Not sure why you were downvoted. Upvoted even though I don't particularly agree.
Having lived in Seattle for a couple of years, and knowing many Microsoft employees during that time, my outsider's view is that MS's consumer-side failures are largely geographical and cultural.
Redmond, or even Bellevue, is extremely isolated from Seattle, which in and of itself is not exactly deeply intertwined with the cultural centers of the US. Locals know this - Microsoft employees who move from Seattle across the lake to the east side often joke about nobody ever visiting them again (sometimes less-than-jokingly). It's also more or less a company town - Microsoft's presence is so overwhelming and absolute that a lot of the technological zeitgeist from the rest of the country never make it there. If you lived/worked there it's easy to believe Microsoft's ridiculously optimistic PR pieces - pieces that would be hilarious when read in any other environment.
This isn't even an urban/suburban argument (though it has shades of it), it's a "company town vs. diverse city" thing. Microsoft's geographical location gives its people tunnel vision and a grossly false picture of the technology sector.
The second part I've observed is a lack of internal honesty within Microsoft. Failure seems to be couched in safe corporate-speak to the point where it's greatly muted (maybe that's the intent). You cannot expect your work force to pivot and fight hard when they've been falsely told their giant failure was a minor hiccup. I saw this after the WinPhone launch - MS employees were still honestly bullish about its prospects even when the market as a whole had completely rejected it.
If MS wants to be nimble in the consumer space, it needs to set up shop in cities where their competitors play - you will not get an honest impression of how your products (or your competitors' products) are doing otherwise. They also need to have frequent, honest, no-holds-barred accountings of how they are doing. If a product was a flop, call it a flop.
Your observation in many ways can be extended to the Microsoft ecosystem as a whole. Microsoft as a company has always had this weird thing where the materials they release (marketing, documentation) are written in an alternative universe where no non-Microsoft technology exists. I haven't been part of the MS ecosystem for a number of years but I do get the sense this has been changing. But in many ways I don't think it's a deliberate framing, it's likely just as much due to the reality that inside of the Redmond/Bellevue bubble, things like Ruby on Rails, the iPhone, and non-IE browsers are weird, untrusted 3rd party technologies that nobody uses (partly because they think Microsoft products by definition are better, partly because they fear if word gets out they are toying with these things there will be negative consequences.) I remember when C# was originally released the degree to which Microsoft managed to pretend like Java did not exist was just plain bizarre.
I guess one way to look at it is Microsoft is a good counterweight to the argument you should eat your own dogfood. You should, but you should not do so exclusively.
Having worked there for 11 years I also got the impression that company management is inadvertently trying to stay culturally isolated.
For example, when the iPhone came out, the management called AT&T and asked them to exclude the iPhone from the previously negotiated Microsoft Employee Discount program. MS phone is Ok, Blackberry is Ok, iPhone not Ok. The effect was, obviously, even less awareness of the best products out there, especially among the most loyal, and thus most influencing managers. One high-ranked manager told me he can't use an iPhone because he couldn't give money to the company trying to kill MS. Assuming the unlikely that Apple indeed was out to kill MS (rather than the more plausible - to make a good product and a few bucks), that would be a very good reason to get half a dozen iPhones, so that you know well what's going to hit you over the head real soon.
Culture is the least identifiable, least amendable, and yet most influential component of any organization...
I've never worked there. I did work at IBM while MS was beating the hell out of OS/2 and Lotus though. During those years, MS did use phrases like "cut off the air supply" and "embrace, extend and extinguish." "Killing the opposition" seems like it's a very deep part of their corporate ethos, at least that's what a lot of their competition thinks and FWIW, their golder years seemed to be when they were more vocally that way. I'm not sure that's the healthiest approach to take. From there, every thing starts to look like defense, are they making a given play because they have something to contribute and a vision of how search, mobile, gaming, etc.. should be that's different than the market? Or are they making the play because they want to shore up their defenses?
I'm not sure I'll ever fully trust them, maybe if they had a complete outsider running the show.
I graduated from high school in Bothell (just north of Kirkland) and I'm a Microsoft employee, but I've never been based in Redmond before. I find your post is a bit weird, bizarre, and maybe a bit biased.
Yes, suburb Seattle is quite different from urban Seattle, but ALOT more people live in the suburbs. You also have to compare it to San Francisco and San Jose, how many of your friends from the city will visit you once you moved to San Jose? Honestly any?
Seattle is fairly international and non-isolated, its in the same category as the bay area, which is to say: we have a lot of space between us and the next mega-cities (Vancouver or Portland), but that is true of any western city.
As for Redmond, I remember when it was just a bunch of trees with a filming lot for Northern Exposure. It never had much of its own identity, like Kirkland, Bothell, or Lynwood; they are just part of the suburbs. Even Bellevue is a bit souless, they have an urban core but its mostly a shopping mall. Not much difference from any other big city in the states!
Microsoft employees are actually brutally honest. We internally criticize our own stuff all the time, there is not much of a reality distortion field in Redmond or Beijing. But we aren't going to hang our dirty laundry in public, what company would do that?
Finally, Microsoft has many offices around the world, many are deeply involved in core products; Silicon Valley for example. My own office has a 1000 people I think.
> "Yes, suburb Seattle is quite different from urban Seattle, but ALOT more people live in the suburbs."
I was careful to disclaim that this isn't a urban vs. suburban thing (though it is, to a limited extent) - this is a company town vs. business-diverse city thing.
After all, Google and Facebook were both born and headquartered deep within suburbs. The difference is that Mountain View and Palo Alto are swimming in tech companies - even if your social circles were entirely tech people, it's extremely unlikely they all work at the same place.
Compare with Seattle (stronger in Redmond/Bellevue) where practically everyone works for Microsoft (if you're on the east side) or Amazon (if you're on the west). Even for members of the community who don't directly work for MS, the relationship with MS is so overwhelming that it grossly distorts reality inside the bubble.
There's a lack of perspective because just about everyone works for the same company, subject to the same cognitive biases, with no substantial competition base (or hell, just other tech companies) to give you the necessary occasional whack upside the head.
> " but its mostly a shopping mall. Not much difference from any other big city in the states!"
I very, very heavily disagree. The US has many incredibly interesting big cities, even if some of them are deeply flawed from a financial or civic perspective. NYC and SF are no-brainers, but even the much-lampooned suburban gridlock of LA is (arguably) the cultural center of the entire country. New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago, Boston... I don't think I can seriously describe any of those as soulless mostly-shopping-malls.
This is my personal opinion, but IMO Bellevue epitomizes the worst of forced-urbanization. Its soullessness and emptiness is far from the norm in the US, and definitely not the norm for urbanization in the world.
Even if you are in Mountain View, say you have friends in San Jose; how often do you see them? Its really not that different.
I think you have a very poor understanding of the pudget sound area economy. On the west side, you are just as likely to run into someone working for a startup, Starbucks, or Boeing, or UW, than Amazon. Amazon isn't that dominating. Now, in the east side, Microsoft is bigger, but there are still a lot of other companies, eBay, Google (on both east and west sides, and even in freaking Bothell now), a bunch of startups. Its not quite the monoculture you make it out to be!
Now, when we are talking about Bellevue, you compare it to San Jose, not San Francisco, or Fort Worth, not Dallas, or some weird industrial wasteland suburb of New Orleans (of which there are plenty), not the wards or the French Quarter. All of these interesting cities have their souless mostly-shopping mall areas. Looking international, what I've seen the same nearby satallite cities of Tokyo, Paris, Bangkok, Amsterdam, Lausanne, etc...tells me suburban blight is not just an American problem.
Mega-cities on the West Coast? Portland and Vancouver are mega-cities? San Francisco and Seattle are not mega-cities either. It's really funny how things can look so differently depending on where you sit.
Based on comments like yours, and general awareness of MS, I think Microsoft has long ago moved from <choose any category you like> to generic mega corporation. In such a company, an individual's success depends on learning how to operate the corporation, and operate within it.
It's a destination for MBAs and project managers, not a place to innovate.
Having lived in Seattle for a couple of years, and knowing many Microsoft employees during that time, my outsider's view is that MS's consumer-side failures are largely geographical and cultural.
Redmond, or even Bellevue, is extremely isolated from Seattle, which in and of itself is not exactly deeply intertwined with the cultural centers of the US. Locals know this - Microsoft employees who move from Seattle across the lake to the east side often joke about nobody ever visiting them again (sometimes less-than-jokingly). It's also more or less a company town - Microsoft's presence is so overwhelming and absolute that a lot of the technological zeitgeist from the rest of the country never make it there. If you lived/worked there it's easy to believe Microsoft's ridiculously optimistic PR pieces - pieces that would be hilarious when read in any other environment.
This isn't even an urban/suburban argument (though it has shades of it), it's a "company town vs. diverse city" thing. Microsoft's geographical location gives its people tunnel vision and a grossly false picture of the technology sector.
The second part I've observed is a lack of internal honesty within Microsoft. Failure seems to be couched in safe corporate-speak to the point where it's greatly muted (maybe that's the intent). You cannot expect your work force to pivot and fight hard when they've been falsely told their giant failure was a minor hiccup. I saw this after the WinPhone launch - MS employees were still honestly bullish about its prospects even when the market as a whole had completely rejected it.
If MS wants to be nimble in the consumer space, it needs to set up shop in cities where their competitors play - you will not get an honest impression of how your products (or your competitors' products) are doing otherwise. They also need to have frequent, honest, no-holds-barred accountings of how they are doing. If a product was a flop, call it a flop.