<i>The Zune is criticised for it’s poor market share and is regarded as a failure. It’s important to remember that it took three years for the iPod to get market dominance, and it’ll take a lot longer than that for anyone to make inroads into it. To criticise the Zune for a poor market share misses the point. It’s like criticising a child because its first steps weren’t of olympic standards.</i><p>No. The Zune is criticized because before the iPod, there were no mp3 players for grandma. Apple obviously created a winning product. Depending on how charitable you want to be, Microsoft either 1) observed the same market opportunity and took longer to create an inferior product or 2) shamelessly ripped off the ipod, and did a poor job at it.<p>The author also compares a company with a market cap of $250 Billion to a child. The big boys play for keeps. There's no excuse for "well, they did their best" at companies of this scale. To quote another 80s movie: "Do or do not, there is no try".
Good point. When eventually Microsoft has a hit sensation everyone will say, "hey they've finally figured it out" and "this came out of nowhere", when, actually, as this article points out, there is a long series of steps to get there.
Microsoft learned? If so, then why is Copy and Paste going to be absent from the Windows Phone 7 Series???<p><a href="http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/windows-phone-7-series-wont-have-copy-and-paste/" rel="nofollow">http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/16/windows-phone-7-series-wo...</a>
If the thesis of this article is correct, the most important stride Microsoft has made has not been industrial design or touch-interfaces - it's that they have learned to have their products leverage advances from elsewhere in the company and have their divisions work together towards a coherent vision.<p>Unfortunately, this is at odds with much of what I know about Microsoft, and this was the core complaint of Dick Brass' "Micrsoft's Creative Destruction", which was one of the more widely-discussed (and in my opinion, spot-on) Microsoft doom-and-gloom stories:
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html</a><p>It is clear that Windows Phone 7 has benefited a lot from Zune...but they are in the same division, with some of the same leadership. If different Microsoft divisions can actually work together to advance a clear and coherent vision about the future of computing, Microsoft will rise to once again be a dominant power in new and emerging areas of the industry. However, if Microsoft remains a group of independent fiefdoms each looking to advance the careers of their own management, Microsoft will continue to be a super-profitable enterprise company that is mostly irrelevant in new markets.<p>Sadly, I think that the author is looking at the Zune->Windows Phone example and inferring a broader trend where there is none.
Eventually Microsoft will be able to produce something as good as a current iPod. Unfortunately for them, by that time, it's quite likely Apple will have raised the bar once again with another gizmo.<p>It's also possible Microsoft will leave the copycat behaviour behind and start creating original products instead of knock-offs of the market leaders. That, however, seems unlikely.<p>I can't remember a Microsoft product that was genuinely pioneering something.
One of the most reasonable articles on Microsoft that I've read lately. Their recent products show a lot of potential and I'd be very glad to see them execute well.