Text 18531, 185 rader
Skriven 2007-06-07 18:58:48 av mike (1:379/45)
Ärende: Microsoft Surface: The Fine Clothes of a Naked Empire
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From: mike <mike@barkto.com>


http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/2152AFA3-DE5C-4A92-BE17-672C785
8E854.html

===
What happens when the core values of an empire are exposed as a fraud? Does it
prompt it change? More likely, it results in the generation of more false
information to cover up the embarrassing failings.

Such is the case with Microsoft Corp., which has lost its leadership position
in the tech world after six years of failed consumer products initiatives and
the inability to innovate beyond--or even keep pace with--faster moving rivals,
including Apple and Google.

Apple and Google: A Tough Act for Microsoft to Follow. While Microsoft faces
challenges on a number of fronts, including Linux and open source in general,
its most obvious and public direct commercial competitors are Apple and Google.
Apple has been targeting and neutralizing one Microsoft stronghold after
another:

•reclaiming the lead in technical innovation in commercial desktop operating
systems with Mac OS X
•pushing new media development in directions that Microsoft can't with
QuickTime
•pushing media download sales in directions that Microsoft can't with iTunes
•delivering profitable consumer products like the iPod while Microsoft's tank
miserably and lose billions a year •mounting a powerful assault on Microsoft's
dismal Windows Mobile smartphone franchise with the iPhone

At the same time, Google is tackling future markets with efforts that deny
Microsoft any room for new expansion:

•it owns--by a huge lead--web search and the pay-for-placement model of online
marketing
•it is rapidly developing web based alternatives to the online software model
Microsoft envisions for Office •its profits are sucking the life out of
Microsoft's own web efforts and draining the tech brain pool
•it’s beating Microsoft to key acquisitions in video distribution and ad
network expansion

This has left Microsoft scrambling to catch up while also frantically working
to keep its monopolies of Windows and Office relevant.

Having lost its competitive edge as a self satisfied empire throughout the 90s,
the company is now facing both troubled sales across its consumer electronics
efforts and the complaints of dissatisfied critics for both Windows Vista and
the new Office 2007.

Time to blow out a distraction!

[Windows 95 and Vista: Why 2007 Won't Be Like 1995]

Pay No Attention To the Man Behind the Curtain. In January, Microsoft rolled
out Vista with as much hype as its multi-million dollar campaign could
generate, while it also debuted Windows Home Server, a product vision for
reselling its Windows Server software as a consumer appliance. Neither
generated a decent fraction of the attention the company expected.

Instead, both were grossly overshadowed by Apple's simultaneous introduction of
the iPhone, a product that embarrassed the scarcely two month old Zune while
also heaping reproach upon Microsoft's newest sixth generation of its
WinCE-based Windows Mobile smartphones.

Microsoft has been trotting out WinCE-based personal digital assistants since
1998, and WinCE-based mobile phones starting around 2003, but neither have
created any meaningful impact on the tech world, and both have been huge
failures financially. Apple's product demonstrations of the iPhone made it
crushingly obvious that Microsoft's entire approach to smartphones and handheld
computing was completely wrong.

Fast forward six months later, and the iPhone is still bathed in giddy
anticipation, with more than a million users officially signed up, clamoring
for information on its release.

Windows Mobile has gone nowhere, while Vista and the Zune have generated as
much interest--even among PC enthusiast users--as ice cold lemonade might on
the South Pole.

[Windows Home Server vs AirPort Extreme] [Zune vs. iPhone: Five Phases of Media
Coverage]

When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade. With nothing else left to show for
the last six years of development, Microsoft desperately needed to have
something to demonstrate for all its mega-millions expended in research, and
quickly. The result was Microsoft Surface, which the company bills as “a new
computing platform.ö

In reality, as “Scratching the Surface of Microsoft's New Table PCö detailed,
this new platform is just a software shim for using a Windows PC as an
interactive kiosk. Using a marketing committee to generate an outrageous amount
of saccharine hype, Microsoft spun the tale of a few interesting human
interface ideas as if it were introducing an entirely new kind of computer.

The ideas of wireless syncing and barcode scanning were presented as a new
epoch of computing, hinged upon the buzzword of multitouch: responding to
multiple inputs at once.

The Surface doesn't even use a touch screen, but rather a projector and a set
of infrared cameras that sense the positioning of objects and direct
manipulation occurring on top of its bathtub base.

This is technology hobbyists have been building on their own for years, not the
result of some top secret project.

Microsoft Surface should have been called Vista Veneer.

[Scratching the Surface of Microsoft's New Table PC]

Enter the Crickets Critics
What say the analysts on this subject? First, lets look at Glenn Derene’s
report for Popular Mechanics. Derene was invited to Microsoft's campus for a
briefing. As could be expected, he was delighted to accommodate Microsoft's
desperate bid to present its naked empire as clothed in the most remarkable and
beautiful threads of technology ever to be witnessed.

Derene is so excited by the company’s marketing speak that he writes,
“Microsoft has quietly been developing the first completely new computing
platform since the PC.ö

That suggests that Microsoft developed the original PC, which is wrong (the
blame lies with IBM), but also insists that readers forget the series of ‘new
computing platforms’ Microsoft previously unveiled with blaring loud hype, only
to be received with nothing more than the isolated chirps of crickets in the
marketplace:

•the 1991 Windows for Pen Computing platform •the 1992-1994 WinPad vaporware
computing platform •the 1996 Handheld PC / ‘PC companion’ computing platform
•the 1998 Palm PC computing platform •the 2002 Mira Windows Terminal display
computing platform •the 2003 Pocket PC computing platform •the 2003 Tablet PC
computing platform •the 2004 Media2Go/Windows Portable Media Center computing
platform •the 2006 Origami / Ultra Mobile PC computing platform

That’s a lot of spectacular failures over a long period of time. No need to dig
back into the 80s like Brent Schlender’s attack on Apple TV and Steve Jobs’
ability to deliver products; Microsoft simply can not deliver its new computing
platform product plans at all, and never has.

[The Spectacular Failure of WinCE and Windows Mobile] [Innovation: Apple at
Macworld vs Microsoft at CES] [The Secret Failures of Microsoft]
[1980-1985: 8-Bit Platforms]

Look Mom, No Cables!
Derene introduced Jeff Gattis as Microsoft's Surface demonstrator; he says “the
frustrating mess of cables, drivers and protocols that people must use to link
their peripheral devices to their personal computersö moved the Surface team to
introduce a bathtub with no external USB ports and “no obvious point of
interaction except its screen.ö That means no keyboard or mouse.

However, the reason Microsoft's Tablet PC was a recurring failure in its many
instantiations was in part due to the fact that it was a PC device with no
effective means of input. That means that either Microsoft has not learned
anything at all in twenty years, or the company has invented some wildly new
way to interact... or that Surface is not a new computing platform at all, but
rather just a limited use, information kiosk like all the ones we've already
seen elsewhere.

After all, most kiosks do lack a keyboard; Microsoft didn’t invent that nugget
of genius in its six years of laboring.

“If it seems as though the Surface machine sprang up out of nowhere, that's
only because Microsoft has been unusually secretive about it,ö Derene says,
failing to point out that not only does Surface offer nothing new apart from a
handful of clever interface animations suitable to use in kiosks, but that
everything it does has been done for years by others--from commercial companies
to homebrew tinkerers--and more effectively at that.

Derene does present a video of multitouch expert Jeff Han, who worked in
multitouch research at NYU, demonstrated the state of the art in multi-touch at
TED in 2006, and is now a commercial competitor to Microsoft, albeit on a scale
above simplistic kiosk demos. Despite that, Derene still presents Microsoft is
as having invented Surface as a secret six year effort. Boggle!...
===



Vista Veneer, I like that.  ;)

(lots of links in the article)

 /m

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