9/12/2023 0 Comments Stack ranking appleWindows 8 may well stem the mind share drain brought on by the iPad, but subtle clues suggest otherwise. But the legacy revenue is an albatross difficult to shake off, with its devastating impact on the new thinking required to understand the new realtime mobile world. What does Microsoft see when it looks in the mirror? Surely the bluster from Ballmer comes from that same well of hope, arrogance, and doubt, the confidence that Windows and Office and the Server division will finance eventual success in the innovation race. And analysts have to be careful not to overestimate Microsoft impact in the marketplace should miscalculation come back to haunt them the way Ballmer’s predictions about the viability of the iPhone did him. Why aren’t the media companies afraid of rocking the boat? Probably because Microsoft needs them more than the other way around, what with new product coming from Apple, Google, Amazon, and possibly social players. With October looming large as the locus of a shipping Windows 8, Surface Tablet, and Windows Phone, there should be plenty of marketing dollars in the pipeline. Microsoft presented such momentum, clout, and inevitability, along with serious ad dollars, to make such a negative attack very dangerous to the health of media companies. Even more tellingly, the very tone and audacity of the article, its mainstream non-tech audience, would never have occurred in the past. If the Vanity Fair author got the context of C# wrong and understated the company’s growth through the so-called Lost Decade, Shaw left unchallenged the central logic of the article and its implications moving forward. Instead, Frank’s data points have the opposite effect of reinforcing the central thesis of the article. He doesn’t answer the logical followup, wondering how much more innovation there could have been if the culture hadn’t crushed so much of the opportunity in the first place. He debunks the article with big numbers and the promise of Xbox, Kinect, and by implication but not direct attribution the Surface Tablet. Where social is a requirement in a system that lives on innovation, Microsoft is forced to go against the grain to share in realtime.Įven its brilliant head of communication Frank Shaw finds it oddly difficult to work his way out of the box they’re in. According to the article, executives withhold just enough vital information to maintain their own position of unique value. Unlike a where each passing day engenders innovation as a way of validating the subscription model, Microsoft is a victim of its own success at the hands of its most successful. Coming from the Office group and its success at wiping out both WordPerfect and Lotus productivity suites, Sinofsky is now the putative heir to the throne once Ballmer fades.īut the undercurrent of the Vanity Fair analysis is that the toxic anti-innovation culture of the company trumps even Bill Gates’ unlikely return to the throne. Steve Sinofsky saved Windows from the Longhorn/Vista debacle by shipping something that promised and delivered. There’s plenty of that in the Redmond DNA, what with the wildly successful Windows, Office, and Server Tools groups, both status and quo. What happens when you pit executives against each other for promotions, bonuses, and what used to be called Bill-time, is that every action the company takes is predicated on preserving some version of the status quo. Stack ranking, it turns out, is a cancer eating away at Microsoft’s ability to save itself. But what wasn’t so obvious was the carefully constructed attack on the Windows company’s ability to compete. The usual obvious stuff was there: Microsoft was the richest failure of the modern age, all dressed up with nowhere to go as Google and Apple and Amazon and whatnot sucked up all the juice and left nothing but rind for Redmond. All of which reminded me of something when I read about Microsoft in Vanity Fair. The eyes are the giveaway to 40, and 65, and 12 for that matter. They see you the same way, full of hope and arrogance and doubt and everything all wrapped together. Namely that age is invisible until you look in the mirror, and even then if you look into the eyes. But when you’re lucky enough to reach that time, you discover a version of what you learned at 40, namely that you feel remarkably like that time long ago when you first started acting your age. Doc Searls captures something valuable on the occasion of his 40th birthday.
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