The Top 10
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The Top 10
I'm a big fan of top ten lists and grew up in high school and college enjoying the nightly list from David Letterman. They're usually just for fun and not that serious, and usually quite humorous.
So when I ran across this list, I was hoping it might be funny, but it was more of a serious look at the top 10 Microsoft flops, at least those from Bill Gates' tenure. Since he's been the guy in charge during these times, it's a look at some of the things that didn't fair so well. I'll give you the short list and you can read the article for the details:
- Microsoft Bob
- Windows ME
- Tablet PC
- SPOT watches
- Microsoft Money
- DOS 4.0
- Microsoft TV
- MSNBC
- Livemeeting
- No MS Linux
I remember the fanfare behind a few of these and some I never expected to take off. However I'm not sure these are the biggest flops. Except for prehaps one of them.
I've been pushing #10 to every program manager I meet at Microsoft. Usually when we sit down to chat at lunch. Not the whole OS, but at least a version of SQL Server. Or Office or something else.
I've always like Microsoft products because they've made it easy to develope corporate applications. After trying other frameworks and systems over the years, at the end of the day, Microsoft products make it easy to build stuff.
And to me that's their biggest flop. Not that they've built products that needed work (every software product meets that test), but that they didn't take their expertise in making it easy to build software and enhance all platforms, not just Windows. Just imagine DTS or SQL Server 2000 on Linux? I think lots of people would have purchased it. Just look at how well Office and other products from Microsoft have done on the Mac.
I don't think that Microsoft should be the only game in town. Competition is good and I wish that Microsoft was a little more open, but more I'd like to see SQL Server competing against other products on their own platform.
I think it could win.
Steve Jones
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Steve,
Can you please try to grammar check your editorials before posting? This one was hard to follow-did you change thoughts mid-stream? I have noticed this before but this one is worse than usual. This is meant as constructive criticism-please don't take offense.
Annette
Network Admin
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Steve,
I understood what you meant just fine.
To respond to your content rather than your form, I figure that the problem for MS rolling out programs for Linux, is that there are so many flavours of Linux, and even their social collective' can not keep tabs on which is what 'level' or version, it would make its nigh impossible to provide solid odbc and ado connections, due to the variances in version and flavours of code.
I've tried to work with or develop code to extend a good deal of these 'flops'.
For example
Microsoft Bob
with MS bob, it wasn't build simple enough to have 'the agent' work to do things, without purchasing after market tools, the new re-found widgets and other vendors widgets seem to be the evolution for that mini app.
Windows ME
Only made really to keep up with apple's multimedia support. But then it crippled so many other aspects of pretty solid foundation. 95/98/ME were just 'stolen' code from Norton’s' desktop for win 3.1, an amazing app for its time and blown out of the water by putting all its features into 98, ME was the final bits of Norton desktop, and the Mac os's multimedia support
Tablet PC
A creation from seeing something happen in star trek or other SCI FI movies, it's the reverse of when you see a MAC in most movies do stuff, that was never or is possible.
SPOT watches
Dick Tracey watches anyone, always trying to charge subscription, one might argue MS catalog kills any new products, I'm sure not many people by from the corp. store, MS catalog. OS/2 tried the same thing for its software app's, instead of opening up apps or hardware sales to the third party vendors, let the sales slide and well 'no sales ... no products'
Microsoft Money
Accounting and other financial software is often needing such customization its hard to market a product in which many of the 'money' organizations already have teams of monkey building their 'standard'.
DOS 4.0
I started with DOS 4.2 and a touch of 3 before that, couldn't tell you why 4 was a flop, I'm gathering OS competition was fierce then and between IBM and PC DOS, they strived for better memory management and value added features.
Microsoft TV
I tried it, barely get it to work, was to dependent on external sources and worked in an awkward way. It was to me like software satellite but your request for information wasn’t 'real time'.
MSNBC
I was never a fan of NBC, let alone MSNBC, but the brand game seemed a foot, nothing like controlling the media for some easy press, but viewers were not that stupid.
Livemeeting
I do not think this as a flop but as a tool to try and trump lotus notes and other 4g programs, arguing that we can fed the ego's of top corps, but the quality was as built in defrag is to diskkeeper which would then be the hardware net meetings options. One might include 'messenger' vs msn messenger as an apt comparison.
No MS Linux
I personally think Linux, must be sucky compared to MS OS's or any other OS. I can grep and mozilla, or do some C coding or recompiling if necessary with the best of them. Linux 'code' as a desktop is too stuck up on trying to prove its "its good old UNIX of the memory of Bell /AT&T days of supposed unstoppability, a pillar of western military invincibility" and the dev's have an inferiority complex, in having to assert 'Were just like Unix.. please please please believe us."
MS would probably have to then get into that game, again suggesting they have to assert their is as good as Unix, a stupid argument but one would end up playing to secure market share.
Where Linux shines is the headless os's in EPROM for hardware, where it can be programmed to do a set of tasks and that’s it, you wont mod it generally. I have worked with the dev tools on our print controllers and when it works nothing would compare to it, but most of it is privately developed and quite pricey, our 'professional, engineer' level RIP's (raster image processors) are amazing but its really the only way to get PS or PCL emulation and fast at that without licensing for fonts as an issue, Adobe type manager alone is like 20k - 50 k, in contrast the entire software and hardware solution with emulation is in and around that much.
To conclude hopefully, Vista is an improvement of xp, but with MS removing native OPEN GL support, I see state of the art games on the pc taking a hit, is soft way for forcing people to build games for XBOX or making the companies that make the games for the pc move again from the smaller shops to only the giant ones.
Edward William Stanley
Information Systems Architect
grammar and spelling apologises forth coming...(wave as you go by)
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Being a staunch aficionado of this site, I understand exactly what Annette means! You hold something in high esteem - your expectations of the standards are raised proportionately! "Content" and not "form" is perfectly acceptable in all other forums where linguistic skills and diversity are not at all important (or even relevant)!
When a forum is titled "Editorials" and many of the subscribers have time to read just this when there's a time-crunch, it becomes paramount to rank form right alongside with content!
Steve - hope you understand that my comments are also "because" I'm "SSC Crazy" and not "inspite of"..
Edward Stanley - Peace!
**ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI !!!** -
Now...if MS was to make a SQL Server for Linux, they would have three problems:
1) Sales of Windows Server would drop;
2) They would have a less optimal database because they couldn't be 100% certain of the O/S foundation (right, wrong or indifferent SQL Server gains by being single-platform); and
3) They would be diverting their development resources into coding/testing for multiple platforms, and increase the time-to-live between design and implementation of new SQL Server bits.
As for their biggest flops...I tend to agree that that list reflects their biggest market flops rather well, but think about how many of those "flops" introduced some shred of what is now a core functionality. Hell, even the widget/gadget bit from MS Bob (and the dreadful Active Desktop) is reappearing in Vista.
MS's single biggest mis-step, flop, oopsie, probably is that they left Internet Explorer (IE) to flounder around the beach for so long. Most of the big security issues in the recent past are a result of IE, and not attacking the browser with the kind of creativity they used in other realms has left them egg-faced far too often.
Second, for me, is that they have too often confused "ease of use" with value. A lot of the Windows interface, for years, has been redesigned to dumb it down, and that has made it a clumsy O/S for people who use these machines primarily as tools. Pretty grows tired.
As for your editorial today, Steve...it wandered a bit, but it was pretty clear to me, so maybe it wandered enough to engage my wandering mind?
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The MS Linux won't happen. I will say this. I am a Linux "liker" not lover. We use linux in our office when it suites what we are doing, and I've also worked with MySQL.
Being an MS Certified Partner, I have seen a switch in microsoft from the old "what we do, everyone else should follow" to "what is everyone else doing and how can we leverage that?" They are definately on the ball in interopablitly (sp?). Our website is running on IIS 6.0 with PHP, .Net 1.1, .Net 2.0 and Java Servlets. If I would have tried this stuff on NT 4, it would have died.
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I'm also need to argue with 'Edward William Stanley' about Vista since I am part of the Vista Touchdown program.
Vista to me is XP Plus. Most of the new features that will be offered in Vista, will also be offered in XP, as long as they don't get dropped before the release of Vista.
Vista is TRUELY, Microsoft competing with MAC on a visual level, nothing more. There are some cool new features like XAML and pulling out the Windows Workflow from Business Portal, but like I said, it will be offered in XP.
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I also have to disagree with an item.
Tablet PCs are not a flop from Microsoft but a flop from the industry in general. I own an Acer tablet and I use it on a regular basis both as a notebook and tablet. The reason for the Tablet PCs lack of success is that the computer manufacturers lack of production. IBM just recently released one and Tablet OS has been out for 3+ years!
Microsoft's mistake is that it doesn't promote it enough. They need for the general computing population to clearly understand what the OS is for, who it will help, and why or why not you would want it. I've personally seen entire Doctors and Dentists offices running on Motion tablets. No more carrying around paper files. Their productivity increased dramatically. I've also seen people purchase a tablet and never touch it because they don't understand it. (It was a "cool Star Trekie" thing to buy)
I have to stop now because I'm starting to sound like those Mac and Linux guys
Have fun!
Ron
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Sorry about the grammar. I found a few mistakes and fixed them above. Course, maybe a few of you are as tired as I and didn't catch them.
I don't think Windows sales would drop much and here's why. If you're a Windows shop, you aren't switching to Linux. It seems realtively few of those places are moving. It's more that people running Solaris, AIX, etc. are easily moved to Linux. And they don't consider Windows in general. I've dealt with lots of clients over the years and it's very rare that a primarily Unix shop considers SQL Server. Usually they go Oracle or DB2, depending on their skill sets. If it's a mixed shop, then SQL Server sometimes isn't considered because it's only on Windows and they feel a *nix solution has much more stability.
That may change, but I think having SQL Server on Linux, maybe hiring 400 more people to do it, would increase sales more than hurt them.
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It's not a bad list, but the point that Mary Jo Foley misses is this: If these are the major flops, that's a big part of why Microsoft has been so successful. None of these were fatal mistakes, unlike many of Microsoft's long-departed former rivals.
For many of those has-been companies, each list may be only one or two items long, but those one or two flops were real company-killing whoppers.
Examples:
+ WordPerfect
+ Lotus
+ Borland
+ Ashton-Tate (combine this one with Borland)
+ Netscape (no, they weren't victims of anti-trust but rather victims of their own mismanagement)
+ PC software division(s) of IBM (remember how wonderful Displaywrite IV was!)
For a great personal point-of-view of how a Microsoft competitor shot itself in the foot, see this article by Luke Chung of FMS as he relates Borland's arrogant "We're not worried" attitude.
No, I think BillG's legacy of creating and leading a great company is secure. The question is: what are the mistakes that Microsoft may be making right now, and will they be company-killers?
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sorry - the link to the Luke Chung article is
http://www.microsoft.com/Office/previous/access/10years/chung.asp
-- SteveR
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I wish that Microsoft was a little more open,
Yeah, I feel the same way about my bank, my car dealer, my grocer, my clothier, etc. I just don't understand why they have to have money (and on time) for their stuff
HTH,doco
xlseer.com -
Steve left out the MS Grammar Check on the flop list
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Ouch
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I'm also part of the vista beta test program, I see it more of an overhaul and upgrade then Mike suggests, there are so many changes to the OS... there are few sites that go into it at a greater detail than I can ever do.
With the total size of the Ultimate version of Vista at around 10 GIG's It would be hard pressed for anyone to suggest it is only a new desktop and a few widgets.
But the below articles are great for those who don't wish to bother throwing a dev box together.
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