Without a doubt, Microsoft failed, and failed expensively in the smartphone/tablet wars. I believe there was a $2b writedown on the Surface RT, as well as $7b + on the botched Nokia acquisition. Those are failures you can attribute actual dollar figures to.
But for the rest, I doubt MS would have succeeded in those markets even under the best of circumstances. The iPod made Apple big again, but without Steve Jobs as the pitchman, it wouldn't have had the massive impact it did. The offerings of MS (the Zune) and others (Creative, Sandisk, Toshiba, Sony, etc.) were more than good enough, and they worked with a variety of online music stores. It's just without the brand cachet of the iPod and Apple's lifestyle marketing, it's hard to get excited about an MP3 player.
Slack and Dropbox are both huge inside startups, but nonexistent in old-school enterprise companies. Nobody at work wants yet another login to have to remember. I know this because I work inside a digital team at a 3000-person company where everyone swears by O365's out of the box capabilities. Skype for Business and OneDrive for Business inside of an O365 plan is "good enough" for a lot of people.
Dropbox has made losses each year since 2015. It's great that it's achieved good market share since it started in 2007, but maybe there's a limited enterprise market for something that's a one-trick pony. And one-trick ponies are the polar opposite of MS' strategy.
> I believe there was a $2b writedown on the Surface RT, as well as $7b + on the botched Nokia acquisition. Those are failures you can attribute actual dollar figures to.
I assume part of that is part of $1 billion total, it gets a bit complicated since they bought a going concern, and T-Mobile forced them to finish satisfying the requirements in the contact they assumed.
Which was part of why the Kin was so late, they moved every Danger employee they retained who was working on the Hiptop line to the Kin, then had to pull a bunch back to finish 2 more versions. Who could have guessed that Deutsche Telekom could pose a serious threat to Microsoft?
The offerings of MS (the Zune) and others (Creative, Sandisk, Toshiba, Sony, etc.) were more than good enough, and they worked with a variety of online music stores.
The Zune came out in November 2006 - less than three months before the iPhone was introduced and a little bit over a year before iPod sales started declining.
That's why I mentioned the other manufacturers. In the MP3 player market, Sandisk and Creative were #2 and #3 behind Apple and had been in the game much longer than Microsoft.
Unlike today, where we have multiple Surface-branded products, back then Microsoft only had Xbox, which operated as an entirely separate division from Windows + Office.
Before the Zune, MS tried to be the software partner for non-iPod devices, with the Windows Media Player store and Plays4Sure DRM standard (which they botched). It's only after it all failed that they rushed into the market with the Zune, which was a partially redesigned rebrand of a Toshiba MP3 player that was in the works.
Zune was a good example of too little too late. It would have had to be extraordinary to have made a big impact that late in the game. Instead, it was perfectly serviceable.
Microsoft introduced a hard drive based player years after the flash based Nanos were already more popular.
Then MS released the flash based non touch screen Zunes after the iPod Touch was becoming popular.
Finally they released the touch screen Zunes after the App Store came out and the Zunes couldn’t run third party apps. Even the hard drive based iPods had a few curated third party apps by 2005.
Dropbox has good market share but such a small network effect. You could easily migrate to a lot of cloud based or self hosted options and hardly lose any features.
Not that I like Microsoft... And I really did like sticking it to their loyal followers with the iPhone destroying Windows Phone.
Looking back, it’s OK Microsoft lost out on a few things. There’s now a bit more balance in tech.
Going forward, Microsoft does have some exciting products that could be great. For example, the Surface and HoloLens.
Apple is dragging their feet with the iPad and AR can’t get here soon enough. Microsoft hits it big with either of those products and no one will care about not beating Dropbox or iPhone, etc.
Not beating Dropbox, sure Microsoft may not care about that even now. Not beating the iPhone, one of the most successful consumer electronics products in history, they will always care.
> with the iPhone destroying Windows Phone.
Which was very unfortunately, because the OS was vastly superior to both Android and iOS. I wish MS would open source it, even partially (like .NET) would be amazing.
Even without the funeral story, it was pretty clear they thought Apple was the competition. Another lens through which I saw this at the time: some of their arbitrarily-removed or scoped out features early on [think copy-paste], or dubious restrictions on apps. As if they thought they could copy Apple's limitations without understanding what it was they did well.
It seemed as much like they thought they had Apple's timeline and luck to follow. In which case copying Apple's limitations wasn't so much a misunderstanding as a profoundly naïve optimism.
Apple had first mover advantage, so the time it took for them to catch up on features like copy/paste was negligible because "no one else" had it either, because consumers thought of it as a new category [0]. Microsoft didn't have the luxury of first mover advantage (or even second mover because Android).
Apple also had the marketing luck of hitting enough sales power early enough to control their own fate with the big US telecom carriers (AT&T especially from the start, but eventually they all played ball with Apple). Microsoft was expected by the telecoms to follow the old rules that they should have known by heart from Windows Mobile <= 6.5, not Apple's (still) very special rules, and that shouldn't have been a surprise. Android played by the old rules and decided the wild west of fragmentation issues was fine enough.
[0] (That is that they weren't feature comparing the iPhone to say Palm, Blackberry, or even Windows Mobile 6.x.)
You have way too much "Apple" in this reply, though. They gave the concept of a smartphone a huge boost, but they are not the market leader. This is another misstatement of the problem Microsoft got caught in, implicit in my posts here.
I was agreeing with you on that. Microsoft was following Apple far too much in the early game, and yes, they were ignoring too much of the existential threat of Android, especially from a hardware standpoint.
For instance, I'd argue the point where Windows phone/mobile lost the "bottom" segment of the market (esp. in India and "emerging markets"), when the OS became too hard to run on cheap handsets of the lowest specs, to cheaper Android knockoffs was a key inflection point where the platform lost so much of its momentum.
Whether or not you feel that Microsoft buying Nokia was a cause of that or a symptom of that. It was somewhere between "both" in my mind, in that it was a symptom of software upgrades at first but snowballed because of the Nokia purchase. Certainly there were factors that the OS was maybe too quickly pushing bottom level specs. (As much maligned as the app lifecycles of Windows 8 apps were from a developer standpoint, they did help the platform hit some very low specs. Windows 10 over-correcting from developer complaints did not help mobile.) In addition to not solving the telecom carrier software update problem satisfactorily to OEM needs (as I mentioned), there's also the Android price match question of whether or not Microsoft dropped the OEM price to "free" for Windows on the mobile form factor too late to win new OEMs. (They probably were too late, but there still seemed opportunity at the time they dropped the price. Again, purchasing Nokia confuses the timing of all that and which effects were snowballing.)
Don't forget PS4 / Nintendo Switch. The XB1 isn't selling. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft is now porting their games to other platforms with a focus on XBOX Live (service).
Microsoft doesn't care about losing against all these new things; they know their cash cows are Windows desktop and server, Office suite, and developer tools.
Nothing is as sticky as Windows desktop and office. Show me anything that competes with that combination? Even with the advent of the smartphone, the combination of those two is still unbeatable in corporate America.
There's an entire generation of kids growing up on smartphones and iPads right now, doing all of their schoolwork on school-issued Chromebooks, many without ever touching MS Office.
If they don't happen to get into PC gaming with Windows there are kids aged 5-10 right now that might sit down at a Windows PC for the first time in college or when they start their first job in corporate America. Things could easily follow Blackberry's path very suddenly when new workers are no longer familiar with the tools and there's cheaper, faster, and more productive alternatives that your employees would prefer using and are advocating for.
Yeah but they are doing it on microsoft products related to the web like azure, sql server, etc. microsoft is making money without users ever knowing they are touching microsoft products.
Efficiencies of scale, for one thing. Microsoft with a strong mobile OS sharing a kernel and a greater software ecosystem with its desktop OS only has to make an app once and flex that across mobile and desktop. Instead, Microsoft today absolutely has to build apps for iOS, Android, and Windows to stay competitive.
This is probably a good thing in the long run for Microsoft as some of its more innovative work has been when it's tried to focus on cross-platform software (its founding era, and the early GUI wars, for instances), but that vision of a single flexible OS across all device form factors is still an attractive one, especially from an efficiency of scale perspective.
They already tried that. It was a horrible experience with Windows CE. The .Net Compact Framework was a subset of the .Net Framework. You could run a .Net compact targeted app on the desktop. I wrote Windows Mobile apps back in the day. You could also write C++/MFC apps that targeted both. They weren’t great apps.
But today MS has Xamarin that is a good enough cross platform framework for enterprise style apps.
Don't forget that Windows CE was rather dominant, though. It's partly that Windows Mobile 6.x was a market leader for long enough that Microsoft somewhat seemed to ignore the iPhone in its early days.
Windows CE never had the efficiency of scale convergence quite in mind, though. Windows CE was never quite Windows at the kernel level, for instance, and it was a competing OS inside Microsoft in some ways that mattered in the old xkcd siloes pointing guns at each other fashion.
Windows 10 mobile, especially towards the end (Redstone 3) was so very similar to Desktop Windows under the hood. It was still a fork, but it was a converging fork.
(UWP still sometimes gets unfavorably compared to the .NET CF, but UWP has always been more powerful and capable than CF and CE-era C++/MFC, even at its "worst" when Windows 8 launched. Especially now that .NET Core is open source and "leading" the .NET Framework/.NET standards rather than vice versa, UWP is much stronger than .NET CF ever was.)
Their biggest defeat was perhaps the browser war. They were so strongly trying to dominate the open standards they totally forgot about the applications. Funny how Qt and Electron are now exactly where Microsoft had always wanted to be.
Are they? AFAICS Microsoft in the past never wanted to rule cross-platform anything. They just wanted to be the only (OS) platform, using UI toolkits as a means to that end.
Microsoft was founded on cross-platform. Their goal was clearly to have their software on every "home computer" regardless of manufacturer. Owning the OS just makes that goal easier.
Even the early GUI era you could see Microsoft hedging bets and trying to be the best Macintosh software company while working on Windows. Even as late as the XP/Vista timeframe you could see that Microsoft was often proud of being the largest third-party software vendor for the Macintosh. (That statistic got shaken up soon after, IIRC, but Microsoft held that position for a long time.)
Cross-platform certainly isn't a new attitude for Microsoft. In some ways it seems a return "home" to when they were the BASIC provider for every computer. (Though the argument of whether or not BASIC then was an OS platform is a fascinating one, which is why both perspectives are "correct".)
But for the rest, I doubt MS would have succeeded in those markets even under the best of circumstances. The iPod made Apple big again, but without Steve Jobs as the pitchman, it wouldn't have had the massive impact it did. The offerings of MS (the Zune) and others (Creative, Sandisk, Toshiba, Sony, etc.) were more than good enough, and they worked with a variety of online music stores. It's just without the brand cachet of the iPod and Apple's lifestyle marketing, it's hard to get excited about an MP3 player.
Slack and Dropbox are both huge inside startups, but nonexistent in old-school enterprise companies. Nobody at work wants yet another login to have to remember. I know this because I work inside a digital team at a 3000-person company where everyone swears by O365's out of the box capabilities. Skype for Business and OneDrive for Business inside of an O365 plan is "good enough" for a lot of people.
Dropbox has made losses each year since 2015. It's great that it's achieved good market share since it started in 2007, but maybe there's a limited enterprise market for something that's a one-trick pony. And one-trick ponies are the polar opposite of MS' strategy.