How Wrong Can One Guy Be?
I just caught this article in the Seattle Weekly. The author is a former Microsoft employee who now embraces the Mac platform and now has predictions of doom and failure for his former employer.
So how can the supposed failures of Microsoft be sensationalized? Let me count the ways:
Why are Microsoft products so endlessly frustrating to use? Even techno-geeks like me get annoyed by Windows. I'm tired of spending the first 10 minutes of my day rebooting just so I can get to work. Microsoft Outlook 2003, the latest version of the company's e-mail and calendar software, hangs for me about once a day, requiring me to restart my PC. I also have a problem with Word 2003: Whenever I bullet a line of text, every line in the document gets a bullet. Asking Windows to shut down is more of a request than a command-it might, it might not. And recently, Internet Explorer stopped opening for me.
I have seen this kind of system behavior before, and its name is virus. For Pete's sake, I've been using Windows since 3.1 and I have NEVER seen a system fail that often or that severely in the absence of a virus or a hardware problem. Sure, you get the occasional blue screen (and when I say occasional, I'm talking every couple months at worst), but...Internet Explorer won't open at all? And that's Microsoft's fault? Look at your PC, my man.
But in the first five minutes on my new Mac, I was surfing the Internet, sending e-mail, and ripping a CD. OS X has been a breath of badly needed fresh air after Windows.
And you couldn't do this on your Windows system? Millions of other users manage to do these very tasks on a regular basis. Something's rotten in Denmark, I think.
This made me wonder about Microsoft's willingness to innovate and compete. Why are Microsoft products still so difficult to use and so unreliable? Why is the company improving them so slowly? Is Microsoft losing its competitive edge? Has the company seen its best days?
This strikes me as the thinking of somebody who, having embraced a new computing paradigm, is now trying to over-justify his change by finding fault in his former paradigm. I mean, Microsoft is far from perfect, but if we're going to bash them, let's bash them for things they're actually at fault for.
Jeff, here's some news for you: it is OK to decide that you prefer the Mac platform to the Wintel platform. No, really - it's OK. This is a free country and if you love your G5, more power to you. But what is NOT OK is writing up hyperbole and inaccuracies in order to justify the change.
Discuss 'How Wrong Can One Guy be?' here
12:29 PM
Christopher on Eric on Ries and Trout
Eric Sink has been doing something very cool for the past few days: he's posting an opinion piece each day about one chapter of the Al Ries & Jack Trout classic, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. As anyone who knows me can attest, this is one of my favorite books.
Anyway, Eric hit a sour note with me today. :P I feel compelled to razz him a little bit in response to his assertion that:
"We underestimate the value of mindshare when we try to change the minds of people. Ries and Trout say that "The single most wasteful thing you can do in marketing is to change a mind." I would love to know how much it will eventually cost to convince the world's VB6 programmers to move to VB.NET. The audacity of this move is simply amazing. For any other company in the history of the earth, it would be suicide to try and change the minds of several million of your own customers."
Now, I won't challenge the premise that the industry often underestimates the value of mindshare. But using MS as an example just doesn't fly.
No other company in the history of the Earth has ever had so much control over the environment in which customers use the company's product as MS has right now, and that makes all the difference. Sure, the transition from VB6 to VB.NE will be expensive - but the end result is a lock; given sufficient time, most VB6 programmers WILL end up using VB.NET. The issue is not so much one of cost as it is one of value; however much it will eventually cost to force the transition, MS must think it will be worth it.
My point is that MS is not a good example to illustrate underestimating the value of mindshare because the consequences of that underestimation are miniscule for them. A company that attempted such a radical shift with the prospect of severe consequences might have been a better example.
Suppose (for example) that Pacific Bell tried to force all their residential customers to abandon their landlines and go cellular. Would they be guaranteed to retain all or most of their customers, even if they were handing out free phones? Probably not. Cellular service is largely undifferentiated between providers (they all suck equally), so rather than getting any kind of lock-in, Pacific Bell would lose a lot of customers.
But when you are a VB6 programmer who is largely dependant upon Microsoft's operating system and IDE to do your work, who else can you turn to in the "operating systems and development tools for creating and deploying VB6 programs" market for the gear you need to continue being a VB6 programmer once there are no more flavors of Windows or Visual Studio that support VB6? I can't think of anyone. Can you, Eric? ;)
Discuss 'Christopher on Eric' here
12:15 PM
