I’ve been saying this for a while now – it just seems that Microsoft has become increasingly complacent and has lost their way. They doesn’t seem to be anything new coming from Microsoft – everything they release just seems to attempting to have a slice of the ‘me too’ pie. Vista and Windows 7 are no-where as revolutionary as prior Windows releases before it. The XBox (both versions) are just an attempt to get a foot in the door of console gaming (the first XBox was nothing more than a PC in a black box anyway – definitely nothing revolutionary there), Zune is trying to cash in on the iPod’s success, and Microsoft have been talking for ages that Windows Mobile will take market share back from the iPhone, but where is it? They’ve got a gargantuan task ahead of themselves to lift Windows Mobile up to the standards of anything remotely close to the success of the iPhone since, no-one wil argue this, Windows Mobile is a steaming pile of turd. And now they’ve got a new competitor in the form of the Android platform, who’s popularity is accelerating. If you’re asked to name an innovator in IT, I bet you Microsoft is not going to be the first company that comes to mind. That’s a sad change in a way for a company that was ‘the’ company in everything regarding PCs and PC based operating systems. But maybe that’s part of the problem. The world is moving on, the way we access and use information is changing, and Microsoft has put all it’s eggs in one basket relying on the success of it’s PC based operating system, but the world is changing, and Microsoft is failing (and probably has already failed) to keep up.
The Register has the same conclusion – read their assessment of the company that ‘lost their mojo’ in the 2000s here.