I feel that if Microsoft had taken Bill Gates' book "The Road Ahead" and implemented a lot of the ideas in the book they could have preempted Apple and Google by several years! What's amazing to me is that the book is over 15 years old and just now a lot of what he mentioned in there with respect to the cloud is being implemented. Not by his company but Apple.
For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
71–80 of 176 posts
Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Give me a break, the only people watching these keynotes are geeks.
My wife is a nurse. She has no real interest in technology, though she loves her iPhone. When a new iPhone or new major version of iOS comes out she always asks me about because all her nursey mates on the ward chat about it.
Agreed. A fellow co-worker, who doesn't even have an iPhone, loves watching Steve Jobs present keynotes due to his presentation style and they way he/apple demo's new technology. While she may be a producer in a digital agency she is certainly not tech savvy and not trying to keep up with the latest apple news.
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Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#73Microsoft does poor advertising. Office 2011 has a pretty sick cloud integration although you need to be running windows to use it properly. http://explore.live.com/windows-live-skydrive Skydrive. And Office 365 is even further along apparently although I am not a Beta user. I would argue M$FT is ahead of both apple and google, if you run windows and have a win7 phone your integration is pretty insane at this point, toss in an xbox + live and everything is integrated really well. It's just not so cool to talk M$FT as it isn't as shiny. I have a Mac now and have for 6 years, for the 4 years before that I went to a high school with all macs, just trying to point out I am not biased. People just seem to want to love apple and hate msft and as a user of both I don't get why other than "apple's cool."
On a similar note, many people buy macs because they "don't have viruses" which has to do with market share not that they aren't vulnerable as we all know. Am I the only one who believes the Mac App Store is just the beginning of them closing off the system so that in the case they reach a substantial market share they can avoid virus control by making sure you download directly from them? If M$FT told dev's you can only put software on our machines if you give us 30% ppl would go nuts.
Just saying, the fanboyism keeps many users from being critical, in the end they are a company, question every move they make as with google and M$FT.
Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#74Microsoft has a marketing problem, they have a lot of cloud services like Skydrive, Live Mesh etc. but are not able to grab the attention of consumers or media like Jobs is able to, on stage. However, Windows 8 seems to be coming with a ton of integrated cloud features so I don't know about the humiliation part.I just don't see that their marketshare is affected more than 1% specifically due to the cloud services in…
Taking all Apple's emphasis on design, marketing, etc., aside. It starts very simple: Steve Jobs looks like a sympathetic guy on stage that we could easily emphasize with. Steve Ballmer looks, let's put it bluntly, unsympathetic and rude. This difference is clearly visible in every fiber of marketing material from both companies. Apple marketing feels friendly and fresh, while Microsoft's tends to feel aggressive. So…
"If you don't have an iPhone, you don't have an iPhone", (neener, neener, neener).
Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#75I don't know that anything Apple is doing is that revolutionary, the difference is that Apple and Jobs are phenomenal at presenting the idea so that people actually get it. I'm sure there are a lot of Microsoft execs right now that are saying "we already do that with product X" and pretty pissed off that they were never able to sell product X over 5 years the way Apple did in an hour. The bottom line is that Apple kn…
> Microsoft and Google both suffer from the same disease, they try to sell a product, not address a need. Actually, Chrome and Nexus-branded Android phones are the only Google products that I've seen advertised, ever. Of their hundreds of products, those 2 are the only ones that they're trying to "sell". In fact, Wave was pretty much their only product that comes to mind that didn't address a need (or at least that w…
Actually ou probably saw the very first Google ad on TV. It was a very cute ad for search. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU for the ad.
Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So you're saying that one of the spectacularly failed Windows powered tablets from yesteryear would succeed today, because the "timing is right"?
No. Those products were terrible, horrible, awful products, that's why they failed.
The timing for tablets is evidently perfect now, and yet not all tablets are succeeding in the market. Because they suck.
Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 downvot…
The problem with Windows home sharing isn't that it's hard to do. But that it's not a good idea. I don't want content to rely upon my laptop downstairs not being in hibernate.
The cloud or syncing are the way to share content. Not by sharing actual live content on laptops.
Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#78Earlier 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.
I agree. It appears that turn by turn navigation (via Bing Maps) is also coming in the Mango update and if so, it would be a really big differentiator (only Android has it thus far) for their platform. Not a peep during their event.
-- John Gruber recently critiqued the Windows 8 preview video that was uploaded to youtube.
It looked like a high school project. I doubt Apple would ever preview their OS with such a poorly produced video.
Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p92QfWOw88I
Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#79The problem for Microsoft is that they continue to serve two masters: consumer users and corporate users. Corporate IT shops, especially within certain industries, can be exceptionally wary of anything that moves data outside their walls. Consumers are in general not nearly so picky. Corporations are MS's biggest customers and for years have had considerable influence on product direction. It's just not in Microsoft's DNA to ruffle the corporate customer feathers too much (whereas I get the sense Google and Apple almost take pleasure in it).
The biggest issue for MS isn't just that iCloud might be an embarrassment. It's a full on attack on the Windows monopoly. Apple telegraphed this in the WWDC presentation when they showed the stats on the numbers of people who don't own a personal computer (either Mac or Windows) in different countries around the world. The combination of iCloud + iPad means that the iPad can be a standalone device. This could potentially be huge in markets like China. How many SharePoint licenses does MS have to sell to make up for ceding a significant portion of the untapped Chinese PC market to the iPad?
Re: For Google, iCloud Is Annoying; For Microsoft, It's A Humiliation
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 downvot…
I'd argue that, through failure to gain consumer traction, Microsoft just haven't been able to create the network of tightly related devices that Apple has. Thanks to their consumer focus, Apple have an entire platform sharing the same operating system, individual devices developed somewhat in harmony. Microsoft, attempting to corner several markets separately, has competing teams working on entirely unrelated produc…
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