Last week, we posted about an article from Vanity Fair entitled, The Empire Reboots. Terrific article on Microsoft, with focus on the current relationship of Bill Gates and Satya Nadella and the longtime reign of CEO Steve Ballmer.
Matt Rosoff, from CITEworld, read the Vanity Fair piece and posted a tweet-storm based on the idea that a time traveler from today went back to 2004 and met Steve Ballmer, filling him in on ten years of tech advances.
For example:
The most valuable tech company–in fact, most valuable company–is Apple. Yeah, that Apple. iPod. Mac.
and
They got there by building a smartphone with a touchscreen, browser, and apps. It was years ahead of the competition.
Here’s a single page that gathers the tweet-storm and some additional thoughts. Nice job, Matt.
Microsoft got greedy with Office and that U.S. what hurting Microsoft. The Ballmer period was a lesson of complicity in an old man culture. History is riddled with companies that complicity doomed themselves and Microsoft is heading right toward the falling waterfall, it is almost to late.
Ballmer’s failures are akin to those of Lazaridis and Balsillie. Arrogance in seeing one’s own vision as unassailable. “Not Invented Here” as dogma.
Ballmer was right about Vista, except he understated it. It literally ripped the heart and soul out of that company.
He and Gates also brought in Ray Ozzie which signaled to everyone inside the organization that they were becoming an enterprise focused company. That attitude lingered until he left – just look at his famous reaction to the iPhone. “It doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine.” Microsoft is now primarily an old school enterprise software company. Ballmer succeeded spectacularly at that.
Now they’re pushing a “productivity everywhere” message which doesn’t appeal to most people. When I think of productivity software and practices nowadays I don’t think of Microsoft. They can either defend their position in the enterprise against some tough hombres or find a new path. I have no idea what that would be.
I don’t hate Microsoft like a lot of other people but I don’t find them interesting either. And when “meh…” is the emotional response that people have then you’re in a terrible, terrible spot.
Because of Monopoly of Microsoft platform, industry had
to pay a Microsoft Tax on Innovation.
In order to not pay this tax, the industry simply went with next
tech which was HTML.
Microsoft tried their best to copy and thwart it but had
government on its back.
Microsoft was focused on current threat of HTML and Java
and told itself the Apple was no more a threat.
They were wrong.
Plus Apple made sure Microsoft couldn’t clone the current tech
without getting the cross license on multi-touch.
By that time it was too late.
Another mistake was Microsoft’s monopoly was based on backward compatibility but new tech can’t be backward compatible.
They forced it and consumer rejected them even more.
Let see how long it will take for them to copy ApplePay and AppleWatch.
He didn’t need to see 10 years into the future. He just needed to look to the future and not be so stuck in what his company was making right now.
This is most evidenced by this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
He LAUGHED at the iPhone. So forget some guy coming back from the future. When he saw the actual device he still couldn’t see how much better it was than the crap they were peddling at the time.
This is a guy who doesn’t allow his family to use Apple devices. That is the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand. Instead he should have let his family use what they thought was the best device and then ask them why they thought it was the best. LEARN from that. And this doesn’t just apply to his family. Instead, he gets stuck on this idea that what he is making is the best, even when it is clearly not.
exactly. the banning-family thing is the canary in the goal mine — failure. ask and learn, as you say… why pay for market research when you can just ask those nearest and dearest to you?