected in the way that the company does things today.
On the positive side, Google will really go out of their way to provide you with excellent user experience that’s easy to use and intuitive, making their platform a joy to use, automating most tasks and reducing the number of steps a user needs to take to get their job done, which saves companies money in engineering hours.
On the negative side, Google is not very strong at having humans deal with customers, as it isn’t part of their core values. This also has the side effect that they will often automate very drastic actions without seemingly having a human intervene first. For example, there are a few examples online where GCP accounts were suspended without any sort of explanation, leaving some of their customers hanging. I can’t say for certain the reason is this, and I am assuming it is very rare, but I am willing to wager it falls along the same lines of automating anything and everything for the user (in this case, the user being internal employees)
Google also sees their employees as users, so they create very intuitive and easy-to-use tools for them to do their job easier and get into flow state without needing much help. This is probably why Google is one of the best at developer experience, because there is very little friction in the way of doing your job.
AWS customer obsession is also shown by the multitude of products they release to satisfy the needs of almost any corporate customer, legacy or not. On the flipside, Google prefers that customers adapt to the future and gives products that are aligned with their vision of “accelerate organizations' ability to digitally transform” This is why you see products like client VPN in AWS, but for GCP, you have something more modern like BeyondCorp (Zero trust networks), and this is also probably why GCP is far more ruthless about deprecating products than AWS is.
Conclusion
It is important to review the vision, mission, and values of a company you are going to buy services from and try to understand whether they live by them and how. This will make it easier for you to make decisions that align with what you most need and also will help you determine more accurately what the future of the company holds.
Companies without a clear (or hidden) vision and set of values can also be very successful, but it will be much harder to determine with accuracy what to expect from them, and the quality of the results will not be as consistently good.
About the Author
Fernando Villalba has over a decade of miscellaneous IT experience. He started in IT support ("Have you tried turning it on and off?"), veered to become a SysAdmin ("Don't you dare turn it off") and later segued into DevOps type of roles ("Destroy and replace!"). He has been a consultant for various multi-billion dollar organizations helping them achieve their highest potential with their DevOps processes.
Great post, thank you…But, Microsoft’s original mission was to see “a PC on every desktop and every home” which was very focused and required low cost Intel chips married with Windows and Office to make it happen. I think that was a big bold goal…