Microsoft Mission Impossible

>First of all, "good ideas, theory and philosophy" only go so far when we're talking thousands of more developers and billions of dollars. Excel, is pretty awesome but it's not perfect. I often find myself using Open Office because of some UTF8 issues when importing data into Excel. I own Excel but I use Open Office just as often.

True, it's not perfect, but it's OO is simply not comparable. I'm not saying OO is bad either, just that Excel really is fantastic as far as software goes. The more important question is why haven't the thousands of developers and billions of development time spent on open source software not only built comparable software, but better software?

> Visio, Access, and PowerPoint were purchased by Microsoft. Sure they continued to develop them, but at one point I used Access for 5-6 years and it hardly got any major features when Microsoft upgraded Office. So, these great innovations didn't originate with Microsoft.

So? When was PowerPoint purchased? 1987? I'd be willing to wager one entire American dollar that there aren't more than 100 lines of original "Presenter" code in today's PowerPoint. More importantly, in all that time they've managed not to drive it into the ground, but keep it at the pinnacle of presentation software. Keynote is probably the closest thing PowerPoint has to a reasonable competitor after almost 3 decades.

>The major reason that you don't see much competition with Office is because of their proprietary formats have basically won. People don't want 99% compatibility, they need 100%, so other vendors have fallen out of the game because they can't make the same level of investment.

Again so? OO has had it's own format for many years now thank you and still isn't as good of a piece of software. The format the tool uses is orthogonal to the quality of the software. And OO simply isn't as good. It's not bad, it's good even, but not as good.

> As for being easy to learn, I think if you Google "Microsoft Office classes", you'll find that lots of people still require training. Just switching to the Ribbon Bar caused problems for many users.

There are classes for just about everything Google "how to use a mouse" and you'll find a few million helpful sites on them. Fact is, a computer illiterate person can learn how to write a reasonable document, or do basic spreadsheety things with a little prompting. To fully invalidate your point, believe it or not, there are actually Open Office classes and even iWorks classes.

No software is so easy to use that somebody who's never seen it before can walk up to it and start using it and it's a delusion that software can be that's a continuous problem with many tech communities. It's an issue that goes back to the late '70s, and if somebody hasn't learned to use a computer decently in the last 40 years I'd submit that no amount of work in software interfaces will ever overcome that barrier.

I'd argue you could say company with billions of dollars and the prestige to hire world class programmers. Windows Phone is an amazing piece of software, and if we got it 3-4 years earlier, it may have stood a chance.

The real problem for Microsoft and PC makers is that everyone has a PC and they don't need a new one. Whatever PC almost anyone has is now good enough. People are spending their money on the latest phones and tablets.

Oracle

Salesforce

Mozilla

Sony

Nintendo

Samsung

Blackberry

IBM

Heroku

Rackspace

Sun

Novell

Red Hat

Jetbrains

Not to mention, open source projects like Apache, Linux, Open Office, etc that attempt to commoditize their products.

That is an incredibly huge list by any standard, and many on that list are giants themselves. Now, given that Microsoft has competed, on average, successfully against all these rivals, many of whom give away competing products for free, would you still consider their lack of success against a select few to be a huge shortcoming?

(Edit: typos, fixes, adding more rivals as I think of them)

1) I'd argue that just maintaining the profit level they have now, over the next decade, would be a success given the situation.

2) Breaking the company into pieces, and letting new growth thrive from a smaller base, and letting old pieces die off if that's the way it's going to be (eg Windows consumer desktop). There's a lot of precedence for this sort of maneuver outside of tech, for stodgy old companies with mixtures of slow/no and faster growth businesses. The pieces could be seeded with tremendous amounts of cash to jump start them.

I think #2 is very unlikely given the Microsoft culture, however I think that's exactly what should happen.