Ballmer (and Microsoft) still doesn't get the iPad
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
"Hey guys, we completely missed on this. Apple brought out this really cool device that we have no answer for. Our bad. shrugs"
No, I'm sure that they firmly understand what's going on. The question is, do they still have the technical expertise to actually do anything about it? I'm not really sure. They remind me of Nokia actually.
Little known fact: Nokia was working on a touchscreen device LONG before the iPhone came out.
The problem was two-fold: they didn't understand how to innovate the interface. Their attempt was largely click based. Your finger was supposed to be more or less like a mouse.
Second, when the iPhone did come out they lacked the technical competency to respond. Their base operating system, S60, was a poorly engineered mess and at the lower levels everyone knew it. Trying to bolt on a next-generation interface was a dead-end, but that didn't stop them from trying. To this day, the engineering culture at Nokia shows little ability to actually keep up and compete.
I fear Microsoft is in much the same position. Do they know they're getting their butts kicked on tablets (and mobile for that matter)? Yep. But unlike previous times they've gotten beaten up (think netscape/Internet) they just don't seem to have the ability to respond. In the past they'd hire their way out of it... but Google has already snatched up and incredible amount of mobile talent (like Matias Duarte). Not that it matters, because the culture at Microsoft appears to have become frozen. I'm just not sure that they have the will, as a company, to respond in any meaningful way.
Microsoft’s strategy would be completely different if they “got it”. They would’ve taken their billions of dollars in the bank, and hired a team of people who could get a new platform built. They’d have set internal expectations high, and kept a tight focus on meeting real needs with an interface that could delight users.
I think the individual technical expertise probably exists somewhere inside Microsoft: they do all kinds of neat research, and employ plenty of smart people. Evidently, though, the institutional structure of Microsoft, with competing teams vying for resources and squabbling over areas of perceived overlapping expertise, has prevented them from executing.
In my opinion, everything Microsoft has done over the last 5-10 years (if not forever) has been a game of catch-up, trying to copy competitors when they see those competitors as more successful, and seldom if ever really innovating, at least not in shipping products. The Microsoft product vision seems myopic and incoherent.
1) The go with touch bolted onto Windows on x86. While it's understandable that they'd like to carry along a base of existing software, what are the chances of the interface working well? The CES demo didn't seem to show any more touch than flipping through pages in an e-reader someone else wrote. The lack of OS features and other apps to show off was very telling. It's doubtful many are surprised that HP hasn't shipped yet.
There's been touch support in Windows since XP, but as an add-on, how can it being anything but an awful kludge?
Even if they succeed with a Windows offering, it is apt to be a failure in the sense that it'd just be cannibalizing their own netbook/laptop sales. Vendors do seem to be waiting for Intel to ship a lower power x86 part, so a Windows kludge seems to be the most likely path.
2) They could go with something new... run on another CPU (different instruction set) porting some frameworks from Windows but using a new U.I. Can they pull off a great touch U.I? Can they write code that'll deliver speedy performance and good battery life with a low-power CPU? Can they write a few great core apps and make the platform attractive to developers? (They've got no phone to migrate an alternative base from). Can they out-Apple Apple?
I don't think it's the competition that's going to be scared of big old Microsoft... more likely the users and developers, and to a lesser degree the stockholders.
With something new, a so-so offering would fail big time. (Think Zune). It'd really have to offer something Apple doesn't. If lower price is the only draw, it may get sales without making anybody any money. Apple has room to cut prices if they want to.
Having picked up Palm and WebOS and BeOS, I think HP has a better chance of cooking up a viable tablet OS (and hardware bundle) than MS and other partners.
Personally, I consider that a failure. Even in the poop brown colour people still assume it is an iPod.
I don’t see how that can be called success.
Ballmer may be doing a Jobs. "Nobody reads anymore"... well not until I release iBooks that is.
At this point there is so little reason to play their tablet hand if it is WP7. They already have 3rd parties working on apps. The only thing they'd get is scrutiny.
Update: This is basically exactly what the TechFlash article referred to in another comment says.
The question is: are any of these platforms actually successful? If Microsoft “got it”, wouldn’t there be some notable successes here among all the failures? Wouldn’t the company be able to make something other than Windows and Office reasonably profitable, if they truly understood where technology was going and what users wanted?
And even WinMo came out and did match their chief competitor at the time, Palm OS.
The problem isn't that they can't make products successful -- Zune makes a profit. It's that they need to make a profit that moves the bottomline, which is hard if you have Windows and Office.
The problem (from my consumer perspective) is that Microsoft’s existence (at least for the last 15 years) doesn’t result in any products that are fundamentally better than those that would have been around anyway. The comparison to Apple (the original topic here) is like night to day.
Lets take Excel as an example. What is a superior spreadsheet to Excel today? It is by far the easiest spreadsheet that I've used. Much easier than Google's or Open Office's. Plus has capabilities that neither has. For example, check out its support for pivot tables and pivot charts, including accessing RDBMS and OLAP stores. And with PowerPivot now supports GB in memory warehouses. Really, give me a spreadsheet that can do what Excel can do, yet I can give it to a 10 year old kid and they can keep their batting average tracked in it?
And don't forget that Excel and Word (and the rest of Office) come with powerful addin models. I've seen companies build their entire workflow in Office. Something you simply can't do with any other product in the market.
Sure Excel may not be innovating in the sense that it doesn't have an external antenna. But there's a reason that people pay money for it, despite these free products. And its not because they're idiots. It's because when you actually stack up the apps, and look at the features, Excel kills it. And Excel 2010 adds a LOT of new features that paying customers want (and have asked for). Sure, I don't expect the 10 year old kid who is tracking his RBIs to care about about new built-in calculations or embedded filters in charts, or no PIA deployment, but for people who demand a lot of their spreadsheets, it can't be beat.
And you don't think Kinect is a little innovative? Really? Sure, maybe not your cup of tea, but if people are falling all over themselves for the iPhone 4's gyroscope you have to give MS a little props for Kinect (not to mention XBox Live).
For starters, technical ability probably isn't a problem.
The tablet didn't fail for technical reasons, it failed for business reasons -- mostly driven my Microsoft's insistence on not supporting it intelligently. After all, for years the Tablet PC platform carried a large price premium AND performance deficit... which ruled it out of pretty much every market that it would otherwise have appealed to -- a big one being CG artists.
I expect that there are quite a few people at Microsoft that DO get it, but I'm pretty sure that Ballmer isn't one of them.
Part of my evidence for this is based on the fact that the more Ballmer leaves things alone (games) the more successful they are. Microsoft produces a lot of great games -- and I am fairly certain that if Ballmer exerted more control over those games, they'd be quite a bit less successful.
For those who aren't familiar with the book, the basic idea is that well-managed firms are structured to direct resources toward the needs of their most profitable customers. In Microsoft's case, that's the corporate IT department. Licenses to home users are lucrative, but consumers only buy Windows with new PCs, and MS has little influence on when they upgrade. Corporate customers have more discretion. Microsoft is built to serve them.
The best proof of this interpretation is that the most successful consumer-oriented projects within Microsoft have been the ones that were incubated in isolation from the rest of the company - XBox and the Zune.
It's going to be extremely difficult for Microsoft to compete with iOS and Android devices, because their corporate customers simply don't care about them. As a result, middle managers in Microsoft largely don't care about them, and will never give those projects the attention and resources they would need to be competitive.
As for customers, some would argue that businesses cut back more than consumers in a tight economy. There tends to be little expansion, few new startups, and most stick with hardware that's already working. But consumers still have children going to school, and some have machines that become unworkable for them (less skill in avoiding and coping with malware than businesses have). In spite of naysayers predicting that consumers would stay away from premium products during the major downturn, Apple certainly has had healthy growth by any measure, and did well with its' OS upgrade sales as well as hardware. It seems buyers are out there if one has what they want. If Microsoft did focus excessively on corporate IT, it was through lack of insight. They've certainly had the financial and human resources to throw at any market they were after. reliability and profits took quite a while for the Xbox, but it does enjoy a significant loyal base now, probably more than for most of MS' other offerings where there's more lock-in than love. Some feel they've overstated Xbox profitability some by lumping it in with the Mac business (which includes Mac Office revenue).
The Zune doesn't seem to have either a huge following or contribute in a very important way to the overall profitability. In terms of an installed base that'll continue to stick with the company, the Xbox seems far more successful.
I find it hard to accept that any underachievement in timely delivering of innovative well-received products is the fault of lack of resources. If anything there seem to be too many people not working together with good focus. They've obviously got some very talented engineers and have shown some cool things from R&D. The failure to produce more fruit falls on management.
I think they're finally getting the idea that desktop Windows is not the answer for a phone, but they don't seem to have a clue for tablets. If they did we would be hearing from all sorts of developers about NEW apps. Trying to push desktop Windows as the solution is a bit too much like eating yogurt with a pitchfork. They may not yet be ready for a fresh start on the desktop, but they'd be foolish not to start anew on tablets.
Patch Tuesday coming up brings 14 patches addressing 34 vulnerabilities. (with the recent hacker convention, it's the season for finding bugs in every platform, even Apples')
If Microsoft has had anything that could be considered a disruption for development, it's the constant need to put out fires the vulnerabilities bring. I think it's fair to say that their past emphasis on upgrade sales through feature bloat while neglecting less visible security, performance, and stability, is/was a management failing that has cost them heavily. Besides taking resources, it's also made alternative platforms much more appealing by comparison.
"Consumers only buy Windows with new PCs" That seems to be true for the most part but why? Maybe if updates came out more often, most people would at least have hardware that would be suitable. Apple makes gets significant sales of OS upgrades, proving it is possible. Keeping more of the installed base up to date widens the base for app developers to cater to, and would help weed out legacy browsers.
On top of that, the UI that I could see was rather nice.
Second, if MS ever wakes up, they will most certainly be scary. That isn't likely to happen with Ballmer, but if Bill was ever to return (or even appoint a new CEO) Microsoft may return to being scary.
You're paraphrasing me. I said MS isn't big and scary anymore. Like a big scary monster. Of course they're still a large company.
But now anyone doing something in computing is worried that MS will either incorporate what they're doing into Windows or buy their competitors product instead of theirs.
tablet != slate
That is all, back to work now.
It's got the same core ingredients as the Mac: utterly, shockingly new user interface paradigm that is easier to use, a machine which at launch is locked down tighter than a bank vault (and dismissed as a toy by people still wedded to the old paradigm), plug-in-and-go computing.
This time, he's added a couple of new twists: the app store (so Apple can veto apps that don't mesh with their vision of where the platform is going, the smaller portable gizmos (phone and ipod touch), syncing to a mothership for backup.
I expect in the longer term, (a) the sync hub will migrate from the (dying) Mac platform to the cloud and/or Apple's MobileMe service, and (b) we'll eventually see some opening up of the platform -- I'd love the iPad equivalent of the Mac II, but that's probably a couple of years away.
For now, Apple have got their pure and shiny platform back, better than before and not liable to being cloned by Microsoft in the short term (unlike the Mac platform, which was visibly losing its UI lead over Windows with Win7 and facing parity as of Win8). I don't think this one will keep them ahead anything like as long as the Mac did, but it's got to be good for 5-10 years.
So, I do agree with Ballmer, and probably my next portable computer will be a Windows7 foldable laptop.