There was recently a little skirmish on the web regarding the question of whether or not Microsoft has stopped innovating — whether the internal corporate culture there has thwarted new ideas, and so on. Well, I think we can all agree that Microsoft hasn’t exactly been an innovation machine in recent years; although, with as little currency as the word “innovation” has these days, that’s not saying much — but the fact is that its products haven’t shown as much ingenuity as its competitors in nearly every arena. And like a dragon guarding its hoard, it has striven primarily to maintain its stranglehold on enterprise, which makes up the vast majority of Microsoft’s treasure intake. Who can blame them? You wouldn’t give up a goose that laid golden eggs either. But the the goose is getting old, and people are getting tired of eggs. What’s the next step?
Gates once famously said his greatest fear was “someone in a garage who is devising something completely new.” So the solution is simple: start building garages.
Of course, we must be fair to Microsoft and say that they probably have as many metaphorical garages as anyone else in the world. Microsoft Research and Microsoft Labs, among many other experimental sections, employ an immense amount of people, and frequently come out with really cool stuff. The trouble is that something in the structure of Microsoft’s complex interlocking-teams method of management prevents these things from being anything other than great ideas. Look at Google. Their “release early, release often” strategy not only familiarizes people with the products, but also inures them to the “beta” process (some more than others), and lastly, allows Google to gauge the weight each project should have. It’s not a failure when something like Orkut doesn’t take off: it’s a successful risk assessment.
The trouble, I feel, lies in the middle layer of the cake — as it does so often in real life (damn the jelly). The issue is that the best ideas often occur on the lowest levels, as much because those levels are highly populated as that they are the youngest and freshest, and these ideas must trickle up. That is, from what I understand of Microsoft (very little), in fact how it was designed. Good projects gain members and budget by degrees and snowball until they reach product status. The idea is that the whole process is smooth and practically automatic. And isn’t it pretty to think so? Unfortunately, when you factor in the inevitable corporate friction, you’re looking at years of development for a product which may or may not even be worthwhile. By the time the sausage is made, everyone has already moved on to quail. If there were an easy solution to this I’m sure everyone would take it, but Google’s seems to be the best approach when you’ve got a steady supply of golden eggs, as both they and Microsoft do in the form of advertising and enterprise revenue respectively.
Microsoft is simply too big and too inflexible to really push truly interesting products out the door as fast as they need to. This isn’t any sort of big revelation, but it’s a problem with a solution: turn the company upside-down. Give the people with infinite power to crush and elevate projects direct access to the “garages” (or rather, give the garages access to them) and let them rule their arbitrary way. If they’re really as smart as they should be in order to hold a position of such power (no guarantee there), then you’ll nip non-starters in the bud and get millions into the market-breakers. The Microsoft method of slowly advancing employees’ responsibilities has created so many middle men that there is hardly any other kind of person working there any more.
The best examples for this are also the best examples of the current system failing. I’ll be honest: these are in fact my favorite pet projects of Microsoft’s and are by no means successes yet, though in my fantasy alternate universe they might have been.
Item: SurfaceWhat does it tell you when an innovative and forward-looking project has had the same hardware for some four or five years, and despite getting a nod from Gates himself in 2003, took four years to reveal — and three years later it’s still completely inaccessible to consumers? Sure, it’s “not a consumer device.” Who do you think made that decision? Not the project team, who almost certainly envisioned a number of consumer applications. Someone limited the scope of the project and restricted its growth, even when the iPhone came out and vindicated the consumer concept. The aborted tablet project of the early 2000s and Surface might have been pushed together by a budget-slinger with vision, and they might have put out the iPad in 2006. Which brings us to the Courier.
Item: Courier
Pop quiz, hot shot: the entire tech world is buzzing with the idea of a tablet device by one of your primary competitors. Someone leaks video of a project that is totally original and totally doable, and the internet goes wild (kind of). What do you do? A: shower the team with gold and see how fast they can whip out a prototype, which you can show at CES, pre-empting your competitor? or B: continue working on a boring design with a vanilla PC maker, that is in fact something no one wanted when you showed it last time. To be fair, it seems that Microsoft may have done a little bit of both. But Ballmer himself professes ignorance of the Courier project, and we still have yet to see one in the wild. This could have taken a lot of bit out of the iPad announcement.
We had word yesterday that the Courier is running Tegra 2 and will implement some Zune stylings. Well, that puts it at least on a hardware par with the iPad and it fits with the increasingly Zune-reliant design of Microsoft’s handheld devices. Unified interface? Office applications? E-book functionality? Check, check, and double check — but instead they lay money on an awkward and underpowered shrink-down of Windows 7. Again, who made this decision? Some board room jockeys likely voted 7 to 4 to “emphasize existing properties.” If there was an informed and alert adjudicator with a nice big slush fund, this thing might have been hands-on at CeBit.
Item: Multi-touch mice
What can I say? Get a team of talented, creative people, refuse to settle on a design, and watch your competitor put out the exact product you were thinking of. All it would take is for someone to walk into the same room I did, get the same demo I did, and then point with his index finger. “That one.” Call up in-house prototyping and you’ve got a working model in two months. It’d break a few hearts to scrap the excess designs, but how many designs do you think Apple scrapped for the iPod? Those heartbroken designers now live in houses of solid gold. And they eat pearls for breakfast. Not an exaggeration.
Item: Windows Phone 7 Series
What better icon for Microsoft’s inertia than Windows Mobile? Every release has been more and more out of date, by reason that its competitors moved faster and didn’t have quite the legacy install base to worry about. When you make a big deal out of something like 6.5 years after the iPhone, and when Google is putting out Android 2.0, you might as well be selling telegraph poles. Meanwhile, slouching slowly towards release is Windows Phone 7 Series (yeah – they’ll need to change the name), which while still behind the times (and getting more so every day it’s released in Q4 2010), is a shot in the arm for Microsoft’s entire mobile division. A whole new design aesthetic! Apps! A decent media player! They knew they had a winner on their hands sometime before the launch of the Zune HD, which they rightfully called part of a new platform.
Once again: whose idea was it to wait until WinMo 6 had completed its graceful conversion into a complete wreckage? Well, someone worked real hard on the 6.5 app store and Today screen, and they wouldn’t want to steal 6.5′s thunder (cough) by announcing its successor at the same. Here is where, a year and a half ago, a smart person with a free hand might have said “sorry guys, you’re polishing the knobs on the Titanic. Finish what you’re working on, then you’re going to App development for the new hotness.” No sales would have been lost, and 7 would have launched (consulting arbitrary number calculator) six months earlier. Or something.
Okay, okay. I admit it. The only point I’m really making (in so many words!) is one that’s so obvious that it’s hardly worth saying: “Smart people should be giving money to promising projects and culling projects that have no future.” Any company could use more of that, and in the end this is mostly just a rant about the inertia that takes over big companies. But Microsoft has a track record of getting beaten to the punch because of a simple lack of boldness. They’re on the cutting edge and they refuse to acknowledge it. I’m slightly ashamed to say that I am reminded of the bar scene in Swingers where Jon Favreau is assured that he has claws and just doesn’t know what to do with them.
What I’m seeing, though, is that maybe Microsoft is starting to get this. The projects above were major breaks from Microsoft’s staples, but are finally getting the juice they deserve. I feel like I’m at a “mandatory innovation seminar” saying this, but taking a few serious risks is the only way Microsoft will be able to stay competitive for the rest of its dwindling lifetime. If they can put their trust (and their war chest) into the hands of a few worthy idea wranglers, they’ve got a fair chance of turning Microsoft Research into Microsoft Pile Of Money.
The bad news for Microsoft is that the only products anybody is excited about are the ones most unlike what they’ve been doing for 20 years. The good news for Microsoft is that they’re making products unlike what they’ve made for 20 years, and people are excited about them. It might just be too late and every project I mentioned will be torn to shreds by Apple, Google, and the other wolves pawing at Microsoft’s door. But I think that at the final accounting, people will be able to look back and say “Well, it didn’t save them, but towards the end there, they actually started to get it.”
Have you seen this video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQv_3fwopo8&feature=player_embedded ?
Probably not.
“the trouble is that something in the structure of Microsoft’s complex interlocking-teams method of management prevents these things from being anything other than great ideas.”
two quick examples that negate what you say: project natal for xbox, and pixel positioning in the zune hd and windows phone, are all originating from ms labs
MS r&d = $9.5 billion
u think theyre researching for fun?
Natal didn’t really originate from Labs, the company that ended up being bought by MS actually pitched Nintendo first.
The Zune HD… a great device but far from a market leader. And Windows Phone, still a phantom on the horizon. Check back in a year.
I applaud the intent behind this story but unfortunately it falls into the trap of being too shallow which is ironic given this is a site focused on ‘technology’.
Firstly I agree with the premise that some things are broken at Microsoft in relation to commercialising some aspects of R&D but that does not mean that every R&D idea should be or could be commercialised. Microsoft is a business with shareholders and simply releasing ideas is not a sustainable business model. There are costs with support, maintenance, distribution, marketing and continuing product development.
I have read about so called ‘innovation’ in the web 2.0 era from early 2000 onwards but how much true innovation has been successfully commercialised, how many industries have been truly created generating wealth for others and generating jobs? And what is ‘innovation’?
Innovation can be described many ways and ask enough people and you will get a huge variety of views. Innovative at its simplest may refer to incremental and emergent or radical and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. Most people incorrectly apply too narrow a focus on ‘innovation’. Innovation leading to increased productivity is the fundamental source of increasing wealth in an economy. There is continuous improvement, incremental innovation and transformational innovation.
Continuous improvement takes current practice to best practice. Incremental innovation means doing something in a different way because it is more effective; does the same thing better or more efficiently or does the same thing with fewer resources.
Incremental innovation is often achieved by adopting ideas that already exist elsewhere, but applying them in a different context. An example of incremental innovation is Skype which transforms the telecommunication industry and some parts of its infrastructure. Transformational innovation means completely rethinking the way we achieve a goal and in some cases this may mean redefining the goal we are trying to achieve.
Transformational innovation means coming up with a new idea or approach and applying this in a new context. It involves risk and its introduction will sometimes completely transform the organisational landscape and render old ways of doing things out-of-date and redundant. Transformational innovation starts with the future in mind, and works backwards to provide a solution.
As outlined above, innovation is not simply limited to ‘ideas’ created from within – which is a simplistic view held by most fanboys. But, what ‘wealth’ has companies like Google and Apple – with very narrow and closed ecosystems – actually created – other than for themselves and for shareholders? I am not saying there isn’t any wealth created but compared to the Microsoft’s, Cisco’s, Intel’s, IBM’s and other tech ‘giant’s’, Apple & Google have hardly contributed much ‘value’ to the world’s wealth. Yet, people constantly refer to these two companies being ‘innovative’. The key difference with other major technology giants vs Google & Apple is that they have created wealth across all aspects of their ecosystems; ISV’s, OEM’s, Retailers, Partners, Small, Medium & Large Businesses, Government and on and on. Now, obviously I am only providing a very heuristic look at this as it is a subject requiring a post in its own right.
So, let me address my comment relating to ‘shallow’ views of Microsoft. Many of Microsoft’s bread winning products and technologies barely get a mention by ‘technology’ journalists.
For example we hardly ever hear tech journalists discuss the following products & technologies as they simply focus on the ‘consumer’ orientated tech or the high profile product lines like Xbox, Office & Windows:
Microsoft Dynamics CRM through AX, GP, NAV & more
Windows Server
BizTalk
Exchange
SharePoint
SQL
System Centre
Forefront
Hyper-V
Visual Studio
Silverlight
Expression
Computer Cluster Server
Storage Server
Office Communication Server
Azure
.NET Framework
Microsoft Online Services
Hardware & Mice
XNA and on and on
Now, as mentioned earlier I completely agree with the premise that some parts of Microsoft are broken. Internet Explorer is an example, as is Windows Mobile and Vista and many other previous, existing and future potential products & technologies. But, I think there are very different reasons for each of these ‘falling’ behind the times and much of that is about leadership, people and organisational agility which in most times can be easily fixed – aka Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7.
Other than the so called ‘innovators’ Google & Apple, how many other technology startup’s, particulary web 2.0 startups have actually developed successful business models and gone on to earn a lot of money and create wealth?
Let’s take a superficial look at Facebook. What value is it really creating other than for the founders, early investors and venture capitalists behind it? What is their sustainable business model? How many jobs is it creating around the world either directly or indirectly in proportion to its audience and global footprint? What ecosystem of ‘wealth’ is it creating?
I actually think better questions to be raised, debated and discussed sooner rather than later are:
What is ‘technology’ destroying (jobs, industries, business models) – whether for good or bad
What is ‘innovation’?
How much industry, jobs and wealth has the web 2.0 technology era really actually created?
How many successful web 2.0 technology startup’s actually have sustainable business models?
Microsoft pays a dividend that should tell you a lot about what type of company they are. I also think that arguing the Microsoft should flip itself upside down is a bit much.
[your comment was removed because you put link spam in it. don't do that.]
The challenge will be changing their culture to one that is innovative and forward thinking… instead of conservative, protectionist, and backward looking.
If microsoft wants to stay relevant then they have to take a long hard look at the culture that they’ve created over the years, and take some pretty brutal steps to change it.
Out of all of that I remember this vividly,
“By the time the sausage is made, everyone has already moved on to quail. If there were an easy solution to this I’m sure everyone would take it, but Google’s seems to be the best approach when you’ve got a steady supply of golden eggs, as both they and Microsoft do in the form of advertising and enterprise revenue respectively.”
Made me hungry.
Steve Ballmer is all about “competing”. So he gets exactly what he wants – lots of competition from everywhere and inner “civil wars”.
Google is clearly focused more for innovation and creativity. So they get what they focused upon as well.
Perhaps if Microsoft would become some sort of M-Combinator – investing in “garage” startups, keeping percentage of shares and giving creative people more freedom – things might get more interesting.
Agreed. They can kick off M-Combinator by buying Apple.
Great article
Microsoft has a long standing history of shutting out critisizm, and responding badly to complaints.
Just like Borland in 1996, they are heading towards delisting status from NASDAQ in the next 10 years.
Their commander Gates has retired and now they are just another Borland with a larger market cap.
Courier, Zune HD, Windows Phone 7, Windows 7….yeah it’s another Borland.
Courier is a fantasy product until it’s released and matters not until it’s made a ton of money.
Zune HD has failed to make a significant dent in Apple’s market share.
Windows 7 sold so well because everyone(in Microsoft’s defence, wrongly) hated Vista.
Windows 7 is a glorified service pack for Vista. They just took the existing code base, made it a little more efficient and added a dozen or so tiny features that are handy.
I don’t dislike the product(in fact I bought it and am happy that I did) but that doesn’t make it some sort of revolutionary, innovative product.
As a developer who spent three years working on Windows 7, I resent this sort of comment. Windows 7 is nothing like a service pack. A service pack is a compilation of hotfixes made by a few people making very targeted fixes without changing functionality. Windows 7 is the product of thousands of engineers working roughly three years on nothing else. It has entirely new functionality at all levels, major architectural improvements, hundreds of new features, an endless count of great new APIs and platform components…
The only thing it has in common with a service pack is the high level of compatibility it maintains with its predecessor, which itself is never an easy feat.
Regardless, I’m glad to hear you like it :)
But by windows 7 they hit the target ..
Zune can beat with Nano not iPod ..
bill gates reading books about farming his is not interesting any more to technology ..
xbox live – largest online gaming community
bing – good reviews, increasing marketshare
-xbox 360 – best selling console.
XBox Live can be as big as it wants. Until it makes money, that’s like[BEFORE they announced plans to monetise] saying twitter has twitter has 20 million(or 50 million or 1 billion) users. Until they make a lot of money it means little.
Bing is growing fast because it was tiny(msn search, windows live search) for the longest time. It’s still tiny.
Again, the XBox can see as many units as they like, but Microsoft loses money on every sale. Sure, Sony recently has been too, but Sony didn’t have to publicly-announce they were spending $1 Billion on fixing a broken product by massive warranty extensions.
Bing market growth is coming at the expense of tremendous internal bleeding and blood loss. Absolutely they have improved tremendously and it is great to see that they have begun really ramping up momentum in this area in a productive manner.
Xbox Live DOES make money. Members pay $50 per year with over 20 million members. This isn’t including the additional sells made with the service.
MS stopped selling 360s at a loss several years ago. They’re not the best selling console though and Sony is catching up as well.
I think the Zune is nifty but I can’t imagine them holding onto that cool but dead product indefinitely.
Have to side with Jeff on this one. You’re reaching, big time. Borland was essentially ONLY a software development tools company (C, Pascal, Delphi, dBase, etc.). Microsoft is vastly larger and more diversified than Borland ever was at its peak.
Absolutely correct…everyone I ever talk to from Microsoft seems to have been preprogrammed with a liturgical speech refuting any and every criticism put towards them. Thats not bad – its a good thing to be able to defend your company against common complaints. What is bad is then going on to pretend like you get to ignore all the faults and keep doing what you were doing. It is a hive mindset on a massive scale.
About 1/3 of the way down the article, I thought you were going to say ‘Microsoft need to have 20% time’. By the end I don’t really know what you are trying to tell MS to do (i.e. what does “upside-down” mean?).
This article is the reason I read everyday Techcrunch.com, wow, Devin Coldewey you made an ultra-well crafted (without wastes) article. Keep writing like this. Excellent, excellent.
Good post, should have referenced Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen as it validates your point
Devin, more articles like this and you’ll have John’s job in no time. MUHAHAHAAA!
Place all MGMT on the lowest level pay and tie the performance bonus to how many ‘new’ things they can crank out in a year.
You’ll have clones of everything ever made or thought of, by November.
Why would we WANT ANY company to maintain control of 90% of all computing? I’m happy to see MS’ dominance fading – they’ve kept the price of OS and productivity software artificially high, destroyed countless up-and-coming competitors (innovators), are convicted monopoly abusers, and yet have no loss for defenders/champions?
Stockholm syndrome.
If they’re doing a good job of managing that 90%, I don’t see why not.
So… How can you judge the job they’ve done when you’ve nothing else to compare them to? That’s the neat thing about a monopoly. I’m sure most Russians thought a Trabant was a great car, unless they had an opportunity to drive anything else.
MS has done an impressive job making sure you have to use Office apps and Windows if you want to keep your job. Again, why anybody would want to defend this is beyond me.
Lol, Trabant is not a russian car and never was
What about Silverlight? It is much more than “Microsoft’s version of Flash”. You can create full scale line of business applications on both the PC and the Mac and Windows phone.
They release early and often (about every 9 months) and not just “beta” but full complete supported releases.
Micheal,
I work on SIlverlight for my employer. All I can say is that Silverlight is just a substitute for Flash. Instead of making the web more powerful using HTML5, Javascript etc, they choose to develop Silverlight and ignore IE.
Another example of MS tactics to lock down people in their technologies.
Take a look at the Silverlight Showcase (http://www.silverlight.net/showcase). Can you do all that in Flash with the same performance, really?
As someone who has been working with Flash from the beginning, I have to say you are dead wrong. I have never worked with Silverlight, but I have looked over the tools and white papers. If I had to compare it to any Macromedia/Adobe technology, I would say Silverlight is more like a much better version of Shockwave. You make the mistake that has become almost universal, to assume that Silverlight is all about the web. I can’t even begin to fathom what HTML5 has to do with deploying desktop apps utilizing 3D element, but you can do it in Expression/Silverlight.
Mind you, this is coming from someone who has never used a single Microsoft development tool, and has been Macromedia/Adobe for 20 years now, but Silverlight sure has me checking it out.
Great comment, Lee.
Guy who has used Silverlight vs guy who has looked at Silverlight but doesn’t really use any Microsoft products.
Your comparison is bang on.
Great article. Couldn’t agree more.
Here are a few more products which are just amazing and Microsoft is putting zero marketng effort behind:
1. Live Mesh: Why is this not 100% integrated already into Windows 8? This product has changed how I use my work and personal computers. Attn: Ray Ozzie and Windows team.
2. SkyDrive: free 5 GB (25GB free on WL Photos) and great service with no competition from Google or anyone else: Why are they not doing anything with this? Are they waiting till GDrive arrives? Attn: Windows and Windows Live teams.
3. Windows Media Center: simply the best TV experience you can get (with a TV card), better than iTV or Hulu or Boxee.tv. So why can’t I buy a TV netbook with Windows 7 and a preconfigured TV card? Why isn’t WMC integrated well into everything else? Why are they just focusing on the defunct Microsoft IPTV product? Attn: Windows team and the defunct MS IPTV team.
***
The problem of Microsoft is not lack of innovation. The problem is that they build great products but the business teams put zero effort behind because they’re too busy with the legacy products. It’s as if the senior management at Microsoft was recruited in 1980-1990 and still believes the world is only about Windows and Windows Server.
This is the mistake they’re only now fixing with the Cloud: “We’re all in” says Steve Ballmer. You’re damn right, shame it took you 3 years to do that. What were you doing for so long? Waiting with all your cloud products for Google to steal your business?!
I sure hope Steve Balmer and his Presidents are reading this post (and this comment).
Microsoft has gotten one thing right in the past 10 years: XBox Live.
I don’t understand why reporters find the need to tell business leaders how to conduct their business. If Warren Buffet would make such comments then there’s point to listen, but from someone who hasn’t run a company, let alone a company with billions of dollars in revenue and tens of thousands of employees? give me a break. critique a product, a service, an initiative, but not lecture people on how to run their businesses.
I agree Ramzi. Talk is cheap and MSFT is earning billions despite bad and good products. Sadly nobody gave recommendations to Sun or Yahoo.
Terribly sorry for speaking above my station!
Devin, its not that. I really like your writings in general, but I tend to think that the value of writing is either to report / inform, or provoke a discussion by providing new point of view or insight into a topic. The article above tries to be something it can’t: offer new real observation on how MSFT should conduct business, but it lacks credibility & data in doing so and thus merit-less. If you want blunt comparison, its like a republican publicist that didn’t served a day in the military critiquing Obama for not using the right war tactics in Afghanistan, or a Democrat publicist raving about the public option in 500 words without knowing what it really costs.
I don’t know what data is necessary for my argument other than what I included (and everyone’s observations over the last decade), and I really don’t think my suggestions are quite so peremptory as you suggest. I’m just adding my voice to the chorus.
Don’t listen to them Devin, I came to the same conclusion about MS a while back.
The thing is we can see better from the outside than they can from inside the company. Its like when you see someone in a bad relationship and they don’t think…or their in denial…that its bad.
Anyways if they listen to their fresh minds they probably would have more innovative products coming out. Surface is a great example, from what I see of the OS the core idea would be great for a tablet. You have your running apps floating around and you can switch between them easily.
Right now the seasoned old crows of MS who are comfortable within the company are the ones that give the OK to the products. They’re like most people when they get comfortable within a company or relationship, they let their guard down and get lazy. They just do what they have to do because they don’t feel they have to do any more. The new young people, they’re hungry, they feel the need to impress and come out with the innovative ideas, the ideas MS needs. The thing is with a company as big as MS, the new people get lost in the fold. They tell someone higher up their idea and they get a pat on the head, good boy, they make a rough version of it and it gets pushed back for something plain and unoriginal because it was made by a seasoned old goat who doesn’t want the new people one upping them.
I can easily see Natal being more than just for the Xbox and I really hope MS sees this vision. Natal would be great for PC’s, Laptops and even cell phones. Giving people a virtual touchscreen thats not really a touch screen. The one thing I think would be wrong with a touch screen for a PC is that you’d have to have the screen right at the edge of the desk or you have to lean forward or and get into a uncomfortable position to use it, you can’t just sit back, and relax. Touchscreens are great for tablets because they’re on your lap, right in front of you, no keyboard in the way. With Natal you can just hover your finger where over the app you want to run and virtually press it..simple. Also I think MS should work more on voice recognition. They put voice recognition into Vista and Windows 7 but between Vista and Windows 7 they haven’t worked on it…that I can see. This is a component that someone put into the OS but no one that I know of uses it…why because its not easy to use, and its difficult to get accurate results. Between Natal/touchscreens and voice recognition, with a great user interface, to compliment the tech, MS wouldn’t have to worry about someone else making an OS that would dethrone them. But if they drag their feet and keep up the slowness that is known as MS, someone will beat them to the punch. The next major evolution of the OS people will jump at and not worry about backwards compatibility. If MS could give both backwards compatibility and the next evolution…or even better backwards compatibility via virtualization and keep the new OS pure that would be even better. MS says that Windows 8 is going to be something spacial and different and I hope it is because I’d hate to see someone like Apple beat them….the thought makes me want to puke.
i understand your idea on “start building garages”. What you forgot to explain to us is why a smart, young and hard-working fellow should go to a Microsoft garage to build the next big thing and not do it from his/her own garage…Did Gates or Jobs or Dell or the Google Brothers or even Zuckerberg :) go to Bell Labs’ garage to build their products? Bill is absolutely right and there is simply NOTHING he can do about it except for that he can write out huge checks to buy interesting companies put together by other people working from their own garages. It is a garage world! :)
A very Interesting article.
As pointed out, the mechanics of large corporations does not make a good environment for growing new ideas. Yet I don’t see this is a problem for them – because they have the capital to buy them.
Personally, I think the best strategy for Microsoft (and indeed Google) is to focus on what they do best and to learn to recognize trends faster than their competitors and buy into them.
No guy in a garage could ever produce a search engine as sophisticated as theirs. Years of research have honed their technology so that without a “step change” in technology, it is impossible to beat. So their only real fear is the invention of something truly innovative.
Yet no innovation blooms riches over night. It can take years for it to recognize it’s potential. So surely the real secret for large corporations is not to try to “seed” these ideas – but to recognise them when they grow elsewhere and buy them.
Indeed – wasn’t that the real genius of Bill Gates? He didn’t invent MS-DOS, it was bought from another company.
Microsoft makes its money the same way that it did 2 decades ago. There’s no innovation happening in Redmond. They lost the ability to leverage their desktop monopoly. That’s the only thing that has changed. WinMo is dead. Compete agains RIM, Google, Nokia and Google? Not a chance.
Linux phones will catch WinMo by the end of this year or early 2011.
Compete aggressively in the cloud and risk cannibalizing their cash cow Office? Ha!
Google and Apple are going to pick apart MSFT. It’s going to be fun to watch!
Office is already moving into the cloud. You obviously haven’t tried to office 2010 beta.
And you honestly think the blackberry OS is better than winmo? You’re off your rocker. RIM hasn’t had an idea of their own, ever.
Post the link where I can use the new beta. I run Mac, Linux and Solaris.
Forgive me for disrupting this cheerful bashing of Microsoft, but this article, while well-written, hardly does Microsoft justice.
It is nothing short of absurd to seriously claim that Microsoft has a “dwindling lifetime”; You are blatantly ignoring some key facts:
- MS still commands 90% of the OS market with no real immediate threat.
- Their Office suite is the de-facto standard across the world, despite all the excitement and hype the tech community treats other startups and new productivity solutions with.
- XBox is quite a success in a wholly different market. Project Natal is the kind of innovation you would get all giddy over if it was announced by a company more to your liking. Seriously, how can you write such and article and not even bother to mention the word Natal?!
I could go on, but I believe my point is clear. You can’t expect them to be on the forefront of every market and always beat the competition to the next innovative idea.
Now, I am by no means a MS “fanboy” and I do agree with some of the points raised about their lack of innovation in certain key markets, however that’s still a long way away from announcing their inevitable demise. MS is here to stay, and you can expect them to be a dominant player in several key markets 10 years down the road. You can keep chanting “another Borland” all you like, that won’t make it so.
And as a final word of advice – the world is more complex than most of you like to think most of the time. Believe it or not – Vista isn’t as bad as most people assume (and doesn’t differ all that much from Win7), and neither is WinMo 6.5, but once it gets some bad criticism it becomes a snowball, and it seems everyone has to get in on it, regardless of the real situation. It would serve you well to take the time and evaluate the facts before coming to a conclusion, and that goes for all aspects of life.
Correct, Microsoft will continue to make gobs of money on their current desktop and Office monopolies for years to come. No one is denying that. Also, I don’t think the Xbox is profitable. However, it does provide great competition for Sony.
Here, study the chart for WinMo (2nd graph). They are dropping like a rock!
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/02/iphone-and-android-biggest-winners-in-mobile-market-in-2009.ars
WinMo will never be as good as the iPhone. It might be better than Android(hard to say), but Android is free. WinMo will be fight hard for 4th or 5th place in the phone market. I don’t really see the point.
Just a quick correction:
– MS still commands 90% of the DESKTOP OS market with no real immediate threat.
- Linux commands 90% of the server OS market and the cloud.
> Linux commands 90% of the server OS market and the cloud.
What are you talking about? Check this – http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html
MS – 24% of the (web)server OS market (and the cloud)
Great article, like getting hit between the eye’s with my grand daddy’s 2×4. Earlier this week I ran across a little company that launched their beta http://smi.sh , I was thinking about how cool it was and the ramifications it would have on Microsoft, once the masses adopted the concept (which I have no doubt they will). I was also thinking to myself “why is ms so behind the times and why haven’t they come up with something like Smi.sh”, at the same time this great TC article came across my screen, validating my exact thoughts. Great article, much loved and hit the nail on the head! keep up the good writes.
I have first hand experience trying to cultivate innovation at Microsoft. It was a few years back, and there may have been some changes, but I doubt it.
The problem with your idea of turning the company upside down is that the top guys simply don’t have time for even contemplating high-risk projects. Most of their attention goes to managing the incremental growth of their existing lines of business.
Their level of comfort for developing new lines of business is along the lines of committing $60-100M or more to one big bet and then slogging away at it. That’s a lot easier for them to swallow than putting $30M to fund, say, 30 small projects and then shoot the laggarts, force the middling ones into an existing product, and double-down on the leaders. Their lieutenants may be a little more willing to give attention to risky projects, but when it comes down to it, they are scared to actually commit any resources. Our little team actually took a political hit for picking up the salary of a guy who had a great idea to give him a chance to shop it around internally. We would have funded it ourselves, but our Sr VP sponsor didn’t think it fit in his division. The guy shopped it to slightly less Sr. VPs in other divisions. Pretty much all of them thought it was something Microsoft should be doing, but it fell into the gaps between their division and another one, and they weren’t willing to take the risk to make room for it.
Forward thinking projects have the best chance of getting funded if their are well respected people attached to them, but in order to gain that respect, you need to come up through Microsoft’s promotion system, which strongly rewards predictability and discourages risk-taking. So, very few well respected people are willing to pursue innovative projects, and even then, they have a hard time staffing them with good people inside Microsoft, because those good people are themselves likely to come from stock that has any sort of appetite for risk bred or beaten out of them. Their might be some hope of hiring outsiders, but when I was there it was hard to get approval to hire people in to MS, something that’s probably still true now due to the down economy. Even if you could hire outsiders, would ones worth hiring want to work at MS these days?
Finally, someone is willing to risk their reputation and perhaps slip a few rungs down the corporate ladder to push forward an innovative project ends up saying to themself “ok, I’m willing to take the risk, but is it really worth the hassle?” You slog through until you find someone to fund the project, but then, every step you take is likely to be dogged by someone worrying that you are going to start eating into territory that is on their product roadmap for two or three versions hence. And if you succeed, you might get promotion, which might be good enough, but there are much easier ways to get one.
Or, they could leave the company, probably land some VC funding more easily than getting internal funding, push forward with their vision without getting attacked by the “antibodies” in existing product groups. Negotiating partnerships is probably easier too. Finally, for those who care about such things, success can come with a big fat payday.
I think Microsoft’s best hope is to install a rotating door. Make it relatively easy for people leaving MS to get some seed funding, with the promise of help with follow-on funding and introductions to VCs if/when the time comes. Make it easy for them to license technology too, and don’t discourage ongoing contact with people still at the company. Open communication helps make it more likely that these startups will produce products that compliment Microsoft’s own efforts. Because Microsoft is an early investor, they can acquire proven products at less than market rate while the entrepreneur and other investors still get a healthy payoff. This is essentiallly what Cisco does (though primarily with Hardware), and there is evidence that Google is doing something similar.
Wow, great post. You’ve given real insight as to how this company works, or doesn’t work.
its been time for a LONG time.
I am a ISV (independent software vendor) that uses Microsoft’s tools extensively.
Notice three areas that were not mentioned:
1. Visual Studio.
2. C#/.Net
3. SQL Server.
My feeling is that Microsoft’s best talent is in those areas and they are putting out great stuff every year.
They are also making progress in the Enterprise software arena (Exchange/DPM/System Center) but that’s more slow going.
The Window Mobile 7 stuff shows what happens when they can really leverage the .Net infrastructure and ditch their legacy. I’d love to see them do that with Office as well.
From my point-of-view, Microsoft is doing just fine. And the new mobile stuff means I might not have to deal with Apple/objective-C or Java/Oracle.
Great analysis, I’d have to agree with you that I think MS is finally getting it.
No offense but MSFT has a better chance to still be around in 20 years than TC does…
I have been reading “MSFT is doomed” articles since Netscape went IPO back in 1995..and again in 1996 with Java/Sun Microsystem…and again in 1997 with Red Hat/Linux, etc. etc.
Since 1995 when I first read about the impending doom, MSFT has continued to grow from doing $5.9 billion in revenue to $60.2 billion in 2008.
There is one really huge part you leave out of your analysis, which is public perception. The reality is Google can get away with putting out a fairly broken product, and as long as it is ‘free,’ and has that little “beta” tag on it, people focus on how cool the parts that do work are, and don’t hold the broken parts against them. Apple can put out a completely garbage piece of 1st-gen hardware, and as long as it looks pretty and shows promise, everyone is willing to make jokes about how stupid early adopters are for buying a 1st-gen Apple product, and don’t hold it against the company.
Meanwhile, if Microsoft makes a few changes to their graphics API, and third-party video card manufacturers don’t properly update their drivers to accommodate it, a decade later people are still making BSOD jokes. The reality is that users, and more importantly these days blogs like this, hold Microsoft to a completely different standard than they do the rest of the industry, and it puts Microsoft in a position where their management HAS to be more cautious than their competitors.
When Microsoft does take chances, like with natural interfaces such as handwriting and voice recognition (where they have made huge strides over the years), or 64-bit support going all the way back to XP, no one even mentions it. If there is even the most minor hiccup (like poor third-party driver support at Vista’s launch), it can take them years to recover from it. Meanwhile, companies like Apple and Google might have several missteps in the same period of time, and all anyone says is that “unlike Microsoft, at least they are trying.”
Just look at how many years the tech press spent gnawing over rumors for what turned out to be an iPod touch with a bigger screen, while completely dismissing two relaunches of Microsoft’s tablet concept. You can argue that Microsoft keeps hedging their bets on tablets by just adding features to their established OS, and that is fair, but I don’t see any shortage of people claiming it is a world-changing revolution when Apple takes the utterly safe path of making a bigger iPod. By the same token, when Google copies and incrementally improves on a product that is already well established in the market, like maps, webmail, or even search, people coo and swoon over how well they did it. When Microsoft does the same thing, out come the “Microsoft, start your copiers” jokes.
I’m not trying to be a apologist for Microsoft. They have a lot of truly out of date and awful programs like Windows Mobile. But seriously, take an honest look at the coverage Microsoft gets and ask yourself, was Windows Mobile a touchscreen phone OS that is 5 years out of date three years ago, or was the iPhone the revolutionary device that invented the concept of the touchscreen phone 3 years ago, which Microsoft just copied? Both can’t be true, and it is a question that shows a very telling bias of how people approach Microsoft products. I mean you and I both know, when Windows Phone 7 comes out, if it can’t do MMS, has no cut and paste, doesn’t integrate with Exchange, can’t install apps, and won’t record video, they are going to get torn apart for “not getting it,” yet we can all remember a phone that “revolutionized the industry” years after all of those things were standard on any smartphone. Microsoft can’t compete in the same way their competitors do, because they aren’t judged by the same standard their competitors are.
I hear you. Yes, it’s the burden of legacy. Unfortunately I have no suggestions for that other than total self-rebranding, which they are not good at. The damage you speak of will take years to undo … and who knows how many years they have left?
But you have to admit that everyone who actually comes in contact with a Zune HD, a Surface, or any of Microsoft’s truly interesting products, is always very impressed. Though like you say, their first reaction will always be “Wait, you said Microsoft makes this?”
Sorry, you write for an online blogpinion site. You just wrote an article about what they “should do” and now your answer is “I have no suggestion for x…”
You can either be part of the problem or part of the solution.
My article was about catapulting innovations occurring at low levels, not about fixing Microsoft’s image problem.
>>Though like you say, their first reaction will always be “Wait, you said Microsoft makes this?”
Very true. I bought a Zune HD after reading your review (Till then I never imagined I would ever buy a music player made by MS). A lot of people’s (not just apple fanboys) first comment after seeing my Zune is “Are you kidding? You bought a *Zune*??”
glad i helped convince you! but yeah, everybody laughs until they pick it up, and then you see their expression change. “This is… really nice..”
Best comment on this page!
I switched to a Mac 2 yrs ago, and I’ll never go back. But I work in VS2008, and really look forward to VS2010 which is the BEST IDE on the market. It’s not all black or white.
Microsoft is a victim of its own success, and the nature of its most loyal markets. “Nobody every got fired for buying ‘IBM’” has been replaced with “Microsoft”. MS has a hardcore conservative market segment that HATES change and innovation, who sees it as Apple-like and who would gladly stay with XP.
Unlike Apple who started with the pretty UI and then built out the performance over time, MS started with performance and an ugly UI and slowly made it prettier. So many MS users generally place more value on compatibility and reliability, and Mac users generally demand innovation and design. And lets face it, innovation makes for better news copy, including the juicy controversies when it fails (like Vista, or the Mac Cube).
But MS also leveraged its HW partnerships for many years to spread the platform. But waiting on compatibility and consensus slows down innovation. So they had to stab their Plays4Sure partners in the back with Zune, and are now about to orphan their Win6.5 app and HW partners with WM7S. And I’m sure their migration to XBOX didn’t please PC makers either.
So MS is trying differentiate itself now, when it’s been able to survive for nearly two decades on “good enough”. That’s a corporate 180 and no doubt that battle ship is hard to turn. Ballmer laughed at the iPhone, and now he’s having to play catch-up. And with RIM, Google, and others, MS is fighting a much wider range of foes on numerous fronts. They’re not alone in this (as recent Apple patent battles show) but they’re still the big dog, and as the “Evil Empire” will have to spend the most resources to combat.
What’s interesting is to watch Google, now sitting in a comparable catbird seat, so much so that MS is going after THEM for antitrust. To see MS presenting itself as the Netscape, in this scenario, is a brand-jarring experience. In the end it’s like MS is experiencing an internal and external identity crisis. They were so easy to peg ten years, ago. Now they just look like they’re trying to defend the fort and chase a few new dollars here and there. Nothing like “The Road Ahead” years when Bill was still at the helm. And Bill’s pursuit of philanthropy almost lessens Redmond’s relevance that much more.
Because, don’t you change the world more with technology than giving out money?
I essentially lost all respect of you when I read that last statement. So it’s better/more helpful for Gates to make tech for the elite than to give out to the impoverished? Right…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K76CJrA6-4Y
Loved Robert Scoble’s recent video at Standford University, whereby he mentioned his time working at Microsoft.
In this piece he mentioned that he himself told Bill Gates to acquire both Skype and Flickr in their early days, to which he recieved the reply – ‘where is the business model?’
Scoble’s piece shows you just how Microsoft does not get the Internet.
Okay the business model at Flickr may not be lucrative, but its web reach as the No1 Photo Sharing Site is an important asset to own.
With its recent good relationship with Yahoo, Microsoft should seriously think about asking Yahoo if they can acquire Flickr.
Google already owns the biggest Video sharing site on the web, but imagine if Google were to also acquire Flickr.
From the money that they would have wasted in acquiring Yahoo, they should spend some of those billions in acquring Flickr, Twitter & Siri – and add them all as key web features across Bing Search.
Now these companies may not be huge revenue earners but they will give them valuable web assets to own.
Microsoft needs to wake up regarding the web.
Where IS the business model of Skype and Flickr?
eBay lost billions on Skype and Yahoo is making nothing at all from Flickr. Good thing Bill Gates did not heed to Scoble’s recommendation.
The business model of Skype is to get you to buy little credits and then they expire the ones you don’t use before you get around to them and collect the breakage.
But the real value for Microsoft in acquiring both Skype and Flickr is that they can both be used to add core value to other Microsoft Brands and Services.
Imagine Skype being integrated with Messenger, Office Communicator & Windows Phone Series7.
Or Flickr being added to Bing Live Maps, Photosythn and Windows Phone Series Series7.
If Microsoft is now serious about business in the ‘Cloud’, then they could no wrong in acquring big ‘Cloud’ brands, like Skype, Flickr & Twitter.
Skype – the No1 Web Voice Communicator Platform.
Flickr – the No1 Web Photo Sharing Platform.
Twitter – the No1 Web Mirco-blogging Platform.
Add up all of the millions of people using those platforms into the Microsoft umbrella – and you will have a huge online user base in which to sell other Microsoft products and services.
Why would Microsoft need Skype? The same features are already on Windows Live Messenger?
Jobs : We’re better than you are, we’ve better stuff.
Gates : You didn’t get it Steve, that doesn’t matter.
The only example given that the mainstream public may even have heard about is Windows Phone 7. Some of my colleagues have heard of the Surface and want one badly but we’re all uber geeks. Fewer have heard of the Courier.
This is the first time the thought has crossed my mind but maybe it’s time for MS to buy Palm and collaborate on a next gen business and consumer smartphone to more seriously compete against both Apple and Blackberry. With the iPhone vs. Android wars going on, someone’s going to get squeezed out.
They also need to fire up the M&A and get some hot relevant startups under their belt to reinvigorate their web/Bing franchise. One a month should be good. Otherwise their web efforts are turning into the next Yahoo or Aol sad story.
I have never seen Ballmer as the kind of person who can run an innovative tech company. Give him another decade. The picture will be the same: Windows and Office, and a bunch of also-ran technologies in other areas.
If Microsoft were smart, they would stop wasting money on product development, and use the money they save to buy rising star companies.
Micro not so soft?
Well intended article. It does get some bashing from fanboys for ‘telling’ what MS should do. But I too believe MS has gotten into an inertia mode and something needs to happen to get it back into ‘groundbreaking’ realm.
I am typing this from my new MacBook, having spent my entire career till date on MS technologies. After using this for a few months the saying – ‘grass is greener on the other side of the pasteur’ comes to mind ;-).
But we are talking MS so let’s stay on track. Yes MS is big, and it will continue to be so. But numbers like 90% marketshare in Desktop or ‘Iron Grip’ on enterprise market, are things they cannot rely on. The sooner they realize the better it will be for them. After all WinMo was a leader in Smart Phones to start with. The ‘marketshare’ didn’t take too long to vanish…
They did bulldoze Netscape out of the browser market with sheer muscle (monetary and engineering). But upcoming competitors might just be better at exploiting ‘the bigger they come, the harder they fall’. In short it might not be that easy to repeat history in future…
@Lee Floyd: Couldn’t have agreed with you more. It’s amazing to see fanboys at force on anything remotely related to a half eaten apple ;-). Sometimes it’s hard to believe they have only 10% of the desktop computing ‘market’ ;-)…
Err… My bad, apologies to @Lee Lloyd whom I intended to address in my comment above…
What microsoft, american auto makers etc. do not have right is that they are all run by either tech guys, or accountants. I have nothing against either, my mom is an accountant, and i am a tech guy, however, you look at a company like apple that has a very good public image and you notice two things: Apples have nothing to do with computers or nerds, and steve jobs has nothing to do with computers or nerds education wise. Jobs is a college dropout with a trained expertise in calligraphy, and a natural presentation skill. With his super tight micromanagement style he is able to apply an opinion that is very close to that of a consumer. Ballmer and Gates etc. can be seen as “nerds” to the general public, worse still are the names Microsoft, Office, and Windows. People associate “…soft” with sweaty greasy nerds, they don’t like an office because that is where they have to work, and windows is creative, likeable because people like the outdoors, however, it was destroyed by the old pixelated wavy windows logos that were associated with a bland grey OS. If you compare them to things like Apple, iWork, and Snow Leopard you find that the names by apple seem considerably more creative… maybe Bill Gates should have become Buddhist and tried a little of that LSD.
wow, that was a long sentence there.
Oh dude you totally left out Natal – I can’t wait to see how they ruin that one. It’s failure in process…everyone pull up a chair and watch the fail in real time.
yah i will watch your momas tits fail
Dude you are so right !!
Btw, do you have a blog ?
Here it is the problem with tinkering in a garage with stuff you found on a heap of “Build in progress”.
Is the ”Policy” accompany them stating they can change , charge or just disregard any effort you put into discovering and building something yourself(sarcasm) from it at any time for their own personal use.
”well sucks to be you reading the policy is knowing something like that would happen when they discover ”that” works now lets commercialize it and charge support).
Yeah and innovation can give us some ugly gadgets to ”look” at or ”work” with (Google, Microsoft, Palm , Dell ). Their just not geeky enough to show us some relevant stuff but thats what you get following change in the market and not listening to apply them.
Way back having a computer on your desk now that was innovation plain simple. Geeks lost connecting new things with what we already got and familiar with.
The way I see it, innovation is made (Palm , Google , Microsoft , Apple , Samsung etc) But it comes as hmmm almost there not just yet. Ahw damn what a shame they lost it.
I interned at MS this past summer, and attended a talk by a SVP (high ranking executive member) to a couple hundred interns. During the Q/A part, I asked:
“If we, as interns, have an awesome idea, what resources are available to us/what can we do?”
I expected a textbook response with some useful info, but got this:
“Join us fulltime!”
Not only was that offensive, but it proves that there are definite problems in management. An entrepreneur doesn’t want to join a product team full time so they can pursue a different project. From my experience, MS’s management is focused on execution, and does very little to encourage creativity. I hope the rest of the leadership doesn’t share the same beliefs because MS is an awesome company to work for otherwise…
Maybe they need to turn themselves inside out also.
The Padrino
http://www.thepadrino.com
Nice article. It quite sums up on how people view the MS stuffs outside the Microsoft world.
The only thing which I like about MS is that, they are in every market. They give a tough competition to each and every company and at the end of day, its the end-user who gets benefited from the technology! – No matter its from Google, Oracle or Microsoft.
Since its invention, the Windows mobile has been the only OS which supports Multi-tasking and no matter the UX has developed in the other ones, they still lag in it. Hope the WinMO gets back to its grace with Mobile 7 Series.
As an end user, I love to use the stuffs which are best..! The innovations which are great and give me a wow factor to use them and be proud about it.
Bill Gates wasn’t afraid of garages, he was afraid of the people inside of them. Innovation comes from great minds that are not shackled down by bloated corporate culture and politics.
agree. Their cutting edge and magnanimous resources are looking more feeble by the day as you see Apple and Google keep their foot on the peddle.
However i also agree that MS is beginning to understand this. Bing Augmented reality maps and Project Natal are examples.
It sounds like we are only focusing on consumer orientated tech. Which is not really fair when talking about a company like Microsoft. But if we are to focus on the consumer products, there are plenty that deserve credit.
Windows 7 alone, which is packaged with an amazing Media Center is a super product that trumps it’s competition.
The Xbox systems have shaped and created a standard for the online gaming community. Any serious gamer that loves teamwork based gameplay with whole heartedly tell you that there is no substitute for Xbox Live. It seamlessly lets you organize games with friends quickly and easily. It give standardized tools to developers that allows them to focus on game making rather than online infrastructure.
Sync has set a new bar for media navigation in cars. This is an amazing product that is just starting to be tapped. And Microsoft is positioned pretty well to be a leader.
I agree: http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Why-former-employees-say-Microsoft-cant-innovate/1265750084
I guess the comments have covered most of the opinions people have on MSFT – one question
are microsoft aiming for the next generation of tools and allowing the market to mature out – some of their r&d seems to be a few leaps ahead of existing commercially available consumer tech – the surface for instance.
Perhaps they think enterprise or huge consumer level dominance all the time – maybe they dont want to release free applications or small winners right now(with all the risks and management associated with it) but aim for a massive bumper win down the line. Something that will make it worthwhile for them and their shareholders.
We guys tend to think in terms of a few years tops (apple really got back on track with the ipod)…but microsoft probably thinks more than 10 or 15 years ahead.
just my 2c
~ Windows 7 saved Redmond’s breakfast to last through the day.That nice public beta touch had people asking for 1 thing and 1 thing only;NO MORE RIDICULOUS SKUS!..well guess we’re way past that already.They had the best window of opportunity (pun intended) to finally show the world to do 1 little thing.A SIMPLE thing for a change to underscore that they can but they didn’t.NOOOO…Mr.Ballmer wouldn’t have it any other way and has this ever present itch to flaunt MS as the BIG DAWG in the game.Windows 7 and Windows 7 “E” for Enterprise in 32 and 64 bit variants was the dream.Didn’t happen.Billions in spare cash,an army of devs and obvious market control are apparently not enough to realize the vision.There are millions of PC and it was their idea.Guess what I’m Malaysian.Not even Acer nor Dell here REALLY pushed for Home Basic and it’s safe to say a good majority has no idea about that version.And you ask why people are still on XP?
~ Branding are literally left to dictionaries,archaic geek thinkers and disconnects normal people.Bing sounds OK.So does Xbox.OK some more points to Silverlight,still a bit glaring RPG-ish tinge to that but still fine.Zune’s a bit out there maybe but they could have gone with “Windows Media Player PLAYER” if they had their way…But Courier and Windows Phone 7 Series?Voila they done it again by moving the 6.5 to “Classic”,flailing arms all over the world and facepalms.Waiting for another IE6 funeral maybe?South Korean car companies may have the habit of introducing quirky names but at least they know when to give those an own ring.And that’s just branding..
~ For PC/Windows gamer,what’s the average to wait for every new DirectX iteration supporting game title?A year?Or 2 maybe?And how many?3 in a year at best?I’m not into these “Can haz Crysis?” shooters more of a RPG guy but really?That API + nVIDIA are the 2 only saving graces left.Add Xbox but that’s another segment platform wise.So when people are getting a bit pissed about hardware upgrades then why should they be compelled to grab the pwnest OS around?AMD/ATI loyally supports the cause.So does nVIDIA but more at renamings and price points.I don’t think right now Intel are particularly interested to push the 3Ghz barrier than adding cores?Laptops are exceeding desktops for a reason ya know…
I still thank Microsoft for not engaging in the currently “in” patent trolling antics…Yet…
Maybe at the end of the day we’ll get better hints later this year for WinPho 7…and for their sake that smartphone fight had better grow some real teeth.
well *I* think “courier” sounds cool…
Not going to happen.
I’d like to see some more innovation on the Zune side of things. The ZuneHD was a big step forward and I enjoy owning one, but there is still a lot more they can do with it. I hope they do…
Well I just saw a couple of TED talks directly related to innovation that MS is doing with Bing (Photosynth, 3D maps, Pivot) and ,regardless of whether they catch on or not, they are really quite cool.
I’m a consumer, and I just switched to Windows 7. I was sick of OSX making it a huge headache every time I transfered files from one machine to another. My photos and music were scattered, I couldn’t see what was going on. I like a plug and play experience, until something goes wrong. Then I want to fix whatever it is myself.
What gets me is the lack of self confidence in MS. I live in Seattle, and I run into these guys all day. When they hear how happy I am now, they are surprised. They always ask, astounded, “Why?” I just wanted Steve’s hands off my media. Its mine, I made it/bought it, and that’s the world I live in.
There are hundreds of thousands of MS-built PCs in living rooms all over the world. Committing to the cloud? How about throwing some function in those boxes and giving me one of those fancy wireless keyboards so I can have a truly seamless experience couch-office-phone? Just do the damn thing already! If you don’t they will. And stop acting like a bunch of snotty teens that “are stuck” working for the Man! Be proud that your products make the world go ’round.