“The problem is that Microsoft is utterly incapable of innovation,” Taylor writes. “Over the past three years the company has spent about $25-billion on research and development.”
Taylor writes, “What do shareholders have to show for that investment? Vista, an operating system that users were frantically uninstalling within days of loading the cumbersome beast onto their laptops? Zune, the supposed competitor to Apple’s iTunes and iPod? Kin One and Kin Two, Microsoft’s answer to the smart phone? Two intense years in the making before they hit store shelves, they were pulled after two months and scrapped.”
“The stark truth is that Microsoft has rarely invented anything that mattered. It didn’t invent the operating system. It didn’t invent the graphical user interface. It didn’t invent the spreadsheet or the word processor or the Web browser,” Taylor writes. “It didn’t invent the gaming console or the search engine or the tablet PC or server software. It has, in short, invented nothing – or at least nothing of consequence. What other technology company in the history of business has invented nothing and survived for long? Many of them invented very cool things and still didn’t last.”
Taylor writes, “The company should stop messing around and behave like a utility: Cut costs, including R&D, focus on what it does reasonably well and give all the money it can back to shareholders to maximize their returns.”
There’s much more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: And, the world awakens at long last.
May Steve Ballmer remain Microsoft CEO for as long as it takes!
So many will soon die off and you can put PCWorld in the heap bag as well.
I could have told you all that.
“I like their strategy. I like it alot.”
– Steve Jobs
I am truly surprised
</sarcasm>
[chant]
Balmer … Balmer … Balmer …
For as long as it takes!
Like I said, anyone with an ounce of brain matter knows that MS can’t innovate their way out of a paper bag. MS locked in the business world with their deal with IBM, who was stupid enough to fall for it. Poor Gary Kildall, got screwed in the process…
This is bs. Apple has 10% or less of pc market and only makes money off of products that also works on pc. Why does apple products also work on pc well because over 90% of us use windows pc. And ooooo kin failed it didn’t it’s just being moved out of the way for windows phone 7 which will let you connect to windows messenger and xbox live users wow that’s innovation. I love apple but windows will never die they run our world.
Microsoft has made a couple of good innovations: ODBC for databases, and the scroll wheel for the mouse. That pretty well sums up their list of useful innovations.
@Eric
I was mildly entertained watching your ruptured artery of stupid spurt glops of retardation all over my computer screen. Please post more.
Didn’t MS invent that talking paperclip thing?
@eric spielberg
troll and moron… nice combo
@MDN take…
spot on.
And it’s only taken, what, 20 years??
@eric spielberg…
People eventually stopped using horse-drawn carriages and buggy-whips too. But I suppose that with you hope continues to spring eternal. Keep the faith. Dolt.
Yay Clippie! And Bob, of course.
Not to mention the Microsoft Store fiasco. Check out this article about the MS Store in Arizona. Pathetic: http://bit.ly/9SfhzH
Wasn’t there some kind of Wizard that would pop up and try to help you?
I remember a purple wizard hat.
Eric, there are no versions of Logic or Aperture that run on windows.
Windows trolls apparently know nothing about spelling or grammar, either.
Thanks for playing!
Microsoft is kinda like a giant turd that you just can’t flush down the toilet. It continues to float and stink up the room and there’s little you can do about it.
(Microsoft’s Modus Operandi)
Steal, Bribe, Buy, & Bully their way into Others Innovation.
“Hey Bill, Karma is a Bitch Ain’t it”
“May Monkeyboy Remain as Microsoft’s CEO 4 as Long as it Tales”
MicroSoft’s days of true hegemony are ending. BUT, it will be around for the foreseeable future as a major player. Maybe not the great dramatic might, but a lot of folks are still buying Windows PCs. You may not like them, but there they are, still with huge amounts of market share. Yes, Apple may capture a sizable share of the $1,000+ computing segment (the one it cares about), but for the “average user”, that $600 Dell or $800 Toshiba is “good enough”. They use Word a couple times a week, maybe excell to write a paking list, and their kid will use PowerPoint to make a presentation on the seasons for school. They make about $50,000 a year, so that $600 investment is a sizable one, and the computer works “good enough” for them.
In fact, as we move on, most consumers are going to be looking for an even more “bottom of the barrel experience”. That average person doesn’t even need Microsoft Office, Google Docs (which will happily exploit their privacy but oh, who cares) works just as well for them. The Home Computer has reached a breaking point where it offers a bigger capability than the average home user will ever need.
Not saying that’s me… I’m a professional musician, my iTunes library is over 100 GB alone, the more ram the better my notation software runs, the iMovie and Garageband are really useful for recording music lessons for me, I love my mac and will probably never get a Windows machine again in my life. Just saying, to the average home user, a 200 GB hard drive is about as useful as a 500 GB hard drive, 4 GB RAM is about as useful as 8 GB RAM, and for this core group of computer users, Windows is “just fine”
“And ooooo kin failed it didn’t it’s just being moved out of the way for windows phone 7…”
So Kin is released and about a month later (sure, it’s still out there in the US, but neither MS nor the carrier are doing anything for it at this point), more than a few months before Windows Phone 7, it is killed, but that is not failure, it is strategy? If that is true, then MS strategy is pretty fucked up.
Seriously, you believe that they actually meant to bring out a product for a only a month? If not, then it’s a failure.
It did not connect with the teen/early twenty crowd to which it was supposed to connect. FAIL. It’s failure is probably linked to WP7, but more because of an internal power struggle between the Kin and WP7 teams than some grand product rollout scheme.
That said, you do have a point about MS being too heavily embedded to go away even in the next 20 yrs. Business PC users and Windows in devices everywhere in the economy (it is the wonderful reason the the self checkout system at my supermarket is always down) require that it will be around for quite a long time.
They may suck, but so many things do suck that stick around because it is too difficult to change.
Gut Feel: 2 outcomes are possible for MicroSoft
1. Attempt to do everything with a half-hearted salesman as CEO as they are now (Balmer has to have been under extreme BoD pressure for some time).
2. Break Microsoft up into separate public companies; PC OS & server, Applications, Mobile, Gaming.
The questions is when will the Board get tired of #1 and do #2. Given Balmer & Gates shareholding and other institutional investors control of shares, it will take a revolution from the large shareholders.
How long can you take before you admit failure to grow and match the competition?
I’ve worked for and around a few guys with attitude like Balmer and NONE of those ever achieved much, because they didn’t know how and people behind their backs looked at them as sales clowns.
Kin failed because tween parents scoffed at the notion of being forced into a $30 a month data plan, a “kid phone” shouldn’t cost the parents about $70 a month, you can get a fully featured Android from VZW for that price. If the Data would have been optional, and had included free wifi, or even if VZW would have put it on their $9.99/month Data plan and promoted it (partnered with pre-movie commercials for the new Twilight movie, or product placed on some show on ABC Family) the phone could have actually succeeded. I doubt most tweens even know what a “kin” is.
So WP7 would be next of “kin”?
Great points Lamos. Only thing that is missing there is the fact that those computers that the “average user” is buying will fill up and bloat up with it’s limited memory and hard drive storage. Then when Microsoft has another update, they will discover that they need to purchase yet another computer or update what they have. Since a new computer is so inexpensive, they will just opt for purchasing a new one. Rinse, repeat, and recycle. Meanwhile, with every update that Apple has given us, we have discovered that our old Macs actually run faster. Cost of ownership on a Mac if FAR less than with a PC! Once you factor in all the applications, ease of use, setup, support, and lack of virus’s just to name a few.
Why ANYONE would want to buy a PC is beyond me other than games. That arena is soon to change too!
@Eric,
Why do Apple products work well on PC’s? Because Apple knows how to write software as well as make great hardware. Their software works DESPITE the limitations of Windows.
Actually, there are a lot of complaints about iTunes on Windows; your praise for Apple software just goes to show that the alternatives aren’t very good. Why are there complaints? For one thing, because iTunes is designed for a modern and stable OS that allows the creation of new processes, not the garbage work- around that bundles processes together into system processes.
Next, why do Apple products work great in a mixed network environment? Again, it’s despite Windows. Apple promotes interoperability through open standards and just works — plug- and-play. Invariably, PCs require far more support in a networked environment. Heck, PCs require support to open documents created by different versions of MS software. Apple created, promoted or contributed toward most interoperable standards: network protocols, CUPS and Bonjour for printing, etc., USB, Firewire, and lots more.
Mac OS supports things like PDF at a system level, and even plays better in MS’s own playground: connecting to MS own mail servers, etc. much easier than PC’s do! Many enlightened IT managers use Macs to do all their network management because it is so much easier.