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Microsoft Brand In Sharp Decline
Amy Bennett writes "A recent poll of about 12,000 US business decision-makers by market researcher CoreBrand found that Microsoft's brand power has taken a dive over the past four years. According to the study, Microsoft dropped from number 12 in the ranking of the most powerful US company brands in 2004 to number 59 last year. In 1996, the company ranked number 1 in brand power among 1,200 top companies in about 50 industries. The CEO of CoreBrand said: 'When you see something decline with increasing velocity, it's a concern.' To add some historical context, IBM suffered a much faster and more severe decline in brand power in the early 1990s and it took them 10 years to rebuild the brand's reputation."
I have a friend who got a Macbook the other day. She said it was really awesome. I was trying to figure out why she liked it so much, but when I asked her she said, "everything is so easy to use!"
That seemed a little strange to me, since it usually takes a little while to get used to a new interface. Then she said, "My boss and coworkers are so jealous."
That's how you know Apple has turned the corner. When suddenly random people can become cool for owning a Mac. Compare that to a few years ago, my brother mentioned in his university classes he was the only one who had a Mac, and people gave him strange looks. You had to actively go against the flow to get an Apple in those days. Now the flow is starting to head in that direction.
(Heads off to buy more Apple stock).
Qxe4
I'm sure unfavorable reception to Vista doesn't help, but it's not like MS hasn't weathered that before. (ME anyone?) I would suspect brand dilution is more to blame, as they branch out more and more. At one point, people might just have thought of their software, but now there's a whole slew of different products that may bring their reputation down. Users who prefer the iPod to the Zune, or the Wii to the Xbox 360, or now see Google as the big cheese in the online world may all have a less favorable impression of MS as a whole.
hot foreign sheep.
(Heads off to buy more Apple stock).
While I acknowledge others' pervious predictions of rough sailing ahead for Apple have generally not come to reality (since the return of Jobs), your tale leads me in the opposite direction.
It reminds of the story of Joe Kennedy knowing it was time to get out of the stock market when he was getting stock tips from the shoe shine boy. Part of Apple's appeal was its status as an outsider. Random people can't become cool for owning a Mac; the point of being cool is you're not just another random person.
With apologies to Yogi, are we reaching a point where no one will buy an Apple because everyone's buying Apple?
I guess I just don't understand the list of apples and oranges and cars from the article. It just seems to me that if you're going to compare companies they should be at least in similar markets. Sure if you're doing a who's top earner then I can see throwing everyone in the same basket, but then you'd also want to get more accurate information and not just base findings off of a phone survey, which to me is just crap info.
Ave Molech Setting
#4 is Harley-Davidson, which is listed in the "Hotel & Entertainment" category. Are there Harley Hotels I'm unaware of? Shouldn't they be in "Motor Vehicles"?
I wonder if this is less a matter of Microsoft Vs. Apple, or the lack of quality in Vista, but more a matter of MSN Vs. Google
I don't believe you, I'm here for a seat on the secret spaceship.
IMO, MS lost its direction when they became entirely marketing/business/lawyer driven instead of engineering driven. If they dumped the power hungry upper echelons (Balmer I'm looking at you) and started actually making engineering decisions (maybe even sound ones) they could turn things around.
By way of anecdote, being a developer in Seattle you will inevitably work with other who have at one point or another worked at MS. One common thread I've heard (as a developer in the Peugeot Sound) is that the MS company culture is severely dysfunctional (ie: many meetings and decisions are nothing but a contest to see who can position themselves for the next raise/promotion). At first I thought this was a given as these developers, program managers, and executives are EX-employees (if they liked it they would have stayed). However, the universality of their experiences combined with the complaining of those I know who still work at MS makes me believe there's merit to their comments.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
Branding == Reputation. In that manner, it is absolutely essential that a brand be strong. You can do it through heavy advertising, or just by having a quality product.
Example: When you think "car" you should think "Honda." When you think "Honda" you should remember how your last one ran for 13 years before you couldn't stand it anymore and sold it, how it handled well, etc. (Not to promote the Honda brand, but I know someone this actually happened to, and he bought a new Honda.)
Apple is not even on the entire 100 list. What's with that. Apple has to be in the top ten.
I'd like to point out that this study is pretty much worthless. I like to hate Ms as much as the next guy but this study shows a slippage against other brands *IN OTHER INDUSTRIES*. This is comparing Microsoft and Coke? WTF. Maybe some of these other brands surged in popularity. Or maybe computer industry in general is viewed less favorably. This would be much more useful if it was focused a specific industry.
Actually, I have. Sad as that may sound.
E.g., when some people I knew switched the whole company from WordPerfect to MS Word, much against my zealotry at the time. The fact is, the first attempts at WP For Windows sucked hairy donkey balls. Word might not have been a shiny gold nugget, but compared to WP it was at least like polished lead compared to a turd.
E.g., Windows itself gained a lot of market share fast back in the day, because the 386 version was pretty much the only thing that combined (A) preemptive multitasking, at least for legacy apps, (B) a GUI, unpolished as that might have been, and (C) compatibility with those legacy apps. And maybe (D) a price you can actually afford, as opposed to buying an ultra-expensive, and just as proprietary, Unix for that PC. There have been other attempts at one of the three, but they typically missed the other two.
Yes, I know, _nowadays_ Linux exists which fits all the bills and is a viable choice and all. But back then the competition actually had worse products than MS, sad as that may sound. Who was better than Windows? GEM with its max 4 windows and no support for using memory over 640k? The text-mode-only task-switching of DesqView? (Even DesqView/X was too little, too late. Way too late.) OS/2? Heh. Trust me, I used all those, I even was an OS/2 fanboy at one point, but looking back, I can see how Windows won on its own merits back then.
The last genuine competitor to Windows was IBM's OS/2, and even that was a sad story. For a start it was a story of corporate schizophrenia, where half of IBM didn't want to use or sell the OS that the other half created and/or endorsed. But it was also a story of IBM ignoring the users' grievances. Year after year people complained that a single mis-behaved or crashed application can lock up the common event queue, and thus the whole computer. And year after year IBM stuck to its guns that that's the right way to do things, and generally STFU you bloody user. It was a story of such fuck-ups as IBM launching a version of OS/2 with much fanfare, and then discovering that if you were upgrading from a previous version, it would fuck up the config so badly that your newly installed OS wouldn't boot. (Or not make it to the desktop.) It was a story of IBM developer suport being non-existent. Much as we laugh at "Uncle Fester" Balmer's developers dance on the stage, it was a whole other message than IBM's. IBM at felt a lot more like "fuck off and stop trying to steal the market for our own apps for OS/2." Etc. And IBM lost. Why? Because, bloody sad as it sounds, their stuff was actually worse than MS's.
E.g., I remember being one of the last Netscape fanboys in a world which was quickly going IE, and Netscape's Mozilla team had gone in dada land for years reinventing skinned widget libraries instead of making a browser. The fact that everyone kept pointing out was that IE was head and shoulders above the buggy (and rapidly getting outdated) mess that was Nescape 4.x. Both being free, people preferred the MS one as (subjectively) better.
Etc.
I can even tell you the mistake you're making. You're seeing just the years after they became a monopoly, and when they actually could push people to buy just for compatibility sake. But you forget their years of actually fighting uphill in those markets. Before you could have people telling each other "get Word already because we all have it", you first have to convince enough people to ditch WordStar and WordPerfect, _in_ _spite_ of the fact that everyone else has them.
Don't get me wrong, that doesn't excuse MS's monopolistic tactics or anything. That's not what I'm saying. But I'm saying you first have to have enough of a foothold before you can apply them. MS's monopoly isn't based on just one thing, it's an interlocking porcupine of pieces which need each other. It only starts working at all after you have at least a few such pieces which are the de-facto standard. And there must have been _some_ merit involved in getting at least those ramm
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I disagree. I think that outside of certain circles of the tech industry, the majority of people out there don't really give a crap about the anti-trust stuff anymore, never gave a crap about shrink-wrap licenses, or ISO processes, etc.
I think it has more to do with the fact that MS consistently shipped mediocre software, and that fact caught up with them in two ways. First off the internet allowed people to become more educated on alternatives, allowing things like Linux and Apple to gain a small amount of mindshare (which is slowly turning into marketshare), and the internet also exposed Windows to a very "dangerous" environment, and Microsoft was not prepared for all the problems that it caused.
MS has seemed to get a halfway decent handle on the security issues, I haven't seen many news reports about huge global systems being suddenly taken down by worms anymore, and while my mom's computer still manages to get malware on it, it's not rendered unuseable every 6 weeks anymore. But people remember those problems, and those problems were enough of a headache that they got they started looking at some alternatives.
Prior to the internet becoming such a major part of the computing landscape, MS could put out whatever crap they wanted, and nobody really knew any better. The internet served both to expose a lot of those flaws, and at the same time it empowered people, or at least made it significantly easier for them to share their issues and look for solutions. Unfortunately for Microsoft, some of those solutions involve Linux/MacOS/other non-microsoft software.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.