Microsoft's image problem
Some thoughts on why the Microsoft brand has become tarnished, and what they might do to fix it.
Remember this?
This one minute commercial featuring the music of the Rolling Stones was the centrepiece of Microsoft’s marketing blitz for the launch of Windows 95. The first version of the system to feature the now familiar layout with the ‘start’ button in the corner, ‘95 felt like a revolutionary upgrade, and Microsoft were the most exciting company on the planet.
Fast-forward seventeen years, to the launch of Windows 8. Another radical change to the UI courtesy of the smartphone inspired ‘Metro/Modern’ interface.. but where’s the buzz? Product reviews have been reasonable, but the prevailing mood amongst PC users seems to be resigned disinterest. Few people are excited about Microsoft these days, and the company has fallen behind upstart Google and the late Steve Jobs’ Apple, a competitor who had almost been crushed out of existence back in the 1990s. Why has this happened, and what could Microsoft do about it?
A recent article in Vanity Fair characterised the period since Steve Ballmer took over as CEO as a ‘lost decade’ of false starts, technological wrong-turns and bureaucratic infighting in an increasingly bloated company where the suits and the salesmen were now more influential than the technologists. A writer for Forbes magazine described Ballmer as ‘without doubt the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today’, and if half what you read is true then that might be a fair judgement.
From the ordinary user’s point of view there are a few notable pieces of tarnish on the Microsoft brand. One is the Vista debacle, and the sense that MS product upgrades deliver little benefit but require costly hardware upgrades. I’m not sure that the ubiquity of Windows and Office in the corporate market does them any favours here - it becomes software we associate with work, usually running on a crummy bulk-bought machine clogged with corporate netware, the epicentre of our daily frustrations. In some ways it is almost unfair to compare the performance of Windows in these circumstances with OS/X - I bet even Vista would run pretty smoothly on a custom-designed chunk of £1500 hardware. But many techies claim that Windows has always been a bit of a mess under the covers, and perhaps that’s just beginning to show.
Then there’s the consumer electronics space, where the contrast with Apple is especially sharp. It was the iPod that kickstarted Apple’s extraordinary resurgence, and over the last decade they have delivered a succession of world-changing Jonathon Ive products like the iPhone and iPad. Not everything Microsoft have tried has been a technical failure - the Windows phone has been particularly warmly reviewed- but they’ve usually been too late and too poorly marketed. The one shining success here is the Xbox, which has taken the gaming world by storm.
Wherever you look the story is similar. Developers love the C# language, but not so many of them love the .Net framework or the MS technology stack, these days open source is where it is at. The Bing search engine has some nice features, and virtually no market share. The appalling saga of Internet Explorer succeeded in exhausting almost everybody’s patience. And Windows 8? Too early too say. The Metro interface looks great, but the transition to a familiar looking desktop when you enter an app like Office seems bizarre. You can see why the idea of single cross-device experience is appealing, but in practice trying to have one OS work the same way on an desktop as it does on a phone may be stretching things too far. Microsoft tries to be all things to all men, and the result is no real success at any one thing.
So what should they do? It should certainly be possible to recover, they’re still a massively strong and profitable company with a lot of smart people, and their competitors are far from invincible. It seems to me that their product line lacks a clear focus, and the day may come when they need to do something really dramatic to reverse public perceptions. How about splitting the brand (if not the company) in half? Exploit their strong corporate position under the respected Office brand, and present a completely different, edgier face to the increasingly phone and tablet dominated consumer market. Following the principle of leading with the strongest brand you have, how about the ‘Xbox phone’?