Microsoft Problems

A couple bits rolled past my reader today and got me annoyed. Now I’m posting this. It’s the circle of life. So the first thing I noticed was this post that says Microsoft has decided, again, to be in the content business. Kara is totally into it. Totally. She wonders if this is going to be the thing that saves MSN, praising it for being interesting and innovative.

Wonderwall

It’s a gossip site. Like your TMZ, Perez, Deceiver, WWTD, etc… So, well, I guess she’s not talking about the content being innovative. I guess it must be the site, then. The main thrust of the site is this massive horizontal scrolling grid with small pictures and headlines. It’s cool. For about 45 seconds. Then you remember how freaking annoying horizontal scrolls are and how the internet collectively got over side scrolling, with few special exceptions, maybe a decade ago. Kara, that’s why you don’t see stuff like this.

She talks about how it looks like it was made for touch screens. Of course, it couldn’t be made for phones because it requires massive, massive screen real estate since clicking on any article opens up a horizontal space on the wall. Second of all, in order to scroll you just can click and slide the wall itself, nope, nor can you use the horizontal tilt of a mousewheel, nope. You have to find the small scrollbar under the wall and then slide it and then when you see something you like mouse back up to the thing and click it. Repeat all the way to the end of the wall. You know… it’s hard enough to get people to scroll down vertically even when you have tons of help (mousewheels, two finger drags, etc…), I’m just saying.

Beyond that, Wonderwall barely has any MSN branding. A tiny logo (not even clickable) at the top left and a little Microsoft at the bottom right. So you know, even if this were going to be successful (which it won’t be) there most likely will not be much halo effect for the rest of MSN, unless they change things up a good bit. But it looks pretty purposefully distanced. Microsoft loves doing that to itself? Remember Plays-for-sure?

XP to Windows 7

The other post was this one noting that, and this is kinda unbelievable, there’s no easy upgrade path from XP to Windows 7?? By all accounts on the internets, Windows 7 is going to happen soon and it’s going to be good – it’s going to be what Vista should have been. Which is great, it’s good to have MSFT back in the OS game – let’s at least light a little fire under Apple’s already nimble toes.

But what the hell? That article says that 71% of corporate PCs are still running XP. Those are the people who are going to upgrade, home users don’t upgrade their windows machines (ok, maybe you do, but you’re special. and nerdy. your mom isn’t upgrading hers, she’ll get the latest when she buys a new computer). So who cares if the upgrade path from Vista to Windows 7 is “pretty easy” – that’s 29% of your users – it seems like it’d be much more important to get those 71% of users who actually probably need the upgrade the most (since they’re running an almost EOL’d product).

Hopefully they get their crap together and come up with a way to help those companies upgrade their computers from XP to Win7. If they don’t, man. Apple should just come out with some kinda eMac but for business instead of education (bMac??) that’s cheap and easy to maintain and give those companies something to really upgrade, too. :) Seriously, I mean if Ballmer’s pitch for upgrading is that workers will wonder why their work doesn’t have the same OS as their home computer… well, they’ve probably already been doing that with Vista and it doesn’t seem to have worked out too well. So… you know.

Microsoft frustrates the hell out of me. It’s like they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re just throwing around their billions of dollars and every now and again they do something good but most of the time they’re just crashing blindly around the china store. If they just focused and reorganized themselves (at the top) they could easily be a powerhouse again. What do you think? Is Microsoft doing just fine? Or do they need some serious leadership changes?

felix

Robin, that's a nice insight that success reinforces your existing behaviors - definitely true. Even when skinner box like, it wasn't necessarily your behaviors that brought on that success. Is Microsoft just a massive, massive skinner box experimentee?? :) A lot of their success was right thing at the right time with an initial good idea.

I think that's why I believe that the change has to start at the top, that is, they need an executive transfusion to bring in a different culture to the place. I suspect that this will start to happen over the next 5 or so years, they simply can't go on as they have been. Shareholders gotta be pissed over their stocks not moving in the past decade.
Robin

One way of looking at Microsoft is that for three decades, they led in the commercialization of packaged software. One can argue about whether they did any real innovation in terms of user experience or ideas - but they did a better job of anyone else in commercializing it. This resulted in them gaining huge amounts of cash, as well as a significant degree of control over the market. Controlling a market isn't actually a long-term advantage because it closes you off from information about what people really want - i.e you impose your will on consumers rather than listening to their needs. Success reinforces the behaviors you have been doing, whether or not they have any causal relationship to the outcome. These things are in the DNA of the organization - both its structure, and its top management, some of whom have lived their entire professional lives within this environment. Their brains are literally wired for this and won't be unwired any time soon.

Right now, it looks as though they are seeing other people being successful, not understanding why, and trying to copy their behaviors. In particular they know they aren't perceived as cool and are trying to become cool.

I this is actually a very rational response - we do most of our learning though mimicry even if it looks silly and derivative at first, and their cash means they can afford to do this for a while.

At the same time, they're struggling with their addiction to being in control. Not being dependent on being in control is what enabled Apple to rise to where they are now, and of course their challenge is to avoid becoming dependent on the control they now enjoy, because this dependency is how Microsoft painted itself into it's current corner.

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