jbelkin

Microsoft's iPod Killer Emerges -- Should Apple be Scared? You Bet! (AAPL, MSFT)

In case, Andrew Schmidt didn't notice, it's taken MS 9 years to come close to the Treo/Palm and that's WITH the help of partners. They want to go it alone it alone here so their firstv task will be to defeat their "partners," (Creative, iriver, san disk, sony & samsung)

How many more successes can MS or MS shareholders afford?

They've spent about $400 to sell each XBox & 360 - that's $8 BILLION dollars to be third ... which is where they will be in the ipod race ... BTW, third means a marlet share of about 5%.

MS has failed in EVERY consumer venture. MSN, MSN search, WebTv, watch OS, BobOS, The talking barney, the watch OS, home networking, the Ms remote control, and even the palm when the cosnumer amrlet was 40% of the PDA marketplace, etc ... other than buying the 15% of the video game market for $8 BILLION dollars, they pretty much are clueless when it comes to consumers.

It's not just Apple they can't compete against. It's EVERYONE who sells to consumers. MS is great at enterpros selling - completetly clueless when selling to cosnumers (just look at Vista - missed two holiday season and now coming out with 4 similiar sounding versions and offering stickers that say it's capable or Vista-ready? yea, real clear).

MS is done. They are the GM of technology.

Good at fleet selling - not much at anything else.

A New iTunes Rip-Off? Microsoft Reinventing Itself in all the Wrong Ways (MSFT)

Chad is absolutely right but John also brings up an intersting point and why MS' old habits no longer work. BG & MS were brilliant at selling to corporations, agencies & governments because MS looked at the best features and threw them all into their OS & apps. Didn't really matter that you don't need 200 starburst shapes in PPT - it beats Harvard Graphics by 175 shapes.

Corporations who don't mind buying something and getting it right three years later on a maintenace upgrade because they are two budgets from two different departments - the guy who okayed the purchase (capital expenditures) could care less about the upgrade contract or viruses - those costs do not his his bottom line or his responsibility.

Conversely, there are limited sellers to the corporate marketplace - easy for MS to give them free tools or lock up contracts (legal or otherwise) but on the consumer, things are literally the wild west. We'll say one thing but we do not follow through - sure we want a Pc we can write and change our scribbles (tablet pc) but the reality is we're willing to pay maybe a $25 premium and not if it's weird ... or we don't really know what we want until it's out (do I want to convert all my Cd to figital files and carry it around with me? Why?) But then you put an ipod in front of 50 million people and they go - ah ... yes ...

MS is clueless because their old habits/culture doesn't work on consumers.

a) we don't really care if something has more "features," if anything, we actually prefer many things with less features.

b) unlike corporations who will tell you straight out - here's our spec list, consumers say they want video on the phones but not if it's too hard and they won't pay $15 a month for that feature. Or ultimately - show us, if we like it, we'll buy it ... but only after you build the thing.

c) collolary to that is that consumers will not buy if it doesn't work and until you do, we'll wait ... unlike corporations, we only have one budget and as you point out, we do CARE if you copy and WE KNOW.

That's why Ms is confused about consumers in more ways than one. They presume they are smarter than us and don't get it when we don't buy what they offer (MSN, MSN search, WMA stores, WebTV and even XBox) ...

Compounded is that all the real go-getters have left to start their own companies - leaving just bureaucrats who are good at creating their own fiefdom and "maintaining," and with Bill metaphorically gone, it'll only get worse as things will bog down with:

This isn't the way would've done it.

You're not Bill G, I'm not following this order.

and for engineers and programmers, Steve Ballmer is just a pile of sweaty steaming detergent salesman who garners no respect.

MS in the 1990's weere the 1950's to GM. They are ot what they once were ...