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For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

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Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#51

Post by marknutter »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #39
raganwald wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree that this is about "getting" marketing. You may not mean it this way, but when people describe Apple as being a marketing company, the implication is that given the exact same product, Apple would succeed where Microsoft would fail. The truth is, Apple doesn't build the exact same products as Microsoft. What Apple does is what Dropbox did: They take a product and build what people actually want. People…

I think the point was about non-obvious features. Lets take the Aero snap feature in Windows 7. How many would know that it is possible to drag a window to the sides and the top etc. and have it snap into place for split screen view or to maximize? Most of the people who know would be either geeks, or someone who saw someone else do it or discovered it by accident. Contrast that to Apple's features, which are demoed…

Give me a break, the only people watching these keynotes are geeks.

Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#53

Post by lotusleaf1987 »

kenjackson wrote: post #50
recoiledsnake wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point was about non-obvious features. Lets take the Aero snap feature in Windows 7. How many would know that it is possible to drag a window to the sides and the top etc. and have it snap into place for split screen view or to maximize? Most of the people who know would be either geeks, or someone who saw someone else do it or discovered it by accident. Contrast that to Apple's features, which are demoed…

Did you see the SkyDrive features at the MS event? No. Actually neither did I. In fact it wasn't in the recent MS events. In fact it was announced with with a blog entry: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archiv... Why didn't MS talk about this at their special Mango VIP event? No idea. MS seems to think that getting too much attention for features is a bad thing.

Skydrive is also quite useless with file restrictions like no files over 50mb. Why not just use Dropbox?

Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#54

Post by sjs »

CoryMathews wrote: post #38
rimantas wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pressing Save on a document open You will not need to even do that. It's autosaved. Coming to Lion next month.

Auto-save coming to office, docs etc. since.. years ago.

Auto-save coming to games since 10 years ago. Who cares? This is OS-wide auto save and heavily promoted as how all modern OS X apps should behave. That's far bigger than implementing it in one suite of software and stopping there.

Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#56

Post by DanI-S »

napierzaza wrote: post #46

MS has been humiliated by Apple for over a decade now. Bill Gates wrote an entire book about the home of the future. And how digital devices would rule it. Who came across and actually did that? iPod, iPhone, iPad and the AppleTV are all very successful and the "digital hub" is basically the same thing that MS has been saying. MS has been doing a lot of catch-up "also-ran" devices trying to do what Apple has done. It…

Microsoft need to do more of what they did with XBox - spin off a smaller, more agile brand that doesn't invoke the image of dusty CRT monitors and lumbering corporate IT.

Apple's brand identity works for selling consumer products, but nobody really finds value in the fact that their music player or phone was branded Microsoft. Their brand's strength isn't in consumer tech.

Apple didn't manage this by standing still, either. Their brand used to be Apple Computer, and their logo was a cheesy rainbow. That doesn't cut it with 21st century consumers, so they redrew their image.

Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#57

Post by babar »

kenjackson wrote: post #37
raganwald wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree that this is about "getting" marketing. You may not mean it this way, but when people describe Apple as being a marketing company, the implication is that given the exact same product, Apple would succeed where Microsoft would fail. The truth is, Apple doesn't build the exact same products as Microsoft. What Apple does is what Dropbox did: They take a product and build what people actually want. People…

I agree that Microsoft execs probably think they already do product X or Y or Z that Apple is doing, but I don't think they do X or Y or Z the way Apple does them: I think Apple does them right much more often than Microsoft does. Actually I don't think most MS execs think they build the same cloud product. I think they believe they have the feature set, but they realize, probably better than most, that they're not a…

How much of Microsoft's difficulty integrating things into Windows is a result of the anti-trust lawsuit they went through? People seem to forget that Microsoft went through 3 years of worrying that the government would break them up because they bundled a browser with Windows. That had to have changed how they felt about bundling new things into the OS. Or do people think it was long enough ago that the culture has moved on?

Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#58

Post by powertower »

tjogin wrote: post #30
raganwald wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree that this is about "getting" marketing. You may not mean it this way, but when people describe Apple as being a marketing company, the implication is that given the exact same product, Apple would succeed where Microsoft would fail. The truth is, Apple doesn't build the exact same products as Microsoft. What Apple does is what Dropbox did: They take a product and build what people actually want. People…

Agreed. An obvious example from the real world is the tablet. Prior to the introduction of the iPad, Microsoft and its partners had shipped lots of models of tablets for over a decade and they were all failures. Then came the iPad. The iPad didn't succeed because Apple presented it well. It succeeded because unlike all of its predecessors it didn't suck .

Sometimes the market is just not there, and it's more about the timing.

Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#59

Post by sjs »

ltamake wrote: post #49
hussam wrote: post #33

Good god! Isn't it too early to prejudge iCloud? It will likely get a lot of users (it's mostly free and automatically integrated into their products after all), and it will likely succeed given mobility trends. But it is also too early to judge the future success or failure of Microsoft's cloud offering (though from what I'm seeing now, I guess it is likely to succeed as well). At this point in time, Apple's success…

It'll get a lot of users because a lot of people own iDevices. The product can completely suck and people will still use it because it's Apple and unlike MobileMe, it's free. Microsoft doesn't understand the cult following that Apple has.

Apple is far bigger than their cult following. If you attribute their success to the cult you are only fooling yourself. A cult alone doesn't buy 200,000,000+ iOS devices.

People generally do not use Apple products that suck, not everything they do takes off. They are just vocal about things that take off and very quiet on the rest, e.g. dismissing AppleTV as a "hobby" even though they clearly want it to take off.

You can attribute Apple's success to marketing, cult, whatever you want but at the end of the day Apple makes good products and puts a lot of care into them, and that's why they sell.

Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation

#60

Post by jamesaguilar »

DanI-S wrote: post #56
napierzaza wrote: post #46

MS has been humiliated by Apple for over a decade now. Bill Gates wrote an entire book about the home of the future. And how digital devices would rule it. Who came across and actually did that? iPod, iPhone, iPad and the AppleTV are all very successful and the "digital hub" is basically the same thing that MS has been saying. MS has been doing a lot of catch-up "also-ran" devices trying to do what Apple has done. It…

Microsoft need to do more of what they did with XBox - spin off a smaller, more agile brand that doesn't invoke the image of dusty CRT monitors and lumbering corporate IT. Apple's brand identity works for selling consumer products, but nobody really finds value in the fact that their music player or phone was branded Microsoft. Their brand's strength isn't in consumer tech. Apple didn't manage this by standing still,…

Branding is a relatively small issue. The bigger problem is that Microsoft's products simply don't "just work" as digital hub solutions. You can make them work if you want to muck around with home groups, addresses prefixed with //, domains, confusing file ACLs, and "shares". But it takes a lot more effort than just putting in your iTunes username and password, which is how you hook up your Apple devices.

The downvotes are coming from . . . people who think setting up MS home sharing is easy? (Maybe people who have never done it -- I have.) Or people who genuinely believe branding is more important than the product being branded? I have no use for either of these perspectives but I am curious.

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