The best thing Microsoft could do is to innovate and do something no one's done. Everything they've done of late is in markets where someone has already done very well in, and they've done such a half-assed job of it that it's a guaranteed fail. Think what you want of Apple, but their products have been things largely not done before. Microsoft is copying the wrong half -- the product ideas themselves -- they should be copying the act of innovating.
> The best thing Microsoft could do is to innovate and do something no one's done.
The last time they did so was when Allen and Gates decided there must be a market for BASIC on Altair and microcomputers in general. Maybe Traf-o-matic was an innovation, too. However none of their significant products afterwards was anything new :
* common programming languages for different systems
* MS-DOS, built from a borrowed clone of CP/M
* Xenix, an AT&T licensed Unix
* Windows, a pale copy of existing GUIs of the time
* Word, a Wordstar rip-off
* Multiplan, a VisiCalc rip-off
* Excel, a Lotus 1-2-3 rip-off
<snip some years>
* C# and .Net, an enhanced java
The list goes on and on. I really can't see any innovating product ever coming from Microsoft (there are excellent products, but these are incremental enhancements). Apple, on the contrary, has a long history of earth-shaking innovations (brought to the masses the personal computer, the GUI, the graphic printer, the IDE, the mp3 player, the touchscreen devices...) . It's simply not comparable.
Actually they have done one excellent innovative product. It's called OneNote and it's the only reason I keep a Windows partition on my laptop. I take lots of meeting minutes and the ability to record audio that is in sync with my typing is a killer feature. Damn, I wish someone would do that in Linux (this feature doesn't work in Wine).
Looks like an interesting gadget but I'm not sure that it really works for me. My handwriting is shite and my typing, while not always accurate, is pretty fast. I like the relative portability though.
ETA the downloadable demo is really cool. You can run the demo before it's done installing and it will download the rest of the program in the background, prioritizing features you're trying to use. Sweet!
>>The best thing Microsoft could do is to innovate and do something no one's done. Everything they've done of late is in markets where someone has already done very well in
But that is what Microsoft has done historically.
The old solution was to use profits from already owned market segments to invest much more in other market segments, until they own those too.
I don't know either why it stopped working.
Could the problem be a lack of a monopoly leverage? They can't threaten hardware/software makers anymore?
Or maybe the problem is just leadership, as others wrote?
Or maybe they have just screwed over too many people (to paraphrase an old Netscape executive, too many people has woken up with a bloody computer monitors in bed)?
They no longer can use one monopoly to create another. That's what landed them in trouble in the US and in the EU. Their historical model of growth is no longer possible.
I would suspect they rely too much on focus groups to drive product development. There is only so much consumers can tell you about what they need. You can't just round up a bunch of consumers and ask them what will be the Next Big Thing. Well... You can, but you will end up with a Kin or a Zune in your hand.
>>They no longer can use one monopoly to create another.
I tried to write that in the paragraph starting with: "Could the problem be a lack of a monopoly leverage?". :-)
>>That's what landed them in trouble in the US and in the EU.
I wonder if that is the reason. They kept ignoring the monopoly laws and paid fines ten years later, when they courts had managed to get to the (then ancient) transgression.
>>I would suspect they rely too much on focus groups to drive product development.
I believe top management really wants to completely ignore the law and employ every subcriminal tactic available in the books and, perhaps, write a couple new ones in the process. I also believe they don't have the guts this would take, as they believe that their past transgressions brought attention enough for someone to end in jail.
That and the lack of balls to design products no focus group wants, but build them because you know people will want them once they see them.
