I loved my pocket PC. The stylus and palm style glyth input gave data entry a practicality Android tablets can't match today.
What the IPad had was style, a lot of style. The UI was beautiful. In terms of functionality didn't carry redundant desktop features like menus with it. But it was the style, the cool factor, that made it consumer in a way that nerdy Pocket PCs never were.
I feel, (like ValueAct), that Microsoft is losing consumer outside of games, and would do better to concentrate on enterprise.
SharePoint is not a successful product!! It is very frustrating to run Sharepoint as anything it is marketing for.
Document sharing - bad execution, horrible UI. Something that should take 2 clicks takes about 8 clicks on Sharepoint.
Sharepoint as a Website - don't even get me started with that. Unless you want to spend 3 months hiring a 3rd party sharepoint company to implement 3rd party tools to make it half usable, you are out of luck.
They also have very little marketing budget, and then when used was spent ineffectively. Apple reportedly lavished 700m on advertising the iPhones teaching people how to use it. Not only that, Apple figured out how to get free press for their product releases. Microsoft on the other hand, gets free press on product bungles.
They did, but their homegrown product, Lync, is far superior. They bought Skype for its user base, brand and reach on other platforms, not for the technology.
Since we've just barely gotten English audio recognition at a good state (and I'm talking in general, not just Microsoft), there hardly should be any surprise that non-English recognition is where it is.
I don't see how "catering to the needs of customers outside the US" is related to "audio recognition" other than that one of them is a thing. If you didn't realize, Microsoft products are available in a dozen languages, and localization tests take a long amount of time as it is. As a company, it supports an incredibly large number of countries, more than almost all companies posted here on HN, and definitely just as much if not more than most in the world. Just because one or two products is hard to localize does not mean that Microsoft has "severely lost in the last decade to catering to the needs of customers outside the US".
I see that Microsoft can get their software translated. Yet that is very different from actually supporting a country.
Some examples of this:
I want podcast support in my Windows Phone. Because I live outside the US, I don't have it. I simply cannot understand why.
I want support for DVB-C Media in Windows, because that is the standard in my country. Because the US have other standards, my only option is using some half-baked korean crap receiver. I want to bet that the upcoming XBox One will not really work with TV in my country.
XBox Music is the new Music service from Microsoft. Guess how good the local music selection is in my country. How does Microsoft want to compete with Spotify here? Is this product even serious?
Bing is just no good outside the US. Yet it will be an important part of Windows 8.1, so I really wonder how this is gonna play out in my country when people start using it.
However, they failed at most things:
- they were too early and the market and technology was not ready for it (Pocket PC)
- they were too late (Zune, Windows Phone)
- plans were blocked by companies who's support they needed but who were scared of them (music/movies/mobile phone industry)
- execution sucked and products were not good enough (Windows Mobile, home server, media center, everything speech)
- their reputation with consumers was tainted and the press wrote very negatively without really understanding much (hailstorm, drm)
- they made it cost money and other offered it for free, ad supported (MapPoint)
- negotiation power and influence in the market diminished after the monopoly abuse trials
- it took a long time before they understood their problems