Microsoft’s low-octane swan song was nothing if not symbolic of more than a decade littered with errors, missed opportunities, and the devolution of one of the industry’s innovators into a “me too” purveyor of other companies’ consumer products.There are fifteen mentions of some form of the word "innovate", which is interesting because I can't really think of any Microsoft innovations. Were there some? I'm sure I'm missing one or two. Or is this standard middle-management language that justifies middle-management positions? Yglesias, eyeing a future in management, sees this bullshit and follows with:
The basic issue facing Microsoft over the past ten years has been this—innovating is really hard.He says some other boring stuff too. As a long-time unwilling Windows user I cannot recall wanting them to innovate, I just wanted them to clean their fucking systems up, make tasks take less clicks, show me the information I wanted, et cetera. Microsoft got where it did by having The Stuff That Is On The Machine, not by "innovating". Everybody else beat them to the good stuff and they fucked it up, from MS-DOS forward, but they did good business so that was what you got. FUCK INNOVATION, LET ME DO MY WORK. The Atrios take is right in principle:
I think the real lesson is it's okay to be a big company with a stable revenue and stable predictable dividends.That's true, but Microsoft produced stuff that people always seem happy to abandon where there's a viable alternative. The lock on the pre-loaded OS has always been their big strength. They can't just cruise along because they've never built the good stuff. They're the god of the gaps, needed by those who don't see or understand the alternatives. If Windows or Office were inherently satisfying their position might be different.
That used to be the norm.
Now we infuriate mikey. I think I'm going to investigate 10.8 largely because of Dictation. It could make my mom's life a lot easier if it works well.
