Tim Bray posted an interesting observation that I think personally resonates, given that I switched to Mac over four years ago and haven’t looked back:
Last week I spent time talking to a lot of different technology
people, from all over the world geographically and organizationally and culturally.
The conversation kept looping back to Microsoft, and to the same sentiment: They’ve lost their mojo. Lots of people will end up using Vista, but does anyone care? The Microsoft execs look haggard and joyless, and half the interviews feel phoned-in. There’s real innovation in the Office UI, and everyone says “But it’s OK, the old keyboard shortcuts still work”. The advertising campaign is vapid and lame, but then that’s nothing new; they haven’t run an effective one in years. I’m sure that Microsoft can come back, the way IBM did after their bad patch last century; maybe the energy is building in a building in Redmond where nobody’s looking. I’ve never liked Microsoft, but now I realize how much energy they used to inject into the ecosystem, because it’s not there any more and I miss it.
What’s interesting about this, while a curious take on Microsoft’s challenges to keep its dominant industry position, is that it speaks to a much greater challenge, and one that might have otherwise been avoided.
Witness the loss of one’s mojo from the outside is never pretty. Especially in the slow mojo-death of Microsoft over the last five years, it’s been a rather excruciating affair. Though there have been glimmers of hope, much thanks to Scoble’s voice, the truth of the matter is that the core of Microsoft never changed, and that the values that propelled it to the top were antithetical to the openness, transparency and ethics that would rule in Web 2.0.
And mojo isn’t about what’s right or wrong inside an organization — it has much more to do with what’s going on externally — and how your actions and behaviors make people feel.
A wise woman once said that it’s not what you say, but how you make your audience feel that matters. And how Tim feels resonates for many, I would guess.
So in extending this a little further, I think Microsoft could have benefited from taking a Tinkerbell mentality — that is, one of utter subservience and partnership with its customers — listening to them, responding, guiding forward and taking risks, all because it believed it was acting in the interest of its most important customers, and not its shareholders.
But this is not what Microsoft did, and now, five or so years later, after countless missed opportunities, when Microsoft’s Tinkerbell is at its weakest, needing its customers to clap for it just to keep it alive, they can’t be bothered, much the same as Microsoft couldn’t be bothered when Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape, a product of the ether, to answer for Microsoft’s insouciance. Now it seems, given the lukewarm response to Vista, that Microsoft’s Tinkerbell has, much like its mojo, died.
5 Comments
And when MSFT’s earnings beat expectation the next quarter and the one after that and so on, what does say? MS may have lost some Mojo is some places but it’s making up for it in others.
BTW, Tim Bray is a Sun employee. If anyone should know about lost Mojo, it’s those at Sun.
Sun seem to be getting some mojo back. Those T1000 and T2000 boxes with Solaris and ZFS are fun and good. SmugMug likes em.
As for MS, yeah. It is sad really. I want MS to do well so we have continued OS competition.
Microsoft never *had* any “mojo.” Gates has always hated his customers — ever since the Altair Basic fiasco. Furthermore, Microsoft has *never* had *any* useful products; all they have done is stifle innovation and hold the industry back. (However, as a programmer, they have certainly made things easy for me — nobody expects software to actually work anymore.) In a free market Microsoft would never be able to sell anything.
Microsoft has certainly at least misplaced who its customers are. For example, with Vista, it seems Microsoft thinks its customer is not the average Joe or even the average Joe Businessman, but the RIAA and MPAA. They have lost touch with who their customer really is and as a result no one wants to be their customer or even wants to acknowledge being their customer. (Why acknowledge it if they are going to hate you, demean you, and mistreat you for it?) So, not only has Microsoft screwed their shareholders, but their customers as well…well no duh their business is dying and not faring well.
As to quarterly results, they may do better later this year (especially after Vista SP1/SP2 is released), but that does not mean that they do not have a big problem. With Vista and Office 2007, the market is ripe to switch to Mac or Linux; KOffice, OOorg, StarOffice, Google Productivity Suite, or Corel Office. Especially as Microsoft has not put ODF support into Office, they are in trouble, certainly so when the rest of the multi-billion dollar business rides on the success of only two products - two products which are now themselves ripe for the picking.
just saw my dad. he got a new computer, and it has vista. and as we pulled something up on the web, he commented — w/o prompting — about how he’s just truly tired of getting screwed, not knowing where anything is on the thing anymore, confused by some of the changes…. he “just wanted XP back.” for me, it was a tell-tale comment on lost mojo from an (ex-) pro-MS computer sales guy — vista isn’t “neat” and “new,” it’s just a huge PITA for him, and his voice was weary when he even discussed it.
but inertia continues to be MS’s ace in the hole. the license came w/ the dell, he won’t bother to reinstall, even if he could dredge up an XP license + CDs. no non-geek does.
3 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[...] The slow mojo-death of Microsoft over the last five years “Mojo isn’t about what’s right or wrong inside an organization — it has much more to do with what’s going on externally — and how your actions and behaviors make people feel. A wise woman once said that it’s not what you say, but how you make your audience feel that matters.” [...]
[...] Source: Citizen Agency » Tinkerbell and maintaining your mojo [...]
[...] Chris was writing a post on Microsoft losing it’s mojo over at the CA blog at the same [...]
Post a Comment