When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he made it really clear that Apple's job wasn't to beat Microsoft. Apple then delivered on that assessment and created entirely new markets for themselves.
Sadly, somehow, Microsoft went all XOR on our asses. I'm still baffled about how Microsoft is still trying to out-Apple Apple when they've repeatedly proven it's a disastrous strategy (see: Zune).
Microsoft are kings of productivity software and the corporate desktop. They own business communications. They own corporate email. So when it comes to revitalizing their phone product, they focus on the twittering tweens?
Is it just me, or is it not freaking obvious that Microsoft should focus on building the ultimate business phone? Something that corporations around the world would deploy to every single employee in a heartbeat?
Hey, RIM is struggling. Perhaps Microsoft could stand to fork out a Skype-sized bundle of cash to buy them out.
> when they've repeatedly proven it's a disastrous strategy (see: Zune).
That's not the best example to use of Microsoft's failure.
Every time Zune has been brought up for discussion here, I've seen primarily two types of responses...
From people that actually owned a Zune: Fantastic product (better than my Apple iPod).
From people that never owned or tried a Zune: It's absolute crap (I've never seen any of my iPod friends with one).
The iPod users verbal diarrhea was so thick, that MS's marketing department couldn't cut through it. One iPod user would regurgitate it down another's mouth, and soon everyone had fed on the same crap.
Watching their "network effect" was kind of impressive.
I was given a Zune. It was well made and easy to navigate, much better than the Archos I bought before I bought my iPod. If the Zune had been released before the iPod, it would have been an impressive piece of hardware. A great product! However it wasn't. I tried really hard to enjoy my Zune. It felt like a waste just to throw it away.
The problem was that it was almost as good as my iPod. Releasing a product that is almost as good as a product that came out 3 years earlier doesn't work. If you are going to release 3 years late, you have to be better. I agree with the above comment, Microsoft will fail it tries to beat apple where it is strong. Microsoft either needs to find a "Steve Jobs" who can drastically change its company culture or stop tying to compete with apple on consumer products.
Note: I am being generous when I say it was almost as good. It had downsides. In particular the companion software to load up music was a bad experience.
My guess is that when people say they loved their Zune, its because they wanted to love it. If you gave the same person an iPod (and they were being impartial) my guess is they would choose the iPod.
However, I don't think its likely these Zune owners were impartial. It would not be a big surprise if most people who bought and defend the Zune are Microsoft Zealots that want to find reasons to prove Microsoft is great and Apple is bad.
I can't believe you just complained about the Zune software in a comparison with Apple's stuff. iTunes is the most amazing piece of garbage I've ever been forced to use for so long.
I bought an iPod in 2005, it was a nice piece of gear for sure, but for some random reason I ended up buying a Zune in 2007, and the iPod never saw the light again until I managed to break the Zune. The main reason for that is I never wanted to see iTunes again. I would have succeeded were it not for my damn company-provided iPhone! :)
> iTunes is the most amazing piece of garbage I've ever been forced to use for so long.
I don't have that many complaints about it. It looks weird on Windows, of course, but it blends in nicely on a Mac. From your comment, I assume you haven't used Sharepoint.
I use Sharepoint everyday. I hate it and iTunes equally. I use the Zune software everyday. I have it installed on all of my computers. I can't say that it is perfect, but it is leaps and bounds better than iTunes in my opinion.
I will admit that I never liked iTunes as a music manager for my iPod. I used a program on Linux to put songs on my iPod, however, I liked iTunes much more than the Zune software.
I played around (and rather liked the Zune) when it came out, but as with many of the devices discussed here it is more about the ecosystem than the device.
I was very put off by moves that Microsoft had made with Plays4Sure[1] (oh the irony) and worried that they would do similar with Zune Marketplace.
> That's not the best example to use of Microsoft's failure.
I think it is. I liked the zune myself and would have switched if it could sync with my mac. However, it's undeniable that the Zune was a failure. I think the OP's point remains true.
I had one, and while the Zune devices were great the PC software was the worst media navigation stuff since Sony's Minidisc<->PC efforts. The sad thing is MS appear to have expanded the Zune PC thing to cover the entire OS.
Every company has failures and successes. For every a zune there is also xbox, Kinect and PC periferals. For iPad there are Apple TVs and Newtons, etc. What's the point?
Xbox is a failure by almost every financial metric. Microsoft is not anywhere near recouping the initial costs. The entertainment/devices division is rarely profitable and last quarter lost over $200 million.
And yet the Xbox still hasn't recouped it's losses total.
A few profitable quarters does not make up for years of losses. Here are some charts for you to make it painfully clear which divisions are profitable and keep MS running:
You are assuming that the brand are business are done. At the end of all the investment Microsoft has a great consumer brand name and a beachhead in living room. What is that worth to you? To call it a loss, what makes you assume that the business will at best run at break-even and won't make any profits, or Microsoft won't be able to leverage the existing xbox brand to sell additional Services/products?
I am not assuming anything, I simply presented some facts.
My opinion is MS has squandered both the smart phone market lead they had nearly 10 years ago and the TV space as the XBox would have been an obvious Apple TV/ Google TV type platform.
Whether MS can dig themselves out of the hole remains to be seen, at this point I have little faith, but as along time MS proponent now converted to Apple, I would still like to see them succeed, but I do think that will require a leadership change.
I'm sure the Zune was a fantabulous product. It was still an utterly failed strategy, because by that point, the game wasn't a competition about how nice to use the product was.
> I'm still baffled about how Microsoft is still trying to out-Apple Apple when they've repeatedly proven it's a disastrous strategy (see: Zune).
I don't see how they're trying to out-Apple Apple in this case. They're releasing a mobile operating system for third party vendors to create hardware for. Remove "mobile" and this is the exact same thing they've been doing all along.
> Microsoft are kings of productivity software and the corporate desktop. They own business communications. They own corporate email. So when it comes to revitalizing their phone product, they focus on the twittering tweens?
Are you forgetting that they're also still king of the consumer desktop? I highly doubt that their 85% market share[1][2] is business alone. Apple isn't selling more computers than all manufacturers combined[3].
> Are you forgetting that they're also still king of the consumer desktop?
They're probably still the majority shareholder, but I wouldn't call them kings. And if they are kings, they're leading a dying kingdom. Have you seen the iPad sales numbers recently?
There is no denying that the traditional laptop/desktop market is slowly dying away due to the iPad (and soon Windows 8 tablets), but I don't understand why this should drive them to build a business only device. Microsoft is still a very consumer oriented company, in addition to their business "kingdom".
Before Windows Phone 7 even shipped, I was talking to my Microsoftie friends and said that I thought there was a great opportunity to build a phone that had the best Microsoft enterprise (Exchange and Sharepoint) integration, good free developer tools, and a good app marketplace with better organization and discovery than Apple's. Now throw in great Skype integration and Office support and they could have a good business phone. But if the phone doesn't have Dropbox, Pandora, and dozens of other high-profile apps users are already using on other platforms, that's a hard sell to anyone outside of IT departments.
I think there's also a window to build a decent consumer phone with great XBox integration. Make the phone essentially compete with Wii U and have great stand-alone mobile games too. That could be a great phone for twittering teens. You just have to get on other carriers besides AT&T though.
>> doesn't have Dropbox, Pandora, and dozens of other high-profile apps
Some of these apps were limited because older windows phone did not have native code support and had a limited reach. Now with shared core with windows desktop and tablet, a developer has opportunity to write for windows phone and then run it on all devices. That sounds damn attractive a proposition.
Besides the argument is losing its steam pretty fast. With already 100?K apps out there the list of apps missing is growing smaller every day and in most cases a replacement is already available.
Something that corporations around the world would deploy to every single employee in a heartbeat?
That's not necessarily up to IT anymore, thanks to the iPhone. To achieve your goal, they would have to build something that those employees insist on bringing to work under pain of termination, as they did the iPhone.
Nothing in Microsoft's DNA -- and specifically in Steve Ballmer's DNA -- would permit the creation of such a device.
I think iPhone started the BYOD movement because it was so much better than the rest of the devices for quite some time. Its only now that android and windows phone are catching up. If you see there are only marginal differences between the top of the line devices now. So the "insist on bringing to work" that you talk about is not strong enough as long as the device is a easy replacement. Both Android and I think windows phone with v8 are getting there. So IT should not feel resistance to deploy these. Besides with Microsoft's familiarity and IT friendly tools and mindset, they might actually favor a windows phone over iPhone which does not have features such as company specific app store.
Another aspect of BYOD is that companies aren't paying for phones any more. I don't think they'll ever go back, even if someone could develop a mullet phone that pleases both consumers and IT.
MS isn't going after Apple. It probably can't, but it knows that if it delivers tablets and phones that can integrate with AD, Exchange, and other enterprise services and be a lot less locked down, they can steal Android's lunch and create a business friendly phone/tablet ecosystem.
If Joe and Jane Public buy those, that's great too. Oh, and they will because they'll feel comfortable with Windows, especially if they are told "Oh btw, you can have Windows on your phone and tablet as well as Office now, why bother with whatever Android is or that Apple stuff."
Its also a little silly to expect MS to not try to compete in these areas. Their Win8/Tablet strategy is big and risky and may or may not pay off, but conceding that realm to Apple and Google seems foolish. Personally, I like the idea of a "super tablet" that replaces my laptop entirely as opposed to this odd device that kinda sorta fits between my phone and my laptop.
Microsoft is absolutely going after Apple. Apple is making inroads into business -- and with that influence and control over enterprise choices -- and Microsoft rightly sees the threat. On the Venn diagram of needs that a device satisfies, WP7 and now 8 overlaps the iPhone far more than it overlaps Android.
Oh, and they will because they'll feel comfortable with Windows, especially if they are told "Oh btw, you can have Windows on your phone and tablet as well as Office now, why bother with whatever Android is or that Apple stuff."
That was what led to the Windows CE disaster. Of course this time around they're trying it in the opposite direction, trying to force a smartphone UI on desktops. We'll see how that works out.
Mind you I wholly disagree with the GP, and I think it too was drawn from the well of delusion: Microsoft saw that the separation of enterprise and consumer has blurred. Trying to out-RIM the Blackberry -- as it fails -- would be a hilariously dumb move at this point. People want to carry one device and it needs to competently cover both sides of the equation.
Trying to beat RIM is obviously a bad move, but there's still billions of dollars to be made on phones that businesses deploy to their employees.
Extensive remote control, feature-by-feature lock-down, active directory style roaming profiles, super-hardened security, VoIP-over-VPN phone calls... the list of possibilities goes on. Get this right, and every company on the planet with any sense of paranoia will be theirs for the taking.
No. What led to the Windows CE disaster was what Google is (was, until ICS?) doing with Android: let OEMs customize UX the hell out of it and go bananas on cutting h/w components costs to the bone.
I don't think twittering teens is their target market.
"To help tell the story, we introduce our muses, Anna, Miles and their son, Luca. They represent classic Life Maximizers – busy personally and busy professionally, constantly juggling priorities, settled rather than seeking, and valuing technology as a means to an end, a way to get things done."
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=189338
And most of the "screenshot" images I have seen involve young families with 'hard working' parents that are trying to balance work and life 'in more demanding times'. Kids are almost always featured (not the target, but within).
There are a few billion people living in presently up-and-coming developing countries that will jump straight to the ubiquitous smartphone era instead of first going through the ubiquitous "personal computer" phase.
Windows 8 has native Active Directory support for device and user management. That along with ActiveSync and I think the phones and tablets are for the enterprise.
The BlackBerry is pretty much dead. This is now largely the iPhone's market (being the only modern smartphone platform with completely solid Exchange support), so Microsoft is back to competing with Apple again.
Android has some level of Exchange support, as well. But what that entails depends on the OEM and their modifications (eg. Exchange support on an HTC Android device is completely different than what you get on a Galaxy Nexus, or a Motorola "BLUR" device.
Legacy BBOS is for all intents and purposes, dead.
BlackBerry 10 hasn't launched yet, but it's not exactly dead. Those of us actively developing for it are seeing lots of progress, and feel that RIM is far from dead.
Look, I'm going to be a bit harsh here. I've read your other BB cheerleading submission and the comments.
You can claim BB10 isn't dead, but neither is it alive.
It's vaporware at this point -- and it's logical to look at RIM's current performance to get a clue about how BB10 is going to perform and it just doesn't look good at all.
> Those of us actively developing for it are seeing lots of progress, and feel that RIM is far from dead.
Yeah and you're a small group of people compared to any other mobile platform with a very minority opinion. See also: the Amiga.
This just reeks of the WebOS debacle all over again. You can have the greatest technology ever but it won't matter if the company that owns it mis-markets/mis-manages it into the ground.
I hope they do succeed. I probably won't use one but it will foster more much needed competition.
>Is it just me, or is it not freaking obvious that Microsoft should fire their phone strategists, and focus on building the ultimate business phone? Something that competes with Blackberry? Something that corporations around the world would deploy to every single employee in a heartbeat?
Microsoft is already eating RIMs lunch without a buy out. A lot of RIM's enterprise software is tailor written for the old BBOS and wouldn't do MS a lot of good.
Which is why RIM is trying to move their expertise into areas such as Mobile Fusion, allowing administrators to managed BYOD in the enterprise. Imagine BlackBerry BES services on your personal Android or iPhone, so you can access your company's assets in a secure manner. It's something RIM is working towards, and is honestly something that Microsoft's culture wouldn't allow.
Sadly, somehow, Microsoft went all XOR on our asses. I'm still baffled about how Microsoft is still trying to out-Apple Apple when they've repeatedly proven it's a disastrous strategy (see: Zune).
Microsoft are kings of productivity software and the corporate desktop. They own business communications. They own corporate email. So when it comes to revitalizing their phone product, they focus on the twittering tweens?
Is it just me, or is it not freaking obvious that Microsoft should focus on building the ultimate business phone? Something that corporations around the world would deploy to every single employee in a heartbeat?
Hey, RIM is struggling. Perhaps Microsoft could stand to fork out a Skype-sized bundle of cash to buy them out.