When will they stop? It has gone on and on for several years now. The Apple iPod came out and Microsoft brought out their Zune. The marketplace shrugs... Eh. They keep doing that sort of thing. They keep making the same mistakes on every one of their products. First of all, they wait a certain amount of time to see if the competitor's product will really sell. By the time they do decide to bring out a competing product the innovative company has become firmly entrenched as the leader. The second thing they continually do is to try to create things using things they already own. Kind of like a car company bringing out a new model that uses an old engine because they had a warehouse full of them already.
This time it's a "new" tablet to compete with the Apple iPad, only it's going to run Windows 7. Hahaha...
They opened the Microsoft Store (hey, Apple had one so we should too!) so they wouldn't feel left out. They brought out the Windows Phone so they wouldn't feel left out. Both times the marketplace wondered why.
Don't get me wrong--I like what Microsoft did for the computing world. When I was in the computer sales business in the late 80's there were so many "flavors" of computers it was mind-boggling. There was no one that out-shined the rest. Microsoft has been instrumental in making the computer a ubiquitous item of our lives.
Funny thing though, I don't think Microsoft has yet to have had a successful product that they invented. All of their products are things that they have bought, borrowed, tweaked (or completely redeveloped), and sold as theirs. BASIC, DOS, and Windows are all things invented elsewhere. The look and feel of a windows-based computer really got started with the Apple Lisa. Even their Internet Explorer was formerly sombody else's product before Microsoft bought it. I like most Microsoft products. It does upset me when they change something that was already fine in order to "improve" it but really only make it worse (Office 2007 comes to mind). There have been countless articles on how Microsoft has failed to innovate or how they haven't really invented anything. Oh, except for Microsoft Bob--They invented that. It was such a colossal flop that they actually removed all mention of it like it never existed.
I think they have gotten much better with software apps though. It's probably due to them buying good products from existing companies and making them their own. Like LiveWriter--It's an excellent blog writing application and it's free. In my opinion, one nice thing about Internet Explorer 8 is that it’s the most powerful Firefox downloading tool on the planet. Because that’s all I ever use Internet Explorer for: downloading Firefox. A lot of people like the Bing search engine. As I said, they have done a lot of things right, but they should stay out of the electronic gadget business.
I picture a big board room full of out-of-touch people looking blankly at each other, wondering what they can do to increase profits. They can't come up with anything innovative so they tweak something the public already likes so they'll feel compelled to buy the "new and improved" version. It's the same kind of thing we used to see when they'd show a bewildered parent listening to one of their children talk and not understanding a word they were saying.But back to my original point.
Almost every time something new and truly innovative has come out in the world, there is Microsoft in the background: "Hey, don't forget about us! We're going to sell one of those too, only ours will be better!"
No, I couldn't do better than Microsoft myself, I guess I just love to make fun of them.
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