Microsoft vs the Karate Kid
contrast.ie
contrast.ie
No. The Zune is criticized because before the iPod, there were no mp3 players for grandma. Apple obviously created a winning product. Depending on how charitable you want to be, Microsoft either 1) observed the same market opportunity and took longer to create an inferior product or 2) shamelessly ripped off the ipod, and did a poor job at it.
The author also compares a company with a market cap of $250 Billion to a child. The big boys play for keeps. There's no excuse for "well, they did their best" at companies of this scale. To quote another 80s movie: "Do or do not, there is no try".
What? Every color screen phone I have ever owned has had a grid of icons.
If you think of the grid design, what it basically says, visually is that all apps are of equal importance. Which is weird, when you think about it. Surely on a phone, ringing someone is a more important task than , say , Settings, yet the grid style (whether Apples or indeed a Symbian KHTML based) says they're of equal importance
http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/windows-phone-7-series-wo...
For most users, I am guessing the most common use case is copying a browser link to an email/IM/SMS, and this can be supported without an actual copy/paste implementation. The hard part of full-blown copy/paste isn't implementing copy/paste storage, it is figuring out the UI for selecting text on a touch screen.
but yes, copy+paste isn't all that necessary, but i can imagine mobile bloggers, among others, needing it from time to time.
btw, don't downvote me for using winmo. i'm not a fanboy, I just get tethering (bluetooth/usb), opera mini (the latest version is great), skyfire (streams flash/sivlerlight). It's a bit slow and the ui isn't great but I use a utily that helps me start apps using keyboard shortcuts and can multi-task (go figure) very easily.
Unfortunately, this is at odds with much of what I know about Microsoft, and this was the core complaint of Dick Brass' "Micrsoft's Creative Destruction", which was one of the more widely-discussed (and in my opinion, spot-on) Microsoft doom-and-gloom stories: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html
It is clear that Windows Phone 7 has benefited a lot from Zune...but they are in the same division, with some of the same leadership. If different Microsoft divisions can actually work together to advance a clear and coherent vision about the future of computing, Microsoft will rise to once again be a dominant power in new and emerging areas of the industry. However, if Microsoft remains a group of independent fiefdoms each looking to advance the careers of their own management, Microsoft will continue to be a super-profitable enterprise company that is mostly irrelevant in new markets.
Sadly, I think that the author is looking at the Zune->Windows Phone example and inferring a broader trend where there is none.
It's also possible Microsoft will leave the copycat behaviour behind and start creating original products instead of knock-offs of the market leaders. That, however, seems unlikely.
I can't remember a Microsoft product that was genuinely pioneering something.
Surface and Natal comes to my mind. But then again, I've seen both only in videos.
Surface appears heavily inspired by Jeff Han's TED presentation or a Reactable (I am sure both came first). Calling it a shipping product is somewhat of a stretch. It's more like a tech demonstrator you can buy, if they are willing to sell you one and you are willing to pay what they want for it.
Call me skeptical, but I am only counting products that you can buy at a computer store or download or use through the web.
Personally, despite not owning one myself, I'd say that the Zune HD is already on par with the iPod Touch in terms of what the product offers. They have different strengths, overlapp in some areas, and both make excellent devices. The iPod Touch wins only when you include the content of the App Store (note that I'm making a distinction between the Store and the content there). If Windows Phone lives up to what they've shown so far, I believe that landscape may shift toward parity faster than you'd expect...
How, exactly? Evolving a product is neither revolutionary nor particularly original. A multi-player hub? An app-store? I am pretty much sure everything on this list was invented by someone else. XBL is a successful product, but it's the execution, not being first.
Also, having the whole Xbox user population captive doesn't hurt market share. It's not like they could go to the Playstation hub.
> Zune HD is already on par with the iPod Touch in terms of what the product offers
Also, it's not feature count, it's how well it works on the whole. The iPod was never the feature-count leader - just about every competitor had more features or could perform some tricks the iPods of that time couldn't. It's how well rounded the product is. The iPod is a solid product and was the first really usable music player. It works really well. Besides that, a Zune HD won't work with a Mac, despite the fact iPods work very well with PCs (and, with some fiddling, other Unixes).
I don't always like Apple (their DRM'ed cables are ridiculous and OSX is Unix with a 70's feel when you drop into the terminal) but I have to admit they do some really excellent products my family can use.
Interesting, because the example you point to, the iPod, didn't really capture it's outrageously huge market share until the iPod Mini, which was an evolution on the original design. In fact, the entire iPod line until the introduction of touch was a steady evolution from one to the next, and continued onward winning over customers. It beat out other mp3 players despite all of them having the same features, if not more, by doing it well. Or as you put it:
>I am pretty much sure everything on this list was invented by someone else ... it's the execution, not being first ... Also, it's not feature count, it's how well it works on the whole.
Thanks for making my point for me :)