What happened to Microsoft?
The bigger problem is that Microsoft isn’t very good, and I mean that in a big way. I was too young to appreciate their word-processor and spreadsheet battles of the very early 90s, but that’s what Joel typically cites as an example of Microsoft’s excellent strategy and their production of high-quality software. They may have been great back then, but that’s not the Microsoft we know today.
Today’s Microsoft is impulsive and sloppy. It has become massive and complex with too many layers of management, committees, and bureaucracy to produce anything great — the best they can hope for is good, and even that’s rare.
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Microsoft’s woes aren’t specific failures of strategy or execution: the company culture, structure, inertia, and ethos are so deeply flawed that it can’t recover. Microsoft can never do what Apple and Google are doing today. It’s too broken. Insert your Titanic metaphor of choice.
Very well written and argumented. I’d add that Microsoft never took the time to develop a “cool” factor that maybe wasn’t necessary in the 90s but is compulsory these times.
9 months ago • 68 notes
