Execution is everything. Microsoft tried to execute on some of these ideas, but the result was always too cumbersome/confusing.
MS needs to have a haircut like Marissa Mayer gave Yahoo. Hardware and SAAS are not the way for MS; they need to get back into large(r) system OS dev in a big way, to run house and building automation. The game console should only be part of it. If they want to do hardware, it better be to run the code they write, otherwise they will be stomped.
What would that same conversation with an HCI expert yield today ? Even though it all seems obvious in retrospect, it mustn't have been that easy to forecast at the time
While it is seen here regularly -- and is always strangely given a pass -- this remains the most profoundly meaningless, if not outright stupid, thing that anyone in this industry can mutter.
I could just do something, literally anything, and me, having done a thing, would be worth way more than me, having an idea.
Many people have great ideas, few people have the balls or resources to actually execute them and make them worth something.
Just a thought.
do you really not understand what this means?
here's an awesome idea. A sensor and software that can read your brain waves so you don't need mouse or keyboard. Awesome idea, right? Worthless without the implementation.
Not terribly applicable here... but at the same time not terribly irrelevant here either.
Ideas are cheap and contagious, execution is expensive and risky.
When I think about the concept of an "idea" vs "execution," I think about the youtube, vimeo, blip, etc sprint. Each company had relatively the same idea--video on the internet--but no number of analysts could've predicted that youtube would be the outright success of the lot. All of them had excellent execution, but it's always risky, and for youtube, it paid off.
It's not like it's impossible to sell an idea, and the world is full of self-styled idea men who are happy to do so, but buyers are thin on the ground.
Let's all agree ideas alone are not industrial products.
However, they failed at most things:
- they were too early and the market and technology was not ready for it (Pocket PC)
- they were too late (Zune, Windows Phone)
- plans were blocked by companies who's support they needed but who were scared of them (music/movies/mobile phone industry)
- execution sucked and products were not good enough (Windows Mobile, home server, media center, everything speech)
- their reputation with consumers was tainted and the press wrote very negatively without really understanding much (hailstorm, drm)
- they made it cost money and other offered it for free, ad supported (MapPoint)
- negotiation power and influence in the market diminished after the monopoly abuse trials
- it took a long time before they understood their problems
What the IPad had was style, a lot of style. The UI was beautiful. In terms of functionality didn't carry redundant desktop features like menus with it. But it was the style, the cool factor, that made it consumer in a way that nerdy Pocket PCs never were.
I feel, (like ValueAct), that Microsoft is losing consumer outside of games, and would do better to concentrate on enterprise.
They must execute better if they want to survive.
Document sharing - bad execution, horrible UI. Something that should take 2 clicks takes about 8 clicks on Sharepoint.
Sharepoint as a Website - don't even get me started with that. Unless you want to spend 3 months hiring a 3rd party sharepoint company to implement 3rd party tools to make it half usable, you are out of luck.
Didn't they buy Skype?
To be completely fair, Kinect Audio recognition is awesome.
Another thing Microsoft has severely lost in the last decade is catering to the needs of customers outside the US. Case in point: Bing
http://www.quora.com/Tablet-Devices-and-Tablet-Market/Why-do...
Would love to see Apple get into Pen computing, and this is one area where I think Surface could have really distinguished itself (including a digitizer on a low-end Surface RT, for example).
FTA: "Ballmer's Microsoft wasn't lacking for ideas; it was lacking execution."
Whatever the reason for Microsoft's inability to execute, the history shows that Gates (a programmer) could get stuff done, and Ballmer (a salesman) can't.
IMHO it's probably stack ranking that killed their execution (http://slate.me/19Jf74r). Salespeople (like Ballmer) use external fear to motivate people (Make the sale or my boss will fire me!). Programmers (like Gates) use internal fear to motivate themselves (Make this code work or my colleagues will think I'm stupid!). How can any programmer execute properly in an environment of both internal and external fear?
Ultimately the answer doesn't matter to me. The company has always been a bully, both in the marketplace and internally towards their staff. No one wants to see a bully succeed.
Edit: Wikipedia says "Since the 2000s, Microsoft used a stack ranking similar to the vitality curve." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve#Criticisms_of_ra...) Ballmer became CEO of Microsoft January 2000.
All of those things seem simple in hind sight, but there were very real hurdles preventing them from being realized at that time (for example, the Internet infrastructure for real-time video chat).
Concept videos like this are just the tech world's version of concept-cars by the auto industry. They make the company seem innovative and research oriented without the significant resources required to make a practical product. True, they sometimes yield useful research, but most of the time they're just meant to be good P.R.
I think, at least for me, the true failure of MS Surface was the crappy display it came with.
Are you maybe referring to the lower-res display on the Surface RT? (I haven't played with that one much.)
But then they stopped. They knew that they had the best sailing ships and knew that changing the technology will only disrupt seas in a way threatening their supremacy.
And so the torpedo was invented by the Austrians, the steam and iron ships were pioneered by the French and Americans. This continued even in the 19th century - the century was of Pax Britanica was a century of catchup.
In the end economics was important - Britain remained the worlds leader in industry and trade.
These superficial concept videos have about as much relevance to the world of actual usable technology as porn has to the complexity and compromises of married life. The encyclopaedia we have today is Wikipedia, not Encarta, and no-one cares that it doesn't have embedded videos of antelopes bounding or the galaxy turning.
I care. I think Wikipedia would be greatly improved with relevant embedded video content. Unfortunately, getting high quality relevant public domain video is virtually impossible. It is nice to think about though.
I was more trying to illustrate that multimedia alone does not make a high quality resource, as proved the downfall of the "Multimedia CD-ROM" era of content production, which I feel these concept videos are rooted in.
But most of these? They exist now. Not quite as nice as the video shows, but they exist.
Kinect actually enabled a lot of the voice control experiences, Skydrive and Sharepoint do some of the other sharing scenarios, just not as nice as they all should be. I saw some awesome mapping stuff working on Windows Mobile well before the iPhone came out, including actual building maps and linking into ones "social network" (however limited that was at that time) to show where one's friends sat.
It is actually sort of sad that none of the experiences have been polished nearly as well as they should have been, by any of the players in the market really. Google Hangouts comes close with some of their collaborative tools, but then something falls apart in the experience, for example in the case of Hangouts, it can be a pain to start one depending on which UI path ones chooses to take, and various bugs pop up and just break the immersion of the experience.
MSN Messenger had a lot of good stuff, video and voice conferencing both worked long ago, but then that market fell apart.
Collaborative Document Editing was done right by Microsoft with One Note 2007, and then completely ignored from then on by the rest of the Office line. Amazing technology, not sure why it wasn't more widely adopted (I'm guessing due to file format needs, presumably the One Note team had the advantage of building up from scratch).
Perhaps most amusing in this video is what people thought LCD screens would look like! I am thankful the ID on LCDs did not go that way!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html?pagew...
early in my tenure, our group of very clever graphics experts invented a way to display text on screen called ClearType...
Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed it made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The vice president for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control. As a result, even though it received much public praise, internal promotion and patents, a decade passed before a fully operational version of ClearType finally made it into Windows.
When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.
So once again, even though our tablet had the enthusiastic support of top management and had cost hundreds of millions to develop, it was essentially allowed to be sabotaged. To this day, you still can’t use Office directly on a Tablet PC. And despite the certainty that an Apple tablet was coming this year, the tablet group at Microsoft was eliminated.
And thereby, being unwilling to disrupt themselves, made themselves ripe for it.
We must all keep in mind these concepts were showcased 13 years before in the famous Knowledge Navigator video or in Sun's less known 1994 Starfire video.
And, probably, on many others that remained unseen by the masses.
>> "Shut. Up."
Strange how the promised land looks like hell on earth.
Microsoft had a great vision for the future they just failed in execution.