Bishop asked Bach about Microsoft’s “Courier” device and Bach replied, “Well, Courier — Courier, first of all, wasn’t a device. The project and the incubation and the exploration we did on Courier I view as super important. The “device” people saw in the video isn’t going to ship, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t learn a bunch and innovate a bunch in the process. And I’m sure a bunch of that innovation will show up in Microsoft products, absolutely confident of it.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As per Bach’s last sentence: 20 years of bullshitting is obviously tough to stop immediately, if ever. As for the rest, yes, sometimes it’s tough always being right, but, hey, somebody has to do it:
“It’s not a ‘booklet,’ it’s a ‘vaporlet.’ So, why is this ‘astounding’ CG imagery being emitted right now? Are Microsoft worried that a real device is coming soon from another company?” – MacDailyNews Take, September 23, 2009, the day “Courier” supposedly was “leaked” by Gizmodo.
We find it immensely amusing that Microsoft still thinks they have the power to freeze markets. Up in Redmond, they’re delusional beyond repair.
@ Jersey_Trader,
“Anyone ever seen that Big Ass Table in the real world yet?”
I saw one being rolled down the sidewalk on one of those wheeled platforms that moving companies use. The guy pushing it was also dragging a strung out extension cord. He said it was the Big Ass Table Portable Windows 7 Edition.
I backed away carefully.
Poor, pitiful Gizmodo.
Suckers.
I have just suffered through reading the entire interview.
What a complete moron! Any other organization would have fired his ass 22 years ago. Keep up the good work, M$oft!
I forgot about the question of the “Big Ass Table”. Isn’t that the device the news junkies have been using to track breaking stories for us? Often wall-mounted, but I’ve seen them as a table. Saw lots of them the last election, sorting through which states were red or blue, which HAD been which, which mattered most … then moving on to the data-base info of how voters broke out between male and female, younger older and in between, sedan drivers vs coupe … OK, not that. What convinced me was the occasional crash … carried live. Are you telling me I watch too much TV? Or that these Blue-Screen incidents just looked like Windows? Or, what? Maybe someone could query AC-360 for more info?
“I am sure, voice recognition as a form of personal navigation, is surely on it’s way…”
Why do you think Apple bought Siri? This is precisely what we will see from Apple, though not before it actually goes on sale!
Wow, they make shitty real products, now the also make shitty vapor-wear? must be a rounding error!
And this is a surprise how?
Now all the M$ fangrlz will have to go back to beating off over Miss May.
@nownow, were you being sarcastic, because you made my point.
Dang, reading that full interview is painful. Thank God we Apple fanboies don’t have to pretend to admire an exec who obviously aspires to Pointy-Haired-Boss-style communication. Barfola.
That sounds like a very different product development approach than Apple.
The core of Apple’s approach is: we want a device to do X. Sometimes, that X implies a form factor, eg iPod. It is then built up from there with the focus on delivering on a well realized premise. Understanding the market for the device is required to form the premise, the function and form of the device.
I don’t know much about MS prod devel, but it seems that if management kills it at the end because they did not know the market for it at the beginning. Why even start the project in the first place? To innovate? We can all agree that innovation is good. We also know that some discoveries are sometimes useful later in ways that could not have been predicted. But having lab simply “innovating” it is not a recipe for making a coherent product. Even when kick ass products emerge, lack of understanding of the market means that the people that should be in love with the device do not even know that it exists, let alone the features (see Sony).
More evidence that the problem with Microsoft is their leadership. They seem to actually believe that they are still the center of the tech world. They throw around words like “incubate” and “innovate” as if that’s what they really do. They seem to believe their press releases, when most press releases are just a collection of the currently popular buzz words, meant for public and press consumption. As the MDN Take says, they are “delusional beyond repair.”
So if Microsoft is going to become more relevant again, they need to get rid of ALL their current leaders, including the one at the top. The new leadership needs act like Microsoft is the “underdog” with something to prove, and view Microsoft realistically, as the rest of the world views it.
Microsoft needs to stop wasting shareholder money on unfocused “incubation,” and existing products that will go nowhere, such as Zune, Kin, and the “big-ass table.” They need to rethink their Windows “mobile” strategy, so that what they eventually offer is more than just a glorified PDA-class OS. They need to refocus on what brings in most of the revenue, Windows and Office, and make them into products that people actually want to use, not just products people have to use by default.
But they can’t do that with the current leadership in place, because the current leadership has too much “baggage” and cannot make the necessary decisions.
@ Jersey_Trader,
“Anyone ever seen that Big Ass Table in the real world yet?”
Yup – they had two in the lobby-lounge of the Sheraton I stayed at in Chicago. I tried one of them (after the little kids quit trying to play checkers on it). The interface was horrible and kludgy. The map feature barely worked, and I consistently had to use two hands to get it to read my gesture correctly. Purely a POS.
“Ex-Microsoftie Robbie Bach confirms ‘Courier’ was vaporware”
Only Courier???
Come on!!
They “learned a bunch”……about making animations.
It really goes to show that if you want to try to stifle innovation, create FUD to obfuscate the obvious – That you have nothing to offer of any substance, and that by turning heads you slow down the innovator that is not yourself, by casting doubt into the minds of customers.
Case in point, I held off buying an iPad because I wanted to see the Courier and The Slate. The Courier was ridiculously different and I thought a possible worthy competitor, given its different form factor. Now I find out that the “originality” was pure nonsense. There was no originality. THERE WAS NO PRODUCT! I will not make the same mistake again. I will not wait for Google’s product, because in my opinion if any company had an IPAD Killer sitting in R&D;, they would have released it already and not given Apple a 2 million head count head start, knowing fully well that iPad v2.0 will have twice as many apps and already be imprinted in the minds of the masses.
I’ll stay with the one great innovator of the 21st century.
A question to ask is why is this Courier story being recycled now? I think the answer is a four letter word: SIRI