Microsoft: Utterly incapable of innovation and well on its way to obsolescence

“Nortel Networks, Remington, Eastman Kodak: The list of once-thriving and now-defunct or moribund technology companies reads like the stops on an abandoned railway line,” Fabrice Taylor writes for The Globe and Mail. “You can add Microsoft to that list. It’s well on its way to obsolescence. Nothing can be done. It’ll take a long time – decades – but this $200-billion (U.S.) company is finished.”

“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!