Microsoft and Vista get no love

I ran across this article that was a pretty nice collection and interpretation of articles on microsoft’s release of vista. It is, to me, startling to see the variety of media outlets that are ragging on Vista - I suppose I knew it already, but collected in one place it’s pretty interesting.

One theme that I, and I suspect everyone, is noticing is that Gates (and Ballmer) are some of the least charismatic people you could ever see. On video they are fidgeting and speaking very poorly and in general doing their products no good, if they aren’t actually hurting them. These products should be something Gates and Ballmer are passionate about, that they could speak about at length, and when someone asks a tough question (and it’s not like these are coming out of the blue, every question I’ve seen asked has been asked many a time before) they should have a good answer at the ready. Instead you see them hem and haw and fidget or get angry and blubber out some unconvincing reply. Gates quote about the cool kids is just painful to hear.

Another theme is comparing the release of Vista to the release of Win95. I think this one’s a bit unfair, though. They say nobody’s lining up at CompUSA at midnight to pick up their copy of Vista like they did with Win95. But that was a decade ago, people lost their windows enthusiasm long ago - WinXP inspired no such excitement either. Sadly, you can see Microsoft’s out of touch ways of trying to get some of that back with signed copies of Vista.

The article’s main thrust is that microsoft is a giant, like IBM and Sony, and is being felled by the nimble consumer-focussed upstart. Google, Apple, Nintendo, even Amazon are all cited as eating Microsoft’s lunch. I think the conclusion is that Microsoft has become a huge, lumbering monopoly out of touch with it’s consumer base. It’s marketing, once famed and feared makes mistake after mistake - remember those commercials where they called all their customers dinosaurs? What did welcome to the social actually mean? Did they really ask all asian people who weren’t buying xbox, whatswrongwithu??

Microsoft needs to change and that change really, really needs to start at the top.

Feb 7th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: microsoft