Agreed! It is this lack of vision and poor execution that has taken Microsoft to its current status: a company that is living on its legacy products with nothing new to move their earnings needle.
They have been earning more quarter and doing better than most companies. Apple has bested them in revenue, gross and net profits and are still rising, but that doesn?t mean MS isn?t still a powerful company with a lot of earning potential simply because they are no longer the number one earner.
On top of that, MS has had wild success wild with the Kinect on a 5 year old console and have done a great job rethinking what an OS is with WP7, though it?s still unclear if it will be a market success.
I understand that this site has a lot of pro-Apple and anti-MS sentiments but if we try to remove ourselves from our emotions, only looking at MS? financials compared to other tech companies, they are not someone we should write off anytime soon.
Sorry but the need for something bigger that 3.5, 4, and 4.3 inch screen automatically makes you wrong MS. Come out with a tablet and then you can talk.
Read the actual interview. He talks a about mobile phone that project a HDTV sized screen onto your retina.
No doubt they will do a tablet, but this guy sounds like he is talking about a 15-20 year timeframes.
I don't care about earnings, and unless you're a shareholder, I don't know why you would either.
However, over the past few years Microsoft has released some awesome products, many of which were innovative, and most of which were very good executions:
Windows 7
Office 2010
Windows Phone 7 (they could easily have copied iPhone/Android, but chose to make a truly unique mobile OS)
Xbox 360
Kinect
Zune
The only thing that's really happening on the list is Windows and Office, same as it ever was.
WP7 looks promising but it may be too little too late. And just because it has a slightly eccentric UI doesn't make it terribly innovative or awesome-- it's just the minimum MS had to do to not be completely counted out of the mobile OS market.
Xbox is what it is, Zune is gone, Kin is gone, Kinect is an add-on for Xbox.
Where, in that list, are the products that shape our future? That challenge the status quo? That actually excite? I guess if you're an Xbox owner the Kinect is cool, but it's hardly the next big thing. Outside of that, it's Windows and Office forever.
You had me going until you said Zune. Oh, and earnings are at least a little important to non-shareholders, because companies which don't have earnings don't continue to exist indefinitely.
Have you ever used Zune?
I was fortunate enough to try it when I was on holiday in the USA (they haven't released it in other markets, which may account for lower sales). Very well made player, with a very nice UI.
The Zune software that it connects to on Windows is also miles ahead of iTunes. Much better interface and far, far more responsive.
I was fortunate enough to try it when I was on holiday in the USA (they never released it in other markets, which may account for lower sales). Very well made player, with a very nice UI.
The Zune software that it connects to on Windows is also miles ahead of iTunes. Much better interface and far, far more responsive.
Yeah? So where is it? MS is the giant of computer operating systems. They had every incumbents advantage imaginable for digital music. Just by making something reasonable that worked on every PC they could have totally dominated. But they did nothing of note until Apple had already more or less locked up the market. They've done it again with phones, and they appear to be determined to do it with tablets.
There's more to a product than some nice ideas and decent hardware. You have to stick to a plan, make everything work together, and give people a reason to want your stuff. MS is capable of good work, but they have no consistent vision for why-- or rather, the wrong why, which is "to sell more Windows and Office licenses."
WP7 looks promising but it may be too little too late. And just because it has a slightly eccentric UI doesn't make it terribly innovative or awesome-- it's just the minimum MS had to do to not be completely counted out of the mobile OS market.
What I see is Android?s fractured, undefined success has given MS a way back into the smartphone game. This is a play Apple has excelled at on many occasion. Will MS pull it off or revert to their old way? Maybe, but I think teaming with Nokia was a great move. A bad move would have been to try to be equal to all and have less OS requirements for the HW (like Android does) or to get someone else to build your HW and then put your name it (the way MS did with Creative on the Zune).
Plus, the OS changes aren?t just a new UI. They have started with the ground up with this. The only difference between MS and Apple on this front is that Apple leveraged Mac OS, though that might be happening with Windows 8? which in itself could be a huge blistering blender of a blunder.
What I see is Android’s fractured, undefined success has given MS a way back into the smartphone game. This is a play Apple has excelled at on many occasion. Will MS pull it off or revert to their old way? Maybe, but I think teaming with Nokia was a great move. A bad move would have been to try to be equal to all and have less OS requirements for the HW (like Android does) or to get someone else to build your HW and then put your name it (the way MS did with Creative on the Zune).
Plus, the OS changes aren’t just a new UI. They have started with the ground up with this. The only difference between MS and Apple on this front is that Apple leveraged Mac OS, though that might be happening with Windows 8… which in itself could be a huge blistering blender of a blunder.
Right, I didn't mean the UI wasn't new or innovative for MS, rather that I think we've reached the point were a spiffy UI may not be enough in the mobile market. We need to be looking at allover scope of vision, what a given vendor's grasp of what "mobile" really means over the next ten years.
My concern is that MS isn't getting that-- that they're still being reactive to what Apple did a year or two ago. A decent phone OS is a start, and certainly it's to their credit that they came up with something strikingly different. But are internal rivalries going to keep that OS on phones only? That would be a disaster, and completely misses the point of the mobile revolution.
It makes them seem positively dull-witted. It's like they looked around after a long slumber and said "Oh. Phones? People want phones? OK, we'll get on that." And by the time they got there, they looked around again and said "Oh, wait, tablets? We already do that, right? With Windows? But more touch-y? OK, we'll get on that." And instead of ever skating to where the puck will be, they say "We think in the future hockey will be replaced by hover-car races."
So when the Zune went away, didn't everybody lose all that music they thought they "bought", but only "subscribed" to? Or am I misunderstanding the business model? It would be the second time MS screwed everybody over like that (Plays4Sure), so I bet I'm not. I'd be mad as hell, but somehow I'm sure it's all Apple's fault.
I love my iPhone, but there's no way that a smartphone can replace a desktop or laptop computer.
What about if your phone projected a HDTV sized image onto your retina? What if it communicated with an LED contact lens that presented you with an image overlay or potentially your entire field of vision?
This isn't science fiction, this is technology that we will be using in 10-20 years.
In any case, you get my point. When you ask the research guy a question you're going to get some odd answers.
Ask Ford or Chevy: they spend all that money advertising a product, among all their product lines, that the fewest people buy. (Well, there may be some dismal subcompact that gets outsold by an F-150, but you get the idea.)
Are they insane? No, they like big margins. Trucks have the biggest margins of any consumer class vehicle on the road.
These "post-PC" devices all suffer from thin margins that are only getting thinner as vendor X or vendor Y locks up the supply chain for various otherwise-hard-to-procure components. The easiest place for a Dell to compete and keep its margins somewhat higher than those in the tablet space is in the PC space, where commodification is still possible and profitable.
Microsoft shouldn't whine about the analogy; they should try to build a better truck.
Ummm, the top 2 selling vehicles in the US are Ford's F-150 and the Chevrolet Silverado, by a HUGE margin. number 3 is the Toyota Camry but it could double it's sales and still be 3rd. Just sayin'\
However, over the past few years Microsoft has released some awesome products, many of which were innovative, and most of which were very good executions:
Windows 7
Office 2010
Windows Phone 7 (they could easily have copied iPhone/Android, but chose to make a truly unique mobile OS)
Xbox 360
Kinect
Zune
And which of these products truly came from MS?
Windows came from MacOS and Windows 7 was largely driven by features from OSX
Office got its origins from Word Perfect and Lotus 123
Windows Phone would never have existed without inspiration from the iPhone
Xbox is another game console in a market that had Nintendo, Playstation, etc.
Kinect is the closest to an inspired product but came to being because of Wii
I assume the idea would be that you carried a digital identity with you (device, card, biometrics, implant, wearable) that toggled personalized services wherever you happened to be. The client devices would reside in the architecture, and instead of a single box that was the "computer" there would be many, many web connected devices distributed throughout the environment. There would still be portable screens, of course, but most if not all of their computing power would be offloaded to the always available servers.
This, of course, is also Google's vision, since a ubiquitously connected world is a world always ready to be served ads.
This was also (sort of) part of the original NeXT vision 25 years ago. The idea behind the 256MB magneto-optical disk was that you carried the disk with you to any location where a NeXT Cube was, pop it in, boot it and have your own environment. There were many reasons this did not work out, two of those being the price of those discs and the lack of speed on those discs.
Another dumb set of comment from a foolish MS exec. They don't get the market so they just hope they can figure something out. The Kinect is cool, but it's not going to be practical to have the Room be the computer. Not like they are talking about. I'm not sure he even knows what he is talking about.
Kinect is cool but you really shouldn't dismiss it as a complement to other computing approaches.
In any event these execs are killing their credibility here. I'm seeing iPads and iPhones adopted in east cost organizations that would have never considered Apple products in the past. This is very very impressive and is as much a validation of Apples approach as it is a sign of disappointment with MicroSoft. It is also a sign in my mind that MS recognizes that coming up with a similar API to what Apple has in iOS is a large undertaking that they can't respond to in a few months.
In a nut shelf they don't have a solution so they can only try to defuse Apples success.
This was also (sort of) part of the original NeXT vision 25 years ago. The idea behind the 256MB magneto-optical disk was that you carried the disk with you to any location where a NeXT Cube was, pop it in, boot it and have your own environment. There were many reasons this did not work out, two of those being the price of those discs and the lack of speed on those discs.
I think the promise of the ubiquitously connected future is that you don't have to do or carry anything. Accessing data, services and computational power would be no more taxing than flipping on a light, if that.
The downside, of course, is that various corporate and governmental interests are very interested in your whereabouts and doings, and becoming a creature of the data-sphere makes you easy prey. I don't really know how that problem is resolved, although it appears that one way is to raise a generation that doesn't think it's a problem at all and happily and promiscuously makes all of their private information readily available.
So when the Zune went away, didn't everybody lose all that music they thought they "bought", but only "subscribed" to? Or am I misunderstanding the business model?
You misunderstand that Zune went away.
The Zune device hit an end of life and Microsoft haven't announced they are making another. The Zune Marketplace didn't go anywhere.
It's basically the same as if Apple decided to not release a new iPod Touch. It wouldnt affect the ITunes store, existing iPod Touch owners or anyone using their iPhone or iPad to purchase music.
If the actual Zune Marketplace went away then Zune Pass users wouldn't be able to listen to the entire Zune catalog anymore, just the 10 "free" songs they received each month. Pretty much in the same way that if your cable operator went broke you wouldn't be able to watch TV anymore (except your cable operator doesn't let you pick 10 show each month to own).
While he believes most computing will be done on phones in the future, Mundie believes the successor to the traditional desktop PC is "the room." He envisions a future where a person's at-home computer won't be a box on a desk, but something that users can interact with wherever they are in a room, powered by a device like Microsoft's controller-free gaming controller, the Kinect.
I would love to hear the step by step process to which he draws his conclusion. Please enlighten us as to why you think this way instead of hitting us with a blanket statement.
Comments
Agreed! It is this lack of vision and poor execution that has taken Microsoft to its current status: a company that is living on its legacy products with nothing new to move their earnings needle.
They have been earning more quarter and doing better than most companies. Apple has bested them in revenue, gross and net profits and are still rising, but that doesn?t mean MS isn?t still a powerful company with a lot of earning potential simply because they are no longer the number one earner.
On top of that, MS has had wild success wild with the Kinect on a 5 year old console and have done a great job rethinking what an OS is with WP7, though it?s still unclear if it will be a market success.
I understand that this site has a lot of pro-Apple and anti-MS sentiments but if we try to remove ourselves from our emotions, only looking at MS? financials compared to other tech companies, they are not someone we should write off anytime soon.
Sorry but the need for something bigger that 3.5, 4, and 4.3 inch screen automatically makes you wrong MS. Come out with a tablet and then you can talk.
Read the actual interview. He talks a about mobile phone that project a HDTV sized screen onto your retina.
No doubt they will do a tablet, but this guy sounds like he is talking about a 15-20 year timeframes.
I don't care about earnings, and unless you're a shareholder, I don't know why you would either.
However, over the past few years Microsoft has released some awesome products, many of which were innovative, and most of which were very good executions:
Windows 7
Office 2010
Windows Phone 7 (they could easily have copied iPhone/Android, but chose to make a truly unique mobile OS)
Xbox 360
Kinect
Zune
The only thing that's really happening on the list is Windows and Office, same as it ever was.
WP7 looks promising but it may be too little too late. And just because it has a slightly eccentric UI doesn't make it terribly innovative or awesome-- it's just the minimum MS had to do to not be completely counted out of the mobile OS market.
Xbox is what it is, Zune is gone, Kin is gone, Kinect is an add-on for Xbox.
Where, in that list, are the products that shape our future? That challenge the status quo? That actually excite? I guess if you're an Xbox owner the Kinect is cool, but it's hardly the next big thing. Outside of that, it's Windows and Office forever.
You had me going until you said Zune. Oh, and earnings are at least a little important to non-shareholders, because companies which don't have earnings don't continue to exist indefinitely.
Have you ever used Zune?
I was fortunate enough to try it when I was on holiday in the USA (they haven't released it in other markets, which may account for lower sales). Very well made player, with a very nice UI.
The Zune software that it connects to on Windows is also miles ahead of iTunes. Much better interface and far, far more responsive.
Did you ever use Zune?
I was fortunate enough to try it when I was on holiday in the USA (they never released it in other markets, which may account for lower sales). Very well made player, with a very nice UI.
The Zune software that it connects to on Windows is also miles ahead of iTunes. Much better interface and far, far more responsive.
Yeah? So where is it? MS is the giant of computer operating systems. They had every incumbents advantage imaginable for digital music. Just by making something reasonable that worked on every PC they could have totally dominated. But they did nothing of note until Apple had already more or less locked up the market. They've done it again with phones, and they appear to be determined to do it with tablets.
There's more to a product than some nice ideas and decent hardware. You have to stick to a plan, make everything work together, and give people a reason to want your stuff. MS is capable of good work, but they have no consistent vision for why-- or rather, the wrong why, which is "to sell more Windows and Office licenses."
WP7 looks promising but it may be too little too late. And just because it has a slightly eccentric UI doesn't make it terribly innovative or awesome-- it's just the minimum MS had to do to not be completely counted out of the mobile OS market.
What I see is Android?s fractured, undefined success has given MS a way back into the smartphone game. This is a play Apple has excelled at on many occasion. Will MS pull it off or revert to their old way? Maybe, but I think teaming with Nokia was a great move. A bad move would have been to try to be equal to all and have less OS requirements for the HW (like Android does) or to get someone else to build your HW and then put your name it (the way MS did with Creative on the Zune).
Plus, the OS changes aren?t just a new UI. They have started with the ground up with this. The only difference between MS and Apple on this front is that Apple leveraged Mac OS, though that might be happening with Windows 8? which in itself could be a huge blistering blender of a blunder.
Denial is not a strategy.
What I see is Android’s fractured, undefined success has given MS a way back into the smartphone game. This is a play Apple has excelled at on many occasion. Will MS pull it off or revert to their old way? Maybe, but I think teaming with Nokia was a great move. A bad move would have been to try to be equal to all and have less OS requirements for the HW (like Android does) or to get someone else to build your HW and then put your name it (the way MS did with Creative on the Zune).
Plus, the OS changes aren’t just a new UI. They have started with the ground up with this. The only difference between MS and Apple on this front is that Apple leveraged Mac OS, though that might be happening with Windows 8… which in itself could be a huge blistering blender of a blunder.
Right, I didn't mean the UI wasn't new or innovative for MS, rather that I think we've reached the point were a spiffy UI may not be enough in the mobile market. We need to be looking at allover scope of vision, what a given vendor's grasp of what "mobile" really means over the next ten years.
My concern is that MS isn't getting that-- that they're still being reactive to what Apple did a year or two ago. A decent phone OS is a start, and certainly it's to their credit that they came up with something strikingly different. But are internal rivalries going to keep that OS on phones only? That would be a disaster, and completely misses the point of the mobile revolution.
It makes them seem positively dull-witted. It's like they looked around after a long slumber and said "Oh. Phones? People want phones? OK, we'll get on that." And by the time they got there, they looked around again and said "Oh, wait, tablets? We already do that, right? With Windows? But more touch-y? OK, we'll get on that." And instead of ever skating to where the puck will be, they say "We think in the future hockey will be replaced by hover-car races."
I love my iPhone, but there's no way that a smartphone can replace a desktop or laptop computer.
What about if your phone projected a HDTV sized image onto your retina? What if it communicated with an LED contact lens that presented you with an image overlay or potentially your entire field of vision?
This isn't science fiction, this is technology that we will be using in 10-20 years.
In any case, you get my point. When you ask the research guy a question you're going to get some odd answers.
Ask Ford or Chevy: they spend all that money advertising a product, among all their product lines, that the fewest people buy. (Well, there may be some dismal subcompact that gets outsold by an F-150, but you get the idea.)
Are they insane? No, they like big margins. Trucks have the biggest margins of any consumer class vehicle on the road.
These "post-PC" devices all suffer from thin margins that are only getting thinner as vendor X or vendor Y locks up the supply chain for various otherwise-hard-to-procure components. The easiest place for a Dell to compete and keep its margins somewhat higher than those in the tablet space is in the PC space, where commodification is still possible and profitable.
Microsoft shouldn't whine about the analogy; they should try to build a better truck.
Ummm, the top 2 selling vehicles in the US are Ford's F-150 and the Chevrolet Silverado, by a HUGE margin. number 3 is the Toyota Camry but it could double it's sales and still be 3rd. Just sayin'\
However, over the past few years Microsoft has released some awesome products, many of which were innovative, and most of which were very good executions:
Windows 7
Office 2010
Windows Phone 7 (they could easily have copied iPhone/Android, but chose to make a truly unique mobile OS)
Xbox 360
Kinect
Zune
And which of these products truly came from MS?
Windows came from MacOS and Windows 7 was largely driven by features from OSX
Office got its origins from Word Perfect and Lotus 123
Windows Phone would never have existed without inspiration from the iPhone
Xbox is another game console in a market that had Nintendo, Playstation, etc.
Kinect is the closest to an inspired product but came to being because of Wii
Zune? Really?
I assume the idea would be that you carried a digital identity with you (device, card, biometrics, implant, wearable) that toggled personalized services wherever you happened to be. The client devices would reside in the architecture, and instead of a single box that was the "computer" there would be many, many web connected devices distributed throughout the environment. There would still be portable screens, of course, but most if not all of their computing power would be offloaded to the always available servers.
This, of course, is also Google's vision, since a ubiquitously connected world is a world always ready to be served ads.
This was also (sort of) part of the original NeXT vision 25 years ago. The idea behind the 256MB magneto-optical disk was that you carried the disk with you to any location where a NeXT Cube was, pop it in, boot it and have your own environment. There were many reasons this did not work out, two of those being the price of those discs and the lack of speed on those discs.
Another dumb set of comment from a foolish MS exec. They don't get the market so they just hope they can figure something out. The Kinect is cool, but it's not going to be practical to have the Room be the computer. Not like they are talking about. I'm not sure he even knows what he is talking about.
Kinect is cool but you really shouldn't dismiss it as a complement to other computing approaches.
In any event these execs are killing their credibility here. I'm seeing iPads and iPhones adopted in east cost organizations that would have never considered Apple products in the past. This is very very impressive and is as much a validation of Apples approach as it is a sign of disappointment with MicroSoft. It is also a sign in my mind that MS recognizes that coming up with a similar API to what Apple has in iOS is a large undertaking that they can't respond to in a few months.
In a nut shelf they don't have a solution so they can only try to defuse Apples success.
This was also (sort of) part of the original NeXT vision 25 years ago. The idea behind the 256MB magneto-optical disk was that you carried the disk with you to any location where a NeXT Cube was, pop it in, boot it and have your own environment. There were many reasons this did not work out, two of those being the price of those discs and the lack of speed on those discs.
I think the promise of the ubiquitously connected future is that you don't have to do or carry anything. Accessing data, services and computational power would be no more taxing than flipping on a light, if that.
The downside, of course, is that various corporate and governmental interests are very interested in your whereabouts and doings, and becoming a creature of the data-sphere makes you easy prey. I don't really know how that problem is resolved, although it appears that one way is to raise a generation that doesn't think it's a problem at all and happily and promiscuously makes all of their private information readily available.
So when the Zune went away, didn't everybody lose all that music they thought they "bought", but only "subscribed" to? Or am I misunderstanding the business model?
You misunderstand that Zune went away.
The Zune device hit an end of life and Microsoft haven't announced they are making another. The Zune Marketplace didn't go anywhere.
It's basically the same as if Apple decided to not release a new iPod Touch. It wouldnt affect the ITunes store, existing iPod Touch owners or anyone using their iPhone or iPad to purchase music.
If the actual Zune Marketplace went away then Zune Pass users wouldn't be able to listen to the entire Zune catalog anymore, just the 10 "free" songs they received each month. Pretty much in the same way that if your cable operator went broke you wouldn't be able to watch TV anymore (except your cable operator doesn't let you pick 10 show each month to own).
While he believes most computing will be done on phones in the future, Mundie believes the successor to the traditional desktop PC is "the room." He envisions a future where a person's at-home computer won't be a box on a desk, but something that users can interact with wherever they are in a room, powered by a device like Microsoft's controller-free gaming controller, the Kinect.
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[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ][/c]
I would love to hear the step by step process to which he draws his conclusion. Please enlighten us as to why you think this way instead of hitting us with a blanket statement.