So Microsoft's CEO
Steve Ballmer plans to retire within the next year. "Huzzah!" said the markets, as the stock price jumped on the news in what also must have been just the latest blow to Ballmer's self-esteem. No wonder, though: Ballmer oversaw
Microsoft during its lost decade, and here's a look at opportunities missed — and botched.
Mobile
Microsoft achieved dominance when everyone wanted a personal computer. Then other devices started taking screen time away from desktops and laptops that were Microsoft's bread and butter. The biggest threat came from smartphones. Ballmer had
Windows Mobile on the market way back, but it was never a great product. He also struck a belated partnership with Nokia, and reviews suggest that their product has some neat advantages (such as the camera's ability to take pictures at night — cool!), but it all smacks of too little, too late.
Music
It's easy to forget that Apple was nearly dead in the late 1990s. It was saved by iTunes and iPod. While Microsoft had an early head start making software for the portable music market, the manufacturers it relied on to make devices weren't very good at making great music gadgets. Eventually, in 2006, Microsoft came up with the Zune — but it turned out to be...wait for it, wait for it...a flop.
Tablets
Microsoft debuted e-book software in 2000, long before Amazon and Apple had offerings, but it failed to take off because no one had invented a screen that was easy on the eyes for hours until the Kindle. (See the pattern? When Microsoft first dominated the arena, software trumped hardware. But as time went on, software divorced from great hardware came to be a liability and Microsoft, except for the Xbox, has never been a primo hardware company.)
Search
Microsoft knew that the internet was big and was ruthless at fighting and winning the browser war. Internet Explorer was so successful that Microsoft had to spend years fighting off antitrust suits that now seem silly. Those clashes probably distracted the company from the internet's real moneymaker: search products. Microsoft later realised that Google's success was due to its monopoly in searchbased ad sales and tried to compete with its own service, Bing. Too late. Google already had become the Microsoft of search.
Innovation at scale
One very successful product was launched during Ballmer's tenure: the Xbox game console. The question is: why was it the only successful venture Microsoft made into a new product line?? The answer perhaps lies in the next point.
Corporate management
Running companies is hard. Running huge companies is harder. All of Microsoft's problems boil down to a mix of bad luck and bad management. Microsoft continues to make excellent office productivity software (I'm writing this on Word, and I use Excel all the time), and I have no interest in trading in my Windows OS for anything else. Yet these are successes engineered by a company that is a very profitable utility, not a groundbreaking innovator. Ballmer's successor clearly has a lot to do.
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