What I don't get is why a company like Microsoft - rich and no longer in the lead doesn't setup a couple of well funded skunk works companies. Drop the baggage (ie don't force them to use windows and allow a new culture to emerge) and give each one a target - touch computing or something else and let 'em go.
Microsoft has all the pieces - money , good engineers, marketing etc. but it's not working. They have the financial space to do something radical and disruptive to themselves and jump on that if it pans out.
Either that or just get some strong with real vision at the helm who is capable of turning it around.
> Microsoft has all the pieces - money , good engineers, marketing etc.
They don't have the most important thing. Leadership. Everything about Ballmer reminds me of a salesperson who is trying over-hype a product in to selling it to you. With very little knowledge as to what the product actually does.
Like Ballmer, Steve Jobs is also not a tech nerd (in the sense that they are not developers/programmers or engineers), but Steve always seems to have a more in-depth knowledge about Apple products and knows it inside out.
On the other hand the top three guys at Google are hackers.
> Like Ballmer, Steve Jobs is also not a tech nerd
Though Jobs isn't a certified engineer, he did wrote code, soldered chips on motherboards, etc. He certainly knows what parts a computer is made of, how software works, etc.
Jobs has a wonderful concept of the user experience that he tries to enforce on all of Apple's products. If you notice, the underlying technology is really 2nd or 3rd on the list. How the user interacts with it, what their workflow is, how the software presents itself. These are all paramount.
Ballmer's focus seems to be on metrics and sales figures instead.
It's actually worse -- MSFT has the skunkworks, but they keep ignoring the nifty new toys that come out of them.
It reminds me of IBM -- there was an amazing amount of very cool new stuff appearing out of the TJ Watson lab (when my parents were IBM'ers, I got to read their journals regularly). IBM brought very few of them to market, even when other companies did so with gusto (PDAs are an example -- IBM had working prototypes stuffed on a shelf somewhere long before Apple started even hyping the Newton).
And the defecutives didn't learn their lesson -- when their server market started suffering when the bubble burst, my mother started asking friends and colleagues about potential candidates for IBM tools and servers when she became a marketing exec there. I gave her a list of companies like PIXAR, Blue Sky Studios, Digital Domain (you see where this is going). 3 months later I went to Linux Expo with my mother and several of hear colleagues, all of whom wondered why IBM hadn't gone after those markets -- the people who gave my mother her mission stopped her from going after the companies I referred her to.
We were particularly impressed by their foolishness when we attended Carly Fiorina's keynote -- in which she listed nearly every company I'd suggested, some with video interviews, and making a big deal about how HP had provided them with Linux based solutions.
Ipods & iphones share the same apps. Windows' greatest strength is its software. If you prove that it's easy to leave, nobody knows where the customers will jump next.
Well, they share one app (iTunes). I was more thinking iPod classic (I group iPod touch in with the iPhones), but I get your meaning. Yes, the risk is that they don't jump where you want them to go, but that is the same risk as you doing nothing. The users are going to jump.
Microsoft should have been fine, but it looks like they are so locked on what they are doing now and allowing middle managers to play politics instead of technology (see the Clear Type stories for instance) that they are heading to the iceberg. The Titanic was "unsinkable" until it hit the iceberg. Microsoft's software is not really geared for mobile and replacements with reputations are appearing on other platforms. I believe Microsoft's strengths now are inertia, document formats, and servers (specifically Exchange and SQL).
If I was in charge of Microsoft, I would probably do a modified version of the OS X -> iOS strategy. Use a beefed up version of Silverlight refocused on touch and make sure the new apps run under Windows 7 also. Make sure you ship an "App Store" to enterprise customers that automatically installs the right apps on machines and does backups.
A viable alternative made and sold by ... Microsoft? This wouldn't be taking away from Windows, it would be designing and selling the right tool for the job.
OTOH, they are too scared to do it and create incentives for people to migrate away from Windows. Even if most of them move to another Microsoft offering, they don't seem to want risking it.
Microsoft has all the pieces - money , good engineers, marketing etc. but it's not working. They have the financial space to do something radical and disruptive to themselves and jump on that if it pans out.
Either that or just get some strong with real vision at the helm who is capable of turning it around.
Perhaps its much the same thing