Microsoft in shambles
March 26th, 2006A Microsoft employee calls for the firing of top-level managers and many Microsoft employees agree. The comments are very telling; they detail a buearocratic mess the sits above them. Seems like there are a staggering number of hurdles between coding something and getting it incorporated into a repository. Even worse, the employees aren’t even excited about Vista; they think it’s going to suck or at least be underwhelming. More than once, the employees say that they wish Vista was good enough to get excited about the way they are excited about new versions of Mac OS X. Microsoft may be a monopoly, but they can only deliver crap for so long. I am reminded of a quote by Steve Jobs several years ago:
Once a company devises a great product, he says, it has a monopoly in that realm, and concentrates less on innovation than protecting its turf. “The Mac-user interface was a 10-year monopoly,†says Jobs. “Who ended up running the company? Sales guys. At the critical juncture in the late ’80s, when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits. They made obscene profits for several years. And their products became mediocre. And then their monopoly ended with Windows 95. They behaved like a monopoly, and it came back to bite them, which always happens.â€Microsoft is acting like a monopoly: they are concentrating on profits and innovation has all but ceased. I think Steve Jobs wants the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard) to do to Microsoft what Windows 95 did to the Mac. If Leopard can run Windows programs natively, this just migh happen.