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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, June 20 2012 @ 12:34 PM EDT |
I don't understand the modern direction of Microsoft at all. It seems like they
have somehow lost their (corporate) mind, and forgotten what made them
successful, and abandoned it in favor of corporate infighting and terrible
product decisions that make no sense.
Windows 8 looks like unusable garbage. They think they can compete in the
tablet market against Apple (the premium brand) and cheap tablet-makers who use
Android (which is free for them). Their new phone OS is also getting no
traction, and their partner Nokia seems completely unsalvageable now.
On the developer front, Microsoft is putting .NET out to pasture, killing off
WPF and Silverlight, and putting all their hopes on WinRT (which is basically
slightly-nicer COM for native code, and .NET will be a second-class citizen
now). Its been a long time since I paid attention to the development of
consumer software for Windows, but it seems to me that MS is alienating their
developer base and killing off the "promising new" technologies that
they were evangelizing just a few years ago.
Their next-gen Xbox console to replace the Xbox 360 might turn out to be good
(who knows), but even if everyone loves it they will still lose money on its
hardware for at least the first 2 years.
I don't know what the future will bring for MS, but I expect it will not be
pretty. It happens that they are sitting on a giant mountain of cash, even if
things go as badly as I expect them to, it will take 10 years for the life to
bleed out of them. That's long enough that they might be able to find some way
to reverse the decline.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: marcosdumay on Wednesday, June 20 2012 @ 02:04 PM EDT |
The only possible explanation is that Microsoft understands (correctly or not -
and I think not) that their dominance on the PC market is finished. It either
expands to portable or it's over. That may be either because the PC market is
over, that competitors are too good now, or that portables level the playing
field. Or maybe there is some other possible reason that I didn't see. But,
anyway, it thinks the PC game is over.
The consequence of that is that Microsoft is betting the farm on getting into
the portables. That is the only rational thing to do when your market goes away,
you forget about it and go for something else. That's the reason for Windows 8,
for ditching the OEMs, and everything else they are doing recently at the
personal devices (as oposed to servers).[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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