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Comment by s3r3nity | Hacker News Reader

Thank you -- I wanted to write a post regarding that article for the past week, but couldn't do it as well or as eloquently.

"The nature of progress is to move incrementally. The great leaps are exceedingly few and far between."

I have a few buddies working on tech at Apple & MSFT that is crazy cool, but simply because it's not a shiny new product sitting on my desk next to my coffee cup 2013 was a lull in tech?! Give me a break.

(Sidebar: one of my favorite advances in tech this year is the new Kinect. Seriously. Read up on its power and potential use cases sometime and it's f*ing mind-blowing. If MSFT only had the marketing power of Apple...)

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>If MSFT only had the marketing power of Apple

You mean if MS only had Apple's talent for turning advanced technology into compelling products, right?

I think he means MS does make compelling products, they just can't market them as well.

As for "advanced technology", Apple is far behind Microsoft and Google these days when it comes to cutting edge stuff, but this is mostly because they both have fingers in a lot of pies while Apple restricts itself to a few highly profitable niche areas.

> I think he means MS does make compelling products, they just can't market them as well.

I think there's a blurry place between marketing and UX where Microsoft falls flat.

For example, Windows got "Shadow Volume Copy", and then OSX got "Time Machine." Windows could have done something exactly like Time Machine given Shadow Volume Copy, but they didn't until Windows 8 (File History Backup.) And so people use Time Machine as the example when they ask questions like "but if my computer is getting backed up, and it contains my music library, is that fair use?"

Now, is that a marketing failure, a UX failure, or something that's not quite either? Either way, it's a failure to create something users will want to talk about.

Its an executive failure. Shadow Volume Copy was gimped on Windows to try and move copies of "enterprise" versions of Windows.

If MSFT had marketing power of Apple then Zune would be surely alive today as one of the top media players.

I had a Creative Nomad jukebox and it was so bad I went back to an MP3 discman (all the while laughing at the $500 iPod). I had never owned an Apple product. After trying a Mac I saw first-hand that Apples makes great products so I tried an iPod and loved it. Not because of marketing or advertising. People who claim that Apple is successful because of marketing – and think Apple's millions of customers are brainwashed – are the ones who are brainwashed.

I would agree with you sjs. If your product is crappy then marketing can't do anything. I tried lot of laptop but none of them worked like macbookpro. I have tried lot of phones but none of them worked like iPhone.

Plenty of people don't know that Zune existed.

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