I am sorry for all those talented folks who work there that have to endure this kind of mismanagement. Keeping their faith must require almost toxic quantities of corporate-issued Kool-Aid...
I wonder how long it'll take before the current crop of bad management gets shown the door and we get some new blood. With the talent, history and resources of MS, they should be dominating anything with an integrated circuit inside of it.
Instead, like an aging football fan trying to relive glory days as the high school quarterback, they're languishing on old glories and screwing up on most new efforts - badly.
They should start a completely new "startup division", similar to the Xbox business unit, roughly autonomous from the rest of the brokenness in the org, and just fund it to the tune of about a billion or two a year. The mandate? Start new "companies" completely autonomous from Mother MS, and they can be anything from new software, to web apps, to heck, even iPhone apps. That's got to give better ROI than the current brain-dead strategy.
How many ground zero startups could have been incubated for the money sunk on just the Kin?
However that only gets you your first or maybe second version (I'm thinking PC AT for the latter). Microsoft famously blew it when they tried to bring too much of the core engineering in house with the Xbox 360. Sort of like how the IBM PC unit utterly failed once it was totally IBMized (the Microchannel and PS/2).
Plus the "new blood" are going to be (almost by definition) managers that thrived in the current culture. It's not at all clear to me that they're likely to succeed.
And then there's the politics that drive the platform tax; the Xbox started with "150K lines" of Windows NT 4 code (appropriately, NT 4 was the version that brought the GDI inside the kernel...) and the Zune runs a version of Windows CE.
> the current crop of bad management gets shown the door
It may take a while. It's the current crop of bad management that has to show the current crop of bad management the door. I cannot attribute any of their successes to good management practices. I am more inclined to point out to very clever products that fit niches that passed under management's radar (would it be pedantic to write "RADAR"?) and hit the market by sheer luck.
I also doubt the "start new companies" division would be completely free. They would, most probably, be forbidden to use any competing technology.
No question. It seems like there are a lot of very smart, enthusiastic people with great ideas floating around in Microsoft, but every time we see one of those ideas surface (Kin, Courier, etc.) they get squashed. It's almost as though the tallest blades of grass keep getting cut by the lawn mower of upper management.
No. no. You got it backwards. The Kin is the hardware of a smartphone, with the cost of a smartphone and the bandwidth of a smartphone with dumbed down functionality. It's a terrible idea.
And the Courier was pure vaporware. It's like calling Apple's Knowledge Navigator a product.
It really is impossible not to use "corporate" in a sentence with "Microsoft" these days. I get what Steve Jobs means when he likens Apple to a start-up.
I have no illusions about the kind and quantities of Kool-Aid Apple issues its workers. The current iPhone 4 antenna problem is a nice demonstration of how bad news can go ignored not to spoil the presentations you give your managers.
It's absolutely impossible nobody had noticed that problem before the phone being shipped.
