My final report about spending a month using Microsoft products went up on the Beast this morning. (You can read it here. Bottom line: Great products, some of which I will really miss. The Lenovo W520 powerhouse laptop is highly recommended as a desktop substitute. I really do not want to send it back. Windows 7 is stable and fast, but you knew that. Windows 8 is mind-blowing and is going to shine on tablets. I used it only on a laptop, a Lenovo U300, but saw it on a few tablets and, well, when they come out, I want one. Same for the Arc Touch mouse, which has won design awards, and deservedly so. It’s the best mouse I’ve ever used.
But the real star is the Xbox, and thank God our Xbox doesn’t need to be returned; we bought it last year. If you do not have an Xbox, you need to get one. I mean it. Even if you don’t play games (I don’t) it’s a fantastic living room hub. Get the Kinect, and see what the future looks like.
Microsoft has a great opportunity to provide an entire ecosystem where everything works together seamlessly. But for now the parts still feel not well tied together. And there’s too much MicroCruft hanging around, old services and products, redundancies, and so forth, that make things too confusing. Microsoft needs a Steve Jobs to come in, take control of everything on the consumer side, and start killing off lots of useless products and building out from a simple core. They need a product dictator, someone with a vision for how to unify everything.
The big challenge Microsoft has (that Apple doesn’t) is that Microsoft has to try to achieve all this stuff on the consumer side while also running a huge enterprise business. It may be that you can’t really do both. Time will tell, I guess.
One thought I had over the weekend, while walking around wearing my tinfoil hat and talking to myself: What if Microsoft doesn’t really care about the consumer space? What if being an also-ran in mobile phones and Internet search is just fine by Microsoft, since it keeps people from noticing that, in the enterprise side, Microsoft not only dominates but is getting stronger? And maybe that’s where the real money is going to be made — building out the cloud, handling big data, delivering back-end and front-end services to big corporations, slowly gobbling up workloads that used to run on big iron, chipping away at software makers like Oracle and SAP?
Well I’m sure Microsoft isn’t deliberately trying to fail in the consumer space. But the fact that the Borg makes so much money on the enterprise side surely must soften the blow. And it can’t hurt that a few highly visible failures probably help keep the DOJ at bay.
Anyway: A big thanks to Microsoft for going along with this. It had been a long time since I used Microsoft products on a day-to-day basis, and I really enjoyed it. I’m really excited about all the stuff that is coming out of Microsoft these days, and I think by this time next year we’re all going to be talking about them a lot more.
You never stopped by my office. I wanted to toss my famous Kai-Fu chair at you.
I guess all that Microsft ass kissing worked.
Windows 8 on tablets is horrible and won’t sell.
The XBox needs blu-ray.
Most people use the Kinect a few times and then it sits gathering dust.
Windows 7 is the same old crud mediocre os. It’s better than Vista but what isn’t?
Lenovo has cheapened what used to be a quality laptop.
Steve Jobs is designing better products from the grave. Nice try.
I had a great time reading the article since i have been a long time fan of microsft (the company itself), but in the essence of it you had to force yourself to use microsoft products. That’s the problem microsoft is having in the consumer area, that people don’t even think about microsoft anymore when they are looking for gadget or services (email, online storage, ect).
For me the two big winners right now for Microsoft are the Xbox and Microsoft Office. Not counting the OS.
“Microsoft needs a Steve Jobs to come in, take control of everything on the consumer side, and start killing off lots of useless products and building out from a simple core. They need a product dictator, someone with a vision for how to unify everything.”
Very perceptive and imo accurate insight. Ballmer doesn’t give a shit about these problems, obviously. He probably doesn’t even understand most of them. They need someone new who does.
It was purportedly a chair thrown during a meeting with Mark Lucovsky. If you’re going to troll, at least get your facts straight.
Oracle/SAP is going to be like PanAm at the end of the decade – Red Hat, Microsoft, Amazon and Google will be dominant companies in enterprise and cloud services – until that one really big solar flare wipes out the electric grid and we’re all back to 1837-like conditions.
Well, so their money-losing side-business of Xbox is pretty good, huh. You really don’t want to send the laptop back, but you are, eh. What are you running instead, let me guess, an Apple product? Why won’t you say it, because it doesn’t fit the narrative?
Oh Microsoft cares about the consumer space. They haven’t adapted to changes in the industry and their playbook of undercutting on price doesn’t work anymore, so they are completely failing to get traction. And it’s bleeding away their enterprise space as well (*cough* iPad *cough) and, most importantly, has ended their ability to create their own incompatible standards, other than Office, from sheer force of will.
Everybody was scared shitless of MS back in the 90s. No more. They’re a distant second, at best, in everything that matters. The only company that has fallen more dramatically is Sony.
I wish you were right about Oracle but I don’t think so. Oracle is so incredibly expensive and so incredibly painful to implement, deploy and operate that you would expect people to try to move away from them but other than a few high-profile successes like Skype saving millions by using clustered PostgreSQL instead, Oracle continues to own the high end, and I don’t see who’s going to knock them out.
It’s gotta be a SQL solution. All the NoSQL guys who push it as a panacea have their heads so far up there that they might as well crawl in and disappear.
That’s not to say there couldn’t be a good SQL cloud product, but if there is it will probably come from Oracle.
even though i’m a dyed-in-the-wool (the silicon?) apple fanboi, i agree on xbox. it is the shizznit. the only reason i don’t own one is i don’t need yet another addition and money syphon subscription service.
Xbox takes longer than any other media device to boot up. Microsoft would do well to make a non-gaming version of the device.