1 post tagged “technology”
Companies cannot rely on momentum as much as they may hope. This explains the disconnect between what people perceive of a company's ability and what the company actually delivers. People look to past performance as an indicator of future results, but perhaps we shouldn't be looking back quite as far.
Take Microsoft. By all accounts they should be doing better than they are. But rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt, let's look at the last two years. What have they done?
They have released the Zune to mediocre reviews and paltry marketshare. The Zune isn't a failure, but it's not a hit. They released the XBox 360 a year before their competitors and still fell to second place when the Nintendo Wii outsold the Xbox almost 2 to 1 in almost every month since launch. The XBox is a strong product, but it's second place. It could even slip to third in the coming years, even with its year head-start. Out of three. And of course, Vista, which brought many improvements but was generally considered late, buggy, and disappointing. Mac OS X sales are exploding, coincidentally.
And of course there's MSN Search, with 6% marketshare and a brewing catastrophe brewing in the coming hostile takeover of Yahoo.
Oh, and the mobile space, which Microsoft ceded to Apple after a single quarter, despite having a several year head start.
As I've said many times before, Microsoft isn't going anywhere. But for the first time, I mean that both in the positive and negative sense. They're not disappearing. But they're also increasingly irrelevant. Through the lens of the last 10 years, that seems an outlandish claim. Through the lens of the last one, you can't help but wonder: if Microsoft didn't have the Windows and Office momentum, would they have anything at all?
