From: mike 


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

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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.”

In reality, as “Scratching the Surface of Microsoft's New Table PC”
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.”

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 computers” moved the
Surface team to introduce a bathtub with no external USB ports and “no
obvious point of interaction except its screen.” 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,” 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!...
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Vista Veneer, I like that.  ;)

(lots of links in the article)

 /m

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