Paul Graham called it : Microsoft is Dead - last year.
Maybe that was an exaggeration, but there's a grain of truth. 2008 is the year M$ is obviously in one long, wrenching car-crash.
They are innovating nothing, *leading* in nothing ... Apple owns the major device-swarm platforms (iPod, iPhone). Sure M$ have their own ... but these are simply "me too" efforts ... always following the trends that Apple sets. They might as well be Toshiba or HTC for all the memetic advance they're making.
Apple own the local user experience; and now Apple are hoovering up developers, and with the launch of Adobe's Flex, the Mac may become the standard environment for the cross-platform desktop application developer. (Don't forget you get Ruby on Rails bundled too.) And all the Unix goodness. The Mac is increasingly a luxury brand for important people and those who think they need to keep up with them.
Google have made massive incursions into everything this year, from Application Engine to OpenSocial to their FriendConnect to Android to GData to iGoogle to the revamped Orkut ... they have all bases covered.
Microsoft have been trying to play catch-up here too ... but trying to buy Yahoo revealed colossal FAIL. (A strategy about nothing more than aggregating eyeballs.) Their shift to advertising, aping Google without understanding it, in disarray. Now this : they've been beaten in the only advertising market that really matters.
Suddenly (and really, it's come up quite fast and unexpectedly), it really is too late.
They're no longer a playa who seem to be slipping up a bit. They're *gone*. A has-been. We expect nothing from them. No innovation. Smart people don't want to go work there to help them. Gaping Void's sly, edgy icon is empty. M$ can't change the world any more ... it's already changing too quickly under the seismic influence of Google and Apple and Nintendo. All they can do is try to tag along or watch helplessly from the side-lines ... until it is time to go home.
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2 comments:
Remember what everybody said about Apple in the early nineties?
Or, to pick a more recent example, how many people thought the idea of MS successfully entering the game console market would ever work? I know I didn't.
MS has a stupid number of very clever folk working there. They have a big pile of money. I wouldn't write it off for a few years yet...
Apple and Google are interesting contrasts.
Apple is all about Steve Jobs and his taste and design-vision. Apple in the early 90s didn't have that, and it's hard to see that Apple would have amounted to much without Jobs' return. The good people would have evaporated ... to Be, to 90s web-startups etc.
Microsoft are analogous. In fact, Bill Gates's vision was pretty fundamental to it. M$ began to go downhill in the late 90s when Gates was out of sympathy with the times, and it went completely to pieces when Gates lost interest entirely.
Sure, Microsoft's strengths have always been a) its shedload of smart people and developer mindshare; and b) its money.
But look how they're (proverbially) "pissing both away" (eg. on Vista). The institution doesn't (at the moment) enable those people and so it will lose them.
Google did the opposite. They hired all the smart people and then found a way to harness their creativity and energy ("20% time")
That's driving Google's world domination ... the ability to apply the collective intelligence of their employees.
Of course, Microsoft *might* either a) get taken over by a new genius or b) discover a new way exploit their collective. No one can say it won't happen.
But it hasn't happened *yet*.
Today, their trajectory is very much into oblivion.
And prediction is really only about naming present trends - not claiming genuine clairvoyance.
So yeah, you're right ... I'm not writing them off. But I need to see one of those things happen before I change my prediction. (I think copying Google is the more likely : it's easier and closer to M$ "DNA" ... Chanel 9 was a promising start ... perhaps more federation / autonomy / even directly ripping off "20% time") might save them.
Game console market I'm not sure about ... the only *ideas* in game consoles seem to come from Nintendo. Frankly the whole gaming world is moribund anyway. Sony and M$ are merely about technical competence and massive advertising. Their success is bought.
I suppose there is "platform strategy" somewhere ... but not sure where.
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