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I think you're mistaking feature creep with their crazy good backwards compatibility. They simply can't remove anything.

Exactly. Which leads to some of the most awful and crazy designs decisions.

Look at the upgrade to 64 bit. In Windows 16 bit days you had the C:\Windows\System directory. In Windows 32 bit, you gained C:\Windows\System32 for your system libraries. In Windows 64 bit you would assume C:\Windows\System64 right? Nope. 64 bit dlls go in to System32 and 32bit dlls go into SysWOW64. WTF?

Same goes with Program Files (32 bit) etc. They are pretty much screwed by legacy.

The windows mobile, XBox, and WinRT guys must feel so much better than having to work on Windows core because they don't have to deal with supporting 17+ years of software still running on their platform.

Though I agree with your general point about Microsoft being hampered by legacy support (but for other reasons such as having 2 UI paradigms of Metro and Windows together), I don't think this is the best example. The everyday user really doesn't care what folder their software is installed to as long as its easily accessible from the desktop/programs.

The big issue that comes out of that mindset is that it's people that do work in those folders that end up telling laymen that stuff is done stupid, opening up a nice spot for apple and it's simple and easy everything to come in and take away sales. (Or my favorite, when I can manage to get someone to try out Ubuntu :) )

That is until they need to scavenge and mess around the file system because of a virus, failed uninstall, missing DLL or something. Then they really care.

If that's the problem, what's the better approach to solving it: cleaning up the file system organization, or making it so that those things don't happen and make people mess around with the file system in the first place (e.g. by introducing a declarative isolated application model such as AppX in Windows 8)?

I'd say their bigger problem is that they can't say "no" to anything (which is a consequence of their enterprise focus)

And now you've got me wondering if it would be possible for microsoft to spin off a whole new company (or just division) to build an os or products under a new brand with no backwards compatibility or tie to the past. So the current products would be kept for enterprises and the new one could target consumers.

Have any companies of this size done this successfully? It would require a lot of work but could help them greatly in the consumer space.

Xbox is a good example of this working in a new cooler market , it has so few ties with microsoft that some of my 10 - 15 year old cousins who dislike microsoft don't even realize the xbox is a microsoft product.

Could have easily made the same criticism of Apple in the mid 90s. Microsoft can definitely be saved. You just have to fire Ballmer and put a visionary in charge. There are still some really good people working at Microsoft. Unfortunately, the leadership and vision haven't been there. Nobody has been willing to take risks.

They took a risk in killing the OEMs and building Surface in house. They now need to take a bigger one.

I used the think the same thing, but it's not clear to me that Microsoft "needs" saving. They're growing the enterprise side of their business quite fast and the problem just seems to be that investors expect them to be the next Apple, whereas Ballmer is turning them into the next IBM.

They'll still make boatloads of money on the enterprise side and that'll be enough to keep them floating for decades to come, so I continue to wonder if there truly is a problem with their business strategy or if it's just misaligned expectations.

If Ballmer was aiming for the next IBM, he'd have spun off Windows Phone as IBM sold off its PC business. They wouldn't be buying companies and pouring resources into it and pissing off the OEMs by pouring resources into Surface.

And if they were just shooting for Enterprise++, keeping Windows Phone and Surface to keep enterprise device sales under their umbrella, they'd be spinning off the XBox and consumer media properties.

But they're not spinning anything off. They're still expanding into new spaces. And they're fighting for consumer money harder than ever.

I'd say the evidence suggests that, even though it could be wildly profitable if it went the IBM way, Ballmer still wants Microsoft to be all things to all people.

Isn't Microsoft more profitable than IBM?

http://ycharts.com/companies/IBM/profit_margin

http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/profit_margin

And how much more profitable would they be without things like their Entertainment division, Bing, Ad company acquisitions, etc?

They are doing this because they know that today's consumer market = tomorrow's enterprise market.

Apple mid-90s might have been _trying_ to do everything, but they weren't getting there. Yes, they had a lot of products, but they were mediocre and lacked the installed base and mindshare of Windows. It is easier to focus when you aren't walking away from successful markets or customer expectations.

Microsoft nowadays Does Everything because it is evolved from a corporate strategy of dominating the OS space by providing users The Way to realizing the potential of computing technology. They wanted to provide CIOs and developers with the basic foundation, so they had to offer tools for all sorts of stuff.

Its future position is eroded as browsers "embrace and extend" to swallow up much of the daily activity on the desktop, leaving those users free to look at devices on dimensions other than satisfying an OS utility requirement, and as the iPad carves out a consumption-dedicated computing space.

Surviving into that space will be a very different challenge than Apple had. They have to move from successful businesses into new computing usage paradigms. Those involve a kind of user-experience focus that Microsoft hasn't previously needed, and couldn't match with its strategic utility role in the first place. It will take a very different vision and focus than what brought them here.

I agree that slapping a new logo on the current structure won't do much. But if that new branding is aspirational, its most important audience might be Microsoft's own employees, telling them that their past successes don't matter so much and that they have to get into a different frame. And quickly.

Introducing an entirely new API with Windows 8 is incredibly risky.

The vision for Windows 8/Windows Phone 8/Xbox is pretty good and is happening under Ballmer's watch. I don't know how much he can take responsibility for but if it succeeds, it will be awesome.

It may look like Ballmer hasn't done much since Gates left, but it's not surprising that it would take this many years to shift a company the size of Microsoft to the common platform/vision that is Windows 8.

If this design makes you uneasy and go "But that's not Microsoft!", slap your gut and tell it to listen because that's just the branding talking. Take a step back and recognize that EVERY emotion you feel about Microsoft is arbitrary. Branding is just the mental handle we use to talk about the automatic emotions we get. That is the tough part about branding: it happens unconsciously. It is that surge of instantaneous feeling that bypasses logic.

Engineering brands is reprogramming everyone's gut reaction. Our "gut" reaction feels right by definition (a tautology) and everything else feels wrong. It is only with conscious thought can we fight it. We as web developers know the power of the "default". Imagine that! Being able to set everyone's default setting to a selection of your choosing is like a superpower.

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Changing brand is always an ugly business. For example, think back in high school about the personal brand you exuded on campus.

One day, you decided to start dressing in jeans and wearing a motorcyclist black leather jacket everyday. You get comments like "But that's not you! Why are you trying to be someone else? Stop being a phony." It feels impossible that you'll ever be accepted as a badass motorcycle jockey. The next day, you drive an actual motorcycle to campus. People see you driving a motorcycle. In the coming weeks, you offer rides to select people. Those people now start raving about your motorcycle and how "cool" you are.

We revisit the same campus 3 years later and people can't imagine you not as a badass motorcycle guy. You might ask, "Did you know that I use to be a nerd?" They reply, "But that's impossible! There is NO way that's true."

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Ask a teenager: "Did you know that Apple use to be a terrible company with mediocre computers, losing money and weeks from going out of business?"

Answer: "What? But that's impossible! I don't believe you."

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For Microsoft to make a big change, it should be that big, sudden announcement of that branding change. It will appear unfamiliar, it will appear strange, they might even appear phony. That's when the process begins. In the coming weeks, Microsoft publicizes new products that incorporate their new paradigm. Sleek, minimal, digital, modern. They even snag a few early adopters that try out the new products. You start getting friends that rave about the new products.

It is during this process that you go from feeling that its impossible that Microsoft is cool, to feeling that it's inevitable that it's cool. That is the magic of branding: the ability to reprogram the gut to have one thing be absolutely right and have everything else feel wrong, unnatural or impossible.

> EVERY emotion you feel about Microsoft is arbitrary. Branding is just the mental handle we use to talk about the automatic emotions we get.

That might be true for companies that are completely unimportant, but many of us have seen whole careers, companies, and industries rise and fall on the movements of Microsoft.

As a relatively small example, when Microsoft tried to lock my family out of our home PC using and accused us of being software pirates that brought up some emotions that were certainly not arbitrary.

I was in total disbelief when UPS started running their "brown" campaigns. They had one of the most recognizable brands anywhere and some genius decided to throw millions of dollars at the idea of confusing customers with the whole "what can brown do for you?" campaign (and all the sophomoric jokes that went with that when they screwed-up a delivery). Simply amazing. Instead of "What can UPS do for you?" they took off in a completely different direction. I'd love to read a post-mortem on that whole story.

I would too. they were memorable for me. Different strokes for different folks.

Careful, it's not just about branding. You have to live the brand idea as well, it has to perspire in your products, down to the tiniest detail. Anyone can hire a new brand team, pour millions in TV ads and new copies, but that won't change squat until the products themselves follow the very same idea.

At a company scale such as Microsoft's, true rebranding will take significant time and resources, or they will have to take hard hits first before they realize they have to change something.

As you mentioned in your example, you can rebrand yourself from one day to another and pretend it's the new "you", but you can't move that fast when you have 100 000 employees who have to pull that act at the same time.

Isn't it true that strong vision that people have a true emotional response to and believe in can move 100k people (or even more)?

Maybe an expensive "true rebrand" is a way to make a promise to your people and help build trust in your new direction. Also making it so visible and present can help remind people of this direction when they make every day decisions.

The problem is not only the number, it's the overall inertia between what management wants and what workers are all levels can get to. Management may have a forward moving vision, but it takes time to communicate it, to ensure everyone understands what it means, etc... and there are always resistances, too.

Plus, in a 100k company, I don't think 100% of employees are blindly following what the CEO wants them to do.

But why should i even care about an advertising campaign , when i can look at youtube videos, reviews, and ask my friends about microsoft's products ? if microsoft's product is cool enough, or solves some specific problem i've got, i'll probably hear about it.

YouTube videos and reviews (online or not) are mostly just astro-turfed advertising campaigns. You and your friends are likely influenced by either of these things on both a conscious and subconscious level, which then feeds back into the advertising campaign (this works in both a negative and positive sense). [Edit: this is how the "cool" that you mention gets created. I highly suggest watching a PBS documentary called "The Merchants of Cool", if a bit dated, to see how prevalent this is]

As an example, take a look at any car magazine (e.g. Sports Compact Car) and read any of the articles. Or read a Cosmo or GQ article. The one thing they all have in common is they push a product through a story that doesn't even seem like advertising. It's both brilliant and slimy at the same time, and is the ultimate goal of any advertising campaign -- to assimilate itself into the culture without appearing that it is even trying. Like Apple.

Like it or not, we are all influenced by ads on some level, and if nothing else, the reason any one of us "hackers" should care about advertising campaigns is at least to appreciate, analyze and improve upon them for our own products.

If you filter reviews, videos and comments and dig in a bit you can get a balanced view of a product.

Yes, ads do influence people somewhat, but the influence is not that big , unless it's supported by a product that can support the imaginary world of the ad.

So brand design is much more than ad design, you have to design every part of your offer to support this illusion.

This is a branding exercise not a GUI implementation.

There has never been any connection between the actual products and MS branding. In fact for most brands those two are only connected via post rationalisation.

Of course it can work.

That's an interesting perspective that I'd never considered before. If you're right, and you sound it, then Microsoft clearly has an internal struggle.

Metro is all about simple. It's fast, it's fluid, it's simple, it's "alive with activity". But it's not complex, packed with features. This is the image Microsoft wants to present to consumers.

On the other hand, Microsoft's Business division is all about things packed with features. Huge, bulky, expensive, extremely powerful but bloated products. Products licensed with 3 to 6 zeros on the price.

Perhaps they need two brands. The consumer brand, and the business brand, because otherwise you have constant conflict.

Microsoft largely resolves this conflict in a way that works for consumers but not for tech pundits: they bring the same B2B customer service principles to their consumer product support channels (e.g. three years of Xbox repairs for the red-ring of death - on a 90 day warranty no less).

Keep in mind that Metro is exactly what enterprise wants. Just listen to the good people at 37signals.

Could you give us a link to what the good people at 37signals have to say?

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/

Haven't they been down this road before with the Windows NT line that they released alongside Windows 9x?

I suppose the different versions of Vista and 7 speak to them re-exploring this business-consumer partitioning. I don't have the information to comment on how effective this split was for Microsoft.

They're not really re-exploring it, they had Home/Pro versions of XP as well. They've always drawn the line between the two, although it used to be a lot more pronounced since 9x and NT were totally different codebases whereas now they're just arbitrarily partitioning their market. I assume the 9x/NT split was decided not to be effective since they ended up moving to a single codebase.

They already have multiple lines of windows which are all the same except the some features are turned off with a lower level serial key

I think that the sci-fi thing fits better with some modern Linux distros.

The freeness of Linux reminds me of sci-fi settings where humanity has moved beyond money, a lot of Linux enthusiasts have this kind of starry eyed idea of building the future and having complete control over your device is very empowering. You can really feel the super-computer attached to your keyboard.

I like the effect of the monochrome images inlaid in the "slate", though they could just do that with the new Windows 8 logo anyway. I don't think the slate shape does anything to fix his criticism that the new Windows logo looks "visually uncomfortable" when applied to devices however, his looks just as akimbo applied to the Surface, if not more so.

You are totally right with this, the big companies want to see more for their money. They don't understand minimal. I'm sure we'll get there some day, but right now the closest thing to minimal appreciation goes to the apple users, and the complement to that are the people who relate 'more & inexpensive' as better. I know that, when I show my dad some kind of minimal design he always goes, "where's the rest?, they're wasting so much space here."

Couldn't have said it better myself. The whole concept of a brand also becomes harder to change the more well known it is. For Microsoft it is close to impossible at this point unless they branch out completely another business, and a good example would be xbox.

The fascinating thing about Microsoft today is they find themselves in such a strategically desperate position that they are beginning to change that attitude.

Ouch. But as a former geeky kid with oversized glasses that still plays Magic: The Gathering sometimes, I can tell you that the new wardrobe does help :)

So a better logo for Microsoft would be a Katamari Damacy ball?